When facing doubt, humans can go back over a performed action in order to optimize subsequent performance. The present study aimed to establish and characterize physiological doubt and checking behavior in non-human primates (NHP). We trained two rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in a newly designed "Check-or-Go" task that allows the animal to repeatedly check and change the availability of a rew...

This pilot study addresses the legal and scientific ramifications of the "certainty" expressed by mental health professionals when functioning as expert witnesses in criminal and civil proceedings. The sporadic attention paid to "certainty" in the professional literature has typically taken the form of general policy oriented analyses as opposed to empirical, data-driven investigations. In the ...

Probable: the ruling in a case is probably still good law and would most likely be applied to another case with a similar fact pattern in the same jurisdiction; also used for a statute when it has not been repealed by a legislature or questioned by a court. Questionable: the ruling in a case may still be good law but other different rulings under similar circumstances cast doubt on the issue; a...

This is a slightly altered portion of an expert report I wrote recently, released with permission, that I thought might serve as an example of how to go about seeking the truth and presenting the state of the science when truly definitive statements based on first principles are not available. Of course, I look forward to the readership proving me wrong with real-world examples, but somehow, I ...

ing space There is something unsettling about space. Whether it is existential or historical, our spatiality seems to generate a persistent sense of unknowing that animates repetitive projects of abstraction. Space has to be marked, framed, mapped, subject to boundaries. In that sense, as Perec writes in his extraordinary catalogue of forms of spatiality, space is a perpetual doubt (1997 [1974]...

Hume appeals to different kinds of certainties and necessities in the Treatise. He contrasts the certainty that arises from intuition and demonstrative reasoning with the certainty that arises from causal reasoning. He denies that the causal maxim is absolutely or metaphysically necessary, but he nonetheless takes the causal maxim and ‘proofs’ to be necessary. The focus of this paper is the cer...

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Excerpt: November, 2006 marked the third annual meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and it was another blockbuster, with 850 participants, a rich array of sessions, the “Commons@ISSoTL” for informal exchange and sharing of resources, and a true international feel. As in past years, the conference also provided a window into the character and progre...

fear of death through enemy constructions...widening security agendas articulate the inability to fix threatening forces and the referent object which receives the threats... thus creates a condition of ontological insecurity – the impression of chaos. Even though I agree with Huysmans about the angst produced by the uncertainty of not knowing the possible threats, the scope he gives to ontolog...