Does Nature Versus Nurture Makes Sense?

 My PsycCRITIQUES review is about to release for James Tabery's book "Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture." Here are some highlights:

Libertarianism and American Philosophy II

Why the politics all of a sudden? Aside from a long time interest, I will be doing an interview this Monday at 8 pm for John Shook's "Humanist Matters." John has great knowledge of American Philosophy (he runs pragmatism.org, edits Contemporary Pragmatism and has numerous books and articles), he is also a prominent atheist (e.g., The God Debates), and a prominent humanist. We have a lot to talk about, but an ongoing discussion we have had is whether my libertarian leanings are compatible with my other beliefs. As I said in the last post, I think it is possible to provide a grounding for libertarian ideas within the context of philosophers such as Peirce, James, Dewey, and Holt, and I think it is worth the effort to see where this leads. In this post, I want to talk about honesty regarding psychology, in relation to politics.

Why it is important that we see the things we see

A little bit ago there was a nice post over on Gary William's blog about "Panpsychism vs. Inogranicism" - usually taken as two extremes at which either everything is said to have mental properties to some degree (panpsychism) or the existence of mental things is denied across the board (inorganicism). This grew out of a book review from a few months ago, in which Gary claimed the author endorsed panpsychism, for the slightly less extreme position of claiming at least some inorganic things should be considered to have mental properties. At any rate, the comments on the post got interesting, and I was posed a question that would take too long to answer in there... so I'll try to answer it here... The answer requires a bit of discussion about radical empiricism and realism, in particular regarding color perception. These are crucial issues for creating a psychological science with any chance of making sense. 

Mind-Body Dualism is Bad for your Health!

Hey, you know all that pop-psych BS coming out of positive psychology and similar movements? Things like: "Try forgiveness, your cholesterol level will thank you!"*

Thanks to the good people at Psychological Science, I finally found a result I can support! October's issue brought us: "The mind is willing, but the flesh is week": The effects of mind-body dualism on health behavior by Forstmann, Burgmer, & Mussweiler from the University of Cologne. This clever little study found out that being a mind-body dualist is actually bad for your health. This is great! No more bothering with logical arguments or historic discussions, no more focus on incoherence, no more two part posts. You should all stop being dualist because it will make you gain weight and die young. Problem solved. And this isn't a all a joke, their methods were pretty clever, and the results pretty clear. The researchers start with a simple hypothesis:

Specifically, we hypothesized that the more people perceive their minds and bodies to be distinct entities, the less they engage in behaviors that protect their bodies.

In testing this hypothesis, they present six studies, with a few hundred participants between them. It all went something like this:

Tool Use in Fish = Good, Future Planning in Fish = Bad

As I was working on the next embodiment post, my attention was drawn to the recent report of tool use in fish (for example, this). As this report was exactly on topic with the issues Beyond the Brain is dealing with, it didn't seem a bad idea to take a minute to think about.

Basically, researchers found a fish that digs small clams out of sand, then swim around with the clam in their mouths until they find an 'appropriate' rock sticking up out of the sand. Then the fish hurl the clam at the rock to break it open and get to the yummy meat inside. My background is in animal behavior, so this all seemed very plausible and very cool. I had never heard of fish doing something exactly like this, but there are species fish do related things, like gathering stones to make 'nests'. So, the argument that fish 'use tools' seems strong, especially if we are willing to accept a graded notion of tool use, and are merely accepted that fish do something on the low end of that spectrum. However, the authors of the report also seem to believe that they have found evidence that the fish plan ahead. That last part seems problematic.