Philosophy Makes No Progress,So What Is the Point of It?

Philosophy makes no progress. It fails to do so in the way science and mathematics make progress. By “no progress” is meant that there is no successive advance of a well‐established body of knowledge—no views are definitively established or definitively refuted. Yet philosophers often talk and act as if the subject makes progress, and that its point and value lies in its doing so, while in fact they also approach the subject in ways that clearly contradict any claim to progress. This article presents evidence for, and a theoretical explanation of, the view that philosophy makes no progress, concluding with an account of what philosophy is and what the point and value of it is. Philosophy should not be shy about being what it is, nor should it pretend to be what it is not. What it is should be reflected in philosophizing and the way it is taught.     

What Makes Care Pastoral?

This essay argues for including two principal foci in both research and practice within pastoral theology. These foci include the care of souls (soul care) and care offered against the backdrop of “the Christian story.” The distinctiveness of pastoral care, as compared with other types of care, is also discussed.     

Dual Relationships and Pastoral Counseling: Asset or Liability?

Dual relationships are proscribed in the standards of ethical conduct for most professional groups that provide counseling or psychotherapy. Dual relationships are thought to be unethical because they cloud the clinical judgment of the counselor and may present conflicts of interest that prevent the counseling relationship from being beneficial. Pastors frequently provide counseling for troubled persons or families, yet they often maintain other roles and relationships with these persons and families. This article addresses the issue of the inevitability of dual relationships in pastoral counseling. Courses of action for handling dual relationships in pastoral counseling are identified.     

Assessment: What Role the Assessor?

The advent of automated assessment contains the seeds of both threat and promise for professional assessors. Placing the problem in the historical and sociological contexts, this article examines computer-based test interpretation (CBTI) and the frequently misunderstood role of actuarial data in relation to it. I argue that sound clinicianship is central not only to the development of adequate CBTI systems, but also to the systems' appropriate and skillful use in practice. When properly utilized by otherwise well-qualified clinicians, CBTI can substantially enhance practice.     

Endogenous Ketamine-Like Compounds and the NDE: If So, So What?

This commentary on Karl Jansen's ketamine model for the near-death experience expands upon and raises additional questions about several issues and hypotheses: self-experimentation as a source of data; ketamine's similarities to and differences from classical hallucinogens; the need for quantification of unusual subjective states; clinical research and toxicological implications of this model; drugs as gateways to religious states; and evolutionary versus religious significance of naturally occurring compounds released in the near-death state. I suggest future research that could help explicate several of these areas.Formerly Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine     

What Makes Crohn's Disease Patients Difficult to Manage? The Role of Psychosocial Factors

Most GI clinicians face the problem of a small group Crohn's Disease (CD) patients who function poorly and consume inordinate amounts of service with poor outcome. This study examines the hypothesis that psychosocial factors differentiate the CD patients who function poorly from the typical CD patient. A prototypal sample of CD patients with problems functioning, more typical CD patients (not selected for having problems in functioning), and healthy controls each completed a battery of validated psychosocial measures of disease-specific quality of life, coping skills, social support and life stress, perceived medical symptoms and life history factors. Chart data on hospital admissions, ER, GI, Surgeon, and GP visits were also collected. The CD patients with problems functioning reported more symptoms (GI and non-GI) and had many more ER, GI, and GP visits than the typical group. Psychologically, those with problems functioning had poorer quality of life and were more likely to cope using emotional discharge and support seeking. They experienced significantly more stress and reported a more chaotic family history. No differences on an experimental method of information processing biases were found between the CD groups, however. These results indicated that patients with problems functioning, selected by GI staff because they were best-case examples of functional difficulties, shared little with a matched group of typical CD patients. These patients likely require psychological as well as medical intervention to best manage their illness.     

What Makes for a Merry Christmas?

Despite the importance of Christmas within many cultures, researchhas not examined the types of experiences and activities that are associated withholiday well-being. Thus, we asked 117 individuals, ranging in age from 18 to 80,to answer questions about their satisfaction, stress, and emotional state during theChristmas season, as well as questions about their experiences, use of money, andconsumption behaviors. More happiness was reported when family and religiousexperiences were especially salient, and lower well-being occurred when spendingmoney and receiving gifts predominated. Engaging in environmentally consciousconsumption practices also predicted a happier holiday, as did being older and male.In sum, the materialistic aspects of modern Christmas celebrations may underminewell-being, while family and spiritual activities may help people to feel more satisfied.     

What Makes a Manipulated Agent Unfree?

Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much hangs on this issue because manipulation‐based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will.     

What Makes a Lengthy Article Brief?

ABSTRACT

Evidence continues to accumulate supporting an innate basis of human sexual identity as male or female. Selective mustering of these particles of data can congeal into a compelling argument.

Plyers of the law trade present one side of an argument in their legal brief. The reader is overwhelmed by its forceful logic and inevitable conclusions. The reader is dumbfounded that there is an opposition. Until reading the opponent's brief.

That is law. This is science. A peer-reviewed journal is a vehicle for balanced presentation of data with conclusions not outstripping the evidence.

This lengthy article on gender identity is a brief cross-dressed as science. It set out to “pass” but it was “read.”     

What Makes a Basic Structure Just?

In his multi-faceted attack on Rawls’s account of justice, G.A. Cohen has argued that the notion of basic structure is necessarily insensitive to the importance of informal social norms to social justice. The paper argues that the most plausible account of the basic structure is not blind to informal social norms in any meaningful sense. Whereas informal, non-legally coercive institutions are not part of the basic structure as such, their careful consideration is necessary for the assessment of whether the basic structure itself is indeed just. This claim is based on an account of what it means for normative principle to apply to institutions, which I expound in detail throughout the paper. Principles apply to institutions, I argue, not in that they restrain their conduct, but in that they indicate which social conditions they should bring about.

What is the Role of Culture in the Association of Relationships with Health?

There is now widespread recognition that relationships have important implications for health. To better understand this linkage, scholars have called for greater bridging between relationship science and the study of health. The goal of this paper is to raise awareness of another factor that needs to be incorporated into this area of study: culture. I recommend three steps that researchers can take to systematically incorporate culture into the study of relationships and health. First, I suggest four possible culture patterns to study: similarity, moderation, mediation, and novel constructs. Second, I suggest that theoretically meaningful cultural variation and multiple cultures be concurrently studied. The value of this strategy is highlighted via examples from three contexts that emphasize distinct approaches to self and emotion in relationships. Third, I suggest that key relationship processes in families and couples, two relationships with extensive implications for health, be studied. Selected studies of four relationship processes known to be relevant for health – expectations, formation and maintenance, emotions, and social support – are briefly reviewed to highlight the value of this focus. The theoretical and applied benefit of incorporating culture into the study of the association of relationships with health is discussed.     

The Zygote Argument Is Still Invalid: So What?

Philosophia - In “The Zygote Argument is Invalid: Now What?”, Kristin Mickelson argues that Alfred Mele’s original Zygote Argument is invalid: its two premises tell us merely that...     

What Makes People Revise Their Beliefs Following Contradictory Anecdotal Evidence?: The Role of Systemic Variability and Direct Experience

The extent to which belief revision is affected by systematic variability and direct experience of a conditional (if A then B) relation was examined in two studies. The first used a computer generated apparatus. This presented two rows of 5 objects. Pressing one of the top objects resulted in one of the bottom objects being lit up. The 139 adult participants were given one of two levels of experience (5 or 15 trials) and one of two types of apparatus. One of these was completely uniform, while the other had an element that randomly alternated in its result. Following the testing of the apparatus, participants were asked to rate their certainty of the action of the middle element, which was always uniform (the AB belief). Then they were told of an observation inconsistent with this belief. Participants were then asked whether they considered the AB belief or the anecdotal observation to be more believable. Results showed that increased experience decreased the tendency to reject the AB belief, when the apparatus did not have any randomness. However, the presence of a single element showing random variation in the system strongly increased rejection of this belief. A second study looked at the effect of a single random element on a mechanical system as well as an electronic system using graphical representations. This confirmed the generality of the effect of randomness on belief revision, and provided support for the effects of embedding a belief into a system of relations. These results provide some insight into the complex factors that determine belief revision.     

What’s So Special About Persecution?

The article focuses on examining the distinct nature of persecution. In the article I argue that on the grounds of common historical cases of persecution an account of the core components of the concept may be established. The core comprises three central elements: asymmetrical and systemic threat, severe and sustained harm, and unjust discriminatory targeting. I will conclude the paper by suggesting that none of the components alone make persecution anything distinct. However, the simultaneous occurrence of the components may be argued to amount to a separable class of harms that are among the worst-case scenarios for those having to endure them.     

What Makes Good Ministry Good? Women in Ministry

Abstract

What are the special ethical issues faced by women in ministry? In this article conventional assumptions about ethics in ministry, taken from the work of Gaylord Noyce, are compared with the experiences, attitudes and expectations of ordered and lay members of the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada in two Canadian regions. The similarities and differences are then explored in conjunction with more contemporary theories. Conventional approaches to pastoral ethics and women in ministry limit concern to issues of discrimination in wages, employment and advancement. This article concludes that while such discrimination exists, it is not nearly as great a concern for women as the fear of sexual harassment. This fear is not only great but well founded. The research supports the claim that for a woman to be engaged in good ministry, she is required to do it differently from men.