...This chapter explores two important consequences of the genetic abilities that started the human evolutionary transition: faithful sequence representation and mental flexibility. The chapter emphasizes how genetic abilities have profound consequences for the behavioral and mental skills of humans...

...This chapter argues that even if it is true that a person who would not succeed at some aim even if they tried, lacks the ability to achieve that aim, this fails to show that people who cannot bring themselves to do it cannot do it. While that may be so in some special cases, it is not true...

...This chapter begins by laying out a theory of competence in general and its application to epistemology. This is meant to round out the concept of virtue epistemology, which must essentially rely on a theory of competence. A competence is a disposition (ability) to succeed when one tries. When...

...Human beings have evolved to become the most dominant species on Earth. This astonishing transformation is usually explained in terms of cognitive ability—people are just smarter than all the rest. But this book argues that culture—our ability to learn from each other—has been the essential...

... of evidence from behavioral economics and psychology of the so-called “reasoning failure”: the fact that individuals, in trying to achieve the end of improving their well-being, tend to make mistakes and do so in a systematic way. Four possible sources for such failure are discussed: limited technical ability...

...This chapter examines group ability composition and social combination processes on world knowledge tasks. On difficult world knowledge tasks, high-ability persons performed better in cooperative groups with other high-ability members than they did alone, and this difference increased with group...

...This chapter explores the nature of the virtue of compassion, in which every exemplar of compassion's generic ability is to make correct moral judgements in situations that call for compassion that is partly constituted by a morally rectified sympathy trait. It discusses the role assigned...