Search results for "Counterfactual thinking"
showing 3 items of 13 documents
How does the brain encode epistemic reliability? Perceptual presence, phenomenal transparency, and counterfactual richness
2014
AbstractSeth develops a convincing and detailed internalist alternative to the sensorimotor-contingency theory of perceptual phenomenology. However, there are remaining conceptual problems due to a semantic ambiguity in the notion of “presence” and the idea of “subjective veridicality.” The current model should be integrated with the earlier idea that experiential “realness” and “mind-independence” are determined by the unavailability of earlier processing stages to attention. Counterfactual richness and attentional unavailability may both be indicators of the overall processing level currently achieved, a functional property that normally correlates with epistemic reliability. Perceptual p…
Guises and their Existence
1996
According to H-N. Castafieda, a guise the very thin individual which lies at the bottom of the ontological furniture of the world is indifferent to existence in a Meinongian way, in the sense that it remains the same whether it exists or not. Moreover, its existence does not alter its intentional character, as it is the very same individual which is thought of regardless of its being real or not. ~ In what follows, I will attempt to show that with regards to guises both theses are illegitimate, unless one introduces the notion of an existentiallyconditioned property as a counterfactual property which a guise has prior to its actual existence. To do so means to work out an amendment to Casta…
Causal Inference and Statistical Fallacies
2001
Fallacies are defined as plausible-seeming arguments that give the wrong conclusion. The article concentrates on those with some connection with causality. The classical definition of causality involving a necessary and sufficient condition for an effect is rejected and three possible definitions discussed. The first is that of a statistical association that cannot be explained away as the effect of admissible alternative features. To make this more precise, Markov graphical representations are introduced and the important distinction between pairs of variables on an equal footing and those in a potential explanatory-response relation described. The roles of unobserved confounders and of ra…