Religious Commitment in Scriptural Reasoning: A Critical Engagement with Gavin D'Costa's “Catholics Reading the Scripture of Other Religions”

The essay considers the objection that Scriptural Reasoning does not actually bring particular religious points of view into discussion, but rather suppresses traditions by the way it is organized. The article contends that, while Scriptural Reasoning as a whole is not entirely determined by a defining statement from any single religious tradition, any given participant can and is encouraged to bring the fullness of their commitment to discussion, and even overarching accounts of Scriptural Reasoning may well deploy the resources of a tradition. The essay closes by testing Scriptural Reasoning against criteria for being religious, concluding that it allows religious commitment to function in every respect that matters, given that it allows multiple traditions to have a say in how the practice is configured.     

Mood and the generation effect

Three experiments address the assumptions, derived from a dual-force model, that positive mood supports assimilative (knowledge-driven) processes whereas negative mood supports accommodative (stimulus-driven) functions, and that mood-selective recall (mood congruency) is mainly a matter of assimilation. The generation-effect paradigm was borrowed from memory research to test these assumptions. In Experiment 1, the theoretical variable, degree of assimilation, was operationalised by the ease with which stimulus meaning could be generated from word fragments. In Experiment 2, self-generated stimuli (assimilation) were compared to experimenter-provided stimuli (accommodation). As predicted, positive mood supported assimilation which in turn enhanced mood-congruent recall. In Experiment 3, retrieval mood rather than encoding mood was manipulated. In this situation, positive mood facilitated the recall of all self-generated information, whether congruent or not. The empirical results are generally consistent with the predictions derived from the dual-force framework.     

On Social Attribution: Implications of Recent Cognitive Neuroscience Research for Race, Law, and Politics

Interpreting the world through a social lens is a central characteristic of human cognition. Humans ascribe intentions to the behaviors of other individuals and groups. Humans also make inferences about others?? emotional and mental states. This capacity for social attribution underlies many of the concepts at the core of legal and political systems. The developing scientific understanding of the neural mechanisms used in social attribution may alter many earlier suppositions. However, just as often, these new methods will lead back to old conundrums. Cognitive neuroscience will not dispel the hard problems of social judgment.