On Bradley’s preservation condition for conditionals

Bradley has argued that a truth-conditional semantics for conditionals is incompatible with an allegedly very weak and intuitively compelling constraint on the interpretation of conditionals. I argue that the example Bradley offers to motivate this constraint can be explained along pragmatic lines that are compatible with the correctness of at least one popular truth-conditional semantics for conditionals.     

Drinking and driving “safely”: Who uses a breathalyzer and when?

Breathalyzers are often promoted on the grounds of safety. However, drivers who use them to avoid illegal blood-alcohol levels inadvertently expose themselves to sleepiness-related risks following alcohol intake. Personal breathalyzers may even be counterproductive if they make more drivers engage in more frequent or habitual drinking and driving. This study explores the extent to which and how drivers use the breathalyzer. We contacted nine major breathalyzer importers in Finland and found out that the estimated number of devices delivered during 2006 was almost 50,000, equaling approximately one percent of population and one-and-a-half percent of driving-license holders. Survey data on a representative sample of Finnish active drivers (N = 1121) showed that 11.5% owned a breathalyzer. More men than women own and use a breathalyzer, and most often the men are aged 36–55 years. These men also use it more often after acute drinking (32% vs. 20% in the whole sample). Seventy-nine percent of breathalyzer use occurs the following day after evening or night drinking. Therefore, while in a smaller percentage of cases the risk involves the additive and interactive effects of alcohol and sleepiness in the evening, most users expose themselves to risks related to daytime sleepiness due to drinking the previous night.     

Redundancy effects of a moving distractor generated by alerting and orienting

Redundancy effects refer to improvement of performance in response to irrelevant stimulation, or distractors. Previously described redundancy effects have mainly been associated with relatively high-level perception. The present study examines whether redundancy effects exist in basic attentional and perceptual systems, such as alerting and orienting. Participants performed speeded detection of briefly presented targets while ignoring moving distractors. The presence/absence of distractors and their spatial relationships with targets were manipulated to dissociate possible alerting and orienting redundancies. The distractor pathway (straightforward vs. chaotic) and its motion predictability (blocked vs. intermixed sequences of straightforward and chaotic trials) were also manipulated. The presence of a distractor resulted in faster responses (alerting redundancy). Furthermore, participants responded faster to targets behind distractors (orienting redundancy). Orienting redundancy was found only in the straightforward condition. This indicates that generating an orienting redundancy effect is a relatively slow process based on continuous observation of motion. Lastly, a blocked sequence of trials improved the alerting redundancy effect in comparison with an intermixed sequence.     

The role of importance/consequentiality appraisal in flashbulb memory formation: the case of the death of Pope John Paul II

This study investigates how flashbulb memories (FBMs) relative to the death of Pope John Paul II vary according to the persons' evaluation of the event's importance and consequences. In particular, FBMs were investigated in persons who were expected to attribute different degrees of importance/consequentiality to the event as a function of two factors: (1) religious involvement, (2) nationality (Polish, Italian, Swiss). The comparison was made with respect to the following hypothesized determinants of FBMs: surprise, emotional reaction, rehearsal, event memory and especially the attitudes towards the Pope and the appraisal of the importance and the consequences of his death. Structural equation modelling indicates that importance/consequentiality is a fundamental determinant of FBM and is influenced by antecedent personal and social characteristics reflected in the person's attitudes. Moreover, memory consistency seems to be both directly influenced by emotional intensity and indirectly through rehearsal, whereas surprise seems not a critical determinant of FBM. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Assertion,Moore, and Bayes

It is widely believed that the so-called knowledge account of assertion best explains why sentences such as “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t believe it” and “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t know it” appear odd to us. I argue that the rival rational credibility account of assertion explains that fact just as well. I do so by providing a broadly Bayesian analysis of the said type of sentences which shows that such sentences cannot express rationally held beliefs. As an interesting aside, it will be seen that these sentences also harbor a lesson for Bayesian epistemology itself.

The Preface Paradox Revisited

The Preface Paradox has led many philosophers to believe that, if it isassumed that high probability is necessary for rational acceptability, the principleaccording to which rational acceptability is closed under conjunction (CP)must be abandoned. In this paper we argue that the paradox is far less damaging to CP than is generally believed. We describe how, given certain plausibleassumptions, in a large class of cases in which CP seems to lead tocontradiction, it does not do so after all. A restricted version of CP canthus be maintained.     

Binocularity and visual search—Revisited

Binocular rivalry is a phenomenon of visual competition in which perception alternates between two monocular images. When two eye’s images only differ in luminance, observers may perceive shininess, a form of rivalry called binocular luster. Does dichoptic information guide attention in visual search? Wolfe and Franzel (Perception & Psychophysics, 44(1), 81–93, 1988) reported that rivalry could guide attention only weakly, but that luster (shininess) “popped out,” producing very shallow Reaction Time (RT) × Set Size functions. In this study, we have revisited the topic with new and improved stimuli. By using a checkerboard pattern in rivalry experiments, we found that search for rivalry can be more efficient (16 ms/item) than standard, rivalrous grating (30 ms/item). The checkerboard may reduce distracting orientation signals that masked the salience of rivalry between simple orthogonal gratings. Lustrous stimuli did not pop out when potential contrast and luminance artifacts were reduced. However, search efficiency was substantially improved when luster was added to the search target. Both rivalry and luster tasks can produce search asymmetries, as is characteristic of guiding features in search. These results suggest that interocular differences that produce rivalry or luster can guide attention, but these effects are relatively weak and can be hidden by other features like luminance and orientation in visual search tasks.     

Testing Inference To The Best Explanation

Inference to the Best Explanation has become the subject of a livelydebate in the philosophy of science. Scientific realists maintain, while scientificantirealists deny, that it is a compelling rule of inference. It seems that anyattempt to settle this debate empirically must beg the question against theantirealist. The present paper argues that this impression is misleading. A methodis described that, by combining Glymour's theory of bootstrapping and Hacking'sarguments from microscopy, allows us to test IBE without begging any antirealistissues.