Conspiracy theories (CTs) are widespread ways by which people make sense of unsettling or disturbing cultural events. Belief in CTs is often connected to problematic consequences, such as decreased engagement with conventional political action or even political extremism, so understanding the psychological and social qualities of CTs belief is important. CTs have often been understood to be “monological”, displaying the tendency for belief in one conspiracy theory to be correlated with belief in (many) others. Explanations of monologicality invoke a nomothetical (...) or “closed” mindset whereby mutually supporting beliefs based on mistrust of official explanations are used to interpret public events as conspiracies, independent of the facts about those events (which they may ignore or deny). But research on monologicality offers little discussion of the content of monological beliefs and reasoning from the standpoint of the CT believers. This is due in part to the “access problem” (Wood & Douglas, 2015): CT believers are averse to being researched because they often distrust researchers and what they appear to represent. We used several strategies to address the access problem, and investigated the symbolic resources underlying CTs by reconstructing a conspiracy worldview - a set of beliefs held by CT believers about important dimensions of ontology, epistemology, and human agency. To do this, we analysed media documents, conducted field observation, and engaged in semi-structured interviews,. We describe six main dimensions of a conspiracy worldview: Views of the nature of reality, the self, the outgroup, the ingroup, action, and the future. We also describe a typology of five types of CT believers, which vary according to their positions on each of these dimensions. Our findings converge with prior explorations of CT beliefs but also revealed novel aspects: A sense of community among CT believers, a highly differentiated representation of the outgroup, a personal journey of conversion, variegated kinds of political action, and optimistic belief in future change. These findings are at odds with the typical image of monological CT believers as paranoid, cynical, anomic and irrational. For many, the CT worldview may rather constitute the ideological underpinning of a nascent pre-figurative social movement. (shrink)

Models carry the meaning of science. This puts a tremendous burden on the process of model selection. In general practice, models are selected on the basis of their relative goodness of fit to data penalized by model complexity. However, this may not be the most effective approach for selecting models to answer a specific scientific question because model fit is sensitive to all aspects of a model, not just those relevant to the question. Model Structural Adequacy analysis is proposed as (...) a means to select models based on their ability to answer specific scientific questions given the current understanding of the relevant aspects of the real world. (shrink)

Recently, several states in the US have made it more difficult to receive nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the hope of better orienting parents towards vaccination. However, little is known about how public-facing school staff implement and enforce mandate policies, including why or how often they steer parents towards nonmedical exemptions. This study focused on Michigan, which has recently added an additional burden for families seeking nonmedical exemptions. We used an anonymous online survey to assess Michigan public-school employees (...) (n = 157) about their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding Michigan's school enrollment vaccine mandate policy. Our main conclusions are that frontline school staff are generally knowledgeable about vaccines and immunization policy, but are at best ambivalent about their role in immunization governance, believing that other agents should be responsible for ensuring that children are vaccinated. Furthermore, some respondents indicated low vaccine confidence, which was associated with increased ambivalence about, or opposition to, their role in immunization governance. As more jurisdictions within and beyond the US consider introducing or tightening childhood vaccine mandates, it is increasingly important to understand how these policies can be improved by attending to the attitudes and roles of relevant frontline actors. (shrink)

Vaccine refusal is not a free rider problem. The claim that vaccine refusers are free riders is inconsistent with the beliefs and motivations of most vaccine refusers. This claim also inaccurately depicts the relationship between an individual’s immunization choice, their ability to enjoy the benefits of community protection, and the costs and benefits that individuals experience from immunization and community protection. Modeling vaccine refusers as free riders also likely distorts the ethical analysis of vaccine refusal and may lead to unsuccessful (...) policy interventions. (shrink)

In a recent article, "Can One Both Contribute to and Benefit from Herd Immunity?", Lucie White argues that vaccine refusal is more like free riding than we have claimed that it is. Here, we critically reply to White’s arguments.

The study of colour has become familiar territory in anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Mark Bradley reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. He also demonstrates that the questions of what colour was and how it functioned - as well as how it could be (...) misused and misunderstood - were topics of intellectual debate in early imperial Rome. Suggesting strategies for interpreting Roman expressions of colour in Latin texts, Dr Bradley offers alternative approaches to understanding the relationship between perception and knowledge in Roman elite thought. In doing so, he highlights the fundamental role that colour performed in the realms of communication and information, and its intellectual contribution to contemporary discussions of society, politics and morality. (shrink)

Qualia are the elements of phenomenal consciousness -- the raw feels which constitute what it is like to be in a conscious mental state. Some claim that qualia are epiphenomenal properties -- mere by-products of brain function which are causally inert. Though this is an implausible theory, it is difficult to show that it is false. Here I present an ad hominem argument -- the argument from coincidence -- which shows that epiphenomenalism about qualia is explanatorily deficient because it leaves (...) unexplained a highly improbable state of affairs, and so we have good reason to suppose that qualitative properties must be causally efficacious, and must be so in virtue of their qualitative nature. (shrink)

Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, by Joseph Levine, is reviewed. The position that Levine takes in the current philosophical debate about consciousness is identified and the general approach of the essay outlined. I focus on two of the more important issues in the book - the conceivability argument against materialism, and the explanatory gap argument against dualism - and argue that Levine's argument against the former is unconvincing and his diagnosis of the source of the latter leads him into (...) problems. I suggest a more promising route. (shrink)

One recent attempt to capture the content of physicalism involves characterising it negatively in terms of the non-mental. This thesis is criticised on the grounds that it fails to provide a sufficient condition for an adequate characterisation of physicalism, since, from a global physicalist perspective, it has both nothing to say about other so-called non-physical entities and fails to exclude them from the fundamental entities that such an account must posit. This latter problem is also faced by a more local (...) form of physicalism – one that restricts itself to just the mental domain. Some possible responses from the physicalist are briefly discussed and dismissed, and it is suggested that the physicalist must have some implicit idea of what she means by ‘the physical’, an idea which must amount to more than simply ‘the non-mental’. (shrink)

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Typically, literature is defined ontologically as linguistically-fixed texts consisting of specific words and word order. However, some have noted that this condition is too strict for linguistically-fluid works such as the Iliad where the words and word order differ in their various instances. I argue that it is not strict enough for some works of literature, such as pattern poetry and the novels of Irvin Welsh and Mark Z. Danielewski, that have a further ontological condition. In that the graphic (...) features play an artistic role in these works, those graphic features must be reproduced in an authentic copy. Using exemplars in both poetry and prose, I define these works as graphically-fixed literature and identify a sufficient condition of such works specific to their graphic features. Finally, I examine copies of graphically-fixed works that omit their graphic features as well as audiobook and Braille editions that necessarily lack graphic components. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question: how should the traditional doxastic attitude of agnosticism be represented in a Bayesian framework? Bas van Fraassen has one proposal: a Bayesian is agnostic about a proposition if her opinion about the proposition is represented by a probability interval with zero as the lower limit. I argue that van Fraassen's proposal is not adequate. Mark Kaplan claims that this leads to a problem with constructive empiricism; I show that Kaplan's claim is incorrect.

Like much in this book, the title and dust jacket illustration are clever. The first evokes Hume's remark in the Treatise that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’ The second, which represents a cross between a dance-step and a clinch, links up with the title and anticipates an example used throughout the book to support its central claims: that Ronnie, unlike Bradley, has a reason to go to a party – namely, that there (...) will be dancing at the party – because Ronnie, unlike Bradley, loves dancing. So, the explanation of why Ronnie's and Bradley's reasons differ lies in their respective psychologies.Schroeder argues for a version of the Humean Theory of Reasons he calls Hypotheticalism, which says that every reason is explained by a desire in the same way as Ronnie's is. Schroeder argues that on almost every count, Hypotheticalism is as good as, or preferable to, the Humean and non-Humean alternatives; and he defends it against an array of objections. For example, he explains that while Hypotheticalism claims that ‘desires have to serve in the explanation of every reason because desires are part of the correct analysis of reasons’, it does not claim that a desire that explains a reason is part of that reason: rather it is a background condition for it. This, Schroeder argues, allows him to rebut a variety of objections that depend on conflating reasons with their background conditions. Other …. (shrink)

In 2013, the first reader of Jean-Luc Marion’s works appeared, Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, meticulously edited by his friend and colleague Kevin Hart. Yet, if the appearance of volume marked Marion’s status as France’s most influential living philosopher, Hart’s Kingdoms of God marks the beginning of a systematic theology long in the making. In addition to serving as the prologemenon to his planned systematics, the work also serves to differentiate Hart’s phenomenological theology from Marion’s phenomenology of revelation and doctrine (...) of revelation through the rendering of what Hart calls the basilaic reduction, on the basis of which Hart builds a twofold theological criticism of Marion. He first criticizes Marion’s claim that revelation can gain phenomenological status like ordinary phenomena, and second contests the notion that revelation is always characterized by a saturation that bedazzles its receiver. I explore each thinker’s approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology, using their engagements with the works of Jacques Derrida and Karl Barth as points of comparison in order to contextualize Hart’s theological criticisms of Marion. I conclude by arguing that Hart’s, rather than Marion’s, approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology corresponds to the core concerns of the second generation of the “theological turn” of French phenomenology. (shrink)

In 1996, L. S Cousins published a groundbreaking piece on paths of monastic practice titled ‘Scholar Monks and Meditator Monks Revisited’. As the title suggests, this work reconsiders the role of two types of monks, doing so by closely analyzing a famous sutta that depicts a strong dispute between jh?yins or ‘meditators’ and dhammayogas, whom scholarship has almost universally defined as ‘scholars’. Because of this, almost all have interpreted this debate as the first sign in early Indian Buddhism of a (...) great bifurcation in the sa?gha between those concentrating on book learning and those concentrating on practice — a split that became more and more marked over the centuries until the division became more or less official in medieval Sri Lanka. Cousins convincingly contests this history, with one of his main points being that the dhammayogas were not at all just scholars. Like the meditators, theirs was a practical path that resulted in profound realization of the Dhamma, albeit a different path from that of the meditators. Cousins then goes even further, arguing that the split between scholars and meditators is not very evident in South Asian Buddhist history until the time of Buddhaghosa and thereafter. My intention here is to respond as fully as possible to Cousins’ methods and conclusions, by offering evidence and arguments that sometimes support his work further and sometimes critique his work. This is done in the spirit of spurring on more discussions on this important, complex, and contested issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aesthetic Classroom and the Beautiful GameBradley Baurain (bio)IntroductionSoccer fans will not be surprised that understanding "the beautiful game" can contribute to understandings of teaching and learning. After all, at least one theorist sees "the nature of all social life" to be reflected in soccer: "The unfolding match between team-mates and opponents [illustrates] … the interdependency of human beings, and the 'flexible lattice-work of tensions' generated through their social (...) bonds. Power flows fluidly between players, jockeying for possession and moving between attack and defence."1 Another finds striking parallels between cultural history and tactics of play in soccer, including a "modernist" period emphasizing cautious ball control and defense-oriented player formations, and the current "postmodern" style emphasizing creativity and fluidity; he even identifies the history of the free kick as a microcosm of the whole.2The idea I explore in this essay is in a sense simply an extended analogy: A well-played soccer game has much in common with a well-taught lesson or course. Features of the one are set for comparison and discussion alongside features of the other. Yet, as with any good analogy, matters are not really so simple. One makes the comparison so that the juxtaposed items inform and illuminate one another—that is, one looks at a thing in order to see a different thing more clearly. So while I contend that soccer has much in common with teaching, the reverse is also true; I am not using soccer only as a "way through" to teaching. Neither of my terms of comparison are merely means to an end; instead both are ends in themselves. Reading the soccer parts of this essay will, I trust, inform and illuminate teaching and [End Page 50] curriculum, but at the same time my goal is for any soccer player who might read the teaching parts also to learn something about "the beautiful game."Soccer, "the beautiful game," is an apt comparison for the aesthetic classroom. My thoughts on what characterizes aesthetic teaching will emerge and take on flesh as this essay develops, but let me begin by describing it as "concerned for acts of mind as opposed to end products, fluidity and imagination rather than fixed sequence, judgment within learning experiences in contrast to deciding everything in advance, and dwelling with subject matter rather than merely covering subject matter."3 As Wanda May comments: "I suggest that when teaching is done well … it is a work of art because we reconfigure and decorate our spaces, make our marks, elevate ourselves and others above confinement, routine, and the mundane. We expand our capacity to see, hear, love, critique, and act on our possibilities in the world."4 I could as easily have applied both of these quotations to soccer. It is no accident that John Dewey links sports with the aesthetic: "Dance and sport are activities in which acts once performed spontaneously in separation are assembled and converted from raw, crude material into works of expressive art."5I anchor my discussion in four concepts foundational to the aesthetic classroom: play, relationality, process, and flow. My analysis of each of these key ideas moves back and forth among soccer, aesthetic and pedagogical theory, and classroom research and narratives. Examples, including those from my own experience, are drawn primarily from the related fields of language education and English as a Second Language (ESL). If soccer and the classroom can have much in common, another way of introducing this essay is to say that I spend it trying to see what takes place in the gaps, in the "muchness" that lies between the two terms of the analogy. I hope that readers will "make much" of this, too, for without them the seeing remains incomplete.The Concept of Play, Playing with ConceptsThough it has become a multibillion-dollar global business, at its best soccer is play: "We play sport, we don't work sport."6 Play means having fun and inspiring joy, but this sense of freedom does not mean play is unstructured. Games have rules, skills, procedures, and boundaries, and these features enable rather than constrain. From Dewey's point of view, they are... (shrink)

Allow me to rehearse a familiar scenario. We all know that which ends you have has something to do with what you ought to do. If Ronnie is keen on dancing but Bradley can’t stand it, then the fact that there will be dancing at the party tonight affects what Ronnie and Bradley ought to do in different ways. In short, (HI) you ought, if you have the end, to take the means. But now trouble looms: what if (...) you have dreadful, murderous ends? Ought you to take the means to them? Seemingly not. But fortunately, an assumption made by deontic logics1 comes to the rescue. Since ‘‘ought’’, according to this assumption, is a sentential operator, HI must really be ambiguous. It could be read either as (Narrow) You have the end ! O(you take the means) or as (Wide) O(you have the end ! you take the means). Now if Narrow is true, then you really ought to take the means to your murderous ends. But this doesn’t follow from Wide. All that follows from Wide is that you ought to either take the means to these ends or else give them up. Conclusions: (1) Since HI is on some reading true, but Narrow isn’t, Wide is true. (2) Wide accounts for the relationship between your ends and what you ought to do. This elegant scenario repeats itself in many other domains in which it seems like something can have a bearing on what some particular agent ought to do. Does what you know affect what you ought to do? Do your beliefs about what you ought to do affect what you ought to do? Do your promises affect what you ought to do? Do your beliefs affect what you ought to believe? On each of these counts, the intuitive answer is ‘‘yes’’. And so each of these questions leaves something for the moral philosopher or the epistemologist to investigate. On each count, it seems that what we all know, is that (Account) you ought, if p, to do A. But on each count, the Narrow-scope reading of the ‘‘ought’’ in this claim yields unintuitive consequences. So since Account is true, it must be true on the Wide-scope reading.. (shrink)

Deflationism about truth, what is often simply called “deflationism”, is really not so much a theory of truth in the traditional sense, as it is a different, newer sort of approach to the topic. Traditional theories of truth are part of a philosophical debate about the nature of a supposed property of truth. Philosophers offering such theories often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; truth consists in coherence with a set of beliefs or propositions; (...) truth is what is acceptable in the ideal limit of inquiry. According to deflationists, such suggestions are mistaken, and, moreover, they all share a common mistake. The common mistake is to assume that truth has a nature of the kind that philosophers might find out about and develop theories of. The main idea of the deflationary approach is (a) that all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ or of the concept of truth in our talk and thought, and (b) that, by contrast with what traditional views assume, this role is neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory. For example, according to deflationary accounts, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is in some sense strongly equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary approach, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’. Philosophers looking for some underlying nature of some truth property that is attributed with the use of the expression ‘true’ are bound to be frustrated, the deflationist says, because they are looking for something that isn’t there. Deflationism comprises a variety of different versions, each of which have gone by different names, including at least the following: disquotationalism, minimalism, prosententialism, the redundancy theory, the disappearance theory, the no-truth theory. There has not always been terminological consensus in the literature about how to use these labels: sometimes they have been used interchangeably; sometimes they have been used to mark distinctions between different developments of the same general approach. The actual variety of deflationary views has not always been clear in discussions of this approach, especially in the earlier literature, where important differences are occasionally missed. To help clear this up, we will use ‘deflationism’ to denote the general approach we want to discuss and reserve other names for specific versions of that approach. (shrink)

Dominic Lopes proposes that seeing-in admits of kinds. He thus suggests five ways of seeing-in that he feels do justice to the variety of pictorial representations. More recently Dan Cavedon-Taylor has argued that the space of seeing-in marked out by Lopes is incomplete, and thus proposes a sixth kind of seeing-in that fits neatly into the taxonomy. I argue that the phenomenon of seeing-in does not divide in as many ways as Lopes and Cavedon-Taylor propose. I show that the purported (...) cases of pseudo-design seeing do not demonstrate that actual design properties are not experienced and as such these cases can be captured by the other ‘ways of seeing-in’ that Lopes identifies. I also argue against the claim that actualism is a distinct kind of seeing-in. Thus the space of seeing-in ought to be significantly reduced. (shrink)

I argue that there is a flaw in the way that response-dependence has been formulated in the literature, and this flawed formulation has been correctly attacked by Mark Johnston’s Missing Explanation Argument (1993, 1998). Moving to a better formulation, which is analogous to the move from behaviourism to functionalism, avoids the Missing Explanation Argument.

The archive can take many forms but all are marked by a connective sequence: archive, memory, the past, narrative. The author explores this sequence through an account of her engagement with four different types of archive, constructing a phenomenology of the archive which highlights the promises and seductions offered to the researcher. Postmodern questioning may throw in doubt older conceptions, whereby the archive is used to legitimate knowledge claims about the past of a nomological nature. However, in a context where (...) intellectuals become interpreters rather than legislators, the role of the archive as repository of inert meanings is strengthened rather than weakened; using the archive helps us to understand the dialectical nature of the relationship between past and present and our own positioning within this. (shrink)

The nineteenth century saw the development of reductive views of attention. The German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) proposed an original reductive view according to which attention is nothing but interest and interest itself is a positive feeling. Stumpf’s view was developed by Francis Bradley (1846-1924), George Frederick Stout (1860-1944), and Josiah Royce (1855-1916), but has been overlooked in the recent literature. In this paper, I will expound Stumpf’s view of attention, trace it back to its Aristotelian roots (...) and defend the version offered by Stout and Royce. In this version a new kind of feeling, feelings of interest, and value, intellectual value, take centre stage. (shrink)

This collection explores the phenomenon of the messianic in contemporary philosophy, religion and culture. From the later Derrida’s work on Marx and Benjamin to Agamben and Badiou’s recent texts on St Paul, it is becoming possible to detect a marked ‘messianic turn’ in contemporary continental thought. However, despite the plethora of work in the field there has not been any sustained attempt to think through the larger philosophical, theological and cultural implications of this phenomenon. What, then, characterises our contemporary messianic (...) moment? Where does it come from? And why speak of the messianic now? In _The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture_, a group of internationally-known figures and rising stars within the fields of continental philosophy, religious studies and cultural studies come together to consider what the messianic might mean at the beginning of the 21 st century. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of _Cultural Research._. (shrink)

This paper interprets Kant's theory of right on analogy with his theory of truth. The familiar distinction is presented between the mental act and its object: e.g. between the act of believing and the belief; the perceiving and the thing perceived; the act of willing and the action willed. The act of mind is always private; different people, however, can perceive and believe the same or contradictory things. The notion of truth depends (for Kant) on the intersubjectivity or universalizability of (...) the mental object. It might seem that the act intended as well as the act of intending must be private, however, because I can will only my own actions; but Kant suggests that I may will not as myself but as one of a community: the logical subject of the intending may not be I but We. Kant had in mind the community of rational beings; Bradley and Green relativize the community to national groups. (shrink)

The lead-off essay by Kenneth Minogue is an Oakeshottian reflection on the extent to which modern people have become passive spectators of action, detached from traditional loyalties and modes of identity and thus a kind of new Epicurean, shorn of the genuinely contemplative character of the originals. Eric Ormsby follows this with a judicious appraisal of the possibilities and perils for culture associated with the advent of the new information technology. Anthony Daniels provides a similarly sober account of the many (...) consequences and dilemmas of medical technology for the noble Hippocratic art. David Pryce-Jones’s essay recounts the antipolitical utopianism of the totalitarian ideologies that shadowed most of the twentieth century and worries about the potentially destructive utopian tendencies in the contemporary project of European integration. Keith Windschuttle surveys the range of ideologies currently deployed in the academy, most of which derive from vulgarizations of Nietzsche. Edward Said’s influential body of work comes in for particular scrutiny here. Mark Steyn contributes a discussion of the now all-too-familiar self-hatred of Western intellectuals with the blunt precision and wit so characteristic of his splendid newspaper columns. Martin Greenberg’s essay on Burke manages to educe in brief compass the understanding of freedom that is the animating heart of that exemplary statesman’s thought and practice. Diana Schaub makes a case for the importance of political philosophy to the practice of modern politics centered on the statesmanship of Lincoln. Robert Bork’s chapter on the “adversary judiciary” limns the extent to which judges have gone from being the guarantors of the rule of law to the most effective antagonists of traditional institutions and values. Finally, Roger Kimball fittingly recalls the original Ciceronian understanding of culture as the development of the mind analogous to the cultivation of the earth, and connects it with the celebrated program of criticism proposed by Matthew Arnold. (shrink)

Among the many sorts of problems encountered in decision theory, allocation problems occupy a central position. Such problems call for the assignment of a nonnegative real number to each member of a finite set of entities, in such a way that the values so assigned sum to some fixed positive real number s. Familiar cases include the problem of specifying a probability mass function on a countable set of possible states of the world, and the distribution of a certain sum (...) of money, or other resource, among various enterprises. In determining an s-allocation it is common to solicit the opinions of more than one individual, which leads immediately to the question of how to aggregate their typically differing allocations into a single “consensual” allocation. Guided by the traditions of social choice theory decision theorists have taken an axiomatic approach to determining acceptable methods of allocation aggregation. In such approaches so-called “independence” conditions have been ubiquitous. Such conditions dictate that the consensual allocation assigned to each entity should depend only on the allocations assigned by individuals to that entity, taking no account of the allocations that they assign to any other entities. While there are reasons beyond mere simplicity for subjecting allocation aggregation to independence, this radically anti-holistic stricture has frequently proved to severely limit the set of acceptable aggregation methods. As we show in what follows, the limitations are particularly acute in the case of three or more entities which must be assigned nonnegative values summing to some fixed positive number s. For if the set V⊆[0,s] of values that may be assigned to these entities satisfies some simple closure conditions and Vis finite, then independence allows only for dictatorial or imposed aggregation. This theorem builds on and extends a theorem of Bradley and Wagner and, when V={0,1}, yields as a corollary an impossibility theorem of Dietrich on judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Differences in the ability of students to judge images can be assessed by analyzing the individual preference order of images. To gain insights into potential heterogeneity in judgement of visual abstraction among students, we combine Bradley–Terry preference modeling and model-based recursive partitioning. In an experiment a sample of 1,020 high-school students ranked five sets of images, three of which with respect to their level of visual abstraction. Additionally, 24 art experts and 25 novices were given the same task, while (...) their eye movements were recorded. Results show that time spent on the task, the students’ age, and self-reported interest in visual puzzles had significant influence on rankings. Fixation time of experts and novices revealed that both groups paid more attention to ambiguous images. The presented approach makes the underlying latent scale of visual judgments quantifiable. (shrink)

§ 1. Apparent philosophical disagreement: a philosophical problem. Philosophers are frequently criticized for their remarkable inability to reach consensus. “‘The same problems,’ we hear it often, ‘the same disputes, the same sheer failure. Why not abandon it and come out? Is there nothing else more worth your labour?’”. In science there are established results and generally accepted theories. Philosophy, by contrast, seems to breed only disagreement and controversy. Unless philosophers are simply a peculiarly argumentative lot, we are told, the fact (...) that philosophy is marked by widespread disagreement must indicate something about the nature of the philosophical enterprise. And the usual conclusion is that either it is intrinsically flawed or it is not as it has appeared to be, a search for truth. (shrink)