Ryan Nichols
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3837258 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Ryan Nichols |
| PRENOMES | Ryan |
| SOBRENOME | Nichols |
| ASSINATURA | NICHOLS R |
| AFILIAÇÕES | California State University, Fullerton |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9445-9821 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 16 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Experiments in Distant Reading
The article tries to answer whether the BERTopic topic modeling framework can be used to obtain topics that meaningfully distinguish two corpora of Buddhist Chinese texts from 500 to 800 CE. The first corpus consists of translated Indian-Chinese Buddhist texts, the second of “Chinese-Chinese” texts, i.e. texts directly authored in Buddhist Chinese. Does the application of topic modeling reveal aspects that are typical for these corpora and do the…
Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and the Comprehension of Determinism
Cross-cultural variation in cognitive style
The presumption of compatibilism
Recent debates over the relationship between omniscience and free will have generated a number of views (e.g. Ockhamism). Though fascinating in their own right, what interests us in this paper is not so much the views themselves, but the way that intuitions have figured prominently in justifying these views. Proponents of the various views assume that their intuitions are the most pre-philosophically natural (or closely aligned with common sense)…
Cultural evolution
The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation…
Footbinding and its cessation
An agent-based model was developed to represent demographic, marital, and economic data from the period of Chinese history during which footbinding was practiced. This general model of the Chinese social ecology is used to understand the maintenance and cessation of footbinding in the context of contested explanations from the social sciences. The Labor Market Hypothesis states that parents initiated and maintained the practice to exploit the han…
How to create a cultural species
This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tom…
Introducing this Special Issue
The Institution as an Explanatory Mechanism in Cultural Evolution
The purpose of this paper is to stimulate productive research on institutions from within cultural evolutionary science and, especially, philosophy of science. It aims to achieve this goal by distinguishing between three types of question a theory of institutions ought to answer; by comparing and analyzing three theories of institutions; and by raising, for each theory, potential challenges and questions. Theories analyzed include a cognitive psy…
Unfulfilled Promise of Cross-Cultural, Interdisciplinary Ancient History
This commentary focuses on G.E.R. Lloyd’s latest work, Ambivalences of Rationality (2018). The book is summarized chapter by chapter. Criticisms are presented with special attention to Lloyd’s unusual wealth of research from developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, anthropology, experimental linguistics and cognitive science. The commentary concludes that Lloyd has done a disservice to cited researchers in the mind sciences who invest…
Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis
Supernatural agents and prosociality in historical China
A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive science is the social effects of belief in high gods. Belief in high gods is both hypothesized to catalyze a cognitive punishment-avoidance mechanism at the level of individual minds, and a group cultural evolutionary mechanism that amplifies in-group cooperation. Recent research into non-Western contexts not only indicates a multiplicity of supernatur…
The Origin and Cultural Evolution of East Asian Cognitive Style
Experimental tests about cross-cultural differentiation of cognitive style conclude that East Asian and Western cognition differ. Tendencies described as East Asian include holism, non-linearity, expectation of change, relationalism, field dependence, causal pluralism, dialecticism, and a tolerance of contradiction. Cross-cultural psychologists generally refrain from discussing the intellectual history or cultural evolution of these differences, …
Understanding East Asian holistic cognitive style and its cultural evolution
The status of women in Neolithic & pre-Imperial China
Where do Chinese gender norms come from and how did they culturally evolve through time? This question receives ample debate in the context of Warring States, pre-Imperial, and Imperial China. Many archaeologists and interdisciplinary scholars contend that earliest China treated its women relatively well. This paper’s interdisciplinary examination of bioarchaeological evidence from Neolithic and pre-Imperial sources synthesizes new information to…
Systematic Cognitive Bias in the History of Philosophy and its Cultural Transmission
This article argues influential eighteenth-century thinker Thomas Reid’s philosophical system gets infected with determinable cognitive biases when scientific claims jeopardize his core Christian commitments. These biases are most active, and led reliably to fallacious reasoning, when Reid writes about issues with implications on substance dualism and the human soul, and on the activity of supernatural agents in the material world. Falling into t…
Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking . Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled”…
Modeling the Contested Relationship betweenAnalects, Mencius, andXunzi
This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes "distant reading" methods in the humanities and the authors' corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors' data; discusses complementary relationsh…
The Distant Reading of Religious Texts
This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the “strong” holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative dist…
Civilizing Humans with Shame
To say Early Confucians advocated the possession of a sense of shame as a means to moral virtue underestimates the tact and forethought they used successfully to mold natural dispositions to experience shame into a system of self, familial, and social governance. Shame represents an adaptive system of emotion, cognition, perception, and behavior in social primates for measurement of social rank. Early Confucians understood the utility of the sham…
Toward a science of science fiction
What is a genre? What distinguishes a genre like science fiction from other genres? We convert texts to data and answer these questions by demonstrating a new method of quantitative literary analysis. We state and test directional hypotheses about contents of texts across the science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genres using psychometrically validated word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We also recruit the work of traditi…
The Social Cost of Atheism
Social psychologists have found that stereotypes correlate with moral judgments about agents and actions. The most commonly studied stereotypes are race/ethnicity and gender. But atheists compose another stereotype, one with its own ignominious history in the Western world, and yet, one about which very little is known. This project endeavored to further our understanding of atheism as a social stereotype. Specifically, we tested whether people w…
Joshua Alexander
The Origins and Effects of Filial Piety (Xiao 孝)
Parent–offspring conflict theory hypothesizes that interests of offspring and parents are asymmetrical in key contexts including the offspring's mating strategies and mate preferences. Evidence supports this hypothesis and documents these asymmetries in humans. However, offspring in East Asia have mate preferences and mating strategies that are in significantly greater harmony with their parents' preferences about their mating choices as compared…
Disbelief in the gods and the “cooperation enhancement” account of supernatural punishment theory
The Social Cost of Atheism
Social psychologists have found that stereotypes correlate with moral judgments about agents and actions. The most commonly studied stereotypes are race/ethnicity and gender. But atheists compose another stereotype, one with its own ignominious history in the Western world, and yet, one about which very little is known. This project endeavored to further our understanding of atheism as a social stereotype. Specifically, we tested whether people w…
The Distant Reading of Religious Texts
This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the “strong” holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative dist…
The Origins and Effects of Filial Piety (Xiao 孝)
Parent–offspring conflict theory hypothesizes that interests of offspring and parents are asymmetrical in key contexts including the offspring's mating strategies and mate preferences. Evidence supports this hypothesis and documents these asymmetries in humans. However, offspring in East Asia have mate preferences and mating strategies that are in significantly greater harmony with their parents' preferences about their mating choices as compared…
Modeling the Contested Relationship betweenAnalects, Mencius, andXunzi
This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes "distant reading" methods in the humanities and the authors' corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors' data; discusses complementary relationsh…
Civilizing Humans with Shame
To say Early Confucians advocated the possession of a sense of shame as a means to moral virtue underestimates the tact and forethought they used successfully to mold natural dispositions to experience shame into a system of self, familial, and social governance. Shame represents an adaptive system of emotion, cognition, perception, and behavior in social primates for measurement of social rank. Early Confucians understood the utility of the sham…
Reid on Fictional Objects and the Way of Ideas
I argue that Reid adopts a form of Meinongianism about fictional objects because of, not in spite of, his common sense philosophy. According to ‘the way of ideas’, thoughts take representational states as their immediate intentional objects. In contrast, Reid endorses a direct theory of conception and a heady thesis of first‐person privileged access to the contents of our thoughts. He claims that thoughts about centaurs are thoughts of nonexisten…
Reid on Fictional Objects and the Way of Ideas
I argue that Reid adopts a form of Meinongianism about fictional objects because of, not in spite of, his common sense philosophy. According to ‘the way of ideas’, thoughts take representational states as their immediate intentional objects. In contrast, Reid endorses a direct theory of conception and a heady thesis of first‐person privileged access to the contents of our thoughts. He claims that thoughts about centaurs are thoughts of nonexisten…
Critical Notice
Natural Philosophy and its Limits in the Scottish Enlightenment
Journal Article Natural Philosophy and its Limits in the Scottish Enlightenment Get access Ryan Nichols Ryan Nichols California State University Fullerton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 90, Issue 2, 1 April 2007, Pages 233–250, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist200790215 Published: 25 November 2014
Thomas Reid's Theory of Perception
The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
An international team of over 100 leading scholars has been brought together to provide authoritative exposition of how history s most important philosophical thinkers - from antiquity to the present day - have sought to analyse the concepts and tenets central to Western religious belief, especially Christianity. Volume 3 comprises an introduction, presenting an overview of Early Modern philosophy of religion, and a series of essays on Early Mode…
Denis Dutton (2008). The Art Instinct
Disbelief in the gods and the “cooperation enhancement” account of supernatural punishment theory
The Origins and Effects of Filial Piety (Xiao 孝)
Parent–offspring conflict theory hypothesizes that interests of offspring and parents are asymmetrical in key contexts including the offspring's mating strategies and mate preferences. Evidence supports this hypothesis and documents these asymmetries in humans. However, offspring in East Asia have mate preferences and mating strategies that are in significantly greater harmony with their parents' preferences about their mating choices as compared…
Toward a science of science fiction
What is a genre? What distinguishes a genre like science fiction from other genres? We convert texts to data and answer these questions by demonstrating a new method of quantitative literary analysis. We state and test directional hypotheses about contents of texts across the science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genres using psychometrically validated word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We also recruit the work of traditi…
The Social Cost of Atheism
Social psychologists have found that stereotypes correlate with moral judgments about agents and actions. The most commonly studied stereotypes are race/ethnicity and gender. But atheists compose another stereotype, one with its own ignominious history in the Western world, and yet, one about which very little is known. This project endeavored to further our understanding of atheism as a social stereotype. Specifically, we tested whether people w…
Joshua Alexander
Civilizing Humans with Shame
To say Early Confucians advocated the possession of a sense of shame as a means to moral virtue underestimates the tact and forethought they used successfully to mold natural dispositions to experience shame into a system of self, familial, and social governance. Shame represents an adaptive system of emotion, cognition, perception, and behavior in social primates for measurement of social rank. Early Confucians understood the utility of the sham…
The Distant Reading of Religious Texts
This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the “strong” holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative dist…
Modeling the Contested Relationship betweenAnalects, Mencius, andXunzi
This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes "distant reading" methods in the humanities and the authors' corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors' data; discusses complementary relationsh…
Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking . Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled”…
Systematic Cognitive Bias in the History of Philosophy and its Cultural Transmission
This article argues influential eighteenth-century thinker Thomas Reid’s philosophical system gets infected with determinable cognitive biases when scientific claims jeopardize his core Christian commitments. These biases are most active, and led reliably to fallacious reasoning, when Reid writes about issues with implications on substance dualism and the human soul, and on the activity of supernatural agents in the material world. Falling into t…
Unfulfilled Promise of Cross-Cultural, Interdisciplinary Ancient History
This commentary focuses on G.E.R. Lloyd’s latest work, Ambivalences of Rationality (2018). The book is summarized chapter by chapter. Criticisms are presented with special attention to Lloyd’s unusual wealth of research from developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, anthropology, experimental linguistics and cognitive science. The commentary concludes that Lloyd has done a disservice to cited researchers in the mind sciences who invest…
Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis
Supernatural agents and prosociality in historical China
A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive science is the social effects of belief in high gods. Belief in high gods is both hypothesized to catalyze a cognitive punishment-avoidance mechanism at the level of individual minds, and a group cultural evolutionary mechanism that amplifies in-group cooperation. Recent research into non-Western contexts not only indicates a multiplicity of supernatur…
The Origin and Cultural Evolution of East Asian Cognitive Style
Experimental tests about cross-cultural differentiation of cognitive style conclude that East Asian and Western cognition differ. Tendencies described as East Asian include holism, non-linearity, expectation of change, relationalism, field dependence, causal pluralism, dialecticism, and a tolerance of contradiction. Cross-cultural psychologists generally refrain from discussing the intellectual history or cultural evolution of these differences, …
Understanding East Asian holistic cognitive style and its cultural evolution
The status of women in Neolithic & pre-Imperial China
Where do Chinese gender norms come from and how did they culturally evolve through time? This question receives ample debate in the context of Warring States, pre-Imperial, and Imperial China. Many archaeologists and interdisciplinary scholars contend that earliest China treated its women relatively well. This paper’s interdisciplinary examination of bioarchaeological evidence from Neolithic and pre-Imperial sources synthesizes new information to…
Footbinding and its cessation
An agent-based model was developed to represent demographic, marital, and economic data from the period of Chinese history during which footbinding was practiced. This general model of the Chinese social ecology is used to understand the maintenance and cessation of footbinding in the context of contested explanations from the social sciences. The Labor Market Hypothesis states that parents initiated and maintained the practice to exploit the han…
How to create a cultural species
This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tom…
Introducing this Special Issue
Epistemology (22 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · History (9 obras) · Cognition (8 obras) · Cultural Differences and Values (8 obras) · Cognitive science (7 obras) · Philosophy of mind (7 obras) · Social Psychology (7 obras)