The myth of the myth of supervenience

Philosophical Studies - Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities (properties, facts, objects, etc.). In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful...     

Intellectual disability examinations and social context variables among patients of low socioeconomic status

The purpose was to investigate the demographic, clinical, and social context variables of clients seeking intellectual disability screening assessments, so as to promote planning and development of services in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands region of South Africa. Of 100 consecutive attendees seeking intellectual disability examinations at state mental health facilities, 70% were male and 70% were less than 18 years of age. 51% had Moderate or Severe Mental Retardation, 52% lived in homes with more than six people, and 52% in homes where nobody was employed. Of participants' families, 85% relied on social grants, 46% of attendees or caregivers wanted a social grant, 28% hoped for appropriate school placement, and 17% wanted both. Of the participants' households, 26% reported going without food for days. The results are discussed within the context of the regional social deprivation.     

Narcissism and the personal myth

Kris (1956) described the concept of the personal myth as an autobiographical story built around a family romance fantasy seen specifically in obsessive characters and serving a defensive function. In this paper the concept of the personal myth was expanded to include similar defensive constellations originating from within the grandiose self, built around omnipotent and omniscient fantasies and occurring in character formations with pregenital, narcissistic pathology. The case of a known author and poet, Nikos Kazantzakis, was used to illustrate the thesis of the paper. The available biographical material and the work of the author offer evidence to support the claim that the author's personal myth was a protective shield against anxiety originating in early narcissistic traumata.     

Overcoming the myth of the mental

Can we accept John McDowell’s Kantian claim that perception is conceptual “all the way out,” thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor? I argue that we shouldn’t leave the conceptual component of our lives hanging in midair and suggest how philosophers who want to understand knowledge and action can profit from a phenomenological analysis of the nonconceptual embodied coping skills we share with animals and infants, as well as the nonconceptual immediate intuitive understanding exhibited by experts.     

The stroop effect and the myth of automaticity

A widespread view in cognition is that once acquired through extensive practice, mental skills such as reading are automatic. Lexical and semantic analyses of single words are said to be uncontrollable in the sense that they cannot be prevented. Over the past 60 years, apparently convincing support for this assumption has come from hundreds of experiments in which skilled readers have processed an irrelevant word in the Stroop task despite explicit instructions not to, even when so doing would hurt color identification performance. This basic effect was replicated in two experiments, which also showed that a considerable amount of semantic processing is locally controlled by elements of the task. For example, simply coloring a single letter instead of the whole word eliminated the Stroop effect. This outcome flies in the face of any automaticity account in which specified processes cannot be prevented from being set in motion, but it is consistent with the venerable idea that mental set is a powerful determinant of performance.     

The myth of the encoding-retrieval match

Modern memory researchers rely heavily on the encoding-retrieval match, defined as the similarity between coded retrieval cues and previously encoded engrams, to explain variability in retention. The encoding-retrieval match is assumed to be causally and monotonically related to retention, although other factors (such as cue overload) presumably operate in some circumstances. I argue here that the link between the encoding-retrieval match and retention, although generally positive, is essentially correlational rather than causal--much like the link between deep/elaborative processing and retention. Empirically, increasing the functional match between a cue and a target trace can improve, have no effect, or even decrease retention performance depending on the circumstance. We cannot make unequivocal predictions about retention by appealing to the encoding-retrieval match; instead, we should be focusing our attention on the extent to which retrieval cues provide diagnostic information about target occurrence.     

The myth of the encoding-retrieval match

Modern memory researchers rely heavily on the encoding-retrieval match, defined as the similarity between coded retrieval cues and previously encoded engrams, to explain variability in retention. The encoding-retrieval match is assumed to be causally and monotonically related to retention, although other factors (such as cue overload) presumably operate in some circumstances. I argue here that the link between the encoding-retrieval match and retention, although generally positive, is essentially correlational rather than causal—much like the link between deep/elaborative processing and retention. Empirically, increasing the functional match between a cue and a target trace can improve, have no effect, or even decrease retention performance depending on the circumstance. We cannot make unequivocal predictions about retention by appealing to the encoding-retrieval match; instead, we should be focusing our attention on the extent to which retrieval cues provide diagnostic information about target occurrence.     

The myth of the collective unconscious

This essay challenges the most basic tenet of Jung’s analytical psychology, namely, the existence of the collective unconscious. Despite the fact that there are purported to be universal processes and ontological features of mind throughout all psychoanalytical schools of thought, Jung’s is unique in the history of psychoanalytic ideas for positing a supraordinate, autonomous transpersonal psyche that remains the source, ground, and wellspring from which all unconscious and conscious manifestations derive. This bold claim is analyzed through a close inspection of Jung’s texts that questions the philosophical justification for postulating a supernatural macroanthropos or reified collective mind. Pointing out the problems of agency and fallacies of hypostatization, it is not necessary to evoke a transpersonal cosmogony to explain how universality suffuses individual subjectivity within social collectives. Here we may conclude that the collective unconscious construct is a signifier for the common psychological dynamics and characteristics of shared humanity. In this sense, the myth of the collective unconscious is better understood as a metaphor for a higher abstraction or ideal principle ordained with numinous value.     

Public discourse and the myth of religious speech

Critics of public religious speech have proposed various strategies for limiting the presence of religion in the public square, while proponents of public religious speech argue that such limitations constitute an infringement of the freedom of speech. For theoretical, practical, and ethical reasons, I argue for dismissing the category of ‘religious speech’, which rests on the erroneous assumption of a clear distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. ‘Religious speech’ should be regarded no differently from any other kind of speech; it therefore ought not to be subject to either special limitations or protections. Regarding religious speech as nothing other than free speech ensures the right of religious citizens publicly to express their views, while simultaneously preserving the right of other citizens to provide a critique to arguments that are framed in religious terms.     

Peer pressure and drug use--exploding the myth

"Peer pressure" and "everyone is doing it" have been used as excuses for some drug-taking behavior for too long. We must look harder into reasons for drug use and neither accept these concepts nor teach our young people that this is what is really happening.