Three studies (N = 171) examined preschool children's tendency to use category information to make inferences about ambiguous behavior. Children heard stories in which category information about story characters was manipulated and behavioral information was held constant. Participants were asked to evaluate, explain, and determine the significance of the behavior in question. Children tended t...

Central to the project of Smithies’s excellent The Epistemic Role Consciousness (2019) is a doctrine he calls mentalism, that ‘epistemic justification depends solely on your mental states, rather than reliability their connections external world’ (193). That by no means trivial thesis. However, it does not pin down what distinctive synoptic theory epistemology and philosophy mind. Someone quite...

David Lewis (1974, 1994/1999) proposed to reduce the facts about mental representation sensory evidence, dispositions act, and rationality. Recently, Robert Williams (2020) Adam Pautz (2021) have taken up developed Lewis's project in sophisticated novel ways. In this paper, we aim present, clarify, ultimately object core thesis that they all build their own views around. The different developme...

This study examined the relationship between multicultural personality dispositions and trait emotional intelligence. The sample included 152 graduate education students enrolled at a university in a large northeastern city of the United States. The multicultural personality dispositions of Cultural Empathy and Social Initiative predicted variance in trait emotional intelligence above and beyon...

In secularized modern Western societies, moral opposition to the liberalization of abortion, gay adoption, euthanasia, and suicide often relies on justifications based on other-oriented motives (mainly, protection of the weak, e.g., children). Moreover, some argue that the truly open-minded people may be those who, against the stream, oppose the established dominant liberal values in modern soc...

There is a huge chasm between the sort of lawful determination that figures in fundamental physics, and the sort of causal determination that figures in the ‘folk physics’ of everyday objects. For example, consider a rock sitting on a desk. In everyday life, we think of the rock as having a fixed stock of dispositions--the disposition to slide on the desk when pushed, to shatter when struck by ...

We are concerned here with explaining how successful rule-following behavior might evolve and how an old evolved rule might come to be successfully used in a new context. Such rule-following behavior is illustrated in the transitive judgments of pinyon and scrub-jays (Bond et al., Anim Behav 65:479–487, 2003). We begin by considering how successful transitive rule-following behavior might evolv...

This article presents a series of studies on narcissism, a personality syndrome receiving increasing theoretical and practical attention. Four empirical studies were carried out to (a) identify narcissistic acts in everyday life, (b) identify the acts subsumed by dispositions that are seen as central components of narcissism, (c) identify which acts and which dispositions are most and least cen...