The case against mental duality

The arguments for and against Puccetti’s (1981a) notion of “mental duality” are reviewed. This model of mind asserts that not only do commissurotomy patients have two independent spheres of consciousness but so do normal intact brains. The role of the corpus callosum is viewed as being purely duplicative, not integrative. Following a detailed discussion of conceptual and terminological issues, neuropsychological and neuroanatomical considerations, and various clinical implications of the model, it is concluded that the available empirical evidence refutes the model and that the model is conceptually inadequate.     

Autonomy,life as an intrinsic value,and the right to die in dignity

This paper examines two models of thinking relating to the issue of the right to die in dignity: one takes into consideration the rights and interests of the individual; the other supposes that human life is inherently valuable. I contend that preference should be given to the first model, and further assert that the second model may be justified in moral terms only as long as it does not resort to paternalism. The view that holds that certain patients are not able to comprehend their own interests in a fully rational manner, and therefore ‘we’ know what is good for these patients better than ‘they’ do, is morally unjustifiable. I proceed by refuting the ‘quality of life’ argument, asserting that each person is entitled to decide for herself when it is worth living and when it is not. In this connection, a caveat will be made regarding the role of the family. The author’s research interests include bioethics, free speech, tolerance and ethics in the media.     

Reasons and impossibility

In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible.     

Hell Despite Vagueness: A Response to Sider

Ted Sider argues that a binary afterlife is inconsistent with a proportionally just God because no just criterion for placing persons in such an afterlife exists. I provide a possible account whereby God can remain proportionally just and allow a binary afterlife. On my account, there is some maximum amount of people God can allow into Heaven without sacrificing some greater good. God gives to all people at least their due but chooses to allow some who do not deserve Heaven to enter out of grace. Although this model implies a precise cutoff between those who enter Heaven and those who do not, I have argued that there is a precise point where God best serves justice and some greater good. Although God’s actions may appear arbitrary and ‘whimsically generous,’ it is merely because we are ignorant of the precise cutoff point that best serves his purposes.     

Bergmann’s dilemma: exit strategies for internalists

Michael Bergmann claims that all versions of epistemic internalism face an irresolvable dilemma. We show that there are many plausible versions of internalism that falsify this claim. First, we demonstrate that there are versions of “weak awareness internalism” that, contra Bergmann, do not succumb to the “Subject’s Perspective Objection” horn of the dilemma. Second, we show that there are versions of “strong awareness internalism” that do not fall prey to the dilemma’s “vicious regress” horn. We note along the way that these versions of internalism do not, in avoiding one horn of the dilemma, succumb to the dilemma’s other horn. The upshot is that internalists have many available strategies for avoiding dilemmatic defeat.     

Lakatos’s Challenge? Auxiliary Hypotheses and Non-Monotonous Inference

Summary  Gerhard Schurz [2001, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 32, 65–107] has proposed to reconstruct auxiliary hypothesis addition, e.g., postulation of Neptune to immunize Newtonian mechanics, with concepts from non-monotonous inference to avoid the retention of false predictions that are among the consequence-set of the deductive model. However, the non-monotonous reconstruction retains the observational premise that is indeed rejected in the deductive model. Hence, his proposal fails to do justice to Lakatos’ core-belt model, therefore fails to meet what Schurz coined “Lakatos’ challenge”. It is argued that Lakatos’s distinction between core and belt of a research program is not mapable onto premise-set and consequence-set and that Schurz’s understanding of a ceteris paribus clause as a transfinite list of (absent) interfering factors is problematic. I propose a simple reading of Lakatos’s use of the term ceteris paribus clause and motivate why the term hypothesis addition, despite not being interpretable literally, came to be entrenched.

It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather we propose a maze of theories and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT. Lakatos (1978, p. 45)

     

Seeing by Feeling: Virtues,Skills, and Moral Perception

Champions of virtue ethics frequently appeal to moral perception: the notion that virtuous people can “see” what to do. According to a traditional account of virtue, the cultivation of proper feeling through imitation and habituation issues in a sensitivity to reasons to act. Thus, we learn to see what to do by coming to feel the demands of courage, kindness, and the like. But virtue ethics also claims superiority over other theories that adopt a perceptual moral epistemology, such as intuitionism – which John McDowell criticizes for illicitly “borrow[ing] the epistemological credentials” of perception. In this paper, I suggest that the most promising way for virtue ethics to use perceptual metaphors innocuously is by adopting a skill model of virtue, on which the virtues are modeled on forms of practical know-how. Yet I contend that this model is double-edged for virtue ethics. The skill model belies some central ambitions and dogmas of the traditional view, especially its most idealized claims about virtue and the virtuous. While this may be a cost that its champions are unprepared to pay, I suggest that virtue ethics would do well to embrace a more realistic moral psychology and a correspondingly less sublime conception of virtue.     

No bare particulars

There are predicates and subjects. It is thus tempting to think that there are properties on the one hand, and things that have them on the other. I have no quarrel with this thought; it is a fine place to begin a theory of properties and property-having. But in this paper, I argue that one such theory—bare particularism—is false. I pose a dilemma. Either bare particulars instantiate the properties of their host substances or they do not. If they do not, then bare particularism is both unmotivated and false. If they do, then the view faces a problematic—and, I shall argue, false—crowding consequence.     

The “voice of justice” vs. the “voice of care” in the assignment of criminal sanctions

According to Gilligan's model of moral reasoning, some people approach difficult decisions situationally and in response to needs and relationships of the people involved, often including themselves. People who think this way operate with a “care voice” and tend to be girls and women. Others do so with concerns about rights, obligations, and rules, employing conventional standards uniformly to be fair. These people operate with a “justice voice.” A study was conducted to assess the usefulness of the model for understanding student opinions of penalty for two hypothetical criminal offenders. Based upon data obtained from a self-administered written questionnaire and a quantitative index of “voice,” three themes emerged. First, most students exhibited concerns reflective of the two internal moral structures, the “care voice” and the “justice voice,” when they responded to queries about the proper function of criminal sanctions. This indicates that at least two equally legitimate yet competitive definitions of criminal justice exist. Second, gender and “voice” are associated, but not invariably. Third, “voice” is more helpful than gender for explaining penalty choices. The care model is associated with penalty choices that are responsive to needs of people involved in the situation, and the custodial nature of sanctions lends insight into these choices. The justice model is associated with the assignment of normative sanctions. Moreover, many students expressed a “model of voice,” or a view of fairness, that conflicts with the dominant model of the criminal justice system.     

Bounded Revision: Two-Dimensional Belief Change Between Conservative and Moderate Revision

This paper presents the model of ‘bounded revision’ that is based on two-dimensional revision functions taking as arguments pairs consisting of an input sentence and a reference sentence. The key idea is that the input sentence is accepted as far as (and just a little further than) the reference sentence is ‘cotenable’ with it. Bounded revision satisfies the AGM axioms as well as the Same Beliefs Condition (SBC) saying that the set of beliefs accepted after the revision does not depend on the reference sentence (although the posterior belief state does depend on it). Bounded revision satisfies the Darwiche–Pearl (DP) axioms for iterated belief change. If the reference sentence is fixed to be a tautology or a contradiction, two well-known one-dimensional revision operations result. Bounded revision thus naturally fills the space between conservative revision (also known as natural revision) and moderate revision (also known as lexicographic revision). I compare this approach to the two-dimensional model of ‘revision by comparison’ investigated by Fermé and Rott (Artif Intell 157:5–47, 2004) that satisfies neither the SBC nor the DP axioms. I conclude that two-dimensional revision operations add substantially to the expressive power of qualitative approaches that do not make use of numbers as measures of degrees of belief.     

Functions and emergence: when functional properties have something to say

In a recent paper, Bird (in: Groff (ed.) Revitalizing causality: Realism about causality in philosophy and social science, 2007) has argued that some higher-order properties—which he calls “evolved emergent properties”—can be considered causally efficacious in spite of exclusion arguments. I have previously argued in favour of a similar position. The basic argument is that selection processes do not take physical categorical properties into account. Rather, selection mechanisms are only tuned to what such properties can do, i.e., to their causal powers. This picture seems ultimately untenable in the light of further exclusion problems; but at the same time, it meets our explanatory demands. My purpose is therefore to show that there is a real antinomy with regard to evolved emergent properties. I develop a physicalist exclusion argument and then I go on to consider an argument that seems to establish that evolved emergent properties are causally efficacious, and propose a compatibilist solution. Finally, I very briefly consider what the proposed model may imply for the issue of mental causation.     

Optimal data selection: Revision,review, and reevaluation

Since it first appeared, there has been much research and critical discussion on the theory of optimal data selection as an explanation of Wason’s (1966, 1968) selection task (Oaksford & Chater, 1994). In this paper, this literature is reviewed, and the theory of optimal data selection is reevaluated in its light. The information gain model is first located in the current theoretical debate in the psychology of reasoning concerning dual processes in human reasoning. A model comparison exercise is then presented that compares a revised version of the model with its theoretical competitors. Tests of the novel predictions of the model are then reviewed. This section also reviews experiments claimed not to be consistent with optimal data selection. Finally, theoretical criticisms of optimal data selection are discussed. It is argued either that the revised model accounts for them or that they do not stand up under analysis. It is concluded that some version of the optimal data selection model still provides the best account of the selection task. Consequently, the conclusion of Oaksford and Chater’s (1994) original rational analysis (Anderson, 1990), that people’s hypothesis-testing behavior on this task is rational and well adapted to the environment, still stands.     

Nietzsche Contra “Self-Reformulation”

Not only do the writings of Nietzsche – early and late – fail to support the pedagogy of self-reformulation, this doctrine embodies what for him is worst in man and would destroy that which is higher. The pedagogy of self-reformulation is also incoherent. In contrast, Nietzsche offers a fruitful and comprehensive theory of education that, while non-democratic and contemptuous of egalitarian aspirations, emerges consistently from his metaphysics and philosophical anthropology. Whatever, then, we might think of his premises, Nietzsche’s philosophy of education represents an attractive model for those who would develop a meaningful, distinctive, and persuasive educational theory. It defines a domain of the possible and then straightforwardly states what is and is not to be done within it – and why.     

Learning from Minimal Economic Models

It is argued that one can learn from minimal economic models. Minimal models are models that are not similar to the real world, do not resemble some of its features, and do not adhere to accepted regularities. One learns from a model if constructing and analysing the model affects one’s confidence in hypotheses about the world. Economic models, I argue, are often assessed for their credibility. If a model is judged credible, it is considered to be a relevant possibility. Considering such relevant possibilities may affect one’s confidence in necessity or impossibility hypotheses. Thus, one can learn from minimal economic models.

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Close Calls and the Confident Agent: Free Will, Deliberation, and Alternative Possibilities

Two intuitions lie at the heart of our conception of free will. One intuition locates free will in our ability to deliberate effectively and control our actions accordingly: the ‘Deliberation and Control’ (DC) condition. The other intuition is that free will requires the existence of alternative possibilities for choice: the AP condition. These intuitions seem to conflict when, for instance, we deliberate well to decide what to do, and we do not want it to be possible to act in some other way. I suggest that intuitions about the AP condition arise when we face ‘close calls,’ situations in which, after deliberating, we still do not know what we really want to do. Indeed, several incompatibilists suggest such close calls are necessary for free will. I challenge this suggestion by describing a ‘confident agent’ who, after deliberating, always feels confident about what to do (and can then control her actions accordingly). Because she maximally satisfies the DC condition, she does not face close calls, and the intuition that the AP condition is essential for free will does not seem to apply to her. I conclude that intuitions about the importance of the AP condition rest on our experiences of close calls and arise precisely to the extent that our deliberations fail to arrive at a clear decision. I then raise and respond to several objections to this thought experiment and its relevance to the free will debate.     

The Alignment of Measures and Constructs in Organizational Research: The Case of Testing Measurement Models of Creativity

Purpose  

Organizational creativity research has a curious misalignment between construct definitions and measurement model specifications—definitions embrace multiple facets, but empirical measures do not. The purpose of this study was to examine potential measurement model misspecification in organizational creativity research. We compare whether creativity is best assessed as a unidimensional common latent construct model with reflective indicators or as a multi-dimensional composite latent construct model with formative indicators.     

The EZ diffusion method: Too EZ?

The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) for fast two-choice decisions has been successful in a number of domains. Wagenmakers, van der Maas, and Grasman (2007) proposed a new method for fitting the model to data (“EZ”) that is simpler than the standard chisquare method (Ratcliff & Tuerlinckx, 2002). For an experimental condition, EZ can estimate parameter values for the main components of processing using only correct response times (RTs), their variance, and accuracy, not error RTs or the shapes of RT distributions. Wagenmakers et al. suggested that EZ produces accurate parameter estimates in cases in which the chi-square method would fail-specifically, experimental conditions with small numbers of observations or with accuracy near ceiling. In this article, I counter these claims and discuss EZ’s limitations. Unlike the chi-square method, EZ is extremely sensitive to outlier RTs and is usually less efficient in recovering parameter values, and it can lead to errors in interpretation when the data do not meet its assumptions, when the number of observations in an experimental condition is small, or when accuracy in an experimental condition is high. The conclusion is that EZ can be useful in the exploration of parameter spaces, but it should not be used for meaningful estimates of parameter values or for assessing whether or not a model fits data.