Selective retrieval of task-relevant information often facilitates memory retention of that information. However, it is still unclear if selective retrieval of task-relevant information can alter memory for task-irrelevant information, and the role of emotional arousal in it. In two experiments, we used emotional and neutral faces as stimuli, and participants were asked to memorise the name (who is this person?) and location (where does he/she come from?) associated with each face in initial study. Then, half (...) of the studied faces were presented as cues, and participants were asked to retrieve the corresponding names (Experiment 1) or locations (Experiment 2). Finally, all the faces were presented and participants were asked to retrieve both the corresponding names and locations. The results of the final test showed that retrieval practice not only enhanced memory of task-relevant information but also enhanced memory of task-irrelevant information. More importantly, negative emotion amplified the retrieval practice effect overall, with a larger retrieval-induced benefit for the negative than neutral condition. These findings demonstrated an emotional arousal amplification effect on retrieval-induced enhancement effects, suggesting that the advantage of the retrieved memory representations can be amplified by emotional arousal even without explicit goals in a task setting. (shrink)

Describing his creative process, David Bowie stated: “I’ll take articles out of newspapers, poems that I’ve written, pieces of other people’s books, and put them all into this little warehouse, thi...

ABSTRACTDeception has been reported to be influenced by task-relevant emotional information from an external stimulus. However, it remains unclear how task-irrelevant emotional information would influence deception. In the present study, facial expressions of different valence and emotion intensity were presented to participants, where they were asked to make either truthful or deceptive gender judgments according to the preceding cues. We observed the influence of facial expression intensity upon individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving. Larger cost was observed for (...) high intensity faces compared to low intensity faces. These results provided insights on how automatic attraction of attention evoked by task-irrelevant emotional information in facial expressions influenced individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving. (shrink)

We agree with Emily Walsh (2020) that the current preferences of patients with dementia should sometimes supersede those patients’ advance directives. We also agree that consensus clinical ethics guidance does a poor job of explaining the moral value of such patients’ preferences. Furthermore, Walsh correctly notes that clinicians are often averse to treating patients with dementia over their objections, and that this aversion reflects clinical wisdom that can inform revisions to clinical ethics guidance. But Walsh’s account of the moral value (...) of the preferences of patients with dementia suffers from three major problems: (1) it does not engage the actual practices of clinical ethics; (2) it provides an inadequate account of why these patients’ preferences matter; and (3) it offers a poor explanation of clinicians’ intuitions in these cases. Her arguments engage a philosophical debate that is largely irrelevant to clinical practice and she therefore leaves pressing real-world clinical ethics questions unaddressed. After underscoring some of Walsh’s main points, we will discuss each of these shortcomings. (shrink)

In opposition to what we claimed in Unfit for the Future, Jan Christoph Bublitz argues that people have a right to privacy which stands in the way of the use of biomedical moral enhancement. We reply that it is not clear that he has understood what we mean by a right to privacy, that we were speaking of moral and not a legal right to privacy, and that we take a moral right to privacy to be a right against others (...) that they don’t acquire certain beliefs about us. This is compatible with the fact that the means they use to acquire beliefs about us, or the use to which they put these beliefs could violate our moral rights. Once these points are taken on board, it becomes clear that the existence of a right to privacy is irrelevant to biomedical moral enhancement which consists in changing us rather than simply acquiring information about us. (shrink)

It is commonly believed in research ethics that some form of equipoise is a necessary condition for justifying randomized clinical trials, that without it clinicians are violating the moral duty to do what is best for the patient. Recent criticisms have shown how complex the concept of equipoise is, but often retain the commitment to some form of equipoise for randomization to be justified. This article rejects that claim. It first asks for what one should be equally poised (scientific or (...) clinical equipoise), then asks who should be equally poised (scientist, clinician, or subject), and finally asks why any of these players need be equally poised between treatment options. The article argues that only the subject's evaluation of the options is morally relevant and that even the subject need not be equally poised or indifferent between the options in order to volunteer for randomization. All that is needed is adequately informed, free, and unexploited consent. It concludes equipoise is irrelevant. (shrink)

Despite explicit warnings from Shannon to tread carefully when applying Information Theory to fields for which it was not designed, contemporary neuroscientists adopting the framework of Information Theory have fallen right into the traps Shannon and others cautioned against. What makes the neuroscientist more than anyone prone to fall prey to confusion is that neuroscience looks back on a tradition—which long predates Shannon—in which information and related semantic communication notions (message, codes) are invoked as central explanatory posits. (...) In the first part of this paper, I shall give a selective historical overview of this tradition, which runs via Aristotle over Descartes to the groundbreaking work of the early nerve physiologists. At the same time, I will show how the history of explaining brain activity in semantic communication terms is characterised by a process of de-metaphorisation. Next, I will show how semantic notions, including semantic information, are still routinely relied upon within contemporary information theoretic approaches to the brain, despite the fact that Shannon deemed meaning irrelevant for his theory. There are, then, two very different notions of information at work within one and the same scientific discipline. I will demonstrate how these two notions get as a rule tangled up here. Next, I will show how invoking semantic-intentional information at the level of the brain raises two specific problems: first, notions that aim to explain by invoking semantic content or meaning, like the pre-theoretical notion of information, in principle resist integration within causal-mechanistic explanations; second, such notions are part of a mode of explanation which logically presupposes a cognitive agent. As I will also show, however, we indeed find that the neuroscientist has embraced the habit of treating neurons as cognitive agents, attributing to them capacities we would normally only attribute to persons. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need (...) to post content as a way of making sense of the situation and for gathering reactions of consensus from friends. This paper describes three types of informational context—weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional—which have not yet been taken into account by current measures to curb down the informational disorders. I show how these contexts are related to the infodemic and I propose measures for dealing with them for future global crisis situations. (shrink)

Objective According to legal and ethical obligations, patients must be thoroughly informed about the trial in which they could enrol, requiring them to consider and digest a significant amount of complex information. Many cancer patients feel overwhelmed which hinders their ability to make informed decision regarding their care. There is a need for further evidence-based strategies on how to improve both physician-patient-communication and informed consent (IC) documents in this area. We explored the views of experts from various disciplines on (...) communication in IC processes in oncology. Methods Seventeen semi-structured interviews with multidisciplinary experts were conducted and analysed using framework analysis. Results Several experts stated that IC documents have become highly legalistic, often prioritizing the interests of sponsors and further institutions involved over patient understanding. IC conversations are considered essential, as many patients do not thoroughly read IC documents. Conducting an unbiased IC conversation in an understandable manner may be challenging for physicians because they often have vested interests in recruiting patients for trials. Introducing evidence-based checklists for IC conversations and involving nursing staff may assist in addressing practical issues patients may have, reduce anxiety, and increase consent rates. Strategies to improve IC documents include reducing potentially irrelevant information (e.g., on contraception), improving the adaptation of international consent forms to local settings and incorporating graphical abstracts and study flowcharts to offer brief and visually engaging summaries. Additionally, fostering open dialogue and involvement of all relevant stakeholders (including patient representatives from various sociodemographic backgrounds) in designing IC documents may enhance IC processes. Many experts expressed the need for further research on the needs of different target groups, such as individuals with a migrant background or visual or other impairments. Conclusions There is a significant gap between legal and ethical obligations related to IC and patients not being able to understand the abundance of unfamiliar, complex information provided to them. Evidence-based IC checklists, involving nursing staff and improved written IC materials may help improve communication in this area. Further interventional research is required to IC processes in oncology with the aim to provide optimal, patient-centred care. (shrink)

John Rawls’ method of reflective equilibrium is the most influential methodology in contemporary ethics.This paper argues that this influence is undeserved, for two reasons. First, reflective equilibrium fails to accomplish two tasks that give us reason to care about methodology. On the one hand, it fails to explain how (or whether) moral knowledge is possible.This is because the method is explicitly oriented towards the distinct (and less interesting) task of characterizing our moral sensibilities. On the other hand, the method fails (...) to provide an informative way of adjudicating central methodological debates in ethics. Second, where Rawls’ method –and the background methodology he uses to motivate it –do have substance, that substance is implausible. The role of dispositions in the method entails that it endorses obviously irrational inferences. Further, the method makes substantively implausible distinctions between the dispositions that are allowed to play a methodological role. Rawls' background methodology appeals to the idea of a psychology in ‘wide reflective equilibrium’. However, both formal and empirical path-dependence considerations strongly suggest that there is nothing even minimally determinate that is someone’s psychology in ‘wide reflective equilibrium’. I close by exploring salient attempts to salvage the spirit of reflective equilibrium by abandoning elements of Rawls’ approach. I argue that none of these attempts succeed. I conclude that appeal to the method of reflective equilibrium is not a helpful means of addressing pressing methodological questions in ethics. In a slogan, reflective equilibrium is methodologically irrelevant. (shrink)

The tools employed might appear appropriate, the reasoning sound and argumentation valid, but the subject-matter, well one wonders what that has to do with philosophy, if anything at all? Viewing some of the topics one really wonders of the notion of philosophy is not stretched too far? So much that is passed off as philosophy itself or some kind of so-called interdisciplinary issues really appear as irrelevant. Topics from the grievance studies especially fall under this. It seems as if (...) individuals have personal issues, obsessions and psychological, social and cultural problems that they attempt to interpret, perceive and treat as if they are philosophical and/or philosophically related. I wish to suggest that those issues are treated as disciplines or subjects in their own right, for example racism, feminism and gender studies, but not as if they have anything to do with philosophy or should be treated in a philosophical manner. As if they inform us about profound philosophical issues or concerns. Perhaps aspects of them can be dealt with as psychological, anthropological, sociological, biological, political, etc, but dealing with them as if they provide us with some kind of profound philosophical ideas and insights might be stretching the notion of philosophy a bit too far. I’ve wondered about the seeming dichotomy of materialism/physicalism and panpsychism and if they are really the only possible consciousness explanatory positions? How about biologism? That is as if all living biological matter or organisms are conscious, as well as that consciousness (the many types of it) can be explained best by the nature of those phenomena. A biologically restricted form or modification of pan-psychism? Part II What is Philosophy by Philosophers a Compilation. (shrink)

Recent work in psychology on ‘cultural cognition’ suggests that our cultural background drives our attitudes towards a range of politically contentious issues in science such as global warming. This work is part of a more general attempt to investigate the ways in which our wants, wishes and desires impact on our assessments of information, events and theories. Put crudely, the idea is that we conform our assessments of the evidence for and against scientific theories with clear political relevance to (...) our pre-existing political beliefs and convictions. In this paper I explore the epistemological consequences of cultural cognition. What does it mean for the rationality of our beliefs about issues such as global warming? I argue for an unsettling conclusion. Not only are those on the ‘political right’ who reject the scientific consensus on issues like global warming unjustified in doing so, some of those on the ‘political left’ who accept the consensus are also unjustified in doing so. I finish by addressing the practical implications of my conclusions. (shrink)

Relevance and irrelevance, it is argued, are constitutive to our access to “information objects” on three interconnected levels: (1) access to the information object itself, (2) the information gained from it, (3) the use of that information. Relevance selectively shapes our experience and action, but the “irrelevance” of what is left out is not simply the opposite or absence of relevance. The complex relation between relevance and irrelevance expresses itself in different shades of knowledge and ignorance, (...) and in a fuzzy border between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. This implies both chances and risks for communication as a process of producing and exchanging information objects. In a second step, previous research on relevance and irrelevance is sketched with respect to different traditions and approaches: (1) Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch; (2) Paul Grice, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson; (3) library and information science; (4) signs and language; and (5) epistemology and logic. Finally, the role of the word “relevance”, which is not found in all languages, is briefly considered after distinguishing the explicit reflection of relevance from the constitutive role of relevance, which often remains implicit. (shrink)

Maher [2004. “Bayesianism and Irrelevant Conjunction.” Philosophy of Science, 71:515–520] attempts to resolve the paradox of irrelevant conjunction by arguing that the explicandum underlying the paradox is different from that of Bayesian confirmation theory. However, his solution remains inconclusive as he fails to specify the explicandum that underlies the paradox. In this article, we argue that pursuit worthy confirmation (pw-confirmation) is the explicandum in the case of the paradox. Given background information K, evidence E pw-confirms hypothesis H, (...) meaning H is confirmed as being worthy of pursuit. When many find the confirmation of irrelevant conjunction unintuitive, their notion of confirmation is neither incremental confirmation (i-confirmation) nor absolute confirmation (a-confirmation), but rather pw-confirmation. Following Šešelja, Kosolosky, and Straßer [2012. “Rationality of Scientific Reasoning in the Context of Pursuit: Drawing Appropriate Distinctions.” Philosophica 86:51–82], the article distinguishes between two phases of pursuit worthiness and proposes a Bayesian definition for both phases. We demonstrate that irrelevant conjunctions are not eligible to be considered as candidates for initial pursuit. Often in practice, hypothesis testing can be conceived only as a part of a pursuit. Paradox is a conflation of two explicanda: i-confirmation and pw-confirmation. The standard Bayesian approach fails to tackle the paradox as it does not recognise pw-confirmation as a distinct category of confirmation. While developing a theory of pw-confirmation, we argue that a Bayesian definition of pw-confirmation can address some of the concerns Kuhn raises about scientific rationality.In addition to critically analyzing the standard Bayesian solution to the paradox, we also examine the limitations of Schurz [2022. “Tacking by Conjunction, Genuine Confirmation and Convergence to Certainty.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12:1–18], Bandyopadhyay, Brittan, and Taper [2016. Belief, Evidence, and Uncertainty: Problems of Epistemic Inference. Springer], and Chandler [2007. “Solving the tacking problem with contrast classes.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58:489–502] solutions. (shrink)

The lack of a theory of relevance in the current state of the art of informal logic has often been considered regrettable, a gap that must be filled before the Relevance-Sufficiency-Acceptability model can be considered complete. I wish to challenge this view. A theory of relevance is neither desirable nor possible. Informal logic can get by perfectly well, and has been doing so far, with relevance judgments that are by nature unanalysable and intuitive. Criticism of theories of relevance, for example (...) in Woods, is deflated. (shrink)

This paper aims to reexamine the axiom of the independence of irrelevant alternatives in the theory of social choice. A generalized notion of independence is introduced to clarify an informational requirement of binary independence which is usually imposed in the Arrovian framework. We characterize the implication of binary independence.

As documented by Darwin 150 years ago, emotion expressed in human faces readily draws our attention and promotes sympathetic emotional reactions. How do such reactions to the expression of emotion affect our goal-directed actions? Despite the substantial advance made in the neural mechanisms of both cognitive control and emotional processing, it is not yet known well how these two systems interact. Here, we studied how emotion expressed in human faces influences cognitive control of conflict processing, spatial selective attention and inhibitory (...) control in particular, using the Eriksen flanker paradigm. In this task, participants viewed displays of a central target face flanked by peripheral faces and were asked to judge the gender of the target face; task-irrelevant emotion expressions were embedded in the target face, the flanking faces, or both. We also monitored how emotion expression affects gender judgment performance while varying the relative timing between the target and flanker faces. As previously reported, we found robust gender congruency effects, namely slower responses to the target faces whose gender was incongruent with that of the flanker faces, when the flankers preceded the target by 0.1 s. When the flankers further advanced the target by 0.3 s, however, the congruency effect vanished in most of the viewing conditions, except for when emotion was expressed only in the flanking faces or when congruent emotion was expressed in the target and flanking faces. These results suggest that emotional saliency can prolong a substantial degree of conflict by diverting bottom-up attention away from the target, and that inhibitory control on task-irrelevant information from flanking stimuli is deterred by the emotional congruency between target and flanking stimuli. (shrink)

Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, “relevance” has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different (...) fields discuss relevance and relate it to the challenges of “irrelevance”, which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background. (shrink)

Disagreements about abortion are often assumed to reduce to disagreements about fetal personhood (and mindedness). If one believes a fetus is a person (or has a mind), then they are “pro-life.” If one believes a fetus is not a person (or is not minded), they are “pro-choice.” The issue, however, is much more complicated. Not only is it not dichotomous—most everyone believes that abortion is permissible in some circumstances (e.g. to save the mother’s life) and not others (e.g. at nine (...) months of a planned pregnancy)—but scholars on both sides of the issue (e.g. Don Marquis and Judith Thomson) have convincingly argued that fetal personhood (and mindedness) are irrelevant to the debate. To determine the extent to which they are right, this article will define “personhood,” its relationship to mindedness, and explore what science has revealed about the mind before exploring the relevance of both to questions of abortion’s morality and legality. In general, this article does not endorse a particular answer to these questions, but the article should enhance the reader’s ability to develop their own answers in a much more informed way. (shrink)

The common view that the notion of a Turing machine is directly relevant to AI is criticised. It is argued that computers are the result of a convergence of two strands of development with a long history: development of machines for automating various physical processes and machines for performing abstract operations on abstract entities, e.g. doing numerical calculations. Various aspects of these developments are analysed, along with their relevance to AI, and the similarities between computers viewed in this way and (...) animal brains. This comparison depends on a number of distinctions: between energy requirements and information requirements of machines, between ballistic and online control, between internal and external operations, and between various kinds of autonomy and self-awareness. The ideas are all intuitively familiar to software engineers, though rarely made fully explicit. Most of this has nothing to do with Turing machines or most of the mathematical theory of computation. But it has everything to do with both the scientific task of understanding, modelling or replicating human or animal intelligence and the engineering applications of AI, as well as other applications of computers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen processing information about human faces, we have to integrate different sources of information like skin colour and emotional expression. In 3 experiments, we investigated how these features are processed in a top-down manner when task instructions determine the relevance of features, and in a bottom-up manner when the stimulus features themselves determine process priority. In Experiment 1, participants learned to respond with approach-avoidance movements to faces that presented both emotion and colour features. For each participant, only one (...) of these two features was task-relevant while the other one could be ignored. In contrast to our predictions, we found better learning of task-irrelevant colour when emotion was task-relevant than vice versa. Experiment 2 showed that the learning of task-irrelevant emotional information was improved in general when participants’ awareness was increased by adding NoGo-trials. Experiment 3 replicated these results... (shrink)

Research has established that exposure to a combination of diagnostic (i.e., relevant) and nondiagnostic (i.e., irrelevant) information results in predictions that are more regressive than predictions based on diagnostic information (Hackenbrack, 1992; Hoffman and Patton, 1997). This phenomenon has been labeled the dilution effect (e.g., Tetlock and Boettger, 1989) and has been documented when individuals make predictions. This study tests for the dilution effect when small groups make predictions, and examines the effect of using a procedure designed (...) to reduce the dilution effect. Results indicate that group predictions are influenced by nondiagnostic information in the same manner as are individual predictions, and allowing participants to rate the diagnosticity of information prior to making predictions does not reduce the dilution effect. (shrink)

Research has established that exposure to a combination of diagnostic (i.e., relevant) and nondiagnostic (i.e., irrelevant) information results in predictions that are more regressive than predictions based on diagnostic information (Hackenbrack, 1992; Hoffman and Patton, 1997). This phenomenon has been labeled the dilution effect (e.g., Tetlock and Boettger, 1989) and has been documented when individuals make predictions. This study tests for the dilution effect when small groups make predictions, and examines the effect of using a procedure designed (...) to reduce the dilution effect. Results indicate that group predictions are influenced by nondiagnostic information in the same manner as are individual predictions, and allowing participants to rate the diagnosticity of information prior to making predictions does not reduce the dilution effect. (shrink)

Robert Bass argues that the evidential problem of evil can be strengthened by the application of a Bayesian conditionalization argument. I argue that, whatever the merits of Bayesian conditionalization arguments, they are unsuccessful in substantiating the evidential problem of evil because the problem of evil doesn’t meet the necessary conditions for applying the formula informatively. I offer two examples to show that a successful application of the Bayesian formula must pass two tests, the competency test and the connection test. I (...) then show that the problem of evil passes neither, and is therefore not strengthened by the Bayesian analysis. I conclude that Bass’s reformulated argument poses no substantive threat to theism. (shrink)

Early in the course of undertaking empirical research on the sexual diversity of the judiciary I had to address a particular challenge. Sexuality, I was repeatedly told, is not and ought not to be a difference that is taken into account. At best it ought to be disregarded or taken out of consideration. This generated a number of challenges for my research. How do you research and make sense of sexuality as a difference that key informants assert is absent or (...) seek to make invisible and irrelevant? How do you research the operation and effects of that which is not to be spoken about? How do you research the sexual norm when its existence and operation is denied? This article explores one response. It is a project that may for some be surprising and unexpected. It is a study of judicial portraits. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and art historical scholarship on portraits I undertake a textual analysis of these images, focusing upon the aesthetic and artistic traditions used to make them. A small case study of portraits of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales is used to explore how, if at all, sexuality figured in these portraits. (shrink)