Individual differences in epistemic style: A dual-process perspective

This article reports the results of using a specially designed scaled questionnaire to investigate the dualistic properties of epistemic style. The scale is introduced as a measure of individual difference in epistemic style, conceptualized within the framework of dual-process notions of cognitive function. The study examined several psychometric components of the measure, including dimensional structure, distributional characteristics, and indications of construct validity. The instrument, called the Epistemic Preference Indicator, was found to be a reliable and valid measure of two dimensions that are negatively related—each reflecting incompatible epistemic assumptions and approaches to solving knowledge-dependent problems. Theoretical speculations are made concerning the nature of epistemic dualism and the dimension of cognitive processing that may underlie the two proposed epistemic preferences or styles.     

Epistemic modals, relativism and assertion

I think that there are good reasons to adopt a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a <world, time> pair). Anyone who is inclined to relativise truth to more than just worlds and times faces a problem about assertion. It's easy to be puzzled about just what purpose would be served by assertions of this kind, and how to understand what we'd be up to in our use of sentences like ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', if they have such peculiar truth conditions. After providing a very quick argument to motivate a relativist view of epistemic modals, I bring out and attempt to resolve this problem in making sense of the role of assertions with relativist truth conditions. Solving this problem should be helpful in two ways: first, it eliminates an apparently forceful objection to relativism, and second, spelling out the relativist account of assertion and communication will help to make clear just what the relativist position is, exactly, and why it's interesting. Thanks to Brian Weatherson, John Hawthorne, Daniel Stoljar, Frank Jackson, Ben Blumson, Seth Yalcin, Karen Bennett, Kent Bach, Matthew Weiner, Jonathan Kvanvig, Eric Swanson, David Chalmers, Agustin Rayo, Dustin Locke, Aaron Bronfman, Michael Allers, Ivan Mayerhofer, and to the participants at the BSPC 2005 for helpful discussion.     

Reasons to act and believe: naturalism and rational justification in Hume’s philosophical project

Is Hume a naturalist? Does he regard all or nearly all beliefs and actions as rationally unjustified? In order to settle these questions, it is necessary to examine their key terms (‘naturalism’ and ‘rational justification’) and to understand the character—especially the normative character—of Hume’s philosophical project. This paper argues (i) that Hume is a naturalist—and, in particular, both a moral and an epistemic naturalist—in quite robust ways; and (ii) that Hume can properly regard many actions and beliefs as “rationally justified” in several different senses of that term.     

A logical calculus for controlled monotonicity

In this paper we introduce a new deductive framework for analyzing processes displaying a kind of controlled monotonicity. In particular, we prove the cut-elimination theorem for a calculus involving series-parallel structures over partial orders which is built up from multi-level sequents, an interesting variant of Gentzen-style sequents. More broadly, our purpose is to provide a general, syntactical tool for grasping the combinatorics of non-monotonic processes.     

Dialetheism and the Impossibility of the World

This paper first offers a standard modal extension of dialetheic logics that respect the normal semantics for negation and conjunction, in an attempt to adequately model absolutism, the thesis that there are true contradictions at metaphysically possible worlds. It is shown, however, that the modal extension has unsavoury consequences for both absolutism and dialetheism. While the logic commits the absolutist to dialetheism, it commits the dialetheist to the impossibility of the actual world. A new modal logic AV is then proposed which avoids these unsavoury consequences by invalidating the interdefinability rules for the modal operators with the use of two valuation relations. However, while using AV carries no significant cost for the absolutist, the same isn't true for the dialetheist. Although using AV allows her to avoid the consequence that the actual world is an impossible world, it does so only on the condition that the dialetheist admits that she cannot give a dialetheic solution to all self-referential semantic paradoxes. Thus, unless there are any further available modal logics that don't commit her to the impossibility of the actual world, the dialetheist is faced with a dilemma. Either admit that the actual world is an impossible world, or admit that her research programme cannot give a comprehensive solution to the self-referential paradoxes.     

The Appeal to Expert Opinion: Quantitative Support for a Bayesian Network Approach

The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme‐based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how people evaluate this argument, suggesting that such an approach might be beneficial to argumentation research generally. We subsequently present two experiments as an example of the potential for future research in this vein, demonstrating that participants' quantitative ratings of the convincingness of a proposition that has been supported with an appeal to expert opinion were broadly consistent with the predictions of the Bayesian model.     

Concept Appraisal

This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts. We demonstrate that there are multiple, reliably judged, dimensions of epistemic appraisal of concepts. Four of these dimensions are accounted for by a common underlying factor capturing how well people believe they understand a concept. Further studies show how dimensions of concept appraisal relate to other aspects of concepts. First, they relate directly to the hierarchical organization of concepts, reflecting the increase in specificity from superordinate to basic and subordinate levels. Second, they predict inductive choices in category-based induction. Our results suggest that epistemic appraisals of concepts form a psychologically important yet previously overlooked aspect of the structure of concepts. These findings will be important in understanding why individuals sometimes abandon and replace certain concepts; why social groups do so, for example, during a “scientific revolution”; and how we can facilitate such changes when we engage in deliberate “conceptual engineering” for epistemic, social, and political purposes.     

机器学习在解决过拟合现象中的作用

过拟合现象是心理学走向预测科学的重要阻碍。文章综述了机器学习在解决过拟合现象中的价值和实现途径：（1）介绍了过拟合的两种表现形式和现状;（2）分析过拟合的根因,即“高解释力≠高预测力”;（3）厘清机器学习的建模逻辑与核心技术在解决过拟合中的作用;（4）利用样例数据和代码说明机器学习统计思想在模型拟合中的具体应用过程。文章指出心理学应从解决实际问题的角度出发,借鉴机器学习的分析思想,避免过拟合,进而提供更准确更稳定的结论和预测模型。     

Dispositional optimism and luck attributions: Implications for philosophical theories of luck

We conducted two studies to determine whether there is a relationship between dispositional optimism and the attribution of good or bad luck to ambiguous luck scenarios. Study 1 presented five scenarios that contained both a lucky and an unlucky component, thereby making them ambiguous in regard to being an overall case of good or bad luck. Participants rated each scenario in toto on a four-point Likert scale and then completed an optimism questionnaire. The results showed a significant correlation between optimism and assignments of luck: more optimistic people rated the characters in the ambiguous scenarios as more lucky while more pessimistic people rated the same characters in the same scenarios as more unlucky. Study 2 separated the good and bad luck components of the study 1 scenarios and presented the components individually to a new group of participants. Participants rated the luckiness of each component on the same four-point scale and then completed the optimism questionnaire. We found that the luckiness of the bad luck component could be significantly predicted by their level of optimism. We discuss how these findings pose problems for philosophical accounts that treat luck as an objective property.