51 found
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  1. Socially adaptive belief.Daniel Williams - 2020 - Mind and Language 36 (3):333-354.
    I clarify and defend the hypothesis that human belief formation is sensitive to social rewards and punishments, such that beliefs are sometimes formed based on unconscious expectations of their likely effects on other agents – agents who frequently reward us when we hold ungrounded beliefs and punish us when we hold reasonable ones. After clarifying this phenomenon and distinguishing it from other sources of bias in the psychological literature, I argue that the hypothesis is plausible on theoretical grounds and I (...)
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  2. Predictive Processing and the Representation Wars.Daniel Williams - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (1):141-172.
    Clark has recently suggested that predictive processing advances a theory of neural function with the resources to put an ecumenical end to the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. In this paper I defend and develop this suggestion. First, I broaden the representation wars to include three foundational challenges to representational cognitive science. Second, I articulate three features of predictive processing’s account of internal representation that distinguish it from more orthodox representationalist frameworks. Specifically, I argue that it posits a resemblance-based (...)
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  3. Predictive coding and thought.Daniel Williams - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1749-1775.
    Predictive processing has recently been advanced as a global cognitive architecture for the brain. I argue that its commitments concerning the nature and format of cognitive representation are inadequate to account for two basic characteristics of conceptual thought: first, its generality—the fact that we can think and flexibly reason about phenomena at any level of spatial and temporal scale and abstraction; second, its rich compositionality—the specific way in which concepts productively combine to yield our thoughts. I consider two strategies for (...)
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  4. Realism and instrumentalism in Bayesian cognitive science.Danielle Williams & Zoe Drayson - 2023 - In Tony Cheng, Ryoji Sato & Jakob Hohwy (eds.), Expected Experiences: The Predictive Mind in an Uncertain World. Routledge.
    There are two distinct approaches to Bayesian modelling in cognitive science. Black-box approaches use Bayesian theory to model the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a cognitive system without reference to the mediating causal processes; while mechanistic approaches make claims about the neural mechanisms which generate the outputs from the inputs. This paper concerns the relationship between these two approaches. We argue that the dominant trend in the philosophical literature, which characterizes the relationship between black-box and mechanistic approaches to (...)
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  5.  83
    From symbols to icons: the return of resemblance in the cognitive neuroscience revolution.Daniel Williams & Lincoln Colling - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):1941-1967.
    We argue that one important aspect of the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” identified by Boone and Piccinini :1509–1534. doi: 10.1007/s11229-015-0783-4, 2015) is a dramatic shift away from thinking of cognitive representations as arbitrary symbols towards thinking of them as icons that replicate structural characteristics of their targets. We argue that this shift has been driven both “from below” and “from above”—that is, from a greater appreciation of what mechanistic explanation of information-processing systems involves, and from a greater appreciation of the problems (...)
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  6.  58
    The marketplace of rationalizations.Daniel Williams - 2023 - Economics and Philosophy 39 (1):99-123.
    Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their (...)
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  7.  72
    Motivated ignorance, rationality, and democratic politics.Daniel Williams - 2020 - Synthese 198 (8):7807-7827.
    When the costs of acquiring knowledge outweigh the benefits of possessing it, ignorance is rational. In this paper I clarify and explore a related but more neglected phenomenon: cases in which ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. The paper has four aims. First, I describe the psychological and social factors underlying this phenomenon of motivated ignorance. Second, I describe those conditions in which it is instrumentally rational. Third, I draw on evidence from the (...)
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  8.  43
    Imaginative Constraints and Generative Models.Daniel Williams - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (1):68-82.
    ABSTRACT How can imagination generate knowledge when its contents are voluntarily determined? Several philosophers have recently answered this question by pointing to the constraints that underpin imagination when it plays knowledge-generating roles. Nevertheless, little has been said about the nature of these constraints. In this paper, I argue that the constraints that underpin sensory imagination come from the structure of causal probabilistic generative models, a construct that has been highly influential in recent cognitive science and machine learning. I highlight several (...)
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  9.  98
    Epistemic Irrationality in the Bayesian Brain.Daniel Williams - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (4):913-938.
    A large body of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience draws on Bayesian statistics to model information processing within the brain. Many theorists have noted that this research seems to be in tension with a large body of experimental results purportedly documenting systematic deviations from Bayesian updating in human belief formation. In response, proponents of the Bayesian brain hypothesis contend that Bayesian models can accommodate such results by making suitable assumptions about model parameters. To make progress in this debate, I (...)
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  10.  31
    Signalling, commitment, and strategic absurdities.Daniel Williams - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):1011-1029.
    Why do well‐functioning psychological systems sometimes give rise to absurd beliefs that are radically misaligned with reality? Drawing on signalling theory, I develop and explore the hypothesis that groups often embrace beliefs that are viewed as absurd by outsiders as a means of signalling ingroup commitment. I clarify the game‐theoretic and psychological underpinnings of this hypothesis, I contrast it with similar proposals about the signalling functions of beliefs, and I motivate several psychological and sociological predictions that could be used to (...)
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  11.  78
    Hierarchical minds and the perception/cognition distinction.Daniel Williams - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (2):275-297.
    Recent research in cognitive and computational neuroscience portrays the neocortex as a hierarchically structured prediction machine. Several theorists have drawn on this research to challenge the traditional distinction between perception and cognition – specifically, to challenge the very idea that perception and cognition constitute useful kinds from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. In place of this traditional taxonomy, such theorists advocate a unified inferential hierarchy subject to substantial bi-directional message passing. I outline the nature of this challenge and then raise (...)
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  12.  65
    Hierarchical Bayesian models of delusion.Daniel Williams - 2018 - Consciousness and Cognition 61:129-147.
  13.  42
    The case for partisan motivated reasoning.Daniel Williams - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-27.
    A large body of research in political science claims that the way in which democratic citizens think about politics is motivationally biased by partisanship. Numerous critics argue that the evidence for this claim is better explained by theories in which party allegiances influence political cognition without motivating citizens to embrace biased beliefs. This article has three aims. First, I clarify this criticism, explain why common responses to it are unsuccessful, and argue that to make progress on this debate we need (...)
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  14.  77
    Bad beliefs: why they happen to highly intelligent, vigilant, devious, self-deceiving, coalitional apes.Daniel Williams - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (4):819-833.
    Neil Levy argues that the importance of acquiring cultural knowledge in our evolutionary past selected for conformist and deferential social learning, and that contemporary bad beliefs – roughly, popular beliefs at odds with expert consensus – result primarily from the rational deployment of such conformity and deference in epistemically polluted modern environments. I raise several objections to this perspective. First, against the cultural evolutionary theory from which Levy draws, I argue that humans evolved to be highly sophisticated and vigilant social (...)
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  15.  38
    Is the brain an organ for free energy minimisation?Daniel Williams - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1693-1714.
    Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle in cognitive science and philosophy: that it identifies a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems; and that it has important implications for our understanding of how the brain works, defining a set of process theories—roughly, theories of the structure and functions of neural mechanisms—consistent with the free energy minimising imperative that it derives as a necessary feature of all self-organising systems. I argue that the conjunction (...)
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  16.  83
    Pragmatism and the predictive mind.Daniel Williams - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (5):835-859.
    Predictive processing and its apparent commitment to explaining cognition in terms of Bayesian inference over hierarchical generative models seems to flatly contradict the pragmatist conception of mind and experience. Against this, I argue that this appearance results from philosophical overlays at odd with the science itself, and that the two frameworks are in fact well-poised for mutually beneficial theoretical exchange. Specifically, I argue: first, that predictive processing illuminates pragmatism’s commitment to both the primacy of pragmatic coping in accounts of the (...)
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  17.  66
    Action, affordances, and anorexia: body representation and basic cognition.Stephen Gadsby & Daniel Williams - 2018 - Synthese 195 (12):5297-5317.
    We evaluate a growing trend towards anti-representationalism in cognitive science in the context of recent research into the development and maintenance of anorexia nervosa in cognitive neuropsychiatry. We argue two things: first, that this research relies on an explanatorily robust concept of representation—the concept of a long-term body schema; second, that this body representation underlies our most basic environmental interactions and affordance perception—the psychological phenomena supposed to be most hospitable to a non-representationalist treatment.
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  18. Two senses of medium independence.Danielle J. Williams - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    The term “medium independence” has different meanings. One sense maps onto “abstract-as-abstracta” descriptions while the other maps onto “abstract-as-omission” descriptions. Both senses have been deployed when it comes to understanding the nature of physical computation. However, because medium independence is a polysemic term, the sense being used should be clearly stated. If the sense is not clearly stated, then those who wish to engage in debates regarding medium independence and physical computation run the risk of conflating different but related issues (...)
     
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  19.  71
    Bayesian Psychiatry and the Social Focus of Delusions.Daniel Williams & Marcella Montagnese - manuscript
    A large and growing body of research in computational psychiatry draws on Bayesian modelling to illuminate the dysfunctions and aberrations that underlie psychiatric disorders. After identifying the chief attractions of this research programme, we argue that its typical focus on abstract, domain-general inferential processes is likely to obscure many of the distinctive ways in which the human mind can break down and malfunction. We illustrate this by appeal to psychosis and the social phenomenology of delusions.
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  20.  29
    Identity-Defining Beliefs on Social Media.Daniel Williams - 2022 - Philosophical Topics 50 (2):41-64.
    When membership of a community depends on commitment to shared beliefs, the community is a belief-based coalition, and the beliefs are identity-defining beliefs. Belief-based coalitions are pervasive features of human social life and routinely drive motivated cognition and epistemically dysfunctional group dynamics. Despite this, they remain surprisingly undertheorized in social epistemology. This article (i) clarifies the properties of belief-based coalitions and identity-defining beliefs, (ii) explains why they often incentivize and coordinate epistemically dysfunctional forms of communication and cognitive labor, and (iii) (...)
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  21.  79
    Predictive minds and small-scale models: Kenneth Craik’s contribution to cognitive science.Daniel Williams - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 21 (2):245-263.
    I identify three lessons from Kenneth Craik’s landmark book “The Nature of Explanation” for contemporary debates surrounding the existence, extent, and nature of mental representation: first, an account of mental representations as neural structures that function analogously to public models; second, an appreciation of prediction as the central component of intelligence in demand of such models; and third, a metaphor for understanding the brain as an engineer, not a scientist. I then relate these insights to discussions surrounding the representational status (...)
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  22. Continued wilderness participation: Experience and identity as long-term relational phenomena.Jeffrey Brooks & Daniel R. Williams - 2012 - In David N. Cole (ed.), Wilderness visitor experiences: Progress in research and management; April 4-7, 2011 (pp. 21-36); Missoula, MT. Proceedings RMRS-P-66. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. pp. 21-36.
    Understanding the relationship between wilderness outings and the resulting experience has been a central theme in resource-based, outdoor recreation research for nearly 50 years. The authors provide a review and synthesis of literature that examines how people, over time, build relationships with wilderness places and express their identities as consequences of multiple, ongoing wilderness engagements (i.e., continued participation). The paper reviews studies of everyday places and those specifically protected for wilderness and backcountry qualities. Beginning with early origins and working through (...)
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  23.  23
    Distributional learning has immediate and long-lasting effects.Paola Escudero & Daniel Williams - 2014 - Cognition 133 (2):408-413.
  24.  79
    Place as Relationship Partner: An Alternative Metaphor for Understanding the Quality of Visitor Experience in a Backcountry Setting.Jeffrey J. Brooks, George N. Wallace & Daniel R. Williams - 2006 - Leisure Science: An Interdisciplinary Journal 28 (4):331-349.
    This article presents empirical evidence to address how some visitors build relationships with a wildland place over time. Insights are drawn from qualitative interviews of recreation visitors to the backcountry at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The article describes relationship to place as the active construction and accumulation of place meanings. The analysis is organized around three themes that describe how people develop relationships to place: time and experience accrued in place, social and physical interactions in and with the (...)
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  25. Stakeholder understandings of wildfire mitigation: A case of shared and contested meanings.Joseph G. Champ, Jeffrey Brooks & Daniel R. Williams - 2012 - Environmental Management 50 (4):581-597.
    This article identifies and compares meanings of wildfire risk mitigation for stakeholders in the Front Range of Colorado, USA. We examine the case of a collaborative partnership sponsored by government agencies and directed to decrease hazardous fuels in interface areas. Data were collected by way of key informant interviews and focus groups. The analysis is guided by the Circuit of Culture model in communication research. We found both shared and differing meanings between members of this partnership (the ‘‘producers’’) and other (...)
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  26. Pluralities of place: A user's guide to place concepts, theories, and philosophies in natural resource management.Daniel R. Williams - 2008 - In Linda Everett Kruger, Troy Elizabeth Hall & Maria C. Stiefel (eds.), Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management. U.S. Dept. Of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. pp. 7--30.
     
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  27.  64
    Markov blankets: Realism and our ontological commitments.Danielle J. Williams - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e217.
    The authors argue that their target is orthogonal to the realism and instrumentalist debate. I argue that it is born directly from it. While the distinction is helpful in illuminating how some ontological commitments demand a theory of implementation, it's less clear whether different views cleanly map onto the epistemic and metaphysical uses defined in the paper.
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  28.  11
    An Hermeneutic Approach to Studying the Nature of Wilderness Experiences.Michael E. Patterson, Alan E. Watson, Daniel R. Williams & Joseph R. Roggenbuck - 1998 - Journal of Leisure Research 30 (4):423-452.
    The most prevalent approach to understanding recreation experiences in resource management has been a motivational research program that views satisfaction as an appropriate indicator of experience quality. This research explores a different approach to studying the quality of recreation experiences. Rather than viewing recreation experiences as a linear sequence of events beginning with expectations and ending with outcomes that are then cognitively compared to determine experience quality, this alternative approach views recreation as an emergent experience motivated by the not very (...)
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  29. God's Grace and Man's Hope.Daniel Day Williams - 1949
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  30. Moral obligation in process philosophy.Daniel D. Williams - 1959 - Journal of Philosophy 56 (6):263-270.
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  31.  17
    The Andover Liberals. A Study in American Theology.Daniel Day Williams - 1942 - Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):83-84.
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  32.  34
    Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs, by Lisa Bortolotti.Daniel Williams - 2021 - Mind 132 (526):549-558.
    So begins Dr Lisa Bortolotti’s excellent new book, The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs (henceforth TEIIB). Of course, the observation that irrational.
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  33. The Advancement of Theological Education.H. Richard Niebuhr, Daniel Day Williams & James M. Gustafson - 1957
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  34. The Ministry in Historical Perspectives.H. Richard Niebuhr & Daniel D. Williams - 1957
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  35.  2
    Do popular delusions deserve a more positive reputation? A commentary on " Why Delusions Matter ".Daniel Williams - 2024 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5.
    In "Why Delusions Matter", Lisa Bortolotti argues both that the concept of delusions should be extended to cover certain beliefs that bear no relationship to pathology, and that delusions deserve a more positive reputation. Drawing attention to the role of self-serving propaganda in prominent examples of non-clinical delusions, I argue that there is a tension between these parts of the project.
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  36.  6
    Essays in Process Theology.Daniel Day Williams - 1985
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  37. Implementation and Interpretation: A Unified Account of Physical Computation.Danielle J. Williams - 2023 - Dissertation, University of California, Davis
  38.  51
    Priests, prophets, and the establishment.Daniel Day Williams - 1967 - Zygon 2 (4):309-326.
  39.  16
    The Concept of Truth in Karl Barth's Theology.Daniel D. Williams - 1970 - Religious Studies 6 (2):137 - 145.
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  40.  47
    The Concept of Truth in Karl Barth's Theology: DANIEL D. WILLIAMS.Daniel D. Williams - 1970 - Religious Studies 6 (2):137-145.
    In this paper on Karl Barth's conception of truth I shall try to state his position regarding the nature of truth and the criterion of truth, and secondly I shall draw from his position some propositions which I believe exhibit a pattern in his theology which brings it into close relationship to a philosophical tradition.
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  41. Tillich's doctrine of God.Daniel D. Williams - 1960 - Philosophical Forum 18:40.
     
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  42. The prophetic dimension.Daniel Day Williams - 1969 - In John D. Roslansky & Ernan McMullin (eds.), The uniqueness of man. London,: North-Holland Pub. Co..
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  43. The Spirit and the Forms of Love.Daniel Day Williams - 1971 - Religious Studies 7 (1):70-71.
     
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  44. What Present-Day Theologians Are Thinking.Daniel Day Williams - 1952
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  45.  56
    It takes two to make a view go right. [REVIEW]Danielle J. Williams - 2024 - The Brains Blog.
    The Physical Signature of Computation is the most “robust” mapping view that’s ever hit the market. It is impressive in its detail and the careful attention paid to its characterization of both the physical system and the formal computational description—a true service to the philosophical literature. The book promises a “unified account of artifact and biological computation,” but here’s where things take a turn: after handling artifacts, the Robust Mapping Account fades from view and the Mechanistic Account of Physical Computation (...)
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  46.  15
    Book Review:The Christian Philosophy of History. Shirley Jackson. [REVIEW]Daniel D. Williams - 1945 - Ethics 55 (3):230-.
  47.  32
    Book Review:Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth. Erich Frank. [REVIEW]Daniel D. Williams - 1946 - Ethics 56 (2):149-.
  48.  12
    Review of Erich Frank: Philosophical understanding and religious truth[REVIEW]Daniel D. Williams - 1946 - Ethics 56 (2):149-151.
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  49.  17
    A House for Hope. [REVIEW]Daniel D. Williams - 1972 - Process Studies 2 (3):239-241.
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  50.  44
    Cognitive pluralism. [REVIEW]Daniel Williams - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (1):139-143.
    Much of contemporary philosophy assumes a close connection between thought and language. It is widely assumed, for example, that the structural units, semantic properties, and forms of reasoning as...
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