Pessimistic Fallibilism and Cognitive Vulnerability

Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases

Whether animals experience human-like emotions is controversial and of immense societal concern [1-3]. Because animals cannot provide subjective reports of how they feel, emotional state can only be inferred using physiological, cognitive, and behavioral measures [4-8]. In humans, negative feelings are reliably correlated with pessimistic cognitive biases, defined as the increased expectation o...

Fallibilism and concessive knowledge attributions

Lewis concludes that fallibilism is uncomfortable, though preferable to scepticism. However, he believes that contextualism about knowledge allows us to ‘dodge the choice’ between fallibilism and scepticism. For the contextualist semantics for ‘know’ can explain the oddity of fallibilism, without landing us into scepticism. The challenge facing the non-contextualist advocate of fallibilism is t...

Depression and Cognitive Vulnerability

Cognitive vulnerability and dental fear

BACKGROUND The Cognitive Vulnerability Model proposes that perceptions of certain characteristics of a situation are critical determinants of fear. Although the model is applicable to all animal, natural environment and situational fears, it has not yet been applied specifically to dental fear. This study therefore aimed to examine the association between dental fear and perceptions of dental v...

[Cognitive vulnerability to depression].

This concise review of cognitive vulnerability to depression contains the discussion of several fundamental theoretical, methodological and empirical issues related to this important subject. The main aim was to describe in some detail the construct itself and to critically evaluate the hypotheses concerning the causal relation between specific processes, structures and cognitive contents and t...