Is Forgotten Evidence a Problem for Evidentialism?

The “problem of forgotten evidence” is a common objection to evidentialist theories of epistemic justification. This objection is motivated by cases where someone forms a belief on the basis of supporting evidence and then later forgets this evidence while retaining the belief. Critics of evidentialist theories argue that in some of these cases the person's belief remains justified. So, these critics claim that one can have a justified belief that is not supported by any evidence the subject possesses. I argue that these critics are mistaken.     

Public justification versus public deliberation: the case for divorce

I drive a wedge between public deliberation and public justification, concepts tightly associated in public reason liberalism. Properly understood, the ideal of public justification imposes no restraint on citizen deliberation but requires that those who have a substantial impact on the use of coercive power, political officials, advance proposals each person has sufficient reason to accept. I formulate this idea as the Principle of Convergent Restraint and apply it to legislators to illustrate the general reorientation I propose for the public reason project.     

Modelling partially cross‐classified multilevel data

This article proposes an approach to modelling partially cross‐classified multilevel data where some of the level‐1 observations are nested in one random factor and some are cross‐classified by two random factors. Comparisons between a proposed approach to two other commonly used approaches which treat the partially cross‐classified data as either fully nested or fully cross‐classified are completed with a simulation study. Results show that the proposed approach demonstrates desirable performance in terms of parameter estimates and statistical inferences. Both the fully nested model and the fully cross‐classified model suffer from biased estimates of some variance components and statistical inferences of some fixed effects. Results also indicate that the proposed model is robust against cluster size imbalance.     

Mechanisms for Robust Cognition

To function well in an unpredictable environment using unreliable components, a system must have a high degree of robustness. Robustness is fundamental to biological systems and is an objective in the design of engineered systems such as airplane engines and buildings. Cognitive systems, like biological and engineered systems, exist within variable environments. This raises the question, how do cognitive systems achieve similarly high degrees of robustness? The aim of this study was to identify a set of mechanisms that enhance robustness in cognitive systems. We identify three mechanisms that enhance robustness in biological and engineered systems: system control, redundancy, and adaptability. After surveying the psychological literature for evidence of these mechanisms, we provide simulations illustrating how each contributes to robust cognition in a different psychological domain: psychomotor vigilance, semantic memory, and strategy selection. These simulations highlight features of a mathematical approach for quantifying robustness, and they provide concrete examples of mechanisms for robust cognition.     

The effects of interword spacing on the eye movements of young and older readers

Recent evidence indicates that older adults (aged 65+) are more disrupted by removing interword spaces than young adults (aged 18–30). However, it is not known whether older readers also show greater sensitivity to the more subtle changes to this spacing that frequently occur during normal reading. In the present study the eye movements of young and older adults were examined when reading texts for which interword spacing was normal, condensed to half its normal size or expanded to 1.5 times its normal size. Although these changes in interword spacing affected eye movement behaviour, this influence did not differ between young and older adults. Furthermore, a word frequency manipulation showed that these changes did not affect word identification for either group. The results indicate that older adults can adapt their eye moment behaviour to accommodate subtle changes in the spatial layout of text equally effectively as young adults.     

A psychophysical investigation of language priming effects in two english-french bwguals

Abstract

This paper attempts to apply psychophysical methodology, usually reserved for the study of low-level perceptual proocsses, to the study of language priming effects in bilingual subjects. Previous research using more traditional psycholinguistic techniques has demonstrated that bilinguals find words in one language harder to recognise when immediately preceded by a word of their other language. In the present experiments, this result was shown to remain robust even after the subjects had become very familiar with the experimental stimuli, thus suggesting that it is a highly automatised, irrepressible effect. The basic language priming effect was shown to be dependent on the neighbourhood characteristics (number of orthographically similar words in each language) of the prime words, but mainly at short prime exposures (>60 msec). At longer durations (428 msec), only the language of the prime (English or French) played a role.     

A quantification of robustness

Robustness is an important construct in domains as diverse as evolutionary biology, structural engineering, and decision-making. Unfortunately, in many domains, most relevantly cognitive science, considerations of robustness end with vague semantic references. Little attention is paid to formal analysis. The aim of this paper is to initiate a discussion in the scientific community regarding methods for quantifying and analyzing robustness. To this end, we propose a means for assessing robustness that may supplant the current ambiguous use of the term. We demonstrate our quantitative approach using examples of heuristic-based decision processes, selected due to their explicit association with robustness in the psychological literature. These examples serve to illustrate basic properties of our general methodology for quantifying robustness.