Natural categories: Well defined or fuzzy sets?

Thirty college students made category membership decisions for each of 540 candidate exemplar-category name pairs (e.g.,apple-fruit) in each of two separate sessions. For highly typical category members (e.g., chair for thefurniture category), and for items unrelated to a category (e.g.,cucumber-furniture), subjects agreed with each other and were consistent in their decisions. However, for intermediate-typicality items (e.g.,bookends-furniture), subjects disagreed with each other and were frequently inconsistent from one session to the next. These data suggest that natural categories are fuzzy sets, with no clear boundaries separating category members from nonmembers.     

Why perfect being theology?

I display the historical roots of perfect being theology in Greco-Roman philosophy, and the distinctive reasons for Christians to take up a version of this project. I also rebut a recent argument that perfect-being reasoning should lead one to atheism.     

Does Skeptical Theism Lead to Moral Skepticism?

The evidential argument from evil seeks to show that suffering is strong evidence against theism. The core idea of the evidential argument is that we know of innocent beings suffering for no apparent good reason. Perhaps the most common criticism of the evidential argument comes from the camp of skeptical theism, whose lot includes William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and Stephen Wykstra. According to skeptical theism the limits of human knowledge concerning the realm of goods, evils, and the connections between values, undermines the judgment that what appears as pointless evil really is pointless. For all we know the suffering of an innocent being, though appearing pointless, in fact leads to a greater good. In this paper I argue that no one who accepts the doctrines of skeptical theism has a principled way of avoiding moral skepticism.     

Systematic theology at the crossroads: Explication of a symbolic universe or contextualization of a redemptive message?

The article compares Ted Peters' and Klaus Nürnberger's approaches in their recently published systematic theologies. Peters retains the traditional symbolic universe, explicating it for “a new era”; Nürnberger treats the evolving tradition as a series of contextualizations that must be replaced with new contextualizations as situations change. The difference and its consequences are demonstrated in the cases of the concept of God, eschatology, and the content of the gospel. At stake is the validity of the tradition on the one hand and the plausibility of the Christian faith in a modern context on the other.     

Thinking ahead or not? Natural aging and anticipation during reading

Despite growing evidence of young adults neurally pre-activating word features during sentence comprehension, less clear is the degree to which this generalizes to older adults. Using ERPs, we tested for linguistic prediction in younger and older readers by means of indefinite articles (a’s and an’s) preceding more and less probable noun continuations. Although both groups exhibited cloze probability-graded noun N400s, only the young showed significant article effects, indicating probabilistic sensitivity to the phonology of anticipated upcoming nouns. Additionally, both age groups exhibited prolonged increased frontal positivities to less probable nouns, although in older adults this effect was prominent only in a subset with high verbal fluency (VF). This ERP positivity to contextual constraint violations offers additional support for prediction in the young. For high VF older adults, the positivity may indicate they, too, engage in some form of linguistic pre-processing when implicitly cued, as may have occurred via the articles.     

Is Natural Kindness a Natural Kind?

Philosophical Studies -     

Are you free? Invitations to theology

Books reviewed in this article:
David Ford, Theology: A Very Short Introduction
Gareth Jones, Christian Theology: A Brief Introduction     

Passion or Perjury: Center or Circumference?

Are all transcendental claims a lost cause because they can have no objective empirical truth? Or does the transcendent still move among us as immanent, and, if so, how so? The question of ultimacy and the validity of the symbolic is considered through the views of Paul Ricoeur and Carl Jung.     

Psychological-type theory and Christian theology: a conflict between implicit and explicit religions?

This study analyses the relationship between psychological-type theory and Christian theology through the lens of implicit religion, drawing on the conceptualisation of implicit religion proposed by Edward Bailey, on the methodology for identifying implicit religion proposed by Tatjana Schnell, and on an heuristic framework derived from systematic theology. The case is argued that psychological-type theory can be conceptualised as implicit religion and implicit theology in a way that enables dialogue (and conflict) between psychological-type theory and Christian theology to be reconceptualised within the established field of the theology of religions.     

Gurus and Devotees: Guides or Gods? Pathology or Faith?

This research investigated whether individuals who were members of a religious group in which they participated in a guru-devotee relationship differ in particular psychological and developmental ways (the need to be mirrored, the need to idealize, and retrospective perceptions of styles of having been parented) from individuals who were members of other groups, religious or non-religious. One hundred and eight subjects were drawn from three groups: (a) a Hindu based guru-devotee group, (b) a Unitarian Universalist Church with a non-hierarchical polity, and (c) a non-religious group, a computer company. Subjects were men and women ranging in age from 23 to 83. Each completed the Goal Instability and Superiority Scales (GIS) the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ) and a demographics questionnaire. Results demonstrated no statistically significant differences among the groups on the measures of idealizing, mirroring, and perceived styles of having been parented, thus challenging the conventionally held belief that guru-devotee involvement is indicative of pathology. Private practice in     

Are Emotions Natural Kinds?

ABSTRACT— Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)—that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified objectively, then it is possible to make discoveries about that emotion. Indeed, the scientific study of emotion is founded on this assumption. In this article, I review the accumulating empirical evidence that is inconsistent with the view that there are kinds of emotion with boundaries that are carved in nature. I then consider what moving beyond a natural-kind view might mean for the scientific understanding of emotion.     

Ecology: Religious or Secular?

‘Ecology: religious or secular?’ addresses the issue of the relation between ecology and the idea of God. ‘Social’ interpretations of ecology seem to fit with traditional Christian models, such as stewardship, for grasping the relation between humanity and nature. ‘Deep’ interpretations of ecology, in which nature is understood to encompass humanity, appear, by contrast, less amenable to assimilation by Christianity. The choice – for so it is often presented – between ‘deep’ and ‘social’ forms of ecology is thus a test case for Christianity. Does the Christian theologian opt for ‘social’ ecology because it best addresses the issue of human embeddedness in nature or because it fits better with prior metaphysical commitments? This article argues that the only way such a dilemma can be addressed theologically is by thinking through at a fundamental level the character of God’s relation to the world. An enquiry in philosophical theology, through the consideration of the concept of divine simplicity, it is argued, suggests that Christianity is not condemned to ‘religious’ readings of ecology. That is, Christianity is not obliged to select evidence based on criteria derived from prior theological commitments (e.g. to the model of stewardship). Instead, beginning in the concept of God enables a truly ‘secular’ enquiry which acknowledges a wide range of evidence of our materiality. Indeed, such a ‘secular’ enquiry can only be established by reference to the idea of God.     

Holism: Revolution or reminder?

Conclusion Among the four propositions considered in this paper, we have found two which can contribute to a holistic environmental ethic: individuals acquire some of their value through participating in communities, including biotic communities, and wholes, including biotic communities, can have values which are not the sum of the values of the individuals composing them. However, accepting these propositions does not represent a revolutionary break distinguishing holism from traditional value theories or ethics. On the other hand, the holistic propositions we considered which would clearly differentiate holism from (at least some) traditional value theories and ethics are unacceptable. Consequently, if the propositions we have discussed fairly represent what goes under the name of holism, then rather than being a new kind of ethic, a viable ethical holism will make its contribution by emphasizing the communal elements of traditional ethics which have sometimes been neglected in glorifications of the individual. This would not be an inconsiderable contribution, philosophically, socially, or environmentally.