Mourning the Religious Self: An Experience of Multiplicity,Loss, and Religious Melancholia

The loss of religion is not one thing to all people, nor even one thing to one person. This article asks the question, “when we are talking about the loss of religion, who is mourning what?” The author considers what the loss of religion looks like if we view the self as abiding in both multiplicity and melancholia, and claims that the loss of religion requires a reconfiguration of the inner landscape of centrality and marginality. A clinical example illustrates how one patient’s “loss of faith” calls her to a complex mourning process that includes confronting many personal losses and their relation to her transgendered self.     

“Coming from Afar” and “Temporarily Becoming the Patient Without Knowing it”: Two Necessary Analytic Conditions According to Ferenczi’s Later Thought

In this paper the author discusses two points regarding Ferenczi’s views of psychoanalysis. The first concerns the fact that analysts, like their patients, “come from afar” (a concept of Borgogno, 2011). The second, closely linked to the first, has to do with Ferenczi’s belief that psychoanalytical knowledge is not intellectual but visceral, seeing that if analysts are to truly understand their patients they must first “take on” their suffering in such a way as to “become the patient.” The author follows Ferenczi’s progression along these two points through his whole oeuvre, from his first psychoanalytical writings to the Clinical Diary (1932a) of the last year of his life.     

Melancholy,Acculturation, and Relief: A Brief Essay on the Religion of Ordinarity

Han is not an idiosyncratic, psychological experience that is peculiar to Koreans, but a multifaceted mode of melancholy experienced by many and various people. What makes this psychological experience particularly familiar to Koreans, however, is that this phenomenon is colored by various, macroscopic factors common in the Korean context, such as sociocultural rigidness, historical instability, political feudality, and economic vulnerability. In this sense, han is an acculturated, multifaceted melancholy. Not only that, it has developed its own religiousness, the goal of which is the restoration of ordinarity, because the state of han premises extraordinary, abnormal, or tension-provoking situations. The explicit and implicit religious idioms developing in the religion of han, such as tongsung-kido and wishing-for-blessing, evolve around this religious telos, helping individuals in Korea restore and live ordinarity.     

The logic of how-questions

Philosophers and scientists are concerned with the why and the how of things. Questions like the following are so much grist for the philosopher’s and scientist’s mill: How can we be free and yet live in a deterministic universe?, How do neural processes give rise to conscious experience?, Why does conscious experience accompany certain physiological events at all?, How is a three-dimensional perception of depth generated by a pair of two-dimensional retinal images?. Since Belnap and Steel’s pioneering work on the logic of questions, Van Fraassen has managed to apply their approach in constructing an account of the logic of why-questions. Comparatively little, by contrast, has been written on the logic of how-questions despite the apparent centrality of questions such as How is it possible for us to be both free and determined? to philosophical enterprise.¹ In what follows I develop a logic for how-questions of various sorts including how-questions of cognitive resolution, how-questions of manner, how-questions of method, of means, and of mechanism.     

Higher-order theories of consciousness and what-it-is-like-ness

Ambitious higher-order theories of consciousness aim to account for conscious states when these are understood in terms of what-it-is-like-ness. This paper considers two arguments concerning this aim, and concludes that ambitious theories fail. The misrepresentation argument against HO theories aims to show that the possibility of radical misrepresentation—there being a HO state about a state the subject is not in—leads to a contradiction. In contrast, the awareness argument aims to bolster HO theories by showing that subjects are aware of all their conscious states. Both arguments hinge on how we understand two related notions which are ubiquitous in discussions of consciousness: those of what-it-is-like-ness and there being something it is like for a subject to be in a mental state. This paper examines how HO theorists must understand the two crucial notions if they are to reject the misrepresentation argument but assert the awareness argument. It shows that HO theorists can and do adopt an understanding—the HO reading—which seems to give them what they want. But adopting the HO reading changes the two arguments. On this reading, the awareness argument tells us nothing about those states there is something it is like to be in, and so offers no support to ambitious HO theories. And to respond to the misrepresentation understood according to the HO reading is to simply ignore the argument presented, and so to give no response at all. As things stand, we should deny that HO theories can account for what-it-is-like-ness.     

Reasoning defeasibly about probabilities

In concrete applications of probability, statistical investigation gives us knowledge of some probabilities, but we generally want to know many others that are not directly revealed by our data. For instance, we may know prob(P/Q) (the probability of P given Q) and prob(P/R), but what we really want is prob(P/Q&;R), and we may not have the data required to assess that directly. The probability calculus is of no help here. Given prob(P/Q) and prob(P/R), it is consistent with the probability calculus for prob(P/Q&;R) to have any value between 0 and 1. Is there any way to make a reasonable estimate of the value of prob(P/Q&;R)? A related problem occurs when probability practitioners adopt undefended assumptions of statistical independence simply on the basis of not seeing any connection between two propositions. This is common practice, but its justification has eluded probability theorists, and researchers are typically apologetic about making such assumptions. Is there any way to defend the practice? This paper shows that on a certain conception of probability—nomic probability—there are principles of “probable probabilities” that license inferences of the above sort. These are principles telling us that although certain inferences from probabilities to probabilities are not deductively valid, nevertheless the second-order probability of their yielding correct results is 1. This makes it defeasibly reasonable to make the inferences. Thus I argue that it is defeasibly reasonable to assume statistical independence when we have no information to the contrary. And I show that there is a function Y(r, s, a) such that if prob(P/Q) = r, prob(P/R) = s, and prob(P/U) = a (where U is our background knowledge) then it is defeasibly reasonable to expect that prob(P/Q&;R) = Y(r, s, a). Numerous other defeasible inferences are licensed by similar principles of probable probabilities. This has the potential to greatly enhance the usefulness of probabilities in practical application.     

Obligation as Optimal Goal Satisfaction

Formalising deontic concepts, such as obligation, prohibition and permission, is normally carried out in a modal logic with a possible world semantics, in which some worlds are better than others. The main focus in these logics is on inferring logical consequences, for example inferring that the obligation O q is a logical consequence of the obligations O p and O (p → q). In this paper we propose a non-modal approach in which obligations are preferred ways of satisfying goals expressed in first-order logic. To say that p is obligatory, but may be violated, resulting in a less than ideal situation s, means that the task is to satisfy the goal p ∨ s, and that models in which p is true are preferred to models in which s is true. Whereas, in modal logic, the preference relation between possible worlds is part of the semantics of the logic, in this non-modal approach, the preference relation between first-order models is external to the logic. Although our main focus is on satisfying goals, we also formulate a notion of logical consequence, which is comparable to the notion of logical consequence in modal deontic logic. In this formalisation, an obligation O p is a logical consequence of goals G, when p is true in all best models of G. We show how this non-modal approach to the treatment of deontic concepts deals with problems of contrary-to-duty obligations and normative conflicts, and argue that the approach is useful for many other applications, including abductive explanations, defeasible reasoning, combinatorial optimisation, and reactive systems of the production system variety.     

Exploring Cultural Psychology: Introduction to a Book Forum on <Emphasis Type="Italic">Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion: Principles,Approaches, Applications</Emphasis> by Jacob A. Belzen

This article introduces a book forum on Jacob A. Belzen’s book Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion: Principles, Approaches, Applications. The introduction discusses the relatively recent “turn to culture” and how it has affected the field of psychology of religion and the variety of concerns examined by the journal Pastoral Psychology.     

Descartes’ debt to Teresa of Ávila,or why we should work on women in the history of philosophy

Despite what you have heard over the years, the famous evil deceiver argument in Meditation One is not original to Descartes (1596–1650). Early modern meditators often struggle with deceptive demons. The author of the Meditations (1641) is merely giving a new spin to a common rhetorical device. Equally surprising is the fact that Descartes’ epistemological rendering of the demon trope is probably inspired by a Spanish nun, Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), whose works have been ignored by historians of philosophy, although they were a global phenomenon during Descartes’ formative years. In this paper, I first answer the obvious question as to why previous early modernists have missed something so important as the fact that Descartes’ most famous publication relies on a well-established genre and that his deceiver argument bears a striking similarity to ideas in Teresa’s final work, El Castillo Interior (Interior Castle, 1588)? I discuss the meditative tradition at the end of which Descartes’ Meditations stands, present evidence to support the claim that Descartes was familiar with Teresa’s proposals, contrast their meditative goals, and make a point-by-point comparison between the meditative steps in Teresa’s Interior Castle and those in Descartes’ Meditations which constitute (what I call) their common deceiver strategy. My conclusion makes a case for a broader and more inclusive history of philosophy.     

Scope Processing in Chinese

The standard view maintains that quantifier scope interpretation results from an interaction between different modules: the syntax, the semantics as well as the pragmatics. Thus, by examining the mechanism of quantifier scope interpretation, we will certainly gain some insight into how these different modules interact with one another. To observe it, two experiments, an offline judgment task and an eye-tracking experiment, were conducted to investigate the interpretation of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese, like Mei-ge qiangdao dou qiang-le yi-ge yinhang (Every robber robbed a bank). According to current literature, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese like the above are unambiguous, which can only be interpreted as ‘for every robber x, there is a bank y, such that x robbed y–surface scope reading), contrary to their ambiguous English counterparts, which also allow the interpretation that ‘there is a bank y, such that for every robber x, x robbed y–inverse scope reading). Specifically, three questions were examined, that is, (i) What is the initial reading of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese? (ii) Whether inverse scope interpretation can be available if appropriate contexts are provided? (iii) What are the processing time courses engaged in quantifier scope interpretation? The results showed that (i) Initially, the language processor computes the surface scope representation and the inverse scope representation in parallel, thus, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese are ambiguous; (ii) The discourse information is not employed in initial processing of relative scope, it serves to evaluate the two representations in reanalysis; (iii) The lexical information of verbs affects their scope-taking patterns. We suggest that these findings provide evidence for the Modular Model, one of the major contenders in the literature on sentence processing.     

Exploration of Male Attitudes on Partnerships and Sexuality with Female <Emphasis Type="Italic">BRCA1/2</Emphasis> Mutation Carriers

Women with BRCA mutations are inundated with decisions about managing cancer risks and childbearing considerations. Decisions become more complicated when women face disclosing their mutation and risk-reduction options to a romantic partner. This study identifies the concerns and perspectives of male romantic partners regarding these unique decisions. Twenty-five male participants completed an online survey posted to cancer support group message boards. Participants reported relationship changes regarding intimacy levels (n?=?9), attraction (n?=?2), and communication (n?=?22) after mutation disclosure. Participants whose partners had not undergone prophylactic mastectomy (n?=?14) reported concerns regarding sexual relations (n?=?5), post-surgical appearance (n?=?2), post-surgical attraction (n?=?5), and health/lifespan (n?=?9). Participants did not express attitude changes toward childbearing. While mutation disclosure conversations and surgical options are concerns for many BRCA mutation carriers in relationships, male partners share these concerns. Aspects of the relationship may change, but male study participants continued to support their partners. This information can benefit female BRCA mutation carriers, their current or future partners, and genetic counselors working with this particular population.     

Grammatical Aspect in Early Child Mandarin: Evidence from a Preferential Looking Experiment

The study assessed 30-month-old Mandarin-speaking children’s awareness of aspectual distinctions involving the perfective marker le and the imperfective marker zhe in a preferential looking experiment. In the experiment, we presented our child subjects with a choice between two video clips (one depicting a closed event and the other depicting an on-going event), in the presence of an auditory stimulus (either the le sentence, the zhe sentence or the control sentence without any aspect marker). Children’s looking behavior in the task was recorded and analyzed. The results revealed 30-month-old children’s emerging sensitivity to the aspectual contrast between le and zhe. This was manifest by an increase in looking to the closed event when hearing the le sentence and an increase in looking to the on-going event when hearing the zhe sentence. The absence of le or zhe in the control sentence did not result in any increase or decrease in looking to either event. We also found that the effect of le on children’s looking behavior was immediate whereas the effect of zhe was late. We attributed this difference to the facilitative role of le in children’s sentence processing as well as their preference for the event boundary. The results lend support to the continuity view that functional morphemes like aspect markers are available to children early in language development.     

The knowledge argument,the open question argument,and the moral problem

Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical nature could, apparently, suffer from ignorance about various aspects of conscious experience. Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical and mental nature could, apparently, suffer from moral ignorance. Does it follow that there are ways the world is, over and above the way it is physically or psychophysically? This paper defends a negative answer, based on a distinction between knowing the fact that p and knowing that p. This distinction is made intelligible by reference to criterial connections between the possession of moral or phenomenal knowledge, and the satisfaction of cognitively neutral conditions of desire and experiential history. The existence of such connections in the moral case makes for an efficient dissolution of the so-called moral problem.     

The Interaction of Contextual and Syntactic Information in the Processing of Turkish Anaphors

In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors o, kendi, and kendisi. The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas o behaves like a pronoun and kendi behaves like a reflexive, kendisi has a more flexible behavior and it can function as both a pronoun and a reflexive. Using acceptability judgments and a self-paced reading task, we examined how Turkish anaphors are processed in isolated sentences and within larger discourse contexts. We manipulated contextual information by creating passages where the context favored a local, long-distance or extra-sentential referent prior to the appearance of the anaphor. We measured the effect of the context on participants’ reading times and their end-of-trial coreference assignments. Our results suggest that contextual information affects the interpretive possibilities associated with an anaphor, but that the influence of context depends on the degree to which the anaphor is syntactically constrained.     

Animal groups and social ontology: an argument from the phenomenology of behavior

Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the superorganism and selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome this bias. I define behavior as a holistic, ongoing, meaningful and Umwelt-oriented intrinsically configured expression of living forms of existence. By looking at cases of animal groups drawn from contemporary studies in zoology and behavioral ecology, I show that animal groups, in the fact that they behave, manifest themselves to be a fundamental form of existence, namely, the social form of existence.     

Parts and differences

Part/whole is said in many ways: the leg is part of the table, the subset is part of the set, rectangularity is part of squareness, and so on. Do the various flavors of part/whole have anything in common? They may be partial orders, but so are lots of non-mereological relations. I propose an “upward difference transmission” principle: x is part of y if and only if x cannot change in specified respects while y stays the same in those respects.     

The Social and Cultural Construction of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Burqa</Emphasis>: The Case of Gheshm Island in Iran

The present study attempts to describe the components, characteristics, and implications of burqa in Qeshm Island, Iran, through an ethnographic method. The sample of the study is composed of twelve burqa-wearing women who were selected by applying a purposive sampling method. The process of data collection took 1 year, and the researchers conducted observations, note-takings, photography, and interviews with the participants on the field. The findings indicated that unlike niqab in the Arab countries, burqa is not surrounded by ideology. It is a cultural product which needs to be understood based on six main themes. In this cultural context, burqa is considered to be a social construction through which women reconstruct and moderate their social status, distance themselves from imposed roles and stereotypes, distinguish themselves from others with their creativity and innovation in designing burqas, and occasionally benefit from burqas’ financial value. Considering the various implications of burqa in the Muslim world and in Iran, it is proposed that the laws pertaining to this region be legislated based on the recognized indication of burqa by ethnic and religious groups.     

Logically Incorrect Arguments

What do we learn when we find out that an argument is logically incorrect? If logically incorrect means the same as not logically correct, which in turn means not having a valid logical form, it seems that we do not learn anything too useful—an argument which is logically incorrect can still be conclusive. Thus, it seems that it makes sense to fix a stronger interpretation of the term under which a logically incorrect argument is guaranteed to be wrong (and is such for purely logical reasons). In this paper, we show that pinpointing this stronger sense is much trickier than one would expect; but eventually we reach an explication of the notion of (strong) logical incorrectness which we find non-trivial and viable.     

Subjunctive Conditional Probability

There seem to be two ways of supposing a proposition: supposing “indicatively” that Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, it is likely that someone else did; supposing “subjunctively” that Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, it is likely that nobody would have written the play. Let P(B//A) be the probability of B on the subjunctive supposition that A. Is P(B//A) equal to the probability of the corresponding counterfactual, A □→B? I review recent triviality arguments against this hypothesis and argue that they do not succeed. On the other hand, I argue that even if we can equate P(B//A) with P(A □→B), we still need an account of how subjunctive conditional probabilities are related to unconditional probabilities. The triviality arguments reveal that the connection is not as straightforward as one might have hoped.