Schaffer's Demon

Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – which he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. We show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition and can do so only if a plausible thesis about justification is false.     

An approach to families of acting-out adolescents--a case study.

Certain types of acting-out in the adolescent express the feelings of deprivation of the parental pair in a maladaptive aggressive way. Family therapists have attempted to convert the acting-out behavioral disorders into an effective state, i.e., make the family aware of their feelings of deprivation by focusing on the aggressive component. In many instances, the family becomes depressed and then interrupts or terminates treatment. The authors feel that this is due to the therapist's interpretations which bring about the depressive state via guilt provocation. The family understands the interpretations as meaning "You are bad to have your adolescent offspring behave in such a way". The therapist is thus seen as the family's collective super-ego. In order to prevent premature termination, the therapist should instead help the members of the family to become more conscious of their loving, "welfare" feelings for one another. In this way the self-esteem of the family is increased, which then permits more verbal action of aggressive feelings--thus a decrease in the acting-out, and ultimately an increase in the capacity to mourn. It should be pointed out, however, that in certain families, the technique described is not applicable. In these cases, although there is acting-out, the families are unable to draw on sufficient good experiences together which are necessary to elicit positive feeling for one another. The absence of readily available "welfare" feelings is of diagnostic and prognostic significance and differentiates the disorganized, sociopathic or schizophrenic family from the acting-out of parental deprivation as illustrated in this paper.     

Dual processes in reasoning?

Previous results have shown that the introduction of negatives into the sentences used in a deductive problem affected behavior in a systematic way which was independent of the logical structure of the problem. In the present investigation, the subjects were asked to justify their responses when reasoning about such sentences. In accordance with previous results, the responses were dominated by the terms in the sentences regardless of whether they were negated. However, the justifications did vary when negatives were introduced in accordance with the logical consequences of the responses. The interpretation of these justifications as causes of behavior seemed implausible. It was suggested that they were rationalizations, or that there was at least some form of dual processing between behavior and conscious thought.