The role of sound intensity and stop-consonant voicing on McGurk fusions and combinations

The present paper argues that generalisation is conservative. Our goal was to experimentally study the links between knowledge generalisation and the storage of contextual elements. The knowledge domain, very simple chess configurations, allowed subjects, novices in chess, to acquire micro-expertise based on the analysis of a single source problem. In the first experimental phase, subjects had to analyse a source problem. We induced two modes of source-problem encoding: In the first group, subjects were given explanations focused on the sequence of elementary solving steps; in the other group they were given the general principle relevant to the category of problems in question. Subjects had then to solve different tests (solving isomorphic problems, recall tests, similarity tests) designed to answer two questions: The first question was to test whether the experimental manipulation in the two groups had in fact generated knowledge that varied in abstractness; the second question was to determine whether generalisation is accompanied by storage of surface features of the source problem. Results show that the knowledge generalisation is conservative. Subjects who generalise their knowledge have a better memory retention of context-dependent elements than the other subjects.     

Negative evidence and inductive generalisation

How do people use past experience to generalise to novel cases? This paper reports four experiments exploring the significance on one class of past experiences: encounters with negative or contrasting cases. In trying to decide whether all ravens are black, what is the effect of learning about a non-raven that is not black? Two experiments with preschool-aged, young school-aged, and adult participants revealed that providing a negative example in addition to a positive example supports generalisation. Two additional experiments went on to ask which kinds of negative examples offer the most support for generalisations. These studies contrasted similarity-based and category-based accounts of inductive generalisation. Results supported category-based predictions, but only for preschool-aged children. Overall, the younger children showed a greater reliance on negative evidence than did older children and adults. Most things we encounter in the world are negative evidence for our generalisations. Understanding the role of negative evidence is central for psychological theories of inductive generalisation.     

Imitating Christ's Cross: Lonergan and Girard on How and Why

The article begins with the gospels’ admonition to take up one's cross and asks how Christians might understand Christ's work on the cross so that we might better imitate or participate in it. Using tools from recent advances in literary analysis and systematic theology, the article attempts to provide some answer to this question. It considers contemporary feminist and liberation theologians’ criticism of the common but problematic interpretation of Christ's cross, what is often called ‘substitutionary penal atonement.’ It compares this with Anselm's atonement theory of satisfaction and Bernard Lonergan's and René Girard's analysis of the cross as a communication of love that invites others into loving relationship. With these interpretations of Christ's work, it concludes with some thoughts on how Christians might take up their own daily crosses.     

What is interdisciplinary communication? Reflections on the very idea of disciplinary integration

In this paper I attempt to answer the question: What is interdisciplinary communication? I attempt to answer this question, rather than what some might consider the ontologically prior question—what is interdisciplinarity (ID)?—for two reasons: (1) there is no generally agreed-upon definition of ID; and (2) one’s views regarding interdisciplinary communication have a normative relationship with one’s other views of ID, including one’s views of its very essence. I support these claims with reference to the growing literature on ID, which has a marked tendency to favor the idea that interdisciplinary communication entails some kind of ‘integration’. The literature on ID does not yet include very many philosophers, but we have something valuable to offer in addressing the question of interdisciplinary communication. Playing somewhat fast-and-loose with traditional categories of the subdisciplines of philosophy, I group some philosophers—mostly from the philosophy of science, social–political philosophy, and moral theory—and some non-philosophers together to provide three different, but related, answers to the question of interdisciplinary communication. The groups are as follows: (1) Habermas–Klein, (2) Kuhn–MacIntyre, and (3) Bataille–Lyotard. These groups can also be thought of in terms of the types of answers they give to the question of interdisciplinary communication, especially in terms of the following key words (where the numbers correspond to the groups from the previous sentence): (1) consensus, (2) incommensurability, and (3) invention.     

TSUNAMI: Simultaneous Understanding,Answering, and Memory Interaction for Questions

Question processing involves parsing, memory retrieval, question categorization, initiation of appropriate answer-retrieval heuristics, answer formulation, and output. Computational and psychological models have traditionally treated these processes as separate, sequential, independent, and in pursuit of a single answer type at a time. Here this view is challenged and the implications of a theory in which question processes operate simultaneously on multiple question interpretations are explored. A highly interactive model is described in which an expectation-driven parser generates multiple question candidates, including partially-specified candidates. Question candidates act as constraints for a matcher which activates memory items. An answer retrieval process examines question candidates and the active portions of memory in an attempt to generate answer candidates. Answer candidates are examined by an output process that derives the final answer. These processes run simultaneously and interact. Three experiments on human question answering are also described which provide evidence that working memory load during question reading is affected by processes related to answer retrieval.     

Causal Generalisations in Policy-oriented Economic Research: An Inferentialist Analysis

The most common way of analysing the meaning of causal generalisations relies on referentialist semantics. In this article, we instead develop an analysis based on inferentialist semantics. According to this approach, the meaning of a causal generalisation is constituted by the web of inferential connections in which the generalisation participates. We distinguish and discuss five classes of inferential connections that constitute the meaning of causal generalisations produced in policy-oriented economic research. The usefulness of our account is illustrated with the analysis of generalisations about unemployment put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in its highly influential 1994 OECD Jobs Study. The article ends with a discussion of some crucial philosophical questions about the use of inferentialism in the analysis of causal generalisations.     

Relating familiarity-based recognition and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Detecting a word’s recency in the absence of access to the word

After viewing a list of single-word answers to general knowledge questions, participants received a test list containing general knowledge questions, some of whose answers were studied, and some of whose were not. Regardless of whether participants could provide the answer to a test question, they rated the likelihood that the answer had been studied. Across three experiments,participants consistently gave higher ratings to unanswerable questions whose answers were studied than to those whose answers were not studied. This discrimination ability persisted in the absence of reported tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states and when no information about the answer could be articulated. Studying a question's answer did not increase the likelihood of a later TOT state for that question, yet participants gave higher recognition ratings when in a TOT state than when not in a TOT state. A possible theoretical mechanism for the present pattern is discussed, as are relevant theories of familiarity-based recognition and of the TOT phenomenon.     

On the essence of empty properties

This paper deals with generalisations of modally based criteria for determining whether a given property is essential to an individual to the case of generic essences. These criteria usually presuppose extensionally individuated properties. The limitations of their generalisations are demonstrated using the case of the necessarily empty individual property and the necessarily empty individual office. I do not present a novel stance on the discussion of individual essences. The novelty of this paper lies in its claim that none of these criteria can be generalised to generic essences.

     

Children's event reports: Factors affecting responses to repeated questions in vignette scenarios and event recall interviews

When adults repeat questions, children often give inconsistent answers. This study aimed to test the claim that these inconsistencies occur because children infer that their first answer was unsatisfactory, and that the adult expects them to change their answer. Children aged 4, 6, and 8 years (N= 134) were asked about vignettes in which an adult repeated a question, with manipulation of the adult's overt dissatisfaction (high vs. low pressure) and knowledge about the information sought. On a separate occasion, the children were given an unrelated event recall interview containing repeated questions. All age groups showed sensitivity to adult dissatisfaction, interpreting question repetition as an implicit request for answer change more frequently in the high than in the low‐pressure vignettes. Overall, however, these ‘change‐expected’ interpretations were least frequent in the younger children, who were the most prone to shifting. Also there was no evidence that these interpretations were associated with more frequent shifting in the recall interview. The results do not provide clear support for a simple conversational inference account of shifting, especially in younger children.     

Priming and communication: Social determinants of information use in judgments of life satisfaction

Two experiments examined the effects of answering a question about a specific component of life satisfaction on respondents' assessment of their overall satisfaction with life. The results suggest that the use of primed information in forming subsequent judgments is determined by Grice's conversational norms. In general, answering the specific question increases the accessibility of information relevant to that question. However, the effect that this has on the general judgment depends on the way in which the two questions are presented. When the two questions are merely placed in sequence without a conversational context, the answer to the subsequent general question is based in part on the primed specific information. As a result, the answer to the general question becomes similar to that for the specific question (i.e. assimilation). However, this does not occur when the two questions are placed in a communication context. Conversational rules dictate that communicators should be informative and should avoid redundancy in their answers. Therefore, when a specific and a general question are perceived as belonging to the same conversational context, the information on which the answer to the specific question was based is disregarded when answering the general one. This attenuates the assimilation effect. The conditions under which these different processes occur are identified and experimentally manipulated, and the implications of these findings for models of information use in judgment are discussed.     

I—Liberty's Chains

Is the principal concern of political philosophy the source of political authority? And, if so, can this source be located in individual consent? In this article I draw on Rousseau to answer the second question negatively; and in rejecting that answer, why we might answer the first question in the negative as well. We should be concerned with questions of legitimacy rather than with the source of authority and political obligation. Our principal concern, that is, should be with the question how well political institutions meet the needs of individuals. I pursue these issues in the context of interpreting Rousseau's distinctive contribution to political thought. I start out by asking the question 'What problem is the General Will designed to solve?' I argue that Rousseau's challenge to Hobbes represents a crucial step in the move from the source of authority and political obligation to a focus on legitimacy.     

Algebraic reasoning and bat-and-ball problem variants: Solving isomorphic algebra first facilitates problem solving later

The classic bat-and-ball problem is used widely to measure biased and correct reasoning in decision-making. University students overwhelmingly tend to provide the biased answer to this problem. To what extent might reasoners be led to modify their judgement, and, more specifically, is it possible to facilitate problem solution by prompting participants to consider the problem from an algebraic perspective? One hundred ninety-seven participants were recruited to investigate the effect of algebraic cueing as a debiasing strategy on variants of the bat-and-ball problem. Participants who were cued to consider the problem algebraically were significantly more likely to answer correctly relative to control participants. Most of this cueing effect was confined to a condition that required participants to solve isomorphic algebra equations corresponding to the structure of bat-and-ball question types. On a subsequent critical question with differing item and dollar amounts presented without a cue, participants were able to generalize the learned information to significantly reduce overall bias. Math anxiety was also found to be significantly related to bat-and-ball problem accuracy. These results suggest that, under specific conditions, algebraic reasoning is an effective debiasing strategy on bat-and-ball problem variants, and provide the first documented evidence for the influence of math anxiety on Cognitive Reflection Test performance.     

Parity still isn't a generalisation problem

Clark & Thornton take issue with my claim that parity is not a generalisation problem, and that nothing can be inferred about back-propagation in particular, or learning in general, from failures of parity generalisation. They advance arguments to support their contention that generalisation is a relevant issue. In this continuing commentary, I examine generalisation more closely in order to refute these arguments. Different learning algorithms will have different patterns of failure: back-propagation has no special status in this respect. This is not to deny that a particular algorithm might fortuitously happen to produce the "intended" function in an (oxymoronic) parity-generalisation task.     

Base‐rates of Negative Traits: Instructions for Use in Criminal Trials

Decision‐makers in institutional and non‐institutional contexts are sometimes confronted with the issue of whether to use generalisations expressing the statistical incidence of a negative trait in a disadvantaged and discriminated‐against social group in order to draw an inference concerning a member of that group. If a criminal court were confronted with such a question, what answer should it give? First, the article argues that, our qualms notwithstanding, morality does not demand that these generalisations be disregarded. In doing so, the article addresses the relationship between factual accuracy and the demands of morality in criminal trials. Second, the article considers the implications of this conclusion for the legal question as to whether the evidence at issue should be excluded, in particular, on grounds of unfairness — pursuant to section 78(1) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.     

Hempel's Paradox, Law-likeness and Causal Relations

It is widely thought that Bayesian confirmation theory has provided a solution to Hempel's Paradox (the Ravens Paradox). I discuss one well-known example of this approach, by John Mackie, and argue that it is unconvincing. I then suggest an alternative solution, which shows that the Bayesian approach is altogether mistaken. Nicod's Condition should be rejected because a generalisation is not confirmed by any of its instances if it is not law-like. And even law-like non-basic empirical generalisations, which are expressions of assumed underlying causal regularities, are not so confirmed if they are absurd in the light of our causal background knowledge or if their instances are not also possible instances of the relevant causal claim.     

The use of pronoun anaphora and speaker mood in the interpretation of conversational utterances by right hemisphere brain-damaged patients.

Understanding utterances in conversations requires a listener to weigh the disparate pieces of information present in a discourse. In this study, we examined how right hemisphere brain-damaged (RHD) patients and non-brain-damaged control subjects interpreted responses to questions concerning the location of a person (e.g., "Where's Dad?"). Stimulus vignettes included variation on three factors relevant to discourse comprehension: the mood of a speaker, the plausibility of the answer to a question, and whether the answer contained an anaphoric pronoun linking the response to the preceding question. Relative to the control subjects, the RHD patients made greater than normal use of the presence/absence of an anaphoric pronoun in their utterance interpretations, less than normal use of the speaker's mood, and marginally less than normal use of a response's plausibility. These data show how RHD patients rely on their largely intact linguistic abilities when understanding discourse and how their comprehension goes awry due to their reduced appreciation of other essential aspects of natural communication. The discussion focuses on the variable roles of speaker mood, plausibility, and pronoun anaphora in supporting inferences about a speaker's intended meaning and on the selective nature of RHD patients' impairment in this domain.     

Locke and Hume on Belief, Judgment and Assent

Hume's account of belief has been much reviled, especially considered as an account of what it is to assent to or judge a proposition to be true. In fact, given that he thinks that thoughts about existence can be composed of a single idea, and that relations are just complex ideas, it might be wondered whether he has an account of judgment at all. Nonetheless, Hume was extremely proud of his account of belief, discussing it at length in the Abstract, and developing it in the Appendix. Furthermore, he claimed several times that his account was new. It was not just a new answer to an old question, but an answer to a new question as well. Why did Hume think he was raising, and answering, a new question? Is his answer really so appalling? Why did he define belief in terms of a relationship with a present impression? In this paper, I propose answers to these questions. The answers emerge by contrasting Hume with Locke. Locke thought that belief was a pale imitation of knowledge, and that the assent we give to propositions is constituted in the very same act as forming those propositions. Hume saw the problems such a theory faced concerning existential beliefs. By ceasing to treat existence as a predicate, Hume was confronted with the issue of what it was to judge something to be true, or to assent to something. This issue had to be solved independently of the question of what it was to conceive something, or understand the content of a proposition. Hume thought this problem was new. He should be looked at, not as giving a bad answer to an important question, but rather as being the first in the early modern period to recognize that there was an important question here to be answered.     

The artful dodger: answering the wrong question the right way

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). Listeners were not blind to all dodge attempts, however. Dodge detection increased when listeners' attention was diverted from social goals toward determining the relevance of the speaker's answers (Study 1), when speakers answered a question egregiously dissimilar to the one asked (Study 2), and when listeners' attention was directed to the question asked by keeping it visible during speakers' answers (Study 4). We also examined the interpersonal consequences of dodge attempts: When listeners were guided to detect dodges, they rated speakers more negatively (Study 2), and listeners rated speakers who answered a similar question in a fluent manner more positively than speakers who answered the actual question but disfluently (Study 3). These results add to the literatures on both Gricean conversational norms and goal-directed attention. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in the contexts of interpersonal communication and public debates.     

Unpriming: the deactivation of thoughts through expression

Unpriming is a decrease in the influence of primed knowledge following a behavior expressing that knowledge. The authors investigated strategies for unpriming the knowledge of an answer that is activated when people are asked to consider a simple question. Experiment 1 found that prior correct answering eliminated the bias people normally show toward correct responding when asked to answer yes-no questions randomly. Experiment 2 revealed that prior answering intended to be random did not unprime knowledge on subsequent attempts to answer randomly. Experiment 3 found that exposure to the correct answer did not influence the knowledge bias but that exposure to the incorrect answer increased bias. Experiment 4 revealed that merely expressing the answer for oneself was sufficient to unprime knowledge. Experiment 5 found that each item of activated knowledge needs to be unprimed specifically, in that correctly answering 1 question does not reduce the knowledge bias in randomly answering another.