Iterated Non‐Refutation: Robert Lockie on Relativism 1

Abstract

I argue that an experience’s sensuous elements play an ineliminable role in our being intentionally directed upon an entity through perception. More specifically, I argue that whenever we appreciate a sensuous element in experience, we appreciate an intrinsic and irreducibly phenomenal aspect of experience that I call phenomenal presence – an aspect of experience that I show is central to its presentational character – and that the appreciation of phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality. If an experience is to possess intentionality, the experience itself must make an entity available as an object of perceptually-based singular beliefs and the experiencing subject, by virtue of undergoing the experience, must in some sense be able to appreciate that it has done so. Phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality because it plays an ineliminable role in making an entity available to its subject in this way.     

The Donor's Dilemma: Recipient's Reactions to Aid from Friend or Foe1

Subjects participating as decision-makers in the Tactical and Negotiations Game experimental simulation encountered a programed emergency and then received an offer of aid from either an ally or an enemy donor. Findings indicate that recipients of aid from an ally donor perceived the donor to be more positively motivated and perceived the aid to reflect greater effort and to be of greater value than recipients of an equal amount of aid from an enemy donor. In addition, aid from an ally precipitated a positive shift in recipient perceptions of the donor and a negative shift in recipient perceptions of the enemy nondonor, while aid from an enemy had essentially no effects. The applied implications of these findings are discussed.     

Acting with Feeling from Duty

A central claim in Kantian ethics is that an agent is properly morally motivated just in case she acts from duty alone. Bernard Williams, Michael Stocker, and Justin Oakley claim that certain emotionally infused actions, such as lending a compassionate helping hand, can only be done from compassion and not from duty. I argue that these critics have overlooked a distinction between an action's manner, how an action is done, and its motive, the agent's reason for acting. Through a range of examples I demonstrate how an emotion can determine an action's manner without also serving as the motive. Thus, it is possible for an agent to act compassionately from duty alone. This distinction between the manner and the motive of an action not only restores a central claim in Kantian ethics but it also allows for an expanded role of emotions in moral action.     

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.     

Mere exposure and the endowment effect on consumer decision making

Previous researchers (e.g., J. A. Bargh, 1992, 2002) demonstrated the importance of nonconscious processes on consumer choice behavior. Using an advertisement, the authors determined the effect of two nonconscious processes--the mere exposure effect, which increases object preference by increasing consumer exposure to an object, and the endowment effect, which increases object valuation by providing consumer possession of an object--on consumer behavior. Although the mere exposure effect and endowment effect did not produce an interaction, they produced independent effects. The endowment effect increased object valuation but not object preference. The mere exposure effect increased object preference but not object valuation. Thus, at the unconscious level, an increase in object preference does not lead to an increase in object valuation, nor does an increase in object valuation lead to an increase in object preference. The authors discuss the importance of developing measures of unconscious process in advertising effectiveness.     

Ego Constriction

The terms ego constriction, ego inhibition, and ego restriction have not been clearly differentiated in their usage in the literature. In this paper a rationale for "ego constriction" as an entity distinct from both ego inhibition and ego restriction is given, despite its clear similarities to each. In a person with an ego inhibition, the ego inhibits a part of its own functioning because a particular function is linked to an unacceptable impulse. It is an internalized conflict. The person with an ego restriction, in contrast, avoids psychological pain triggered from an area in the outside world by restricting activity in that area. Like each of these problems but different, a person with an ego constriction first externalizes an internalized conflict associated with important functions or activities. Then, only through a series of particular obligatory steps can the person "overcome" the ego constriction--albeit temporarily. It is noted in this paper that the function of the specified obligatory steps is structurally parallel to the rigid obligatory behavior necessary for genital gratification in the perversions. As the recognition of this distinction arose in the course of an analysis of a mental health professional, something of the necessarily shared nature of analytic work is noticeable, shining through as the background for the work of this paper.     

Objective Consequentialism and Avoidable Imperfections

There are two distinct views on how to formulate an objective consequentialist account of the deontic status of actions, actualism and possibilism. On an actualist account, what matters to the deontic status of actions is only the value of the outcome an action would have, if performed. By contrast, a possibilist account also takes into account the value of the outcomes that an action could have. These two views come apart in their deontic verdicts when an agent is imperfect in an avoidable way, viz., when agent brings about less good than she could. In this paper, I offer an argument against actualism that draws on the connection between moral obligation and practical reasons.     

Age-of-acquisition and cumulative frequency have independent effects

Lewis (1999) argued that effects of age of acquisition (AoA) are entirely attributable to cumulative frequency. He reported an instance-based model in which the number of instances of the stimulus stored in memory predicts reaction time. We note four aspects of the literature on AoA that cannot be explained by this instance-based approach. Firstly, an effect of AoA has been observed in the absence of an effect of frequency. Secondly, an effect of AoA has been observed when cumulative frequency has been controlled. Thirdly, the effect of AoA is dependent on task. Fourthly, the effect of word frequency is dependent on stimulus modality. Lewis reported an experiment in which participants make a decision based on identity-specific semantic information to celebrity faces to demonstrate an effect of the number of instances in memory, which he interpreted as an effect of AoA. We note that effects of AoA have been found in lexical and perceptual tasks, but to date all attempts to demonstrate an advantage for early-acquired items in semantic classification tasks have failed. We conclude that the effects of AoA cannot be attributed solely to the effects of cumulative frequency.     

An epistemic and dynamic approach to abductive reasoning: Abductive problem and abductive solution

We propose a study of abductive reasoning addressing it as an epistemic process that involves both an agent?s information and the actions that modify this information. More precisely, we present and discuss definitions of an abductive problem and an abductive solution in terms of an agent?s information, that is, in terms of knowledge and beliefs. The discussion is then formalised by ‘implementing’ our definitions in a dynamic epistemic logic framework, where the properties of these definitions are studied, an epistemic action that represents the application of an abductive step is introduced, and an illustrative example is provided. A number of the most interesting properties of abductive reasoning (those highlighted by Peirce) are shown to be better modelled within this approach.     

Agent-Basing,Consequences, and Realized Motives

According to agent-based approaches to virtue ethics, the rightness of an action is a function of the motives which prompted that action. If those motives were morally praiseworthy, then the action was right; if they were morally blameworthy, the action was wrong. Many critics find this approach problematically insensitive to an act’s consequences, and claim that agent-basing fails to preserve the intuitive distinction between agent- and act-evaluation. In this article I show how an agent-based account of right action can be made sensitive to an act’s consequences. According to the approach which I defend, an action is right just in case it realizes an agent’s morally praiseworthy motive. Conversely, an action is wrong just in case it realizes a morally blameworthy motive. Specifying act-evaluation in terms of the realization, rather than the expression, of an agent’s motives allows an agent-based approach to distinguish between agent- and act-evaluation. This is because an agent may act from a morally praiseworthy motive, but fail (either through bad luck or poor judgment) to realize that motive. Her action will therefore not have been the right one, despite its being the expression of morally praiseworthy motives.     

Smilansky, Arneson, and the asymmetry of desert

Desert plays an important role in most contemporary theories of retributive justice, but an unimportant role in most contemporary theories of distributive justice. Saul Smilansky has recently put forward a defense of this asymmetry. In this study, I argue that it fails. Then, drawing on an argument of Richard Arneson’s, I suggest an alternative consequentialist rationale for the asymmetry. But while this shows that desert cannot be expected to play the same role in distributive justice that it can play in retributive justice, it does not fully vindicate the asymmetry, since desert can still play an important role in the former.     

Obtaining guilty knowledge in human intelligence interrogations: Comparing accusatorial and information-gathering approaches with a novel experimental paradigm

Substantial research has assessed interrogations seeking to obtain a criminal confession, and consequently much has been learned regarding the potential problems with confession evidence. However, an increasing focus on counter-terrorism, and therefore intelligence interrogations, reveals an obvious gap in the literature. Intelligence interrogations are primarily focused on collecting information from individuals as opposed to a confession linked to an alleged event, and little of the extant psychological literature can speak directly to such a scenario. The current research developed an experimental paradigm to test interrogation approaches in an intelligence-gathering context, providing a method for gathering empirical data on human intelligence collection. In the first implementation of this paradigm, accusatorial and information-gathering interrogation strategies were tested using a procedure high in psychological realism. Results indicate that an information-gathering approach yields more relevant information than an accusatorial approach and leads to more diagnostic impressions by third party observers.     

Normative Objectivity Without Ontological Commitments?

Several non-naturalist philosophers look for ways to maintain the objectivity of morals without making any (robust) ontological commitments. Recently Derek Parfit proposed an account of non-ontologically existing irreducible moral properties. My first aim in this paper is to outline that such an account is doomed to fail. My second aim in this paper is to argue that irreducible moral properties can be integrated with adaptions into an ontological framework such as E.J. Lowe’s four-category ontology. If it can be shown that irreducible moral properties have a proper place in such an ontology, then there is no need to distinguish between an ontological and non-ontological mode of existence, which, in turn helps to eschew the obscurities that this distinction brings in its wake.     

Exogenous temporal cues enhance recognition memory in an object-based manner

Exogenous attention enhances the perception of attended items in both a space-based and an object-based manner. Exogenous attention also improves recognition memory for attended items in the space-based mode. However, it has not been examined whether object-based exogenous attention enhances recognition memory. To address this issue, we examined whether a sudden visual change in a task-irrelevant stimulus (an exogenous cue) would affect participants' recognition memory for items that were serially presented around a cued time. The results showed that recognition accuracy for an item was strongly enhanced when the visual cue occurred at the same location and time as the item (Experiments 1 and 2). The memory enhancement effect occurred when the exogenous visual cue and an item belonged to the same object (Experiments 3 and 4) and even when the cue was counterpredictive of the timing of an item to be asked about (Experiment 5). The present study suggests that an exogenous temporal cue automatically enhances the recognition accuracy for an item that is presented at close temporal proximity to the cue and that recognition memory enhancement occurs in an object-based manner.     

Erotic Transference and Its Relationship to Childhood Seduction

The phenomenon of an erotic transference has long been a difficult, if not mysterious, process within clinical psychoanalysis. Traditionally, the development of an erotic transference has been viewed as a negative clinical event fueled by the analyst's countertransference reaction. A much neglected dimension, the relationship between childhood seduction and the development of an erotic transference, will be introduced and examined. In three clinical cases our data suggest that actual sexual abuse in childhood is a causal factor in the manifestation of an erotic transference in the clinical interaction of an analysis.     

Self-construal and the processing of covariation information in causal reasoning

Causal induction provides a nice test domain for examining the influence of individual-difference factors on cognition. The phenomena of both conditionalization and discounting reflect attention to multiple potential causes when people infer what caused an effect. We explored the hypothesis that individuals with an independent self-construal are relatively less sensitive to context (other causes) than are individuals with an interdependent self-construal in this domain. We found greater levels of conditionalization and data consistent with discounting for participants in whom we primed an interdependent self-construal than for participants in whom we primed an independent self-construal.     

Indirect personality assessment of the violent true believer

The violent true believer is an individual committed to an ideology or belief system which advances homicide and suicide as a legitimate means to further a particular goal. The author explores useful sources of evidence for an indirect personality assessment of such individuals. He illustrates both idiographic and nomothetic approaches to indirect personality assessment through comparative analyses of Timothy McVeigh, an American who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian who led the airplane attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. The risks of indirect personality assessment and ethical concerns are identified.     

Roman Catholic Approaches to the Qur'an since Vatican II

Vatican II opposes polemical attitudes to Islam but gives no specific guidance on the Qur'an. Modern Roman Catholic writing on the Qur'an includes a considerable variety of approaches. At the positive end of the spectrum: for Christian members of GRIC (Groupe de Recherche Islamo-Chrétien) the Qur'an is “an authentic Word of God, but one in part essentially different from the one in Jesus Christ”; George Dardess affirms that the Qur'an and the Eucharist are both means through which “God shares with us God's self through the word”; for Giulio Basetti-Sani the Qur'an is divine revelation but it does not contradict Christian doctrine; Jacques Dupuis sees the Qur'an as a real but imperfect revelation. More cautious approaches are found in the writings of Jacques Jomier and Christian Troll, for whom the biblical testimony to Christ is the decisive word of God, and not just one divine revelation alongside another in the Qur'an.     

Using logical relevance for question answering

We propose a novel method of determining the appropriateness of an answer to a question through a proof of logical relevance rather than a logical proof of truth. We define logical relevance as the idea that answers should not be considered as absolutely true or false in relation to a question, but should be considered true more flexibly in a sliding scale of aptness. This enables us to reason rigorously about the appropriateness of an answer even in cases where the sources we are getting answers from are incomplete or inconsistent or contain errors. We show how logical relevance can be implemented through the use of measured simplification, a form of constraint relaxation, in order to seek a logical proof than an answer is in fact an answer to a particular question. We then give an example of such an implementation providing a set of specific rules for this purpose.