Meaning Made of Stress among Veterans Transitioning to College: Examining Unique Associations with Suicide Risk and Life‐Threatening Behavior

Meaning made of stress has been shown to be a unique predictor of mental and physical health. In this study, we examined the unique associations between two facets of meaning made of stress (comprehensibility and footing in the world) and suicide risk and life‐threatening behavior among military veterans who have transitioned to college were examined, controlling for demographic factors, religiousness, combat‐related physical injury, combat exposure, depressive symptoms, and posttraumatic stress symptoms. Findings suggest that comprehensibility (having “made sense” of a stressor) is uniquely associated with lower suicide risk and a lower likelihood of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol and engaging in self‐mutilating behaviors.     

Law and Gospel,or the Law of the Gospel? Karl Barth’s Political Theology Compared with Luther and Calvin

This essay is an attempt to understand the significance of Barth's redefinition of the "law/gospel" rubric for political theology. Barth's thought is exposited at length, and illumined by comparison with Luther and Calvin. Luther emphasizes the distance between gospel and the law, distinguishing between serving God in the secular regiment, and serving Christ in the spiritual regiment. He thereby challenges the improper relation of state and church, but does so in a manner that can lead to a passive dualism. Calvin holds that preaching the law to the state includes preaching the gospel; thus, the church has a positive vision against which it can evaluate the state's service to God in Christ. This leads, however, to the danger of a 'clerical guardianship' of the state.
Barth finds a positive connection between the two governments in the fact that both communities are based in Christ, in whom the gospel is their law. This grounds his high view of the state as predecessor to the heavenly kingdom, as well as a prophetic mission of the church to the state. This does not lead to a new Christendom, however, first, because Barth hopes not for a kingdom wrought by human hands, but for the Theocracy of God, and second, because Barth sees the fallen reality of both church and state, the state pagan and violent, and the church a poor witness. In the end, though Barth makes a strong case for supporting theological critique of the state, while avoiding Constantinianism, he is unable to solve the problem of how to connect the gospel and the law in the civil community.     

Toward a Science of Other Minds: Escaping the Argument by Analogy

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper, we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second‐order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.     

Can Bayesianism Solve Frege’s Puzzle?

Philosophia - Chalmers (Mind, 125, 499–510, 2016), responding to Braun (Mind, 125, 469–497, 2016), continues arguments from Chalmers (Mind, 120, 587–636, 2011a) for the conclusion...     

Books Recently Received

(Neill, A. S. Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. New York: Hart Publishing Co., 1960.) Reviewed By E. Lakin Phillips.     

The effectiveness of short-format refutational fact-checks

Fact-checking has become an important feature of the modern media landscape. However, it is unclear what the most effective format of fact-checks is. Some have argued that simple retractions that repeat a false claim and tag it as false may backfire because they boost the claim's familiarity. More detailed refutations may provide a more promising approach, but may not be feasible under the severe space constraints associated with social-media communication. In two experiments, we tested whether (1) simple ‘false-tag’ retractions can indeed be ineffective or harmful; and (2) short-format (140-character) refutations are more effective than simple retractions. Regarding (1), simple retractions reduced belief in false claims, and we found no evidence for a familiarity-driven backfire effect. Regarding (2), short-format refutations were found to be more effective than simple retractions after a 1-week delay but not a one-day delay. At both delays, however, they were associated with reduced misinformation-congruent reasoning.     

Remedial Responsibility for Severe Poverty: Justice or Humanity?

Remedial responsibility is the prospective responsibility to assist those in great need. With tens of millions of people worldwide suffering from severe poverty, questions about the attribution of remedial responsibility and the nature of the relevant duties of assistance are among the most pressing of our time. This article concerns the question of whether remedial responsibility for severe poverty is a matter of justice or of humanity. I discuss three kinds of situation in which an agent owes remedial responsibility to another suffering from severe poverty. In the first, the remedially responsible agent foreseeably and avoidably caused the poverty. In the second, the poverty was caused by forces outside the control of any agent, such as natural disaster. And in the third situation, the agent who was originally attributed remedial responsibility fails to fulfil it, and so remedial responsibility for the poverty in question is acquired by a secondary bearer. According to David Miller, remedial responsibility is a matter of justice in the first two situations, but not in the third. I argue that his grounds for thinking that remedial responsibility in the second situation are in tension with his view that remedial responsibility is not a matter of justice in the third situation. This has important implications in our world in which remedial responsibilities too often go unfulfilled.