According to relational egalitarians, equality is not primarily about the distribution of some good but about people relating to one another as equals. However, compared with other theorists in political philosophy – including other egalitarians – relational egalitarians have said relatively little on what role personal responsibility should play in their theories. For example, is equality compatible with responsibility? Should economic distributions be responsibility-sensitive? This article fills this gap. I develop a relational egalitarian framework for personal responsibility and show that (...) relational equality commits us to responsibility. I develop two sets of arguments. First, I draw on relational theories of moral responsibility – particularly Strawsonian views – to show that valuable egalitarian relationships require responsibility. Second, I show why relational equality sometimes requires that economic distributions be sensitive to responsibility and choice. I also defend a seemingly paradoxical result: being committed to responsibility, relational egalitarianism not only justifies some distributive inequalities but some relational inequalities too. Overall, relational egalitarianism gives a nuanced and coherent answer as to why and how responsibility matters from within egalitarianism. That it does should be an important argument in its favour. (shrink)

By synthesizing research from psychology, economics, and philosophy, Propelled criticizes notions of well-being that overly focus on positive emotions and experiences. Against a tradition that has condemned boredom and frustration to be emotional obstacles that hinder human flourishing, Propelled shows that to live a good life we must experience and react appropriately to both. In addition, it argues that we need to anticipate, wait for, and even long for future events. Boredom, frustration, and anticipation are not unpleasant accidents of our (...) lives. Rather, they are vital psychological states that illuminate our desires and expectations, inform us of when we find ourselves stuck in unpleasant and unfulfilling situations, and motivate us to furnish our lives with meaning, interest, and value. (shrink)

ABSTRACTContemporary accounts of knowing one’s own mental states can be instructively supplemented by early modern accounts that understand self-knowledge as an important factor for flourishing human life. This article argues that in the early modern French moralists, one finds diverging conceptions of how knowing one’s own personal qualities could constitute a kind of human excellence: François de la Rochefoucauld argues that the value of knowing one’s own character faults could contribute to an attitude of self-acceptance that liberates one from the (...) effort of deceiving oneself and others. Madeleine de Scudéry argues that knowing one’s own character faults could be an incentive for self-cultivation that leads to the development of character traits that are naturally good. Anne-Thérèse de Lambert concurs with Scudéry’s insight and develops it further. According to Lambert, self-knowledge is crucial for developing character traits that give rise to the natural right of bei... (shrink)

This paper extends scholarship on multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in the context of corporate social responsibility in three ways. First, I outline a framework to analyze the strength of couplings between actors participating in MSIs. Characterizing an MSI as consisting of numerous local networks that are embedded in a wider global network, I argue that tighter couplings (within local networks) and looser couplings (between local networks) coexist. Second, I suggest that this coexistence of couplings enables MSIs to generate policy outcomes which (...) address the conditions of a transnational regulatory context. I argue that MSIs’ way of organizing enables them to cope with three challenges: the stability, flexibility, and legitimacy of governance. Reflecting on these challenges, the article identifies a number of problems related to MSIs’ role in transnational governance. Third, I discuss the UN Global Compact as an illustrative case and examine problems and opportunities related to its stability, flexibility, and legitimacy. (shrink)

While contemporary accounts understand esteem and self-esteem as essentially competitive phenomena, early modern natural law theorists developed a conception of justified esteem and self-esteem based on naturally good character traits. This article explores how such a normative conception of esteem and self-esteem is developed in the work of Christian Wolff. Two features make Wolff’s approach distinctive: He uses the analysis of common notions that are expressed in everyday language to provide a foundation for the aspects of natural law on which (...) his conception of natural duties of esteem depends. He develops a non-competitive conception of esteem and self-esteem into a cooperative conception, according to which enhancing the esteem in which others are held is seen as a tool for promoting self-perfection. Wolff’s ideas offer a solution to the well-known problems connected with competitive life-styles, and at the same time assign a central role in moral motivation to the desire of being esteemed and of having high self-esteem. Moreover, due to his emphasis on presenting a philosophical analysis based on common notions, he offers a solution that is meant to be persuasive from the perspective of everyday morality. (shrink)

Cognitive functions like perception, memory, language, or consciousness are based on highly parallel and distributed information processing by the brain. One of the major unresolved questions is how information can be integrated and how coherent representational states can be established in the distributed neuronal systems subserving these functions. It has been suggested that this so-called ''binding problem'' may be solved in the temporal domain. The hypothesis is that synchronization of neuronal discharges can serve for the integration of distributed neurons into (...) cell assemblies and that this process may underlie the selection of perceptually and behaviorally relevant information. As we intend to show here, this temporal binding hypothesis has implications for the search of the neural correlate of consciousness. We review experimental results, mainly obtained in the visual system, which support the notion of temporal binding. In particular, we discuss recent experiments on the neural mechanisms of binocular rivalry which suggest that appropriate synchronization among cortical neurons may be one of the necessary conditions for the buildup of perceptual states and awareness of sensory stimuli. (shrink)

Different people have different perceptions about artificial intelligence (AI). It is extremely important to bring together all the alternative frames of thinking—from the various communities of developers, researchers, business leaders, policymakers, and citizens—to properly start acknowledging AI. This article highlights the ‘fruitful collaboration’ that sociology and AI could develop in both social and technical terms. We discuss how biases and unfairness are among the major challenges to be addressed in such a sociotechnical perspective. First, as intelligent machines reveal their nature (...) of ‘magnifying glasses’ in the automation of existing inequalities, we show how the AI technical community is calling for transparency and explainability, accountability and contestability. Not to be considered as panaceas, they all contribute to ensuring human control in novel practices that include requirement, design and development methodologies for a fairer AI. Second, we elaborate on the mounting attention for technological narratives as technology is recognized as a social practice within a specific institutional context. Not only do narratives reflect organizing visions for society, but they also are a tangible sign of the traditional lines of social, economic, and political inequalities. We conclude with a call for a diverse approach within the AI community and a richer knowledge about narratives as they help in better addressing future technical developments, public debate, and policy. AI practice is interdisciplinary by nature and it will benefit from a socio-technical perspective. (shrink)

I explore the limits of corporate responsibility standards – for example Social Accountability 8000 (SA 8000), the Global Reporting Initiative, the Fair Labor Association workplace code – by looking at these initiatives through Derrida's aporias of justice as set out in 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"'. Based on a discussion of SA 8000, I uncover the unavoidable aporias that are associated with the use of this standard. I contribute to the literature on corporate responsibility standards in general (...) and SA 8000 in particular by showing (a) that attempts to standardise corporate responsibility can only be successful insofar as we recognise that compliance with SA 8000's rules requires a 'fresh judgement' every time they are applied, (b) that SA 8000 should not be pushed down the supply chain as such coercion does not require a truly responsible decision by suppliers and eventually leads to moral mediocrity and (c) that the necessarily time-consuming reflections about the singular contexts within which SA 8000 is applied challenge the urgent need for implementing this standard. I discuss the implications of my analysis of SA 8000 for corporate responsibility standards in general. (shrink)

A curious feature of Belnap’s “useful four-valued logic”, also known as first-degree entailment (FDE), is that the overdetermined value B (both true and false) is treated as a designated value. Although there are good theoretical reasons for this, it seems prima facie more plausible to have only one of the four values designated, namely T (exactly true). This paper follows this route and investigates the resulting logic, which we call Exactly True Logic.

Modal logic has been applied in many different areas, as reasoning about time, knowledge and belief, necessity and possibility, to mention only some examples. In the present paper, an attempt is made to use modal logic to account for the semantics of theoretical sentences in scientific language. Theoretical sentences have been studied extensively since the work of Ramsey and Carnap. The present attempt at a modal analysis is motivated by there being several intended interpretations of the theoretical terms once these (...) terms are introduced through the axioms of a theory. (shrink)

This book aims to lay bare the logical foundations of tractable reasoning. It draws on Marvin Minsky's seminal work on frames, which has been highly influential in computer science and, to a lesser extent, in cognitive science. Only very few people have explored ideas about frames in logic, which is why the investigation in this book breaks new ground. The apparent intractability of dynamic, inferential reasoning is an unsolved problem in both cognitive science and logic-oriented artificial intelligence. By means of (...) a logical investigation of frames and frame concepts, Andreas devises a novel logic of tractable reasoning, called frame logic. Moreover, he devises a novel belief revision scheme, which is tractable for frame logic. These tractability results shed new light on our logical and cognitive means to carry out dynamic, inferential reasoning. Modularity remains central for tractability, and so the author sets forth a logical variant of the massive modularity hypothesis in cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper investigates different modes of organizing for corporate social responsibility (CSR). Based on insights from organization theory, we theorize two ways to organize for CSR. “Complete” organization for CSR happens within businesses and depends on the availability of certain organizational elements (e.g., membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctioning). By contrast, “partial” organization for CSR happens when organizers do not have direct access to all these organizational elements. We discuss partial organization for CSR by analyzing how standards and cross-sector partnerships (...) make selective use of organizational elements. We maintain that an important feature of the increasing institutionalization of CSR—not only within businesses but also among non-governmental, governmental, and professional actors—is the rise of partial forms of organization. We discuss the contributions to this Special Issue in the context of our theorization of complete/partial organization for CSR and outline avenues for further research. (shrink)

Two prominent relational egalitarians, Elizabeth Anderson and Niko Kolodny, object to giving people in a democratic community differential voting weights on the grounds that doing so would lead to unequal relations between them. Their claim is that deviating from a “one-person, one-vote” scheme is incompatible with realizing relational egalitarian justice. In this article, I argue that they are wrong. I do so by showing that people can relate as moral, epistemic, social, and empirical equals in a scheme with differential voting (...) weights. I end the article by showing that from the perspective of relational egalitarianism, it is sometimes true that differential voting weights are more just than equal voting weights. (shrink)

This paper tries to explain why racial profiling involves a serious injustice and to do so in a way that avoids the problems of existing philosophical accounts. An initially plausible view maintains that racial profiling is pro tanto wrong in and of itself by violating a constraint on fair treatment that is generally violated by acts of statistical discrimination based on ascribed characteristics. However, consideration of other cases involving statistical discrimination suggests that violating a constraint of this kind may not (...) be an especially serious wrong in and of itself. To fully capture the significant wrong that occurs when racial profiling is targeted at black Americans or other similarly situated groups, it is argued that we should appeal to the idea that this basic injustice is exacerbated when it forms part of a larger pattern of similar actions that collectively realize a state of cumulative injustice. (shrink)

Whereas scholars often look to De Anima 2.5 to support one or another understanding of the sense in which perception, for Aristotle, qualifies as an alteration and qualitative assimilation to the sense-object, I ask the more basic question of what the chapter is meant to establish or accomplish with respect to the question whether perception is an alteration. I argue that the chapter does not presuppose or legitimate the view that perception is an alteration where it is thought to, and (...) that it is meant rather to challenge that view, most importantly, by putting its argumentative weight behind a different model of perception, leading to a kind of antinomy. What stands in the way of understanding perception as an alteration (and assimilation to the sense-object), in this chapter, is ultimately the lack of an account of perceiving a quality as having that quality. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Is international judicial human rights review anti-democratic and therefore illegitimate, and objectionably epistocratic to boot? Or is such review compatible with—and even a recommended component of—an epistemic account of democracy? This article defends the latter position, laying out the case for the legitimacy, possibly democratic legitimacy of such judicial review of democratically enacted legislation and policy-making. The article first offers a brief conceptual sketch of the kind of epistemic democracy and the kind of international human rights courts of concern—in particular (...) the European Court of Human Rights. The article goes on to develop some of the relevant aspects of democratic theory: components of an epistemic justification for democratic majority rule, namely to determine whether proposed policy and legislation bundles are just, and providing assurance thereof. Several critical premises and scope conditions are noted. The article goes on to consider the case for international judicial review, arguing that such review helps secure those premises and scope conditions. The article finally considers the scope such review should have—and some objections to such an account. (shrink)

Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über philosophische Debatten zum Umgang mit menschlicher Mobilität über nationalstaatliche Grenzen. Dabei wird zum einen auf die Diskussion über ein staatliches Recht auf Ausschluss bzw. ein individuelles Recht auf Einwanderung eingegangen, zum anderen wird die Frage beleuchtet, wer aufgrund einer besonderen Bedrohungslage im Herkunftsland einen Anspruch auf Aufnahme hat und wie Pflichten zur Aufnahme von Geflüchteten unter den Staaten zu verteilen sind.

According to David Lewis, the argument from temporary intrinsics is ‘the principal and decisive objection against endurance’. I focus on eternalist endurantism, discussing three different ways the eternalist endurantist can try to avoid treating temporary intrinsics as relational. Two of them, generally known as ‘adverbialism’ and ‘SOFism’, are familiar and controversial. I scrutinize them and argue that Lewis’ scepticism about them is well founded. Then, I sketch a further, to some extent new, version of eternalist endurantism, where the key idea (...) is that intrinsic monadic properties had simpliciter by objects are eternal, time-transcendent properties in Fine’s sense, i.e., properties had by objects regardless of time. Eternal properties of an object are ipso facto sempiternal. When something is P at one time and not P at another, it is radically indeterminate whether it is Psimpliciter or not. I argue that an account along these lines is better placed to treat intrinsic monadic properties of changing objects than any other known alternatives insofar as it recognizes that something is Psimpliciter ; it is able to account for x’s being P at a time in terms of something’s being P simpliciter; it has an answer to the question ‘is \simpliciter?’ when x is P at one time and not P at another. I conclude that endurantism is no less at ease with intrinsics than perdurantism is. (shrink)

Recently, the idea that our desire for the esteem of others could function as a regulative principle of social life has been criticized because the economy of esteem could reinforce oppressive structures due to expressions of mutual esteem within oppressing groups with deviant group norms. This article discusses this problem from a historical point of view, focusing on the moral and political writings of the eighteenth-century French materialist Paul Thiry d’Holbach. D’Holbach’s thoughts are relevant in two respects: For situations of (...) extreme power and wealth differences within oppressing groups, he shows that the economy of esteem does not work in favour of the members of these groups. This is so because the conditions of esteem and self-esteem of the members with lower hierarchical standing tend to be precarious, while the members with higher standing cannot use the flatteries of their inferiors as credible sources of esteem. D’Holbach concedes that self-esteem could be stabilized by refraining from self-reflection but argues that such a strategy comes at the price of an impaired capacity for protecting one’s natural needs. The upshot of his considerations is that our interest in esteem and self-esteem provides strong pragmatic and moral reasons for opposing oppression. (shrink)

In this article, Andreas Reichelt Lind explores the possibilities of a Deweyan account of education for democracy. To that end, an account emphasizing democratic habit formation, direct experience of democracy as a way of life, and the distinction between being and becoming is explicated and discussed. Lind shows how these elements together point to the issue of designing educational environments and then discusses in a preliminary way the implications of this insight from the perspective of education for democracy. The (...) article's contribution is twofold. First, it explicitly contributes to a reconstruction of Dewey in relation to the issue of educating for democracy. This represents a reframing of his writings. Second, it highlights and discusses some theoretical implications of the possibilities inherent in the Deweyan account of education for democracy. (shrink)

The following is a set of reading notes on, and questions for, the Neuroeconomics enterprise. My reading of neuroscience evidence seems to be at odds with basic conceptions routinely assumed in the Neuroeconomics literature. I also summarize methodological concerns regarding design, implementation, and statistical evaluation of Neuroeconomics experiments.

El estudio de la paralingüística, esto es, los modos de comunicar sin recurrir al lenguaje, ya sea de manera consciente, intencional y voluntaria, o de algún otro modo, es un componente esencial de cualquier intento por reconstruir, comprender e interpretar los sistemas de comunicación cultural, social, institucional, moral e interpersonal en las sociedades modernas y antiguas. Tres aspectos específicos de la paralingüística, tal como son descritos en la oratoria ática, son examinados en este artículo: el rostro y los órganos faciales (...) (como la boca y la nariz), las manos y el modo de andar. La hipótesis es que las referencias a la paralingüística apuntan a ganarse al auditorio en el tribunal o en las asambleas políticas suscitando emociones e incitando una guerra entre los oponentes del orador y la comunidad ateniense, cuyos valores culturales y creencias, según son presentados, los oponentes transgreden. (shrink)

This paper has two parts. First, I argue that three prominent arguments in favour of affirmative action—the mitigating discrimination argument, the equality of opportunity argument and the diversity argument—may be based on a relational egalitarian theory of justice, as opposed to a distributive understanding of justice. Second, I argue that basing these arguments in favour of affirmative action on relational egalitarianism has an interesting implication when it comes to the site(s) of affirmative action. Whereas affirmative action is usually discussed and (...) pursued in university admissions and in hiring for jobs, the relational egalitarian-based arguments entail, all else equal, that we have more reason to pursue affirmative action in the political domain than in the traditional sites. (shrink)

This paper aims to set forth Carnapian structuralism, i.e., a syntactic view of the structuralist approach which is deeply inspired by Carnap’s dual level conception of scientific theories. At its core is the axiomatisation of a metatheoretical concept AE(T) which characterises those extensions of an intended application that are admissible in the sense of being models of the theory-element T and that satisfy all links, constraints and specialisations. The union of axiom systems of AE(T) (where T is an element of (...) the theory-net N) will allow us to present scientific theories in an axiomatic fashion so that deductive reasoning in science can be formalised. Thereupon defeasible and paraconsistent means of reasoning will be introduced. The logical study of scientific reasoning is the key motivation of Carnapian structuralism. A further motivation is to help overcome the syntactic-semantic split in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Information generally comes from less than fully reliable sources. Rationality, it seems, requires that one take source reliability into account when reasoning on the basis of such information. Recently, Bovens and Hartmann (2003) proposed an account of the conjunction fallacy based on this idea. They show that, when statements in conjunction fallacy scenarios are perceived as coming from such sources, probability theory prescribes that the “fallacy” be committed in certain situations. Here, the empirical validity of their model was assessed. The (...) model predicts that statements added to standard conjunction problems will change the incidence of the fallacy. It also predicts that statements from reliable sources should yield an increase in fallacy rates (relative to unreliable sources). Neither the former (Experiment 1) nor the latter prediction (Experiment 3) was confirmed, although Experiment 2 showed that people can derive source reliability estimates from the likelihood of statements in a manner consistent with the tested model. In line with the experimental results, model fits and sensitivity analyses also provided very little evidence in favor of the model. This suggests that Bovens and Hartmann’s present model fails to explain fully people’s judgements in standard conjunction fallacy tasks. (shrink)

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, A. J. Ayer was an analytic philosopher who had sustained throughout his career some interest in developments in the work of his ‘continental’ peers. Ayer, who spoke French, held friendships with some important Parisian intellectuals, such as Camus, Bataille, Wahl and Merleau-Ponty. This paper examines the circumstances of a meeting between Ayer, Merleau-Ponty, Wahl, Ambrosino and Bataille, which took place in 1951 at some Parisian bar. The question under discussion during this meeting was (...) whether the sun existed before humans did, over which the various philosophers disagreed. This disagreement is tangled with a variety of issues, such as Ayer’s critique of Heidegger and Sartre, Ayer’s response to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of empiricism, and Bataille’s response to Sartre’s critique of his notion of ‘unknowing’, which uncannily resembles Ayer’s critique of Sartre. Amidst this tangle one finds Bataille’s statement that an ‘abyss’ separates English from French and German philosophy, the first recorded announcement of the analytic-continental divide in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This article reviews evidence suggesting that the cause of approach and avoidance behavior lies not so much in the presence (i.e., the stimulus) but, rather, in the behavior’s anticipated future consequences (i.e., the goal): Approach is motivated by the goal to produce a desired consequence or end-state, while avoidance is motivated by the goal to prevent an undesired consequence or end-state. However, even though approach and avoidance are controlled by goals rather than stimuli, affective stimuli can influence action control by (...) priming associated goals. An integrative ideomotor model of approach and avoidance is presented and discussed. (shrink)

Sartre’s account of the emotions presupposes a conception of human nature that is never fully articulated. The paper aims to render such conception explicit and to argue that frustration occupies a foundational place in Sartre’s picture of affective existence.

A number of multinational enterprises have come under ethical scrutiny over the recent decades. In some cases, this may be due to a lack of maturity of corporate moral reasoning. The article is based on a framework developed by Lawrence Kohlberg. He suggested three main stages of moral development: They are (1) pre-conventional moral reasoning, (2) conventional and (3) post-conventional moral reasoning. The article places different approaches to business ethics into the framework developed by Kohlberg. It is argued that the (...) first two stages form an insufficient basis for ethical guidance for multinational organizations. Five post-conventional ethical perspectives are presented to assist MNC's in their analysis in order to uncover the possible dilemmas, to avoid harming others and also to avoid costly embarrassment at the hands of critics. (shrink)

It is fashionable to argue that nature and society are obsolete categories. The two, we are told, can no longer be distinguished from one another; continuing loyalty to the ‘binary’ of the natural and the social blinds us to the logic of current ecological crises. This article outlines an argument for the opposite position: now more than ever – particularly in our rapidly warming world – we need to sift out the social components from the natural, if we wish to (...) understand the crises and retain the possibility of intervening in them. Tracing the current of hybridism to the writings of Bruno Latour, this article ends with a critique of the foremost proponent of a hybridism in Marxist garb: Jason W. Moore. Against his theories, it suggests that historical materialism is a form of property dualism that distinguishes between social and natural relations while considering them equally material in substance. That is also the analytical premise of ecological class hatred, the flames of which ecological Marxism seeks to fan. (shrink)

This paper concerns the classification of the process of mixture, for Aristotle, and the related issue of the manner in which the ingredients remain present once mixed. I argue that mixture is best viewed as a kind of substantial generation in the context of the GC and, accordingly, that the ingredients do not enjoy the kind of strong presence within a mixture usually attributed to them. To do this, I critically examine the most promising versions of the standard view and (...) offer a new interpretation of Aristotle’s treatment of a puzzle about mixture in GC 1.10. (shrink)

People may disagree about moral issues because they have fundamentally different intuitions. I argue that we ought to suspend judgement in such cases. Since we trust our own moral intuitions without positive evidence of their reliability, we must necessarily extend this trust to the moral intuitions of others: a fundamental self-other asymmetry in moral epistemology is untenable. This ensures that disagreements in moral intuition are defeating. In addition, I argue that brute conflicts in moral intuition require suspension of judgement only (...) if we are required to exhibit this kind of default trust with respect to the moral intuitions of others. (shrink)

We show that the modal propositional logic G, originally introduced to describe the modality "it is provable that", is also sound for various interpretations using filters on ordinal numbers, for example the end-segment filters, the club filters, or the ineffable filters. We also prove that G is complete for the interpretation using end-segment filters. In the case of club filters, we show that G is complete if Jensen's principle □ κ holds for all $\kappa ; on the other hand, it (...) is consistent relative to a Mahlo cardinal that G be incomplete for the club filter interpretation. (shrink)

A simple explanation of theoreticity says that a term is theoretical if and only if it refers to nonobservational entities. Paradigmatic examples of such entities are electrons, neutrinos, gravitational forces, genes etc. There is yet another explanation of theoreticity: a theoretical term is one whose meaning becomes determined through the axioms of a scientific theory. The meaning of the term ‘force’, for example, is seen to be determined by Newton’s laws of motion and further laws about special forces, such as (...) the law of gravitation. Theoreticity is a property that is commonly applied to both expressions in the language of science, and referents and concepts of such expressions. Objects, relations and functions as well as concepts thereof may thus qualify as theoretical in a derived sense. (shrink)

People often struggle with Bayesian reasoning. However, research showed that people’s performance (and rationality) can be supported by the way of representing the statistical information. First, research showed that using natural frequencies instead of probabilities as format of statistical information increases people’s performance in Bayesian situations thoroughly. Second, research also yielded that people’s performance increases through using visualization. We build our paper on existing research in this field. The main aim is to analyse people’s strategies in Bayesian situations that are (...) still erroneous although statistical information is represented by natural frequencies and visualizations. In particular, we compare two pairs of visualization with similar numerical information (tree diagram vs. unit square and double-tree diagram vs. 2x2-table) concerning their impact on people’s erroneous strategies in Bayesian situations. For this aim, we conducted an experiment with 540 university students. The students were randomly assigned to four conditions that are defined by the four different visualizations of statistical information. The students were asked to indicate a fraction as response in four Bayesian situations. We documented the numerator and the denominator of the students’ responses representing a basic set and a subset in a Bayesian situation. Our results show that people’s erroneous strategies are highly dependent on the visualization. A central finding is that the visualization’s characteristic of making the nested-sets structure of a Bayesian situation transparent has a facilitating effect on people’s Bayesian reasoning. For example, compared to the unit square, a tree diagram does not explicitly visualize the set-subset relations that are relevant in a Bayesian situation. Accordingly, compared to a unit square, a tree diagram partly hinders people to find the correct denominator in a Bayesian situation, and, in particular, triggers to select a wrong numerator. By analyzing people’s erroneous strategies in Bayesian situations, we contribute to investigating approaches to facilitate Bayesian reasoning and to further develop the teaching of Bayesian reasoning. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.