In advocating Bayesian Enlightenment as a solution to Bayesian Fundamentalism, Jones & Love (J&L) rule out a broader critique of rationalist approaches to cognition. However, Bayesian Fundamentalism is merely one example of the more general phenomenon of Rationalist Fundamentalism: the tendency to characterize human judgments as rational and optimal in a post hoc manner, after the empirical data are already known.

Gibt es eine autonome Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften und speist sich diese aus der Quelle einer eigenstandigen, besonderen Vernunft, die das Denken und Forschen in diesen Disziplinen charakterisiert? Dieser Fragestellung gehen die Beitrage dieses Bandes am Leitfaden der Begriffsgeschichte des Konzepts der Phronesis nach. Hatte diese in der Antike ihren Platz primar in der Ethik und erfullte als Kategorie eine Abgrenzungsfunktion fur die Bestimmung einer spezifisch praktischen Vernunft im Unterschied zur theoretisch-wissenschaftlichen, so scheint sich der Begriff in Neuzeit und Moderne zunehmend (...) in einen wissenschaftstheoretischen Reflexionsbegriff verwandelt zu haben, der das Potential hat, den aus dem Trivium hervorgegangenen Geisteswissenschaften im Streit mit den Naturwissenschaften und im Streit um Autarkie und Abhangigkeit von Theologie und Philosophie eine eigene Form der Vernunft zuzuordnen.Die scheinbar rein wissenschaftsmethodische Fragestellung fuhrt somit, so zeigen es die Beitrage mit grosser Deutlichkeit, unmittelbar in die virulente Frage nach der Geschichte der verschiedenen Vernunftbegriffe und ihrer Transformationen.Mit Beitragen von Arbogast Schmitt, Hans Buchheim, Rainer Thiel, Christoph Markschies, Christel Meier, Friedo Ricken, Steven Harvey, Peter-Andre Alt, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Klaus W. Hempfer, Emil Angehrn, Ludger Honnefelder und Gyburg Radke-Uhlmann. (shrink)

Warum hat Platon Dialoge geschrieben? Diese Frage formuliert eines der größten Rätsel der Philosophiegeschichte. Das Buch diskutiert die Antwortversuche der gegenwärtigen Platonforschung, präsentiert erstmals ausführlich die neuplatonischen Deutungen zur literarischen Form der Philosophie Platons und zeigt, warum diese als Alternative zu modernen Ansätzen und Aporien erwogen werden können.

This chapter examines the concepts of expression and affect in the works of Heinrich von Kleist, Samuel Beckett, and Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that Kleist, Beckett, and Edward Gordon-Craig belong a minor tradition of acting and explains that this minor tradition is one that aims to create a theatre which moves away from the inner world of an actor in favour of developing affects which express an external composite world. It also analyses Kleist's short story ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ and (...) Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. (shrink)

This review of 122 research reports (184 independent samples, 14,900 subjects) found average r ϭ .274 for prediction of behavioral, judgment, and physiological measures by Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures. Parallel explicit (i.e., self-report) measures, available in 156 of these samples (13,068 subjects), also predicted effectively (average r ϭ .361), but with much greater variability of effect size. Predictive validity of self-report was impaired for socially sensitive topics, for which impression..

Automatic preferences can influence a decision maker’s choice before any relevant or meaningful information is available. We account for this element of human cognition in a computational model of problem solving that involves active trial and error and show that automatic biases are not just a beneficial or detrimental property: they are a tool that, if properly managed over time, can give rise to superior performance. In particular, automatic preferences are beneficial early on and detrimental at later stages. What is (...) more, additional value can be generated by a timely rebiasing, i.e., a calculated reversal of the initial automatic preference. Remarkably, rebiasing can dominate not only debiasing but also continuously unbiased decision making. This research contributes to the debate on the adaptiveness of automatic and intuitive biases, which has centered primarily on one-shot controlled laboratory experiments, by simulating outcomes across extended time spans. We also illustrate the value of the novel intervention of adopting the opposite automatic preference—something organizations can readily achieve by changing key decision makers—as opposed to attempting to correct for or simply accepting the ubiquity of such biases. (shrink)

Recent work within psychology demonstrates that unconscious cognition plays a central role in the judgments and actions of individuals. We distinguish between two basic types unconscious social cognition: unconsciousness of the influences on judgments and actions, and unconscious of the mental states that give rise to judgments and actions. Influence unconsciousness is corroborated by strong empirical evidence, but unconscious states are difficult to verify. We discuss procedures aimed at providing conclusive evidence of state unconsciousness, and apply them to recent empirical (...) findings. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) is often characterised in the history of philosophy as the rationalist philosopher par excellence. However, much contemporary critical interpretation of his thought has...

Beckett often made use of images from the visual arts and readapted them, staging them in his plays, or using them in his fiction. Anthony Uhlmann sets out to explain how an image differs from other terms, like 'metaphor' or 'representation', and, in the process, to analyse Beckett's use of images borrowed from philosophy and aesthetics. This is the first study to carefully examine Beckett's thoughts on the image in his literary works and his extensive notes to the philosopher (...) Arnold Geulincx. Uhlmann considers how images might allow one kind of interaction between philosophy and literature, and how Beckett makes use of images which are borrowed from, or drawn into dialogue with, philosophical images from Geulincx, Berkeley, Bergson, and the ancient Stoics. Uhlmann's reading of Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical interests provides a revolutionary new reading of the importance of the image in his work. (shrink)

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari muse on that time of life when a philosopher feels compelled to reflect upon the question of the nature of her or his practice. The desire for such reflection, they argue, comes with age. It involves self-reflection, something that concerns one's disposition, and one's place in the world. As such it is properly an ethical process. The idea of reflection, however, is also fundamental to both thought itself and to artistic practice, or the (...) practice of creation. In considering the nature of philosophy, then, Deleuze and Guattari turn, through logical necessity, to the nature of thought and the thought of nature: that is, they also consider science, and art. This chapter argues that this interrelation is at the heart of their understanding of natural being, and links up with the minor traditions of thinking that they trace and extend in their own work. Yet the connection between art and how we should live also occurs in the dominant tradition of thought: rather than ethics, however, this tradition links artistic practice to morals, and the ‘moral’. There are a number of distinctions, then, which involve not so much binary oppositions as differences of perspective, and these are crucial to an understanding of the interrelations Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari develop between art, ethics, and ethology. These distinctions assert an ethics over a morality; thought over consciousness; creation over mimesis. (shrink)

Sunstein's review of research on moral heuristics is rich and informative – even without his central claim that individuals often commit moral errors. We question the value of positing such a normative moral framework for the study of moral judgment. We also propose an alternative standard for evaluating moral judgments – that of subjective rationality.

McCullough et al.'s functionalist model of revenge is highly compatible with the person-centered approach to moral judgment, which emphasizes the adaptive manner in which social perceivers derive character information from moral acts. Evidence includes act–person dissociations in which an act is seen as less immoral than a comparison act, yet as a clearer indicator of poor moral character.

This title presents a collection of critical essays investigating the complex encounter between Beckett's works and the discourse of philosophy.

Recent experimental evidence indicates that intuitions about inherence and system justification are distinct psychological processes, and that the inherence heuristic supplies important explanatory frameworks that are accepted or rejected based on their consistency with one's motivation to justify the system.

Plato’s dialogues often end in a seemingly unsatisfactory conclusion, or aporia. Such aporetic endings are regularly interpreted as examples of Socratic irony, in which Socrates mocks his interlocutors by feigning ignorance and deliberately leading them into an aporia. Alternatively, they are seen as reflecting skepticism about the attainment of certain and consistent empirical knowledge. This paper revisits Plato’s Euthyphro and argues that the arguments and attempts at definition provide methodological criteria for the acquisition of knowledge and do not fail entirely, (...) but only in certain aspects. It shows how a new, comprehensive understanding of piety can be developed by collecting the unrefuted, fragmented insights on piety from Euthyphro and integrating them with pieces of knowledge from the Politeia. The paper also explores the reasons for the deliberate presentation of failure in the Aporetic dialogues, namely to highlight the pitfalls of believing in one’s illusory expertise about something without fully understanding it, and thus to encourage the pursuit of sound, reliable knowledge by overcoming ›double ignorance‹. (shrink)

In Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann offers a reading of Beckett in relation to recent French philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and Derrida. Uhlmann offers a work of literary criticism that is also a piece of intellectual history, emphasising how Beckett develops a kind of critical thinking which differs from yet is just as powerful as that of philosophers who, along with Beckett, found themselves faced with sets of ethical problems which were thrown (...) into sharp relief in post-war France. Uhlmann explores the links between ethics and physical existence in Beckett, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, and between ethics and language in Beckett, Derrida, and Levinas, showing how post-war French philosophy was powerfully affected by Beckett's work. Literature is not reduced to philosophy or vice versa; rather Uhlmann considers how they interrelate and overlap, informing and deforming one another, and how both encounter history. (shrink)

Any engagement with Spinoza's views on art is bound to mention his account of the rightful pleasures that the wise man takes in things that appeal to the imagination and delight his senses: beautif...

Ego-justifying, group-justifying, and system-justifying motivations contribute to base-rate respect. People tend to neglect (and use) base rates when doing so allows them to draw desired conclusions about matters such as their health, the traits of their in-groups, and the fairness of the social system. Such motivations can moderate whether people rely on the rule-based versus associative strategies identified by Barbey & Sloman (B&S).

Transition Probability (fidelity) for pairs of density operators can be defined as a “functor” in the hierarchy of “all” quantum systems and also within any quantum system. The Introduction of “amplitudes” for density operators allows for a more intuitive treatment of these quantities, also pointing to a natural parallel transport. The latter is governed by a remarkable gauge theory with strong relations to the Riemann-Bures metric.

Critical aspects of the “rationality of rationalizations” thesis are open empirical questions. These include the frequency with which past behavior determines attitudes (as opposed to attitudes causing future behaviors), the extent to which post hoc justifications take on a life of their own and shape future actions, and whether rationalizers experience benefits in well-being, social influence, performance, or other desirable outcomes.

Demonstrating the limitations of the one-at-a-time approach, crowd initiatives reveal the surprisingly powerful role of analytic and design choices in shaping scientific results. At the same time, cross-cultural variability in effects is far below the levels initially expected. This highlights the value of “medium” science, leveraging diverse stimulus sets and extensive robustness checks to achieve integrative tests of competing theories.

By organizing crowds of scientists to independently tackle the same research questions, we can collectively overcome the generalizability crisis. Strategies to draw inferences from a heterogeneous set of research approaches include aggregation, for instance, meta-analyzing the effect sizes obtained by different investigators, and parsing, attempting to identify theoretically meaningful moderators that explain the variability in results.

Contradicting our earlier claims of American moral exceptionalism, recent self-replication evidence from our laboratory indicates that implicit puritanism characterizes the judgments of people across cultures. Implicit cultural evolution may lag behind explicit change, such that differences between traditional and non-traditional cultures are greater at a deliberative than an intuitive level. Not too deep down, perhaps we are all implicit puritans.

Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines [Causation, Prediction, and Search Springer] described a pointwise consistent estimator of the Markov equivalence class of any causal structure that can be represented by a directed acyclic graph for any parametric family with a uniformly consistent test of conditional independence, under the Causal Markov and Causal Faithfulness assumptions. Robins et al. [Biometrika 90 491–515], however, proved that there are no uniformly consistent estimators of Markov equivalence classes of causal structures under those assumptions. Subsequently, Kalisch and B¨ (...) class='Hi'>uhlmann [J. Mach. Learn. Res. 8 613–636] described a uniformly consistent estimator of the Markov equivalence class of a linear Gaussian causal structure under the Causal Markov and Strong Causal Faithfulness assumptions. However, the Strong Faithfulness assumption may be false with high probability in many domains. We describe a uniformly consistent estimator of both the Markov equivalence class of a linear Gaussian causal structure and the identifiable structural coefficients in the Markov equivalence class under the Causal Markov assumption and the considerably weaker k-Triangle-Faithfulness assumption. (shrink)

Following important work by Pizarro, Uhlmann and Salovey (2003) on moral judgments of uncontrolled/impulsive versus controlled/ deliberate action, we focus on the related issue of the moral evaluation of emotion-motivated versus principle-driven behavior. We examine: (a) the potential lesser blameworthiness of antisocial acts perceived as driven by emotion as opposed to principle; (b) how factors governing the moral evaluation of antisocial acts might extend to the evaluation of prosocial acts; and (c) how overriding a moral emotion in favor of (...) a moral principle affects moral attributions. (shrink)