Eric Mandelbaum
Biographic Data
| ID | 3865985 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Mandelbaum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Mandelbaum |
| SIGNATURE | MANDELBAUM E |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Graduate Center, CUNY |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0624-7763 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Truth-value judgments
Philosophers, psychologists and linguists routinely use truth-value judgments as a source of evidence for the meaning of specific expressions. This method presupposes that truth-value judgments track whether what was said corresponds with facts. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that ordinary people’s behavior on the truth-value judgment task is sensitive to a range of factors beyond correspondence with facts. In this paper, we investi…
Logical Operations Shape the Formation of Implicit Attitudes: Evidence From the Negation of Bipolar and Unipolar Adjectives
Emerging single-process propositional perspectives in psychology and philosophy have introduced the key idea that, much like their explicit (deliberately retrieved) counterparts, implicit (automatically retrieved) attitudes should be sensitive to logical operations such as negation. In the present project, we subject this idea to a particularly stringent test by probing not only whether the formation of implicit attitudes is sensitive to negation…
Disfluency attenuates the reception of pseudoprofound and postmodernist bullshit
Four studies explore the role of perceptual fluency in attenuating bullshit receptivity, or the tendency for individuals to rate otherwise meaningless statements as “profound”. Across four studies, we presented participants with a sample of pseudoprofound bullshit statements in either a fluent or disfluent font and found that overall, disfluency attenuated bullshit receptivity while also finding little evidence that this effect was moderated by c…
The Sound of Slurs: Bad Sounds for Bad Words
An analysis of a valenced corpus of English words revealed that words that rhyme with slurs are rated more poorly than their synonyms. What at first might seem like a bizarre coincidence turns out to be a robust feature of slurs, one arising from their phonetic structure. We report novel data on phonaesthetic preferences, showing that a particular class of phonemes are both particularly disliked and overrepresented in slurs. We argue that phonaes…
Everything and More: The Prospects of Whole Brain Emulation
Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) has been championed as the most promising, well-defined route to achieving both human-level artificial intelligence and superintelligence. It has even been touted as a viable route to achieving immortality through brain uploading. WBE is not a fringe theory: the doctrine of Computationalism in philosophy of mind lends credence to the in-principle feasibility of the idea, and the standing of the Human Connectome Project…
Modularist explanations of experience and other illusions
Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of Perception
Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias
The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived:…
Thinking is Believing
The idea that people can entertain propositions without believing them is widespread, intuitive, and most probably false. The main goal of this essay is to argue against the claim that people can entertain a proposition without believing it. Evidence is presented demonstrating that we cannot withhold assent from any proposition we happen to consider. A model of belief fixation is then sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant …
Thinking is Believing
The idea that people can entertain propositions without believing them is widespread, intuitive, and most probably false. The main goal of this essay is to argue against the claim that people can entertain a proposition without believing it. Evidence is presented demonstrating that we cannot withhold assent from any proposition we happen to consider. A model of belief fixation is then sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant …
Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias
The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived:…
Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of Perception
Modularist explanations of experience and other illusions
Everything and More: The Prospects of Whole Brain Emulation
Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) has been championed as the most promising, well-defined route to achieving both human-level artificial intelligence and superintelligence. It has even been touted as a viable route to achieving immortality through brain uploading. WBE is not a fringe theory: the doctrine of Computationalism in philosophy of mind lends credence to the in-principle feasibility of the idea, and the standing of the Human Connectome Project…
Disfluency attenuates the reception of pseudoprofound and postmodernist bullshit
Four studies explore the role of perceptual fluency in attenuating bullshit receptivity, or the tendency for individuals to rate otherwise meaningless statements as “profound”. Across four studies, we presented participants with a sample of pseudoprofound bullshit statements in either a fluent or disfluent font and found that overall, disfluency attenuated bullshit receptivity while also finding little evidence that this effect was moderated by c…
The Sound of Slurs: Bad Sounds for Bad Words
An analysis of a valenced corpus of English words revealed that words that rhyme with slurs are rated more poorly than their synonyms. What at first might seem like a bizarre coincidence turns out to be a robust feature of slurs, one arising from their phonetic structure. We report novel data on phonaesthetic preferences, showing that a particular class of phonemes are both particularly disliked and overrepresented in slurs. We argue that phonaes…
Logical Operations Shape the Formation of Implicit Attitudes: Evidence From the Negation of Bipolar and Unipolar Adjectives
Emerging single-process propositional perspectives in psychology and philosophy have introduced the key idea that, much like their explicit (deliberately retrieved) counterparts, implicit (automatically retrieved) attitudes should be sensitive to logical operations such as negation. In the present project, we subject this idea to a particularly stringent test by probing not only whether the formation of implicit attitudes is sensitive to negation…
Truth-value judgments
Philosophers, psychologists and linguists routinely use truth-value judgments as a source of evidence for the meaning of specific expressions. This method presupposes that truth-value judgments track whether what was said corresponds with facts. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that ordinary people’s behavior on the truth-value judgment task is sensitive to a range of factors beyond correspondence with facts. In this paper, we investi…
Philosophy (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Cognitive psychology (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Cognition (2 works) · Cognitive science (2 works) · Consciousness (2 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (2 works)