Sociality: Psycoloquy Call for Commentary

The target article by L. Caporael on Sociality whose abstract follows below has just been published in Psycoloquy, refereed electronic journal of articles, commentaries and responses sponsored by the American Psychological Association. Qualified professional biobehavioral, neural or cognitive scientists are hereby invited to submit Open Peer Commentary on this article. Please write for Instructions if you are not familiar with Psycoloquy format and acceptance criteria (all submissions are refereed). The address for submitting articles and requesting information is psyc(a)pucc.princteton.edu The ABSTRACT includes the author's Rationale for Soliciting Commentary. The full article and all past Psycoloquy articles, commentaries and responses are publicly accessible by ftp, gopher and World-Wide-Web at the URLs below. Instructions for Retrieval follow the Abstract. Stevan Harnad Editor, Psycoloquy Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu Universal Resource Locators (URLs) for the Psycoloquy Archives: ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/psyc.html http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals ----------------------------------------------------------------------- psycoloquy.95.6.01.group-selection.1.caporael Monday 20 February 1995 ISSN 1055-0143 (51 pars, 1 table, 1 note, 44 refs, 999 lines) Psycoloquy is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) Copyright 1995 Linnda R. Caporael SOCIALITY: COORDINATING BODIES, MINDS AND GROUPS Linnda R. Caporael Department of Science and Technology Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY 12180 caporl(a)rpi.edu ABSTRACT: Human interaction, as opposed to aggregation, occurs in face-to-face groups. "Sociality theory" proposes that such groups have a nested, hierarchical structure, consisting of a few basic variations, or "core configurations." These function in the coordination of human behavior, and are repeatedly assembled, generation to generation, in human ontogeny, and in daily life. If face-to-face groups are "the mind's natural environment," then we should expect human mental systems to correlate with core configurations. Features of groups that recur across generations could provide a descriptive paradigm for testable and non-intuitive evolutionary hypotheses about social and cognitive processes. This target article sketches three major topics in sociality theory, roughly corresponding to the interests of biologists, psychologists, and social scientists. These are (1) a multiple levels-of-selection view of Darwinism, part group selectionism, part developmental systems theory; (2) structural and psychological features of repeatedly assembled, concretely situated face-to-face coordination; and (3) superordinate, "unsituated" coordination at the level of large-scale societies. Sociality theory predicts a tension, perhaps unresolvable, between the social construction of knowledge, which facilitates coordination within groups, and the negotiation of the habitat, which requires some correspondence with contingencies in specific situations. This tension is relevant to ongoing debates about scientific realism, constructivism, and relativism in the philosophy and sociology of knowledge. KEYWORDS: developmental systems theory, group coordination, group selection, hierarchy, human evolution, social cognition, social identity, teleofunctionalism ------------------------------------------------------------- THREE(+) WAYS TO SEARCH AND RETRIEVE FROM THE Psycoloquy ARCHIVES Psycoloquy is now retrievable both by the standard listserv file retrieval commands on Bitnet and by anonymous ftp (plus some remarkable new tools) on the Internet: ----- (1) The HARDEST AND LEAST POWERFUL way to serach and retrieve Psycoloquy: Bitnet/Listserv Retrieval of Psycoloquy Archive: Bitnet users can either send the commands shown below as a TELL message to Listserv (TELL LISTSERV AT PUCC) or as email to LISTSERV(a)PUCC.bitnet. If you use email, your commands should appear in the body of the message and not in the subject line. Remember to send your mail requests to LISTSERV(a)PUCC.bitnet, not to PSYC(a)PUCC.bitnet To get a list of all PSYC files: GET PSYC FILELIST This will send you a file containing the names of all the available files. Then, to order an individual file: GET fname ftype fname and ftype are the CMS Filename and Filetype as listed in the PSYC FILELIST file. ----- (2) An EASIER AND MORE POWERFUL way to search and retrieve Psycoloquy: Internet/Unix/ftp Retrieval of Psycoloquy Archive The Psycoloquy archives are available by anonymous ftp, if you have it. To retrieve a file by ftp from a Unix/Internet site, type either: ftp princeton.edu or ftp 128.112.128.1 When you are asked for your login, type: anonymous Enter password as per instructions (make sure to include the specified @), and then change directories with: cd /pub/harnad/Psycoloquy To show the volumes, type: volumes ls This will show the following directories:: 1990.volume.1 1991.volume.2 1992.volume.3 1993.volume.4 1994.volume.5 1995.volume.6 Indices.1990-1994 to list all contents of, say, 1992, type: ls 1992.volume.3/* Next, to retrieve the file you want with (for example): get 1992.volume.3/psyc.92.3.15.consciousness.1.bridgeman or just: mget *3/*3.15* When you have the file(s) you want, type: quit In case of doubt or difficulty, consult your system manager. ----- (3) The EASIEST AND MOST POWERFUL ways to retrieve Psycoloquy. (3) Easier and more direct and powerful access to the Psycoloquy archives is also available via archie, gopher, veronica, mosaic/world-wide-web and various wais servers, which do all the anonymous ftp search and retrieval for you and allow keyword and even full-text searching. Please ask your system administrator about these remarkable new electronic search and retrieval tools, or write to psyc(a)pucc.bitnet or psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu for some general information about them (they are free, easy, and worth mastering, because they will be the primary means of accessing scholarly and scientific information in the near future). gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html ftp://princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Where the above procedures are not yet available (e.g. from Bitnet or some other networks), there are two fileservers: ftpmail(a)decwrl.dec.com and bitftp(a)pucc.bitnet that will do the ftp search and retrieval for you. To one or the other of them, send the following one line message: help for instructions (which will be similar to the above, but will be in the form of a series of lines in an email message that ftpmail or bitftp will then execute for you). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- INSTRUCTIONS FOR PSYCOLOQUY AUTHORS AND COMMENTATORS Psycoloquy is a refereed electronic journal (ISSN 1055-0143) sponsored on an experimental basis by the American Psychological Association and currently estimated to reach a readership of 40,000. Psycoloquy publishes brief reports of new ideas and findings on which the author wishes to solicit rapid peer feedback, international and interdisciplinary ("Scholarly Skywriting"), in all areas of psychology and its related fields (biobehavioral science, cognitive science, neuroscience, social science, etc.). All contributions are refereed. Target article length should normally not exceed 500 lines [c. 4500 words]. Commentaries and responses should not exceed 200 lines [c. 1800 words]. All target articles, commentaries and responses must have (1) a short abstract (up to 100 words for target articles, shorter for commentaries and responses), (2) an indexable title, (3) the authors' full name(s) and institutional address(es). In addition, for target articles only: (4) 6-8 indexable keywords, (5) a separate statement of the authors' rationale for soliciting commentary (e.g., why would commentary be useful and of interest to the field? what kind of commentary do you expect to elicit?) and (6) a list of potential commentators (with their email addresses). All paragraphs should be numbered in articles, commentaries and responses (see format of already published articles in the Psycoloquy archive; line length should be < 80 characters, no hyphenation). It is strongly recommended that all figures be designed so as to be screen-readable ascii. If this is not possible, the provisional solution is the less desirable hybrid one of submitting them as postscript files (or in some other universally available format) to be printed out locally by readers to supplement the screen-readable text of the article. Psycoloquy also publishes multiple reviews of books in any of the above fields; these should normally be the same length as commentaries, but longer reviews will be considered as well. Book authors should submit a 500-line self-contained Precis of their book, in the format of a target article; if accepted, this will be published in Psycoloquy together with a formal Call for Reviews (of the book, not the Precis). The author's publisher must agree in advance to furnish review copies to the reviewers selected. Authors of accepted manuscripts assign to Psycoloquy the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently retrievable electronically, but they retain the copyright, and after it has appeared in Psycoloquy authors may republish their text in any way they wish -- electronic or print -- as long as they clearly acknowledge Psycoloquy as its original locus of publication. However, except in very special cases, agreed upon in advance, contributions that have already been published or are being considered for publication elsewhere are not eligible to be considered for publication in Psycoloquy, Please submit all material to psyc(a)pucc.bitnet or psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu Anonymous ftp archive is DIRECTORY pub/harnad/Psycoloquy HOST princeton.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------