What might philosophy of science look like if chemists built it?

Had more philosophers of science come from chemistry, their thinking would have been different. I begin by looking at a typical chemical paper, in which making something is the leitmotif, and conjecture/refutation is pretty much irrelevant. What in fact might have been, might be, different? The realism of chemists is reinforced by their remarkable ability to transform matter; they buy into reductionism where it serves them, but make no real use of it. Incommensurability is taken without a blink, and actually serves. The preeminence of synthesis in chemistry could have led philosophers of science to take more seriously questions of aesthetics within science, and to find a place in aesthetics for utility. The necessary motion twixt macroscopic and microscopic views of matter in modern chemistry leads to the coexistence of symbolic and iconic representations. And in another way to the deliberate, creative violation of categories.     

Counting does not improve the accuracy of long time productions

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - It is common to use counting strategies to produce time intervals accurately. Does counting improve the accuracy (deviation of produced duration from...     

A Survey of non-Prioritized Belief Revision

This paper summarizes and systematizes recent and ongoing work on non-prioritized belief change, i.e., belief revision in which the new information has no special priority due to its novelty.     

Cognitive biases in the perception of discrimination: The importance of format

Previous work has shown that people seem less able to perceive sex discrimination on a personal level than on a societal level. The present experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that this phenomenon is in part an information-processing bias; that is, the perception of discrimination is more difficult when one makes case-by-case comparisons than when one encounters information in aggregate form. The experiment demonstrated the importance of formatting for the perception of discrimination. Among subjects with little or no emotional investment in the issue of sex discrimination, the format of the pertinent information has a large effect on information processing: subjects perceived less discrimination when they encountered the relevant information in little chunks than when they saw the total picture at a single shot.     

In defense of base contraction

In the most common approaches to belief dynamics, states of belief are represented by sets that are closed under logical consequence. In an alternative approach, they are represented by non-closed belief bases. This representation has attractive properties not shared by closed representations. Most importantly, it can account for repeated belief changes that have not yet been satisfactorily accounted for in the closed approach.     

Fired managers: Experiences from their own unemployment

This paper purports to enhance the understanding of stress and its effects on unemployed executives. The idea that unemployed managers perceive and confront stress differently from their employed colleagues is addressed. A sampling of 32 unemployed executives and managers was taken using The Stress Profile, to survey reasons for stress, coping ability, and response to stress. The profiled samples were then compared to a comparison group of 367 employed managers. The results showed that unemployed managers, when compared to their employed associates, tended to have less desireable family situations, more worries about finances, decreased perception of self and self-coherence, decreased coping ability, and heightened emotional and behavioral reaction to stress. The conclusion was that when dealing with stressors, unemployed managers experienced a decreased sense of psychological well-being and coping abilities as compared to employed managers.     

Decision theoretic foundations for axioms of rational preference

Rationality postulates for preferences are developed from two basic decision theoretic principles, namely: (1) the logic of preference is determined by paradigmatic cases in which preferences are choice-guiding, and (2) excessive comparison costs should be avoided. It is shown how the logical requirements on preferences depend on the structure of comparison costs. The preference postulates necessary for choice guidance in a single decision problem are much weaker than completeness and transitivity. Stronger postulates, such as completeness and transitivity, can be derived under the further assumption that the original preference relation should also be capable of guiding choice after any restriction of the original set of alternatives.     

The use of time during lexical processing and segmentation: A review

Speech, by its very nature, is a time-based phenomenon. Speech sounds are temporally distributed, with the presentation of one sound roughly conditioned by the fading of the previous one. In this review, three classes of models are discussed with respect to the sequential nature of speech. It is argued that the three resulting conceptions of time are linked to the type of segmentation process proposed by these models to deal with speech continuity. In the first one, lexical activation is viewed as perfectly synchronized with the temporal deployment of speech. This type of model corresponds to the traditional left-to-right (proactive) account of lexical processing. Because serious segmentation problems exist for such an approach (e.g.,car andcard are embedded incardinal), the second type of model treats word recognition as the result of a mechanism that sometimes delays commitment on word identity beyond word offset. Lexical activation, instead of shadowing the unfolding of time, lags behind it until an unambiguous decision can be made. The temporarily unprocessed information is stored in a memory buffer. In the third approach, a prosodic cue (lexical stress) contributes actively to speech segmentation and lexical processing. Every stressed syllable encountered in the signal is postulated as a word onset and thus constitutes the starting point of lexical activation. However, with non-initial-stressed words, retroactive procedures going “back in time” must be used. Finally, the use of time (including proactive, delayed, and retroactive procedures) is discussed in light of cross-linguistic phonological differences.