The Enkratic Requirement

Abstract: Agents are enkratic when they intend to do what they believe they should. That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial, yet you may be enkratic in a way that does not exhibit any rationality on your part. Thus, what I call the enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic in the right way. In particular, I will argue that it demands that you base your belief about what you should do and your intention to do it on the same considerations. The idea is that, if you base your belief and your intention on different considerations, then you are inconsistent in your treatment of those considerations as reasons. The enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic by treating considerations consistently as reasons.     

The Newcomb Problem: An Unqualified Resolution

The Newcomb problem is analysed here as a type ofcommon cause problem. Inrelation to such problems, if you take the dominatedoption your expected outcomewill be good and if you take the dominant optionyour expected outcome will be notso good. As is explained, however, these arenot conventional conditional expectedoutcomes but `conditional evidence expectedoutcomes' and while in the deliberationprocess, the evidence on which they are based isonly hypothetical evidence.Conventional conditional expected outcomes aremore sensitive to your currentepistemic state in that they are based purely onactual evidence which is available toyou during the deliberation process. So althoughthey are conditional on a certain actbeing performed, they are not based on evidencethat you would have only if that actis performed. Moreover, for any given epistemicstate during the deliberationprocess, your conventional conditional expectedoutcome for the dominant option willbe better than that for the dominated option. Theprinciple of dominance is thus inperfect harmony with the conventional conditionalexpected outcomes. In relation tothe Newcomb problem then, the evidence unequivocallysupports two-boxing as therational option. Yet what is advanced here isnot simply a two-boxing strategy. Tosee why, two stages to the problem need to berecognised. The first stage is thatwhich occurs before the information used by thepredictor in making his predictionshas been gained. The second stage is after thispoint. Provided that you are still inthe first stage, you have an opportunity toinfluence whether or not the predictorplaces the $1m in the opaque box. To maximisethe probability that it is, you need tocommit yourself to one-boxing.     

Imagination and Belief in Action

Philosophia - Imagination and belief are obviously different. Imagining that you have won the lottery is not quite the same as believing that you have won. But what is the difference? According to...     

Comprehension and memory for nonliteral utterances: The problem of sarcastic indirect requests

Three experiments examined understanding and memory for sarcastic indirect requests. Experiment 1 showed that people process sarcastic indirect requests, like I sure love a messy room (meaning ‘Clean up this room’), faster than they comprehend either literal uses of the same sentences, or nonsarcastic indirect requests, like Would you clean up your room? This suggests that people can understand sarcastic utterances without having to analyze the literal meanings of these expressions before figuring out their sarcastic interpretations. The results of experiment 2 showed that people better recognize sarcastic indirect requests than they do nonsarcastic ones. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that subjects remembered sarcastic expressions best because of any special intonation properties associated with these utterances. Overall, the results of these studies support the idea that sarcastic utterances are not necessarily more difficult to understand in conversation and that their special pragmatic properties makes them particularly memorable.     

The Benefits of Coming into Existence

This paper argues that we can benefit or harm people by creating them, but only in the sense that we can create things that are good or bad for them. What we cannot do is to confer comparative benefits and harms to people by creating them or failing to create them. You are not better off (or worse off) created than you would have been had you not been created, for nothing has value for you if you do not exist, not even neutral value.     

Prophetic criticism,incarnational optimism: On recovering the late Kierkegaard

Actually the revolution is much closer than we think. The last band of free thinkers (Feuerbach and all related to him) has attacked or tackled the matter far more clearly than formerly, for if you look more closely, you will see that they actually have taken upon themselves the task of defending Christianity against contemporary Christians. The point is that established Christendom is demoralized, in the profoundest sense all respect for Christianity's existential commitments has been lost … Now Feuerbach is saying: No, wait a minute—if you are going to be allowed to go on living as you are living, then you also have to admit that you are not Christians … it is wrong of established Christendom to say that Feuerbach is attacking Christianity; it is not true, he is attacking the Christians by demonstrating that their lives do not correspond to the teachings of Christianity … What Christianity needs for certain is traitors … (JP 6523)     

Response to Brian K. Smith: Re-envisioning Hinduism

Actually the revolution is much closer than we think. The last band of free thinkers (Feuerbach and all related to him) has attacked or tackled the matter far more clearly than formerly, for if you look more closely, you will see that they actually have taken upon themselves the task of defending Christianity against contemporary Christians. The point is that established Christendom is demoralized, in the profoundest sense all respect for Christianity's existential commitments has been lost … Now Feuerbach is saying: No, wait a minute—if you are going to be allowed to go on living as you are living, then you also have to admit that you are not Christians … it is wrong of established Christendom to say that Feuerbach is attacking Christianity; it is not true, he is attacking the Christians by demonstrating that their lives do not correspond to the teachings of Christianity … What Christianity needs for certain is traitors … (JP 6523)     

The real symmetry problem(s) for wide-scope accounts of rationality

You are irrational when you are akratic. On this point most agree. Despite this agreement, there is a tremendous amount of disagreement about what the correct explanation of this data is. Narrow-scopers think that the correct explanation is that you are violating a narrow-scope conditional requirement. You lack an intention to x that you are required to have given the fact that you believe you ought to x. Wide-scopers disagree. They think that a conditional you are required to make true is false. You aren’t required to have any particular attitudes. You’re just required to intend to x or not believe you ought to x. Wide-scope accounts are symmetrical insofar as they predict that you are complying with the relevant requirement just so long as the relevant conditional is true. Some narrow-scopers object to this symmetry. However, there is disagreement about why the symmetry is objectionable. This has led wide-scopers to defend their view against a number of different symmetry objections. I think their defenses in the face of these objections are, on the whole, plausible. Unfortunately for them, they aren’t defending their view against the best version of the objection. In this paper I will show that there is a symmetry objection to wide-scope accounts that both hasn’t been responded to and is a serious problem for wide-scope accounts. Moreover, my version of the objection will allow us to see that there is at least one narrow-scope view that has been seriously underappreciated in the literature.     

Privileged access

That everyone has some privileged access to some information is trivially true. The doctrine of privileged access is that I am the authority on all of my own experiences. Possibly this thesis was attacked by Wittgenstein (the thesis on the non‐existence of private languages). The thesis was refuted by Freud (I know your dreams better than you), Duhem (I know your methods of scientific discovery better than you), Malinowski (I know your customs and habits better than you), and perception theorists (I can make you see things which are not there and describe your perceptions better than you can). The significance of this rejected thesis is that it is the basis of sensationalism and thus of all inductivist and some conventionalist philosophy.     

How to check a computer program

The usual ways of checking computer programs have important flaws. A better way to check a program you have written is to have someone else write a program that does the same thing and then compare the output of the two programs over a wide range of input. Two examples are described.     

Developmental changes in consistency of preferential feeling for peers and objects around age four

When do young children come to have an individual mental image of each peer? Forming a stable impression of each person requires maturation of at least two cognitive abilities, inferring the other's mind and episodic memory. According to past studies, the critical period for both these abilities is around age four. Thus, it was hypothesized that the child begins to form a consistent mental image of each peer at or after age four. To test this hypothesis, the temporal consistency of preference for peers was examined in 3-, 4-, and 5-yr.-olds. Each subject was asked "Who do you like better than others in this class?" once a week for three times (Study 1). The results indicated that most of the 3-yr.-olds answered different names as their favorite friends or nonsense things inconsistently week by week, whereas older children tended to answer the same names across weeks. However, changing the question to "Which object do you like best of these alternatives?" dramatically changed the response pattern (Study 2): preferences among nonhuman objects (playthings) were temporally consistent even for 3-yr.-olds. These results indicate that children before age four do have a temporally consistent feeling toward general objects but do not have a consistent firm feeling about personal relationships among peers. The results are discussed in relation to the critical developmental changes about age 4 in other cognitive abilities.     

What is a City?

Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole.

     

“No More” leads to “Want More,” but “No Less” leads to “Want Less”: Consumers' counterfactual thinking when faced with quantity restriction discounts

The current research examines the impact of point‐of‐purchase (POP) discounts on consumers' counterfactual thinking (CFT). Study 1 reveals that consumers tend to engage in upward CFT (what might have been better) rather than downward CFT (what might have been worse) in response to POP discounts. Study 2 shows that upward CFT depends on how the discount information is framed. A discount with a lower‐quantity restriction (e.g., “X % off if you buy at least Y items”) leads consumers to counterfactually wish to buy more, but a discount with an upper‐quantity restriction (“X % off – limit Y items per customer”) leads consumers to wish to buy less. Study participants in both conditions report they would buy the same POP‐suggested amount, but for completely opposite reasons. In Study 3, this convergence effect in purchase quantity disappears when the maximum and minimum restrictions are lifted, suggesting that quantity restrictions in POP discounts guide quantity decisions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How to deal with your most difficult client—You

Conclusion Therapists are human-and, believe it or not, fallible humans. Ideally, they are supremely well infored, highly confident, minimally disturbed, extremely ethical and rarely under- or overinvolved with their clients/Actually, they are hardly ideal. If you, as a therapist, find yourself seriously blocked in your work, look for the same kind of irrational beliefs, inappropriate feelings, and dysfunctional behaviors that you would investigate in your underachieving clints. When you ferret out the absolutistic philosophies and perfectionist demads that seem to underlie your difficulties, ask yoursell—yes,strongly ask yourself—these trenchant questions: (a) Why do Ihave to be an indubitably great and unconditionally lowed therapist?; (b) Where is it written that my clientsmust follow my teachings and absolutelyshould do what I advise?; (c) Where is the evidence that therapymust be easy and that Ihave to enjoy every minute of it?If you persist in asking important questions like these and insist on thinking them through to what are scientific and logical answers, you may still never become the most accomplished and sanest therapist in the world. But I wager that you will tend to be happier and more effective than many other therapists I could—but charitably will not—name. Try it and see!This article is adapted from an invited address presented at the 91 st Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association at Anaheim, Calif., August 1983.     

智慧推理：概念、测量、影响因素及展望

智慧推理源于新皮亚杰主义与柏林智慧模式的研究。研究者进一步整合其内涵,不断推进与革新测量方法。年龄、文化与情境是影响智慧推理的主要因素。未来研究重点应包括考察物慧中的智慧推理内涵,开发“面对面”式的测量方法,探究智慧推理的脑神经机制并比较其与一般抽象推理的不同。     

Knowledge,certainty, and assertion

Researchers have debated whether knowledge or certainty is a better candidate for the norm of assertion. Should you make an assertion only if you know it's true? Or should you make an assertion only if you're certain it's true? If either knowledge or certainty is a better candidate, then this will likely have detectable behavioral consequences. I report an experiment that tests for relevant behavioral consequences. The results support the view that assertability is more closely linked to knowledge than to certainty. In multiple scenarios, people were much more willing to allow assertability and certainty to come apart than to allow assertability and knowledge to come apart.     

Fugu for Logicians

What do you get when you cross a fallacy with a good argument? A fugu, that is, a valid argument that tempts you to reach its conclusion invalidly (named after the dangerous but delicious Japanese puffer fish). You have yielded to the temptation more than you realize. If you are a teacher, you may have served many fugus. They arise systematically through several mechanisms. Fugus are interesting intermediate cases that shed light on the following issues: bare evidentialism, false pleasure, philosophy of education, and the ethics of argument. Normally, a fugu will not yield knowledge from known premises. But if the reasoning is only slightly fallacious, they do yield knowledge. These mild fugus show that we can gain knowledge by invalid reasoning. This is a conservative resource for historians. They want to credit discoveries to Euclid rather than those who made minor corrections to his proofs, such as David Hilbert. We also benefit from this practice of grandfathering in old standards of knowledge attribution. For we can compete spiritedly for priority. We do not need to worry that credit will instead go to future scholars who will make the minor amendments needed to raise present proofs to a future standard of demonstration.     

Slim by design: Redirecting the accidental drivers of mindless overeating

We first choose what to eat and then we choose how much to eat. Yet as consumer psychologists, we understand food choice much better than food consumption quantity. This review focuses on three powerful drivers of food consumption quantity: 1) Sensory cues (how your senses react), 2) emotional cues (how you feel), and 3) normative cues (how you believe you are supposed to eat). These drivers influence consumption quantities partly because they bias our consumption monitoring—how much attention we pay to how much we eat. To date, consumption quantity research has comfortably focused on the first two drivers and on using education to combat overeating. In contrast, new research on consumption norms can uncover small changes in the eating environment (such as package downsizing, smaller dinnerware, and reduced visibility and convenience) that can be easily implemented in kitchens, restaurants, schools, and public policies to improve our monitoring of how much we eat and to help solve mindless overeating. It is easier to change our food environment than to change our mind.     

Are we free to imagine what we choose?

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended.

     

The foreign-language effect: thinking in a foreign tongue reduces decision biases

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.