Verbal Reports and "Real' Reasons" : Confabulation and Conflation

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. Constantine Sandis, ‘Verbal Reports and “Real” Reasons: Confabulation and Conflation’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 18(2): 267-280, first published online 18 March 2015. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9576-6 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015This paper examines the relation between the various forces which underlie human action and verbal reports about our reasons for acting as we did. I maintain that much of the psychological literature on confabulations rests on a dangerous conflation of the reasons for which people act with a variety of distinct motivational factors. In particular, I argue that subjects frequently give correct answers to questions about the considerations they acted upon while remaining largely unaware of why they take themselves to have such reasons to act. Pari passu, experimental psychologists are wrong to maintain that they have shown our everyday reason talk to be systematically confused. This is significant because our everyday reason-ascriptions affect characterizations of action (in terms of intention, knowledge, foresight, etc.) that are morally and legally relevant. I conclude, more positively, that far from rendering empirical research on confabulations invalid, my account helps to reveal its true insights into human nature.Peer reviewe

The ligand shuttle'' reactions of cytochrome oxidase: Spectroscopic evidence, dynamics, and functional significance

Time-resolved electronic absorption, infrared, resonance Raman, and magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopies are applied to characterization of the intermediate which is formed within 20 ps after photodissociation of CO from cytochrome a{sub 3} of reduced cytochrome oxidase. This intermediate decays with the same halflife (ca. 1 {mu}s) as the post-photodissociation Cu{sub B}{sup +} -CO species previously observed by time-resolved infrared. The transient UV-Vis spectra, kinetics, infrared, and Raman evidence suggest that an endogenous ligand is transferred from Cu{sub B} to Fe{sub a3} when CO binds to Cu{sub B}, forming a cytochrome a{sub 3} species with axial ligation which differs from the reduced unliganded enzyme. The time-resolved magnetic circular dichroism results suggest that this transient is high spin and therefore five coordinate. Thus we infer that the ligand from Cu{sub B} binds on the distal side of cytochrome a{sub 3} and displaces the proximal histidine imidazole. This remarkable mechanistic feature is an additional aspect of the previously proposed ligand shuttle'' activity of the Cu{sub B}/Fe{sub a3} pair. We suggest that the ligand shuttle may play a functional role in redox-linked proton translocation by the enzyme. 7 refs., 2 figs