Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation

Four experiments examined people’s folk-psychological concept of intentional action. The chief question was whether or not evaluative considerations — considerations of good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame — played any role in that concept. The results indicated that the moral qualities of a behavior strongly influence people’s judgements as to whether or not that behavior should be considered ‘intentional.’ After eliminating a number of alternative explanations, the author concludes that this effect is best explained by the hypothesis that evaluative considerations do play some role in people’s concept of intentional action

Haemophilia and joint disease: pathophysiology, evaluation and management

In patients with haemophilia, regular replacement therapy with clotting factor concentrates (prophylaxis) is effective in preventing recurrent bleeding episodes into joints and muscles. However, despite this success, intra-articular and intramuscular bleeding is still a major clinical manifestation of the disease. Bleeding most commonly occurs in the knees, elbows, and ankles, and is often evident from early childhood. The pathogenesis of haemophilic arthropathy is multifactorial, with changes occurring in the synovium, bone, cartilage, and blood vessels. Recurrent joint bleeding causes synovial proliferation and inflammation (haemophilic synovitis) that contribute to end-stage degeneration (haemophilic arthropathy); with pain and limitation of motion severely affecting patients’ quality of life. If joint bleeding is not treated adequately, it tends to recur, resulting in a vicious cycle that must be broken to prevent the development of chronic synovitis and degenerative arthritis. Effective prevention and management of haemophilic arthropathy includes the use of early, aggressive prophylaxis with factor replacement therapies, as well as elective procedures, including restorative physical therapy, analgesia, aspiration, synovectomy, and orthopaedic surgery. Optimal treatment of patients with haemophilia requires a multidisciplinary team comprising a haematologist, physiotherapist, orthopaedic practitioner, rehabilitation physician, occupational therapist, psychologist, social workers, and nurses.Journal of Comorbidity 2011;1(1):51–59

Normality: Part Descriptive, part prescriptive

People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms

Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology

Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect our civilization alone.Comment: 25 pages; v2: revised version to appear in British Journal for the Philosophy of Scienc

On the instrumental value of hypothetical and counterfactual thought.

People often engage in “offline simulation”, considering what would happen if they performed certain actions in the future, or had performed different actions in the past. Prior research shows that these simulations are biased towards actions a person considers to be good—i.e., likely to pay off. We ask whether, and why, this bias might be adaptive. Through computational experiments we compare five agents who differ only in the way they engage in offline simulation, across a variety of different environment types. Broadly speaking, our experiments reveal that simulating actions one already regards as good does in fact confer an advantage in downstream decision making, although this general pattern interacts with features of the environment in important ways. We contrast this bias with alternatives such as simulating actions whose outcomes are instead uncertain

Moral Structure Falls Out of General Event Structure

The notion of agency has been explored within research in moral psychology and, quite separately, within research in linguistics. Moral psychologists have suggested that agency attributions play a role in moral judgments, while linguists have argued that agency attributions play a role in syntactic intuitions. To explore the connection between these two lines of research, we report the results of an experiment in which we manipulate syntactic cues for agency and show a corresponding impact on moral judgments. This result suggests that the two effects observed previously — in morality and in syntax — might each be a reflection of a more general capacity to understand event structure

Dual Character Art Concepts

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept ART. At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts. Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon that is associated with ART can also be found in a broad class of other dual character concepts, including SCIENTIST, CHRISTIAN, GANGSTER, and many others. Instead of focusing narrowly on the case of ART, we try to offer a more general account of these concepts and the puzzles to which they give rise. Then, drawing on the general theory, we introduce a series of hypotheses about art concepts, and put those hypotheses to the test in three experimental studies

The true self: A psychological concept distinct from the self

A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish people’s understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral, and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology