Science as a justification for psychology as a social institution

Psychology seeks to justify its claims to privilege as a social institution largely on the basis of its scientific knowledge claims. These knowledge claims tend to be based on, and to reflect a particular view about the nature of science which is under increasing challenge. This situation is discussed and some of its implications examined.     

Wide reflective equilibrium as a method of justification in bioethics

Carson Strong has recently argued that wide reflective equilibrium (WRE) is an unacceptable method of justification in bioethics. In its place, Strong recommends a methodology in which certain foundational moral judgments play a central role in the justification of moral beliefs, and coherence plays a limited justificatory role in that the rest of our judgments are made to cohere with these foundational judgments. In this paper, I argue that Strong??s chief criticisms of WRE are unsuccessful and that his proposed alternative is in fact just another version of WRE. In the course of doing so, I specify which theses are central to WRE and which are not, and thus, provide a response to an additional objection, advanced by Peter Singer, that WRE is vacuous. I conclude by arguing that there may be better prospects for advancing the debate regarding methodology in bioethics if we focus on restricted epistemic and methodological theses rather than broad approaches, such as WRE, that come in many different varieties.     

Reasoning as simulation

The theory that human cognition proceeds through mental simulations, if true, would provide a parsimonious explanation of how the mechanisms of reasoning and problem solving integrate with and develop from mechanisms underlying forms of cognition that occur earlier in evolution and development. However, questions remain about whether simulation mechanisms are powerful enough to exhibit human-level reasoning and inference. In order to investigate this issue, we show that it is possible to characterize some of the most powerful modern artificial intelligence algorithms for logical and probabilistic inference as methods of simulating alternate states of the world. We show that a set of specific human perceptual mechanisms, even if not implemented using mechanisms described in artificial intelligence, can nevertheless perform the same operations as those algorithms. Although this result does not demonstrate that simulation theory is true, it does show that whatever mechanisms underlie perception have at least as much power to explain non-perceptual human reasoning and problem solving as some of the most powerful known algorithms.     

Discovery as the context of any scientific justification

Summary The analysis of philosophically important themes can depart from two different angles. The first one investigates the various answers that have been given to a certain issue, like that of the problem of knowledge, the justification of theories, the notion of culture, etcetera. These answers are often mutually contradictory which, by the way, facilitates their overview (like the schemes of rationalism-empiricism, justification-discovery, universalism-relativism). A second approach starts from the problems (or: problematique) behind the divergent answers (e.g., foundationalism behind both, empiricism and rationalism).In the following sections the issue of discovery is discussed. Here the second line of approach has been followed, not only by making visible a same problematique, but more by trying to set out the common context of the discussion about context of discovery and context of justification. The idea is that this discussion, or better the shift taking place in that discussion, finds its reason in a context in which the distance between traditional methodology and contemporary scientific practice, also between scientific knowledge and the experience of reality has become greater. This is related to the deepening awareness of the cultural context of scientific method. Man and world, scientific method and cultural context are always interacting.From this point of view quite different philosophical approaches show nevertheless similar features pointing to new solutions. A more psychological approach to scientific method (like: Gordon's and Grmek's, even perhaps Gutting's reinterpretation of Popper) and a sociological one (e.g., Barnes, Bloor, and already Durkheim) are opposed to a more logically structured analysis of Nagel, Hempel, and also Popper. Nevertheless the view on the flexibility of scientific method defended along different lines by for instance Achinstein, Bachelard, Hesse, Piaget, Polanyi, Toulmin manifests a certain convergence in those divergent standpoints, the more so since often the cultural context of science is being stressed (e.g., Ladriére, Prigogine, Needham).The miscellany of philosophical orientations, presented in the following sections, can in this way perhaps give profile to deeper tendencies: to relate again scientific method to the context of culture and of human strategy in general. This does not blend, however, the distinction between context of justification and context of discovery. By changing their roles a new overview of this dilemma becomes possible. There is no juxtaposition of both, nor has the one to be absorbed by the other. The conclusion will be that there are still two contexts, but that one is wider, less defined and demarcated from the wider field of daily culture, and that the other is more restricted, functioning as a kind of safetydevice on behalf of the wider strategy of discovery. In such a way discovery is regarded as the wider context of the more restricted context of justification.     

Heyting Mereology as a Framework for Spatial Reasoning

In this paper it is shown that Heyting and Co-Heyting mereological systems provide a convenient conceptual framework for spatial reasoning, in which spatial concepts such as connectedness, interior parts, (exterior) contact, and boundary can be defined in a natural and intuitively appealing way. This fact refutes the wide-spread contention that mereology cannot deal with the more advanced aspects of spatial reasoning and therefore has to be enhanced by further non-mereological concepts to overcome its congenital limitations. The allegedly unmereological concept of boundary is treated in detail and shown to be essentially affected by mereological considerations. More precisely, the concept of boundary turns out to be realizable in a variety of different mereologically grounded versions. In particular, every part K of a Heyting algebra H gives rise to a well-behaved K-relative boundary operator.     

Reductionism as Resource-Conscious Reasoning

Reductivist programs in logicand philosophy, especially inthe philosophy of mathematics,are reviewed. The paper argues fora ``methodological realism' towardsnumbers and sets, but still givesreductionism an important place,albeit in methodology/epistemologyrather than in ontology proper.     

Belief-content justification for cases of a priori justification: A neo-Haackian model

I differentiate justification of the subject (S-justification) from justification of the content of a belief (C-justification) and note the questions associated with truth conduciveness of justification. I employ Susan Haack’s analysis of empirical justification and show how, with certain adaptations, it can account for justification from non-experiential sources, if there are any. I give at least one example from mathematical visual thinking.     

Reading as a source of knowledge

Synthese - This paper argues that reading is a source of knowledge. Epistemologists have virtually ignored reading as a source of knowledge. This paper argues, first, that reading is not to be...     

Reasons as Premises of Good Reasoning

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ‐ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative.     

Feedback as a source of information and as a source of noise in absolute judgments of loudness.

Two experiments investigated the effects of feedback on absolute judgements of loudness. In Experiment 1, subjects received aceurate, unreliable, or no feedback. While feedback improved the information transmitted in judgments, it gave lower d' values than no feedback. These results were not compatible with a signal detection model with a noisy sensory stage and a decision stage with a fixed criterion, but suggested that criteria move in response to feedback and thus contribute judgmental noise to perceptual processes. Further confirmation for a variable criterion was obtained in Experiment 2, where reliability of feedback was held constant, but feedback was biased to favor some response alternatives more than others. Biased feedback shifted the positions of criteria, but also increased the inertia of some criteria in responding to feedback which caused changes in d'.     

Freud's letters as a historical source

This article introduces the project of a "concordance of letters to and by Freud". It should make the broadly scattered Freud-correspondence more accessible to the historian. (Since the death of Freud, almost 3200 letters written by him and nearly 1200 letters to him have been published.) At the same time principles of methodology are discussed which have to be observed in using letters as historical source material.     

Reasoning about conventional time as a function of conventional time systems

This study investigated how reasoning about conventional time information varied as a function of conventional time systems by using the Chinese month and Jieqi systems. Twenty Chinese students were asked to answer month-related questions and another 20 were asked to answer Jieqi-related questions. Reaction time and accuracy were the dependent measures. A cross-boundary effect was observed in processing months, and distance and direction effects were obtained when participants judged the interval of Jieqi. These results suggested that arithmetic operations were used in Chinese reasoning about months and verbal-articulatory processes were used for the Jieqi. The effects of mode of language representation on cognition and the strategies for cross-linguistic study are discussed.     

Sikh historical memory as an ideological justification for Khalistan

The Khalistan movement was an armed secessionist struggle carried out by the Sikhs of Punjab, northern India, which spanned the period between 1981 and 1993. In parallel with other such insurgencies around the world, it is evident that the Khalistan movement had a strong ideological underpinning which not only helped to fuel its rise, but also helped to sustain it throughout its tenure. In this regard, the reference point for ideological justification was very much the past experiences and episodes of the Sikh community, or, to be precise, their ‘historical memory’ of these. This article focuses its attention on identifying, describing and interrogating the strength of the ideological justifications that were extracted from Sikh historical memory in support of Khalistan.     

Performance as a source of perceived control

The purpose of this experiment was to examine the effects of choice and environmental control on the development of the perception of control. The results showed that the perception of control develops from an opportunity to make choices. More deliberate (slower) decisions resulted in an increase in the perception of control, and these perceptual effects generalized to a dice-throwing task over which no choice was possible. A model was examined which assumes that subjects monitor their own behavior with the result that more thoughtful decisions lead subjects to infer higher levels of control.A portion of these results was presented at the annual meeting of the South Eastern Psychological Association, 1983. This research was supported in part by the VA Medical Research Services, the U.S. Army Human Engineering Laboratory, and Grant AGO 2300 from the National Institute on Aging. Appreciation is expressed to Kathleen Flannery for her assistance with the preparation of this paper and for her helpful comments.     

Shoes as a source of first impressions

Surprisingly minimal appearance cues lead perceivers to accurately judge others’ personality, status, or politics. We investigated people’s precision in judging characteristics of an unknown person, based solely on the shoes he or she wears most often. Participants provided photographs of their shoes, and during a separate session completed self-report measures. Coders rated the shoes on various dimensions, and these ratings were found to correlate with the owners’ personal characteristics. A new group of participants accurately judged the age, gender, income, and attachment anxiety of shoe owners based solely on the pictures. Shoes can indeed be used to evaluate others, at least in some domains.