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. 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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. 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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. 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