Adults see vision to be more informative than it is

Humans gain a wide range of knowledge through interacting with the environment. Each aspect of our perceptual experiences offers a unique source of information about the world—colours are seen, sounds heard and textures felt. Understanding how perceptual input provides a basis for knowledge is thus central to understanding one's own and others' epistemic states. Developmental research suggests that 5-year-olds have an immature understanding of knowledge sources and that they overestimate the knowledge to be gained from looking. Without evidence from adults, it is not clear whether the mature reasoning system outgrows this overestimation. The current study is the first to investigate whether an overestimation of the knowledge to be gained from vision occurs in adults. Novel response time paradigms were adapted from developmental studies. In two experiments, participants judged whether an object or feature could be identified by performing a specific action. Adult participants found it disproportionately easy to accept looking as a proposed action when it was informative, and difficult to reject looking when it was not informative. This suggests that adults, like children, overestimate the informativeness of vision. The origin of this overestimation and the implications that the current findings bear on the interpretation of children's overestimation are discussed.     

Resurgence of goal-directed actions and habits

This study investigated how goal-directed and habitual behaviors recover after extinction within the context of the resurgence effect, a form of relapse induced by the removal or worsening of alternative reinforcement. Rats were trained to press a target lever with one reinforcer (O1) for either minimal (4) or extended (16) sessions. An extinction test after the completion of O1 devaluation confirmed that minimal and extended training formed goal-directed and habitual behaviors, respectively. Then, pressing an alternative lever was reinforced with a second reinforcer (O2) while the target response was placed on extinction. When O2 was discontinued, the minimally trained target response resurged with goal-directed status as in the extinction test. However, the extinguished habitual behavior in the extensively trained rats did not recover as a habit but instead with goal-directed status, possibly due to the context specificity of habits or the introduction of a new response–reinforcer contingency. The critical finding that reinforcer devaluation consistently led to less resurgence regardless of the amount of acquisition training provides a clinical implication that coupling differential-reinforcement-of-alternative-behavior (DRA) treatments with the devaluation of the associated reinforcer of problematic behavior could effectively diminish its recurrence.     

Anxiety Influences the Perceptual-Motor Calibration of Visually Guided Braking to Avoid Collisions

We investigated whether anxiety influences perceptual-motor calibration in a braking to avoid a collision task. Participants performed either a discrete braking task (Experiment 1) or a continuous braking task (Experiment 2), with the goal of stopping before colliding with a stop sign. Half of participants performed the braking task after an anxiety induction. We investigated whether anxiety reduced the frequency of crashing and if it influenced the calibration of perception (visual information) and action (brake pressure) dynamically between-trials in Experiment 1 and within-trials in Experiment 2. In the discrete braking task, anxious participants crashed less often and made larger corrective adjustments trial-to-trial after crashing, suggesting that the influence of anxiety on behavior did not occur uniformly, but rather dynamically with anxiety amplifying the reaction to previous crashes. However, when performing continuous braking, anxious participants crashed more often, and their within-trial adjustments of deceleration were less related to visual information compared to controls. Taken together, these findings suggest that the timescale and nature of the task mediates the influence of anxiety on the performance of goal-directed actions.     

Preventive Wars, Just War Principles, and the United Nations

This paper explores the question of whether the United Nations should engage in preventive military actions. Correlatively, it asks whether UN preventive military actions could satisfy just war principles. Rather than from the standpoint of the individual nation state, the ethics of preventive war is discussed from the standpoint of the UN. For the sake of brevity, only the legitimate authority, just cause, last resort, and proportionality principles are considered. Since there has been disagreement about the specific content of these principles, a third question also is explored: How should they be formulated? Moreover, these questions are addressed in the context of a particular issue: the goals of the non-proliferation and the abolition of weapons of mass destruction.     

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.     

Epistemology and artificial intelligence

In this essay we advance the view that analytical epistemology and artificial intelligence are complementary disciplines. Both fields study epistemic relations, but whereas artificial intelligence approaches this subject from the perspective of understanding formal and computational properties of frameworks purporting to model some epistemic relation or other, traditional epistemology approaches the subject from the perspective of understanding the properties of epistemic relations in terms of their conceptual properties. We argue that these two practices should not be conducted in isolation. We illustrate this point by discussing how to represent a class of inference forms found in standard inferential statistics. This class of inference forms is interesting because its members share two properties that are common to epistemic relations, namely defeasibility and paraconsistency. Our modeling of standard inferential statistical arguments exploits results from both logical artificial intelligence and analytical epistemology. We remark how our approach to this modeling problem may be generalized to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of epistemic relations.     

The effects of process and outcome accountability on judgment process and performance

This article challenges the view that it is always better to hold decision makers accountable for their decision process rather than their decision outcomes. In three multiple-cue judgment studies, the authors show that process accountability, relative to outcome accountability, consistently improves judgment quality in relatively simple elemental tasks. However, this performance advantage of process accountability does not generalize to more complex configural tasks. This is because process accountability improves an analytical process based on cue abstraction, while it does not change a holistic process based on exemplar memory. Cue abstraction is only effective in elemental tasks (in which outcomes are a linear additive combination of cues) but not in configural tasks (in which outcomes depend on interactions between the cues). In addition, Studies 2 and 3 show that the extent to which process and outcome accountability affect judgment quality depends on individual differences in analytical intelligence and rational thinking style.     

Epistemic means and ends: a reply to Hofmann

How is epistemic justification related to knowledge? Is it, as widely thought, constitutive of knowledge? Is it merely a means to knowledge, or merely a means to something else, such as truth? In a recent article in this journal, Hofmann (2005, Synthese, 146(3), 357–369) addresses these questions in attempting to defend an important argument articulated by Sartwell (1992, The Journal of Philosophy, 89(4), 167–180) and reconstructed and criticized by Le Morvan (2002, Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 56(2), 151–168). This Sartwellian argument purported to show that, since epistemic justification is of merely instrumental value, it is not constitutive of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Hofmann’s defense of Sartwell fails, but that its failure brings to light some important lessons concerning the nature of justification and its relationship to truth and knowledge.     

The virtues of epistemic conservatism

Although several important methodologies implicitly assume the truth of epistemic conservatism, the view that holding a belief confers some measure of justification on the belief, recent criticisms have led some to conclude that epistemic conservatism is an implausible view. That conclusion is mistaken. In this article, I propose a new formulation of epistemic conservatism that is not susceptible to the criticisms leveled at earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism. In addition to withstanding these criticisms, this formulation of epistemic conservatism has several benefits. First, this formulation has the benefits of earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, that is to say it makes sense of our intuitions about justification in regard to both memory beliefs and beliefs for which we have forgotten our evidence. Second, it provides a good way of responding to the skeptic’s challenge concerning the possibility of possessing knowledge of the external world posed by the Alternative Hypotheses argument. Third, it provides responses to both forms of a new skeptical problem plaguing basic knowledge structure theories, the Problem of Easy Knowledge formulated by Stewart Cohen. I argue that given the many benefits of this formulation of epistemic conservatism and the fact that it is not vulnerable to the criticisms that undermine earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, this formulation of epistemic conservatism is a plausible view to maintain.