Who am I?
My name is Konrad Talmont-Kaminski and I am superstitious. Just like everyone else. Superstition is a universal human trait. It has been with us at least since ancient times and probably since before we were mammals, and it will almost definitely survive in some form so long as humanity survives in some form. In the meanwhile, I am trying to understand it.
I am a philosophy lecturer at the Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. My research focusses upon understanding rationality and irrationality. Superstition makes for a fascinating case study. It allows me to bring together a variety of outlooks on the issue: be they from philosophy, psychology, biology, history, anthropology or any other discipline. It also allows me to chuckle at the foolishness of humans, myself included.
Hi Konrad! Your CFP for your conference in September (which looks interesting, but alas I can’t attend – Poland is too far from New Zealand) led me to your blog. My – you’ve been busy! A very impressive site. I hope all is well with you!
Cheers,
Cathy
Konrad, the KNEW 07 link on your webpage is still going to 06. Great blog and I’m linking a couple of your articles to my science and human values website. (www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mayesgr) We’ve got some similar interests. See drafts of my latest under Scribble link. Hope to meet you sometime.
Randy Mayes, CSUS Philosophy
The links are fixed now, I hope. Thanks for the compliments.
Since before we were mammals??? That strikes me as an incredibly unlikely claim. Besides, it implies this “great-chain-of being” thing, which is just a misunderstanding of evolution. Before we were mammals “we” weren’t anything. A more charitable reading, however, suggests that you are claiming that an ancestor of mammals had superstition – but you do realize that you are talking abut amniotic tetrapods, right? This is an ancestor we share with all reptiles (and birds) so do you think reptiles and birds are superstitious?
Ashley, when talking about the time before ‘we’ were mammals I am fairly clearly speaking metaphorically. Or so I thought. As such it is meant as a statement of the evolutionary interconnectedness of all life and not of any chains-of-being which I do not believe in any more than you do. So, yes, I do think that not just humans are superstitious. Indeed, I am hardly the first to think birds superstitious. The classic text for this is Skinner’s 1948 “‘Superstition’ in the pigeon”. Skinner puts superstition in scare quotes and there has been an ongoing scientific argument about whether pigeons can be said to be strictly speaking superstitious. There are two main worries. The empirical one is whether the behaviour pigeons exhibit is properly understood as the result of operant conditioning in which the reinforcement schedule is not connected to the pigeon’s behaviour. The deeper question is whether superstition requires explicit beliefs such as humans have and are capable of espousing. Obviously, my answers to these questions are ‘yes’ to the first and ‘no’ to the second. Again, I am hardly the only person to make these claims. There are various underlying philosophical commitments which lead me to this stance. There is also a general methodological motivation – In recent years an enormous amount of research has been done which sees human behaviour in the light of animal behaviour (or vice versa). This research has been very fruitful, often in areas that were once thought to be paradigmatically human. Connecting human and animal behaviour seems to be a good move methodologically. So, which part of what I have said is ‘incredibly unlikely’?
Hello, I’m an Italian guy. I had your name from Dr P Stevens because I made photos rather unusual. I made a website http://www.sentieridiluce.altervista.org where I published the photos.
I would know who can analyze the photos to understand what are the figures present.
Sorry for my bad English.
I have no skill in analysing photos. All that I know is that there is a broad range of optical effects which can lead to the appearance of strange phenomena in pictures.
Konrad: thank you for the nice read this Saturday morning. I also enjoyed the CFI video link and saw some of my heroes; i will be reviewing your presentation on bounded rationality; my research interest is in bounded rationality with respect to military decisionmaking and examiniing the effect of military culture on adapting curriculum to accomodate insights from BR, whereas current military planning strongly favors a rational, analytical, economic model. If you find yourself in Kansas (it could happen!), stop in and see us at the US Army Command & General Staff College
cheers! ken
kansasreflections.wordpress.com
Konrad: i am sorry, but i forgot also to recommend Richard Burton’s “On Being Certain” (2008). a neurosurgeon who examines the case for how the brain organically creates a “feeling of knowing” that accompanies the production of a specific “intuition”, which through unconcious/subconcious processes “nominate” topics for our concious attention to focus on. It struck me that this might be of interest to you in your work on superstition. It has certainly caused me to examine with healthy skepticism various claims of “My intuition tells me that this course of action is the best” when conducting planning and decision making under conditions of extreme stress.
cheers!
ken
Ken, thanks for the kind words and the invite – first time I’d been invited to a military facility. Given the connection between stress and superstition the army must be a good place to run tests. Do you think the military are among the more superstitious groups of people? The Burton book sounds very interesting. In a bit of serendipity, Burton has an article in today’s salon.com on voting patterns.
[...] on the psychology of voting Ken suggested that I look at Robert Burton’s book On Being Certain, and it definitely sounds like something [...]
Burton on the psychology of voting « Just Another Deisidaimon said this on September 22, 2008 at 9:23 am |
i think we are very “superstitious” in the sense that we have invested a lot of belief in “rules of thumbs” and the received wisdom of very successful leaders in the past. We take up their advice with religous fervor. What i find interesting is that this is also a culture that places a very high value on rational, analytical control to achieve certainty. Yet when the stress levels go high and you must choose in the absence of certainty, military officers revert even more quickly and stubbornly to the chestnuts of the past. An example: we revere Clauswitz and Jomini, studying them carefully. In what other profession that idealizes certianty and modernity do you see the leading philosophers living in the 19th century? Is their content really that timeless or has our culture placed them on such a high pedestal and invested such emotion in being right that we are locked into this “superstition”? I am probably not using superstition in the formal sense but this is the paradox I see.
Also, i should correct myself and note, as you know, that Burton’s first name is of course Robert, not Richard
cheers!
ken
Hello Konrad,
I just viewed your response to the “Genetic map of Europe”. I want to thank you for being respectful of me and voicing your opinion in a positive way. Usually I don’t say this but you must forgive me, it is just the negatives done to Europe by the Turks that upset me, especially being 1/4 Serb myself. And yes I realize we are all mixed. Especially us Americans like I myself.
Interesting blog. I can’t say much, for I’m not superstitious: it brings bad luck, they say.