Development and validation of a multi-dimensional measure of intellectual humility

This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model’s cross-cultural generalizability

Constructing and validating a scale of inquisitive curiosity

We advance the understanding of the philosophy and psychology of curiosity by operationalizing and constructing an empirical measure of Nietzsche’s conception of inquisitive curiosity, expressed by the German term Wissbegier, (“thirst for knowledge” or “need/impetus to know”) and Neugier (“curiosity” or “inquisitiveness”). First, we show that existing empirical measures of curiosity do not tap the construct of inquisitive curiosity, though they may tap related constructs such as idle curiosity and phenomenological curiosity. Next, we map the concept of inquisitive curiosity and connect it to related concepts, such as open-mindedness and intellectual humility. The bulk of the paper reports four studies: an Anglophone exploratory factor analysis, an Anglophone confirmatory factor analysis, an informant study, and a Germanophone exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis

Rational surface maps with invariant meromorphic two forms

We consider a rational map f:S->S of a complex projective surface together with an invariant meromorphic two form. Under a mild topological assumption on the map, we show that the zeroes of the invariant form can be eliminated by birational change of coordinate. In this context, when the form has no zeroes, we investigate the notion of algebraic stability for f. We show in particular that algebraic stability is equivalent to a more tractable condition involving the behavior of f on the poles of the form. Finally, we illustrate our results in the particular case where S is the projective plane and the invariant form is dx dy / xy, showing that our criterion for stability translates to whether or not the rotation number for a certain circle homeomorphism is rational.Comment: Maps on irrational surfaces are now discussed in much more detai

Composing, Researching and Ways of Talking

© Copyright Cambridge University Press 2015This reply addresses a number of misunderstandings that have arisen with regard to my argument in ‘Composition is not Research’; notably that it rests on a definition of research derived from ‘scientific method’, and that it somehow entails the view that composers should not be asked to write about their music. It is argued here that referring to composition as ‘research’ is at best a perverse (if institutionally expedient) way of talking about what composers have always done, and at worst leads to a distorted picture of compositional work and musical value

Juhos' Antiphysicalism and his Views on the Psychophysical Problem

My primary aim in this paper is to discuss Bela Juhos' views on the mind-body problem and his objections to the physicalist accounts of Carnap, Neurath and Hempel in the early 1930s. In order to achieve this, I also provide some background against which his ideas can be located: I shall outline Juhos' metaphilosophical views on the nature and goal of philosophical inquiry, and the diverse accounts of the psychophysical problem in and around the Vienna Circle

A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Off-Switch Game

The off-switch game is a game theoretic model of a highly intelligent robot interacting with a human. In the original paper by Hadfield-Menell et al. (2016), the analysis is not fully game-theoretic as the human is modelled as an irrational player, and the robot's best action is only calculated under unrealistic normality and soft-max assumptions. In this paper, we make the analysis fully game theoretic, by modelling the human as a rational player with a random utility function. As a consequence, we are able to easily calculate the robot's best action for arbitrary belief and irrationality assumptions