God knows (but does God believe?)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent.     

Secure attachment and material reward both attenuate romantic jealousy

Research has shown that social support and materialism can both serve as coping mechanisms, reducing individuals’ experiences of physical and social pain (Zhou and Gao in Psychol Inq 19(3–4):127–144, 2008). We extend this paradigm by testing the buffering effects of secure attachment and material reward on a specific form of social psychological pain: romantic jealousy. Two studies examined the effects of these variables after an imagined relational threat. Participants were primed with (a) secure attachment, (b) material reward, or (c) neutral control, and then responded to a hypothetical scenario involving their romantic partners behaving flirtatiously with a rival. Results from both studies showed that the secure attachment and material reward primes both attenuated jealous responses to the provoking stimuli, relative to the neutral control prime. Neither trait attachment styles nor chronic jealousy moderated the priming effects in Study 1, but attachment styles did slightly moderate the priming effects in Study 2.     

Examining the association between MAOA genotype and incarceration, anger and hostility: The moderating influences of risk and protective factors

Findings from molecular genetic research have indicated that a polymorphism in the promoter region of the MAOA gene interacts with environmental liabilities to predict antisocial phenotypes. We use these findings as a springboard to examine whether a global protective-risk factor index moderates the effect of MAOA genotype on the probability of being incarcerated and on a measure of anger and hostility. Analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) indicates that exposure to risk and protective factors in adolescence are able to moderate the effect of MAOA genotype on anger and hostility in adulthood for males. The results in relation to the probability of being incarcerated were consistently null.     

Socrates,Crito, and emigration from South Africa

This article uses Plato’s Crito as a lens through which to consider the question of whether a South African citizen should emigrate from South Africa. While this question is not exactly parallel to that of whether the condemned Socrates should flee Athens, it has much more to do with justice than is commonly thought. For in order for one to know whether one has an overall duty to remain in or leave South Africa, one must determine what one owes to one’s country and compatriots, one’s community, one’s family, and oneself.     

Confusion about concessive knowledge attributions

Concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) are knowledge attributions of the form ‘S knows p, but it’s possible that q’, where q obviously entails not-p (Rysiew, Nous (Detroit, Mich.) 35:477–514, 2001). The significance of CKAs has been widely discussed recently. It’s agreed by all that CKAs are infelicitous, at least typically. But the agreement ends there. Different writers have invoked them in their defenses of all sorts of philosophical theses; to name just a few: contextualism, invariantism, fallibilism, infallibilism, and that the knowledge rules for assertion and practical reasoning are false. In fact, there is a lot of confusion about CKAs and their significance. I try to clear some of this confusion up, as well as show what their significance is with respect to the debate between fallibilists and infallibilists about knowledge in particular.     

The dental anomaly: how and why dental caries and periodontitis are phenomenologically atypical

Use of humanities content in American medical education has been debated for well over 60 years. While many respected scholars and medical educators have purported the value of humanities content in medical training, its inclusion remains unstandardized, and the undergraduate medical curriculum continues to be focused on scientific and technical content. Cited barriers to the integration of humanities include time and space in an already overburdened curriculum, and a lack of consensus on the exact content, pedagogy and instruction. Edmund Pellegrino, physician and scholar of the latter twentieth century, spent much of his professional life promoting the value and importance of the humanities in medical education, seeking the best way to incorporate and teach this content in clinically relevant ways. His efforts included the founding of multiple enterprises starting in the 1960s and 1970s to promote human values in medical education, including the Society for Health and Human Values and its Institute on Human Values in Medicine. Regardless of his efforts and those of many others into the current century, the medical humanities remains a curricular orphan, unable to find a lasting home in medical education and training.     

Attentional Selectivity in Short-term Memory: Similarity of Process,Not Similarity of Content,Determines Disruption

Background sound substantially disrupts serial recall, even under conditions where participants are explicitly told to ignore it. Study of such a phenomenon may serve to illuminate the manner in which information from various sources interacts in memory, as well as the extent to which unattended information is processed. A review of the literature is presented that points to a number of conclusions. First, that interference occurs in memory, not on the basis of similarity of content between relevant and irrelevant material, but rather on the basis of similarity of process. Specifically, in a serial recall task, the key memory process is that of order retention, and therefore, order information in the sequence of auditory events interferes with the process of ordering within the rehearsal set. Second, that organisation and interference within memory are intimately connected with perceptual processes.     

Contextual cues aid recovery from interruption: the role of associative activation

A series of experiments introduced interruptions to the execution phase of simple Tower of London problems and found that the opportunity for preparation before the break in task reduced the time cost at resumption. Retrieval of the suspended goal was facilitated when participants were given the opportunity to encode retrieval cues during an "interruption lag" (the brief time before engaging in the interrupting task) but was impeded when these visual cues were subsequently altered following interruption. The results provide useful support for the goal-activation model (E. M. Altmann & G. J. Trafton, 2002), which assumes that context--at the points of both goal suspension and goal retrieval--is critical to efficient interruption recovery.     

Attentional and perceptual sources of the auditory attentional blink

When a rapid succession of auditory stimuli is listened to, processing of the second of two successive targets among fillers is often impaired, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). Three experiments were conducted to examine the role of filler items in modulating the size of the auditory AB, using a two-alternative forced choice discrimination paradigm. In the first experiment, dual-stream presentations in which low- and high-pitch items were separated by six semitones were tested. A transient deficit in reporting the probe was observed in the presence of fillers that was greater when fillers were in the same stream as the probe. In the absence of a filler, there was a residual deficit, but this was not related to the time lag between the target and the probe. In the second and third experiments, in which single-stream presentations were used, a typical AB was found in the presence of homogeneous fillers, but heterogeneous fillers tended to produce a greater deficit. In the absence of a filler, there was little or no evidence of a blink. The pattern of results suggests that other attentional and perceptual factors contribute to the blink.     

Auditory attentional capture during serial recall: violations at encoding of an algorithm-based neural model?

A novel attentional capture effect is reported in which visual-verbal serial recall was disrupted if a single deviation in the interstimulus interval occurred within otherwise regularly presented task-irrelevant spoken items. The degree of disruption was the same whether the temporal deviant was embedded in a sequence made up of a repeating item or a sequence of changing items. Moreover, the effect was evident during the presentation of the to-be-remembered sequence but not during rehearsal just prior to recall, suggesting that the encoding of sequences is particularly susceptible. The results suggest that attentional capture is due to a violation of an algorithm rather than an aggregate-based neural model and further undermine an attentional capture-based account of the classical changing-state irrelevant sound effect.