805 research outputs found
Teleology and mentalizing in the explanation of action
In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this strategy is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent
Illegitimate Values, Confirmation Bias, and Mandevillian Cognition in Science
In the philosophy of science, it is a common proposal that values are illegitimate in science and should be counteracted whenever they drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions. Drawing on recent cognitive scientific research on human reasoning and confirmation bias, I argue that this view should be rejected. Advocates of it have overlooked that values that drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions can contribute to the reliability of scientific inquiry at the group level even when they negatively affect an individual’s cognition. This casts doubt on the proposal that such values should always be illegitimate in science. It also suggests that advocates of that proposal assume a narrow, individualistic account of science that threatens to undermine their own project of ensuring reliable belief formation in science
On the Automaticity and Ethics of Belief
Recently, philosophers have appealed to empirical studies to argue that whenever we think that p, we automatically believe that p (Millikan 2004; Mandelbaum 2014; Levy and Mandelbaum 2014). Levy and Mandelbaum (2014) have gone further and claimed that the automaticity of believing has implications for the ethics of belief in that it creates epistemic obligations for those who know about their automatic belief acquisition. I use theoretical considerations and psychological findings to raise doubts about the empirical case for the view that we automatically believe what we think. Furthermore, I contend that even if we set these doubts aside, Levy and Mandelbaum’s argument to the effect that the automaticity of believing creates epistemic obligations is not fully convincing
The complementarity of mindshaping and mindreading
Why do we engage in folk psychology, that is, why do we think about and ascribe
propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, intentions etc. to people? On the
standard view, folk psychology is primarily for mindreading, for detecting mental states
and explaining and/or predicting people’s behaviour in terms of them. In contrast,
McGeer (1996, 2007, 2015), and Zawidzki (2008, 2013) maintain that folk psychology
is not primarily for mindreading but for mindshaping, that is, for moulding people’s
behavior and minds (e.g., via the imposition of social norms) so that coordination
becomes easier. Mindreading is derived from and only as effective as it is because of
mindshaping, not vice versa. I critically assess McGeer’s, and Zawidzki’s proposal and
contend that three common motivations for the mindshaping view do not provide
sufficient support for their particular version of it. I argue furthermore that their
proposal underestimates the role that epistemic processing plays for mindshaping. And I
provide reasons for favouring an alternative according to which, in social cognition
involving ascriptions of propositional attitudes, neither mindshaping nor mindreading is primary but both are complementary in that effective mindshaping depends as much on mindreading as effective mindreading depends on mindshaping
Values in Science: Assessing the Case for Mixed Claims
Social and medical scientists frequently produce empirical generalizations that involve
concepts partly defined by value judgments. These generalizations, which have been
called ‘mixed claims’, raise interesting questions. Does the presence of them in science
imply that science is value-laden? Is the value-ladenness of mixed claims special
compared to other kinds of value-ladenness of science? Do we lose epistemically if we
reformulate these claims as conditional statements? And if we want to allow mixed
claims in science, do we need a new account of how to reconcile values with objectivity?
Alexandrova (2017, 2018) offers affirmative answers to these questions. In responding to
Alexandrova’s arguments, this discussion note motivates negative ones and in doing so
casts new light on mixed claims
Breaking Symmetries
A well-known result by Palamidessi tells us that {\pi}mix (the {\pi}-calculus
with mixed choice) is more expressive than {\pi}sep (its subset with only
separate choice). The proof of this result argues with their different
expressive power concerning leader election in symmetric networks. Later on,
Gorla of- fered an arguably simpler proof that, instead of leader election in
symmetric networks, employed the reducibility of "incestual" processes (mixed
choices that include both enabled senders and receivers for the same channel)
when running two copies in parallel. In both proofs, the role of breaking (ini-
tial) symmetries is more or less apparent. In this paper, we shed more light on
this role by re-proving the above result-based on a proper formalization of
what it means to break symmetries-without referring to another layer of the
distinguishing problem domain of leader election.
Both Palamidessi and Gorla rephrased their results by stating that there is
no uniform and reason- able encoding from {\pi}mix into {\pi}sep . We indicate
how the respective proofs can be adapted and exhibit the consequences of
varying notions of uniformity and reasonableness. In each case, the ability to
break initial symmetries turns out to be essential
On the Distributability of Mobile Ambients
Modern society is dependent on distributed software systems and to verify
them different modelling languages such as mobile ambients were developed. To
analyse the quality of mobile ambients as a good foundational model for
distributed computation, we analyse the level of synchronisation between
distributed components that they can express. Therefore, we rely on earlier
established synchronisation patterns. It turns out that mobile ambients are not
fully distributed, because they can express enough synchronisation to express a
synchronisation pattern called M. However, they can express strictly less
synchronisation than the standard pi-calculus. For this reason, we can show
that there is no good and distributability-preserving encoding from the
standard pi-calculus into mobile ambients and also no such encoding from mobile
ambients into the join-calculus, i.e., the expressive power of mobile ambients
is in between these languages. Finally, we discuss how these results can be
used to obtain a fully distributed variant of mobile ambients.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2018, arXiv:1808.08071. Conference version
of arXiv:1808.0159
Adding Priority to Event Structures
Event Structures (ESs) are mainly concerned with the representation of causal
relationships between events, usually accompanied by other event relations
capturing conflicts and disabling. Among the most prominent variants of ESs are
Prime ESs, Bundle ESs, Stable ESs, and Dual ESs, which differ in their
causality models and event relations. Yet, some application domains require
further kinds of relations between events. Here, we add the possibility to
express priority relationships among events.
We exemplify our approach on Prime, Bundle, Extended Bundle, and Dual ESs.
Technically, we enhance these variants in the same way. For each variant, we
then study the interference between priority and the other event relations.
From this, we extract the redundant priority pairs-notably differing for the
types of ESs-that enable us to provide a comparison between the extensions. We
also exhibit that priority considerably complicates the definition of partial
orders in ESs.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2013, arXiv:1307.690
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