John D. Norton

Folk epistemology refers to a range of cognitive skills that involve epistemic concepts such as knowledge and truth. As human beings we are able to assess the truth of an utterance by another agent or whether an inference someone makes is valid. We can evaluate to what extent sources we acquire information from are reliable and whether new information we acquire should lead to belief revision. ...

We explore potential conceptual and cultural change in folk-medical models within a Mexican community that may have taken place over the past 30 years. Building on a study from the 1970s, we explore the effects a government-supported biomedical clinic had on the content and distribution of folk-medical concepts. Surprisingly, we find that despite a dramatic increase in access to biomedicine and...

The study investigated differences in morphological, motor and functional abilities between folk and ballet dancers. The sample comprised 51 female subjects: Croatian National Ballet (N=30) and Croatian National Folk Ensemble "LADO" (N=21). The data regarding menstrual cycle, menarche, number of births and smoking habit were collected and the morphological, motor and functional abilities measur...

In studying folk psychology, cognitive and developmental psychologists have mainly focused on how people conceive of non-experiential states such as beliefs and desires. As a result, we know very little about how non-philosophers (or the folk) understand the mental states that philosophers typically classify as being phenomenally conscious. In particular, it is not known whether the folk even t...

Offspring of individuals with psychoses sometimes display an abnormal development of cognition, language, motor performance, social adaptation, and emotional functions. The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of children of mothers with schizophrenia (n = 28) and bipolar disorder (n = 23) to understand mental states of others using the Eyes Test (folk psychology or "theory of mind"...

Real world players often increase their payo¤s by voluntarily committing to play a …xed strategy, prior to the start of a strategic game. In fact, the players may further bene…t from commitments that are conditional on the commitments of others. This paper proposes a model of conditional commitments that uni…es earlier models while avoiding circularities that often arise in such models. A commi...

Moral realists believe that there are objective moral truths. According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is sup...