More Than Afterthoughts and Details: Maintenance and Booster Effects as Critical Elements of Intervention Research

The set of studies in this special section bring into relief the importance of due attention to maintenance effects and use of boosters as critical components of intervention planning and evaluation, requiring theoretical and analytic forethought and direction. While some trends can be identified across these included reports and the other few studies of boosters in child psychopathology intervention, the main implication of work to date is to highlight the need to consider maintenance and booster effects analyses as more than afterthoughts of technical interest primarily. In addition, this collection of studies includes treatment and prevention efforts focused on a shared topic, which is rare in child psychopathology topical collections. This juxtaposition helps illuminate some of the many considerations that could influence how maintenance effects and booster contributions might be tested. It is hoped that further work will occur that builds on these exemplary efforts.     

Reaction time and probability on isolated terms

The reaction-time probability effect on isolated trials was found to be asymmetrical in an experiment on 64 college students. There was a large drop in RT for a high-probability probe trial embedded in a block of low-probability trials, but a much smaller rise for a low-probability trial embedded in high-probability trials. Thus, low- but not high-probability responses seem to be influenced by characteristics of the trial block. If the basis of the probability effect were the strategic placement of the criterion for response initiation, symmetrical results should have been obtained. A motivational account which accords with the present data is that the subject is ordinarily willing to prepare but is averse to doing so in some (not entirely specified) low-probability circumstances.     

Carnap on theoretical terms: structuralism without metaphysics

Both realists and instrumentalists have found it difficult to understand (much less accept) Carnap’s developed view on theoretical terms, which attempts to stake out a neutral position between realism and instrumentalism. I argue that Carnap’s mature conception of a scientific theory as the conjunction of its Ramsey sentence and Carnap sentence can indeed achieve this neutral position. To see this, however, we need to see why the Newman problem raised in the context of recent work on structural realism is no problem for Carnap’s conception; and we also need to locate Carnap’s work on theoretical terms within his wider program of Wissenschaftslogik or the logic of science.     

Reference and ethnic-group terms

The increasingly pluralistic character of modern societies has led to questions, not only about the proper use of ethnic-group terms, but also about the correct semantic analysis of them. Here I argue that ethnic-group terms are analogous to other linguistic expressions whose extension is fixed in the way suggested by a causal theory of reference. My view accommodates precisely those scenarios of communication involving ethnic-group terms that will be seen puzzling to Fregeans. At the same time, it undermines the plausibility of skepticism about those terms.