What did GLOBE really measure? Researchers’ minds versus respondents’ minds

What the Problem of Other Minds Really Tells us about Descartes

Ever since the first generation Cartesian Gerauld de Cordemoy wrote a selfstanding book dedicated to the problem of other minds philosophers have proceeded as though Descartes’ work entails some version of the problem. In this paper I evaluate Descartes’ own contribution to creating and answering skepticism about other minds. It is my contention, first, that for most of his working life Descart...

Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are

Constructing an animat mind using 505 sub-minds from 234 different authors

The World-Wide-Mind (WWM) is a scheme for putting minds (by which we mean the software to drive a real or virtual agent) online for remote re-use by third parties. Although the animat community favours the extension of existing agent minds in an ongoing process, there is currently no easy way to re-use minds built by other authors. If re-use became the norm, it is suggested that larger, more di...

Minds as social institutions

I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and specialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the participants, both in terms of beliefs and acceptanc...

Millikan Lecture 1999: The Workplace, Student Minds, and Physics Learning Systems

We review three important ideas concerning physics education. First, what do surveys from the workplace indicate about the relative importance in student education of scientific process knowledge, personal skills, and conceptual physics knowledge? Second, what are the characteristics of student minds that need to acquire this knowledge and these skills? Finally, what can we do with physics lear...