True Belief Research Articles

Executive functions and theory of mind development in preschoolers: Insights from NIRS data

Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of executive functions (EFs) in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) in preschoolers. However, research focusing on young children at the neural level has been limited. This study examined the relationship between EFs and ToM in twenty-nine healthy Japanese preschoolers aged 5–7 years, focusing on neural responses during EF and ToM tasks using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to monitor prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity. The study utilized EF tasks and the Sally-Anne scenario to assess false- and true-belief understanding, aiming to provide a comprehensive analysis of ToM capabilities. Results indicated that despite advanced EF capabilities and a ceiling effect across all EF tasks, there were no significant correlations between EF performance or verbal ability and ToM task performance. NIRS data revealed no PFC activation during the Stroop task. However, activation was observed in the left and right lateral PFC in the control false belief condition, the left lateral PFC in the false belief condition, and across all PFC regions in the true belief condition during ToM tasks. Significant relationships were found between behavioral performance in ToM tasks and neural activity in key brain regions. The study also identified a complex relationship between false and true belief reasoning, suggesting a nuanced developmental trajectory for ToM. These findings underscore the crucial role of early childhood in the development of ToM and the complex interplay between cognitive functions and neural efficiency in understanding others' mental states.

Unlocking the Puzzle: Exploring the Declining Interest in Economics among Faculty and Students at East Africa University's Garowe Campus

The purpose of this study is to examine the students’ perceptions of economics, identify the factors responsible for the diminished interest in economics, and determine how to create effective solutions for these problems. East Africa University's (EAU) Garowe campus, which is among the oldest in the state, has been considered the subject of this study. The study adopted basic random sampling to determine the sample size for the survey. The data in this research was collected through online surveys and interviews. The survey was given to the university students. The survey consisted of multiple-choice questions and Likert-scale responses. Participants were given enough time to fill out the survey anonymously, and 28 people responded. When the survey was fully completed, the data was then analysed using Microsoft Excel. The results of the research conducted showed that: (1) there is a lack of public awareness about the importance of this field and the career opportunities associated with it, as proven by 97% of the respondents who chose (agree and strongly agree). (2) The belief that economics is tough because of math causes some students to choose not to major in this field. This belief influences the majority of students' decisions not to pursue degrees in this field, as demonstrated by the 54% of respondents who selected (agree and strongly agree). This is a true belief that could prevent students from learning economics. (3) Economics is not a hard field of study, as proven by 64% of students who chose “no” to the statement of whether economics is a hard field of study, confirming that economics is not a difficult subject. (4) Business and economics was an interesting subject in high school, as proven by 75% of the respondents who chose (agree and strongly agree)

Intellectual autonomy as the aim of critical thinking

Critical thinking is often nominated as a graduate attribute, a learning outcome, and is even offered as a discrete subject in schools and universities. Therefore, it is important to gain clarity about the fundamental goal or purpose of critical thinking education. What should instructors be aiming at when they seek to instil critical thinking in their students? In this paper, we argue that the aim of critical thinking is the achievement and maintenance of intellectual autonomy. In setting out our argument for this conclusion, we investigate the three most plausible candidates for the goal of critical thinking practice. The first such candidate is successful inquiry: inquiry that succeeds in obtaining epistemic goods such as knowledge, true belief, or empirically adequate explanation. The second candidate is epistemically virtuous inquiry, i.e. inquiry that exhibits the full range of epistemic virtues, including the skills and capacities needed to support them. The third candidate is intellectual autonomy. We develop an account of intellectual autonomy as a form of self-respect attached to one’s epistemic and intellectual life and argue that only intellectual autonomy in this sense does full justice to the practice of critical thinking.

Registered Replication Report: A Large Multilab Cross-Cultural Conceptual Replication of Turri et al. (2015)

According to the justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge, people can truly know something only if they have a belief that is both justified and true (i.e., knowledge is JTB). This account was challenged by Gettier, who argued that JTB does not explain knowledge attributions in certain situations, later called “Gettier-type cases,” wherein protagonists are justified in believing something to be true, but their belief was correct only because of luck. Laypeople may not attribute knowledge to protagonists with justified but only luckily true beliefs. Although some research has found evidence for these so-called Gettier intuitions, Turri et al. found no evidence that participants attributed knowledge in a counterfeit-object Gettier-type case differently than in a matched case of JTB. In a large-scale, cross-cultural conceptual replication of Turri and colleagues’ Experiment 1 ( N = 4,724) using a within-participants design and three vignettes across 19 geopolitical regions, we did find evidence for Gettier intuitions; participants were 1.86 times more likely to attribute knowledge to protagonists in standard cases of JTB than to protagonists in Gettier-type cases. These results suggest that Gettier intuitions may be detectable across different scenarios and cultural contexts. However, the size of the Gettier intuition effect did vary by vignette, and the Turri et al. vignette produced the smallest effect, which was similar in size to that observed in the original study. Differences across vignettes suggest that epistemic intuitions may also depend on contextual factors unrelated to the criteria of knowledge, such as the characteristics of the protagonist being evaluated.

Positive beliefs about cross-partisan empathy can strengthen Americans' support for democracy.

Undemocratic practices, such as voter suppression and election interference, threaten democracies worldwide. Across four studies (N = 4,350), we find that informational and motivational factors drive Americans' support for such practices. Partisans drastically overestimate how much opponents support undemocratic practices, which decreases people's willingness to defend democracy themselves (S1-S2). One remedy for this dynamic is to inform people about the extent to which their rivals actually support democracy, but in polarized contexts, people are incurious about the true beliefs of outpartisans. To address this, we test a new method for improving democratic attitudes-changing beliefs about cross-party empathy. Empathizing across disagreements can improve connections and boost persuasion. When people learn about these valued consequences of empathic engagement, their curiosity about outpartisans increases (S3), and they choose to learn about opponents' support for democracy, which reduces their own support for undemocratic practices and politicians (S4). Our findings suggest that fostering support for democracy requires not just informational strategies but also motivational ones. The power of our combined approach comes in that-instead of presenting people with information about outpartisans-it induces them to seek out that information themselves. Together, these results highlight how cross-party empathy beliefs can increase people's curiosity about those they disagree with and disrupt processes of political escalation.

Momentum mechanisms under heterogeneous beliefs

We establish a continuous-time heterogeneous beliefs model to discuss the mechanisms of Momentum and Reversal. Price learning, information transmission and extrapolative expectation are incorporated into a unified framework for the Momentum and Reversal. The calibration results from SP500 show that the presence of Extrapolators and Information-driven Traders are important influences of Momentum and Reversal in all phases. We also find that momentum and reversal become significantly stronger as belief weights approach true belief weights.

Knowledge transfer, not just true beliefs: virtue epistemology as a philosophical basis for education

Introduction. Modern pedagogical practice is being reformed due to systemic changes in the ways of social interaction. Knowledge transfer is being significantly modified under the influence of technical innovations, although it remains traditionally one of the main tasks of the educational process. The development of artificial intelligence, neural networks and other analytical computer systems shows that propositional knowledge is not the privilege of the human mind. This state of affairs changes the idea of knowledge as such. In this regard, the participants of the educational process face the task of revising the philosophical basis of modern learning in terms of finding a new definition of knowledge. It is also necessary to develop new methodological recommendations that would correspond to modern epistemological theories of knowledge, belief and understanding. Materials and research methods. The article uses the methods of conceptual analysis and comparative study characteristic of philosophy. The research materials are sources on theory of knowledge, education and also on applied epistemology. Results. Virtue epistemology is one of the most actively developing theories of knowledge in contemporary philosophy and humanities. It is based on the idea that knowledge cannot be an accidental belief, but must be the merit of a cognitive agent. This approach solves many problems of the philosophical theory of knowledge and creates a subjectoriented view of the nature of the cognitive process. This attitude allows us to use virtue epistemology in debates about applied issues, including those related to the explanation of the tasks and content of education. Discussion. A feature of the analysis within virtue epistemology is attention to cognitive skills (reliabilism) and sustained intellectual dispositions (responsibilism) in their relationship to the process of formation of true beliefs. Virtue epistemology defines knowledge through the notion of merit in the manifestation of subjective qualities, so the student's motivation and the context of belief formation should be taken into account when developing specific methodological recommendations. Such an approach explains why standardized testing cannot serve as the sole and primary means of assessing learners. At the same time, the general semantic peculiarity of the notions of virtue allows us to appeal to examples of individuals as ideal types of certain qualities (this is called exemplarism). At the same time, it is necessary to explain why these traits are the excellences that make their bearer better in epistemic terms. Conclusion. In explaining the knowledge transfer, pedagogy can be based on the philosophical principles of virtue epistemology. Such integration enriches both disciplines: pedagogy gets a conceptual scheme adequate to the modern social and technological situation, and epistemology gets a practical application.

Verbal Perceptual Prompts Facilitate Children's Sensitivity to False Beliefs.

False belief understanding is always regarded as a milestone of Theory of Mind (ToM), which is an important aspect of social intelligence. Recently, some researchers have suggested the existence of two ToM systems in individuals: one that explicitly guides false belief understanding and another that implicitly directs sensitivity to false beliefs. However, studies on sensitivity to false beliefs have encountered challenges with replicability, and the factors influencing the manifestation of sensitivity to false beliefs remain to be explored. Based on the anticipatory looking task, we investigated whether verbal perceptual prompts could improve children's performance of sensitivity to false beliefs. Fifty-eight children aged 5 to 6 were randomly assigned tasks with or without verbal perceptual prompts, involving verbal descriptions and explanations of the protagonist's perceptual state. The findings showed that verbal perceptual prompts could slightly reduce children's propensity to look at the actual location of the object in false belief situations and increase the likelihood of exhibiting accurate anticipatory looking patterns across false belief and true belief situations. The results suggest that children's sensitivity to false beliefs may be situation-dependent, yet further investigation is needed to determine which situational factors can most effectively trigger robust sensitivity to false beliefs in children. The results enlighten educational practice, indicating that introducing cues in social environments that convey insights into others' mental states, akin to the use of learning scaffolding, is advantageous for the development of children's social cognitive abilities.

How Partisanship Can Moderate the Influence of Communicated Information on the Beliefs of Agents Aiming to Form True Beliefs

ABSTRACT Partisan epistemology – individuals granting greater credibility to co-partisan sources in evaluating information – is often taken to be evidence of directionally motivated reasoning in which concerns about group membership override concerns about accuracy. Against this dominant view, I outline a novel accuracy-based account of this mode of reasoning. According to this account, partisan epistemology stems from the inference that co-partisans are more likely to be right as they have superior epistemic access to the relevant facts and seek to realize the correct values. I argue that this theory fits better with relevant findings than motivated-reasoning theories of partisan epistemology. Finally, I suggest it has adequate explanatory power vis-à-vis patterns of misinformation belief.

The Essence of Ridha: Ibn Qayyim al-Jauziyah's Views on Spiritual Fulfillment and Divine Acceptance

This paper investigates the Islamic philosophical and theological concept of ridha as elucidated by the prominent scholar Ibn Qayyim Al-Jauziyah. Ridha, in Ibn Qayyim’s view, represents a state of inner tranquility and acceptance, essential for mitigating anxiety and dissatisfaction in individuals. Despite the material wealth prevalent in contemporary society, many still experience spiritual unrest due to a lack of ridha. This study posits that true belief in God necessitates a serene acceptance of divine provisions, embracing both adversities and blessings with contentment. The research employs a qualitative approach, utilizing library research and descriptive analysis of relevant literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of ridha. Content analysis techniques are applied to systematically evaluate and interpret the concept and its implications. Findings reveal that for Ibn Qayyim, ridha involves a profound acceptance of Allah’s will, characterized by the absence of discontent towards divine decrees and a balanced approach to both favorable and adverse circumstances. The study delineates three progressive stages of ridha: reconciling with one's situation, fostering harmonious relationships with others, and overcoming envy. This exploration underscores the enduring relevance of ridha in addressing modern existential challenges and spiritual fulfillment.

Conveniently pessimistic: manipulating beliefs to excuse selfishness in charitable giving

This paper demonstrates how people can manipulate their beliefs in order to obtain the self-image of an altruistic person. I present an online experiment in which subjects need to decide whether to behave altruistically or selfishly in an ambiguous environment. Due to the nature of ambiguity in this environment, those who are pessimistic have a legitimate reason to behave selfishly. Thus, subjects who are selfish but like to think of themselves as altruistic have an incentive to overstate their pessimism. In the experiment, I ask subjects how optimistic or pessimistic they feel about an ambiguous probability and then, through a separate task, I elicit their true beliefs about the same probability. I find that selfish subjects claim to be systematically more pessimistic than they truly are whereas altruistic subjects report their pessimism (or optimism) truthfully. Given the experiment design, the only plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that selfish subjects deliberately overstate their pessimism in order to maintain the self-image of an altruistic person. Altruistic subjects, whose behavior has already proven their altruism, have no such need for belief manipulation.JEL ClassificationsC91, D82, D83, D84.

Epistemic Hubris

ABSTRACT It is common nowadays for laypeople to take public stances on complex issues, such as the effectiveness of a vaccine or the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change, without any kind of disciplinary expertise. Yet those who do so act as if they were experts in the field, disseminating their thoughts and sometimes also spreading their advice. Scholars have ascribed this phenomenon to various kinds of individuals, such as conspiracy or contrarian thinkers, science denialists, know-it-all experts and celebrities. This paper aims to argue that behind such different manifestations lies a common, independently identifiable epistemic disposition that will be called epistemic hubris that will be fully explained in relation to other epistemic vices already discussed in the literature. Epistemic hubris includes, but is not limited to, overconfidence; it may or not entail arrogance; it is similar to yet distinct from hyper-autonomy and conspiracy thinking. Its peculiarity is that individuals who develop it seem to believe that they can easily become experts, even without special training. This disposition negatively affects individuals’ epistemic conduct, hindering knowledge and true belief formation, and can generate morally relevant consequences when people who falsely consider themselves experts begin to share their mistaken beliefs.

Religious Diversity, Personal Knowledge, and Oblivious Salvation

In this paper, I employ recent work on divine ineffability (Jacobs, 2015) and personal knowledge (Benton, 2017) to argue that specific propositional knowledge cannot be required for salvation, where salvation is understood to involve a general claim about a person’s union with God. If this is true, I show that nobody can be excluded from salvation through mere happenstance of birth. Furthermore, I argue that adherents of this minimalist order of salvation ought to adopt a position of significant religious humility, for it is a consequence of this view that those with wildly divergent propositional beliefs about God, including people of different faiths, and even of no faith, can ultimately experience union with the same God. Although presented as an argument for salvific inclusivity, I conclude by showing that a similar argument can be adapted in defence of salvific pluralism. If there are no fundamentally true propositional beliefs about God to be had, each true claim made about God must be non-fundamentally true. Furthermore, just as there are multiple ways to truly, but non-fundamentally, describe the same object (ways that might contradict each other), so might there be multiple ways to truly, but non-fundamentally, describe God.

Modal Knowledge for Expressivists

What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein’s ‘safety semantics’ and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss.

Self-knowledge in joint acceptance accounts

ABSTRACT This paper closes a gap in joint acceptance accounts of the mental life of groups by presenting a theory of group self-knowledge in the joint acceptance framework. I start out by presenting desiderata for a theory of group self-knowledge. Any such theory has to explain the linguistic practice of group avowals, and how self-knowledge can play a role in practical and moral considerations. I develop an account of group self-knowledge in the joint acceptance framework that can explain these desiderata. I argue that a group has self-knowledge of its own attitude A if and only if (i) the operative members jointly accept that the group has attitude A; and (ii) that joint acceptance is non-deviantly caused by the operative group members’ belief that the members jointly accepted attitude A; and (iii) the group has attitude A. Together (i) to (iii) give us conditions for a group having a justified, non-lucky, true belief about its own attitude.

Predictability and Liberty

Predictability tends to elicit a clear behavioral response and hence, for humans, it is a basic need in both their physical and social environment. However, the liberty inherent in a democratic society makes life essentially unpredictable and, in this sense, may create a sense of unease in its citizens who then may strive for stability in dogma. Dogmatism, however, is antithetical to democratic liberty. Once we take up this Janus focus of democracy, i.e., that it can lead to the best of times and the worst of times, it becomes clear that, to preserve democracy, we must educationally invest in anchoring predictability in the individuals rather than in the environment in which they subsist, and that we can achieve this (i) by explicating clearly to young citizens that the chaos of reasons doing battle is fundamentally different from the chaos of persons doing battle, and (ii) by shoring up what Charles Taylor (1989) calls strong evaluation, i.e., shoring up the ability to confidently and independently judge the worth of any proposed action and how it reflects on one’s ideal self. We will argue, perhaps counterintuitively, that this confidence in the predictability of one’s capacity for independent thought can best be achieved through an education that affords frequent engagement in “truth-seeking” interpersonal inquiries of the sort frequently utilized the practice of Philosophy for Children, but one that is buttressed by reinforcing the belief in Truth and, as well, by exposing participants to “truth-seeking” interpersonal dialogues that are focused on genuine, relevant, and difficult moral quandaries.

Knowing with

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that there are irreducibly social epistemic values alongside more traditional epistemic values such as knowledge and true belief. In particular, I argue that what I call “epistemic convergence” is one such value, and that it can help us explain the badness of social epistemic pathologies, such as testimonial injustice and epistemic bubbles.

People see more of their biases in algorithms

Algorithmic bias occurs when algorithms incorporate biases in the human decisions on which they are trained. We find that people see more of their biases (e.g., age, gender, race) in the decisions of algorithms than in their own decisions. Research participants saw more bias in the decisions of algorithms trained on their decisions than in their own decisions, even when those decisions were the same and participants were incentivized to reveal their true beliefs. By contrast, participants saw as much bias in the decisions of algorithms trained on their decisions as in the decisions of other participants and algorithms trained on the decisions of other participants. Cognitive psychological processes and motivated reasoning help explain why people see more of their biases in algorithms. Research participants most susceptible to bias blind spot were most likely to see more bias in algorithms than self. Participants were also more likely to perceive algorithms than themselves to have been influenced by irrelevant biasing attributes (e.g., race) but not by relevant attributes (e.g., user reviews). Because participants saw more of their biases in algorithms than themselves, they were more likely to make debiasing corrections to decisions attributed to an algorithm than to themselves. Our findings show that bias is more readily perceived in algorithms than in self and suggest how to use algorithms to reveal and correct biased human decisions.

Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance

Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance

What Large Language Models Know

Abstract The strengths and weaknesses of generative applications built on large language models are by now well-known. They excel at the production of discourse in a variety of genres and styles, from poetry to programs, as well as the combination of these into novel forms. They perform well at high-level question answering, dialogue, and reasoning tasks, suggesting the possession of general intelligence. However, they frequently produce formally correct but factually or logically wrong statements. This essay argues that such failures—so-called hallucinations—are not accidental glitches but are instead a by-product of the design of the transformer architecture on which large language models are built, given its foundation on the distributional hypothesis, a nonreferential approach to meaning. Even when outputs are correct, they do not meet the basic epistemic criterion of justified true belief, suggesting the need to revisit the long neglected relationship between language and reference.