WALKER PERCY,LANGUAGE, AND HOMO SINGULARIS

The novelist Walker Percy argued that modern science has a tremendous blind spot in its view of human nature. Unlike purely physical phenomena, which can be explained by the interaction of dyadic relationships, human beings must also be understood in terms of triadic relationships brought into being by symbolic language. The self brought into being by symbolic language is nonmaterial but real, and operates by different “laws” than those that govern dyadic relations. In making this case, Percy drew a sharp line between human and nonhuman language, a line that more recent developments in science has challenged. However, Percy's central point, that the agent of symbolic language cannot be understood within a materialist framework, remains valid.     

What Is and Is Not Ethnocentrism? A Conceptual Analysis and Political Implications

Conceptual analysis has not been systematically implemented in psychology, and many concepts have often been defined in different and contradictory ways. This article focuses on a conceptual clarification of ethnocentrism. It points out the conceptual confusion surrounding the term, reviews numerous definitions and operationalizations, and attempts to clarify it. Ethnocentrism is reconceptualized as a strong sense of ethnic group self‐centeredness, which involves intergroup expressions of ethnic group preference, superiority, purity, and exploitativeness, and intragroup expressions of ethnic group cohesion and devotion. It is conceptually and empirically distinguished from other concepts, such as outgroup negativity and mere ingroup positivity. The article presents a theoretical framework and related empirical analyses supporting the usefulness of reconceptualized ethnocentrism. It also details important and unique implications of reconceptualized ethnocentrism for political phenomena. It is expected that reliance on the clarified reconceptualization should enable researchers to systematically study ethnocentrism, its origins, and consequences.     

Cognitive processes underlying lottery and sports gambling decisions: The role of stated probabilities and background knowledge

Two studies compared choice and underlying cognitive processes in equivalent decision tasks involving risk and uncertainty (lotteries versus sports gambles including displayed expert probability judgements). In sports gambles, background knowledge was triggered via information on team location, home or away. Otherwise, displayed risk information (stake, winnings, odds, and outcome probabilities) was controlled across gamble type. In a choice study, home win bets were chosen significantly more frequently than draws or away wins, compared to lottery equivalents. In a parallel study eliciting concurrent verbal protocols, participants made fewer evaluations of odds and probabilities, and more statements involving background knowledge in sports gambles. Furthermore, some sports gamble protocols indicated modifications of stated probabilities and decision strategies contingent on domain knowledge. It was concluded that stated probability revision and knowledge-based reasoning are key cognitive processes in sports gambling not normally applied in the lottery paradigms often employed in decision research.     

Resemblance and general terms

Philosophical Studies -     

Interactions between conditioned stimuli for food and water in the rat

In two experiments rats were initially trained with one conditioned stimulus (CS) signalling food and another CS signalling water. The main purpose of the experiments was to examine the effects of presenting these stimuli in compound. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the level of conditioned responding to this compound was equal to that of a group for which the compound was composed of elements that had separately signalled the same reinforcer. Moreover, the level of this responding was greater than for a group that had received only compound conditioning. In the second experiment it was found that after the initial training, repeatedly pairing the compound with a single reinforcer resulted in an equivalent loss of conditioned responding to both elements. These findings suggest that the interaction between conditioned stimuli for food and water is facilitatory rather than inhibitory.