From the perspective of distributed cognition I will stress how abduction is essentially multimodal, in that both data and hypotheses can have a full range of verbal and sensory representations, involving words, sights, images, smells, etc., but also kinesthetic – related to the ability to sense the position and location and orientation and movement of the body and its parts – and motor experiences and other feelings such as pain, and thus all sensory modalities. The presence of kinesthetic and (...) motor aspects demonstrates that abductive reasoning can be manipulative. We can also see, in this regard, how implicit factors take part in the abductive procedure, which consequently acquires the character of a kind of “thinking through doing”. This paper further describes 1) the fact that hypotheses in science can be built through different cognitive mediators and so they can also model the same cognitive aspect in different ways; how they can be carriers/ producers of knowledge in a multimodal way; 2) the problem of the possible non-explanatory and instrumental nature of abductive reasoning and the analysis of the consequences for induction; 3) the role of manipulative abduction in building new evidence/ experiments and how they trigger smart inductive inferences. (shrink)

The increase in claim sophistication in both the insurance and legal domains is a result of an increase in stokes and heterogeneity of data needed to assess the claim validity. Originally, this task was performed by some sort of subjectivity assessments and graphical rule sets, which is very slow and may be inherently erroneous due to its purely manual nature. Hence, with progressivity in multimodal learning, specifically in AI, there is now a unique chance of solving these challenges through (...) the use of text data, which may include policies, reports and images, which may include accident images, evidence images, videos such as surveillance, cam videos among others. However, existing AI-based solutions usually address only one of the modalities, which makes it difficult to evaluate an integrated situation. This has led to the need for systems that will integrate information from all these modalities and come up with an accurate, efficient, and transparent processing system. Indeed, this paper seeks to discuss the use of Multimodal generative AI to address this need as one of the most recent approaches that rely on high-performing models that can process and integrate text, image, and video data. The proposed system combines these modalities to ensure that the system captures relevant data from each data type and combines all in a way that provides more comprehensive and enriched decision support. An initial system was designed and empirically tested against current claim adjudication techniques and was found to yield substantial enhancements in all utilization rates, throughput and main rationale for the claim decisions. The findings shown in the study stress the capability of multimodal generative AI for revolutionizing the present approaches of claims analysis and developing more efficient, accurate, and capable responses to various real-life conditions. This integration of technologies is an unprecedented advance towards advancing functional processes in the insurance and legal industries. (shrink)

Many philosophers take experience to be an essential aspect of perceptual justification. I argue against a specific variety of such an experientialist view, namely, the Looks View of perceptual justification, according to which our visual beliefs are mediately justified by beliefs about the way things look. I describe three types of cases that put pressure on the idea that perceptual justification is always related to looks-related reasons: unsophisticated cognizers, multimodal identification, and amodal completion. I then provide a tentative diagnosis (...) of what goes wrong in the Looks View: it ascribes a specific epistemic role to beliefs about looks that is actually fulfilled by subpersonal perceptual processes. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that values “fill the logical gap” of underdetermination of theory by evidence, namely, values affect our choice between two or more theories that fit the same evidence. The underdetermination model, however, does not exhaust the roles values play in evidential reasoning. I introduce WAVE – a novel account of the logical relations between values and evidence. WAVE states that values influence evidential reasoning by adjusting evidential weights. I argue that the weight-adjusting role of (...) values is distinct from their underdetermination gap-filling role. Values adjust weights in three ways. First, values affect our trust in the testimony of others. Second, values influence the evidential thresholds required for justified epistemic judgments. Third, values influence the relative weight of a certain type of evidence within a body of multimodal discordant evidence. WAVE explains, from an epistemic perspective, rather than psychological, how smokers, for example, can find the same evidence about the dangers of smoking less persuasive than non-smokers. WAVE allows for a wider effect of values on our accepted scientific theories and beliefs than the effect for which the underdetermination model allows alone; therefore, science studies scholars must consider WAVE in their research and analysis of evidential case studies. (shrink)

Disorders of consciousness (DoC)—that is, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state and minimally conscious state—are debilitating conditions for which no reliable markers of consciousness recovery have yet been identified. Evidence points to the GABAergic system being altered in DoC, making it a potential target as such a marker.

The first premise of Schellenberg’s particularity argument reads, “If a subject S perceives a particular α, then S discriminates and singles out α” (2018: 25). But this is false if seeing a ganzfeld is possible (i.e., a homogeneous field without any particulars to discriminate). In response, Schellenberg argues that seeing a ganzfeld is impossible by appealing to the ganzfeld effect (viz. hallucinatory experiences caused by ganzfeld exposure) exclusively as a ‘sense of blindness’. I present two challenges for this line of (...) reasoning. The first concerns the need to account for the long delay before blindness is reported (if it is reported at all) and the second concerns the need to be consistent with potential causes of ganzfeld hallucinations (in general, not exclusive to the sense of blindness). I show how Schellenberg’s particularity argument can meet the first challenge but struggles to meet the second. I present evidence based on considerations related to sensory deprivation and that follow from the predictive processing theory of cognition, which describes seeing a ganzfeld as the cause of ganzfeld hallucinations. If correct, this means that you can see a homogeneous field, and thus we ought to be skeptical of the soundness of Schellenberg’s particularity argument. I conclude with a possible strategy for rehabilitating the particularity argument that reconceptualizes perceptual experience as fundamentally multimodal, constituted by both exteroceptive and interoceptive sensation. (shrink)

Consensus conferences are social techniques which involve bringing together a group of scientific experts, and sometimes also non-experts, in order to increase the public role in science and related policy, to amalgamate diverse and often contradictory evidence for a hypothesis of interest, and to achieve scientific consensus or at least the appearance of consensus among scientists. For consensus conferences that set out to amalgamate evidence, I propose three desiderata: Inclusivity, Constraint, and Evidential Complexity. Two examples suggest that consensus (...) conferences can readily satisfy Inclusivity and Evidential Complexity, but consensus conferences do not as easily satisfy Constraint. I end by discussing the relation between social inclusivity and the three desiderata. (shrink)

In the case of ventriloquism, seeing the movement of the ventriloquist dummy’s mouth changes your experience of the auditory location of the vocals. Some have argued that cases like ventriloquism provide evidence for the view that at least some of the content of perception is fundamentally multimodal. In the ventriloquism case, this would mean your experience has constitutively audio-visual content (not just a conjunction of an audio content and visual content). In this paper, I argue that cases like (...) ventriloquism do not in fact warrant that conclusion. I then try to make sense of crossmodal cases without appealing to fundamentally multimodal content. (shrink)

There is converging evidence that high doses of hallucinogenic drugs can produce significant alterations of self-experience, described as the dissolution of the sense of self and the loss of boundaries between self and world. This article discusses the relevance of this phenomenon, known as “drug-induced ego dissolution (DIED)”, for cognitive neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind. Data from self-report questionnaires suggest that three neuropharmacological classes of drugs can induce ego dissolution: classical psychedelics, dissociative anesthetics and agonists of the kappa (...) opioid receptor (KOR). While these substances act on different neurotransmitter receptors, they all produce strong subjective effects that can be compared to the symptoms of acute psychosis, including ego dissolution. It has been suggested that neuroimaging of DIED can indirectly shed light on the neural correlates of the self. While this line of inquiry is promising, its results must be interpreted with caution. First, neural correlates of ego dissolution might reveal the necessary neurophysiological conditions for the maintenance of the sense of self, but it is more doubtful that this method can reveal its minimally sufficient conditions. Second, it is necessary to define the relevant notion of self at play in the phenomenon of DIED. This article suggests that DIED consists in the disruption of subpersonal processes underlying the “minimal” or “embodied” self, i.e., the basic experience of being a self rooted in multimodal integration of self-related stimuli. This hypothesis is consistent with Bayesian models of phenomenal selfhood, according to which the subjective structure of conscious experience ultimately results from the optimization of predictions in perception and action. Finally, it is argued that DIED is also of particular interest for philosophy of mind. On the one hand, it challenges theories according to which consciousness always involves self-awareness. On the other hand, it suggests that ordinary conscious experience might involve a minimal kind of self-awareness rooted in multisensory processing, which is what appears to fade away during DIED. (shrink)

Suppose that you are at a live jazz show. The drummer begins a solo. You see the cymbal jolt and you hear the clang. But in addition seeing the cymbal jolt and hearing the clang, you are also aware that the jolt and the clang are part of the same event. Casey O’Callaghan (forthcoming) calls this awareness “intermodal feature binding awareness.” Psychologists have long assumed that multimodal perceptions such as this one are the result of a subpersonal feature binding (...) mechanism (see Vatakis and Spence, 2007, Kubovy and Schutz, 2010, Pourtois et al., 2000, and Navarra et al., 2012). I present new evidence against this. I argue that there is no automatic feature binding mechanism that couples features like the jolt and the clang together. Instead, when you experience the jolt and the clang as part of the same event, this is the result of an associative learning process. The cymbal’s jolt and the clang are best understood as a single learned perceptual unit, rather than as automatically bound. I outline the specific learning process in perception called “unitization,” whereby we come to “chunk” the world into multimodal units. Unitization has never before been applied to multimodal cases. Yet I argue that this learning process can do the same work that intermodal binding would do, and that this issue has important philosophical implications. Specifically, whether we take multimodal cases to involve a binding mechanism or an associative process will have impact on philosophical issues from Molyneux’s question to the question of how active or passive we consider perception to be. (shrink)

Intermodal representationalists hold that the phenomenal characters of experiences are fully determined by their contents. In contrast, intramodal representationalists hold that the phenomenal characters of experiences are determined by their contents together with their intentional modes or manners of representation, which are nonrepresentational features corresponding roughly to the sensory modalities. This paper discusses a kind of experience that provides evidence for an intermodal representationalist view: intermodal experiences, experiences that unify experiences in different modalities. I argue that such experiences are (...) much easier to explain on the intermodal view. (shrink)

Sense interaction is ubiquitous. All conscious experiences involve at least some interaction between the senses. One of the most debated questions in recent scholarship concerns the proper way of characterizing the phenomenology of multisensory experiences. According to Charles Spence and Tim Bayne (2015), the phenomenal character of multisensory integration is reducible to the co-conscious sum of modality-specific features. Following Casey O'Callaghan (2015), we can call this The Thesis of Minimal Multimodality. The main goal of the paper is to refute the (...) thesis and show that the effect of multisensory integration is reflected in experience in a way that is not exhausted by (the sum of) modality-specific phenomenal features. Whereas O'Callaghan's strategy in trying to prove this consists in providing phenomenological evidence that runs contrary to what Spence and Bayne hold, he does not, however, put into question what has become since T. Nagel's famous essay (1974) the standard conception of the phenomenal. By drawing conceptual resources in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, I will elaborate another approach and explain why the phenomenal character of experience cannot be reduced to its "what it's like" character. Phenomenal experience is thicker, and also includes various forms of bodily self-experiences and felt possibilities of action and behaviours. Building on these and like insights, the main objective of the paper is to outline a phenomenological account of multimodal perception and sensory interaction. I will draw three main conclusions. First, I will argue that both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty would, too, reject The Thesis of Minimal Multimodality and endorse the strong, Constitutive Thesis that O'Callaghan defends. More interestingly still, we will see, secondly, that the widening of phenomenal consciousness that they argue for allows to generalize the constitutive thesis, thereby showing that all perceptual experience constitutively depend on the interplay of two or more senses. Spelling out the details of this claim will bring me, thirdly, to specify the intrinsic relation between normativity and perceptual experience. In short, I will argue that the mechanisms responsible for multimodality make a phenomenological difference evaluable in normative terms. (shrink)

In crossmodal identification, a subject token identifies an item perceived in one sensory modality with an item perceived in another sensory modality. Does crossmodal identification always occur in cognition, or does crossmodal identification sometimes take place in perception? This paper argues that crossmodal identification occurs in cognition, and not in perception. Nevertheless, multisensory perception is not unalive to crossmodal identity. Experimental evidence demonstrates that perception is differentially sensitive to the identity of individuals presented to distinct senses. Such sensitivity enhances (...) recognition and improves action. This approach relies on distinguishing crossmodal identification from perceiving crossmodal identity. Perception registers crossmodal identity, but crossmodal identification as such belongs to thought. (shrink)

This chapter examines how our sense modalities interact in the perception of persistence. The chapter concentrates on two questions. The first concerns perceptual processing—do perceptual computations of object persistence ever integrate and compute over representations from more than one modality? It argues that this question should be answered affirmatively. The second question concerns perceptual experience—do experiences of object persistence ever exhibit a constitutively multisensory phenomenal character, or is the phenomenology of object persistence always uniquely associated with just one modality? The (...) chapter argues that the available evidence underdetermines the answer to this question, but suggests ways it might be empirically resolved. (shrink)

Traditional medical Artificial Intelligence models, approved for clinical use, restrict themselves to single-modal data e.g. images only, limiting their applicability in the complex, multimodal environment of medical diagnosis and treatment. Multimodal Transformer Models in healthcare can effectively process and interpret diverse data forms such as text, images, and structured data. They have demonstrated impressive performance on standard benchmarks like USLME question banks and continue to improve with scale. However, the adoption of these advanced AI models is not without (...) challenges. While multimodal deep learning models like Transformers offer promising advancements in healthcare, their integration requires careful consideration of the accompanying ethical and environmental challenges. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that our experience of artworks is normally multimodal. It is the result of perceptual processing in more than one sense modality. In other words, multimodal experience of art is not the exception; it is the rule. I use the example of music in order to demonstrate the various ways in which the visual sense modality influences the auditory processing of music and conclude that this should make us look more closely (...) at our practices of engaging with artworks. (shrink)

This research article examines the potential of multimodal techniques in promoting inclusive practices in the English language classroom, delving into the multidisciplinary fields of English Language Teaching (ELT) and inclusive education. This study intends to investigate how multimodal resources, such as visual aids, technology, and creative activities, may be effectively integrated to meet the various learning needs of students using a pedagogical lens. This paper examines the theoretical underpinnings and practical implications of using multimodal approaches in ELT (...) settings, shedding light on their potential to promote inclusivity, engagement, and language acquisition among learners with diverse abilities and backgrounds. It does this through a thorough literature review and analysis of pedagogical frameworks. (shrink)

It is common to characterize pain with touch-related terms, like ‘cutting’, ‘pressing’, ‘sharp’, and ‘pulsing’, or temperature-related terms, like ‘hot’ or ‘burning’. This suggests that many pains are phenomenally multimodal because they are experienced as having some tactile-like or thermal-like character. The goal of this chapter is to investigate the structure of phenomenally multimodal pain experiences. It is argued that the usual accounts of multimodal structure proposed in investigations regarding exteroceptive experiences cannot be plausibly applied to (...) class='Hi'>multimodal experiences of pain. Instead, an alternative framework is proposed which characterizes the structure of tactile-like and thermal-like pains by referring to the notion of crossmodal correspondences. (shrink)

This paper presents an analytical framework for analyzing how multimodal resources of emotion expression are semiotically materialized in discursive interactions specific to political discourse. Interested in how political personae are emotionally constructed through multimodal meaning-making practices, our analysis model assumes an interdisciplinary perspective, which integrates facial expression analysis – using FaceReader™ software –, the theory of emotional arcs and bodily actions (hand gestures) analysis that express emotions, in the analytical framework of multimodality. The results show how the (...) class='Hi'>multimodal choices that political actors make during discursive interactions allow them to build their political brand and make connections with the audience on an emotional level. (shrink)

The analysis of multimodal argumentation in advertising is a crucial and problematic area of research. While its importance is growing in a time characterized by images and pictorial messages, the methods used for interpreting and reconstructing the structure of arguments expressed through verbal and visual means capture only isolated dimensions of this complex phenomenon. This paper intends to propose and illustrate a methodology for the reconstruction and analysis of “double-mode” arguments in advertisements, combining the instruments developed in social semiotics, (...) pragmatics, and argumentation theory. An advertisement is processed through a five-step path. The analysis of its context, text genre, and images leads to a first representation of the messages that it encodes both pictorially and verbally (step 1). These first semantic representations are further enriched by including their polyphonic articulations and presuppositions (step 2), their explicatures (step 3), and their dialogical functions and illocutionary forces (step 4). These pragmatic steps retrieve the commitment structure of the ad, which allows a further argument analysis conducted through argumentation schemes (step 5). (shrink)

What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically-oriented procedures in order to reach an answer. I argue that this constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology constitutive of phenomenal contrast cases, but that there is a crucial respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable faculties. I thus have two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible (...) contents debate into a multimodal framework, charting its various significances. The second is to explore whether any experimental studies of multimodal perception support a so-called Liberal (or ‘high-level’ or ‘rich’) account of perception’s admissible contents. I conclude that the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist effect are both explicable without the postulation of high-level content, but that at least one multimodal experimental paradigm may necessitate such content: the rubber hand illusion. One upshot of this argument is that Conservatives who claim that the Liberal view intolerably broadens the scope of perceptual illusions, particularly from the perspective of perceptual psychology, should pursue other arguments against that view. (shrink)

With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular attention was paid to contributions that clarify how the structural features - the modes - of the arts, their perception, and their signifying potential in terms of content are interrelated (...) and how they are to be understood in communicative and thus socioculturally relevant terms. Thus, in addition to neuroscientific contributions, those from cultural anthropology, art history, image and art studies, and literary studies were included. -/- Articles -/- 8 Martina Sauer and Christiane Wagner - Introduction -/- 11 Giada Lombardi and Giuseppe Di Cesare - From Neuroscience to Art: The Role of ‘Vitality Forms’ in the Investigation of Multimodality -/- 25 Martina Sauer - Abstract - Affective – Multimodal: Interaction between Medium and Perception of Moving Images from the Viewpoint of Cassirer’s, Langer’s and Krois’ Embodiment Theories -/- 49 Göran Sonesson - The Secrets of Plastic Language Revealed: Multimodality, Polysemiosis, and Iconicity -/- 71 Natalia Igl - Making Sense of the Material: Multisensory Reader Involvement in Contemporary Multimodal Novels -/- 87 J. Philippe Thompson - Art is All: Proust’s Life Lessons Through Perception and Art -/- 107 Hans Dieter Huber - Philippe Parreno and the Exhibition as a Multimodal Aesthetic Experience -/- 135 Jörg U. Lensing - The Performing Human Being in a Media Interaction Space: Multi- and intermodal productions by the Düsseldorf Theater der Klänge (Theatre of Sounds) . (shrink)

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011. This portion of the report explores the question: Are some of the basic units of consciousness multimodal?

This is an excerpt from a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012. This excerpt explores the question: What are the origins of multimodal associations?

Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively (...) class='Hi'>evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the evidenceresponsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I appeal to a large range of empirical evidence to argue that delusions are evidence-responsive in the sense that subjects have the capacity to respond to evidence on their delusion in rationally permissible ways. The extreme evidence-resistance of delusions is a consequence of powerful masking factors on these capacities, such as strange perceptual experiences, motivational factors, and cognitive biases. This view makes room for holding both that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive and that delusions are beliefs, and it has important implications for the study and treatment of delusions. (shrink)

This chapter presents a typology of the different kinds of inductive inferences we can draw from our evidence, based on the explanatory relationship between evidence and conclusion. Drawing on the literature on graphical models of explanation, I divide inductive inferences into (a) downwards inferences, which proceed from cause to effect, (b) upwards inferences, which proceed from effect to cause, and (c) sideways inferences, which proceed first from effect to cause and then from that cause to an additional effect. (...) I further distinguish between direct and indirect forms of downwards and upwards inferences. I then show how we can subsume canonical forms of inductive inference mentioned in the literature, such as inference to the best explanation, enumerative induction, and analogical inference, under this typology. Along the way, I explore connections with probability and confirmation, epistemic defeat, the relation between abduction and enumerative induction, the compatibility of IBE and Bayesianism, and theories of epistemic justification. (shrink)

Mental imagery is early perceptual processing that is not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. Multimodal mental imagery is early perceptual processing that is triggered by sensory stimulation in a different sense modality. For example, when early visual or tactile processing is triggered by auditory sensory stimulation, this amounts to multimodal mental imagery. Pulling together philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, I will argue in this paper that multimodal mental imagery plays a crucial role in (...) our engagement with musical works. Engagement with musical works is normally a multimodal phenomenon, where we get input from a number of sense modalities. But even if we screen out any input that is not auditory, multimodal mental imagery will still play an important role that musicians and composers often actively rely on. (shrink)

Can beliefs that are not consciously formulated serve as part of an agent's evidence for other beliefs? A common view says no, any belief that is psychologically immediate is also epistemically immediate. I argue that some unconscious beliefs can serve as evidence, but other unconscious beliefs cannot. Person-level beliefs can serve as evidence, but subpersonal beliefs cannot. I try to clarify the nature of the personal/subpersonal distinction and to show how my proposal illuminates various epistemological problems and (...) provides a principled framework for solving other problems. (shrink)

The paper argues that knowledge is not closed under logical inference. The argument proceeds from the openness of evidential support and the dependence of empirical knowledge on evidence, to the conclusion that knowledge is open. Without attempting to provide a full-fledged theory of evidence, we show that on the modest assumption that evidence cannot support both a proposition and its negation, or, alternatively, that information that reduces the probability of a proposition cannot constitute evidence for its (...) truth, the relation of evidential support is not closed under known entailment. Therefore the evidence-for relation is deductively open regardless of whether evidence is probabilistic or not. Given even a weak dependence of empirical knowledge on evidence, we argue that empirical knowledge is also open. On this basis, we also respond to the strongest argument in support of knowledge closure. Finally, we present a number of significant benefits of our position, namely, offering a unified explanation for a range of epistemological puzzles. (shrink)

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to vindicate both (1) and (2). But diagnosing why this (...) is so leads to a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I claim that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology. (shrink)

Why can testimony alone be enough for findings of liability? Why statistical evidence alone can’t? These questions underpin the “Proof Paradox” (Redmayne 2008, Enoch et al. 2012). Many epistemologists have attempted to explain this paradox from a purely epistemic perspective. I call it the “Epistemic Project”. In this paper, I take a step back from this recent trend. Stemming from considerations about the nature and role of standards of proof, I define three requirements that any successful account in line (...) with the Epistemic Project should meet. I then consider three recent epistemic accounts on which the standard is met when the evidence rules out modal risk (Pritchard 2018), normic risk (Ebert et al. 2020), or relevant alternatives (Gardiner 2019 2020). I argue that none of these accounts meets all the requirements. Finally, I offer reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects of having a successful epistemic explanation of the paradox. I suggest the discussion on the proof paradox would benefit from undergoing a ‘value-turn’. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach in the form of multimodality as a semiotic method that can be used by marketers and semioticians to induce online flow, a psychological state, on a brand website. First, we refer to multimodality as a semiotic analysis that can be used for a better optimization of semiotic resource sets in meaning-making, and we distinguish it from another similar concept: multimedia. Second, after a critical literature review, we address the flow (...) construct - a state of mind sometimes experienced by people who are deeply involved and immersed in some event, object or activity. Previous quantitative studies show a correlation between online flow experience and other variables such as design, content, sound and layout that are suggested to be its antecedents. In our study, these flow antecedents are viewed as sets of signs or modes that can be orchestrated in order to create different levels of perceived challenge for brand website users. We consider that multimodality can be used for a better optimization of these various meanings as expressed by modes that are "essentially different in nature" (Bateman, 2008, p.54). Also, we refer to the online marketing outcomes of the online flow experience, in order to outline its importance and its implications in the online environment. The main conclusion of our paper is that multimodality can be used by scholars and practitioners as a premise to induce online flow on a brand website, by optimizing the sets of signs or modes. Originality – our contribution consists of an interdisciplinary approach. We use concepts from semiotics, positive psychology, and online marketing for a better understanding of how marketers and semioticians can positively influence online customer behaviour. (shrink)

Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations mislead us and prompt us to (...) act. Moreover, it shows in virtue of what we are in a better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases. (shrink)

The full Bayesian signi/cance test (FBST) for precise hypotheses is presented, with some illustrative applications. In the FBST we compute the evidence against the precise hypothesis. We discuss some of the theoretical properties of the FBST, and provide an invariant formulation for coordinate transformations, provided a reference density has been established. This evidence is the probability of the highest relative surprise set, “tangential” to the sub-manifold (of the parameter space) that defines the null hypothesis.

Evidence based medicine (EBM) is under critical debate, and person centered healthcare (PCH) has been proposed as an improvement. But is PCH offered as a supplement or as a replacement of EBM? Prima facie PCH only concerns the practice of medicine, while the contended features of EBM also include methods and medical model. I here argue that there are good philosophical reasons to see PCH as a radical alternative to the existing medical paradigm of EBM, since the two seem (...) committed to conflicting ontologies. This paper aims to make explicit some of the most fundamental assumptions that motivate EBM and PCH, respectively, in order to show that the choice between them ultimately comes down to ontological preference. While EBM has a solid foundation in positivism, or what I here call Humeanism, PCH is more consistent with causal dispositionalism. I conclude that if there is a paradigmatic revolution on the way in medicine, it is first of all one of ontology. (shrink)

The increasing prevalence of mental health issues, particularly stress, has necessitated the development of data-driven, interpretable machine learning models for early detection and intervention. This study leverages multimodal data, including activity levels, perceived stress scores (PSS), and event counts, to predict stress levels among individuals. A series of models, including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and Neural Networks, were evaluated for their predictive performance. Results demonstrated that ensemble models, particularly Random Forest and Gradient Boosting, performed significantly better compared (...) to Logistic Regression. Random Forest achieved an accuracy of 73%, while Gradient Boosting delivered a balanced precision-recall tradeoff with an accuracy of 72%. Gradient Boosting outperformed in identifying high-stress instances, achieving a recall of 70%, making it the most reliable model for stress prediction. Explainable AI (XAI), which refers to the ability of machine learning models to provide transparent and understandable explanations for their predictions, was employed in this study using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). SHAP values revealed that Perceived Stress Score (PSS) had the most significant impact on predictions, followed by event count and activity inference. Higher PSS scores strongly correlated with high-stress predictions, while increased event counts and activity levels were associated with lower stress. These findings underscore the importance of incorporating behavioral patterns in stress diagnostics and highlight the utility of explainable models in improving transparency, trust, and usability for clinical decision-making. This research establishes a robust foundation for deploying interpretable machine learning systems to support mental health diagnostics and enhance clinician decision support. (shrink)

There are at least two different aspects of our rational evaluation of agents’ doxastic attitudes. First, we evaluate these attitudes according to whether they are supported by one’s evidence (substantive rationality). Second, we evaluate these attitudes according to how well they cohere with one another (structural rationality). In previous work, I’ve argued that substantive and structural rationality really are distinct, sui generis, kinds of rationality – call this view ‘dualism’, as opposed to ‘monism’, about rationality – by arguing that (...) the requirements of substantive and structural rationality can come into conflict. In this paper, I push the dialectic on this issue forward in two main ways. First, I argue that the most promising ways of resisting the diagnosis of my cases as conflicts still end up undermining monism in different ways. Second, supposing for the sake of argument that we should understand the cases as conflicts, I address the question of what we should do when such conflicts arise. I argue that, at least in a prominent kind of conflict case, the coherence requirements take precedence over the evidential requirements. (shrink)

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why (...) admitting other forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

This essay is an accessible introduction to the proof paradox in legal epistemology. -/- In 1902 the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine filed an influential legal verdict. The judge claimed that in order to find a defendant culpable, the plaintiff “must adduce evidence other than a majority of chances”. The judge thereby claimed that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. -/- In this essay I first motivate the claim that bare statistical evidence does not (...) suffice for legal proof. I then introduce and motivate a knowledge-centred explanation of this fact. The knowledge-centred explanation rests on two premises. The first is that legal proof requires knowledge of culpability. The second is that one cannot attain knowledge that p from bare statistical evidence that p. To motivate the second premise, I suggest that beliefs based on bare statistical evidence fail to be safe—they could easily be wrong—and bare statistical evidence cannot eliminate relevant alternatives. -/- I then cast doubt on the first premise; I argue that legal proof does not require knowledge. I thereby dispute the knowledge-centred explanation of the inadequacy of bare statistical evidence for legal proof. Instead of appealing to the nature of knowledge, I suggest we should seek a more direct explanation by appealing to those more foundational epistemic properties, such as safety or eliminating relevant alternatives. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss a problem that arises when you try to combine an attractive account of what constitutes evidence with an independently plausible account of the kind of access we have to our evidence. According to E = K, our evidence consists of what we know. According to the principle of armchair access, we can know from the armchair what our evidence is. Combined, these claims entail that we can have armchair knowledge of (...) the external world. Because it seems that the principle of armchair access is supported by widely shared intuitions about epistemic rationality, it seems we ought to embrace an internalist conception of evidence. I shall argue that this response is mistaken. Because externalism about evidence can accommodate the relevant intuitions about epistemic rationality, the principle of armchair access is unmotivated. We also have independent reasons for preferring externalism about evidence to the principle of armchair access. (shrink)

Cancer research is experiencing ‘paradigm instability’, since there are two rival theories of carcinogenesis which confront themselves, namely the somatic mutation theory and the tissue organization field theory. Despite this theoretical uncertainty, a huge quantity of data is available thanks to the improvement of genome sequencing techniques. Some authors think that the development of new statistical tools will be able to overcome the lack of a shared theoretical perspective on cancer by amalgamating as many data as possible. We think instead (...) that a deeper understanding of cancer can be achieved by means of more theoretical work, rather than by merely accumulating more data. To support our thesis, we introduce the analytic view of theory development, which rests on the concept of plausibility, and make clear in what sense plausibility and probability are distinct concepts. Then, the concept of plausibility is used to point out the ineliminable role played by the epistemic subject in the development of statistical tools and in the process of theory assessment. We then move to address a central issue in cancer research, namely the relevance of computational tools developed by bioinformaticists to detect driver mutations in the debate between the two main rival theories of carcinogenesis. Finally, we briefly extend our considerations on the role that plausibility plays in evidence amalgamation from cancer research to the more general issue of the divergences between frequentists and Bayesians in the philosophy of medicine and statistics. We argue that taking into account plausibility-based considerations can lead to clarify some epistemological shortcomings that afflict both these perspectives. (shrink)

Evidence matters for responsibility. This paper investigates implications of this insight for group responsibility and the literature on group belief. In particular, we will be focusing on the transmission of group responsibility from group to individual. We will argue that there are cases in which responsibility transmits fully (to all members of the group), partially (to some but not all of its members), or not at all (to none of its members), and we will explore some implications of these (...) observations for accounts of group belief and evidence in the literature on social epistemology. More specifically, we will provide reason to think that these observations provide support for an account of group belief that we favour over its main rivals in the literature. (shrink)

Public policymakers and institutional decision-makers routinely face questions about whether interventions “work”: does universal basic income improve people’s welfare and stimulate entrepreneurial activity? Do gated alleyways reduce burglaries or merely shift the crime burden to neighbouring communities? What is the most cost-effective way to improve students’ reading abilities? These are empirical questions that seem best answered by looking at the world, rather than trusting speculations about what will be effective. Evidence-based policy (EBP) is a movement that concretizes this intuition. (...) It maintains that policy should be based on evidence of “what works.” Not any evidence will do, however. Following on the heels of its intellectual progenitor, evidence-based medicine (EBM), EBP insists on the use of high-quality evidence produced in accordance with rigorous methodological standards. Though intuitively compelling, EBP has attracted significant criticism from methodologists, political scientists, and philosophers. This chapter provides a critical overview of EBP through a philosophical lens, reviewing and discussing some of the most pressing challenges that EBP faces and outlining some proposals for improving it. I first provide a brief overview of EBP and distinguish a broader and narrower understanding of it. I then review existing lines of criticism of EBP, two of which are considered in detail. The first elaborates how EBP struggles with extrapolation, that is, the use of evidence from study populations to make inferences about the effects of policies on novel target populations. The second maintains that EBP’s methodological tenets are deeply entwined with moral and political values, which can threaten EBP’s promise to promote objectivity in policymaking. Finally, I make some proposals for how EBP could be improved going forward. (shrink)

Martin Smith has recently proposed, in this journal, a novel and intriguing approach to puzzles and paradoxes in evidence law arising from the evidential standard of the Preponderance of the Evidence. According to Smith, the relation of normic support provides us with an elegant solution to those puzzles. In this paper I develop a counterexample to Smith’s approach and argue that normic support can neither account for our reluctance to base affirmative verdicts on bare statistical evidence nor (...) resolve the pertinent paradoxes. Normic support is, as a consequence, not a successful epistemic anti-luck condition. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to the Dogmatism Puzzle presented by Gilbert Harman, knowledge induces dogmatism because, if one knows that p, one knows that any evidence against p is misleading and therefore one can ignore it when gaining the evidence in the future. I try to offer a new solution to the puzzle by explaining why the principle is false that evidence known to be misleading can be ignored. I argue that knowing that some evidence is misleading doesn't always (...) damage the credential of the evidence, and therefore it doesn't always entitle one to ignore it. I also explain in what kind of cases and to what degree such knowledge allows one to ignore evidence. Hopefully, through the discussion, we can not only understand better where the dogmatism puzzle goes wrong, but also understand better in what sense rational believers should rely on their evidence and when they can ignore it. (shrink)

The traditional view of evidence in mathematics is that evidence is just proof and proof is just derivation. There are good reasons for thinking that this view should be rejected: it misrepresents both historical and current mathematical practice. Nonetheless, evidence, proof, and derivation are closely intertwined. This paper seeks to tease these concepts apart. It emphasizes the role of argumentation as a context shared by evidence, proofs, and derivations. The utility of argumentation theory, in general, and (...) argumentation schemes, in particular, as a methodology for the study of mathematical practice is thereby demonstrated. Argumentation schemes represent an almost untapped resource for mathematics education. Notably, they provide a consistent treatment of rigorous and non-rigorous argumentation, thereby working to exhibit the continuity of reasoning in mathematics with reasoning in other areas. Moreover, since argumentation schemes are a comparatively mature methodology, there is a substantial body of existing work to draw upon, including some increasingly sophisticated software tools. Such tools have significant potential for the analysis and evaluation of mathematical argumentation. The first four sections of the paper address the relationships of evidence to proof, proof to derivation, argument to proof, and argument to evidence, respectively. The final section directly addresses some of the educational implications of an argumentation scheme account of mathematical reasoning. (shrink)

Everyday media consumption leaves no doubt that the perception of moving images from various media is characterized by experience and understanding. Corresponding research in this field has shown that the stimulus patterns flooding in on us are not only processed mentally, but also bodily. Building on this, the following study argues that incoming stimuli are processed not only visually, but multimodally, with all senses, and moreover affectively. The classical binding of a sensory organ to a medium, on whose delimitation the (...) common understanding of multimodality is based, is thus abolished. Can arguments for this assumption be found? Building on the research of cultural anthropologist Ernst Cassirer and his successors, the two American philosophers Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois, and supported by research from the life sciences in which, in parallel, the arts also play an important role in understanding image formation, as in the work of Heinz Werner and, following on from this, in the more recent research of the child psychologist Daniel N. Stern in collaboration with mirror neuron research by the group of neuroscientists around Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, justifications for this will be provided. What the multimodal processing of film images is concretely based on will finally be made clear by means of an exemplary analysis of a video film by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. It aims to prove, that the prerequisites for the thesis can only lie in the fact, that both the modes of perception (visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory) as well as the medially conditioned modes of image formation are based on non-discursive, formal-abstract structures that are also processed affectively. At the same time, the analysis thus shows how the selection and composition of the vital experienced forms can provide information about the socio-culturally shaped self-image of the producer and the viewer. (shrink)

Evidence that minds are neural electromagnetic fields comes from research into how separate brain activities bind to form unified percepts and unified minds. Explanations of binding using synchrony, attention, and convergence are all problematic. But the unity of EM fields explains binding without these problems. These unified fields neatly explain correlations and divergences between synchrony, attention, convergence, and unified minds. The simplest explanation for the unity of both minds and fields is that minds are fields. Treating minds as the (...) fields' underlying, intrinsic nature has the further virtue of avoiding mind-body problems. There's also rising evidence that EM fields interact with brains. McFadden argues here that fields help shift the focus of attention by initiating synchrony in different neural networks, which boosts their own fields and thereby binds their activity. This evidence that minds are fields that bind and guide brain activities supports free will over epiphenomenalism and supervenience. (shrink)

Medicine, like law, is a pragmatic, probabilistic activity. Both require that decisions be made on the basis of available evidence, within a limited time. In contrast to law, medicine, particularly evidence-based medicine as it is currently practiced, aspires to a scientific standard of proof, one that is more certain than the standards of proof courts apply in civil and criminal proceedings. But medicine, as Dr. William Osler put it, is an "art of probabilities," or at best, a "science (...) of uncertainty." One can better practice medicine by using other evidentiary standards in addition to the "scientific." To employ only the scientific standard of proof is inappropriate, if not impossible; furthermore, as this review will show, its application in medicine is fraught with bias. Evidence is information. It supports or undermines a proposition, whether a hypothesis in science, a diagnosis in medicine, or a fact or point in question in a legal investigation. In medicine, physicians marshal evidence to make decisions on how to best prevent, diagnose, and treat disease, and improve health. In law, courts decide the facts and render justice. Judges and juries assess evidence to establish liability, to settle custody and medical issues, and to determine a defendant's guilt or innocence. (shrink)