Grounding: it’s (probably) all in the head

In this paper we provide a psychological explanation for ‘grounding observations’—observations that are thought to provide evidence that there exists a relation of ground. Our explanation does not appeal to the presence of any such relation. Instead, it appeals to certain evolved cognitive mechanisms, along with the traditional modal relations of supervenience, necessitation and entailment. We then consider what, if any, metaphysical conclusions we can draw from the obtaining of such an explanation, and, in particular, if it tells us anything about whether we ought to posit a relation of ground.     

BLOCKING THE PATH FROM VAGUENESS TO FOUR DIMENSIONALISM*

There is a general form of an argument which I call the ‘argument from vagueness’ which attempts to show that objects persist by perduring, via the claim that vagueness is never ontological in nature and thus that composition is unrestricted. I argue that even if we grant that vagueness is always the result of semantic indeterminacy rather than ontological vagueness, and thus also grant that composition is unrestricted, it does not follow that objects persist by perduring. Unrestricted mereological composition lacks the power to ensure that there exist instantaneous objects that wholly overlap persisting objects at times, and thus lacks the power to ensure that there exists anything that could be called a temporal part. Even if we grant that such instantaneous objects exist, however, I argue that it does not follow that objects perdure. To show this I briefly outline a coherent version of three dimensionalism that grants just such an assumption. Thus considerations pertaining to the nature of vagueness need not lead us inevitably to accept perdurantism.     

The Metaphysical Equivalence Of Three And Four Dimensionalism

I argue that two competing accounts of persistence, three and four dimensionalism, are in fact metaphysically equivalent. I begin by clearly defining three and four dimensionalism, and then I show that the two theories are intertranslatable and equally simple. Through consideration of a number of different cases where intuitions about persistence are contradictory, I then go on to show that both theories describe these cases in the same manner. Further consideration of some empirical issues arising from the theory of special relativity lead me to conclude that the two theories are equally explanatory, and thus finally that they are metaphysically equivalent.     

The effect of gaze on gaze direction while looking at art

In highly controlled cuing experiments, conspecific gaze direction has powerful effects on an observer’s attention. We explored the generality of this effect by using paintings in which the gaze direction of a key character had been carefully manipulated. Our observers looked at these paintings in one of three instructional states (neutral, social, or spatial) while we monitored their eye movements. Overt orienting was much less influenced by the critical gaze direction than what the cuing literature might suggest: An analysis of the direction of saccades following the first fixation of the critical gaze showed that observers were weakly biased to orient in the direction of the gaze. Over longer periods of viewing, however, this effect disappeared for all but the social condition. This restriction of gaze as an attentional cue to a social context is consistent with the idea that the evolution of gaze direction detection is rooted in social communication. The picture stimuli from this experiment can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Talking About a Universalist World

The paper defends a combination of perdurantism with mereological universalism by developing semantics of temporary predications of the sort ’some P is/was/will be (a) Q’. We argue that, in addition to the usual application of causal and other restrictions on sortals, the grammatical form of such statements allows for rather different regimentations along three separate dimensions, according to: (a) whether ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are being used as phase or substance sortal terms, (b) whether ‘is’, ‘was’, and ‘will be’ are the ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘will be’ of identity or of constitution, and (c) whether ‘Q’ is being used as a subject or predicate term. We conclude that this latitude is beneficial, as it conforms with linguistic reality (i.e., the multiple uses actually in place) and also enables one to turn what is ordinarily perceived as a problem for universalist perdurantism viz., a commitment to all sorts of weird and gerrymandered temporally extended entities, into an advantage, for the richness in questions allows us to make sense of the many different readings of sentences of the same grammatical form.     

There is No <Emphasis Type="Italic">Simpliciter Simpliciter</Emphasis>

This paper identifies problems with indexicalism and abverbialism about temporary intrinsic properties, and solves them by disentangling two senses in which a particular may possess a property simpliciter. The first sense is the one identified by adverbialists in which a particular possesses at all times the property as a matter of foundational metaphysical fact regardless of whether it is manifest. The second involves building on adverbialism to produce a semantics for property-manifestation according to which different members of a family of second-order properties of the foundational property are relevant to property manifestation at different times.     

Generalizing Teaching Techniques from University to K-12 Classrooms: Teaching Preservice Teachers to Use What They Learn

Preservice teachers learn evidence-based practices in university classrooms but often fail to use them later on in their own K-12 classrooms. The problem may be a missing link in teacher preparation, i.e., failure to teach preservice teachers to generalize newly acquired techniques. Two experiments using multiple baseline designs across participants assessed effectiveness of a model to promote generalization and maintenance of a specific teaching skill. In Experiment 1, preservice teachers’ maintenance of behavior deteriorated from practicum to student teaching when intervention consisted of training to criteria alone. When a programming for generalization component (program common stimuli) was added to the intervention, teachers in Experiment 2 generalized and maintained behavior across settings (student teaching to own classrooms) at a higher average than occurred during intervention.     

Reconceptualizing inhibition of return as

Inhibition of return (IOR) is an effect on spatial attention whereby reaction times to a target presented at a location where a stimulus had recently been presented are increased, as opposed to when a target is presented at a new location. Despite early reports that habituation is not responsible for the IOR effect, the human cognitive literature provides indirect evidence in favor of the possibility. In addition, recent neurophysiological studies provide direct support for the idea that habituation is at least a contributing source for the IOR effect. The present article describes how habituation may account for the IOR effect and explores some of the predictions that this hypothesis suggests.     

Interviewing Witnesses: Forced Confabulation and Confirmatory Feedback Increase False Memories

In two experiments, adults who witnessed a videotaped event subsequently engaged in face-to-face interviews during which they were forced to confabulate information about the events they had seen. The interviewer selectively reinforced some of the participants' confabulated responses by providing confirmatory feedback (e.g., "Yes, _is the correct answer") and provided neutral (uninformative) feedback for the remaining confabulated responses (e.g., "O.K. _"). One week later, participants developed false memories for the events they had earlier confabulated knowingly. However, confirmatory feedback increased false memory for forcibly confabulated events, increased confidence in those false memories, and increased the likelihood that participants would freely report the confabulated events 1 to 2 months later. The results illustrate the powerful role of social-motivational factors in promoting the development of false memories.