Do Belief Reports Report Beliefs

Abstract: The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this "Specification Assumption", that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuitively more plausible approach to the semantics of belief reports. But this approach must confront a puzzle of its own: it turns out that every case is a Paderewski case, at least potentially.     

Scientific approach of health by INSERM youth clubs

Health education must rest on the notion of responsibility, for the young must be aware of their own health. This can be achieved through the acquisition of a scientific approach, but also by realizing the realities of science. On this account, INSERM youth clubs are an illustration of the partnership which can exist between the worlds of science and of youth.     

Dehumanization and its effects on the ghetto family

Abstract

Object-directed dehumanization leads to self-directed dehumanization. The poor in our midst become dehumanized by the benign neglect they suffer from the rest of society. The family counselor is called to create conditions for rehumanization, as an agent of change and social advocate. His role is to help the poor change society and reject the dehumanization process so that they cease to be powerless victims. He must provide information and act as liason to social agencies. He also must create a counseling relationship which allowes for the expression of rage and for the exploration of feelings of anger.     

优化乙肝治疗方案真实评价治疗效果

目前乙肝治疗比较混乱,给患者带来许多损失,优化乙肝治疗方案,是从患者病情出发,实施个体化治疗,目标是安全、有效、经济和适度,处于抗病毒最佳时机的患者可以考虑使用干扰素或拉米夫定;乙肝病毒携带者暂时禁止使用药物治疗;急性乙肝只给与基本治疗,待其自愈.实施优化方案,杜绝各种各样的商业广告;凡是尝试性治疗,一律按照新药临床验证程序进行,一律实行免费.治疗乙肝的疗效最终取决于持久、完全效应,不应局限在病毒阴转或肝功正常上.     

Contractarianism, Other-regarding Attitudes, and the Moral Standing of Nonhuman Animals

abstract  Contractarianism roots moral standing in an agreement among rational agents in the circumstances of justice. Critics have argued that the theory must exclude nonhuman animals from the protection of justice. I argue that contractarianism can consistently accommodate the notion that nonhuman animals are owed direct moral consideration. They can acquire their moral status indirectly, but their claims to justice can be as stringent as those among able-bodied rational adult humans. Any remaining criticisms of contractarianism likely rest on a disputable moral realism; contractarianism can underwrite the direct moral considerability of nonhuman animals by appealing to a projectivist quasi-realism.     

Influence of an intertrial interval on sequential effects related to preparatory period duration for reaction time-task

In reaction time tasks, where the moment of occurrence of the response signal is uncertain, the temporal constraints of preparatory processes imply that subjects distribute their preparation during the preparatory period. The notion of cost of preparation has been proposed to explain the time course of these processes. This experiment was run to determine the effect of the cost of preparation on a serial-RT task and on a RT task where a rest interval of various possible durations (3, 6, or 9 sec.) is introduced. 12 subjects were tested. Data show that the amount spent on preparation during a trial affects the subject's performance during the next trials. But an hypothesis about memory search must also be advanced to explain the effect of the rest interval on the relationship of RT and the current preparatory period.     

MUST ETHICS BE THEOLOGICAL? A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW PRAGMATISTS

In the last decade there has been a pragmatic turn in the work of those doing Christian ethics, especially as represented by the work of Jeffrey Stout and Franklin Gamwell. The pragmatic turn represents a critique of the highly influential work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, which argues for a strongly intra-church ethics. The pragmatists are correct in arguing that Christian ethics must engage the public sphere. However, I argue that they are deeply mistaken in their claim that this engagement must rest on a weak or non-existent theology. I show that the claim that robust theology adds nothing to ethics, and that we can get along without it, is unsustainable.     

Can Bioethics be Lutheran?

Abstract :  A Lutheran bioethics must rest on a reconstructed version of Martin Luther's ethics. In the article it is shown that this ethics is Christian in that it has faith in Jesus Christ as its source. But the ethics of neighbor love is practiced in the secular world where it to some extent corresponds with natural law ethics. A Christian believer acts ethically both as an individual and as a citizen. Against the background of this understanding of Lutheran ethics, the position of Ted Peters and Gilbert Meilaender on genetics and stem cells is presented and criticized. One conclusion is that there is no Lutheran doctrine on the status of the human embryo.     

RETHINKING THE IMAGE OF GOD

Abstract The present ecological crisis imposes a rethinking of the relation between the human being and the rest of nature. Traditional theological articulations of this relation have proven problematic where they foster separatism and anthropocentrism, which give a false report on the relation and have a negative impact on thinking and acting in relation to nature. One place to begin rethinking is through an exploration of the affirmation that the human being is “made in the image of God,”imago dei. Some ways of construing the theological meaning of this designation are more helpful than others. Science has recognized the extent to which the human being is not only dependent upon but even emergent from nature. We are made of the same “stuff” that makes up the rest of the universe. We are nature. The place of the human being is much more modest, recent, and precarious than usually acknowledged in theological reflection. New ways of interpreting our role within nature must evolve out of this new understanding. Philip Hefner has proposed that we think of the human being as created co‐creator. His is a distinctive and promising contribution. This essay responds with both affirmations and friendly questions.     

The import of infancy for individual, family, and societal development: commentary on the special section: does infancy matter?

Across their life spans humans actualize a rich potential for cognitive and behavioral plasticity, a set of developmental changes that require regulation of organism-context relations on the part of both the individual and society. An individual’s action on the context must be started in infancy and maintained in subsequent periods of life for adaptive functioning to occur across ontogeny. The process of the individual acting as an agent of his or her own development is continuous, although the particular ways in which such control is manifested will change in developmentally appropriate ways. As demonstrated by the papers in this special issue, the significance of infancy for the rest of the life-span rests on an integration of this continuity and discontinuity within the person-context developmental system.     

Against 'Time–Slices'

The concept of 'time–slice' turns out to be at best philosophically inconsequential, I argue. Influential philosophies of time as apparently diverse as those of Dummett, Lewis and Bergson, thus must come to grief. The very idea of 'time–slice' upon which they rest – the very idea of spatialising time, and of rendering the resulting 'slices' of potentially infinitely small measure – turns out on closer acquaintance not to amount to anything consequential that has yet been made sense of. Time is, rather, a ubiquitous lived 'tool' for the organisation and co–ordination of human activities, a tool so completely involved in those activities that Anti–Realism about it is as unstateable as Realism about it is unnecessary.     

Culture and intelligence

Intelligence cannot be fully or even meaningfully understood outside its cultural context. Work that seeks to study intelligence acontextually risks the imposition of an investigator's view of the world on the rest of the world. Moreover, work on intelligence within a single culture mayfail to do justice to the range of skills and knowledge that may constitute intelligence broadly defined and risks drawing false and hasty generalizations. This article considers the relevance of culture to intelligence, as well as its investigation, assessment, and development. Studies that show the importance of understanding intelligence in its cultural context are described; the author concludes that intelligence must be understood in such context.     

Test–retest reliability of the soleus H-reflex excitability measured during human walking

The purpose of the study was to investigate with what accuracy the soleus H-reflex modulation and excitability could be measured during human walking on two occasions separated by days. The maximal M-wave (Mmax) was measured at rest in the standing position. During treadmill walking every stimulus elicited an M-wave of 25 ± 10% of Mmax in the soleus muscle and a supra-maximal stimulus elicited a maximal M-wave 60 ms after the first stimulus. Both Mmax during rest and during walking were later used for normalization. When normalized to resting Mmax, the peak reflex amplitude during walking was 5% lower on Day 2 than on Day 1 (p = .32). However, when the peak H-reflex was normalized to Mmax in every sweep, Day 2 showed a significant 15% lower amplitude (p = .037). The same pattern was found for the mean H-reflex. Spearman’s Rho was .92 when normalized to resting Mmax but .88 when normalized to Mmax in every sweep. The Pearson product was used to identify one participant at a time on Day 1 among all seven participants on Day 2. For both normalization procedures 5 of 7 participants were identified by this test. Since 5 of 7 participants were recognized between days, it must be recommended to use 10-15 participants for training or intervention studies as far as the H-reflex pattern of modulation during movement is concerned.     

NATURE, GOD'S GREAT PROJECT

Abstract. Scientific understandings suggest very strongly that humans are related to the rest of nature in ways that are expressed both by metaphors of genetic kinship and by ecological interrelatedness. The image of genetic kinship is the more intense image, and also the most likely to cause discomfort for Western traditions. Both secular critical reason and Western religious traditions favor images that portray the relation of humans to nature in terms of separation, domination, and stewardship. At best they are ambivalent toward portrayals of a more intense relatedness. In order to best serve our self-understandings, we must recognize (1) our intrinsic kinship with the rest of nature; (2) that our purpose as humans is to serve nature; (3) that we are preparers for nature's future; (4) that our highest calling as humans is to discern the dimensions of ultimacy in nature and to conceptualize them. In this, we follow God's own pattern of investing in nature as the greatest project.     

How to Understand Internalism

Internalism about practical reasons claims that there is a necessary connection between what an agent has reason to do and what he would be motivated to do if he were in privileged or optimal conditions. Internalism is traditionally supported by the claim that it alone can capture two (supposed) conditions of adequacy for any theory of practical reasons, that reasons must be capable of justifying actions, and that reasons must be capable of explaining intentional acts. Robert Johnson ( The Philosophical Quarterly , 49 (1999), pp. 53–71) has argued that versions of internalism which avoid obvious problems nevertheless fail to capture both conditions. I argue that Johnson's criticisms rest upon a misinterpretation of the 'explanatory condition', and I proceed to formulate a version of internalism which will allow practical reasons to have both justificatory and explanatory force.     

A Walk Down the Lane Gives Wings to Your Brain. Restorative Benefits of Rest Breaks on Cognition and Self‐Control

We investigated the effect of rest breaks on mental‐arithmetic performance, examining performance as a function of the factor rest, time‐on‐task, and demand. We asked the following questions: (i) Does rest (vs a continuous‐work condition) improve cognitive performance? (ii) Is active rest (taking a walk) better than passive rest (watching a video)? (iii) Do compensatory effects of rest increase with time‐at‐work? (iv) Are there differential effects of rest on automatic and controlled processes? (v) Are there differential effects of rest on performance speed versus variability? The results indicate that while rest is generally beneficial for performance, these benefits are similar for active and passive rest. The benefits increase with time‐on‐task and are larger for high (vs low) demand. Further, the effects on average response speed originated only partially from a reduction in the probability of attentional failure, as indicated by reaction‐time (ex‐Gaussian model) distributional and delta‐plot analysis.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Success modulates consolidation of a visuomotor adaptation task

Consolidation is a time-dependent process that is responsible for the storage of information in long-term memory. As such, it plays a crucial role in motor learning. Prior research suggests that some consolidation processes are triggered only when the learner experiences some success during practice. In the present study, we tested whether consolidation processes depend on the objective performance of the learner or on the learner's subjective evaluation of his or her own performance (i.e., how successful the learner believes he or she is). Four groups of participants performed 2 sessions of a visuomotor adaptation task for which they had to learn a new internal model of limb kinematics; these sessions were either 5 min or 24 hr apart. The task was identical for all participants, but each group was given a difficult or an easy objective that affected the participants' evaluation of their own performance during the initial practice session. All groups adapted their movements similarly to the rotation of the visual feedback during the first session. However, when retested the following day, participants who had a 24-hr rest interval and had initially experienced success performed significantly better than those who did not feel successful or who were given a 5-min rest interval. Our results indicate that a certain level of subjective success must be experienced to trigger certain consolidation processes.     

Learning overhypotheses with hierarchical Bayesian models

Inductive learning is impossible without overhypotheses, or constraints on the hypotheses considered by the learner. Some of these overhypotheses must be innate, but we suggest that hierarchical Bayesian models can help to explain how the rest are acquired. To illustrate this claim, we develop models that acquire two kinds of overhypotheses--overhypotheses about feature variability (e.g. the shape bias in word learning) and overhypotheses about the grouping of categories into ontological kinds like objects and substances.     

Overdetermination and Elimination

Abstract

I focus on two arguments, due to Jaegwon Kim and Trenton Merricks, that move from claims about the sufficiency of one class of causes to the reduction or elimination of another class of entity, via claims about overdetermination. I argue that in order to validate their move from sufficiency to reduction or elimination, both Kim and Merricks must assume that there can be no ‘weak overdetermination’; i.e., that no single effect can have numerically distinct but dependently sufficient causes occurring at the same time. One problem for both arguments is that weak overdetermination isn't obviously objectionable. That point has been well made before. But I want here to go further than merely shifting the burden of proof onto the advocates of overdetermination arguments. I want to tease out why they are so convinced that we must resist weak overdetermination and explain why their conviction is misguided. Both Merricks and Kim, I shall argue, ultimately rest their case on the same motivating principle, which I call the principle of additional causal powers. This principle, I argue further, should be rejected. It lacks argumentative support, and it begs the question against those at whom the arguments are directed.