Intentions are mental states

Richard Scheer has recently argued against what he calls the ‘mental state’ theory of intentions. He argues that versions of this theory fail to account for various characteristics of intention. In this essay we reply to Scheer's criticisms and argue that intentions are mental states.     

Why religious nationalists are not fundamentalists

J. W. Nicholas, Psience—a general theory of existence, Reality revealed—the theory of multidimensional reality Call Adonoi—manual of practical cabalah and gestalt mysticism The Expanding Force in Newton's Cosmos D. Vogt &; G. Sultan, Vector Associates, San Jose (California), 1977, 460 pp;

A. L. Schutz, Quantal, Goleta (California), 1980, 100 pp; D. Castillejo, Ediciones de Arte y Bibliofilia, Madrid, 1981, 125 pp     

Why metrical properties are not powers

What has the dispositional analysis of properties and laws (e.g. Molnar, Powers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003; Mumford, Laws in nature, Routledge London, 2004; Bird, Nature’s metaphysics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007) to offer to the scientific understanding of physical properties?—The article provides an answer to this question for the case of spacetime points and their metrical properties in General Relativity. The analysis shows that metrical properties are not ‘powers’, i.e. they cannot be understood as producing the effects of spacetime on matter with metaphysical necessity. Instead they possess categorical characteristics which, in connection with specific laws, explain those effects. Thus, the properties of spacetime do not favor the metaphysics of powers with respect to properties and laws.     

Performance bias: Why judgments of learning are not affected by learning

Past research has shown a performance bias: People expect their future performance level on a task to match their current performance level, even when there are good reasons to expect future performance to differ from current performance. One explanation of this bias is that judgments are controlled by what learners can observe, and while current performance is usually observable, changes in performance (i.e., learning or forgetting) are not. This explanation makes a prediction that we tested here: If learning becomes observable, it should begin to affect judgments. In three experiments, after practicing a skill, participants estimated how they performed in the past and how they expected to perform in the future. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants knew they had been improving, as shown by their responses, yet they did not predict that they would improve in the future. This finding was particularly striking because (a) they did improve in the future and (b) as Experiment 3 showed, they did hold the conscious belief that past improvement predicted future improvement. In short, when learning and performance are both observable, judgments of learning seem to be guided by performance and not learning.     

Why faces are and are not special: an effect of expertise

Recognition memory for faces is hampered much more by inverted presentation than is memory for any other material so far examined. The present study demonstrates that faces are not unique with regard to this vulnerability to inversion. The experiments also attempt to isolate the source of the inversion effect. In one experiment, use of stimuli (landscapes) in which spatial relations among elements are potentially important distinguishing features is shown not to guarantee a large inversion effect. Two additional experiments show that for dog experts sufficiently knowledgeable to individuate dogs of the same breed, memory for photographs of dogs of that breed is as disrupted by inversion as is face recognition. A final experiment indicates that the effect of orientation on memory for faces does not depend on inability to identify single features of these stimuli upside down. These experiments are consistent with the view that experts represent items in memory in terms of distinguishing features of a different kind than do novices. Speculations as to the type of feature used and neuropsychological and developmental implications of this accomplishment are offered.     

Self-Doubt: Why We are not Identical to Things of Any Kind

There are two fundamental aspects of the notion of a self: (i) it is the owner of one’s experiences, that to which one’s experiences are properly attributed, and (ii) it perceives itself. (ii) is a condition on the self’s being capable of attributing experiences to itself or being introspectively aware of its experiences, which constitutes a third, higher‐order aspect of the self. I claim that it is a common sense assumption, enshrined in the use of ‘I’, that one’s body satisfies the first two aspects. I then argue that these two aspects are not really satisfied by one’s body, which is essentially a human organism. Nor are they satisfied by anything of any other kind. So we are not identical to things of any kind, since one can be identical only to that which is one’s self or is the referent of one’s uses of ‘I’.     

Why mental content is not like water: reconsidering the reductive claims of teleosemantics

Synthese - According to standard teleosemantics, intentional states are selectional states. This claim is put forward not as a conceptual analysis, but as a ‘theoretical...     

Self-control and mechanisms of behavior: Why self-control is not a natural mental kind

In this paper, I argue for two main hypotheses. First, that (philosophical) self-control is not a natural mental kind and, second, that there is no dedicated mechanism of self-control (indeed, the latter claim forms part of my argument for the former). By the first claim, I simply mean that those behaviors we label as “self-controlled” are a somewhat arbitrarily selected hodgepodge that do not have anything in common that distinguishes them from other behaviors. In other words, self-control is a gerrymandered property that does not correspond to a natural mental or psychological kind. By the second claim, I mean that self-controlled behaviors are not produced by a mechanism (or a set of them) that is not utilized in the production of other (non-self-controlled) behaviors. Not only is there no natural mental property of self-control, there is no mechanism (such as willpower) that is dedicated to producing self-controlled behavior. I further evaluate whether this account of self-control has enough explanatory power to account for a range of phenomena related to self-control (systematic self-control failures, etc.). I argue that my account does a better job of explaining these phenomena than accounts which appeal to a dedicated self-control mechanism.     

Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken: A reply to Feltz and Millan

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan (2015 Feltz, A., &; Millan, M. (2015). An error theory for compatibilist intuitions. Philosophical Psychology, 28(4), 529–555.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy.     

Help yourself by helping others: The joint impact of group member organizational citizenship behaviors and group cohesiveness on group member objective task performance change

This paper examines how a group member's individual‐targeted citizenship behavior (OCBI) and organization‐targeted citizenship behavior (OCBO) interact with a salient group‐level contextual variable, group cohesiveness, to foster positive change for that group member, starting with job self‐efficacy change, and followed by objective task performance change. Over a span of 6 months, we engaged in multilevel, multisource, multistage data collection and surveyed 587 members in 83 work groups. Our results indicate that a group member's OCBI, in comparison with OCBO, is more positively related to his or her job self‐efficacy change. Group cohesiveness was found to attenuate the relationship between a group member's OCBI and job self‐efficacy change, and conversely, to accentuate the relationship between a group member's OCBO and job self‐efficacy change. Furthermore, a group member's job self‐efficacy change mediated the interactive effects of the group member's OCBI and group cohesiveness (as well as the group member's OCBO and group cohesiveness) on his or her objective task performance change.     

Effects of a group stereotype on memory for behaviors performed by a group member

Participants were provided with a group impression prior to receiving behavioral information pertaining to a group member. The group impression conveyed a below average level of intelligence or an above average level of intelligence. In addition, the distribution of intelligence scores within the group was unimodal in one condition and bimodal in another condition. The behavioral information pertaining to the individual group member was predominantly intelligent or predominantly unintelligent, thereby affording the on‐line formation of an intelligent or unintelligent personal impression regarding the group member. After receiving the behavioral information, participants recalled the behaviors and rated the group member along the intelligence dimension. Recall and judgment data revealed that the group impression functioned as the dominant expectancy that influenced processing of the behavioral information. Moreover, the effect of the group expectancy was substantially greater in the unimodal condition than in the bimodal condition. Presence of a group impression appears to reduce the tendency for participants to derive a personal impression on‐line, and reduce the tendency for participants to rely on a derived personal expectancy when encoding behaviors performed by a group member. Potential moderators of this effect are discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fractions but not negative numbers are represented on the mental number line

The present study is the first to directly compare numerical representations of positive numbers, negative numbers and unit fractions. The results show that negative numbers and unit fractions were not represented in the same way. Distance effects were found when positive numbers were compared with fractions but not when they were compared with negative numbers, thus suggesting that unit fractions but not negative numbers were represented on the number line with positive numbers. As indicated by the semantic congruity effect, negative numbers were perceived to be small, positive numbers were perceived as large, while unit fractions were perceived neither as large nor small. Comparisons between negative numbers were faster than between unit fractions, possibly due to the smaller differences between the holistic magnitudes of the unit fractions. Finally, comparing unit fractions to 1 was faster than comparing them to 0, consistent with the idea that unit fractions are perceived as entities smaller than 1 (Kallai & Tzelgov, 2009). The results are consistent with the idea of a mental division between numbers that represent a quantity (positive numbers and unit fractions) and those that do not (negative numbers).     

More than skin deep: visceral states are not projected onto dissimilar others

What people feel shapes their perceptions of others. In the studies reported here, we examined the assimilative influence of visceral states on social judgment. Replicating prior research, we found that participants who were outside during winter overestimated the extent to which other people were bothered by cold (Study 1), and participants who ate salty snacks without water thought other people were overly bothered by thirst (Study 2). However, in both studies, this effect evaporated when participants believed that the other people under consideration held political views opposing their own. Participants who judged these dissimilar others were unaffected by their own strong visceral-drive states, a finding that highlights the power of dissimilarity in social judgment. Dissimilarity may thus represent a boundary condition for embodied cognition and inhibit an empathic understanding of shared out-group pain. Our findings reveal the need for a better understanding of how people's internal experiences influence their perceptions of the feelings and experiences of those who may hold values different from their own.