Contents \t\t\t\t\t \tTRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION \t\t1 \t \tNOTE ON THE TRANSLATION \t\t39 \t OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME \t\t\t\t\t \tSECTION ONE: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Distinct Objects of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime \t\t45 \tSECTION TWO: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime.

The categorical imperative can be construed as a universalization test for moral permissibility. False negatives of the categorical imperative would be maxims failing this test, despite the permissibility of their actions; maxims like: ‘I’ll withdraw all my savings on April 15th’. Examples of purported false negatives familiar from the literature can be grouped into three general categories, and dispatched by applying category-specific methods for proper formulation of their maxims, or for proper testing. Methods for reformulating failing maxims, such (...) as the addition of appropriate conditional clauses, do not generate false-positive counterexamples in other instances. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe negativity bias is the tendency for individuals to give greater weight, and often exhibit more rapid and extreme responses, to negative than positive information. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott illusory memory paradigm, the current study sought to examine how the negativity bias might affect both correct recognition for negative and positive words and false recognition for associated critical lures, as well as how trait neuroticism might moderate these effects. In two experiments, participants studied lists of words composed of (...) semantic associates of an unpresented word. Half of the lists were comprised of positive words and half were comprised of negative words. As expected, individuals remembered negative list words better than positive list words, consistent with a negativity bias in correct recognition. When tested immediately, individuals also exhibited greater false memory for negative versus positive critical lures. When tested after a 24-hr delay... (shrink)

To investigate the effects of mood on people's end-of-life treatment decisions and their false memories of those decisions, participants took part in two sessions. At Time 1, participants were experimentally induced into positive or negative moods. They decided whether they would want to receive or refuse treatments in a range of hypothetical medical scenarios, such as tube feeding while in a coma. Four weeks later, at Time 2, participants were induced into the same or the opposite mood and (...) made these decisions a second time. They also recalled their previous decisions. Participants in negative moods at Time 2 changed more of their current decisions and falsely remembered more of their previous decisions than participants in positive moods. These findings suggest that people's current moods influence whether they change their treatment decisions; current decisions in turn bias recall of past decisions. (shrink)

Emotional content has complex effects on false memory. Under certain circumstances, emotional material may reduce the likelihood of false memory, a phenomenon that some consider related to it being...

Previous research shows that manipulations (e.g. levels-of-processing) that facilitate true memory often increase susceptibility to false memory. An exception is the generation effect. Using the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, Soraci et al. found that generating rather than reading list items led to an increase in true but not false memories. They argued that generation led to enhanced item-distinctiveness that drove down false memory production. In the current study, we investigated the effects of generative processing on valenced stimuli and (...) after a delayed retention interval to examine factors that may lead to a generation effect that increases false memories. At the immediate test, false recognition rates for both negative and neutral valanced critical lures were similar across read and generate conditions. However, after a one-week delay, we saw a valence differentiation, with a generation effect for false recognition but only for negative stimuli. The roles of item-specific and relational processing during encoding and their interaction with long-term retention are discussed. (shrink)

Three claims are widely held and individually plausible, but jointly inconsistent: (1) Negative actions (intentional omissions, refrainments, etc.) are genuine actions; (2) All actions are events; (3) Some, and perhaps all, negative actions aren't events, but absences thereof (when I omit to raise my arm, no omission-event occurs; what happens is just that no arm-raising occurs). Drawing on resources from metaphysics and the philosophy of language, I argue that (3) is false. Negative actions are events, just (...) as ordinary actions are. Moreover, each token negative action is identical to a token positive event, so we can adopt this realist view of negative actions without adding metaphysically negative entities (absences, negative states of affairs) to our ontology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research has shown that, in comparison to neutral stimuli, false memories for high arousing negative stimuli are greater after very fast presentation and limited attention at study. However, full compared to limited attention conditions still produce comparably more false memories for all stimuli types. Research has also shown that emotional stimuli benefit from a period of consolidation. What effect would such consolidation have on false memory formation even when attention is limited at study? The aim (...) of the present study was to investigate the effect of fast presentation on false memory production for negatively-arousing and neutral items over time using the DRM paradigm. Sixty-eight participants studied Negative and neutral DRM lists with fast or slow presentation conditions. Half completed a recognition test immediately and half completed a recognition test after one-week. Results revealed that, for fast presentation, negative critical lures increased after one week and were comparab... (shrink)

Our limited a priori-reasoning skills open a gap between our finding a proposition conceivable and its metaphysical possibility. A prominent strategy for closing this gap is the postulation of ideal conceivers, who suffer from no such limitations. In this paper I argue that, under many, maybe all, plausible unpackings of the notion of ideal conceiver, it is false that ideal negative conceivability entails possibility.

In this paper I confront what I take to be the crucial challenge for fictional realism, i.e. the view that fictional characters exist. This is the problem of accounting for the intuition that corresponding negative existentials such as ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’ are true (when, given fictional realism, taken literally they seem false). I advance a novel and detailed form of the response according to which we take them to mean variants of such claims as: there is (...) no concrete x such that x is Sherlock Holmes. (shrink)

This paper consists in a comparative study of the notions of negative fact in the early works of Russell and Wittgenstein. How to account for our ability to think both that it is false that what is not the case is the case and incorrect to think that it is true that what is not the case is the case? Are the truth and the correctness of such thoughts and of their expressions meant to be insured by the (...) existence of negative facts? Or do we need to think of negative facts differently? In his early works, Russell argues not only that negative facts exist, but also that the philosophical problem they suffice to solve is real. While in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein dissolves the philosophical problem by letting the superfluity and misleadingness of the affirmation of the existence of negative facts be seen as such. (shrink)

What makes it true when we say that something is not the case? Truthmaker maximalists think that every truth has a truthmaker—some fact in the world—that makes it true. No such facts can be found for the socalled negative truths. If a proposition is true when it has a truthmaker, then it would be false when it has no truthmaker. I therefore argue that negative truths, such as t<p>, are best understood as falsehoods, f<p>.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments ENJOYING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN FICTIONS by John Morreall There is a puzzle going back to Aristotle and Augustine that has sometimes been called the "paradox of tragedy": how is it that nonmasochistic, nonsadistic people are able to enjoy watching or reading about fictional situations which are filled with suffering? The problem here actually extends beyond tragedy to our enjoyment of horror films and other fictional (...) depictions of situations which we would not enjoy in real life. What is it about fiction that turns intensely unpleasant situations into situations we can enjoy? Ofthe many solutions proposed to this puzzle, I shall mentionjust four. Aristotle held that in viewing tragedy we experience negative emotions — pity and fear — but get pleasure from the experience nonetheless because we are thereby purged of excess pity and fear. For Aristotle, too, there is a pleasure which tragedy shares with fiction in general, the delight we take in representations.1 Hume put more weight on this latter delight. Our pleasure in tragedy, he said, is based on our appreciation of the skill with which the literary or other artist has depicted the unpleasant scenes.2 Susan Feagin has recently located the pleasure we take in tragic art not in our direct responses to the work, which are "unpleasant experiences," she says, but in our meta-response of moral self-congratulation at these responses.3 The fourth solution to our puzzle is really a dissolution: it consists of denying that we actually feel fear, pity, and other negative emotions in our experience of fiction. The guiding principle here is that in order to have some emotion toward a situation, we must believe that it is a real situation. This principle is articulated in an influential article by Kendall Walton, though he does not apply it to our puzzle.4 95 96Philosophy and Literature I believe that this last solution is no solution at all because we do in fact feel emotions in our appreciation of fiction (a point I will develop later). The other three solutions above address the puzzle, and the pleasures they appeal to all have some explanatory power. But these solutions seem to me to overlook perhaps the most basic pleasure we take in tragedy, horror films, and the like — the direct pleasure of feeling (ear, pity, and similar emotions. The idea of enjoying negative emotions seems counterintuitive at first; indeed it may seem analytically false. But let us look more closely at those emotions to see what there might be to enjoy in them. Because the idea that we experience real emotions in response to fiction is controversial, we will begin not with fiction but with real life. After seeing how negative emotions can be enjoyed in real life, we can then consider their enjoyment in response to fiction. Fear is perhaps the most basic negative emotion, and at first glance one of the least likely to be enjoyed. To feel fear, many have claimed, we have tojudge that we are in danger, and danger is disturbing to us. And so it is natural that in fear there is the motivation to eliminate the danger, by fleeing, protecting ourselves, or attacking. Changes in the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system equip us forjust such actions. They produce an increase in alertness and muscle tension, a faster and stronger heartbeat, a redistribution of the blood from the skin and internal organs to the voluntary muscles and brain, and a release of stored sugar from the liver into the bloodstream. Now although we may not be able to identify all these changes when we are in a state of fear, we can feel many of them directly, and we certainly feel the overall excitement which they produce. It is this excitement, I think, that makes fear potentially enjoyable. Especially for someone who leads a relatively dull life, the stimulation provided by fear can be pleasurable by contrast with the ordinary lack of stimulation. Many people, indeed, go to considerable trouble to put themselves into dangerous situations, in part, at least, for the thrill of fear that the danger will provide. Consider mountain climbers and skydivers, for instance. Now there are many sources... (shrink)

Russell's introduction of negative facts to account for the truth of "negative" sentences or beliefs rests on his collaboration with Wittgenstein in such efforts as the characterization of formal necessity, the theory of logical atomism, and the use of the Ideal Language. In examining their views we arrive at two conclusions. First, that the issue of negative facts is distinct from questions of meaning or intentionality; what a sentence or belief means or is about rather than what (...) makes it true or false. Second, that the ontological use of the Ideal Language is incompatible with the requirements of its employment in the logical study of inferences. On this basis we conclude that despite elaborations by recent proponents, the doctrine of negative facts lacks adequate support, and perhaps more importantly, it is proper ontological method to free the Ideal Language from the exigencies of a symbolism constructed for logical investigation. (shrink)

History is replete with false and unfulfilled promises, but also with singular acts of courage, resilience, and ingenuity. These episodes have led to significant changes in the way people think and act in the world, or have set the stage for such transformations in the form of rational expectations in theory and the hopeful anticipations of dialectical imagination. -/- Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness revisits some of Theodor W. Adorno’s most influential (...) writings and theoretical interventions to argue not only that his philosophy is uniquely suited to bring such events into sharp relief and reflect on their entailments, but also that an effective historical consciousness today would be a consciousness awake to the events that interpellate and shape it into existence. -/- More broadly, Vangelis Giannakakis presents a compelling argument in support of the view that the critical theory developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School still has much to offer in terms of both cultivating insights into contemporary human experience and building resistance against states of affairs that impede human flourishing and happiness. (shrink)

Objective: To determine if the medical record might overestimate the quality of care through false, and potentially unethical, documentation by physicians.Design: Prospective trial comparing two methods for measuring the quality of care for four common outpatient conditions: structured reports by standardised patients who presented unannounced to the physicians’ clinics, and abstraction of the medical records generated during these visits.Setting: The general medicine clinics of two veterans affairs medical centres.Participants: Twenty randomly selected physicians from among eligible second and third year (...) internal medicine residents and attending physicians.Main measurements: Explicit criteria were used to score the medical records of physicians and the reports of SPs generated during 160 visits . Individual scoring items were categorised into four domains of clinical performance: history, physical examination, treatment, and diagnosis. To determine the false positive rate, physician entries were classified as false positive , false negative, true positive, and true negative.Results: False positives were identified in the medical record for 6.4% of measured items. The false positive rate was higher for physical examination and diagnosis than for history and treatment . For individual physician subjects, the false positive rate ranged from 0.098 to 0.397.Conclusions: These data indicate that the medical record falsely overestimates the quality of important dimensions of care such as the physical examination. Though it is doubtful that most subjects in our study participated in regular, intentional falsification, we cannot exclude the possibility that false positives were in some instances intentional, and therefore fraudulent, misrepresentations. Further research is needed to explore the questions raised but incompletely answered by this research. (shrink)

It is typically assumed that actions are events, but there is a growing consensus that negative actions, like omissions and refrainments, are not events, but absences thereof. If so, then we must either deny the obvious, that we can exercise our agency by omitting and refrainment, or give up on event-based theories of agency. I trace the consensus to the assumption that negative action sentences are negative-existentials, and argue that this is false. The best analysis of (...) negative action sentences treats them as quantifying over omissions and refrainments, conceived of as events. (shrink)

The centuries-long evolution of the iconography of Niccolò Machiavelli is itself a chapter in the history of Machiavelli’s reputation. As intuited by one of his foremost biographers, Oreste Tommasini, portraits of the Florentine are probably best considered as visual expressions of philosophical and literary anti-Machiavellism, which exercised, in their own way, a negative influence on the reception and interpretations of his writings. The Machiavelli who we have seen represented over the course of history in paintings, prints, and engravings may (...) be nothing more, therefore, than a Machiavellian persona: the visual translation of a conventional and stereotypical interpretation, which considers the author of The Prince to be the champion of a politics based on duplicity, cunning, deceit, and guile. This essay examines the origins and dissemination over the centuries of ‘La Testina’, one of the most celebrated and widely publicized portraits of Machiavelli. The conclusion, after comparing all of the extant variants of this portrait, is that it is an unfaithful and invented graphic representation of Machiavelli, whose fortunes in publishing and in the collective imagination have kept pace with the spread of a demonizing interpretation of Machiavelli, the master of evil, well-rooted even today in mass popular culture. (shrink)

If propositions are made true in virtue of corresponding to facts, then what are the truth-makers of true negative propositions such as ‘The apple is not red’? Russell argued that there must be negative facts to account for what makes true negative propositions true and false positive propositions false. Others, more parsimonious in their ontological commitments, have attempted to avoid them. Wittgenstein rejected them since he was loath to think that the sign for negation referred (...) to a negative element in a fact. A contemporary of Russell’s, Raphael Demos, attempted to eliminate them by appealing to ‘incompatibility’ facts. More recently, Armstrong has appealed to the totality of positive facts as the ground of the truth of true negative propositions. Oaklander and Miracchi have suggested that the absence or non-existence of the positive fact (which is not itself a further fact) is the basis of a positive proposition being false and therefore of the truth of its negation. (shrink)

The author argues for the existence of negative facts. The first section is devoted to an argument, grounded on truthmaker maximalism, that aims at demonstrating that negative facts must exist at least as false propositions’ falsemakers. In the second section, the author analyzes and criticizes several attempts to get rid of negative facts: the ones based on incompatibilities, absences, totality facts and polarities, as well as the ones based on various restrictions on truthmaker maximalism or on (...) the non-acceptance of facts as truthmakers. In particular, it is shown that an ontology that accepts negative facts is simpler than an ontology that denies their existence and that in general, many attempts to get rid of negative facts turn out to recognize the existence of such entities or of entities that are more mysterious than negative facts themselves. (shrink)

Teenagers enjoy better physical and mental health when they avoid early sexual debut and reserve the sexual act for marriage. Teens who initiate sexual relations outside of marriage risk contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and those who also use hormonal contraception to avoid pregnancy often suffer unwanted physical and emotional side effects. Teens who have multiple partners may have later attachment or bonding difficulties. The consequences of an unintended pregnancy after a casual sexual relationship are often abortion or single motherhood and (...) an increased likelihood of poverty. Teenagers who save sexual relations for marriage experience freedom from these negative consequences and are more likely, in marriage, to experience the beauty of self-giving love. (shrink)

The phenomenon of multi-used stock photography in the news contradicts the photojournalism professional values of truthful and emotional depictions. This reality echoes other false images increasingly appearing in the media, including deepfakes and artificial intelligence. In the present study, a two (stock and staff photo) by two (positive and negative valence) quasi-experiment is conducted. The dependent variables include: 1) credibility; 2) self-reported arousal level; 3) emotional valence perceptions; 4) fixation duration; and 5) fixation count. Participants viewed staff photos (...) as more credible in both positive and negative valences. Negative photos were perceived as slightly less credible. Stock and staff photos were similarly arousing, received similar valence perceptions, and had similar gaze fixations and durations. Overall, participants perceived the genuine emotion portrayed truthfully in photojournalism as opposed to the faux emotion acted out in stock photos. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, if truthmaker theory is true, then all truths have truthmakers, but there are no truthmakers for negative truths - therefore, the theory is false. In this paper, I defend truthmaker theory by arguing against both claims. I begin by examining and rejecting a recent attempt to argue against. I then present my own argument against by considering the connection between truthmaking and the more general notion of grounding. Finally, I critically examine the proposal by (...) Ross Cameron and argue that the world as a whole can make all negative truths true, despite an apparent inconsistency in and an implausible consequence of Cameron's account. The discussion reveals how negative truths are grounded in reality on the basis of a reassessment of how such truths matter to truthmaker theory. (shrink)

I shall argue in this article that, if we need to admit of negative facts in our ontology as falsemakers of false propositions, then it is plausible to accept that there are also negative properties conceived of as modes. After having briefly recalled the falsemaker argument, I shall explore five different alternative interpretations of negative facts and I shall demonstrate that each alternative – except for the one involving negative properties – is affected by some (...) problems. Later on, I shall deal with a number of objections against negative properties and I shall demonstrate that they can be overcome without much difficulty. Eventually, I shall tackle Nick Zangwill's argument against the thesis that negative properties are as real as positive ones. Among other things, I shall argue that Zangwill's argument is at least limited in its scope, since it only works with negative and positive determinates within some common determinable. (shrink)

The question of Leibniz’s relationship to mysticism has been a topic of some debate since the early part of the 20th Century. An initial wave of scholarship led by Jean Baruzi presented Leibniz mystic. However, later in the 20th Century the mood turned against this view and this negative appraisal holds sway today. In this paper I aim to do two things: First I provide a detailed account of the ways in which Leibniz is critical of mysticism; second, I (...) argue that there is, nonetheless, an important sense in which Leibniz should be regarded as an advocate of mysticism. However, the approach that I take does not focus on an effort to overturn the kinds of considerations that led people to reject the views of Baruzi. Instead, I try to reframe the discussion and explore more complex and interesting relationships that exist between mysticism and Leibniz’s philosophical theology than have been articulated previously. Here I draw on some recent discussions of mysticism in the philosophical literature to illuminate Leibniz’s own distinction between “false mysticism” and “true mystical theology.”. (shrink)

The aim of our experiment was to analyse the effect of the emotional valence (positive, negative, or neutral) on true and false recognition, matching the arousal, frequency, concreteness, and associative strength of the study and recognition words. Fifty younger adults and 46 healthy older adults performed three study tasks (with words of different valence: positive, negative, neutral) and their corresponding recognition tests. Two weeks later, they performed the three recognition tests again. The results show that words with (...) a negative valence produced less true recognition and less false recognition than words with a positive or neutral valence, in both younger and older adults, on the immediate recognition test. This pattern of results was also found in the younger adults on the delayed recognition test, whereas in the older participants, these differences disappeared. Thus, when arousal is controlled, both younger and older adults tend to recognise negative information worse than positive or neutral information, but they also commit fewer errors. Results would suggest that the greater arousal commonly associated with negative stimuli, rather than their own valence, could explain some of the contradictory results found in the literature. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In “Die Verneinung”, Frege discusses two types of negation, a semantic one and a pragmatic one. Semantic negation consists in the application of the logical function denoted by ‘it is false that p’ to a thought, and pragmatic negation in the act of asserting or judging a thought as false. According to the standard interpretation, Frege does not acknowledge pragmatic negation, because it is logically redundant. He therefore rejects the classical dualistic view that both truth and falsity (...) are qualities of judgement and adopts instead the monistic view that to judge is always to recognize a thought as true. My aim in this paper is to show that this interpretation cannot be sustained. Though Frege does not endorse the classical view, he defends a dualistic conception that is characterized by the claim that judging is a binary operation that contains both the act of recognizing a thought as true and the act of rejecting the opposite thought as false. To make this interpretation plausible, Frege’s dualistic remarks on negation in three posthumous writings, which have received little attention so far, are analyzed in detail and their background is reconstructed. It is argued that Frege acknowledges negative judgements to account for the epistemic role of the act of judgement in the acquisition of knowledge. RESUMO Frege discute dois tipos de negação em “Die Verneinung” : uma semântica e uma pragmática. Negação semântica consiste na aplicação da função lógica denotada por ‘é falso que p’ para um pensamento, e negação pragmática no ato de afirmar ou julgar um pensamento como falso. De acordo com a interpretação padrão, Frege não reconhece a negação pragmática, porque ela é logicamente redundante. Assim, ele rejeita a visão dualística clássica de que tanto verdade quanto falsidade são qualidades de julgamento e, em vez disso, adota a visão monística de que julgar é sempre reconhecer um pensamento como verdade. Meu objetivo neste artigo é mostrar que tal interpretação não pode ser sustentada. Apesar de Frege não endossar a visão clássica, ele defende um conceito dualista que é caracterizado pela afirmação de que julgar é uma operação binária que contém tanto o ato de reconhecer um pensamento como verdade, quanto o ato de rejeitar o pensamento oposto como falso. Para tornar essa interpretação plausível, Frege faz observações dualísticas sobre a negação em três escritos póstumos, que têm recebido pouca atenção até o presente, são analisadas em detalhe e seu background é reconstruído. Argumenta-se que Frege reconhece o julgamento negativo para explicar o papel epistêmico do ato de julgar na aquisição de conhecimento. (shrink)

The book has two currents. The first is an analysis of the three concepts of freedom, which are called, respectively, negative, positive, and inner. Negative freedom is defined as an absence of coercion, positive freedom as an ability to rule oneself and rule others, inner freedom as being oneself, that is, being an author of one's decisions. Each concept is analyzed both in terms of its development in the history of ideas and in terms of its internal logic. (...) The major problem of negative freedom is to find widely accepted rules according to which this freedom can be distributed. The major problem of positive freedom is to define what constitutes a free person. The major problem of inner freedom is how to correlate it with the proper interpretation of the human self. The book advances the thesis - and this constitutes the other current of its narrative - that we have been witnessing the advent of a new form of despotism, much of it being the effect of the dominant position of liberalism. Precisely because it took a reductionist position, liberalism has impoverished our view of freedom, and consequently, our notion of human nature with its political, moral, and metaphysical dimensions. (shrink)

False information is always produced after the outbreak of major emergencies. Taking this into consideration, this paper discusses the behavior of multiple parties in relation to false information dissemination after major emergencies. First, a game model is constructed, using relevant knowledge of evolutionary game theory, between three parties: regulatory institutions, opinion leaders, and ordinary Internet users. Second, the model equations are solved, and the evolutionary stability strategies of each game party under different circumstances are analyzed. Third, a numerical (...) simulation is applied to the evolutionary trends under different strategy combinations with varying parameters. The results show that the probability of each game party making ideal decisions is positively correlated with the degree of punishment imposed by regulatory institutions on opinion leaders who release false information, the reward provided by regulatory institutions on opinion leaders who release positive information, the degree of participation and satisfaction gained by Internet users in adopting positive information, the richness of authentic content released by opinion leaders, and the psychological identification of Internet users with opinion leaders. Meanwhile, the probability of each game party making ideal decisions is negatively correlated with investigation and evidence collection costs borne by opinion leaders who release positive information, the additional income for opinion leaders who have false information adopted by Internet users, the costs of Internet users’ time and energy when they adopt information released by opinion leaders, and the costs of independently judging the accuracy of information by Internet users. (shrink)

Establishing a precise definition of moral innocence is a difficult task. Ordinarily philosophers explore the necessary and sufficient conditions of a term or concept in order to determine its meaning. Doing so with “moral innocence” proves difficult because the concept is mutable. The term is used in varying contexts to refer to ignorance, naiveté, sexual inexperience, legal and moral culpability, noncombatants in war, and moral purity. For our present purposes, we can exclude the contexts of law and war because they (...) are too specialized to aid us in identifying the commonalities present in the more general uses of the term. Once we take the other common uses into consideration—ignorance, naiveté, and sexual inexperience—a shared feature surfaces. Each of these conditions of character or states of being is a mode of immaturity. Now we are impelled to ask: what are the qualities of this immaturity? More specifically, what are the features of moral immaturity? To answer this question, the first section of this chapter argues that moral innocence ought to be interpreted in terms of illusion and inability. The innocent hold certain illusions about the moral order that make them unable to engage in practices constitutive of the moral community. Specifically, the morally innocent falsely believe that a life of moral purity—that is, a life devoid of wrongdoing—is possible to achieve. This illusion is based on the following three elements characteristic of an immature and rudimentary understanding of moral interaction: the belief that human nature has only a propensity for goodness; the belief that following ethical rules is sufficient to avoid transgressing moral values; and, the inability to see oneself as a perpetual source of wrongdoing. The subsequent sections establish why each of these elements hinders the development of a realistic and mature moral acumen. We will proceed by examining the thought of two figures in the history of philosophy who have not previously been associated with the notion of moral innocence, and yet through the present analysis and interpretation can provide insight into its nature. First, Immanuel Kant’s theory of radical evil demonstrates that the human propensity to evil is so pervasive that it is, practically speaking, unavoidable. Therefore, to believe that one can avoid acting upon temptations to evil is self-deception. The final section engages in a thorough analysis of Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy and interprets it in a new way as a theory of moral maturity. The morally mature individual is one who questions ethical rules and who, through self-reflection, recognizes herself as a potential source of wrongdoing. As a result of these arguments, we will identify rule-questioning, self-reflection, and locating wrongdoing in terms of one’s own agency as essential features of moral maturity. We will determine the essential characteristics of moral innocence by examining its positive attributes before establishing it as a negative counterpart to moral maturity. (shrink)

This paper examines how people anticipate negative emotion when faced with an uncertain outcome and try to manage their expectation. While extant research streams remain equivocal on whether managing expectation always succeeds, this research examines situations in which setting a low expectation can have an adverse emotional impact and ways to alleviate this negative emotional consequence. Using goal setting and false-feedback paradigm, we show that those who set low goals to manage expectation can end up feeling more (...) disappointed than those who set high goals (study 1), but this negative impact can be avoided when goals are reminded at feedback and when individuals are made aware of the inaccuracies in forecasting affect or are reminded of their initial goal (studies 1 and 2). (shrink)

In the last 30 years, the key issue in developmental Theory of Mind has been if and when children are capable of representing false beliefs. Moving away from this research question, the aim of this study was to investigate the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks. We focused on the design of the test phase and investigated two factors that may be critical for 3-year-old children’s success: the form of the wh-question and the salience of the target (...) object. The results of two experiments confirmed that 3-year olds are able to explicitly choose the correct answer in a false-belief task provided that they are allowed to focus on the protagonist throughout the task. The salience of the target object, however, was a critical factor in the design of the test phase, as increasing it had a negative effect on children’s performance. These results suggest that the experimental record of the last 30 years may be skewed since standard false-belief tasks do not control for the relative salience of the wrong response, potentially hindering the performance of children under 4. We conclude that a careful investigation of performance factors in false-belief tasks has the potential to reveal deep insights into the development of Theory of Mind skills, even if not directly focused on children’s representation of beliefs. (shrink)

From the concrete experience of war, Michael S. Yandell constructs a phenomenology of “negative revelation” in which false or distorted claims of goodness and justice disintegrate and become meaningless, adding depth to the term moral injury.

The debate on whether and why misinformation is bad primarily focuses on the spread of false beliefs as its main harm. From the assumption that misinformation primarily causes harm through the spread of false beliefs as a starting point, it has been contended that the problem of misinformation has been exaggerated. Its tendency to generate false beliefs appears to be limited. However, the near-exclusive focus on whether or not misinformation dupes people with false beliefs neglects other (...) epistemic harms associated with it. Specifically, I show that misinformation also causes trouble for the epistemic goods of truth attainment, intellectual autonomy and debate pluriformity. Moreover, for each of these goods, I argue that emphasizing error-avoidance exacerbates, rather than mitigates, the harms caused by misinformation. These oversights and dilemmas show that prioritizing error-avoidance in the fight against misinformation is not a neutral default policy or necessarily a net positive. A shift in focus away from the spread of false beliefs as the main harm of misinformation is needed to better understand and counter its negative effects. (shrink)

The first section (§1) of this essay defends reliance on truth values against those who, on nominalistic grounds, would uniformly substitute a truth predicate. I rehearse some practical, Carnapian advantages of working with truth values in logic. In the second section (§2), after introducing the key idea of auxiliary parameters (§2.1), I look at several cases in which logics involve, as part of their semantics, an extra auxiliary parameter to which truth is relativized, a parameter that caters to special kinds (...) of sentences. In many cases, this facility is said to produce truth values for sentences that on the face of it seem neither true nor false. Often enough, in this situation appeal is made to the method of supervaluations, which operate by “quantifying out” auxiliary parameters, and thereby produce something like a truth value. Logics of this kind exhibit striking differences. I first consider the role that Tarski gives to supervaluation in first order logic (§2.2), and then, after an interlude that asks whether neither-true-nor-false is itself a truth value (§2.3), I consider sentences with non-denoting terms (§2.4), vague sentences (§2.5), ambiguous sentences (§2.6), paradoxical sentences (§2.7), and future-tensed sentences in indeterministic tense logic (§2.8). I conclude my survey with a look at alethic modal logic considered as a cousin (§2.9), and finish with a few sentences of “advice to supervaluationists” (2.10), advice that is largely negative. The case for supervaluations as a road to truth is strong only when the auxiliary parameter that is “quantified out” is in fact irrelevant to the sentences of interest—as in Tarski’s definition of truth for classical logic. In all other cases, the best policy when reporting the results of supervaluation is to use only explicit phrases such as “settled true” or “determinately true,” never dropping the qualification. (shrink)

Since Plato’s Symposium, romantic, sexual love has been characterized as a movement in desire that seeks wholeness and identity since it is, at heart, broken.1 The yearning for sexual consummation is predicated upon the idea that love completes the self. Copulation provides lovers with a moment of rapture, relief, and oneness, but once satisfied it is again wanting in reawakening the desire to pledge and to make love again. Love operates much like a promise whose constant and insistent offerings seek (...) to recover again and again its inherent brokenness. The promise of love and the many promises of love are divided further by the dual possibility of being fulfilled or unfulfilled, sincere or insincere, true or false... (shrink)

The primary aim of the current study was to examine whether depleted cognitive resources might have ramifications for the formation of neutral and negative spontaneous false memories. To examine this, participants received neutral and negative Deese/Roediger–McDermott false memory wordlists. Also, for half of the participants, cognitive resources were depleted by use of an ego depletion manipulation . Our chief finding was that depleted cognitive resources made participants more vulnerable for the production of false memories. Our (...) results shed light on how depleted cognitive resources affect neutral and negative correct and errant memories. (shrink)

E-commerce sites have been doing profitable business since their induction in high-speed and secured networks. Moreover, they continue to influence consumers through various methods. One of the most effective methods is the e-commerce review rating system, in which consumers provide review ratings for the products used. However, almost all e-commerce review rating systems are unable to provide cumulative review ratings. Furthermore, review ratings are influenced by positive and negative malicious feedback ratings, collectively called false reviews. In this paper, (...) we proposed an e-commerce review system framework developed using the cumulative sum method to detect and remove malicious review ratings. (shrink)

Sometimes we make mistakes, even when we try to do our best. When those mistakes are about normative matters, such as what is required, this leads to a puzzle. This puzzle arises from the possibility of misleading evidence about what rationality requires. I argue that the best way to solve this puzzle is to distinguish between two kinds of evaluation: requirement and appraisal. The strategy I defend connects three distinct debates in epistemology, ethics, and normativity: the debate over how our (...) theories of epistemic rationality should accommodate misleading evidence, the debate over the relationship between complying with requirements and deserving particular appraisals, and the debate over whether normative ignorance can excuse. Part 1 shows how three apparently plausible claims about epistemic rationality generate a puzzle when agents have misleading evidence about what rationality requires. Part 2 solves this puzzle by distinguishing between evaluations of requirement and appraisal and rejecting the idea that one is required to conform to the Enkratic Principle. I argue instead that complying with the Enkratic Principle provides defeasible evidence that the agent should be positively appraised. One of the consequences of this solution is that false normative beliefs can sometimes excuse agents from negative appraisal they would otherwise deserve for violating requirements. Part 3 defends the view that false normative belief can sometimes excuse against the rival views that false normative belief always excuses, and that false normative belief never excuses. I argue that false normative belief can sometimes excuse violations of requirements, when it is the case that the agent has done what it is reasonable to expect of her. (shrink)

This essay explicates the primary interpretative import of B1: 31-32 in Parmenides poem (On Nature)—lines which have radical implications for the overall argument, and which the traditional arrangement forces into an irreconcilable dilemma. I argue that the “negative” reading of lines 31-32 is preferable, even on the traditional arrangement. This negative reading denies that a third thing is to be taught to the reader by the goddess—a positive account of how the apparent world is to be “acceptably” understood. (...) I then suggest that a rearrangement of the fragments would make more sense overall, while further supporting the “negative” reading as more natural and coherent. In particular, the rearrangement dispels the objection that, “if mortal opinions were not true, why would Parmenides include such a lengthy false account of the apparent world--an account which explicitly denies the conclusions of the earlier section, Truth?”. (shrink)

One rather common way of doing philosophy involves what is called “the method of cases,” where philosophers design hypothetical cases and use what we think about those cases—our “philosophical intuitions”—as evidence that certain philosophical theories are true or false, and as reasons for believing that those theories are true or false. This way of doing philosophy has been challenged in recent years on the basis of both general epistemological considerations and more specific methodological concerns. These methodological concerns have (...) focused not on whether philosophical intuitions can be a good source of evidence, but rather on whether they can be used in the ways that they currently are used in actual philosophical practice given how little we know about them and some of the worrisome things that we have learned about them in recent years. My goal here is to provide you with a short introduction to this way of challenging to how philosophers use the method of cases, and to walk you through some of the more popular ways of responding to this kind of methodological challenge and some of their shortcomings. (shrink)

We argue that some algorithms are value-laden, and that two or more persons who accept different value-judgments may have a rational reason to design such algorithms differently. We exemplify our claim by discussing a set of algorithms used in medical image analysis: In these algorithms it is often necessary to set certain thresholds for whether e.g. a cell should count as diseased or not, and the chosen threshold will partly depend on the software designer’s preference between avoiding false positives (...) and false negatives. This preference ultimately depends on a number of value-judgments. In the last section of the paper we discuss some general principles for dealing with ethical issues in algorithm-design. (shrink)