Reliabilism without Epistemic Consequentialism

This paper argues that reliabilism can plausibly live without epistemic consequentialism, either as part of a non-consequentialist normative theory or as a non-normative account of knowledge on a par with certain accounts of the metaphysics of perception and action. It argues moreover that reliabilism should not be defended as a consequentialist theory. Its most plausible versions are not aptly dubbed ‘consequentialist’ in any sense that genuinely parallels the dominant sense in ethics. Indeed, there is no strong reason to believe reliabilism was ever seriously intended as a form of epistemic consequentialism. At the heart of its original motivation was a concern about the necessity of non-accidentality for knowledge, a concern quite at home in a non-consequentialist or non-normative setting. Reliabilism's connection to epistemic consequentialism was an accretion of the ’80s, and a feature of only one of its formulations in that decade.     

Negative priming and stimulus-response compatibility

The subjects in this study made incongruent naming responses to words and pictures that were presented on alternate trials (e.g., say “car” toBIKE). Their response time was longer if the correct response for the current trial was the name of the stimulus presented on the preceding trial, as compared with a control condition. These results suggest that the tendency to produce the (congruent) name of the stimulus is automatically activated and then inhibited. The “negative priming” effects appeared stronger for words where pictures were primes than for pictures where words were primes. The implications of these results for negative priming and stimulus-response compatibility are discussed.     

The way irrelevant dimensions are processed depends on what they overlap with: The case of Stroop- and Simon-like stimuli

Summary According to the dimensional-overlap model (Kornblum, 1992), irrelevant dimensions that overlap with a stimulus dimension (e. g., Stroop-type stimuli) are processed by a different stage than those that overlap with the response (e. g., Simon-type stimuli). We show that the effects of these two types of overlap are additive, thus supporting the model's hypothesis. We also show that the time course of facilitation and interference is different for these two types of overlap.     

Can performance epistemology explain higher epistemic value?

Synthese - Judgment and Agency contains Sosa’s latest effort to explain how higher epistemic value of the sort missing from an unwitting clairvoyant’s beliefs might be a special case of...     

Non‐epistemic perception as technology

Some epistemologists and philosophers of mind hold that the non‐epistemic perceptual relation of which feature‐seeing and object‐seeing are special cases is the foundation of perceptual knowledge. This paper argues that such relations are best understood as having only a technological role in explaining perceptual knowledge. After introducing the opposing view in §1, §2 considers why its defenders deny that some cases in which one has perceptual knowledge without the relevant acquaintance relations are counterexamples, detailing their case for lurking inferential epistemology. §§3–4 suggest that this strategy fails in many other cases. While there is a computational tale that might be deemed ‘inferential’ in these cases, there is no corresponding tale in epistemic structure, not even if one rejects what Siegel (2017) calls the ‘Reckoning Model’ of inference. §5 offers a more fundamental dilemma. §6 concludes that there is only a technological role for non‐epistemic perception in grounding perceptual knowledge, but allows that it might play a more‐than‐technological role elsewhere.     

A priming method for investigating the selection of motor responses

We describe a priming method for investigating the mechanisms underlying the selection of motor responses. The empirical question addressed with the method is how the choice reaction time for a response depends on its relationship to a response that the subject was primed to perform. We explore the method in a study of manual response selection where we investigate the effects of requiring that two possible responses use the same finger or hand. A requirement of the method — that subjects get ready to perform primed responses only — is not met in some conditions of the experiment. When the two possible responses are made with different hands, it appears that multiple response preparation occurs prior to detection of the reaction signal, whereas when the two possible responses are made with different fingers of the same hand it appears that advance preparation is limited to a single response. This finding implies that subjects engage in different kinds of response preparation depending on the relationship between the alternative possible responses. We discuss the implications of this hypothesis for the priming method introduced here as well as for theories of response selection generally.     

Cause as an implication

An appropriately unprejudiced logical investigation of causation as a type of implication relation is undertaken. The implication delineated is bounded syntactically. The developing argument then leads to a very natural process analysis, which demonstrably captures the established syntactical features. Next relevantly-based semantics for the resulting logical theory are adduced, and requisite adequacy results delivered. At the end of the tour, further improvements are pointed out, and the attractive terrain beyond present developments is glimpsed.This paper was presented at the 1986 Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Logic in Auckland, 9–12 July, 1986.     

Repeated measurements analysis of variance when the correlations have a certain pattern

Consider a repeated measurements study in which a single observation is taken at each oft(t > 2) equally spaced time points for each ofn subjects. This paper uses a result of Box to find the appropriate multiplicative correction term for the degrees of freedom in the analysis of variance table for the case when there is equal variability per time point, and when the correlation between observationsu time units apart is equal to ^u . For large values oft, the multiplicative correction has a lower bound approximately equal to 2.5/(t – 1).Dr. Fleiss is also with the Biometrics Research Unit of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. This work was supported in part by grant DE 04068 from the National Institute of Dental Research.