Too far beyond the call of duty: moral rationalism and weighing reasons

Philosophical Studies - The standard account of supererogation holds that Liv is not morally required to jump on a grenade, thereby sacrificing her life, to save the lives of five soldiers. Many...     

A negative compatibility effect in priming of emotional faces

The negative compatibility effect (NCE) is the surprising result that low-visibility prime arrows facilitate responses to opposite-direction target arrows. Here we compare the priming obtained with simple arrows to the priming of emotions when categorizing human faces, which represents a more naturalistic set of stimuli and for which there are no preexisting response biases. When inverted faces with neutral expressions were presented alongside emotional prime and target faces, only strong positive priming occurred. However, when the neutral faces were made to resemble the target faces in geometry (upright orientation), time (flashing briefly), and space (appearing in the same location), positive priming gradually weakened and became negative priming. Implications for theories of the NCE are discussed.     

Adult attachment and preemptive defenses: converging evidence on the role of defensive exclusion at the level of encoding

The objective of this research was to determine whether the tendency of highly avoidant adults not to recall attachment-related information is best explained through defensive strategies that operate on encoding or retrieval processes. In Study 1 participants listened to an emotionally evocative recording and were given both explicit and implicit tests of their memory for the material. Compared to less avoidant people, highly avoidant people recalled fewer details from the recording and performed worse on an implicit test of their memory for the information. In Study 2 we manipulated people's motivation to retrieve information from memory by offering participants a monetary award for recall. Highly avoidant people recalled less information than less-avoidant people despite the monetary incentive. Taken together, these results suggest that the relative inability of avoidant adults to recall attachment-related information is due to the defensive exclusion of information at the time of encoding rather than the time of retrieval.     

A Formal Characterisation of Hamblin’s Action-State Semantics

Hamblin’s Action-State Semantics provides a sound philosophical foundation for understanding the character of the imperative. Taking this as our inspiration, in this paper we present a logic of action, which we call ST, that captures the clear ontological distinction between being responsible for the achievement of a state of affairs and being responsible for the performance of an action. We argue that a relativised modal logic of type RT founded upon a ternary relation over possible worlds integrated with a basic tense logic captures intuitions of the Hamblinian model of imperatives. The logic implements a direct mapping of each of Hamblin’s key concepts: strategies, partial strategies and wholehearted satisfaction.     

Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds

Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non‐nomic matters of fact? Lange’s criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of primitive subjunctive facts and suggest that a ‘mixed’ metaphysics to the lawmaker question might be attractive.     

The boundaries between attachment and personality: Associations across three levels of the attachment network

This research examined the associations between measures of sociotropic and autonomous personality, romantic attachment anxiety and avoidance, and corresponding attachment ratings across a range of different specific relationships with people whom participants regularly interacted (including romantic partners, friends, family members, and colleagues). Analyses using hierarchical linear modeling showed that sociotropy and autonomy were directly associated with respective ratings of relationship-specific anxiety and avoidance within non-romantic relationships. In contrast, domain-specific romantic attachment predicted relationship-specific attachment with romantic (but not non-romantic) partners, and, as hypothesized, mediated the associations between sociotropy and autonomy and relationship-specific attachment within this domain. Implications for the operationalization of sociotropy and autonomy as broad-bandwidth (personality-level) measures that assess more global summaries of regularities in the same dual dimensions identified in the attachment literature (i.e., attachment anxiety and avoidance) are discussed.     

Anything is possible

This paper criticises necessitarianism, the thesis that there is at least one necessary truth; and defends possibilism, the thesis that all propositions are contingent, or that anything is possible. The second section maintains that no good conventionalist account of necessity is available, while the third section criticises model theoretic necessitarianism. The fourth section sketches some recent technical work on nonclassical logic, with the aim of weakening necessitarian intuitions and strengthening possibilist intuitions. The fifth section considers several a prioristic attempts at demonstrating that there is at least one necessary proposition and finds them inadequate. The final section emphasises the epistemic aspect of possibilism.