The Scope of Deflationism: Reply to Gregory

Paul Gregory's careful and insightful response to "Carnap and Two Dogmas of Empiricism" highlights a number of points which were underdeveloped in that paper. I think that he has brought into relief a central issue between Camap and Quine by supplying a crucial distinction. However I still maintain that Quine's assault is less than successful and that Gregory's further analysis of the debate sheds light on why this is so.     

Worldly Reasons: An Ontological Inquiry into Motivating Considerations and Normative Reasons

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine‐grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse‐grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence‐based correspondence.     

Internal Reasons: Reply to Brady, Van Roojen and Gert

In an earlier paper I identified two desiderata of a theory of practical reasons which favour internalism, and then argued that forms of this doctrine which are currently on offer lose either one or the other in trying to avoid the conditional fallacy. Michael Brady, Mark van Roojen and Josh Gert have separately attempted to respond to my argument. I set out reasons why all fail.     

On the Dialectical Disadvantage of the Normative Error Theorist: A Reply to Clipsham

Philosophia - In response to the companions in guilt arguments, some error theorists have tried to defend a nihilist thesis that there truly are no normative epistemic reasons to believe, and...     

Reply to Rouder (2014): Good frequentist properties raise confidence

Established psychological results have been called into question by demonstrations that statistical significance is easy to achieve, even in the absence of an effect. One often-warned-against practice, choosing when to stop the experiment on the basis of the results, is guaranteed to produce significant results. In response to these demonstrations, Bayes factors have been proposed as an antidote to this practice, because they are invariant with respect to how an experiment was stopped. Should researchers only care about the resulting Bayes factor, without concern for how it was produced? Yu, Sprenger, Thomas, and Dougherty (2014) and Sanborn and Hills (2014) demonstrated that Bayes factors are sometimes strongly influenced by the stopping rules used. However, Rouder (2014) has provided a compelling demonstration that despite this influence, the evidence supplied by Bayes factors remains correct. Here we address why the ability to influence Bayes factors should still matter to researchers, despite the correctness of the evidence. We argue that good frequentist properties mean that results will more often agree with researchers’ statistical intuitions, and good frequentist properties control the number of studies that will later be refuted. Both help raise confidence in psychological results.     

Decision criteria do not shift: Reply to Treisman

Recently, we argued that the detection criterion representation of decision-making biases, embedded within the theory of signal detection, is empirically testable and has, in fact, been falsified by empirical results from visual discrimination experiments. Treisman (2002) attempts to show that there is an alternative interpretation of our results that could explain them without dropping the detection criterion construct. In lieu of attempting to fit the data with a model, however, he gives two kinds of theoretical examples, both involving manipulations of the spacing of criteria on a decision axis. The first example correctly predicts that the bias estimate we developed will be zero but does so by assuming zero spacing between some criteria (some rating responses are never used). We did not observe zero spacing between any criteria and did not perform any analyses on responses that never occurred. Moreover, this example does not explain why the upper-bound bias estimates that we obtained by combining results from two criteria placements were also trivially small. His second example predicts that the bias should have been detectable with sufficiently large sample sizes. In our experiments, the sample sizes were, in fact, quite large, large enough for the results to be consistent in 18 different experimental conditions. Finally, all of Treisman’s criteria placement examples also fail to explain the pronounced effects of base rates on the shapes of the rating ROC curves, and his suggestion that there are problems of logical interpretation with our proposed distribution model ignores the predictions of large classes of alternatives to detection theory, including the dynamic models of perception.     

难治性抑郁症成因与优化治疗的思考

抑郁症是一种高患病率、高致残率及高自杀率的严重精神疾患。在过去10年中,抗抑郁药物研究取得了突飞猛进的进展,然而,在临床上仍约有30％～50％的抑郁症患者最终成为难治性抑郁症病例。目前针对难治性抑郁症尚无较好的治疗策略。本文运用系统论方法学分析生物、心理、社会各个要素在病因中所起作用,探讨最佳治疗策略。     

难治性抑郁症成因与优化治疗的思考

抑郁症是一种高患病率、高致残率及高自杀率的严重精神疾患.在过去10年中,抗抑郁药物研究取得了突飞猛进的进展,然而,在临床上仍约有30%～50%的抑郁症患者最终成为难治性抑郁症病例.目前针对难治性抑郁症尚无较好的治疗策略.本文运用系统论方法学分析生物、心理、社会各个要素在病因中所起作用,探讨最佳治疗策略.     

Time capsules are not a panacea: A reply to Vernon

Vernon (1986) and I do not disagree on much. The main point of my critique—that there is much more to intelligence than mental speed—holds.