Development of the deontic advantage in reasoning: Reply to Cummins

In response to Cummins’s report that comments on our article (Dack & Astington, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2011, Vol. 110, pp. 94–114), this article clarifies our perspective on what constitutes the deontic advantage, and notes similarities and differences between Cummins’s perspective and our own. Like Cummins, we believe that young children are capable of deontic reasoning and that methodological factors alone cannot explain this ability. However, we maintain that it is important to be precise about methodology in order to facilitate investigation of how the deontic advantage changes over developmental time, and this question is our main interest, although as yet incompletely answered. Contrary to Cummins, we do not think that existing data can speak to the issue of the potential innateness of deontic reasoning. We also disagree with Cummins’s perspective on norm versus normative proposition and with some of her comparisons between deontic and epistemic phenomena.     

Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children revisited: Comment on Dack and Astington

Dack and Astington (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 110 2011 94–114) attempted to replicate the deontic reasoning advantage among preschoolers reported by Cummins (Memory & Cognition 24 1996 823–829) and by Harris and Nuñez (Child Development. 67 1996 572–1591). Dack and Astington argued that the apparent deontic advantage reported by these studies was in fact an artifact due to a methodological confound, namely, inclusion of an authority in the deontic condition only. Removing this confound attenuated the effect in young children but had no effect on the reasoning of 7-year-olds and adults. Thus, removing reference to authority “explains away” young children’s apparent precocity at this type of reasoning. But this explanation rests on (a) a misunderstanding of norms as targets of deontic reasoning and (b) conclusions based on a sample size that was too small to detect the effect in young children.     

My people,right or wrong? Minimal group membership disrupts preschoolers’ selective trust

When preschoolers decide to trust one speaker over another, how does group membership influence their tracking of speaker reliability? In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were assigned to arbitrary groups of no social significance (0055 and 0170) and asked to endorse novel object labels provided by two ingroup members, one of whom was reliable and the second of whom was unreliable. Children selectively trusted the more reliable informant. In Experiment 2, we asked whether ingroup status or reliability would determine children's choices and found that 4-year-olds failed to trust reliable outgroup members over unreliable ingroup members (or vice versa). Experiment 3 showed that the failure of trust in Experiment 2 was not due to the mere inclusion of both ingroup and outgroup members: children presented with a control paradigm in which the ingroup members were reliable trusted reliable ingroup members over unreliable outgroup members. Children's use of reliability as an indicator of future credibility therefore appears disrupted when outgroup status and reliability are in conflict, even when group membership is arbitrary.     

Investigating whether group status modulates the relationship between individual differences in epistemic motivation and political conservatism

Previous research has found that individual differences in epistemic motivation predict political conservatism. However, meta-analyses indicate substantial heterogeneity in this association and such variation remains underexamined. Using a large, pre-existing dataset, we investigated whether group status—a group’s social value—modulates this relationship. We used several assessments of epistemic motivation (need for structure, need for cognition) and group status (race, gender, social class). We found that the epistemic motivation-ideology relationship was stronger for women (versus men) and for members of lower (versus higher) social class groups, although the relationship strength differences were relatively small. The relationship did not consistently vary across racial group status. Group status appears to be a small, but not consistent, moderator of the epistemic motivation-ideology relationship.     

A Dynamic-Logical Perspective on Quantum Behavior

In this paper we show how recent concepts from Dynamic Logic, and in particular from Dynamic Epistemic logic, can be used to model and interpret quantum behavior. Our main thesis is that all the non-classical properties of quantum systems are explainable in terms of the non-classical flow of quantum information. We give a logical analysis of quantum measurements (formalized using modal operators) as triggers for quantum information flow, and we compare them with other logical operators previously used to model various forms of classical information flow: the “test” operator from Dynamic Logic, the “announcement” operator from Dynamic Epistemic Logic and the “revision” operator from Belief Revision theory. The main points stressed in our investigation are the following: (1) The perspective and the techniques of “logical dynamics” are useful for understanding quantum information flow. (2) Quantum mechanics does not require any modification of the classical laws of “static” propositional logic, but only a non-classical dynamics of information. (3) The main such non-classical feature is that, in a quantum world, all information-gathering actions have some ontic side-effects. (4) This ontic impact can affect in its turn the flow of information, leading to non-classical epistemic side-effects (e.g. a type of non-monotonicity) and to states of “objectively imperfect information”. (5) Moreover, the ontic impact is non-local: an information-gathering action on one part of a quantum system can have ontic side-effects on other, far-away parts of the system.     

Epistemic comparative conditionals

The interest of epistemic comparative conditionals comes from the fact that they represent genuine ‘comparative epistemic relations’ between propositions, situations, evidences, abilities, interests, etc. This paper argues that various types of epistemic comparative conditionals uniformly represent comparative epistemic relations via the comparison of epistemic positions rather than the comparison of epistemic standards. This consequence is considered as a general constraint on a theory of knowledge attribution, and then further used to argue against the contextualist thesis that, in some cases, considering a new counter- possibility can raise the epistemic standard of knowledge attribution. Instead, the paper shows that considering a new counter-possibility can only lower the epistemic position of a putative knower. Moreover, since the comparison, by the nature of conditionals, is free from any commitment to the truth-values of specific knowledge attributions, my conclusion is free from the debate between contextualism and invariantism on whether the truth-value of a knowledge attribution can actually vary with context.     

Epistemic luck and the generality problem

Epistemic luck has been the focus of much discussion recently. Perhaps the most general knowledge-precluding type is veritic luck, where a belief is true but might easily have been false. Veritic luck has two sources, and so eliminating it requires two distinct conditions for a theory of knowledge. I argue that, when one sets out those conditions properly, a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism emerges.

Evidentialism and pragmatic constraints on outright belief

Evidentialism is the view that facts about whether or not an agent is justified in having a particular belief are entirely determined by facts about the agent’s evidence; the agent’s practical needs and interests are irrelevant. I examine an array of arguments against evidentialism (by Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath, David Owens, and others), and demonstrate how their force is affected when we take into account the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief. Once we are sensitive to one of the factors that secure thresholds for outright believing (namely, outright believing that p in a given circumstance requires, at the minimum, that one’s degree of belief that p is high enough for one to be willing to act as if p in the circumstances), we see how pragmatic considerations can be relevant to facts about whether or not an agent is justified in believing that p—but largely as a consequence of the pragmatic constraints on outright believing.