The Express Knowledge Account of Assertion

Many philosophers favour the simple knowledge account of assertion, which says you may assert something only if you know it. The simple account is true but importantly incomplete. I defend a more informative thesis, namely, that you may assert something only if your assertion expresses knowledge. I call this ‘the express knowledge account of assertion’, which I argue better handles a wider range of cases while at the same time explaining the simple knowledge account's appeal. §1 introduces some new data that a knowledge account of assertion well explains. §2 explains the simple knowledge account's advantage over two of its main competitors. §3 presents a problem for the simple account and offers a solution, which is to adopt the express knowledge account. §4 encapsulates the case for the express knowledge account, and offers a unifying vision for the epistemology of belief and assertion. §5 answers an objection. §6 briefly sums up. Even those who ultimately reject my conclusion can still benefit from the new data presented in §1, and learn an important lesson from the problem discussed in §3, which demonstrates a general constraint on an acceptable account of the norm of assertion.     

MORAL CONTEXTUALISM AND MORAL RELATIVISM

Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like 'right' and 'wrong'. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. However, I argue that a version of moral contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizing sentence truth to contexts of assessment. This version of moral contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds.     

Bayesian data analysis for newcomers

This article explains the foundational concepts of Bayesian data analysis using virtually no mathematical notation. Bayesian ideas already match your intuitions from everyday reasoning and from traditional data analysis. Simple examples of Bayesian data analysis are presented that illustrate how the information delivered by a Bayesian analysis can be directly interpreted. Bayesian approaches to null-value assessment are discussed. The article clarifies misconceptions about Bayesian methods that newcomers might have acquired elsewhere. We discuss prior distributions and explain how they are not a liability but an important asset. We discuss the relation of Bayesian data analysis to Bayesian models of mind, and we briefly discuss what methodological problems Bayesian data analysis is not meant to solve. After you have read this article, you should have a clear sense of how Bayesian data analysis works and the sort of information it delivers, and why that information is so intuitive and useful for drawing conclusions from data.     

Am I You?

It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the reflexive and the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretrievably alienated from you. To allow the possibility of addressing oneself is to assume one of the following accounts of the second-person pronoun. Either one has to follow R. Heck and conceive it as a merely linguistic phenomenon whose content can be analyzed in terms of “the person to whom I'm now speaking”; or one has to internalize the second person and follow Ch. Korsgaard in taking its prior use to be entirely within and independent of its linguistic expression. But to account for the idea of mutual recognition requires a third view according to which address is an act of mind sui generis for which linguistic expression is essential.     

Visual and Affective Multimodal Models of Word Meaning in Language and Mind

One of the main limitations of natural language-based approaches to meaning is that they do not incorporate multimodal representations the way humans do. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people's representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models we compare include unimodal distributional linguistic models as well as multimodal models which combine linguistic with perceptual or affective information. There are two types of linguistic models: those based on text corpora and those derived from word association data. We present two new studies and a reanalysis of a series of previous studies. The studies demonstrate that both visual and affective multimodal models better capture behavior that reflects human representations than unimodal linguistic models. The size of the multimodal advantage depends on the nature of semantic representations involved, and it is especially pronounced for basic-level concepts that belong to the same superordinate category. Additional visual and affective features improve the accuracy of linguistic models based on text corpora more than those based on word associations; this suggests systematic qualitative differences between what information is encoded in natural language versus what information is reflected in word associations. Altogether, our work presents new evidence that multimodal information is important for capturing both abstract and concrete words and that fully representing word meaning requires more than purely linguistic information. Implications for both embodied and distributional views of semantic representation are discussed.     

Unsafe Assertions

John Turri has recently provided two problem cases for the knowledge account of assertion (KAA) to argue for the express knowledge account of assertion (EKAA). We defend KAA by explaining away the intuitions about the problem cases and by showing that our explanation is theoretically superior to EKAA.     

Believing For a Reason

This paper explains what it is to believe something for a reason. My thesis is that you believe something for a reason just in case the reason non-deviantly causes your belief. In the course of arguing for my thesis, I present a new argument that reasons are causes, and offer an informative account of causal non-deviance.     

Beyond Words: Inarticulable Reasons and Reasonable Commitments

We often come to value someone or something through experience of that person or thing. Call such an experience direct appreciation. When you appreciate something directly you may come to embrace a value that you did not previously grasp. Moreover, in a large and important subset of cases it seems you could not have fully appreciated that value, absent some such experience, merely by considering a report of the reasons or arguments that purport to justify your attitude. It follows that you will remain incapable of fully communicating the reasons for your valuing attitude to someone who lacks any such experience. Despite its ubiquity, this phenomenon goes missing in a great deal of contemporary work in ethics and political philosophy. To make sense of it we need an account of the standards governing our normative commitments that explains how we can have reasons for them without requiring articulacy about these reasons.     

Why do you fear the bogeyman? An embodied predictive coding model of perceptual inference

Why are we scared by nonperceptual entities such as the bogeyman, and why does the bogeyman only visit us during the night? Why does hearing a window squeaking in the night suggest to us the unlikely idea of a thief or a killer? And why is this more likely to happen after watching a horror movie? To answer these and similar questions, we need to put mind and body together again and consider the embodied nature of perceptual and cognitive inference. Predictive coding provides a general framework for perceptual inference; I propose to extend it by including interoceptive and bodily information. The resulting embodied predictive coding inference permits one to compare alternative hypotheses (e.g., is the sound I hear generated by a thief or the wind?) using the same inferential scheme as in predictive coding, but using both sensory and interoceptive information as evidence, rather than just considering sensory events. If you hear a window squeaking in the night after watching a horror movie, you may consider plausible a very unlikely hypothesis (e.g., a thief, or even the bogeyman) because it explains both what you sense (e.g., the window squeaking in the night) and how you feel (e.g., your high heart rate). The good news is that the inference that I propose is fully rational and gives minds and bodies equal dignity. The bad news is that it also gives an embodiment to the bogeyman, and a reason to fear it.     

How literature expands your imagination

Many great authors claim that reading literature can expand your phenomenal imagination and allow you to imagine experiences you have never had. How is this possible? Your phenomenal imagination is constrained by your phenomenal concepts, which are in turn constrained by the phenomenology of your own actual past experiences. Literature could expand your phenomenal imagination, then, by giving you new phenomenal concepts. This paper explains how this can happen. Literature can direct your attention to previously unnoticed phenomenal properties of your own past experiences, as brought to mind by involuntary memory. This process gives you the opportunity to notice those phenomenal properties for the first time, and so also to form phenomenal concepts of those properties. Forming a new phenomenal concept strictly expands the range of your phenomenal imagination. It gives you the capacity to imagine more than you could have before, including certain specific kinds of experience that you yourself have never enjoyed firsthand. Literature’s capacity to expand your phenomenal imagination in this way is central to its social, moral, and epistemic value.     

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.

     

Kultursensible Diagnostik in Forschung und Praxis

Nearly one fifth of the German population are migrants of the first and second generation. Evidence-based knowledge about mental health of migrants, their health care needs and the actual mental health care situation of this population is limited. Psychometric instruments are helpful for the assessment of mental disorders. Although a culture-sensitive approach in diagnostics is necessary it is often neglected in research as well as in clinical practice. This article describes culture-specific and linguistic challenges and specifies specific communication problems. In most cases psychometric instruments are not developed simultaneously in different languages but are translated later on. After translation psychometric instruments should be culturally validated and adapted with respect to linguistic, cultural and metric equivalence. The article gives an overview about the different aspects of equivalence and explains these aspects on the example of the PHQ-9.     

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Considering the Relationship Between Language,Culture and Cognition to Scrutinize the Lexical Influences on Cognition

In this paper, we examine the interrelationships among language, culture, and cognition. The central notion that individuals with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds think differently is not far from our everyday experience. If you have had the opportunity to engage in a conversation with a person whose native language is not English, you may have found that communication breaks down at times and that some concepts are not easily translated into another language. Or if you happen to be a fluent bilingual or multilingual, you may agree with those bilinguals or multilinguals who mention that they think differently in each of their language. A number of intriguing questions arise here. Is there a particular style of thinking that is natural for speakers of each language? If so, is it possible for a person to think in a different way, one that is not natural for that individual? Is this style of thinking imparted by the language, the culture, or both? These and lots of other questions have engaged the attention of anthropologists, linguists and psychologists, but the point that we are going to explore is the lexical influences on cognition considering the relationship between language, culture and cognition.     

Agent causation as a solution to the problem of action

My primary aim is to defend a nonreductive solution to the problem of action. I argue that when you are performing an overt bodily action, you are playing an irreducible causal role in bringing about, sustaining, and controlling the movements of your body, a causal role best understood as an instance of agent causation. Thus, the solution that I defend employs a notion of agent causation, though emphatically not in defence of an account of free will, as most theories of agent causation are. Rather, I argue that the notion of agent causation introduced here best explains how it is that you are making your body move during an action, thereby providing a satisfactory solution to the problem of action.     

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)     

Luck,envy and gratitude: It could have been different

Previous studies have shown that people feel lucky in situations that could easily have turned into something worse. The present investigation was designed to focus more closely on the comparative aspect of luck, using a linguistic approach (Study 1 and 2) as well as self-reports of perceived luck accompanying selected emotional episodes (Study 3). The participants in Study 1 were asked to comment upon the difference between describing a state of affairs as “lucky” vs. “good”. The term “lucky“ was frequently seen to imply a comparison process, sometimes expressing gratitude (“It is lucky I have a family”) and at other times envy (“it is lucky you have a job”). This was confirmed in Study 2 where statements about self and other being lucky or unlucky were rated for implying comparison, gratitude, envy, concern, and impression of speaker. In Study 3, 60 students described situations in which they had felt grateful towards other people as well as towards “life in general”. Questionnaire answers revealed that they also had felt very lucky and had been thinking “it could have been different”. They also produced recollections of envy, which were rated to imply others' good luck and own bad luck, which could easily have been interchanged (“it could have been merdquo;). It is concluded that counterfactual thoughts are decisive for the experiences of luck, gratitude, and envy.     

Perceptual effects of linguistic category priming: The Stapel and Semin (2007) paradigm revisited in twelve experiments

Linguistic category priming is a novel paradigm to examine automatic influences of language on cognition (Semin, 2008). An initial article reported that priming abstract linguistic categories (adjectives) led to more global perceptual processing, whereas priming concrete linguistic categories (verbs) led to more local perceptual processing (Stapel & Semin, 2007). However, this report was compromised by data fabrication by the first author, so that it remains unclear whether or not linguistic category priming influences perceptual processing. To fill this gap in the literature, the present article reports 12 studies among Dutch and US samples examining the perceptual effects of linguistic category priming. The results yielded no evidence of linguistic category priming effects. These findings are discussed in relation to other research showing cultural variations in linguistic category priming effects (IJzerman, Saddlemyer, & Koole, 2014). The authors conclude by highlighting the importance of conducting and publishing replication research for achieving scientific progress.     

What’s the matter with Huck Finn?

This paper explores some key commitments of the idea that it can be rational to do what you believe you ought not to do. I suggest that there is a prima facie tension between this idea and certain plausible coherence constraints on rational agency. I propose a way to resolve this tension. While akratic agents are always irrational, they are not always practically irrational, as many authors assume. Rather, “inverse” akratics like Huck Finn fail in a distinctively theoretical way. What explains why akratic agents are always either theoretically or practically irrational? I suggest that this is true because an agent’s total evidence determines both the beliefs and the intentions it is rational for her to have. Moreover, an agent’s evidence does so in a way such that it is never rational for the agent to at once believe that she ought to Φ and lack the intention to Φ.     

Good Samaritans, Good Humanitarians

abstract   Duties of beneficence are not well understood. Peter Singer has argued that the scope of beneficence should not be restricted to those who are, in some sense, near us. According to Singer, refusing to contribute to humanitarian relief efforts is just as wrong as refusing to rescue a child drowning before you. Most people do not seem convinced by Singer's arguments, yet no one has offered a plausible justification for restricting the scope of beneficence that doesn't produce counterintuitive results elsewhere. I offer a defence of this restricted scope by introducing the notion of unique dependence, a notion that is both intuitively attractive and theoretically grounded. It explains why your reason to rescue the drowning child is more stringent than your reason to contribute to humanitarian relief, while blocking the conclusion that we have no reason at all to aid distant sufferers.