Shabbir Akhtar on Muslims,Christians and British society: An appraisal and Christian response

An attempt will be made here to engage with the work of Shabbir Akhtar, whose stance as a theological modernist and Muslim fundamentalist represents one possible direction for the development of British Islam. Several points will be made which look toward constructive ways of negotiating with differences in a pluralist society. These include a recognition of the role of implicit theology in shaping our opinions, and the adoption of non-foundationalist philosophical positions. In response to Akhtar's criticisms of Christian theologies of power I call for a closer analysis of power and its operation, and for more energy to be devoted to alternative methods of persuasion and conflict resolution to the use of violence, observing that British Muslims are already becoming familiar with such methods, as the burning of The Satanic Verses illustrates.     

Tenacious inferential illusions: Experimental fact vs. critical fancy

Tzeng and Tzeng's (1982) assertion that the results from two indices of estimated item coendorsement should not have been combined in Mirels' (1976) demonstration of inferential illusions is shown to be based on erroneous suppositions. Evidence for the equivalence of the two formats makes it clear that the separate presentation of data for each index would have yielded results and led to conclusions virtually identical to those for the combined data. The objection by Tzeng and Tzeng to Mirels' use of empirical conditional probabilities as a criterion against which to assess the veridicality of Implicit Personality Theory is also shown to be without empirical foundation. In the light of available findings, the existence of striking inaccuracies in the culturally prevalent Implicit Personality Theory seems well established.     

Priming effects from phonologically related distractors in picture-word interference

In the cross-modal picture-word interference task, distractors phonologically related to a to-benamed picture facilitate the naming response as compared to unrelated distractors. Our experiment shows that this phonological priming effect can be obtained with as early an SOA as-300 ms. The experiment also demonstrates that this priming effect cannot be attributed to strategic behaviour of the participants as opposed to automatic preactivation processes in the lexical-conceptual system. The implications for studies using the picture-word interference task as a tool for investigating lexicalization processes in speech production are discussed.