There are two types of stock price manipulation examined in the theoretical literature: insider trading, which involves private information that is true and the public spreading of fraudulent false information. While there is a large empirical literature on insider trading, this is the first empirical article to examine the impact of false, fraudulent public information on stock prices and trading volume. We find that such false information, even after being denied by a credible (...) source such as the SEC, generates both abnormal returns and abnormal trading volume. We also find that the effects of the false information on security returns and volume can be persistent for at least 2 weeks. In addition, we show that perpetrators of false news attacks can make potentially large profits from such market manipulations. (shrink)

This article considers the government, opinion leaders, and Internet users to be a system for correcting false information, and it considers the problem of correcting false information that arises in the aftermath of major emergencies. We use optimal control theory and differential game theory to construct differential game models of decentralized decision-making, centralized decision-making, and subsidized decision-making. The solutions to these models and their numerical simulations show that the government, opinion leaders, and Internet users exercise cost-subsidized (...) decision-making instead of decentralized decision-making. The equilibrium strategies, local optimal benefits, and overall optimal benefits of the system achieve Pareto improvement. Given the goal of maximizing the benefits to the system under centralized decision-making, the equilibrium results are Pareto-optimal. The research here provides a theoretical basis for dealing with the mechanism of correcting false information arising from major emergencies, and our conclusions provide methodological support for the government to effectively deal with such scenarios. (shrink)

False information is always produced after the outbreak of major emergencies. Taking this into consideration, this paper discusses the behavior of multiple parties in relation to false information dissemination after major emergencies. First, a game model is constructed, using relevant knowledge of evolutionary game theory, between three parties: regulatory institutions, opinion leaders, and ordinary Internet users. Second, the model equations are solved, and the evolutionary stability strategies of each game party under different circumstances are analyzed. Third, (...) a numerical simulation is applied to the evolutionary trends under different strategy combinations with varying parameters. The results show that the probability of each game party making ideal decisions is positively correlated with the degree of punishment imposed by regulatory institutions on opinion leaders who release false information, the reward provided by regulatory institutions on opinion leaders who release positive information, the degree of participation and satisfaction gained by Internet users in adopting positive information, the richness of authentic content released by opinion leaders, and the psychological identification of Internet users with opinion leaders. Meanwhile, the probability of each game party making ideal decisions is negatively correlated with investigation and evidence collection costs borne by opinion leaders who release positive information, the additional income for opinion leaders who have false information adopted by Internet users, the costs of Internet users’ time and energy when they adopt information released by opinion leaders, and the costs of independently judging the accuracy of information by Internet users. (shrink)

As false information may spread rapidly on social media, a profound understanding of how it can be debunked is required. This study offers empirical insights into the development of rumors after they are debunked, the various user groups who are involved in the process, and their network structures. As crisis situations are highly sensitive to the spread of rumors, Twitter posts from during the 2017 G20 summit are examined. Tweets regarding five rumors that were debunked during this event (...) were manually coded into the following categories: rumor, debunking message, uncertainty about rumor, uncertainty about debunking message, and others. Our findings show that rumors which are debunked early and vehemently by official sources are the most likely to be stopped. When individuals participate in the process, they typically do so by sharing uncommented media content, as opposed to contributing user-generated content. Depending on the conditions in which a rumor arises, different network structures can be found. Since some rumors are easier for individuals to verify than others, our results have implications for the priorities of journalists and official sources. (shrink)

The distinction between misinformation and disinformation becomes especially important in political, editorial, and advertising contexts, where sources may make deliberate efforts to mislead, deceive, or confuse an audience in order to promote their personal, religious, or ideological objectives. The difference consists in having an agenda. It thus bears comparison with lying, because lies are assertions that are false, that are known to be false, and that are asserted with the intention to mislead, deceive, or confuse. One context in (...) which disinformation abounds is the study of the death of JFK, which I know from more than a decade of personal research experience. Here I reflect on that experience and advance a preliminary theory of disinformation that is intended to stimulate thinking on this increasingly important subject. Five kinds of disinformation are distinguished and exemplified by real life cases I have encountered. It follows that the story you are about to read is true. (shrink)

Braüner, Blackburn and Polyanskaya relate children’s being deceived to their theory of mind skills. Second‐order false‐belief tasks are often used to test children’s second‐order theory of mind development. The article gives a logical analysis of the reasoning needed to solve four types of second‐order false belief tasks, distinguished on whether a story character is deceived, and on whether the story hinges on facts in the world changing. The principle of inertia plays an important role. [74].

"Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (...) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively."–Publisher’s description. (shrink)

For a conference at my college I was asked to think about how my teaching —not my research— would be affected by rapid, cheap, and simple access by computer to all the published literature of the human race. Forget what impediments stand in the way of this hypothetical future and imagine that your campus has the means for you and your students to locate, search, sort, copy, and store anything in digital form that has ever been in print. How would (...) you answer? (shrink)

Abstract: According to the Veridicality Thesis, information requires truth. On this view, smoke carries information about there being a fire only if there is a fire, the proposition that the earth has two moons carries information about the earth having two moons only if the earth has two moons, and so on. We reject this Veridicality Thesis. We argue that the main notions of information used in cognitive science and computer science allow A to have (...) class='Hi'>information about the obtaining of p even when p is false. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Information and the Veridicality Thesis Information as a Mongrel Concept Natural Information Without Truth Nonnatural Information: The Case for the Veridicality Thesis Nonnatural Information Without Truth An Objection Conclusion Acknowledgments References.

Combating the identity problem is crucial and urgent as false identity has become a common denominator of many serious crimes, including mafia trafficking and terrorism. Without correct identification, it is very difficult for law enforcement authority to intervene, or even trace terrorists’ activities. Amongst several identity attributes, personal names are commonly, and effortlessly, falsified or aliased by most criminals. Typical approaches to detecting the use of false identity rely on the similarity measure of textual and other content-based characteristics, (...) which are usually not applicable in the case of highly deceptive, erroneous and unknown descriptions. This barrier can be overcome through analysis of link information displayed by the individual in communication behaviours, financial interactions and social networks. In particular, this paper presents a novel link-based approach that improves existing techniques by integrating multiple link properties in the process of similarity evaluation. It is utilised in a hybrid model that proficiently combines both text-based and link-based measures of examined names to refine the justification of their similarity. This approach is experimentally evaluated against other link-based and text-based techniques, over a terrorist-related dataset, with further generalization to a similar problem occurring in publication databases. The empirical study demonstrates the great potential of this work towards developing an effective identity verification system. (shrink)

When seriously ill patients reach the end of the standard treatment trajectory for their condition, they may qualify for the use of unapproved, investigational drugs regulated via expanded access programs. In medical-ethical discourse, it is often argued that expanded access to investigational drugs raises ‘false hope’ among patients and is therefore undesirable. We set out to investigate what is meant by the false hope argument in this discourse. In this paper, we identify and analyze five versions of the (...) false hope argument which we call: (1) the limited chance at benefit argument, (2) the side effects outweighing benefits argument, (3) the opportunity costs argument, (4) the impossibility of making informed decisions argument, and (5) the difficulty of gaining access argument. We argue that the majority of these five versions do not provide normative ground for disqualifying patients’ hopes as false. Only when hope is rooted in a mistaken belief, for example, about the likelihood of benefits or chances on medical risks, or when hope is directed at something that cannot possibly be obtained, should it be considered false. If patients are adequately informed about their odds of obtaining medical benefit, however small, and about the risks associated with an investigational treatment, it is unjustified to consider patients’ hopes to be false, and hence, to deny them access to investigational drug based on that argument. (shrink)

In the Deese-Roediger/McDermott paradigm, distinctive encoding of list items typically reduces false recognition of critical lures relative to a read-only control. This reduction can be due to enhanced item-specific processing, reduced relational processing, and/or increased test-based monitoring. However, it is unclear whether distinctive encoding reduces false recognition in a selective or global manner. To examine this question, participants studied DRM lists using a distinctive item-specific anagram generation task and then completed a recognition test which included both DRM critical (...) lures and either strongly related lures or weakly related lures. Compared to a read-control group, the generate groups showed increased correct recognition and decreased false recognition of all lure types. We then estimated the separate contributions of encoding and retrieval processes using signal-detection indices. Generation improved correct recognition by both increasing encoding of memory information for list words and by increasing memory monitoring at test. Generation reduced false recognition by reducing the encoding of memory information and by increasing memory monitoring at test. The reduction in false recognition was equivalent for critical lures and related lures, indicating that generation globally reduces the encoding of related non-presented items at study, while globally increasing list-theme-based monitoring at test. (shrink)

To reliably choose morally sound policies, whether as a society or as an individual, will typically require a deep and wide-ranging base of relevant knowledge. In this paper I consider the epistemic demands for morally sound action and policy in the Anthropocene age. I argue that these demands are likely to be unsatisfied, leading to a potential downward spiral of ineffective action in the face of worsening conditions; this seems a strong possibility both for individual lives, and for societies as (...) a whole. Given the likely scale of ignorance in the face of rapid, poorly-understood change, the best efforts of future generations to act morally may often be little more than guesses, with a far lower chance of success than in more stable conditions. If moral failures mount, and conditions continue to deteriorate, our epistemic efforts seem likely to be pressured and subject to various biases, leading to further errors and failures. Our ability to live virtuously and to act rightly is likely to be put under severe strain in the Anthropocene. Our approach to ethics will likely need to change to the extent that, for a wide range of cases, we will not know what the right action to perform will be; we will typically be acting without such moral knowledge. Instead, we must come to expect to merely act non-culpably at best, with many errors and false starts along the way. The final section of my paper addresses ways in which we might attempt to address or mitigate these worries. (shrink)

Information-theoretic approaches to formal logic analyse the "common intuitive" concept of propositional implication (or argumental validity) in terms of information content of propositions and sets of propositions: one given proposition implies a second if the former contains all of the information contained by the latter; an argument is valid if the conclusion contains no information beyond that of the premise-set. This paper locates information-theoretic approaches historically, philosophically and pragmatically. Advantages and disadvantages are identified by examining (...) such approaches in themselves and by contrasting them with standard transformation-theoretic approaches. Transformation-theoretic approaches analyse validity (and thus implication) in terms of transformations that map one argument onto another: a given argument is valid if no transformation carries it onto an argument with all true premises and false conclusion. Model-theoretic, set-theoretic, and substitution-theoretic approaches, which dominate current literature, can be construed as transformation-theoretic, as can the so-called possible-worlds approaches. Ontic and epistemic presuppositions of both types of approaches are considered. Attention is given to the question of whether our historically cumulative experience applying logic is better explained from a purely information-theoretic perspective or from a purely transformation-theoretic perspective or whether apparent conflicts between the two types of approaches need to be reconciled in order to forge a new type of approach that recognizes their basic complementarity. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised challenges in dealing with information sharing by the public and the authorities. There are two categories of information sharing on social media that are believed to be potentially problematic and unethical: the sharing of personal information of patients and the sharing of fake news or false information. We present a discussion on how the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia can be ethically handled in terms of information sharing. (...) It is recommended that the public should cultivate the basic skills to evaluate information and determine its validity. On the other hand, the authorities should refrain from placing the blame on patients to avoid them from being stigmatized. It is crucial that all parties are aware of their ethical duty to ensure only ethical and valid information gets shared on social media. (shrink)

Is there some general reason to expect organisms that have beliefs to have false beliefs? And after you observe that an organism occasionally occupies a given neural state that you think encodes a perceptual belief, how do you evaluate hypotheses about the semantic content that that state has, where some of those hypotheses attribute beliefs that are sometimes false while others attribute beliefs that are always true? To address the first of these questions, we discuss evolution by natural (...) selection and show how organisms that are risk-prone in the beliefs they form can be fitter than organisms that are risk-free. To address the second question, we discuss a problem that is widely recognized in statistics – the problem of over-fitting – and one influential device for addressing that problem, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). We then use AIC to solve epistemological versions of the disjunction and distality problems, which are two key problems concerning what it is for a belief state to have one semantic content rather than another. (shrink)

I take 'informal logic' to be the (descriptive and normative) study of 'real arguments'-arguments which are or have been used with the aim of convincing others of a point of view. I argue that the informal logic tradition thus conceived (i) lends strong support to something like Quine's view that our beliefs really support one another like the filaments in a spider's web--and thus that the traditional view that implication is an asymmetric relation is false; (ii) suggests that the (...) classic division of arguments into deductive and inductive has distorted our thinking about the evaluation of real arguments; and (iii) implies that naturalised epistemology is on the right track. (shrink)

In United States ex rel. Quirk v. Madonna Towers, Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that the failure of a skilled nursing facility's executives to seek a legal opinion regarding a billing practice they considered valid did not meet the definition of knowingly presenting a false claim for payment to the federal government under the False Claims Act. Alleging that the facility that provided care to his aunt fraudulently submitted claims to Medicare for (...) services provided free of charge, the appellant brought this case qui tam on behalf of the federal government under the FCA.The FCA was passed by the legislature in an effort to punish and deter fraud against the federal government. It provides financial incentives for private individuals to come forward with information about fraudulent activity. (shrink)

The partner choice approach to understanding the evolution of cooperation builds on approaches that focus on partner control by considering processes that occur prior to pair or group formation. Proponents of the partner choice approach rightly note that competition to be chosen as a partner can help solve the puzzle of cooperation. I aim to build on the partner choice approach by considering the role of signalling in partner choice. Partnership formation often requires reliable information. Signalling is thus important (...) in the context of partner choice. However, the issue of signal reliability has been understudied in the partner choice literature. The issue deserves attention because – despite what proponents of the partner choice approach sometimes claim – that approach does face a cheater problem, which we might call the problem of false advertising in biological markets. Both theoretical and empirical work is needed to address this problem. I will draw on signalling theory to provide a theoretical framework within which to organise the scattered discussions of the false advertising problem extant in the partner choice literature. I will end by discussing some empirical work on cooperation, partner choice, and punishment among humans. (shrink)

This study examines the spontaneous use of embodied egocentric transformation in understanding false beliefs in the minds of others. EET involves the participants mentally transforming or rotating themselves into the orientation of an agent when trying to adopt his or her visuospatial perspective. We argue that psychological perspective taking such as false belief reasoning may also involve EET because of what has been widely reported in the embodied cognition literature, showing that our processing of abstract, propositional information (...) is often grounded in concrete bodily sensations which are not apparently linked to higher cognition. In Experiment 1, an agent placed a ball into one of two boxes and left. The ball then rolled out and moved either into the other box or back into the original one. The participants were to decide from which box they themselves or the agent would try to recover the ball. Results showed that false belief performance was affected by increased orientation disparity between the participants and the agent, suggesting involvement of embodied transformation. In Experiment 2, false belief was similarly induced and the participants were to decide if the agent would try to recover the ball in one specific box. Orientation disparity was again found to affect false belief performance. The present results extend previous findings on EET in visuospatial perspective taking and suggest that false belief reasoning, which is a kind of psychological perspective taking, can also involve embodied rotation, consistent with the embodied cognition view. (shrink)

The use of new paradigms of false belief tasks allowed to reduce the age of children who pass the test from the previous 4 years in the standard version to only 15 months or even a striking 6 months in the nonverbal modification. These results are often taken as evidence that infants already possess an—at least implicit—theory of mind. We criticize this inferential leap on the grounds that inferring a ToM from the predictive success on a false belief (...) task requires to assume as premise that a belief reasoning is a necessary condition for correct action prediction. It is argued that the FBT does not satisfactorily constrain the predictive means, leaving room for the use of belief-independent inferences. These heuristics, when applied to the FBT, can achieve the same predictive success of a belief-based inference because information provided by the test stimulus allows the recognition of particular situations that can be subsumed by their ‘laws’. Instead of solving this issue by designing a single experimentum crucis that would render unfeasible the use of non-representational inferences, we suggest the application of a set of tests in which, although individually they can support inferences dissociated from a ToM, only an inference that makes use of false beliefs is able to correctly predict all the outcomes. (shrink)

Financial accountants falsify financial statements by means of financial techniques such as financial practices and financial standards, and when compared with conventional financial data, it is found that the falsified financial data often lack correlation or even contradict each other in terms of financial data indicators. At the same time, there are also inherent differences in reporting patterns from conventional financial data, but these differences are difficult to test manually. In this paper, the fuzzy C-means clustering method is used to (...) amplify these differences and thus identify false financial statements. In the proposed algorithm, firstly, the normalization constraint of the FCM clustering algorithm on the sum of affiliation of individual samples is relaxed to the constraint on the sum of affiliation of all samples, thus reducing the sensitivity of the algorithm to noise and isolated points; secondly, a new affiliation correction method is proposed to address the problem that the difference in affiliation is too large after the relaxation of the constraint. In the discussion of this paper, most of the information comes from the annual reports of companies, administrative penalty decisions of the Securities Regulatory Commission, and some information comes from research reports made by securities institutions, which are limited sources of information. The proposed method can correct the affiliation to a reasonable range, effectively avoiding the problem that some samples have too much affiliation and become a class of their own and also avoiding the problem that it is difficult to choose the termination threshold of the algorithm iteration due to too little affiliation, and can ensure that the constraint on the sum of affiliation of all samples is always satisfied during the iteration of the algorithm. The method has the characteristics of high recognition accuracy and has the significance of theoretical method innovation. (shrink)

The incorporation of post-event testimonial information into an agent’s memory representation of the event via constructive memory processes gives rise to the misinformation effect, in which the incorporation of inaccurate testimonial information results in the formation of a false memory belief. While psychological research has focussed primarily on the incorporation of inaccurate information, the incorporation of accurate information raises a particularly interesting epistemological question: do the resulting memory beliefs qualify as knowledge? It is intuitively plausible (...) that they do not, for they appear to be only luckily true. I argue, however, that, despite its intuitive plausibility, this view is mistaken: once we adopt an adequate (modal) conception of epistemic luck and an adequate (adaptive) general approach to memory, it becomes clear that memory beliefs resulting from the incorporation of accurate testimonial information are not in general luckily true. I conclude by sketching some implications of this argument for the psychology of memory, suggesting that the misinformation effect would better be investigated in the context of a broader “information effect”. (shrink)

Empirical research on public opinion has tended to misjudge the normative rationales for modern democracy. Although it is often presumed that citizens' policy preferences are the opinions of interest to democratic theorists, and that democracy requires a highly informed citizenry, neither of these premises represents a dominant position in mainstream democratic theory. Besides incorrect assumptions about major tenets of democratic theory, empirical research on civic engagement is running into dead ends that will require normative analysis to overcome. Bringing political philosophy (...) back in to the study of public opinion can not only remedy shortcomings in the empirical literature, but can also underscore how relevant that literature is for a wide range of problems in democratic practice. (shrink)

A lively exchange sparked by Ortmann and Hertwig's call to outlaw deception in psychological research was intensified by underlying differences in the meaning of deception. The conception held by Broder, who defended deception, would restrict research more than Ortmann and Hertwig's conception. Historically, a similar difference in conceptions has been embedded in the controversy over deception in research. The distinction between informational and relational views of deception elucidates this difference. In an informational view, giving false information, allowing (...) class='Hi'>false assumptions, and withholding information are deceptive. In a relational view these failures to inform are not necessarily deceptive. Rather, relational criteria, including denial of right to the truth, betrayal of trust, and impairment of commerce with reality finally determine what is deceptive. Analyses reveal that fewer research procedures are deceptive on a relational view than on an informational view. Surveys of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology correspondingly show that a lower percentage of studies are deceptive on the relational view applied in this analysis than on the informational view applied by Sieber, Iannuzzo, and Rodriguez. If restrictions on deception keep increasing, more studies will be vetoed on the currently salient informational view than would be vetoed on a relational view. (shrink)

Information-theoretic approaches to formal logic analyze the "common intuitive" concepts of implication, consequence, and validity in terms of information content of propositions and sets of propositions: one given proposition implies a second if the former contains all of the information contained by the latter; one given proposition is a consequence of a second if the latter contains all of the information contained by the former; an argument is valid if the conclusion contains no information beyond (...) that of the premise-set. This paper locates information-theoretic approaches historically, philosophically, and pragmatically. Advantages and disadvantages are identified by examining such approaches in themselves and by contrasting them with standard transformation-theoretic approaches. Transformation-theoretic approaches analyze validity (and thus implication) in terms of transformations that map one argument onto another: a given argument is valid if no transformation carries it onto an argument with all true premises and false conclusion. Model-theoretic, set-theoretic, and substitution-theoretic approaches, which dominate current literature, can be construed as transformation-theoretic, as can the so-called possible-worlds approaches. Ontic and epistemic presuppositions of both types of approaches are considered. Attention is given to the question of whether our historically cumulative experience applying logic is better explained from a purely information-theoretic perspective or from a purely transformation-theoretic perspective or whether apparent conflicts between the two types of approaches need to be reconciled in order to forge a new type of approach that recognizes their basic complementarity. (shrink)

Stone & Wang collate the nascent research examining the mnemonic consequences associated with social media use. In particular, they highlight two important factors in understanding how social media use shapes the way individuals and groups remember the past: the type of information (personal vs. public) and the role (producer vs. consumer) individuals undertake when engaging with social media. Stone and Wang investigate those two features in relation to induced forgetting for personal information and false memories/truthiness for public (...) information. (shrink)

Building on Dor’s theory of language as a social technology for the instruction of imagination, I suggest that autobiographical memory evolved culturally as a response to the problems of false memory and deliberate deceit that were introduced by that technology. I propose that sapiens’ linguistic communication about past and future events initially occurred in small groups, and this helped to correct individual memory defects. However, when human groups grew in size and became more socially differentiated, and movement between groups (...) prevented story-verification, misattributions of events became more common. In such conditions individuals with better autobiographical memory had an advantage because they could evaluate their own contents and sources of information, as well as that of others, more accurately; this not only benefitted them directly, but also improved their reliability as social partners. Autobiographical memory thus evolved in the context of human linguistic communication through selection for communicative reliability. However, the advantages of imagination, which enables forward-planning and decision-Making, meant that memory distortions, although controlled and moderated by autobiographical memory, could not be totally eradicated. This may have driven the evolution of additional forms of memory control involving social and linguistic norms. I interpret the language and the social norms of the Pirahã as the outcome of the cultural-evolutionary control of memory distortions. Some ways of testing aspects of this proposal are outlined. (shrink)

Floridi’s Theory of Strongly Semantic Information posits the Veridicality Thesis. One motivation is that it can serve as a foundation for information-based epistemology being an alternative to the tripartite theory of knowledge. However, the Veridicality thesis is false, if ‘information’ is to play an explanatory role in human cognition. Another motivation is avoiding the so-called Bar-Hillel/Carnap paradox. But this paradox only seems paradoxical, if ‘information’ and ‘informativeness’ are synonymous, logic is a theory of inference, or (...) validity suffices for rational inference; a, b, and c are false. (shrink)

Modeling involves the use of false idealizations, yet there is typically a belief or hope that modeling somehow manages to deliver true information about the world. The paper discusses one possible way of reconciling truth and falsehood in modeling. The key trick is to relocate truth claims by reinterpreting an apparently false idealizing assumption in order to make clear what possibly true assertion is intended when using it. These include interpretations in terms of negligibility, applicability, tractability, early-step, (...) and more. Elaborations are suggested about their precise formulations, mutual relationships, and truth-aptness. (shrink)

I argue that both language acquisition and cultural and social factors contribute to the formation of schemata that facilitate false belief reasoning. While the proposal for an active role of language acquisition in this sense has been partially advanced by several voices in the mentalizing debate, I argue that other accounts addressing this issue present some shortcomings. Specifically, I analyze the existing proposals distinguishing between “structure-oriented” views :1858–1878, 2007; de Villiers in Why language matters for theory of mind. Oxford (...) University Press, New York, pp 186–219, 2005), that stress the role of language as a set of rules providing syntactic input and providing a representational format, and “cultural/social-oriented views”, that stress the role of social interaction. Starting from the analysis of these views, I defend my own account of the role of language acquisition in aiding false belief reasoning. I argue that language acquisition plays a pivotal role in the formation of schemata used by pre-schoolers to pass the false belief task. I propose a specific learning mechanism for exploiting linguistic information that taps into specific cognitive abilities, thus making a very concrete suggestion about the role of linguistic input in specific cultural contexts for the development of false belief skills. (shrink)

One challenge to creating realistic cognitive models of memory is the inability to account for the vast common–sense knowledge of human participants. Large computational knowledge bases such as WordNet and DBpedia may offer a solution to this problem but may pose other challenges. This paper explores some of these difficulties through a semantic network spreading activation model of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory task. In three experiments, we show that these knowledge bases only capture a subset of human associations, while (...) irrelevant information introduces noise and makes efficient modeling difficult. We conclude that the contents of these knowledge bases must be augmented and, more important, that the algorithms must be refined and optimized, before large knowledge bases can be widely used for cognitive modeling. (shrink)

Luciano Floridi (2003) offers a theory of information as a “strongly semantic” notion, according to which information encapsulates truth, thereby making truth a necessary condition for a sentence to qualify as “information”. While Floridi provides an impressive development of this position, the aspects of his approach of greatest philosophical significance are its foundations rather than its formalization. He rejects the conception of information as meaningful data, which entails at least three theses – that information can (...) be false; that tautologies are information; and, that “It is true that...” is non-redundant – appear to be defensible. This inquiry offers various logical, epistemic, and ordinary-language grounds to demonstrate that an account of his kind is too narrow to be true and that its adoption would hopelessly obscure crucial differences between information, misinformation, and disinformation. (shrink)

Can heroin addicts give consent to research on trials in which heroin is prescribed to them? Analyses of addicts and informed consent have been objects of debate in several articles. Informed consent requires the agent not only to be competent but also to give consent voluntarily. This has been questioned because of alleged features of heroin addiction. Until recently the discussion has focused on heroin addicts' desires for heroin, whether these are irresistible and thus pose a problem for giving consent. (...) Still, in light of empirical evidence, there seems to be a consensus more or less that the problem is not whether the addicts can resist their desire for heroin. A recent article concentrates specifically on heroin addicts' false assumptions of options and voluntariness. We argue that the prevailing framing of the options in this discussion in terms of heroin and access to it is problematic. The way in which the options are typically laid out suggests an assumption that participation in the research is allegedly based on the addicts' views on using the drug. We argue that this way of presenting the options is, first, a mismatch to the studies carried out and, second, symptomatic of potential misconceptions about heroin addiction and addicts. Furthermore, we also suggest that the account of voluntariness needs to be realistic in order for subjects to be able to give consent voluntarily in actual situations, and for medical research to carry out studies on improving outcomes in addiction treatment in an ethical way. (shrink)

One challenge to creating realistic cognitive models of memory is the inability to account for the vast common–sense knowledge of human participants. Large computational knowledge bases such as WordNet and DBpedia may offer a solution to this problem but may pose other challenges. This paper explores some of these difficulties through a semantic network spreading activation model of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory task. In three experiments, we show that these knowledge bases only capture a subset of human associations, while (...) irrelevant information introduces noise and makes efficient modeling difficult. We conclude that the contents of these knowledge bases must be augmented and, more important, that the algorithms must be refined and optimized, before large knowledge bases can be widely used for cognitive modeling. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to analyze the information in the social media which is being produced and included into the stream by mass media in the context of digital ethics and cyber security. The principles of digital ethics includes norms that takes individual’s privacy of life into consideration. In addition to being a concept related to cyberspace, computer, and computer networks, it also includes the whole human-made activities, for this reason manipulation techniques in cyberspace appear as an (...) important cyber threat to users. As it comes to the purpose of coping with cyber threats the development of digital etic rules is essential. As a result of the violation of digital etic rules, wrong and false information is formed and individuals are misinformed. In the study, social media, which aims to bring individuals together on the basis of "being the same", has been evaluated within the scope of the culture industry concept of Adorno and Horkheimer. In this direction, content with a manipulative nature has been analyzed in the context of digital ethical principles. Then, social media threats encountered in cyberspace in general and information manipulation, in particular, are compared in the context of cybersecurity strategies implemented by states. As a result, it has been observed that the manipulative nature of information increases as it moves away from the principles of digital ethics. For this reason, it has been determined that all actors of cyberspace must be effective in order to develop and apply cyber ethics rules. (shrink)

A growing number of left-wing scholars criticize practices of transnational solidarity. Pointing to the cooptation of “globalism” by neoliberal capitalism, these scholars utilize this critique to advance leftwing nationalism. In this article, I reconstruct symptomatic texts of this genre and identify the critique of (liberal) cosmopolitanism as the common denominator in their calls for nationalizing the Left. As a consequence of their opposition to cosmopolitanism, these authors reject freedom of movement or global justice activism. In order to examine whether the (...) project of transnational solidarity is affected by this critique, I reconstruct its justifications in Critical Theory and postcolonial-feminist theory. Hauke Brunkhorst and Chandra Mohanty exemplarily theorize transnational solidarity in different ways, but each based on a substantial critique of liberal cosmopolitanism. By that, I show that a principled return to nationalism derived from a critique of cosmopolitanism is informed by coincidental evidence that rejects practices of transnational solidarity because of their alleged embeddedness in cosmopolitan reason. Drawing on La Via Campesina, I illustrate principles of a transnational solidarity project that is not justified with liberal cosmopolitan ideas. Their experiences challenge the nationalist/statist critique while not falling back into naïve and/or neoliberal cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Information Centrism is the view that contexts consist of information that can be characterized in terms of the propositional attitudes of the conversational participants. Furthermore, it claims that this notion of context is the only one needed for linguistic theorizing about context-sensitive languages. We argue that Information Centrism is false, since it cannot account correctly for facts about truth and reference in certain cases involving indexicals and demonstratives. Consequently, contexts cannot be construed simply as collections of (...) shared information. (shrink)

Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people’s susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to misremembering events. Recent research suggests that pregoal emotions—those experienced before goal attainment or failure —narrow the scope of people’s attention to information that is central to their goals. This narrow focus can impair memory for peripheral details, leaving people vulnerable to misinformation concerning those details. In contrast, (...) postgoal emotions—those experienced after goal attainment or failure —broaden the scope of attention leaving people more resistant to misinformation. Implications for legal contexts, such as emotion-related errors in eyewitness testimony, are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe negativity bias is the tendency for individuals to give greater weight, and often exhibit more rapid and extreme responses, to negative than positive information. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott illusory memory paradigm, the current study sought to examine how the negativity bias might affect both correct recognition for negative and positive words and false recognition for associated critical lures, as well as how trait neuroticism might moderate these effects. In two experiments, participants studied lists of words composed of semantic (...) associates of an unpresented word. Half of the lists were comprised of positive words and half were comprised of negative words. As expected, individuals remembered negative list words better than positive list words, consistent with a negativity bias in correct recognition. When tested immediately, individuals also exhibited greater false memory for negative versus positive critical lures. When tested after a 24-hr delay... (shrink)