Pollard on Habits of Action

Bill Pollard has recently developed an account of habits of action, endeavoring to rehabilitate the traditional notion of habit in a way that can be used to address current philosophical concerns. I argue that Pollard’s account has important shortcomings. The account is intended to apply indiscriminately to both habitual and skilled acts, but this overlooks crucial distinctions. Moreover, Pollard’s account fails to do justice to the various ways in which the idea of habit figures in the explanation and assessment of action. These shortcomings are a consequence of certain assumptions Pollard shares with the accounts of mind and action he sets to criticize. As long as these assumptions are left intact, the potential of dispositional notions such as habit and skill to contribute to contemporary debates will not be realized.     

Predictions,precision, and agentive attention

Ransom, Fazelpour, and Mole (this journal - 2017) raise an important puzzle for the ‘prediction error minimization’ account of cognitive processing. That account depicts all cognitive processing as fundamentally in the business of minimizing prediction errors concerning the evolving flow of sensory information. One of the cornerstones of these highly ambitious, would-be unifying accounts is their depiction of attention as nothing other than the process of optimizing the precision (inverse variance) of critical prediction error signals. But that story, Ransom et al. suggest, cannot accommodate voluntary shifts of attention. In this paper, I show why this challenge to the grand unifying project fails. It fails because it locates the origins of voluntary attention in complexes of unanalyzed desire rather than in changing complexes of beliefs.     

行动语义、客体背景和判断任务对客体动作承载性的影响

客体动作承载性指人们知觉客体时同时激活的针对客体的行动。当Gibson最初提出动作承载性概念时, 他认为客体的这种属性是可以自动激活的。然而近年来越来越多的证据显示, 在知觉和行动的关系中, 行动语义知识和客体所处背景对客体动作承载性具有调节作用, 表现在人们可以根据这些自上而下的信息选择针对客体的适当的行动。此外, 不同的判断任务在引发客体动作承载性效应上具有特异性, 表现在若判断任务仅需知觉客体表层属性时, 不能激活对客体的动作, 进而不能产生客体动作承载性; 若判断任务需要对客体进行深层加工时, 才会激活对客体的动作。未来研究还需要进一步探究行动语义知识和客体所处背景影响客体动作承载性发生的原因和机制, 以及不同判断任务中出现结果特异性的原因。     

Proportional reasoning,framing effects,and affirmative action: Is six of one really half a dozen of another in university admissions?

People often reason proportionally, perceiving fixed outcomes as larger or smaller depending upon the reference condition. Thus, for policies affecting individuals, presenting data as percentages rather than frequencies can alter perceived effects on high versus low base rate group members, even though identical numbers of individuals in each group are affected. Such numerical framing effects were explored through a case analysis of public debates over race-conscious selection policies and through experimental manipulations employing a race-conscious university admissions scenario. Undergraduates (N = 193) received data reporting the expected impact on black and white student enrollment resulting from a university shift to race-neutral admissions. Compared to those encountering percentages or proportions, participants receiving identical information expressed as frequencies revealed a predicted greater preference for race-neutral or “race blind” admissions. Structural equation analysis supported a model in which perceived impact and fairness mediated the relationship between format and endorsement of race-neutral admissions.     

Accurate motion-produced distance and direction under systematically distorted perception

Abstract:  We report the visually directed actions of soccer players. After perceiving the location of a target on their left side at the starting point and traveling toward the ball without seeing the target, the players could kick the ball accurately (Experiment 2). In contrast, if they were verbally asked the direction of the target in a similar situation, the perceived direction was systematically distorted (Experiment 3). Our major concern in explaining the distorted perception was whether the egocentric distance before locomotion was perceived accurately or not, and whether the updating of the target location during locomotion was accurate or not. Combining these two possibilities, there should be four hypotheses, each of which assumes either: (1) accurate egocentric distance and accurate updating, (2) inaccurate egocentric distance and accurate updating, (3) accurate egocentric distance and inaccurate updating, or (4) inaccurate egocentric distance and inaccurate updating. Based on these hypotheses, we conducted four simulations, which revealed that the combination of the perception of the accurate egocentric distance and the distorted updating that substituted the constant function for the sine function produced not only a good r ², but also three kinds of interactions obtained in Experiment 3. Why did the players, based on their distorted perception, perform accurately? We would like to suggest that through perceptual learning they might acquire a perceptual-motor relation as the inverse function of the physical-perceptual relation.     

New interpretative styles: Progress or contamination? Psychoanalysis and phenomenological psychopathology1

Psychoanalysis has started to recoup, often quite implicitly, a more phenomenological stance, ever since psychoanalysts have started working with borderline and psychotic patients. As many of these patients have commonly been through traumatic experiences, psychoanalysts have been using an approach that questions the role of traditional psychoanalytical interpretation and pays more attention to the patient's inner conscious experiences; this approach is characteristic of a specifi c form of contemporary psychiatry: phenomenological psychopathology, founded by Karl Jaspers in 1913 and developed into a form of psychotherapy by Ludwig Binswanger, with his Daseinsanalyse. If what we could call a phenomenological ‘temptation’ has been spreading over psychoanalysis, so too has a psychoanalytical ‘temptation’ always been present in phenomenological psychopathology. In fact, even though this branch of psychiatry has led us towards a deeper understanding of the characteristics of psychotic being‐in‐the‐world, its therapeutic applications have never been adequately formalised, much less have they evolved into a specifi c technique or a structured psychotherapeutic approach. Likewise, phenomenological psychotherapy has always held an anaclitic attitude towards psychoanalysis, accepting its procedures but refusing its theoretical basis because it is too close to that of the objectifying natural sciences. Psychoanalytic ‘temptation’ and phenomenological ‘temptation’ can thus be considered as two sides of the same coin and outline a trend in psychoanalytic and phenomenological literature which points out the fundamental role of the patient's inner conscious experiences in the treatment of borderline and psychotic patients.     

THEOLOGY AND PHYSICS FORTY YEARS LATER

Abstract. Almost forty years later I look back on a 1966 article on theology and physics by Sanford Brown and my response published with it. I reflect on his hope that theological seminaries would give attention to the methods used in scientific inquiry. I compare our comments with subsequent thought on three issues: (1) the role of models in science and religion; (2) the relation of wholes to parts in physics and other sciences and the debate over reductionism and emergence; and (3) the implications of quantum physics for theology, including the possibility of divine action at the quantum level.     

Collective Action Meets Prospect Theory: An Application to Coalition Building in Chile, 1973–75

Expected utility theory explains collective action as an attempt by individuals to maximize their gains. In contrast, my application of prospect theory to collective action suggests that people are motivated to participate in collective action by a fear of loss. These alternative rationalities are considered in the context of the successful cooperative effort of four economic groups in Chile during 1973–75, the first years of the Pinochet military regime. In this case, the logic of prospect theory better captures how actors made decisions about whether or not to engage in collective action. Of the four groups that did join the 1973–75 economic coalition, only one (the mineowners) appears to have maximized its net asset level, as expected utility theory predicts. All four groups seem to have been motivated to cooperate because they found themselves in the domain of losses and expected that cooperation with other, even rival, economic groups might help them recoup their recent losses.     

"The End of all our Exploring" in Science and Theology

Abstract. The present malaise of religion—and of theology, its intellectual formulation—in Western society is analyzed, with some personal references, especially with respect to its history in the United Kingdom and the United States. The need for a more open theology that takes account of scientific perspectives is urged. An indication of the understandings of God and of God's relation to the world which result from an exploration starting from scientific perspectives is expounded together with their fruitful relation to some traditional themes. The implications of this for the future of theology are suggested, not least in relation to the new phase, beginning in 2003, of the development of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science. In a concluding reflection the hope is expressed that the shared global experience and perspectives generated by the sciences might form a more common and acceptable starting point than hitherto for the exploration towards God of the seekers of many religious traditions and of none.     

Reasoning through doing. Epistemic mediators in scientific discovery

The recent epistemological and cognitive studies concentrate on the concept of abduction, as a means to originate and refine new ideas. Traditional cognitive science and computational accounts concerning abduction aim at illustration discovery and creativity processes in terms of theoretical and “internal” aspects, by means of computational simulations and/or abstract cognitive models. I will illustrate in this paper that some typical internal abductive processes are involved in scientific reasoning and discovery (for example through radical innovations). Nevertheless, especially concrete manipulations of the external world constitute a fundamental passage in science: by a process of manipulative abduction it is possible to build prostheses (epistemic mediators) for human minds, by interacting with external objects and representations in a constructive way. In this manner it is possible to create implicit knowledge through doing and to produce various opportunity to find, for example, anomalies and fruitful new risky perspectives. This kind of embodied and unexpressed knowledge holds a key role in the subsequent processes of scientific comprehension and discovery.