The hegemony of the practical in embodied cognitive science and the question of bodily vulnerability

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - When perception is made the subject of philosophy, it is primarily understood as pre-theoretical sensual knowledge, and the question of its truth content...     

Charismatic Leadership and Objective Performance Indicators

Recent empirical and theoretical work has advanced our understanding of charismatic leadership in organisations. Despite this progress, only a few studies have tested the hypothesis that charismatic leadership might be related to objective, organisationally relevant indicators. In order to address this research gap, the present study tested whether charismatic leadership was related to followers’ absenteeism, their training and development activities, as well as branch‐level profit. Charismatic leadership was defined according to Conger and Kanungo's (1998 ) theory. It could be demonstrated that facets of charismatic leadership were negatively related to followers’ absenteeism, but positively related to their training and development activity. Moreover, charismatic leadership showed a positive relationship to profit. In sum, the results contribute to theory and practice of charismatic leadership. Un travail empirique et théorique récent a fait progresser notre compréhension du leadership charismatique dans les organisations. Malgré ce progrès, seules quelques études ont testé l’hypothèse selon laquelle un leadership charismatique serait liéà des facteurs objectifs et pertinents pour l’organisation. Pour une compréhension plus approfondie des effets du leadership chatismatique, la présente étude teste si ce style de leadership est lié aux suiveurs, à l’absentéisme, aux activités de formation et de développement ainsi qu’aux bénéfices au niveau de la branche. Le leadership charismatique est défini en accord avec la théorie de Conger et Kanungo (1998). On a pu démontrer que les facettes du leadership charismatique sont liées négativement aux suiveurs, à l’absentéisme et positivement à l’activité de formation et de dévelpppement. En outre, le leadership charismatique montre une relation positive au profit. En somme, les résultats contribuent à la théorie et à la pratique du leadership charismatique.     

The ABC of Social Desires: Affiliation,Being Alone,and Closeness to Partner

We propose a triadic model of social desires directed at appetence/aversion of affiliation with friends (A), being alone (B), and closeness to one's partner (C) that account for individual differences in subjectively experienced needs for proximity and distance in serious couple relationships. The model assumes that A, B, and C can be conceptualized at the individual level as correlated latent factors measured by appetence and aversion indicators with opposite factor loadings and low shared method variance and at the couple level assuming the same measurement model and identical (co)variances for men and women. The model was confirmed with confirmatory factor analyses in a sex‐balanced internet sample of 476 individuals and a longitudinal sample of both partners of 578 heterosexual couples by assessing the ABC desires with brief appetence/aversion scales. In both samples, the desires showed expected unique associations with the Big Five personality traits, loneliness and relationship satisfaction, perceived available support by friends and partner, and attachment style toward the partner and high 1‐year stability in the longitudinal sample. We suggest that the ABC model helps to integrate research on couples' distance regulation along the lines of communal and agentic motivation. Copyright © 2012 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Past and Future Non-Existence

According to the “deprivation approach,” a person’s death is bad for her to the extent that it deprives her of goods. This approach faces the Lucretian problem that prenatal non-existence deprives us of goods just as much as death does, but does not seem bad at all. The two most prominent responses to this challenge—one of which is provided by Frederik Kaufman (inspired by Thomas Nagel) and the other by Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer—claim that prenatal non-existence is relevantly different from death. This paper criticizes these responses.     

Pain and Sacrifice: Experience and Modulation of Pain in a Religious Piercing Ritual

Fascinating pain-related rituals have been observed throughout the world, but so far no systematic evidence exists to support previous ethnographic reports of analgesic states and dissociative symptoms during these events. To address this issue, we combined quantitative and qualitative measures with the aim of investigating pain experience and modulation of pain during the Thaipusam Kavadi ritual in Mauritius. In Study 1, results indicated low levels of pain intensity during the ritual, and regression analyses showed that expectations of pain were significantly predictive of actual pain intensity ratings. In Study 2, the meanings surrounding the ritual were found to generate expectations of low pain and a positive outcome, and intense prayer was reported as the main coping strategy. In addition, most participants expressed symptoms of dissociation (including amnesia, absorption, and depersonalisation) during Thaipusam, and a high prevalence of these symptoms was associated with low levels of pain.     

Impossible worlds and logical omniscience: an impossibility result

In this paper, I investigate whether we can use a world-involving framework to model the epistemic states of non-ideal agents. The standard possible-world framework falters in this respect because of a commitment to logical omniscience. A familiar attempt to overcome this problem centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. As we shall see, if we admit impossible worlds where “anything goes” in modal space, it is easy to model extremely non-ideal agents that are incapable of performing even the most elementary logical deductions. A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge is to ensure that the resulting modal space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient but nevertheless logically competent. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out subtly impossible worlds that verify complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out blatantly impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. To model moderately ideal agents, I argue, the job is to construct a modal space that contains only possible and non-trivially impossible worlds where it is not the case that “anything goes”. But I prove that it is impossible to develop an impossible-world framework that can do this job and that satisfies certain standard conditions. Effectively, I show that attempts to model moderately ideal agents in a world-involving framework collapse to modeling either logical omniscient agents, or extremely non-ideal agents.     

Asymmetry and Incoherence: A Reply to Cyr

In defense of the Deprivation Approach to the badness of death against the Lucretian objection that death is relevantly similar to prenatal nonexistence, John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have suggested that whereas death deprives us of things that it is rational for us to care about, prenatal nonexistence does not. I have argued that this suggestion, even if correct, does not make for a successful defense of the Deprivation Approach against the Lucretian objection. My criticism involved a thought experiment in which a person avoids being tortured. Recently, Taylor Cyr has defended Fischer and Brueckner’s approach, arguing that my thought experiment is incoherent. In this response, I question both the truth and relevance of Cyr’s incoherence claim.     

The Lucretian Puzzle and the Nature of Time

If a person’s death is bad for him for the reason that he would have otherwise been intrinsically better off, as the Deprivation Approach says, does it not follow that his prenatal nonexistence is bad for him as well? Recently, it has been suggested that the “A-theory” of time can be used to support a negative answer to this question. In this paper, I raise some problems for this approach.     

Taking a new look at looking at nothing

A crucial question in cognitive science is how linguistic and visual information are integrated. Previous research has shown that eye movements to objects in the visual environment are locked to linguistic input. More surprisingly, listeners fixate on now-empty regions that had previously been occupied by relevant objects. This 'looking at nothing' phenomenon has been linked to the claim that the visual system constructs sparse representations of the external world and relies on saccades and fixations to extract information in a just-in-time manner. Our model provides a different explanation: based on recent work in visual cognition and memory, it assumes that the visual system creates and stores detailed internal memory representations, and that looking at nothing facilitates retrieval of those representations.