THE RELATIONSHIP OF ‘EXCHANGE-ORIENTATION’ AND ‘COMMITMENT’ SCALES TO MARRIAGE ADJUSTMENT*

Believing that “exchange” and “commitment” are basic dimensions associated with marriage adjustment (MA), scales measuring these three dimensions were administered to 40 married couples. Exchange was predicted to be negatively correlated with MA, commitment positively associated with it, and an individual's exchange and commitment qualities were predicted to affect his partner's MA. The hypotheses were all supported. Further analyses, however, revealed that husbands' MA was more strongly associated with their own exchange and commitment scores than those of their wives. However, wives' MA was equally associated with their own and their husbands' exchange and commitment scores. The implications of this finding for women's position in marriage are discussed.     

ON THE ‘FITTINGNESS’ OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH

In modern theology the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Christ, including the doctrine of his Virginal Conception, has been the subject of considerable scepticism. One line of criticism has been that the traditional doctrine of the Virgin Birth seems unnecessary to the Incarnation. In this essay I lay out one construal of the traditional argument for the doctrine and show that, although one can offer an account of the Incarnation without the Virgin Birth which, in other respects, is perfectly in accord with catholic Christianity, such a doctrine is still contrary to the plain teaching of Scripture and the Creeds on the question of the mode of the Incarnation. It might still be thought that the Incarnation was an ‘unfitting’ means of Incarnation. In a final section I draw upon Anselm's arguments in defence of the Incarnation to show that this objection can also be overcome.     

‘CREATIONISM’ AND THE CONTINGENT A PRIORI

Williamson (1986) presents a troublesome example of the contingent a priori; troublesome, because it does not involve indexicals, and hence cannot be defused via the usual two‐dimensional strategies. Here I explore how the example works, via an examination of crucial belief‐forming method M, partly in response to Hawthorne (2002) and the questions there raised for ‘hyperreliable’ belief‐forming methods. I suggest that, when used to form a belief, M does its special work through creating a verifying state of affairs which guarantees the truth of the belief thus formed. This creative link can be said to account for the knowledge‐conferring status of M. But it also provides us with a way to defuse the purported example of the contingent a priori. The knowledge at issue is only a priori in virtue of this creative link, an importantly different epistemic achievement from standard cases of a priori knowledge. One important moral to be drawn is that the a priori/a posteriori distinction does not appear to be slicing the epistemological beast at its joints.     

‘Yes,we have bananas!’1

This paper takes as its starting point ‘identifying markers of Latin American psychoanalysis’. The authors see this theme as a compromise between two diverging approaches. On one hand, the conference at which the content was presented provided the opportunity for Latin American psychoanalytical thinking to be discussed and, as a reward to the best papers, to be published. On the other, both the conference and the reward are more indicative of the observer's biases than of the object's peculiarities. The authors consider that the conference mistakenly focused on the search for minor differences (secondary identifi cations) instead of looking for invariances (identities). Considering that uncertainty, pluralism and complexity are issues relevant to the whole of psychoanalysis in its current stage of development as a scientifi c discipline, the authors think that treating these elements as ‘identifying markers of Latin American psychoanalysis’ is evidence of prejudice brought about by a coloniser‐colonised relationship. To develop their argument, the authors discuss a paper on editorial criteria by Tuckett as a clinical case, and use an episode of Brazilian history as further illustration. They address issues such as conformity to cultural patterns; the search for certainties and proofs; the domination of some groups over others; and editorial power‐more specifi cally, its infl uence on the acceptance or rejection of scientifi c ideas. These issues have distracted attention away from the fundamentals of psychoanalysis by introducing other, extraneous aims. Publication plays a key role in feeding a possibly vicious circle wherein only a small proportion of scientifi c contributions manages to reach a wide audience‐exactly those contributions that conform to established patterns. The act of publication turns that portion into offi cial knowledge, while unpublished ideas become increasingly excluded.     

ON BEING JUDGED ‘INTELLIGENT’

This paper proposes that we explore, not only the definition of intelligence, but also the way in which the judgment is made that someone is “intelligent ”or not, the rules that underlie behaviour in evaluation situations, and the way people protect themselves from judgment. For each of these issues it is proposed that we consider situations of both formal testing and everyday judgment, together with developmental aspects.