This is the Introduction to a forthcoming book (McGraw-Hill, January 2002) on the origin of the Scientific Revolution. It includes a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book.

This is an invited comment on a forthcoming target article (Rachlin, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press) which provides a further entry in the long list of proposals for reducing what might be seen as social motivation to some roundabout form of self-interest. But his argument exhibits the...

This draft material gives an account of the "S-diagram", which uses Schelling's social choice diagram in the context of my NSNX ("neither selfish nor exploited") model of individual choice to provide an account of social equilibrium in situations in which social outcomes are contested. Examples...

This responds to an invitation to comment on Steve Fuller’s severely critical appraisal of Thomas Kuhn. In a slightly different version it appears, along with other invited comments and a response from Steve Fuller, in Social Epistemology 17:211-213 (November 2003).

The prevailing account of expert vs. lay conflicts of risk intuition on such matters as nuclear waste and pesticides is that experts focus on a very narrow range of consequences, but ordinary people have a much richer sense of what is involved in choices about risk. Experts may feel comfortable...

These are draft chapters for "Cognition and Social Motivation", to be published by Routledge in late 2007. The book should go formally into press about January 1. Comments welcome. The chapters will be posted as they emerge from a final read-through, but with Chapter 9 posted early for use in...

A controversy among economists and others interested in the limits of rational choice analysis, still running after an onset at least two decades ago, concerns whether intelligent people, and especially experts, can be subject to cognitive illusions. This note provides a striking illustration...

A "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" (Guardian, 9 September) is the latest reminder of the persistence of controversy over who wrote Shakespeare. But the skeptics' case depends on a logical slip. The starting point is always some close variant of the claim that while Shakspere (a common spelling...

The paper gives an account of several well-known cognitive illusions in terms of contextual defaults which guide intuition where familiar cues are ambiguous. When the default is inappropriate, as it sometimes must be, the result is a cognitive illusion. In contrast to Kahneman & Tversky...

I introduce the notion of "neglect defaulting", which labels the propensity to neglect possibilities which are ordinarily sensibly neglected. In familiar contexts we are well-tuned to recognize when to override the default. But outside the range of familiar experience – here in the artificial...