Several scholars, e.g. Sellars (1956), Meltzoff & Gopnik (1993), have construed the attribution of experiences as being governed by a folkpsychological theory in which experiences function as theoretical entities. However, so far this claim has not been convincingly supported by an account of how people infer the existence of experiences. In this paper I argue that the mechanisms that lead to t...

It is argued that neuroscience will eventually revolutionize the law (Wegner, 2002; Greene and Cohen, 2004; O’Hara, 2004; Churchland, 2011). Virtually all legal systems are grounded on the assumption that human beings (can) act on the basis of their own free will; voluntary actions are driven by people’s intentions, and individuals are therefore responsible (and punishable) for their own action...

Proponents of non-conceptual content have recruited it for various philosophical jobs. Some epistemologists have suggested that it may play the role of “the given” that Sellars is supposed to have exorcised from philosophy. Some philosophers of mind (e.g., Dretske) have suggested that it plays an important role in the project of naturalizing semantics as a kind of halfway between merely informa...

Abstract The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars (1956, 1981) continues to be at the center heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, ‘conceptualism’ nonconceptual content philosophy perception, nature experiential given phenomenology cognitive sciences. I argue that question just what myth is supposed first place more...

Models of elections tend to predict that parties will maximize votes by converging to an electoral center. There is no empirical support for this prediction. In order to account for the phenomenon of political divergence, this paper offers a stochastic electoral model where party leaders or candidates are differentiated by differing valences—the electoral perception of the quality of the party ...

In this paper, we examine institutional trading surrounding corporate news by combining a comprehensive database of news releases for all US firms during 2000 to 2010 with a high-frequency database of institutional trades. We find that institutions trade on the news tone only on the news release day. This news-trading pattern is more pronounced for news related to firm fundamentals, and with a ...

This paper attempts to evaluate the magnitude of the influence of relative price shifts on the overall inflation in Poland during the period of 1989 to 1997. For that purpose, the theoretical model has been employed that predicts a positive relationship between variance and skewness of the distribution of relative price changes and the general inflation rate. Regressions performed in the framew...

The highlight for November is from Dr. Linda Parker from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. For over 30 years, Dr. Parker and her colleagues have provided a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the basis of conditioned taste aversion learning. Beginning with her published account of the differences between the conditioned aversions elicited by amphetamine and LiCl-pair...