Moral relativism and deontic logic

If a native of India asserts “Killing cattle is wrong” and a Nebraskan asserts “Killing cattle is not wrong”, and both judgments agree with their respective moralities and both moralities are internally consistent, then the moral relativist says both judgments are fully correct. At this point relativism bifurcates. One branch which we call content relativism denies that the two people are contradicting each other. The idea is that the content of a moral judgment is a function of the overall moral point of view from which it proceeds. The second branch which we call truth value relativism affirms that the two judgments are contradictory. Truth value relativism appears to be logically incoherent. How can contradictory judgments be fully correct? For though there will be a sense of correctness in which each judgment is correct — namely by that of being correct relative to the morality relative to which each was expressed — if contradictory, the judgments cannot both be true, and thus cannot both be correct in this most basic sense of correctness. We defend truth value relativism against this sort of charge of logical incoherence by showing it can be accommodated by the existing semantical metatheories of deontic logic. Having done this we go on to argue that truth value relativism is the best version of relativism.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

An on-line assessment of causal reasoning during comprehension

Fletcher and Bloom (1988) have argued that as readers read narratives, clause by clause, they repeatedly focus their attention on the last preceding clause that contains antecedents but no consequences in the text. This strategy allows them to discover a causal path linking the text's opening to its final outcome while minimizing the number of times long-term memory must be searched for missing antecedents or consequences. In order to test this hypothesis, we examined the reading times of 25 subjects for each clause of eight simple narrative texts. The results show that: (1) causal links between clauses that co-occur in short-term memory (as predicted by the strategy) increase the time required to read the second clause; (2) potential causal links between clauses that never co-occur in short-term memory (again as predicted by the strategy) have no effect on reading time; and (3) reinstatement searches are initiated at the end of sentences that are causally unrelated to the contents of short-term memory or that contain clauses that satisfy goals no longer in short-term memory. These results support the claim that subjects engage in a form of causal reasoning when they read simple narrative texts.     

Finding relations between systems of entities: a multivariate approach

A procedure to find out the relationship between systems of entities is described. The crux of the approach depends on projecting the systems to be compared on the same arbitrary hyperspace so that any two systems of entities can be related. The procedure described applies to data presented in square or rectangular non-singular matrices and provides a procedure to determine multiple regression coefficients, multiple correlations, canonical correlations and the relationships between the inner product of the row vectors and of the column vectors of the matrices involved. The operations described apply to raw values, deviation or standard scores, and may help in interdisciplinary research, though the risks involved in the blind application of a mathematical abstract formulation should not be ignored.     

The role of compliance in hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia

We modified the standard procedure for administering finger pressure pain in order to assess the extent to which subjects biased their reports of pain reduction when exposed to compliance-inducing instructions. Experiment 1 used only highly hypnotizable subjects and found that compliance-induced reductions in reported pain were about half as large as the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Experiment 2 used low as well as high hypnotizables and administered hypnotic or nonhypnotic analgesia instructions and compliance instructions to the same subjects on separate pain trials. Reported pain reductions produced by hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia suggestions and those produced by compliance instructions were substantially and significantly correlated. Furthermore, hypnotizability correlated with compliance-induced reported pain reductions as highly as it correlated with the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Among high hypnotizables (but not low hypnotizables) compliant responding was predicted by social desirability. The findings of both studies indicate that compliance strongly influences the reports of hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia proffered by high hypnotizables. The role of compliance in the pain reductions reported by low hypnotizables is less clear-cut.     

Syntactic comprehension in Japanese aphasics: effects of category and thematic role order.

Syntactic comprehension disturbances in Japanese aphasics were investigated focusing on the role of category order and thematic role order. The data from Japanese aphasics show that the canonicity of thematic role order determines the ease of interpretation of different sentence types. This finding implies that language-specific factors, rather than language-universal factors, influence the sentence comprehension mechanisms that are retained by aphasic patients.     

The predictive validity of teacher nominations: A five-year followup of at-risk youth

The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive validity of a teacher nomination procedure for identifying at- risk children. Two hundred and twenty-five children were nominated by their teachers as well- adjusted (n= 75), socially withdrawn (n=76), or socially aggressive (n=74) during the fourth grade. Five years later, 198 of these children (88%) were located and their adjustment evaluated. Significant differences among the nominated children were found on a variety of measures, including academic grades, sociometric status, and social behavior. In addition, differences in school dropout and delinquent offenses were noted. Results are discussed in terms of the validity of teacher nomination procedures and their utility in identifying at- risk youth.     

Rate variables and automatized naming in developmental dyslexia

The rate variable in rapid automatized naming (RAN) was investigated in 50 adolescent and 40 adult students with developmental dyslexia, in matched normal controls, and in learning-disabled students without reading difficulties. Visual stimuli depicting familiar colors and common objects were presented in isolation at three film speeds and three exposure times. Film speed and exposure time contributed as independent variables to error rate; and dyslexic subjects of both age groups made significantly more naming errors than controls. Dyslexic subjects also responded with longer naming latencies than controls when the same RAN stimuli were presented in a continuous sequential mode as a matrix of rows and columns. Naming latencies in the sequential presentation were highly correlated with naming errors in the film version. The implications of reduced naming rates for nongraphological stimuli in developmental dyslexia are discussed.     

Stimulus repetition effects and the dimension-feature distinction in alternative targets

The negative repetition effect (NRE) refers to a poorer perception of the target in noise-same-as-target than in noise-alternative-target displays. Using the parenthesis as target and noise that are either identical or different in orientation, we tested predictions derived from a feature-specific inhibition model (Bjork & Murray, 1977) that explains the NRE as arising from inhibitory interactions among channels handling identical inputs. Contrary to our expectation of evidence for orientation-specific inhibition, a positive repetition effect (PRE) was observed. We also found a PRE for the dimension target sets whose stimuli differ only in orientation and an NRE for the feature target sets whose stimuli differ in the number of elements. Further experiments that systematically varied relationships between alternative targets indicate that these basic findings, termed the stimulus attributes effects, do not arise from pattern masking, perceptual strategies, or response bias.     

The effects of right hemisphere damage on the pragmatic interpretation of conversational remarks

The ability to interpret conversational utterances was assessed in a group of 12 male patients with unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) and 12 non-brain-damaged, age-matched male control subjects. Subjects listened to short vignettes which described both the affective tone of the relationship between a speaker and an actor, and the actor's performance on a task. Each vignette concluded with the speaker characterizing the actor's performance. In half of the items, the speaker's utterance was literally true; in the other half, the utterance was literally false and invited a nonliteral interpretation. Results showed no appreciable differences in the performance of control subjects and RHD patients when interpreting literally true utterances. In contrast, the two groups differed reliably when interpreting the pragmatic intent of nonliteral utterances: Control subjects used information about both the actor's performance and the speaker-actor relationship, while RHD patients demonstrated difficulty in using the information about the speaker-actor relationship. Results have implications for patients' understanding of essential elements of conversations, such as characters' internal states and their intentions in employing different forms of literal and nonliteral language.