Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Concepts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Concepts. Show all posts

Thursday, August 19, 2021

A simple definition of ‘intentionally’

Quillien, T., & German, T. C.
Cognition
Volume 214, September 2021, 104806

Abstract

Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that X was causally dependent on how much the agent wanted X to happen (or not to happen). Combined with recent models of human causal cognition, this definition provides a good account of the way people use the concept of intentional action, and offers natural explanations for puzzling phenomena such as the side-effect effect. We provide empirical support for our theory, in studies where we show that people's causation and intentionality judgments track each other closely, in everyday situations as well as in scenarios with unusual causal structures. Study 5 additionally shows that the effect of norm violations on intentionality judgments depends on the causal structure of the situation, in a way uniquely predicted by our theory. Taken together, these results suggest that the folk concept of intentional action has been difficult to define because it is made of cognitive building blocks, such as our intuitive concept of causation, whose logic cognitive scientists are just starting to understand.

From the end

People can use the word “intentionally” in very strange ways. Our intuitions about whether something is intentional are swayed by moral considerations, are pulled one way or another depending on the amount
of control an agent exerts, and are influenced by how circuitous the causal chain between the agent and the outcome is. Intentionality requires a relevant belief, but the latter can be present in very small doses.
Norm-violating actions are judged as more intentional than norm-conforming actions – except when they are judged as less intentional.

These seemingly erratic intuitions can be anxiety-inducing. One might conclude that our commonsense psychology is fundamentally moralistic; that linguistic meaning is hopelessly entangled in its context;
or that motivational and pragmatic factors constantly warp our intuitions about the proper extension of words.

We think such anxiety might be misplaced. Instead, we view the strangeness of “intentionally” as emerging naturally from the core structure of the concept. The way people use the concept of intentional
action offers a fascinating window on some of the building blocks that make up human thought: it lets us glimpse into our implicit causal model of the mind, and the algorithms with which we assign causes to events.

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Certainty Is Primarily Determined by Past Performance During Concept Learning

Louis Martí, Francis Mollica, Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd
Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
Posted Online August 16, 2018

Abstract

Prior research has yielded mixed findings on whether learners’ certainty reflects veridical probabilities from observed evidence. We compared predictions from an idealized model of learning to humans’ subjective reports of certainty during a Boolean concept-learning task in order to examine subjective certainty over the course of abstract, logical concept learning. Our analysis evaluated theoretically motivated potential predictors of certainty to determine how well each predicted participants’ subjective reports of certainty. Regression analyses that controlled for individual differences demonstrated that despite learning curves tracking the ideal learning models, reported certainty was best explained by performance rather than measures derived from a learning model. In particular, participants’ confidence was driven primarily by how well they observed themselves doing, not by idealized statistical inferences made from the data they observed.

Download the pdf here.

Key Points: In order to learn and understand, you need to use all the data you have accumulated, not just the feedback on your most recent performance.  In this way, feedback, rather than hard evidence, increases a person's sense of certainty when learning new things, or how to tell right from wrong.

Fascinating research, I hope I am interpreting it correctly.  I am not all that certain.

Monday, December 19, 2016

Normality: Part descriptive, part prescriptive

Adam Bear and Joshua Knobe
Cognition
Published October 24, 2016

Abstract

People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms.

The article is here.