The Epistemological Roots of Ecclesiastical Claims to Knowledge

In theoretical matters, ecclesiastical claims to knowledge have lead to various conflicts with science. Claims in orientational matters, sometimes connected to attempts to establish them as a rule for legislation, have often been in conflict with the justified claims of non-believers. In addition they violate the Principle of Autonomy of the individual, which is at the very heart of European identity so decisively shaped by the Enlightenment. The Principle of Autonomy implies that state legislation should not interfere in the life of individual citizens, as long as his or her actions do not violate the rights of others. This paper—using the example of the theory of evolution—rejects ecclesiastical claims to theoretical knowledge as completely unfounded and preposterous. In the case of orientational knowledge—using the example of euthanasia—ecclesiastical claims to (universalizable) knowledge are shown to be unfounded as well. The Church’s position with respect to euthanasia and a range of other bio-ethical topics, such as pre-marital sex, contraception, abortion, indissolubility of marriage, and homosexuality, rests on a very peculiar ethical position. This ethical position is the natural right theory, which—far from being universalizable—is shared by very few people. Among other things, this position presupposes the belief in God as the creator of nature, and the assumption that ethical norms can be derived from this premise. Thus ecclesiastical knowledge claims, cannot be justified in a way which could be reasonably supposed to be universally acceptable. Kant (see the quote) was the first to require this sort of justification. Claims that fail to implement Kant’s stipulations should be eliminated by what I would like to call “Kant’s razor”.     

On listening where we look: the fragility of a phenomenon

The role of eye position information has been the subject of some debate in the literature on the visual facilitation of auditory localization and attention. In one particularly compelling study, Reisberg, Scheiber, and Potemken (1981) found that fixation position strongly influenced subjects' recall performance in a binaural selective-listening task. The present paper describes repeated failures to demonstrate the eye position effect under conditions similar to those of the original study, thus challenging the robustness of this oft-cited phenomenon of "listening where we look."     

Distinctiveness of processing,processing time and memory performance

The research reported here, explored the conditions where processing time can be used as a predictive measure for retention performance. The results showed that, in similar but quantitatively different tasks, both processing time and retention performance increased with increasing task difficulty. The strongly suggests that processing time can be used as an independent measure for extensiveness of processing, and as a predictor for later retention performance. This relationship, however, is restricted to the comparison of similar processing tasks that differ only in the amount of processing necessary to perform the task.It is hypothesized that longer processing times are indicative of more extensive processing, leading to the formation of more distinctive memory representations. These, in turn, cause higher retention performance because they allow better discrimination from other memory traces, and because they are retrieved more easily.Although distinctiveness of memory representations is an important variable in determining retention performance, it is not the only one. In a recall test, semantic relations between items had an effect on performance independent of distinctiveness.     

Luther's Eight Sermons at Wittenberg: the Credo of a Gentle Reformer

This article develops an understanding of Luther which runs counter to the classic Roman Catholic image of him as zealotic iconoclast. In Luther's life these discourses mark the zenith of his influence and spiritual authority. The experience of the radical movement in Wittenberg (1521–22) decisively formed Luther's reforming activities; in the area of the reorganization of the Mass, where the safety of conscience and Christian liberty were involved, he became cautious and slowed the development rather than pushed it forward. Furthermore, the pluralistic arrangements of the Lutheran orders of service are ultimately the unavoidable consequence of those theological principles as contained in this series of sermons.     

Spatial cognition: evidence from visual neglect

Recent work on human attention and representational systems has benefited from a growing interplay between research on normal attention and neuropsychological disorders such as visual neglect. Research over the past 30 years has convincingly shown that, far from being a unitary condition, neglect is a protean disorder whose symptoms can selectively affect different sensory modalities, cognitive processes, spatial domains and coordinate systems. These clinical findings, together with those of functional neuroimaging, have increased knowledge about the anatomical and functional architecture of normal subsystems involved in spatial cognition. We provide a selective overview of how recent investigations of visual neglect are beginning to elucidate the underlying structure of spatial processes and mental representations.     

Relationships between Turkish Eighth-Grade Students’ Oral Reading Efficacy,Reading Comprehension and Achievement Scores on a High-Stakes Achievement Test

The present study aimed to explore the relation between students’ oral reading efficacy, reading comprehension, and academic performance on a nationwide high school placement exam (TEOG). The students were selected from a public middle school. The students’ oral reading efficacy, comprehension, and TEOG achievement scores were obtained to figure out the relations between them. The students’ TEOG results were obtained from the school administration. The findings revealed that there were statistically significant relations between oral reading efficacy, reading comprehension and TEOG achievements. Particularly, students’ reading comprehension and accuracy skills together explained 57% of variance in overall TEOG achievements.     

Full versus divided attention and implicit memory performance

Effects of full and divided attention during study on explicit and implicit memory performance were investigated in two experiments. Study time was manipulated in a third experiment. Experiment 1 showed that both similar and dissociative effects can be found in the two kinds of memory test, depending on the difficulty of the concurrent tasks used in the divided-attention condition. In this experiment, however, standard implicit memory tests were used and contamination by explicit memory influences cannot be ruled out. Therefore, in Experiments 2 and 3 the process dissociation procedure was applied. Manipulations of attention during study and of study time clearly affected the controlled (explicit) memory component, but had no effect on the automatic (implicit) memory component. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Retention performance as a function of the distinctiveness of memory traces and retention task

Summary In the acquisition phase of an incidental learning paradigm, words that are exemplars of categories were judged as to whether or not they belonged to a specified category. This was followed by a forced choice recognition task. The effects of three variables were studied: a) whether the acquisition task called for a positive or a negative response; b) the number of exemplar words per category; and c) whether distractor items in the recognition test came from the same category as the target words or from other categories. The results showed that recognition errors were influenced by all three variables. Unlike the variables a) and c) which showed significant main effects, the effect of number of exemplars per category was significant only for the same category distractor condition. In this condition more exemplars per category led to more recognition errors. The results are explained by assuming that retention performance is determined by two factors. The first factor is the distinctiveness of the memory traces. This is supposed to be a joint product of task-specific encoding and stimulus characteristics. The second factor is the distinctive similarity between the retrieval information and the stored memory traces. Although the results show some sublte effects that are not easy to explain, it is argued that this model offers a good account of the general findings.     

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