Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as “change blindness,” is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl, and Simons documented this intuition by showing that the majority of subjects believe they would notice changes that are actually very rarely detected. Thus subjects exhibit a metacognitive error we refer to (...) as “change blindness blindness.” Here, we test whether CBB is caused by a misestimation of the perceptual experience associated with visual changes and show that it persists even when the pre- and postchange views are separated by long delays. In addition, subjects overestimate their change detection ability both when the relevant changes are illustrated by still pictures, and when they are illustrated using videos showing the changes occurring in real time. We conclude that CBB is a robust phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by failure to understand the specific perceptual experience associated with a change. (shrink)

Vernae—often but not exclusively taken to be home-born slaves—are usually thought to have had a privileged role within the ancient Roman household. While previous studies have highlighted how these individuals were represented with affection or as surrogate members of the freeborn family, this article uses epigraphic evidence from Pompeii to argue that the reality for at least some vernae was much more grim. A full examination of Pompeian attestations of the word verna reveals that there was a connection to prostitution (...) in over seventy per cent of extant appearances of the noun. Furthermore, contextualizing this phenomenon within the corpus of prostitution-related graffiti more broadly reveals that verna was the single most commonly used descriptor in advertisements for sexual services at Pompeii. Ultimately, the epigraphic evidence from Pompeii suggests that vernae were not safe from sexual exploitation, and it may have been their status as vernae that made them attractive to those wishing to purchase sex. (shrink)

This paper addresses the killing of Freya the Walrus by the Norwegian fishing authorities in August 2022. Freya became famous for sunbathing on boats in the marina in the Oslo fjord, but she was soon euthanized in the name of public safety. Her death caused international outrage, and the aim of our paper is to demonstrate using philosophical argument why her death was unjust. We examine her plight through frameworks developed by animal ethicists involving co-sovereignty, capability, and individuality, concluding that (...) any one of these frameworks, let alone several, would have led to a more just outcome for Freya. We argue that policy makers could put these insights into practice in a number of concrete ways going forward, as such incidents are likely to reoccur given the changes in migration patterns for animals in the Anthropocene era. (shrink)

Recent arguments claim that behavioral science has focused – to its detriment – on the individual over the system when construing behavioral interventions. In this commentary, we argue that tackling economic inequality using both framings in tandem is invaluable. By studying individuals who have overcome inequality, “positive deviants,” and the system limitations they navigate, we offer potentially greater policy solutions.

The study of emotional intelligence and its relationship with the dark triad has emerged as a popular research area. However, the complex nature of the dark triad and EI, including multiple me...

Environmental change requires individuals and institutions to facilitate adaptive governance. However, facilitating adaptive governance may be difficult because resource users' perceptions of desirable ways of life vary. These perceptions influence preferences related to environmental governance and may stem from the ways individuals subjectively value their work and their connections to their environment. This paper uses a value-based approach to examine individual and institutional preferences for adaptive governance in Carelmapu, Chile. We show that two groups had different value frames rooted in (...) divergent ontologies which influenced their actions related to adaptive governance, creating conflict. (shrink)

In his recent book, Frame It Again: New Tools for Rational Decision-Making, J. L. Bermúdez argues that it can be rational to evaluate the same thing differently when it is described using alternati...

Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior on the fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task together and other times dividing it up into sub‐tasks to work on in parallel. Underlying the human ability to collaborate is theory‐of‐mind (ToM), the ability to infer the hidden mental states that drive others to act. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decentralized multi‐agent learning mechanism with these abilities. Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hidden intentions of others by inverse planning. (...) We test Bayesian Delegation in a suite of multi‐agent Markov decision processes inspired by cooking problems. On these tasks, agents with Bayesian Delegation coordinate both their high‐level plans (e.g., what sub‐task they should work on) and their low‐level actions (e.g., avoiding getting in each other's way). When matched with partners that act using the same algorithm, Bayesian Delegation outperforms alternatives. Bayesian Delegation is also a capable ad hoc collaborator and successfully coordinates with other agent types even in the absence of prior experience. Finally, in a behavioral experiment, we show that Bayesian Delegation makes inferences similar to human observers about the intent of others. Together, these results argue for the centrality of ToM for successful decentralized multi‐agent collaboration. (shrink)

Traditional notions of civic education often introduce privilege and reproduce Eurocentric notions of citizenship. Proponents of cultural citizenship champion Black cultural knowledge, and critical race pedagogies to help marginalized individuals, including students of color, actualize their agentic selves. This manuscript presents three vignettes to demonstrate how teachers implemented the Black Lives Matter at School’s 13 Guiding Principles to develop Black cultural citizenship with students. Three salient aspects emerged: (1) the need for students to be active contributors in the current movement (...) for Black liberation; (2) a call to support students unlearning and relearning Black history; and (3) instruction that provides opportunities for students to recognize and challenge systems of oppression. (shrink)

Over the past decade, sexual rumor spreading, slut-shaming, and homophobic labeling have become central examples of bullying among young women. This article examines the role these practices— what adults increasingly call “bullying” and what girls often call “drama”— play in girls’ gendering processes. Through interviews with 54 class and racially diverse late adolescent girls, I explore the content and functions of “sexual drama.” All participants had experiences with this kind of conflict, and nearly a third had been the subject of (...) other girls’ rumors about their own sexual actions and/or orientations. Their accounts indicate that sexual drama offers girls a socially acceptable site for making claims to, and sense of, gendered sexuality in adolescence. While they reproduce inequality through these practices, sexual drama is also a resource for girls—one that is made useful through the institutional constraints of their high schools, which reinforce traditional gender norms and limit sexuality information. (shrink)

Sarah A. Mattice develops a comparative intervention in contemporary metaphilosophy. Drawing on resources from hermeneutics, cognitive linguistics, aesthetics, and Chinese philosophy, she explores how philosophical language is deeply intertwined with the definition and practice of the discipline.

Exploring the Heart Sutra brings an interdisciplinary philosophical approach to this much-loved Buddhist classic. This new translation with commentary situates the sutra in a Chinese context, offering fresh interpretive resources for making sense of this profound work.

Unprecedented levels of access to adolescents' time and attention provide opportunities to convert traditional character and socioemotional competencies interventions into behavioral intervention technologies. However, these new tools must be evaluated rather than assuming previously validated activities will be efficacious when converted to a mobile platform. Thus, we sought to design and provide initial data on the effectiveness of the CharacterMe smartphone app to build self-control and patience, which are built on underlying social-emotional regulation competencies, in a sample of 618 adolescents. (...) We also sought to examine whether framing the app activities as having a transcendent rather than instrumental purpose would increase engagement and change in self-control, patience, and emotion regulation. Finally, we tested the impact of framing activities as building strengths vs. fixing weaknesses. Results highlight the difficulty of translating psychological interventions to behavioral intervention technologies. Overall, the CharacterMe smartphone app was unsuccessful in increasing self-control, patience, or emotion regulation in adolescents, with analyses showing no significant mean changes over time. Framing conditions and user engagement were largely not significant predictors of change in self-control, patience, and emotion regulation. (shrink)

Both an emphasis on logic and an emphasis on rhetoric lead to a kind of care for language. However, in early Greece this care for language through the lens of logic manifested in the drive to ‘get it right’, whereas in early China the care for language manifested in the pervasive concern for zhengming, for using names properly. For the early Chinese thinkers, especially the early Confucians, this was not predominantly a linguistic affair—zhengming is a key component of moral cultivation. (...) As we explore the ethical import of Confucian role ethics, we need to pay attention to the philosophical vocabulary of this worldview and to how our understanding of these crucial terms changes if persons are seen as relational—a central premise of Confucian role ethics. In this essay I argue against reading zhengming as fagu, merely a conservative retrieval of historical meaning, as suggested by the political philosopher Hsiao Kung-chuan, among others. Instead, I argue for three theses: (1) although stubbornly persistent, ‘rectification of names’ is not an adequate translation for zhengming; (2) the conservative reading of zhengming is problematic and needs to be rethought as an hermeneutic process intersecting past meanings, present circumstances, and future possibilities; and (3) zhengming is, in an important sense, the ‘art’ of Confucian role ethics, for achieving moral competency in this tradition is a matter of constantly revising one's roles and relationships. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of philosophical exemplars, focusing on two uncommon but valuable figures: Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion, and the plumber-as-philosopher described by Mary Midgley. These figures highlight philosophical activity as benefitting from a wide variety of heterogenous sources, styles, and models, and suggest that philosophy be understood as a response to lived needs. The paper concludes with some suggestions for ways in which these exemplars might be relevant for contemporary issues in the academy.

In team-based tasks, successful communication and mutual understanding are essential to facilitate team coordination and performance. It is well-established that an important component of human conversation is the maintenance of common ground. Maintaining common ground has a number of associated processes in which conversational participants engage. Many of these processes are lacking in current synthetic teammates, and it is unknown to what extent this lack of capabilities affects their ability to contribute during team-based tasks. We focused our research on how (...) teams package information within a conversation, by which we mean specifically whether information is explicitly mentioned or implied, and how multiple pieces of information are ordered both within single communications and across multiple communications. We re-analyzed data collected from a simulated remotely-piloted aerial system task in which team members had to specify speed, altitude, and radius restrictions. The data came from three experiments: the “speech” experiment, the “text” experiment, and the “evaluation” experiment. We asked first whether teams settled on a specific routine for communicating the speed, altitude, and radius restrictions, and whether this process was different if the teams communicated in speech compared to text. We then asked how receiving special communication instructions in the evaluation experiment impacted the way the human teammates package information. We found that teams communicating in either speech or text tended to use a particular order for mentioning the speed, altitude, and radius. Different teams also chose different orders from one another. The teams in the evaluation experiment, however, showed unnaturally little variability in their information ordering and were also more likely to explicitly mention all restrictions even when they did not apply. Teams in the speech and text experiments were more likely to leave unnecessary restrictions unmentioned, and were also more likely to convey the restrictions across multiple communications. The option to converge on different packaging routines may have contributed to improved performance in the text experiment compared some of the conditions in the evaluation experiment. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of Fair Trade on the sustainability of coffee growing. To examine sustainability we use an ethnographic approach, interviewingproducers and their associated buyers working in Fair Trade organizations in Chiapas Mexico. We focus on social, economic and ecological dimensions of the producers’ and buyers’ experience.

Human judgements are affected by the words in which information is presented —or ‘framed’. According to the standard gloss, ‘framing effects’ reveal counter-normative reasoning, unduly affected by positive/negative language. One challenge to this view suggests that number expressions in alternative framing conditions are interpreted as denoting lower-bounded (minimum) quantities. However, it is unclear whether the resulting explanation is a rationalising one. I argue that a number expression should only be interpreted lower-boundedly if this is what it actually means. I survey (...) how number expressions might be assigned lower-bounded meanings, due to their conventional semantics or pragmatic enrichment in context. I argue that deciding between these possibilities requires foundational philosophical input. (shrink)

This article surveys the latest research on risky-choice framing effects, focusing on the implications for rational decision-making. An influential program of psychological research suggests that people's judgements and decisions depend on the way in which information is presented, or ‘framed’. In a central choice paradigm, decision-makers seem to adopt different preferences, and different attitudes to risk, depending on whether the options specify the number of people who will be saved or the corresponding number who will die. It is standardly assumed (...) that such responses violate a foundational tenet of rational decision-making, known as the principle of description invariance. We discuss recent theoretical and empirical research that challenges the dominant ‘irrationalist’ narrative. These approaches typically pay close attention to how decision-makers represent decision problems (including their interpretation of numerical quantifiers or predicate choice) and they highlight the need for a more robust characterization of the description invariance principle. We conclude by indicating avenues for future research that could bring us closer to a complete—and potentially rationalizing—explanation of framing effects. (shrink)

In this essay I am concerned with our understanding of philosophical dialogue. I will examine the most prevalent western model of dialogue—the combat model—and suggest some flaws in this model. I will outline concerns as to how standards for what counts as ‘philosophical’ are determined, and use this outline to frame preliminary objections to conceiving of philosophical dialogue as combative. Noting that philosophy is a socially and historically rooted practice, I argue that the view of philosophy as a kind of (...) combat has its origins in features of ancient Greek life. Next, I will look to other cultures and traditions for differing conceptual resources. Specifically, I look to ancient China’s philosophical narrative as one that does not primarily conceive of philosophy in terms of combat. I conclude by suggesting the relevance of this inquiry into methodology for practices of teaching philosophy. (shrink)

This study highlights a range of perspectives offered by 11 international teachers, participating in a cultural immersion experience, as they reflect on how they saw democracy manifested at their school internships. Teachers from six different countries studied and taught in a rural community in the Southern United States, where a medium-sized research university hosted the teachers as part of a federally-funded program during an academic semester. As a part of a larger qualitative research study analyzing the international teachers’ perception of (...) American schooling, data from intercultural sessions, individual interviews, and assigned reaction papers highlighted multiple contradictions between the teachers’ interpretation of democratic ideals and democratic education as they saw manifested in American schools. These narratives highlight the complex forces that shape individuals’ perceptions of democracy as played out in the everyday life of a cultural immersion experience. The researchers suggest that these transnational perspectives can serve as a mechanism allowing Western educators to listen to the “Other” as they interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about American schooling. Narratives primarily highlight inconsistencies between the goals of citizenship education and the way in which citizenship is promoted or neglected in K-12 classrooms. (shrink)

The Han dynasty Huainanzi is a compendium of knowledge. This edited volume follows a multi-disciplinary approach to explore how and why the Huainanzi was produced and how we should interpret the work.

Graduates of doctoral programs are expected to be competent at designing and conducting research independently. Given the level of research competence needed to successfully conduct research, it is important that assessors of doctoral programs have a reliable and validated tool for measuring and tracking perceived research competence among their students and graduates. A high level of research competence is expected for all Ph.D. graduates worldwide, in addition to in all disciplines/fields. Moreover, graduates of Ph.D. programs may complete their studies in (...) one country but then obtain a research position in another country, emphasizing the need to ensure that all doctoral programs are fostering similar levels of research competence. Thus, the purpose of this study was to gather additional evidence for validity and reliability of the Research Competence scale. Specifically, we sought to extend the findings of by adapting the scale, translating it to other languages, and applying the tool with a sample of early stage researchers. Our findings provide initial evidence that the adapted PR-Comp is appropriate for use in three languages and across a variety of disciplines/programs of study. (shrink)

The commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” is central to Christian discipleship. How does the concrete way that we express love enhance or diminish our ability to love? This paper brings Karl Rahner’s theology of neighbor love into dialogue with a description of altruism and compassion provided by social psychologist, C. Daniel Batson, and neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki. For Rahner, grace enables and sustains love. In addition, a mutually reciprocal relationship of unity exists between human love for (...) God, neighbor, and self. Furthermore, Rahner contends prayer as one way to cultivate compassion for another. The scientific research presented here examines aspects of the relationship between self and other known as empathy and compassion. The research of Batson, Singer, and Klimecki shed light on the role of self-love in compassion as well as the ways our capacity to empathize conditions our potential for altruism. (shrink)

I use the psychological phenomenon of ‘attribute framing’ as a case study for exploring philosophical conceptions of semantics and the semantics-pragmatics divide. Attribute frames are pairs of sentences that use contradictory expressions to predicate the same property of an individual or object. Despite their equivalence, pairs of attribute frames have been observed to induce systematic variability in hearers’ responses. One explanation of such framing effects appeals to the distinct ‘reference point information’ conveyed by alternative frames. Although this information is taken (...) to be pragmatic, a live debate in the philosophy of language concerns the extent to which pragmatic information can really be held apart from semantics. Therefore, in this article I examine whether – and how – reference point information might be thought to intrude on the semantics of an attribute frame. I describe two ways in which the information might be considered broadly semantic, due to its being directly communicated or conventional. However, I argue that the framing data in fact support a narrower conception of semantics, and a semantics-pragmatics distinction that separates standing sentence meaning from enriched communicated meaning. (shrink)

From self-cultivation to global justice, from environmental ethics to the interrelation of religion and science, this collection of essays highlights the central role of philosophy, and comparative philosophy in particular, for understanding and appreciating the connections and discontinuities of East and West.

This paper explores Confucius’ views on warfare according to the Gongyang Commentary. Though often overlooked as a source for understanding Confucius’ position on warfare, the Gongyang Commentary is replete with comments and anecdotes on the topic. It articulates a complex set of ethico‐ritual principles pertaining to warfare in which certain kinds of warfare are clearly condoned and praised while others are clearly condemned and criticized. What according to the Gongyang Commentary was the Gentleman's position on warfare? The paper explores this (...) central question through a close reading of anecdotal narratives and selected passages from the Gongyang Commentary and related texts on the subject of warfare. (shrink)

In his recent book, Frame It Again: New Tools for Rational Decision-Making, J. L. Bermúdez argues that it can be rational to evaluate the same thing differently when it is described using alternati...

Bermúdez claims that agents think about framed outcomes, not outcomes themselves; and that seemingly incoherent preferences can be rational, once defined over framed outcomes. However, the agents in his examples know that alternative frames describe the same outcome, neutrally understood. This undermines the restriction of their preferences to framed outcomes and, in turn, the argument for rational framing effects.

Framing effects occur when people respond differently to the same information, just because it is conveyed in different words. For example, in the classic ‘Disease Problem’ introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, people’s choices between alternative interventions depend on whether these are described positively, in terms of the number of people who will be saved, or negatively in terms of the corresponding number who will die. In this paper, I discuss an account of framing effects based on ‘fuzzy-trace theory’. (...) The central claim of this account is that people represent the numbers in framing problems in a ‘gist-like’ way, as ‘some’; and that this creates a categorical contrast between ‘some’ people being saved (or dying) and ‘no’ people being saved (or dying). I argue that fuzzy-trace theory’s gist-like representation, ‘some’, must have the semantics of ‘some and possibly all’, not ‘some but not all’. I show how this commits fuzzy-trace theory to a modest version of a rival ‘lower bounding hypothesis’, according to which lower-bounded interpretations of quantities contribute to framing effects by rendering the alternative descriptions extensionally inequivalent. As a result, fuzzy-trace theory is incoherent as it stands. Making sense of it requires dropping, or refining, the claim that decision-makers perceive alternatively framed options as extensionally equivalent; and the related claim that framing effects are irrational. I end by suggesting that, whereas the modest lower bounding hypothesis is well supported, there is currently less evidence for the core element of the fuzzy trace account. (shrink)

The debate between Semantic Minimalism and Radical Contextualism is standardly characterized as concerning truth-evaluability—specifically, whether or not sentences require rich contextualization in order to express complete, truth-evaluable contents. In this paper, I examine the notion of truth-evaluability, considering which kinds of mappings it might require from worldly states of affairs to truth-values. At one end of the spectrum, an exhaustive notion would require truth-evaluable contents to map all possible states of affairs to truth-values. At the other end, a liberal notion (...) would require only that truth-evaluable contents map at least one possible state of affairs to at least one truth-value. I show that both Minimalists and Radical Contextualists rely on some intermediate, moderately strict notion of truth-evaluability, falling between these two poles. I consider four ways in which such a notion could be defined. However, I argue that each of these is ultimately implausible, giving us no reason to favour a moderately strict notion of truth-evaluability over the liberal alternative. This suggests that the debate must shift to more moderate ground; rather than concerning the in principle possibility of truth-evaluable contents, it fundamentally hinges on their explanatory value. More generally, paying close attention to the notion of truth-evaluability allows us to tease apart distinct strands in the Minimalism-Contextualism debate, and gain a better appreciation of what is at stake. (shrink)

When asked to identify objects having unique shapes and colors among other objects, English speakers often produce redundant color modifiers (“the red circle”) while Spanish speakers produce them less often (“el circulo (rojo)”). This cross‐linguistic difference has been attributed to a difference in word order between the two languages, under the incremental efficiency hypothesis (Rubio‐Fernández, Mollica, & Jara‐Ettinger, 2020). However, previous studies leave open the possibility that broad language differences between English and Spanish may explain this cross‐linguistic difference such that (...) English speakers may generally produce more modifiers than Spanish speakers, including redundant ones, irrespective of word order. Here, we test the incremental efficiency hypothesis in a language production task crossing language (English, Spanish) with modifier type (color, number). Critically, number words occur on the same side of the noun in both English and Spanish. If broad language differences are responsible for the higher rate of color word production in English compared to Spanish, then the same effect should hold for number words. In contrast, the incremental efficiency hypothesis predicts an interaction between language and modifier type, due to different ordering for color words but identical ordering for number words. Our pre‐registered analyses offer strong support for the incremental efficiency hypothesis, demonstrating how seemingly small differences in language can cause us to describe the world in surprisingly different ways. (shrink)

Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages contributes to multiple health problems including obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay, especially among children. Excise taxation has been proven efficacious in changing purchasing behaviors related to tobacco use with resulting improvements in public health outcomes. Similar taxes applied to SSBs are starting to take hold internationally and domestically. SSB taxes have been proposed in over 30 U.S. jurisdictions since 2009, but only Berkeley has passed and implemented one to date. Given empirical evidence of their effectiveness, governments (...) should consider implementation of SSB excise taxes based on uniform definitions of SSBs and other factors. (shrink)