Why should musical compositions and artistic images be included among the types of expression covered by free speech principles? One way to answer this question is to show how expression in nonverbal media can be functionally similar to other types of verbal expression. But this leaves us with an intuitively unsatisfying explanation of why free speech principles cover nonverbal creative expression that does not functionally emulate literal speech. In this article, as an alternative justification, we develop and defend the idea (...) that musical and pictorial expression‚ much like literal speech, can be media through which people think aloud, as opposed to mere tools for the transmission of thought. We use this proposal to provide a more robust justification for including nonverbal creative expression in the scope of free speech coverage, and we outline some of the practical policy implications that come with adopting this justificatory strategy. (shrink)

The study examines the relative merits of a noncompatibility and a restructuring explanation of the recurrent empirical finding that a prominent attribute looms larger in choices than in judgments. Pairs of equally attractive options were presented to 72 undergraduates who were assigned to six conditions in which they performed (1) only preference judgments or choices, (2) preference judgments or choices preceded by judgments of attractiveness of attribute levels, or (3) preference judgments or choices accompanied by think-aloud reports. The results (...) replicated the prominence efTect for choices, but a prominence effect was also found for preference judgments. In accordance with the restructuring explanation, the think-aloud protocols indicated that options were more often restructured in choices than in preference judgments. However, restructuring could not explain the prominence effect observed for preference judgments. A modified compatibility hypothesis is offered as an alternative explanation. (shrink)

1. EXPLICATING THE CONCEPT OF REFLECTION (under review) -/- To understand how ‘reflection’ is used, I consider ordinary, philosophical, and scientific discourse. I find that ‘reflection’ seems to refer to reasoning that is deliberate and conscious, but not necessarily self-conscious. Then I offer an empirical explication of reflection’s conscious and deliberate features. These explications not only help explain how reflection can be detected; they also distinguish reflection from nearby concepts such as ruminative and reformative reasoning. After this, I find that (...) reflection is not obviously limited to only practical or only theoretical reasoning. The chapter ends with reasons to prefer ‘unreflective’ and ‘reflective’ to dual process theorists’ labels about systems or types. -/- 2. BOUNDED REFLECTIVISM & EPISTEMIC IDENTITY (in Metaphilosophy) -/- Reflection features centrally in philosophy (e.g., Korsgaard, 1996; Rawls, 1971; Sosa, 1991) and psychology (e.g., Pennycook, 2018). Bounded reflectivism is an empirically adequate model of reflection that explains reflection’s capacity to either help or hinder reasoning—e.g., reflective equilibrium vs. reflective polarization (e.g., Kahan et al., 2017). One innovation of the model is epistemic identity: an identity that involves particular beliefs—e.g., religious and political identities. When we feel that our epistemic identity is threatened, we can reflectively defend its beliefs rather than update our beliefs according to the best arguments and evidence. The solution, I argue, is not to suppress epistemic identity but embrace it by appealing to shared, superordinate epistemic identities. -/- 3. ALL MEASURES ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL (under review) -/- A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? “10 cents” comes to most people’s minds immediately. However, upon reflection, we can realize that “5 cents” is the correct answer. There are many reflection tests. Each has its limitations. Some reflection tests are mathematical—like the bat-and-ball problem (e.g., Frederick, 2005) and others are logical (e.g., Janis & Frick, 1943). So there are concerns that reflection tests track logical and mathematical competence rather than reflection per se. Also, some psychologists assume a priori that correct answers are reflective and lured answers are unreflective. New evidence raises additional concerns about the plausibility of these assumptions. I argue that think aloud protocols (Ericsson & Simon, 1998) and process dissociation (Jacoby, 1991) can assuage some of these concerns. -/- 4. GREAT MINDS DO NOT THINK ALIKE (in Review of Philosophy and Psychology) -/- Two large studies (N = 1299), one pre-registered, found that many correlations between reflection and philosophical beliefs among non-philosophers replicated among philosophers. For example, less reflective philosophers preferred theism to atheism and utilitarian rather than deontological responses to the trolley problem (Hannikainen & Cova, in prep.; Pennycook et al., 2016; Reynolds, Byrd, & Conway, forthcoming). However, philosophical judgments were sometimes better predicted by factors like education, gender, and personality than by reflection test performance. So although some relationships between reflection and philosophy were robust, there is more to the link between reflection and philosophy. Normative implications are also discussed—e.g., how we can infer the quality of philosophical views from their correlations with reflective or unreflective reasoning. -/- 5. WHAT WE CAN (AND CAN’T) INFER ABOUT IMPLICIT BIAS (in Synthese) -/- Contrary to some philosophers and psychologists, I argue that implicit bias is probably associative. However, I also argue that debiasing is not thereby entirely unconscious and involuntary. Indeed, strong evidence suggests that reflection can change implicitly biased behavior—e.g., conscious and deliberate counterconditioning. This has implications for the science and morality of implicit bias—e.g., evidence suggests that we can reform biases; so. intuitively, we can be responsible for biases. (shrink)

A Mathematical Review by John Corcoran, SUNY/Buffalo -/- Macbeth, Danielle Diagrammatic reasoning in Frege's Begriffsschrift. Synthese 186 (2012), no. 1, 289–314. ABSTRACT This review begins with two quotations from the paper: its abstract and the first paragraph of the conclusion. The point of the quotations is to make clear by the “give-them-enough-rope” strategy how murky, incompetent, and badly written the paper is. I know I am asking a lot, but I have to ask you to read the quoted passages—aloud (...) if possible. Don’t miss the silly attempt to recycle Kant’s quip “Concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind”. What the paper was aiming at includes the absurdity: “Proofs without definitions are empty; definitions without proofs are, if not blind, then dumb.” But the author even bollixed this. The editor didn’t even notice. The copy-editor missed it. And the author’s proof-reading did not catch it. In order not to torment you I will quote the sentence as it appears: “In a slogan: proofs without definitions are empty, merely the aimless manipulation of signs according to rules; and definitions without proofs are, if no blind, then dumb.”[sic] The rest of my review discusses the paper’s astounding misattribution to contemporary logicians of the information-theoretic approach. This approach was cruelly trashed by Quine in his 1970 Philosophy of Logic, and thereafter ignored by every text I know of. The paper under review attributes generally to modern philosophers and logicians views that were never espoused by any of the prominent logicians—such as Hilbert, Gödel, Tarski, Church, and Quine—apparently in an attempt to distance them from Frege: the focus of the article. On page 310 we find the following paragraph. “In our logics it is assumed that inference potential is given by truth-conditions. Hence, we think, deduction can be nothing more than a matter of making explicit information that is already contained in one’s premises. If the deduction is valid then the information contained in the conclusion must be contained already in the premises; if that information is not contained already in the premises […], then the argument cannot be valid.” Although the paper is meticulous in citing supporting literature for less questionable points, no references are given for this. In fact, the view that deduction is the making explicit of information that is only implicit in premises has not been espoused by any standard symbolic logic books. It has only recently been articulated by a small number of philosophical logicians from a younger generation, for example, in the prize-winning essay by J. Sagüillo, Methodological practice and complementary concepts of logical consequence: Tarski’s model-theoretic consequence and Corcoran’s information-theoretic consequence, History and Philosophy of Logic, 30 (2009), pp. 21–48. The paper omits definitions of key terms including ‘ampliative’, ‘explicatory’, ‘inference potential’, ‘truth-condition’, and ‘information’. The definition of prime number on page 292 is as follows: “To say that a number is prime is to say that it is not divisible without remainder by another number”. This would make one be the only prime number. The paper being reviewed had the benefit of two anonymous referees who contributed “very helpful comments on an earlier draft”. Could these anonymous referees have read the paper? -/- J. Corcoran, U of Buffalo, SUNY -/- PS By the way, if anyone has a paper that has been turned down by other journals, any journal that would publish something like this might be worth trying. (shrink)

Critical thinking involves deliberate application of tests and standards to beliefs per se and to methods used to arrive at beliefs. Pedagogical license is authorization accorded to teachers permitting them to use otherwise illicit means in order to achieve pedagogical goals. Pedagogical license is thus analogous to poetic license or, more generally, to artistic license. Pedagogical license will be found to be pervasive in college teaching. This presentation suggests that critical thinking courses emphasize two topics: first, the nature (...) and usefulness of critical thinking; second, the nature and pervasiveness of pedagogical license. Awareness of pedagogical license alerts the student to the need for critical thinking. Indoctrination is done to students; education is done by students. (shrink)

This is the full version of the Delphi Report on critical thinking and critical thinking instruction at the post-secondary level.

How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are (...) not sure of. For example, you might think that it will rain sometime this month, but not be sure that it will. Both what we're sure of and what we think have important normative connections to action. But the connections are quite different. This paper explores these issues with respect to assertion, inquiry, and decision making. We conclude by arguing that there is no theoretically significant notion of ‘full belief’ intermediate in strength between thinking and being sure. (shrink)

There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teaching debiasing strategies in critical thinking courses. We summarize some of the grounds before suggesting a broader taxonomy of debiasing strategies. This four-level taxonomy enables a useful diagnosis of biasing factors and situations, and illuminates more strategies for more effective bias mitigation located in the shaping of situational factors and reasoning infrastructure—sometimes called “nudges” in the literature. The question, we contend, then becomes how best (...) to teach the construction and use of such infrastructures. (shrink)

Why do people create extra representations to help them make sense of situations, diagrams, illustrations, instructions and problems? The obvious explanation— external representations save internal memory and com- putation—is only part of the story. I discuss seven ways external representations enhance cognitive power: they change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they facilitate re- representation; they are often a more natural representation of (...) structure than mental representations; they facilitate the computation of more explicit encoding of information; they enable the construction of arbitrarily complex structure; and they lower the cost of controlling thought—they help coordinate thought. Jointly, these functions allow people to think more powerfully with external representations than without. They allow us to think the previously unthinkable. (shrink)

Math prospective teachers must be able to think creatively and solve problems. The study looked into preservice teachers’ creative thinking and problem-solving abilities in statistics. The investigation was guided by a correlational design in a public university in the Philippines. Stratified random sampling was used to select the 103 study participants from two teacher education programs. Through google forms, data were collected using Torrance et al. (2008)’s tests of creative thinking and researcher-made statistics problem test. The findings revealed (...) that preservice teachers have commendable creative thinking, particularly fluency, flexibility, and elaboration skills. Still, they lack problem-solving skills in statistics, specifically with central tendency, dispersion, and position measures. The correlational analysis revealed no link between creative thinking and problem-solving. Still, creative thinking and problem-solving courses are recommended to help preservice teachers develop their fundamental skills as mathematics educators. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Max Deutscher’s recent accounts of thinking, willing and judging, derived from his reading of Hannah Arendt’s 'The Life of the Mind', as set out in his book 'Judgment After Arendt'. Against Deutscher I argue that thinking does not presuppose thoughtfulness, that being willing is compatible with willing reluctantly, and that actor and spectator judgments are distinct types of judgments.

Eugenic thinking involves distinguishing between sorts or kinds of people in terms of the perceived desirable or undesirable traits that those people are likely to transmit to future generations. While eugenics itself is often thought of as an ideology that generated a social movement of global influence from roughly 1900 to 1945, eugenic thinking both pre-dates this period and continues to inform a range of contemporary debates and social policies, including those concerning prenatal screening, transhumanism, population control, and (...) disability. Various sciences, including the then-nascent sciences of psychology and psychiatry, played important roles in early twentieth-century eugenics, and their legacy is reflected in contemporary eugenic thinking and policies. Understanding the history of eugenics and the role of these early sciences of cognition in that history is useful in reflecting further on ongoing forms of eugenic thinking to which the contemporary cognitive sciences are relevant. (shrink)

Action can only be spontaneous and impulsive if not guided by contemplation; contemplation, on the other hand, may only be luxurious playfulness if not either purposed - or suitable - to motivate action. This volume seeks to prove what may seem self-evident to common sense, but adhering to common sense is never pointless nor excessive. Next to this, Thinking in Action is the offspring of friendship, respect and commitment between two academic communities, the Hellenic and the Serbian philosophical communities, (...) that admittedly have a lot in common, especially with regard to philosophy, and hopefully as many differences as needed in order to secure a long-lasting and fertile exchange of ideas; it is also the natural-born child of necessity: philosophy is about argumentation, debate and confrontation. Thinking in Action inaugurates Hellenic-Serbian Philosophical Dialogue Series that entertains no hesitation in being as ambitious as any philosophical series could be: it seeks to establish a permanent, wide and rich channel of fruitful philosophical interaction between the two philosophical communities. Having high aspirations is one thing; meeting these aspirations as well as the expectations of the reader is a totally different one. We wish Thinking in Action, the first volume of the Hellenic-Serbian Philosophical Dialogue Series, apart from being the initial step of a long journey, will also be a fascinating one to the reader. (shrink)

This paper defends the view, put roughly, that to think that p is to guess that p is the answer to the question at hand, and that to think that p rationally is for one’s guess to that question to be in a certain sense non-arbitrary. Some theses that will be argued for along the way include: that thinking is question-sensitive and, correspondingly, that ‘thinks’ is context-sensitive; that it can be rational to think that p while having arbitrarily low (...) credence that p; that, nonetheless, rational thinking is closed under entailment; that thinking does not supervene on credence; and that in many cases what one thinks on certain matters is, in a very literal sense, a choice. Finally, since there are strong reasons to believe that thinking just is believing, there are strong reasons to think that all this goes for belief as well. (shrink)

The concept of population thinking was introduced by Ernst Mayr as the right way of thinking about the biological domain, but it is difficult to find an interpretation of this notion that is both unproblematic and does the theoretical work it was intended to do. I argue that, properly conceived, Mayr’s population thinking is a version of trope nominalism: the view that biological property-types do not exist or at least they play no explanatory role. Further, although population (...) thinking has been traditionally used to argue against essentialism about biological kinds, recently it has been suggested that it may be consistent with at least some forms of essentialism—ones that construe essential properties as relational. I argue that if population thinking is a version of trope nominalism, then, as Mayr originally claimed, it rules out any version of essentialism about biological kinds. (shrink)

Using the method of Descriptive Experience Sampling, some subjects report experiences of thinking that do not involve words or any other symbols [Hurlburt, R. T., and C. L. Heavey. 2006. Exploring Inner Experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Hurlburt, R. T., and S. A. Akhter. 2008. “Unsymbolized Thinking.” Consciousness and Cognition 17 : 1364–1374]. Even though the possibility of this unsymbolized thinking has consequences for the debate on the phenomenological status of cognitive states, the phenomenon is still insufficiently examined. (...) This paper analyzes the main properties of unsymbolized thinking and advances an explanation of its origin. According to our analysis, unsymbolized thoughts appear as propositional states, that is, they are experienced as compositional conceptual phenomena, with semantic and syntactic features analogous to those of the contents of utterances. Based on this characterization, we hypothesize that UT is continuous with the activity of inner speech, in particular, it i... (shrink)

In this essay, I draw on Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to interrogate what philosophy is and how it can continue to think. Though my answer is not reducible to the views of either philosopher, what joins them is an attempt to elaborate philosophy as a different way of seeing. In this light, I propose a view of philosophy as prosthesis—as a means and a way for seeing differently. Rather than a simple tool, philosophy as prosthesis is a transformative supplement, (...) one that our bodily perception calls for and wherein that perception is recast. Rather than a fixed or assured view, this prosthesis holds open the interval in which thinking can take place. Philosophy, I argue, must wait. It sees and thinks hesitatingly, for the temporality it inscribes is not a foreseeable development but the unfolding of life as tendency, as that which creates its own possibility as it comes into existence. (shrink)

Perception of a property (e.g. a colour, a shape, a size) can enable thought about the property, while at the same time misleading the subject as to what the property is like. This long-overlooked claim parallels a more familiar observation concerning perception-based thought about objects, namely that perception can enable a subject to think about an object while at the same time misleading her as to what the object is like. I defend the overlooked claim, and then use it to (...) generate a challenge for a standard way of thinking about the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. Put informally, that view holds that just as we can mislead others by saying something false, illusory experience misleads by misrepresenting how things stand in the world. I argue that we ought to abandon this view in favour of some radical alternative account of the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. (shrink)

This article is a reflective case-study presenting and analysing the findings of ‘Thinking Is Seeing’, a practice-led research project we conducted between March and April 2017 under the Tate Exchange platform. The project focused on Tate Liverpool’s _Constellations_, the pioneering way of exhibiting works from the Tate collection motivated by thematic, chronological, or interpretative links identified through extended curatorial research. -/- The philosophical background informing our research is the role that perception apportions to thought: a _constellation_, literally a collection (...) of celestial objects, or more widely a set of any other things, events, (art)works, and experiences signifies a process of identifying connections, categorising meanings, drawing inferences. In other words, it signifies _thinking_. As Norman Maclean puts it: ‘All there is to thinking […] is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.’ (_A River Runs through It and Other Stories_. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017 (=1976), pp. 105–106.) This organic relation between thinking and seeing, where the one is but a prerequisite for the other, also echoes Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of a ‘constellation’: ‘Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it.’ (_Negative Dialectics_, translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 (=1966), p. 163.) -/- Against this background and given that the aim of the _Constellations_ is —to quote Francesco Manacorda— ‘to empower people to come and make their own thinking inside these rooms’, we investigated the ways in which _Constellations_ work as an exchange between art, curatorial gesture, and public engagement. What difference does it make to one’s appreciation of, say, Barnett Newman’s _Untitled Etching #1_ when one attends to those features of the work that make it part of a given curatorial narrative (like a _Constellation_)? Do members of the public feel empowered to challenge the perspective of the curator in recognising affinities within a _Constellation_ and construct new narratives? -/- In order to tackle these research questions, we deployed participatory research during three public interactive workshops, which incorporated philosophical inquiry through structured discussion, reflective questioning, and shared criticism. This article shows how the practice of philosophical inquiry within the community, helps us understand that _seeing_ art happens through _understanding_ art and _vice versa_, while empowering participants to articulate exciting new interpretations. (shrink)

The paper briefly summarises and critiques Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Thinking. After offering an overview of the book, the paper focusses on one particular part of Tomasello’s proposal on the evolution of uniquely human thinking and raises two points of criticism against it. One of them concerns his notion of thinking. The other pertains to empirical findings on egocentric biases in communication.

In his 2009 monograph, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith accuses biologists of demonstrating ‘Darwinian Paranoia’ when they engage in what he dubs ‘agential thinking’. But as Daniel Dennett points out, he offers neither an illuminating set of examples nor an extended argument for this assertion, deeming it to be a brilliant propaganda stroke against what is actually a useful way of thinking. Compared to the dangers of teleological thinking in biology, the dangers of agential (...) class='Hi'>thinking have unfortunately rarely been discussed. Drawing on recent work by Samir Okasha, I attempt to remedy this omission, through analyzing the nature of agential thinking, and providing a philosophical treatment of the unexamined dangers in this peculiar, yet tempting way of thinking. (shrink)

Plagiarism, which Indiana University’s Writing Tutorial Service defines as "using others' ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information", is often described as a major problem. However, standard definitions such as this one suggest only limited solutions to the problem: acknowledging sources or forbidding reuse. Since all scholarship involves engaging with the ideas of others and academic writing tends to reuse certain expressions, these solutions – though important – are of limited utility. This paper examines a type (...) of plagiarism to which the standard solutions do not apply: the reuse of linguistic models without sufficient attention to the logic or thoughts the texts express. We present two cases of plagiarism, from which we can see that plagiarism shows a gap between the written texts and the thoughts of the author. In order to fill the gap, one needs to know how to integrate not only the texts borrowed from others into one’s writing but also the thoughts expressed by the texts. Thus a satisfactory solution to the plagiarism problem requires not only writing skills but also logical thinking skills. (shrink)

This study investigates all available literature related to critical thinking in business education in a survey of publications in the field produced from 1990-2019. It conducts a thematic analysis of 787 articles found in Web of Science and Google Scholar, including a specific focus on 55 highly-cited articles. The aim is to investigate the importance of critical thinking in business education, how it is conceptualised in business education research, the business contexts in which critical thinking is situated, (...) and the key and more marginal themes related to critical thinking outlined in the business and business education literature. The paper outlines six key areas and topics associated with those areas. It suggests future directions for further scholarly work in the area of critical thinking in business education. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify Design Thinking and its use in NGOs in Gaza Strip. In order to achieve the objectives of the study and to test its hypotheses, the analytical descriptive method was used, relying on the questionnaire as a main tool for data collection. The study society was one of the decision makers in the local NGOs in the Gaza Strip. The study population reached 78 local NGOs in Gaza Strip. The overall inventory of the possible study (...) community was based mainly on the use of the SPSS in processing and analyzing the data obtained through the survey tool. Smart-PLS was also used to construct the structural equation model (SEM) Analyzing the relationship between study variables. The study found that Design Thinking mediates the relationship between the management of process design and decision making with a holistic effect. The study showed the interest of local NGOs in creating a good mental image in the local community. And the ownership of local NGOs to the expertise and technical skills required to implement the projects, and showed the adoption of local NGOs in their activities to meet the needs of the beneficiaries and their wishes, and local NGOs analyze the problem, and causes, through data relevant to the decision, based on reference data for decision-making. The main recommendations of the study are: The need for senior management in the local NGOs in Gaza Strip to adopt the methodology of design thinking because of its impact on the sustainability of the projects, design the technical feasibility study and meet the wishes of the beneficiaries. (shrink)

The reproducibility crisis in social sciences has revealed significant weaknesses in conventional research practices, including selective publication, questionable statistical methods, and opaque peer review processes. This paper introduces Granular Interaction Thinking Theory (GITT) as a novel framework for understanding the plausibility of scientific findings, conceptualizing knowledge validation as a structured entropy-reduction process. Within this framework, open science practices—such as open data, open review, and open dialogue—initially increase informational entropy by exposing inconsistencies. However, through iterative refinement, they ultimately enhance the (...) robustness and plausibility of scientific knowledge. To systematically assess a study’s plausibility, we propose the Scientific Plausibility Index (SPI)—an entropy-based metric that integrates data and method transparency, replication success rates, and community engagement. Additionally, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), a dynamic plausibility-tracking system could be developed to detect unreliable claims early and accelerate scientific self-correction. This shift—from closed, one-time assessments to continuous, community-driven evaluation models—ensures that scientific knowledge remains rigorously tested and updated. We advocate for shifting from closed, one-time assessments to continuous, community-driven evaluation models, ensuring that scientific knowledge remains rigorously tested and updated. Ultimately, aligning incentives with entropy-reducing mechanisms—such as rewarding replication efforts and fostering open discourse—can cultivate a research culture that prioritizes robustness, transparency, and cumulative knowledge-building. (shrink)

The article aims to determine how university professors critically perceive and evaluate information when interacting with the media sphere. The study's relevance is due to the insufficient elaboration of Russian teachers' attitude to the information in the media sphere, which is significant in developing students' critical thinking. The study analyzes theoretical sources and documents on critical thinking in the media sphere and the results of processing empirical data obtained from questioning teachers. The main measuring instrument is a questionnaire (...) survey of university professors with various lengths of service. The study involved 76 teachers from Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin. Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia). Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod (Nizhny Novgorod, Russia). The data obtained from the study of the teachers' attitude to the information content of the media sphere show a predominant critical attitude in assessing the reliability and availability of information on social networking platforms. This conclusion is important for personality traits that develop students' critical thinking. (shrink)

In his account of the individuation and creation of thinking in Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze claims that there belongs “an experience of death.” What does this mean and imply for an attempt to come to terms with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism? The following article presents a reading that explores this question, arguing that Deleuze’s account of what it means to think has two aspects that must be understood in relation to each other. On the one hand, Deleuze’s ontology of (...) intensive difference involves an image of human individuation grounded upon a “death present in the living.” On the other hand, Deleuze writes that in the creation of “thinking in thought” there is an experience of death. Understanding the relation between the individuating aspect of death – as the emergence of the pure and empty form of time as the basis for representational thinking and judgement – and the experience of this individuating factor in the creation of thinking in thought, Deleuze’s claim can be made sense of and its centrality in his system clarified. When death as an individuating factor becomes experience, thinking is transmuted from dead representation to intensive life, and transcendental empiricism is operationalized. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking—the capacity to reflect on what would, could, or should have been if events had transpired differently—is a pervasive, yet seemingly paradoxical human tendency. On the one hand, counterfactual thoughts can be comforting and inspiring (Carroll & Shepperd, Chapter 28), but on the other they can be anxiety provoking and depressing (Zeelenberg & Pieters, Chapter 27). Likewise, such thoughts can illuminate pathways toward better future outcomes (Wong, Galinsky, & Kray, Chapter 11), yet they can also promote confusion and (...) lead us astray (Sanna, Schwarz, & Kennedy, Chapter 13). The first part of this chapter focuses on work that supports the prevailing Zeitgeist in the counterfactual thinking literature: Counterfactual thinking is beneficial. The second part of the chapter, however, strikes a more cautionary tone by reviewing work that describes some deleterious consequences of counterfactual thinking. We conclude by offering a tentative reconciliation of these conflicting perspectives and suggesting directions for future research. (shrink)

A feminist standpoint addresses the ideals or norms and attendant practices involved in science and knowledge with a mind to lived experiences of oppression. That such matters of social context and awareness of that context influence the ability of individual people to know their worlds constitutes the Situated Knowledge Thesis (Intemann 2016; Wylie 2003). Situated knowledges provide the evidence and inspiration for the central epistemological tenet of feminist standpoint theory. Individuals and liberatory communities obtain the epistemic advantage of a standpoint (...) through an Outside- In Process of thinking, drawing into science and knowledge the “outside” values and experiences of marginalized people. Outside- in thinking manifests both as a theory and a methodology in feminist philosophy of science. (shrink)

When someone says she believes that God exists, is she expressing the same kind of mental state as when she says she thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists⎯i.e., does she refer to the same kind of cognitive attitude in both cases? Using evidence from linguistic corpora (Study 1) and behavioral experiments (Studies 2-4), the current work provides evidence that individuals typically use the word “believe” more in conjunction with statements about religious credences and “think” more in conjunction (...) with factual statements, pointing to two different understandings of claims made with these two terms. These patterns do not appear to reflect low-level differences based on the amount of consensus surrounding a particular claim, the extent to which the truth of a particular claim is known to the participant, or linguistic differences between religious and factual statements. We discuss implications of these findings for religious cognition (e.g., as supporting the theory that religious credences are qualitatively distinct from factual beliefs) as well as cognitive processes more broadly. Finally, we relate the present findings to prior theoretical work on differences between factual belief and religious credence. (shrink)

In the Philippines, improving pre-service math teachers’ critical thinking is receiving increasing attention, emphasizing the importance of tailoring instructional methods to students’ learning approaches for a more equitable environment and enhanced mathematics performance. Thus, this study aimed to determine if the critical thinking disposition subscales (reflective, attentiveness, open-mindedness, organization, perseverance, and intrinsic motivation) and learning approach (deep approach and surface approach) predict the mathematics performance of pre-service math teachers. This study employed a descriptive-correlational research design to randomly selected (...) 125 pre-service math teachers from Central Luzon, Philippines. The survey instruments are administered through the student-educator negotiated CTDs scale, the revised two-factor study process questionnaire, and the 40-item validated test. Using descriptive analysis, findings revealed that preservice mathematics teachers have moderate levels of CTD, most of which use a deep approach and have average mathematics performance. Regression analysis showed that CTD and the deep approach were predictors. Therefore, pre-service mathematics teachers with a higher CTD and a deep approach are likelier to perform better in mathematics. These findings provide valuable insights into enhancing mathematics teacher education. (shrink)

Technology should be aligned with our values. We make the case that attempts to align emerging technologies with our values should reflect critically on these values. Critical thinking seems like a natural starting point for the critical assessment of our values. However, extant conceptualizations of critical thinking carve out no space for the critical scrutiny of values. We will argue that we need critical thinking that focuses on values instead of taking them as unexamined starting points. In (...) order to play a crucial role in helping to align values and technology, critical thinking needs to be modified and refocused on values. Here, we outline what value-centred critical thinking could look like. (shrink)

[File is the introduction to the monograph] -/- Abstract to monograph -/- How and whether thinking affects perceiving is a deeply important question. Of course it is of scientific interest: to understand the human mind is to understand how we best distinguish its processes, how those processes interact, and what this implies for how and what we may know about the world. And so in the philosopher’s terms, this book is one on both mental architecture and the epistemology of (...) perception. But there is a more human interest. How we make contact with the world, and with one another, is of the most basic of importance. We can make both sensory contact and cognitive contact with the world. The first is traditionally supposed to be determined by the biological nature of our sensory systems, while the second is at least partly determined by us, what we have learned, our experiences, and so on. The most basic claim of the book is that this is mistaken and importantly so. Our sensory contact with the world can also change and in a way that is importantly affected by the cognitive contact that we have, or have had, with the world. Thinking does not just affect perceiving, thinking improves perceiving. If this is true, it changes not only how we should theorize the mind, it changes how we should understand, as individuals, our place in and contact with the world. (shrink)

Remember that childhood game “Odds or Evens” you used to play in order to settle important disputes such as who gets the last slice of pizza? There was only one element of skill to that game: trying to figure out what the other person would throw. But that wasn’t easy. If your opponent was savvy, that meant trying to figure out what he thought you were going to throw. And that sometimes meant figuring out what he thought you thought he (...) was going to throw. -/- Philosophers call this “thought attribution,” and top poker players are remarkably good at it. The ability to attribute thoughts to other people is especially important in the No-Limit Texas Hold’em tournaments that have, through television and the Internet, swept the globe in recent years. What is required to succeed in this game is not merely attributing “first-order” thoughts to other players, but attributing to them thoughts about your thoughts about their thoughts. In fact, that’s the minimum. The kind of thinking done by the very best players (T. J. Cloutier, Howard Lederer, and Daniel Negreanu are especially good at it) is much more complex than that. -/- In this paper, I explore the light that recent philosophical work on thought attribution sheds on the kind of thinking that goes on at the expert poker table. The paper should be revealing to poker experts and novices alike. And it should be of interest to philosophers interested in poker or thought attribution. -/- The essay is published in Poker and Philosophy, a volume of Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy Series. The goal of the series is to introduce philosophical themes to non-philosophers by way of particular topics of interest (in this case poker). (shrink)

Arendt is a philosopher despite herself, and this paper uses the resources of her <<The Life of the Mind>> to develop her comparison of thinking as a 'departure' from the world with the fore-doomed attempt by Orpheus to bring from underground into the light of day. The paper investigates how thinking, though we 'lose' it in the speech and writing that makes it public, still can have the delicate power that Arendt attributes to it.

Paper presented at the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking meeting in conjunction with the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, April 2004.

I argue that on Aristotle’s account practical thinking is thinking whose origin (archē) is a desire that has as its object the very thing that one reasons about how to promote. This feature distinguishes practical from productive reasoning since in the latter the desire that initiates it is not (unless incidentally) a desire for the object that one productively reasons about. The feature has several interesting consequences: (a) there is only a contingent relationship between the desire that one (...) practically reasons about how to satisfy and the action one decides on; (b) practical thinking and action cannot be separated from the agent, whereas productive thinking and production can be outsourced to someone else. The view has consequences also for the distinction between action and production. Finally, I illustrate the usefulness and correctness of my account of practical thinking by using it to shed new light on Aristotle’s claim that the virtuous agent must decide on her virtuous actions ‘for themselves’. (shrink)

To explore the question of physical thinking – using the body as an instrument of cognition – we collected extensive video and interview data on the creative process of a noted choreographer and his company as they made a new dance. A striking case of physical thinking is found in the phenomenon of marking. Marking refers to dancing a phrase in a less than complete manner. Dancers mark to save energy. But they also mark to explore the tempo (...) of a phrase, or its movement sequence, or the intention behind it. Because of its representational nature, marking can serve as a vehicle for thought. Importantly, this vehicle is less complex than the version of the same phrase danced ‘full-out’. After providing evidence for distinguishing different types of marking, three ways of understanding marking as a form of thought are considered: marking as a gestural language for encoding aspects of a target movement, marking as a method of priming neural systems involved in the target movement, and marking as a method for improving the precision of mentally projecting aspects of the target. (shrink)

Suppose that you're lying in bed. You just woke up. But you're alert. Your mind is clear and you have no distractions. As you lie there, you think to yourself, ‘2 + 2 = 4.’ The thought just pops into your head. But, wanting to be sure of your mathematical insight, you once again think ‘2 + 2 = 4’, this time really meditating on your thought. Now suppose that you're sitting in an empty movie theatre. The lighting is normal (...) and the screen in front of you is blank. Then at some point an image of a peach is flashed on the screen. The image isn't up there for long. In fact, it's only on the screen for what seems like an instant—just long enough for you to see it. These two scenarios are a bit mundane. But, as I will show, reflection on them can yield significant results concerning the nature of persons and their persistence through time. First I will show that thought and perception have temporal constraints whereby your thinking or perceiving in the above scenarios implies that you exist through a temporally.. (shrink)

Human cognition is extended and enacted. Drawing the boundaries of cognition to include the resources and attributes of the body and materiality allows an examination of how these components interact with the brain as a system, especially over cultural and evolutionary spans of time. Literacy and numeracy provide examples of multigenerational, incremental change in both psychological functioning and material forms. Though we think materiality, its central role in human cognition is often unappreciated, for reasons that include conceptual distribution over multiple (...) material forms, the unconscious transparency of cognitive activity in general, and the different temporalities of metaplastic change in neurons and cultural forms. (shrink)

We spend a good deal of time thinking about how and when to advise others, and how to respond to other people advising us. However, philosophical discussions of the nature and norms advising have been scattered and somewhat disconnected. The most focused discussion has come from philosophers of language interested in whether advising is a kind of assertive or directive kind of speech act. This paper argues that the ordinary category of advising is much more heterogenous than has been (...) appreciated: it is possible to advise by asserting relevant facts, by issuing directives, and by asking questions and other kinds of adviceless advising. The heterogeneity of advising makes speech act-theoretic accounts of advising look like accounts of special cases, and motivates us to look elsewhere for an account of what advising is. I suggest that we think about advising as a distinctive species of joint practical thinking—which I will call collaborative deliberation—and show how our need for a concept to pick out this kind of joint activity emerges from our practical needs as deliberators. This view helps to shed light on a number of puzzling features of advising and offers some guidance to be better at advising and at being advised. (shrink)

“Critical thinking in higher education” is a phrase that means many things to many people. It is a broad church. Does it mean a propensity for finding fault? Does it refer to an analytical method? Does it mean an ethical attitude or a disposition? Does it mean all of the above? Educating to develop critical intellectuals and the Marxist concept of critical consciousness are very different from the logician’s toolkit of finding fallacies in passages of text, or the practice (...) of identifying and distinguishing valid from invalid syllogisms. Critical thinking in higher education can also encompass debates about critical pedagogy, i.e., political critiques of the role and function of education in society, critical feminist approaches to curriculum, issues related to what has become known as critical citizenship, or any other education-related topic that uses the appellation “critical”. Equally, it can, and usually does, refer to the importance and centrality of developing general skills in reasoning—skills that we hope all graduates possess. Yet, despite more than four decades of dedicated scholarly work “critical thinking” remains as elusive as ever. As a concept, it is, as Raymond Williams has noted, a ‘most difficult one’ (Williams, 1976, p. 74). (shrink)

To continue the project of explicating Pacific values and worldviews, this paper focuses on correlative thinking in some of the cultural philosophies of the Pacific islands, especially Micronesia. Correlative thinking differs, in degree, from scientific and academic logic that emphasize the truth-value of statements. After examining aspects of correlative thinking in Bali and the Philippines, I extract some characteristics of Pacific philosophies from cultural practices, myths, and beliefs. Unlike William Alkire (Alkire, 1972), I find that Pacific islanders (...) use correlative thinking, not dualism, to fill their canoes and baskets of wisdom, so that they can navigate between contemporary logic or scientific thinking, and their cultural knowledge systems and ways of reasoning. (shrink)

There seems to be widespread agreement that to be responsible for something is to be deserving of certain consequences on account of that thing. Call this the “merited-consequences” conception of responsibility. I think there is something off, or askew, in this conception, though I find it hard to articulate just what it is. The phenomena the merited-consequences conception is trying to capture could be better captured, I think, by noting the characteristic way in which certain minds can rightly matter to (...) other such minds—the way in which certain minds can carry a certain kind of importance, made manifest in certain sorts of responses. Mattering, not meriting, seems to me central. However, since I cannot yet better articulate an alternative, I continue in the merit-consequences framework. I focus on a particular class of consequences: those that are non-voluntary, in a sense explained. The non-voluntariness of these reactions has two important upshots. First, questions about their justification will be complex. Second, they are not well thought of as consequences voluntarily imposed upon the wrongdoer by the responder. By focusing on merited consequences and overlooking non-voluntariness, we risk misunderstanding the significance of moral criticism and of certain reactions to moral failure. (shrink)

The article reflects on where AI is headed and the world along with it, considering trust, ethics and safety. Implicit in artificial thinking and doomsday appraisals is the engineered divorce from reality of sublime human embodiment. Jeffrey White, Dietrich Brandt, Jan Soeffner, and Larry Stapleton, four scholars associated with AI & Society, address these issues, and more, in the following exchange.

In this article, I identify some good-making features of a deliberative democratic theory. The article will proceed as follows: First, I present both some important insights and some shortcomings of Rawls’ theory. I then present Robert Talisse’s account, focusing on how Talisse both accommodates what is right about Rawls while avoiding some of Rawls’ weaknesses. Finally, some positive claims are made about what an adequate deliberative theory might look like.

The application of statistical methods and models both in the natural and social sciences is nowadays a trivial fact which nobody would deny. Bold analogies even suggest the application of the same statistical models to fields as different as statistical mechanics and economics, among them the case of the young and controversial discipline of Econophysics . Less trivial, however, is the answer to the philosophical question, which has been raised ever since the possibility of “commuting” statistical thinking and models (...) between natural and social sciences emerged: whether such a methodological kinship would imply some kind of more profound unity of the natural and the social domain. Starting with Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) and ending with the Vienna Circle (from the late 1920s until the 1940s), this paper offers a brief historical and philosophical reconstruction of some important stages in the development of statistics as “commuting” between the natural and the social sciences. This reconstruction is meant to highlight (with respect to the authors under consideration): (1) the existence of a significant correlation between the readiness to “transfer” statistical thinking from natural to social sciences and vice versa, on the one hand, and the standpoints on the issue of the unity/disunity of science, on the other; (2) the historical roots and the fortunes of the analogy between statistical models of society and statistical models of gases. (shrink)

An examination of the structure of dichotomous thinking.

Projects of human improvement take both individual and intergenerational forms. The biosciences provide many technologies, including prenatal screening and the latest gene editing techniques, such as CRISPR, that have been viewed as providing the means to human improvement across generations. But who is fit to furnish the next generation? Historically, eugenics epitomizes the science-based attempt to improve human society through distinguishing kinds of people and then implementing social policies—from immigration restriction to sexual sterilization and euthanasia—that influence and even direct what (...) sorts of people populate our future. Despite recognition of the horrors of the eugenic extremes of the past and of the subhumanizing of those sufficiently below appearance or ability norms to be viewed as “defective” or “unfit”, many people continue to be drawn to strands of eugenic thinking. (shrink)

This paper concentrates on the resurrection of the journey of analytic philosophy from the perspective of ‘critical thinking,’ a tool of proper thought and understanding. To define an era of philosophy as analytic seems indeed a difficult attempt. However, my attempt would be to look up a few positions from the monumental thoughts of Frege, Russell, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Putnam on their ‘analysis’ minded outlooks that developed in different ways based on logic, scientific spirit, conceptual, language etc. Analytic (...) philosophers intend to intertwine between word and world in terms of mind and language guided by critical analysis that I think remarkably encompassed by clarity, truth, analysis, accuracy, and open-mindedness. My attempt would be to resurrect the philosophical development of analytic philosophy in different periods that were enormously nourished by the idea of ‘critical thinking’ and the analysis of natural language. (shrink)