Relativist Dispositional Theories of Value

Adopting a dispositional theory of value promises to deliver a lot of theoretical goodies. One recurring problem for dispositional theories of value, though, is a problem about nonconvergence. If being a value is being disposed to elicit response R in us, what should we say if it turns out that not everybody is disposed to have R to the same things? One horn of the problem here is a danger of the view collapsing into an error theory—of it turning out, on account of the diversity of agents' relevant dispositions, that nothing is really a value, since nothing is disposed to elicit R in everybody. Alternatively, there is a danger of an objectionable fragmentation of value, according to which there is no such thing as a value simpliciter, but only values_me and values_you, values_us and values_them. I advocate a de se relativist version of a dispositional theory of value. If we go for this sort of de‐se‐ified dispositional theory, we get to keep our theoretical goodies, but we avoid the problem of nonconvergence that leads to a danger of either collapse into an error theory, or else talking‐past, and a loss of common subject matter.     

Information Processing and Decision-Making in Pathological Worriers and their Potential Role in Mechanisms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Systematic information processing and decision-making under uncertainty are key constructs of new conceptions explaining the severity of pathological worry. The current study attempted to analyze their usefulness in subclinical and clinical groups. In the first phase of the study (N = 251) participants were examined with the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), a GP consultationrelated survey, and a screening survey for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). In the second phase (N = 220), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the PSWQ, and tasks measuring systematic information processing (SIP) versus heuristic reasoning (HR) were applied. In the third phase (N = 60), GAD (n = 30) and healthy control (n = 30) groups were examined with the above methods and the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). In the low risk group, a relationship between mood and the representativeness heuristic (ρ = 0.50), as well as anchoring and adjustment heuristic (anxiety-related stimuli) was found (ρ = −0.53). In the GAD group, significant correlations between the PSWQ score, the IGT loss avoidance score (ρ = 0.40), and total IGT score (ρ = 0.48) were found. The results did not confirm a particular usefulness of the systematic/heuristic information processing construct in subclinical and clinical groups. Theory-consistent results were rather found in the nonclinical groups. Nevertheless, the data revealed some interesting findings supporting potential explanatory power of some theoretical models.     

A New Logic of Technical Malfunction

Aim of the paper is to present a new logic of technical malfunction. The need for this logic is motivated by a simple-sounding philosophical question: Is a malfunctioning corkscrew, which fails to uncork bottles, nonetheless a corkscrew? Or in general terms, is a malfunctioning F, which fails to do what Fs do, nonetheless an F? We argue that ‘malfunctioning’ denotes the modifier Malfunctioning rather than a property, and that the answer depends on whether Malfunctioning is subsective or privative. If subsective, a malfunctioning F is an F; if privative, a malfunctioning F is not an F. An intensional logic is required to raise and answer the question, because modifiers operate directly on properties and not on sets or individuals. This new logic provides the formal tools to reason about technical malfunction by means of a logical analysis of the sentence “a is a malfunctioning F”.     

Norms of valence and arousal for 14,031 Spanish words

Most current models of research on emotion recognize valence (how pleasant a stimulus is) and arousal (the level of activation or intensity that a stimulus elicits) as important components in the classification of affective experiences (Barrett, 1998; Kuppens, Tuerlinckx, Russell, & Barrett, 2012). Here we present a set of norms for valence and arousal for a very large set of Spanish words, including items from a variety of frequencies, semantic categories, and parts of speech, including a subset of conjugated verbs. In this regard, we found that there were significant but very small differences between the ratings for conjugations of the same verb, validating the practice of applying the ratings for infinitives to all derived forms of the verb. Our norms show a high degree of reliability and are strongly correlated with those of Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, and Comesaña’s (2007) Spanish version of the influential Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley & Lang, 1999), as well as those from Warriner, Kuperman, and Brysbaert (2013), the largest available set of emotional norms for English words. Additionally, we included measures of word prevalence—that is, the percentage of participants that knew a particular word—for each variable (Keuleers, Stevens, Mandera, & Brysbaert, 2015). Our large set of norms in Spanish not only will facilitate the creation of stimuli and the analysis of texts in that language, but also will be useful for cross-language comparisons and research on emotional aspects of bilingualism. The norms can be downloaded and available as a supplementary materials to this article.     

The child's memory for actional, locational, and serial scenes

Three-, four-, and six-year-old children (N = 180) were tested for recall of a toy missing from a previously seen display of four toys. Toys were displayed initially as a series (StoS), as a unit (UtoU), or moved from a series to a unit as S watched (StoU). There was a significant increase in memory for the missing toy with age. In addition, children viewing StoU displays remembered significantly more toys than did children viewing the other displays, independent of age. Twenty-five percent of the 6-year-olds rehearsed spontaneously while viewing the displays. Results indicated that the nature of a memory unit does not change with age, that memory improves with age, and that separate visual and verbal memories are operative in Ss in this age range.     

Awareness of errors and feedback in human time estimation

Behavioral and electrophysiology studies have shown that humans possess a certain self-awareness of their individual timing ability. However, conflicting reports raise concerns about whether humans can discern the direction of their timing error, calling into question the extent of this timing awareness. To understand the depth of this ability, the impact of nondirectional feedback and reinforcement learning on time perception were examined in a unique temporal reproduction paradigm that involved a mixed set of interval durations and the opportunity to repeat every trial immediately after receiving feedback, essentially allowing a “redo.” Within this task, we tested two groups of participants on versions where nondirectional feedback was provided after every response, or not provided at all. Participants in both groups demonstrated reduced central tendency and exhibited significantly greater accuracy in the redo trial temporal estimates, showcasing metacognitive ability, and an inherent capacity to adjust temporal responses despite the lack of directional information or any feedback at all. Additionally, the feedback group also exhibited an increase in the precision of responses on the redo trials, an effect not observed in the no-feedback group, suggesting that feedback may specifically reduce noise when making a temporal estimate. These findings enhance our understanding of timing self-awareness and can provide insight into what may transpire when this is disrupted.

The tendency to reflect on one''s mental state, or metacognition, is an essential human trait that is a central component of consciousness, memory processing, language, and decision-making, and, most importantly, time perception (Fleming and Dolan 2012; Yeung and Summerfield 2012). Accurate time perception is also a hallmark of consciousness and critical for everyday behaviors and cognitive functions ranging from speech, motor control, adaptive behavior, and survival (Meck 2005; Grondin 2010). Self-assessment of one''s own timing ability without any external feedback, known as temporal metacognition, is vital for reliably determining temporal accuracy and variance despite uncertainty (Balcı et al. 2011; Lamotte et al. 2012; Akdoğan and Balcı 2017). Past research shows that humans and rodents can successfully incorporate the endogenous timing uncertainty and trial-by-trial variability associated with time perception tasks into their behavioral responses in a way that maximizes performance, updates temporal representations, and boosts reward (Balcı et al. 2011; Li and Dudman 2013). Human performance is measured via interval timing tasks that instruct participants to estimate temporal intervals of several seconds (Buhusi and Meck 2005). One particular task, temporal reproduction, involves exposure to a specific duration (encoding) and then an opportunity to recreate the interval duration via keypress (reproduction), with or without feedback. Previous research has shown that human subjects can accurately infer the distribution of intervals presented, and use this information to guide reproductions in the phase of measurement uncertainty (Jazayeri and Shadlen 2010; Acerbi et al. 2012). While the evidence already points toward an existing self-awareness of time, evaluating timing aptitude in context of feedback and learning may broaden our understanding of internal metacognitive process and its role in time perception.Detecting and correcting errors is an important component for metacognition and self-awareness of one''s cognitive state (Fleming and Dolan 2012; Yeung and Summerfield 2012). The brain''s performance monitoring system is responsible for assessing and minimizing these errors and facilitating the selection of an appropriate motor program to successfully complete the chosen task or behavior (Ullsperger et al. 2014). Error tracking mechanisms have been reported for temporal, numerosity, and spatial errors, implying that there may be a common metric error-monitoring system that underpins magnitude-based representations (Duyan and Balcı 2019). In particular, how errors related to early or late timing either with or without external feedback are managed is not fully understood. Studies on the impact of feedback on time perception have produced conflicting results, particularly due to the variability in the type of feedback delivery. Experimental timing paradigms offer a broad array of options ranging from no feedback, magnitude and directional feedback, magnitude-based feedback only, or directional-only feedback. Our study is an initial assessment of whether there is self-awareness of directional temporal information and compares the no feedback and magnitude-based conditions, serving as a launching point for further studies.Akdoğan and Balcı (2017) used a temporal reproduction task to assess how subjects reproduced a range of suprasecond intervals; their findings demonstrated that humans are aware of both the magnitude and direction (early/late) of their timing errors despite not receiving any external feedback. Another recent behavioral study used a temporal production task, in which subjects were asked to repeatedly produce a single duration (3 sec) and compared performance during a condition when only the magnitude of the error was given (absolute) against another condition in which both the magnitude and direction (signed) were given (Riemer et al. 2019). Signed feedback delivery yielded more behavioral adjustments in opposition to the direction of the error in subsequent trials, reduced bias in temporal estimates, and produced a more accurate and better calibrated performance when compared with absolute feedback. This study illustrated that directional information was not intrinsically accessible to the subject and that the participant''s internal timing error representation failed to include that error direction. Furthermore, subjects assigned to the absolute feedback group also tended to report an overreproduction of the interval duration when in reality, they were underreproducing (Riemer et al. 2019). A key difference should be noted between these two studies, notably that feedback and retrospective self-judgments respectively were given following an entire block (Riemer et al. 2019) rather than trial by trial as in the Akdoğan and Balcı (2017) experiment. Task context also played a crucial role, as different tasks were used for the two studies; Akdoğan and Balcı (2017) used a temporal reproduction with a mixed set of intervals while Riemer et al. (2019) used a temporal production task with a singly presented interval.In addition to simply supplying knowledge and guidance about the response (Salmoni et al. 1984), feedback has numerous other uses. It reduces response drifts over the experimental trajectory (Salmoni et al. 1984; Riemer et al. 2019) and may be erroneous or correct, but our study concentrates on correct feedback that tends to positively adjust behavioral responses (Salmoni et al. 1984). Its delivery may be absolute—after every trial or on a percentage of trials (relative). Additionally, feedback can be a motivational factor and act as an implicit reward for behavioral learning (Salmoni et al. 1984; Tsukamoto et al. 2006). Posterror feedback can also facilitate the learning of time intervals (Ryan and Robey 2002). Feedback may be processed differently depending on the quality of the learners and is reflected in a well-functioning performance monitoring system (Luft et al. 2013).Numerous timing studies demonstrate that participants are aware of their errors prior to or independent of the administration of feedback (Akdoğan and Balcı 2017; Brocas et al. 2018; Kononowicz et al. 2018). In a recent M/EEG study using a temporal production task with the objective of repeatedly producing the same single interval duration, Kononowicz et al. (2018) asked respondents to first judge their own performance. Afterwards, they were provided with 100% directional feedback in two blocks out of the six and 15% feedback on the remaining blocks. The initial self-assessment of their performance prior to feedback matched the true interval duration and β power operated as an index of the actual duration and the self-evaluative ability to track timing errors (Kononowicz et al. 2018). In yet another single duration temporal production study, Brocas et al. (2018) tasked participants to generate interval durations of 30+ sec repeatedly for 10 trials and introduced a reward scheme to incentivize making accurate temporal estimates. Similarly to Riemer''s paradigm, participants accurately self-evaluated their performance after a block of trials and correctly identified what proportion of trials were above or below the target interval duration (Brocas et al. 2018). Although accurate in their assessments of bias or tendency to overestimate or underestimate, the participants were less successful in prediction beforehand or correction of their responses (Brocas et al. 2018).Self-knowledge about your internal timing behavior also incorporates reinforcement learning, another adaptive behavioral operation that integrates previous behavioral experiences and applies them to future scenarios to improve outcomes and maximize future rewards (Lee et al. 2012). Predicting the value of a set action along with its outcome and determining whether it will be awarded involves precise timing mechanisms (Petter et al. 2018; Mikhael and Gershman 2019). Errors are prone to occur in this process, particularly when there is a mismatch between the expected and actual outcomes, manifesting itself in the form of a reward prediction error (RPE) (Hollerman and Schultz 1998).Notwithstanding errors, the process of learning interval durations transpires fairly quickly and is achieved with only one trial (Simen et al. 2011). To measure the speed of temporal learning, Simen et al. (2011) devised the “beat the clock task,” a paradigm where a green square is displayed on a computer screen for an unknown amount of time. It remains onscreen until the appearance of a red square outline signals that the interval is ending. Participants must respond with a keypress before the stimulus terminates and are rewarded for on-time responses. Larger rewards are delivered the closer a participant makes an on-time response (Simen et al. 2011). Although the task comprises mixed interval durations that transition rapidly, early responding is minimized and on-time responding becomes the norm as participants learn the structure of the task. It is noteworthy that despite the endogenous timing uncertainty stemming from the presentation of rapidly changing durations, performance improvement was not impeded (Simen et al. 2011). In fact, all beat the clock participants improved in response times after only a single trial of beat-the-clock task, quickly reduced their timing errors, and were able to implement a strategy that facilitated learning interval durations (Simen et al. 2011).Using an appropriate feedback technique is pivotal to understanding self-timing awareness. The traditional feedback structure in psychophysics studies is best suited for single interval reproductions because the same interval is successively reproduced; therefore, the majority of the studies described above are single interval experiments. Challenges arise when reproducing a random set of a mixed range of intervals because corrective guidance is given on one interval duration, yet the next interval may be of a different duration (Ryan 2016). This is problematic since there is no opportunity to use the feedback from the previous trial to the new trial, so the feedback is frequently misapplied to an entirely different duration (Ryan 2016). To rectify this issue, we introduced a “redo” trial, which allows the subject to use the original feedback from the first trial in a second trial of the same duration. We hypothesized that the redo trials will be beneficial to subjects for improving performance and in minimizing the Vierordt effect (underestimation of long intervals and overestimation of short intervals) (Ryan 2016). It is for this reason our study also incorporated absolute (nondirectional) feedback: to assess whether subjects possess awareness of the direction of the timing errors. If there is a substantial directional awareness of timing error, then the central tendency would be reduced.     

Conversation through actions and the changing of epistemic states in a game

When a person performs a certain action, it signifies that he is causing a certain event to occur. Therefore the action is conveying a certain true sentence. Playing a game is a mutual activity, namely the listener and the speaker undertake an exchange through a linguistic dialogue or communicate through action. Because of the peculiar nature of the action, the actions in games belong to an activity where the speaker speaks “true words” and the listener hears “true words.” A static game is a process through which the participants are simultaneously “speaking” and “listening”; and a dynamic game is a process where speaking and listening take place in turn. Each step of a dynamic game is a “speaking-listening” exchange. Through “listening” and “speaking,” changes in the epistemic states of the participants occur. Of course, the degree of change depends on the type of game being played. In a dynamic game, each participant proceeds through a process of induction, and thus forms new epistemic states.     

Sick? Or slow? On the origins of intelligence as a psychological object

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of “psychometrics” as a discipline, using a history of the Binet–Simon test (precursor to the Stanford–Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a “psychological object.” To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857–1911) to identify “mental testing” as a research area worth pursuing. This included a long-standing rivalry with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840–1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this. Supported by the Société libre de l'étude psychologique de l'enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a “metric” scale of intelligence—and the associated testing apparatus—to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating “the abnormal”. The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow” (arriéré), but not “sick.” This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test's influence on Lewis Terman (1877–1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society.     

‘Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?’ The Big Question

‘Good’ is nothing specific but is transcendentally or generally applied over specific, and specified, ‘categories’. These ‘categories’ may be seen—at least for the purposes of this note—as under Platonic Forms. The rule that instances under a category or form need a Form to be under is valid. It may be tautological: but this is OK for rules. Not being specific, however, ‘good’ neither needs nor can have a specifying Form. So, on these grounds, the Form of the Good is otious. Any rule of the kind, ‘Everything needs a Form, so good needs a Form of the Good’ is mistaken, in that good is not a kind, but a transcendental. To give a Form to the transcendental ‘good’ is a mistake: it is a Rylian category mistake. And the Form of the Good either does no work, or works unprofitably in any but an aesthetic sense.     

And All is Always Now: Contemplations on Artistic Talent

This paper aims to suggest the notion of layers of dying, as a metaphorical discussion of states that call for the breakdown of opposites and a unification in the form of a lived experience. Artistic talent is seen as a personal capacity to sustain such a state and transform it into a communicative form that is accessible to us all. Winnicott, in his “fear of breakdown” paper is a main source of influence, along with Bion who encouraged the articulation of “stray thoughts.”

Confucianism between Tradition and Modernity, Religion, and Secularization: Questions to Tu Weiming

The article discusses central assumptions of Tu Weiming’s program of overcoming the “enlightenment mentality” and throws a critical light on his conceptions of religious or spiritual Confucianism, of a Confucian modernity, and of the “multiple modernities” theory in general. It defends a unitary rather than multiple concept of modernity in terms of the realization of a morally controlled “principle of free subjectivity” and tries to show how Confucianism, understood as a secular ethics, could contribute to this goal.     

Cracking the mirror: on Kierkegaard’s concerns about friendship

In this article, I offer a brief account of some of Kierkegaard’s key concerns about friendship: its “preferential” nature and its being a form of self-love. Kierkegaard’s endorsement of the ancient idea of the friend as “second self” involves a common but misguided assumption: that friendship depends largely upon likeness between friends. This focus obscures a vitally important element, highlighted by the so-called “drawing” view of friendship. Once this is emphasized, we can see a significant aspect - though by no means all - of Kierkegaard’s worry as misplaced. However, the “drawing” view also enables us to begin to see what a “Kierkegaardian” friendship might look like.     

Residence time and choice in concurrent foraging schedules

Five pigeons were trained on a concurrent-schedule analogue of the “some patches are empty” procedure. Two concurrently available alternatives were arranged on a single response key and were signaled by red and green keylights. A subject could travel between these alternatives by responding on a second yellow “switching” key. Following a changeover to a patch, there was a probability (p) that a single reinforcer would be available on that alternative for a response after a time determined by the value of λ, a probability of reinforcement per second. The overall scheduling of reinforcers on the two alternatives was arranged nonindependently, and the available alternative was switched after each reinforcer. In Part 1 of the experiment, the probabilities of reinforcement, ρ_red and ρ_green, were equal on the two alternatives, and the arranged arrival rates of reinforcers, λ_red and λ_green, were varied across conditions. In Part 2, the reinforcer arrival times were arranged to be equal, and the reinforcer probabilities were varied across conditions. In Part 3, both parameters were varied. The results replicated those seen in studies that have investigated time allocation in a single patch: Both response and time allocation to an alternative increased with decreasing values of λ and with increasing values of ρ, and residence times were consistently greater than those that would maximize obtained reinforcer rates. Furthermore, both response- and time-allocation ratios undermatched mean reinforcer-arrival time and reinforcer-frequency ratios.     

On the maximum number of folds of a piece of paper

We argue that a piece of paper, of thickness T and width W, can be folded a maximum number N?=?0.962 ln(f W/T) times, where f is a factor of order unity, determined by mechanical constraints. N typically takes a value of around six.     

Dissociating linguistic and non-linguistic gesture processing: electrophysiological evidence from American Sign Language

A fundamental advance in our understanding of human language would come from a detailed account of how non-linguistic and linguistic manual actions are differentiated in real time by language users. To explore this issue, we targeted the N400, an ERP component known to be sensitive to semantic context. Deaf signers saw 120 American Sign Language sentences, each consisting of a “frame” (a sentence without the last word; e.g. BOY SLEEP IN HIS) followed by a “last item” belonging to one of four categories: a high-close-probability sign (a “semantically reasonable” completion to the sentence; e.g. BED), a low-close-probability sign (a real sign that is nonetheless a “semantically odd” completion to the sentence; e.g. LEMON), a pseudo-sign (phonologically legal but non-lexical form), or a non-linguistic grooming gesture (e.g. the performer scratching her face). We found significant N400-like responses in the incongruent and pseudo-sign contexts, while the gestures elicited a large positivity.     

Counting distinctions: on the conceptual foundations of Shannon’s information theory

Categorical logic has shown that modern logic is essentially the logic of subsets (or “subobjects”). In “subset logic,” predicates are modeled as subsets of a universe and a predicate applies to an individual if the individual is in the subset. Partitions are dual to subsets so there is a dual logic of partitions where a “distinction” [an ordered pair of distinct elements (u, u′) from the universe U] is dual to an “element”. A predicate modeled by a partition π on U would apply to a distinction if the pair of elements was distinguished by the partition π, i.e., if u and u′ were in different blocks of π. Subset logic leads to finite probability theory by taking the (Laplacian) probability as the normalized size of each subset-event of a finite universe. The analogous step in the logic of partitions is to assign to a partition the number of distinctions made by a partition normalized by the total number of ordered |U|² pairs from the finite universe. That yields a notion of “logical entropy” for partitions and a “logical information theory.” The logical theory directly counts the (normalized) number of distinctions in a partition while Shannon’s theory gives the average number of binary partitions needed to make those same distinctions. Thus the logical theory is seen as providing a conceptual underpinning for Shannon’s theory based on the logical notion of “distinctions.” This paper is dedicated to the memory of Gian-Carlo Rota—mathematician, philosopher, mentor, and friend.     

Normative Naturalism and the Relativised <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Priori</Emphasis>

Summary  In this paper I address some shortcomings in Larry Laudan’s normative naturalism. I make it clear that Laudan’s rejection of the “meta-methodology thesis”, or MMT is unnecessary, and that a reformulated version MMT can be sustained. I contend that a major difficulty that attends Laudan’s account is his contention that a naturalistic philosophy of science cannot accommodate any a priori justification of methodological rules, and consider what sort of naturalism might best replace Laudan’s. To do this, I discuss Michael Friedman’s account of a relativised a priori and show that it is consistent with naturalistic philosophy of science and that it can help form the basis of a plausible normative naturalism. In particular, this discussion shows that Laudan’s rejection of any a priori justification of methodological rules is unjustified and inconsistent with scientific practice. Finally, I point the way to a version of normative naturalism that includes MMT and accounts for the role of constitutive a priori principles within science.     

Zhuangzi and relativistic scepticism

Chad Hansen is one of the strongest proponents of the view that the important second chapter of Zhuangzi's Inner Chapters (The Qi Wu Lun) reveals Zhuangzi to be a relativistic sceptidst. Hansen argues that Zhuangzi is a sceptic because he is first and foremost a relativist. Hansen's argument is essentially that Zhuangzi's perspectivism, his belief that one's linguistic and conceptual perspective determines what one claims to know, makes him a thorough going relativist and sceptic. I agree that Zhuangzi is a perspectivist, but disagree with Hansen's portrayal of him as a relativistic sceptic. I first show that there is an important ambiguity in Hansen's argument. I then proceed to argue that important passages in the Qi Wu Lun (in particular the butterfly dream passage,) reveal serious problems with Hansen's interpretation of Zhuangzi's philosophical stance, I maintain that Zhuangzi is neither a sceptic nor a perspectival relativist. He is rather a perspectival realist.