August 17, 2012
Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth (or lack of truth) so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception. Simple instances of self-deception include common occurrences such as: the alcoholic who is self-deceived in believing that his drinking is under control, the husband who is self-deceived in believing that his wife is not having an affair, the jealous colleague who is self deceived in believing that her colleague’s greater professional success is due to ruthless ambition.
A consensus on the identification of self-deception remains elusive to contemporary philosophers, the result of the term’s paradoxical elements and ambiguous paradigmatic cases. Self-deception also incorporates numerous dimensions, such as epistemology, psychological and intellectual processes, social contexts, and morality. As a result, the term is highly debated and occasionally argued to be an impossible phenomenon.
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August 17, 2012
The term ‘motivated tacticians‘ is used in social psychology to describe a human shifting from quick and dirty cognitively economical tactics to more thoughtful, thorough strategies when processing information depending on their type and degree of motivation. This idea has been used to explain why people use stereotyping, biases, and categorization in some situations and more analytical thinking in others. Because of the empirical evidence and robust nature, the concept is now a preferred theory of human social perception.
After much research on categorization, and other cognitive shortcuts, psychologists began to describe human beings as cognitive misers (i.e. they use a lot of mental shortcuts); which explains that a need to conserve mental resources causes people to use shortcuts to thinking about stimuli, instead of motivations and urges influencing the way humans think about their world.
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August 17, 2012
Cognitive miser is a term which refers to the idea that only a small amount of information is actively perceived by individuals when making decisions, and many cognitive shortcuts (such as drawing on prior information and knowledge) are used instead to attend to relevant information and arrive at a decision. The term was coined in 1984 by Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor in an early book on social cognition (thinking related to interpersonal relationships). In the area of psychology, perception is one of the base fields. It is defined as how one views the world, but is not necessarily an accurate interpretation of it.
A cognitive miser, therefore, refers to how people cannot possibly assimilate all the information they are bombarded with by the world. The mind will either take in relevant information into the conscious mind, or information that may be relevant to the subconscious mind. The information taken into the subconscious will later undergo an internal screening. Anything useful will be reinforced with ties to other areas where it is of use, anything not of use will typically be forgotten.
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August 16, 2012
Tabula rasa [tab-yuh-luh rah-suh] (Latin: ‘blank slate’) is the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.
The theory was discussed by Aristotle, but popularized by John Locke (the father of liberalism) in the 17th century: ‘Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? … To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.’ Locke thought all knowledge came from sense data (smells, sights, sounds, pain, etc.), and that the mind is empty at birth. Locke’s idea was immediately picked up by others.
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August 15, 2012
In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are ‘native’ or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to empiricism, the ‘blank slate’ or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs. Some nativists believe that specific beliefs or preferences are hard wired. For example, one might argue that some moral intuitions are innate or that color preferences are innate.
A less established argument is that nature supplies the human mind with specialized learning devices. This latter view differs from empiricism only to the extent that the algorithms that translate experience into information may be more complex and specialized in nativist theories than in empiricist theories. However, empiricists largely remain open to the nature of learning algorithms and are by no means restricted to the historical associationist mechanisms of behaviorism (which argued that the content of consciousness can be explained by the association and reassociation of irreducible sensory and perceptual elements).
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August 10, 2012
A Swadesh [sway-desh] list is a compilation of concepts for which words are deemed to exist in the largest number of languages. Translations of a Swadesh list into a set of languages allows researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages.
Swadesh lists are named after the U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh. They are used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence).
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August 9, 2012
Purple Earth is an astrobiological hypothesis that life forms of early Earth were retinal-based rather than chlorophyll-based thus making Earth appear purple rather than green. According to Shil DasSarma, a microbial geneticist at the University of Maryland, chlorophyll appeared after retinal (another light-sensitive molecule) was already present on early Earth. Retinal, today found in the plum-colored membrane of a photosynthetic microbes called halobacteria, absorbs green light and reflects back red and violet light, the combination of which appears purple. Scientists believe that if future research validates the purple Earth hypothesis, it would have implications for scientists searching for life on distant worlds.
Eventually other microbes came along that used chlorophyll instead of retinal. And since all the high energy green wavelengths of sunlight were being absorbed by the retinal using microbes, in order to survive, chlorophyll made use of the available blue and red light that the retinal was reflecting. Some scientists believe that for a period of time in Earth’s history these two coexisted, but eventually the chlorophyll using microbes overcame. The retinal based microbes may have absorbed the highest energy green light waves, but the chlorophyll using microbes made better use of what energy they received and were victorious in the end.
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August 9, 2012
Euler’s [oi-lers] disc is a scientific educational toy, used to illustrate and study the dynamic system of a spinning disk on a flat surface (such as a spinning coin).
This phenomenon was first noted by Swiss physicist Leonhard Euler in the 18th century, hence the name.
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August 6, 2012
The Curiosity rover is a nuclear-powered exploration vehicle that is part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. The MSL spacecraft was launched in late 2011 and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater in the summer of 2012. The approximately 2 billion-year-old impact crater is hypothesized to have gradually been filled in, first by water-deposited, and then by wind-deposited sediments, possibly until it was completely covered, before wind erosion scoured out the sediments, leaving an isolated 5.5 km (3.4 mile) high mountain, Aeolis Mons, at the center of the 154 km (96 mi) wide crater.
Thus, it is believed that the rover may have the opportunity to study two billion years of Martian history in the sediments exposed in the mountain. Additionally, its landing site should be on or near an alluvial fan, which is hypothesized to be the result of a flow of ground water, either before the deposition of the eroded sediments or else in relatively recent geologic history.
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August 6, 2012
The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that ‘the intellectual life of the whole of western society’ was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities — and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems. Snow’s Rede Lecture condemned the British educational system as having, since the Victorian period, over-rewarded the humanities (especially Latin and Greek) at the expense of scientific and engineering education, despite such achievements having been so decisive in winning the Second World War for the Allies.
This in practice deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation to manage the modern scientific world. By contrast, Snow said, German and American schools sought to prepare their citizens equally in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled these countries’ rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age. Later discussion of ‘The Two Cultures’ tended to obscure Snow’s initial focus on differences between British systems (of both schooling and social class) and those of competing countries.
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August 6, 2012
In science and history, consilience [kun-sil-ee-ehns] (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can ‘converge’ to strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence are very strong on their own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus.
The principle is based on the unity of knowledge (a thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole); measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer. For example, it should not matter whether one measures the distance between the Great Pyramids of Giza by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a meter stick – in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same. For the same reason, different dating methods in geochronology should concur, a result in chemistry should not contradict a result in geology, etc.
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August 6, 2012
‘Consilience [kun-sil-ee-ehns]: The Unity of Knowledge’ is a 1998 book by biologist E. O. Wilson on the unification of scientific fields of inquiry and the potential unification of hard and soft sciences (humanities). Wilson uses the term to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor.
He defines it as: ‘Literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.’ Examples include the unification of Darwin’s theory of evolution with genetics; the unification of forces in modern physics; Einstein’s work unifying Brownian motion with atomic theory; Rene Descartes’ unification of geometry and algebra; and Newton’s universal gravitation, which unified the laws of falling bodies with the laws of planetary motion.
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