Not Always Worth the Effort: Difficulty and the Value of Achievement

Recent literature has argued that what makes certain activities ranging from curing cancer to running a marathon count as achievements, and what makes achievements intrinsically valuable is, centrally, that they involve great effort. Although there is much the difficulty‐based view gets right, I argue that it generates the wrong results about some central cases of achievement, and this is because it is too narrowly focused on only one perfectionist capacity, the will. I propose a revised perfectionist account on which an achievement is an activity that fully exercises or expresses any number of a range of perfectionist capacities.     

The Value of Achievements

This article gives an account of what makes achievements valuable. Although the natural thought is that achievements are valuable because of the product, such as a cure for cancer or a work of art, I argue that the value of the product of an achievement is not sufficient to account for its overall value. Rather, I argue that achievements are valuable in virtue of their difficulty. I propose a new perfectionist theory of value that acknowledges the will as a characteristic human capacity, and thus holds that the exercise of the will, and therefore difficulty, is intrinsically valuable.     

The Constitutional Theatre

Constitutionalism is a typically modernist project in that it seeks to dictate social order by means of institutional design. This project, however, fails in two ways. Empirically, constitutionalism is confronted with the fact that constitutions have limited control over their social environment. Epistemologically, constitutionalism has great difficulty in finding a convincing foundational relation between abstract constitutional provisions and constitutional norms for concrete situations. On the basis of this poor record, it is hard to comprehend how constitutionalism remains such an influential factor in our polity. This article tries to explain our adherence to the philosophy of constitutional ordering by analysing its function in constitutional discourse. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effects of difficulty and diagnosticity on choice among tasks in relation to achievement motivation and perceived ability.

The experiment is a partial replication of a study conducted by Trope. It investigates the effects of two person characteristics (achievement motive and perceived own ability) and two task characteristics (difficulty and diagnostic value about own ability) on choice among achievement tasks. In accordance with the results of Trope, it was found that high-diagnostic tasks were preferred to low-diagnostic tasks, independent of their difficulty. Trope's finding that high resultant achievers choose high-diagnostic tasks over low-diagnostic tasks to a greater extent than low resultant achievers was not replicated. However, the perceived degree of own ability affected choice behavior: When easy and difficult tasks were both high in diagnosticity, subjects high in perceived ability preferred difficult over easy tasks, whereas subjects low in perceived ability preferred easy over difficult tasks. From this latter finding it is concluded that a self-informational conception of choice behavior has to include the subjective probability of success at tasks as a determinant of choice, in addition to objective difficulty and diagnostic value.     

Lucky achievement: virtue epistemology on the value of knowledge

Virtue epistemology argues that knowledge is more valuable than Gettierized belief because knowledge is an achievement, but Gettierized belief is not. The key premise in the achievement argument is that achievement is apt (successful because competent) and Gettierized belief is inapt (successful because lucky). I first argue that the intuition behind the achievement argument is based wrongly on the fact that ‘being successful because lucky’ implicates ‘being not competent enough’. I then offer an argument from moral luck to argue that virtue epistemologists should maintain that knowledge is no more valuable than Gettierized belief.     

Goals and task difficulty expectations modulate striatal responses to feedback

The striatum plays a critical role in learning from reward, and it has been implicated in learning from performance-related feedback as well. Positive and negative performance-related feedback is known to engage the striatum during learning by eliciting a response similar to the reinforcement signal for extrinsic rewards and punishments. Feedback is an important tool used to teach new skills and promote healthful lifestyle changes, so it is important to understand how motivational contexts can modulate its effectiveness at promoting learning. While it is known that striatal responses scale with subjective factors influencing the desirability of rewards, it is less clear how expectations and goals might modulate the striatal responses to cognitive feedback during learning. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the effects of task difficulty expectations and achievement goals on feedback processing during learning. We found that individuals who scored high in normative goals, which reflect a desire to outperform other students academically, showed the strongest effects of our manipulation. High levels of normative goals were associated with greater performance gains and exaggerated striatal sensitivity to positive versus negative feedback during blocks that were expected to be more difficult. Our findings suggest that normative goals may enhance performance when difficulty expectations are high, while at the same time modulating the subjective value of feedback as processed in the striatum.     

Motivated but not engaged: The implicit achievement motive requires difficult or unclear task difficulty conditions to exert an impact on effort

Integrating the achievement motive literature and motivational intensity theory, we expected the implicit achievement motive (nAch) to directly determine effort mobilization when task difficulty is unclear. However, nAch should interact with task difficulty in determining effort mobilization when task difficulty is clear. Participants worked on an easy versus difficult memory task (Study 1) or a clear versus unclear arithmetic task (Study 2). We used the Picture-Story-Exercise to assess nAch and pre-ejection period (PEP) to operationalize effort. As predicted, PEP reactivity was strong in the difficult-high-nAch condition and in the unclear-high-nAch condition but low in the other three conditions. Supporting motivational intensity theory, our results showed that nAch requires difficult or unclear task conditions to exert a noticeable impact on effort.     

Social Class,Merit and Equality of Opportunity in Education

The paper offers to substantiate a claim about the so-called Meritocratic Conception of how educational opportunities ought to be distributed. Such a conception holds an individual’s prospects for educational achievement may be a function of that individual’s talent or effort levels but should not be influenced by their social class background. The paper highlights the internal tension in the Meritocratic Conception between on the one hand a prohibition on the influence of social class on educational opportunities and on the other a permission to allow unequal educational opportunities on the basis of talent and effort. This tension obtains because individuals’ talent and effort are themselves subject to influence by social class. The paper makes a positive case for an interpretation of the Meritocratic Conception that resolves this tension in favour of an egalitarian version, such that social class represents an objectionable determinant of unequal educational prospects even when its influence is mediated through the cultivation of talent and effort. This argument is further supported through an explanation that the character of social class as a systemic social source of the structure of individuals’ opportunities makes it an objectionable influence on educational opportunities.     

Modeling experimentally induced strategy shifts

In dynamic decision-making environments, observers must continuously adjust their decision-making strategies. Previous research has focused on internal fluctuations in decision mechanisms, without regard to how these changes are induced by environmental changes. We developed a simple paradigm in which we manipulated task difficulty, thereby inducing changes in decision processes. We applied this paradigm to recognition memory, manipulating task difficulty by changing the similarity of lures to targets. More difficult decision environments caused participants to make more careful decisions, but these changes did not appear immediately. We propose a simple theoretical account for these data, using a dynamic version of signal detection theory fitted to individual subjects. Our model represents a significant departure from existing models because it incorporates subject-controlled parameters that may adjust over time in response to environmental changes.     

Introduction to the Panel: “Time’s Up?”: The Psychodynamic Politics of Sexual Coercion and #MeToo

In deconstructing the alchemy of sexuality, awash in its painful pleasures, these papers consider how the eros of erotic pressure can default into the trauma of sexual coercion. They also consider how, from a feminist perspective, the “personal is (still) political,” but how, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the sheer messiness of sex makes it extremely difficult to hold it to account. In sexuality, surrender and submission live in very close quarters, making “coercion” a very complex matter.     

风险情景中不同成就动机者的冒险行为特征

采用计算机模拟和问卷的方法,研究不同成就动机的个体在动态情境下的冒险行为。结合成就动机的静态与动态理论,考察具有不同程度的成就动机个体在动态环境中的行为差异。结果发现,在动态情境的初期,可以看到不同成就动机的被试有稳定的偏好：成就动机高的个体偏爱中等难度的任务,成就动机低的个体偏爱较易或者是较难难度的任务;随着行为的动态进行,个体的冒险行为呈现出与静态情境中不同的规律性：成就动机高的个体在初期选择的中等难度的基础上逐渐选择更难的任务;成就动机低的个体在初期选择较易难度任务的基础上也逐渐选择更难的任务;相对于成就动机低的个体,成就动机高的个体会更慢地选择难度高的任务;高成就动机个体出现非典型转换次数显著低于低成就动机的个体。     

Syntax in A Dynamic Brain

Proponents of the language of thought (LOT) thesis are realists when it comes to syntactically structured representations, and must defend their view against instrumentalists, who would claim that syntactic structures may be useful in describing cognition, but have no more causal powers in governing cognition than do the equations of physics in guiding the planets. This paper explores what it will take to provide an argument for LOT that can defend its conclusion from instrumentalism. I illustrate a difficulty in this project by discussing arguments for LOT put forward by Horgan and Tienson. When their evidence is viewed in the light of results in connectionist research, it is hard to see how a realist conception of syntax can be formulated and defended.

     

The interplay between achievement goals and specific target goals in determining performance

This study examined relatively broad achievement goals (performance-approach, performance-avoid, mastery), and aspects of more specific target goals (goal difficulty, expectancy, framing) as predictors of academic performance. All three achievement goals predicted academic performance (with performance-avoid goal predicting poorer performance, and performance-approach and mastery goals predicting better performance). The association between performance-avoid goals and poorer performance was mediated by negative framing. The positive relations between performance-approach and mastery goals and performance were mediated by goal difficulty. In all cases, the aspects of the specific goal predicted performance independent of the broader achievement goals, but the achievement goals did not predict independent of the specific goals. Discussion focuses on how goals of different types combine to affect performance.     

Meno’s paradox and medicine

The measurement of diagnostic accuracy is an important aspect of the evaluation of diagnostic tests. Sometimes, medical researchers try to discover the set of observations that are most accurate of all by directly inspecting diseased and not-diseased patients. This method is perhaps intuitively appealing, as it seems a straightforward empirical way of discovering how to identify diseased patients, which amounts to trying to correlate the results of diagnostic tests with disease status. I present three examples of researchers who try to produce definitive diagnostic criteria by directly inspecting diseased and not diseased patients. Despite this method’s intuitive appeal, I will argue that it is impossible to carry out. Before researchers can inspect these patients to discover definitive diagnostic criteria, they must be able to distinguish diseased and not-diseased patients; and they do not know how to do this, because this is what they are trying to discover. I suspect the intuitive appeal of directly inspecting patients makes this difficult to appreciate. To counter this difficulty, I present this problem as a manifestation of ‘Meno’s paradox’, which was described in classical antiquity, and of ‘the problem of nomic measurement’, described more recently. Considering these philosophical problems may help researchers address the methodological issues they face when evaluating diagnostic tests.

     

Why,and to What Extent,Is Sexual Infidelity Wrong?

Sexual infidelity is widespread, but it is also widely condemned, yet relatively little philosophical work has been done on what makes it wrong and how wrong it is. In this paper, I argue that sexual infidelity is wrong if it involves breaking a commitment to be sexually exclusive, which has special significance in the relationship. However, it is not necessarily worse than other kinds of infidelity, and the context in which it takes place ought to be considered. I finish the paper by looking at how the hegemonic norm of monogamy makes infidelity both more likely and more difficult to deal with.     

Type and token bigram frequencies for two-through nine-letter words and the prediction of anagram difficulty

Recent research on anagram solution has produced two original findings. First, it has shown that a new bigram frequency measure called top rank, which is based on a comparison of summed bigram frequencies, is an important predictor of anagram difficulty. Second, it has suggested that the measures from a type count are better than token measures at predicting anagram difficulty.Testing these hypotheses has been difficult because the computation of the bigram statistics is difficult. We present a program that calculates bigram measures for two-to nine-letter words. We then show how the program can be used to compare the contribution of top rank and other bigram frequency measures derived from both a token and a type count. Contrary to previous research, we report that type measures are not better at predicting anagram solution times and that top rank is not the best predictor of anagram difficulty. Lastly we use this program to show that type bigram frequencies are not as good as token bigram frequencies at predicting word identification reaction time.     

Von Balthasar's Aims In His Theological Aesthetics

The volume and diversity of Balthasar's output makes it hard to grasp his theological purpose. This article considers the aims of Herrlichkeit in particular. To take the beautiful seriously is ontologically important but evangelically more urgent still. The Gospel requires sensitivity to the form of Jesus Christ. If the anxieties of those who fear the aesthetic will displace the ethical and even the religious can be overcome, this approach permits a wonderful integration of apologetics and dogma, fundamental and systematic theology. This primary aim of Herrlichkeit is supported by showing it is not unknown to the history of Christian thought. To gain a proper idea of its scope, however, requires exploration of pre-Christian paganism's estimate of the beauty of being, and of the human capacity to register it. then, under the impact of revelation, it is possible to locate the climax of ontological thinking about beauty in the work of Aquinas—which integrated revealed and natural sources in an account of being as glorious because given away: supremely on the Cross, in self-diffusion of the Trinitarian life. Balthasar's purpose now shifts. He will show how Western metaphysics declined from this high-point of perception—but in such a way that the glory of being took refuge in the holy folly of the saints. Finally, he aims to show how re-reading Scripture in the light of the above can generate the conviction that the message of the Bible is ultimately about the self-giving divine glory as universal foundation of history and the world.     

Performance as a function of resultant achievement motivation (perceived ability) and perceived difficulty

Subjects worked on a task which was described as either easy or difficult. When the task was thought to be difficult, Ss high in resultant achievement motivation performed better than those low in resultant achievement motivation. However, when the task was perceived as easy, the high motive group performed worse than the low group. These results confirm a prediction from Kukla's attributional theory of performance, in which resultant achievement motivation is conceived as a measure of perceived ability. They are not, however, deriveable from Spence's theory of the effects on performance of objective task difficulty, nor from Weiner's hypothesis concerning the motivational effects of success and failure. On the other hand, Kukla's theory provides an explanation for both the data usually cited in support of Spence's position and those taken to confirm Weiner's hypothesis. The relationship between the present results and Atkinson's theory of achievement motivation, which also hypothesizes an effect of perceived difficulty on performance, is discussed.