On "On what there is"

All sides in the recent debates over the Quine-Putnam Indispensability thesis presuppose Quine's criterion for determining what a discourse is ontologically committed to. I subject the criterion to scrutiny, especially in regard to the available competitor-criteria, asking what means of evaluation there are for comparing alternative criteria against each other. Finding none, the paper concludes that ontological questions, in a certain sense , are philosophically indeterminate.     

Ontic terms and metaontology,or: on what there actually is

Terms such as ‘exist’, ‘actual’, etc., (hereafter, “ontic terms”) are recognized as having uses that are not ontologically committing, in addition to the usual commissive uses. (Consider, e.g., the Platonic and the neutral readings of ‘There is an even prime’.) In this paper, I identify five different noncommissive uses for ontic terms, and (by a kind of via negativa) attempt to define the commissive use, focusing on ‘actual’ as my example. The problem, however, is that the resulting definiens for the commissive ‘actual’ is itself equivocal between a commissive and a noncommissive reading. I thus consider other proposals for defining the commissive use, including two proposals from David Lewis. However, each proposal is found to be equivocal in the same way—and eventually I argue that it is impossible to define an ontic term unequivocally. Even so, this is not meant to overshadow that we can understand an ontic term as univocally commissive, in certain conversational contexts. I close by illustrating the import of these observations for the Hirsch–Sider debate in metaontology.     

说造就人的好话

言语是人一生当中用来表达自己的情感和心思意念的工具。在人际关系中,人们是和睦相处,还是冷眼相对,往往与他们说的话紧密关联,因为有其人必有其言。同样,在我们基督徒的信仰生活中,上帝特别看重我们所说的话,因为我们所说的话能反映出我们内心的景况。在圣经当中记载了许多关于言语的教训,上帝将这么多有关言语的教导摆在我     

Against deliberative indispensability as an independent guide to what there is

Philosophical Studies - David Enoch has recently proposed that the deliberative indispensability of irreducibly normative facts suffices to support their inclusion in our ontology, even if they are...     

Object detection and basic-level categorization: Sometimes you know it is there before you know what it is

A tight temporal coupling between object detection (is an object there?) and object categorization (what kind of object is it?) has recently been reported (Grill-Spector &; Kanwisher, 2005), suggesting that image segmentation into different objects and categorization of those objects at the basic level may be the very same mechanism. In the present work, we decoupled the time course of detection and categorization through two task manipulations. First, inverted objects were categorized significantly less accurately than upright objects across a range of image presentation durations, but no significant effect on object detection was observed. Second, systematically degrading stimuli affected categorization significantly more than object detection. The time course of object detection and object categorization can be selectively manipulated. They are not intrinsically linked. As soon as you know an object is there, you do not necessarily know what it is.     

Visual recognition: as soon as you know it is there, you know what it is

What is the sequence of processing steps involved in visual object recognition? We varied the exposure duration of natural images and measured subjects' performance on three different tasks, each designed to tap a different candidate component process of object recognition. For each exposure duration, accuracy was lower and reaction time longer on a within-category identification task (e.g., distinguishing pigeons from other birds) than on a perceptual categorization task (e.g., birds vs. cars). However, strikingly, at each exposure duration, subjects performed just as quickly and accurately on the categorization task as they did on a task requiring only object detection: By the time subjects knew an image contained an object at all, they already knew its category. These findings place powerful constraints on theories of object recognition.     

Representation facilitates reasoning: what natural frequencies are and what they are not

A good representation can be crucial for finding the solution to a problem. Gigerenzer and Hoffrage (Psychol. Rev. 102 (1995) 684; Psychol. Rev. 106 (1999) 425) have shown that representations in terms of natural frequencies, rather than conditional probabilities, facilitate the computation of a cause's probability (or frequency) given an effect--a problem that is usually referred to as Bayesian reasoning. They also have shown that normalized frequencies--which are not natural frequencies--do not lead to computational facilitation, and consequently, do not enhance people's performance. Here, we correct two misconceptions propagated in recent work (Cognition 77 (2000) 197; Cognition 78 (2001) 247; Psychol. Rev. 106 (1999) 62; Organ. Behav. Hum. Decision Process. 82 (2000) 217): normalized frequencies have been mistaken for natural frequencies and, as a consequence, "nested sets" and the "subset principle" have been proposed as new explanations. These new terms, however, are nothing more than vague labels for the basic properties of natural frequencies.     

On what is bound in figures and grounds

All else being equal, regions providing a quick, good match to object memories are likely to be seen as shaped figures rather than as shapeless grounds. Good matches to object memories occur only if the parts are properly bound spatially. If object memories are accessed in the course of perceptual organization even for regions ultimately seen as shapeless grounds, then binding of parts cannot require attention to figures. Novel silhouette primes were shown immediately before real or novel line drawings. The silhouette contours of half of the primes preceding real line drawings sketched a known shape on the outside, which nevertheless appeared to be a shapeless ground. At short prime-line drawing SOAs, observers took longer to categorize real line drawings following these experimental primes than control primes, suggesting that parts are properly bound spatially for regions perceived to be shapeless grounds, and further that object memories matching grounds are inhibited.     

Gender and the infinite: On the aspiration to be all there is

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

On regulating what is known: A way to social epistemology

This paper lays the groundwork for normative-yet-naturalistic social epistemology. I start by presenting two scenarios for the history of epistemology since Kant, one in which social epistemology is the natural outcome and the other in which it represents a not entirely satisfactory break with classical theories of knowledge. Next I argue that the current trend toward naturalizing epistemology threatens to destroy the distinctiveness of the sociological approach by presuming that it complements standard psychological and historical approaches. I then try to reassert, in Comtean fashion, the epistemologist's credentials in regulating knowledge production. Finally, I consider how social epistemology may have something exciting and relevant to say about contemporary debates in the theory of knowledge.A version of this paper appears as chapter one of Fuller (1988). My warmest thanks goes to Fred Schmitt, who saved me from many unclarities and howlers, as well as provided many probing remarks and criticisms with which I have barely begun to grapple.     

Recalling what was where when seeing nothing there

So-called “looks-at-nothing” have previously been used to show that recalling what also elicits the recall of where this was. Here, we present evidence from an eye-tracking study which shows that disrupting looks to “there” does not disrupt recalling what was there, nor do (anticipatory) looks to “there” facilitate recalling what was there. Therefore, our results suggest that recalling where does not recall what.     

On what it is to be in a quandary

A number of serious problems are raised against Crispin Wright’s quandary conception of vagueness. Two alternative conceptions of the quandary view are proposed instead. The first conception retains Wright’s thesis that, for all one knows, a verdict concerning a borderline case constitutes knowledge. However a further problem is seen to beset this conception. The second conception, in response to this further problem, does not enjoin the thesis that, for all one knows, a verdict concerning a borderline case constitutes knowledge. The result is a much simpler and more plausible version of the quandary view.     

Representation, space and Hollywood Squares: looking at things that aren't there anymore

It has been argued that the human cognitive system is capable of using spatial indexes or oculomotor coordinates to relieve working memory load (Ballard, D. H., Hayhoe, M. M., Pook, P. K., & Rao, R. P. N. (1997). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20(4), 723), track multiple moving items through occlusion (Scholl, D. J., & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1999). Cognitive Psychology, 38, 259) or link incompatible cognitive and sensorimotor codes (Bridgeman, B., & Huemer, V. (1998). Consciousness and Cognition, 7, 454). Here we examine the use of such spatial information in memory for semantic information. Previous research has often focused on the role of task demands and the level of automaticity in the encoding of spatial location in memory tasks. We present five experiments where location is irrelevant to the task, and participants' encoding of spatial information is measured implicitly by their looking behavior during recall. In a paradigm developed from Spivey and Geng (Spivey, M. J., & Geng, J. (2000). submitted for publication), participants were presented with pieces of auditory, semantic information as part of an event occurring in one of four regions of a computer screen. In front of a blank grid, they were asked a question relating to one of those facts. Under certain conditions it was found that during the question period participants made significantly more saccades to the empty region of space where the semantic information had been previously presented. Our findings are discussed in relation to previous research on memory and spatial location, the dorsal and ventral streams of the visual system, and the notion of a cognitive-perceptual system using spatial indexes to exploit the stability of the external world.     

Psychological distance and emotional experience: what you see is what you get

Recent research suggests that perceiving negative emotion-eliciting scenes approaching intensifies the associated felt emotion, while perceiving emotion-eliciting scenes receding weakens the associated felt emotion (Muhlberger, Neumann, Wieser, & Pauli, 2008). In the present studies, we sought to extend these findings by examining the effects of imagining rather than perceiving such changes to negative emotion-eliciting scenes. Across three studies, we found that negative scenes generally elicited less negative responses and lower levels of arousal when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking, and more negative responses and higher levels of arousal when imagined moving toward participants and growing, as compared to the responses elicited by negative scenes when imagined unchanged. Patterns in responses to neutral scenes undergoing the same imagined transformations were similar on ratings of emotional arousal, but differed on valence-generally eliciting greater positivity when imagined moving toward participants and growing, and less positivity when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking. Moreover, for these effects to emerge, participants reported it necessary to explicitly imagine scenes moving closer or farther. These findings have implications for emotion regulation, and suggest that imagined spatial distance plays a role in mental representations of emotionally salient events.     

Perception and perceptual-motor integration: there is a difference

Explored the independence of perceptual and perceptual-motor performance in a group of second graders with effects of chronological age and intelligence controlled. Resulting correlation indicated that 16% of the variance of one variable is predictable from the other variable, supporting the growing evidence that these two skills are to a large degree independent.     

Smelling what was there: Acquired olfactory percepts are resistant to further modification

Repeated exposure to a mixture of two odors can increase their perceived similarity to each other when presented separately. Experiment 1 failed to detect any reduction of this effect by an interference treatment consisting of separate exposures to the odors after they had first been presented as a mixture. Exposure to a mixture also results in participants mistakenly rating this mixture and its elements as having occurred with equal frequency (i.e., confusing the mixture and its elements). The interference treatment did not affect this either, whereas it did change judgments about the frequency of a color–odor mixture and its elements. The greater resistance to interference of odor–odor learning compared to color–odor learning may result from configural encoding of odor–odor mixtures. Experiment 2 found that separate exposures to two odors not previously mixed decreased their perceived similarity. This result was inconsistent with the possibility that the interference treatment in Experiment 1 had tended to increase the similarity of the two odors, for example, by a process of sensory adaptation. Rather it suggested a process akin to acquired distinctiveness.