http://cogweb.net/biopolitics

Hobbes formulates the classic conundrum of political theory: the problem of collective action (Parsons, 1949; Coleman, 1990; Olson, 1965; Harré, 1993).

To end the "warre, as is of every man, against every man" in the state of nature, men entered into a "Covenant of every man with every man" to set a king above themselves.

"Covenants being but words, and breath, have no force to oblige, contain, constrain, or protect any man" (Leviathan, 123).

"[T]he bonds of words are too weak to bridle mens ambition, avarice, anger, and other Passions, without the feare of some coercive Power' (Leviathan, 96).

Natural law dictates that if you enter into a covenant in the state of nature, you should not honor it: someone who trusts another without good assurances of reciprocity "does but betray himselfe to his enemy" (Leviathan, 96).

"Therefore before the names of Just, and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power, to compell men equally to the performance of their Covenants, by the terrour of some punishment, greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their Covenant." (Leviathan, 100-1)

Commentators have identified a number of problems with Hobbes' proposal.

• The contract must precede itself: only after a sovereign government has emerged will promises enjoy the condition of substantial security which they need in order to attain bindingness. Yet, according to Hobbes, the instituting of any sovereign government must itself occur by way of originary promises.
  
  A horrible state of nature inclines people to yearn for calm and orderliness, but also kindles the hatred and distrust that ensure the continuation of violence.
  
  This defines a deontic double bind: you should not honor the contract to institute an enforcer, because the conditions of enforcement are not yet in place and you have no reason to trust your would-be collaborators.
  
  More generally, the common meaning that enables people to negotiate and establish a covenant presupposes the kind of community the covenant supposedly establishes.
  

• The benefits delivered by the social contract does not require a single, centralized enforcer: I know of no game-theoretical models that make use of the kind of enforcer of contracts that Hobbes posits as necessary
  
  The degree of rationality required to institute the contract may be argued to obviate the need for a king: if people can choose to cooperate, they should be able to solve the problems of commitment, to punish defection, to detect bluffs, etc.
  
  Evolutionary psychologists agree that stable regimes of cooperation require cheater-detection and may favor a willingness on the part of honest cooperators to assume the cost of penalizing defectors – in the absence of any absolute authority.
  
  
• The model is historically inaccurate: states did not in fact form on the basis of an originary covenant
  
  Hobbes leaves out a crucial level of social organization between the individual and the state, namely the kinship group.
  
  Anthropologists today agree that the vast majority of human history was spent in "primitive" societies – adopting Chagnon's (1992) definition of a primitive society as one in which the highest level of organization is the kinship group.

Nevertheless, this revised view of our evolutionary history also vindicates Hobbes' formulation in a crucial sense: the social contract is an unnatural cultural innovation that requires a special explanation.

In this talk, I argue that the kind of explanation we need must be both evolutionary and cultural.

1. I start by making a general argument about the relations between evolution and culture.
2. I then argue that evolutionary game theory is a necessary but not sufficient level of analysis.
3. Using Hobbes' contemporary Filmer, I argue that the social construct of the king may in fact have been important for the formation of the state.
4. I present a cognitive hypothesis, informed by evolutionary theory, for explaining the particular dynamics of the epidemiology of representations that make the king an effective facilitator of a certain form of the social contract.
5. It is this dynamics, I argue, that deserves the name propaganda, which I attempt to give a more precise cognitive definition.

Cosmides and Tooby argue in "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" (The Adapted Mind, 1992) that evolution has produced a large number of specialized, domain-specific cognitive adaptations. These adaptations are what makes human culture possible. A future theory of culture, they suggested, will integrate an understanding of these mechanisms with an understanding of forms of culture:

"models of psychological mechanisms, such as social exchange, maternal attachment, sexual attraction, sexual jealousy, the categorization of living kinds, and so on, are the building blocks out of which future theories of culture will, in part, be built" (121).

Following Sperber (1990), they propose three dimensions of culture:

• a universal metaculture – constructed across cross-cultural regularities and resulting in panhuman similarities (cf. Brown (1984), Human Universals)
  
• a local evoked culture – triggered by local circumstances and resulting in local differences, such as different languages (cf. Pinker (1994) The Language Instinct)
  
• an epidemiological culture, where "domain-specific mechanisms influence which representations spread through the population" (121)

I'll be focusing on the third kind of culture, the epidemiological. Specifically, I suggest the problem of collective action has an irreducible epidemiological dimension.

After Axelrod and Hamilton's (1981) seminal paper on the evolution of cooperation and Maynard Smith (1982) broad application of game theory to evolution, social scientists with an evolutionary bent have argued that cooperative solutions can be evolutionary stable strategies (e.g. Bergstrom & Stark (1993), How altruism can prevail in an evolutionary environment; Hoffman, McCabe & Smith (1996), Reciprocity: The Behavioral Foundations of Socio-Economic Games; and Axelrod (1997), The Complexity of Cooperation.)

These models attempt to situate cooperation within universal culture – they specify which adaptations may be required to solve various game-theoretical problems related to cooperation. They demonstrate that adaptations for complex forms of cooperation meet the evolvability constraint – given a set of reasonable assumptions and plausible initial conditions, you can end up with cooperation. In Evolution of the Social Contract, for instance, Skyrms (1996) suggests evolution creates a "veil of ignorance" comparable to that proposed in Rawls' (1971) thought experiment, and can therefore help create a preference for justice.

To demonstrate evolvability and to characterize universal adaptations is necessary but not sufficient to account for the development of the social contract. The social contract also belongs to epidemiological culture:

• The social contract is a cultural innovation

Hobbes is right: there is a distinction between the state of nature and the state created by the social contract. Evolutionary theories should be able to account directly for the kinds of cooperation we find in primitive societies. However, an evolutionary theory that makes the social contract inevitable must be wrong. The social contract is not even facultative, in Tooby & Cosmides' (1992) sense of an adaptation that comes online given certain local conditions.

The social contract as such has no evolutionary history, though it is made possible by evolved adaptations. More precisely,

• The social contract is the proper domain of no cognitive adaptation

The proper domain of a cognitive module is "all the information that it is the module’s biological function to process" (Sperber 1994:52); the biological function of a module is to solve the adaptive problem for which it was designed (Millikan, 1984, 1993). The social contract is such a recent innovation that it is unlikely we have any adaptations designed to deal with it.

• The social contract belongs to epidemiological culture

This is not to say evolution is irrelevant to the social contract: evolved cognitive adaptations make it possible and determine its ability to spread. However, to understand how this happens, we need a theory of the dynamics of the epidemiology of representations – a theory of communication.

To give an example of the kind of analysis that I suggest is necessary, I'll consider the case of Hobbes' contemporary, the royalist Robert Filmer.

Filmer wrote Patriarcha; or the Natural Power of Kings in 1643, at the start of a civil war that continued in skirmishes, local insurrections, plots, and foreign-sponsored invasions for most of the century. In 1680, it was published by the Tories as a textbook of divine-right royalism; it became their rallying point and chief propaganda position.

Filmer was competing with the champions of natural liberty – in his own formulation, the ideology that

Mankind is naturally endowed and born with Freedom from all Subjection, and at liberty to chose what Form of Government it please: And that the Power which any one Man hath over others, was at first bestowed according to the discretion of the Multitude.

The tenet of natural liberty, Filmer argued, was "new, plausible, and dangerous" – all the more dangerous because plausible. History shows that people have always been ruled by kings, and these kings were fathers:

the first Kings were Fathers of Families, … and all Kings are either Fathers of their People, Heirs of such Fathers, or Usurpers of the Right of such Fathers.

Why does Filmer's argument matter? It was the rejection of the arbitrary authority of the king that fueled the intense political conflict of the seventeenth century. The dissenters – chiefly Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers – and other radical groups such as the Diggers, the Levellers, and the Ranters formulated their own manifestoes, which advocated a new political regime, that of republicanism, or the compromise of a constitutional monarchy.

Filmer's argument is also theoretically interesting. The fact that the Tories sponsored the publication of Filmer's Patriarcha indicates that they implicitly granted what the book explicitly denies: that kings derive their power from the consent and approval of the people. What people think matters because in practice they make and unmake kings.

In this talk, I will assume that Filmer and his Tory champions were correct in their tacit assumption that ideology makes a difference in people's political decisions – that is, I adopt an idealist rather than a materialist position.

I'll propose an evolutionary-based cognitive theory of how and why Filmer's Patriarcha works as propaganda.

The problem is not just one of the spread of culture, but of deliberately manipulating the spread of certain representations in order to achieve control of people’s decisions.

More broadly, I suggest that the phenomenon of propaganda can be grounded in evolutionary theory, but only indirectly, though a high-level cognitive analysis.

How do we get from universal evolved psychology to a historically contingent and geographically / temporally local culture?

Universal, species-specific adaptations matter. Given a certain account of human nature, we can derive a space of possible actions. Inversely, given certain cultural phenomena, we can infer, through an act of reverse engineering, what cognitive capacities must be present.

In a slightly more abstract sense, each adaptation or skill defines a possibility space, consisting of all theoretically possible actions. Human actions develop within the possibility spaces defined by evolved capacities. The combination of a large number of capacities means we are dealing with a complex multidimensional possibility space. Only tiny fractions of this space is realized at any given time.

The seventeenth-century project – notably pursued by Hobbes and Locke – of deriving possible forms of government from human nature is considerably more ambitious than current biopolitical approaches. Because people are fundamentally selfish, there is war in the natural state; because people use tools, there is equality, since anybody can kill anybody. A certain description of human nature – say, that people are fundamentally selfish, or that they are empathic and caring, or that they use tools – define a possibility space of human society.

Yet Hobbes views the social contract as an unnatural innovation that is not directly warranted by human nature – it requires crutches. The social contract is located outside of the possibility space defined by human cognitive capacities and proclivities. It must be formed through an biologically unprecedented collective action: the social contract.

Evolutionary game-theorists have argued that Hobbes' account of human nature is overly grim. In their view, the social contract lies within the possibility space created by universal human cognitive adaptations – this is what I take Skyrms to be attempting to establish. But in accounting for how such a collective action actually takes place, it is not enough to grant that it is possible. Without recourse to mutations, people are perfectly capable of living in the state of nature or to form a social contract.

We might for the sake of argument accept Skyrms' or comparable proposals that natural selection could in principle and may in fact have constructed cognitive adaptations for handling cooperation at the level required for forming a social contract. But we still need to understand how and why they are organized into the particular form of a social contract.

This is on the one hand an appeal to historicity, or the time-ordered self-understanding of a continuing human society. On the other, it is an appeal to cognitive adaptations that are recruited by specific historical processes to evolutionarily unprecedented ends.

Cognitive adaptations tend to be partially cue-based: certain kinds of input are accepted, giving rise to a certain kind of processing and resulting in a certain output. Cues can also function as triggers, turning whole inference systems on and off. Cosmides and Tooby suggest the analogy of a jukebox – which record is played is a function of the local environment.

Human culture, however, cannot be accounted for directly by the jukebox model. We have constructed societies, technologies, and cultural forms that have no precedent in nature. What are the cognitive mechanisms that have made this transcendence of nature possible? According to the Standard Social Science Model (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992), human cognition is domain-general. In this view, there is no problem: there is no human nature; we create ourselves ex nihilo through cultural construction, unconstrained by our biology. The evolutionary psychology account, on the other hand, faces the problem of explaining how a set of domain-specific cognitive adaptations optimized for an ancestral environment of hunting and gathering in small groups of related individuals could possibly have given rise to the kinds of cultural creations we see today.

In the following, I'll suggest that the transcendence of nature is made possible by the recruitment of evolved cognitive inference engines into new domains. Specifically, I'll suggest that the notion of a king taps into an evolved psychology of kinship. Hamilton's notion of inclusive fitness suggests that natural selection will have favored adaptations for identifying kin and for being disposed to be kind to them. The next few slides will outline the kind of cognitive architecture that allows adaptations that evolved to encourage collaboration with kin to be extended, through the use of propaganda, to relations between non-kin under a king.

First, let's consider an interesting implication to be drawn from the notion that evolution will tend to create cue-based inference systems. The argument for the necessity of relying on cues was first made by Hume – in the context of a theory of knowledge.

"It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets," he wrote in 1748, "and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends."

"Our senses inform us of the colour, weight, and consistence of bread; but neither sense nor reason can ever inform us of those qualities which fit it for the nourishment and support of a human body." This is an epistemological argument, relating to what is intelligible, or knowable. In an evolutionary context, it becomes an argument about what is evolvable, which is to say, what is functional, what works.

Bread, being a recent invention, is a poor example, but let us substitute a piece of fruit, which our ancestors have been eating for tens of millions of years. The senses of our Pleistocene ancestors informed them of the color, the weight, the consistency, and the taste of fruit, but – in Hume's words – neither sense nor reason informed them of those qualities which fit it for the nourishment and support of the human body.

The association of "like sensible qualities" with "like secret powers" poses an epistemological problem: how can we know? "It is allowed on all hands," Hume wrote, "that there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature."

Turning this around, we see that such correlations are precisely what natural selection must act on: "like sensible qualities" become proxies for "like secret powers." Natural selection acts on statistical invariances; if certain sensible qualities are reliably associated with certain "secret powers," then motivational systems evolve that take advantage of this correlation.

Hume poses the problem of how to choose food that will nourish you. Consider the case of fruit. How do you select the most nourishing fruit? Ripe fruit contains calories, minerals, vitamins, trace elements, fiber, anti-oxidants – a large list of nutrients that our ancestors would have needed to survive. Yet they have no knowledge of these "secret powers" – they rely on a few proxies: the color of the fruit, the consistency, but above all, the taste. The dominant proxy is the sweetness of the taste: if the fruit is sweet, eat it. If it is not sweet or even bitter, spit it out.

The motivation, the sense of taste, is geared towards a few proxies such as sugar content. All the other nutrients as it were piggyback on this proxy. You don't need to taste them because they invariably come packaged with the fructose.

Yet reliance on the proxy opens up for certain kinds of problems. From the fact that something worked in the past, Hume argues, does it follow "that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers? The consequence seems nowise necessary."

If evolution produces cue-based inference engines, Hume's problem of induction applies. The interesting consequence of this for our present purposes is that the proxy can be deliberately, through acts of cultural manipulation, be dissociated from its target good.

If you can manipulate your environment, this manipulation will tend to isolate the proxy, since this is where you hit a motivational bull's eye.

Consider the history of sugar. Initially, it was just chewed, but soon a syrup was extracted by means of pressing and boiling the cane. By 600 A.D. the practice of breaking up the sugar cane and boiling it to produce sugar crystals was widespread. When Marco Polo visited China, he saw flourishing sugar mills. The proxy was deliberately removed from the target good it had initially served to identify. The proxy retains all the motivational force of the adaptation, but in this culturally constructed environment, it will fail to locate the target good.

From Persia and Egypt, sugar cane was introduced to Sicily and Spain. Elizabeth I was known for her black teeth, rotted by sugar. The demand for sugar was a major spur to colonization and slavery. The industry today produces 100 million tons a year and methods of removing all traces of valuable nutrients have been perfected. Risks of sugar consumption include obesity, gallstones, diabetes, Crohn's disease, and heart disease.

The proxy worked in the EEA, or environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Culture will show a natural tendency to locate it, isolate it, and manufacture it. In this form, it may be worse than useless, but the motivational force will remain.

For a variety of complex reasons, humans have evolved systems for handling multiple interacting inputs, including inputs from memory. These are more efficient at picking out variable but statistically significant features of the environment. Specifically, this is a method for handling local knowledge (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000).

Instead of responding to a cue automatically, we accept multiple inputs and construct a simulation; this simulation then serves as input to the adaptation. The output modifies the simulation, eventually resulting in behavior.

In an evolutionary-based account of culture, what matters is that mental simulations work because they are able to access the cue-based inference systems produced by evolution. Thinking about something dangerous, say, creates a readiness to respond to danger; imagining a succulent steak makes your mouth water.

More broadly, simulations can be used to explore the possibility space of action in a cheap way.

The simulations must necessarily rely on proxies, since it is proxies that satisfy the input conditions to cognitive adaptations. Proxies, however, can be dissociated from their target good and manufactured to serve new purposes and agendas.

By using representations from one domain to access an inference engine in another domain, you can generate inferences that get applied to the first domain.

This is where I propose to situate the phenomenon of propaganda, or the deliberate manipulation of people's minds through the selective spread of ideas.

A significant contribution to the problem of modeling how culture piggybacks on nature is the theory of neural recruitment formulated by Lakoff and a number of his collaborators, notably Mark Johnson (philosophy), Jerry Feldman (AI), and Srini Narayan (cognitive science). The Neural Theory of Language model is a development of Lakoff and Johnson's earlier work on metaphor; see for instance their Metaphors We Live By (1980) and the recent Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); papers are available online at http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/NTL/

According to the NTL model, human beings are able to understand, think about, and construct novel phenomena by enlisting neural structures that have been constructed for other purposes. This phenomenon was first studied as a device in poetics under the label of metaphor – a word that means roughly "carrying across." In "my love is like a red, red rose," your knowledge of roses constitute a source domain that is selectively mapped onto the target domain of love. The phenomenon may appear trivial. Lakoff, however, makes the case that Western philosophy has been constructed on the basis of a set of metaphors; he has just completed a book that makes the same argument for mathematics.

Lakoff is largely an experientialist – that is to say, in his model, literal thought develops through the pan-human experience of being embodied. In the strong version of the theory, abstract thought is made possible through neural recruitment of inference systems that develop through ontogeny. Motor control structures, for instance, form the architecture of narratives; the experience of a strict versus a nurturing parent forms the difference in political outlook of Republicans and Democrats. Lakoff's system of neural recruitment, however, lends itself to a firmer grounding in evolved psychology and to be systematically extended to data sets beyond linguistics.

Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have further developed the model of metaphorical mapping first developed by Lakoff and Johnson. They call their model conceptual integration – see for instance their Cognitive Science article "Conceptual Integration Networks" (1998). In this model, two or more input spaces are drawn upon selectively to create a simulation, or a blended space.

The ability to integrate concepts in a new blend is crucial for the development of human culture. The paleoanthropologist Steven Mithen argues in A Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (1996) that the cultural explosion we find in the archaeological record around 40,000 years ago may be due to a new capacity he calls "cognitive fluidity" – it is basically the ability to construct cross-domain conceptual blends.

This is the set of proposed cognitive adaptations relevant for describing the dynamics of the epidemiology of representations. First, cognitive adaptations are faced with the problem of induction. In practice they need to rely on "sensible qualities" that are statistically correlated with "secret powers." Culture can extract the proxy and remove it from the target good, as in the example of sugar. Mental simulations are useful only if they can elicit a response from evolved inference engines, but this also means that what they are responding to is proxies. Cognitive linguists suggest that abstract thought is made possible by the systematic exploitation of the capacity for conceptual integration through a process of neural recruitment.

If you have a population of people that use multiple inputs of information from several sources and synthesize new information with recalled memories into a mental simulation that explores multidimensional possibility spaces, you might have a hard time controlling their minds.

We can address the problem of coordination bottom up: how do people agree to form a social contract, of the same form, at the same time? Or top down: how do you control people's minds?

Propaganda in the simplest sense is to spread information. The term was first used to name a Catholic organization, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or College of the Propaganda, founded in 1622 and responsible for missionary activities.

It is now defined as "the systematic propagation of a given doctrine or of allegations reflecting its views and interests" (Am Heritage Dict).

People make decisions based on mental simulations constructed from personal memories. This may seem almost impossible to control. How do you control the exploration of possibility spaces, and thus the inferences derived and the resulting intentions and actions?

Propaganda is a special case of conceptual integration through neural recruitment. How does it differ from other modes of culturally innovative thinking? Propaganda is a form of persuasion; its purpose is to influence the mind through the controlled dissemination of representations. What I'm proposing is that these representations will succeed if they in some way mimic the input conditions of a cognitive adaptation. These representations won't just tend to spread, they will tend to affect people in predictable ways.

Representations from an evolutionarily novel domain – say, that of the state – will allow inferences to be generated from an evolved domain – say, that of kinship. These inferences will feed backwards into the domain of the state, generating the desired political convictions.

Now this response just appears in the mind – the simulation may be conscious and some of the output of the adaptation is conscious, but the inference engine itself is cognitively impenetrable. So you don’t see what’s happening.

At the base of the political propaganda of the seventeenth century lies a much older metaphor, that of God the father. In creating a mental simulation of God the Father, you imagine an all-knowing, all-seeing, and ever-present person who cares for you, who is always watching you. This can be an extremely gratifying simulation: faced with powerful people who are indifferent to your well-being, the thought of a benevolent and omnipotent father who orders all for the good makes you feel better, more confident, more relaxed, more at peace, less worried, less afraid.

Considered as a proxy that accesses an evolved inference system, the target good of the representation of God is a real father. Natural selection has favored a set of cognitive adaptations for feeling happy and secure when your father cares for you and anxious and afraid if you believe there is a chance he will reject you. Your prototypical father has your best interest at heart, so you should trust him and obey him even if you don't always understand how he makes his decisions.

This set of inferences provides an extremely tempting prize.

When you think about God – an all-powerful and omniscient being who watches over you and loves you – it feels great. You might realize that it’s just a simulation, but the effect is so great that you might also think it must have a real cause. Thinking that there is a real cause makes you feel even better, as you can assign a greater credal value to the simulation.

But there’s always the problem of knowing what God wants. If you could control the flow of information, you might want to try to just tell people what God wants and make sure that everyone hears the same story. Since you know what he wants, you become a mediator between God and men, and this gives you a great deal of power.

The Protestant rebellions are rebellions against the idea that you need someone to tell you what God wants. But if nobody agrees on what God wants, you have mayhem.

The simplest method of control is to control input. Prior to the seventeenth century, monarchs were to some extent able to control what went into people's minds. They controlled the church and the printing presses. In the course of the seventeenth century, sovereigns lost control of the dissemination of information.

The strategy for controlling minds shifted from a strategy of controlling inputs to a strategy of attempting to control how information is processed. Instead of censorship, they had to rely on propaganda – fighting like with like. Propaganda becomes important as the price of information drops so low that even if you have a great deal of resources, it's hard to control it.

The number of publications plotted over time tracks the major political events of the century:

Access to the adaptation for parental love, respect, and subordination is an extremely tempting prize. How can you insert yourself between God and the individual?

There is of course the problem of reading God's mind. What does he want? In Catholicism, the Pope is the father – Il Papa. He steps in and tells us what God wants. Priests are the fathers of their congregation.

The King fits into the symbolic slot occupied by God. He is the authorized substitute or representative. In this analysis, the point of patriarchy is not that men are really in charge and have all the power; the vast majority of men have very little power. The point is that a simulation is created where the representation of a father is used as a proxy to access a range of inferences. It is not primarily directed against women – matriarchy might be just as effective, and perhaps just as prone to abuse of power. Both rely on proxies.

Filmer makes use of these inferences in the Patriarcha. "It is unnatural for the People to Govern, or choose Governours" (Ch. II). "Positive Laws do not infringe on the Natural and Fatherly Power of Kings (Ch. III). "The King the Author, the Interpreter, and Corrector of the Common Laws (III. 9). "The Liberty of Parliament not from Nature, but from the Grace of Princes" (III.15).

These are politically extremely powerful inferences. The proxy has the energy warranted by the target good – the motivational energy is proportionate to the evolutionary significance of the target good.

The inferences are presented as normative. To question them is to be disobedient to God, who "governed always by Monarchy" (II. 9). This suggests a reliance on cognitive frames that discourage an independent examination of the claims. The sense of validity produced by propaganda, although specious, becomes buffered by emotions. For instance, guilt may be associated with the attempt to dispel the delusion.

Propaganda, I suggest, works by taking advantage of the relative modularity of inference systems, recruiting neural structures in one domain to produce inferences that are taken to be valid in another, and preventing a reexamination of the output.

I have proposed that evolutionary accounts that rely on evolved cue-based systems fail to account for the social contract, since the social contract is a cultural innovation and not a direct product of evolution – it belongs to epidemiological rather than universal culture.

One of Skyrms' (1996) results is that "Strategies that are ruled out by every theory of rational choice can flourish under favorable conditions of correlation" (106). Hamilton's (1964) notion of inclusive fitness suggests that natural selection will have favored adaptations for identifying kin and for being disposed to be "kind" – words that, incidentally, come from the same root as "king."

But the problem of the creation of the state is that by definition it reaches beyond kinship. Through the double-scoped conceptual integration of king and father, the inference systems designed to deal with a father is recruited to yield inferences concerning the king – and the king's other subjects. These inferences may facilitate collaborative relations between subjects.

This analysis of propaganda relies on a level of analysis that acknowledges the historicity of culture, grounded in a set of cognitive inference systems. In culture, these evolved and ontogenetically developed systems are recruited through conceptual integration in ways that diverge from their biological function. More specifically, propaganda differs from other forms of conceptual integration in its reliance on cognitive frames that aim to forestall a reexamination of the output and discourage independent thinking.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Robert (1997). The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reviewed by Ken Binmore (external).

Axelrod, Robert, and Hamilton, W.D. (1981). The Evolution of Cooperation. Science 211: 1390-1396.

Bergstrom, Theodore C. and Stark, Oded (1993). How altruism can prevail in an evolutionary environment. American Economic Review 83: 149-156. Abstract.

Brown, Donald E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Chagnon, Napoleon (1992). Yanomamo: The Fierce People. 4th ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Recent interview.

Coleman, James Samuel (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (2000). Consider the source: The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentations. In Metarepresentation. Ed. Dan Sperber. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner (1998). "Conceptual Integration Networks." Cognitive Science 22 (2): 133-187. Abstract.

Filmer, Robert (1980). Patriarcha: or The Natural Power of Kings. London: Printed for Ric. Chiswell in St. Paul's Church-Yard, Matthew Gillyflower and William Hench-man in Westminster Hall, 1680. Also in Filmer, Robert (1991). Patriarcha and other writings. Ed. Johann P. Sommerville. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Hoffman, E., K. McCabe and V. Smith (1996). Reciprocity: The Behavioral Foundations of Socio-Economic Games. Understanding Strategic Interaction. Essays in Honor of Reinhard Selten. Edited by W.Albers et al. Berlin: Springer.

Maynard Smith, John (1982). Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hamilton, W.D.(1964). The genetical evolution of social behavior. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52. Also in Hamilton, W.D. (1996). Narrow Roads of Geneland, the Collected papers of W. D. Hamilton. Volume 1: The evolution of social behavior. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman.

Harré, Rom (1993). Social being. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA : Blackwell.

Hobbes, Thomas (1997/1651). Leviathan: authoritative text, backgrounds, interpretations. Ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York, NY: Norton.

Hume, David (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. London: Millar. Full text.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Reviewed by Francis Steen in Philosophy and Literature.

Millikan, Ruth Garrett (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Millikan, Ruth Garrett (1993). White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reviewed by Anthony Chemero (external).

Mithen, Steven J. (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cf. abstract of Mithen's plenary talk at HBES 95 (external). Howard Gardner's review in the NYRB.

Olson, Mancur (1965). The logic of collective action; public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Parsons, Talcott (1949). The structure of social action; a study in social theory with special reference to a group of recent European writers. 2d ed. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Morrow. Michael Coe's NYT review.

Rawls, John. A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Skyrms, Brian (1996). Evolution of the Social Contract. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. (Reviewed in TLS August 29, 1997.)

Sperber, Dan (1990). The Epidemiology of Beliefs. In C. Fraser and G. Gaskell (eds.). The Social Psychological Study of Widespread Beliefs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sperber, Dan (1994). The Modularity of Thought and the Epidemiology of Representations. In Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. and Gelman, Susan A. (eds). Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Contents and abstracts.

Tooby, John and Cosmides, Leda (1992). The Psychological Foundations of Culture. In Barkow J.H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (eds.) (1992). The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Contents and abstracts.

top