This paper challenges the appeal to theory virtues in theory choice as well as the appeal to the intellectual and moral virtues of an agent as determining unique choices between empirically equivalent theories. After arguing that theoretical virtues do not determine the choice of one theory at the expense of another theory, I argue that nor does the appeal to intellectual and moral virtues single out one agent, who defends a particular theory, and exclude another agent defending an alternative theory. (...) I analyse Duhem’s concept of good sense and its recent interpretation in terms of virtue epistemology. I argue that the virtue epistemological interpretation does not show how good sense leads to conclusive choices and scientific progress. (shrink)

The importance of unconscious cognition is seeping into popular consciousness. A number of recent books bridging the academic world and the reading public stress that at least a portion of decision-making depends not on conscious reasoning, but instead on cognition that occurs below awareness. However, these books provide a limited perspective on how the unconscious mind works and the potential power of intuition. This essay is an effort to expand the picture. It is structured around the book that has garnered (...) the most attention, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink , but it also considers Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer and How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman . These books help deepen the . (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

The standard of proof applied in civil trials is the preponderance of evidence, often said to be met when a proposition is shown to be more than 50% likely to be true. A number of theorists have argued that this 50%+ standard is too weak – there are circumstances in which a court should find that the defendant is not liable, even though the evidence presented makes it more than 50% likely that the plaintiff’s claim is true. In this paper, (...) I will recapitulate the familiar arguments for this thesis, before defending a more radical one: The 50%+ standard is also too strong – there are circumstances in which a court should find that a defendant is liable, even though the evidence presented makes it less than 50% likely that the plaintiff’s claim is true. I will argue that the latter thesis follows naturally from the former once we accept that the parties in a civil trial are to be treated equally. I will conclude by sketching an alternative interpretation of the civil standard of proof. (shrink)

(This is for the Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Marcus Rossberg) In this handbook entry, I survey the different ways in which formal mathematical methods have been applied to philosophical questions throughout the history of analytic philosophy. I consider: formalization in symbolic logic, with examples such as Aquinas’ third way and Anselm’s ontological argument; Bayesian confirmation theory, with examples such as the fine-tuning argument for God and the paradox of the ravens; foundations of mathematics, with examples such as (...) Hilbert’s programme and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems; social choice theory, with examples such as Condorcet’s paradox and Arrow’s theorem; ‘how possibly’ results, with examples such as Condorcet’s jury theorem and recent work on intersectionality theory; and the application of advanced mathematics in philosophy, with examples such as accuracy-first epistemology. (shrink)

This commentary provides a brief overview of the methods and results presented by Jennifer Kuzma, Pouya Najmaie, and Joel Larson in “Evaluating Oversight Systems for Emerging Technologies: A Case Study of Genetically Engineered Organisms.” It offers suggestions regarding how supplemental information might be used to gain additional insights into the authors' results and how future research could further enhance our understanding of the attributes and outcomes of regulatory oversight for genetically engineered organisms.

Although the relationship between prejudice and predictive coding has attracted more attention recently, many important issues remain to be investigated, such as why prejudice is so persistent and how to accommodate seemingly conflicting studies. In this paper, we offer an integrated framework to explain the functional-computational mechanism of prejudice. We argue that this framework better explains (i) why prejudice is somewhat immune to revision, (ii) how inconsistent processing (e.g. one’s moral belief and biased emotional reaction) may occur, (iii) the dispute (...) over the content of ‘alief’ (unconscious belief), and (iv) conflicting data reported in disinformation studies. Finally, we briefly review the main intervention strategies and offer recommendations. (shrink)

What does it mean to replicate an experiment? A distinction is often drawn between ‘exact’ (or ‘direct’) and ‘conceptual’ replication. However, in recent work, Uljana Feest argues that the notion of replication in itself, whether exact or conceptual, is flawed due to the problem of systematic error, and Edouard Machery argues that, although the notion of replication is not flawed, we should nevertheless dispense with the distinction between exact and conceptual replication. My plan in this paper is to defend the (...) value of replication, along with the distinction between exact and conceptual replication, from the critiques of Feest and Machery. To that end, I provide an explication of conceptual replication, and distinguish it from what I call ‘experimental’ replication. On the basis, then, of a tripartite distinction between exact, experimental and conceptual replication, I argue in response to Feest that replication is still informative despite the prospect of systematic error. I also rebut Machery’s claim that conceptual replication is fundamentally confused and wrongly conflates replication and extension, and in turn raise some objections to his own Resampling Account of replication. (shrink)

Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology engages first-time philosophy readers on a guided tour through the core concepts, questions, methods, arguments, and theories of epistemology—the branch of philosophy devoted to the study of knowledge. After a brief overview of the field, the book progresses systematically while placing central ideas and thinkers in historical and contemporary context. The chapters cover the analysis of knowledge, the nature of epistemic justification, rationalism vs. empiricism, skepticism, the value of knowledge, the ethics of belief, Bayesian epistemology, social (...) epistemology, and feminist epistemologies. Along the way, instructors and students will encounter a wealth of additional resources and tools: chapter learning outcomes, key terms, images of philosophers and related art, useful diagrams and tables, boxes containing excerpts and other supplementary material, questions for reflection, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary. For an undergraduate survey epistemology course, Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology is ideal when used as a main text paired with primary sources and scholarly articles. For an introductory philosophy course, select book chapters are best used in combination with chapters from other books in the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series (edited by Christina Hendricks). (shrink)

A promising recent approach for understanding complex phenomena is recognition of anticipatory behavior of living organisms and social organizations. The anticipatory, predictive action permits learning, novelty seeking, rich experiential existence. I argue that the established frameworks of anticipation, adaptation or learning imply overly passive roles of anticipatory agents, and that a fictionalist standpoint reflects the core of anticipatory behavior better than representational or future references. Cognizing beings enact not just their models of the world, but own make-believe existential agendas as (...) well. Anticipators embody plausible scripts of living, and effectively assume neo-Kantian or pragmatist perspectives of cognition and action. It is instructive to see that anticipatory behavior is not without mundane or loathsome deficiencies. Appreciation of ferally fictionalist anticipation suggests an equivalence of semiosis and anticipation. (shrink)

Three experiments explored the effects of word problem cueing on debiasing versions of the bat-and-ball problem. In the experimental condition order, participants solved a simpler isomorphic version of the problem prior to solving a standard version that, critically, had the same item-and-dollar amounts. Conversely, in the control condition order, participants solved the standard version prior to solving the isomorph. Across the first 2 experiments, participants cued with the isomorph were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem. (...) In the third experiment, this cueing effect was not replicated, but importantly cued participants were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem with other item-and-dollar amounts, indicating near transfer. Far transfer was evident in faster response times to other problems in the Cognitive Reflection Test following practice. Along with providing converging evidence for the cueing account, these results are consistent with recent attentional debiasing findings. (shrink)

Is a belief that one will succeed necessary for an intention? It is argued that the question has traditionally been badly posed, framed as it is in terms of all-out belief. We need instead to ask about the relation between intention and partial belief. An account of partial belief that is more psychologically realistic than the standard credence account is developed. A notion of partial intention is then developed, standing to all-out intention much as partial belief stands to all-out belief. (...) Various coherence constraints on the notion are explored. It is concluded that the primary relations between intention and belief should be understood as normative and not essential. (shrink)

In this paper, two central questions will be addressed: ought we to implement medical AI technology in the medical domain? If yes, how ought we to implement this technology? I will critically engage with three options that exist with respect to these central questions: the Neo-Luddite option, the Assistive option, and the Substitutive option. I will first address key objections on behalf of the Neo-Luddite option: the Objection from Bias, the Objection from Artificial Autonomy, the Objection from Status Quo, and (...) the Objection from Inscrutability. I will thereafter present the Demographic Trends Argument and the Human Enhancement Argument in support of alternatives to the Neo-Luddite option. In the second half of the paper, I will argue against the Substitutive option and in favour of the Assistive option, given the existence of two chief formal deficits in medical AI technology: the causality deficit and the care deficit. (shrink)

ArgumentThe main contribution of the Alfred P. Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations' behavioral economics program (1984–1992) was not the resources it provided, which were relatively modest. Instead, the program's contribution lay in catalyzing “a sense of mission” in the collaboration between psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, economist Richard Thaler, and their associates. Partly this reflected the common strategy of American foundations to pick an individual or small group of scientists and stick with them until scientific success had been achieved. (...) But moreover, it was a consequence of the careful management of the program's director Eric Wanner. The various actors involved in the behavioral economics program constructed a new behavioral economic sub-discipline in economics by tapping into existing missionary sentiments in the economic and psychological disciplines, while at the same time actively shaping this sense of mission. (shrink)

The no miracles argument is one of the main arguments for scientific realism. Recently it has been alleged that the no miracles argument is fundamentally flawed because it commits the base rate fallacy. The allegation is based on the idea that the appeal of the no miracles argument arises from inappropriate neglect of the base rate of approximate truth among the relevant population of theories. However, the base rate fallacy allegation relies on an assumption of random sampling of individuals from (...) the population which cannot be made in the case of the no miracles argument. Therefore the base rate fallacy objection to the no miracles argument fails. I distinguish between a “local” and a “global” form of the no miracles argument. The base rate fallacy objection has been leveled at the local version. I argue that the global argument plays a key role in supporting a base-rate-fallacy-free formulation of the local version of the argument. (shrink)

Naturalized epistemology is not a recent invention, nor is it a philosophical invention. Rather, it is a cognitive phenomena that is pervasive and desirable in the way of human epistemic engagement with their world. It is a matter of the way that one’s cognitive processes can be modulated by information gotten from those same or wider cognitive processes. Such modulational control enhances the reliability of one’s cognitive processes in many ways ‐ and judgments about objective epistemic justification consistently evince a (...) reasonable demand for it. However, with suitable modulational control in place within an agent or a community of agents, the fitting cognitive processes take time to generate information that then engenders changes in processes and norms. Further, as there are significant historical and biographical contingencies involving trajectories through one’s environment, there are contingencies in the information and modifications that will be engendered by suitable modulational control. As a result, what makes for objectively justified belief at a time will vary ‐ as the fruits of suitable modulational control accrue over time. This is a moderate form of historicism about epistemic justification. (shrink)

These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2018.

Here are some of the ways in which some philosophers and psychologists have taken the emotion of guilt to be essential to morality. One relatively central idea is that guilt feelings are warranted if an agent knows that he or she has acted morally wrongly. It might be said that in such a case the agent has a strong reason to feel guilt, that the agent ought to have guilt feelings, that the agent is justified in having guilt feelings and (...) unjustified in not having guilt feelings. It might be said that it would be immoral of an agent not to have feelings of guilt after realizing that he or she has acted morally wrongly or that only an agent with bad character would not have such feelings. (shrink)

Emotion plays a significant role in our reasoning even without awareness, perhaps especially for individuals who have difficulties tolerating strong, negative emotions. Opportunity for reflection may help such individuals decide when emotions should influence reasoning. Two studies attempted to clarify the relationships among reasoning, emotions, and emotion tolerance (measured with the Affect Intolerance Scale). The first examined the effect of affect intolerance on a reasoning task. Participants were asked to determine whether conclusions logically followed from both emotional and neutral if–then (...) statements. Emotion had a small effect on performance on the reasoning task, unmoderated by affect intolerance. The second study examined whether reflection on emotional responses impacts performance on the same reasoning task. Participants asked to reflect on their emotions performed more poorly on the reasoning task than participants asked to reflect on the task’s cognitive aspects. People who endorse greater affect tolerance performed better in the cognitive reflection condition than the emotional reflection condition. People with less tolerance performed the same in both conditions. Overall, these studies support previous findings that emotion can negatively impact performance on reasoning tasks but suggest a more complex relationship for affect intolerance. (shrink)

People made forecasts from graphically presented time series. Series were sinusoids overlaid by a zero or positive linear trend and a zero, low, moderate, or high level of noise. Forecasting performance was affected by both these variables. However, it did not correlate with ability to identify the trend and correlated significantly with ability to detect the sinusoidal pattern only when series were noise-free. A second experiment showed that the effect of data noise was not influenced by the number of forecasts (...) that people made from a series. These findings are consistent with the view that data noise does not affect the way that forecasts are made but that it impairs them for two reasons. First, it renders the anchor-and-adjust heuristics underlying them less effective. Second, it causes people to add more noise to their judgements in their attempts to make them representative of the data. (shrink)

A recent study showed physicians' reasoning about a realistic case to be ignorant of base rate. It also showed physicians interpreting information pertinent to base rate differently, depending on whether it was presented early or late in the case. Although these adult reasoners might do better if given hints through talk of relative frequencies, this would not prove that they had no problem of base rate neglect.

Current conceptions of the nature of human reasoning make it no longer tenable to assess children's inference by reference to the norms of logical inference. Alternatively, the complexity of the mental models employed in children's inferences can be analysed. This approach is applied to transitive inference, class inclusion, categorical induction, theory of mind, oddity, categorical syllogisms, analogy, and reasoning deficits. It is argued that a coherent account of children's reasoning emerges in that there is correspondence between tasks at the same (...) level of complexity across different domains, and that the inferences of younger children, while impressive and important, are consistently simpler than those of older children. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 602-620, July 2022.

Language pragmatics is applied to analyse problem statements and instructions used in a few influential experimental tasks in the psychology of reasoning. This analysis aims to determine the interpretation of the task which the participant is likely to construct. It is applied to studies of deduction (where the interpretation of quantifiers and connectives is crucial) and to studies of inclusion judgment and probabilistic judgment. It is shown that the interpretation of the problem statements or even the representation of the task (...) as a whole often turn out to differ from the experimenter's assumptions. This has serious consequences for the validity of these experimental results and therefore for the claims about human irrationality based on them. (shrink)

The notion of bounded rationality has recently gained considerable popularity in the behavioural and social sciences. This article surveys the different usages of the term, in particular the way ‘anomalosus’ behavioural phenomena are elicited, how these phenomena are incorporated in model building, and what sort of new theories of behaviour have been developed to account for bounded rationality in choice and in deliberation. It also discusses the normative relevance of bounded rationality, in particular as a justifier of non‐standard reasoning and (...) deliberation heuristics. For each of these usages, the overview discusses the central methodological problems. (shrink)

Manipulations that draw attention to extensional or set-based considerations are neither sufficient nor necessary for enhanced use of base rates in intuitive judgments. Frequency formats are only one part of the puzzle of base-rate use and neglect. The conditions under which these and other manipulations promote base-rate use may be more parsimoniously organized under the broader notion of case-based judgment.

People are adept at inferring novel causal relations, even from only a few observations. Prior knowledge about the probability of encountering causal relations of various types and the nature of the mechanisms relating causes and effects plays a crucial role in these inferences. We test a formal account of how this knowledge can be used and acquired, based on analyzing causal induction as Bayesian inference. Five studies explored the predictions of this account with adults and 4-year-olds, using tasks in which (...) participants learned about the causal properties of a set of objects. The studies varied the two factors that our Bayesian approach predicted should be relevant to causal induction: the prior probability with which causal relations exist, and the assumption of a deterministic or a probabilistic relation between cause and effect. Adults’ judgments (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) were in close correspondence with the quantitative predictions of the model, and children’s judgments (Experiments 3 and 5) agreed qualitatively with this account. (shrink)

Note posted 9 Jun 08 : Modifications made today include a new section on predictive validity, and addition of recently published article and in in-press article, both by Nosek & Hansen, under the "CULTURE VS. PERSON" heading, which replaces a previously listed unpublished ms. of theirs. I continue to encourage all interested to send material that they are willing to be included on this page. Please also to let me know about errors, including faulty links.

This volume is a collection of some of the most important philosophical papers by Peter Gärdenfors. Spanning a period of more than 20 years of his research, they cover a wide ground of topics, from early works on decision theory, belief revision and nonmonotonic logic to more recent work on conceptual spaces, inductive reasoning, semantics and the evolutions of thinking. Many of the papers have only been published in places that are difficult to access. The common theme of all the (...) papers is the dynamics of thought. Several of the papers have become minor classics and the volume bears witness of the wide scope of Gärdenfors’ research and of his crisp and often witty style of writing. The volume will be of interest to researchers in philosophy and other cognitive sciences. (shrink)

In the methodology of scientific research programs (MSRP) there are important features on the problem of prediction, especially regarding novel facts. In his approach, Imre Lakatos proposed three different levels on prediction: aim, process, and assessment. Chapter 5 pays attention to the characterization of prediction in the methodology of research programs. Thus, it takes into account several features: (1) its pragmatic characterization, (2) the logical perspective as a proposition, (3) the epistemological component, (4) its role in the appraisal of research (...) programs, and (5) its place as a value for scientific research. -/- The notion of “novel facts” is highly relevant in his conception, where several aspects are involved: the directions of novel facts, the different kinds of novelty, and the transition from six possible options of “novel facts” to four choices. Thereafter, the prediction of novel facts as the criterion of appraisal is considered. On the one hand, this requires analyzing the theoretical, empirical, and heuristic possibilities of appraisal; and, on the other, whether there is an overemphasis on the role of prediction in methodology of scientific research programs. As a consequence, there is an analysis of Lakatos’ criterion of appraisal in MSRP and economics. (shrink)

Normative theories can be useful in developing descriptive theories, as when normative subjective expected utility theory is used to develop descriptive rational choice theory and behavioral game theory. “Ought” questions are also the essence of theories of moral reasoning, a domain of higher mental processing that could not survive without normative considerations.