Reconstructing Judgment: Emotion and Moral Judgment

A traditional association of judgment with “reason” has drawn upon and reinforced an opposition between reason and emotion. This, in turn, has led to a restricted view of the nature of moral judgment and of the subject as moral agent. The alternative, I suggest, is to abandon the traditional categories and to develop a new theory of judgment. I argue that the theory of judgment developed by Justus Buchler constitutes a robust alternative which does not prejudice the case against emotion. Drawing on this theory I then develop how to conceptualize the ways in which feeling and emotion can be (or be components of) moral judgments.     

Motivated Strategies for Judgment: How Preferences for Particular Judgment Processes can Affect Judgment Outcomes

Beyond motivations to achieve particular outcomes, people also have motivations to use particular strategies while pursuing these outcomes. This article integrates research on the latter strategic preferences and discusses the place of such research in the broader investigation of motivated thinking. A review of studies examining the strategic preferences stemming from both motivations for promotion versus prevention ( Higgins, 1997 ) and motivations for locomotion versus assessment ( Higgins, Kruglanski, & Pierro, 2003 ) illustrates that these preferences have unique effects on basic processes of judgment, including the evaluation of alternative hypotheses or counterfactuals, the prioritization of fast versus accurate information processing, and the recall and activation of knowledge from memory. Moreover, this review also demonstrates important interactions between strategic preferences and outcome preferences. Strategic preferences thus appear to make distinct and important contributions to understanding how motivation influences judgment and should feature prominently in general analyses of motivated thinking.     

Kant's Modalities of Judgment

Abstract: This paper proposes a way to understand Kant's modalities of judgment—problematic, assertoric, and apodeictic—in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference. Other interpretations have tended to understand these modalities of judgment in terms of one or other conventional notion of modality. For example, Mattey (1986) argues that we should take them to be connected to notions of epistemic or doxastic modality. I shall argue that this is wrong, and that these kinds of interpretation of the modality of judgments cannot be reconciled with a key claim made by Kant, namely, that the modality of a judgment does not contribute to its content, and has nothing to do with the matter that is judged. I offer an alternative interpretation based upon Kant's explicating these modalities in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference, whereby the modality of a judgment is determined by the role a judgment plays in a given course of reasoning. If I am right, then Kant in fact presents an intriguing thesis pertaining to the inferential status and potential of all our judgments.     

Responsibility and Judgment

I focus on the type of responsibility that an agent has for actions that express his practical identity, making it appropriate to evaluate him on the basis of those actions. This kind of responsibility is often called attributability. In this paper, I argue for a novel view of attributability—the Judgment Responsiveness View (JRV). According to the JRV, an agent is attributability responsible for an action A if and only if A results from either 1) his responding to his judgments about the (normative) reasons that he has in favor of doing A by doing A or 2) his failing to exercise his capacity to respond to his judgments about the (normative) reasons that he has against doing A by not doing A. The JRV diverges from other views of attributability for actions in two significant respects. First, it is not reasonably thought of as a “deep self view.” According to deep self views, attributable actions are actions that express deep features of the agent, such as his fundamental values, cares, or commitments. As I show, thinking in terms of the deep self is too narrow for attributability. Second, unlike other views, the JRV claims—via condition 2)—that we can be attributionally responsible for actions that result from failing to exercise the attributability‐relevant capacity to avoid them. My argument for the JRV thus shows that attributability is a broader and richer conception of responsibility than has been previously thought.     

Rationality and Judgment

Abstract: Philosophical/epistemic theories of rationality differ over the role of judgment in rational argumentation. According to the “classical model” of rationality, rational justification is a matter of conformity with explicit rules or principles. Critics of the classical model, such as Harold Brown and Trudy Govier, argue that the model is subject to insuperable difficulties. They propose, instead, that rationality be understood, ultimately, in terms of judgment rather than rules. In this article I respond to Brown's and Govier's criticisms of the classical model, and to the “judgment model” they propose in its place. I argue that that model is unable both to distinguish between rational and irrational judgment and to avoid recourse to rules, and is therefore inadequate as an account of rationality, critical thinking, or argument appraisal. More positively, I argue that an adequate account of rationality must include a place for both rules and judgment.     

Judgment in Fiction

Abstract

In this paper, I show that in order to gain an understanding of the facts about fiction it is more fruitful to pursue an analysis of judgment in fiction than an analysis of truth in fiction. I do so in two steps. First I take the analyses of truth in fiction which David Lewis provides in “Truth in Fiction”, which are formulated in terms of possible worlds, and provide counterpart analyses of judgment in fiction, formulated in terms of (mental) models and rules for the construction of (mental) models. In the course of discussion I identify various problems for Lewis’s account of truth in fiction and solve or dissolve them using the account of judgment in fiction. Second, I show that once we have an analysis of judgment which appeals to rules, we can extend the account of judgment by using Lewis’s account of accommodation and resistance in “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” to explain the evolution of the genres of fiction, construed as systems of rules. The result is to provide a dynamic account of judgment which does justice to modern poststructuralist observations in the philosophy of literature.     

Two Models of Moral Judgment

This paper compares two theories and their two corresponding computational models of human moral judgment. In order to better address psychological realism and generality of theories of moral judgment, more detailed and more psychologically nuanced models are needed. In particular, a motivationally based theory of moral judgment (and its corresponding computational model) is developed in this paper that provides a more accurate account of human moral judgment than an existing emotion‐reason conflict theory. Simulations based on the theory capture and explain a range of relevant human data. They account not only for the original data that were used to support the emotion – reason conflict theory, but also for a wider range of data and phenomena.     

Kant's Conception of Analytic Judgment

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of "containment," a second time in terms of "identity," a third time in terms of the explicative-ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of "cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction." The paper asks which, if any, of these characterizations—or apparent characterizations—has the best claim to be Kant's fundamental conception of analyticity in the first Critique. It argues that it is the second. The paper argues, further, that Kant's distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject-predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction's meaning and tenability.     

从具身视角看道德判断

道德判断是个体对于某类行为的善恶好坏和是非对错所进行的评价及判断。随着具身认知理论的兴起, 道德判断的具身研究随之展开。道德判断具身性的研究主要围绕身体清洁、厌恶, 身体温度及身体动作这3个维度展开。从皮亚杰及维果茨基的心理发展观, 概念隐喻理论和进化心理学3个角度对道德判断具身效应进行了理论解释和探讨。考虑到身体变量会通过情绪、认知因素进而影响道德判断, 今后具身认知视角下的道德判断应与道德判断中已有的理论进行整合, 同时对其与道德直觉的关系需要深入探讨, 并需进一步考察具身效应发生的时效性和动态性问题, 探讨道德判断具身效应的调节变量及个体差异, 同时要对道德判断具身效应进行跨文化比较。     

Culture and Probability Judgment

Many, if not most, real-life decisions depend heavily on judgments, which are opinions as to what was, is, or will be the state of some relevant aspect of the world. Thus, for instance, physicians’ medical treatment decisions are often predicated on judgments as to the true cause of the patient’s symptoms, and jurors’ verdicts rest on their beliefs about whether the defendant actually committed the crime in question. Studies have shown that the kinds of judgments that inform people’s decisions can differ substantially and surprisingly according to the cultural backgrounds (e.g., Chinese versus Japanese versus American) of those rendering the judgments, particularly judgments expressed as probabilities (e.g., “There’s a 75% chance that that will happen”). This article reviews major cultural variations in key characteristics of probability judgments (e.g., their overconfidence) and why those differences exist. It also discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the findings, including for collaborations among decision makers from distinct cultures.     

A Plea for Judgment

Judgment is central to engineering, medicine, the sciences and many other practical activities. For example, one who otherwise knows what engineers know but lacks ??engineering judgment?? may be an expert of sorts, a handy resource much like a reference book or database, but cannot be a competent engineer. Though often overlooked or at least passed over in silence, the central place of judgment in engineering, the sciences, and the like should be obvious once pointed out. It is important here because it helps to explain where ethics fits into these disciplines. There is no good engineering, no good science, and so on without good judgment and no good judgment in these disciplines without ethics. Doing even a minimally decent job of teaching one of these disciplines necessarily includes teaching its ethics; teaching the ethics is teaching the discipline (or at least a large part of it).