‘There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping’, writes Hubert Dreyfus, ‘for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body’1. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both (...) habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multidimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. (shrink)

Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action outcomes. This allows fine-grained (...) differentiation of the contributions of self and external factors to action outcomes. We further argue that the sense of agency incorporates prospective awareness of actions that are possible in a situation and awareness of the limits of control. These forms of sense of agency enable highly flexible, context-sensitive strategic control, and are likely to contribute to high interindividual variability in responses to complex tasks. (shrink)

The nature of the cognition-motor interface has been brought to prominence by Butterfill & Sinigaglia, who argue that the representations employed by the cognitive and motor systems should not be able to interact with each other. Here I argue that recent empirical evidence concerning the interface contradicts several of the assumptions incorporated in Butterfill & Sinigaglia’s account, and I seek to develop a theoretical picture that will allow us to explain the structure of the interface presented by this evidence. The (...) central idea is that neural plasticity incorporates metarepresentational rules for constructing representational systems and linking them. The structure of the cognition-motor interface is constructed flexibly during development and skill learning based on information processing demands. (shrink)

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children’s understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N = 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether (...) children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner’s motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action. -/- . (shrink)

B eginning with the problem of integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives on moral cognition, we argue that the various disciplines have an interest in developing a common conceptual framework for moral cognition research. We discuss issues arising in the other chapters in this volume that might serve as focal points for future investigation and as the basis for the eventual development of such a framework. These include the role of theory in binding together diverse phenomena and the role of philosophy in (...) the construction of moral theory. We discuss the problem of distinguishing descriptive and normative issues and the importance of systematic normative analysis for empirical research. We argue that theories of cognitive architecture should play an important role as a backdrop for investigation into specific aspects of moral cognition, and we consider some of the taxonomic issues that will arise for moral cognition research, including types of moral agents, forms of moral cognition, and the nature of morality itself. Finally, we discuss some key issues in moral development, including the importance of.. (shrink)

We investigate flexibility and problem solving in skilled action. We conducted a field study of mountain bike riding that required a learner rider to cope with major changes in technique and equipment. Our results indicate that relatively inexperienced individuals can be capable of fairly complex 'on-the-fly' problem solving which allows them to cope with new conditions. This problem solving is hard to explain for classical theories of skill because the adjustments are too large to be achieved by automatic mechanisms and (...) too complex and rapid to be achieved by cognitive processes as they are usually understood. A recent theory, Mesh, can explain these results because it posits that skill-specific cognitive abilities develop during skill learning and that control typically involves an interplay between cognitive and automatic mechanisms. Here we develop Mesh further, providing a detailed explanation for these problem solving abilities. We argue that causal representation, metacognitive awareness and other forms of performance awareness combine in the formulation and control of action strategies. We also argue that the structure of control present in this case is inconsistent with Bratman's model of intentions, and that, in the face of high uncertainty and risk, intentions can be much more labile than Bratman recognises. In addition, we found limitations and flaws in problem solving which illuminate the representations involved. Finally, we highlight the crucial role of social and cultural learning in the development of complex skills. (shrink)

How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research suggests that the (...) key to this skill is a declarative mental roadmap aiding musical performance. This hypothesis is neatly and unintentionally summarized by professional pianist Imreh, who states when learning a new piece of music “My fingers were playing the notes just fine. The practice I needed was in my head. I had to learn to keep track of where I was. It was a matter of learning exactly what I needed to be thinking of as I played, and at exactly what point. (shrink)

There is a widespread view that well-learned skills are automated, and that attention to the performance of these skills is damaging because it disrupts the automatic processes involved in their execution. This idea serves as the basis for an account of choking in high pressure situations. On this view, choking is the result of self-focused attention induced by anxiety. Recent research in sports psychology has produced a significant body of experimental evidence widely interpreted as supporting this account of choking in (...) certain kinds of complex sensorimotor skills. We argue against this interpretation, pointing to problems with both the empirical evidence and the underlying theory. The experimental research fails to provide direct support for the central claims of the self-focus approach, contains inconsistencies, and suffers from problems of ecological validity. In addition, qualitative studies of choking have yielded contrary results. We further argue that in their current forms the self-focus and rival distraction approaches both lack the theoretical resources to provide a good theory of choking, and we argue for an expanded approach. Some of the elements that should be in an expanded approach include accounts of the features of pressure situations that influence the psychological response, the processes of situation appraisal, and the ways that attentional control can be overwhelmed, leading to distraction in some cases, and in others, perhaps, to damaging attention to skill execution. We also suggest that choking may sometimes involve performance-impairing mechanisms other than distraction or self-focus. (shrink)

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For (...) Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes (AIR) approach?a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices? research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance. (shrink)

Seeking to expand on previous theories, this paper explores the AIR (Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes) approach to expert performance previously outlined by Geeves, Christensen, Sutton and McIlwain (2008). Data gathered from a semi-structured interview investigating the performance experience of Jeremy Kelshaw (JK), a professional musician, is explored. Although JK’s experience of music performance contains inherently uncertain elements, his phenomenological description of an ideal performance is tied to notions of vibe, connection and environment. The dynamic nature of music performance (...) advocated by the AIR approach is illustrated by the strategies that JK implements during performance. Through executing these strategies, JK attempts to increase the likelihood of vibe and connection by selectively exercising agency over performance variables within his control. In order to achieve this, JK must engage in ongoing monitoring of his performance, whereby the spotlight of his attention pans across a vast array of disparate performance processes (and levels within these processes) in order to ascertain how he can most effectively meet the specific demands of a given performance situation. It is hoped that future research compiling data from numerous interviews and sources as well as using different research methodologies will further unlock the potential that the AIR approach holds for understanding expert performance. (shrink)

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

This paper explores an initially attractive principle connecting beliefs in general with beliefs about what beliefs are rational. The principle turns out to be violated by intuitively rational beliefs in some situations. The paper lays out some options for reacting to this fact.

Formally inclined epistemologists often theorize about ideally rational agents—agents who exemplify rational ideals, such as probabilistic coherence, that human beings could never fully realize. This approach can be defended against the well-known worry that abstracting from human cognitive imperfections deprives the approach of interest. But a different worry arises when we ask what an ideal agent should believe about her own cognitive perfection (even an agent who is in fact cognitively perfect might, it would seem, be uncertain of this fact). (...) Consideration of this question reveals an interesting feature of the structure of our epistemic ideals: for agents with limited information, our epistemic ideals turn out to conflict with one another. This suggests that we must revise the way we see ideal agents in epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

This chapter will review selected aspects of the terrain of discussions about probabilities in statistical mechanics (with no pretensions to exhaustiveness, though the major issues will be touched upon), and will argue for a number of claims. None of the claims to be defended is entirely original, but all deserve emphasis. The first, and least controversial, is that probabilistic notions are needed to make sense of statistical mechanics. The reason for this is the same reason that convinced Maxwell, Gibbs, and (...) Boltzmann that probabilities would be needed, namely, that the second law of thermodynamics, which in its original formulation says that certain processes are impossible, must, on the kinetic theory, be replaced by a weaker formulation according to which what the original version deems impossible is merely improbable. Second is that we ought not take the standard measures invoked in equilibrium statistical mechanics as giving, in any sense, the correct probabilities about microstates of the system. We can settle for a much weaker claim: that the probabilities for outcomes of experiments yielded by the standard distributions are effectively the same as those yielded by any distribution that we should take as a representing probabilities over microstates. Lastly, (and most controversially): in asking about the status of probabilities in statistical mechanics, the familiar dichotomy between epistemic probabilities (credences, or degrees of belief) and ontic (physical) probabilities is insufficient; the concept of probability that is best suited to the needs of statistical mechanics is one that combines epistemic and physical considerations. (shrink)

It is commonly acknowledged that, in order to test a theoretical hypothesis, one must, in Duhem' s phrase, rely on a "theoretical scaffolding" to connect the hypothesis with something measurable. Hypothesis-confirmation, on this view, becomes a three-place relation: evidence E will confirm hypothesis H only relative to some such scaffolding B. Thus the two leading logical approaches to qualitative confirmation--the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) account and Clark Glymour' s bootstrap account--analyze confirmation in relative terms. But this raises questions about the philosophical interpretation (...) of the technical conditions these accounts describe. What does it mean to say that E confirms H "relative to B"? How should we interpret the relation we are trying to analyze? (shrink)

A letter protesting the publication of a homophobic rant in the Proceedings of the APA.

This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance in action as (...) well as other defects of agency, explain cases of skilled agency and sharpen questions about the role of thought in agency. This provides for a different orientation in the theory of action. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that visual attention is cognitively penetrated by intention. I present a detailed account of attention and its neural basis, drawing on a recent computational model of neural modulation during attention: divisive normalization. I argue that intention shifts computations during divisive normalization. The epistemic consequences of attentional bias are discussed.

Milner and Goodale's influential account of the primate cortical visual streams involves a division of consciousness between them, for it is the ventral stream that has the responsibility for visual consciousness. Hence, the dorsal visual stream is a ‘zombie’ stream. In this article, I argue that certain information carried by the dorsal stream likely plays a central role in the egocentric spatial content of experience, especially the experience of visual spatial constancy. Thus, the dorsal stream contributes to a pervasive feature (...) of consciousness. (shrink)

This paper considers the connection between automaticity, control and agency. Indeed, recent philosophical and psychological works play up the incompatibility of automaticity and agency. Specifically, there is a threat of automaticity, for automaticity eliminates agency. Such conclusions stem from a tension between two thoughts: that automaticity pervades agency and yet automaticity rules out control. I provide an analysis of the notions of automaticity and control that maintains a simple connection: automaticity entails the absence of control. An appropriate analysis, however, shows (...) that actions are forms of control and pervasively automatic even if automaticity implies the absence of control. Consequences are drawn for the theory of mental agency and the psychological concepts of automaticity and control. (shrink)

Do self‐monitoring accounts, a dominant account of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, explain auditory verbal hallucination? In this essay, I argue that the account fails to answer crucial questions any explanation of auditory verbal hallucination must address. Where the account provides a plausible answer, I make the case for an alternative explanation: auditory verbal hallucination is not the result of a failed control mechanism, namely failed self‐monitoring, but, rather, of the persistent automaticity of auditory experience of a voice. My argument (...) emphasizes the importance of careful examination of phenomenology as providing substantive constraints on causal models of the positive symptoms in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Empirical work and philosophical analysis have led to widespread acceptance that vision for action, served by the cortical dorsal stream, is unconscious. I argue that the empirical argument for this claim is unsound. That argument relies on subjects’ introspective reports. Yet on biological grounds, in light of the theory of primate cortical vision, introspection has no access to dorsal stream mediated visual states. It is thus wrongly assumed that introspective reports speak to absent phenomenology in the dorsal stream. In light (...) of this, I consider a different conception of consciousness’s relation to agency in terms of access. While theoretical reasons suggest that the inaccessibility of the dorsal stream to conceptual report is evidence that it is unconscious, this position begs important questions. I propose a broader notion of access in respect of the guidance of intentional agency and not, narrowly, conceptual report (Note: this paper contradicts my earlier paper, "The Case for Zombie Agency"). (shrink)

In response to Mole 2009, I present an argument for zombie action. The crucial question is not whether but rather to what extent we are zombie agents. I argue that current evidence supports only minimal zombie agency.

The standard treatment of conditional probability leaves conditional probability undefined when the conditioning proposition has zero probability. Nonetheless, some find the option of extending the scope of conditional probability to include zero-probability conditions attractive or even compelling. This article reviews some of the pitfalls associated with this move, and concludes that, for the most part, probabilities conditional on zero-probability propositions are more trouble than they are worth.

One finds, in Maxwell's writings on thermodynamics and statistical physics, a conception of the nature of these subjects that differs in interesting ways from the way that they are usually conceived. In particular, though—in agreement with the currently accepted view—Maxwell maintains that the second law of thermodynamics, as originally conceived, cannot be strictly true, the replacement he proposes is different from the version accepted by most physicists today. The modification of the second law accepted by most physicists is a probabilistic (...) one: although statistical fluctuations will result in occasional spontaneous differences in temperature or pressure, there is no way to predictably and reliably harness these to produce large violations of the original version of the second law. Maxwell advocates a version of the second law that is strictly weaker; the validity of even this probabilistic version is of limited scope, limited to situations in which we are dealing with large numbers of molecules en masse and have no ability to manipulate individual molecules. Connected with this is his concept of the thermodynamic concepts of heat, work, and entropy; on the Maxwellian view, these are concepts that must be relativized to the means we have available for gathering information about and manipulating physical systems. The Maxwellian view is one that deserves serious consideration in discussions of the foundation of statistical mechanics. It has relevance for the project of recovering thermodynamics from statistical mechanics because, in such a project, it matters which version of the second law we are trying to recover. (shrink)

Comments and replies from the 2021 Eastern APA book symposium on Jill North's Physics, Structure, and Reality.

This paper has three purposes: first, to explicate the ex istential basis of Arendt's theory of action. This will be done by first tracing the intellectual derivation of Arendt's existentialism and the modifications she made to fit it in to her public realm. Second, I will demonstrate the con nection between Arendt's existentialism and her formula tion of political freedom. Third, I will illustrate throughout that Arendt's political ideas, if they are to be properly understood, must be subsumed under her (...) existentialism .\nPart I treats Arendt's effort to find a home for the in dividual Human Being by attacking the modern tendency to make freedom an inner domain of the mind and refuge from the outside world. We will see how she uses the ideas of Heidegger and Jaspers to counter the Being of Kant and the philosophy of Mill and Augustine. Part II demonstrates her effort to make freedom a world reality and counter to the forces of totalitarianism: the modern enchantment with totality and an inexorable history. She attacks the Will, consciousness, Being, and the historical process itself.\nFinding no suitable conceptualization of freedom which makes it political by giving it a public space, Arendt turns finally to Jaspers' communicative existentialism and Duns Scotus' emphasis on contingency. (shrink)

Tasks, tools, and techniques that we perform, use, and acquire, define the elements of expertise which we value as the hallmarks of goal-driven behavior. Somehow, the creation of tools enables us to define new tasks, or is it that the envisioning of new tasks drives us to invent new tools? Or maybe it is that new tools engender new techniques which then result in new tasks? This jumble of issues will be explored and discussed in this diverse collection of papers. (...) Individually, few of the papers are related to each other by topic or by techniques of analysis. Collectively, all focus on tasks performed using tools and discuss the techniques of tool use which enable differences in performance and expertise across individuals, societies, and (even) species. -/- . (shrink)

We respond to Moseley and Wilkinson's defense of inner speech models of AVH.

In his rich and provocative paper, Peter Carruthers announces two related theses: (a) a positive thesis that “central cognition is sensory based, depending on the activation and deployment of sensory images of various sorts” (Carruthers 2013) and (b) a negative thesis that the “central mind does not contain any workspace within which goals, decisions, intentions, or non-sensory judgments can be active” (Carruthers 2013). These are striking claims suggesting that a natural view about cognition, namely that explicit theoretical reasoning involves direct (...) operations over beliefs, is wrong. Our beliefs, on this natural view, interact with each other to yield new beliefs. If Carruthers is right, beliefs have only an indirect or mediated influence in cognition with sensory states playing the direct role. I think it an important feature of Carruthers’ discussion that he draws support from work on the neural circuits and mechanisms that subserve these processes. In what follows, I want to regis. (shrink)

In this paper, the issues of computability and constructivity in the mathematics of physics are discussed. The sorts of questions to be addressed are those which might be expressed, roughly, as: Are the mathematical foundations of our current theories unavoidably non-constructive: or, Are the laws of physics computable?

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

This is a critical study of Robert Nozick's The Nature of Rationality.

In his 2004 article “Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard: Pedagogy in the Consumer Society,” Trevor Norris bemoans the degree to which contemporary education’s focus can increasingly be described as primarily nurturing “consumers in training.” He goes on to add that the consequences of such “mindless” consumerism is that it “erodes democratic life, reduces education to the reproduction of private accumulation, prevents social resistance from expressing itself as anything other than political apathy, and transforms all human relations into commercial transactions of (...) calculated exchange.” This, then, is the challenge of the age: to articulate the sort of education that might prompt our youngsters to imagine a genuine alternative to this consumer madness—a challenge that the authors of this paper attempt to tackle. (shrink)

Sometimes we get evidence of our own epistemic malfunction. This can come from finding out we’re fatigued, or have been drugged, or that other competent and well-informed thinkers disagree with our beliefs. This sort of evidence seems to seems to behave differently from ordinary evidence about the world. In particular, getting such evidence can put agents in a position where the most rational response involves violating some epistemic ideal.

CLE aims and clients’ needs conflict where students’ interests are put beyond clients’ needs. Students have interests in gaining employment, impressing instructors and supervisors, and experiencing the active application of law. Where the clients’ service-needs are subordinated to students’ interests, the relationship between the two—the ‘tension’—is tilted in a manner in which the clients are disserved through the fulfilment of students’ interests. This may be exacerbated by faulty institutional cultures where clinical faculty are treated differently, or as less accomplished or (...) ‘worthwhile’ than their ‘traditional’ counterparts. This also emphasizes that it is the clinical law faculty who may exacerbate or assuage the tension, as it is for clinical faculty to assure that clients’ needs are met on ethical grounds,20 and to equate the practice of law with excellence before students. (shrink)

How much should your confidence in your beliefs be shaken when you learn that others – perhaps 'epistemic peers' who seem as well-qualified as you are – hold beliefs contrary to yours? This article describes motivations that push different philosophers towards opposite answers to this question. It identifies a key theoretical principle that divides current writers on the epistemology of disagreement. It then examines arguments bearing on that principle, and on the wider issue. It ends by describing some outstanding questions (...) that thinking about this issue raises. (shrink)

The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statue in 1998, and began operating in 2002, to the widespread applause in the international community. Under the post‐UN Charter multilateral system, the ICC’s formation was a welcomed extension of the UN Security Council’s reach, as part of the new supra‐state legal order whereby consenting states hold certain criminal acts arising to a scale of severity—crimes of scale—unacceptable by all. Yet, in its near 19‐year history, it remains unclear whether the ICC (...) is effective. This lack of clarity is in part attributable to divergent and elusive approaches to defining and measuring effectiveness, and the strong views by ICC proponents and detractors who find dispositive evidence for held views through myriad means. What follows is a discussion of different ways ICC effectiveness is defined and measured, the existing conflicting evidence on its effectiveness, and additional considerations required to form a conclusive opinion. I conclude that the most telling measure of ICC effectiveness is its ability to deter crimes of scale, and that on that measure, the ICC is thus far ineffective. (shrink)

Responding rationally to the information that others disagree with one’s beliefs requires assessing the epistemic credentials of the opposing beliefs. Conciliatory accounts of disagreement flow in part from holding that these assessments must be independent from one’s own initial reasoning on the disputed matter. I argue that this claim, properly understood, does not have the untoward consequences some have worried about. Moreover, some of the difficulties it does engender must be faced by many less conciliatory accounts of disagreement.

This is a collective study of the epistemic significance of disagreement: twelve contributors explore rival responses to the problems that it raises for philosophy. They develop our understanding of epistemic phenomena that are central to any thoughtful engagement with others' beliefs.

The impossibility of an indeterministic evolution for standard relativistic quantum field theories, that is, theories in which all fields satisfy the condition that the generators of space-time translation have spectra in the forward light-cone, is demonstrated. The demonstration proceeds by arguing that a relativistically invariant theory must have a stable vacuum and then showing that stability of the vacuum, together with the requirements imposed by relativistic causality, entails deterministic evolution, if all degrees of freedom are standard degrees of freedom.

It has often been noticed that conciliatory views of disagreement are "self-undermining" in a certain way: advocates of such views cannot consistently maintain them when other philosophers disagree. This leads to apparent problems of instability and even inconsistency. Does self-undermining, then, show conciliationism untenable? If so, the untenablity would extend not only to almost all views of disagreement, but to a wide range of other views supporting what one might call epistemic modesty: roughly, the idea that getting evidence that one (...) has made an epistemic error in arriving at one’s opinion may require adjusting that opinion. This paper argues that the phenomenon of self-undermining does not disclose any defect in views mandating epistemic modesty. Instead, it highlights an uncomfortable but natural consequence of reflecting on one's own possible epistemic imperfections, a sort of reflection that tends to cause epistemic ideals to conflict. (shrink)

Conciliationism holds that disagreement of apparent epistemic peers often substantially undermines rational confidence in our opinions. Uniqueness principles say that there is at most one maximally rational doxastic response to any given batch of total evidence. The two views are often thought to be tightly connected. This paper distinguishes two ways of motivating conciliationism, and two ways that conciliationism may be undermined by permissive accounts of rationality. It shows how conciliationism can flourish under certain strongly permissive accounts of rationality. This (...) occurs when the motivation for conciliationism does not come from taking disagreement as evidence of one's own rational failings. However, divorcing the motive for conciliating from worries about rationality does not remove a feature of conciliationism that some find troubling: that conciliationism can lead to cases of “rational toxicity,” in which the most rational response to one's evidence involves violating some rational ideal. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTime-consciousness has long been a focus of research in phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. We advance and extend this tradition of research by focusing on the character of temporal experience under conditions of mania. Symptom scales and diagnostic criteria for mania are peppered with temporally inflected language: increased rate of speech, racing thoughts, flight-of-ideas, hyperactivity. But what is the underlying structure of temporal experience in manic episodes? We tackle this question using a strategically hybrid approach. We recover and reconstruct three hypotheses (...) regarding manic temporality that were advanced and modeled by two pioneers of clinical phenomenology: Eugène Minkowski and Ludwig Binswanger. We then test, critique, and refine these hypotheses using heterophenomenological methods in an interview-based study of persons with a history of bipolar and a current diagnosis of acute mania. Our conclusions support a central hypothesis due to Minkowski... (shrink)

A critical examination of the Reflection principle in Bayesian epistemology, and of the diachronic Dutch-book-style arguments that have been invoked to support Reflection and Conditionalization.