Science education is generally perceived as a key facilitator in cultivating a scientifically literate society. In the last decade, however, this conventional wisdom has been challenged by evidence that greater scientific literacy and critical thinking skills may in fact inadvertently aggravate polarization on scientific matters in the public sphere. Supporting an alternative “scientific update hypothesis,” in a series of studies (total N = 2087), we show that increased science’s epistemology literacy might have consequential population-level effects on the public’s alignment with (...) scientific results. In one exploratory study and a pre-registered national online survey, we first show that understanding scientific epistemology predicts refusal of pseudoscientific beliefs and higher scores in a methodology of science test. We also find and replicate a propensity for epistemologically literate citizens to endorse the norm of belief updating and the communicated scientific consensus following both ideologically congruent and incongruent scientific results. Notably, after 2 months of first being presented with scientific results on politically controversial issues, a one standard deviation higher score in epistemological literacy is associated with a 14% increase in the odds of individuals switching their beliefs to align with the scientifically communicated consensus. We close by discussing how, on the face of ideological incongruity, a general understanding of scientific epistemology might foster the acceptance of scientific results, and we underscore the need for a more nuanced appreciation of how education, public comprehension of scientific knowledge, and the dynamics of polarization intersect in the public sphere. (shrink)

By systematically biasing our beliefs, self-deception can endanger our ability to successfully convey our messages. It can also lead lies to degenerate into more severe damages in relationships. Accordingly, I suggest that the biases reviewed in the target article do not aim at self-deception but instead are the by-products of several other mechanisms: our natural tendency to self-enhance, the confirmation bias inherent in reasoning, and the lack of access to our unconscious minds.

Modern societies depend on a growing production of scientific knowledge, which is based on the functional differentiation of science into still more specialised scientific disciplines and subdisciplines. This is the basis for the paradox of scientific expertise: The growth of science leads to a fragmentation of scientific expertise. To resolve this paradox, the present paper investigates three hypotheses: 1) All scientific knowledge is perspectival. 2) The perspectival structure of science leads to specific forms of knowledge asymmetries. 3) Such perspectival knowledge (...) asymmetries must be handled through second order perspectives. We substantiate these hypotheses on the basis of a perspectivist philosophy of science grounded in Peircean semiotics and autopoietic systems theory. Perspectival knowledge asymmetries are an unavoidable and necessary part of the growth of scientific knowledge, and more awareness of this fact can help avoid blind and futile struggles between scientific perspectives, and direct efforts toward more appropriate ways of handling these fundamental knowledge asymmetries. Concretely, we show how different kinds of scientific knowledge, expertise, disagreement and learning can be correlated to the perspectival structure of science, and propose how polyocular communication based on observations of the observations made by specialised perspectives can be used to handle such perspectival knowledge asymmetries. This can help overcome the observed problems in carrying out cross-disciplinary research and in the collective use of different kinds of scientific expertise, and thereby make society better able to solve complex, real-world problems. (shrink)

Trata-se de um breve e parcial recenseamento do paradigma naturalista em desenvolvimentos clássicos e recentes da filosofia fenomenológica. Em um primeiro momento, tentar-se-á estabelecer elementos mínimos acerca do que pode ser considerado um “paradigma filosófico”. Em seguida, será mostrada uma presença improvável e discreta da física enquanto imaginário privilegiado na ontologia fenomenológica de Jean-Paul Sartre. Também será explorada a resistência de Paul Ricoeur ao reducionismo neurobiológico, bem como uma improvável presença de um enquadramento naturalista na base de sua antropologia filosófica. (...) Por fim, serão apresentados indícios, na literatura recente, da possibilidade de uma relação fecunda e amigável entre a fenomenologia hermenêutica de Heidegger e as ciências naturais. Palavras-chave: Fenomenologia. Hermenêutica. Naturalismo. Paradigma. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo pretendo mostrar que el pensamiento de Carl Schmitt tiene un carácter marcadamente filosófico. Más precisamente: que en la base de él se halla una teoría de la comprensión. Esa teoría de la comprensión tiene la particularidad de que se desarrolla a partir de una teoría de la comprensión jurídica, pero se extiende, en su obra, a la comprensión en general.

Delayed responses are a common phenomenon in experience sampling studies. Yet no consensus exists on whether they should be excluded from the analysis or what the threshold for exclusion should be. Delayed responses could introduce bias, but previous investigations of systematic differences between delayed and timely responses have offered unclear results. To investigate differences as a function of delay, we conducted secondary analyses of nine paper and pencil based experience sampling studies including 1,528 individuals with different clinical statuses. In all (...) participants, there were significant decreases in positive and increases in negative affect as a function of delay. In addition, delayed answers of participants without depression showed higher within-person variability and an initial strengthening in the relationships between contextual stress and affect. Participants with depression mostly showed the opposite pattern. Delayed responses seem qualitatively different from timely responses. Further research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying these differences. (shrink)

We are witnessing a return of the real which philosophy seems illequipped to handle. I argue (1) that this return of the real must be read as a rejection of those philosophical tendencies which were prevalent in the past decades and which I call philosophies of mediation: They supplanted all references to something real by the sole reference to those processes in which reality was supposed to be given or shaped (in interpretations, linguistic structures, historical or social conditions, media…). The (...) current urgency of the question of the real indicates that those philosophies have lost credibility. On the other hand (2), the contemporary attempts to resuscitate philosophical realism cannot be considered satisfactory either. It is curiously the real itself they fail to fully appreciate. All in all (3), the return of the real has to be interpreted as the effect of an event that has little to do with philosophy, namely the return of politics. (shrink)

Although there might seem to be a natural continuity and interplay between the cognitive sciences and the social sciences, the integration of the two has, on the whole, been fraught with difficulties. In some areas the transition was relatively smooth. For instance, political psychology is now a well-recognized branch both of psychology and of political science. In economics, things have been more difficult, with the entrenched assumption of a perfectly rational homo economicus, but behavioral economics is now well recognized, and (...) one of the founders of the field, Daniel Kahneman, went on to win a Nobel Prize.Social and cognitive sciences have proven more difficult to bridge in anthropology and sociology. Most of the efforts have been pursued—and resisted—in anthropology (although, for sociology, see Clément and Kaufmann 2011). At first, scholars attempted to import the methods of evolutionary biology straight into the study of culture (Dawkins 1976; Lumsden and Wilson 1981). This prom .. (shrink)

This work mainly concerns the—here introduced—category of \(\mathscr {Q}\) -sets and functional morphisms, where \(\mathscr {Q}\) is a commutative semicartesian quantale. We prove it enjoys all limits and colimits, that it has a classifier for regular subobjects (a sort of truth-values object), which we characterize and give explicitly. Moreover: we prove it to be \(\kappa \) -locally presentable, (where \(\kappa =max\{|\mathscr {Q}|^+, \aleph _0\}\) ); we also describe a hierarchy of monoidal structures in this category.

People not only disagree about religious belief, but they disagree about what it is to disagree about religious belief; and consequently about what it would be for one religion to be uniquely true. What I shall try to do first is to characterise the nature of religious disagreement; and next to suggest in what the uniqueness of Christianity might consist.