Causes,Conditions and Counterfactuals

The article deals with one particular problem created by the counterfactual analysis of causality à la Lewis, namely the context-sensitivity problem or, as I prefer to call it, the background condition problem. It appears that Lewis’ counterfactual definition of causality cannot distinguish between proper causes and mere causal conditions – i.e. factors necessary for the effect to occur, but commonly not seen as causally efficacious. The proposal is put forward to amend the Lewis definition with a condition, based on the notion of cotenability, which would eliminate the problem. It is shown that the corrected definition of causality leads to the transitivity of the causal relation. Possible objections to the proposed solution, involving the assumption of indeterminism and the preemption cases, are given a thorough consideration.     

Tokens, Dates And Tenseless Truth Conditions

There are two extant versions of the new tenseless theory of time: the date versionand the token-reflexive version. I ask whether they are equivalent, and if not, whichof them is to be preferred. I argue that they are not equivalent, that the date version isunsatisfactory, and that the token-reflexive version is correct. I defend the token-reflexive version against a string of objections from Quentin Smith. My defence involves a discussion of the ontological and semantic significance of truth conditions, and of the connection between truth and reality on the one hand, and that between truth and meaning on the other. I argue that Smith's objections to the token-reflexive theory stem from his confusing these two aspects of the notion of truth.     

Quasivarieties of Logic,Regularity Conditions and Parameterized Algebraization

Relatively congruence regular quasivarieties and quasivarieties of logic have noticeable similarities. The paper provides a unifying framework for them which extends the Blok-Pigozzi theory of elementarily algebraizable (and protoalgebraic) deductive systems. In this extension there are two parameters: a set of terms and a variable. When the former is empty or consists of theorems, the Blok-Pigozzi theory is recovered, and the variable is redundant. On the other hand, a class of membership logics is obtained when the variable is the only element of the set of terms. For these systems the appropriate variant of equivalent algebraic semantics encompasses the relatively congruence regular quasivarieties.     

不作为惯性产生的原因、条件及应用

不作为惯性指如果个体先前已错过了一个更优的机会, 当次一些的类似机会再出现时(但仍好于一般情况), 个体会倾向于继续放弃这一机会。本文首先简要介绍了不作为惯性的概念、操作定义和基本研究方法; 然后着重探讨了导致不作为惯性的原因及相关实证研究, 目前研究者普遍认为后悔情绪和估价是导致不作为惯性的两个主要原因; 随后探讨了不作为惯性产生的条件及在市场营销及股票市场中的应用研究; 最后未来研究需要更加注重研究方法上的改进以及对不作为惰性的原因探讨。     

Laws, Ceteris Paribus Conditions, and the Dynamics of Belief

The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Likewise, the issue about ceteris paribus conditions is essentially about how we epistemically deal with exceptions. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of defeasible reasoning seems ideally suited to explicate these points in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it will turn out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables. This entails that de Finetti's representation theorems can be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of laws thus conceived. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Chronic Conditions: Beckett,Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurological dimension. Beckett’s writing explores the Bergsonian notion, informed by medicine and experimental psychology, of the limitations of agency, of “the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter,” and of the human as always already inflicted by the mechanical, a fact that is poignantly highlighted by the case of Samuel Johnson. Through his encounter with Johnson, Beckett registers a paradigm shift in the understanding of subjectivity. Whereas Bergson aims, throughout his career, to contest the mechanical, habitual and automatic that threaten to encrust themselves upon the living, in Beckett’s often uncannily Johnsonian writing, the habitual and the automatic become progressively more central, until in the late works, habit and mechanical behavior constitute a tenuous, fraught and primitive ontology, the residues of an agential self.     

Conditions of contact, common in-group identity, and in-group bias toward contingent workers

In a survey-based field study of 111 permanent Finnish restaurant employees, the authors investigated intergroup relations between permanent and contingent workers. On the basis of the common in-group identity model, the authors hypothesized that the conditions of contact (supportive norms and perceived intergroup competition) would be related to common in-group identity, which in turn would be negatively related to intergroup bias. The present results indicated that perceived competition and institutional support were related to in-group bias only through their influence on the common in-group identity, as the model predicted.     

Implicit Affect Primes Effort: Basic Processes,Moderators, and Boundary Conditions

This article informs about the implicit‐affect‐primes‐effort (IAPE) model – a theory on the impact of implicit affect on resource mobilization – and research testing this account. Beside basic influences of implicitly processed affective stimuli on behavior, this article highlights moderators and boundary conditions of this process. The IAPE model posits that affect primes implicitly activate mental representations of affective states containing information about performance ease and difficulty. This influences subjective task demand during performance, which determines effort. A series of experiments assessing implicit affect's impact on effort‐related cardiovascular response in cognitive tasks revealed replicated support for the IAPE model. Moreover, objective task difficulty and incentive moderated the effect of implicit affect on effort, and especially controlled processing of affect primes and activated concepts turned out to be boundary conditions.     

The psychology of personhood: Conditions for a viable, neo-meadian pluralism

Two conditions for a potentially viable pluralism, based on recent interpretations of the work of George Herbert Mead, are discussed: (1) a shared conception of the psychological person acting in the biophysical and sociocultural world, and (2) a willingness to engage across differing sub-disciplinary perspectives. Even with these conditions in place, any such pluralism still faces significant challenges in avoiding ever-present challenges of creeping imperialism and interdisciplinary gloss.