Alter Egos: Notes on the basic Processes of specular Identification

Although identity is always dependant on observing minds, identification in physics and biology remains merely external, avoiding therefore the more serious problems of identity which arise in the presence of observed minds. Minds are defined in this paper as specular machines, i.e. systems capable of crossed self‐representations. Specularity is introduced as the primary condition of any objective identification, and self‐identification is presented as the core of specularity. Elementary illustrations are given of the role of specularity in both sociology and psychopathology.     

Nietzsche on Honesty and the Will to Truth

ABSTRACT

Nietzsche values intellectual honesty, but is dubious about what he calls the will to truth. This is puzzling since intellectual honesty is a component of the will to truth. In this paper, I show that this puzzle tells us something important about how Nietzsche conceives of our pursuit of truth. For Nietzsche, those who pursue truth occupy unstable ground, since being honest about the ultimate reasons for that pursuit would mean that truth could no longer satisfy the important human needs it satisfies at present. We can pursue truth, or be honest about what in us is served by such a pursuit, but not both. Nietzsche aims to show that understanding and owning up to this instability is the sort of affirmation of human life to which we ought to aspire, and is the price we pay for being free from otherworldly morality.     

Effects of context on the rate of conjunctive responses in the probabilistic truth table task

The probabilistic truth table task involves assessing the probability of "If A then C" conditional sentences. Previous studies have shown that a majority of participants assess this probability as the conditional probability P(C│A) while a substantial minority responds with the probability of the conjunction A and C. In an experiment involving 96 participants, we investigated the impact on the rate of conjunctive responses of the context in which the task is framed. We show that a context intended to lead participants to consider all the possible cases (i.e. the throw of a die known to allow six possibilities) elicited more conjunctive responses than a context assumed not to have this effect (an unfamiliar deck of cards). These results suggest that the step of inferring the probability can distort our assessment of participants' interpretation of conditional sentences. This might compromise the validity of the probabilistic task in studying conditional reasoning.