Two (Weak) Cheers for Markets in Votes

This paper offers the first moral defense of markets in votes in a democratic electoral system based on majority rule where there are no moral restrictions on how votes can be cast. In Part 1 I outline the type of vote buying that I defend in this paper, and defend my methodological assumption. In Part 2 I criticize Freiman’s arguments for legalizing vote buying (arguments that do not address its morality). In Part 3 I outline and reply to some responses that could be made to my criticisms of Freiman’s arguments. In Part 4 I draw from the flaws in Freiman’s arguments to argue that vote buying is morally permissible and defend these arguments against objections.     

Feminist Perspectives on the Human Rights Act: Two Cheers for Incorporation

This paper considers feministperspectives on the Human Rights Act. Itdiscusses the reasons why many feminists aresceptical regarding the impact the Act willhave on women's lives, including theimplications for anti-discrimination law,problems with the framework of rights in theEuropean Convention and deeper difficulties facingfeminism in negotiating rights discourse. Whileacknowledging these problems, it is argued thatthere are grounds for a more positiveinterpretation of incorporation. Questions arethen raised about the nature and scope of rightsand the role of the state in challenging genderinequality.     

Two Kinds of Commitments (And Two Kinds of Social Groups)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of "commissive" utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation.     

Four tables for the statistical interpretation of factor scores on the Wechsler intelligence scale for children—Revised (WISC-R)

When the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Revised (WISC-R) is analyzed into three factors (Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Organization, and Freedom From Distractibility), the clinician has the choice of expressing each factor as either a deviation quotient (an IQ analog) or a factor score (the arithmetic mean of the constituent subtests). For the clinician who wishes to use factor scores instead of deviation quotients, four tables are presented that provide (1) the percentile equivalents of factor scores; (2) the significance of differences between factor scores; (3) the frequency with which specified discrepancies occur; and (4) the significance of differences between a factor score and the scaled score of a constituent subtest.     

One-Hit Wonders in Classical Music: Evidence and (Partial) Explanations for an Early Career Peak

Several recent empirical and theoretical examinations of creativity have concluded that creativity is content specific (i.e., creativity within certain content areas is independent of creativity in other content areas). Indeed, the idea that creativity may even be task specific enjoys considerable research support. Most of this research and theory, however, suffers from conceptual, methodological, or logical oversights. The debate about the content general or specific nature of creativity is far from settled, and more comprehensive research programs are necessary if progress is to be made in this area.     

Decay theory of immediate memory: From Brown (1958) to today (2014)

This work takes a historical approach to discussing Brown's (1958) paper, “Some Tests of the Decay Theory of Immediate Memory”. This work was and continues to be extremely influential in the field of forgetting over the short term. Its primary importance is in establishing a theoretical basis to consider a process of fundamental importance: memory decay. Brown (1958) established that time-based explanations of forgetting can account for both memory capacity and forgetting of information over short periods of time. We discuss this view both in the context of the intellectual climate at the time of the paper's publication and in the context of the modern intellectual climate. The overarching theme we observe is that decay is as controversial now as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.     

Two arguments for a pre-reflective core self: commentary on Praetorius (2009)

Contra Praetorius (2009), I present two brief arguments which support the existence within the human brain of a pre-reflective core self.     

Reply to Rouder (2014): Good frequentist properties raise confidence

Established psychological results have been called into question by demonstrations that statistical significance is easy to achieve, even in the absence of an effect. One often-warned-against practice, choosing when to stop the experiment on the basis of the results, is guaranteed to produce significant results. In response to these demonstrations, Bayes factors have been proposed as an antidote to this practice, because they are invariant with respect to how an experiment was stopped. Should researchers only care about the resulting Bayes factor, without concern for how it was produced? Yu, Sprenger, Thomas, and Dougherty (2014) and Sanborn and Hills (2014) demonstrated that Bayes factors are sometimes strongly influenced by the stopping rules used. However, Rouder (2014) has provided a compelling demonstration that despite this influence, the evidence supplied by Bayes factors remains correct. Here we address why the ability to influence Bayes factors should still matter to researchers, despite the correctness of the evidence. We argue that good frequentist properties mean that results will more often agree with researchers’ statistical intuitions, and good frequentist properties control the number of studies that will later be refuted. Both help raise confidence in psychological results.