Easy Knowledge Makes No Difference: Reply to Wielenberg

We have recently proposed a diagnosis of what goes wrong in cases of ‘easy-knowledge.’ Erik Wielenberg argues that there are cases of easy knowledge thatour proposal cannot handle. In this note we reply to Wielenberg, arguing that our proposal does indeed handle his cases

Rationality and Truth

The traditional view in epistemology is that we must distinguish between being rational and being right (that is also, by the way, the traditional view about practical rationality). In his paper in this volume, Williamson proposes an alternative view according to which only beliefs that amount to knowledge are rational (and, thus, no false belief is rational). It is healthy to challenge tradition, in philosophy as much as elsewhere. But, in this instance, we think that tradition has it right. In this paper we defend our version of the traditional view and argue against Williamson’s alternative

Williamson on Gettier Cases and Epistemic Logic

Timothy Williamson has fruitfully exploited formal resources to shed considerable light on the nature of knowledge. In the paper under examination, Williamson turns his attention to Gettier cases, showing how they can be motivated formally. At the same time, he disparages the kind of justification he thinks gives rise to these cases. He favors instead his own notion of justification for which Gettier cases cannot arise. We take issue both with his disparagement of the kind of justification that figures in Gettier cases and the specifics of the formal motivation

Disentangling the role of deviant letter position on cognate word processing

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://osf.io/mqhu5/?view_only=94cdf0d86e0b4e7e8b2757e33f6a78ce.The way of coding letter position has been extensively assessed during the recognition of native words, leading to the development of a new generation of models that assume more flexible letter position coding schemes compared to classical computational models such as the interactive activation (IA) model. However, determining whether similar letter position encoding mechanisms occur during the bilingual word recognition has been largely less explored despite its implications for the leading model of bilingual word recognition (multilink) as it assumes the input-coding scheme of the IA model. In this study, we aimed to examine this issue through the manipulation of the position of the deviant letter of cognate words (external and internal letters). Two experiments were conducted with Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (a masked priming lexical decision task and a two-alternative forced-choice task) and their respective monolingual controls. The results revealed a differential processing for the first letter in comparison to the other letters as well as modulations as a function of language cue, suggesting amendments to the input-coding scheme of the multilink model.This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Center (CIPsi/UM), School of Psychology, University of Minho, supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653. This was been also funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PCIN-2015-165-C02-02 and MINECO/FEDER), by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (RED2018-102615-T), and by the Research Promotion Program of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (2018PFR-URV-B2-32)

Of beavers and tables: the role of animacy in the processing of grammatical gender within a picture-word interference task

Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors. However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character of an agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation of the direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolled variables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments with European Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentage of animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gender congruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Results support the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreement context, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al., 2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involved in the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to the detriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritizationThis work was supported by the Government of Spain, Ministry of Education and Vocational Training through the Training program for Academic Staff (FPU [BOE-B-2017-2646]), the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation with the research project PID2019-110583GB-I00, the Galician Government (grant for research groups ED431B 2019/2020), and by the FCT and FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653S