The Impact of Cognitive Diversity on Crisis Negotiations

This paper reports on a series of experiments designed to assess the impact of grouping decision makers by level of cognitive complexity on the outcomes they attain in crisis negotiations. The participants—University of Maryland undergraduates who took roles in a simulated international hostage crisis—used a computer decision support system and a controlled network environment for communications. The goal of the experiments was to better understand the dynamics that lead certain types of groupings to have greater success in negotiations, and that lead certain groups of adversaries to achieve more mutually beneficial outcomes such as compromise and agreement. The findings point to a positive relationship between the level of homogeneity in cognitive complexity among decision makers and the achievement of positive outcomes in crisis negotiations.     

Understanding as compression

Philosophical Studies - What is understanding? My goal in this paper is to lay out a new approach to this question and clarify how that approach deals with certain issues. The claim is that...     

Understanding as representation manipulability

Claims pertaining to understanding are made in a variety of contexts and ways. As a result, few in the philosophical literature have made an attempt to precisely characterize the state that is y understanding x. This paper builds an account that does just that. The account is motivated by two main observations. First, understanding x is somehow related to being able to manipulate x. Second, understanding is a mental phenomenon, and so what manipulations are required to be an understander must only be mental manipulations. Combining these two insights, the paper builds an account (URM) of understanding as a certain representational capacity—specifically, understanding x involves possessing a representation of x that could be manipulated in useful ways. By tying understanding to representation, the account correctly identifies that understanding is a fundamentally cognitive achievement. However, by also demanding that which representations count as understanding-conferring be determined by their practical effects, URM captures the insight that understanding is vitally connected to practice. URM is fully general, and can apply equally well to understanding states of affairs, understanding events, and even understanding people and works of art. The ultimate test of URM is its applicability in actual scientific and philosophical discourse. To that end the paper discusses the importance of understanding in the philosophy of science, psychology, and computer science.     

Category structure and created memories

Cued recall of categorized lists was used to examine effects of category structure on the creation of false memories. In three experiments, category members that had not been presented on studied categorized lists were nonetheless recalled by participants. Delaying the category cued recall test (Experiment 1) and priming category members that had been omitted from target lists (Experiment 3) increased the frequency of false recall. All three experiments showed that nonpresented category members that were higher in output dominance were more frequent intrusions. The typicality of category members, however, did not uniquely contribute to the predictability of false recall (or accurate recall) once the contribution of output dominance was taken into account, suggesting that item accessibility (related to output dominance) may be more instrumental than item distinctiveness (related to typicality) in causing certain types of false recall. The results show that created memories in category cued recall are strongly biased by prior category knowledge and can be predicted by the graded structure of categories, particularly in terms of the output dominance of category instances.     

Contextual utility affects the perceived quality of explanations

Are explanations of different kinds (formal, mechanistic, teleological) judged differently depending on their contextual utility, defined as the extent to which they support the kinds of inferences required for a given task? We report three studies demonstrating that the perceived “goodness” of an explanation depends on the evaluator’s current task: Explanations receive a relative boost when they support task-relevant inferences, even when all three explanation types are warranted. For example, mechanistic explanations receive higher ratings when participants anticipate making further inferences on the basis of proximate causes than when they anticipate making further inferences on the basis of category membership or functions. These findings shed light on the functions of explanation and support pragmatic and pluralist approaches to explanation.     

Functional explaining: a new approach to the philosophy of explanation

In this paper, I argue that explanations just ARE those sorts of things that, under the right circumstances and in the right sort of way, bring about understanding. This raises the question of why such a seemingly simple account of explanation, if correct, would not have been identified and agreed upon decades ago. The answer is that only recently has it been made possible to analyze explanation in terms of understanding without the risk of collapsing both to merely phenomenological states. For the most part, theories of explanation were for 50 years held hostage to the historical accident that they far outstripped in sophistication corresponding accounts of understanding.