Grounding: Necessary or Contingent?

Recent interest in the nature of grounding is due in part to the idea that purely modal notions are too coarse‐grained to capture what we have in mind when we say that one thing is grounded in another. Grounding not being purely modal in character, however, is compatible with it having modal consequences. Is grounding a necessary relation? In this article I argue that the answer is ‘yes’ in the sense that propositions corresponding to full grounds modally entail propositions corresponding to what they ground. The argument proceeds upon two substantive principles: the first is that there is a broadly epistemic constraint on grounding, while the second links this constraint with Fine's Aristotelian notion of essence. Many think grounding is necessary in something like the sense specified above, but just why it's necessary is an issue that hasn't been carefully addressed. If my argument is successful, we now know why grounding is necessary.     

A BLACK FEMINIST MODEL OF RAPE MYTH ACCEPTANCE

A Black feminist model was used to investigate rape myth acceptance between African American antirape activists and a comparison group of nonactivists using Cross's (1991) racial identity model and Downing and Roush's (1985) feminist identity model. As predicted, activists rejected rape myths more than nonactivists; the earlier stages of both models were associated with rape myth acceptance; the later stages were associated with rape myth rejection; and activists evidenced more sociopolitical maturity (race and gender consciousness) than nonactivists. The findings suggest that researchers may need to investigate to what degree rape myth acceptance serves an overarching system of social domination where racism and sexism overlap.     

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.