Events,processes, and the time of a killing

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurrents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defence of process ontology, relying instead on extant defences. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it.     

Persistence of response prevention effects following retraining of escape behavior

This study evaluated the effects of response prevention procedures on the extinction of escape behavior following the reinstatement of shock-escape training prior to the start of extinction. Female hooded rats were assigned to four groups (N = 10) in a factorial design which orthogonally combined response prevention or pseudo-prevention procedures with escape retraining or no retraining procedures. Results showed that prevention reliably impaired shock-escape behavior on early retraining trials; but this effect dissipated completely by the end of retraining. In extinction, prevention reliably facilitated the extinction of escape behavior relative to that of pseudo-prevention controls; but the degree of facilitation was reliably attenuated by retraining procedures. These findings were related to the competing response interpretation of prevention effects.     

Backward conditioning as an extinction procedure

In two conditioned suppression experiments, rats received Pavlovian forward defense conditioning in which tonal conditioned stimuli (CSs) terminated with the onset of scrambled grid shock unconditioned stimuli (USs). After this experience, the rats then received a Pavlovian backward conditioning procedure in which the same USs now terminated with the onset of the same CSs. Although the two experiments differed greatly in terms of CS and US parameters, number of forward and backward pairings, and in terms of the general techniques used to establish and measure the Pavlovian conditioned response (CR), the results of both experiments agreed in showing that backward conditioning can indeed weaken a CR based on forward pairings. The results also show that, under some conditions, the backward procedure can be at least as effective in weakening an established CR as the traditional CS-alone extinction procedure; but, under other conditions, the backward procedure is less effective and leads to more spontaneous recovery than the CS-alone procedure.     

Acquisition and retention of gestures by apraxic patients

The purpose of this study was to examine whether apraxic-aphasic patients with parietal lesions had difficulty learning lists of gestures and whether the performance deficits they displayed resulted from an inability either to consolidate this information in memory or to retrieve the information once stored. The findings indicate that apraxic-aphasic patients do have difficulty acquiring lists of gestures. This inability to reproduce gestural information was not associated with a retrieval disorder, but instead the apraxic-aphasic subjects could not consolidate the information in memory.     

象征之镜的生产和生产之镜的象征,或马克思和鲍德里亚

鲍德里亚批评马克思的逻辑有一个递进过程,从最初借助于马克思的拜物教理论发展出一种以符号(或形式)分析为核心的消费社会观,到对马克思主义“生产力”理论批评,最后以“象征交换”理论替代马克思的“生产”理论。在这一过程中,他把西方马克思主义哲学逻辑的失败原因追溯到马克思主义起点上,并借助于结构主义、精神分析和相关人类学成果构建了一种从象征关系入手对当代资本主义文化和意识形态的批判话语,但是在根本上“象征之镜”却是资本主义“生产之镜”话语之外的另一种非历史话语,批判本身成为与历史生成具体情境无关的一种话语反对另一种话语的斗争。在直接的意义上,鲍德里亚式的批评是当代左派激进文化批判的困境表现。     

Counterfactuals and Context-Sensitivity

It is commonly agreed that when evaluating the validity of an argument involving context-sensitive expressions, the context should be held fixed. In their 2008 essay “Counterfactuals and Context,” Brogaard and Salerno argue further that context should be held fixed when evaluating an argument involving counterfactuals for validity, since, as many will agree, counterfactuals are context-sensitive. In the present paper, it will however be argued that Brogaard and Salerno fail to distinguish between two different roles that context plays in determining the meaning of a given counterfactual. If they were fully aware of the distinction between these two roles played by context, they might propose a contextualist approach to counterfactuals, as has been developed by Ichikawa in his 2011 paper “Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals.”     

Extinction effects following interpolation of instrumental trials among response prevention periods

Two experiments evaluated the effectiveness of response prevention when prevention periods were interpolated with instrumental trials which permitted performance of the originally trained instrumental behavior. In Experiment 1, interpolation of instrumental escape trials under shock and nonshock procedures reliably reduced prevention's influence on performance and yielded extinction responding similar to that of pseudo-prevention controls. In Experiment 2 interpolation of instrumental escape trials under nonshock conditions yielded passive avoidance performance similar to that of pseudo-prevention controls but reliably different from that of a regular prevention group.     

Reevaluating the initial impact of John Broadus Watson on American psychology: The necessity of comparative parameters

In recent decades, various studies have challenged the traditional view that John Broadus Watson's Behaviorist Manifesto prompted a psychological revolution. However, methodological hindrances underlie all these attempts to evaluate the impact of Watson's study, such as the absence of comparative parameters. This article remedies this problem by conducting a comparative citation analysis involving Watson and eight other representative psychologists of the time: J. R. Angell, H. Carr, J. M. Cattell, J. Dewey, G. S. Hall, W. James, E. L. Thorndike, and E. B. Titchener. Eight important American journals were scrutinized for the period between 1903 and 1923, a decade before and a decade after the publication of Watson's Manifesto. The results suggest that even if Watson's study cannot be taken as revolutionary, it had an impact between 1914 and 1923 that was close to Dewey's, Titchener's, and Thorndike's and higher than Angell's, Carr's, Cattell's, and Hall's, although distant from James's. Finally, some methodological implications of this study are discussed.     

Purdue pegboard performance of disabled and normal readers: Unimanual versus bimanual differences

Differences between dyslexics and controls in the unimanual and bimanual conditions of the peg placement section of the Purdue Pegboard Test were examined. Twenty-three disabled and twenty-three normal readers were studied. The groups were carefully screened on a neuropsychological battery. The disabled readers were comprised of a relatively homogeneous language-disordered subgroup exhibiting deficits in naming. Significant Group X Condition interactions were obtained for both raw and percentile scores and indicated that disabled readers performed worse than controls in the unimanual compared to bimanual conditions. The dyslexics performed particularly poorly compared with controls on the left hand condition. The implications of these data for hypotheses which argue for left hemisphere dysfunction, as well as those which posit interhemispheric transfer deficits in reading disabled children, are discussed.     

Retention of verbal information by rehearsal in relation to the fluency of verbal output in aphasia

The purpose of the present study was to determine if aphasic subject groups differentiated by the fluency of their verbal output employed rehearsal as a strategy for maintaining verbally coded information in primary memory. A task based upon the Brown-Peterson paradigm was administered to 10 fluent aphasic patients, 10 nonfluent aphasic patients, 10 right-brain-damaged patients, and 10 nonneurological patients. The findings indicate that the nonfluent aphasic patients did not rehearse the verbal information while the fluent aphasic, right-brain-damaged, and nonneurological patients did rehearse. In addition, both fluent and nonfluent aphasic patients encoded significantly less information into the memory system initially and performed worse on the task overall than right-brain-damaged and nonneurological patients.     

鲍德里亚对马克思劳动概念的误读及其方法论根源

鲍德里亚与历史唯物论彻底决裂,由西方马克思主义转向后马克思主义思潮,是从对“劳动”范畴的全面批判和解构入手的。但他对马克思劳动范畴的批判和解构,是建立在其对这一范畴的误读和曲解基础上的。鲍德里亚对劳动范畴的误读和曲解,不仅有着直接的理论和现实原因,而且有其深层的方法论根源。正是这种错误的方法论,导致了他在理论上对唯物史观解构的非法性,并在实际上从对资本主义的绝望反抗走向对资本主义反抗的绝望。     

BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS AND ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY: PAST,PRESENT, AND FUTURE. A REVIEW OF HARRY HEFT'S ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN CONTEXT

Relations between behavior analysis and ecological psychology have been strained for years, notwithstanding the occasional comment on their affinities. Harry Heft's (2001) Ecological Psychology in Context provides an occasion for reviewing anew those relations and affinities. It describes the genesis of ecological psychology in James's radical empiricism; addresses Holt's neorealism and Gestalt psychology; and synthesizes Gibson's ecological psychology and Barker's ecobehavioral science as a means for understanding everyday human behavior. Although behavior analysis is excluded from this account, Heft's book warrants a review nonetheless: It describes ecological psychology in ways that are congruent and complementary with behavior analysis (e.g., nonmediational theorizing; the provinces of natural history and natural science). After introducing modern ecological psychology, I comment on (a) Heft's admirable, albeit selective, historiography; (b) his ecological psychology—past and present—as it relates to Skinner's science and system (e.g., affordances, molar behavior); (c) his misunderstandings of Skinner's behaviorism (e.g., reductionistic, mechanistic, molecular); and (d) the theoretical status of Heft's cognitive terms and talk (i.e., in ontology, epistemology, syntax). I conclude by considering the alliance and integration of ecological psychology and behavior analysis, and their implications for unifying and transforming psychology as a life science, albeit more for the future than at present.     

The puzzling rabbis

Religion is one of the cultural systems that attempts to deal with human puzzlement. This paper uses the metaphor of the puzzle to make sense of what has always been a disconcerting feature of rabbinic Judaism, namely, the rabbis’ (200–600 C.E.) blatantly ad hoc manner of interpreting Scripture. The rabbis seem to know in advance what a verse must mean and go to great lengths to find a legitimation of that reading in the verse in question. Typically this ad hoc quality of rabbinic interpretation is explained as a means whereby the rabbis provide ‘prooftexts’ for new practices without Scriptural warrants. But what from one perspective appears as an attempt to find prooftexts is from another perspective an attempt to solve a puzzle. Conceptually speaking, solving a puzzle and finding prooftexts are worlds apart. This paper treats the rabbis as an inter‐generational community of puzzle solvers involved in the quest to discover how the oral Torah is already contained in the written Torah. Like all matching puzzles, this one is necessarily ad hoc.

The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity within himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos (Weber 1925, 1978 p. 506).

Analysis into parts is not really so important in these societies as is the periodic construction or reconstruction of the whole. The whole is what is truly edifying, and its reconstruction is a purpose which puzzlement can subtly serve (Fernandez, 1986, p. 179).     

Regularity as a Form of Constraint

Regularity theories of causation are guided by the idea that causes are collectively sufficient for their effects. Following Mackie [1974], that idea is typically refined to distinguish collections that include redundant members from those that do not. Causes must be collectively sufficient for their effects without redundancy. While Mackie was surely right that the regularity theory must distinguish collections that are in some sense minimally sufficient for an effect from those that include unnecessary hangers-on, I believe that redundancy is the wrong mark of that distinction. I propose a way to develop the regularity theory without it. Instead of distinguishing minimal from mere sufficiency in terms of redundancy, we should look to the influence that events have in the world. Causes, so construed, must have just enough collective influence to ensure that an effect occurs. I argue that such an account provides a uniform solution to the problem of epiphenomena and to a pair of related problems that arise for prior iterations of the regularity theory.     

Charting the map metaphor in theories of religion

The idea that scholars of religion produce ‘maps’ that represent the ‘territories’ of religion(s) is common and influential. This paper first discusses the role of the metaphor, with special reference to the work of J.Z. Smith, and some of the problems raised by the map metaphor (above all, its implicit reliance on a naive correspondence view of truth). It then draws two important distinctions: between different levels of representation; and between the representing and guiding function of maps (truth and use). It ends by comparing issues in the philosophy of science and the theory of religion in order to highlight some promising directions for more defensible semantic and epistemological groundwork in theory of religion.     

Why Euclid’s geometry brooked no doubt: J. H. Lambert on certainty and the existence of models

J. H. Lambert proved important results of what we now think of as non-Euclidean geometries, and gave examples of surfaces satisfying their theorems. I use his philosophical views to explain why he did not think the certainty of Euclidean geometry was threatened by the development of what we regard as alternatives to it. Lambert holds that theories other than Euclid’s fall prey to skeptical doubt. So despite their satisfiability, for him these theories are not equal to Euclid’s in justification. Contrary to recent interpretations, then, Lambert does not conceive of mathematical justification as semantic. According to Lambert, Euclid overcomes doubt by means of postulates. Euclid’s theory thus owes its justification not to the existence of the surfaces that satisfy it, but to the postulates according to which these “models” are constructed. To understand Lambert’s view of postulates and the doubt they answer, I examine his criticism of Christian Wolff’s views. I argue that Lambert’s view reflects insight into traditional mathematical practice and has value as a foil for contemporary, model-theoretic, views of justification.     

Heymans' temperamental dimensions in personality research

In this article an overview is given of personality research related to the temperamental system of the Dutch philosopher and psychologist Gerard Heymans (1852–1930). After a sketch of this three-dimensional typology, three domains of research are briefly described. The first is a line of research on the system itself and its applications in differential psychology. In the second, the role of its dimensions in modern trait psychology is sketched. In the third line of thought the Heymans categories are viewed and investigated as dimensions of person perception.