Against Unconditional Love

Abstract While unconditional love is frequently regarded as the best kind of romantic commitment, our commitments in general are not thought to be unconditional. In other contexts, we think conditional commitment (commitment which can in some sense be rendered intelligible by appeal to reasons) to be superior. This paper examines the peculiar status of unconditional love in the romantic context and argues that it is unwarranted; the best kind of romantic commitment should be viewed as conditional. The first part of the paper examines and criticises those arguments which attempt to defend conditional love by appeal to the idea that love is based upon the properties of the beloved. The second part of the paper examines Harry Frankfurt's narrowly subjective conception of unconditional love and highlights certain counterintuitive consequences of it. The final section of the paper argues that the best kind of love will prompt us to adopt two perspectives with regard to the beloved. While loving does involve the narrowly subjective perspective defended by Frankfurt, it also demands that we strive for a more objective perspective, which takes into consideration the reasons we might be able to offer to render our commitment intelligible to others.     

In Honor of My Father and My Son

The author advises survivors on the four tasks of grief and reflects on the suicide of her college-age son in 1977 and the recent death of her father, a suicidologist, from age-related causes. She describes current collaborative efforts by organizations dedicated to the prevention and aftermath of suicide.     

Learning of object-object associations by monkeys

Monkeys were trained in tasks where stimulus objects were presented in pairs, one object of a pair concealing the other, and the monkeys had to displace the top object followed by the bottom object in order to obtain a food reward. In two experiments it was demonstrated that under these conditions the animals formed object-object associations such that the top object recalled in memory the bottom object that had previously been found underneath it. The monkeys were able to discriminate in recall between bottom objects that were identical in secondary reinforcing value and differed only in colour.     

Reading for meaning: The effects of concurrent articulation

Six experiments are reported which examine the assertion that phonological recoding for the purpose of lexical access in visual word recognition is prevented or impaired by concurrent articulation (“articulatory suppression”). The first section of this paper selectively reviews the literature, and reports two experiments which fail to replicate previous work.

The third experiment contrasts performance with visually presented words and with non-words. Latency measures show an effect of suppression that is specific to words, whilst error rates show an effect common to both words and non-words. The fourth experiment shows that if the task is changed from a judgement of rhyme (BLAME-FLAME) to one of homophony (AIL-ALE), the suppression effect seen in the latency data is eliminated, whilst error effects remain. It is suggested that, in addition to producing error effects that are not easily interpretable, suppression prevents or impairs a phonological segmentation process operating subsequent to the retrieval of whole word phonology (a process that is needed for rhyme judgement but not for one of homophony).

Experiment V shows that while suppression has no effect on the time taken to decide if printed non-words sound like real words (e.g. PALLIS), error rates increase. Experiment VI shows that suppression has no effect on either RT or errors in the same task if subjects suppress at a slower rate than in Experiment V.

It is suggested that there are at least two different phonological codes. Buffer storage and/or maintenance of phonologically coded information derived from print is affected by suppression; phonological recoding from print for the purpose of lexical access can be carried out without any interference from suppression.     

This and THAP -- constraints on the pronunciation of new, written words

The pronunciation of nonwords that start with TH is investigated in lists and sentences. The initial phoneme is usually unvoiced (as in THOUGHT) when the nonword is embedded in lists of words and nonwords. In contrast, the initial phoneme is usually voiced (as in THIS) when such nonwords are read aloud in a function word position in a sentence. These findings are inconsistent with the current dual process theory of the routes from print to sound which implies that the phonology of a new word or nonword can be derived only from a form of letter-sound correspondence which is independent of lexical/syntactic pressures.