… And Then Again,He Might Not Be

In reply to Michael Bertrand, I clarify my view that the problem of physical evil is not an a priori problem but an a posteriori one.     

It’s Not You,It’s Me…No,Actually It’s You: Perceptions of What Makes a First Date Successful or Not

Early communication plays an important role in influencing the perceptions one has of an individual. The first form of in-person communication individuals often have with potential romantic partners is during the first date. This date tends to take on the form of a “dance” involving carefully orchestrated conversation and self-disclosures. What is said is certainly important, as are the behaviors exhibited by each member of the dyad. This study examined how individuals interpreted what potential romantic partners say and do during, or immediately following, the first date to get a sense of how they perceive these actions and words. Special attention was placed on the participants’ interpretations of whether or not their date was attracted to them. A survey was given to 390 participants, and many interesting differences were found between the genders. Certain behaviors, such as steering the conversation to the topic of sex signaled to men that their date was attracted to them. However, women looked for different behaviors to infer attraction on the part of their partner, such as mentioning future plans and kissing them goodbye. With a better understanding of how certain phrases and actions influence others, people can be more aware of the signals sent to others upon their pivotal initial encounters.     

“Not Thinking” Helps Reasoning

Despite previous research suggesting that participants’ negative and positive emotions can impair and facilitate reasoning performance, a recent study proposes that the emotional content of the mood induction materials may not be crucial in eliciting these phenomena—deontic selection task performance is as poor when these materials are neutral as when they are negative (Perham and Oaksford 2006). We extend this finding to syllogistic reasoning performance. Participants in the mood induction conditions (negative and neutral) verbally described their experiences in relation to twenty negative or neutral words whereas participants in the control condition received no such mood induction. Subsequent syllogistic reasoning performance was significantly poorer for both mood induction conditions yet only those in the negative mood induction condition showed a significant increase in anxiety. Results imply that the key mechanism involved in the impairment derives from the production of irrelevant thoughts and that these need not be linked to a positive or negative mood, thus “not thinking” may actually help the reasoning process.     

It’s Not About Technology

It is argued that the question “Can we trust technology?” is unanswerable because it is open-ended. Only questions about specific issues that can have specific answers should be entertained. It is further argued that the reason the question cannot be answered is that there is no such thing as Technology simpliciter. Fundamentally, the question comes down to trusting people and even then, the question has to be specific about trusting a person to do this or that.     

Why Not Interfere With Nature?

Advocates of an environmental ethic frequently claim that what makes an ethical theory truly and uniquely environmental is its commitment to the principle that environmental wholes such as species, ecosystems, and biotic communities are morally considerable. The prevailing view is that our primary duty towards these wholes is to respect their integrity, stability, and beauty, and that the best way to do this is to leave them alone, not interfere with them, and let nature follow its own course. But is that correct? Why should be refrain from interfering with nature? There are two ways an environmentalist might try to justify an exceptionaless, prima facie principle of noninterference. First, she might claim that there is a contingent but universal connection between human interference and ecosystemic harm. There is also an epistemic variant of this view. When faced with a decision concerning whether to interfere with an ecosystem, there will always be overwhelming reasons for thinking that interference will be harmful, regardless of the specific circumstances. Send, there might be some conceptual connection between interference and harm to ecosystems. For example, if the well-being of an ecosystem is identified with its wildness, and wildness is understood as the absence of human intervention or manipulation, then any human interference necessarily detracts from an ecosystem's wildness and thereby has a detrimental effect on its well-being. In this paper I examine these justifications in detail and argue that none can support an exceptionaless principle of noninterference.     

When Is Perception Top‐Down and When Is It Not? Culture,Narrative, and Attention

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, 2003 ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross‐cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.     

Freedom is Not Free?: Posthumanist,Ecological Reflections on Christian Freedom and Responsibility

Philosophers aligned with a kind of posthumanism emphasize the modern, modern human's freedom and ethics are founded on a break from all ties to animality and materiality. Highlighting the posthumanist work of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, this article aligns key insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's work, such as his pervasive concept of “sociality,” with the call for a more ecologically embedded humanity. The resulting reconstruction of Christian freedom is profoundly Christological and sacramental: freedom‐for the other comes in, with, and through—not apart from—both the divine and created other.     

How to Individuate Universals—Or Not

In a recent article in this journal, J. P. Moreland (2013) extends his theory of individuation to include universals. In this note, I show how Moreland’s novel proposal leads to the unwanted conclusion that every concrete particular exists of necessity and has but a single essential property.     

When Can Attention Not Be Divided?

Humans can guide simple concurrent and seemingly independent movements of digits between hands, but it is shown here that they find it impossible to do this with digits within a hand. This inability demonstrates a basic characteristic of the relation between attention and the control of the skeletal musculature: Mechanisms that are available to provide the illusion of concurrent and independent guidance of separate movements between hands are not available within a single-hand control system. There is no reason to believe that the inability to divide focal attention in the guidance of two concurrent controlled activities, as exemplified in the example of within-hand movements, does not also extend to nonmotor processes.     

Rapid averaging? Not so fast!

Previous research suggests that sets of similar items are represented using a rapid averaging mechanism that automatically extracts statistical properties within 50 ms. However, typically in these studies, displays are not masked, so it is possible that the sets are available for longer than this duration. In the present study, using masked displays, we (a) tested a newly proposed strategy for extracting the mean size of a set of circles, and (b) more precisely evaluated the time course of rapid averaging. The results indicate that when viewing conditions are poor, performance can be explained by assuming that observers rely on information from previous trials. In this study, observers required at least a 200-ms exposure time in order to derive the average size of a set of circles without relying on information from previously-viewed sets, suggesting that rapid averaging is not as fast as previously assumed and, therefore, that it may not be an automatic process.     

Too Many Boxes,or Not Enough? Preferences for How We Ask About Gender in Cisgender,LGB, and Gender-Diverse Samples

As U.S. society has become more aware of gender identity issues, there has been a push for more inclusive demographic categories that go beyond the traditional gender binary of male/female. In three studies, we assessed the attitudes of U.S. cisgender men and women across sexual orientations (Study 1), heterosexual cisgender men and women (Study 2), cisgender LGB men and women (Study 3), and transgender and gender non-binary individuals across sexual orientations (Study 3) regarding different formats of gender questionnaires. Studies 2 and 3 showed a strong overall preference for the non-binary formats. Across all three studies, preferences for the binary format and objections to the non-binary formats were related to gender-binary beliefs, distinctiveness threat, cisgender and mostly heterosexual male participants, conservative political orientation, and religiosity. These findings suggest that general opposition to utilizing non-binary formats may be influenced by institutionalized binary gender norms and heteronormativity. Across both cisgender and gender-diverse samples, most participants preferred a non-binary gender question format, and gender-diverse individuals overwhelmingly preferred the expanded format. We suggest that those who collect gender data use the expanded format in order to be more inclusive and allow gender-diverse individuals to identify themselves if they choose to do so.     

When Is Genetic Reasoning Not Fallacious?

Attempts to evaluate a belief or argument on the basis of its cause or origin are usually condemned as committing the genetic fallacy. However, I sketch a number of cases in which causal or historical factors are logically relevant to evaluating a belief, including an interesting abductive form that reasons from the best explanation for the existence of a belief to its likely truth. Such arguments are also susceptible to refutation by genetic reasoning that may come very close to the standard examples given of supposedly fallacious genetic reasoning.     

Not “Not ‘Better Never to Have Been’”: A Reply to Christine Overall

Philosophia - In her Why Have Children?, Christine Overall takes issue with my anti-natalist arguments that it is better never to come into existence. She provides three criticisms of my arguments...