I suggest that contemporary economics shares many of the characteristics of methodological behaviourism in psychology, with its emphasis on the influence of motivation, learning, and situational incentives on behaviour, and minimal interest in the details of the cognitive processes that transform input (information) into output (behaviour). The emphasis on these characteristics has the same strengths and weaknesses in economics as in behaviourist psychology.

It is human nature to wonder how things might have turned out differently--either for the better or for the worse. For the past two decades psychologists have been intrigued by this phenomenon, which they call counterfactual thinking. Specifically, researchers have sought to answer the "big" questions: Why do people have such a strong propensity to generate counterfactuals, and what functions does counterfactual thinking serve? What are the determinants of counterfactual thinking, and what are its adaptive and psychological consequences? This important (...) work brings together a collection of thought-provoking papers by social and cognitive psychologists who have made important theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of this topic. The essays in this volume contain novel theoretical insights, and, in many cases descriptions of previously unpublished empirical studies. The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking provides an excellent overview of this fascinating topic for researchers, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduates in psychology--particularly those with an interest in social cognition, social judgment, decision judgment, decision making, thinking and reasoning. (shrink)

Good explanations are not only true or probably true, but are also relevant to a causal question. Current models of causal explanation either only address the question of the truth of an explanation, or do not distinguish the probability of an explanation from its relevance. The tasks of scenario construction and conversational explanation are distinguished, which in turn shows how scenarios can interact with conversational principles to determine the truth and relevance of explanations. The proposed model distinguishes causal discounting from (...) causal backgrounding , and makes predictions concerning the differential effects of contextual information about alternative explanations on: (a) the kind of mental models constructed; (b) belief revision about probable cause; and (c) the perceived quality of a focal explanation. Four experiments are reported that test these predictions. The significance of the notion of explanatory relevance for research on causal explanation is then discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to difference-based models of causal judgement, the epistemic state of the agent should not affect judgements of cause. Four experiments examined opportunity chains in which a physical event enabled a subsequent proximal cause to produce an outcome. All four experiments showed that when the proximal cause was a human action, it was judged as more causal if the agent was aware of his opportunity than if he was not or if the proximal cause was a physical event. The first (...) two experiments showed that these preferences could not be explained in terms of differences in perceived conditional probability, social controllability or perceptions of the causal sequence as forming a single unit. The third experiment showed that awareness affected the perceived deliberateness with which the action brought the outcome about but not its perceived voluntariness. The fourth experiment showed that... (shrink)

We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the addressees identified by the rule, whereas they perceived duties as benefiting the collective that imposed the rule. Studies 2, 3, and 4 showed that rule content had clear effects on perceptions of violations and relevance of cases for (...) explaining the rule, even when controlling for deontic verb, phrasing of the action permitted by a right, or the formality of the deontic verb. These effects are incompatible with a simple pragmatic disambiguation approach to pragmatic modulation, as they often induce permissibility judgments that contradict the core semantic meanings of the deontic verbs. Other ways of reconciling verb meaning with rule content should be considered in a fuller the.. (shrink)

The suppression of the Modus Ponens inference is described as a loss of confidence in the conclusion C of an argument ''If A1 then C; If A2 then C; A1'' where A2 is a requirement for C to happen. It is hypothesised that this loss of confidence is due to the derivation of the conversational implicature ''there is a chance that A2 might not be satisfied'', and that different syntactic introductions of the requirement A2 (e.g., ''If C then A2'') will (...) lead to various frequencies in the derivation of this implicature, according to previous studies in the field of causal explanation. An experiment is conducted, whose results support those claims. Results are discussed in the light of the Mental Logic and Mental Model theories, as well as in the light of the pragmatic approach to uncertain reasoning. (shrink)

We discuss what makes a “good” environmental nudge from the policy maker’s point of view. We first delineate what is paternalistic about environmental nudges. We then discuss the effectiveness of nudges, including their paradoxical effects on the targeted behaviour, as well as possible collateral effects on the decision-maker’s wellbeing. We also discuss why the libertarian and ethical aspect of nudges may render them more, and not less, attractive as policy instruments and decision aids. We conclude by discussing accuracy and privacy (...) concerns of information-based nudges, and with some recommendations for the design of effective and ethical nudges. (shrink)

Causal pre-emption scenarios are problematic for the counterfactual framework of causation (CFC) because people judge an action to be the actual cause of an outcome although the outcome would have occurred anyway due to the action of a pre-empted alternative cause. We propose that commonsense causal questions typically probe specific events that actually happened as and how they did, and show that counterfactuals that probe specific events match selections of actual cause, and dissociations only occur with non-specific counterfactuals. In addition, (...) the pre-empted action is often selected as the or an actual cause when it causes the pre-empting action (auto-pre-emption). Judgements of an action’s responsibility for the outcome track judgements of actual cause following the legal sine qua non principle. Agent reproach is also influenced by the agent's intention. The effects of causal dependency structure and counterfactual question type are robust across the intentionality of the pre-empting action and scenario content. (shrink)

We argue that logical expressions in human language enable speakers to perform particular acts as well as stating propositions which may be true or false. We present a conversational action planning model of co-ordinated reasoning, which we use to predict choice of logical expressions in situations in which two people co-operate in the face of risk and uncertainty. We first show how this model predicts preferences for formulations of conditional directives where a principal instructs an agent on how to behave (...) in a hypothetical situation. Second, we show how this model accounts for choices of quantity and probability expressions that express risk, in situations where a professional advises a client on her options. We conclude that the pragmatic signals encoded in human logical vocabulary can facilitate the co-ordination of social interaction through aiding mutual recognition of intentions on joint projects where collaboration is likely to create value. (shrink)

These rhetorical texts by Apuleius, second-century Latin writer and author of the famous novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, have not been translated into English since 1909. They are some of the very few Latin speeches surviving from their century, and constitute important evidence for Latin and Roman North African social and intellectual culture in the second century AD, a period where there is increasing interest amongst classicists and ancient historians. They are the work of a talented writer who is being (...) increasingly viewed as the major literary artist of his time in Latin. (shrink)

Considering the philosophic intelligence that has set out to discredit it, intentionalism in critical interpretation has shown an uncanny resilience. Beginning perhaps most explicitly with the New Criticism, continuing through the analytic tradition in philosophy, and culminating most recently in deconstructionism, philosophers and literary theorists have kept under sustained attack the notion that authorial intention can provide a guide to interpretation, a criterion of textual meaning, or a standard for the validation of criticism. Yet intentionalist criticism still has avid theoretical (...) defenders and plenty of informal practitioners. The essay that follows, while an exercise in neither such defense nor practice, nevertheless attempts to demonstrate why intentional questions can be expected to be of permanent concern to criticism. (shrink)

Though capable of reproducing experimentally observed velocity profiles, the model proposed by Plamondon & Alimi (P&A) does not provide a viable theoretical framework for the understanding of trajectory formation and speed/accuracy trade-offs. The issues of variation and stability can be better understood by considering movement as resulting from an underlying dynamic rather than from an impulse-response of the system.

Aging is accompanied by changes in general cognitive functioning which may impact the learning rate of older adults; however, this is often not controlled for in cognitive aging studies. We investigated the contribution of differences in learning rates to age-related differences in landmark knowledge acquired from route learning. In Experiment 1 we used a standard learning procedure in which participants received a fixed amount of exposure to a route. Consistent with previous research, we found age-related deficits in associative cue and (...) landmark sequence knowledge. Experiment 2 controlled for differences in learning rates by using a flexible exposure learning procedure. Specifically, participants were trained to a performance criterion during route learning before being tested on the content of their route knowledge. While older adults took longer to learn the route than younger adults, the age-related differences in associative cue knowledge were abolished. The deficit in landmark sequence knowledge, however, remained. Experiment 3 replicated these results and introduced a test situation in which a deficit in landmark sequence knowledge yielded an increased likelihood of disorientation in older adults. The findings of this study suggest that age-related deficits in landmark associative cue knowledge are attenuated by controlling for learning rates. In contrast, landmark sequence knowledge deficits persist and are best explained by changes in the learning strategy of older adults to acquire task essential associative cue knowledge at the expense of supplementary sequence knowledge. (shrink)

Annotation. Against the background of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Bradley provides a detailed differentiation between Aristotle's and Aquinas's view on moral principles and the end of man.

Illness is a reality that affects all people, and healing is the main reason why people attend worship services in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the Ritual Studies scholar Ronald Grimes, illness is a social reality; it is socially imagined and constructed. Healing in the church is something that many believers experience, also in the context of worship and liturgy. In order to explore such healing as it occurs in liturgy a research project was undertaken making use of both empirical work (...) and a literature study. The aim of this research was to take the light off of direct pastoral care and investigate how the liturgy affects individuals within the congregation with regard to healing. A praxis-theory cycle was followed in the research, and a preliminary liturgical theory for praxis was developed based on the insight from the empirical study and ritual theory that healing through worship entails either transformation or reconciliation. (shrink)

This paper tackles the issue of the diversity of déjà experiences. According to the standard view in the neuropsychological literature, they should all be defined by means of a psychological criterion, by which they are experiences triggered by a perceived item and consist of a conscious clash between a first-order feeling of familiarity about the item and a second-order evaluation that assesses the first-order feeling as erroneous. This paper dismisses the standard view and contends there are two types of déjà (...) experiences, labeled déjà vu and déjà vécu respectively. But it also takes issue with the rare proponents of a distinct déjà vécu type. Contrary to their achievement view, it argues that recollection is not involved in déjà vécu experiences as an actual mental state or a component thereof. In our ability view, déjà vécu involves the feeling that one could recollect past occurrences of a currently lived episode of experience. (shrink)

In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant works. Students of Plato now had access to the entire range of the dialogues, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments, etymologies, fragments of poetry, other works of philosophy, aspects of ancient pagan religious practices, concepts of mathematics and natural philosophy, and the dialogic nature of the Platonic corpus's interlocutors. By and large, Renaissance readers in the (...) Latin West encountered Plato's text through Ficino's translations and interpretation. -/- In Plato's Persona, Denis J.-J. Robichaud provides the first synthetic study of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic corpus. Robichaud analyzes Plato's works in their original Greek and in Ficino's Latin translations, as well as Ficino's non-Platonic writings and correspondence, in the process uncovering new aspects of Ficino's intellectual work habits. In his letters and works, Ficino self-consciously imitated a Platonic style of prose, in effect devising a persona for himself as a Platonic philosopher. Plato's dialogues are populated with a wealth of literary characters with whom Plato interacts and against whom Plato refines his own philosophies. Reading through Ficino's translations, Robichaud finds that the Renaissance philosopher seeks an understanding of Plato's persona(e) among all the dialogues' interlocutors. In effect, Ficino assumed the role of Plato's Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance. -/- Plato's Persona is grounded in an extensive study of scholarship in Renaissance humanism, classics, philosophy, and intellectual history, and contextualizes Ficino's intellectual achievements within the contemporary Christian orthodox view of Platonism. Ficino was an influential figure in the early Italian Renaissance: the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, and between manuscript and print, giving voice to Plato and access to the ancient frameworks needed to interpret his dialogues. (shrink)

Why, after two centuries of secularization, does biblical religion not only survive but, recently, even find support from some philosophers, among them notably Derrida, who maintains that “citations from religious traditions are more fundamental to the structure of language and experience” than all the reductionist “genealogies, critiques, and transcendental reflections” of post-Enlightenment thought? The western religious tradition survives because, from the beginning, it has internalized a radical critique: the theological via negativa which, by strenuously qualifying religion’s factual, logical, and ontological (...) claims, brings about religion’s death but simultaneously and perpetually assures its resurrection whether “in its present guise or in another”. (shrink)

Antecedent to the present volume, the author had already published an important historical study of Aquinas’s metaphysical theory of human action, and had written, for the benefit of his students at the Gregorian University, an unusually distinguished, in-house textbook, which, in French translation, was more widely accessible.