Truth Judgments Research Articles

Niall Frossach's True Judgement

This article presents a critical reading of the short untitled saga about King Niall Frossach (d. 778) that survives in the Book of Leinster. The discussion focuses on the seemingly unique combination of motifs that makes up the narrative, especially the Act of Truth and the release of ascetic heat. This odd combination of regal and saintly motifs is designed to paint a flattering picture of Niall, a righteous, yet austere, ruler who represents the very epitome of Christian kingship.

Niall Frossach's True Judgement

Niall Frossach's True Judgement

Libertarianism, Luck, and Action Explanation

My primary objective is to motivate the concern that leading libertarian views of free action seem unable to account for an agent's behavior in a way that reveals an explanatorily apt connection between the agent's prior reasons and the intentional behavior to be explained. I argue that it is this lack of a suitable reasons explanation of purportedly free decisions that underpins the objection that agents who act with the pertinent sort of libertarian freedom cannot be morally responsible for what they do because their intentional behavior is a matter of luck. The accounts scrutinized include a Kane-type event-causal view, Clarke's account that appeals to both agent causation and event causation in the production of free action, and O'Connor's pure agent-causal account. I conclude by discussing an advantage these libertarian accounts enjoy over compatibilist contenders: they possess a feature necessary to accommodate the truth of judgments of moral obligation.

Piloting a certification process for emergency medicine residency graduates in Kosovo

Study objectives: We implement and describe a process for graduating emergency medicine residents from a new training program in a developing postwar region with no legacy of emergency medicine. Methods: We describe the testing process for the first graduating emergency medicine residency class at the University Hospital in Pristina, Kosovo. The 19 residents had completed 4 years of emergency medicine training. Given the lack of existing emergency medicine specialists in Kosovo, the Ministry of Health required a process for certifying residency graduates as competent to practice independently. Our team developed and conducted that examination process in Kosovo. The 3-day examination process was modeled after the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) examination process. Residents received a 110-question written examination to be taken over a 3-hour period. The questions, adapted from emergency medicine board review materials, were translated into the predominant local language, Albanian, before the team's arrival. A 70% correct response rate was required to pass the written examination, which would be validated on site. Residents were also required to manage oral case simulations. A cardiac, trauma, pediatric, and toxicology case were each prepared by the team before arrival. Because local practice relies heavily on decentralized specialty clinics, the residents had minimal if any pediatric case experience, and this case was eliminated. The oral examination was conducted over a 2-day period. Each case was delivered by either an emergency medicine or emergency medicine–pediatrics ABEM diplomate, whereas residents' performances were judged by a panel composed of an emergency physician and 2 local physicians practicing another specialty. Residents would be scored on a continuum (fail, borderline, acceptable, excellent). Although the Kosovar emergency medicine residents had received 10 weekly sets of practice written questions, they had no experience with oral case simulations. Results: All 19 residents completed the written examination within the allotted time. The median preliminary score for the written examination was 77% (range 67% to 82%). During 4 hours, the team assessed each item's correct response rate. Any question answered incorrectly by more than 60% of the residents was reviewed by the team. Twenty-two items met this criterion and were reviewed separately in the original English and by back-translation from Albanian. On review, 9 items were either judged to be poorly constructed or were not applicable to local realities, whereas 8 were inadequately translated. These 17 items were removed from the numerator and the denominator for scoring. The remaining 5 questions passed review and were retained. The mean score was 88% correct (range 77% to 94%). Although it was intended that each resident receive 3 case simulations, because of the novelty of oral case simulations and the time required for translation, this was impossible. Instead, each resident conducted only 1 case simulation, which would be graded on a pass/fail basis instead of a continuum. Three residents who did not complete required actions or whose actions were considered potentially dangerous or negligent received a second case in an effort to determine whether those deficiencies were due to true poor judgment or lack of familiarity with the examination format. Each received a passing evaluation on the second case. The outbreak of civil unrest on the second day of oral examinations, resulting in an urgent need for physicians, required an expedited completion of the final 2 examination cases and provided the unexpected opportunity for direct observation of the residents' clinical competency, which the team perceived to be evident. Conclusion: The certification process used in the United States may be successfully applied in developing and rebuilding regions, provided that process is flexibly adapted to local realities. The resumption of ethnic hostilities exemplified why emergency medicine is necessary in such regions, just as the disparity between oral case simulation and actual clinical performance serves as a warning. Examination methods that are valid in the United States may be insensitive in discerning competency in other settings, particularly in the absence of extensive experience with those methods. Emergency medicine in the developing world is fragile and often unfamiliar or even threatening to other specialty physicians. A rigid approach to preconceived performance standards, without sensitivity to the limitations of those standards, risks crippling a nascent emergency medicine specialty. However, by including other specialists in a credible certification process and by flexibly demonstrating firm standards, US emergency physicians can lend invaluable credibility and support to the introduction of emergency medicine to developing or rebuilding regions.

The Place of authority in our Judgments of Truth, goodness and Beauty

Kant thinks that our judgments in all three parts of Critical Philosophy: metaphysics, practical judgment, and aesthetics, entail antinomies, antinomies that were to be resolved in analogous ways. For example, in aesthetics, the dictum de gustibus non disputandum is antithetical to the claim that if we could not dispute questions of taste, we could contend for them and expect others to agree (Kritik der Urteilskraft paras. 56, 57, B232-240; A229-237). He putatively resolves the antinomy by claiming that the judgment of taste in the thesis does not presuppose ‘distinct’ concepts, but the judgment of taste in the antithesis presupposes an ‘indistinct’ concept, a super-sensed substratum of appearances.I agree that our judgments in questions of metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics face philosophical problems. There seem to be two ways in which we engage with others in discussing these judgments, the mode by which we say, “Don’t argue! Hutton’s Hams are the best”, and the mode by which we submit to the invitation, “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1.18). I argue that our judgments in questions of fact and of morals and of beauty are made with authority. I argue, further, that our expressed judgments in all three spheres are required to be submitted to the authority of others. This is not an antinomy, since each proposition is consistent with, and even entails, the other.But, you may say, I rarely, if ever, have any authority, since I am compelled by the facts to think what is the case, what is true.

Truth's Fabric

To understand language, philosophers have related sentences and/or their uses to the concept of truth. I study an aspect of this relation by studying the actual structures that sentences expressing truth judgements have, an issue that I consider empirical. So I propose to switch from studying ‘truth conditions’ for sentences (determined metaphysically, or normatively) to studying the structures of expressions of the form This sentence is true/has (some) truth to it. I argue that the status of the ‘truth predicate’ must be understood in terms of the syntax (in Chomsky's naturalistic sense of syntax) of possessive constructions, rather than in terms of metaphysical, epistemic, or action–theoretic factors.

How Does Philosophical Counseling Work?

Hume claims that judgment is the active device through which beliefs influence emotions. Without such a device, Hume reasons that beliefs and emotions would not in­teract at all, because beliefs are always about ideas while emotions are reactions to events in the world. Judgment is the link between the theoretical and the applied aspects of the human being, and is, if Hume is right, crucial for any system of philosophical counseling to be successful. No client would attempt to modify his or her beliefs, or reflect on the thoughts of philosophers, without some expectation of an emotional payoff. The counseling process hinges on a link between reason and the emotions, but what is the nature of this link? Since judgment is itself (if we are lucky) a primarily rational process, the question of the connection between reason and the emotions seems to be left unanswered. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between reason and the emotions by taking judgment to be judgment of truth or falsity. Once a belief is deemed to be true by the client, an assessment is made as to how this truth will affect the client’s well being. I argue that this is true even if the client is severely depressed or believes that he/she does not deserve good treatment or good fortune, or seems otherwise unconcerned with his/her well being. If the truth is judged to be a threat to the well being of the client, an emotional reaction ensues. Likewise, if the truth is judged to be a benefit to the client, an emotional reaction will occur. I argue further that even though different truths will be taken as either benefits or threats depending on the client, the ultimate interpretation of the true statement as either benefit or threat will automatically generate an emotional response. If this ontology is correct, then the philosophical counselor will take as his/her primary role 1) a practitioner of epistemology (determining when beliefs are justified and true) and 2) a trainer in interpretation (determining when beliefs are to be interpreted as blessings or threats.)

Epistemicist Models: Comments on Gómez‐Torrente and Graff

Every philosopher should wish for commentators as thoughtful and rigorous as Mario G6mez-Torrente and Delia Graff. Their papers contribute significantly to our understanding of the fine structure of vagueness, but not by undermining its epistemicist interpretation. According to epistemicism, there is an unknowable truth of the matter in borderline cases. Either is bald or he is not, but we cannot know which. Why not? Suppose that in fact is bald; the argument is similar if he is not. Then we speak truly if we say Harry is But since the case is borderline, we might easily have uttered the same words even if our overall pattern of use had been slightly different so as slightly to shift the boundary of 'bald' in that context, making 'Harry is bald' express a different and false proposition. Thus even if we actually make the true judgement that is bald in this case, we do so on an insufficiently reliable basis to count as knowing that is bald. This is a conceptual analogue of more familiar kinds of ignorance, in which limits on our powers of perceptual discrimination prevent us from knowing the exact values of physical quantities by ordinary perception. Such limits on our knowledge can be expressed as margin for error principles (Williamson 1992, 1994: pp. 216-47). Gomez-Torrente points out that in perceptual cases we can discover the values of the quantities exactly (or at least far less inexactly) by scientific measurement; the unknowability is relative to limited cognitive means. He suggests that the epistemicist explanation establishes at most a similarly limited ignorance in borderline cases, thereby missing the depth of the phenomenon to be explained. The epistemicist explanation is as general as its underlying assumptions. In this context the relevant ones are: (a) the boundary of a vague term is unstable with respect to small changes in use because there is no natural line for it to follow; (b) because our use of such a term is not perfectly co-ordinated internally, a small change in one aspect of use (enough to shift the boundary a little) can easily be combined with preservation of another aspect

The Case of Theaetetus

AbstractAny comprehensive interpretation of the Theaetetus has to provide answers to, among others, two very general questions concerning that dialogue: "What is Plato's relation to the problems faced in the Theaetetus?" and "What is the significance of the absence of the Forms from the discussion of the Theaetetus, given their undoubted relevance to the topic of the dialogue, i.e. knowledge?" Predominantly, the answer given to the first question in the literature has been that the problems are those that Plato is trying to tackle and the one to the second question, when it has been addressed at all, that the Forms are left out of the discussion because Plato no longer thought them relevant, either for having abandoned or seriously revised them, by the time of writing the Theaetetus. In this study of the Wax Block and the Aviary models of judgment that occur in the second part of the Theaetetus as part of its discussion of the problem of false judgment, I argue that the problems faced there actually arise because of the neglect of Forms. The discussion of the second part is, I contend, carried out on a materialist ontology, an ontology assumed because it suits the definition of knowledge as true judgment which inaugurates that part of the dialogue, an ontology in no way subscribed to by Plato. The Wax Block is, I explain, a materialist model and fails in the case of judgments about numbers for treating them on a par with material subjects, ignoring their intelligible status. In particular, it fails to distinguish judging 5 and 7 to be 11 from judging 12 to be 11 because of its neglect of Forms; Plato would distinguish those judgments by distinguishing 5 and 7 from 12 with help from his part-whole analysis, to which the Forms are essential.

The development of epistemological understanding

We propose the coordination of the subjective and objective dimensions of knowing as the essence of what develops in the attainment of mature epistemological understanding. Initially, the objective dimension dominates, to the exclusion of subjectivity; subsequently, the subjective dimension assumes an ascendant position and the objective is abandoned, and, finally, the two are coordinated. This progression, we further postulate, tends to occur in a systematic order across different judgment domains (personal taste, aesthetic, value, and truth), with the orders the reverse of one another in the two major transitions that constitute this progression. These predictions are supported among a sample of seven groups of children, adolescents, and adults varying in age, education, and life experience. Subjectivity is most readily acknowledged in personal taste and aesthetic judgments and least readily in truth judgments. Once subjectivity is accepted and becomes dominant, objectivity is reintegrated in the reverse order, i.e., most readily with respect to truth judgments. Not predicted, however, was the finding that for a number of individuals, both transitions proved most difficult in the values domain.

Should observed overconfidence be dismissed as a statistical artifact? Critique of Erev, Wallsten, and Budescu (1994).

I. Erev, T. S. Wallsten, and D. V. Budescu (1994) showed that the same probability judgment data can reveal both apparent overconfidence and underconfidence, depending on how the data are analyzed. To explain this seeming paradox, I. Erev et al. proposed a general model of judgment in which overt responses are related to underlying "true judgments" that are perturbed by error. A central conclusion of their work is that observed over- and underconfidence can be split into two components: (a) "true" over- and underconfidence and (b) "artifactual" over- and underconfidence due to error in judgment. It is argued in the present article that decomposing over- and underconfidence into true and artifactual components is inappropriate. The mistake stems from giving primacy to ambiguously defined model constructions (true judgments) over observed data.

The Cognitive Process of Information Evaluation in Doctoral Students: A Collective Case Study

Evaluation is a critical thinking process that people use in making judgments of quality, truthfulness, and accuracy. Despite its importance in everyday life, evaluation as a process is poorly understood. This collective case study seeks to describe the cognitive processes used by well-educated, motivated adults as they make critical judgments of information under naturalistic and conducive conditions. Five second-year doctoral students were followed through an information search process involving a topic of personal relevance. Findings revealed that participants use evaluation as part of a complex cognitive process, employing varied and numerous evaluative strategies. Evaluation occurs as a sequence beginning with a discrete initial event, progressing through three distinct deliberative phases, and ending with a decision in the form of a judgment. Initializations occur as complex reactions to informational stimuli. Textual characteristics recognized as problems vary widely across participants.

Externalism and Authoritative Knowledge of Content: A New Incompatibilist Strategy

A typical strategy of those who seek to show that externalism is compatible with authoritative knowledge of content is to show that externalism does nothing to undermine the claim that all thinkers can at any time form correct and justified self-ascriptive judgements concerning their occurrent thoughts . In reaction, most incompatibilists have assumed the burden of denying that externalism is compatible with this claim about self-ascription. Here I suggest another way to attack the compatibilist strategy. I aim to show that forming a justified true self-ascriptive judgement about one’s occurrent thought does not amount to or imply that one ‘knows the content’ of the self-ascribed thought. While the difference between present-tense self-ascription and knowledge of content has previously been brought out using the familiar trappings of world-switching examples, 1 here I attempt to establish the difference by appeal to actual (real-life) memory-involvingcases. To this end, I present a ‘recollection problem’ and argue that, so long as one conflates present-tense self-ascription and self-knowledge of content, there can be no satisfactory response to this problem. The result is that, even if the compatibilist strategy is correct in what it asserts about self-ascription, it has not delivered the relevant goods if it aims to establish a thesis asserting externalism’s compatibility with knowledge of content. I conclude by speculating how the recollection argument to be presented here can be transformed, from an argument against the compatibilist strategy, into an argument for incompatibilism.

The importance of theory: Response to Brenner (2000).

L. Brenner's (2000) critique of I. Erev, T. S. Wallsten and D. V. Budescu (1994) focuses on their (a) use of a model to explain the paradox of the same data appearing to suggest over- and underconfidence, depending on how they are analyzed; (b) definitions of true judgment and error; and (c) specific use of judgments transformed to log-odds and a model formulated in those terms. The authors of the present article strongly disagree with the first point and discuss the importance of using models to interpret data. With regard to the second, the authors admit that the constructs of true judgment and error are poorly named but dispute L. Brenner's specific criticisms. Concerning the third, the authors had not claimed that the log-odds metric has any special status in judgment research and thus agree with L. Brenner's basic point.

"I'm innocent!": Effects of training on judgments of truth and deception in the interrogation room.

The present research examined the extent to which people can distinguish true and false denials made in a criminal interrogation, and tested the hypothesis that training in the use of verbal and nonverbal cues increases the accuracy of these judgments. In Phase One, 16 participants committed one of four mock crimes (breaking and entering, vandalism, shoplifting, a computer break-in) or a related but innocent act. Given incentives to deny involvement rather than confess, these suspects were then interrogated. In Phase Two, 40 observers were either trained in the analysis of verbal and nonverbal deception cues or not trained before viewing the videotaped interrogations and making their judgments. As in past studies conducted in nonforensic settings, observers were generally unable to distinguish between truthful and deceptive suspects. In addition, those who underwent training were less accurate than naive controls—though they were more confident and cited more reasons for their judgments. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of what is known about police interrogations, false confessions, and the wrongful conviction of innocent suspects.

Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth

Statements of the form “Osorno is in Chile” were presented in colors that made them easy or difficult to read against a white background and participants judged the truth of the statement. Moderately visible statements were judged as true at chance level, whereas highly visible statements were judged as true significantly above chance level. We conclude that perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth.

Truthmaker realism1

We take as our starting point a thesis to the effect that, at least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality which make such judgments are true. We argue that two distinct components are involved in this truthmaker relation. On the one hand is the relation of necessitation, which holds between an object x and a judgment p when the existence of x entails the truth of p. On the other hand is the dual notion of projection, which holds between a judgment p and an object x when the truth of p entails the existence of x. A truthmaker for a judgment p is then a necessitator for p which satisfies the further constraint that it is part of p’s projection. We offer a formal theory of the truthmaker relation thus defined, exploiting ontological tools of basic mereology and the theory of dependence. We then apply the theory to a range of problems connected with generic expressions, ellipsis, vagueness, and indexical and perceptual judgments.

Generics, Frequency Adverbs, and Probability

Generics and frequency statements are puzzling phenomena: they are lawlike, yet contingent. They may be true even in the absence of any supporting instances, and extending the size of their domain does not change their truth conditions. Generics and frequency statements are parametric on time, but not on possible worlds; they cannot be applied to temporary generalizations, and yet are contingent. These constructions require a regular distribution of events along the time axis. Truth judgments of generics vary considerably across speakers, whereas truth judgments of frequency statements are much more uniform. A generic may be false even if the vast majority of individuals in its domain satisfy the predicated property, whereas a frequency statement using, e.g., usually would be true. This paper argues that all these seemingly unrelated puzzles have a single underlying cause: generics and frequency statements express probability judgments, and these, in turn, are interpreted as statements of hypothetical relative frequency.

Valutazione con angio-RM di aneurismi cerebrali embolizzati con spirali di Guglielmi

We performed 25 control studies in 17 patients with cerebral aneurysms embolized with Guglielmi coils (GDC), both with MR-angiography (MRA) and digital subtraction angiography (DSA). No case studied with MRA showed artifacts due to GDC. In some cases (15/25, 60%) there was a poor visualization of small vessels, distal to the aneurysm (probably caused by turbulent flow due to GDC presence). In cases with complete occlusion (16/25) there was a good correlation between MRA and DSA. At the moment the cases of partial occlusion (9/25) are too few to express a true judgement. In conclusion MRA may become an alternative to DSA, mainly in elderly patients.

On the Importance of Random Error in the Study of Probability Judgment. Part II: Applying the Stochastic Judgment Model to Detect Systematic Trends

Erev, Wallsten, and Budescu (1994) and Budescu, Erev, and Wallsten (1997) demonstrated that over- and underconfidence often observed in judgment studies may be due, in part, to the presence of random error and its effects on the analysis of the judgments. To illustrate this fact they showed that a general model that assumes that overt responses representing (perfectly calibrated) true judgments perturbed by random error can replicate typical patterns observed in empirical studies. In this paper we provide a method for determining whether apparent overconfidence in empirical data reflects a systematic bias in judgment or is an artifact due solely to the presence of error. The approach is based, in part, on the Wallsten and González-Vallejo (1994) Stochastic Judgment Model (SJM). The new method is described in detail and is used to analyze results from a new study. The analysis indicates a clear overconfidence effect, above and beyond the level predicted by a model assuming perfect calibration perturbed by random error. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.