As defined in my previous work, (un)reliability is one of five types of hypothesis or integration mechanism, whereby readers account for textual incongruities. In principle, we may always appeal to alternative logics of resolution: ambiguous data may be attributed to generic convention, as in the detective story, and/or to functional drives, like surprise, no less than to the teller’s blind spo...

In a recent article, van Fraassen has taken issue with the use to which Perrin’s experiments on Brownian motion have been put by philosophers, especially those defending scientific realism. He defends an alternative position by analysing the details of Perrin’s case in its historical context. In this reply, I argue that van Fraassen has not done the job well enough and I extend and in some resp...

The current experiment extended earlier findings on the impact of the fear-then-relief technique (FTR). People that experience fear followed by immediate relief show higher compliance with a request after this FTR manipulation, this is because FTR makes people function mindless. I argue that nonverbal behavior is a critical factor that determines the success of the FTR technique. Nonverbal beha...