Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

The idea that there can be cases of faultless disagreement, cases of disagreement in which neither party is making a mistake, is frequently discussed in connection with relativist views in philosophy of language. My goal is to argue that we can make sense of faultless disagreement without being committed to any form of relativism if we recognise that disagreement sometimes involves attitudes other than belief, such as desires or preferences. Furthermore, this way of making sense of faultless disagreement allows us (...) to avoid some of the problems that have been raised in connection with relativist accounts of faultless disagreement. (shrink)

Formal models of appearance and reality have proved fruitful for investigating structural properties of perceptual knowledge. This paper applies the same approach to epistemic justification. Our central goal is to give a simple account of The Preface, in which justified belief fails to agglomerate. Following recent work by a number of authors, we understand knowledge in terms of normality. An agent knows p iff p is true throughout all relevant normal worlds. To model The Preface, we appeal to the normality (...) of error. Sometimes, it is more normal for reality and appearance to diverge than to match. We show that this simple idea has dramatic consequences for the theory of knowledge and justification. Among other things, we argue that a proper treatment of The Preface requires a departure from the internalist idea that epistemic justification supervenes on the appearances and the widespread idea that one knows most when free from error. (shrink)

The inflation of Type I error rates is thought to be one of the causes of the replication crisis. Questionable research practices such as p-hacking are thought to inflate Type I error rates above their nominal level, leading to unexpectedly high levels of false positives in the literature and, consequently, unexpectedly low replication rates. In this article, I offer an alternative view. I argue that questionable and other research practices do not usually inflate relevant Type I error (...) rates. I begin by introducing the concept of Type I error rates and distinguishing between statistical errors and theoretical errors. I then illustrate my argument with respect to model misspecification, multiple testing, selective inference, forking paths, exploratory analyses, p-hacking, optional stopping, double dipping, and HARKing. In each case, I demonstrate that relevant Type I error rates are not usually inflated above their nominal level, and in the rare cases that they are, the inflation is easily identified and resolved. I conclude that the replication crisis may be explained, at least in part, by researchers’ misinterpretation of statistical errors and their underestimation of theoretical errors. (shrink)

David Miller is the foremost exponent of the purist critical rationalist doctrine and here presents his mature views, discussing the role that logic and argument play in the growth of knowledge, criticizing the common understanding of argument as an instrument of justification, persuasion or discovery and instead advocating the critical rationalist view that only criticism matters. Miller patiently and thoroughly undoes the damage done by those writers who attack critical rationalism by invoking the sterile mythology of induction and justification that (...) it seeks to sweep away. In addition his new material on the debate on verisimilitude is essential reading for all working in this field. (shrink)

In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers – including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves – are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze as metalinguistic negotiations, speakers might quite (...) strongly resist the idea that their debate is in any sense about language. In this paper, we explore and provide responses to what we take to be the best versions of an objection that our view involves an unacceptable attribution of false beliefs to ordinary speakers. (shrink)

Sometimes it takes years of debate for philosophers to discover what it is they really disagree about. Sometimes they talk past each other in long series of books and articles, never guessing at the root disagreement that divides them. But occasionally a day comes when something happens to coax the cat out of the bag. "Aha!" one philosopher exclaims to another, "so that's why you've been disagreeing with me, misunderstanding me, resisting my conclusions, puzzling me all these years!".

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are (...) four primary mechanisms through which the epistemic schema of ableism distorts communication between nondisabled physicians and disabled patients: testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing. Measures against epistemic injustices in general and against schema-based medical errors in particular are ultimately issues of justice that must be better addressed at all levels of health care practice. (shrink)

Epistemologists generally agree that the stringency of intuitive ascriptions of knowledge is increased when unrealized possibilities ofenor are mentioned. Non-sceptical invanantists (Williamson, Hawthorne) think it a mistake to yield in such cases to the temptation to be more stringent, but they do not deny that we feel it. They contend that the temptation is best explained as the product of a psychological bias known as the availability heuristic. I argue against the availability explanation, and sketch a rival account of what (...) happens to us psychologically when possibilities of error are raised. (shrink)

According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit :127–138, 2010. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world ever be motivated to seek out novelty? Novelty for such an agent would arrive in the form of sensory and physiological (...) states that are unexpected. Such an agent ought therefore to avoid novel and surprising interactions with the world one might think. Yet humans and many other animals find play and other forms of novelty-seeking and exploration hugely rewarding. How can this be understood in frameworks for studying the mind that emphasise prediction error minimisation? This problem has been taken up in recent research concerned with epistemic action—actions an agent engages in to reduce uncertainty. However that work leaves two questions unanswered, which it is the aim of our paper to address. First, no account has been given yet of why it should feel good to the agent to engage the world playfully and with curiosity. Second an appeal is made to precision-estimation to explain epistemic action, yet it remains unclear how precision-weighting works in action more generally, or active inference. We argue that an answer to both questions may lie in the bodily states of an agent that track the rate at which free energy is being reduced. The recent literature on the predictive brain has connected the valence of emotional experiences to the rate of change in the reduction of prediction error :e1003094, 2013. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003094; Van de Cruys, in Metzinger and Wiese Philosophy and predictive processing, vol 24, MIND Group, Frankfurt am Main, 2017. doi: 10.15502/9783958573253). In this literature valenced emotional experiences are hypothesised to be identical with changes in the rate at which prediction error is reduced. Experiences are negatively valenced when overall prediction error increases and are positively valenced when the sum of prediction errors decrease. We offer an ecological-enactive interpretation of the concept of valence and its connection to rate of change of prediction error. We show how rate of change should be understood in terms of embodied states of affordance-related action readiness. We then go on to apply this ecological-enactive account of error dynamics to provide an answer to the first question we have raised: It may explain why it should feel good to an agent to be curious and playful. Our ecological-enactive account also allows us to show how error dynamics may provide an answer to the second question we have raised regarding how precision-weighting works in active inference. An agent that is sensitive to rates of error reduction can tune precision on the fly. We show how this ability to tune precision on the go can allow agents to develop skills for adapting better and better to the unexpected, and search out opportunities for resolving uncertainty and progressing in its learning. (shrink)

Many moral error theorists hold that moral facts are irreducibly normative. They also hold that irreducible normativity is metaphysically queer and conclude that there are no irreducibly normative reasons and consequently no moral facts. A popular response to moral error theory utilizes the so-called ‘companions in guilt’ strategy and argues that if moral reasons are irreducibly normative, then epistemic reasons are too. This is the Parity Premise, on the basis of which critics of moral error theory draw (...) the Parity Conclusion that if there are no irreducibly normative reasons, there are no moral reasons and no epistemic reasons. From the Parity Conclusion and Epistemic Realism (the view that there are epistemic reasons), it follows that it is false that there are no irreducibly normative reasons. In this paper, I argue that the Parity Premise and the Parity Conclusion can both plausibly be rejected. (shrink)

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a (...) property which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists recommend that we get rid of moral discourse and moral judgement. At first glance this seems repugnant, but abolitionists think that we have overestimated the practical value of our moral framework and that eliminating it would be in our interests. I argue that abolitionism has a surprising amount going for it. Traditionally, abolitionism has been treated as an option available to moral error theorists. Error theorists say that moral discourse and judgement are committed to the existence (...) of moral properties, and that no such properties exist. After error theory is established, abolitionism is one potential way to proceed. However, many error theorists suggest that we retain moral discourse as a sort of fiction. I evaluate some attractions of both fictionalism and abolitionism, arguing that abolitionism is a plausible position. No one doubts that error theorists can be abolitionists. However, what has gone largely undiscussed is that it is open to others to be abolitionists as well. I argue that moral realists of a metaphysically robust sort can and perhaps should be abolitionists. ‘Realist abolitionism’ makes for a surprisingly neat theoretical package, and I conclude that it represents an interesting new option in the theoretical landscape. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 121-133, February 2022.

Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of “I”, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity to error through misidentification (“IEM”); first-personal claims are IEM in the use “as subject”, but not in the other use. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are not strictly speaking IEM; Gareth Evans disputed this. Similar issues have been debated regarding self-ascriptions of conscious thoughts based on first-personal awareness, (...) in the light of claims of “thought insertion” in schizophrenic patients. The paper aims to defend a Shoemaker-like line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions. Methodologically, the paper argues that to properly address these issues the all-inclusive term “thought” should be avoided, and specific types of thoughts countenanced. (shrink)

Nietzsche has sometimes been interpreted as endorsing an error theory about moral judgements. A host of passages provide prima facie reason for such an interpretation. However, the extent of the appropriateness of this interpretation is a matter of dispute. The parameters of his alleged error theory are unclear. This paper reconsiders the evidence for the view that Nietzsche is a moral error theorist and makes the case that Nietzsche defends a local theory about a particular form of (...) “morality,” but that a global error theory about value judgments in general is not established by the textual evidence. This view is defended by considering Nietzsche's affinities with Hume and how they are better harnessed in service of a projectivist error-theoretic reading as opposed to alternatives in the secondary literature (such as noncognitivist readings). Moreover, it explores how Nietzsche can continue to make genuine (that is, nonfictionalist) evaluative judgments by his drawing of a distinction between conventional evaluative practice expressive of herd morality on the one hand and a revisionary evaluative practice available to a small number of “higher types” or “free spirits” on the other. (shrink)

During multiple testing, researchers often adjust their alpha level to control the familywise error rate for a statistical inference about a joint union alternative hypothesis (e.g., “H1,1 or H1,2”). However, in some cases, they do not make this inference. Instead, they make separate inferences about each of the individual hypotheses that comprise the joint hypothesis (e.g., H1,1 and H1,2). For example, a researcher might use a Bonferroni correction to adjust their alpha level from the conventional level of 0.050 to (...) 0.025 when testing H1,1 and H1,2, find a significant result for H1,1 (p < 0.025) and not for H1,2 (p > .0.025), and so claim support for H1,1 and not for H1,2. However, these separate individual inferences do not require an alpha adjustment. Only a statistical inference about the union alternative hypothesis “H1,1 or H1,2” requires an alpha adjustment because it is based on “at least one” significant result among the two tests, and so it refers to the familywise error rate. Hence, an inconsistent correction occurs when a researcher corrects their alpha level during multiple testing but does not make an inference about a union alternative hypothesis. In the present article, I discuss this inconsistent correction problem, including its reduction in statistical power for tests of individual hypotheses and its potential causes vis-à-vis error rate confusions and the alpha adjustment ritual. I also provide three illustrations of inconsistent corrections from recent psychology studies. I conclude that inconsistent corrections represent a symptom of statisticism, and I call for a more nuanced inference-based approach to multiple testing corrections. (shrink)

Theories of content purport to explain, among other things, in virtue of what beliefs have the truth conditions they do have. The desire for such a theory has many sources, but prominent among them are two puzzling facts that are notoriously difficult to explain: beliefs can be false, and there are normative constraints on the formation of beliefs.2 If we knew in virtue of what beliefs had truth conditions, we would be better positioned to explain how it is possible for (...) an agent to believe that which is not the case. Moreover, we do not say merely of such an agent that he believes that p when p is not the case. We say the agent made a mistake, and often criticize him accordingly; we think agents ought not have false beliefs, and that such beliefs should be changed; etc. An adequate theory of content would, presumably, reveal the source of these normative facts about the mental lives of agents. Indeed, it is typically taken to be an adequacy constraint on a theory of content that it help explain the possibility of error and the "normativity" of content. Teleological theories of content promise to do just this. (shrink)

In the 1950s–60s biochemists searched intensively for a series of high-energy molecules in the cell. Although we now believe that these molecules do not exist, biochemists claimed to have isolated or identified them on at least sixteen occasions. The episode parallels the familiar eighteenth-century case of phlogiston, in illustrating how error is not simply the loss of facts but, instead, must be actively constructed. In addition, the debates surrounding each case demonstrate how revolutionary-scale disagreement is sometimes resolved by differentiating (...) or partitioning empirical domains, rather than by replacement of one theory by another. (shrink)

An important theme to have emerged from the new experimentalist movement is that much of actual scientific practice deals not with appraising full-blown theories but with the manifold local tasks required to arrive at data, distinguish fact from artifact, and estimate backgrounds. Still, no program for working out a philosophy of experiment based on this recognition has been demarcated. I suggest why the new experimentalism has come up short, and propose a remedy appealing to the practice of standard error (...) statistics. I illustrate a portion of my proposal using Galison's experimental narrative on neutral currents. (shrink)

Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111 c.e .) is well known, among other things, for his account, in al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (Deliverance from error), of a struggle with philosophical skepticism that bears a striking resemblance to that described by Descartes in the Meditations . This essay aims to give a close comparative analysis of these respective accounts, and will concentrate solely on the processes of invoking or entertaining doubt that al-Ghazālī and Descartes describe, respectively. In the process some subtle differences between (...) them in this regard will be brought to light that are relevant to the comparative issue of the respective solutions at which they arrive. The latter issue will not be touched upon here, although the present discussion is intended as a prelude to a future treatment of that topic. (shrink)

Contemporary scholars have begun to document the extensive influence of the sixth to seventh century Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti on Pratyabhijñā Śaiva thought. Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta’s adaptation of Dharmakīrti’s apoha theory provides a striking instance of the creative ways in which these Śaivas use Dharmakīrti’s ideas to argue for positions that Dharmakīrti would emphatically reject. Both Dharmakīrti and these Śaivas emphasize that the formation of a concept involves both objective and subjective factors. Working within a certain perceptual environment, factors such as (...) a subject’s desires, habits, and conditioning lead him or her to form a concept based on excluding what is not relevant to the accomplishment of his or her goal. However, the two differ in their account of the relationship between concepts and subject/object duality itself. While Dharmakīrti claims that the division of a cognition into subject, object, and awareness is nonconceptual, the subtly shifted definition of a concept that these Śaivas employ allows them to claim that the error of subject/object duality is actually conceptual. This seemingly small difference in their respective evaluations of the nature of subject/object error has surprisingly large consequences. If, as these Śaivas claim, any awareness involving a duality is conceptual, then subject and object are concepts. Moreover, if the formation of a concept requires desire, then some kind of desire must be inherent to consciousness itself before the formation of a limited subject/object pair. In short, ultimate consciousness must be Śiva, who possesses the freedom to will any and all possible realities. (shrink)

: The purpose of this paper and its sister paper (Farrell and Hooker, b) is to present, evaluate and elaborate a proposed new model for the process of scientific development: self-directed anticipative learning (SDAL). The vehicle for its evaluation is a new analysis of a well-known historical episode: the development of ape-language research. In this first paper we outline five prominent features of SDAL that will need to be realized in applying SDAL to science: 1) interactive exploration of possibility space; (...) 2) self-directedness; 3) localization of success and error; 4) Synergistic increase in learning capacity; and 5) continuity of SDAL process across scientific change. In this paper we examine the first three features of SDAL in relation to the early history of ape-language research. We show that this history is readily explicated as a self-directed, ever-finer, delineation of possibility space that enables the localization of both success and error. Paper II examines the last two features against this history. (shrink)

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems (...) I raise for the Simple Account. (shrink)

This paper shows how to formulate moral error theories given a contextualist semantics like the one that Angelika Kratzer pioneered, answering the concerns that Christine Tiefensee developed.

Shaun Nichols has recently argued that while the folk notion of free will is associated with error, a question still remains whether the concept of free will should be eliminated or preserved. He maintains that like other eliminativist arguments in philosophy, arguments that free will is an illusion seem to depend on substantive assumptions about reference. According to free will eliminativists, people have deeply mistaken beliefs about free will and this entails that free will does not exist. However, an (...) alternative reaction is that free will does exist, we just have some deeply mistaken beliefs about it. According to Nichols, all such debates boil down to whether or not the erroneous folk term in question successfully refers or not. Since Nichols adopts the view that reference is systematically ambiguous, he maintains that in some contexts it’s appropriate to take a restrictivist view about whether a term embedded in a false theory refers, while in other contexts it’s appropriate to take a liberal view about whether a token of the very same term refers. This, according to Nichols, affords the possibility of saying that the sentence “free will exists” is false in some contexts and true in others. In this paper I argue that even if we grant Nichols his pluralistic approach to reference, there is still good reason to prefer eliminativism to preservationism with regard to free will. My argument focuses on one important difference between the concept of “free will” and other theoretical terms embedded in false theories—i.e., the role that the phenomenology of free agency plays in reference fixing. (shrink)

This work compares Autometrics with dual penalization techniques such as minimax concave penalty and smoothly clipped absolute deviation under asymmetric error distributions such as exponential, gamma, and Frechet with varying sample sizes as well as predictors. Comprehensive simulations, based on a wide variety of scenarios, reveal that the methods considered show improved performance for increased sample size. In the case of low multicollinearity, these methods show good performance in terms of potency, but in gauge, shrinkage methods collapse, and higher (...) gauge leads to overspecification of the models. High levels of multicollinearity adversely affect the performance of Autometrics. In contrast, shrinkage methods are robust in presence of high multicollinearity in terms of potency, but they tend to select a massive set of irrelevant variables. Moreover, we find that expanding the data mitigates the adverse impact of high multicollinearity on Autometrics rapidly and gradually corrects the gauge of shrinkage methods. For empirical application, we take the gold prices data spanning from 1981 to 2020. While comparing the forecasting performance of all selected methods, we divide the data into two parts: data over 1981–2010 are taken as training data, and those over 2011–2020 are used as testing data. All methods are trained for the training data and then are assessed for performance through the testing data. Based on a root-mean-square error and mean absolute error, Autometrics remain the best in capturing the gold prices trend and producing better forecasts than MCP and SCAD. (shrink)

In his interesting comment on my recent article, “The Appeals Process as a Means of Error Correction,” Edward Schwartz makes two criticisms of my analysis. The criticisms have essentially to do with my assumption that an appeals court judge will base his or her decisions only on what happened at trial, and not on any inference that can be drawn from the fact that an appeal was brought. Before explaining why I do not find Schwartz's criticisms problematic, it will (...) be helpful for me to restate the main features of the model that I examined in the article. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend the view that judgments based on episodic memory are immune to error through misidentification. I will put forward a proposal about the contents of episodic memories according to which a memory represents a perception of a past event. I will also offer a proposal about the contents of perceptual experiences according to which a perceptual experience represents some relations that its subject bears to events in the external world. The combination of (...) the two views will yield the outcome that the subject is always an intentional object of her own memories: In episodic memory, one remembers being the subject whose extrinsic properties were experienced in some past perception. For that reason, one cannot misidentify oneself in memory unless one is having an inaccurate memory. Thus, the source of immunity to error through misidentification in memory lies in the nature of mnemonic content. (shrink)

The claim that episodic memory is immune to error through misidentification enjoys continuing popularity in philosophy. Psychological research on observer memory—usually defined as occurring when one remembers an event from a point of view other than that that from which he originally experienced it—would seem, on the face of it, to undermine the IEM claim. Relying on a certain view of memory content, Fernández, however, has provided an ingenious argument for the view that it does not. This paper reconstructs (...) Fernández’ argument and shows that there is reason to reject the definition of observer memory and the view of memory content on which it relies. Once these are rejected, it turns out that observer memory does indeed imply that the IEM claim is false. (shrink)

This paper considers whether theism is compatible with moral error theory. This issue is neglected, perhaps because it is widely assumed that these views are incompatible. I argue that this is mistaken. In so doing, I articulate the best argument for thinking that theism and moral error theory are incompatible. According to it, these views are incompatible because theism entails that God is morally good, and moral error theory entails that God is not. I reject this argument. (...) Since it is the best argument for thinking that theism and moral error theory are incompatible, I conclude that these views are compatible: one can coherently accept both views. (shrink)

English grammar error correction algorithm refers to the use of computer programming technology to automatically recognize and correct the grammar errors contained in English text written by nonnative language learners. Classification model is the core of machine learning and data mining, which can be applied to extracting information from English text data and constructing a reliable grammar correction method. On the basis of summarizing and analyzing previous research works, this paper expounded the research status and significance of English grammar (...) error correction algorithm, elaborated the development background, current status, and future challenges of the classification model, introduced the methods and principles of feature extraction method and dynamic residual structure, constructed a basic model for English grammar error correction based on the classification model, analyzed the classification model and translation model of English grammar error correction, proposed the English grammar error correction algorithm based on the classification model, performed the analyses of the model architecture and model optimizer of the grammar error correction algorithm, and finally conducted a simulation experiment and its result analysis. The study results show that, with the continuous increase of training samples and the continuous progress of learning process, the proposed English grammar error correction algorithm based on the classification model will continue to increase its classification accuracy, further refine its recognition rules, and gradually improve correction efficiency, thereby reducing processing time, saving storage space, and streamlining processing flow. The study results of this paper provide a certain reference for the further research on English grammar error correction algorithm based on the classification model. (shrink)

The paper examines Kant’s self-criticism to the account of hypothetical imperatives given in the "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals". Following his corrections in the introductions to the third "Critique", the paper traces the consequences of that change in his later writings, specifically with regard to the status of prudence. I argue that the revision of the account of hypothetical imperatives leads to differentiate, and ultimately separate, two functions in prudence: the setting of ends through maxims, and the pragmatic rules (...) establishing means to reach those ends. Accordingly, I furthermore argue, there is ultimately no genuine structural distinction between the rules of prudence and skill. The only difference lies in the domain in which prudence unfolds, that is, the field of human relations, and in the relevant cognitions. (shrink)