BRING BACK THE MAGIC

Abstract:  Magical ersatzism is the view that possible worlds are primitive abstract entities. In On the Plurality of Worlds , David Lewis presented what appeared to many to be a devastating argument against magical ersatzism. In this paper, I show that Lewis' central argument does not succeed. Magical ersatzism remains a viable theory of possible worlds.     

Heidegger and scientific realism

This paper describes Heidegger as a robust scientific realist, explains why his view has received such conflicting treatment, and concludes that the special significance of his position lies in his insistence upon linking the discussion of science to the question of its relation with technology. It shows that Heidegger, rather than accepting the usual forced option between realism and antirealism, advocates a realism in which he embeds the antirealist thesis that the idea of reality independent of human understanding is unintelligible. This reading is defended against Rorty's antirealist interpretation, as well as Dreyfus' depiction of him as a deflationary realist, and his assessment of background realism is contrasted with Fine's. Further, the robustness of Heidegger's realism is laid out across several texts from 1912 to 1976, in order to show that he is neither an instrumental realist nor an internal realist. Finally, the point is made that the development of his view concerning realism gives rise to a critique of objectivity that is now being similarly advocated by numerous thinkers from a variety of disciplines, and that this critique is inevitably ethical and political.     

Acceptance of External Versus Internal Excuses by an Externally or Internally Oriented Audience

Men and women evaluated a male student who was caught by his professor cheating on a make-up test. The student either gave an external excuse, gave an internal excuse, or accepted responsibility for his action. The prediction that an internal excuse would be favored by participants with an internal locus of control and that an external excuse would be favored by participants with an external locus of control was not supported. It appeared that, because the student was caught in the act of cheating, the use of an excuse as an accounting strategy was not appropriate. The student was evaluated more favorably when he accepted responsibility than when he offered an excuse for his cheating. Harsher punishment was recommended by participants with an internal locus of control. Results were integrated with research studies testing the effectiveness of excuses in moderating the punishment recommended for people who are guilty of an antisocial or illegal act.     

Children's motor imagery modality dominance modulates the role of attentional focus in motor skill learning

We investigated whether children's motor imagery dominance modulated the relationship between attentional focus and motor learning of a tossing task. One hundred and thirty-eight boys (age: M = 10.13, SD = 0.65) completed the Movement Imagery Questionnaire – Children (MIQ-C) to determine imagery modality dominance (kinesthetic, internal-visual, external-visual) and were randomly assigned to either an internal (n = 71) or external (n = 67) attentional focus group. Participants completed 60 trials of a tossing task with their non-dominant hand on day 1. Participants in the internal focus group were asked “to focus on the throwing arm”, whereas participants in the external focus group were instructed “to focus on the ball.” A retention test was conducted 24 h later to assess motor learning. Overall, the results from a nested, multiple linear regression analysis indicated the degree to which internal or external focus influences children's throwing accuracy is dependent upon their motor imagery modality dominance. Specifically, higher levels of external-visual imagery dominance resulted in greater motor learning for children adopting an external focus. In contrast, higher values of kinesthetic imagery dominance resulted in reduced motor learning for children who adopted an external focus. Despite the need for future research, we recommend motor imagery modality dominance assessments be considered when investigating the influence of attentional focus on motor learning, particularly when the target population is children.     

Suicide and Drug Abuse in the Medical Community

ABSTRACT: In the United States each year the equivalent of an average-size medical school graduating class commits suicide, with the highest incidence occurring in the decade following the completion of training. Of these suicides, 20% to 30% are associated with drug abuse and 40% with alcoholism. Various problem areas are considered. Role strain, leading to excessive drug use in an attempt to increase work efficiency, is coupled with a denial of the physician's own dependency needs and gratification. The problem of identity occurs in relation to the exaggerated sense of duty and obligation the physician feels in attending to the demands of the patients and their families. Medicine as magical thinking is also discussed, revealing the physician's belief in his own immunity, which is strenuously tested when he actually sets up in practice. The community's high regard for the physician further complicates the situation. Too little has been done about working with emotional problems of medical students during their training and after they begin to practice. Unfortunately, physicians feel uncomfortable in turning to colleagues for help; rather, they tend to isolate themselves, resorting to alcohol and drugs. One should question the selection of medical students and their overall training, not only in terms of academic learning but also with more consideration for the stresses and strains of the future career.     

Dealing with Poor Performance: Supervisor Attributions and the Cost of Responding1

The Green and Mitchell (1979) model of the process by which supervisors diagnose and deal with the causes of subordinates' poor performance is based upon attribution theory. The notion is that the supervisor makes an attribution about the cause of the poor performance and then selects an appropriate response or solution to deal with the problem. Two ways in which this can lead to an inapprorpriate solution are, first, a bias toward making internal attributions and, second, an aversion to using costly, even though appropriate, solutions. This study demonstrates that it is possible to prompt participants to make more external attribution about poor performance. It also demonstrates that whichever attributions they make (either internal or external), the solutions they select to deal with the poor performance are congruent with their attributions provided that the solutions do not have explicit implementation costs associated with them. However, when implementation costs are made explicit, costs influence solution selection and reduce the congruence between the attributions and the selected solutions. The possible implications of this finding for success in dealing with poor performance are discussed.     

Violence and “Hyperbologic”: Lawlor on Time’s Relation to Metaphysics

In his recent work, Leonard Lawlor draws attention to the problem of “violence,” which is the “problem that provides the most food for thought.” This emphasis on the problem of violence and its connections to metaphysics understood as philosophy has been remarkably consistent over his career, and thinking through responses to “violence” has sustained Lawlor’s continued effort to think about what he calls “violent” relations between event and repeatability and ground these upon a critical phenomenology. This contribution to the discussion of Lawlor’s work focuses on his most recent book, From Violence to Speaking Out (2016), so as to suggest three important directions for this project and for philosophy’s response to violence. I first briefly trace the theme of violence in From Violence to Speaking Out , contextualizing it against the rest of his work, so as to draw out what he means by violence and its provocation to philosophy, with special attention to the way that the violence in question is figured as disrupting the transcendental and confronting philosophy with what Lawlor calls the “ultratranscendental.” Second, I link it to the theme of time by tracing Lawlor’s point about violence in relation to the breaking up of the transcendental subject from Kant into Heidegger. Third, I link these points to the negative movement of the dissolution of modes of repeatability. This dissolution is captured in a kind of “speaking‐out” that Lawlor detects in Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, involving an excess over and above expression, which Deleuze calls “hyperbologic.”     

QUALIA UND PHYSIKALISMUS

Qualia and Physicalism. It is assumed that the following three relations exhaust the possibilities for a physicalist account of qualia: 1. determination, 2. identity, 3. realization. The first relation is immediately rejected because it does not exclude property dualism. The second faces the problem that it is probably impossible to discriminate empirically between the identity thesis and the epiphenomenalist position. The third cannot handle qualia adequately, for qualia are not functional properties and the realization relation is only plausible as a relation between physical realizers and functional properties. Finally, if one attempts to replace multiple realization by multiple identities it is shown that the notion of multiple property identities is unintelligible. The upshot is that if these three relations exhaust the possibilities of a physicalist construal of qualia then physicalism is wrong. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Children's and adults' reactions to magical and ordinary suggestion: Are suggestibility and magical thinking psychologically close relatives?

In Experiment 1, 6‐ and 9‐year‐old children and adults were asked to imagine various types of objects. The experimenter then attempted to change the image of those objects in participants' minds by either suggesting that the objects may change against the participants' will, or by asking participants to change the objects as a favor to the experimenter. Two types of suggestive causation were employed: Magical‐suggestion (a magic spell was cast with the aim of changing the imagined objects) and ordinary‐suggestion (participants were told that the objects in their minds could alter against their will). Ordinary‐suggestion was as effective as magical‐suggestion in changing the participants' imagined objects. For adults, a direct request for compliance produced a stronger effect than did magical suggestion. This effect was not found in children. In Experiment 2, the two types of suggestion were tested on an alternative type of imagined objects. Adult participants were asked to imagine their futures. It was then proposed that (a) a magic spell could be cast on their futures with the aim of changing them either for the worse or for the better (magical‐suggestion), or (b) changing a numerical pattern on a computer screen could change their futures (ordinary‐suggestion). All participants denied that changing a numerical pattern on a computer screen could affect their lives, yet in their actions they demonstrated an element of belief in this possibility. As in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 ordinary suggestion was as effective as magical suggestion. The hypothesis of an historic contiguity between magical causality and ordinary suggestion is discussed.     

Does magical thinking produce neutralising behaviour? An experimental investigation

Magical thinking is of relevance to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and has been most widely investigated in relation to the cognitive bias known as thought-action fusion (TAF). This is seen as playing a role in the formation of fears about responsibility for harm. We suggest that magical thinking may also characterise some types of neutralising behaviour, which arise in response to those fears, and are a hallmark of the disorder. In an experimental study of 51 undergraduate students, we assessed whether the use of neutralising behaviours in response to an induction of fears of increasing likelihood for harm is related to a propensity for magical thinking. The 75.5% of participants demonstrated at least one form of neutralising behaviour in response to a TAF-induction task. Neutralising was associated with stronger and more persistent responses to the task, and with questionnaire measures of magical ideation. Those who neutralised did not report higher levels of OCD symptoms. It appears that neutralising is a common response in circumstances that provoke a sense of responsibility for harm. Its occurrence may be linked to magical thinking, however, the results from this experimental investigation suggested that this process may not be specific to OCD.     

Attention and the crossmodal construction of space

Traditional studies of spatial attention consider only a single sensory modality at a time (e.g. just vision, or just audition). In daily life, however, our spatial attention often has to be coordinated across several modalities. This is a non-trivial problem, given that each modality initially codes space in entirely different ways. In the last five years, there has been a spate of studies on crossmodal attention. These have demonstrated numerous crossmodal links in spatial attention, such that attending to a particular location in one modality tends to produce corresponding shifts of attention in other modalities. The spatial coordinates of these crossmodal links illustrate that the internal representation of external space depends on extensive crossmodal integration. Recent neuroscience studies are discussed that suggest possible brain mechanisms for the crossmodal links in spatial attention.     

Scientific styles,plain truth,and truthfulness

Ian Hacking loosely defines a “style of scientific thinking” as a “way to find things out about the world” characterised by five hallmark features of a number of scientific template styles. Most prominently, these are autonomy and “self-authentication”: a scientific style of thinking, according to Hacking, is not good because it helps us find out the truth in some domain, it itself defines the criteria for truth-telling in its domain. I argue that Renaissance medicine, Mediaeval “demonology”, and magical thinking pass muster as scientific according to Hacking’s criteria. However, application of these thought styles to the entities they introduce generates statements that logically imply a set of “ordinary” statements – or what Bernard Williams calls “plain truths” – which, contra the claims of autonomy and self-authentication, allows styles to be assessed from a style-independent perspective. Using Williams’ notion of plain truth, I show that Renaissance medicine, demonology, and magical thinking, in reality issue in many plain falsehoods. This confronts us with what I call Hacking’s dilemma: either define stricter necessary conditions on being a style of scientific thinking, or concede that some styles albeit scientific are not as good at finding things out about the world as others. I make three suggestions to deal with the dilemma.     

Structure-Making

Friends of states of affairs and structural universals appeal to a relation, structure-making, that is allegedly a kind of composition relation: structure-making ‘builds’ facts out of particulars and universals, and ‘builds’ structural universals out of unstructured universals. D. M. Armstrong, an eminent champion of structures, endorses two interesting theses concerning composition. First, that structure-making is a composition relation. Second, that it is not the only (fundamental) composition relation: Armstrong also believes in a mode of composition that he calls mereological, and which he takes to be the only kind of composition recognized by his philosophical adversaries, such as David Lewis. Armstrong, accordingly, is a kind of pluralist about compositional relations: there is more than one way to make wholes from parts. In this paper, I critically evaluate Armstrong's compositional pluralism.     

Reasonable magic and the nature of alchemy: Jewish reflections on human embryonic stem cell research

The controversy about research on human embryonic stem cells both divides and defines us, raising fundamental ethical and religious questions about the nature of the self and the limits of science. This article uses Jewish sources to articulate fundamental concerns about the forbiddenness of knowledge in general and of knowledge thought of as magical creation. Alchemy, and the turning of elements into gold and into substances for longevity, and magic used for the creation of living beings was at stake in various Talmudic texts. Since contemporary discourse calls regenerative science magical, and makes claims about its restorative power, careful reflection on when magic is forbidden and when it is responsible allows a novel understanding of ethical questions in stem cell research.     

Data selection and responsible conduct: Was millikan a fraud?

This paper addresses a problem in reporting scientific research. The problem is how to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable data selection. Robert Millikan is notorious for an infamous remark that he used all his data when in fact he had used a selection. On this basis he has been accused of fraud. There is a tension here — historians and his defenders see his selection as understandable and legitimate, while current statements about the Responsible Conduct of Research imply his selection was illegitimate. This paper discusses two main issues that arise in assessing his conduct, whether he was intentionally misleading and whether he actually did mislead the scientific community about some facts of nature. It is argued that he was not intentionally misleading, and that it is unlikely that he misled the scientific community.     

Data selection and responsible conduct: Was millikan a fraud?

This paper addresses a problem in reporting scientific research. The problem is how to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable data selection. Robert Millikan is notorious for an infamous remark that he used all his data when in fact he had used a selection. On this basis he has been accused of fraud. There is a tension here — historians and his defenders see his selection as understandable and legitimate, while current statements about the Responsible Conduct of Research imply his selection was illegitimate. This paper discusses two main issues that arise in assessing his conduct, whether he was intentionally misleading and whether he actually did mislead the scientific community about some facts of nature. It is argued that he was not intentionally misleading, and that it is unlikely that he misled the scientific community.     

The Blicket Within: Preschoolers' Inferences About Insides and Causes

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds made inferences from an object's internal parts to its causal properties without being given verbal labels for objects or being shown that insides and causal properties covaried. Experiment 3 found that 4-year-olds chose an object with the same internal part over one with the same external property when asked which object had the same causal property as the target (which had both the internal part and external property). Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that 4-year-olds made similar inferences from causal properties to internal parts, but 3-year-olds relied more on objects' external perceptual appearance. These results suggest that by the age of 4, children have developed an understanding of a relation between an artifact's internal parts and its causal properties.     

From end time to the time of the end: some reflections about the emergence of subjectivity

Abstract :  In this article, the author presents the first ten years of the analysis of a young patient who just barely escaped an onset of schizophrenia. The patient showed defences of the self that had been frozen with regard to his relationship to time, and had shut him outside of any rapport with time, forcing him to seek—as desperately as unconsciously—a 'time of the end', a present time.
He explores different 'lived times': circular and linear times that are both classical in Jungian theory; he then describes what he calls subjective linear 'lived time' as a modality for opening up instinctual objectivity to subjectivity's access to the symbolic. In his theorization of this passage, he uses the Greek notion of Kairos as well as the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche's theory of originary seduction.
Finally, he ties this transition to recent theories in physics of complex systems, also called chaos theory, and poses the hypothesis that this model can represent two essential qualities of subjectivity: its non-predictability and its non-reproductability.     

Belief in Magic Predicts Children's Selective Trust in Informants

Children are able to distinguish between regular events that can occur in everyday reality and magical events that are ordinarily impossible. How do children respond to a person who brings about magical as compared with ordinary outcomes? In two studies, we tested children's acceptance of informants' claims when the informants had produced either magical or ordinary outcomes. In Study 1, children's skeptical or credulous stance toward magic predicted their endorsement of the claims made by the informants. Children who were more credulous were likely to accept information from the informant who had produced magical outcomes. In Study 2, a brief manipulation was only partially effective in changing children's initial stance toward magic. Their initial stance toward magic continued to predict their acceptance of information from the informant who had produced magical outcomes.