Heidegger and the Essence of Dasein

Being and Time argues that we, as Dasein, are defined not by what we are, but by our way of existing, our “existentiell possibilities.” I diagnose and respond to an interpretive dilemma that arises from Heidegger's ambiguous use of this latter term. Most readings stress its specific sense, holding that Dasein has no general essence and is instead determined by some historically contingent way of understanding itself and the meaning of being at large. But this fails to explain the sense in which Being and Time is a work of fundamental ontology, concluding in Heidegger's claim to have found the meaning of Dasein's being in the concept of originary temporality. On the other hand, readings that stress the general sense of “existentiell possibilities” find Heidegger on a fruitless quest for the transcendental conditions necessary for Dasein's existence, which seems to founder on the claims that Dasein is constitutively thrown, factical, and “in‐each‐case‐mine” [jemeinig]. Both readings are problematic and, I contend, result from a failure to disambiguate and explain the ontologically unique relationship between the specific and general aspects of Dasein's essence. I argue that we can better explain this relationship, Heidegger's method for investigating it, and the sense in which Dasein has an essence that is open to philosophical investigation, if we read Being and Time's ontology of Dasein in terms of what Anton Ford calls “categorial” genus‐species relationships.     

Optimising self-regulated study: The benefits—and costs—of dropping flashcards

Self-regulation of study activities is a constant in the lives of students—who must decide what to study, when to study, how long to study, and by what method to study. We investigated self-regulation in the context of a common study method: flashcards. In four experiments we examined the basis and effectiveness of a metacognitive strategy adopted almost universally by students: setting aside (dropping) items they think they know. Dropping has a compelling logic—it creates additional opportunities to study undropped items—but it rests on two shaky foundations: students’ metacognitive monitoring and the value they assign to further study. In fact, being allowed to drop flashcards had small but consistently negative effects on learning. The results suggest that the effectiveness of self-regulated study depends on both the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring and the learner's understanding, or lack thereof, of how people learn.     

What we know and what to do

This paper discusses an important puzzle about the semantics of indicative conditionals and deontic necessity modals (should, ought, etc.): the Miner Puzzle (Parfit, ms; Kolodny and MacFarlane, J Philos 107:115–143, 2010). Rejecting modus ponens for the indicative conditional, as others have proposed, seems to solve a version of the puzzle, but is actually orthogonal to the puzzle itself. In fact, I prove that the puzzle arises for a variety of sophisticated analyses of the truth-conditions of indicative conditionals. A comprehensive solution requires rethinking the relationship between relevant information (what we know) and practical rankings of possibilities and actions (what to do). I argue that (i) relevant information determines whether considerations of value may be treated as reasons for actions that realize them and against actions that don’t, (ii) incorporating this normative fact requires a revision of the standard ordering semantics for weak (but not for strong) deontic necessity modals, and (iii) an off-the-shelf semantics for weak deontic necessity modals, due to von Fintel and Iatridou, which distinguishes “basic” and “higher-order” ordering sources, and interprets weak deontic necessity modals relative to both, is well-suited to this task. The prominence of normative considerations in our proposal suggests a more general methodological lesson: formal semantic analysis of natural language modals expressing normative concepts demands that close attention be paid to the nature of the underlying normative phenomena.     

Originary Temporality and Existential Commitment: A Defense of Heidegger's A Potiori Claim

Being and Time's fundamental ontoogy and existentialism both rest on the A Potiori Claim, which states that originary temporality is, although non‐sequential, a genuine and basic concept of time from which we derive our more ordinary, sequential concept of time. In this paper, I develop a new reading and defense of this claim against the readings of William Blattner, which ties originary temporality too tightly to the particular roles and identities we live out and must therefore find Heidegger's project a failure, and Tony Fisher, who implies that our various roles and identities hang together in time in a merely accidental and non‐rational way. On my reading, originary temporality is the structure of Dasein's characteristic activity of existential commitment. Through this activity, we each work out, in our own case, what it takes to embody the capacity for sense‐making, at all. Here, the non‐sequentiality of originary temporality reflects the way in which commitments are revised and sustained through time, while the sequence of nows derives from our need to embody our commitment in a single life that negotiates among the practical demands that our various identities make of us.     

A Clash of Civilizations? Preferences for Religious Political Leaders in 86 Nations

Huntington claimed that today's major conflicts are most likely to erupt between religiously defined “civilizations,” in particular between Christianity and Islam. Using World Values Surveys from 86 nations, we examine differences between Christians and Muslims in preferences for religious political leaders. The results suggest a marked difference between Muslims and Christians in their attitudes toward religious politicians, with Muslims more favorable by 20 points out of 100. Devoutness, education, degree of government corruption, and status as a formerly Communist state account for the difference. Little support is found for the clash‐of‐civilizations hypothesis. Instead, we find that a clash of individual beliefs—between the devout and the secular—along with enduring differences between the more developed and less developed world explains the difference between Islam and Christianity with regards to preferences for religious political leaders.     

Optimising self-regulated study: the benefits - and costs - of dropping flashcards

Self-regulation of study activities is a constant in the lives of students - who must decide what to study, when to study, how long to study, and by what method to study. We investigated self-regulation in the context of a common study method: flashcards. In four experiments we examined the basis and effectiveness of a metacognitive strategy adopted almost universally by students: setting aside (dropping) items they think they know. Dropping has a compelling logic - it creates additional opportunities to study undropped items - but it rests on two shaky foundations: students' metacognitive monitoring and the value they assign to further study. In fact, being allowed to drop flashcards had small but consistently negative effects on learning. The results suggest that the effectiveness of self-regulated study depends on both the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring and the learner's understanding, or lack thereof, of how people learn.     

Learning concepts and categories: is spacing the "enemy of induction"?

Inductive learning -- that is, learning a new concept or category by observing exemplars -- happens constantly, for example, when a baby learns a new word or a doctor classifies x-rays. What influence does the spacing of exemplars have on induction? Compared with massing, spacing enhances long-term recall, but we expected spacing to hamper induction by making the commonalities that define a concept or category less apparent. We asked participants to study multiple paintings by different artists, with a given artist's paintings presented consecutively (massed) or interleaved with other artists' paintings (spaced). We then tested induction by asking participants to indicate which studied artist (Experiments 1a and 1b) or whether any studied artist (Experiment 2) painted each of a series of new paintings. Surprisingly, induction profited from spacing, even though massing apparently created a sense of fluent learning: Participants rated massing as more effective than spacing, even after their own test performance had demonstrated the opposite.     

The generation effect in monkeys

How well one retains new information depends on how actively it is processed during learning. Active attempts to retrieve information from memory result in more learning than passive observation of the same information (the generation effect). Here, we present evidence for the generation effect in monkeys. Subjects were trained to respond to five-item lists of photographs in a particular order. On some lists, they could request "hints" to guide their behavior; on others, they had to generate the correct order from memory. Training with hints resulted in high levels of initial performance, but accuracy dropped precipitously when the hints were removed on the criterion test. Training without hints led to relatively poor initial performance, but accuracy increased steadily and remained high on the criterion test.     

Transfer of metacognitive skills and hint seeking in monkeys

Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what one knows (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what one does not know (control). Although there is a substantial literature on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. We also show that monkeys can learn to request "hints" when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that nonhuman primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need-to-know basis.