A Quintet,a Quartet,a Trio,a Duo? The Epistemic Regress Problem,Evidential Support,and Skepticism

In his topical article, Andrew Cling claims that the best extant formulation of the so-called epistemic regress problem rests on five assumptions that are too strong. Cling offers an improved version that rests on a different set of three core epistemic assumptions, each of which he argues for. Despite of owing a great deal to Cling’s ideas, I argue that the epistemic regress problem surfaces from more fundamental assumptions than those offered by Cling. There are ultimately two core assumptions—in fact two contradictory strands within the concept of epistemic support—which jointly create a powerful challenge for our pursuit of paramount epistemic values.

Informed consent and patient's rights documents: a right, a rite, or a rewrite?

Both research participants and patients are presumably offered protection from harm through the processes of informed consent and patient's rights. However, both documents are often written at unacceptably high "college" reading levels, making them incomprehensible to the "average" reader who may be reading at a junior-high reading level. Readability researchers are often unfamiliar with important details of readability software, leading to consistent underestimates of document readability. Most informed consent and patient's rights documents are writtin in a one-size-fits-all style and fail to take into account important differences based on cognitive development. Several strategies are described to improve the quality and effectiveness of these materials.     

How to Husserl a Quine — And a Heidegger,too

Is consciousness or the subject part of the natural world or the human world? Can we write intentionality, so central in Husserl's philosophy, into Quine's system of ontological naturalism and naturalized epistemology — or into Heidegger's account of human being and existential phenomenology? The present task is to show how to do so. Anomalous monism provides a key.     

To Become a Filial Son,a Loyal Subject,or a Humane Person?—On the Confucian Ideas about Humanity

Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi regard the human as an emotional being and especially consider such moral feelings as humane love, filial piety and devoted loyalty to be the constituent elements of humanity. On the one hand, they try to integrate the corresponding multiple roles of the humane person, filial son and loyal subject in harmony in order to make one become a true human in the ethical sense; on the other hand, they assign a supreme position merely to filial piety or loyalty in cases of conflict because they regard one's parents or ruler as the greatest root of one's life, respectively. As a result, their ideas about humanity fall into some in-depth moral paradoxes, which might be resolved by a post-Confucian transformation of the traditional Confucian framework from particularistic consanguinism to universalistic humanism.     

Social intelligence, a neurological system?

Social intelligence has been researched for almost 70 yr. without definitive findings. During this period almost no attempts have been made to consider the complexity of the brain's anatomy and functions responsible for social competence. An ecological model focusing on social abilities within a biopsychosocial context is discussed along with supporting literature and an hypothesis for research. This argument invokes social intelligence as an independent brain system. It is suggested that neurological structures and chemical activities controlling social skills are directly influenced by the environment, individual beliefs, personal goals, and physiology.     

Psicología Diferencial, ¿Ciencia o Tecnología?

RESUMEN

En este trabajo Antonio Caparrós analiza, desde el punto de vista de la historia y epistemología de la psicología, el enfoque de Royce, Forteza y Prieto acerca del “status” científico de la Psicología Diferencial. El autor sintetiza en nueve puntos sus reflexiones, manifiestando que el proyecto completo de la Psicología Diferencial debe situarse más en el marco de las necesidades tecnológicas, cuyos fines específicos no son como los de los paradigmas explicativos de la ciencia en sentido estricto. Los dos últimos puntos se reservan al análisis de las interacciones entre ciencia y tecnología a lo largo de la historia, que contribuye a aclarar las relaciones entre algunos de los modelos de la psicología general y/o experimental y otros diferenciales.     

Why a "word order difference" is not always a "word order" difference: a reply to Weyerts,Penke, Münte,Heinze, and Clahsen

We present evidence that the supposed processing advantage for an SV_finO word order over an SOV_fin word order in German argued for by Weyerts, Penke, Münte, Heinze, and Clahsen (2002) is supported by neither experimental nor theoretical evidence. Specifically, we show (a) that the frontocentral negativity for an SOV_fin in comparison to an SV_finO word order in Weyerts et al.'s Experiments 2 and 3 is reducible to more general differences in the electrophysiological responses elicited by nouns versus verbs in a sentence context, and (b) that the P600 difference between the two word orders in Experiment 2, as well as the reading time differences in Experiment 1, result from the fact that the two supposedly ungrammatical conditions actually differ in their degree of ill-formedness. We conclude that there is no evidence for a processing disadvantage for SOV_fin, thus reconciling Weyerts et al.'s results on German sentence processing with the grammatical regularities of German.     

A bribe, “living-bread,” and a white tablecloth

This article describes marital therapy with a Holocaust survival couple in which the wife's demands for living bread plays a highly symbolic role in the marital dynamics. The author draws interesting parallels between the experience of the couple and the meaning of the therapy experience for herself.     

Premarital counseling: Approaches,objectives, content,and evaluation—a bibliography

A major problem for the premarital counselor is that the literature in the field is scattered throughout numerous journals and books representing several disciplines. Since counselors tend to subscribe to and read the literature from their own academic discipline, they may be unaware of what is being written elsewhere. This article contains a bibliography of what the authors consider to be the most relevant books and articles on premarital counseling published by the various disciplines. For the convenience of the reader, each listing is also coded as to its content.The authors express their appreciation to Charles R. Figley, Ph.D., Douglas H. Sprenkle, Ph.D., and Diane Spencer, M.S., for their assistance in the preparation of this paper. The valuable assistance of those contributors who notified the authors of their publications is gratefully acknowledged.     

Is a Worried Citizen a Good Citizen? Emotions,Political Information Seeking,and Learning via the Internet

In this study we explore the mediating role of emotions in the process of becoming a politically informed citizen. Contrary to previous studies, we expect that anger and anxiety will have much different effects on this process. We suspect the role of anxiety is somewhat unique even among negative emotions as mediator of the causal effect of political threats on information seeking and learning. In addition, we speculate that anxiety should improve the quality of information seeking, not just its quantity. In one experiment, we induce emotions directly and find that while anger, enthusiasm, and anxiety can lead people to claim they will pay attention to the campaign, anger actually depresses total information seeking. In a second experiment, we examine the impact of realistic political threats and find that exposure triggers several emotions but that only anxiety boosts information seeking and learning.     

Pastor,are You a Religious Illiterate?

Abstract : The growing religious diversity of the United States forces pastors into the role of spokesperson for the Christian faith along with becoming chief educator about other religious traditions for the congregation. Pastors, now more than ever, have the responsibility to become educated about the world's religions and to share this knowledge with their parishioners. To prepare clergy for these new responsibilities, three Lutheran pastors speak from their own experiences of deliberately engaging and studying diverse religious communities. With special focus on Islam and Hinduism, the pastors provide resources for further reading and study. This collaborative effort aims to encourage and empower pastors to embrace these new components of their calling by openly and regularly interacting with their religious neighbors.     

Thinking Like a Wolf,a Sheep,or a Firefly: Learning Biology Through Constructing and Testing Computational Theories—An Embodied Modeling Approach

Biological phenomena can be investigated at multiple levels, from the molecular to the cellular to the organismic to the ecological. In typical biology instruction, these levels have been segregated. Yet, it is by examining the connections between such levels that many phenomena in biology, and complex systems in general, are best explained. We describe a computation-based approach that enables students to investigate the connections between different biological levels. Using agent-based, embodied modeling tools, students model the microrules underlying a biological phenomenon and observe the resultant aggregate dynamics. We describe 2 cases in which this approach was used. In both cases, students framed hypotheses, constructed multiagent models that incorporate these hypotheses, and tested these by running their models and observing the outcomes. Contrasting these cases against traditionally used, classical equation-based approaches, we argue that the embodied modeling approach connects more directly to students' experience, enables extended investigations as well as deeper understanding, and enables "advanced" topics to be productively introduced into the high school curriculum.     

When does a deep dyslexic make a semantic error? The roles of age-of-acquisition, concreteness, and frequency

Semantic reading errors are the central and defining feature of deep dyslexia. This study compared the words the deep dyslexic patient LW read correctly with those she omitted and those to which she produced semantic errors in terms of their concreteness, age-of-acquisition, frequency, and length. Semantic errors were made to less concrete, later-acquired, and shorter words than were read correctly; there was no reliable effect of word frequency. More importantly, the actual semantic errors produced were later-acquired than the stimulus words, but they were not more concrete or reliably more frequent. These results implicate age-of-acquisition in the process that produces semantic errors. It is proposed that concreteness determines the specificity of the semantic system to activate a set of candidate responses and that age-of-acquisition biases the ease with which certain words can be selected from this set to be produced as reading responses.     

I,Me, You & Us: can a psychodynamic model provide a relational perspective on psychosis?

The concept of psychosis existed long before the current diagnostic definitions we have today. However, current opinion and treatment of psychosis is often dominated by a narrow psychiatric discourse. As a result of this conceptualisation, a diagnosis of psychosis can often feel limiting and disempowering for the individual, especially if he or she holds an alternative perspective. A psychodynamic model may therefore provide a method to examine psychosis from a relational perspective; this may, in turn, broaden one’s understanding and experience of a psychotic episode. In this article, two case examples from different cultural perspectives are used to highlight and explore the potential benefit of psychodynamic theory in the formulation and treatment of psychosis. A psychodynamic model using object relations theory is used for the exploration of both internal and external relational experiences. Both psychodynamic and psychiatric rationales are thus challenged to reflect on the impact of rigid perspectives and how they may limit treatment efficacy. Current research and literature around the use of psychodynamic theory in the treatment of psychosis is reviewed in light of this perspective.     

Self-image disparity, repression-sensitization, and extraversion-introversion: a unitary dimension?

To determination (1) whether self-image disparity, repression-sensitization, and extraversion-introversion intercorrelated to a degree indicative of a unitary personality dimension and, (2) whether the interrelationships among these variables was accounted for by cognitive developmental variance, Byrne's Revised Repression-Sensitization Scale, Giedt and Downing's Extraversion-Introversion Scale, and two measures of self-image disparity were administered to 20 male college freshmen and 20 male seniors. All the correlations among the four measures were significant, but none correlated significantly with cognitive development, as measured by SATs. Factor analysis yielded a clearcut personality factor and a clearcut cognitive factor, indicating that the personality measures reflect a unitary dimension, even after cognitive developmental variance is extracted.