We present two experiments that cast doubt on existing evidence suggesting that it is impossible to suspend belief in a comprehended proposition. In Experiment 1, we found that interrupting the encoding of a statement's veracity decreased memory for the statement's falsity when the false version of the statement was uninformative, but not when the false version was informative. This suggests that statements that are informative when false are not represented as if they were true. In Experiment 2, participants made faster (...) lexical decisions to words implied by preceding statements when they were told that the statements were true than when the veracity of the statements was unknown or when the statements were false. The findings suggest that comprehending a statement may not require believing it, and that it may be possible to suspend belief in comprehended propositions. (shrink)

"Both a political history and a moral critique of the twentieth century, this is a personal and impassioned book from one of Europe's most outstanding intellectuals.

Perceptual conscious experiences result from non-conscious processes that precede them. We document a new characteristic of the cognitive system: the speed with which visual meaningful stimuli are prioritized to consciousness over competing noise in visual masking paradigms. In ten experiments (N = 399) we find that an individual's non-conscious visual prioritization speed (NVPS) is ubiquitous across a wide variety of stimuli, and generalizes across visual masks, suppression tasks, and time. We also find that variation in NVPS is unique, in that (...) it cannot be explained by variation in general speed, perceptual decision thresholds, short-term visual memory, or three networks of attention (alerting, orienting and executive). Finally, we find that NVPS is correlated with subjective measures of sensitivity, as they are measured by the Highly Sensitive Person scale. We conclude by discussing the implications of variance in NVPS for understanding individual variance in behavior and the neural substrates of consciousness. (shrink)

Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social ties, common values, and a coherent and (...) responsible sense of self.Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu, and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self, morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act according to our will while connecting the well-being of other members with our own. It is through this understanding of free will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and personal integrity.Placing the history of ideas at the service of a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live. (shrink)

The political history of the twentieth century can be viewed as the history of democracy’s struggle against its external enemies: fascism and communism. This struggle ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet regime. Some people think that democracy now faces new enemies: Islamic fundamentalism, religious extremism and international terrorism and that this is the struggle that will define our times. Todorov disagrees: the biggest threat to democracy today is democracy itself. Its enemies are (...) within: what the ancient Greeks called 'hubris'. Todorov argues that certain democratic values have been distorted and pushed to an extreme that serves the interests of dominant states and powerful individuals. In the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, the United States and some European countries have embarked on a crusade to enlighten some foreign populations through the use of force. Yet this mission to ‘help’ others has led to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to large-scale destruction and loss of life and to a moral crisis of growing proportions. The defence of freedom, if unlimited, can lead to the tyranny of individuals. Drawing on recent history as well as his own experience of growing up in a totalitarian regime, Todorov returns to examples borrowed from the Western canon: from a dispute between Augustine and Pelagius to the fierce debates among Enlightenment thinkers to explore the origin of these perversions of democracy. He argues compellingly that the real democratic ideal is to be found in the delicate, ever-changing balance between competing principles, popular sovereignty, freedom and progress. When one of these elements breaks free and turns into an over-riding principle, it becomes dangerous: populism, ultra-liberalism and messianism, the inner enemies of democracy. (shrink)

This concise book from internationally renowned historian Tzvetan Todorov establishes the Enlightenment as the philosophical cornerstone of the modern world and argues that the wisdom of those times is just as relevant today.

The political history of the twentieth century can be viewed as the history of democracy’s struggle against its external enemies: fascism and communism. This struggle ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet regime. Some people think that democracy now faces new enemies: Islamic fundamentalism, religious extremism and international terrorism and that this is the struggle that will define our times. Todorov disagrees: the biggest threat to democracy today is democracy itself. Its enemies are (...) within: what the ancient Greeks called 'hubris'. Todorov argues that certain democratic values have been distorted and pushed to an extreme that serves the interests of dominant states and powerful individuals. In the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, the United States and some European countries have embarked on a crusade to enlighten some foreign populations through the use of force. Yet this mission to ‘help’ others has led to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to large-scale destruction and loss of life and to a moral crisis of growing proportions. The defence of freedom, if unlimited, can lead to the tyranny of individuals. Drawing on recent history as well as his own experience of growing up in a totalitarian regime, Todorov returns to examples borrowed from the Western canon: from a dispute between Augustine and Pelagius to the fierce debates among Enlightenment thinkers to explore the origin of these perversions of democracy. He argues compellingly that the real democratic ideal is to be found in the delicate, ever-changing balance between competing principles, popular sovereignty, freedom and progress. When one of these elements breaks free and turns into an over-riding principle, it becomes dangerous: populism, ultra-liberalism and messianism, the inner enemies of democracy. (shrink)

Perceptions of criminality and remorse are critical for legal decision-making. While faces perceived as criminal are more likely to be selected in police lineups and to receive guilty verdicts, faces perceived as remorseful are more likely to receive less severe punishment recommendations. To identify the information that makes a face appear criminal and/or remorseful, we successfully used two different data-driven computational approaches that led to convergent findings: one relying on the use of computer-generated faces, and the other on photographs of (...) people. In addition to visualising and validating the perceived looks of criminality and remorse, we report correlations with earlier face models of dominance, threat, trustworthiness, masculinity/femininity, and sadness. The new face models of criminal and remorseful appearance contribute to our understanding of perceived criminality and remorse. They can be used to study the effects of perceived criminality and remorse on decision-making; research that can ultimately inform legal policies. (shrink)

Le projet -- Rejets et détournements -- Autonomie -- Laïcité -- Vérité -- Humanité -- Universalité -- Les Lumières et l'Europe.

Although all have commendable features, it is the third way, that of the moral individual - the path laid out in Rousseau's novel, Emile - that the philosopher recommends without reservation."--Jacket.

IntroductionThe present study investigates the association of lifetime interpersonal violence exposure, related posttraumatic stress disorder, and appraisal of the degree of threat posed by facial avatars.MethodsWe recorded self-rated responses and high-density electroencephalography among women, 16 of whom with lifetime IPV-PTSD and 14 with no PTSD, during a face-evaluation task that displayed male face avatars varying in their degree of threat as rated along dimensions of dominance and trustworthiness.ResultsThe study found a significant association between lifetime IPV exposure, under-estimation of dominance, and (...) over-estimation of trustworthiness. Characterization of EEG microstates supported that lifetime IPV-PTSD modulates emotional appraisal, specifically in encoding and decoding processing associated with N170 and LPP evoked potentials. EEG source localization demonstrated an overactivation of the limbic system, in particular the parahippocampal gyrus, in response to non-threatening avatars. Additionally, dysfunctional involvement of attention-related processing anterior prefrontal cortex was found in response to relatively trustworthy avatars in IPV-PTSD individuals compared with non-PTSD controls.DiscussionThis study showed that IPV exposure and related PTSD modulate individuals’ evaluation of facial characteristics suggesting threat. Atypical processing of these avatar characteristics was marked by group differences in brain regions linked to facial processing, emotion regulation, and memory. (shrink)

Research in person and face perception has broadly focused on group-level consensus that individuals hold when making judgments of others. However, a growing body of research demonstrates that individual variation is larger than shared, stimulus-level variation for many social trait judgments. Despite this insight, little research to date has focused on building and explaining individual models of face perception. Studies and methodologies that have examined individual models are limited in what visualizations they can reliably produce to either noisy and blurry (...) or computer avatar representations. Methods that produce low-fidelity visual representations inhibit generalizability by being clearly computer manipulated and produced. In the present work, we introduce a novel paradigm to visualize individual models of face judgments by leveraging state-of-the-art computer vision methods. Our proposed method can produce a set of photorealistic face images that correspond to an individual's mental representation of a specific attribute across a variety of attribute intensities. We provide a proof-of-concept study which examines perceived trustworthiness/untrustworthiness and masculinity/femininity. We close with a discussion of future work to substantiate our proposed method. (shrink)

Krueger & Funder (K&F) see social psychologists as driven to demonstrate that people's behavior falls below relevant moral and intellectual standards. We suggest that social psychologists search for demonstrations of when it is that people's actual behaviors and decisions deviate from expected or ideal behaviors and decisions, and what these “deviations” tell us about general decision processes, including those that do not produce unexpected actions. Often the discoveries are of positive rather than negative behaviors.

We consider quantum deformations of the real symplectic (or anti-De Sitter) algebra sp(4), ℝ ≅ spin(3, 2) and of its singleton and (4-dimensional) zero-mass representations. For q a root of −1, these representations admit finite-dimensional unitary subrepresentations. It is pointed out that Uq (sp(4, ℝ)), unlike Uq (su(2, 2)), contains Uq (sl 2 ) as a quantum subalgebra.

The regulatory mechanism which ensures that eukaryotic chromosomes replicate precisely once per cell cycle is a basic and essential cellular property of eukaryotes. This fundamental aspect of DNA replication is still poorly understood, but recent advances encourage the view that we may soon have a clearer picture of how this regulation is achieved. This review will discuss in particular the role of proteins in the minichromosome maintenance (MCM) family, which may hold the key to understanding how DNA is replicated once, (...) and only once, per cell cycle. (shrink)

У статті розглядаються витоки та початок україно-російського конфлікту на сході України у 2014 р. Визначені умови виникнення цього протистояння, доведено провідну роль Росії як організатора та основного виконавця війни проти України. Указано на недостатню роль Заходу в протистоянні російській агресії.

In many studies, human reasoning has been depicted as “biased” or deviating from normative models in both areas of deductive and inductive reasoning. Two criteria for evaluation of reasoning studies are proposed in this paper. The first criterion concerns the selection and application of normative models against which human performance is assessed. The second criterion concerns the role of conversational factors in the differential selection of information used in the subsequent judgment. These two criteria were applied to studies on two (...) tasks from the fields of deductive and inductive reasoning, the Wason selection task and the base rate fallacy. In view of alternative normative systems, control of the application of the normative models used and the perceived conversational relevance of the information presented in the experimental tasks, the alleged biases have been demonstrated to be largely unsupported. The analysis is consistent with the notion that human reasoning is optimal and rational. The implications of the present account for reasoning experiments are discussed. (shrink)