Default View Research Articles

Reading minds or reading scripts? De-intellectualising theory of mind.

Understanding the origins of human social cognition is a central challenge in contemporary science. In recent decades, the idea of a 'Theory of Mind' (ToM) has emerged as the most popular way of explaining unique features of human social cognition. This default view has been progressively undermined by research on 'implicit' ToM, which suggests that relevant precursor abilities may already be present in preverbal human infants and great apes. However, this area of research suffers from conceptual difficulties and empirical limitations, including explanatory circularity, over-intellectualisation, and inconsistent empirical replication. Our article breaks new ground by adapting 'script theory' for application to both linguistic and non-linguistic agents. It thereby provides a new theoretical framework able to resolve the aforementioned issues, generate novel predictions, and provide a plausible account of how individuals make sense of the behaviour of others. Script theory is based on the premise that pre-verbal infants and great apes are capable of basic forms of agency-detection and non-mentalistic goal understanding, allowing individuals to form event-schemata that are then used to make sense of the behaviour of others. We show how script theory circumvents fundamental problems created by ToM-based frameworks, explains patterns of inconsistent replication, and offers important novel predictions regarding how humans and other animals understand and predict the behaviour of others.

Social exclusion and green consumption: The multi‐motive theory approach

AbstractHousehold consumption accounting to more than 70% of global GHG emissions is an indication to where sustainable policies should focus their efforts toward a sustainable world. Indeed, one of the tools suggested by governments in their “policies to encourage sustainable consumption” is behavioral approaches. Within this regard, how psychological consequences of social exclusion relate with green consumption is much studied. For example, recent studies adopted costly signaling theory and social belongingness hypothesis to predict green consumption after events of social exclusion/inclusion. Such studies rely heavily on the default view of “humans as social animals” without adequately accounting for the role of motives. Using multi‐motive theory, we show how construals like “perceived importance of a relationship” and traits like “fear of negative evaluation” play a role in the relationship between social exclusion and green consumption. In addition, we develop and report a 20 items reliable and valid multidimensional measure for green consumption.

It’s common sense – you don’t need to believe to disagree!

ABSTRACT It is often assumed that disagreement only occurs when there is a clash (e.g., inconsistency) between beliefs. In the philosophical literature, this “narrow” view has sometimes been considered the obvious, intuitively correct view. In this paper, we argue that it should not be. We have conducted two preregistered studies gauging English speakers’ intuitions about whether there is disagreement in a case where the parties have non-clashing beliefs and clashing intentions. Our results suggest that common intuitions tell against the default view. Ordinary speakers describe clashes of intentions as disagreements, suggesting that the ordinary concept of disagreement is “wide” in that it extends beyond beliefs.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Political Normativity

Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism as well as realist responses to those attacks unduly conflate distinctly political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctly political normativity depends on assuming moralism as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgements are moral judgements, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgements are moral judgements.

Encroachment on Emotion

AbstractThis paper introduces a novel form of pragmatic encroachment: one that makes a difference to the status of emotion rather than the status of belief. I begin by isolating a distinctive standard in terms of which we can evaluate emotion – one sometimes called “subjective fittingness,” “epistemic justification,” or “warrant.” I then show how this standard for emotion could face a kind of pragmatic encroachment importantly similar to the more familiar encroachment on epistemic standards for belief. Encroachment on warranted emotion is a striking proposal that deserves attention. In fact, there are good reasons to think that encroachment on warranted emotion deserves to be considered the default view for those who already accept pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic status of belief. I support this parity claim by arguing for a principle that establishes a limited coordination between the conditions that warrant emotion and the conditions that justify belief.

The Dizzying Turn of Epistemic Contextualism

AbstractThe debate concerning epistemic contextualism represents a kind of linguistic turn in epistemology, where the focus has shifted from theorising about knowledge to theorising about knowledge attributions. Such a shift may well prove valuable, but only if we are clear on what the relationship is between a semantic analysis of knowledge attributions and a philosophical analysis of knowledge. One plausible approach is to claim that the semantic analysis entails and is entailed by the philosophical analysis. Yet this view—referred to here as the default view—has been explicitly adopted by few in the contextualism debate. This paper considers a form of argument in favour of the default view, and then considers the challenges that arise from either accepting or rejecting the default view.

Transhumanism, Posthumanism, and the Catholic Church

In this essay, I engage the foreseeable consequences for the future of humanity triggered by Emerging Technologies and their underpinning philosophy, transhumanism. The transhumanist stance is compared with the default view currently held in many academic institutions of higher education: posthumanism. It is maintained that the transhumanist view is less inimical to the fostering of human dignity than the posthuman one. After this is established, I suggest that the Catholic Church may find an ally in a transhumanist ethos in a two‑fold manner. On the one hand, by anchoring and promoting the defense of “the human” already present in transhumanism. On the other, rethinking the effectiveness of the delivery of sacraments in a humanity heavily altered by these technologies.

ClinVar: improvements to accessing data.

ClinVar is a freely available, public archive of human genetic variants and interpretations of their relationships to diseases and other conditions, maintained at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Submitted interpretations of variants are aggregated and made available on the ClinVar website (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/), and as downloadable files via FTP and through programmatic tools such as NCBI's E-utilities. The default view on the ClinVar website, the Variation page, was recently redesigned. The new layout includes several new sections that make it easier to find submitted data as well as summary data such as all diseases and citations reported for the variant. The new design also better represents more complex data such as haplotypes and genotypes, as well as variants that are in ClinVar as part of a haplotype or genotype but have no interpretation for the single variant. ClinVar's variant-centric XML had its production release in April 2019. The ClinVar website and E-utilities both have been updated to support the VCV (variation in ClinVar) accession numbers found in the variant-centric XML file. ClinVar's search engine has been fine-tuned for improved retrieval of search results.

On cultural diversity: international theory in a world of difference

This book is the first in a three-volume project, and therefore necessarily leaves many big questions hanging. It has two principal purposes. The first is to show to the discipline of International Relations (IR) how its engagement with the concept of culture remains wedded to what Christian Reus-Smit labels ‘the default conception’ of culture. This conception sees cultures as largely homogenous, self-generating, bounded social structures interacting with each other in a billiard ball-like way. Reus-Smit argues that this conception was the one prevalent in anthropology and sociology before the Second World War. He shows in considerable depth and detail not only how this old-fashioned default view of culture evolved, but how it still anchors the societal dimension of thinking in four quite different areas of mainstream IR theory: realism, the English School, constructivism and rationalism. The second purpose of the book is to convince mainstream IR that it needs to abandon this old-fashioned view of culture and adopt the more post-modern conception now dominant in anthropology, cultural studies and sociology. In this view, culture is more fluid, variegated, cross-cutting, unbounded and internally contradictory. Reus-Smit thinks that some of the more radical approaches to IR theory such as post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and practice theory have already made this move. Mainstream IR now needs to abandon the default conception of culture not only because it is wrong, but also because it leads to serious misunderstandings about the nature and dynamics of international society. Specifically, the default conception makes cultural difference a zero-sum problem when changes in the distribution of power behind different cultures shift the balance among them. The dominant culture is threatened with losing its position, and the pluralist institutional structures of its order regime are challenged both by a new distribution of power and by new cultural claims. This is precisely the current problem, where western power and culture are in decline, and non-western cultures are gaining in wealth, power and confidence. The issue of how culture is understood is thus central to understanding, and dealing with, contemporary world politics.

Women with extreme low AMH values could have in vitro fertilization success

Circulating anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) and antral follicle count (AFC) are the best predictors of IVF outcomes. However, in extreme low AMH range especially for young patients, AMH prediction power loose its specificity to give real idea of pregnancy chance with IVF treatments and good prognosis of an extremely reduced ovarian reserve and expected poor response. Indeed, this retrospective study was conducted to evaluate IVF outcomes in patients following IVF-ICSI program with extremely low AMH levels (≤0.4 ng/ml; n = 390) compared to those presenting normal AMH range (1.3–2.6 ng/ml; n = 352) considered as control group. As expected, number of oocytes retrieved per patient, and embryological outcomes were significantly lower in the extremely low AMH levels group compared to control. Moreover, it was same trend concerning clinical outcomes but we have to note that even in extreme low AMH, patients could reach ineligible satisfying clinical pregnancy rate compared to control (17% vs 41%). For patients younger than 35 years, clinical pregnancy rate improved to 27%. Women with extreme low AMH values and especially younger ones, still have reasonable chances of achieving pregnancy, highlighting the default view of this category generally excluded from IVF program.

PomBase 2018: user-driven reimplementation of the fission yeast database provides rapid and intuitive access to diverse, interconnected information.

PomBase (www.pombase.org), the model organism database for the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, has undergone a complete redevelopment, resulting in a more fully integrated, better-performing service. The new infrastructure supports daily data updates as well as fast, efficient querying and smoother navigation within and between pages. New pages for publications and genotypes provide routes to all data curated from a single source and to all phenotypes associated with a specific genotype, respectively. For ontology-based annotations, improved displays balance comprehensive data coverage with ease of use. The default view now uses ontology structure to provide a concise, non-redundant summary that can be expanded to reveal underlying details and metadata. The phenotype annotation display also offers filtering options to allow users to focus on specific areas of interest. An instance of the JBrowse genome browser has been integrated, facilitating loading of and intuitive access to, genome-scale datasets. Taken together, the new data and pages, along with improvements in annotation display and querying, allow users to probe connections among different types of data to form a comprehensive view of fission yeast biology. The new PomBase implementation also provides a rich set of modular, reusable tools that can be deployed to create new, or enhance existing, organism-specific databases.

Anti-profit beliefs: How people neglect the societal benefits of profit.

Profit-seeking firms are stereotypically depicted as immoral and harmful to society. At the same time, profit-driven enterprise has contributed immensely to human prosperity. Though scholars agree that profit can incentivize societally beneficial behaviors, people may neglect this possibility. In 7 studies, we show that people see business profit as necessarily in conflict with social good, a view we call anti-profit beliefs. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that U.S. participants hold anti-profit views of real U.S. firms and industries. Study 3 shows that hypothetical organizations are seen as doing more harm when they are labeled "for-profit" rather than "non-profit," while Study 4 shows that increasing harm to society is viewed as a strategy for increasing a hypothetical firm's long-run profitability. Studies 5-7 demonstrate that carefully prompting subjects to consider the long run incentives of profit can attenuate anti-profit beliefs, while prompting short run thinking does nothing relative to a control. Together, these results suggest that the default view of profits is zero-sum. While people readily grasp how profit can incentivize firms to engage in practices that harm others, they neglect how it can incentivize firms to engage in practices that benefit others. Accordingly, people's stereotypes of profit-seeking firms are excessively negative. Even in one of the most market-oriented societies in history, people doubt the contributions of profit-seeking industry to societal progress. (PsycINFO Database Record

Zur zeitlichen Evaluierung von Phasenverben. Das Problem der „leeren Mitte“ oder: Wie viele Intervalle braucht die Semantik von Phasenverben?

On the temporal evaluation of phasal verbs. The problem of the ‘empty mid’ or: How many intervals does the semantics of phasal verbs need? In this paper I argue that the default view on phasal verb semantics, conceptualising them as change-of-state entities shifting from a proposition to its negated counterpart and, consequently, operating with points of time, has to be revised by considering intervals (and not points) as the fundamental semantic reference entities; perhaps more important, the study’s results make it necessary to take into account at least one more interval “in between”. This interval is, I am proposing, by no means marginal, as it constitutes a relevant evaluation interval where phasal meaning proper in terms of beginning, finishing and continuing unfolds. Constructions with phasal verbs in general allow, as will be shown, the possibility of adverbials modifying an interval situated between the interval before and after the moment of change-of-state, which is a strong argument in favour of the proposed third interval. - On the outset of this article it is argued that mainstream approaches to phasal semantics, working with two points of time, indirectly introduce two evaluation intervals, and thereby leave open the interpretation of the mid interval. After having presented and discussed the relevant data, Dowty’s influential work on verb semantics, Word meaning and Montague grammar, is discussed and it will be demonstrated that the ‘problem of the empty mid’ was recognised by Dowty, but not properly integrated into his conception of interval semantics.

Acting sub specie boni

On a traditional view of human agency, intentional actions are performed sub specie boni: Agents, in acting intentionally, must see some good in what they are doing. This view has come under heavy criticism, which has partly focussed on several putative counterexamples, and partly on the view’s underlying rationale. In this paper, I defend one version of the sub specie boni view and try to show that it still deserves its old standing as the “default view” about acting with an intention. For, as I argue, this view helps us to make sense of some crucial features of intentions – in particular, that we are sometimes rationally permitted to abandon intentions in the light of obstacles and costs –­ , for which an alternative explanation will be hard to find.

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

Sbml-diff: A Tool for Visually Comparing SBML Models in Synthetic Biology.

We present sbml-diff, a tool that is able to read a model of a biochemical reaction network in SBML format and produce a range of diagrams showing different levels of detail. Each diagram type can be used to visualize a single model or to visually compare two or more models. The default view depicts species as ellipses, reactions as rectangles, rules as parallelograms, and events as diamonds. A cartoon view replaces the symbols used for reactions on the basis of the associated Systems Biology Ontology terms. An abstract view represents species as ellipses and draws edges between them to indicate whether a species increases or decreases the production or degradation of another species. sbml-diff is freely licensed under the three-clause BSD license and can be downloaded from https://github.com/jamesscottbrown/sbml-diff and used as a python package called from other software, as a free-standing command-line application, or online using the form at http://sysos.eng.ox.ac.uk/tebio/upload.

Moving to a personalized medicine approach to promote health across the weight spectrum.

We disagree with the assertion by Bell et al.1 that '[s]ufficient evidence has amassed to dismiss healthy obesity as a harmless condition, and to instead adopt a default view of healthy obesity as a high risk state for future decline.' A more comprehensive assessment of the literature reveals many unanswered questions regarding the stability of metabolic health among higher body mass index (BMI) individuals.2 Although some metabolically healthy obese (MHO) individuals see metabolic decline, existing data are insufficient to claim this as inevitable. Indeed, the evidence offered by Bell et al.1 underscores this point. For example, a meta-analysis they reference actually shows considerable variability in the association between MHO and Type II diabetes risk. This is unsurprising given the underpowered nature of this meta-analysis, which documented only 98 incident cases of diabetes in MHO individuals across all studies.3 Likewise, the development of metabolic risk among MHO individuals is either no different from healthy 'normal' weight individuals (in the case of cholesterol and triglycerides) or is inconsistent across time points (in the case of glucose and hypertension).4 Contending 'sufficient evidence' is unwarranted.

Representing the past: memory traces and the causal theory of memory

According to the Causal Theory of Memory (CTM), remembering a particular past event requires a causal connection between that event and its subsequent representation in memory, specifically, a connection sustained by a memory trace. The CTM is the default view of memory in contemporary philosophy, but debates persist over what the involved memory traces must be like. Martin and Deutscher (Philos Rev 75:161–196, 1966) argued that the CTM required memory traces to be structural analogues of past events. Bernecker (Memory: A philosophical study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) and Michaelian (Philos Psychol 24:323–342, 2011), contemporary CTM proponents, reject structural analogues in favor of memory traces as distributed patterns of event features. The proposals are understood as distinct accounts of how memory traces represent past events. But there are two distinct questions one could ask about a trace’s representational features. One might ask how memory traces, qua mental representations, have their semantic properties. Or, what makes memory traces, qua mental representations of memories, distinct from other mental representations. Proponents of the CTM, both past and present, have failed to keep these two questions distinct. The result is a serious but unnoticed problem for the CTM in its current form. Distributed memory traces are incompatible with the CTM. Such traces do not provide a way to track the causal history of individual memories, as the CTM requires. If memory traces are distributed patterns of event features, as Bernecker and Michaelian each claim, then the CTM cannot be right.

Instrumentalism about practical reason: not by default

Instrumentalism is the view that all requirements of practical reason can be derived from the instrumental principle, that is, from the claim that one ought to take the suitable means to one's ends. Rationalists, by contrast, hold that there are requirements of practical reason that concern the normative acceptability of ends. To the extent that rationalists put forward these requirements in addition to the instrumental principle, rationalism might seem to go beyond instrumentalism in its normative commitments. This is why it is sometimes thought that rationalism is stronger than instrumentalism in a way that entails that instrumentalism is the default view, while rationalists carry the burden of proof. In this paper, I explore and discuss different ways of spelling out this idea. I argue that rationalism is not stronger than instrumentalism in a way that has implications for matters of justification and differences in prima facie defensibility of the two sorts of views.

Can We Forget What We Know in a False-Belief Task? An Investigation of the True-Belief Default.

It has been generally assumed in the Theory of Mind literature of the past 30years that young children fail standard false-belief tasks because they attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist (what Leslie and colleagues called a "true-belief default"). Contrary to the traditional view, we have recently proposed that the children's bias is task induced. This alternative view was supported by studies showing that 3 year olds are able to pass a false-belief task that allows them to focus on the protagonist, without drawing their attention to the target object in the test phase. For a more accurate comparison of these two accounts, the present study tested the true-belief default with adults. Four experiments measuring eye movements and response inhibition revealed that (a) adults do not have an automatic tendency to respond to the false-belief question according to their own knowledge and (b) the true-belief response need not be inhibited in order to correctly predict the protagonist's actions. The positive results observed in the control conditions confirm the accuracy of the various measures used. I conclude that the results of this study undermine the true-belief default view and those models that posit mechanisms of response inhibition in false-belief reasoning. Alternatively, the present study with adults and recent studies with children suggest that participants' focus of attention in false-belief tasks may be key to their performance.