The empirical data do not unequivocally support a consistent fixed capacity of four chunks. We propose an alternative account whereby capacity is limited by the precision of specifying the temporal and spatial context in which items appear, that similar psychophysical constraints limit number estimation, and that short term memory (STM) is continuous with long term memory (LTM).

This report discusses the findings of the first ever study dedicated to the qualitative exploration of mirror-touch synaesthesia from a first-person perspective. As part of a project investigating the cross-disciplinary resonances of mirror-touch in the context of the broader social trait of empathy, this study aimed to document the lived experiences of people with this form of synaesthesia in order to offer insights into existing and new theoretical models for mirror-touch. Through examination of quotes drawn from first-hand accounts given by (...) participating mirror-touch synaesthetes concerning their unique perceptual, interpersonal, and social experiences, this report demonstrates the value of experimental research, in particular first-person reporting, to enhancing the understanding of the way mirror-touch relates to empathy and social functioning beyond its quantitiavely measurable characteristics. The descriptions point to mirror-touch synaesthetes' automatic feeling into the emotional lives of others and their deliberate attempts to regulate this. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 23-26 [Access article in PDF] The Complexity of Evil Behavior David E. Ward I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN this reply by thanking the commentators. The reports of their clinical experience contained some interesting evidence regarding evil behavior that, I think, supports my thesis and their full frontal criticism has given me a chance to reemphasize how complex the problem of evil behavior (...) is.On the question raised by Steven Sverdlik, as to whether Kant was in possession of the idea of the unconscious: it never occurred to me that Kant's notion of the subreption of the will—the idea that we could somehow be deceived with regard to our true motives (1956, 121)—could be regarded as a reason for assuming that Kant had a concept of the unconscious. Certainly talk of being unsure of one's motives has been common currency in every age that has had the idea of acting out of duty as opposed to desire. This uncertainty allows us to think about unconscious motives and thus of a set of hidden mechanisms that might motivate our actions without our being aware of them. However, I think we would both agree that Kant nowhere articulates this hypothesis. Freud did articulate it. So I agree that I should have said that Kant was not in possession of a concept of unconscious mechanisms that may generate behavior in such a way as to be opaque to the agent involved.Sverdlik has two worries with regard to my thesis. The first concerns my characterization of evil behavior as wrongdoing for wrongdoing's sake. He believes that rather than insisting that all principled behavior must fit this formula, "Ward is really interested in wrongdoing that is non-impulsive and actuated by some principle, but not necessarily the satanic one." This is, indeed, exactly what I was interested in. It is the unconscious adherence to some principle that causes all the trouble for evil people. Sverdlik thinks that my proposal was "to attribute acceptance [of such principles] to the unconscious" and to maintain that though the agent does "not consciously accept it, [it] does do so unconsciously" (my emphasis). What I actually said was: In my account, there is a near-perfect dovetailing of the two different psychological perspectives—that of Kant's moral psychology (which lacks the resources to accommodate the possibility of evil) and that of Peck's psychiatric diagnosis of evil—that explains (on my construal) how an unconscious adherence to unacknowledged principles could be the driving power behind evil behaviour. What is the difference between unconscious acceptance of a principle and unconscious adherence to it? This difference can be illustrated in connection with Sverdlik's continuation of his argument: Ward suggests that the agent does not consciously accept it, but does so unconsciously. But why does the unconscious not see that it is not universalizable? And if it does see this, why does it proceed to act on it? Ward's picture of the unconscious must allow it to be rational enough to understand the narcissistic principle, for example, [protect your self-image at all costs] and to act on it. But if it is that rational, then it is puzzling that it does not draw the same conclusion [End Page 23] that the agent's conscious deliberation can and will draw. Therefore, if consciously acting on a non-universalizable principle is inexplicable, then so is unconsciously acting on it. According to my picture of the unconscious, what the unconscious is rational about are hypothetical principles: it sees the connection between means and ends with perfect rationality. When, in my article, I distinguished between categorical and hypothetical imperatives I pointed out that... it is clear that hypothetical principles like always dress in woolens can only motivate us if we already have a desire to be warm. Strictly speaking, hypothetical principles do not motivate us by themselves. They are only useful in specifying the means to an end that a rational person would follow if she wanted to satisfy a certain desire. (My emphasis.) I was assuming, then... (shrink)

I assume that we find it hard to understand, for example, how a person could harm another person in cold blood. I then set out Kant's reason's for thinking that, strictly speaking, evil behavior is impossible: people may act on wicked desires but deliberate wrong-doing is not a genuine phenomenon. However, Kant's view is at odds with our common sense intuitions about morally evil behavior, namely, that such behavior is possible, albeit difficult to understand. I then suggest how Kant's analysis (...) of the problem of evil behavior can help us to understand under what conditions evil behavior would be possible. Next, I introduce Peck's theory of how evil behavior can manifest itselfwhen a person suffers from malignant narcissism—a complaint that involves acting on principles which are not consciously acknowledged. I conclude that Kant's views on evil can be understood with reference to Peck's theory (and vice versa). (shrink)

The background to the present discussion is the prevalence of political and personal criticisms in philosophical discussions about Africa. As philosophers in South Africa—both white and black—continue to philosophise seriously about Africa, responses to their work sometimes take the form of political and personal criticisms of, if not attacks on, the philosopher exploring and defending considerations about the African continent. One of us (TM) has been the target of such critiques in light of his work. Our aim in this conversation (...) is not to diminish or deflect such critiques. On the contrary, our aim is to understand them, to make them as strong as possible, and to bring them into the cooler realm of philosophical discussion. (shrink)

Philosophy, as I use it here, is a conversation, one stretching back through various canonical European and Ancient Greek texts at least to Thales. Has this conversation progressed? The main objection to philosophy's having a linear progression is dissensus – the fact that philosophers all disagree but still accept each other as peers. In this chapter, I argue that we should conceive of philosophy as being capable of a branching kind of progression: philosophy progresses when it gives us more ways (...) of conceiving of ourselves. (shrink)

It has often been claimed that our believing some proposition is dependent upon our not being committed to a non-epistemic explanation of why we believe that proposition. Very roughly, I cannot believe that p and also accept a non-epistemic explanation of my believing that p. Those who have asserted such a claim have drawn from it a range of implications: doxastic involuntarism, the unacceptability of Humean naturalism, doxastic freedom, restrictions upon the effectiveness of practical (Pascalian) arguments, as well as others. (...) If any of these implications are right, then we would do well to have a precise statement of the nature of this phenomenon central to first-person doxastic explanations, as well as of our reasons for believing that it holds. Both of these are lacking in the literature. This paper is an attempt to elucidate and defend this claim. (shrink)

Religious Conversion, Serf- Deception, and Pascal's Wager WARD E.JONES BLAISE PASCAL'S Pens~es is a sustained attempt to convert, to lead its reader to form the belief in the articles of faith. Pascal does not hope to convert by a direct presentation of evidence or argument, but rather attempts to induce in the reader a desire for belief in the articles of faith. He hopes that this desire will lead the reader to put herself in a situation in which she (...) will form the belief. Pascal, in other words, wants the reader to take control over her belief, to form it because she wants to do so. We commonly put ourselves in a situation for the purpose of forming beliefs. This is what happens when we choose to go, say, to university; choos- ing to learn is choosing to form beliefs in a given field. Pascal urges something more paradoxical. ~ He wants to induce us to form a particular belief . His dual aim is to induce the unbeliever to want a belief, and then to induce her to do what she can to gain that belief. Now if I want a particular belief, I might place myself in a situation in which nonrational or pragmatic determinants would bring about the belief. I might, that is, visit a hypnotist or a brainwasher, choosing some process which will either directly bring about the desired belief without involving my epistemic capabilities, or one which will diminish my epistemic capabilities. Alternatively, I might search for evidence for the.. (shrink)

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for (...) beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed. (shrink)

At the end of Lecture 3 of The Empirical Stance, Bas van Fraassen suggests that we see the change of view involved in scientific revolutions as being, at least in part, emotional. In this paper, I explore one plausible way of cashing out this suggestion. Someone’s emotional approval of a description of the world, I argue, thereby shows that she takes herself to have reason to take that description seriously. This is true even if she is convinced—as a scientific community (...) is when it considers alternative theories—that this description is false, that it is not the way the world is. (shrink)

Once we establish that the fundamental subject matter of the study of humour is a mental state – which I will call finding funny – then it immediately follows that we need to find the content and function of this mental state. The main contender for the content of finding funny is the incongruous (the incongruity thesis ); the main contenders for the function of finding funny are grounded either in its generally being an enjoyable state (the gratification thesis ) (...) or its tendency to lead to biased social attitudes (the favouritism thesis ). While all three of these families of claims are well-supported and individually plausible, the situation looks different once we attempt to unify our accounts of the content and function of finding funny . While functions based in the gratification thesis readily combine with the incongruity thesis, it is not at all clear how the phenomenon described by the favouritism thesis arises from a state with this content. The upshot is that we may have to sideline the favouritism thesis in our theory of humour. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 126-137. (shrink)

Because higher education brings members of academic communities in direct contact with students, the reflective higher education student is in an excellent position for developing two important intellectual virtues: confidence and humility. However, academic communities differ as to whether their members reach consensus, and their teaching practices reflect this difference. In this essay, Ward Jones argues that both consensus‐reaching and non‐consensus‐reaching communities can encourage the development of intellectual confidence and humility in their students, although each will do so in (...) very different ways. (shrink)

IntroductionA central concern of theoretical speculation about education is the kind of epistemic states that education can and should aim to achieve. One such epistemic state, long neglected in both education theory and philosophy, is wisdom. Might wisdom be something that educators should aim for? And might it be something that their students can achieve? My answer will be a qualified yes.One qualification derives from the fact that in the present paper I will only be concerned with the potentiality of (...) wisdom to be an aim of higher education . Because my argument will depend upon some of the particular features of HE, it may not be extendable to primary or secondary education. A second qualification is that I will defend a place for only one kind of wisdom – what I will call epistemic wisdom – as an aim of HE. The limitation to epistemic wisdom, as we will see, derives in large part from the fact that in this paper I am seeking to establish wisdom as an achievable aim of all disc .. (shrink)

This study analyzes the most important predictors of acceptance of social network sites in a sample of Chilean elder people. We employ a novelty procedure to explore this phenomenon. This procedure performs apriori segmentation based on gender and generation. It then applies the deep learning technique to identify the predictors by segments. The predictor variables were taken from the literature on the use of social network sites, and an empirical study was carried out by quota sampling with a sample size (...) of 395 older people. The results show different predictors of social network sites considering all the samples, baby boomer males and females, silent males and females. The high heterogeneity among older people is confirmed; this means that dealing with older adults as a uniform set of users of social network sites is a mistake. This study demonstrates that the four segments behave differently, and many diverse variables influence the acceptance of social network sites. (shrink)

Associated with Bayesianism is the claim that insofar as thereis anything like scientific theory-commitment, it is not a doxastic commitment to the truth of the theory or any proposition involving the theory, but is rather an essentiallypractical commitment to behaving in accordance with a theory. While there are a number of a priori reasons to think that this should be true, there is stronga posteriori reason to think that it is not in fact true of current scientific practice.After outlining a (...) feature that distinguishes doxastic from practical commitment, I presentempirical evidence that suggests that, like perhaps all other theoretical commitment,scientific theory-commitment is doxastic. (shrink)

After a thorough examination of the claim that "the underdetermination of theory by evidence forces us to seek sociological explanations of scientists' cognitive choices", Samir Okasha concludes that the only significant problem with this argument is that the thesis of underdetermination is not adequately supported. Against Okasha, I argue (1) that there is a very good reason to question the inference from the underdetermination of a theory to a sociological account of that theory's acceptance, and (2) that Okasha's own objection (...) to the argument is too weak. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper, I explore what Jean Améry calls the ?aesthetic view of death?. I address the following three questions. To what extent, and how, do we take an aesthetic view of death? Why do we take an aesthetic view of death? Third, for those whose deaths are impending and have some choice over how they die?most prominently the elderly and the terminally ill?what would it mean for them to take an aesthetic view of their own impending deaths, and, (...) in particular, what would it mean for them to act in the light of such a view? (shrink)

The neologism post-truth is commonly used to characterize a polity in which false and biased beliefs have corrupted public opinion and policymaking. Simplifying and broadening our use of the adjective beyond its current narrow meaning could make post-truth a useful addition to the lexicons of history, politics, and philosophy. Its current use, however, is unhelpful and distracting (at best), and experienced as demeaning and humiliating (at worst). Contemporary polities are better characterized as post-trust. A polity becames post-trust when testimony from (...) either a community of knowledge workers or a social group of complainants—such as women who give testimony of sexual assault—loses influence upon public opinion and policymaking. (shrink)

This volume of contributed, previously unpublished essays focuses on general theoretical, meta-ethical and aesthetic issues in philosophy and the ways in which ...

This is a programmatic paper, calling for the renewal and modernisation of the therapeutic approach to philosophy found in Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics; and, in particular, for an application of the therapeutic approach to the life of poverty. The general assumption behind a therapeutic approach to philosophy is that it is possible for someone to be exposed to philosophical work which leads her to an improved understanding of herself and her situation, and for her life to be improved by this (...) understanding. After offering a sketch of how, given the current nature of academic philosophy, such work will be carried out and disseminated, I suggest three areas in which philosophical discourse could have a therapeutic affect on the poor. (shrink)

Dark comedies invite us to laugh at something which is, at least ostensibly, not funny at all. They take an act or event that would, under most descriptions or presentations, invite pity or anger, and give it characteristics that invite amusement. It is essential to the humour of the kidnapping in The King of Comedy that it is a kidnapping. The immorality of this event is crucial to its humour.

In this paper, I am concerned with elucidating and expanding our attitudes toward our own death. As it is, our common attitudes toward our death are the following: we fear our premature death, and we dread our inevitable death. These attitudes are rational, but I want to argue that our attitudes toward death should be more complicated than this. A condition upon our value, our preciousness, as creatures is that we are vulnerable, and our vulnerability is, at bottom, a vulnerability (...) to death. A corollary of this is that we could not be loved, either by ourselves or by others, for one cannot love—be concerned for—a being invulnerable to death. As a consequence, death plays a deep and abiding role in our value systems. Our susceptibility to premature and inevitable death is a condition upon our being valuable creatures and, in turn, it is a condition upon our being loved. Given the high value that we place on being valuable creatures who deserve love, we should equally place a high value on the const.. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Most explanations of beliefs are epistemically or pragmatically rationalizing. The distinction between these two types involves the explainer's differing expectations of how the believer will behave in the face of counter-evidence. This feature suggests that rationalizing explanations portray beliefs as either a consequence of the believer's following a norm, or part of a sub-intentional goal-oriented system. Which properly characterizes pragmatic believing? If there were pragmatic norms for believing, I argue, they would not be consciously followable. Yet an unallowable norm is (...) not a norm at all, and so I conclude that there are no such norms and that pragmatic believing is a sub-intentional, and not a norm-driven, process. /// La mayoría de las explicaciones de las creencias racionalizan de forma epistémica o pragmática. La distinción entre estas dos involucra las diferentes expectativas del que explica acerca de cómo se comportará el creyente frente a evidencia contraria. Este rasgo sugiere que las explicaciones racionalizadoras toman las creencias o bien como una consecuencia de que el creyente siga una norma, o bien como parte de su sistema subintencional orientado a fines. ¿Cuàl caracteriza de manera apropiada el creer pragmático? Aquí argumento que si hubiera normas pragmáticas para creer, no se podrían seguir conscientemente; sin embargo, una norma no seguible no es una norma en ningún sentido, por lo que concluyo que no existen tales normas y que el creer pragmático es un proceso subintencional y no un proceso guiado por normas. (shrink)

Dark comedies invite us to laugh at something which is, at least ostensibly, not funny at all. They take an act or event that would, under most descriptions or presentations, invite pity or anger, and give it characteristics that invite amusement. It is essential to the humour of the kidnapping in The King of Comedy that it is a kidnapping. The immorality of this event is crucial to its humour.