Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.     

Troubling Consequences of Online Political Rumoring

Fear that the Internet promotes harmful political rumoring is merited but not for reasons originally anticipated. Although the network accelerates and widens rumor circulation, on the whole, it does not increase recipient credulity. E‐mail, however, which fosters informal political communication within existing social networks, poses a unique threat to factual political knowledge. A national telephone survey conducted immediately after the 2008 U.S. presidential election provides evidence that aggregate Internet use promotes exposure to both rumors and their rebuttals, but that the total effect on rumor beliefs is negligible. More troublingly, the data demonstrate that rumors e‐mailed to friends/family are more likely to be believed and shared with others and that these patterns of circulation and belief exhibit strong political biases.     

COHERENTISM AND THE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION OF MORAL BELIEFS: A CASE STUDY IN HOW TO DO PRACTICAL ETHICS WITHOUT APPEAL TO A MORAL THEORY

This paper defends a coherentist approach to moral epistemology. In “The Immorality of Eating Meat” (2000), I offer a coherentist consistency argument to show that our own beliefs rationally commit us to the immorality of eating meat. Elsewhere, I use our own beliefs as premises to argue that we have positive duties to assist the poor (2004) and to argue that biomedical animal experimentation is wrong (2012). The present paper explores whether this consistency‐based coherentist approach of grounding particular moral judgments on beliefs we already hold, with no appeal to moral theory, is a legitimate way of doing practical ethics. I argue (i) that grounding particular moral judgments on our core moral convictions and other core nonmoral beliefs is a legitimate way to justify moral judgments, (ii) that these moral judgments possess as much epistemic justification and have as much claim to objectivity as moral judgments grounded on particular ethical theories, and (iii) that this internalistic coherentist method of grounding moral judgments is more likely to result in behavioral guidance than traditional theory‐based approaches to practical ethics. By way of illustrating the approach, I briefly recapitulate my consistency‐based argument for ethical vegetarianism. I then defend the coherentist approach implicit in the argument against a number of potentially fatal metatheoretical attacks.     

Counseling in Ireland

Counseling in Ireland has experienced rapid growth in the past 30 years. Public attitudes toward counseling have become more positive, especially with the increasing secularization of a once strongly religious Catholic society. Licensure is nonexistent but there are certification bodies that attempt to ensure qualified practice. There is no third‐party payment, so access to counseling for impoverished individuals is a problem. Training programs are quite varied. Efforts are being made to standardize training and to develop licensure requirements.     

Lines of advance in psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Freud's 1919 paper is taken as a starting-point to review how far we have advanced towards fulfilment of his prophetic remarks about the need to develop psychoanalytic psychotherapy for the masses. A glance is taken back to some of the circumstances and characters involved in Budapest where the paper was given at the 1918 congress, where there was much talk about the need to do something about the war neuroses. Similar pressures led to the founding of the Tavistock Clinic and Cassel Hospital in the UK, long before the start of the NHS. The pressures of both world wars advanced the applications of psychoanalysis; the next wave of pressures may come from NHS changes and entry into Europe. The history of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the UK is also considered via looking briefly at the history and development of psychoanalytic publications, of the Tavistock Clinic, of psychoanalytic training, of child psychotherapy and the emergence of adult (non-medical) psychotherapy. There have always been tensions between exponents of the pure gold of analysis and the needs of its wider applications. More flexible arrangements and boundaries are necessary if we are to spread psychoanalysis beyond London and to fulfil Freud's own hopes about the large-scale application of psychoanalytic therapy.     

RITALIN UPDATE: IMPLICATIONS FOR READING TEACHERS

Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) is a powerful stimulant drug frequently prescribed for children exhibiting hyperactive behavior, poor attention span, and/or distractibility. Reading teachers and other educators have a particular interest in Ritalin since they frequently have students in their classes taking this medication. The researchers in this study were interested in determining how Ritalin is prescribed for children in educational settings, what dosages seem appropriate, and specifically, what effect Ritalin has on reading achievement. Implications for reading teachers are discussed.     

Equality in Law and Philosophy

This article discusses various arguments for and against treating equality as a fundamental norm in law and political philosophy, combining prior arguments to the effect that equality is essentially an empty idea with arguments that treat it as a non‐empty but mistaken value that should be rejected. After concluding that most of the arguments for treating equality as a fundamental value fall victim to one or both of these arguments, it considers more closely arguments made by philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel that base a duty of promoting equality on the fact that governments impose a legal order on persons without their consent. It concludes that these arguments are mistaken: if the legal order imposed by government is justified then imposing it is not wrongful and generates no duty of equal treatment, while if that order is not justified no requirement of equality of treatment would cure the lack of justification. It concludes that equality should not be a value in law or political theory, but in some cases other considerations (such as alleviating poverty and distress, promoting accuracy and substantive justice, avoiding arbitrariness, and other values) may justify particular rules that are sometimes mistakenly thought to be based on equality.