Properties in a Contingentist's Domain

This article attempts to make sense of property contingentism, the view that the metaphysical nature of properties is contingent. That is, it is contingent whether properties are universals or tropes or some other kind of entity. The article argues that even if one thinks that necessities are exhausted by conceptual truths and a posteriori necessities, the sort of methodology that can lead one to endorse contingentism in various domains in metaphysics does not give us good grounds to suppose that the nature of properties is contingent.     

Global precedence and response activation: Evidence from LRPs

Lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) were measured in left/right/no-go tasks using compound global/local stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants responded to local target shapes and ignored global ones. RTs were affected by the congruence of the global shape with the local one, and LRPs indicated that irrelevant global shapes activated the responses with which they were associated. In Experiment 2, participants responded to conjunctions of target shapes at both levels, withholding the response if a target appeared at only one level. Global shapes activated responses in no-go trials, but local shapes did not. The results are consistent with partial-output models in which preliminary information about global shape can partially activate responses that are inconsistent with the local shape. They also demonstrate that part of the global advantage arises early, before response activation begins and probably before recognition of the local shape.     

Feature distribution and background knowledge in category learning

Three experiments examined the interactions of category structure and prior knowledge in category learning.Experiment 1 examined the distribution of atypical or 'crossover' features in category learning. In real categories, crossover features may be unevenly distributed found primarily in very unusual examples of a category (like whales or ostriches). In contrast, in many psychology experiments, each item has exactly one crossover feature. Even versus uneven distribution of crossover features did not affect category learning when the features were neutral. However, when the features were connected by prior knowledge, it was much harder for subjects to learn the structure with the uneven distribution of crossover features. Experiments 2 and 3 found similar results with a slightly less uneven condition. We conclude that learning is a function of the interaction of category structure and prior knowledge rather than either one alone. Furthermore, knowledge benefits learning even when the category contains contradictions of the knowledge, so long as the contradictions are not very salient.