Knowability and bivalence: intuitionistic solutions to the Paradox of Knowability

In this paper, I focus on some intuitionistic solutions to the Paradox of Knowability. I first consider the relatively little discussed idea that, on an intuitionistic interpretation of the conditional, there is no paradox to start with. I show that this proposal only works if proofs are thought of as tokens, and suggest that anti-realists themselves have good reasons for thinking of proofs as types. In then turn to more standard intuitionistic treatments, as proposed by Timothy Williamson and, most recently, Michael Dummett. Intuitionists can either point out the intuitionistc invalidity of the inference from the claim that all truths are knowable to the insane conclusion that all truths are known, or they can outright demur from asserting the existence of forever-unknown truths, perhaps questioning—as Dummett now suggests—the applicability of the Principle of Bivalence to a certain class of empirical statements. I argue that if intuitionists reject strict finitism—the view that all truths are knowable by beings just like us—the prospects for either proposal look bleak.     

Coping with Medical Diagnosis: The Effects of At-Risk Versus Disease Labels Over Time1

We randomly assigned college students to conditions in which they learned that they had gum disease, were at risk of having gum disease, or did not have gum disease. Then we examined their coping responses both immediately after the diagnosis and 2 days later. Students that told they had gum disease saw the disease as more prevalent than students in the other conditions; students identified as at risk saw the disease as more common than students who were told they had no disease. In addition, disease and at-risk diagnosis subjects believed that the disease was less serious but, during the 2-day interval between tests, they reported experiencing more bleeding–a symptom of gum disease. All of these responses to diagnosis were similar immediately after diagnosis and 2 days later. The data support a model of how persons react to illness signs (Ditto, Jemmott, & Darley, 1988) and have practical implications for dental professionals involved in diagnosing gum disease.     

Explaining the Success of Science: Kuhn and Scientific Realists

In this essay, I critically evaluate the approaches to explaining the success of science in Kuhn and the works of inference-to-the-best-explanation scientific realists. Kuhn’s challenge to realists, who invoke the truth of theories to explain their success, is two-fold. His paradigm-account of success confronts realists with the problem of theory change, and the historical fact of successful theories later rejected as false. Secondly, Kuhn’s account of the success of science has no need to bring truth into the explanation. In turn, I argue that weakness in Kuhn and the prevailing forms of scientific realism motivate a better account of realism which I characterize as ‘best current theory realism’ and defend against the pessimistic meta-induction and the problem of theory-change. This realism argues that the best explanation of the success of current and past scientific theories only requires the simple claim that our best current theories are true. Kuhn’s account can explain how normal science succeeds but cannot account for why its problem solutions work where they do and why they fail for other puzzles.     

The Paradox of Abstraction: Precision Versus Concreteness

We introduce a novel measure of abstractness based on the amount of information of a concept computed from its position in a semantic taxonomy. We refer to this measure as precision. We propose two alternative ways to measure precision, one based on the path length from a concept to the root of the taxonomic tree, and another one based on the number of direct and indirect descendants. Since more information implies greater processing load, we hypothesize that nouns higher in precision will have a processing disadvantage in a lexical decision task. We contrast precision to concreteness, a common measure of abstractness based on the proportion of sensory-based information associated with a concept. Since concreteness facilitates cognitive processing, we predict that while both concreteness and precision are measures of abstractness, they will have opposite effects on performance. In two studies we found empirical support for our hypothesis. Precision and concreteness had opposite effects on latency and accuracy in a lexical decision task, and these opposite effects were observable while controlling for word length, word frequency, affective content and semantic diversity. Our results support the view that concepts organization includes amodal semantic structures which are independent of sensory information. They also suggest that we should distinguish between sensory-based and amount-of-information-based abstractness.     

Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church

Abstract

Queer readings of the Bible are sometimes understood to be irrelevant for uses of the Bible in theology, theological education, and ministry. This address challenges that understanding by considering ways in which portions of the Bible take positions vis-à-vis religious tradition that parallel moves made in queer theory and queer theology. Using the task of preaching as an example, the address suggests that queer readings can be useful for the practice of Christian ministry even as such readings challenge certain ‘common-sense’ conceptions of ministry, theological education, and religious community.     

Enthusiasm Versus Self-Possession: The Art of Psychological Science

In this article, I propose that psychology is an art, and that it can be so without forfeiting its identity as a developing science. In support of this proposal, I outline the ways in which art and science unnecessarily have become dichotomized, and I suggest a framework for integrating art and science. This integration is based on reframing the art versus science tension as a vehicle through which the basic human dynamic of "enthusiasm versus self-possession" is expressed. I apply this new framework to the field of psychology and outline ways in which research and practice in psychology can be unified to produce an integrated, dynamic, and creative field.     

Scalar Implicatures Versus Presuppositions: The View from Acquisition

This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals (Chemla 2009; Romoli 2012, Romoli in J Semant 1–47, 2014) posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children (4/5 and 7 year olds) and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures.     

The Wounded Counselor: Battle for the Soul at an Elite Private School

A Jungian analyst describes her experiences as a counselor in an independent school. Inspired to work in a nontherapeutic setting by James Hillman's call for “a depth psychology of extraversion,” she initially finds the school tolerant of human vulnerability and shadow and receptive to her efforts to engage with psyche on the individual and group levels. However, under new leadership the school goes through a radical change and certain forces ascendant in the larger collective—technology, globalization, rationalism, and stepped-up demand for measurable outcomes—come to dominate the school's values and culture. The author explores the impact of these changes on her own role as well as on the social, emotional, and psychological lives of the students. Although tempted to despair over the marginalization of psyche in an increasingly dehumanized world, she also finds cause for optimism in the upcoming generation of young people, which she sees as possessing remarkable psychological and relational intelligence. She ventures some observations about the unique struggles and gifts of the millennial generation, coming of age in the hyperconnected era of the Internet and largely outside the purview of the adults in their lives. Given the culture's failure to provide the psychological eldering these young people crave, she suggests that Jungians are uniquely qualified to fill this role and urges depth psychologists to consider the possibilities that exist in schools for fostering individuation, initiation, and other forms of soul-making. Finally, she explores some ideas for “emotional intelligence” programs grounded not in the standard cognitive-behavioral approaches but in imaginal, archetypal, and psychodynamic perspectives.     

State Versus Content: The Unfair Trial of Perceptual Nonconceptualism

It has recently been pointed out that perceptual nonconceptualism admits of two different and logically independent interpretations. On the first (content) view, perceptual nonconceptualism is a thesis about the kind of content perceptual experiences have. On the second (state) view, perceptual nonconceptualism is a thesis about the relation that holds between a subject undergoing a perceptual experience and its content. For the state nonconceptualist, it thus seems consistent to hold that both perceptual experiences and beliefs share the same (conceptual) content, but that for a subject to undergo a perceptual experience, the subject need not possess the concepts involved in a correct characterization of such content. I argue that the consistency of this position requires a non-Fregean notion of content that fails to capture the way the subject grasps the world as being. Hence state nonconceptualism leaves perceptual content attribution unsupported. Yet, on a characterization of content along the relevant (neo-Fregean) lines, this position would become incoherent, as it would entail that a subject could exercise cognitive abilities she doesn’t possess. I conclude that, given the notion of content demanded by the debate, the state view does entail the content view after all.

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Attributions for Presidential Elections: The Situational Shift Over Time

Two investigations examined attributions for the outcomes of presidential elections. The first experiment examined attributions made by editorial writers for presidential elections from 1964 to 1984. The writers tended to make personal attributions for the causes of the election outcome a few days after the election, but shifted to primarily situational attributions 2 to 3 years later. Subjects in the second experiment were surveyed through a random-digit dialing procedure either a few days after the 1988 presidential election or 1 year later and asked why the election turned out the way it did. A shift toward more situational explanations over time was found, but not among those who had voted for the winning candidate. This latter finding illustrates a limitation of the situational shift effect.     

Jumping Over the Fence:

This work first presents a review of the cultural foundations of the development of modern psychology and the conceptual and linguistic limits that define the field, limiting the possibilities for change therein. The latter sections propose an alternative to the field of psychology for effecting positive change, which the author calls psykailogy. Psykailogy translates etymologically as "breathing whole worlds." Unlike psychology, which is rooted in 17th century physics, psykailogy leaves behind mechanistic constructs and relies instead on some of the basic ideas of quantum theory.     

The Emotional Impact of Ambivalent Sexism: Forecasts Versus Real Experiences

Research on affective forecasting indicates that people regularly mispredict the emotional impact of negative events. We extended this work by demonstrating several forecasting errors regarding women’s affective reactions to ambivalent sexism. In response to a survey about sexism against women, students at a university in the Central U.S. (N?=?188) overestimated the negative impact of hostile sexism, and underestimated the negative impact of benevolent sexism, relative to women’s reports of their actual experiences. Moreover, people mispredicted both the intensity of women’s initial affective reactions to, and the duration of women’s recovery following, ambivalent sexism. The data supported a model in which inaccurate estimates of initial intensity fully accounted for people’s inaccurate estimates of recovery duration following ambivalent sexism.