Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips (...) of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p <.001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p <.001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p <.001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p <.001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits. (shrink)

Philosophers agree that scientific explanations aim to produce understanding, and that good ones succeed in this aim. But few seriously consider what understanding is, or what the cues are when we have it. If it is a psychological state or process, describing its specific nature is the job of psychological theorizing. This article examines the role of understanding in scientific explanation. It warns that the seductive, phenomenological sense of understanding is often, but mistakenly, viewed as a cue of genuine understanding. (...) The article closes with a discussion of several new paths of research that tie the psychology of scientific explanation to cognate notions of learning, testimony, and understanding. (shrink)

There is now a considerable literature on Michel Foucault but this is the first monograph which explicitly addresses his influence and impact upon education. Personal autonomy has been seen as a major aim, if not the aim of liberal education. But if Foucault is correct that personal autonomy and the notion of the autonomous person are myths, then the pursuit of such an aim by educationalists is misguided. The author develops this critique of personal autonomy and liberal education from the (...) writings of Foucault, and also considers Foucault's own educational practices. The author, James Marshall, who lives in New Zealand, has already written several articles for academic journals on Foucault. (shrink)

(2002). Philosophy of Science 72 (January), 198-208.

This chapter compares the authors' naturalistic approach to epistemology to that of SAE. It is argued that the theories of SAE are structurally analogous to the naturalistic approach — they have at their core a descriptive theory, and from that descriptive theory, proponents of SAE draw normative, epistemological prescriptions. The prospects for the theories of SAE overcoming the is-ought gap are not good. The chapter also argues for the superiority of Strategic Reliabilism over any extant theory of Standard Analytic Epistemology.

Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of (...) the prevalence of counterfeit understanding in the history of science, I argue that many forms of cognitive achievement do not involve a sense of understanding, and that only the truth or accuracy of an explanation make the sense of understanding a valid cue to genuine understanding. (shrink)

Realizing the ideal of democracy requires political inclusion for citizens. A legitimate democracy must give citizens the opportunity to express their attitudes about the relative attractions of different policies, and access to political mechanisms through which they can be counted and heard. Actual governance often aims not at accurate belief, but at nonepistemic factors like achieving and maintaining institutional stability, creating the feeling of government legitimacy among citizens, or managing access to influence on policy decision-making. I examine the traditional relationship (...) between inclusiveness and accuracy, and illustrate this connection by discussing empirical work on how group decision-making can improve accuracy. I also advance a Generic Epistemic Principle that any evidence-based decision-making procedures must embrace. Focusing on policy-making, I then measure the distance between these standards and the ones actually implemented in U.S. political settings. Psychological research on individual and group decision-making is a source of normative assessment for existing policy judgment, but it neither rationalizes nor legitimates the actual and typical processes used in U.S. institutions of political decision making. To establish this point, I focus on one characteristic government institution—the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology—that displays deliberative processes at odds with the sciences they advocate, and with the Generic Epistemic Principle. I explain this discouraging condition in terms of several inveterate factors in U.S. politics: a limitlessly money-driven and endless campaigning process that effectively forces elected representatives to align themselves with money and vote strategically, the use of procedural arrangements known to make people feel politically included when they are not, and the unresponsiveness of a majoritarian (vs. consensus) democracy. (shrink)

In an essay entitled ‘Cinna the Poet’ published in 1974, T. P. Wiseman forcefully countered the arguments of Monroe E. Deutsch and others against the identification of the ‘neoteric’ poet Cinna with the tribune Gaius Helvius Cinna, who after Caesar's funeral was torn to pieces by an enraged mob, mistaken by it for the praetor Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who had applauded Caesar's murder. The identification of the poet with the tribune is supported by Plutarch, Brutus 20.4, where the murdered tribune (...) is called a ποιητικ⋯ς ⋯ν⋯ρ. As Wiseman says, ‘there are six other ancient accounts of the murder, drawn from a source or sources unknown; five of them call the victim a tribune of the plebs, and none of them says he was a poet. Impressed by this, many scholars have thought that the victim was not in fact the poet Helvius Cinna, and M. E. Deutsch suggested in 1925 that either the phrase in the Brutus describing him as a poet is a gloss, or “the tribune also dabbled in verse but was not the famous poet”.’ Wiseman's refutation of the various arguments of Deutsch and his followers against the identity of the poet and the tribune seems to me quite cogent, but the debate shows no sign of having been brought to a close: G. V. Sumner concludes his review of Wiseman's essay with an argument that the tribune was probably somewhat younger than the poet, and the suggestion that the tribune may have been ‘the adoptive, and hence homonymous, son of the poet’. (shrink)

This paper advances a novel argument that speech perception is a complex system best understood nonindividualistically and therefore that individualism fails as a general philosophical program for understanding cognition. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I describe a "replaceability strategy", commonly deployed by individualists, in which one imagines replacing an object with an appropriate surrogate. This strategy conveys the appearance that relata can be substituted without changing the laws that hold within the domain. Second, I advance a "counterfactual test" (...) as an alternative to the replaceability strategy. Third, I show how the typical objects of cross-modal processes (in this case, auditory-visual speech perception), more clearly irreplaceable than the objects of the unimodal process examined by Burge [(1986) Individualism and psychology, The Philosophical Review, XCV, 3-45], supply a firm basis for a nonindividualist interpretation of such cases. Finally, I demonstrate that the routine violation of the individualist's Replaceability Condition occurs even in unimodal cases - so the violation of the replaceability constraint does not derive simply from the diversity of modal sources but rather from the causal complexity of psychological processes generally. The conclusion is that philosophical progress on this issue must await progress in psychology, or, at least, philosophical progress in accounting for psychological complexity--precisely the vicissitude predicted by a thoroughgoing naturalism. (shrink)

I understand Pluralism to be the doctrine that, either generally or with reference to some particular area of judgement, there is more than one basic principle. It endorses the possibility that some particular case may arise which will be adjudicated in one way if one principle is applied while another principle points otherwise and to an answer which, at least in practice, is incompatible. Thus in morality, according to pluralism there may be more than one correct answer to the question (...) of which of the decisions available in some particular situation is the best. (shrink)

In “Forced to be Free”, Neil Levy surveys the raft of documented decision-making biases that humans are heir to, and advances several bold proposals designed to enhance the patient's judgment. Gratefully, Levy is moved by the psychological research on judgment and decision-making that documents people's inaccuracy when identifying courses of action will best promote their subjective well-being. But Levy is quick to favour the patient's present preferences, to ensure they get “final say” about their treatment. I urge the opposite inclination, (...) raising doubts about whether the patient's “present preferences” are the best expression of their “final say”. When there is adequate evidence that people, by their own lights, overemphasize their present preferences about the future, we should carefully depreciate those preferences, in effect biasing them to make the right decision by their own lights. (shrink)