Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice

Despite the now considerable literature on intellectual virtue, there remains relatively little philosophical discussion of intellectual vice. What discussion there is has been shaped by a powerful assumption—that, just as intellectual virtue requires that we are motivated by epistemic goods, intellectual vice requires that we aren't. In this paper, I demonstrate that this assumption is false: motivational approaches cannot explain a range of intuitive cases of intellectual vice. The popularity of the assumption is accounted for by its being a manifestation of a more general understanding of vice as an inversion or mirror image of virtue. I call this the inversion thesis, and argue that the failure of the motivational approach to vice exposes its limitations. I conclude by suggesting that recognizing these limitations can help to encourage philosophical interest in intellectual vice.     

Bayesian PTSD-Trajectory Analysis with Informed Priors Based on a Systematic Literature Search and Expert Elicitation

There is a recent increase in interest of Bayesian analysis. However, little effort has been made thus far to directly incorporate background knowledge via the prior distribution into the analyses. This process might be especially useful in the context of latent growth mixture modeling when one or more of the latent groups are expected to be relatively small due to what we refer to as limited data. We argue that the use of Bayesian statistics has great advantages in limited data situations, but only if background knowledge can be incorporated into the analysis via prior distributions. We highlight these advantages through a data set including patients with burn injuries and analyze trajectories of posttraumatic stress symptoms using the Bayesian framework following the steps of the WAMBS-checklist. In the included example, we illustrate how to obtain background information using previous literature based on a systematic literature search and by using expert knowledge. Finally, we show how to translate this knowledge into prior distributions and we illustrate the importance of conducting a prior sensitivity analysis. Although our example is from the trauma field, the techniques we illustrate can be applied to any field.     

The Experience of Being a Qualified Female BME Clinical Psychologist in a National Health Service: An Interpretative Phenomenological and Repertory Grid Analysis

This study explores the lived experience of black and minority ethnic (BME) clinical psychologists employed in the U.K. National Health Service (NHS). A mixed method qualitative approach was employed using repertory grids and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Six female BME clinical psychologists took part. Four master themes emerged from the analysis, including standing out as different, negotiating cultural and professional values, sitting with uncertainty, and feeling proud to be a clinical psychologist. The repertory grid analysis supported these findings and enriched the study. Implications of the study are discussed—namely, the importance of the profession increasing the cultural competency and sensitivity of its members as well as becoming more diverse.     

Ebola ‘Done Done’—But What Has It Left Behind?

Sierra Leone, a country that has been recovering from a brutal civil war, was in 2014 struck by a new crisis in the Ebola epidemic. This article reports on interviews and repertory grids completed by two groups of people who had been affected by the epidemic: amputee footballers who had lost family members or friends, and burial workers. The interviews and grids are analyzed in terms of the professional constructs of personal construct psychology, highlighting the anxiety, threat, guilt, and shame experienced by the participants; similarities in their construing of the Ebola epidemic and the civil war; and their positive anticipations of the future.     

Iconicity in the speech of children and adults

Iconicity – the correspondence between form and meaning – may help young children learn to use new words. Early‐learned words are higher in iconicity than later learned words. However, it remains unclear what role iconicity may play in actual language use. Here, we ask whether iconicity relates not just to the age at which words are acquired, but also to how frequently children and adults use the words in their speech. If iconicity serves to bootstrap word learning, then we would expect that children should say highly iconic words more frequently than less iconic words, especially early in development. We would also expect adults to use iconic words more often when speaking to children than to other adults. We examined the relationship between frequency and iconicity for approximately 2000 English words. Replicating previous findings, we found that more iconic words are learned earlier. Moreover, we found that more iconic words tend to be used more by younger children, and adults use more iconic words when speaking to children than to other adults. Together, our results show that young children not only learn words rated high in iconicity earlier than words low in iconicity, but they also produce these words more frequently in conversation – a pattern that is reciprocated by adults when speaking with children. Thus, the earliest conversations of children are relatively higher in iconicity, suggesting that this iconicity scaffolds the production and comprehension of spoken language during early development.