Hidden Assumption Research Articles

Gestalt theory: A revolution put on pause? Prospects for a paradigm shift in the psychological sciences

This paper will discuss whether there are chances for a paradigm shift, i.e., a shift away from the (almost without much thought) taken-for-granted sequential, from piece-to-whole mainstream understanding of a cognitivist, now almost 70-year old information processing perspective to a perspective that takes as its starting point the whole, and hence meaning. The whole may stand for an object as embedded in its immediately salient as well as inconspicuous environment, where parts cannot be made sense of without knowing and understanding their roles in the larger configurations. It may stand for an organism or an organismic collectivity as embedded in its environment, a person or a collectivity of people in their embedded immediate and phenomenal field, which we will also not understand unless we understand their larger environmental, societal and cultural embeddedness. In today's scientific climate where the mainstream information-processing perspective is serving as an unchallenged, often hidden assumption within neuroscience and computer science, I will look for recent, promising developments which might nonetheless be paving the road to a perspective so long ago proposed by the Gestaltists yet somehow “lost in translation”. In that sense, Gestalt theory, which till today has been widely distorted as a theory that talks about ‘a bunch of grouping principles in (static) vision’, is the very first dynamical theory within the psychological sciences that meticulously proposed this with a firm philosophical grounding, something that is ever more missing within theory building in psychology.

How Did Evil Come into the World? A Primordial Free-Will Theodicy

James P. Sterba has provided a compelling argument to the effect that given the extent of significant, and indeed even horrendous, evil that an all-good and all-powerful being could have prevented, there is no God. There is a hidden assumption in Sterba’s reasoning, involving an inference from God being able to do anything metaphysically possible (omnipotence) to his being, after creation, able to prevent evil. As what follows shows, that isn’t a purely logical matter. It depends on ruling out a determinate theological account of how creation limits what is then metaphysically possible for God, an account set out in detail below. So Sterba’s argument is not deductively valid, unless that account is incoherent. Accordingly, we are back in the realm of total judgments of theoretical plausibility, and the effects of God-given grace on what then will strike one as the right view to live by.

A quantum view of photon gravity: The gravitational mass of photon and its implications on previous experimental tests of general relativity

General relativity (GR) is an important theory that requires very stringent tests. So far, its supporting evidence comes mainly from measurements of photon gravitational effects, including light bending near the Sun, gravitational lensing in some galaxies and gravitational redshift of light. These previous experiments were designed based on a hidden assumption, namely, the gravitational mass of a photon is zero; thus, light should not be bent in a gravitational field if there is no space-time curving. In this work, we showed that the gravitational mass of a photon is not zero. Instead, it is equal to its quantum mass, which can be determined from its momentum using the de Broglie relation. Based on this understanding, the gravitational effects of light can be explained more simply using quantum physics. Our findings suggest that, in order to fully evaluate the theory of GR, more stringent experimental tests are required. Some examples of future experiments for testing the principle of equivalence are proposed here.

The Negative Aha-Moment, or: Anticipating the Need for Dialogical Tolerance

Kippbild hermeneutics, developed on the basis of Wittgenstein’s model of Kippbilder, can be understood as a specific postmodern method of coping with (religious) conflicts by relativizing their differences as different ways as seeing as. While it would at first seem that Kippbild hermeneutics enables a relativistic understanding of religious differences, I would like to show that it entangles us ever deeper in the moment in which we understand that the hidden assumption of our (“humanist”, “liberal”, “postmodern”) tolerant superiority towards other groups (e.g., religions) is precisely the moment when we conform to the image we have of the other group. This uncanny experience is what I call a negative aha-moment, and I claim that it could be a means to anticipate the very need for what Paul Mendes-Flohr calls “dialogical tolerance”.

Utilitarianism on the front lines: COVID-19, public ethics, and the “hidden assumption” problem

Abstract How should we think of the preferences of citizens? Whereas self-optimal policy is relatively straightforward to produce, socially optimal policy often requires a more detailed examination. In this paper, we identify an issue that has received far too little attention in welfarist modelling of public policy, which we name the “hidden assumptions” problem. Hidden assumptions can be deceptive because they are not expressed explicitly and the social planner (e.g. a policy maker, a regulator, a legislator) may not give them the critical attention they need. We argue that ethical expertise has a direct role to play in public discourse because it is hard to adopt a position on major issues like public health policy or healthcare prioritisation without making contentious assumptions about population ethics. We then postulate that ethicists are best situated to critically evaluate these hidden assumptions, and can therefore play a vital role in public policy debates.

What We Don’t Know About the Effects of Temperature on Salmonid Growth

AbstractSalmonid biologists use both mental models—simple assumptions—and bioenergetics‐based mathematical models to understand and predict effects of temperature regime on growth. Bioenergetics model results, however, sometimes conflict with common assumptions. Previous studies plus “Wisconsin model” bioenergetics simulations lead to four conclusions that conflict with some management assumptions. The first conclusion is that food consumption is at least as important as temperature in explaining growth; we cannot understand temperature effects without understanding food consumption. Second, at natural food consumption rates, there is no “optimal temperature for growth”; growth peaks in model results are artifacts of food consumption assumptions, and growth peaks in laboratory studies are (apparently) artifacts of ad libitum feeding. Third, effects of temperature on growth can be stronger during cooler seasons than in summer; traditional temperature criteria are not useful for managing such effects. Fourth, salmonid populations that are adapted to survive higher temperatures may be more, not less, vulnerable to temperature effects on growth due to their higher metabolic rates. Temperature–growth relations observed under ad libitum feeding seem risky for managing wild populations. Model predictions of growth need to carefully consider assumptions about food consumption. For predicting effects of increased temperature, the traditional assumption that consumption is a constant fraction of maximum consumption rate appears especially uncertain and incautious, with its hidden assumption that consumption increases with temperature; assuming a constant ration is simpler and more cautious. Growth can be predicted more reliably with feeding models and individual‐based population models that consider how consumption and energetic costs depend on processes such as habitat selection, competition, and adaptive behaviors involving tradeoffs between food intake and predation risk. Two research needs are clear: empirical observations for parameterizing and testing the Wisconsin model comprehensively under natural conditions (which we lack despite the extensive energetics literature), and methods for predicting salmonid food production responses to temperature and flow regimes.

Nonlinear classification of emotion from EEG signal based on maximized mutual information

Recent research reveals that continuous efforts are being made to explore the relationship between EEG signals and manually scored emotions through feature extraction or emotion extraction. In order to achieve emotion extraction, wavelet transforms, Support Vector Machine (SVM), higher-order crossing, short term Fourier transform and ANOVA as classifiers are commonly used. This paper presents for the first time, the determination of maximally informative dimensions from EEG signals, the application of the same for the prediction of human emotions and assessment of the prediction for manually scored emotions. This is an alternative approach of emotion extraction compared to traditional approaches such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) and random forest. The information space, that is available in an EEG database does not usually map into the emotion space entirely. Thus a relevant subspace needs to be developed, which satisfactorily defines the target emotional space. Feature vectors of the dataset are reoriented to the directions, which are relevant informative directions for identifiable emotion. The correlation of manually scored emotion with EEG signal is assessed using mutual Information concerning emotional space. There is no hidden assumption in this method and hence the method is generic in nature. Our method predicts 82% and 72% in ‘two-class emotional scoring’ and ‘three-class emotional scoring’ methods of emotions respectively in a limited dataset of 32 subjects. The maximum prediction recorded is 95.87% for the dominance component of emotion.

Revealing the existence of the ontological commitment in fish schools

The heap paradox is an enduring problem in complex systems, and it has many variations. One variation of the heap paradox considers how many parts of a whole are required to generate group behaviour. The initial heap paradox indicates that the recursive adding grain process finally makes a heap at a certain point. In this study, we point out the hidden assumption of this paradox, which a recursive operation involves ontological commitment (i.e. anticipation for the forthcoming heap from non-heap in every procedure). The aim of this study is to show the existence of the ontological commitment in a real fish school via IIT 3.0. We analysed the behaviour of Plecoglossus altivelis with group sizes ranging from 2 to 5 fish. Consequently, the subschool embedded in the whole group has a qualitatively different causal structure compared with a whole group of the same size. That is, 2-fish subschools lose the chasing property, but gain the leadership property, which has never been observed in a 2-fish whole school. Accordingly, 3- and 4-fish subschools also show a completely different property from the same sized whole school. Our results suggest that a real fish school contains the ontological commitment to maintain their group behaviour.

Saturated hydraulic conductivity of problematic soils measured by a newly developed low-compliance triaxial permeameter

Research on the reliable characterization of saturated permeability has received great yet necessary attention globally. However, most studies were carried out on soils with a volumetric tendency being almost insensitive to water saturation or at least with this hidden assumption. This is clearly not the case when dealing with the two broad categories of problematic soils, including collapsible and expansive soils. As confirmed by previous research, at least one-fifth of the planet comprises of these soils with a relatively fair distribution. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to introduce a low-compliance double cell/burette permeameter to track all volumetric changes during the whole pre- and post-saturation testing stages with distinct enhancement of accuracy. In order to examine the performance of the device, two typical types of collapsible and expansive soils are synthesized and tested for a wide variety of void ratios. Comparison of results with four standardized and conventional testing protocols in the literature reveals that current laboratory methods fail in reliable quantification of saturated permeability of problematic soils due to inaccurate evaluation of void ratio, imperfect saturation, or both. Eventually, a discussion will be presented on the performance of some empirical models in capturing the new experimental trends.

What is the economic concept of choice? An experimental philosophy study

AbstractEconomists and philosophers disagree about the concept of choice used in economics. Some behavioural economists argue that economic models of choice will improve as they become more and more psychologically realistic. Don Ross argues that this argument fails because its hidden assumption – that the economic concept of choice is the same as the psychological counterpart – is false. Ross conjectures that the economic concept of choice concerns a population-scale pattern of behavioural changes in response to incentives. We conduct a survey experiment to test two predictions that Ross’s conjecture generates. The statistical analysis of our data confirms our predictions, although with some qualifications. In interpreting our results, we distinguish two versions of commonsensible realism, strong and weak, and propose the weak one as a plausible explanation of our results. Weak commonsensible realism also produces further testable hypotheses. Some methodological implications of our study are discussed.

Out of the Vacuum: A Hidden Assumption

Out of the Vacuum: A Hidden Assumption

A Constructivist View of Newton\u2019s Mechanics

In the present essay we attempt to reconstruct Newtonian mechanics under the guidance of logical principles and of a constructive approach related to the genetic epistemology of Piaget and García (Psychogenesis and the history of science, Columbia University Press, New York, 1989). Instead of addressing Newton’s equations as a set of axioms, ultimately given by the revelation of a prodigious mind, we search for the fundamental knowledge, beliefs and provisional assumptions that can produce classical mechanics. We start by developing our main tool: the no arbitrariness principle, that we present in a form that is apt for a mathematical theory as classical mechanics. Subsequently, we introduce the presence of the observer, analysing then the relation objective–subjective and seeking objectivity going across subjectivity. We take special care of establishing the precedence among all contributions to mechanics, something that can be better appreciated by considering the consequences of removing them: (a) the consequence of renouncing logic and the laws of understanding is not being able to understand the world, (b) renouncing the early elaborations of primary concepts such as time and space leads to a dissociation between everyday life and physics, the latter becoming entirely pragmatic and justified a-posteriori (because it is convenient), (c) changing our temporary beliefs has no real cost other than effort. Finally, we exemplify the present approach by reconsidering the constancy of the velocity of light. It is shown that it is a result of Newtonian mechanics, rather than being in contradiction with it. We also indicate the hidden assumption that leads to the (apparent) contradiction.

Expectations of Bank Employees on the Influence of Key Performance Indicators and the Relationship with Job Satisfaction and Work Engagement

Feedback systems of key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for companies to monitor their goals. To stay successful and to improve performance, the employees of a company are a potential resource as they build the link between resources and outcome. A hidden assumption in goal-setting is that the employees feel to have full influence on KPIs. Hence, employees’ self-efficacy about believing in one’s own capabilities and expectations about being able to influence KPIs are needed for organizational performance as well as high job satisfaction and work engagement. The present study examined whether influence expectations on KPIs can predict job satisfaction and work engagement above and beyond professional self-efficacy. Results from 136 bank employees in Austria showed that job satisfaction can be predicted by professional self-efficacy and influence expectations on bank-specific KPIs. Furthermore, professional self-efficacy, influence expectations on economic KPIs, and the influence expectations of the branch manager predicted work engagement. This study contributes to the importance of employees’ belief in their own skills and in their influence on KPIs to be satisfied and engaged at work. Furthermore, it offers innovative and useful insights into the measurement of influence expectations.

Continuity and discontinuity in physics and biology

Although classical physicists believed that nature does not make leaps – it is continuous and infinitely divisible – 20th century physicists soon realised that there are indivisible elementary particles (quanta) and that physical space is therefore not continuous and also not infinitely divisible. This state of affairs is also underscored by the duality of particle and wave. Even for Einstein the continuity of the microstructure of ‘space-time’ was still an open question. Therefore considering physical phenomena as literally continuous could be questioned. Moreover it is striking that reflection on the nature of matter gave birth both to an ‘atomistic’ and a ‘continuity’ conception. Faithful to modern nominalism (neo-)Darwinism accepts no universality outside the human mind. Plants and animals are simply positioned in a continuum with the aid of arbitrary names. This continuity postulate – known as ‘gradualism’ – is, nonetheless, confronted from the outset with the dominant stasis pattern of the paleontological record: a type appears abruptly, remains constant for millions of years and then disappears equally abruptly. As a consequence the assumed ‘imperfection’ of the fossil record could be questioned. Prominent biological thinkers still wrestle with the problem of continuity and discontinuity. One of them explains that these stories begin from the same foundational fallacy and then proceed in an identically erroneous way. They start with the most dangerous of mental traps: a hidden assumption, depicted as self-evident, if recognised at all, namely, a basic definition of evolution as continuous flux.

Preventive Ethics Through Expanding Education.

Healthcare institutions have been making increasing efforts to standardize consultation methodology and to accredit both bioethics training programs and the consultants accordingly. The focus has traditionally been on the ethics consultation as the relevant unit of ethics intervention. Outcome measures are studied in relation to consultations, and the hidden assumption is that consultations are the preferred or best way to address day-to-day ethical dilemmas. Reflecting on the data from an internal quality improvement survey and the literature, we argue that having general ethics education as a key function of ethics services may be more important in meeting the contemporaneous needs of acute care settings. An expanded and varied ethics education, with attention to the time constraints of healthcare workers' schedules, was a key recommendation brought forward by survey respondents. Promoting ethical reflection and creating a culture of ethics may serve to prevent ethical dilemmas or mitigate their effects.

Beyond linguistic and party homogeneity

Political parties are often thought of as unitary actors that have consistent preferences. This ‘hidden assumption’ means that heterogeneity within parties, and therefore intra-party dynamics, are overlooked in explaining attitudes. When it comes to devolution and federalisation, parties or MPs belonging to the same region are also often implicitly considered to have homogeneous viewpoints and attitudes. Relying on an original survey of MPs carried out during the Belgian political gridlock of 2010–2011, this article uncovers some of the key dimensions of the intra-party dynamics through analysis of MPs’ preferences towards institutional reform in Belgium. Far from being explained along party or community lines, our results demonstrate how MPs’ political and sociological background, national/regional identity, political career, and inter-community relations strongly shape their preferences.

Surrogates for ocular perfusion pressure are not perfect‐ authors reply

Dr. Khawaja and his colleagues commented on our recent review article (Costa et al. 2013) dealing with ocular perfusion pressure (OPP), and we are grateful for the opportunity to clarify certain points. They have quite correctly commented here, and before in the published letter, they cite (Khawaja et al. 2013) that there are theoretical problems with using the traditional formula for OPP (or more correctly, a surrogate for OPP) derived from brachial artery pressure (BP) and intraocular pressure (IOP), as well as how multivariate analyses are performed. The hidden assumption when testing the impact of OPP on glaucoma is that an abnormally low OPP due to a high IOP may be equivalent to the same OPP due to a low BP. Of course, that is the hypothesis that many of the studies try to address. Stated differently, investigators are attempting to understand whether BP is relevant to the occurrence, severity or progression of glaucomatous damage, or is everything simply dependent on IOP (Costa et al. 2013). Should a surrogate OPP be studied at all? It is difficult, if not impossible, to measure true ocular OPP directly, and if the problem is to be studied, it becomes necessary to use an estimate and hope that the estimate is not too bad. Should the surrogate OPP be corrected for IOP? Probably not, as OPP is calculated with IOP (along with BP) as one of the variables, and hence, multivariate analysis is ruined by the non-independence of the variables OPP and IOP, as Dr. Khawaja and colleagues explain in detail in their already published letter (Khawaja et al. 2013). The corrected value simply represents BP anyway. However, we still believe that this is an important finding, especially because several researchers tended to assume that the only reason for the positive association between OPP and glaucoma was IOP. When one adjusts for IOP and the association remains significant, it is possible to conclude that not only IOP is affecting the positive association, but BP too also is an important driving factor. On the other hand, such analysis does not answer the question of whether OPP itself, whether altered by IOP or BP, is in the final common pathway for damage. It may answer whether BP is relevant, but maybe not whether it is as important the IOP considered by itself. The reviewed studies are not consistent in showing or failing to show a relationship of BP and glaucomatous damage. It does seem that either a very low BP or chronic hypertension, perhaps on treatment with a now-normal BP, each might logically affect the course of glaucoma (Costa et al. 2009). It might be speculated that a sufficiently low BP might indeed result in reduced perfusion. At the same time, long-standing hypertension results in narrowed and stiffened arteries and arterioles, which both increases resistance to flow and impairs the regulatory mechanisms for flow. If so, then the relationship of BP to glaucomatous damage is not linear, because either extreme has an adverse effect. The non-linearity confounds any multivariate analysis that assumes linearity between the independent variables being tested for impact on the dependent variable, glaucomatous damage. Finally, flow depends not only on perfusion pressure, but also on resistance in the vascular bed. The resistance to flow is not fixed, even under completely normal circumstances. The resistance is modified by regulatory mechanisms over a range of perfusion pressures, so the OPP by itself may not have an effect except at the extremes when the capacity for regulation has been exceeded. It is a complex physiological system to study adequately. The innate capacity for regulation may vary from one person to another, and it may be altered by disease, such as stiffening of the arteries by chronic hypertension (arteriosclerosis). Therefore, the review did not have a firm conclusion about the place of OPP in the glaucomatous process. Our only conclusion, cautiously stated in the abstract, is summarized in the sentence: ‘We believe that the balance between IOP and BP, influenced by the autoregulatory capacity of the eye, is part of what determines whether an individual will develop optic nerve damage.’ Dr. Khawaja and colleagues have served us well by highlighting what might be lost in our lengthy review, namely, the difficulties in reaching more targeted conclusions from the studies to date, for both mathematical and physiological reasons. We thank them.

Importance of the Inverted Control in Measuring Holistic Face Processing with the Composite Effect and Part-Whole Effect

Holistic coding for faces is shown in several illusions that demonstrate integration of the percept across the entire face. The illusions occur upright but, crucially, not inverted. Converting the illusions into experimental tasks that measure their strength – and thus index degree of holistic coding – is often considered straightforward yet in fact relies on a hidden assumption, namely that there is no contribution to the experimental measure from secondary cognitive factors. For the composite effect, a relevant secondary factor is size of the “spotlight” of visuospatial attention. The composite task assumes this spotlight can be easily restricted to the target half (e.g., top-half) of the compound face stimulus. Yet, if this assumption were not true then a large spotlight, in the absence of holistic perception, could produce a false composite effect, present even for inverted faces and contributing partially to the score for upright faces. We review evidence that various factors can influence spotlight size: race/culture (Asians often prefer a more global distribution of attention than Caucasians); sex (females can be more global); appearance of the join or gap between face halves; and location of the eyes, which typically attract attention. Results from five experiments then show inverted faces can sometimes produce large false composite effects, and imply that whether this happens or not depends on complex interactions between causal factors. We also report, for both identity and expression, that only top-half face targets (containing eyes) produce valid composite measures. A sixth experiment demonstrates an example of a false inverted part-whole effect, where encoding-specificity is the secondary cognitive factor. We conclude the inverted face control should be tested in all composite and part-whole studies, and an effect for upright faces should be interpreted as a pure measure of holistic processing only when the experimental design produces no effect inverted.

Cross-modal transfer without concurrent stimulation: a challenge to a hidden assumption

Cross-modal transfer without concurrent stimulation: a challenge to a hidden assumption

Determination of contact angle from the maximum height of enlarged drops on solid surfaces

Measurement of the liquid/solid contact angle provides useful information on the wetting properties of fluids. In 1870, the German physicist Georg Hermann Quincke (1834–1924) published the functional relation between the maximum height of an enlarged drop and its contact angle. Quincke’s relation offered an alternative to the direct measurement of contact angle, which in practice suffers from several experimental uncertainties. In this paper, we review Quincke’s original derivation and show that it is based on a hidden assumption. We then present a new derivation that exposes this assumption and clarifies the conditions under which Quincke’s relation is valid. To explore Quincke’s relation experimentally, we measure the maximum height of enlarged water drops on several substrates and calculate the contact angle in each case. Our results are in good agreement with contact angles measured directly from droplet images.