Some problems of counter‐inductive policy as opposed to inductive

The article is concerned with the practicalist attempt to ‘solve’ the problem of induction. The point of departure is the concept of counter‐induction introduced by Max Black and his refutation of practicalism. If we arc not to beg the question whether induction yields knowledge of the future, Max Black asserts, there is a symmetry between induction and counter‐induction as methods. The main point of the article is to show that this assertion is false, at least when induction and counter‐induction are compared as regards their relations to hypo‐thetico‐deductive method. As regards these relations, there is a striking asymmetry. The author tries to establish the following conclusion: A theory can agree with all future data and yet be false because it does not agree with all past data. If we are not to be in a position where our theories are necessarily falsified either by past or future data, we must use induction rather than counter‐induction.     

The Resilience of Structure Built Around the Predicate: Homesign Gesture Systems in Turkish and American Deaf Children

Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called homesigns, which have many of the properties of natural language—the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built around the predicate—in particular, how manner and path are mapped onto the verb—in homesign systems developed by deaf children in Turkey and the United States. We also asked whether the Turkish homesigners exhibit sentence-level structures previously identified as resilient in American and Chinese homesigners. We found that the Turkish and American deaf children used not only the same production probability and ordering patterns to indicate who does what to whom, but also used the same segmentation and conflation patterns to package manner and path. The gestures that the hearing parents produced did not, for the most part, display the patterns found in the children's gestures. Although cospeech gesture may provide the building blocks for homesign, it does not provide the blueprint for these resilient properties of language.     

Social change,political beliefs,and everyday expectations in hungarian society

The sudden political shift in Hungary from state socialism to democracy concealed the much slower pace of change in economics and civil society. Distrust and suspicion evolved towards politics and politicians. Liberalism became the major political ideology but it lacked consistency and a firm social basis. A permanent social deprivation was experienced since the inception of the transition period, which gave rise to hidden socialist expectations supporting strong state intervention into housing, employment, education, health care. There is a strong social basis in Hungary for any political aspiration that introduces nationalism into political discourse. Inconsistencies between cognitive elements of diverse political ideologies were revealed along with a strong drive for consistency among intellectuals, who were the leading forces in the transition process. The authors of this article argue that there will be no successful transition without the development of new patterns of thought and social skills replacing helplessness, intolerance and aggression. His major research areas include Hungarian national identity, political socialization, political and ideological attitudes. His major research areas cover social mobility under state socialism, political sociology and perception of social injustice from a cross-national perspective.     

Fading—A new technique in the treatment of phobias

Phobias have been subject to more research by behavior therapists than any other psychiatric disorder. In 1975 Marks described more than 20 different techniques that have been developed for or used in the treatment of phobias.The technique to be described in this paper—fading—was first used by Barlow and Agras (1973) as an alternative to aversive techniques for homosexuals. Originally the technique was designed to change the stimulus control of sexual responsiveness by introducing or “fading in” heterosexual stimuli during periods of sexual arousal elicted by homosexual stimuli.One purpose of the single-case studies presented here was to explore the possibility of achieving a similar result with phobic clients. In other words, the aim was to create a state of calmness and positive sensations in the client and then to gradually “fade in” phobic stimuli. The hypothesis was that the stimulus control of anxiety exerted by the phobic stimuli would decrease and finally be extinguished due to the antagonistic effects of observing and imagining positive scenes.A second purpose of this application of fading was to develop a technique for reducing phobic anxiety which could give more control to the client than is the case in, for example, systematic desensitization.     

‘Preparedness’ and ‘arousability’ as determinants of electrodermal conditioning

‘Arousability’, as defined through spontaneous electrodermal responses, has been empirically linked to anxiety, phobic symptoms and outcome of systematic desensitization. Previous data from our laboratory indicate that ‘preparedness’, as defined through potentially phobic vs. fear-irrelevant or ‘neutral’ conditioned stimuh, is an important determinant of electrodermal conditioning. The present experiment compared groups selected to be high or low in spontaneous responding during differential conditioning to potentially phobic or neutral stimuh. It was found that the effects of these two factors were essentially additive, i.e. conditioning and resistance to extinction were better for phobic stimuli and for high-arousal groups. The high-aroused group with phobic stimuh showed diffuse responding during acquisition, not differentiating between reinforced and unreinforced cues. However, it was the only group that failed to extinguish during 20 trials, which indicates that high arousal gives superior resistance to extinction particularly for phobic stimuli.     

The role of integration in recognition failure and action memory

In three experiments, we studied memory for action events with respect to exceptions from the Tulving-Wiseman function demonstrated in experiments on recognition failure of recallable words. In Experiment 1, we examined exceptions of poor integration in a regular recognition failure condition (i.e., recognition of targets without contextual cues, followed by recall of targets in the presence of contextual cues). In Experiment 2, we examined exceptions of cue overlap in which subjects also had access to the information of contextual cues at recognition test. In Experiment 3, we attempted to equate the levels of recognition across the action and verbal encoding. In addition, the cue overlap and no-cue overlap conditions were studied in a within-subjects design. Results from the three experiments indicated that encoding enactment (episodic integration) and conceptual integration (semantic integration) are related to each other. As a consequence of this relationship, there is a larger independence between recognition and recall of well-integrated items with encoding enactment. On the other hand, for the poorly integrated items without encoding enactment, there is a larger dependence between recognition and recall. Even in the cue overlap condition, where there is a case of large dependence between recognition and recall, the same pattern of data was observed. The results are discussed in terms of an episodic integration view of encoding enactment.     

The role of intentionality in perceiving terrorism as a more important problem than traffic accidents

Current Psychology - We hypothesized that perceived intentionality is one of the factors explaining why terrorism is perceived to be a more important problem than traffic accidents. In Study 1, we...