Here, we argue that any neurobiological theory based on an experience/function division cannot be empirically confirmed or falsified and is thus outside the scope of science. A ‘perfect experiment’ illustrates this point, highlighting the unbreachable boundaries of the scientific study of consciousness. We describe a more nuanced notion of cognitive access that captures personal experience without positing the existence of inaccessible conscious states. Finally, we discuss the criteria necessary for forming and testing a falsifiable theory of consciousness.

Although our subjective impression is of a richly detailed visual world, numerous empirical results suggest that the amount of visual information observers can perceive and remember at any given moment is limited. How can our subjective impressions be reconciled with these objective observations? Here, we answer this question by arguing that, although we see more than the handful of objects, claimed by prominent models of visual attention and working memory, we still see far less than we think we do. Taken (...) together, we argue that these considerations resolve the apparent conflict between our subjective impressions and empirical data on visual capacity, while also illuminating the nature of the representations underlying perceptual experience. (shrink)

Originally conceptualized by Bandura as the process of cognitive restructuring that allows individuals to disassociate with their internal moral standards and behave unethically without feeling distress, moral disengagement has attracted the attention of management researchers in recent years. An increasing body of research has examined the factors which lead people to morally disengage and its related outcomes in the workplace. However, the conceptualization of moral disengagement, how it should be measured, the manner in which it develops, and its influence on (...) work outcomes are areas of continued debate among researchers. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of research on moral disengagement in the workplace and develop a comprehensive research agenda that highlights opportunities for theoretical and empirical advancement of the literature. (shrink)

If updating with E has the same result across all epistemically possible worlds, then the agent has no uncertainty as to the behavior of the update, and we may call it a transparent update. If an agent is uncertain about the behavior of an update, we may call it opaque. In order to model the uncertainty an agent has about the result of an update, the same update must behave differently across different possible worlds. In this paper, I study opaque (...) updates using a simple system of dynamic epistemic logic suitably modified for that purpose. The paper highlights the connection between opaque updates and the dynamic-epistemic principles Perfect-Recall and No-Miracles. I argue that opaque updates are central to contemporary discussions in epistemology, in particular to externalist theories of knowledge and to the related problem of epistemic bootstrapping, or easy knowledge. Opaque updates allow us to explicitly investigate a dynamic form of uncertainty, using simple and precise logical tools. (shrink)

Cases of inexact observations have been used extensively in the recent literature on higher-order evidence and higher-order knowledge. I argue that the received understanding of inexact observations is mistaken. Although it is convenient to assume that such cases can be modeled statically, they should be analyzed as dynamic cases that involve change of knowledge. Consequently, the underlying logic should be dynamic epistemic logic, not its static counterpart. When reasoning about inexact knowledge, it is easy to confuse the initial situation, the (...) observation process, and the result of the observation; I analyze the three separately. This dynamic approach has far reaching implications: Williamson’s influential argument against the KK principle loses its force, and new insights can be gained regarding synchronic and diachronic introspection principles. (shrink)

Jonah N. Schupbach and Jan Sprenger and Vincenzo Crupi and Katya Tentori have recently proposed measures of explanatory power and have shown that they are characterized by certain arguably desirable conditions or axioms. I further examine the properties of these two measures, and a third measure considered by I. J. Good and Timothy McGrew . This third measure also has an axiomatic representation. I consider a simple coin-tossing example in which only the Crupi–Tentori measure does not perform well. The Schupbach–Sprenger (...) and Good–McGrew measures are based on different notions of explanatory power, but both are tenable. 1 Introduction2 Measures of Explanatory Power3 The Schupbach–Sprenger Measure4 The Crupi–Tentori Measure5 The Good–McGrew Measure6 Affirmative versus Comprehensive Explanatory Power7 Coin-Flipping Examples8 Decomposition9 Conclusion. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) to different sites allows interfering with dysfunctional network function implicated in major depression. Because a prominent clinical feature of depression is anhedonia--the inability to experience pleasure from previously pleasurable activities--and because there is clear evidence of dysfunctions of the reward system in depression, DBS to the nucleus accumbens might offer a new possibility to target depressive symptomatology in otherwise treatment-resistant depression. Three patients suffering from extremely resistant forms of depression, who did not respond to pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, (...) and electroconvulsive therapy, were implanted with bilateral DBS electrodes in the nucleus accumbens. Stimulation parameters were modified in a double-blind manner, and clinical ratings were assessed at each modification. Additionally, brain metabolism was assessed 1 week before and 1 week after stimulation onset. Clinical ratings improved in all three patients when the stimulator was on, and worsened in all three patients when the stimulator was turned off. Effects were observable immediately, and no side effects occurred in any of the patients. Using FDG-PET, significant changes in brain metabolism as a function of the stimulation in fronto-striatal networks were observed. No unwanted effects of DBS other than those directly related to the surgical procedure (eg pain at sites of implantation) were observed. Dysfunctions of the reward system--in which the nucleus accumbens is a key structure--are implicated in the neurobiology of major depression and might be responsible for impaired reward processing, as evidenced by the symptom of anhedonia. These preliminary findings suggest that DBS to the nucleus accumbens might be a hypothesis-guided approach for refractory major depression. (shrink)

Within psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, theory of mind refers to the cognitive ability to reason about the mental states of other people, thus recognizing them as having beliefs, knowledge, intentions and emotions of their own. In this project, we construct a natural language inference (NLD) dataset that tests the ability of a state of the art language model, RoBERTa-large finetuned on the MNLI dataset, to make theory of mind inferences related to knowledge and belief. Experimental results suggest that the (...) model struggles with such inferences, including after attempts for further finetuning. (shrink)

The problem of perception is the problem of explaining how perceptual knowledge is possible. The skeptic has a simple solution: it is not possible. I analyze the weaknesses of one type of skeptical reasoning by making explicit a dynamic epistemic principle from dynamic epistemic logic that is implicitly used in debating the problem, with the aim of offering a novel diagnosis to this skeptical argument. I argue that prominent modest foundationalist responses to perceptual skepticism can be understood as rejecting the (...) dynamic assumption made by the skeptic, that there are independent reasons to doubt the truth of such a principle in the context of skeptical reasoning, and that making the dynamic principle explicit allows for a better understanding of at least one objection to modest foundationalism. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an effort to explicate the concept of explanatory power in a Bayesian framework by constructing explanatory measures. It has been argued that those measures should not violate the principle of explanatory justice, which states that explanatory power cannot be extended “for free.” I argue, by formal means, that one recent measure claiming to be immune from explanatory injustice fails to be so. I end by concluding that the explanatory justice criticism can be dissolved, given a natural (...) interpretation of the concept of negative explanatory power. (shrink)

Jonah N. Schupbach and Jan Sprenger have proposed conditions of adequacy for measures of explanatory power. They derive and defend a measure of explanatory power satisfying their conditions of adequacy. This article furthers the development of their measure. The requirement that the measure be multidimensional analytic is avoided. Several proofs are simplified, and gaps in proofs are filled.

Williamson (2000) argues that the KK principle is inconsistent with knowledge of margin for error in cases of inexact perceptual observations. This paper argues, primarily by analogy to a different scenario, that Williamson’s argument is fallacious. Margin for error principles describe the agent’s knowledge as a result of an inexact perceptual event, not the agent’s knowledge state in general. Therefore, epistemic agents can use their knowledge of margin for error at most once after a perceptual event, but not more. This (...) insight blocks a crucial step in Williamson’s original argument. Along the way, the value of standard epistemic logic for analyzing margin for error reasoning is challenged. (shrink)

Laurence Goldstein has ‘re-created’ Wittgenstein's doctoral viva, arguing that had Wittgenstein's dissertation, his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘been judged by normal standards of originality and philosophical argumentation, it would have failed’. Goldstein claims that Wittgenstein ‘lifted’ central doctrines from Russell and from Bernard Bolzano. I point out that passages allegedly plagiarized from Russell are actually criticisms of his doctrines, and that there is no evidence that Wittgenstein even knew Bolzano's work, directly or indirectly. I argue that alleged similarities, substantial and stylistic, between (...) his work and Bolzano's give no support even to a weaker claim of influence. (shrink)

A dynamic epistemic logic is presented in which the single agent can reason about his knowledge stages before and after announcements. The logic is generated by reinterpreting multi agent private announcements in a single agent environment. It is shown that a knowability principle is valid for such logic: any initially true ϕ can be known after a certain number of announcements.

V. Alan White and Gertrud Walton have published responses to my note on Einstein's simultaneity Gedankenexperiment, in which I present a version of the argument free of the flaws to be found in that given by Einstein. White thinks I go too far, that no reformulation is necessary; Walton, that I don't go far enough, and that i the inconsistencies in Einstein's exposition are ‘irreconcilable’. I r shall try to explain why I think both are mistaken.

Epistemic closure refers to the assumption that humans are able to recognize what entails or contradicts what they believe and know, or more accurately, that humans’ epistemic states are closed under logical inferences. Epistemic closure is part of a larger theory of mind ability, which is arguably crucial for downstream NLU tasks, such as inference, QA and conversation. In this project, we introduce a new automatically constructed natural language inference dataset that tests inferences related to epistemic closure. We test and (...) further fine tune the model RoBERTa-large-mnli on the new dataset, with limited positive results. (shrink)

V. Alan White and Gertrud Walton have published responses to my note on Einstein's simultaneity Gedankenexperiment , in which I present a version of the argument free of the flaws to be found in that given by Einstein. White thinks I go too far, that no reformulation is necessary; Walton, that I don't go far enough, and that i the inconsistencies in Einstein's exposition are ‘irreconcilable’. I r shall try to explain why I think both are mistaken.

Michael Cohen; V—The Same Action, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 70, Issue 1, 1 June 1970, Pages 75–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/70.

For several decades, researchers have debated whether attention is required for consciousness or not. Throughout this time, three particular paradigms — inattentional blindness, change blindness, and the attentional blink — have been extensively used to examine this relationship. In this chapter, we highlight many of the key findings that have been discovered using these paradigms, and discuss what these findings have taught us about the role attention plays in perceptual consciousness.

This paper aims to explore the complex manner in which Martin Amis defines the state of addiction–as the sustained collapse of objectivity and subjectivity for any inhabitant of a social system–as well as how the systemic patterns of life impose, imprint, and perpetuate themselves upon the individual.

According to one form of epistemic contrastivism, due to Jonathan Schaffer, knowledge is not a binary relation between an agent and a proposition, but a ternary relation between an agent, a proposition, and a context-basing question. In a slogan: to know is to know the answer to a question. I argue, first, that Schaffer-style epistemic contrastivism can be semantically represented in inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, a recent implementation of inquisitive semantics in the framework of dynamic epistemic logic; second, that within (...) inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, the contrastive ternary knowledge operator is reducible to the standard binary one. The reduction shows, I argue, that Schaffer’s argument in favor of contrastivism is compatible with a binary picture of knowledge. This undercuts the force of the argument in favor of contrastivism. (shrink)