Verbal Ability ...

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow .

The bestselling 2008 book Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, helped inspire experimentally tested, psychologically informed policy work around the world, often developed by “behavioural insight teams” in or adjacent to government. Now two leading behavioural scientists, Nick Chater and George Loewenstein, have published an academic working paper suggesting that the movement has lost its way. Professors Chater and Loewenstein are academic advisers to the UK’s behavioural insight group, and...it’s worth paying attention to what they say.

Ponder an advertising campaign from 1971 titled “Crying Indian”. This powerful TV commercial depicts a Native American man paddling down a river [laden with trash. A voice over says] “People start pollution. People can stop it.” The Native American man turns to the camera, a single tear rolling down his cheek. But the message was not what it seemed (and not just because the actor’s parents were in fact Italian): it was funded by some of the leading companies in food and drink packaging. The advert placed responsibility squarely on the shoulders of individuals making selfish choices. It wasn’t governments who didn’t provide bins, or manufacturers who made unrecyclable products. No, the problem was you.

Chater and Loewenstein argue that behavioural scientists naturally fall into the habit of seeing problems in the same way...If your problem is basically that fallible individuals are making bad choices, behavioural science is an excellent solution. If, however, the real problem is not individual but systemic, then nudges are at best limited, and at worst, a harmful diversion.

Historians [now] argue that the Crying Indian campaign was a deliberate attempt by corporate interests to change the subject. Is behavioural public policy, accidentally or deliberately, a similar distraction? A look at climate change policy suggests it might be. Behavioural scientists themselves are clear enough that nudging is no real substitute for a carbon price — Thaler and Sunstein say as much in Nudge. Politicians, by contrast, have preferred to bypass the carbon price and move straight to the pain-free nudging. Nudge enthusiast David Cameron, in a speech given shortly before he became prime minister, declared that “the best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill” was to cleverly reformat the bill itself. This is politics as the art of avoiding difficult decisions. No behavioural scientist would suggest that it was close to sufficient.

Another problem is that empirically tested, behaviourally rigorous bad policy can be bad policy nonetheless. For example, it has become fashionable to argue that people should be placed on an organ donor registry by default, because this dramatically expands the number of people registered as donors. But, as Thaler and Sunstein themselves keep having to explain, this is a bad idea. Most organ donation happens only after consultation with a grieving family — and default-bloated donor registries do not help families work out what their loved one might have wanted.

Behavioural science is a great way of finding small tweaks that can make a substantial difference to behaviour. Such tweaks help if the behaviour change itself solves a problem, but that cannot be taken for granted. It is easy to take a perfectly sound behavioural insight and turn it into a botched piece of policy.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow .

The bestselling 2008 book Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, helped inspire experimentally tested, psychologically informed policy work around the world, often developed by “behavioural insight teams” in or adjacent to government. Now two leading behavioural scientists, Nick Chater and George Loewenstein, have published an academic working paper suggesting that the movement has lost its way. Professors Chater and Loewenstein are academic advisers to the UK’s behavioural insight group, and...it’s worth paying attention to what they say.

Ponder an advertising campaign from 1971 titled “Crying Indian”. This powerful TV commercial depicts a Native American man paddling down a river [laden with trash. A voice over says] “People start pollution. People can stop it.” The Native American man turns to the camera, a single tear rolling down his cheek. But the message was not what it seemed (and not just because the actor’s parents were in fact Italian): it was funded by some of the leading companies in food and drink packaging. The advert placed responsibility squarely on the shoulders of individuals making selfish choices. It wasn’t governments who didn’t provide bins, or manufacturers who made unrecyclable products. No, the problem was you.

Chater and Loewenstein argue that behavioural scientists naturally fall into the habit of seeing problems in the same way...If your problem is basically that fallible individuals are making bad choices, behavioural science is an excellent solution. If, however, the real problem is not individual but systemic, then nudges are at best limited, and at worst, a harmful diversion.

Historians [now] argue that the Crying Indian campaign was a deliberate attempt by corporate interests to change the subject. Is behavioural public policy, accidentally or deliberately, a similar distraction? A look at climate change policy suggests it might be. Behavioural scientists themselves are clear enough that nudging is no real substitute for a carbon price — Thaler and Sunstein say as much in Nudge. Politicians, by contrast, have preferred to bypass the carbon price and move straight to the pain-free nudging. Nudge enthusiast David Cameron, in a speech given shortly before he became prime minister, declared that “the best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill” was to cleverly reformat the bill itself. This is politics as the art of avoiding difficult decisions. No behavioural scientist would suggest that it was close to sufficient.

Another problem is that empirically tested, behaviourally rigorous bad policy can be bad policy nonetheless. For example, it has become fashionable to argue that people should be placed on an organ donor registry by default, because this dramatically expands the number of people registered as donors. But, as Thaler and Sunstein themselves keep having to explain, this is a bad idea. Most organ donation happens only after consultation with a grieving family — and default-bloated donor registries do not help families work out what their loved one might have wanted.

Behavioural science is a great way of finding small tweaks that can make a substantial difference to behaviour. Such tweaks help if the behaviour change itself solves a problem, but that cannot be taken for granted. It is easy to take a perfectly sound behavioural insight and turn it into a botched piece of policy.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow .

Kitcher here relies on Hermann Broch who claims that literature should concern itself with those human problems which are either banished from the sciences because they are intractable or with those problems that sciences are not yet ready to grasp. Kitcher himself wants to focus on “... the recurring questions that seem to resist efforts to find convincing answers, and are thereby vulnerable to dismissal by those impatient with philosophy’s apparent ability to keep talking forever”. The whole purpose of this project is to “break down the barrier between philosophy – serious philosophy – and literature”, something that was (as Kitcher sees it) done by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Coleridge, Proust, Kafka and Camus, and to the highest extent, by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce and in music by Schubert, Mahler and Wagner. By claiming that “philosophical explorations are organically integrated with the narrative, with the evocation and development of character, and with the literary style” and that fiction that does not do this is dead, Kitcher subscribes to the strongest form of literary cognitivism, in that not only is literature cognitively valuable (the so called epistemic thesis), but also this cognitive dimension enhances its aesthetic value (aesthetic thesis).

It is along these same lines that Kitcher formulates his response to what is usually called ‘the sceptic position’ (or anticognitivist position). The first question that a sceptic raises is the following: can philosophy be done through literature if literary fiction does not argue? The problem is that serious philosophy should argue (and use arguments and conclusions), but these argumentative devices are not found in literature. This line of reasoning was developed by Stein Haugom Olsen and Jerome Stolnitz.

By formulating a sceptical position along these lines, Kitcher resonates two arguments that are often put forward by sceptics. The first one is the so-called ‘no argument’ argument, according to which a reader cannot trust what he reads in a work because literary works do not provide arguments in support of the claims they put forward. The second one is a ‘no evidence argument’ which is based on the claim that works do not offer evidence for the claims they advance. The point of these arguments is to call into question the epistemic foundation of literary works and to render them unreliable as a source of cognitive values.

As a response to this, Kitcher offers the following reply. Firstly, he offers an alternative way to how literature influences readers. The way of learning that sceptics presuppose rests on the assumptions that -

I. “psychological movement that occurs in someone who is thinking through a philosophical issue can be exhaustedly characterized in terms of changes in belief (or knowledge)” and

II. “the changes in belief are sparked by the straight forward presentation of new propositions, ideally stated in precise declarative sentences and accompanied by the explicit presentation of cogent reasons”. (excerpted from Literature and Philosophy: Intersection and Boundaries by Iris Vidmar)

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow .

Kitcher here relies on Hermann Broch who claims that literature should concern itself with those human problems which are either banished from the sciences because they are intractable or with those problems that sciences are not yet ready to grasp. Kitcher himself wants to focus on “... the recurring questions that seem to resist efforts to find convincing answers, and are thereby vulnerable to dismissal by those impatient with philosophy’s apparent ability to keep talking forever”. The whole purpose of this project is to “break down the barrier between philosophy – serious philosophy – and literature”, something that was (as Kitcher sees it) done by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Coleridge, Proust, Kafka and Camus, and to the highest extent, by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce and in music by Schubert, Mahler and Wagner. By claiming that “philosophical explorations are organically integrated with the narrative, with the evocation and development of character, and with the literary style” and that fiction that does not do this is dead, Kitcher subscribes to the strongest form of literary cognitivism, in that not only is literature cognitively valuable (the so called epistemic thesis), but also this cognitive dimension enhances its aesthetic value (aesthetic thesis).

It is along these same lines that Kitcher formulates his response to what is usually called ‘the sceptic position’ (or anticognitivist position). The first question that a sceptic raises is the following: can philosophy be done through literature if literary fiction does not argue? The problem is that serious philosophy should argue (and use arguments and conclusions), but these argumentative devices are not found in literature. This line of reasoning was developed by Stein Haugom Olsen and Jerome Stolnitz.

By formulating a sceptical position along these lines, Kitcher resonates two arguments that are often put forward by sceptics. The first one is the so-called ‘no argument’ argument, according to which a reader cannot trust what he reads in a work because literary works do not provide arguments in support of the claims they put forward. The second one is a ‘no evidence argument’ which is based on the claim that works do not offer evidence for the claims they advance. The point of these arguments is to call into question the epistemic foundation of literary works and to render them unreliable as a source of cognitive values.

As a response to this, Kitcher offers the following reply. Firstly, he offers an alternative way to how literature influences readers. The way of learning that sceptics presuppose rests on the assumptions that -

I. “psychological movement that occurs in someone who is thinking through a philosophical issue can be exhaustedly characterized in terms of changes in belief (or knowledge)” and

II. “the changes in belief are sparked by the straight forward presentation of new propositions, ideally stated in precise declarative sentences and accompanied by the explicit presentation of cogent reasons”. (excerpted from Literature and Philosophy: Intersection and Boundaries by Iris Vidmar)

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow .

Kitcher here relies on Hermann Broch who claims that literature should concern itself with those human problems which are either banished from the sciences because they are intractable or with those problems that sciences are not yet ready to grasp. Kitcher himself wants to focus on “... the recurring questions that seem to resist efforts to find convincing answers, and are thereby vulnerable to dismissal by those impatient with philosophy’s apparent ability to keep talking forever”. The whole purpose of this project is to “break down the barrier between philosophy – serious philosophy – and literature”, something that was (as Kitcher sees it) done by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Coleridge, Proust, Kafka and Camus, and to the highest extent, by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce and in music by Schubert, Mahler and Wagner. By claiming that “philosophical explorations are organically integrated with the narrative, with the evocation and development of character, and with the literary style” and that fiction that does not do this is dead, Kitcher subscribes to the strongest form of literary cognitivism, in that not only is literature cognitively valuable (the so called epistemic thesis), but also this cognitive dimension enhances its aesthetic value (aesthetic thesis).

It is along these same lines that Kitcher formulates his response to what is usually called ‘the sceptic position’ (or anticognitivist position). The first question that a sceptic raises is the following: can philosophy be done through literature if literary fiction does not argue? The problem is that serious philosophy should argue (and use arguments and conclusions), but these argumentative devices are not found in literature. This line of reasoning was developed by Stein Haugom Olsen and Jerome Stolnitz.

By formulating a sceptical position along these lines, Kitcher resonates two arguments that are often put forward by sceptics. The first one is the so-called ‘no argument’ argument, according to which a reader cannot trust what he reads in a work because literary works do not provide arguments in support of the claims they put forward. The second one is a ‘no evidence argument’ which is based on the claim that works do not offer evidence for the claims they advance. The point of these arguments is to call into question the epistemic foundation of literary works and to render them unreliable as a source of cognitive values.

As a response to this, Kitcher offers the following reply. Firstly, he offers an alternative way to how literature influences readers. The way of learning that sceptics presuppose rests on the assumptions that -

I. “psychological movement that occurs in someone who is thinking through a philosophical issue can be exhaustedly characterized in terms of changes in belief (or knowledge)” and

II. “the changes in belief are sparked by the straight forward presentation of new propositions, ideally stated in precise declarative sentences and accompanied by the explicit presentation of cogent reasons”. (excerpted from Literature and Philosophy: Intersection and Boundaries by Iris Vidmar)

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow .

Kitcher here relies on Hermann Broch who claims that literature should concern itself with those human problems which are either banished from the sciences because they are intractable or with those problems that sciences are not yet ready to grasp. Kitcher himself wants to focus on “... the recurring questions that seem to resist efforts to find convincing answers, and are thereby vulnerable to dismissal by those impatient with philosophy’s apparent ability to keep talking forever”. The whole purpose of this project is to “break down the barrier between philosophy – serious philosophy – and literature”, something that was (as Kitcher sees it) done by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Coleridge, Proust, Kafka and Camus, and to the highest extent, by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce and in music by Schubert, Mahler and Wagner. By claiming that “philosophical explorations are organically integrated with the narrative, with the evocation and development of character, and with the literary style” and that fiction that does not do this is dead, Kitcher subscribes to the strongest form of literary cognitivism, in that not only is literature cognitively valuable (the so called epistemic thesis), but also this cognitive dimension enhances its aesthetic value (aesthetic thesis).

It is along these same lines that Kitcher formulates his response to what is usually called ‘the sceptic position’ (or anticognitivist position). The first question that a sceptic raises is the following: can philosophy be done through literature if literary fiction does not argue? The problem is that serious philosophy should argue (and use arguments and conclusions), but these argumentative devices are not found in literature. This line of reasoning was developed by Stein Haugom Olsen and Jerome Stolnitz.

By formulating a sceptical position along these lines, Kitcher resonates two arguments that are often put forward by sceptics. The first one is the so-called ‘no argument’ argument, according to which a reader cannot trust what he reads in a work because literary works do not provide arguments in support of the claims they put forward. The second one is a ‘no evidence argument’ which is based on the claim that works do not offer evidence for the claims they advance. The point of these arguments is to call into question the epistemic foundation of literary works and to render them unreliable as a source of cognitive values.

As a response to this, Kitcher offers the following reply. Firstly, he offers an alternative way to how literature influences readers. The way of learning that sceptics presuppose rests on the assumptions that -

I. “psychological movement that occurs in someone who is thinking through a philosophical issue can be exhaustedly characterized in terms of changes in belief (or knowledge)” and

II. “the changes in belief are sparked by the straight forward presentation of new propositions, ideally stated in precise declarative sentences and accompanied by the explicit presentation of cogent reasons”. (excerpted from Literature and Philosophy: Intersection and Boundaries by Iris Vidmar)