The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to be viewed as introducing a report of a distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations. When Michael Hinton first introduced the idea, he suggested that the burden (...) of proof or disproof lay with his opponent, that what was needed was to show that our talk of how things look or appear to one.. (shrink)

Book description: The capacity to represent and think about time is one of the most fundamental and least understood aspects of human cognition and consciousness. This book throws new light on central issues in the study of the mind by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches dealing with the connection between temporal representation and memory. Fifteen specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers investigate the way in which time is represented in memory, and the role memory (...) plays in our ability to reason about time. They offer insights into current theories of memory processes and of the mechanisms and cognitive abilities underlying temporal judgements, and draw out fundamental issues concerning the phenomenology and epistemology of memory and our understanding of time. The chapters are arranged into four sections, each focused on one area of current research: Keeping Track of Time, and Temporal Representation; Memory, Awareness and the Past; Memory and Experience; Knowledge and the Past: The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Time. A general introduction gives an overview of the topics discussed and makes explicit central themes which unify the different philosophical and psychological approaches. (shrink)

Can self-locating beliefs be relevant to non-self-locating claims? Traditional Bayesian modeling techniques have trouble answering this question because their updating rule fails when applied to situations involving contextsensitivity. This essay develops a fully general framework for modeling stories involving context-sensitive claims. The key innovations are a revised conditionalization rule and a principle relating models of the same story with different modeling languages. The essay then applies the modeling framework to the Sleeping Beauty Problem, showing that when Beauty awakens her degree (...) of belief in heads should be one-third. This demonstrates that it can be rational for an agent who gains only self-locating beliefs between two times to alter her degree of belief in a non-self-locating claim. (shrink)

Begins by explaining then proving a generalized language dependence result similar to Goodman's "grue" problem. I then use this result to cast doubt on the existence of an objective evidential favoring relation (such as "the evidence confirms one hypothesis over another," "the evidence provides more reason to believe one hypothesis over the other," "the evidence justifies one hypothesis over the other," etc.). Once we understand what language dependence tells us about evidential favoring, our options are an implausibly strong conception of (...) the a priori, a hard externalism on which agents are unable to determine what their evidence favors, or a subjectivist view that makes evidential favoring relative to features of the agent. (shrink)

Paulin and Cahill‐Lane explore the origins of event processing and event prediction in animal evolution. They propose that the evolutionary benefit of being able to predict and thus to quickly react to anticipated events may have triggered the evolution of the earliest nervous systems.

This article defends the Fixed Point Thesis: that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. The Fixed Point Thesis is inspired by logical omniscience requirements in formal epistemology. It argues to the Fixed Point Thesis from the Akratic Principle: that rationality forbids having an attitude while believing that attitude is rationally forbidden. It then draws out surprising consequences of the Fixed Point Thesis, for instance that certain kinds of a priori justification are (...) indefeasible and that misleading all-things-considered evidence about rational requirements is impossible. Finally, the Fixed Point Thesis is applied to defend the Right Reasons position on peer disagreement, according to which an agent who has drawn the correct conclusion from her evidence should retain belief in that conclusion even in the face of disagreeing peers. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus disease has become a global pandemic, causing substantial anxiety. One potential factor in the spread of anxiety in response to a pandemic threat is emotion contagion, the finding that emotional experiences can be socially spread through conscious and unconscious pathways. Some individuals are more susceptible to social contagion effects and may be more likely to experience anxiety and other mental health symptoms in response to a pandemic threat. Therefore, we studied the relationship between emotion contagion and mental (...) health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. We administered the Emotion Contagion Scale along with a measure of anxiety in response to COVID-19 and secondary outcome measures of depression, anxiety, stress, and obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms. These measures were completed by a large student sample in the United States. Data were collected in the months of April and May of 2020 when the fear of COVID-19 was widespread. Results revealed that greater susceptibility to emotion contagion was associated with greater concern about the spread of COVID-19, more depression, anxiety, stress, and OCD symptoms. Consumption of media about COVID-19 also predicted anxiety about COVID-19, though results were not moderated by emotion contagion. However, emotion contagion did moderate the relationship between COVID-19-related media consumption and elevated OCD symptoms. Although limited by a cross-sectional design that precludes causal inferences, the present results highlight the need for study of how illness fears may be transmitted socially during a pandemic. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

I argue that given standard deontic logic, wide-scope rational requirements entail narrow-scope rational requirements. In particular, the widely-embraced Enkratic Principle entails that if a particular combination of attitudes is rationally forbidden, it is also rationally forbidden to believe that that combination of attitudes is required.

Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.

This article engages with Julian Culp’s Democratic Education in a Globalized World from the perspective of political philosophy in a global world. The focus is on liberalism. From this angle, Culp’s book entails three important claims. The first is that a right to basic education on the global level exists, i.e. a right to education for everybody independent of one’s nation state. The second claim is that the implementation of this right is not a task for each nation state alone (...) but of world society as a whole. This implies that countries that are able to provide more than basic education to its citizens have a duty to redistribute part of their excess resources to help poor countries secure basic education for their citizens. Culp’s third claim, relevant to the liberal project, is on the kind of education that is supposed to go global. This education should be free-standing, that is, based on political as opposed to perfectionist arguments. This contribution agrees with the first claim, is sceptical regarding the second one, and disagrees with the third one. (shrink)

This study examined the influence of 7 high school esports developmental programs on student self-regulation, growth mindset, positive youth development, perceived general health and physical activity, and sport behaviour. A total of 188 students originally participated, with 58 participants completing both pre- and post-program information. At baseline, no significant differences were found between youth e-athletes and their aged-matched controls. The analysis for the observation period showed a significant interaction effect for the PYD confidence scale, with post-hoc comparisons showing a significant (...) decrease in the control group from pre- to post assessment whereas the esports group remained the same. Time main effects showed a decrease in the self-regulation motivation factor, PYD connection factor and PA for all participants. Overall, this study showed that students enrolled in their respective school esports program did not differ from those who did not in self-regulation, growth mindset, PYD, perceived health and PA, and sport behaviour. It was likely that all participants showed a decrease in motivation, connection, and PA due to COVID19 lockdown during the study period. This study is the first to investigate the longitudinal impact of student involvement in high school esports and showed that esports participation did not have a negative impact on any health or psychological factors. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world. (shrink)

Abstract. Richard Feldman’s Uniqueness Thesis holds that “a body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a competing set of proposi- tions”. The opposing position, permissivism, allows distinct rational agents to adopt differing attitudes towards a proposition given the same body of evidence. We assess various motivations that have been offered for Uniqueness, including: concerns about achieving consensus, a strong form of evidentialism, worries about epistemically arbitrary influences on belief, a focus on truth-conduciveness, and consequences for peer disagreement. (...) We argue that each of these motivations either misunderstands the commitments of permissivism or is question-begging. Better understanding permissivism makes it a much more plausible position. (shrink)

The central issue addressed in this CUP monograph is whether and how Christian ethics might be able to make a significant contribution to health care ethics today in the public forum of a Western, pluralistic society. It is the twenty-sixth monograph in the larger project (edited by Robin Gill) New Studies in Christian Ethics that has received considerable international attention. It offers a fresh basis for health care ethics derived from a detailed exegesis of the Synoptic virtues of compassion, care, (...) faith and humility in order to deepen the widely used secular principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice in health care ethics. In an early review David Atkinson concluded that Gills excellent, clear, and well-written book is a significant contribution. (shrink)

The notion of a weak Messianic power serves as the focal point for this study of theological, materialist, poetic, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to time and the historical unconscious in the work of Benjamin, Celan and Derrida.

Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft. Edited by Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xlii + 644. $179, €149.

A response to G.A. Cohen's argument that a prevailing "ethos" of justice would prevent a Rawlsian just society from having any income inequalities. I suggest that Cohen's argument fails because a Rawlsian ethos would involve correlates of both of Rawls' principles of justice.

The paper is a response to Peacocke's chapter. It begins by exploring and recasting his distinction between objects of attention and occupying attention. It goes on to consider cases of self‐ascription based on conscious episodes that are not authoritative, thereby suggesting that Peacocke's treatment needs a way to characterize the kinds of conscious thought, which can provide a rational basis for authoritative self‐ascription. One such kind of case is where knowledge of one's belief arises from one's apparent knowledge of how (...) matters stand in the world. This raises a puzzle as to how directing our attention outward at the world should be to give rise to the knowledge of our own minds, and it is argued that Peacocke's possession‐conditions account of self‐ascription does nothing to solve it. (shrink)

Pope John Paul II called for an intense dialogue between science and theology, “a common interactive relationship,” in which each discipline is “open to the discoveries and insights of the other” while retaining its own integrity. This essay seeks to be responsive to that call and is an initial exploration of relationships between contemporary neuroscience and Catholic theological ethics. It examines neuroscientific data on the bicameral brain and theological ethical data on marital ethics, including divorce and remarriage, and asks what (...) insight the former might provide into both the latter and the different ethical methods that respond to marital ethics. The analysis is undertaken in the hope of illuminating a pathway that opens the insights of one way of doing theological ethics to the insights of another way, thereby eliminating the unnecessary, unhelpful, and sometimes un‐Christian polarizations that presently separate them. (shrink)

This present study takes a new look at the essayist Michel de Montaigne and the philosopher Rene Descartes and attempts to show a new interrelationship between the two. Previous studies have linked the latter's Discours de la mÈthode to the Essais and have noted general similarities, but no major study to date has examined the pair from the standpoint of Descartes' TraitÈ des passions and Montaigne's Essais.

Skepticism, Relativism, and Religious Knowledge shows where responses to skepticism and relativism by Karl Barth and Reformed epistemology have led to impasses, and reconstructs their insights in a more robust response that does not depend on making excessive claims about our epistemic capacities. This response is based on a more nuanced conception of the relationship between trust, doubt, faith, and reason, and a Kierkegaardian perspective on religious knowledge that stresses the role of the will and the intellectual and theological virtues.

Metaethicists have recently devoted a great deal of attention to questions about when a fact counts as a reason for or against a particular conclusion, and how such reasons interact. Chapter 9 asks a broader question: When a set of facts counts in favor of some conclusion, is that always because at least one of those facts is a reason for that conclusion? Examples are offered in which a set supports a conclusion without any fact in that set’s being a (...) reason for. The chapter then assesses the significance of such examples for philosophical methodology, the ‘reasons-first’ program, and metanormative realism. (shrink)

Three computational models: a narrative reader (BORIS), an editorial reader (OpEd), and a stream of thought generator (DAYDREAMER), are presented and discussed, with specific focus on the emotion-related processing and representational elements of each. These models exhibit comprehension and/or generation of emotional behaviour through the interaction of cognitive processes (memory retrieval, planning, and reasoning) over intentional constructs (goals and beliefs).

Comparisons, and by that I mean the hunt for essential similarities or at least serious family resemblances, between the ethical views of Western and non-Western thinkers have been a staple of comparative philosophy for quite some time now. Some of these comparisons, such as between the views of Aristotle and Confucius, seem especially apt and revealing. However, I’ve often wondered whether Western “ethical theory”—virtue ethics, deontology, or consequentialism—is always the best lens through which to approach non-Western ethical thought. Particularly when (...) the discussion has turned to Buddhism and Buddhist ethics, theories of this sort at best seem to have an uncertain application. This is not to say that .. (shrink)

The views of Houk et al., Smith, and Thach on the role of cerebellum in movement control differ substantially, but all three are flawed by the false reasoning that because information passes from the cerebellum to movements the cerebellum must be a movement controller, or a part of one. The divergent and less than compelling ideas expressed by these leading cerebellar theorists epitomize the fruitlessness of this paradigm, and signal the need for a change. [HOUK et al.; SMITH; THACH].

An adequate cerebellar theory should explain the timing and geometry of signal propagation in the molecular layer, hence Braitenberg et al.'s explanation of how parallel fibers may act as delay lines is important. The suggestion that these delay lines may generate control signals that dampen undesirable response modes during movements is merely interesting.

'Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology' provides an accessible introduction to the key concepts and principles of the Bayesian formalism. This volume introduces degrees of belief as a concept in epistemology and the rules for updating degrees of belief derived from Bayesian principles.--.

ABSTRACT A recent approach for bioterrorism risk management calls for stricter regulations over biotechnology as a way to control subversion of technology that may be used to create a man‐made pandemic. This approach is largely unworkable given the increasing pervasiveness of molecular techniques and tools throughout society. Emerging technology has provided the tools to design much deadlier pathogens but concomitantly the ability to respond to emerging pandemics to reduce mortality has also improved significantly in recent decades. In its historical context (...) determining just how ‘risky’ biological weapons is an important consideration for decision making and resource allocation. Management should attempt to increase capacity, share resources, provide accurate infectious disease reporting, deliver information transparency and improve communications to help mitigate the magnitude of future pandemics. (shrink)

While the HVTN 505 trial showed no overall efficacy of the tested vaccine to prevent HIV infection over placebo, markers measuring immune response to vaccination were strongly correlated with infection. This finding generated the hypothesis that some marker-defined vaccinated subgroups were partially protected whereas others had their risk increased. This hypothesis can be assessed using the principal stratification framework (Frangakis and Rubin, 2002) for studying treatment effect modification by an intermediate response variable, using methods in the sub-field of principal surrogate (...) (PS) analysis that studies multiple principal strata. Unfortunately, available methods for PS analysis require an augmented study design not available in HVTN 505, and make untestable structural risk assumptions, motivating a need for more robust PS methods. Fortunately, another sub-field of principal stratification, survivor average causal effect (SACE) analysis (Rubin, 2006) – which studies effects in a single principal stratum – provides many methods not requiring an augmented design and making fewer assumptions. We show how, for a binary intermediate response variable, methods developed for SACE analysis can be adapted to PS analysis, providing new and more robust PS methods. Application to HVTN 505 supports that the vaccine partially protected individuals with vaccine-induced T-cells expressing certain combinations of functions. (shrink)