Why Care about Emotions in Music

The article aims at discerning and explaining the significance and role of emotive notions in understanding music, in performing it or listening to it with the appropriate understanding. The suggestion focuses on two notions: that of making sense of various musical features and their interconnections, and that of helping manage the enormous information one needs to process in keeping on the trail of the music in real time.     

Why More Intelligent Individuals Like Classical Music

The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical problem in social and behavioral sciences. The Savanna‐IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less intelligent individuals but that general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values and preferences. Recent work on the evolution of music suggests that music in its evolutionary origin was always vocal and that purely instrumental music is evolutionarily novel. The Savanna‐IQ Interaction Hypothesis would then imply that more intelligent individuals are more likely to prefer purely instrumental music than less intelligent individuals, but general intelligence has no effect on the preference for vocal music. The analyses of American (General Social Surveys) and British (British Cohort Study) data are consistent with this hypothesis. Additional analyses suggest that the effect of intelligence on musical preference is not a function of the cognitive complexity of music. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Countering Fallacious Moves

Van Eemeren and Houtlosser view fallacies as “derailments of strategic maneuvering” that go against a norm for critical reasonableness. What is to happen if such a derailment is perceived to have taken place? Krabbe (2003) and Jacobs (2000) have discussed the possibilities for continuing the argumentative exchange in a constructive way. Starting from their proposals, van Eemeren and Houtlosser argue that the party who observes that something has gone wrong should maneuver in such a way that at the same time the derailment is recognized and a “re-railment” takes place that brings the discussion back on track. This means that then a meta-dialogue or sub-discussion develops in which the alleged fallacy is responded to and readjusted appropriately. Although this solution has something in common with both Krabbe’s proposal and Jacobs’ proposal, it differs from Krabbe’s proposal because it does not result in just retracting or maintaining the alleged fallacy and it differs from Jacobs’ proposal because it does not allow for making a move that has the appearance of a counter-fallacy.     

Why Everyone Acts Altruistically All the Time: What Parodying Psychological Egoism Can Teach Us

Psychological Altruism (PA) is the view that everyone, ultimately, acts altruistically all the time. I defend PA by showing strong prima facie support, and show how a reinterpretive strategy against supposed counterexamples is successful. I go on to show how PA can be argued for in ways which exactly mirror the arguments for an opposing view, Psychological Egoism. This shows that the case for PA is at least as plausible as PE. Since the case for PA is not plausible, neither is that for PE.     

Almost‐Ontology: Why Epistemicism Cannot Help Us Avoid Unrestricted Composition or Diachronic Plenitude

That any filled location of spacetime contains a persisting thing has been defended based on the ‘argument from vagueness.’ It is often assumed that since the epistemicist account of vagueness blocks the argument from vagueness it facilitates a conservative ontology without gerrymandered objects. It doesn't. The epistemic vagueness of ordinary object predicates such as ‘bicycle’ requires that objects that can be described as almost‐but‐not‐quite‐bicycle exist even though they fall outside the predicate's sharp extension. Since the predicates that begin with ‘almost’ are vague as well, epistemicism's ontological backdrop is far from the conservative picture it is thought to enable.     

感数——它能告诉我们什么?

研究者在列举任务中发现,被试对3个以内项目的报告既快又准确（一般称之为“感数”）,而对3个以上项目的报告既慢又容易出错误（“计数”）,由此他们提出感数和计数属于两种不同性质的加工过程,一系列行为数据的反应时和正确率指标支持了这一假设。此外,最近的脑成像、电生理研究还发现,感数和计数在对注意的需求上同样存在着分离——感数无需注意,只有计数过程才需注意的参与。在此基础上,研究者从不同角度提出了一些解释感数现象的理论