Modularist explanations of experience and other illusions

Debates about modularity invariably involve a crucial premise about how visual illusions are experienced. This paper argues that these debates are wrongheaded, and that experience of illusions is orthogonal to the core issue of the modularity hypothesis: informational encapsulation

Locke's Answer to Molyneux's Thought Experiment

Philosophical discussions of Molyneux's problem within contemporary philosophy of mind tend to characterize the problem as primarily concerned with the role innately known principles, amodal spatial concepts, and rational cognitive faculties play in our perceptual lives. Indeed, for broadly similar reasons, rationalists have generally advocated an affirmative answer, while empiricists have generally advocated a negative one, to the question Molyneux posed after presenting his famous thought experiment. This historical characterization of the dialectic, however, somewhat obscures the role Molyneux's problem has played in spawning debates within the empiricist tradition. Fortunately, the differences between various empiricist accounts have been widely recognized and discussed among historians of philosophy working on the topic. The focus of the present essay is to develop an interpretation of John Locke's views on Molyneux's problem that best coheres with his other views on human understanding as well as with the predominant scientific opinion about the nature of perception during the period in which he lived

The Architecture of Belief: An Essay on the Unbearable Automaticity of Believing

People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observing our behavior, not from introspecting our stock beliefs. The model of belief fixation offered in the dissertation poses a novel dilemma for theories of rationality. One might have thought that the ability to contemplate ideas while withholding assent is a necessary condition on rationality. In short, it seems that rational creatures shouldn‘t just form their beliefs based on whatever they happen to think. However, it seems that we are creatures that automatically and reflexively form our beliefs based on whatever propositions we happen to consider. Thus, either the rational requirement that states that we must have evidence for our beliefs must be jettisoned or we must accept the conclusion that we are necessarily irrational

Can resources save rationality? ‘Anti-Bayesian’ updating in cognition and perception

Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena — belief polarization and the size-weight illusion — that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ brief discussion of reference repulsion. Can resource rationality accommodate them

The science of belief: A progress report

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world

Intrinsic alignments of group and cluster galaxies in photometric surveys

Intrinsic alignments of galaxies have been shown to contaminate weak gravitational lensing observables on linear scales, $r>$ 10 $h^{-1}$Mpc, but studies of alignments in the non-linear regime have thus far been inconclusive. We present an estimator for extracting the intrinsic alignment signal of galaxies around stacked clusters of galaxies from multiband imaging data. Our estimator removes the contamination caused by galaxies that are gravitationally lensed by the clusters and scattered in redshift space due to photometric redshift uncertainties. It uses posterior probability distributions for the redshifts of the galaxies in the sample and it is easily extended to obtain the weak gravitational lensing signal while removing the intrinsic alignment contamination. We apply this algorithm to groups and clusters of galaxies identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey `Stripe 82' coadded imaging data over $\sim 150$ deg$^2$. We find that the intrinsic alignment signal around stacked clusters in the redshift range $0.1<z<0.4$ is consistent with zero. In terms of the tidal alignment model of Catelan et al. (2001), we set joint constraints on the strength of the alignment and the bias of the lensing groups and clusters on scales between 0.1 and $10\,h^{-1}$ Mpc, $b_LC_1\rho_{\rm crit} = -2_{-14}^{+14} \times 10^{-4}$. This constrains the contamination fraction of alignment to lensing signal to the range between $[-18,23]$ per cent below scales of 1 $h^{-1}$ Mpc at 95 per cent confidence level, and this result depends on our photometric redshift quality and selection criteria used to identify background galaxies. Our results are robust to the choice of photometric band in which the shapes are measured ($i$ and $r$) and to centring on the Brightest Cluster Galaxy or on the geometrical centre of the clusters.Comment: 30 pages, 16 figures, published in MNRA