Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T10:58:05.430Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Maladaptive social norms, cultural progress, and the free-energy principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2020

Matteo Colombo Open the ORCID record for Matteo Colombo [Opens in a new window]
Matteo Colombo*
Affiliation:
Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS), Tilburg University, 5000LETilburg, The Netherlands. m.colombo@uvt.nl https://mteocolphi.wordpress.com/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Veissière and collaborators ground their account of culture and social norms in the free-energy principle, which postulates that the utility (or adaptive value) of an outcome is equivalent to its probability. This equivalence would mean that their account entails that complying with social norms has always adaptive value. But, this is false, because many social norms are obviously maladaptive.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 43 , 2020 , e100
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bicchieri, C. (2006) The grammar of society: The nature and dynamics of social norms. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bicchieri, C. (2016) Norms in the wild: How to diagnose, measure, and change social norms. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Binmore, K. (1994) Game theory and the social contract, vol. I. Playing fair. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. (2001) Norms and bounded rationality. In Bounded rationality: The adaptive toolbox, eds. Gigerenzer, G. & Selten, R., pp. 281–96. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Colombo, M. (2014) Two neurocomputational building blocks of social norm compliance. Biology & Philosophy 29(1):71–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colombo, M. (2017) Social motivation in computational neuroscience. Or if brains are prediction machines, then the Humean theory of motivation is false. In Routledge handbook of philosophy of the social mind, ed. Kiverstein, J., pp. 320–40. Routledge.Google Scholar
Colombo, M. & Wright, C. (2018) First principles in the life sciences: The free-energy principle, organicism, and mechanism. Synthese 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01932-w.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, M. (1986) How institutions think. Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar
Elster, J. (1989) Social norms and economic theory. Journal of Economic Perspectives 3(4):99–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gintis, H. (2007) A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30(1):1–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ullmann-Margalit, E. (1977) The Emergence of Norms. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar