Virtue Ethics, Theory, and Warrant

Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This ‘virtue ethical’ claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge. This view seems to confront a regress-problem. For the belief that I am a good moral judge is itself a particular moral judgement. So it seems that, on this view, I need to derive my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge from my warrant for believing that I am a good judge of moral judges; and so on. I show how this worry can be met, and trace the implications of the resulting view for warranted moral judgement.     

Part-whole transfer and organization in children's and adults' multitrial free recall

The effect of age-related differnces in the use of recall organization on the amount of recall and the properties of recall-acquisition patterns obtained in a multitrial part-whole transfer task was investigated among subjects in grade levels 1, 4, 7, and college (ages 6.5, 9.6, 12.6, and 19.7 years, respectively). Half of the subjects receiving relevant and irrelevant part lists sorted stimuli before recall trials; other subjects studied the items as they were presented, one at a time. Relevant part list learning was equally facilitative for all age groups regardless of presentation condition, and despite the greater amounts of recall organization found among college subjects. All age groups showed trial-to-trial improvements in whole-list recall; however, only the college subjects showed corresponding improvements in clustering, and all age groups had high rates of fluctuation in the composition of their recall from trial to trial. It was concluded that while even the limited amounts of spontaneous recall organization found among children are sufficient to enhance recall, organization is not a necessary condition for recall improvement and not the primary means by which children throughout the preformal-operations period increase their recall of unrelated stimuli over trials in a free-recall task.     

Reducing risk of head injury in youth soccer: An extension of behavioral skills training for heading

Recently, concerns regarding sport-related concussions have increased within the research literature, the media, and popular culture. One potential source of soccer-related concussions involves the purposeful striking of the ball with one's head (i.e., heading). There is currently limited research on an effective teaching method to improve safe heading technique. In the current study, Behavior Skills Training (BST) was evaluated as a method to teach correct heading techniques to youth soccer players. BST increased the percentage of correct steps for each player based on a task analysis of heading. Based on social validity questionnaires administered to players and the coach, BST was rated as an acceptable form of training. After the final training session, experienced coaches rated each player as having improved from baseline to training.     

A Principled Approach to Feature Selection in Models of Sentence Processing

Among theories of human language comprehension, cue-based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long-distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well-established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt’s eye-tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue-based retrieval and self-organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons.     

Reasons to act and believe: naturalism and rational justification in Hume’s philosophical project

Is Hume a naturalist? Does he regard all or nearly all beliefs and actions as rationally unjustified? In order to settle these questions, it is necessary to examine their key terms (‘naturalism’ and ‘rational justification’) and to understand the character—especially the normative character—of Hume’s philosophical project. This paper argues (i) that Hume is a naturalist—and, in particular, both a moral and an epistemic naturalist—in quite robust ways; and (ii) that Hume can properly regard many actions and beliefs as “rationally justified” in several different senses of that term.     

A Sandtray a Day Keeps the Doctor at Play: Using Sandtray for Personal and Professional Development

This article details a year-long project in which the author created a series of 365 sandtrays and journaled about them as a professional and personal growth project. The author shares professional and personal lessons learned from this experience and describes how reflective practices can be used as a method to improve clinical work.     

Two Spirit: Counseling Native American Gay,Lesbian, and Bisexual People

The cultural world of the Two Spirit, the traditional role of Native individuals believed to possess both male and female spirit, is explored in both “old ways” and current‐day experiences. Cultural beliefs and meanings around sexual identity are discussed from a Native perspective with recommendations for counseling Two Spirit clients. El mundo cultural del Doble‐espíritu, el rol tradicional de indígenas que se creía que poseían espíritus masculinos y femeninos, se explora en formas tradicionales y experiencias actuales. Creencias culturales y significados acerca de la identidad sexual se analizan desde una perspectiva indígena con recomendaciones para el asesoramiento de clientes Doble‐espíritu.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Girls</Emphasis> and Sex: A Content Analysis of Sexual Health Depictions in HBO’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Girls</Emphasis>

Sex on television has been a topic of interest to scholars and critics alike. History has shown that certain programs break the mold when talking about sex. One show that is currently leading this trend is HBO’s Girls, a fictional comedy-drama show with 4.1 million viewers that has received much attention for its portrayals of sex. This systematic, quantitative content analysis is a case study of the first three seasons of Girls. It examines sexual behaviors, sexual talk, and sexual risk and responsibility. Results revealed kissing to be the most prevalent sexual behavior and talking about own or other’s sexual interests/actions was the most frequent form of sexual talk. Most surprisingly, sexual risk/responsibility was represented much more in Girls than in shows evaluated in previous television content analyses.     

Liberty,Security, and Fairness

What constraints should be imposed on individual liberty for the sake of protecting our collective security? A helpful approach to answering this question is offered by a theory that grounds political obligation and authority in a moral requirement of fair contribution to mutually beneficial cooperative schemes. This approach encourages us to split the opening question into two—a question of correctness and a question of legitimacy—and generates a detailed set of answers to both subsidiary questions, with a nuanced and plausible set of implications. The plausibility of its treatment of the issues surrounding liberty and security, I argue, helps to confer credibility on the fairness-based theory that carries these implications.