Common Sense Judgment Research Articles

Exploring disagreement: Using video‐based interviews to understand a communal resource

AbstractDisagreement is a fundamental dimension of social life. In many situations, however, people are reticent to explicitly criticise the actions of others. It follows that if social researchers wish to study differences in people's common sense judgements of other's actions in an interview setting they need to carefully design how discussion of these differences are structured. This paper examines a research project that used context‐specific video clips to structure interviews with users of a communal infrastructural resource. In digging into the practical detail of an interview encounter, the paper contributes to human geography's ongoing conversation about the practicalities of doing interview‐based research.

Science fiction as a source of realistic description of behavior 
 (based on the short story by Kir Bulychev "I'm dialing a number")

The article disputes the assertion of N. Frye and Tz. Todorov that fiction is created only on the basis of fiction. It is reality that is ultimately the source of works of art. Realistic descriptions may be perfectly present in fiction, and most readers intuitively know what description is realistic and what is fantastic one. But this is a rather difficult task for AI. In order to teach AI to understand tests better, it is necessary to investigate how people build their understanding of the information that is not stated in the text clearly. The article describes the method of behavioral analysis of texts and provides an example of the fantastic story analysis. It shows that a significant part of the knowledge about the characters, their state, circumstances and forms of behavior is extracted on the basis of common sense as something taken for granted for a person belonging to the given culture, but not for a representative of another culture or a computer program. The same applies to the difference between real and fantastic events. For AI to understand the meaning of the described events, it is to be able to rely on common sense knowledge, extract common sense judgments, that are appropriate for a current context, and draw appropriate conclusions based on them.

Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity, and the Theopolitical Problem

Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity, and the Theopolitical Problem

Information and explanation: an inconsistent triad and solution

An important strand in philosophy of science takes scientific explanation to consist in the conveyance of some kind of information (e.g., Lewis, 1986; Railton, Synthese, 48, 233–56, 1981). Here I argue that this idea is also implicit in some core arguments of mechanists, some of whom (e.g., Craver, 2014) are proponents of an ontic conception of explanation that might be thought inconsistent with it (Piccinini & Craver, Synthese, 183, 283–311, 2011; Zednik, 2015). However, informational accounts seem to conflict with some lay and scientific commonsense judgments and a central goal of the theory of explanation, because information is relative to the background knowledge of agents (Dretske, 1981). Sometimes we make lay judgments about whether a model is an explanation simpliciter, not just an explanation relative to some particular agent. And as philosophers of explanation, we would like a philosophical account to tell us when a model is an explanation simpliciter, not just when a model is an explanation relative to some particular agent. Thus, even if one’s account of explanation is not concerned with explanation qua communicative or speech act, the account’s reliance on the concept of information generates a prima facie conflict between the claims that 1) explanation is the conveyance of information, 2) information is relative to the background knowledge of an agent, and 3) some models are explanations not relative to the background knowledge of any particular agent. I sketch a solution to this puzzle by distinguishing informationally what I call “explanation simpliciter” from what I call “explanation-to,” relativizing the latter to an individual’s background knowledge and the former to what I call “total scientific background knowledge”.

The use and limitations of null-model-based hypothesis testing

In this article I give a critical evaluation of the use and limitations of null-model-based hypothesis testing as a research strategy in the biological sciences. According to this strategy, the null model based on a randomization procedure provides an appropriate null hypothesis stating that the existence of a pattern is the result of random processes or can be expected by chance alone, and proponents of other hypotheses should first try to reject this null hypothesis in order to demonstrate their own hypotheses. Using as an example the controversy over the use of null hypotheses and null models in species co-occurrence studies, I argue that null-model-based hypothesis testing fails to work as a proper analog to traditional statistical null-hypothesis testing as used in well-controlled experimental research, and that the random process hypothesis should not be privileged as a null hypothesis. Instead, the possible use of the null model resides in its role of providing a way to challenge scientists’ commonsense judgments about how a seemingly unusual pattern could have come to be. Despite this possible use, null-model-based hypothesis testing still carries certain limitations, and it should not be regarded as an obligation for biologists who are interested in explaining patterns in nature to first conduct such a test before pursuing their own hypotheses.

Draining the pond: why Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor is self-defeating

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence .

The Problem with Person-Rearing Accounts of Moral Status

Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum recently developed the ingenious and novel person-rearing account of moral status, which preserves the commonsense judgment that humans have a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. It aims to vindicate speciesist judgments while avoiding the problems typically associated with speciesist views. We argue, however, that there is good reason to reject person-rearing views. Person-rearing views have to be coupled with an account of flourishing, which will (according to Jaworska and Tannenbaum) be either a species norm or an intrinsic potential account of flourishing. As we show, however, person-rearing accounts generate extremely implausible consequences when combined with the accounts of flourishing Jaworska and Tannenbaum need for the purposes of their view.

Interactivity of Neural Representations for Perceiving Shared Social Memory

Although the concept of “common sense” is often taken for granted, judging whether behavior or knowledge is common sense requires a complex series of mental processes. Additionally, different perceptions of common sense can lead to social conflicts. Thus, it is important to understand how we perceive common sense and make relevant judgments. The present study investigated the dynamics of neural representations underlying judgments of what common sense is. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants indicated the extent to which they thought that a given sentence corresponded to common sense under the given perspective. We incorporated two different decision contexts involving different cultural perspectives to account for social variability of the judgments, an important feature of common sense judgments apart from logical true/false judgments. Our findings demonstrated that common sense versus non-common sense perceptions involve the amygdala and a brain network for episodic memory recollection, including the hippocampus, angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, suggesting integrated affective, mnemonic, and social functioning in common sense processing. Furthermore, functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis revealed that interactivity among the amygdala, angular gyrus, and parahippocampal cortex reflected representational features of common sense perception and not those of non-common sense perception. Our study demonstrated that the social memory network is exclusively involved in processing common sense and not non-common sense. These results suggest that intergroup exclusion and misunderstanding can be reduced by experiencing and encoding long-term social memories about behavioral norms and knowledge that act as common sense of the outgroup.

The Influence of Self-Control and Social Status on Self-Deception.

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of self-control and social status on self-deception. The present study adopted a forward-looking paradigm to investigate how self-control and social status influence self-deception. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to complete 10 questions, after they predicted and completed 40 questions (commonsense judgment materials) either with or without answer hints. The results indicated that the participants had higher predicted scores under conditions with answer hints compared with conditions without answer hints and that the predicted scores were much higher than the actual scores under conditions with answer hints. In Experiment 2, individuals with different self-control traits were chosen to perform the operation and induction of the perception of social status and then complete tests such as Experiment 1. The results showed that differences in the predicted scores between conditions with answer hints and those without answer hints were observed to be greater in individuals with low self-control traits than in individuals with higher self-control traits, however, such differences between individuals with higher and low self-control traits were only observed in conditions with low social status perception, not in the conditions with high social status perception. The findings indicated that compared with individuals with high self-control, low self-control individuals tended to produce more self-deception. In addition, high social status in the individuals’ perception could restrain the influence of low self-control on self-deception, while low social status in the individuals’ perception could increase the self-control’s influence on self-deception.

Rigorously Collecting Commonsense Judgments for Complex Question-Answer Content

Community Question Answering (CQA) websites are a popular tool for internet users to fulfill diverse information needs. Posted questions can be multiple sentences long and span diverse domains. They go beyond factoid questions and can be conversational, opinion-seeking and experiential questions, that might have multiple, potentially conflicting, useful answers from different users. In this paper, we describe a large-scale formative study to collect commonsense properties of questions and answers from 18 diverse communities from stackexchange.com. We collected 50,000 human judgments on 500 question-answer pairs. Commonsense properties are features that humans can extract and characterize reliably by using their commonsense knowledge and native language skills, and no special domain expertise is assumed. We report results and suggestions for designing human computation tasks for collecting commonsense semantic judgments.

Sentient Nonpersons and the Disvalue of Death.

Implicit in our everyday attitudes and practices is the assumption that death ordinarily harms a person who dies. A far more contested matter is whether death harms sentient individuals who are not persons, a category that includes many animals and some human beings. On the basis of the deprivation account of the harm of death, I argue that death harms sentient nonpersons (whenever their lives would be worth continuing). I next consider possible bases for the commonsense judgment that death ordinarily harms persons more than it harms sentient nonpersons. Contrary to what some philosophers believe, it is doubtful that the familiar resources of prudential value theory can vindicate this judgment. I show that the approach that at first glance seems most promising for supporting this judgment - namely, invoking an objective account of well-being - faces substantial challenges, before arguing that McMahan's time-relative interest account supplies the needed theoretical basis. I then go on to extract a significant practical implication of the first thesis, that death ordinarily harms sentient nonpersons: We should find a way to discontinue the routine killing of animal subjects following their use in experiments.

Subsea Source Control Planning Solutions to Prepare Operators for Worse Case Discharge Well Events

The development of a Source Control Emergency Response Plan is one of the best ways in which an operator can ensure that the goals of their regional or project-specific Source Control emergency preparedness efforts will be met, if needed. Procedures for handling emergencies are absolutely essential to ensure the protection of life, property, and the environment. This Source Control Emergency Response Plan (SCERP) is based on decades of conventional and subsea well control experience to ensure that the planning efforts and to develop Source Control Emergency Response Planning (SCERP) through field deployment of the system in order to cap a subsea well. The aforementioned experience covers many years of source control, well control and intervention operations in conceivable operational settings and in a variety of geographic locations. The equipment and procedures specified in this SCERP address a “worst case” scenario involving a loss of well control, necessitating the immediate mobilization of intervention equipment and personnel. The primary objective of the SCERP is to establish a process for responding to and safely managing source-control emergencies using a standard, uniform approach. This process includes the following information:emergency contact information and resourcesresponse managementsource-control operational overview with strategic methodologiesorganizational staffing recommendationscheck list to guide groups and unit leaders andkey resource identification The SCERP is not intended to replace sound judgment. Modification of the mobilization plan and intervention strategy may be necessary, depending on circumstances. Subsea source-control events require common sense and professional judgment on the part of the person(s) in charge of operations, and no operation should be undertaken if it involves unreasonable risk to personnel. Additional, a Logistics Plan must be developed to support operations by identifying mobilization guidelines from the stored location for the capping stack and other support equipment necessary to secure the well. Disembarkation of the equipment clearly offering various options with estimated timelines for transporting the equipment by air, ground and sea should also be outlined to ensure equipment arrives timely and safely. Locating vessels and rigs meeting operational requirements will help ensure well incidents are managed and executed within incident-command and other expectations.

When Does "Diversity"' in Development Reduce Common Failures? Insights from Probabilistic Modeling

Fault tolerance via diverse redundancy, with multiple versions' of a system in a redundant configuration, is an attractive defence against design faults. To reduce the probability of failures, development and procurement practices pursue diversity' between the ways the different versions are developed. But difficult questions remain open about which practices are more effective to this aim. About these questions, probabilistic models have helped by exposing fallacies in common sense judgements. However, most make very restrictive assumptions. They model well scenarios in which diverse versions are developed in rigorous isolation from each other: A condition that many think desirable, but is unlikely in practice. We extend these models to cover nonindependent development processes for diverse versions. This gives us a rigorous way of framing claims and open questions about how best to pursue diversity, and about the effects--negative and positive--of commonalities between developments, from specification corrections to the choice of test cases. We obtain three theorems that, under specific scenarios, identify preferences between alternative ways of seeking diversity. We also discuss nonintuitive issues, including how expected system reliability may be improved by creating intentional negative' dependences between the developments of different versions.

Brief of Professors of Civil Procedure as Amici Curiae in Wood v. Moss, No. 13-115

In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), the Court established the standards to determine whether a complaint states a claim upon which relief can be granted. That determination focuses on the elements of the claim and on the non-conclusory, factual matter alleged in that complaint. The sufficiency of a complaint must be established by reference to the alleged facts and the reasonable inferences that may be drawn therefrom. The question is whether those allegations and inferences plausibly suggest a claim upon which relief can be granted. Wood v. Moss, No. 13-115, now pending before the Supreme Court, raises the issue of what constitutes a reasonable inference under the Twombly-Iqbal standard. In our view, a reasonable inference is one on which reasonable minds may differ. It need not be the exclusive inference one may draw from the facts. Rather, it need only fall within the range of sensible, rational alternatives. We argue that the Court should adopt an approach to reasonable inferences that does not impose a restrictive pleading regime that is inconsistent with the principles underlying Rules 8(a)(2) and 12(b)(6) or with the Court’s decisions in Twombly and Iqbal. The endorsed standard should recognize the primary role of district courts in making what is essentially a practical and commonsense judgment as to which inferences may be sufficient to support a claim. Certainly, a mechanical formula intended to instruct courts on how to identify a reasonable inference would serve neither the ends of justice nor principles of sound case-management.

Safeguarding the Commander's Authority to Review the Findings of a Court-Martial

“Do you really think that after a jury has found someone guilty, and dismissed someone from the military for sexual assault, that one person [the commander], over the advice of their legal counselor, should be able to say, ‘Never mind’?” Senator Claire McCaskill recently posed this question in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, as she and others expressed outrage over the disapproval of a sexual assault conviction by a military commander. Her question reflects a justifiably profound respect for the verdicts of juries, one that runs deep in American legal tradition, but reveals a basic misunderstanding about the court-martial panel in the military. The court-martial panel is not a true jury. Federal juries in criminal cases must have twelve jurors and be unanimous. State juries must have at least six jurors, and five of six jurors voting to convict is not enough to satisfy the Sixth Amendment. Unlike federal and state juries, the panel that convicted the accused in the sex assault case discussed above had only five members and it did not have to be unanimous – only a two-thirds vote, or four out of five, was needed for a conviction. No five-member panel, unanimous or not, is a jury. Because the panel was not a true jury, the panel’s verdict will not always resemble the commonsense judgment of a jury. The Supreme Court made clear that court-martial panels are not juries. Because a court-martial panel is not a true jury, the commander should retain the authority to review its findings for this reason alone. The commander’s authority to review the findings is actually a safeguard against the court-martial panel’s verdict, which is sometimes not supported by the evidence. Part I introduces the right to trial by jury as the key to liberty in the American scheme of justice. It also explains why the Founding Fathers denied military members this right along with all other protections of the Bill of Rights. Part II discusses the historical foundations of the court-martial and why the military justice system developed separately from the civilian justice system. The court-martial was and still is, first and foremost, a tool of discipline and not a court of law. Part III describes the essential differences between panels and juries and why those differences materially affect the reliability of verdicts. Part IV discusses the safeguards enacted by Congress to make up for the panel’s structural flaws. These safeguards are as unorthodox to the American scheme of justice as they are now controversial. They should not be eliminated unless the panel’s structural flaws are also corrected. Part V contains recommendations for amending the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to include a return to the original understanding that courts-martial should be limited in times of peace to disciplinary infractions. If the commander’s role seems antiquated today, so, too, is the denial of genuine due process to the men and women who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces.

The Network Theory of Well-Being: An Introduction

In this paper, I propose a novel approach to investigating the nature of well-being and a new theory about well-being. The approach is integrative and naturalistic. It holds that a theory of well-being should account for two different classes of evidence – our commonsense judgments about well-being and the science of well-being (i.e., positive psychology). The network theory holds that a person is in the state of well-being if she instantiates a homeostatically clustered network of feelings, emotions, attitudes, behaviors, traits, and interactions with the world that tends to have a relatively high number of states that feel good, that lead to states that feel good, or that are valued by the agent or her culture.

REASON, THE COMMON LAW, AND THE LIVING CONSTITUTION

This article reviews David Strauss's recent book,The Living Constitution. The thesis of Strauss's book is that constitutional law is a kind of common law, based largely on judicial precedent and commonsense judgments about what works and what is fair. In defending this claim, Strauss argues that central constitutional prohibitions of discrimination and protections of free speech have a common-law basis and that the originalist should consequently reject them. The review disputes this contention. It examines Strauss's account of the common law and argues that it cannot support our First Amendment protections of subversive advocacy, as Strauss says it does. The review then offers an alternative account of the common law based on the “classical” common-law theory associated with Coke and Hale. The latter account does support our protections of subversive advocacy but is much less appealing to those distrustful of ambitious and large-scale judicial action.

HP Sauce and the Hate Literature of Pop Art: bill bissett in the House of Commons

HP Sauce and the Hate Literature of Pop Art: bill bissett in the House of Commons Ryan J. Cox (bio) The minister, the Government and its vehicle, the Canada Council, are weak and full of fear—fearful of not appearing avant garde, fearful of being labeled culturally illiterate. Robert Wenman, MP Fraser Valley West (PC), 13 December 1977 they got a sause calld houses uv parliament for meat at th tabul hp sause it sure tastes shitty too bill bissett“in nova scotia th peopul call shit houses housus uv parliament” Taken at face value, the bissett affair of 1977–78 seems rather mundane, hardly worth noticing. A group of mostly opposition MPS, headed by Bob Wenman, the Tory member for Fraser Valley West, attempted to take the government to task for, in their eyes, the fiscal irresponsibility of the Canada Council for the Arts, a semi-autonomous Crown corporation. This irresponsibility was evident in the fact that Canada Council was funding “what anyone in [parliament] would term as offensive and demeaning pornography” (Canada 1845) and, as Hugh Anderson, the Parliamentary [End Page 147] Secretary to the Minister of Fisheries, put it, “a degradation to the printed word in Canada” (Canada 4084). It had the potential for great political theatre, linking as it did excessive government spending and morality—Jake Epp, another Tory MP, falsely alleged that certain unnamed publishers, likely alluding to bill bissett and his blew ointment press, had received “in excess of $100000 to publish poetry which … the average Canadian would call pornographic”1 (Canada 4989)—but the scandal never materialized and the stated goal of Wenman and company, the review of the Canada Council’s mandate, was never accomplished. The bissett affair has all the hallmarks of a by rote political scandal. There is little new in the way it attempts to tear strips off the Trudeau government’s hide and gain votes, primarily in conservative areas of the country. The moral panic angle—the poetry of bill bissett at the centre of the scandal is described as “evil,” and Wenman suggested that the government had an “obligation to fight” this evil lest it negatively affect the Dominion (Canada 1845)—had been played numerous times before. In the late 1940s and 1950s, E. Davie Fulton—a Conservative MP for Kamloops—made his political bones by joining Dr. Fredric Wertham’s campaign to control the publishing of crime and horror comics on the grounds that they were a threat to the youth of the nation and lead to juvenile delinquency (Bell 94–98, Palmer 187). Fulton went on, partially in thanks to this crusading, to the position of Minister of Justice under Diefenbaker and eventually ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. Interestingly, the bissett affair wasn’t even the first time in the 1970s that a poet would become a lightning rod in the House of Commons. When bpNichol won his Governor General’s Award in 1970, it provided MPS with an occasion to remark on what they perceived as government subsidizing of Marxism, pornography, and obscenity, which, as Caroline Bayard establishes, is at its core a thinly veiled attack on the counterculture by the establishment (112–13, 304). The other angle, focusing on government arts spending as misappropriation and waste, is also a common trope in Canadian politics. Wenman’s charge that not even “one half of one percent of the Canadian people would say [bissett’s work] is acceptable” and “Common sense judgment says that taxpayers’ dollars not be used to support such work” (Trueman), while allowing him to neatly sidestep the issue of censorship echoes the comments [End Page 148] of Prime Minister Stephen Harper about cuts to the arts in the run-up to the 2008 federal election. There Harper stated that “when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up—I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people” (Benzie, Campion-Smith, and Whittington). Harper’s “ordinary working people...

Lewis’ Modal Realism and Absence Causation

A major criticism of David Lewis’ counterfactual theory of causation is that it allows too many things to count as causes, especially since Lewis allows, in addition to events, absences to be causes as well. Peter Menzies has advanced this concern under the title “the problem of profligate causation.” In this paper, I argue that the problem of profligate causation provides resources for exposing a tension between Lewis’ acceptance of absence causation and his modal realism. The result is a different problem of profligate causation—one that attacks the internal consistency of Lewisian metaphysics rather than employing common sense judgments or intuitions that conflict with Lewis’ extensive list of causes.

Social vulnerability and prefrontal cortical function in elderly people: a report from the Canadian Study of Health and Aging

Prefrontal cortical lobe function is related to social behavior in humans. We investigated whether performance on tests of prefrontal cortical function was associated with social vulnerability. Associations with non-frontal cognitive function were investigated for comparison. 1216 participants aged 70+ of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging-2 screening examination, who also underwent detailed neuropsychological testing, comprised the study sample. Performance on WAIS-R abstraction, WAIS-R comprehension, Trails B, FAS and category verbal fluency, Block construction, Token Test and Wechsler Memory Scale Information Subset was tested in relation to the participant's level of social vulnerability using regression models adjusted for age, education, sex, frailty, MMSE score, diagnosis of depression, and use of psychoactive medications. Social vulnerability was measured by an index comprising many social problems or "deficits". The most socially vulnerable group had worse performance on FAS verbal fluency, generating 4.1 fewer words (95% CI: 1.8-6.4, p<0.001) than those in the least socially vulnerable group; those with intermediate social vulnerability generated 2.6 fewer words (95% CI: 0.4-4.8, p = 0.02). Social vulnerability was also associated, though less strongly, with category verbal fluency. The most socially vulnerable people had impaired performance on the Trails B, taking 37 seconds longer (95% CI: 11-63, p = 0.005). These results were independent of age, education, sex, frailty, MMSE score, depression, and psychoactive medications. Social vulnerability was not associated with performance on WAIS-R abstraction, WAIS-R comprehension, Block Design, Token Test or Wechsler Memory Scale tests. High social vulnerability was associated with impaired performance on verbal fluency and set shifting but not with common sense judgment, abstraction, long-term memory, constructional ability, or language comprehension. The association between social functioning and the cognitive functions subserved by prefrontal cortex warrants further study.