The Senses as Signalling Systems

A central goal of the philosophy of perception is to uncover the nature of sensory capacities. Ideally, we would like an account that specifies what conditions need to be met in order for an organism to count as having the capacity to sense or perceive its environment. And, on the assumption that sensory states are the kinds of things that can be accurate or inaccurate, a further goal of the philosophy of perception is to identify the accuracy conditions for sensory states. In this paper I recommend a novel approach to these core issues, one that draws heavily on game-theoretic treatments of signalling in nature. A benefit of the approach is that it helps us to understand why biologists attribute sensory powers to such a diverse range of organisms, including plants, fungi, and algae.     

Pain for the Moral Error Theory? A New Companions-in-Guilt Argument

The moral error theorist claims that moral discourse is irredeemably in error because it is committed to the existence of properties that do not exist. A common response has been to postulate ‘companions in guilt’—forms of discourse that seem safe from error despite sharing the putatively problematic features of moral discourse. The most developed instance of this pairs moral discourse with epistemic discourse. In this paper, I present a new, prudential, companions-in-guilt argument and argue for its superiority over the epistemic alternative.     

Effects of stimulus order on discrimination processes in comparative and equality judgements: Data and models

In typical discrimination experiments, participants are presented with a constant standard and a variable comparison stimulus and their task is to judge which of these two stimuli is larger (comparative judgement). In these experiments, discrimination sensitivity depends on the temporal order of these stimuli (Type B effect) and is usually higher when the standard precedes rather than follows the comparison. Here, we outline how two models of stimulus discrimination can account for the Type B effect, namely the weighted difference model (or basic Sensation Weighting model) and the Internal Reference Model. For both models, the predicted psychometric functions for comparative judgements as well as for equality judgements, in which participants indicate whether they perceived the two stimuli to be equal or not equal, are derived and it is shown that the models also predict a Type B effect for equality judgements. In the empirical part, the models' predictions are evaluated. To this end, participants performed a duration discrimination task with comparative judgements and with equality judgements. In line with the models' predictions, a Type B effect was observed for both judgement types. In addition, a time-order error, as indicated by shifts of the psychometric functions, and differences in response times were observed only for the equality judgement. Since both models entail distinct additional predictions, it seems worthwhile for future research to unite the two models into one conceptual framework.     

On Being Happy and Mistaken on a Good Day: Revisiting Forgas’s (1998) Mood-Bias Result

Forgas (1998) reported “on being happy and mistaken,” finding that a happy mood increased the fundamental attribution error (FAE) compared to a sad mood. However, the standard attitude-attribution paradigm used by Forgas might contain demand characteristics, to which happy people might be especially susceptible. In addition, Goldenberg and Forgas (2012) showed that a happy mood decreased a form of the FAE. Using the questioner-contestant paradigm, we replicated Forgas’s result, but only when participants were already having a “good day.”