Truth Judgments Research Articles

Literature and Moral Seriousness: A Note

This is a comment on two previous pieces in The Cambridge Quarterly (by Bower and Holman respectively). The author finds neither account of Leavis’s treatment of the subject to be satisfactory, and argues that the moral quality and social limitations of a writer’s life are related to the moral adequacy of his/her work. He finds that Leavis’s work is often limited because he does not take this into account. A disinterested examination of the text will almost always reveal those biographically-based limitations, if they are there. Leavis’s very enthusiasm for certain works and authors leads him to betray his ideal, the common pursuit of true judgement, because he doesn’t examine the text closely enough.

Unveiling the truth: warnings reduce the repetition-based truth effect.

Typically, people are more likely to consider a previously seen or heard statement as true compared to a novel statement. This repetition-based "truth effect" is thought to rely on fluency-truth attributions as the underlying cognitive mechanism. In two experiments, we tested the nature of the fluency-attribution mechanism by means of warning instructions, which informed participants about the truth effect and asked them to prevent it. In Experiment 1, we instructed warned participants to consider whether a statement had already been presented in the experiment to avoid the truth effect. However, warnings did not significantly reduce the truth effect. In Experiment 2, we introduced control questions and reminders to ensure that participants understood the warning instruction. This time, warning reduced, but did not eliminate the truth effect. Assuming that the truth effect relies on fluency-truth attributions, this finding suggests that warned participants could control their attributions but did not disregard fluency altogether when making truth judgments. Further, we found no evidence that participants overdiscount the influence of fluency on their truth judgments.

Les Chemins cartésiens du jugement. By Élodie Cassan.

Élodie Cassan’s acute and learned study challenges a widespread interpretation of early modern philosophy, according to which logic was displaced by or reduced to psychology, on account of Descartes’s nefarious grounding of knowledge in subjectivity. Her focus is on Descartes’s conception of judgement, as aimed both to construct and to conceptualize scientific reasoning. It thus performs a logical function in that its aim is to enable us to avoid error in whatever domain of knowledge we are engaged in. Taking scientific knowledge to be an articulated body of true judgements, Descartes’s concern is with ascertaining the truth of these judgements. An illuminating contextual chapter helps to make sense of his well-known rejection of syllogistic logic, as being incapable of showing us how to produce judgements that are actually true. She reconstructs the approach to logic he would have encountered at La Flèche, and then explores the handling of the concept in Ramus, Bacon, and Montaigne. In Chapter 2 Cassan carefully examines Descartes’s initial doctrine of judgement. In the Regulae , he rejects the standard equation of judgement and proposition, offering an understanding of judgement as involving a legitimate assent to a mental content validated by the mind. Endorsing Aquinas, to the extent that at this stage he makes judgement an operation of the understanding, he nonetheless departs from him when he includes both intuition and deduction within its scope. Both these operations are crucial to the construction of a model of independent truth-seeking emancipated from prior authority. In the Discourse he highlights the obstacles to this independence, especially intellectual preconceptions received unquestioningly from one’s teachers, often in conflict with one’s appetites. Part of the remedy he advocates for this consists in a systematic detachment of oneself from one’s sensations, which enables the suspension of judgement put into practice in the First Meditation. In the Meditations he develops his later doctrine, that judgement is an operation not of the intellect, but of the will; this doctrine protects him, Cassan argues, against the criticism that the key concepts of clarity and distinctness are to be understood in psychological, and hence subjective, terms. (It might have been interesting to pursue this point in relation to the Fifth and Seventh Objections.) The resolution not to pass judgement on things the truth of which is not clearly conceived provides a non-subjective norm of rationality. The chapter concludes with a tantalizingly brief discussion of the vexed question of the divine guarantee in relation to memory. Chapter 3 explores the application of this conception of judgement in the fields of natural philosophy and ethics, and Chapter 4 traces its reception in the Port-Royal Logique and the work of Malebranche. Throughout, Cassan offers helpful commentary on previous critical approaches — one of the many virtues of this valuable reconsideration of a key Cartesian concept, and its role in his overall method for the construction of knowledge.

Judgment, Logos, and Knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus

AbstractIn this second installment on the Theaetetus, I discuss Theaetetus' second and third definitions of knowledge, namely, ‘true judgment’ and then ‘true judgment with the addition of an account’. I offer a brief description of Socrates' intricate examination of these suggestions, concentrating especially on the discussion of false judgment and that of the so‐called ‘Dream Theory’. I then proceed to map different lines of interpretation for these passages that have been offered by scholars writing in the last 40 years.

Training in the Strategic Use of Evidence technique: Improving deception detection accuracy of American law enforcement officers

The Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) approach is a framework for planning and executing suspect interviews with the aim of facilitating judgments of truth and deception. US law enforcement officers (N = 59) either received training in the SUE approach or did not. Each officer interviewed a mock suspect (N = 59) who had either committed a simulated security breach or had completed a benign task. The officers who received SUE training interviewed in line with the training: They questioned the suspect systematically, withheld the evidence and critical case information until after questioning, and relied on statement-evidence inconsistency to detect deceit. Consequently, SUE-trained interviewers achieved a higher deception detection accuracy rate (65%) compared to untrained interviewers (43%).

Judging the Truth-Value of a Statement In and Out of a Deep Processing Context

Individuals judge fluently processed statements truer than disfluent statements, which reflects an illusion of truth. A dual-processing approach to the truth effect suggests that cognitive resources and motivation for accuracy should moderate this effect. However, previous research has only manipulated participants’ capacity during the encoding of the statements. We directly test an account of the truth effect based on processing features of System 1, manipulating both capacity and motivation at the time of the truth judgments. Fluency was manipulated either through repetition (Experiment 1) or perceptual contrast (Experiment 2). Congruent with dualistic assumptions, the evaluations of participants in the high-capacity and high-motivation conditions differed from those of participants in the other three conditions. However, the pattern of the truth effect in that specific condition was not the same in both experiments: in Experiment 1, the illusion of truth was only reduced, whereas the effect was complet...

Extracting Target Detection Knowledge Based on Spatiotemporal Information in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed for many applications of target detection, such as intrusion detection and wildlife protection. In these applications, the first step is to detect whether the target is present or not. However, most of the existing work uses the “simple disk model” as signal model, which may not capture the sensing environment. In this work, we utilize a more realistic signal model to describe sensing process of sensors. On the other hand, the “majority rule” is widely used to make the final decision, which may not obtain the true judgment. To this end, we utilize a more realistic signal model and also use a probabilistic decision model to make the final decision. Moreover, we propose a probabilistic detection algorithm in which all sensors' local measurement values are fully used. This algorithm does not need any artificial threshold compared with traditional algorithms. It makes the most of spatiotemporal information to obtain the final decision. For the spatial perspective, sensors are distributed in different locations cooperating with each other. Meanwhile, for the temporal perspective, multiround subdecisions are fused. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by extensive simulation results, which show high detection probabilities and low false alarm probabilities.

Predication or Participation? What is the Nature of Aquinas’ Doctrine of Analogy?

Predication or Participation? What is the Nature of Aquinas’ Doctrine of Analogy?

Die Bedeutung der pragmatischen Philosophie für die Entwicklung der Gesellschaft

Abstract According to Rorty, pragmatic philosophy asserts that it must play a role in determining the cultural politics, i. e. “which hopes and which programs for actions it must offer for a better future”. Based on Apel’s ethics of consensus and on the power of the best argument presented by Habermas, the social consensus appears to be able to regulate the total experiment of the human being with itself, and to identify the common needs and standards for a social reason of fairness. This pragmatic consensus to establish the rule of reason over desire, however, is based on a false image of the human being. In contrast, the experiment of the human being with itself can only be regulated by a judgment of truth on the human action and the human desire. The logic of truth only regulates this social experiment if the judgment of truth is actually shared between objectives and results.

Posterior Belief Assessment: Extracting Meaningful Subjective Judgements from Bayesian Analyses with Complex Statistical Models

In this paper, we are concerned with attributing meaning to the results of a Bayesian analysis for a problem which is sufficiently complex that we are unable to assert a precise correspondence between the expert probabilistic judgements of the analyst and the particular forms chosen for the prior specification and the likelihood for the analysis. In order to do this, we propose performing a finite collection of additional Bayesian analyses under alternative collections of prior and likelihood modelling judgements that we may also view as representative of our prior knowledge and the problem structure, and use these to compute posterior belief assessments for key quantities of interest. We show that these assessments are closer to our true underlying beliefs than the original Bayesian analysis and use the temporal sure preference principle to establish a probabilistic relationship between our true posterior judgements, our posterior belief assessment and our original Bayesian analysis to make this precise. We exploit second order exchangeability in order to generalise our approach to situations where there are infinitely many alternative Bayesian analyses we might consider as informative for our true judgements so that the method remains tractable even in these cases. We argue that posterior belief assessment is a tractable and powerful alternative to robust Bayesian analysis. We describe a methodology for computing posterior belief assessments in even the most complex of statistical models and illustrate with an example of calibrating an expensive ocean model in order to quantify uncertainty about global mean temperature in the real ocean.

The constitution of judgments in Husserl’s phenomenology

This article intends to research the passive/active process of constitution in a way that shows the essential structures of passivity in consciousness (static phenomenology) and the active constitution through Ego's acts (genetic phenomenology). However, as Husserl intends, according to Anthony Steinbock, this analysis will conduct to leading clues of constitution of meaning in a generative perspective, mainly in his future works. Although one is conscious of this static/genetic/generative phenomenology, I shall mainly concentrate on whether a true judgment is possible. Henceforth, this work will pose some questions: Despite the fact that in passivity the essential structures of constitution face some modalization, whereby the lived-experience of otherwise springs forth, what kind of guarantee does it give for one's judgments? And, if the Ego has its own way of givenness, in which it can actively intervene or be enticed somehow, how is it possibly a judicative certainty? These questions will be answered through the process of constitution itself. Therefore, this work will analyze the passive/active structure of constitution of meaning in experience, and how such experiences influence the judgment itself. The analysis will concentrate on the writings of Husserl from the 1920s and Husserliana XI, which were gathered in a single work by Anthony Steinbock.

The Truth Before and After: Brain Potentials Reveal Automatic Activation of Event Knowledge during Sentence Comprehension.

How does knowledge of real-world events shape our understanding of incoming language? Do temporal terms like "before" and "after" impact the online recruitment of real-world event knowledge? These questions were addressed in two ERP experiments, wherein participants read sentences that started with "before" or "after" and contained a critical word that rendered each sentence true or false (e.g., "Before/After the global economic crisis, securing a mortgage was easy/harder"). The critical words were matched on predictability, rated truth value, and semantic relatedness to the words in the sentence. Regardless of whether participants explicitly verified the sentences or not, false-after-sentences elicited larger N400s than true-after-sentences, consistent with the well-established finding that semantic retrieval of concepts is facilitated when they are consistent with real-world knowledge. However, although the truth judgments did not differ between before- and after-sentences, no such sentence N400 truth value effect occurred in before-sentences, whereas false-before-sentences elicited an enhanced subsequent positive ERPs. The temporal term "before" itself elicited more negative ERPs at central electrode channels than "after." These patterns of results show that, irrespective of ultimate sentence truth value judgments, semantic retrieval of concepts is momentarily facilitated when they are consistent with the known event outcome compared to when they are not. However, this inappropriate facilitation incurs later processing costs as reflected in the subsequent positive ERP deflections. The results suggest that automatic activation of event knowledge can impede the incremental semantic processes required to establish sentence truth value.

Person Perception Aspects of Judgments of Truthfulness in Public Appeals

Although detection of deception accuracy rate has been researched extensively, the person perception components that are the basis for these judgments remain unclear. To explore this, 30 academics' person perceptions, as well as truthfulness judgment, of the individual presenting a televised appeal were measured using a 14-item scale. Twelve appeals (6 genuine and 6 false) for information regarding the whereabouts of a missing relative, or for information to apprehend the person who murdered their relative, were used. The person perception scale consisted of (1) global, abstract judgments (open, deceptive, genuine, trustworthy, and emotional) and (2) behavioural indices (facial pleasantness, facial animation, arousal, tension, involvement, verbal; consistency, plausibility and directness, and vocal certainty). Multiple regression identified person perceptions of openness, (non)deceptiveness, genuineness, trustworthiness, and verbal plausibility as significant predictors of truthfulness judgments. Future research should now explore the relationship of these person perception components of truth judgments to the accuracy.

The differential effects of fluency due to repetition and fluency due to color contrast on judgments of truth.

Two experiments contrast the effects of fluency due to repetition and fluency due to color contrast on judgments of truth, after participants learn to associate high levels of fluency with falseness (i.e., a reversal of the fluency-truth link). Experiment 1 shows that the interpretation of fluency as a sign of truth is harder to reverse when learning is promoted with repetition rather than with perceptual fluency. Experiment 2 shows that when color contrast and repetition are manipulated orthogonally, the reversal of the truth effect learned with color contrast does not generalize to repetition. These results suggest specificities in the processing experiences generated by different sources of fluency, and that their influences can be separated in contexts that allow the contrast of their distinctive features. We interpret and discuss these results in light of the research addressing the convergence vs. dissociation of the effects elicited by different fluency sources.

Two methods to find truth-value gaps and their application to the projection problem of homogeneity

Presupposition, vagueness, and oddness can lead to some sentences failing to have a clear truth value. The homogeneity property of plural predication with definite descriptions may also create truth-value gaps: The books are written in Dutch is true if all relevant books are in Dutch, false if none of them are, and neither true nor false if, say, half of the books are written in Dutch. We study the projection property of homogeneity by deploying methods of general interest to identify truth-value gaps. Method A consists in collecting both truth judgments (completely true vs. not completely true) and, independently, falsity judgments (completely false vs. not completely false). The second method, employed in experiment series B and C, is based on one-shot ternary judgments: completely true vs. completely false vs. neither. After a calibration of these methods, we use them to demonstrate that homogeneity projects out of negation, the scope of universal sentences and the scope of non-monotonic quantifiers such as exactly two, to some extent (i.e., in two out of three conceivable kinds of gap situations). We assess our results in light of different theoretical approaches to homogeneity—approaches based on presuppositions, scalar implicatures, and something like supervaluations, respectively. We identify free parameters in these theories and assess various variants of them based on our results. Our experimental paradigms may be of broader significance insofar as they can be applied to other phenomena which result in the failure of a sentence to have a definite truth value.

Saving cognitive resources when possible: the role of judgment consequences and the judgment tendency of other teachers in teachers’ assessment of students

The present experimental study explores whether teachers are ‘clever’ thinkers when assessing students’ credibility, i.e., saving cognitive resources when possible and making accurate judgments. Participants were asked to decide whether student statements about using unfair means during a test were true or deceptive. First, participants’ own judgment tendency (a true vs. lie tendency) was manipulated by informing them about the resource-consuming consequences of their judgment, i.e., giving additional explanations for each student statement they judged as being true (vs. a lie). Before actually judging the students’ statements they were informed about the judgment tendency of other teachers about the upcoming student statements (true vs. lie tendency of other teachers). It was assumed that participants ‘cleverly’ choose a resource-saving judgment tendency and show a true (vs. lie) tendency when additional explanations for their lie (vs. true) judgments were required. Moreover, it was assumed that participants’ accuracy rate would be higher if their own judgment tendency opposed the judgment tendency of other teachers. The results indicate that teachers are ‘clever’ thinkers. Practical implications are discussed.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Expectations: How Base Rates Inform Lie–Truth Judgments

SummaryWe are biased towards thinking that people are telling the truth. Our study represents the first test of how beliefs about the base rate of truths and lies affect this truth bias. Raters were told either 20, 50 or 80% of the speakers would be telling the truth. As the speaker delivered their statement, participants indicated moment by moment whether they thought the speaker was lying or being truthful. At the end of the statement, they made a final lie–truth judgment and indicated their confidence. While viewing the statement, base rate beliefs had an early influence, but as time progressed, all conditions showed a truth bias. In the final judgment at the end of the statement, raters were truth biased when expecting mostly truths but did not show a lie bias when expecting mostly lies. We conclude base rate beliefs have an early influence, but over time, a truth bias dominates. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

If I imagine it, then it happened: The Implicit Truth Value of imaginary representations

Imagination sometimes leads people to behave, feel, and think as though imagined events were real even when they know they were not. In this paper, we suggest that some understanding of these phenomena can be achieved by differentiating between Implicit Truth Value (ITV), a spontaneous truth evaluation, and Explicit Truth Value (ETV), a self-reported truth judgment. In three experiments, we measure ITV using the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (Sartori, Agosta, Zogmaister, Ferrara, & Castiello, 2008), which has been used to assess which of two autobiographical events is true. Our findings demonstrate that imagining an event, like experiencing an event, increases its ITV, even when people explicitly acknowledge the imagined event as false (Experiments 1a and 1b). Furthermore, we show that imagined representations generated from a first-person perspective have higher ITV than imagined representations generated from a third-person perspective (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures of truth differ in their sensitivity to properties underlying truth judgment. We discuss the contribution of characterizing events according to both ITV and ETV to the understanding of various psychological phenomena, such as lying and self-deception.

The role of consciousness in triggering intellectual habits.

The role of consciousness in triggering intellectual habits.

Truth approximation, belief merging, and peer disagreement

In this paper, we investigate the problem of truth approximation via belief merging, i.e., we ask whether, and under what conditions, a group of inquirers merging together their beliefs makes progress toward the truth about the underlying domain. We answer this question by proving some formal results on how belief merging operators perform with respect to the task of truth approximation, construed as increasing verisimilitude or truthlikeness. Our results shed new light on the issue of how rational (dis)agreement affects the inquirers’ quest for truth. In particular, they vindicate the intuition that scientific inquiry, and rational discussion in general, benefits from some heterogeneity in opinion and interaction among different viewpoints. The links between our approach and related analyses of truth tracking, judgment aggregation, and opinion dynamics, are also highlighted.