Introspection and inference

In this paper I develop the idea that, by answering the question whether p, you can answer the question whether you believe that p. In particular, I argue that judging that p is a fallible yet basic guide to whether one believes that p. I go on to defend my view from an important skeptical challenge, according to which my view would make it too easy to reject skeptical hypotheses about our access to our minds. I close by responding to the opposing view on which our beliefs themselves constitute our only source of first-person access to our beliefs.     

The ethics of belief: doxastic self-control and intellectual virtue

Most of the literature on doxastic voluntarism has concentrated on the question of the voluntariness of belief and the issue of how our actual or possible control of our beliefs bears on our justification for holding them and on how, in the light of this control, our intellectual character should be assessed. This paper largely concerns a related question on which less philosophical work has been done: the voluntariness of the grounding of belief and the bearing of various views about this matter on justification, knowledge, and intellectual virtue. In part, my concern is the nature and extent of our voluntary control over our responses to reasons for believing—or over what we take to be such reasons. This paper provides a partial account of such control and, on the basis of the account, will clarify the criteria for appraising intellectual virtue.     

Trust,hope and empowerment 1

Philosophers and social scientists have focussed a great deal of attention on our human capacity to trust, but relatively little on the capacity to hope. This is a significant oversight, as hope and trust are importantly interconnected. This paper argues that, even though trust can and does feed our hopes, it is our empowering capacity to hope that significantly underwrites—and makes rational—our capacity to trust.     

Ideology in work and organizational psychology: the responsibility of the researcher

This is a rejoinder to the commentaries on our paper on neoliberalism in work and organizational psychology. In this rejoinder, we provide a summarized response to the commentaries, thereby highlighting three main points: (1) when, where and how does neoliberalism manifest in society and our work as Work and Organizational Psychologists, (2) what is our duty as work and organizational psychologists towards society and our own work, and (3) what do we recommend on the basis of the exchange with the commentators on our paper?     

Truth and Consciousness

Many work on flushing out what our consciousness means in cognitive and phenomenological terms, but no one has yet connected the dots on how consciousness and truth intersect, much less how our phenomenal consciousness can form the ground for most of our models of truth. Here, I connect those dots and argue that the basic structure of our phenomenal consciousness grounds the nature of truth as concordance, to harmonize in agreement, and that most extant theories on truth are well explained in that grounding. Said another way, the unifying and bifurcating intentional structure of phenomenal consciousness is the non-epistemic ground of truth, such that most theories of truth can be explained as particular expressions of concordance based upon the differing aspects of that ground.     

Aid and bias

Over the last few decades, psychologists have amassed a great deal of evidence that our thinking is strongly influenced by a number of biases. This research appears to have important implications for moral methodology. It seems likely that these biases affect our thinking about moral issues, and a fuller awareness of them might help us to find ways to counteract their influence, and so to improve our moral thinking. And yet there is little or no reference to such biases in the philosophical literature on many pressing, substantive moral questions. In this paper, I make a start on repairing this omission in relation to one such question, the 'Aid Question', which concerns how much, if anything, we are morally required to give to aid agencies. I begin by sketching a number of biases that seem particularly likely to affect our thinking about that question. I then go on to review the psychological research on 'debiasing' - that is, on attempts to counteract the influence of such biases. And finally I discuss and illustrate certain strategies for counteracting the influence of the biases in question on our thinking about the Aid Question.     

Undermining, circularity, and disagreement

Sometimes we get what seem to be good reasons for believing that we’ve misevaluated our evidence for a proposition P. In those cases, can we use our evidence for P itself to show that we haven’t misevaluated our evidence for P? I show why doing so appears to employ viciously circular reasoning. However, I then argue that this appearance is illusory in certain cases and that we sometimes can legitimately reason in that way. This claim sheds new light on the nature of epistemic undermining and epistemic circularity. In addition, it has implications for the current debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement. An important and influential position in that debate says that disagreement with others dramatically undermines our justification for a wide range of our opinions (e.g., political, religious, moral, economic, and philosophical opinions). My view on undermining and circularity implies that this position on disagreement rests on a mistake.     

Unreliable Bodies: A Follow‐up Twenty Years Later by a Mother and Daughter about the Impact of Illness and Disability on their Lives

We are a mother and daughter, both health care professionals, who offer a follow‐up to an article we published twenty years ago about the impact of each other's ongoing, serious medical problems on our relationship. In this article, we contribute a long‐term perspective on the differences between having an illness that is well or poorly understood by medical professionals and the lay community. We also discuss health in the context of identity formation and life stage, as during this interval the daughter left home, graduated college, married, and had two children. Also in this period, the mother survived a third breast cancer and other life‐threatening illnesses. We discuss the impact of these experiences on each other and in other important relationships in our lives. Current discourses on daughters of breast cancer survivors do not fit our experience and we speculate about why our story differs. We find that although we continue to contend with serious medical issues that impact our own, each other's, and our families' lives, nonetheless, our lives are rich, rewarding, and “appropriate” for our life stage. That is the news.     

Embodiment and affect in research collaborations

This article communicates the emotional experiences of two researchers on a collaborative project. Drawing on our emotional journeys related to an inter-disciplinary research project, we present narratives and poems to reflect specific research moments. These moments reflect our embodied experiences and creative responses to our work, and the wider research project. In so doing, we use the theoretical tools of Bourdieu to reflect on how the fields of practice (and thus habitus) we each bring to a research project can have direct emotional consequences. Indeed, we suggest that being aware of our emotional responses can lead us toward a better understanding of how collaborations can cause tensions between fields of practice.     

Loss Aversion,Intellectual Inertia,and a Call for a More Contrarian Science: A Reply to Simonson & Kivetz and Higgins & Liberman

Higgins and Liberman (2018) and Simonson and Kivetz (2018) offer scholarly and stimulating perspectives on loss aversion and the implications for the sociology of science of its acceptance as a virtual law of nature. In our view, Higgins and Liberman (2018) largely complement our conclusion that the empirical evidence does not support loss aversion. Moreover, in alignment with our call for a contextualized perspective, they provide an excellent discourse on how a more nuanced view of reference points and consumers’ regulatory focus enriches our understanding of the psychological impact of losses and gains. Simonson and Kivetz (2018) approached our perspective with skepticism, and, while they retain some skepticism, they express agreement on the larger point that loss aversion has been accepted too uncritically. Both commentaries point to a need for a critical reevaluation of prevailing paradigms. Here, we build on these perspectives, as well as our experience working on the topic of loss aversion, to call for structural changes to facilitate scholarly debate on science's status quo.     

Actuality and the amodal perspective

In this paper, I examine our intuitive understanding of metaphysical contingency, and ask what features a metaphysical picture must possess in order to satisfy our intuitions about modal matters. After spelling out what I think are the central intuitions in this domain, I examine the debate between the two most widely held views on the nature of modality, namely, modal realism and modal actualism. I argue that while each of these views is able to accommodate some of our intuitions, it leaves others unsatisfied. I then present an alternative metaphysical picture, which I argue can accommodate our intuitions in a way that the traditional views cannot. More specifically, I argue that our intuitions about modality call for a pluralist view of the structure of reality—a view on which there is more than one ultimate ‘shape’ to the fundamental facts, each corresponding to a distinct metaphysically privileged perspective on reality.     

The Sources and Resources of Our Indigenous Theology

In this article I describe the sources of my indigenous theology out of my own experiences, my worldview, and as a woman. In the first part, I mention our struggles of resistance as the source from which we draw our strength and hopes to resist oppression and dream of a different society, as our ancestors dreamed and acted. I then speak of our living for the day as an act of ideological resistance. It is possible that many readers do not yet understand it, but this involves a worldview different from that of Western capitalism. Some communities in the Amazon still practise this other worldview and take it as their guide. They live day by day, concerned not for the morrow but for the present day; they attempt to live a life of quality, justice and honesty, as if it were the last day of their lives. The source from which our theological enterprise springs is also our wise men and women, who still survive in our communities. They are the guardians of our ancestral wisdom on life, the cosmos and our relations with the created world and its creatures. Moreover, our lifestyle is based on caring for and protecting Pachamama as one of the joint creators with God, who offers us life and enables us to live in the world as brothers and sisters, because we come into being in Pachamama and return to her.     

Alethic desires,framing effects,and deflationism: Reply to Asay

Jamin Asay has recently argued that deflationists about the concept of truth cannot satisfactorily account for our alethic desires, i.e., those of our desires that pertain to the truth of our beliefs. In this brief reply, I show how deflationists can draw on well-established psychological findings on framing effects to explain how the concept of truth behaves within the scope of our alethic desires.     

The Cultural Underpinnings of Subjectivity and Inter-Subjectivity: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual”

In “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual,” Dr. González (this issue) argues for the centrality of dynamic and shifting group identifications in shaping our subjectivity and our inter-subjective linking from moment to moment. My commentary about this paper is organized around the themes of cultural dislocation and cultural displacement, experiences related to large-group identifications and identity. These constructs, cultural dislocation and displacement, can deepen our understanding of how inter/intra-group tensions (historic and current) can play a determinative role in shaping individual subjectivity and inter-subjective linking. They complement and amplify claims regarding the centrality of our group identifications on ego functions. They also point toward the determinative impact of context and clashing cultural systems on our object relations and unconscious fantasies. Studying the links between individuals, collectives, and the cultural systems that structure them will deepen our theories and extend our relevance.     

Streams and consciousness: visual awareness and the brain

Vision is our most powerful sense and, arguably, it gives us our most vivid sensory and imaginal experiences. It is also one of the best understood systems in contemporary neuroscience. Yet, contrary to both traditional assumptions and our phenomenological intuition, recent research has shown that vision is not a monolithic system that creates a single general-purpose representation in the brain. For example, selective brain damage can compromise visuomotor control while leaving perception intact, and damage elsewhere can compromise visual perception while leaving visuomotor control intact. Thus, it is becoming apparent that we have two (largely) separate visual systems. One of them is dedicated to the rapid and accurate guidance of our movements: it is a complex and powerful system, and yet it lies outside the realm of our conscious visual awareness. The other seems to provide our perceptual phenomenology, although its primary purpose is probably to provide suitably coded visual inputs for storage in and retrieval from memory. According to this conceptualization, both systems can be seen as serving our behaviour, but each does so on a different time scale. Recent studies suggest that neuropsychological research in humans can play a central role in bridging the gap between neurobiological studies of the monkey's visual system and the search to narrow down the brain mechanisms that mediate our visual awareness.     

Passion and Vulnerability: Clinical Practice and Witnessing in a Wounded Reality: Discussion of Articles by Eldad Iddan and Rita Karuna Cahn

The two articles discussed allow a magnifying glass on the inevitable intertwining of the personal and the political in our offices and beyond. The articles highlight the vulnerability and risks incurred by the therapist who passionately attempts to engage or to witness a wounded reality. It is argued that there is an ambiguity inherent in the attempt to provide a haven and a safe place for our patients while recognizing the inability and the costs of sealing off our offices and our psyches from this wounded world. Similarly, there is a paradox in passionately witnessing suffering in a reality of shifting perpetrator-victim positions. There are no simple solutions to these paradoxes, but living within them means accepting that the vulnerability and risks that define our existence in a wounded reality, constantly intrude our offices, and constitute part of our work. Overarching implications are suggested.     

Kantian constructivism and the authority of others

I argue that Christine Korsgaard's Kantian constructivism cannot accommodate our obligations to others. Because she holds that all of our obligations are grounded in our obligating ourselves, she is committed to the view that our obligations to others are grounded in corresponding obligations to ourselves. Yet this conclusion is objectionable on substantive moral grounds. The problem is that she embraces an egocentric conception of authority, on which we originally have the authority to obligate ourselves whereas others only have the authority to obligate us because we grant it to them. The solution is to adopt a more thoroughly social conception of authority and autonomy.     

Through the looking glass: self and others

In the present article we discuss the relevance of the mirror mechanism for our sense of self and our sense of others. We argue that, by providing us with an understanding from the inside of actions, the mirror mechanism radically challenges the traditional view of the self and of the others. Indeed, this mechanism not only reveals the common ground on the basis of which we become aware of ourselves as selves distinct from other selves, but also sheds new light on the content of our self and other experience, showing that we primarily experience ourselves and the others in terms of our own and of their motor possibilities respectively.     

Language,duration estimation,and causation

Burt (2002) raises several interesting points in his commentary on our paper. However, the most important difference between his and our studies, the design, was not addressed. We argue that our experimental approach makes more realistic assumptions for causal interpretation. The other points that he raises—the relationship between practical and statistical significance, the verbs used by our participants, and definitions of memory—are all discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.