Philosophy

This is the final published version of: Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Strandberg, T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey. PloS one, 7(9), e45457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457 Abstract: Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. Keywords: Morality, Moral Attitudes, Survey Design, Survey Validity, Choice Blindness, Confabulation, Introspection, Self-Knowledge, Self-Report For an overview of our research, and access to our publications, please see our Choice Blindness Lab Page Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey Lars Hall1, Petter Johansson1,2*, Thomas Strandberg1 1 Lund University Cognitive Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 2 Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden Abstract Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. Citation: Hall L, Johansson P, Strandberg T (2012) Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457 Editor: Luis M. Martinez, CSIC-Univ Miguel Hernandez, Spain Received June 1, 2012; Accepted August 22, 2012; Published September 19, 2012 Copyright:  2012 Hall et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The Foundation Natur and Kultur, The Swedish Research Council, The Crafoord Foundation and The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: email@example.com Introduction Every day, thousands of opinion polls, corporate surveys, consumer panels, government feedback forms, and psychological rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. But what is that is being measured with these instruments? Given the ubiquitous use of survey and polling instruments it seems we ought to have firm answers to this fundamental question, but unfortunately we do not [1–4]. The typical approach to the issue is to focus on the predictive utility of the statements people make (irrespective of whether to call them attitudes, opinions, preferences, or evaluations). Hence, psychologists have long been troubling over the fact that what we say often does not predict what we do, and have tried different methodological twists to close the gap between attitudes and behavior [5–7]. Even less optimistically, in the debate over stated vs. revealed preferences, economists have often made wholesale dismissals of stated preferences in favor of market decisions [8–10]. Ideally, what researchers would like to have is a method that measured the propensity for consistency or change at the very moment of the poll (something that allows us to pre-emptively jump the attitude-behavior gap, so to speak). The standard way to approximate this goal is to complement a survey with metaattitudinal judgements, such as perceived certainty or importance [11,12]. These tools add to our predictive edge, but metaattitudinal judgments have a tendency to fractionate into a grab bag of different factors and processes when closely scrutinized [13,14]. In short, asking people to introspect and estimate their own propensity for change often assumes more self-awareness than is warranted from the evidence [4,15–18]. Another possibility is to add some form of implicit measure, typically based on response latency [19,20]. Again, this is helpful, but there is only so much information you can glean in a brief 100 msec reaction time window [21]. Yet, why do we have to conceive of attitude measurements primarily as reports, and not a form of interactive test or experiment? What would happen if we engaged more directly with the attitudes at hand, perhaps even challenged them? Using the phenomenon of Choice Blindness (CB) as a wedge, we have been able to separate the decisions of participants and the outcomes they are presented with. In aesthetic, gustatory and olfactory choices this has previously allowed us to demonstrate that participants often fail to notice mismatches between what they prefer and what they actually get (hence, being blind to the outcome of their choice), while nevertheless being prepared to offer introspective reasons for why they chose the way they did [22–24]. But what about the backbone of attitude research, all those surveys, panels and polls? If CB held across this domain it would create significant strain for our intuitive models of attitudes (in what sense can attitudes be real if people moments later fail to notice they have been reversed?), and provide us with a novel source for understanding prediction, persuasion, and attitude change (how will participants act after they have endorsed the opposite of what they just said?). To investigate these issues, we created a self-transforming paper questionnaire on moral attitudes using a methodology adapted from stage magic (see figure 1). The participants were given a survey on either foundational moral principles or moral PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 September 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 9 | e45457 issues hotly debated in the current media, and their task was to rate on a 9-point bidirectional scale to what extent they agreed or disagreed with each statement. After the participants had completed the questionnaire, we asked them to read aloud some of their answers from the first page, and to explain their ratings to us. However, unbeknownst to the participants, two of the statements they read aloud at this stage were actually the reverse of the statements they had originally rated – i.e. if the original formulation stated that ''large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism.'', it was now changed to ''large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and internet traffic ought to be permitted as a means to combat international crime and terrorism.''. As the rating was held constant but the direction of the statement was reversed, the participants' original opinion was reversed as a consequence. Thus, this technique allowed us to expose participants to altered feedback about their previously stated attitude, and to create a situation in which we could record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite moral view of what they stated only moments ago. Methods Participants In total, 160 volunteers (100 female) participated in the study. Ages ranged from 17 to 69 years (M = 29.5, SD 10.8). We recruited the participants when they were walking through a park and asked them if they wanted to fill in a short survey about moral questions. All participants gave written informed consent to participate in the study, and all but 18 participants also agreed to have the interaction audio recorded. Ethics Statement The study was approved by the Lund University Ethics board, D.nr. 2008–2435. Procedure and Materials We presented the participants with a questionnaire containing 12 moral principles (condition one, N = 81) or statements describing 12 current moral issues (condition two, N = 79), and their task was to rate to what extent they agreed or disagreed with each statement on a 9-point bidirectional scale from 1 ''completely disagree'' to 9 ''completely agree'' (the midpoint of the scale Figure 1. A snapshot of the choice procedure during a manipulation trial. (1) The questionnaire is attached to a clipboard, with the questions distributed over two pages. A paper slip with moral statements is attached to the first page of the questionnaire to conceal the same, but negated set of statements printed on the page. (2) The participants rate their agreement with the statements on the first page of the questionnaire and (3) they turn to the second page, and (4) rate their agreement with a second set of principles. (5) When the participants are asked to flip back the survey to the first page to discuss their opinions, the add-on paper slip from (1) now sticks to a patch of stronger glue on the backside of the clipboard, and remains attached there. This reveals the altered set of principles on the first page, and when the participants now read the manipulated statements the meaning has been reversed (in effect, the equivalent of moving the actual rating score to the mirror side of the scale). (6) During the debriefing, the experimenter demonstrates the workings of the paper slip to the participants, and explains how the manipulation led to the reversal of their position. See http://www.lucs.lu.se/cbq/for a video illustration of the method and the interaction between experimenter and participants. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457.g001 Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 2 September 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 9 | e45457 allowed participants to be neutral or undecided about the issues). In the first condition we used fundamental moral principles adapted from Forsyth's (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire, such as ''It is more important for a society to promote the welfare of the citizens than to protect their personal integrity''. In the second condition, we used concrete moral statements instantiating the principles from the first condition, e.g. ''Large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be permitted as means to combat international crime and terrorism.'' (see table 1). The statements in condition two were picked to represent salient and important current dilemmas from Swedish media and societal debate at the time of the study, thus making it very likely that participants would have been exposed to prior information about the issues they were asked to express their attitudes on. In this way, we could create a contrast between foundational principles, what many suppose is the core of our moral beings, and the everyday manifestation of these principles in current issues, and investigate whether levels of abstraction would influence detection of the manipulations. Intuitively, we would expect abstract principles to allow for more exceptions and qualifications (a feature of abstractness as such), thus engendering lower levels of detection in this condition. In addition, we asked the participants to indicate how strong their moral opinions in general were, and if they were politically active or not, as well as their age and gender. The questionnaire was attached to a clipboard, with the questions distributed over two pages. After completing the survey, we asked the participants to read aloud and discuss three of their ratings from the first page (randomly taken from a limited subset of the principles or statements), and also if it would be possible to audio-record this discussion. If the participants did not want to be recorded, the experiment leader took notes and made the necessary classifications immediately after the trial was completed. As previously explained, at this point two of the statements the participants read aloud had been reversed compared to the statements they had originally rated. When the participants had read the statement, we interjected and summarized their attitudes in a question by saying ''so you don't agree that [statement]?'' or ''so you do agree that [statement]?'' to avoid any misunderstanding of what the rating implied. The reversal was achieved by attaching a lightly glued paper-slip on the first page of the questionnaire, containing the original version of the statements. The layout and shape of the attached slip allow it to blend in perfectly with the background sheet. When the participants folded the first page over the back of the clipboard, the paper-slip stuck on an even stickier patch on the backside of the questionnaire, thus revealing a new set of statements on the first page (see figure 1). Measures All manipulated trials were categorized as either corrected or accepted. In the trials categorized as corrected, the participants either noticed the change immediately after reading the manipulated statement (spontaneous detection), or claimed in the debriefing session to have felt something to be wrong when reading the manipulated sentence (retrospective correction). In detail, we classified any trial as spontaneously detected if the participants showed any signs of having detected the change after reading the manipulated statement, e.g. if they corrected or reversed their rating to match their original position, or if they thought they must have misunderstood the question the first time they read it, etc. Most of the participants who immediately detected the manipulation also corrected the rating by reversing the position on the scale, i.e. had they rated their agreement to 1 (completely disagree) they changed it to 9 (completely agree) (although 10% of these trials were changed to a different number than the exact opposite). After the experiment, the participants were fully debriefed about the true purpose of the experiment. In this interview session we presented a series of increasingly specific questions about the experiment. Firstly we asked the participants in general what they thought about the questionnaire. Secondly, we asked if they had experienced anything as being strange or odd with the questionnaire. Finally, we showed them exactly how we had reversed some of the statements the second time, and asked whether they had felt a suspicion about anything like this during their responding. If at any point during this process they indicated they had felt something to be wrong when reading and responding to the manipulated statements, we asked them to point out which statements had been altered, and categorized these trials as retrospectively corrected. Consequently, in the trials categorized as accepted, there were no such signs of the participants having noticed that the opinions they argued for after the manipulation was the reversal of what they originally intended. Table 1. List of moral principles and issues used for manipulation in condition one and condition two. Original Principle Reversed Principle Original Issue Reversed Issue It is more important for a society to protect the personal integrity of its citizens than to promote their welfare It is more important for a society to promote the welfare of its citizens than to protect their personal integrity Large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism. Large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be permitted as a means to combat international crime and terrorism. Even if an action might harm the innocent, it can still be morally permissible to perform it If an action might harm the innocent, then it is not morally permissible to perform it The violence Israel used in the conflict with Hamas is morally defensible despite the civilian casualties suffered by the Palestinians. The violence Israel use in the conflict with Hamas is morally reprehensible because of the civilian casualties suffered by the Palestinians. What is morally permissible ought to be similar between different societies and cultures What is morally permissible ought to vary between different societies and cultures It is morally defensible to purchase sexual services in democratic societies where prostitution is legal and regulated by the government It is morally reprehensible to purchase sexual services in democratic societies where prostitution is legal and regulated by the government To be moral is to follow the rules and regulations of the society, rather than weighing the positive and negative consequences of one's actions To be moral is to weigh the positive and negative consequences of one's actions, regardless of the rules and regulations of the society It is morally deplorable to harbor immigrants when they have been declared illegal and scheduled to return to their home country by the Swedish government It is morally commendable to harbor immigrants when they have been declared illegal and scheduled to return to their home country by the Swedish government doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457.t001 Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 3 September 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 9 | e45457 To create the most accurate representation of the number of detected trials we tried to create an experimental context with as little reluctance or possible awkwardness for the participants in correcting a manipulation as possible. In doing so, we stressed from the outset of the study that there were no time constraints for answering, that we had no moral or political agenda, and that we would not judge or argue their opinions in any way. Furthermore, the magic trick made the manipulation as such radically nontransparent, and thus it was near impossible for the participants to deduce the underlying intent of the study, and adapt their answers to please the experimenters. But at the same time, the design made it very easy and natural to correct any errors, as everyone is familiar with occasionally misreading or marking the wrong box on a form or survey. Similarly, in the debriefing session, our aim was to provide a sensitive and inclusive estimate of corrections, by giving the participants multiple opportunities with increasingly stronger cues to report any suspicions. If anything, we contend, the incentives of the final debriefing question encourages over-reporting of detections for those participants that do not want to admit to having accepted and argued for the reverse of their original rating. Our experience from prior studies of the CB phenomenon is that the category of detections and non-detections are sharply divided by the level of surprise and curiosity experienced by the participants in the debriefing sessions. It seems highly unlikely to us that participants are systematically withholding their feelings of detections, while at the same time acting as if they are genuinely surprised and curious about our explanation of the manipulations (e.g. see discussion of 'choice blindness blindness' in [23,24]). As the scale the participants used when rating their agreement with the moral principles or statements was bidirectional from 1 ''completely disagree'' to 9 ''completely agree'', the midpoint (5) of the scale allowed participants to be neutral or undecided about the issues. As a consequence, in trials when the participants rated themselves to be neutral, the manipulated reversal of the principle or statement did not affect the participants' stated opinion (i.e. they were still neutral). All such trials were removed from the analysis (36 of 320 M trials). An additional 13 M trials were removed due to technical failures in the manipulation process. All the recordings of the participants' argumentation were transcribed using the CHAT format, developed for the CLAN software. The direction and strength of the argumentation was estimated by three independent raters, and to avoid any bias in the classification of the verbal reports, all statements made by the experimenters, as well as any explicit mention of the direction of the rating, was removed from the transcripts. Results Corrected Trials There were no differences in correction or acceptance rate when comparing the individual principles or statements in each condition. The result of each condition is therefore presented as a combined measure for the principles or statements being manipulated. The majority of the manipulated trials remained undetected. In condition one, about one third of the trials was concurrently detected, and 8% of the trials were claimed to have been detected afterwards. In condition two, the concurrent detection rate was close to 50%, but very few participants claimed afterwards to have felt that something was wrong during the experiment (see table 2). Framing correction in terms of individuals instead of trials reveals that a remarkable 69% of all the participants accepted at least one of the two altered statement/rating relations. As hypothesized, the magic trick behind the self-transforming survey made sure virtually no participants noticed the manipulation as such. Instead, detections only took the form of self-corrections (''I must have misread'', ''I must have marked the wrong end'', etc.). The overall rating of the non-detected manipulated trials was notably high. Using a 9-point scale, the average rating was 2.8 or 7.2 depending on the direction of the rating, which means that the average 'distance' being manipulated when a statement was reversed was 4.4 units on the scale. This is evidence that the participants cared about the issues involved, and expressed seemingly polarized opinions about the manipulated issues they failed to detect. Interestingly, there were no significant difference in these rating averages between the two conditions (condition one = 4.5; condition two = 4.3). Thus, our intuition that abstract principles would involve more moderate attitudes, and engender less detection was not supported by the data. Instead, the result showed high involvement and equal levels of polarization in both the 'abstract' and 'concrete' condition. The participants' self-evaluation of the strength of their moral convictions was not correlated with correction (and neither was age, gender or time spent working on the questionnaire). Thus, participants who believed themselves to hold strong moral opinions in general were no more likely to correct the manipulations. However, the participants in condition two who classified themselves as politically active were more likely to concurrently detect the manipulations when comparing with the politically active participants in condition one (x21 = 5.72, p,.05, Q= .27). Controlling for this interaction effect, there was no difference in concurrent detection rate between condition one and two. Similarly, if we compare condition one and two with a combined measure of correction (concurrent correction, retrospective correction and reinterpretation of statement), we find no differences between the two conditions. Therefore, unless one is directly involved with the current dilemmas (as the politically active participants in condition two were), level of abstraction does not seem to affect levels of CB. There was a positive relationship between the participants' level of agreement and concurrent detection, i.e. the more the participants agreed or disagreed with a statement, the more likely they were to correct the manipulation. This was true in condition 1 (z = 2.97, p,.005, r = .25) as well as in condition 2 (z = 5.43, p,.0001, r = .45). Nevertheless, a full third (31.4%) of all manipulated trials rated at the endpoints of the scale (1 or 9) remained undetected, which shows that not even extreme levels of agreement or disagreement with statements guarantees detection. Additionally, in the dynamic of the magical reversal, participants expressing a highly polarized view were exposed to a more drastic alteration of their opinions than the more moderate ones (in effect turning a 1 into a 9, an 8 into a 2, etc.). Therefore, it is not clear whether participants with more polarized opinions are less amenable to change as such; perhaps there would have been no correlation between level of agreement and detection if the ratings of all the participants had been moved an equal distance on the scale (e.g. from 9 to 4, 8 to 3, etc). Accepted Trials Equally as interesting as whether participants accept the reversed position is what they say when asked to explain the reasoning behind their ratings. From a common sense perspective, it seems reasonable to suspect that even if participants accept the manipulated position, they might still tend towards their original position in their verbal explanations. To examine if this was the Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 4 September 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 9 | e45457 case, we gave the transcribed verbal reports from non-manipulated trials (NM) and accepted manipulated trials (M) to three independent raters. The task for the raters was to blindly judge how strongly the verbal reports agreed or disagreed with a given moral principle or statement, using the same bi-directional 9-point scale as in the experiment. For the M trials, this measure reveals the degree to which the participants argue in support of their original or the reversed position. For example, if participants previously had stated that it is morally deplorable to harbor illegal immigrants, but the raters judge the verbal reports to rather indicate that they finds it morally commendable to harbor illegal immigrants, then this would be clear evidence that an attitude reversal has taken place. There was a high level of inter-rater agreement between the three raters for the NM reports (r = .70) as well as for the M reports (r = .77), indicating that there are systematic patterns in the verbal reports that corresponds to certain positions on the rating scale for both NM and M trials. Even more interestingly, there was a high correlation between the raters estimate and the original rating of the participants for NM (r = .59) as well as for M reports (r = .71), which indicates that the verbal reports in the M trials do in fact track the participants rated level of agreement with the opposite of the initial moral principle or issue (for an illustration of this process and example reports, see figure S1, Supporting Online Material). In addition, this relationship highlights the logic of the attitude reversal, in that more modest positions result in verbal reports expressing arguments appropriate for the same region on the mirror side of the scale. And while extreme reversals more often are detected, the remaining non-detected trials also create stronger and more dramatic confabulations for the opposite position. To visualize the difference between NM and M trials more clearly, we used the result from the independent raters to categorically classify whether the verbal reports supported the original or the reversed position. We classified all verbal reports, from both NM and M trials, into three different categories: i) original position; when the three raters uniformly agreed that the participants argued in the direction of their original position (that is, for the M trials, they reverted to their original position in the arguments after first having accepted the manipulation), ii) indeterminate position; when there was any level of disagreement between the raters as regards which position the participant supported, and iii) reversed position; when all three raters interpreted the verbal report as being in agreement with the opposite of the participants original position (see figure 2). The result shows that the NM and M reports differ substantially: when there is no manipulation, what the participants say is primarily interpreted as supporting the original position, while the manipulated reports are seen as supporting the opposite of what they originally intended. The pattern of distribution for NM and M trials is almost mirror reversed, and consequently there is a highly significant difference when comparing the amount of original and reversed position trials for NM and M trials (x21 = 126.0, p,.0001, Q= .75). Expressed in terms of participants instead of trials, a full 53% of the participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated trials. Discussion It is easy to summarize the present study; participants express their moral opinions, then moments later many of them are blind to the mismatched outcome and endorse the opposite view. But it is considerably more difficult to explicate all the implications of it. If previously there was the trouble of stated attitudes often not translating into actions, now we have compounded this by showing that moral attitudes sometimes can be reversed moments after they are announced. The most obvious suggestion to handle this problem would be to disqualify outright all opinions subject to CB as not real. Because how can it be a 'real' attitude if we moments later are prepared to endorse the opposite? Thus, absence of CB could be taken as a form of acid test for attitudes, a basic criterion for 'attitudeness'. However, one would have to carefully consider the implications of such a criterion. In this study, we made an effort to choose a task that our participants would be knowledgeable about, and that would concern and engage them. To claim that half the Swedish population holds no articulated attitudes about the most visible moral issues in the current societal debate is a most uninviting conclusion to draw. Comparing this task to the 'median attitude study' in all the research fields and societal functions that trade in survey and rating data (which might solicit our opinions about anything from nasal decongestants, to boxaerobics, to diaper recycling, etc.) it seems the application of a CB-criterion for attitudeness would risk a monumental disqualification of current attitude measurements, and a widespread breakdown of survey psychology (including aspects of our own published work). Another option would be to blame the scale instead of the participants; to suggest that the original rating simply failed to capture their 'true' attitudes. However, paradoxically we would then have to convince the participants themselves of the validity of this critique, because from their perspective they often argue their reversed position very convincingly (as seen in the correlation between their manipulated ratings, and the scores we blindly recreated from the transcripts, illustrated in figure 2). For all we know, had the participants not been debriefed at the end of the experiments, the attitudes we registered in the manipulation trials might had lived on to become persistent features of their ideology. In addition, this suggestion takes us down the same unattractive path of generalization as the previous one did. To brand our (in most regard typical) survey as meaningless would create very problematic consequences for scale psychology in general, where Table 2. Distribution of corrected trials for manipulated trials in condition one and condition two. Manipulated trials Spontaneous detection Retrospective correction Total Condition Condition 1: Moral principles 33.8% 10.6% 44.4% Condition 2: Moral issues 48.6% 1.4% 50.0% Total 41.3% 4.4% 47.2% doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457.t002 Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 5 September 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 9 | e45457 far more obscure ratings and far smaller differences than an average of 4.4 units on a 9-point scale routinely are taken to be of theoretical and practical value. We are obviously hesitant to suggest any such calamitous consequences, but the alternatives presented above are at least worthy of serious consideration, and it seems to us that standard models of attitudes would have a difficult time explaining how attitude ratings could be reversed in the current way [25–27]; but see [28–30]? What is needed in order to navigate between the twin horrors of Scylla ('most attitudes are not real') and Charybdis ('most attitude scales are meaningless') is a systematic effort to relate our CB results to the issue of predictive utility and the attitude behavior gap. Regardless of whether the moral attitudes we measured were context dependently created, or stored evaluations inherent before the experiment (a distinction that in itself implies little about stability or change, [18,31]), a CB snapshot might capture much of the same noise as is falling into the attitude-behavior gap, but without the need for repeated measurements from statement to behavior. What remains to be seen is how our CB methodology relates to other measures of attitude strength. The use of meta-attitudinal judgments of confidence/certainty is exceedingly common in psychological research [32,33]. But it seems improbable that the predictive edge we get from this would completely overlap or nullify CB manipulations. For example, in [22], we found no effect of the undetected manipulated trials on the expressed confidence of the participants in their choice of jam or tea, and in the current study, even at the extreme ends of our moral scale, a third of all manipulated trials remained undetected (thus leaving open the intriguing possibility of the meta-attitudinal judgments themselves being open for reversals). Similarly, how does CB relate to the central methodological concept of indifference curves in economic research on attitudes, which aim to find the point where participants are indifferent between options [34,35]. It seems highly unlikely that CB would line up neatly with this point (participants would say some things matter, but not notice alterations, and say some things do not matter, but still reject alterations). This suggests we could instead work from the opposite direction to create a CB difference curve identifying alterations in the options that at least matter enough to be noticed. Also, if we move to response measures, classification of explicit and implicit attitudes often dissociate, but which (if any) factor is the most important driver for levels of CB? Would we exhibit more or less CB for attitudes that have been identified by implicit measures (such as the Implicit Association Test [20]? And would we be more willing to accept reversals that go in the direction of a dissociated or congruent implicit attitude? As the discussion above shows, whatever theoretical perspective one brings to the discussion, the notion of opinions instantly reversing through CB creates considerable tension; specifically, for theories of moral attitudes, the current result seem to give support for models where moral decision or judgment is reached through intuition, and the reasons or arguments for the position are mainly constructed through post-hoc confabulation (as for example, the Social Intuitionist Model, [36,37]). However, if we really had moral gut feelings, a form of spider sense tingling for the different options, it is difficult to envisage why so many of the participants would have failed to notice the reversed alternatives (it truly ought Figure 2. Classification of verbal reports in relation to rated agreement with a moral principle or statement, for NM and M reports, in condition one and condition two. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457.g002 Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 6 September 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 9 | e45457 to have felt wrong to them). Thus, these reversals concerning both foundational principles and real world issues suggest that deliberation and argumentation (post-hoc, or not) play a more prominent role in moral judgments than acknowledged by the current crop of sentiment theories. Framing it this way highlights the intriguing possibility that it might not always be considered an ideal to have the most minutely tuned attitudes, and to consistently notice all CB manipulations. Even if societal standards dictate a moral ought for citizens to educate themselves and form considered opinions about the issues covered in the current study, the complexity of the dilemmas are such that single-mindedness sometimes can invite suspicion (who am I to hold extreme attitudes about the righteousness of the different sides in the Palestine conflict, with its vast historical scope and complexities?). Similarly, while principles are supposed to be the very core of our moral beings, it might be something that only a rigid and legalistic mind actually can adhere to [38]. As argued by [39] with a simple shift of perspective from experimenter to participant, deplorable context 'dependency' turns into opportunistic context 'sensitivity'. In this sense, the results could be seen as unmasking flexibility and openness to change that otherwise would be very difficult to demonstrate among the participants. Thus, while the experimenters remained completely neutral in the interaction, and presented no arguments or support for whatever position the participants presented, the unique dynamic of the experiment was that the participants (unwittingly) brought the full force of their argumentative powers to bear on themselves instead of others. This connects the current study to recent attempts at explaining the function of reasoning and argumentation as primarily being a means of convincing others that whatever conclusion I have reached is the correct one [40]. Furthermore, comparing our methodology to the classic debate about selfperception and dissonance reduction in social psychology [41,42], CB gives us a novel and simple instrument to vary potential internal and external sources of inference in a dynamic account of attitude change. Hence, it would be interesting to see how the recorded attitude changes in the current study would compare with actual attempts at persuasion. Previous research has indicated how role-playing and consider-the-opposite inductions can alter attitudes [43,44], but in this case the whole process would play out on an implicit level. Quite possibly, self-persuasion through CB could be more effective than interpersonal efforts at rational argumentation (Hall et al, unpublished data). In summary, whether they are stated or revealed, inherent or constructed, stable or contextualized, the current study challenges our basic conception of what it means to express an attitude, and demonstrates a considerable malleability of everyday moral opinions. Future studies will determine how our CB methodology relates to established meta-attitudinal and implicit response time measures [45,46], and to further explore the role for selfattribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. Supporting Information Figure S1 Sample verbal reports from undetected manipulated trials in relation to the principle of harming the innocent, and the issue of governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic (all reports have been translated from Swedish, and transcription notation has been removed for ease of reading). Participants were presented with either an abstract principle or concrete moral issue, and then asked to indicate their attitude towards these on a scale from 1 (completely disagrees) to 9 (completely agrees). The figure in each cell of the table (a-h) shows the original rating of the participants as a filled red hexagon on the scale. In a manipulation trial, participants then face a negated principle or issue, which is the equivalent of moving their original rating to the mirror side of the scale. This dynamic is shown as a dotted red line ending in a Xmarked hexagon in the figure. The verbal report the participants give at this point is shown in a speech bubble originating below the X-mark. Looking at the verbal reports it is evident that they present a much better fit to the manipulated side of the scale (the red X), than the original position (the red filling). This is further confirmed by the blue dot, which represents the attitude position the independent raters deemed most appropriate for the same report, when evaluated with no knowledge of the original position. Here, it can be seen that the blue dot consistently is placed on the same side of the scale as the red X, and much closer to it than to the original red filling. (PDF) Acknowledgments We would like to thank A. Lind for his advice and help with the data collection, P. Pärnamets and R. Raafat for their advice and helpful comments. Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: LH PJ TS. Performed the experiments: LH PJ TS. Analyzed the data: LH PJ. Wrote the paper: LH PJ. References 1. Ferguson MJ, Fukukura J (2012) Likes and dislikes: A social cognitive perspective on attitudes. Available online before print. 2. Gawronski B (2007) Editorial: Attitudes can be Measured! But What is an Attitude? Social Cognition 25: 573–581. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.573. 3. Schwarz N, Oyserman D (2001) Asking questions about behavior: Cognition, communication, and questionnaire construction. American Journal of Evaluation 22: 127–160. 4. Dennett DC (1987) The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. doi:10.2307/2026682. 5. Ajzen I, Fishbein M (2000) Attitudes and the Attitude-Behavior Relation: Reasoned and Automatic Processes. European Review of Social Psychology 11: 1–33. doi:10.1080/14792779943000116. 6. Glasman LR, Albarracın D (2006) Forming attitudes that predict future behavior: a meta-analysis of the attitude-behavior relation. Psychological bulletin 132: 778–822. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.5.778. 7. Gross SJ, Niman CM (1975) Attitude-Behavior Consistency: A Review. Public Opinion Quarterly 39: 358. doi:10.1086/268234. 8. Beshears J, Choi J, Laibson D, Madrian B (2008) How are preferences revealed? Journal of Public Economics 92: 1787–1794. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2008.04.010. 9. Varian H (2006) Revealed Preference. In: Szenberg M, Ramrattan L, Gottesman A, editors. Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press. 99–115. 10. Grüne-Yanoff T (2004) The problems of testing preference axioms with revealed preference theory. Analyse & Kritik 26: 382–397. 11. Bassili JN (1996) Meta-judgmental versus operative indexes of psychological attributes: The case of measures of attitude strength. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71: 637–653. doi:10.1037//0022-35220.127.116.117. 12. Koriat A (2011) The self-consistency model of subjective confidence. Psychological review: 1–103. doi:10.1037/a0025648. 13. 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Neuroscience of Preference and Choice. Elsevier Academic Press. Pp. 121–142. 19. Bohner G, Dickel N (2011) Attitudes and attitude change. Annual review of psychology 62: 391–417. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131609. 20. Greenwald AG, McGhee DE, Schwartz JKL (1998) Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 1464–1480. 21. Ajzen I, Cote NG (2008) Attitudes and the prediction of behavior. In: Crano, W, Prislin, R, editors. Attitudes and attitude change. Psychology Press. 289–311. 22. Hall L, Johansson P, Tärning B, Sikström S, Deutgen T (2010) Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition 117: 54–61. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.06.010. 23. Johansson P, Hall L, Sikström S, Olsson A (2005) Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science 310: 116–119. doi:10.1126/science.1111709. 24. Johansson P, Hall L, Sikström S, Tarning B, Lind A (2006) How something can be said about telling more than we can know: On choice blindness and introspection. Consciousness and cognition 15: 673–692. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2006.09.004. 25. Albarracin D, Johnson B, Zanna M (2005) The handbook of attitudes. Mahwah, N.J.:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. 26. Forgas JP, Cooper J, Crano WD, editors (2010) The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change. Psychology Press: Taylor & Francis Group. 27. Haddock G, Maio GR (2004) Contemporary Perspectives on the Psychology of Attitudes. Psychology Press. 28. Bishop GF (2004) The Illusion of Public Opinion: Fact and Artifact in American Public Opinion Polls. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. 29. Converse PE (1964) The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In: Apter DE, editor. Ideology and discontent. London: Collier-Macmillan. 206–261. 30. Uhlmann EL, Pizarro DA, Tannenbaum D, Ditto PH (2009) The motivated use of moral principles. Judgment and Decision Making 4: 479–491. 31. Ariely D, Norton MI (2008) How actions create-not just reveal-preferences. Trends in cognitive sciences 12: 13–16. 32. Petrusic WM, Baranski JV (2003) Judging confidence influences decision processing in comparative judgments. Psychonomic Bulletin Review 10: 177– 183. 33. Tunney RJ (2005) Sources of confidence in implicit cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12: 367–373. 34. Lawson SR, Manning RE (2001) Solitude Versus Access: A Study of Tradeoffs in Outdoor Recreation Using Indifference Curve Analysis. Leisure Sciences 23: 179–191. 35. Thurstone LL (1931) The indifference function. Journal of Social Psychology 2: 139–167. 36. Haidt J (2001) The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological review 108: 814–834. 37. Haidt J, Björklund F (2008) Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In: Sinnott-Armstrong W, editor. Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 181–217. 38. Ainslie G (2001) Breakdown of Will. New York: Cambridge University Press. 39. Schwarz N (2008) Introduction to Research Dialogue. Journal of Consumer Psychology 18: 153–154. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2008.04.012. 40. Mercier H, Sperber D (2011) Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. The Behavioral and brain sciences 34: 57–74; discussion 74–111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. 41. Festinger L (1957) A Theory of Cogntive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 42. Bem JD (1972) Self-perception theory. Advances in experimental social psychology 6: 1–62. 43. Janis IL, King BT (1954) The influence of role-playing on opinion change. Journal of abnormal and social psychology 49: 211–218. 44. 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Prayer-bots and religious worship on Twitter: a call for a wider research agenda

Philosophy

Vol.:(0123456789) Minds and Machines (2019) 29:331–338 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-019-09498-3 1 COMMENTARY Prayer‐Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider Research Agenda Carl Öhman1 * Robert Gorwa2 * Luciano Floridi1,3 Published online: 1 April 2019 © The Author(s) 2019 Abstract The automation of online social life is an urgent issue for researchers and the public alike. However, one of the most significant uses of such technologies seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the research community: religion. Focusing on Islamic Prayer Apps, which automatically post prayers from its users' accounts, we show that even one such service is already responsible for millions of tweets daily, constituting a significant portion of Arabic-language Twitter traffic. We argue that the fact that a phenomenon of these proportions has gone unnoticed by researchers reveals an opportunity to broaden the scope of the current research agenda on online automation. Keywords Automatic prayers * Twitter bots * Digital afterlife industry * Islam * Online death 1 Introduction Online social life is increasingly automated. From virtual assistants that help with day-to-day tasks, to chatbots providing companionship or preserving the memory of deceased family members (Öhman and Floridi 2018), industry has been quick in realizing the potential of the development. At the same time, online social automation is also used for political goals, including automated "bot" accounts on social networks that attempt to influence elections and other key political events (Gorwa and Guilbeault 2018). These trends have rightly attracted much attention, both publicly and in the research community. However, one major area of online automation * Carl Öhman email@example.com 1 Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK 2 Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK 3 The Alan Turing Institute, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK 332 C. Öhman et al. 1 3 has largely been overlooked so far: religious worship. In this article, we provide the first large-scale analysis of the religious use of online automation technologies. More specifically, the article focuses on a particularly wide-spread phenomenon, what we call Islamic Prayer Apps, which, despite their popularity, have so far gone unnoticed by the research community. We argue that the spread and social significance of these applications calls for a broadening of the scope of current research on online automation in general, and on social media bots in particular. 2 Islamic Prayer Apps It is increasingly popular amongst Muslim social media users to employ services that automatically post prayers on one's behalf. In this article, we shall refer to such services as Islamic Prayer Apps. These apps vary in their business model and popularity, but share the same goal: to facilitate and automate worship. This does not mean that the apps replace the mandatory "5-times-aday" prayer rituals. While documented services simply send or post reminders for local prayer times (Wyche et al. 2008), the Islamic Prayer Apps seem to facilitate additional public supplication ( "dua"), which may be understood as a humble asking for an event to occur or a wish to be fulfilled. Believers in Islam may phrase their own personal supplications, but there is also an array of examples in the Quran to choose from. Based on these examples, the apps enable the user to post automatically their supplications on social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook. Du3a.org is a typical example: the site's landing page (see Fig. 1) features some Quranic quotes and popular prayers, and a sidebar encourages visitors to share the site on different social networks, like Facebook and Pinterest, claiming that 26 million visitors have done so already. But the most salient feature is perhaps the button prompting visitors to subscribe to the service. Upon doing so, visitors are redirected to Twitter, where they are asked to authorize the application to use their account and post on their behalf. After a few hours, Du3a begins to post a > 140 character supplication from the user's account every second hour, alongside a site URL (and until recently a "recycling" emoji). Because Du3a.org includes the service's URL in every tweet that is sent out from the user's account, its traffic can be measured using Twitter's Streaming application programming interface (API), which provides live access to up to 1% of Tweets on the global platform. By querying for the dur3a.org URL, we collected tweets posted over a 48-h period, in June 2018. During this time, 3.8 million tweets containing the URL were posted (See Fig. 2). It should be noted however, that Du3a at the time appeared to release one tweet per hour from the users' accounts, a frequency which recently seems to have slowed down to one every second hour. About 50% of the users self-identify as located in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, suggesting that, at least in the case of Du3a, the phenomenon is predominantly Arabic (other countries represent approximately 1% each). The number of 1.9 million tweets per day-coming just from Du3a, one of many Islamic Prayer Apps-demonstrates how much traffic can be generated through 333 1 3 Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider... Fig. 1 Screenshot of Du3a's landing page Fig. 2 Illustration of average tweets per day 334 C. Öhman et al. 1 3 automation. To put the numbers in context (see Fig. 2), Bruns et al. (2013) collected 205,000 tweets on the Arab-Spring related hashtag #egypt on its busiest day, when President Hosni Mubarak resigned amidst intense public pressure. During the 2016 US election, when significant popular attention focused on the role of automated accounts, Bessi and Ferrara (2016) estimated an upper bound of 3.8 million tweets from automated accounts on political topics in the week leading up to voting day (an average of about 540 thousand tweets per day). In other words, according to our exploratory analysis, a single automated prayer app generated almost as many tweets in 2 days as accounts believed to be automated did in the whole week leading up to the US election. Yet, contrary to the US general election, Du3a continues its activity every day of the year. And insofar as we were able to ascertain, this activity has been going on for about 5 years. While exact numbers are difficult to determine, an analysis of Arabic Social Media (2014) estimated that, in 2014, 17.19 million tweets were sent daily from users in the entire Arab world, suggesting that automated prayer may be responsible for a substantial proportion of Twitter in Arabic speaking countries.6 Thus, at least in terms of sheer numbers, the expression of worship may rank among the most significant phenomena on Twitter overall. Du3a.org, like most Islamic Prayer Apps, does not use hashtags which can "trend" and gain visibility, which is a possible reason why the phenomenon has largely remained unnoticed. To our knowledge, it was not until Matthew Rothenberg (2017), the founder of Emojitracker.com, noticed that the recycling emoji (at the time used by Du3a in every tweet)-attributed to the extensive use of the symbol in Muslim tweets-had become the third most popular on Twitter that the apps were first discussed outside the Muslim community. Our exploration of the phenomenon indicates the presence of at least 10 sites with business models similar to Du3a's. Some of the competitors offer more advanced options. For instance, Athantweets.com offers a premium version that, for 100 Saudi Riyals (roughly $27) a year, enables the user to choose specific (as opposed to randomly generated) supplications, and for the tweets to be synchronized to the user's local prayer times. Tweets sent via this premium package also hide the Athantweets URL, making them virtually indistinguishable from any other tweets with Quranic content. This casts light on an important characteristic of the phenomenon as a whole, the fact that a majority of the traffic appears to be organic; that is, derived from ordinary accounts of real people, as opposed to 'bots', understood as accounts with a fake identity set up purely for the purpose of disseminating content. A qualitative close-reading of a few dozen twitter accounts using Du3a shows that, whereas some of the accounts appeared to be created specifically to use these prayer services, most appeared to be ordinary users, who tweeted everyday messages, photos, and commentary interspersed with the automated messages. In other words, much of the traffic appears to be created by authentic accounts, operated by legitimate users, who creatively automate a facet of their online activity while also using the service as they would do ordinarily. 335 1 3 Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider... 3 Religious Context It is too soon to try to explain the specific role that the Islamic Prayer Apps play in the everyday life of their users. Much more work on both the qualitative properties of the phenomenon (such as that of Bell 2006) as well as further analysis of the quantitative ones is needed. "Even though there is almost 1.2 billion Muslims ..." as Akma and Abdul Razak (2013, p. 6) point out, "... there is too little research done on the techno-spiritual application from the Islamic perspective." Looking more closely at some of the accounts captured in our data collection, we see that there seem to be many possible motivations behind the use of such services. One account, for instance, notes that the reason it is set up is to pray for "my brother [name]," suggesting that users might be setting up such accounts to cast prayers on behalf of friends and family. Arguably, one of the core functions of the automated prayer apps is tied to their explicit promise to continue posting even after the user's death. For instance, the slogan of Zad-Muslim.com reads "Register now so your account would tweet now and after you die." Similarly, Dur3a.org promises that "your account will tweet in your life and in your death." This is more than a mere detail. While the posthumous prayer apps resonate with traditions in many different religions, it is notable that such features have emerged within Islam. According to the Quran, one does not receive one's judgement immediately upon death. Instead, those who pass away must wait in their graves for Allah to end Earth and make His final judgment of each respective individual. In order to be eventually sent to paradise, a Muslim's sins must be outweighed by his or her good deeds. But in between the time of death and the final judgement day, a number of factors may posthumously increase their standing in the eyes of Allah. The Prophet Muhammed specifically mentioned three things that can improve one's afterlife reward this way: the continuous effects of charity; the provision of knowledge used by future generations; and virtuous descendants who pray for you (Sahih Muslim 1330, 42: 7064). Islamic scholars debate about how this should be interpreted (see for instance Al-Halbali 2016). However, most interpreters agree that the reward of the afterlife, at least to some degree, is subject to posthumous improvement. Because contributing to the dissemination of Islam is considered an inherent good, it is less important whether this activity is performed by someone personally, or through knowledge that one helps disseminating. So, the hypothesis is that putting in motion an app to post supplications on one's behalf after one's death could help increase one's chances of a good afterlife. With few exceptions, the Islamic community has thus far accepted the incorporation of new technologies into religious practice, especially when it comes to realizing their missionary potential. In her book When Religion Meets New Media, Campbell (2010, p. 96) describes this new emphasis on technology, noting that "Engagement with media is a religious imperative, one which Muslims will be held accountable for in the afterlife." Thus, it seems that the dissemination of Islam through media may have profound implications in both life and death. Yet, little is known about the attitudes of the larger Islamic community 336 C. Öhman et al. 1 3 when it comes to Islamic Prayer Apps, which undoubtedly ties religious practice closer to online technologies. And research is needed to study the specific role that these apps may play within the lives and religious practices of their users. Likewise, little, if anything, is known about the stance of social media platforms themselves on this widespread phenomenon. Unlike a platform such as Facebook, which now has a "memorialization" feature, Twitter handles deceased users by permanently taking down their accounts after some months of inactivity (Twitter n.d.). However, an account that has subscribed to a Islamic Prayer App will not go inactive after the user's death. It will keep tweeting, and will therefore not be identified as inactive or abandoned. This means that the huge presence of the Islamic Twitter supplications will likely continue to grow long after the account holders have died. An array of similar applications, albeit with a secular framing of "immortalizing one's social media presence", have been launched mainly targeting secular Western audiences (Öhman and Floridi 2017). However, such a project of social media immortalization still remains fringe in comparison to the Islamic Prayer Apps. Considering their popularity, it may, even within only a few decades, become increasingly difficult to differentiate between traffic generated by living and deceased users-and not because of the futurist community in Silicon Valley, but because of Islamic worshipers. 4 Broader Implications Religion has always been one of the most significant aspects of human life, individually, socially, as well as technologically. It should not be surprising if it is now emerging as a possible key driver for the mainstream adoption of social technology. Islam is not the only religion incorporating creative automation technologies into worship. The iTunes App Store contains more than 6000 applications related to spirituality and religion (Buie and Blythe 2013, p. 2315). In early 2019, Pope Francis launched a new app called "Click to Pray,"1 with which Catholics may participate in the Pope's prayers and share them on social media. Similarly, the Church of England's new voice activation feature for Amazon's Alexa allows owners of the device to ask it to read daily prayers (BBC 2018). This could be understood as part of a larger movement; after all, the offering of a wax candle in a church can now often be replaced by the turning on of an electric one. In a narrow capacity, technological services can even substitute for priests, answering religious questions like "Who is God?" or what it means to believe in Jesus. Similarly, Jewish communities have started employing new technologies to automate home facilities during the Sabbath (Woodruf et al. 2007), and members of diverse religious communities can now chat and make prayer requests to religious chatbots, such as those created by the Californian start-up Prayerbot. These examples, alongside the scale of the Islamic Prayer Apps, show that religion is far from a small or marginal force in contemporary social automation. 1 https ://click topra y.org/. 337 1 3 Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider... The case of the Islamic Prayer App also provides valuable insights into the complex, fast-evolving discourse on Twitter bots and online automation policy. Much recent literature on social bots focuses on false accounts set up during elections, and other political events, to inflate engagement metrics and help spread problematic political content (Ferrara et al. 2016). In contrast, Islamic Prayer Apps share no hashtags, and do not appear to try and influence the social network, instead remaining unobtrusively out of view. As well, because many of the observed accounts appear to be ordinary users who have partially "botified" or automated their accounts, they complicate the existing discourse, which is often methodologically and conceptually predicated on the assumption that "bots" and "not bots" exist as two distinct categories that can be easily separated (Gorwa and Guilbeault 2018; Stieglitz et al. 2017). Many Twitter users rely on a variety of publicly available services, from Twitter's own platform 'Tweetdeck' to 'If This Then That' to automate parts of their online activity. But how exactly should such behavior be understood? And what are the ethical ramifications? There have been many positive uses of automated social media accounts, which have been deployed creatively by journalists (Lokot and Diakopoulos 2016), activists fighting corruption (Savage et al. 2016), and those promoting institutional transparency (Ford et al. 2016), but religious uses have been largely unexplored. The Islamic Prayer Apps we analysed here arguably represent one of the largest examples to date of Twitter automation being deployed organically in a creative and culturally significant way. The fact that a phenomenon of these unprecedented proportions has gone unnoticed by researchers shows the limitations of our current scope. To quote Bell (2006, p. 155): "We appear to be stubbornly secular in our imaginings of home and leisure contexts of computing." Indeed, now is the time to broaden the conversation. Acknowledgements Our sincere thanks to Bence Kollanyi, for assistance with data collection. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. References Akma, N., & Abdul Razak, F. H. (2013). On the emergence of techno-spiritual: The concepts and current issues. In Computer and mathematical sciences graduates national colloquium 2013 (SISKOM2013). Al-Halbali, I. J. (2016). The three that follow to the grave. Birmingham: Dar As-Sunnah Publishers. Arab Social Media Report. (2014). Twitter in the Arab Region. Available at: http://arabs ocial media repor t.com/Twitt er/LineC hart.aspx. Accessed 12 June 2018. BBC. (2018). Church of England offers prayers read by Amazon's Alexa. BBC.com. https ://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-44233 053. Accessed 27 Mar 2019. Bell, G. (2006). No more SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, religion and techno-spiritual practices. In P. Dourish & A. Friday (Eds.), UbiComp 2006: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4206. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https ://doi.org/10.1007/11853 565_9. 338 C. Öhman et al. 1 3 Bessi, A., & Ferrara, E. (2016). Social bots distort the 2016 US Presidential election online discussion. First Monday. https ://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i1 1.7090. Bruns, A., Highfield, T., Burgess, J. (2013). The Arab spring and social media audiences. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7):871–898. Buie, E., & Blythe, M. (2013). Spirituality: There's an App for That! (But not a lot of research). CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts, April 27–May 2, 2013, Paris, France. Campbell, H. A. (2010). When religion meets new media. London: Routledge. Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C. B., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2016). The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM, 59(7), 96–104. Ford, H., Dubois, E., & Puschmann, C. (2016). Keeping Ottawa honest-One tweet at a time? Politicians, journalists, wikipedians and their twitter bots. International Journal of Communication, 10, 4891–4914. ISSN 1932-8036. Gorwa, R., & Guilbeault, D. (2018). Unpacking the social media bot: A typology to guide research and policy. Policy and Internet. https ://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.184. Lokot, T., & Diakopoulos, N. (2016). News Bots: Automating news and information dissemination on Twitter. Digital Journalism, 4(6), 682–699. https ://doi.org/10.1080/21670 811.2015.10818 22. Öhman, C., & Floridi, L. (2017). The political economy of death in the age of information: A critical approach to the digital afterlife industry. Minds and Machines. https ://doi.org/10.1007/s1102 3-017-9445-2. Öhman, C., & Floridi, L. (2018). An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry. Nature Human Behavior. https ://doi.org/10.1038/s4156 2-018-0335-2. Rothenberg, M. (2017). Why the emoji recycling symbol is taking over Twitter. Medium. Available at: https ://mediu m.com/@mroth /why-the-emoji -recyc ling-symbo l-is-takin g-over-twitt er-65ad4 b18b0 4b. Accessed 25 Apr 2018. Sahih Muslim. (1330). Sahih Muslim Vol. 7, Book of Zuhd and Softening of Hearts, Hadith 7064. Retrieved from: http://www.iupui .edu/~msaiu pui/042.smt.html. Accessed 27 Mar 2019. Savage, S., Monroy-Hernandez, A., Höllerer, T. (2016). Botivist: Calling volunteers to action using online bots. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, pp. 813–822. ACM. Stieglitz, S., Brachten, F., Ross, B., & Jung, A.-K. (2017). Do social bots dream of electric sheep? A categorisation of social media bot accounts. arXiv :1710.04044 [Cs]. Retrieved from http://arxiv .org/ abs/1710.04044 . Twitter. (n.d.). Inactive account policy. Available at: https ://help.twitt er.com/en/rules -and-polic ies/inact ive-twitt er-accou nts. Accessed 27 Mar 2019 Woodruf, A., Augustin, S., & Foucault, B. (2007). Sabbath day home automation: "It's like mixing technology and religion". CHI 2007, April 28–May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA. Wyche, S. P., Caine, K. E., Davison, B., Arteaga, M., & Grinter, R. E. (2008). Sun dial: Exploring technospiritual design through a mobile islamic call to prayer application. CHI 2008, April 5 – April 10, 2008, Florence, Italy ACM. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.


Review of Joshua Gert, "Primitive Colors"

Philosophy

Good book.  See this review's final paragraph for my conspiracy theory defending reflectance physicalism.

This article is the accepted version of the review published here: https://metapsychology.net/index.php/book-review/primitive-colors/ 1 Gert, Joshua. Primitive Colors: A Case Study in Neo-pragmatist Metaphysics and Philosophy of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN 9780198785910 (Hardcover). Pp. ix + 237. Review by Nicholas Danne The subtitle of Primitive Colors best characterizes Joshua Gert's philosophical defense of color primitivism. In neo-pragmatic form, the book steadfastly declines to analyze color in terms of the "truth" and "reference" (3) of the empirical property ascriptions germane to what Gert calls "scientific naturalism" (2). Rivals to color primitivism include reflectance physicalism, reflectance-basis physicalism, dispositionalism (properties induce experiences), eliminativism (qua subjectivism), projectivism (attributing mental properties to objects), and relationalism (colors as multi-part relations between objects, light, and perceivers). Pace these views, the primitivist concludes "that 'red' refers to the property of redness, and - importantly - that this is the end of the matter" (3). Such is not to say that redness is ephemeral or ineffable. Primitive redness is a property "of objects," Gert claims in Chapter 1, but a property that is both "sui generis" and accessible even to children (9, first emphasis mine). Gert's opening argument for primitivism recalls one of Paul Benacerraf's arguments about numbers. Just as numbers need not be a Zermelo sequence of the nested null set any more than numbers need be a successor relation of power sets, so Gert argues that reducing color to a non-primitive base (from the list above) is both arbitrary and generative of "too many modal properties" for the colors (15). One such property is the "dimensions of similarity" that reflectance physicalism grants the colors (28). Reflectance physicalism equates 2 colors with surface spectral reflectance (SSR) profiles, or ranges (400-800 nm) of electromagnetic reflective efficiency at a surface. The 'similarity' problem, therefore, is that two profiles "might" (28) be more similar (blue to yellow) than the profiles of hues that humans experience as similar (blue to another blue). Additional discrepancies between profiles and perceptions motivate Gert to reject reflectance physicalism. To systematically forego all color reductionism, Gert introduces his linguistic neopragmatism in Chapter 2. He calls his account "naturalistic" (46), since it features "human subjects as natural beings in a natural environment" (47). Rather than assuming, however, that all meaningful properties reduce to empirically demonstrable, scientific "essence[s]" (50), Gert maintains that humans learn the meaning of color terms by ostension. He contrasts water, for example, whose meaning as H2O serves to protect humans from poisoning by other clear liquids, with color, whose "superficial appearance" (49) all but exhausts its meaning. More strongly, Gert claims in Chapter 3 that what he calls "precise" colors cannot be physical reflectance profiles or other reduction bases, and indeed cannot obtain at any "surface or volume" at all (57). Precise colors, on Gert's account, are to be distinguished from "rough" colors (57). Rough colors include red, yellow, green, blue, "'yellowish'" (63), "navy blue" (138), "bluish-green" (80), "'dark brown'" (219), and the like. Precise colors, on the other hand, include unique green - the hue of green containing neither more blue than yellow, nor vice versa - and any other "maximally specific location" (56) in hue-saturation-lightness (HSL) color space. While rough colors are primitive properties of objects, precise color language pertains only to the "appearance of a color, for a particular viewer from a particular perspective . . ." (57). Gert calls this rough/precise distinction the "separability thesis" (57). 3 Gert's argument for the separability thesis follows from his linguistic neo-pragmatism. Empirical evidence indicates, for example, that "two people with normal vision are very likely to locate unique green at quite different locations on the spectrum," and from this premise Gert concludes that "we have no reason to favor one over the other" (58). The conclusion is not that a majority of perceivers in agreement correctly ascribes properties qua majority. Rather, by the tenets of linguistic neo-pragmatism, a "sufficiently overwhelming agreement" among perceivers sets the context in which ostension "can often be expected to yield a referring term" (65), and importantly, a useful term (66). The problem for unique green, then, is that no one reliably can teach it by ostension. As Gert points out, the appearance 'unique green' may be learned or taught after merely ostending the rough colors 'blue', 'green', and 'yellow'. In my opinion, however, some implications of the separability thesis clash with common sense. For on Gert's account, the Sherwin Williams product "Lemon Twist" is not a color, it is a "paint," and so Lemon Twist cannot be taught by ostension as a precise color (80). Chapter 4 reinforces the separability thesis with additional terminology. Color appearances, for Gert, are adverbial properties of "visual experience," properties neither of objects, nor "of a visual field or of a sense datum or quale . . ." (88). The neo-pragmatist thus distinguishes "apparent color" (the objective, rough color an object appears to have, but might not have) from "color appearance" (the "way" some objective color looks to me in my circumstances) (89). Neopragmatists need this distinction because they hold that color appearance could be of something that is not a color (unique green), and because color constancy (judging that a surface color remains constant while its illumination changes) is an empirically documented human phenomenon. To be clear, Gert holds that "no color appearance is identical to the objective color of a surface" (111), just as no 2D appearance of a cube is a 3D cube. 4 With these basics of color primitivism in place, the second half of the book engages various, competing theories. Chapter 5 scrutinizes the role of color constancy, for example, as a premise in arguments for non-primitivist color realism. In turn, Gert assesses Jonathan Cohen's anti-realist rejection of constancy, and finds it wanting. As Gert parses Cohen, each part "of a uniform surface" could possess two (or more), relational properties (136). Assuming that two different illuminants (I1, I2) would yield two relational colors (C1, C2) at the surface, then each part of the surface could possess both "C1-under-I1" and "C2-under-I2" (136). This state of affairs preserves the phenomenon of constancy (we perceive that two differently illuminated parts would look like each other under switched illuminants), but no single C-property responsible for constancy obtains across the surface (136). In his extensive reply, Gert remarks that such a theory could generate a high number of "counterfactuals" for "our visual system" to represent (137). He ultimately defends apparent color (versus color appearance) as the sort of uniform property underpinning constancy. Chapters 6 and 7 review, in the following order, Cohen's relationalism, some alternative pluralisms, Keith Allen's rival primitivism, and Derek Brown's puzzle of viewing "a green book through a glass of amber beer" (181). Against Allen, Gert objects that unique green cannot be an objective color, and he criticizes what he takes to be one of Allen's guiding assumptions: "that agreement in rough color across human beings supports the notion . . . [of a] best perceiver" (176, quoting Gert). Gert counter-argues from an analogy to movie genres. Does widespread but imperfect agreement about what counts as horror and comedy imply "that there are precise but often unknowable facts about the correct classifications" of movies (177)? Not according to Gert. He closes the book with Chapter 8 (and a subsequent conclusion), defending a "modest 5 representationalism" (194) about visual perception, and rejecting any notion of "transparency" that undermines the separability thesis (210). Overall, Gert provides a clear and succinct criticism of the dominant realist position on color (reflectance physicalism) with a remarkable economy of technical verbiage and diagrams (as in zero diagrams). That said, the book is not one for learning human physiology or for assessing scientific controversy firsthand; it is trenchantly philosophical. Much of the text consists of Gert responding to published criticisms of his earlier work, so supporters of reflectance physicalism anticipating 200 pages of fresh, anti-SSR polemic may be disappointed. The book has strengthened my thinking on this issue, however, and I recommend it for those seeking a digest of recent sources on color. My only criticism concerns Gert's main argument against SSR reductionism. He claims, "Of course there could be something special about 503 nm that would convince us - to our great surprise - that this spectral location ought to be regarded as the true home of unique green" (68). That claim is fair, but elsewhere he seems to contradict it. He says things like:  non-primitivist accounts of color commit us to controversial and pointless modal claims. (40)  What possible evolutionary advantage could there be in having a phenomenal experience that represented precisely this extremely narrowly specified spectral reflectance? What objects in the world have such specific reflectances and keep them over time? The answer to both of these questions is: None. (78)  What is the relevant difference between shape and color? It is that the causal powers of shapes go well beyond the production of appearances. (90)  There is no motivation even for saying that there is an answer [about which Munsell chip is unique green] - even an unknowable one. (98) My point is that for all of Gert's frequent analogizing of color to shape, he seems to have overlooked that SSR is also a property of laser mirrors (the mathematical principles of optics being 6 strikingly shape-like). Hence a conspiracy theory falsifying all of the above bullets proves easy to generate. If there were a large population of humans who saw reflections from a surface with SSR profile centered at 503 nm as unique green, and if this profile happened to be an essential specification in the design of a massive death-laser (whose beam looks unique green), and if humans who could see unique green were selectively exterminated as part of a government coverup concerning the existence of the superweapon, and if aliens somehow made this part of our evolutionary history in this world (Gert appeals to alien thought experiments in Chapter 3), then we would have not only a neo-pragmatic reason to identify unique green with its SSR profile, but also an evolutionary reason to ascribe a surface property whose 'effect' or 'causal power' transcends its appearance. I do not find the conspiracy theory plausible or motivated, but it is not categorically impossible, even if its implementation as construed would be 'unknowable'. To avoid begging questions about what SSR really is, therefore, Gert's best claim may be his least critical: that a successful color reduction to SSR could prove 'surprising'.


Philosophy

This is a reply to Chris Tweed's recent attempt to solve the problem of "nearly convergent knowledge" and thus defend a binary account of knowledge against a contrastivist alternative. Ingenuous as his proposal is, it still does not solve the problem.

http://social-epistemology.com ISSN: 2471-9560 Nearly Solving the Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge Peter Baumann, Swarthmore College –––––––––––––––––– Baumann, Peter. "Nearly Solving the Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 10 (2018): 16-21. Short url: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41B (provided by WordPress) 16 Vol. 7, no. 10 (2018): 16-21. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41B Contrastivism (see, e.g., Schaffer 2004) is the view that knowledge is not a binary relation between a subject and a proposition but a ternary relation between a subject S, a proposition p (the proposition attributed as known and thus entailed by the knowledge attribution; we can call it the "target proposition") and an incompatible (cf. Rourke 2013, sec.2) and false contrast proposition q (a "contrast").1 The form of a knowledge attribution is thus not S knows that p but S knows that p rather than q. According to contrastivism, it's elliptical, at least, to say that Chris knows that that bird is a goldfinch. Rather, we should say something like the following: Chris knows that that bird is a goldfinch rather than a raven. Chris might not know that that bird is a goldfinch rather than a canary. There can, of course be more than one contrasting proposition; in this case we can consider the disjunction of all the contrasting propositions to constitute the contrast proposition. A Problem and Tweedt's Proposed Solution Chris Tweedt's thought-provoking "Solving the Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge" discusses one kind of argument against the binary view and in favor of contrastivism. The argument (see Schaffer 2007) is based on the claim that knowing that p consists in knowing the answer to a question of the form Is p rather than q the case? ("Is this bird a goldfinch rather than a raven?"; "Is it a goldfinch rather than a canary?"). Put differently, knowing that p consists in knowing the correct answer to a multiple choice question ("What bird is this? A: A goldfinch; B: A raven"; What bird is this? A: A goldfinch; B: A canary"). The binary account faces a problem because it has to claim that if one knows the answer to one such question ("Is it a goldfinch rather than a raven?") then one also knows the answer to the other question ("Is it a goldfinch rather than a canary?"). However, one might only be able to answer one question but not the other. This is the problem of convergent knowledge. This, argues Schaffer, speaks in favor of contrastivism. Some defenders of the binary view (see Jespersen 2008; Kallestrup 2009) have proposed the following way out: One does not know the same proposition when one knows the answers to different contrastive (multiple choice) questions which share a "target" (a target proposition). Rather, the corresponding knowledge has the form S knows that (p and not q). Our subject might know that that bird is a goldfinch and not a raven while it might not know that it is a goldfinch and not a canary. 1 We can allow for a different kind of contrastive knowledge relation where the contrast can also be true. Suppose I know of Jo, the president of the cheese club and also my dentist, that Jo is my dentist. Since I have no clue who might be the president of the cheese club, it could be appropriate to express all this by saying that I know that Jo is my dentist rather than the president of the cheese club. However, against this speaks that the latter is best understood as saying that I know that Jo is my dentist rather than that I know that Jo is the president of the cheese club. But even if there was such an alternative kind of contrastivity of knowledge, we can leave it aside here. P. Baumann 17 Schaffer (2009) has a response to this: Even though there is no convergence of knowledge here there is "near convergence" which is still bad enough. Using the principle of closure of knowledge under known entailment2 one can easily acquire knowledge of the second proposition on the basis of knowledge of the first. If Chris knows that that bird is a goldfinch and not a raven, then Chris also knows or can easily come to know, according to the binary view, that that bird is a goldfinch. Since Chris also knows that whatever is a goldfinch is not a canary, he also knows or can easily come to know that that bird is not a canary. So, he knows or can easily come to know that that bird is a goldfinch and not a canary. Given that this is implausible, the problem of convergent knowledge is reincarnated as the problem of "nearly convergent knowledge". Tweedt's ingenuous reply in favor of the binary account (see also van Woudenberg 2008) proposes to analyze the known answer to a contrastive (multiple choice) question as having conditional form: (0) If p or q, then p.3 Question: Is that bird a goldfinch rather than a raven? Answer: If it is a goldfinch or a raven, then it is a goldfinch! Tweedt claims that this solves the problem of convergent knowledge because the answer to the question "Is that bird a goldfinch rather than a raven?", namely (1) If that bird is a goldfinch or a raven, then it's a goldfinch, is not "a few quick closure steps away" (see Tweedt 2018, 220) from the answer to the question "Is that bird a goldfinch rather than a canary?", namely (2) If that bird is a goldfinch or a canary, then it's a goldfinch. A Problem with Tweedt's Proposal Tweedt does not add an explicit argument to his claim that (2) isn't just a few easy closure steps away from (1). Here is an argument that (2) is indeed just a few easy closure steps away from (1). If that's correct, then Tweedt's proposal fails to solve the problem of nearly convergent knowledge. Let "g", "r" and "c" stand in for "That bird is a goldfinch", "That bird is a raven", and "That bird is a canary" respectively. We can then, following Tweedt, assume (about some subject S) that 2 Here is a basic version: (Closure) If S knows that p, and if S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. Whistles and bells should be added but nothing depends on these here; we can use (Closure) or other simple variants of it here. 3 Tweedt adds that not all knowledge or all answers to questions are conditional in form (see Tweedt 2018, 222). 18 Vol. 7, no. 10 (2018): 16-21. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41B (3) S knows that if g or r, then g. The proposition g is the target proposition here, not r (in the latter case our subject would know that if g or r, then r, instead). Since targets and contrasts are mutually incompatible, we may also assume that (4a) S knows that if g, then not r; (4b) S knows that if g, then not c. Finally, we may assume that (5) S knows that g or r. To be sure, one can ask contrastive questions where both propositions are false: Is Einstein rather than Fido the dog the inventor of the telephone? One might want to answer that Einstein rather than Fido invented the telephone (whether one also believes falsely or doesn't believe that Einstein invented the telephone). However, this is a deviant case not relevant here because we are interested in cases where one of the contrasting propositions is true and particularly in knowledge that p (where p is the target). If that knowledge is construed in a binary way, then it involves knowledge of one of the contrasting propositions (p) that it is true; if it is construed as knowledge that p rather than q, then it still obeys the factivity principle for knowledge and thus entails that p. So, we can assume here that g or r is true.4 We may also assume that in standard cases the subject can know this. Hence: (5) S knows that g or r.5 A closure principle like (Closure) together with (3) and (5) entails (6) S knows that g.6 4 See also Tweedt 2018, 224, fn.11 and 225, fn.14. Given (4a) and therefore also given that if g, then not r, we can also rule out that both propositions are true. Could r be true and g be false? Sure, but then r would be the target proposition, not g. This would not constitute a different case. 5 Even if one insists that knowledge of the answer to a contrastive question is compatible with the lack of truth of any of the contrasting propositions, one still has to accept that there are other cases where there is a true target. And for such cases one still needs a convincing solution of the problem of nearly convergent knowledge. 6 A different route to (6) uses (5) and (8) below together with the claim that all contrasting propositions are mutually incompatible. However, one might have doubts about the latter assumption and allow for propositions in the contrast set to be mutually compatible (as long as they are incompatible with the target proposition). I want to leave this issue open here and will thus not put weight on this alternative route to (6). - P. Baumann 19 (Closure) together with (4b) and (6) entails (7) S knows that not c. So, there are only a few quick and easy "closure steps" to the implausible (7).7 And we can add that disjunction introduction will allow the subject to come to know (on the basis of (6)) that g or c (8) S knows that g or c. (We could also argue for (8) along the lines of the argument above for (5)). Conjunction introduction together with (6) and (8) will allow the subject to know that (g or c) and g: (9) S knows that (g or c) and g. Since whenever a conjunction is true, a corresponding conditional is true, the subject can also come to know that If g or c, then g. In other words: (10) S knows that if g or c, then g.8 There are then also quick and easy closure steps leading from Tweedt's (1) to (2). So, the problem of nearly convergent knowledge remains unsolved. Defending Tweedt? There is more than one strategy for Tweedt to defend his proposal of a solution to the problem of nearly convergent knowledge. One would be to modify the closure principle in such a way that certain steps are not allowed any more. For instance, one could try to argue (4b) and (6) don't lead to (7) because a valid closure principle doesn't allow knowledgeproducing inferences from easy-to-know propositions to hard-to-know propositions. Here is still another route to (6). If it is true (following (3)) that if g or r, then g, (thus ruling out the case in which g is false and r is true) and if it is also true (following (4a)) that if g, then not r (thus ruling out the case in which both g and r are true), and if, finally, r is the disjunction of all the propositions contrasting with g (thus ruling out the case in which both g and r are false), then we are left with only one case: the case in which g is true and r is false. Since this is a case where g is true, S can come to know g on the basis of the considerations just given. However, in many cases the contrast set does not contain all propositions except the target proposition. In all these cases, we need to use another route to (6). 7 If one replaces c by some proposition about the obtaining of a skeptical scenario (like An evil demon makes me hallucinate goldfinches), then one gets to even more drastic cases and implications. 8 Again, if one replaces c by some proposition about the obtaining of a skeptical scenario (like An evil demon makes me hallucinate goldfinches), then one gets to even more drastic conclusions like the following one: S knows that if he is looking at a goldfinch or is suffering from a demon-induced hallucination of a goldfinch, then he is looking at a goldfinch. Hence, given the above, S can also come to know he is looking at a goldfinch and not suffering from a demon-induced hallucination of a goldfinch. 20 Vol. 7, no. 10 (2018): 16-21. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41B This kind of idea is well-known from discussions about skepticism: I might know that I have hands, and I might also know that if I have hands, then I am not merely hallucinating that I have hands, but I don't know that I am not merely hallucinating that I have hands. Fred Dretske and Robert Nozick as well as some others have argued for such a view (see Dretske 2005 and Nozick 1981, ch.3). However, I am not sure whether Tweedt wants to choose this strategy. And it doesn't seem easy to find a modification of the closure principle that is not ad hoc and has independent reasons in its favor. Another strategy would be to identify other analyses of the answer to a contrastive (multiple choice) question. Perhaps one can improve on Tweedt's response in a way similar to the one in which he attempts to improve on Kallestrup's (and Jespersen's) response to the original problem of convergent knowledge. I have to leave open here whether there is an analysis that does the trick, and what it could be (see, e.g., Steglich-Petersen 2015). Could one take Tweedt's conditional (0) not as a material conditional but rather as a subjunctive conditional? I am afraid that this would constitute a change of topic. Knowledge is factive and what would be the case (P) if something else (Q) were the case does not tell us anything about whether P or Q is the case, even if the corresponding subjunctive conditional is indeed true. It might be more promising to explore the potential of a complaint about question begging: Isn't Schaffer's diagnosis that one can know (1) without knowing (2) already presupposing the truth of contrastivism? Why should one believe that there is a problem with knowing (2) but not with knowing (1) if not because one has already accepted contrastivism about knowledge? One final side remark on an alleged advantage of binary accounts like Tweedt's. He argues (see Tweedt 2018, 223) that contrastivism doesn't take the skeptical problem seriously (enough) and rather deflates it; one might even want to say that contrastivism changes the topic. According to contrastivism I can know the Moorean proposition that I have hands rather than stumps even if I do not know the anti-skeptical proposition that I have hands rather than am merely hallucinating hands. Closure does not support any claim that if I know the one, then I know the other, too. Tweedt thinks this is a disadvantage of contrastivism. However, contrastivists like Schaffer would see this as an advantage. It seems to me that both ways of looking at the anti-skeptical potential of contrastivism have something going for them. In this context, it might be better to leave the question open whether skepticism can be deflated or not. (Similar points will apply to Tweedt's remarks concerning the debate about expert disagreement; see Tweedt 2018, 223) Conclusion Ingenuous as Tweedt's proposal is, it does not, I think, solve the problem of nearly convergent knowledge. However, this does not mean that a ternary account of knowledge has to be preferred to a binary account. I think that there are serious problems for P. Baumann 21 contrastivism that make the binary account the better options. But this is something for another occasion. Contact details: email@example.com References Dretske, Fred I. 2005, The Case against Closure, Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa (eds.) Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 13-26. Jespersen, Bjørn 2008, Knowing that p rather than q, Sorites 20, 125-134. Kallestrup, Jesper 2009, Knowledge-wh and the Problem of Convergent Knowledge, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78, 468-476. Nozick, Robert 1981, Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rourke, Jason 2013, A Counterexample to the Contrastive Account of Knowledge, Philosophical Studies 162, 637-643. Schaffer, Jonathan 2004, From Contextualism to Contrastivism, Philosophical Studies 119, 73-103. Schaffer, Jonathan 2007, Knowing the Answer, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75, 383-403. Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn 2015, Knowing the Answer to a Loaded Question, in: Theoria 81, 97-125. Tweedt, Chris 2018, Solving the Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge, Social Epistemology 32, 219-227. van Woudenberg, René 2008, The Knowledge Relation: Binary or Ternary?, Social Epistemology 22, 281-288.