Month: April 2022

Double Prevention, Causal Judgments, and Counterfactuals

Imagine a scenario where Mike accidentally knocks a bottle, and just as Jack tries to catch it, Peter accidentally bumps into Jack and causes him to miss. As a result, the bottle falls and spills its contents. Curiously, most people tend to believe that Mike’s initial knock caused the spill, whereas Peter’s accidental bump had […]

Published on April 30, 2022

Copredication in Context: A Predictive Processing Approach

Understanding the complexities of copredication statements is like solving a mind-boggling puzzle. In these statements, a single phrase describes two different entities at once, which puzzles truth-conditional semantics. To unravel this mystery, researchers have delved into two intriguing questions: What mechanisms shape our judgments about whether copredication statements make sense? And why do similar statements […]

Published on April 30, 2022

Ritalin as a causal perturbation

Imagine trying to understand how a complex machine works by tinkering with its parts and observing the changes in its performance. That’s essentially what scientists do when they investigate the relationship between brain mechanism and function. But achieving persuasive causal perturbations, where they can confidently say cause and effect are at play, is no easy […]

Published on April 30, 2022