Culture, Beliefs, and Decisions

This concluding chapter highlights Robert Boyd's reply to the commentators, in which he expresses appreciation for their thoughtful disagreements, all of which “accept the value of trying to understand how culture evolved.” Boyd notes one broad point of contention, shared by Ruth Mace, Kim Sterelny, and Paul Seabright, which is that he does not “give people enough credit for making smart, well-informed decisions.” Boyd stands his ground, arguing that individual choice matters but people's basic beliefs come from their social context. With respect to the related comments by H. Allen Orr and others, Boyd expresses agreement that “cognitive abilities and cultural learning are mutually reinforcing.” Ultimately, Boyd ably defends his model against all four commentators and concludes by offering a pointed defense, against Seabright, of his own more optimistic view.

Adaption without Insight?

This chapter looks at how philosopher Kim Sterelny endorses the main contours of Robert Boyd's argument that humans are outliers in their capacity to adapt to many environments. However, Sterelny asks whether Boyd goes too far in reducing the role of “our distinctive human intelligence” in explaining humans' ecological adaptability. Sterelny at least partly defends the “library” or “Big Brain” model that Boyd argues against. Tacit, practical know-how is a form of knowledge. In addition, Sterelny contends that Boyd relies too heavily on a simple and “conformist” or “trusting social learning heuristic.” As a final point, Sterelny wonders whether and how social learning has changed across “domains and across time.”

Moral Nativism: Some Controversies

This paper scrutinizes two research programs that advocate respectively for the existence of a universal moral grammar and a predisposition to moralize behaviours with certain contents. It focuses on how the arguments commonly used to ground each program fare at relevant contemporary research in cognitive science and how well they meet constructivist arguments proposed by Jesse Prinz and Kim Sterelny, among others. We argue that there is little evidence that our moral judgements follow the model of principles and parameters. At the same time, ‘ease of learning’ suggests that the human brain is somehow prepared to learn moral rules.