Mill’s act-utilitarian interpreters on Utilitarianism chapter V paragraph 14

In the fourteenth paragraph of the fifth chapter of Utilitarianism, J. S. Mill writes that ‘We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow-creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience.’ I criticize the attempts of three commentators who have recently presented act-utilitarian readings of Mill – Roger Crisp, David Brink, and Piers Norris Turner – to accommodate this passage.     

The Interdisciplinarity of Collaborations in Cognitive Science

We introduce a new metric for interdisciplinarity, based on co‐author publication history. A published article that has co‐authors with quite different publication histories can be deemed relatively “interdisciplinary,” in that the article reflects a convergence of previous research in distinct sets of publication outlets. In recent work, we have shown that this interdisciplinarity metric can predict citations. Here, we show that the journal Cognitive Science tends to contain collaborations that are relatively high on this interdisciplinarity metric, at about the 80th percentile of all journals across both social and natural sciences. Following on Goldstone and Leydesdorff (2006), we describe how scientometric tools provide a valuable means of assessing the role of cognitive science in broader scientific work, and also as a tool to investigate teamwork and distributed cognition. We describe how data‐driven metrics of this kind may facilitate this exploration without relying upon rapidly changing discipline and topic keywords associated with publications.     

The cognitive dynamics of negated sentence verification

We explored the influence of negation on cognitive dynamics, measured using mouse-movement trajectories, to test the classic notion that negation acts as an operator on linguistic processing. In three experiments, participants verified the truth or falsity of simple statements, and we tracked the computer-mouse trajectories of their responses. Sentences expressing these facts sometimes contained a negation. Such negated statements could be true (e.g., "elephants are not small") or false (e.g., "elephants are not large"). In the first experiment, as predicted by the classic notion of negation, we found that negation caused more discreteness in the mouse trajectory of a response. The second experiment induced a simple context for these statements, yet negation still increased discreteness in trajectories. A third experiment enhanced the pragmatic context of sentences, and the discreteness was substantially diminished, with one primary measure no longer significantly showing increased discreteness at all. Traditional linguistic theories predict rapid shifts in cognitive dynamics occur due to the nature of negation: It is an operator that reverses the truth or falsity of an interpretation. We argue that these results support both propositional and contextual accounts of negation present in the literature, suggesting that contextual factors are crucial for determining the kind of cognitive dynamics displayed. We conclude by drawing broader lessons about theories of cognition from the case of negation.     

Listeners invest in an assumed other's perspective despite cognitive cost

We explored perspective-taking behavior in a visuospatial mental rotation task that requires listeners to adopt an egocentric or “other-centric” frame of reference. In the current task, objects could be interpreted relative to the point-of-view of the listener (egocentric) or of a simulated partner (other-centric). Across three studies, we evaluated participants’ willingness to consider and act on partner-specific information, showing that a partner’s perceived ability to contribute to collaborative mutual understanding modulated participants’ perspective-taking behavior, either by increasing other-centric (Study 2) or egocentric (Study 3) responding. Moreover, we show that a large proportion of participants resolved referential ambiguity in terms of their partner’s perspective, even when it was more cognitively difficult to do so (as tracked by online movement measures), and when the presence of a social partner had to be assumed (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, participants continued to consider their partner’s perspective during trials where visual perspectives were shared. Our results show that participants will thoroughly invest in either an other-centric or egocentric mode of responding, and that perspective-taking strategies are not always dictated by minimizing processing demands, but by more potent (albeit subtle) factors in the social context.     

Individual differences in dispositional focus of attention predict attentional blink magnitude

When identifying two targets presented in a rapid serial visual presentation stream, one’s accuracy on the second target is reduced if it is presented shortly (within 500 msec) after the first target—an attentional blink (AB). Individuals differ greatly in the size of their AB. One way to learn about the AB is to understand what underlies these individual differences. Recent studies have suggested that when a broadened or diffused attentional state is induced, the AB deficit can be attenuated. The present study examined whether natural (dispositional) individual differences in focus and diffusion of attention as assessed by the global/local task could predict performance on the AB task. Performance that was consistent with diffusion correlated negatively with AB size, and performance that was consistent with focusing correlated positively with AB size, showing that dispositional focus and diffusion of attention can predict individual differences in the AB. These findings are consistent with the Olivers and Nieuwenhuis (2006) overinvestment hypothesis.     

Predictors of verdict and punitive damages in high-stakes civil litigation

This research investigated demographic and attitudinal- psychological predictors of verdict and amount of punitive damages awarded in high-stakes civil litigation. Four hundred and forty-six surrogate jurors, selected to be representative of actual jurors, were exposed to realistic case presentations in insurance, tobacco, and pharmaceutical cases that were about to go to trial. Hierarchical regression revealed that perceptions of the existence of a litigation crisis predicted verdict in the tobacco and pharmaceutical cases after controlling for all other variables. Demographic variables predicted verdict and punitive damage awards only modestly and in different ways in the three cases. Need for cognition, strength of will and rationality, and a perception that there is a litigation crisis predicted the amount of punitive damages awarded in the tobacco case. Litigation crisis also predicted the amount of punitive damages awarded in the pharmaceutical case. Implications for jury selection are discussed.     

Bochenski on Property Identity and the Refutation of Universals

An argument against multiply instantiable universals is considered in neglected essays by Stanislaw Lesniewski and I.M. Bochenski. Bochenski further applies Lesniewski’s refutation of universals by maintaining that identity principles for individuals must be different than property identity principles. Lesniewski’s argument is formalized for purposes of exact criticism, and shown to involve both a hidden vicious circularity in the form of impredicative definitions and explicit self-defeating consequences. Syntactical restrictions on Leibnizian indiscernibility of identicals are recommended to forestall Lesniewski’s paradox.