There’s a nice interview with my old prof David Buller in Scientific American about his new book on evolutionary psycvhology, which serves a good short introduction to the themes of his work.
Will Wilkinson
The Sweet Release of Reason
There’s a nice interview with my old prof David Buller in Scientific American about his new book on evolutionary psycvhology, which serves a good short introduction to the themes of his work.
Will, I recall you saying that you studied under Buller, in an earlier post. I wonder if you’ve spoken to him about his criticisms of Tooby and Cosmides (since you seem to like their work, judging by your Cato paper). Anyone familiar with the literature would be quick to note that his primary criticism (the difference in the logic of the two types of conditionals) is one that Cosmides has been trying to address for 16 years (since the Chen and Holyoak paper raised a similar point in 1989, in response to Cosmides original paper), and that Buller never mentions the answers to that problem that she and her colleagues have given (including neuropsychological data published 2 years before Buller’s book).
It’s not a problem for critics of Cosmides and Tooby that Buller uses old and largely answered criticisms, since the work of people like Sperber has already shown that Cosmides’ social exchange theory has no empirical support, but I was genuinely surprised that Buller’s otherwise very good book contained such a terrible chapter on social exchange.
Chris, I haven’t spoken to him for a good while, so, no. And I haven’t read Sperber’s rejoinders to C&T’s 2000 defense of relevance of the Wason task. So I need to catch up on it. If I had thought of it, I would have asked Leda where she now stands on this when I saw her a couple weeks back.
Sperber and Girotto had a book chapter a couple years ago that summed up their criticisms of the use of the Wason selection task. I forget what the chapter was called, but it was in From Mating to Mentality, and is probably available on Dan’s website. It sums up their rejoinder to Fiddick, et al. (which really was inferior work) from their cognition paper, and also gives further arguments and descriptions of more data (they also have another paper, from 2001 I believe, in Cognition, which presents some interesting data using deontic versions of the task — data that Buller doesn’t even mention, but should have).
Will, I recall you saying that you studied under Buller, in an earlier post. I wonder if you’ve spoken to him about his criticisms of Tooby and Cosmides (since you seem to like their work, judging by your Cato paper). Anyone familiar with the literature would be quick to note that his primary criticism (the difference in the logic of the two types of conditionals) is one that Cosmides has been trying to address for 16 years (since the Chen and Holyoak paper raised a similar point in 1989, in response to Cosmides original paper), and that Buller never mentions the answers to that problem that she and her colleagues have given (including neuropsychological data published 2 years before Buller’s book).
It’s not a problem for critics of Cosmides and Tooby that Buller uses old and largely answered criticisms, since the work of people like Sperber has already shown that Cosmides’ social exchange theory has no empirical support, but I was genuinely surprised that Buller’s otherwise very good book contained such a terrible chapter on social exchange.
Chris, I haven’t spoken to him for a good while, so, no. And I haven’t read Sperber’s rejoinders to C&T;’s 2000 defense of relevance of the Wason task. So I need to catch up on it. If I had thought of it, I would have asked Leda where she now stands on this when I saw her a couple weeks back.
Sperber and Girotto had a book chapter a couple years ago that summed up their criticisms of the use of the Wason selection task. I forget what the chapter was called, but it was in From Mating to Mentality, and is probably available on Dan’s website. It sums up their rejoinder to Fiddick, et al. (which really was inferior work) from their cognition paper, and also gives further arguments and descriptions of more data (they also have another paper, from 2001 I believe, in Cognition, which presents some interesting data using deontic versions of the task — data that Buller doesn’t even mention, but should have).