Philosophy

"People who know the outcome of an event tend to
overestimate their own prior knowledge or others’ naïve
knowledge of it. This hindsight bias pervades cognition, lending the world an unwarranted air of inevitability. In four experiments, we showed how knowing the identities of words causes
people to overestimate others’ naïve ability to identify moderately to highly degraded spoken versions of those words. We
also showed that this auditory hindsight bias occurs despite
people’s efforts to avoid it. We discuss our findings in the
context of communication, in which speakers overestimate
the clarity of their message and listeners overestimate their
understanding of the message."

Abstract: A growing body of work shows how easy it is to manipulate memory for past events. In this chapter, we review recent research on false memories that can be planted about a non-existent past experience with a particular food or alcohol. These false memories have consequences for people; if the false memory is unpleasant, people avoid the food or drink.

A common view in both philosophy and the vision sciences is that, in human vision, wavelength information is primarily 'for' colouring, for seeing surfaces and various media as having colours. In this article we examine this assumption of 'colour-for-colouring'. To motivate the need for an alternative theory, we begin with three major puzzles from neurophysiology, puzzles that are not explained by the standard theory. We then ask about the role of wavelength information in vision writ large. How might wavelength information be used by any monochromat or dichromat and, finally, by a trichromatic primate with object vision? We suggest that there is no single 'advantage' to trichromaticity but a multiplicity, only one of which is the ability to see surfaces, etc. as having categorical colours. Instead, the human trichromatic retina exemplifies a scheme for a general encoding of wavelength information given the constraints imposed by high spatial-resolution object vision. Chromatic vision, like its' partner, luminance vision, is primarily for seeing. Viewed this way, the 'puzzles' presented at the outset make perfect sense. PART I: REFRAMING THE PROBLEM 3 The view we are presenting-and its near neighbors-is not original to us, or not in its skeletal form. Probably the first person to have expressed something like this view is Peter Gouras. There have been many researchers who, since the late 1980's, devoted their research careers to providing an alternative to the "Colour-for-Colouring" view, and their work has been invaluable in providing an empirical leg to stand on, for the view put forward here. Among those researchers are

Successful perception demands that the senses work in unison. For example, jointperception, or 'cross-modal binding,' requires that we perceive sensible properties from different modalities as inhering in a single object. When I recognize that a particular dog is black and barking, the information I take in from sight and hearing must be entertained in a single psychological state; it is in virtue of that state that I grasp that a single object has both perceptible properties. Perception of differences among features of a single object similarly requires perceptual unification. It is clear, though, that the five special-senses are distinguished from each other in terms of the bodily organ each depends on and the type of perceptible object (color, sound, etc.) each is especially sensitive to. If the senses are distinct, however, the question of how they come to be unified is not an idle or trivial one. Is the perceptual faculty in fact a unity, divided only in its functionality? Or do we have five isolated and distinct senses that are unified one level up, so to speak, when brought together by thought and reason?

Sensitive to challenges raised by Theaetetus, Aristotle does not simply assume that it is possible to perceive objects of different senses in a unified fashion. Instead, the reference to metaperception that opens De Anima III 2 ('Since we perceive that we see and hear') should be read as invoking the general phenomenon of what I call "joint perception": the fact that we perceive our perceptions, when it is conjoined with Aristotle's later claim that perceiving and being perceived are the same activity, accounts for the fact that a numerically single activity is able to have a complex content. The standard reading of the opening of this chapter, which takes it as a narrow discussion of some type of conscious awareness, is shown to be unable to account for the urgency of the aporiai that Aristotle takes to arise from the fact that we metaperceive.

After a brief discussion of the common objects of perception (shape, motion, size, etc.), Aristotle concludes at De Anima [DA] III.1 425a27-28 that "we have already a common sense for the common objects, not coincidentally." Interpreters take this to be a reassertion of the claim from DA II.6 that the common objects are perceived in-themselves (kath' hauta). Other uses of "coincidentally" (kata sumbebêkos) in the immediate context hearken back to the discussion there, as for instance at 425a15 where Aristotle describes the special senses as perceiving the common objects coincidentally. Yet while Aristotle does think that the common objects are perceived in-themselves, I argue that is not the point he is making here: "not coincidentally" modifies our possession of a common sense. The claim is rather that it is not a coincidence that we have a common sense, and the evidence adduced is that if we did not have a common sense we would perceive the common objects in the way we perceive coincidental objects like the son of Kleon. The fact that they common objects are not so-perceived-that they are perceived in-themselves-is an implicit premise, not the explicit conclusion.

One can think of the traditional logic of blame as involving three intuitively plausible claims: (1) blame is justified only if one is deserving of blame, (2) one is deserving of blame only if one is relevantly in control of the relevant causal antecedents, and (3) one is relevantly in control only if one has libertarian freedom. While traditional compatibilism has focused on rejecting either or both of the latter two claims, an increasingly common strategy is to deny the link between blame and desert expressed in (1). While I think there is something right about many of these accounts of blame, I deny that the logic of blame can be divorced from the logic of desert. On my view, blame does have a conceptual connection to desert, but its justification is practical rather than theoretical, as the libertarian condition is a matter of adopting a stance towards a person rather than having a belief about her and the "true" causes of her action. I argue that blame fundamentally requires interacting with a person from the participant perspective and that the participant perspective, understood in terms of second-personal address, involves an ontological commitment to freedom.

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Kantian constructivists locate the source of normativity in the rational nature of valuing agents. Some further argue that accepting this premise thereby commits one to accepting the intrinsic or unconditioned value of rational nature itself. Whereas much of the critical literature on this ''regress on conditions'' argument has focused either on the cogency of the inference from the value-conferring capacity of the will to the unconditional value of that capacity itself or on the plausibility of the initial constructivist premise, my aim is to press the argument from a different direction by asking just how Kantian the constructivist needs to be in order to support a regress on conditions argument. Specifically, I maintain that the argument succeeds only given a full-fledged Kantian moral psychology, including a presupposition of transcendental freedom. If correct, this could have implications regarding the compatibility of Kantian ethics and philosophic naturalism.

If mental anomalism is to be interpreted as a thesisunique to psychology, the anomalousness must begrounded in some feature unique to the mental,presumably its rational nature. While the ground forsuch arguments from normativity has been notoriouslyslippery terrain, there are two recently influentialstrategies which make the argument precise. The firstis to deny the possibility of psychophysical bridgelaws because of the different constitutive essences ofmental and physical laws, and the second is to arguethat mental anomalism follows from the uncodifiabilityof rationality. In this paper I argue that bothstrategies fail – the latter because it conflates primafacie and all things considered rationality and theformer because it rests on a false premise, theprinciple of the rational character of belief. Idistinguish four different formulations of thisprinciple and argue that those formulations which areplausible cannot support the argument for mentalanomalism.

This paper takes up the question of whether the consequences of a person’s volitional actions can contribute to their blameworthiness.  On the one hand it is intuitively plausible to hold that if D1 volitionally shoots V with the intention of killing V then D1 is blameworthy for V’s death.  On the other hand, if the only difference between D1 and D2 is resultant luck, many find it counter-intuitive to hold that D1 is more blameworthy than D2.  There are three broad (non-skeptical) strategies for resolving this tension: accept resultant moral luck, deny that one can be morally responsible for outcomes, or accept that outcomes can be within the scope of things one is morally responsible for while denying that they can affect the degree of blameworthiness.  This paper aims to defend resultant moral luck against both the scoping and the internalist strategies by drawing on an “inclusive conception” of blameworthiness, according to which how much blame one deserves is a function of two i...

I compare William James’ and Friedrich Nietzsche’s construals of consciousness and will, two of the core notions in both philosophy and psychology. I delineate the elements significant in their respective accounts of the two notions, and show that there are significant parallels in their views. An appreciation of the affinities in James’ and Nietzsche’s construals of consciousness and will facilitates an appreciation of their remarkably parallel contributions in both philosophy and psychology. It also enhances an appreciation of James as a philosopher with a rich background and expertise in psychology, and an appreciation of Nietzsche as an original, important philosopher-psychologist. Furthermore, the parallels I will have drawn between their views may provide materials with which to appreciate and substantiate the construal of a strand in contemporary psychology that is philosophically informed, and which embraces a radical version of empiricism that is rid of the dogmas found in traditional empiricism.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/2.1.5048.6725

I make a critical exposition of Kant’s transcendental idealism and empirical realism about space and time: I see that while transcendental idealism, to Kant, warrants his distinction between mere appearances (mere presentations) and things-in-themselves pertaining to external objects, it necessitates empirical realism which demarcates it from the other ‘metaphysically erroneous’ versions of idealism.  I argue that Kant’s distinction between these two “doctrinal systems” – or rather, the correlation between the two – serves to defend his conception of objectivity (of perceptual experiences and of judgments) as that which arises from subjectivity.  Such relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, in turn, defends his contention of synthetic a priority, the possibility of which determines the plausibility of metaphysics as a science of pure reason.  Furthermore, I argue that Kant’s treatment of objectivity goes against the Lockean construal of “secondary qualities” as the ‘powers of objects’; rather, to Kant, the cognitive powers lie in us. (Content word count 1,624)