Openness versus intellect: Much ado about nothing?

McCrae (1990) has argued that Openness to Experience is a fundamental dimension of personality that is not well represented among English-language trait adjectives. Presumably, then, studies of personality adjectives will inevitably fail to capture at least one fundamental personality dimension. I argue that the language does contain many adjectives referring to Openness, and that recent studies of the language of personality reveal a large factor clearly related to both Openness and Intellect. These studies support both the Openness construct and the questionnaire version of the five basic factors. Lexical and questionnaire methods appear to converge on a single structural framework for basic personality traits.     

Much ado about nothing? Why going non-semantic is not merely semantics

This paper argues that deciding on whether the cognitive sciences need a Representational Theory of Mind matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Rowlands’s (2017) argument that the RTM-question is a bad question and that attempts to answer it, one way or another, have neither practical nor theoretical import. Rowlands concludes this because, on his analysis, there is no non-arbitrary fact of the matter about which properties something must possess in order to qualify as a mental representation. By way of reply, we admit that Rowlands’s analysis succeeds in revealing why attempts to answer the RTM-question simpliciter are pointless. Nevertheless, we show that if specific formulations of the RTM-question are stipulated, then it is possible, conduct substantive RTM debates that do not collapse into merely verbal disagreements. Combined, Sections 2 and 3 demonstrate how, by employing specifying stipulations, we can get around Rowlands’s arbitrariness challenge. Section 2 reveals why RTM, as canonically construed in terms of mental states exhibiting intensional (with-an-s) properties, has been deemed a valuable explanatory hypothesis in the cognitive sciences. Targeting the canonical notion of mental representations, Section 3 articulates a rival nonrepresentational hypothesis that, we propose, can do all the relevant explanatory work at much lower theoretical cost. Taken together, Sections 2 and 3 show what can be at stake in the RTM debate when it is framed by appeal to the canonical notion of mental representation and why engaging in it matters. Section 4 extends the argument for thinking that RTM debates matter. It provides reasons for thinking that, far from making no practical or theoretical difference to the sciences of the mind, deciding to abandon RTM would constitute a revolutionary conceptual shift in those sciences.     

Challenges confronting cross-sex friendships: “Much ado about nothing?”

This research was an investigation into four challenges purported to confront cross-sex friends. One hundred and thirty eight individuals (females = 86, males = 52) completed two surveys designed to explore the extent to which the sexual, emotional bond, audience, and equality challenges were present in their cross-sex friendships. Over 98% of the participants were heterosexual, 99% were Caucasian, and approximately 5% were Hispanic. Data gathered from the first survey were analyzed using a three-way analysis of variance, with gender, type of friendship, and romantic status as the independent variables, and three of the four challenges as the dependent variables. The first survey also included open-ended questions designed to explore the nature and existence of the challenges. The second survey was in a diary format. Respondents kept a frequency count for three weeks of discussions they had with their cross-sex friend concerning the challenges, and thoughts that they had as individuals concerning those challenges. Results from both surveys indicate that though the challenges exist and have powerful effects on a small percentage of individuals in cross-sex friendships, for the majority of participants the challenges are not perceived as salient.     

Gender stereotyping in medical advertising: Much ado about something?

Gender bias in medical advertising may be one factor contributing to differential treatment of women and men by physicians. Four hundred forty advertisements from three prominent medical journals were analyzed. Significantly more male, compared to female, recipient ads were found overall as well as for cardiovascular drugs. Males and females were both portrayed stereotypically in the ads, but this trend was especially true for males. The facial expressions of men were more likely to be serious/neutral whereas the facial expressions of women were more often judged to be pleasant. Females tended to be younger than the males that were depicted. Since heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women, underrepresentation of women in cardiovascular ads was questioned. Stereotypical portrayals as well as differences in facial expressions and age of depicted recipients may contribute to physicians being less likely to take the complaints of women, compared to men, seriously.     

Constructive mathematics and unbounded operators — A reply to Hellman

It is argued that Hellman's arguments purporting to demonstrate that constructive mathematics cannot cope with unbounded operators on a Hilbert space are seriously flawed, and that there is no evidence that his thesis is correct.     

The contingency argument—A reply

Conclusion Brian Medlin has excluded the possibility of something being self-explanatory in anything but a logical sense. Hence any non-logical necessity has always to be in terms of something other than the explicand. In this context, the principle of sufficient reason cannot escape contraction to a form so patently useless that no proponent of the contingency argument would want to employ it. Many of the objections in Section 4 have point, however, only against an argument which uses such an unacceptable form of the principle. The objections in Section 5 are directed against an argument framed in the only other way allowable under Medlin’s dichotomy, but which is of no use to the theist, for the simple-reason that its conclusion is not existential in the required (present actuality) sense. Objections against such an argument would concern the theist only if their validity were so wide as to embrace a truly existential argument as well. As we have-seen it is in just that case that they break down. In neither Section 4 nor 5, therefore, does the article come to grips with the contingency argument. The objections leave it untouched, because neither of Medlin’s notions of contingency and necessity corresponds to that which is operative in the argument.     

The conjunction fallacy? A reply to Bar-Hillel

In her commentary on our article, Bar-Hillel (1991) argues that our normative interpretation of the Lindaproblem is inaccurate and that the representativeness heuristic can account for all of the relevant data. I argue that the normative interpretation of the Linda problem remains slippery and that representativeness fails to account for much of the data. Furthermore, substantial evidence supports our suggestion that subjects use different underlying models in estimating likelihoods in different con problems.     

One concept or two? A reply to Raine

It is suggested that Raine's criticisms of the paper by Barbour-McMullen, Coid and Howard rest on misconceptions, particularly regarding the nature of the supposed conceptual dichotomy between “North American” and “European” concepts of psychopathy. Several points of clarification are offered. It is maintained that psychopathy is indeed a dual, rather than a unitary, concept.     

Young infants’ expectations about hidden objects: a reply to three challenges

In this article, I address three broad challenges that have been directed at claims that even young infants are able to represent and to reason about hidden objects. The first challenge is that such claims are static and non-developmental and as such represent an unproductive approach to the study of infant cognition. The second challenge is that claims that even young infants represent hidden objects typically go hand in hand with assertions that infants are born with a belief that objects exist continuously in time and move continuously through space, and there is no evidence to date to support such assertions. Finally, the third challenge is that reports that young infants represent hidden objects can all be explained more parsimoniously in terms of low level perceptual biases in infants’ encoding and processing of events, or in terms of transient expectations formed during habituation trials and later extended to test trials.