When the internet is wrong: Children’s trust in an inaccurate internet or human source

Prior studies have shown that children can select and evaluate information based on the previous accuracy of an informant. The current study examines how 5- to 6-year-old kindergarteners (N = 46) and 7- to 8-year-old second-graders (N = 48) in China judge scientific information provided by the internet or a teacher, and how a source's history of inaccuracy influences participants’ judgments. When lacking explicit information about previous accuracy, neither younger children nor older children showed differential trust in the internet or a teacher. After observing the internet providing inaccurate information, children in both age groups decreased their trust in statements from the internet. When the teacher was consistently inaccurate, children in both age groups also showed reduced preference for the teacher's statements. These findings demonstrate that 5- to 8-year-old children take into account history of inaccuracy when deciding whether to request or endorse information from the internet or a teacher.     

On the Limits of Rights and Representation

This essay explores the degree to which public reason can sustain political liberalism's commitment to justice and pluralism without attending to the role of what Jeffrey Stout calls “cultural inheritance” in shaping and justifying political commitments. At issue is whether public reason is the best resource for guiding conversations on political matters that are enmeshed in religious commitments and moral beliefs. Unless public reason can account for cultural inheritance, and foster a deliberative context in which political actors might grapple with the relationship between overlapping political claims and comprehensive doctrines, public reason will remain narrow and inadequate in a contemporary world where epistemic diversity is increasingly at odds with political liberalism's normative model of social cooperation and public deliberation.     

Empathy,Respect, and Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This paper reconsiders Heather Battaly’s argument that empathy is not a virtue. Like Battaly, I argue that empathy is a disposition that includes elements of virtue acquisition, but is not in itself a virtue in the Aristotelian sense. Unlike Battaly, however, I propose a distinction between care and respect. Drawing on Darwall’s view of recognition respect as well as on phenomenologically inspired views of empathy, I argue that respect can be regarded as the moral feeling that is distinctive of empathy. In my view, the feeling of respect towards another’s situated experience grants epistemic dignity, which is the recognition of the intrinsic significance of subjective experience. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the relation between empathy and respect can be relevant for an account of vulnerability that is not opposed to autonomy.     

Dyadic judgments based on conflicting samples: The failure to ignore invalid input

The present research demonstrates a so far unrecognized impediment of group performance, metacognitive myopia (Fiedler, 2012). Judges and decision-makers follow the given samples of information uncritically and neglect the metacognitive assessment of the samples' validity. Applying this notion to dyadic judgments, we instructed dyads to jointly estimate conditional probabilities p (Win|A) and p (Win|B) of Lotteries A and B. One person per dyad experienced a valid sample (winning rates conditional on lotteries). The other person experienced an invalid, reverse sample (lotteries conditional on winning). Whereas valid samples provide unbiased estimates of lotteries' winning probabilities, invalid samples can greatly misrepresent the association of winning and lotteries (depending on lottery base rates). Across three experiments, metacognitive myopia—both at the individual and at the dyadic group level—prevented participants from discriminating valid and invalid samples. Group judgments were biased toward erroneous implications of invalid samples, reflecting an equality bias among unequal group members.     

Respect,Coercion, and Religious Reasons

It is often assumed that people of faith should not endorse a law for religious reasons, since such an endorsement is considered to be disrespectful. Such a position is increasingly opposed by scholars who argue that such demands unjustifiably force people of faith to compromise their religious ideals. In order to defend their opposition to such demands, some scholars have invoked thought experiments as reductio arguments against the claim that endorsing laws dependent on religious reasons is necessarily disrespectful. I argue that these attempts have failed, and present an alternative thought experiment that demonstrates that such a law is not necessarily disrespectful. Because I conclude that previously proposed principles cannot defend this conclusion, I defend an alternative way of accommodating this intuition; a post‐secular deliberative approach based on the principle of double effect.     

Construct Validity of Belief Systems Subscales

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the construct validity of 11 subscales from the Belief Systems Test, a new Likert-type measure of conceptual system, as defined by Harvey, Hunt, and Schroder's (1961) model of cognitive development. Using responses from 136 undergraduate college students, we examined (a) intercorrelations among scores on the subscales, and (b) correlations between scores on the subscales and several measures of stress, an affective trait theoretically and empirically related to several conceptual systems. The scales associated with System 2 (characterized by rebelliousness and a distrust of people) and those associated with System 3 (defined by a concern for social relationships) emerged as the most cohesive sets of beliefs. System 2 subscales were also positively related to each of the five measures of stress administered.     

Philosophical Diversity and Disagreement

Widespread and lasting consensus has not been philosophy's fate. Indeed, one of philosophy's most striking features is its ability to accommodate “not only different answers to philosophical questions” but also “total disagreement on what questions are philosophical” (Rorty 1995 , 58). It is therefore hardly surprising that philosophers' responses to this metaphilosophical predicament have been similarly varied. This article considers two recent diagnoses of philosophical diversity: Kornblith and Rescher (respectively) claim that taking philosophical disagreement seriously does not lead to metaphilosophical scepticism. The article argues that their confidence is misplaced in so far as both wrongly assume that ordinary, first‐order philosophical practice and second‐order metaphilosophical reflection are separate enterprises.     

Public reason,non-public reasons,and the accessibility requirement

ABSTRACT

In Liberalism without Perfection, Jonathan Quong develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defense of the consensus model of public reason – a model which incorporates both a public-reasons-only requirement and an accessibility requirement framed in terms of shared evaluative standards. While the consensus model arguably predominates amongst public reason liberals, it is criticized by convergence theorists who reject both the public-reasons-only requirement and the accessibility requirement. In this paper, I argue that while we have good reason to reject Quong’s call for a public-reasons-only requirement, all public reason liberals should endorse at least some shared evaluative standards and, hence, an accessibility requirement.     

Kripke's sole route to the necessary a posteriori

In ‘Kripke on epistemic and metaphysical possibility: two routes to the necessary a posteriori’, Scott Soames identifies two arguments for the existence of necessary a posteriori truths in Naming and Necessity (NN). He argues that Kripke's second argument relies on either of two principles, each of which leads to contradiction. He also claims that it has led to ‘two-dimensionalist’ approaches to the necessary a posteriori which are fundamentally at odds with the insights about meaning and modality expressed in NN. I argue that the alleged second argument is not in NN. I identify the mistakes that lead to Soames' misinterpretation.