In 'Joint Action and Development', Stephen Butterfill argues that if several agents' actions are driven by what he calls a "shared goal" -- a certain pattern of goal-relations and expectations -- then these actions constitute a joint action. This kind of joint action is sufficiently cognitively undemanding for children to engage in, and therefore has the potential to play a part in fostering their

According to the standard story given by reductive versions of the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent’s habits and skills. Markos Valaris (2015) argues that,

Leading philosophical accounts of joint activity, such as Michael Bratman’s account of ‘shared intentional activity’, take joint activity to be the outcome of two or more agents having a ‘shared intention’, where this is a certain pattern of mutually known prior intentions (plans) that are directed toward a common goal. With Bratman’s account as a foil, I address two lacunas that are relatively un

The view that an agent’s cognitive processes sometimes include proper parts found outside the skin and skull of the agent is gaining increasing acceptance in philosophy of mind. One main empirical touchstone for this so-called active externalism is Edwin Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition (DCog). However, the connection between DCog and active externalism is far from clear. While active ext

Critics argue that non-cognitivism cannot adequately account for the existence and nature of some thick moral concepts. They use the existence of thick concepts as a lever in an argument against non-cognitivism, here called the Thick Concept Argument (TCA). While TCA is frequently invoked, it is unfortunately rarely articulated. In this paper, TCA is first reconstructed on the basis of John McDowe

Cognitive processes, cognitive psychology tells us, unfold in our heads. In contrast, several approaches in cognitive engineering argue for a shift of unit of analysis from what is going on in the heads of operators to the workings of whole socio-technical systems. This shift is sometimes presented as part of the development of a new understanding of what cognition is and where the boundaries of c

Most reductionist accounts of intentional joint action include a condition that it must be common knowledge between participants that they have certain intentions and beliefs that cause and coordinate the joint action. However, this condition has typically simply been taken for granted rather than argued for. The condition is not necessary for ensuring that participants are jointly responsible for

According to reductionist accounts, intentional joint action can be exhaustively analysed with concepts that are already available and anyway needed for understanding intentional singular action. Most such accounts include a condition that it must be common knowledge between the participants that they have certain intentions and beliefs that causes and coordinates the joint action (a CK-condition)

Numerical simulations are performed to study the combustion processes of n-heptane and methanol/air/EGR under high-temperature and high-pressure conditions relevant to a dual-fuel compression-ignition engine. Detailed chemical kinetic mechanism and transport properties are considered in the simulation. The simulations are carried out by performing three-dimensional (3D) direct numerical simulation

High-profile studies have provided conflicting results regarding the involvement of the Omi/HtrA2 gene in Parkinson's disease (PD) susceptibility. Therefore, we performed a large-scale analysis of the association of common Omi/HtrA2 variants in the Genetic Epidemiology of Parkinson's disease (GEO-PD) consortium. GEO-PD sites provided clinical and genetic data including affection status, gender, et

Early genome-wide association (GWA) studies on Parkinson's disease (PD) have not been able to yield conclusive, replicable signals of association, perhaps due to limited sample size. We aimed to investigate whether association signals derived from the meta-analysis of the first two GWA investigations might be replicable in different populations. We examined six single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP

OBJECTIVE: Eleven genetic loci have reached genome-wide significance in a recent meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in Parkinson disease (PD) based on populations of Caucasian descent. The extent to which these genetic effects are consistent across different populations is unknown.METHODS: Investigators from the Genetic Epidemiology of Parkinson's Disease Consortium were invited to p

Joubert syndrome and related disorders (JSRD) are clinically and genetically heterogeneous ciliopathies sharing a peculiar midbrain-hindbrain malformation known as the 'molar tooth sign'. To date, 19 causative genes have been identified, all coding for proteins of the primary cilium. There is clinical and genetic overlap with other ciliopathies, in particular with Meckel syndrome (MKS), that is al