Normative Practical Reasoning: Christian Pillar

In the first part I discuss the thesis, advanced by John Broome, that intentions are normatively required by all-things-considered judgments about what one ought to do. I endorse this thesis, but remain sceptical about Broome's programme of grounding the correctness of reasoning in formal relations between contents of mental states. After discussing objections to the thesis, I concentrate in the second part on the relation between rational action and rational intention. I distinguish between content-related and attitude-related reasons for propositional attitudes like believing, wanting, and intending something. The former appeal to features of the content of the propositional attitude they are reasons for, the latter would be reasons for a propositional attitude because of features of the propositional attitude as a whole, for example the feature of its being beneficial to believe or to want that p . I try to show that the common philosophical reaction to attitude-related reasons, namely to claim that they are merely content-related reasons in disguise, is mistaken. In its most extreme form such a reaction would fail to respect the first-person character of reasoning which manifests itself in, among other things, the fact that a Moore-sentence and its analogue for intentions cannot be a conclusion of reasoning. In the third part I argue that there are attitude-related reasons for intentions, and, in showing how they influence practical deliberation, I find that their existence can be rendered compatible with the thesis that it is rational to intend to do what one thinks one ought to do.     

Influence of Connectives on Language Comprehension: Eye tracking Evidence for Incremental Interpretation

An eye-tracking experiment investigated whether incremental interpretation applies to interclausal relationships. According to Millis and Just's (1994) delayed-integration hypothesis, interclausal relationships are not computed until the end of the second clause, because the processor needs to have two full propositions before integration can occur. We investigated the processing of causal and diagnostic sentences (Sweetser, 1990; Tversky & Kahneman, 1982) that contained the connective because . Previous research (Traxler, Sanford, Aked, & Moxey, 1997) has demonstrated that readers have greater difficulty processing diagnostic sentences than causal sentences. Our results indicated that difficulty processing diagnostic sentences occurred well before the end of the second clause. Thus comprehenders appear to compute interclausal relationships incrementally.     

Family interaction and child psychopathology: A comparison of two observation strategies

We examined two systems of assessing family interactions that are in common usage: a home based observation of free parent-child interaction and a clinic based observation of a structured mother-child problem solving discussion. Participants were 18 depressed, 27 conduct disordered and 16 comparison children and their mothers. Results indicated that: 1) these observations may yield very different data about child, and to a lesser extent, parent behavior, 2) parental affect in the clinic was related to their level of aversive behaviour in the home, 3) levels of both aversive and positive behavior for children and their mothers were correlated within each setting, 4) accuracy of diagnostic classifications made on the basis of the observational data were highest for comparison and conduct disordered children, but lowest for depressed children observed in the clinic, and 5) the inclusion of data on mothers' behavior increased classification accuracy for conduct disordered children only.     

Higher nervous activity in psychiatric patients

A review is presented of studies of higher nervous activity in psychiatric patients. In neuroses and reactive psychoses the basic pathology appears to be centered around the psychogenic complex structures. In addition, neuroses as well as reactive psychoses reveal general disturbances of higher nervous activity. In the schizophrenic and manic depressive psychoses there are indications of disturbances in deep-lying brain structures. Both types of psychoses are heterogeneous groups of clinical conditions. An important task for future experimental studies is to establish the types of disturbances of higher nervous activity in well-defined clinically homogenous groups. The final section deals with prophylactic psychiatry, with special emphasis on Gantt’s suggestions for an international project.