Realizing what might be

Schulz has shown that the suppositional view of indicative conditionals leads to a corresponding view of epistemic modals. But his case backfires: the resulting theory of epistemic modals gets the facts wrong, and so we end up with a good argument against the suppositional view. I show how and why a dynamic view of indicative conditionals leads to a better theory of epistemic modals.     

Imagining what might be: why children underestimate uncertainty

Children’s well-documented tendency to behave as if they know more than they do about uncertain events is reduced under two conditions: when the outcome of a chance event has yet to be determined and when one unknown outcome has occurred but is difficult to imagine. In Experiment 1, in line with published findings, 5- and 6-year-olds (N = 61) preferred to guess the unknown location of a known object when the object was in place rather than before its location had been determined. There was no such preference when the object’s identity was unknown. In Experiment 2, 29 5- and 6-year-olds were more likely to correctly mark both possible locations when an already hidden object’s identity was unknown rather than known. We conclude that children’s vivid imaginations can lead them to underestimate uncertainty in a similar way to imagination inflation or fluency effects in adults.     

What God might be

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - As Plato suggested, the cosmos may exist because this is ethically necessary. It then might well consist of infinitely many minds, each itself...     

Ways an actualist might be

I discuss Stalnaker’s views on modality. In particular, his views on actualism, anti-essentialism, counterpart theory, and the Barcan formulas.

The future,and what might have been

Philosophical Studies - We show that five important elements of the ‘nomological package’—laws, counterfactuals, chances, dispositions, and counterfactuals—needn’t be...     

Wondering about the future

Philosophical Studies - Will it rain tomorrow? Will there be a sea battle tomorrow? Will my death be painful? Wondering about the future plays a central role in our cognitive lives. It is integral...     

Temporal and causal order effects in thinking about what might have been

When people think counterfactually about what might have been different for a sequence of events, they are influenced by the order in which the events occurred. They tend to mentally undo the most recent event in a temporal sequence of two events. But they tend to mentally undo the first event in a causal sequence of four events. We report the results of two experiments that show that the temporal and causal order effects are not dependent on the number of events in the sequence. Our first experiment, with 300 participants, shows that the temporal order effect occurs for sequences with four events as well as for sequences with two events. Our second experiment, with 372 participants, shows that the causal order effect occurs for sequences with two events as well as for sequences with four events. We discuss the results in terms of the mental representations that people construct of temporal and causal sequences.     

How the ventral pathway got lost: and what its recovery might mean

Textbooks dealing with the anatomical representation of language in the human brain display two language-related zones, Broca's area and Wernicke's area, connected by a single dorsal fiber tract, the arcuate fascicle. This classical model is incomplete. Modern imaging techniques have identified a second long association tract between the temporal and prefrontal language zones, taking a ventral course along the extreme capsule. This newly identified ventral tract connects brain regions needed for language comprehension, while the well-known arcuate fascicle is used for "sensorimotor mapping" during speech production. More than 130 years ago, Carl Wernicke already described a ventral connection for language, almost identical to the present results, but during scientific debate in the following decades either its function or its existence were rejected. This article tells the story of how this knowledge was lost and how the ventral connection, and in consequence the dual system, fits into current hypotheses and how language relates to other systems.