Children's Understanding of Behavioral Consequences of Epistemic States: A Comparison of Knowledge,Ignorance, and False Belief

The author addressed the issue of the simultaneity of false belief and knowledge understanding by investigating children's ability to predict the behavioral consequences of knowledge, ignorance, and false belief. The second aim of the study was to explore the role of counterfactuals in knowledge understanding. Ninety-nine (99) children, age 3–7 years old, completed the unexpected transfer task and a newly designed task in which a protagonist experienced 1 of the following 4 situations: knowing a fact, not knowing a fact, knowing a procedure, and not knowing a procedure. The results showed that factual ignorance was as difficult as false belief for the children, whereas the other conditions were all easier than false belief, suggesting that the well-known lag between ignorance and false belief may be partly methodologically based. The results provide support for a common underlying conceptual system for both knowing and believing, and evidence of the role of counterfactual reasoning in the development of epistemic state understanding. Methodological variations of the new task are proposed for future research.     

A PUZZLE ABOUT NATURALISM

Abstract: This article presents and solves a puzzle about methodological naturalism. Trumping naturalism is the thesis that we must accept p if science sanctions p, and biconditional naturalism the apparently stronger thesis that we must accept p if and only if science sanctions p. The puzzle is generated by an apparently cogent argument to the effect that trumping naturalism is equivalent to biconditional naturalism. It turns out that the argument for this equivalence is subtly question‐begging. The article explains this and shows more generally that there are no scientific arguments for biconditional naturalism.     

INTRODUCTION: VIRTUE AND VICE

Abstract: This introduction to the collection Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic addresses three main questions: (1) What is a virtue theory in ethics or epistemology? (2) What is a virtue? and (3) What is a vice? (1) It suggests that a virtue theory takes the virtues and vices of agents to be more fundamental than evaluations of acts or beliefs, and defines right acts or justified beliefs in terms of the virtues. (2) It argues that there are two important but different concepts of virtue: virtues are qualities that attain good ends, and virtues are qualities that involve good motives. (3) Accordingly, vices are qualities that either fail to attain good ends or involve bad motives. Finally, the introduction summarizes the eleven essays in the collection, which are divided into four sections: the Structure of Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology; Virtue and Context; Virtue and Emotion; and Virtues and Vices.     

Estimation of trade‐off between costs of preprocessing and primary processing

When people engage in a task, they often take preliminary actions (preprocessing) to simplify primary processing. Usually, a trade‐off is made between the costs of preprocessing and primary processing. We conducted three experiments to find out whether people could adaptively estimate the utility of preprocessing depending on the task situation. The result demonstrated that in performing a high‐complexity task, almost all the participants reduced their overall task performance cost by conducting cost‐adaptive preprocessing. However, for a low‐complexity task, participants tended to conduct preprocessing even though this increased overall task performance cost. Based on these results, we discuss human nature from the viewpoint of the influence of cognitive effort.     

Lgbt Catholics: a paradigmatic case of intra-confessional pluralism

ABSTRACT

I will reflect on the reconciliation between “subjective” life and “objective” doctrine experienced by Catholic lgbt couples. Even though their particular experience cannot be considered as universal it can nevertheless constitute a case study for theological reflection. I will propose a theological model for the integration of lgbt Catholics into Christian communities. The case of lgbt Catholics also helps us address the theoretical difficulties of religious pluralism. Their experience of faith is an example of “lived pluralism”. In the lexicon of religious pluralism, this experience is an intra-system or intra-theistic diversity, but it also touches upon the meta-theological issue of the model of reason that is to be applied to every system. I believe that every possible case of pluralism is worth considering if we want to theorize this concept. This may lead us to consider pluralism as a premise from which to start, articulated at different levels.     

Epistemic Responsibility and Critical Thinking

Should we always engage in critical thinking about issues of public policy, such as health care, gun control, and LGBT rights? Michael Huemer (2005) has argued for the claim that in some cases it is not epistemically responsible to engage in critical thinking on these issues. His argument is based on a reliabilist conception of the value of critical thinking. This article analyzes Huemer's argument against the epistemic responsibility of critical thinking by engaging it critically. It presents an alternative account of the value of critical thinking that is tied to the notion of forming and deploying a critical identity. And it develops an account of our epistemic responsibility to engage in critical thinking that is not dependent on reliability considerations alone. The primary purpose of the article is to provide critical thinking students, or those that wish to reflect on the value of critical thinking, with an opportunity to think metacritically about critical thinking by examining an argument that engages the question of whether it is epistemically responsible for one to engage in critical thinking.     

Sinnott-Armstrong,Walter, ed., Moral Psychology,Volume 3. The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion,Brain Disorders,and Development,Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. xix + 569, US $30 (paperback)

Many take the claim that you cannot ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non-moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are justified exclusively by non-moral beliefs—a view that I call moral inferentialism—presents an attractive non-sceptical moral epistemology.     

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.     

Public and private communication are different: results on relative expressivity

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) is the study of how to reason about knowledge, belief, and communication. This paper studies the relative expressivity of certain fragments of the DEL language for public and private communication. It is shown that the language of public communication with common knowledge and the language of private communication with common knowledge are expressively incomparable for the class of all pointed Kripke models, which provides a formal proof that public and private communication are fundamentally different in the presence of common knowledge. It is also shown that single-recipient private communication does not add expressive power to the language of modal logic with common knowledge for any class of transitive pointed Kripke models. The latter result provides a sense in which positive introspection—believing our own beliefs—induces a kind of self-dialog.     

Skeptical Parasitism and the Continuity Argument

Abstract: Recent literature on skepticism has raised a nearly univocal voice in condemning skeptical argumentation on the grounds that such argumentation necessarily involves our adopting some nonordinary or unnatural perspective. Were this really so, then skeptical conclusions would not speak to us in the way in which skeptics think they do; we would be “insulated” from any such conclusions. I argue that skeptical argumentation need not rely on any nonordinary or unnatural standards. Rather, the skeptic's procedure is to offer a critique from within. Having given my argument for this claim (which I call the Continuity Argument), I consider and respond to two important objections. I conclude that the skeptic has a powerful meta‐argument to be deployed in defending the legitimacy of his skeptical conclusions against the slings and arrows of (those I call) the half‐true theorists.