Motivated Reasoning and Response Bias: A Signal Detection Approach Dries Trippas The aim of this dissertation was to address a theoretical debate on belief bias. Belief bias is the tendency for people to be influenced by their prior beliefs when engaged in deductive reasoning. Deduction is the act of drawing necessary conclusions from premises which are meant to be assumed as true. Given that t...

Recent articles by Erich Goode (2000) and Glenn Sparks (2001) discussed the relationship between religious and paranormal beliefs. Goode proposes that they share a common foundation of belief in phenomena that are outside conventional science. Sparks is less certain of a relationship between traditional religion and paranormal beliefs. However, both writers agree that there are multiple dimensi...

Intense controversy surrounds the question of when children first understand that others can hold false beliefs. Results from traditional tasks suggest that false-belief understanding does not emerge until about 4 years of age and constitutes a major developmental milestone in social cognition. By contrast, results from nontraditional tasks, which have steadily accumulated over the past 10 year...

This paper aims to investigate methodologies to utilize an agent’s intentions as a means to guide the revision of its beliefs. For this purpose, we develop a collection of belief revision operators that employ the effect of the revision on the agent’s intentions as the selection criteria. These operators are then assessed for rationality against the traditional AGM postulates. There is a large ...

A study was conducted to assess the relationship between critical thinking and belief in the paranormal. 180 students from three departments (psychology, arts, computer science) completed one measure of reasoning, the Paranormal Belief Scale (Tobacyk & Milford, 1983), and a scale of paranormal experiences. Half of the subjects filled out the Cornell Critical Thinking Test (Ennis & Millmann, 198...

by JOHN DILWORTH Western Michigan University [Theoria 2006.4: 299-318.] Abstract What is the relation between a perceptual experience of an object X as being red, and one's belief, if any, as to the nature of that experience? A traditional Cartesian view would be that, if indeed object X does seem to be red to oneself, then one's resulting introspective belief about it could only be a conformin...

My aim is to motivate and develop a view of what senses are. Senses, as I conceive of them, avoid a number of the problems that plague a broadly Fregean approach to the semantics of belief ascriptions, as I hope to show. The chief innovation of my view that enables these solutions is that beliefs are taken to have multiple, truth-conditionally equivalent contents. In traditional Fregean termino...