Constructive Skepticism Research Articles

La interacción entre contexto social y método científico: implicancias epistemológicas.

Abstract: This paper examines the interaction between the sociocultural environment and scientific progress om an epistemological perspective. It analyzes how exogenous factors, beyond the inherent logical foundations, permeate research work. The study contrasts the internalist tradition, which prioritizes conceptual aspects, with the externalist approach,which contemplates social, political and economic conditioning factors. A critical scrutiny of historical cases shows the reciprocal influences between society and science. Although the scientific community applies rigorous intersubjective controls, it is not exempt from contextual biases. Consequently, a reflexive epistemological perspective is proposed that combines situated knowledge with notions of relative objectivity. This raises important questions: To what extent does science transcend the conditioning factors of its environment to achieve objectivity? How can we discern the validity of scientific findings linked to social interests? A comprehensive understanding of science demands a balance between constructive skepticism about one’s own assumptions and reasonable confidence in solid empirical evidence. Therefore, a critical but open view is required that recognizes contextual limitations and the capacity of science to transcend them through rigorous methods and the inquiry of objective knowledge. This paper seeks to contribute to this epistemological reflection by investigating the complex intertwining of science and society. Keywords: Social context, scientific method, epistemology.

How malleable are cognitive abilities? A critical perspective on popular brief interventions.

A number of popular research areas suggest that cognitive performance can be manipulated via relatively brief interventions. These findings have generated a lot of traction, given their inherent appeal to individuals and society. However, recent evidence indicates that cognitive abilities might not be as malleable as preliminary findings implied and that other more stable factors play an important role. In this article, I provide a critical outlook on these trends of research, combining findings that have mainly remained segregated despite shared characteristics. Specifically, I suggest that the purported cognitive improvements elicited by many interventions are not reliable, and that their ecological validity remains limited. I conclude with a call for constructive skepticism when evaluating claims of generalized cognitive improvements following brief interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Creative Skepticism and Affectionate Curiosity: Scholarship, Practice, and Theory-Building in Psychoanalysis

This paper appreciates and advocates for scholarship in psychoanalysis. This is not the same as “scientific” research—running experiments, sifting through data, having a lab or control group. What I have in mind is an inclusive attitude of synthesis, curiosity, and constructive skepticism—awareness of historical, political, cultural, and organizational contexts; identifying, questioning, and working one’s way through core assumptions; considering diverse ideas, theories, experiences, and evidence; working toward new constructs to integrate those new ideas; discarding outmoded ideas (even when they have been taken for granted); considering established ideas in light of historical and technological change. This kind of open-minded, ongoing, curious, informed reflection about our convictions and influences generates new resources for theory and clinical work. It can protect and promote imagination, discipline, critical faculties, and overall mental acuity and activity.

Shifting Minds: A Quantitative Reappraisal of Cognitive-Intervention Research

Recent popular areas of research in psychology suggest that behavioral interventions can have profound effects on our cognitive abilities. In particular, the study of brain training, video gaming, mindset, and stereotype threat all include claims that low-cost, noninvasive manipulations of the environment can greatly affect individual performance. Here, I provide a quantitative reappraisal of this literature, focusing on recent meta-analytic findings. Specifically, I show that effect-size distributions in the four aforementioned areas are best modeled by multiple rather than single latent distributions, suggesting important discrepancies in the effect sizes reported. I further demonstrate that these multimodal characteristics are not typical within the broader field of psychology, using 107 meta-analyses published in three top-tier journals as a comparison. The effect-size distributions observed in cognitive-intervention research therefore appear to be uncommon, and their characteristics are largely unexplained by current theoretical frameworks of cognitive improvement. Before the source of these discrepancies is better understood, the current study calls for constructive skepticism in evaluating claims of cognitive improvement after behavioral interventions and for caution when this line of research influences large-scale policies.

The Novel’s Promise: George Eliot’s Skepticism

In contrast to standard accounts of George Eliot and nineteenth-century intellectual culture, I argue that Eliot makes a case for the novel, over science or philosophy, as the most promising intellectual paradigm. In Middlemarch, Eliot directs an anti-dogmatic skepticism—one that I argue is distinctively novelistic—toward empiricism, the dominant epistemology in nineteenth-century Britain. She embeds the empirical association of visual experience and knowledge in a complex plot of desire and marriage, reputation and ruin, demonstrating the dangers of dogmatic empiricism for ordinary lives. In its place, Eliot formulates a new, skeptical mode of visuality that encompasses and exceeds the epistemological affordances of sight. By interpolating a constructive skepticism within novelistic form—and showing that it is inseparable from that form—Eliot makes her case for the novel’s unique intellectual promise. I argue, finally, that Eliot’s skepticism both anticipates and complicates Stanley Cavell’s concept of “acknowledgement.”

Gustav Jahoda: The art and science of constructive skepticism.

In this essay, we consider Gustav Jahoda’s contributions to empirical research and conceptual reflection in the fields of cross-cultural and social psychology. The first section draws attention to what we see as salient characteristics of his empirical research. The second section describes Jahoda’s critiques of some iconic theoretical concepts and distinctions. The third section describes his historical interest in the development of the two fields, with cultural context as a focus. In the conclusion section, we mention why Jahoda’s contributions need to be taken into account by current researchers and those to come.

Constructive Skepticism and Being a Mirror in the Zhuangzi

The Zhuangzi text deploys two epistemic themes to accomplish its ends of combatting human pretensions to know the world and to prompting us to rediscover the world through fresh eyes. To get us to shed our arrogant dispositions it applies a constructive skepticism to whatever it is that human beings claim to know. To point towards a more constructive relationship with Nature, it articulates the stance of being a mirror to nature. This essay will explain how the text does this and relates its conceptions of skepticism and being as mirror to relevant contemporary science.

Constructive Skepticism and Being a Mirror in the Zhuangzi

Constructive Skepticism and Being a Mirror in the <i>Zhuangzi</i>

Making sense of discrepancies in working memory training experiments: a Monte Carlo simulation.

The idea that working memory training can enhance general cognitive abilities has received a lot of attention in the last few years. Some studies have demonstrated far transfer to other cognitive abilities after training, whereas others have failed to replicate these findings (see Melby-Lervag and Hulme, 2013, for a meta-analytic review). These setbacks have had unfortunate effects on the field of cognitive training, sometimes raising concerns regarding methodology and analyses in concurrent labs. Although constructive skepticism is often healthy in fields based on peer-review, the current dynamic has created a climate of hostility detrimental to the advancement of science. In this paper, I show that some of these differences can simply emerge from population parameters underlying cognitive growth curves. Based on a Monte Carlo simulation, I demonstrate that unbalanced samples are bound to arise by chance when individuals differ in their ability to learn, and propose a few remedies to circumvent this problem. Finally, I discuss the impact of cognitive training studies in refining theories of cognition and suggest directions for future research.

RE: A Model Too Far

Freidlin and Korn’s editorial (1) concerning our article on prostate cancer overdiagnosis questioned the utility of our personalized overdiagnosis estimates for informing treatment decision making. Their comments suggest that knowing the risk of overdiagnosis does not help to inform about the outcomes of various treatment options after diagnosis. However, overdiagnosis informs about the outcome of a key treatment option—that of no treatment. Consider the dilemma faced by a patient who has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer after a screening test. Knowing that treatment can reduce the risk of dying from cancer but the treatment could leave him impotent or incontinent, should he be treated or not? The value of our results is that they inform the patient about what might happen if his cancer were to be left untreated. Thus, for a 50-year-old man with a biopsy Gleason score of 7 and a prostate-specific antigen of 4.5ng/mL, there is a high risk (risk of 9 of 10) that he will have to deal with a symptomatic tumor at some point in his life if he does not treat his cancer, whereas for an 80-year-old man with a Gleason score 6 and a prostate-specific antigen of 5ng/mL, this risk is much lower, approximately one in five. For this older patient, if he does absolutely nothing at this point, there is an 80% chance that his cancer will never cause symptoms or problems. This kind of information could be very helpful in persuading many older, low-risk patients to consider active surveillance, which is likely to be the single most important change in clinical practice to reduce the problem of overtreatment. Freidlin and Korn also critique our modeling approach, stating that “the most reliable and transparent approach to estimating overdiagnosis … is with an appropriate analysis of data from a randomized screening trial” (1). However they do not tell us what an “appropriate analysis” might be. Conventional statistical analysis runs into problems when attempting to infer overdiagnosis frequencies from trials because whether a case has been overdiagnosed is not observable. There have been attempts to use observed excess incidence in the screened arm as a proxy for overdiagnosis, but this approach, because it typically produces inflated estimates (2), particularly under insufficient follow-up, which is a limitation of all published prostate screening trials. A modeling approach goes beneath the surface of empirical data and can be applied to trials as well as to population incidence data. This approach has a long history in the biostatistics literature [eg, (3,4)]. In general, we support a healthy and constructive skepticism of models. Yet, in this this situation, only a model can provide personalized estimates of the chance that a screen-detected prostate cancer has been overdiagnosed, and the resulting nomogram adds materially to the information currently available for patients considering the option of no treatment.

HES PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: WHAT’S WRONG WITH ECONOMICS?

The piece begins with the proposition that the economic perspective on human activity must reflect the fact that human beings transact in a world defined for the actors by social norms. An analysis of the crisis of 2008 is offered as a demonstration of the value of adopting such a broader perspective. Part II offers an historical model based on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy of such a broader analysis. The piece closes with the case that the history of ideas offers alternative perspectives on the questions we explore in economics today, and thus can serve as a valuable resource for constructive skepticism of the current discourse.

American Literature Coming Apart

Last summer, I received the following email message from Gordon Hutner, editor of American Literary History: Dear David: I'm writing to invite you to contribute to a special issue of ALH that I'm assembling for next year. The project, as part of our anniversary volume, is to review titles from the last twenty years, especially books that our contributors think have been forgotten or misvalued. Ideally, you'll choose a scholarly or critical book that you think has been neglected or one that deserves a more constructive skepticism than it first received. The overall idea is to review the last 20 years and use the occasion of these new “reviews” to provide a kind of retrospect on the last two decades of American literary historiography and criticism. I say that I encourage you to choose a critical or scholarly book, though of course, you are free to select a title that's more notable for its theoretical engagement. You may also choose such a title because you wish it had more impact than it turned out to have.

Locke's 'Constructive Skepticism' -- A Reappraisal

Locke's 'Constructive Skepticism'- A Reappraisal M. JAMIE FERREIRA IN HIS TreatiseHume challenges the philosophical division of all reasoning into "knowledge and probability," proposing as a corrective the intermediate category of "proof. ''~ He recapitulates this point in a footnote to his first Enquiry, where he specifically points to Locke as an exponent of a division of "all arguments into demonstrative and probable," proposing once again the corrective category of "proof."* The suggestion is that Locke failed to recognize that category--namely, those arguments from experience which are "free from doubt" or "leave no room for doubt"3mand so is led to unacceptable conclusions. Hume clearly saw this reading of Locke's dichotomy as a reading for which he need not argue, and thus saw himself as introducing a corrective rather than merely reinforcing or emphasizing a category commonly assumed in philosophical circles. Such a reading of Locke, however, becomes problematic in light of welldocumented analyses of a tradition of "constructive skepticism" (developed in the works of Chillingworth, Tillotson, Wilkins, and others) in the fifty years preceding Locke's Essay, in which the category of "moral certainty"-constituted by the absence of 'reasonable' ground for doubt--provided a bridge between "knowledge" and "probability." For it has been claimed that Locke's view in the Essayshould be seen as "the culmination" of the fifty-year developmentmin particular, that the Essayprovided a "generalized" version and "application" of the "major themes" of those predecessors, and offered a doctrine which was in fact "in its fundamental features identical with those A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, x978), ~24. * Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, a975), 56n. s Cf. my "Hume's Naturalism--'Proof' and Practice" (forthcoming, Philosophical Quarterly) for a study of the possible difference between the two formulations of the definition of proof. [211] 212 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of his predecessors [although] there are terminological differences. TM And that claim has been reiterated in the more recent suggestion that "it is plain that Locke belongs to this tradition of constructive skepticism. ''5 If these claims are correct, then Hume was simply wrong to think that Locke failed to do justice to the category he was proposing as a corrective, for Locke was the culmination of a tradition which was centrally concerned to provide just such a bridge category--namely, "moral certainty," a kind of 'proof' in which there was no "room for doubt." Moreover, other later critics of Locke would also have been guilty of failing to give Locke sufficient credit on this, and consequently on related matters. For example, the "appeal to common sense" and "the deep interest in the psychological aspects of knowledge" are themes which it has been suggested were "undoubtedly inspired in large part by Locke's Essay. ''6 But these were some of the very things which Locke was criticized as failing to do justice to by certain figures coming after him. At the very least the claim that Locke's doctrine was fundamentally "identical " to that of the preceding tradition, appealing like them to "the certainty of ordinary life and the doctrine of levels of certainty ''7 needs qualification. I want to suggest, moreover, that there are elements in Locke's thought which support an understanding of him as departing in a significant way from the earlier tradition, rather than as culminating it through maintaining a doctrine "identical" in its "fundamental features." I suggest that putatively "terminological " differences signal substantive differences between the two doctrines, for Locke's restrictions on the word "certainty" fit with and reinforce a more substantive restriction in his doctrine which serves to distinguish it in an important way from the earlier one. Highlighting this will make more plausible how Locke could have been interpreted, by those after him witnessing (whether knowingly or not) to the earlier tradition, as alien to its overriding concerns. The grounds for that interpretation are worth exploring, both for the light they can shed on Locke's own thought, and for a better understanding of Locke's place in the historical progression of British thought. 1...

RNA “Memory Pills” and Memory: A Review of Clinical and Experimental Status

Various studies which have investigated the effects of RNA and RNA synthesizers on memory and/or learning were evaluated. It was concluded that findings have thus far failed to lend support to the notion that RNA functions as a memory template or encoder. In the future, public announcements regarding the efficacy of “memory drugs” or “memory pills” should be viewed with constructive skepticism.