Neither Fish nor Fowl: Implicit Attitudes as Patchy Endorsements

Implicit attitudes are mental states that appear sometimes to cause agents to act in ways that conflict with their considered beliefs. Implicit attitudes are usually held to be mere associations between representations. Recently, however, some philosophers have suggested that they are, or are very like, ordinary beliefs: they are apt to feature in properly inferential processing. This claim is important, in part because there is good reason to think that the vocabulary in which we make moral assessments of ourselves and of others is keyed to folk psychological concepts, like ‘belief’, and not to concepts that feature only in scientific psychology: if implicit attitudes are beliefs there is a prima facie case for thinking that they can serve as the basis for particular kinds of moral assessment. In this paper I argue that while implicit attitudes have propositional structure, their sensitivity and responsiveness to other mental representations is too patchy and fragmented for them to properly be considered beliefs. Instead, they are a sui generis kind of mental state, a state I dub patchy endorsements.     

Endorsements as Voting Cues: Heuristic and Systematic Processing in Initiative Elections1

This project explores how organizational endorsements influence voter attitudes during initiative elections. Building on the heuristic‐systematic model (Chaiken, 1980; Chen & Chaiken, 1999), we propose that voters use organizational endorsements as heuristic cues to help them develop their attitudes toward initiatives. It is hypothesized that the influence of endorsements on initiative voting depends on the applicability, availability, and diagnosticity of the endorsement voting cue and on the degree to which the voter is motivated to fully evaluate the arguments behind the initiative. An experiment was conducted in which motivation (processing goal instructions), cue applicability (match between endorsing organization and initiative), and initiative (four different hypothetical ballot issues) were manipulated. Results showed support for our first two hypotheses, but not for the third.     

Endorsements by Mexican-Americans of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory: cross-ethnic comparison

Gender-related personality traits among Mexican-American men and women were examined. The sample consisted of 307 Mexican-Americans (150 women, 157 men) in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American community in South Texas. Mexican-American men scored significantly higher than the women on eight masculine items, whereas Mexican-American women scored higher than the men on four feminine items. A comparison between the scores of Mexican-Americans on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory with those of the original sample in the inventory's manual showed that the scores for the Masculinity and Femininity subscales for both Mexican-American men and women were not significantly different from those of the original sample. A significant difference, however, was found on some of the items of the inventory. Analysis also indicated that more Mexican-American men were categorized as Feminine and Androgynous than were non-Hispanic Euro-American males in the original sample. Among Mexican-American women there were more individuals classified as Masculine and Undifferentiated and a lower percentage as Feminine than among the original sample. Implications and recommendations based on the results are discussed.     

Propositions as games as types

Without violating the spirit of Game-Theoretical semantics, its results can be re-worked in Martin-Löf's Constructive Type Theory by interpreting games as types of Myself's winning strategies. The philosophical ideas behind Game-Theoretical Semantics in fact highly recommend restricting strategies to effective ones, which is the only controversial step in our interpretation. What is gained, then, is a direct connection between linguistic semantics and computer programming.The idea of re-working the results of Game-Theoretical Semantics in Martin-Löf's Type Theory dates back to a seminar on constructive logic led by Jan von Plato in the Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, since Spring 1986. I have gained a lot from discussions in the seminar and personally with Jan von Plato. The essential content of this paper has also been presented in the Departments of Mathematics and Philosophy, University of Stockholm, in seminars led by Per Martin-Löf and Dag Prawitz, respectively, and in this case also I have enjoyed personal conversation with the seminar leaders. Other persons I wish to thank are Jaakko Hintikka and Göran Sundholm.     

Enactment as understanding and as misunderstanding

The author considers the concept of enactment as a ubiquitous event that is best seen as part of a sequence in the process of understanding a patient. As such, enactments are not unusual or special save as they are often subject to disavowal or to being singled out by the analyst as especially subject to scrutiny. Once recognized, enactments need to be interpreted: not so much in terms of their unconscious origins, but more with regard to the need to include them in the analytic dialogue.     

Community Engagement as Liberal Performance,as Critical Intellectualism and as Praxis

This article aims to illustrate that engagement is a dynamic and evolutionary process, moulded by contesting ideological, social actor and contextual forces. For purposes of illustration, I draw on a university-affiliated, participatory enactment of community engagement as a case example. The case illustrates that community engagement may assume a form of action, critical intellectualism and praxis. As action, community engagement is oriented towards performance of liberal democracy. Community engagement, as shaped by the critical intellectualism of the Black Consciousness philosophy, reflects community self-affirmation, autonomy and intellectual independence. Community engagement as praxis may be characterised by reflexivity, vision-making and the building of interpersonal relationships. Community engagement is marked by a dynamic interplay between race, power and counter-hegemonic ideology.     

Love as story,love as storytelling

Across three studies, individual differences in the degree to which (a) participants enjoyed autobiographical storytelling with their romantic partners (storytelling enjoyment [SE]) and (b) thought about these relationships in narrative terms (narrative mindset [NM]) were examined in relation to psychological functioning and romantic relationship narratives. Drawing data from over 1,650 participants, relationship satisfaction, certain positive personality traits, and a dimension of secure attachment corresponded with both SE and NM. SE and NM also related to features of participants' relationship narratives. Storytelling and applying a NM to one's love life may carry implications for functioning within the romantic domain.     

Person as scientist, person as moralist

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.