The affective consequences of expected and unexpected outcomes

How do people feel about unexpected positive and negative outcomes? Decision affect theory (DAT) proposes that people feel displeasure when their outcomes fall short of the counterfactual alternative and elated when their outcomes exceed the counterfactual alternative. Because disconfirmed expectations provide a counterfactual alternative, DAT predicts that bad outcomes feel worse when unexpected than when expected, yet good outcomes feel better when unexpected than when expected. Consistency theories propose that people experience displeasure when their expectations are disconfirmed because the disconfirmation suggests an inability to predict. According to consistency theories, both good and bad outcomes feel worse when unexpected than when expected. These two theoretical approaches were tested in three studies. The results consistently support DAT     

The epistemological objection to modal primitivism

Modal primitivists hold that some modal truths are primitively true. They thus seem to face a special epistemological problem: how can primitive modal truths be known? The epistemological objection has not been adequately developed in the literature. I undertake to develop the objection, and then to argue that the best formulation of the epistemological objection targets all realists about modality, rather than the primitivist alone. Furthermore, the moves available to reductionists in response to the objection are also available to primitivists. I conclude by suggesting that extant theories of the epistemology of modality are not sensitive to the question of primitivism versus reductionism.

     

The phenomenon objection to conceptual engineering

Philosophical Studies - Conceptual engineering is sometimes presented as an alternative to conceptual analysis. But one important objection to conceptual analysis threatens to carry across: that...     

The rights and wrongs of consequentialism

I argue that the strongest form of consequentialism is one which rejects the claim that we are morally obliged to bring about the best available consequences, but which continues to assert that what there is most reason to do is bring about the best available consequences. Such an approach promises to avoid common objections to consequentialism, such as demandingness objections. Nevertheless, the onus is on the defender of this approach either to offer her own account of what moral obligations we do face, or to explain why offering such a theory is ill-advised. I consider, and reject, one attempt at the second sort of strategy, put forward by Alastair Norcross, who defends a ‘scalar’ consequentialism which eschews the moral concepts of right, wrong and obligation, and limits itself to claims about what is better and worse. I go on to raise some considerations which suggest that no systematic consequentialist theory of our moral obligations will be plausible, and propose instead that consequentialism should have a more informal and indirect role in shaping what we take our moral obligations to be.     

The disappearing agent objection to event-causal libertarianism

The question I raise is whether Mark Balaguer’s event-causal libertarianism can withstand the disappearing agent objection. The concern is that with the causal role of the events antecedent to a decision already given, nothing settles whether the decision occurs, and so the agent does not settle whether the decision occurs. Thus it would seem that in this view the agent will not have the control in making decisions required for moral responsibility. I examine whether Balaguer’s position has the resources to answer this objection.     

Objective consequentialism and the licensing dilemma

Frank Jackson has put forward a famous thought experiment of a physician who has to decide on the correct treatment for her patient. Subjective consequentialism tells the physician to do what intuitively seems to be the right action, whereas objective consequentialism fails to guide the physician’s action. I suppose that objective consequentialists want to supplement their theory so that it guides the physician’s action towards what intuitively seems to be the right treatment. Since this treatment is wrong according to objective consequentialism, objective consequentialists have to license it without calling it right. I consider eight strategies to spell out the idea of licensing the intuitively right treatment and argue that objective consequentialism is on the horns of what I call the licensing dilemma: Either the physician’s action is not guided towards the intuitively right treatment. Or the guidance towards the intuitively right treatment is ad hoc in some respect or the other.     

Actual utility,the mismatch problem,and the move to expected utility

The mismatch problem for consequentialism arises whenever the theory delivers mismatched verdicts between a group act and the individual acts that compose it. A natural thought is that moving to expected utility versions of consequentialism will solve this problem. I explain why the move to expected utility is not successful.     

The explanatory objection to the fitting attitude analysis of value

Philosophical Studies - The fitting attitude analysis of value states that for objects to have value is for them to be the fitting targets of attitudes. Good objects are the fitting targets of...     

The effects of expected reward on creative problem solving

Creative problem solving involves search processes, and it is known to be hard to motivate. Reward cues have been found to enhance performance across a range of tasks, even when cues are presented subliminally, without being consciously detected. It is uncertain whether motivational processes, such as reward, can influence problem solving. We tested the effect of supraliminal and subliminal reward on participant performance on problem solving that can be solved by deliberate analysis or by insight. Forty-one participants attempted to solve 100 compound remote associate problems. At the beginning of each problem, a potential reward cue (1 or 25 cents) was displayed, either subliminally (17 ms) or supraliminally (100 ms). Participants earned the displayed reward if they solved the problem correctly. Results showed that the higher subliminal reward increased the percentage of problems solved correctly overall. Second, we explored if subliminal rewards preferentially influenced solutions that were achieved via a sudden insight (mostly processed below awareness) or via a deliberate analysis. Participants solved more problems via insight following high subliminal reward when compared with low subliminal reward, and compared with high supraliminal reward, with no corresponding effect on analytic solving. Striatal dopamine (DA) is thought to influence motivation, reinforce behavior, and facilitate cognition. We speculate that subliminal rewards activate the striatal DA system, enhancing the kinds of automatic integrative processes that lead to more creative strategies for problem solving, without increasing the selectivity of attention, which could impede insight.     

Grounding and the luck objection to agent-causal libertarianism

Philosophical Studies - Many philosophers think there is a luck problem confronting libertarian models of free will. If free actions are undetermined, then it seems to be a matter of chance or luck...     

The affective consequences of artistic and scientific problem solving

Abstract

Although the influence of affect on creativity has received some theoretical and empirical attention, the role of affect as a consequence of creative problem solving has been neglected. This study is the one of the first to examine empirically the affect that results from creative problem solving. In a 2 (group) × 3 (time period) × 2 (task) factorial design, 122 art and science students were randomly assigned to complete an art or science task and to report on the kind and intensity of affect before, during, and after creative problem solving. It was predicted that art and science students would report different levels of affect only after the insight, not before or during, and that the effects of task, not just group, would contribute to affective variability between art and science students. Science students reported similar levels of (positive) affective intensity before and during creative insight as art students. It was only after the insight that art students reported more intense affective experiences than science students. Task differences accounted for a significant amount of variance in affective intensities, but primarily for art-oriented subjects. These findings suggest that viewing affect as a dependent variable of cognition, rather than primarily as an independent variable, is a direction that would benefit the field of empirical work on cognition and emotion. Current cognitive theories of emotion offer much potential in understanding the affective consequences of creative problem solving.     

Updating metacognitive control in response to expected retention intervals

In five experiments, we investigated whether expected retention intervals affect subjects’ encoding strategies. In the first four experiments, our subjects studied paired associates consisting of words from the Graduate Record Exam and a synonym. They were told to expect a test on a word pair after either a short or a longer interval. Subjects were tested on most pairs after the expected retention interval. For some pairs, however, subjects were tested after the other retention interval, allowing for a comparison of performance at a given retention interval conditional upon the expected retention interval. No effect of the expected retention interval was found for 1 min versus 4 min (Exp. 1), 30 s versus 3 min (Exp. 2), and 30 s versus 10 min (Exps. 3 and 4), even when subjects were given complete control over the pacing of study items (Exp. 4). However, when the difference between the expected retention intervals was increased massively (10 min vs. 24 h; Exp. 5), subjects remembered more items that they expected to be tested sooner, an effect consistent with the idea that they traded off efforts to remember items for the later test versus items that were about to be tested. Overall, this set of results accords with much of the test-expectancy literature, revealing that subjects are often reluctant to adjust encoding strategies on an item-by-item basis, and when they do, they usually make quantitative, rather than qualitative, adjustments.     

The revisionist's rubric: conceptual engineering and the discontinuity objection

This paper is about conceptual engineering (CE). Specifically, it discusses a common objection to CE, which I call the Discontinuity Objection. According to the Discontinuity Objection, CE leads to problematic discontinuities in subject and/or inquiry – making it philosophically uninteresting or irrelevant. I argue that a conceptual engineer can dismiss the Discontinuity Objection by showing that the pre-engineering concept persists through the proposed changes. In other words, the Discontinuity Objection does not apply if the proposal involves identity-preserving changes. Two existing views on identity-preserving changes are considered and rejected. I then argue that an identity-preserving conceptual change is one that allows the concept to continue to perform its function. A concept’s function is its job, its point and purpose, its role in a conceptual repertoire. In a slogan: Preserve a concept’s function, and you preserve the concept itself; preserve the concept, and you preserve the subject. The paper concludes by discussing some implications of this view.     

Presentism and the objection from being-supervenience

In this paper, we show that presentism—the view that the way things are is the way things presently are—is not undermined by the objection from being-supervenience. This objection claims, roughly, that presentism has trouble accounting for the truth-value of past-tense claims. Our demonstration amounts to the articulation and defence of a novel version of presentism. This is brute past presentism, according to which the truth-value of past-tense claims is determined by the past understood as a fundamental aspect of reality different from things and how things are.