The phenomenon of base-rate neglect has elicited much debate. One arena of debate concerns how people make judgments under conditions of uncertainty. Another more controversial arena concerns human rationality. In this target article, we attempt to unpack the perspectives in the literature on both kinds of issues and evaluate their ability to explain existing data and their conceptual coherence. From this evaluation we conclude that the best account of the data should be framed in terms of a dual-process model of (...) judgment, which attributes base-rate neglect to associative judgment strategies that fail to adequately represent the set structure of the problem. Base-rate neglect is reduced when problems are presented in a format that affords accurate representation in terms of nested sets of individuals. (shrink)

The paper presents and defends a Bayesian theory of trust in social networks. In the first part of the paper, we provide justifications for the basic assumptions behind the model, and we give reasons for thinking that the model has plausible consequences for certain kinds of communication. In the second part of the paper we investigate the phenomenon of overconfidence. Many psychological studies have found that people think they are more reliable than they actually are. Using a simulation environment that (...) has been developed in order to make our model computationally tractable we show that in our model inquirers are indeed sometimes better off from an epistemic perspective overestimating the reliability of their own inquiries. We also show, by contrast, that people are rarely better off overestimating the reliability of others. On the basis of these observations we formulate a novel hypothesis about the value of overconfidence. (shrink)

l / Some Aspects and Developments of Gestalt Psychology1 [I] The Development and Status of the Problem At the basis of the constitution of the physical ...

According to the Argument from Disagreement (AD) widespread and persistent disagreement on ethical issues indicates that our moral opinions are not influenced by moral facts, either because there are no such facts or because there are such facts but they fail to influence our moral opinions. In an innovative paper, Gustafsson and Peterson (Synthese, published online 16 October, 2010) study the argument by means of computer simulation of opinion dynamics, relying on the well-known model of Hegselmann and Krause (J Artif (...) Soc Soc Simul 5(3):1–33, 2002; J Artif Soc Soc Simul 9(3):1–28, 2006). Their simulations indicate that if our moral opinions were influenced at least slightly by moral facts, we would quickly have reached consensus, even if our moral opinions were also affected by additional factors such as false authorities, external political shifts and random processes. Gustafsson and Peterson conclude that since no such consensus has been reached in real life, the simulation gives us increased reason to take seriously the AD. Our main claim in this paper is that these results are not as robust as Gustafsson and Peterson seem to think they are. If we run similar simulations in the alternative Laputa simulation environment developed by Angere and Olsson (Angere, Synthese, forthcoming and Olsson, Episteme 8(2):127–143, 2011) considerably less support for the AD is forthcoming. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973) est surtout connu du public fancophone par son ouvrage de 1957: Theorie du champ de la conscience. C'est la periode parisienne (de l'automne 1933 au printemps 1940) de Gurwitsch que le present volume documente tres precisement: il presente d'abord pour la premiere fois, les resultats substantiels d'un ouvrage en gestation qui n'aura pas vu le jour du vivant de l'auteur et qui rassemble, sous le titre Esquisse de la phenomenologie constitutive, les materiaux des cours et conferences (...) sur la Gestaltpsychologie, la psychologie intentionaliste, la phenomenologie de l'ideation, l'introduction a la phenomenologie. Le present volume rassemble aussi, a titre d'Appendice, quelques uns des articles publies par Aron Gurwitsch lors de cette periode parisienne. L'ensemble de ces travaux constitue un temoignage inedit sur une des toutes premieres introductions a la phenomenologie husserlienne, dans son veritable contexte de probleme. (shrink)

Lamy’s view coincides with much of the self-expansion model of love, but also suggests potential interesting directions for expanding it and integrating it with other ideas. These include the potential role of anticipated rapid self-development through falling in love itself being a self-expansion motivation, which although consistent with the model, has not been fully tested; and the potential role of stories/scripts of love, which although existing in the literature, have been minimally integrated with other lines of work and not at (...) all with the self-expansion model. (shrink)

Aron reflects with simplicity and depth on industrial society, communism, the future of democracy, peace and war, the nuclear age, and also Charles de Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Henry Kissinger and others.

Interoception in the broader sense refers to the perception of internal states, including the perception of the actual state of the internal organs and the motor system. Dimensions of interoception include interoceptive accuracy, i.e., the ability to sense internal changes assessed with behavioral tests, confidence rating with respect to perceived performance in an actual behavioral test, and interoceptive sensibility, i.e., the self-reported generalized ability to perceive body changes. The relationship between dimension of cardioceptive and proprioceptive modalities and their association with (...) affect are scarcely studied. In the present study, undergraduate students filled out questionnaires assessing positive and negative affect, interoceptive sensibility, and body competence. Following this, they completed a behavioral task assessing cardioceptive accuracy and two tasks assessing proprioceptive accuracy with respect to the tension of arm flexor muscles and the angular position of the elbow joint. Confidence ratings were measured with visual analog scales after the tasks. With the exception of a weak association between cardioceptive accuracy and the respective confidence rating, no associations between and within modalities were found with respect to various dimensions of interoception. Further, the interoceptive dimensions were not associated with state and trait positive and negative affect and perceived body competence. In summary, interoceptive accuracy scores do not substantially contribute to conscious representations of cardioceptive and proprioceptive ability. Within our data, non-pathological affective states are not associated with the major dimensions of interoception for the cardiac and proprioceptive modalities. (shrink)

The eighth and final chapter of Aron Gurwitsch’s major book, Leibniz. Philosophy of Panlogism, a translation of which is presented here, lays the foundations for Gurwitsch’s phenomenological reading of Leibnizian thought as a whole, understood and interpreted as a transcendental philosophy : as an objective correlate of the divine thought that sustains its systematic unity and original coherence, the world is itself thoroughly understood as the realization and “incorporation” of logic, in a broader sense. Examining the ontological status of (...) relations, and Leibniz’s conception of divine understanding as the transcendental subject of “possible worlds”, this final chapter brings together the guidelines that support and sustain his entire interpretation. (shrink)

Aron Vinegar’s essay explores art history and visual culture’s dependence on a phenomenological conception of world, which is based on a hermeneutics of facticity, intentionality, and ontological difference. He argues that the ‘basic concept’ of world has structured the field of art history and visual culture in implicit and explicit ways, thus dictating many of its commitments and concerns. One of the primary limitations of this commitment to world, is that it has resulted in art history and visual culture’s (...) tendency to concern itself with a very small portion of existence, usually human existence, in its emphasis on hermeneutics and facticity, thus foreclosing on a more generous and speculative ontology, ethics, and politics. The concept of “world” suggests an overarching totality, an interconnected field of meaning and sense, often indicated by a tacit and resonate tonality. But there is no overarching “world” or “world-view” that can provide us with an overview of or container for the myriad worlds of things. An art history that is willing to consider that the world does not exist would acknowledge and embrace the fact that there is no overall focus, which can encompass things and events in all their spatio-temporal complexity. It would entail a practice attentive to a “supple and inflected bathmology” (Vinegar prefers this phrase to “flat ontology”) in its refusal to emphasize “privileged ontological scenes” predicated on hierarchies of ontological difference, and subsuming things and experience within the structures of phenomenological intentionality. To initiate such a practice, Vinegar suggests an embrace of what he terms “ontological indifference,” a robust notion of habit, and a temporal logic that would be fully attentive to a pluriverse of multiple existences and eruptions of substance, which extend well beyond ‘our’ realms of significance and meaning, cares and concerns, laughter and joy, losses and mournings. (shrink)

Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit, and the Unspoken in Rousseau prend acte d'un grand nombre de publications ayant trait à l'analyse par Rousseau des langues et du langage, de la parole par rapport à l'écriture, de la voix (y compris la voix de la nature). Mais ce volume se consacre tout particulièrement au fonctionnement et aux effets du silence, de l'implicite et du non-dit dans la pensée de Rousseau. Son approche est à la fois polyvalente et cohérente, (...) et ses réflexions sur le silence sont associées à d'autres préoccupations esthétiques, politiques, et morales de son œuvre. Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit, and the Unspoken in Rousseau capitalizes on a great number of publications dealing with Rousseau's analysis of languages and language, speech versus writing, of voice (including the voice of nature). But this volume is particularly dedicated to the study of the functioning and the effects of silence, the implicit and the unspoken in Rousseau's thought. His approach is both polyvalent and consistent, and his reflections on silence are associated with other aesthetic, political, and moral concerns in his work. (shrink)

This edition focuses on Aron's lifelong attempt to bridge the gap between knowledge and action and to understand the dialectical relationship between history ...

Performing surgery in the developing world presents unique challenges and dilemmas for the visiting physician from an industrialized country. Language barriers, widespread, profound pathology, and lack of adequate facilities are obvious hurdles. A more subtle problem, though every bit as significant, is that the principles and procedures we routinely utilize at home to uphold ethical standards of care and to aid us in decision-making are often poorly applicable in the developing world. Acknowledging that cultural factors play a primary role in (...) every aspect of their interaction with patients, physicians must scrutinize and even modify the tools they employ when attempting to deliver ethical care in foreign .. (shrink)

Traditional Bayesianism requires that an agent’s degrees of belief be represented by a real-valued, probabilistic credence function. However, in many cases it seems that our evidence is not rich enough to warrant such precision. In light of this, some have proposed that we instead represent an agent’s degrees of belief as a set of credence functions. This way, we can respect the evidence by requiring that the set, often called the agent’s credal state, includes all credence functions that are in (...) some sense compatible with the evidence. One known problem for this evidentially motivated imprecise view is that in certain cases, our imprecise credence in a particular proposition will remain the same no matter how much evidence we receive. In this article I argue that the problem is much more general than has been appreciated so far, and that it’s difficult to avoid it without compromising the initial evidentialist motivation. _1_ Introduction _2_ Precision and Its Problems _3_ Imprecise Bayesianism and Respecting Ambiguous Evidence _4_ Local Belief Inertia _5_ From Local to Global Belief Inertia _6_ Responding to Global Belief Inertia _7_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Leibniz" verfügbar.

What does it mean for an agent faced with choice under uncertainty to “know” something? While a variety of mathematical methods are available to construct formal models to answer this question, the combination of different approaches may lead to unsettling paradoxes. I propose a unified theory that eliminates such inconsistencies by relying on a sharp conceptual distinction between information the decision-maker observes and how much of that information she can cognitively process. The resulting model allows for natural decision-theoretic characterizations of (...) comparing different amounts of information. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die mitmenschlichen Begegnungen in der Milieuwelt" verfügbar.

In our everyday discourse, most of us use modal statements to express possibility, necessity, or contingency. Logicians, linguists, and philosophers of language tend to use the possible world discourse to analyse the semantics of this kind of sentences. There is a disadvantage of this method: in the usual Quinean meta-ontology it commits the users to the existence of possible worlds. Even though there are many theories on metaphysics of these possible worlds, I will focus on the fictionalist approach, which aims (...) to suspend the undesired ontological commitment. Therefore it is an anti-realist theory. The fictionalist strategy is based on the idea that according to our common-sense ontology, fictions and fictional entities do not exist, and one can treat the possible world discourse as a fiction, and the possible worlds as fictional entities. However, in the last two decades, realist theories about fictions and fictional entities have arisen, especially the abstract artefact theory. In this paper I try to revise the fictionalist approach to modality by keeping the main idea that possible worlds are fictional entities, while accepting that fictional entities are abstract artefacts. The result is a new realist theory of modal fictionalism. (shrink)