Necessity of origins and multi-origin art

The Necessity of Origins is the thesis that, necessarily, if a material object wholly originates from some particular material, then it could not have wholly originated from any significantly non-overlapping material. Several philosophers have argued for this thesis using as a premise a principle that we call ‘Single Origin Necessity’. However, we argue that Single Origin Necessity is false. So any arguments for The Necessity of Origins that rely on Single Origin Necessity are unsound. We also argue that the Necessity of Origins itself is false. Our arguments rely on a thesis in the ontology of art that we find plausible: Multi-Work Materialism. It is the thesis that works of art that have multiple concrete manifestations are co-located with those manifestations.     

Stop talking about fake news!

Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are either nonsense, context-sensitive, or contested. Secondly, that these terms are unnecessary, because we already have a rich vocabulary for thinking about epistemic dysfunction. Thirdly, I observe that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ have propagandistic uses, meaning that using these terms legitimates anti-democratic propaganda, and risks smuggling bad ideology into conversations.     

Color constancy and dispositionalism

This article attempts to do two things. The first is to make it plausible that any adequate dispositional view of color will have to associate colors with complex functions from a wide range of normal circumstances to a wide range of (simultaneously) incompatible color appearances, so that there will be no uniquely veridical appearance of any given color. The second is to show that once this move is made, dispositionalism is in a position to provide interesting answers to some of the most challenging objections that have been pressed against it. It explains why colors do not seem to “come on” when the lights come on, and why the right thing to say seems to be that the light causes the objects to reveal their colors. It explains why the content of visual experience need not be problematically circular. It eliminates the problem of intrapersonal variation in color appearance. And it even provides resources for dealing with the problem of interpersonal variation. It is true that in moving to the more complex view, the dispositionalist becomes subject to a new objection, which has been called “the problem of unity.” The paper offers a solution to this problem as well.     

The Importance of Philosophy: Reflections on John Rawls

This paper tackles the question whet her we should punish a remorseful offender. Traditional retributive and consequentialist theories on punishment are struggling with the question of the justification of punishment, but I think a more basic question needs to be solved first; namely, how can we interpret the practice of punishment. I state that a theory of symbolic restoration can help us to understand the meaning of this practice. A theory of symbolic restoration depends on an expressivist account of punishment, like Joel Feinberg's. Expressivism gives us an insight into the importance of the feeling of moral condemnation and it is this feeling that gives rise to the longing for punishment and remorse. Because of moral condemnation after a crime we ask for punishment and expect some kind of remorse. The question is whether punishment can be exchanged for remorse and I argue that in certain cases it cannot. The punishment of a remorseful offender is, I argue, – in certain cases – justified.     

Ideomotor perception modulates visuospatial cueing

The ideomotor theory of action posits that the cognitive representation of an action includes the learned perceptual effects of the action. Support for this theory has come from studies demonstrating how perceptual features that match the outcome of a response can facilitate selection of that response. We investigated another, complementary implication of ideomotor theory: would a bias toward selecting a response result in a perceptual bias toward the known effect of the response? In other words, would an action tendency direct attention to the anticipated perceptual features? Through an initial acquisition phase, participants learned that two possible responses (left/right keypress) consistently produced two distinct colors. Next, in a test phase, we manipulated response bias at the beginning of each trial, using an uninformative spatial prime presented at the left or right periphery. We then examined the extent to which color transients that either matched or mismatched the induced response bias can orient participants’ visual attention. Results revealed a perceptual bias toward the color effect of the primed response, manifested in a stronger visual orienting toward this color. Thus, biasing response selection can bias perception. These findings extend the scope of the ideomotor theory to visual perceptual processes.     

Pigeons' discrimination of Michotte's launching effect

We trained four pigeons to discriminate a Michotte launching animation from three other animations using a go/no-go task. The pigeons received food for pecking at one of the animations, but not for pecking at the others. The four animations featured two types of interactions among objects: causal (direct launching) and noncausal (delayed, distal, and distal & delayed). Two pigeons were reinforced for pecking at the causal interaction, but not at the noncausal interactions; two other pigeons were reinforced for pecking at the distal & delayed interaction, but not at the other interactions. Both discriminations proved difficult for the pigeons to master; later tests suggested that the pigeons often learned the discriminations by attending to subtle stimulus properties other than the intended ones.     

The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning

On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, whether they were given explicit instruction or just practice. Regardless of training condition, the more children gestured about moving the pieces when asked to explain how they solved the spatial transformation task, the better they performed on the task, with boys gesturing about movement significantly more (and performing better) than girls. Gesture thus provides useful information about children's spatial strategies, raising the possibility that gesture training may be particularly effective in improving children's mental rotation skills.     

Toward Mapping Daily Challenges of Living with ADHD: Maternal and Child Perspectives Using Electronic Diaries

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has an impact on the family as well as the affected child. This study developed and tested an electronic diary for mapping the challenges of everyday family life in a sample of children with ADHD being treated with pharmacotherapy. Across 7 days, mothers and children (27 ADHD; 25 non-ADHD) independently reported their moods, behaviors, and social contexts every 30 min during nonschool hours. Symptomatic behaviors and negative moods were elevated in the ADHD group, combined with maternal perceptions of lower parenting effectiveness and quality of life. Differences in the contexts of maternal anger were salient, with mothers in the ADHD group more often angry when with their children and comparison mothers more often angry when not. Although mothers' diaries were more informative, children's diaries also distinguished the two groups, especially during mornings and weekends. The need for family-wide interventions, the utility of child self-reports, and the promise of electronic diaries are discussed.     

Optimal predictions in everyday cognition

Human perception and memory are often explained as optimal statistical inferences that are informed by accurate prior probabilities. In contrast, cognitive judgments are usually viewed as following error-prone heuristics that are insensitive to priors. We examined the optimality of human cognition in a more realistic context than typical laboratory studies, asking people to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday phenomena such as human life spans and the box-office take of movies. Our results suggest that everyday cognitive judgments follow the same optimal statistical principles as perception and memory, and reveal a close correspondence between people's implicit probabilistic models and the statistics of the world.