At the threshold of knowledge

We explore consequences of the view that to know a proposition your rational credence in the proposition must exceed a certain threshold. In other words, to know something you must have evidence that makes rational a high credence in it. We relate such a threshold view to Dorr et al.’s (Philosophical Studies 170(2):277–287, 2014) argument against the principle they call fair coins: “If you know a coin won’t land tails, then you know it won’t be flipped.” They argue for rejecting fair coins because it leads to a pervasive skepticism about knowledge of the future. We argue that the threshold view of evidence and knowledge gives independent grounds to reject fair coins.     

Does maintenance of colour categories rely on language? Evidence to the contrary from a case of semantic dementia

Recent neuropsychological evidence, supporting a strong version of Whorfian principles of linguistic relativity, has reinvigorated debate about the role of language in colour categorisation. This paper questions the methodology used in this research and uses a novel approach to examine the unique contribution of language to categorisation behaviour. Results of three investigations are reported. The first required development of objective measures of category coherence and consistency to clarify questions about healthy control performance on the freesorting colour categorisation task used in previous studies. Between-participant consistency was found to be only moderate and the number of colour categories generated was found to vary markedly between individuals. The second study involved longitudinal neuropsychological examination of a patient whose colour categorisation strategy was monitored in the context of a progressive decline in language due to semantic dementia. Performance on measures of category coherence and consistency was found to be relatively stable over time despite a profound decline in the patient's colour language. In a final investigation we demonstrated that, for both the patient and controls, between- and within-participant consistency were higher than expected by (a) random sorting and (b) sorting perceptually similar chips together. These findings indicate that the maintenance of colour categorisation need not depend on language.     

Status of the provoker,opportunity to retaliate,and interest in video violence

Two hypotheses derived from affect-dependent stimulus arrangement theory [Zillmann D, Bryant J (1985): In: “Selective Exposure to Communication.” Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.] were tested: (1) provoked persons will express less interest in seeing video violence than will those not provoked, unless they anticipate an opportunity to retaliate against their provocateur; and (2) when provoked persons anticipate an opportunity to retaliate against a provocateur who is not high status, they will express greater interest in seeing video violence than will those not provoked. After being provoked or not provoked by a high or low status experimenter, half the 160 male college student participants were led to believe that their evaluation of the experimenter would determine the experimenter's grade for conducting the research, and half were not given any reason to expect an opportunity to evaluate him. Then each man indicated his degree of interest in seeing each of twelve video selections that had been described in brief paragraphs, three each in four content categories: aggressive, humorous, mildly erotic, and neutral. In confirmation of the first hypothesis, provoked subjects who did not anticipate opportunity to retaliate expressed less interest in seeing aggressive material than did those not provoked. In relationship to the second hypothesis, provoked subjects showed the greatest interest in aggressive video material when they anticipated an opportunity to retaliate against a low status provocateur, but their interest was not greater than corresponding nonangered subjects. The effect of provocation upon interest in the other categories of video material was generally in line with what would be predicted from the theory. When there was no anticipated opportunity to retaliate, interest in humorous material was greater in provoked subjects than in those not provoked. In the case of the mildly erotic category of video selections, there was less interest expressed among provoked subjects when they anticipated having a chance to retaliate against a low status experimenter.     

The condom purchase task: A hypothetical demand method for evaluating sexual health decision-making

Behavioral economic theory has proved useful for understanding the influence of delay and probability on sexual health decision-making. Demand is another principle at the intersection of microeconomics and psychology that has helped advance research relevant to health behaviors. The purpose of the present study was to develop and test a demand measure related to sexual health decision-making and the influence of sexually transmitted infection (STI) risk. Participants (N = 438) recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk completed a commodity purchase task assessing hypothetical condom demand. Condom demand was evaluated at varied prices for use with hypothetical sexual partners that varied in STI risk. Demand was characterized by prototypic decreases in consumption with increases in cost. Higher partner STI risk was associated with greater intentions for condom-protected sex at no cost and smaller decreases in condom demand with increases in cost. Price sensitivity was also related to individual difference factors relevant to sexual health (e.g., alcohol use severity, lower STI knowledge). This study supports the utility of a condom purchase task for indexing condom valuation and capturing individual difference and contextual risk factors relevant to STI transmission. Future studies may leverage this methodology as a means to study sexual health decision-making.     

Equity and derogation of those against whom we have aggressed

Casting the classic provocation-retaliation paradigm in an equity framework, we hypothesized that persons realizing their retribution was excessive would derogate their victim, but only when they did not anticipate an opportunity to compensate her. After retaliating against a peer who had harshly evaluated their essays, 40 female undergraduates were informed that either a serious or mild misfortune had recently been suffered by their partner, and were led to believe that at the outset of the experiment they had carelessly overlooked this “mitigating” information. Half the participants anticipated a later opportunity to do a favor for the other woman. Regardless of the severity of the mitigating information the women were more negative in their evaluation of the partner when they did not anticipate a subsequent opportunity to do the partner a favor. The results are discussed in terms of equity restoration in reactions to having aggressed. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

CAB: Connectionist Analogy Builder

The ability to make informative comparisons is central to human cognition. Comparison involves aligning two representations and placing their elements into correspondence. Detecting correspondences is a necessary component of analogical inference, recognition, categorization, schema formation, and similarity judgment. Connectionist Analogy Builder (CAB) determines correspondences through a simple iterative computation that matches elements in one representation with elements playing compatible roles in the other representation while simultaneously enforcing structural constraints. CAB shows promise as a process model of comparison as its performance can be related to human performance (e.g., solution trajectory, error patterns, time‐on‐task). Furthermore, CAB's bounded working memory allows it to account for the inherent capacity limitations of human processing. CAB's strengths are its parsimony, transparency of operations, and ability to generate performance predictions. In this paper, CAB is evaluated against benchmark phenomena from the analogy literature.     

Psychological Adjustment,Social Responsiveness and Parental Distress in an Italian Sample of Siblings of Children with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

The psychosocial adjustment of siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a relatively recent field of study, but results in literature are often inconsistent, and studies specifically focused on samples of siblings of children with high-functioning ASD are very few. This paper analyzes the level of social impairment (index of broader autism phenotype), the risk of internalizing and externalizing problems (index of psychological adjustment) and the parenting distress in an Italian sample of siblings of children with high-functioning ASD (n = 26). The presence of risk factors (birth order, sex and number of siblings in the family) and the role of the siblings’ age are also explored. The data were collected through self-report instruments administered to parents. The results do not show higher average risk levels for psychosocial adjustment problems, even though a minority of the cases is at risk for social impairments (7.7 %), internalizing (23.1 %), externalizing (3.8 %) and total difficulties (11.5 %) and for distress in the parent–child system (15 %). Distress in the parent-sibling system seems to be modulated by the sibling’s features and to be higher when the sibling is older than the child with ASD. Additionally, a link between difficulties in psychological adjustment and broader autism phenotype is suggested.     

Prospero Moisè Loria: A Case Study of Jewish Secularism in Liberal Italy

In his will, Prospero Moisè Loria (1814–92) requested an autopsy and cremation and left his large inheritance to the municipality of Milan to establish a secular philanthropic institution, the Società umanitaria, “to enable all the disenfranchised poor, without distinction.” Loria and other Italian Jews were at the heart of secularist activity in Italy’s culture wars, as demonstrated by their engagement with secular philanthropy, battles for cremation, and Freemason activity. By exploring Loria as the most generous nineteenth-century Italian Jewish philanthropist, along with his affiliation with the Alliance israélite universelle as a secular Jewish institution in the Mediterranean, this essay shows how forms of secularism and Jewishness could coexist for Italian Jews and how secularism in Italy could include a commitment to a Jewish collective, and thus seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the composite mixture of secular Italians and to a discussion of Jewish secularism in an international context.