There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics, and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

● Darwin invented the concept of group selection to explain the evolution of traits that lead individuals to improve the fitnesses of others at a fitness cost to self. Such traits are now called “altruistic.” ● Understanding Simpson’s paradox is key to understanding how natural selection can cause altruism to increase in frequency in a meta-population. ● A criterion is derived for when altruism is fitter than selfishness in a meta-population in which there are groups of size 2. The relevance of correlation and genealogical relatedness to the evolution of altruism is discussed, as is the question of whether reciprocal altruism is really a form of selfishness. ● The concepts of cultural group selection and species selection require further refinements in how group fitness needs to be understood. ● In addition to individual selection and group selection, there is a third unit of selection – intragenomic conflict. Meiotic drive is a classic example. ● The reductionist thesis that group and individual selection reduce to selection on genes is criticized, as are conventionalist theses that assert that it is a matter of convenience, not biological fact, whether group selection occurs in a population.

The life sciences and social sciences typically study “complex adaptive systems:” nonlinear, self-organizing, adaptive, multilevel, multicomponent systems in which dense interconnections between elements produce irreducible/emergent systems effects. Systems and their components are partially (in)separable: they can be fully understood neither solely in terms of their parts (some outcomes are emergent) nor solely in terms of the whole (the character of the parts is essential to the nature of the whole). Important implications of a complex adaptive systems perspective for IR include a new view of international systems and their structures; a distinctive understanding of social continuity and social change; new perspectives on levels, theory, and explanation; new tools for comparative analysis; renewed attention to hierarchy; and a distinctive understanding of globalization.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

This chapter exposes the received dyadic model of communication and then critically analyzes the presumptions of the model. This reductive model, which views communication as evolving from a basic unit of face-to-face dialogue between two people, has dominated understanding of communication from ancient dialectic to today’s speech act theory, conversation analysis, and argumentation theory – the disciplines discussed in the chapter. While the dyadic reduction has a long, important history in theorizing argumentation and communication – a history that is briefly recounted, going back to the dialectical roots of argumentation theory – the principle of reduction becomes unjustified reductionism that bypasses polylogical realities of argumentation and communication.

Chapter 8 presents the main positions in economics and in the social sciences regarding the agent/structure problem, and explores some contributions that can be made from artificial economics. First, it presents and discusses the individualist/reductionist, structuralist/holistic, and intermediate positions, regarding the agent/structure problem. Then presents simple artificial economics examples of the generation of endogenous preferences, agents' behavioral changes derived from their economic interaction, and of the demographic effects of the introduction of a market institution into an artificial economy.

The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is a pioneering institution in the field of climate modeling. Its founding director, Joseph Smagorinsky, was a member of the Princeton Meteorology Group. He hired a Japanese scientist, Syukuro Manabe, who formulated a one-dimensional model of climate, known as the radiative–convective model, that was able to calculate the amplifying climate feedback due to water vapor. This model provided one of the first reliable estimates of global warming. Manabe worked with other scientists to build three-dimensional climate models, including the first model that coupled an atmospheric model to an ocean model. The concepts of reductionism and emergentism, which provide the philosophical context for these scientific developments, are introduced.

Our practices of pursuing the truth and engaging in ethical or existential commitments, analyzed from a pragmatist perspective in the previous chapters, are inherently normative. This chapter considers the transcendental question concerning the very possibility of normativity - that is, the possibility of our engaging in the normative practices we do engage in, including practices of truth-seeking presupposing individual ethical sincerity - from the point of view of a pragmatist transcendental philosophy (as developed in the earlier chapters). It is suggested that such a transcendental question about normativity belongs to philosophical anthropology, as it examines the most basic aspects of the human condition. It is argued that no contingent and naturalizable matters of fact, such as psychological acts of recognition, can adequately ground the possibility of normativity in the transcendental sense. A pragmatist commitment to sincerity thus also entails a commitment to irreducible (but not therefore mystical or supernatural) normativity. A pragmatic and transcendental form of humanism emerges as the only way of making sense of normativity in our lives and practices.

The chapter discusses the impact of materialistic and reductionist perspectives on peace analysis and examines how they affect understanding human nature.

The chapter discusses the impact of materialistic and reductionist perspectives on peace analysis and examines how they affect understanding human nature.

In the play As You Like It, context influences people to change from bad to good. This is different from the classic psychology experiments on the power of context, which typically demonstrate the power of context to move normal individuals to harm others (moving from good to bad). The change of context in As You Like It involves people moving from the royal court to the wild forest. The nature of “correct” behavior is determined by context. The new normative system prevailing in the forest leads to shifts in the evaluation of emotions, so that what is shunned at court (e.g., melancholy) becomes highly valued by some. Also, the materialism of court is abandoned in favor of a more simple life. This leads to two brothers, the usurping duke and Oliver, to abandon power and material riches in favor of their brothers. The change of context is also associated with a blurring of gender roles in some cases.

Aristotle identifies perception as central to all animals, enabling them to fulfill their ends. His biological works clarify his hylomorphic account of perception as a key activity of the soul by providing detailed overviews of types of perception and perceptual organs. Like other bodily organs, these have complex structures comprised of physical components, often in layers, all ultimately involving the four basic elements. I defend a compromise position on scholarly controversies about whether Aristotle can successfully provide a physicalist account of perception. Briefly, the answer is “yes and no.” His biological works, along with “chemical” works, do give physical accounts of perceptible features like colors and tastes, as well as of the organs (and parts) capable of registering them. However, because of his teleological views about nature, such accounts must be “top-down” and are never purely reductive or translatable into structural accounts like those of the atomists. Finally, we must remember that perception is crucial to the behavioral success of the animal as a whole within its environment. Perceptual “experience” in our modern sense does not occur in any organ but rather in the body as a whole, and more centrally in the heart and blood vessels.

An overview of the creativity-based DOC (Diverge Organize Converge) Process is described in this chapter. The DOC Process is an important sub-process necessary to reduce the design stages of The Innovation Pyramid to practice. It will be applied multiple times, in a variety of different ways, during the innovation design stages. The DOC Process can also be applied to a multitude of other non-innovative challenges. The DOC Process has three distinct components: divergent thinking, organizing and convergent thinking. It is the combination of all three that makes the method powerful. While most are familiar with divergent thinking, particularly brainstorming new solution ideas, the DOC Process is as useful for identifying root-cause problems as it is for ideating new solutions. The Diverge step expands from the original solution idea or problem situation. The second step of the process is the often ignored Organize step. Once the Organize step is completed, the process moves onto the Converge step. Converge narrows the organized concepts down to the “best.” Criteria for choosing “the best” problem or solution must be conscious and public. Unless agreed-upon criteria is defined for choosing “the best,” each of us will apply our own measures, ensuring a chaotic outcome.

Divergent thinking is the first of three essential steps in completing the non-linear DOC Process. Like all DOC Process steps, divergent thinking applies to both the problem and solution spaces. It simply requires different techniques when seeking to identify a root-cause problem versus attempting to come up with a new impactful problem-solving approach.

Identifying root cause issues begins with broadening our purview to ensure we are not overlooking the disease by focusing too closely on its symptoms. Divergence occurs as we zoom in from this broad purview; identifying factors or causes of the identified zoomed-out General Problem, then factors of the identified factors, then causes of the sub-factors, and so on, until the root-cause level is reached.

Divergent thinking for solutions occurs on several perspective levels: feature, function and system. In addition to ideating new and improved features of existing solutions, substitute solutions should be considered. Potential substitutes perform the same function as current solutions, but do so in a very different way. New technology is often the enabler of substitute products. System level thinking diverges solution ideas by strengthening or streamlining system connections or linkages at the broadest purview.

In this chapter we look at two important topics in social epistemology: testimony and disagreement. What is necessary for testimony to be a source of justification or knowledge? Can testimony be a basic source of justification? We also consider three views concerning the appropriate stance in the face of disagreement with one's epistemic peers: the Equal Weight View, the Steadfast View, and the Total Evidence View.

In “Reductionist vs. Neo-Wittgensteinian Semantics,” Rorty does two things: proposes a distinction between reductionist and neo-Wittgensteinian semantics and suggests we see Robert Brandom’s philosophy as contributing to the latter. By “reductionist semantics,” Rorty means a semantics that aims at purifying language by finding equivalent and more perspicuous expressions for expressions we currently use. “Neo-Wittgensteinian semantics” entails a semantics for which such a program does not make any sense because it assumes any expression has a perfectly respectable meaning merely by virtue of having a use. It is “neo-Wittgensteinian” because the view of meaning as use originates in Philosophical Investigations, and “neo-Wittgensteinian” because it relies on how that view was later developed by the likes of Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Brandom. Having explained why Brandom should be so classified, Rorty then proceeds to discuss Brandom’s most valuable and original contribution to this type of semantics: Brandom’s account, in Making It Explicit, of the constraints on the use of marks and noises that make it possible for us to be said to be reasoning rather than simply sounding off in habitual, accepted ways.