Political Agency,Citizenship, and Non-human Animals

In this essay I challenge the idea that political agency must be central to the concept of citizenship. I consider this question in relation to whether or not domesticated animals can be understood as our fellow citizens. In recent debates on this topic, both proponents and opponents of animal citizenship have taken political agency to be central to this question. I advance two main arguments against this position. First, I argue against the orthodox view that claims political agency is a requirement of citizenship. This position ignores both how citizenship is understood in practice by modern, liberal democracies, as well as the separate functions of citizenship. Further, there are no plausible ways we can consistently extend citizenship to humans regardless of intellectual ability, while denying it to domesticated animals. Nevertheless, I argue that it is important to distinguish two ways in which citizenship is enacted: Citizenship as Membership and Citizenship as Responsible, Political Agent. Domesticated animals should be understood as citizens, despite the fact that they are not responsible, political agents. Second, I challenge the view, put forward by Donaldson and Kymlicka, that animals are capable of certain forms of political agency. I argue that political agency is not crucial to whether, and how, the preferences of these animals matter for political decision-making. The upshot of my argument is that political agency matters much less to debates about the citizenship of non-human animals than both sides of this debate have been inclined to think.     

An All Too Radical Solution to the Problem of Evil: a Reply to Harrison

Gerald Harrison has recently argued the evidential problem of evil can be resolved if we assume the moral facts are identical to God’s commands or favorings. On a theistic metaethics, the moral facts are identical to what God commands or favors. Our moral intuitions reflect what God commands or favors for us to do, but not what God favors for Herself to do. Thus, on Harrison’s view, while we can know the moral facts as they pertain to humans, we cannot know the moral facts as they pertain to God. Therefore, Harrison argues, the evidential problem of evil inappropriately assumes God to be intuitively moral, when we have no reason to suppose a perfectly good being would match the expectations provided by our moral intuitions. Harrison calls his view a new form of skeptical theism. In response, I show Harrison’s attempt to dissolve the problem of evil exacerbates well-known skeptical consequences of skeptical theism. Harrison’s new skeptical theism leaves us with problems motivating a substantive religious life, the inability to provide a variety of theological explanations, and, despite Harrison’s comments to the contrary, worsens problems having to do with the possibility of divine deception.     

Verb subcategorization frequencies: American English corpus data, methodological studies, and cross-corpus comparisons.

Verb subcategorization frequencies (verb biases) have been widely studied in psycholinguistics and play an important role in human sentence processing. Yet available resources on subcategorization frequencies suffer from limited coverage, limited ecological validity, and divergent coding criteria. Prior estimates of verb transitivity, for example, vary widely with corpus size, coverage, and coding criteria This article provides norming data for 281 verbs of interest to psycholinguistic research, sampled from a corpus of American English, along with a detailed coding manual. We examine the effect on transitivity bias of various coding decisions and methods of computing verb biases.     

儿童的假想伙伴:理论与实证研究

假想伙伴是在儿童生活中普遍存在的现象,研究者发现拥有假想伙伴的儿童约占52%至65%左右。尽管早在上世纪初就存在相关研究,但是直到近二十年它才获得众多学者关注,成为一个新兴领域。本文总结介绍了假想伙伴的早期背景,以及在理论与实证研究中取得的多方面成果,并且对该领域未来研究的发展方向提出了展望。     

同感、具身和人际理解:从里普斯到舒茨

谈到理解社会认知的本质,我们似乎只能在模仿理论、理论-理论或者二者的一些混合物之间选择。然而,作者在文中提出,现象学传统提供了有别于以上三者的第四个选项。首先,作者讨论了里普斯(Lipps)有关同感的阐释。接着,作者分析了舍勒、施坦(Stein)和胡塞尔批评里普斯的方式,勾勒了他们各自方案的核心特征。接下来,作者考察了舒茨(Schutz)如何承继并修改了上述三人对同感和社会认知的基本看法。最后,在结论中作者反驳了一种针对现象学方案的异议,进一步说明了现象学方案的可行性。     

Examining the Criterion Related Validity of the General Ability Measure for Adults: A two sample investigation

Across two employee samples (N=262 and 265) the authors examined the criterion‐related validity of the General Ability Measure for Adults (GAMA), a brief nonverbal measure of cognitive ability. Results suggested that GAMA predicted job performance in both samples (uncorrected rs ranged from .27 to .50). No evidence was found for differential prediction across gender and age. These results highlight the usefulness of nonverbal cognitive ability tests in selection contexts.     

进展性脑梗死的形成机制与防治策略

进展性脑梗死是临床上常见的一种缺血性脑卒中,其发病率高,致残率高,预后较差,严重危害患者的生命和健康,成为临床卒中治疗的一大难题。本文结合近年来的有关研究文献,就进展性脑梗死的临床分型、形成机制、可能的危险因素及其防治策略等方面的研究进展作一综合性介绍。     

An experiential avoidance conceptualization of depressive rumination: Three tests of the model

This study examined an experiential avoidance conceptualization of depressive rumination in 3 ways: 1) associations among questionnaire measures of rumination, experiential avoidance, and fear of emotions; 2) performance on a dichotic listening task that highlights preferences for non-depressive material; and 3) psychophysiological reactivity in an avoidance paradigm modeled after the one used by Borkovec, Lyonfields, Wiser, and Deihl (1993) in their examination of worry. One hundred and thirty-eight undergraduates completed questionnaire measures and participated in a clinical interview to diagnose current and past episodes of depression. Of those, 100 were randomly assigned to a rumination or relaxation induction condition and participated in a dichotic listening task, rumination/relaxation induction, and depression induction. Questionnaire measures confirmed a relationship between rumination status and avoidance; however, no significant effects were found in the dichotic listening task. Psychophysiological measures indicated no difference in physiological response to a depression induction among high ruminators (HR). However, low ruminators (LR) in the relaxation condition exhibited a larger IBI response than LR in the rumination condition. Overall, these results provide partial support for an avoidance conceptualization of depressive rumination. Implications of these findings are discussed.