scholarly journals Rationality, Appearances, and Apparent Facts

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier González de Prado Salas
Keyword(s):  
Normative Reasons ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Apparent Reasons ◽  
Normative Account

Ascriptions of rationality are related to our practices of praising and criticizing. This seems to provide motivation for normative accounts of rationality, more specifically for the view that rationality is a matter of responding to normative reasons. However, rational agents are sometimes guided by false beliefs. This is problematic for those reasons-based accounts of rationality that are also committed to the widespread thesis that normative reasons are facts. The critical aim of the paper is to present objections to recent proposed solutions to this problem, according to which the responses of deceived agents would be rationalized by facts about how things appear to them. My positive aim is to argue that accounts of reasons in terms of apparent reasons manage to capture the intuitions that seem to favor a normative account of rationality (more specifically, they capture the connection between attributions of rationality and praise and criticism).    

scholarly journals Respect and the reality of apparent reasons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt L. Sylvan
Keyword(s):  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
First Order ◽  
Moral Domain ◽  
Apparent Reasons

Abstract Rationality requires us to respond to apparent normative reasons. Given the independence of appearance and reality, why think that apparent normative reasons necessarily provide real normative reasons? And if they do not, why think that mistakes of rationality are necessarily real mistakes? This paper gives a novel answer to these questions. I argue first that in the moral domain, there are objective duties of respect that we violate whenever we do what appears to violate our first-order duties. The existence of these duties of respect, I argue, ensures that apparent moral reasons are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality. I then extend these arguments to the domain of overall reason. Just as there are objective duties of respect for moral reasons that explain moral blameworthiness, so there are objective duties of respect for reasons (period) that explain blameworthiness in the court of overall reason. The existence of these duties ensures that apparent reasons (period) are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality.

Parentheticalism, Normative Reasons, and Error Cases

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Henning
Keyword(s):  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Subject Orientation

This chapter discusses another crucial use of parenthetical sentences in normative reasons-discourse. Due to their feature of subject-orientation, they enable us to cite known falsehoods as normative reasons without violating the factivity requirements of reasons-discourse. This is important, because it allows us to deal with error cases in a way that does not entail that putatively rational agents systematically misidentify their reasons. Ontological and linguistic objections to the idea that falsehoods can be full-blooded normative reasons for agents are discussed and rejected. A notion of quasi-factivity is introduced to characterize the requirements of reasons-discourse. Parentheticalism is shown to enable a unified account of normative reasons-discourse, avoiding divergences between veridical and error cases.

Reasons for emotion and moral motivation

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 805-827
Author(s):  
Reid Blackman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Rational Agents

AbstractInternalism about normative reasons is the view that an agent’s normative reasons depend on her motivational constitution. On the assumption that there are reasons for emotion I argue that (a) externalism about reasons for emotion entails that all rational agents have reasons to be morally motivated and (b) internalism about reasons for emotion is implausible. If the arguments are sound we can conclude that all rational agents have reasons to be morally motivated. Resisting this conclusion requires either justifying internalism about reasons for emotion in a way hitherto unarticulated or giving up on reasons for emotion altogether.

Do People’s Motives Influence Their Susceptibility to Imagination Inflation?

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie J. Sharman ◽  
Samantha Calacouris
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Source Monitoring ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Explicit Motives ◽  
Imagination Inflation ◽  
Motivational Model ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Affiliation Motives

People are motivated to remember past autobiographical experiences related to their current goals; we investigated whether people are also motivated to remember false past experiences related to those goals. In Session 1, we measured subjects’ implicit and explicit achievement and affiliation motives. Subjects then rated their confidence about, and memory for, childhood events containing achievement and affiliation themes. Two weeks later in Session 2, subjects received a “computer-generated profile” based on their Session 1 ratings. This profile suggested that one false achievement event and one false affiliation event had happened in childhood. After imagining and describing the suggested false events, subjects made confidence and memory ratings a second time. For achievement events, subjects’ explicit motives predicted their false beliefs and memories. The results are explained using source monitoring and a motivational model of autobiographical memory.

Dream interpretation and false beliefs.

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana A. L. Mazzoni ◽  
Pasquale Lombardo ◽  
Stefano Malvagia ◽  
Elizabeth F. Loftus
Keyword(s):  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
False Beliefs

Code-switching in parents’ everyday speech to bilingual infants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena V. Kremin ◽  
Julia Alves ◽  
Adriel John Orena ◽  
Linda Polka ◽  
Krista Byers-Heinlein
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Bilingual Communities ◽  
Apparent Reasons ◽  
At Home

Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents’ code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French–English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. Overall, rates of infant-directed code-switching were low, averaging 7 times per hour (6 times per 1,000 words) at 10 months and increasing to 28 times per hour (18 times per 1,000 words) at 18 months. Parents code-switched more between sentences than within a sentence; this pattern was even more pronounced when infants were 18 months than when they were 10 months. The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant’s understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual language acquisition.

Examining false beliefs about voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
David Gertler Rand
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Election Fraud ◽  
Voter Fraud ◽  
Election News

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election saw an unprecedented number of false claims alleging election fraud and arguing that Donald Trump was the actual winner of the election. Here we report a survey exploring belief in these false claims that was conducted three days after Biden was declared the winner. We find that a majority of Trump voters in our sample – particularly those who were more politically knowl-edgeable and more closely following election news – falsely believed that election fraud was wide-spread and that Trump won the election. Thus, false beliefs about the election are not merely a fringe phenomenon. We also find that Trump conceding or losing his legal challenges would likely lead a ma-jority of Trump voters to accept Biden’s victory as legitimate, although 40% said they would continue to view Biden as illegitimate regardless. Finally, we found that levels of partisan spite and endorsement of violence were equivalent between Trump and Biden voters.

The Fight Against Doubt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inmaculada de Melo-Martín ◽  
Kristen Intemann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Vaccine Safety ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Scientific Process ◽  
The Public ◽  
Scientific Consensus ◽  
Scientific Claims

Current debates about climate change or vaccine safety provide an alarming illustration of the potential impacts of dissent about scientific claims. False beliefs about evidence and the conclusions that can be drawn from it are commonplace, as is corrosive doubt about the existence of widespread scientific consensus. Deployed aggressively and to political ends, ill-founded dissent can intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead both the public and policymakers to oppose important policies firmly rooted in science. To criticize dissent is, however, a fraught exercise. Skepticism and fearless debate are key to the scientific process, making it both vital and incredibly difficult to characterize and identify dissent that is problematic in its approach and consequences. Indeed, as de Melo-Martín and Intemann show, the criteria commonly proposed as means of identifying inappropriate dissent are flawed, and the strategies generally recommended to tackle such dissent are not only ineffective but could even make the situation worse. The Fight against Doubt proposes that progress on this front can best be achieved by enhancing the trustworthiness of the scientific community and being more realistic about the limits of science when it comes to policymaking. It shows that a richer understanding is needed of the context in which science operates so as to disarm problematic dissent and those who deploy it in the pursuit of their goals.

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