Inference without Regress

A central obstacle for an account of inference is to show how it is possible to satisfy the Taking Condition without engendering a vicious regress. This is the lesson of Carroll’s Paradox. The basic difficulty is this: whatever knowledge one employs in judging that the premises support the conclusion would seem itself to be part of what supports the conclusion, thus requiring a further piece of knowledge. I argue that inferring is a matter of understanding the relevant propositions well enough to recognize that it is impossible for premises that one accepts to be true and the conclusion to be false, so that one sees the conclusion as what must be true, thereby believing it. Nothing more is required for inference than the proper understanding of premises and conclusion.

The Challenge for an Account of Inference

The Taking Condition looms large in recent discussions of inference: in inferring q from p, one draws the conclusion in light of one’s representing p as supporting q. This condition highlights two elements of inference. First, a causal element: via the inference, the subject arrives at a belief. Second, this arrival transpires in virtue of the subject’s endorsing the thought: p supports q. Inference thus joins two elements: one causal, the other evaluative. I show in this chapter that extant accounts fail to properly join these two elements. They fail because the two elements are not, as is generally assumed, separable. Inference is the endorsement of a thought that the ground supports the grounded and this endorsement amounts to a causal connection between the corresponding beliefs. The difficulty is in seeing how a thought could not merely register the presence of, but actually constitute the causal relation between beliefs.

Inference and Self-Knowledge

A growing cohort of philosophers argue that inference, understood as an agent-level psychological process or event, is subject to a “Taking Condition.” The Taking Condition states, roughly, that drawing an inference requires one to take one’s premise(s) to epistemically support one’s conclusion, where “takings” are some sort of higher-order attitude, thought, intuition, or act. My question is not about the nature of takings, but about their contents. I examine the prospects for “minimal” and “robust” views of the contents of takings. On the minimal view, taking one’s premise(s) to support one’s conclusion only requires focusing on propositional contents and putative epistemic support relations between them. On the robust view, taking one’s premise(s) to support one’s conclusion also requires knowledge (or being in a position to have knowledge) of the attitudes one holds toward those contents. I argue that arguments for the Taking Condition do not entail or sufficiently motivate the robust view. Accordingly, contra several philosophers, the Taking Condition does not illuminate a deep relationship between inference and self-knowledge.

Limitations of the Evidence that Perspective Taking Increases Empathy

Perspective taking is commonly believed to increase empathy. To support this idea,empirical research must show two pieces of evidence. First, perspective taking interventions should make people empathize more than they would by default. Second, the increase in empathy should be due to perspective taking, and not some other feature of the intervention. Much of the evidence that perspective taking increases empathy comes from studies that compare a perspective taking condition to a condition where subjects are asked to “remain objective”. However, if subjects are not objective to begin with, then asking them to “remain objective” might make them empathize less, which makes it unclear if perspective taking also makes them empathize more. In two new experiments and one replication of the well-known “Katie Banks” experiment, subjects were assigned to a perspective taking intervention, an objective intervention, or no intervention. Subjects assigned to the perspective taking intervention did not empathize more than subjects assigned to no intervention; instead, subjects assigned to the objective intervention down-regulated their emotions and empathized less. Further evidence about whether, when, and how perspective taking increases empathy is needed.

Goodness-Fixing Isn’t Good Enough: A Reply to McHugh and Way

According to McHugh and Way, reasoning is a person-level attitude revision that is regulated by its constitutive aim of getting fitting attitudes. They claim that this account offers an explanation of what is wrong with reasoning in ways one believes to be bad, and that this explanation is an alternative to an explanation that appeals to the so-called Taking Condition. I argue that their explanation is unsatisfying.

The effects of doodling on recall ability

Previous research has documented a positive effect of doodling on individuals’ ability to recall information. However, previous research is limited to structured doodling tasks, such as shading in basic shapes. The present study extends the extant research, and increases the external validity of the previous findings, by considering the effects of multiple forms of doodling on recall. In this experimental study, ninety-three undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to one of 4 conditions (control, structured doodling, unstructured doodling, or note-taking). Participants listened to a fictional dialogue between 2 friends discussing a recent earthquake and then completed a fill-in the blank quiz to test their recall of the conversational information. The results indicated that participants in the unstructured doodling condition performed significantly worse than those in the structured doodling and note-taking condition.

The effect of perspective taking on negative cognitive responses induced by intergroup threat

In two related studies, we explored the influence of perspective taking on the moderation of negative cognitive responses induced by intergroup threat. In Study 1 we recruited undergraduate students at Southwest University who came from rural areas in China. Participants were randomly assigned to either a threat condition group or a control group. We presented to all participants a policy advantageous to urban students and measured their level of opposition. Participants in the threat condition were more opposed to the policy than were the participants in the control condition. In Study 2 we manipulated perspective taking and again measured the level of opposition of a group of students from rural areas to a policy advantageous to urban students. Participants in the perspective-taking condition were less opposed to the policy than were those in the control condition. In summary, perspective taking positively influenced the moderation of negative cognitive responses induced by intergroup threat.

The relation between index-finger extension and the acoustic quality of cooing in three-month-old infants

ABSTRACTFourteen full-term, healthy, three-month-old infants were observed during a total of 15 minutes spontaneous face-to-face interaction with their mothers. Facial and manual actions, gaze direction and vocalizations were coded. The infants' cooing vocalizations were categorized into syllabic and vocalic sounds. Index-finger extension occurred frequently in sequence with syllabic sounds, which are speech-like vocalizations, but rarely occurred in sequence with vocalic sounds. No other categories of nonvocal behaviours showed such a relationship. In a subsequent experiment, the infants experienced either conversational turn-taking or random responsiveness from their mothers. In the turn-taking condition, the infants produced a higher ratio of syllabic to vocalic sounds, and a higher frequency of index-finger extension. These results suggest a strong connection between speech and the pointing gesture long before the infant can actually talk.