Truth in Fiction,Impossible Worlds,and Belief Revision

We present a theory of truth in fiction that improves on Lewis's [1978] ‘Analysis 2’ in two ways. First, we expand Lewis's possible worlds apparatus by adding non-normal or impossible worlds. Second, we model truth in fiction as (make-believed) belief revision via ideas from dynamic epistemic logic. We explain the major objections raised against Lewis's original view and show that our theory overcomes them.     

Quantified modal logic: Non-normal worlds and propositional attitudes

One way to obtain a comprehensive semantics for various systems of modal logic is to use a general notion of non-normal world. In the present article, a general notion of modal system is considered together with a semantic framework provided by such a general notion of non-normal world. Methodologically, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a logical framework for the study of various modalities, notably prepositional attitudes. Some specific systems are studied together with semantics using non-normal worlds of different kinds.     

A General Family of Preferential Belief Removal Operators

Most belief change operators in the AGM tradition assume an underlying plausibility ordering over the possible worlds which is transitive and complete. A unifying structure for these operators, based on supplementing the plausibility ordering with a second, guiding, relation over the worlds was presented in Booth et al. (Artif Intell 174:1339–1368, 2010). However it is not always reasonable to assume completeness of the underlying ordering. In this paper we generalise the structure of Booth et al. (Artif Intell 174:1339–1368, 2010) to allow incomparabilities between worlds. We axiomatise the resulting class of belief removal functions, and show that it includes an important family of removal functions based on finite prioritised belief bases.     

Relevant possibilities

There are a number of relevant alternatives accounts of knowledge in the literature, including those by contextualists (like Lewis and Cohen), and invariantists (like Dretske). Despite widespread discussion of such views, an explication of the notion of relevance is conspicuously absent from the literature. Without a careful explication of that notion, relevant alternatives accounts resist evaluation. This paper attempts to aid in the evaluation of those accounts, by providing an account of relevance. The account rejects two common presuppositions about the notion of relevance. The account holds that worlds, rather than alternatives, are relevant, and that distant worlds can be relevant. Relevant worlds turn out to be those worlds at which an alternative to one’s belief obtains, and is such that one’s epistemic position (with respect to what one believes at the actual world) is worse than it is at the actual world.     

Reasoning with prioritized information by iterative aggregation of distance functions

We introduce a general framework for reasoning with prioritized propositional data by aggregation of distance functions. Our formalism is based on a possible world semantics, where conclusions are drawn according to the most ‘plausible’ worlds (interpretations), namely: the worlds that are as ‘close’ as possible to the set of premises, and, at the same time, are as ‘faithful’ as possible to the more reliable (or important) information in this set. This implies that the consequence relations that are induced by our framework are derived from a pre-defined metric on the space of interpretations, and inferences are determined by a ranking function applied to the premises. We study the basic properties of the entailment relations that are obtained by this framework, and relate our approach to other methods of maintaining incomplete and inconsistent information, most specifically in the contexts of (iterated) belief revision, consistent query answering in database systems, and integration of prioritized data sources.     

Impossible Worlds

Impossible worlds are representations of impossible things and impossible happenings. They earn their keep in a semantic or metaphysical theory if they do the right theoretical work for us. As it happens, a worlds‐based account provides the best philosophical story about semantic content, knowledge and belief states, cognitive significance and cognitive information, and informative deductive reasoning. A worlds‐based story may also provide the best semantics for counterfactuals. But to function well, all these accounts need use of impossible and as well as possible worlds. So what are impossible worlds? Graham Priest claims that any of the usual stories about possible worlds can be told about impossible worlds, too. But far from it. I'll argue that impossible worlds cannot be genuine worlds, of the kind proposed by Lewis, McDaniel or Yagisawa. Nor can they be ersatz worlds on the model proposed by Melia or Sider. Constructing impossible worlds, it turns out, requires novel metaphysical resources.     

Exploring the existential function of religion and supernatural agent beliefs among christians, muslims, atheists, and agnostics

Building on research suggesting one primary function of religion is the management of death awareness, the present research explored how supernatural beliefs are influenced by the awareness of death, for whom, and how individuals' extant beliefs determine which god(s), if any, are eligible to fulfill that function. In Study 1, death reminders had no effect among Atheists, but enhanced Christians' religiosity, belief in a higher power, and belief in God/Jesus and enhanced denial of Allah and Buddha. Similarly, death reminders increased Muslims' religiosity and belief in a higher power, and led to greater belief in Allah and denial of God/Jesus and Buddha (Study 2). Finally, in Study 3, death reminders motivated Agnostics to increase their religiosity, belief in a higher power, and their faith in God/Jesus, Buddha, and Allah. The studies tested three potential theoretical explanations and were consistent with terror management theory's worldview defense hypothesis. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology and Divine Revelation

Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology (ALVE) states that for S to have knowledge, S must have a virtuously formed safe true belief. S’s belief that p is safe if, in most near-by possible worlds where S’s belief is formed in the same manner as in the actual world, S’s belief is true. S’s safe belief that p is virtuously formed if S’s safe belief is formed using reliable and well-integrated cognitive processes and it is to S’s credit that she formed the belief. In this paper, I offer a novel counterexample to ALVE. I offer a case where an individual forms a belief on the basis of divine revelation. Intuitively the person has knowledge, but ALVE predicts otherwise. The upshot is not only that we have a counter example to ALVE, but also, that ALVE may not serve the needs of an adequate religious epistemology.     

What are impossible worlds?

In this paper, I argue for a particular conception of impossible worlds. Possible worlds, as traditionally understood, can be used in the analysis of propositions, the content of belief, the truth of counterfactuals, and so on. Yet possible worlds are not capable of differentiating propositions that are necessarily equivalent, making sense of the beliefs of agents who are not ideally rational, or giving truth values to counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents. The addition of impossible worlds addresses these issues. The kinds of impossible worlds capable of performing this task are not mysterious sui generis entities, but sets of structured propositions that are themselves constructed out of possible worlds and relations. I also respond to a worry that these impossible worlds are unable to represent claims about the shape of modal space itself.     

Sociolinguistic awareness and false belief in young Cantonese learners of English

In this study, we examined whether sociolinguistic awareness and false belief were uniquely related in 3- and 4-year-old Cantonese-speaking children learning English as a second language. The English-use background of these children varied so that they possessed sociolinguistic awareness to different degrees. Results indicated that sociolinguistic awareness predicted false belief uniquely after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, English vocabulary, and family income for both the second language learners and the more balanced bilinguals. The group difference in false belief was adequately explained by the corresponding difference in sociolinguistic awareness over and above the other variables. Such findings provide evidence for the claim that false belief understanding is critically related to sociolinguistic awareness, which in turn is influenced by how a second language is learned.     

Explaining the Relationship between Religiosity and Political Participation: The Mediating Roles of Transcendent Accountability and Religiopolitical Awareness

Prior research tends to find a positive relationship between religiosity and political participation. Explanations of this relationship have focused mostly on religiosity-generated organizational resources (e.g., civic skills), while paying less attention to psychological resources. We simultaneously examined different aspects of religiosity (belief, behavior, and belonging) and political participation (electoral and nonelectoral) in a structural equation model with two psychological resources as mediators: (1) “transcendent accountability”—seeing oneself as responsible to God or a higher power for one's impact on other people and the environment, and (2) “religiopolitical awareness”—perceiving the influence of one's religion and/or spirituality on one's political views and activities. Results from analyzing survey data from a US representative sample showed that transcendent accountability and religiopolitical awareness, whether together or awareness only, mediated positive relationships between religiosity (belief, private and public behaviors, and membership) and political participation (voting and other political activity), highlighting key psychological motivators of political participation.     

Beliefless Knowing

Orthodox epistemology tells us that knowledge requires belief. While there has been resistance to orthodoxy on this point, the orthodox position has been ably defended and continues to be widely endorsed. In what follows, I aim to undermine the belief requirement on knowledge. I first show that awareness does not require belief. Next, I turn my attention to the relation between knowledge and awareness, showing that awareness entails knowledge in a certain range of cases and thus that the cases of awareness without belief that I discuss are also cases of knowledge without belief. Throughout I draw attention to the fact that these are not isolated cases and that beliefless knowledge is a rather common phenomenon. I conclude by arguing that beliefless knowledge is consistent with the idea that all knowledge is grounded in belief and the idea that knowledge is essentially a representational state.     

Death awareness and body–self dualism: A why and how of afterlife belief

Belief in life after death offers potential comfort in the face of inevitable death. However, afterlife belief likely requires not only an awareness of death but also body–self dualism—the perception that the self (e.g., the mind) is distinct from the physical, undeniably mortal, body. In turn, we hypothesized that mortality salience (MS) should heighten afterlife belief only when dualism is facilitated. Study 1 found that MS increased belief for people high, relative to low, in trait mind–body dualism. In Study 2, MS only increased belief when people first wrote about their thoughts and personality, which a pilot study confirmed facilitated dualistic belief, relative to thinking about the physical self. Study 3 used the brain–computer interface technology to induce a dualistic experience: MS increased belief when participants accurately “typed” without the use of their external body (i.e., no hands). Together, these findings support the position that mortality awareness and body–self dualism constitute a “why” and “how” of afterlife belief. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Against global method safety

The global method safety account of knowledge states that an agent’s true belief that p is safe and qualifies as knowledge if and only if it is formed by method M, such that her beliefs in p and her beliefs in relevantly similar propositions formed by M in all nearby worlds are true. This paper argues that global method safety is too restrictive. First, the agent may not know relevantly similar propositions via M because the belief that p is the only possible outcome of M. Second, there are cases where there is a fine-grained belief that is unsafe and a relevantly similar coarse-grained belief (with looser truth conditions) that is safe and where both beliefs are based on the same method M. Third, the reliability of conditional reasoning, a basic belief-forming method, seems to be sensitive to fine-grained contents, as suggested by the wide variation in success rates for thematic versions of the Wason selection task.

     

Spurious Latent Class Problem in the Mixed Rasch Model: A Comparison of Three Maximum Likelihood Estimation Methods under Different Ability Distributions

Recent research has shown that over-extraction of latent classes can be observed in the Bayesian estimation of the mixed Rasch model when the distribution of ability is non-normal. This study examined the effect of non-normal ability distributions on the number of latent classes in the mixed Rasch model when estimated with maximum likelihood estimation methods (conditional, marginal, and joint). Three information criteria fit indices (Akaike information criterion, Bayesian information criterion, and sample size adjusted BIC) were used in a simulation study and an empirical study. Findings of this study showed that the spurious latent class problem was observed with marginal maximum likelihood and joint maximum likelihood estimations. However, conditional maximum likelihood estimation showed no overextraction problem with non-normal ability distributions.     

Where to look first for children's knowledge of false beliefs

Recent research has shown that, although young children have a substantial knowledge of beliefs as internal mental states, they have considerable difficulty in understanding how a false belief can lead to an outcome which is in conflict with a desire. However, this evidence has come from tasks which assume that children follow an experimenter's "implicatures" in conversation and interpret the question "Where will a person (with the false belief) look for the object?" to mean "Where will the person look first?" rather than "Where will the person have to look (or go to look) to find the object?" In our investigation, even 3-year-olds often responded correctly when asked to predict the initial behavior of a story character with a false belief. We discuss these results in terms of the conversational worlds of children and adults.     

Are belief‐based justifications associated with metalinguistic awareness? A cross‐sectional study in school‐age children

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false‐belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross‐sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the association between FB understanding, belief‐based justifications and metalinguistic awareness. A sample of 150 children primary‐school children between 8 and 11 years of age were administered a test of receptive language, a second‐order theory‐of‐mind task and a comprehensive metalinguistic battery. The results of correlational and regression analyses showed that explicit metalinguistic awareness (in particular, performance in the Ambiguity and Phonemic Segmentation subtests) was significantly predicted by children's belief‐based responses to the justification question in the theory of mind task but only for children with small receptive vocabularies; in contrast, FB understanding made no independent contribution (either alone or in interaction with other measures). These findings complement and advance existing data by showing that, in school‐age children, the association between the 2 domains involves more mature, verbally explicit levels of FB understanding and metalinguistic awareness.

Highlights

• We examined the relation between metalinguistic awareness and theory‐of‐mind in primary‐school children.
• Metalinguistic awareness was associated to belief‐based justifications, but only for children with small vocabulary.
• In school‐age children the ability to provide verbal justifications plays a key role in the relation between theory‐of‐mind and metalinguistic awareness.

     

Interpersonal Attachment and Patterns of Ideological Belief

We examine whether two general dimensions of sociopolitical belief—right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO)—are rooted in insecure psychological attachment. Based on an undergraduate sample ( N =  255), we model the relations among attachment styles, general worldviews, RWA, and SDO. A structural equation model indicated that anxious attachment led to RWA but not SDO and that this effect was mediated by the belief that the world is a dangerous place. In contrast, avoidant attachment led to SDO but not RWA, and this effect was mediated by the belief that the world is an uncaring, competitive jungle in which people are motivated to maximize personal utility. We discuss the implications of these findings for the nature and origins of political conservatism.     

Belief in Supernatural Evil and Mental Health: Do Secure Attachment to God and Gender Matter?

This study examines whether belief in supernatural evil is associated with mental health. In addition, it assesses how secure attachment to God moderates this association and how gender conditions the moderating effect of secure attachment to God. Among a variety of mental health outcomes, this study focuses on general mental health problems as well as anxiety-related disorders (e.g., general anxiety, social anxiety, and paranoia). Using data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey (N = 1,627), the analyses reveal that belief in supernatural evil is positively associated with general anxiety and paranoia. In addition, secure attachment to God buffers the positive associations between belief in supernatural evil and social anxiety and paranoia. Yet, when general mental health problems and general anxiety serve as the outcome measures, secure attachment to God attenuates the positive associations of belief in supernatural evil with mental health only for women, but not men. These results underscore the ways that religious beliefs have both positive and negative implications for mental health. Furthermore, they highlight the importance of gender in the complex relationships between religious beliefs and mental health.     

Interpretations of intuitionist logic in non-normal modal logics

Historically, it was the interpretations of intuitionist logic in the modal logic S4 that inspired the standard Kripke semantics for intuitionist logic. The inspiration of this paper is the interpretation of intuitionist logic in the non-normal modal logic S3: an S3 model structure can be 'looked at' as an intuitionist model structure and the semantics for S3 can be 'cashed in' to obtain a non-normal semantics for intuitionist propositional logic. This non-normal semantics is then extended to intuitionist quantificational logic.