The developmental paradox of false belief understanding: a dual-system solution

We explore the developmental paradox of false belief understanding. This paradox follows from the claim that young infants already have an understanding of false belief, despite the fact that they consistently fail the elicited-response false belief task. First, we argue that recent proposals to solve this paradox are unsatisfactory because they (i) try to give a full explanation of false belief understanding in terms of a single system, (ii) fail to provide psychological concepts that are sufficiently fine-grained to capture the cognitive requirements for the various manifestations of false belief understanding, and (iii) ignore questions about system interaction. Second, we present a dual-system solution to the developmental paradox of false belief understanding that combines a layered model of perspective taking with an inhibition-selection-representation mechanism that operates on different levels. We discuss recent experimental findings that shed light on the interaction between these two systems, and suggest a number of directions for future research.     

The Sexual Harassment Seminar: A cultural phenomenon of indoctrination into feminist ideology

I have been doing nationwide research on how faculty are accused of sexual harassment, and what happens afterwards. It is frightening—as due process is often absent, and faculty are often convicted merely on the alleged unhappy feelings of one female student or female employee (Eisenman, 1999).     

Two-state solution to the lottery paradox

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief.

     

A theory of truth based on a medieval solution to the liar paradox

After the 1930s, the research into the foundations of mathematics changed.None of its main directions (logicism, formalism and intuitionism) had any longer the pretension to be the only true mathematics.Usually, the determining factor in the change is considered to be Gödel’s work, while Heyting’s role is neglected.In contrast, in this paper I first describe how Heyting directly suggested the abandonment of the big foundational questions and the putting forward of a new kind of foundational research consisting in the isolation of formal, intuitive, logical and platonistic elements within classical mathematics.Furthermore, I describe how Heyting indirectly influenced the abandon‐ment of the old directions of foundational research by making out some lists of degrees of evidence that exist within intuitionism     

The paradox in Kierkegaard's religiousness A

The attempt to utilize the methods of science to justify one ethical code as opposed to another has the advantage of avoiding the dogmatism and question‐begging techniques characteristic of many traditional ethical theories. However, such attempts are invariably involved in value reductionism, leaving normative terms bereft of their normative import. Science is related to ethics in a number of important ways, but not in the sense that inductive evidence can justify one standard of right conduct as opposed to others.     

On a medieval solution to the liar paradox

In this paper, I examine a solution to the Liar paradox found in the work of Ockham, Burley, and Pseudo-Sherwood. I reject the accounts of this solution offered by modern commentators. I argue that this medieval line suggests a non-hierarchical solution to the Liar, according to which ‘true’ is analysed as an indexical term, and paradox is avoided by minimal restrictions on tokens of ‘true’. In certain respects, this solution resembles the recent approaches of Charles Parsons and Tyler Burge; in other respects, it is related to a suggestion of Gödel. But, as a whole, it suggests an original solution to the Liar paradox, quite unlike any current proposals.