Response to Stuart Kauffman: The Paradox of Divine Action and Scientific Truth

We three authors compare and contrast Stuart Kauffman's concept of the “cosmic mind” with similar ideas developed in our recent book, The Unity of Truth: Solving the Paradox of Science and Religion (IUniverse, 2012). Albert Einstein was known to have said: “Science without religion is lame, religion with science is blind.” We authors make use of the “paradox resolution” methods of physics to find a non-conflicting method by which God's actions communicate with human beings without violating any of the laws of science. The “communications paradox” is resolved by hypothesizing non-causal quantum-mechanical measurements as the way God communicates. the quantum-mechanical resolution of the “communications paradox” is completely consistent with both theist belief and the laws of science, whereas Kauffman's “cosmic mind” concept is seen to be consistent with pantheism.     

Truth as a ‘Living Bond’: A Dialectical Response to Recent Rhetorical Theology

Abstract: In recent years, the Radical Orthodoxy movement (especially John Milbank) has developed an influential theological response to the putative nihilism inherent in modern philosophical tendencies to construe the relation between finite and infinite realities as utterly disjunctive and thus incapable of mediation. This response, which generally implies the championing of a ‘participatory’ ontology, has been very hostile to Protestant or ‘dialectical’ theology, whose insistence upon an ‘indirect’ rather than a ‘rhetorical’ form of truth is taken to implicate such theology in the nihilism of a ‘univocal’ ontology. In this article I offer another reading of the dialectical, via Søren Kierkegaard and René Girard, according to which its anti‐objectivism is due not to the inheritance of modern epistemological dilemmas but to a quite biblical existential rigor. I argue, contrary to Milbank, that this rigor is not finally gnostic, but instead that it alone can preserve the form of truth as a living, spiritual form.     

Coherence and Truth: A Cognitive Model of Propositional Truth Attribution

The truth value assigned to a proposition is treated by philosophers, logicians, and most psychologists as an abstract construct, a theoretical object outside the cognitive system. Breaking away from this consensus, we propose to carry out a psychological investigation to analyse the objective, verifiable properties of representations categorized as true by human individuals. We shall reject the conception whereby attributing a truth value to a proposition is the result of the activation of knowledge about the truth of that proposition. We shall also exclude the conception of truth as the result of the establishment of a correspondence with the world. We propose that truth be understood as the result of a decision about the values taken on by the conditions for fulfilment of the act of referencing in a mental model. Our cognitive model of propositional truth attribution is built on the assumption that the truth value of a proposition is determined by the ability of that proposition to fit into the theory of the field to which it refers. This attribution is viewed as a two-stage cognitive activity. During the first stage, the features defining the coherence of the proposition in the activated mental model determine its plausibility value. This defines a generally inconsistent set of truth candidates. The second stage involves selecting the subset containing all propositions which, in context, will be considered true. Two selection criteria are used: maximum consistency and connectivity. The preliminary experimental results proved to be compatible with the proposed model.     

Reclaiming the Idea of Truth: Some Thoughts on Theory in Response to Practice

This paper examines the idea of truth, its place in therapy and in the history of systemic theory. Beginning with some practice fragments, the theory exploration considers the idea of truth in the modernist frame, the paradox of the modernist metaphor in describing the activity of therapy, and the peculiarities of the idea of truth in the earlier systemic therapies. Postmodernist and social constructionist ideas are then explored, and meaning is identified as the concept which currently occupies the place of an idea of truth in systemic discourse. It is argued that meaning as a concept is insufficiently attached to an idea of (external) reality or to an understanding of the relationship of the individual to knowledge of her/his experience of the world. Reclaiming the idea of truth as an emotional and social process has more potential to meet the complexities of human experience in thinking about the process of therapeutic change.     

Iconic memory: A reply to Professor Holding

Professor Holding has argued that the partial report superiority normally taken as evidence for the existence of iconic memory might instead be due to cue anticipation or output interference. I have suggested that both of these alternative explanations are inconsistent with the finding that the partial report superiority diminishes rapidly with increasing cue delay. In addition, Sperling’s original partial report experiment was designed in such a way that cue anticipation could not have occurred; and both his results with selection by letter vs number and Averbach and Coriell’s bar-marker results indicate that output interference effects are absent or negligible in tachistoscopic experiments. Consequently, I have concluded that the partial report superiority, and especially its decline with increasing delay, remains as strong evidence in favor of the conventional view of iconic memory. Furthermore, if this view were wrong, there would remain no way of giving a satisfactory account of (a) Averbach and Coriell’s results, (b) “direct” investigations of visual persistence, or (c) integration and interruption effects in backward visual masking.