Two Types of Theories about Manipulative Communication

Developing Theories of Types

Evolutionary Theories of Morality and the Manipulative Use of Signals

Several attempts have recently been made to explain moral systems and moral sentiments in light of evolutionary biological theory. It may be helpful to modify and extend this project with the help of a theory of communication developed by ethologists. The core of this approach is the idea that signals are best seen as attempts to manipulate others rather than as attempts to inform them. This ad...

A manipulative test of competing theories for metabolic scaling.

The reasons why metabolic rate (B) scales allometrically with body mass (M) remain hotly debated. The field is dominated by correlational analyses of the relationship between B and M; these struggle to disentangle competing explanations because both B and M are confounded with ontogeny, life history, and ecology. Here, we overcome these problems by using an experimental approach to test among c...

Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality

In this paper we compare two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying morality. One theory, proposed by Sripada and Stich (forthcoming), posits an interlocking set of innate mechanisms that internalize moral norms from the surrounding community and generate intrinsic motivation to comply with these norms and to punish violators. The other theory, which we call the M/C model was sugg...

Types as Theories

There are many notions of type in computing. The most classical notion is \types as sets", which has been extended to cover many features of modern programming languages. This paper shows that such features are handled perhaps even more naturally by an extension of the \types as algebras" notion to a \types as theories" notion. This notion naturally supports object oriented concepts, including ...