Making recognition decisions often requires us to reference the contents of working memory, the information available for ongoing cognitive processing. As such, understanding how recognition decisions are made when based on the contents of working memory is of critical importance. In this work we examine whether recognition decisions based on the contents of visual working memory follow a continuous decision process of graded information about the correct choice or a discrete decision process reflecting only knowing and guessing. We find a (...) clear pattern in favor of a continuous latent strength model of visual working memory–based decision making, supporting the notion that visual recognition decision processes are impacted by the degree of matching between the contents of working memory and the choices given. Relation to relevant findings and the implications for human information processing more generally are discussed. (shrink)

Professor Lewis and I have some important differences of opinion regarding the identity and distinctness of conscious persons, which it will be well to try to clarify on the present occasion, first of all by enumerating a number of points on which we are, I think, in agreement. Both of us believe in the existence of individual persons, each of whom can be said to live in a ‘world’ of his own intentional objectivity, a world ‘as it is for him’, (...) which differs in a considerable extent, both in content and emphasis, from the world as it is for anyone else. Both of us further believe that all these intentionally objective worlds for a large part coincide in content, and are in fact excerpted from a more comprehensive real world which is common to us all, and which, in addition to in some sense including all such intentionally objective worlds, also includes many real material objects which exist regardless of our intentionality, and which further includes our own material bodies, which appear in so central a manner in each of our intentionally objective worlds. Both of us believe in matter as a transcendent reality, as well as an intentional object, and are content to accept the dicta of science as to the most probable view of its structure. We are in fact quite Cartesian and Lockean in our belief in the primary and secondary qualities of matter. We believe further that our intentional subjectivity is geared causally into our material objectivity, and that the gearing takes place, in some inscrutable manner, in our nervous systems. We both also believe that our intentional subjectivity transcends bodily mechanisms and instrumentalities, and can be liberated from the latter, but that, when thus liberated, our subjectivity may still affect some sort of an intentionally objective material body such as we wear in dreams, a body in which it will manifest itself to itself and to others much as we do in our dreams and fantasies. (shrink)

Indian philosophical thought has been deeply metaphysical, and it is no surprise that, faced with the anti-metaphysical thrust of contemporary philosophy, one of the issues uppermost in the minds of Indian thinkers is the question of the possibility of metaphysics. In recent philosophical literature, two tendencies are discernible: an attempt to defend metaphysics in the traditional grand style, and a concern with the idea of descriptive metaphysics as an alternative. For the former, we may turn to Kalidas Bhattacharyya and J. (...) N. Chubb; for the latter to J. N. Mohanty and S. N. Ganguly. (shrink)

This is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the history of understanding of the human mind or soul and its relationship to the body, through the course of more than two thousand years. Thirteen specially commissioned chapters, each written by a recognized expert, discuss such figures as the doctors Hippocrates and Galen, the theologians St Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, and philosophers from Plato to Leibniz.

The Hamiltonian for the Einstein equations is constructed on an outgoing null cone with the help of the usual null tetrad used in the study of the asymptotical gravitational radiation field.

I raise these points because in 1941 I attempted to carry out a project of Wittgenstein’s and to show how all the so-called problems of Time arose out of a strange misunderstanding of the flexible ways of our language, so that we asked questions which could not be answered simply because they violated logical grammar. The concept of the Now of the Present is in ordinary usage infinitely flexible: it can be stretched to cover a decade or a century, or (...) narrowed down to cover what is over in a flash. We are, therefore, inclined to extend it till it covers the whole history of the universe, or to narrow it down till it becomes a mere limit, no sooner arrived at than departed from, and in which it is not significant to posit either a state or a change. In the latter case, we have, then, the problem of constituting Time out of such momentary nothings, which are, even qua nothings, not there all together or, alternatively, of wondering how anything can happen if, before it happens, something else must first happen, and before that again something else, and so on ad infinitum. We have, in short, all the difficulties with which Augustine and Zeno plagued the ancients, to which we may now add the difficulties with which McTaggart has worried the moderns, asking how the same event can be future, present, and past, when it must be these incompatible things at different successive times, and these times, in their turn, must be future, present, and past at different times, and so on ad infinitum. To all these celebrated difficulties the line that I took was plain: that they arose out of imposing a wrong exactness and a wrong generality on the flexible ways of our speech. Augustine and Zeno perplexed us since we failed to see that the present, though never of zero or infinite length, could be just as long or as short as we liked to make it, and McTaggart confused us since we failed to see that there were two distinct ways of talking about events and states, one which remained invariant wherever one was stationed in history, and one which changed according as one changed one’s historical position, and that there was nothing self-contradictory in either form of speech but only in the attempt to combine them. (shrink)

The "historicity" of ideas can be reconciled with their rationality without recourse to relativism if we adopt the following view: The intellectual standards of a scientist are to be found in his intellectual situation, which is a debate underlying problems which discriminate between rival views. There is therefore no circularity between the currently accepted views and the currently accepted standards of judging a theory. debate).