A Partial Defense of Permissivism

Permissivism is the view that sometimes an agent's total evidential state entails both that she is epistemically permitted to believe that P and that she is epistemically permitted to believe that Q, where P and Q are contradictories. Uniqueness is the denial of Permissivism. Permissivism has recently come under attack on several fronts. If these attacks are successful, then we may be forced to accept an unwelcome asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality. In this essay I clarify the debate by distinguishing two versions (each) of Permissiveness and Uniqueness. I then respond to several recent challenges to Permissivism in an attempt to even the score between Permissivism and Uniqueness. I will also respond to a worry – arising out of my discussion – that a defense of Permissivism itself introduces an unwelcome asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality.     

Increased locus coeruleus tonic activity causes disengagement from a patch-foraging task

High levels of locus coeruleus (LC) tonic activity are associated with distraction and poor performance within a task. Adaptive gain theory (AGT; Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005) suggests that this may reflect an adaptive function of the LC, encouraging search for more remunerative opportunities in times of low utility. Here, we examine whether stimulating LC tonic activity using designer receptors (DREADDs) promotes searching for better opportunities in a patch-foraging task as the value of a patch diminishes. The task required rats to decide repeatedly whether to exploit an immediate but depleting reward within a patch or to incur the cost of a time delay to travel to a new, fuller patch. Similar to behavior associated with high LC tonic activity in other tasks, we found that stimulating LC tonic activity impaired task performance, resulting in reduced task participation and increased response times and omission rates. However, this was accompanied by a more specific, predicted effect: a significant tendency to leave patches earlier, which was best explained by an increase in decision noise rather than a systematic bias to leave earlier (i.e., at higher values). This effect is consistent with the hypothesis that high LC tonic activity favors disengagement from current behavior, and the pursuit of alternatives, by augmenting processing noise. These results provide direct causal evidence for the relationship between LC tonic activity and flexible task switching proposed by AGT.     

So far away from one's partner, yet so close to romantic alternatives: avoidant attachment, interest in alternatives, and infidelity

Temptation pervades modern social life, including the temptation to engage in infidelity. The present investigation examines one factor that may put individuals at a greater risk of being unfaithful to their partner: dispositional avoidant attachment style. The authors hypothesize that avoidantly attached people may be less resistant to temptations for infidelity due to lower levels of commitment in romantic relationships. This hypothesis was confirmed in 8 studies. People with high, vs. low, levels of dispositional avoidant attachment had more permissive attitudes toward infidelity (Study 1), showed attentional bias toward attractive alternative partners (Study 2), expressed greater daily interest in meeting alternatives to their current relationship partner (Study 5), perceived alternatives to their current relationship partner more positively (Study 6), and engaged in more infidelity over time (Studies 3, 4, 7, and 8). This effect was mediated by lower levels of commitment (Studies 5-8). Thus, avoidant attachment predicted a broad spectrum of responses indicative of interest in alternatives and propensity to engage in infidelity, which were mediated by low levels of commitment.     

Posttraumatic Stress in U.S. Marines: The Role of Unit Cohesion and Combat Exposure

Combat exposure is a consistent predictor of posttraumatic stress (PTS). Understanding factors that might buffer the effects of combat exposure is crucial for helping service members weather the stress of war. In a study of U.S. Marines returning from Iraq, hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that unit cohesion and combat exposure predicted PTS, depression, and anger. Furthermore, results indicated that unit cohesion may be an important buffer, possibly limiting the development of PTS and depression following combat exposure.     

A Quantitative Analysis and Natural History of B. F. Skinner's Coauthoring Practices

This paper describes and analyzes B. F. Skinner's coauthoring practices. After identifying his 35 coauthored publications and 27 coauthors, we analyze his coauthored works by their form (e.g., journal articles) and kind (e.g., empirical); identify the journals in which he published and their type (e.g., data-type); describe his overall and local rates of publishing with his coauthors (e.g., noting breaks in the latter); and compare his coauthoring practices with his single-authoring practices (e.g., form, kind, journal type) and with those in the scientometric literature (e.g., majority of coauthored publications are empirical). We address these findings in the context of describing the natural history of Skinner's coauthoring practices. Finally, we describe some limitations in our methods and offer suggestions for future research.     

High psychopathic trait females exhibit reduced startle potentiation and increased p3 amplitude

While there has been steady progress in identifying psychophysiological traits associated with psychopathy, most of the existing research has been carried out using incarcerated male participants, and data that include females are particularly rare. This study examined both affective startle blink modulation and P3 amplitude in a sample of female undergraduates grouped by scores on the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R). Those scoring high for psychopathic traits lacked startle blink potentiation and demonstrated larger P3 amplitudes during auditory and visual oddball tasks. These data support the generalizability of deficient startle potentiation to non-incarcerated females with psychopathic traits, and add to a growing body of literature suggesting that psychopathic traits are associated with distinctive information-processing characteristics as indexed by P3 amplitude.     

Physical Attractiveness and Candidate Evaluation: A Model of Correction

Voters typically evaluate an attractive candidate more favorably than an (otherwise equivalent) unattractive candidate. However, some voters “correct” for the biasing influence of physical appearance. This reduces, eliminates, or even reverses the physical attractiveness effect. Correction occurs when political experts evaluate a political candidate under nondistracting conditions. Under these “high cognitive capacity” conditions, voters primarily correct for physical unattractiveness. However, correction fails to occur when voters possess low levels of expertise or are distracted. Thus, in most circumstances, attractive candidates are evaluated more favorably than unattractive candidates. Two experiments provide support for this model of appearance‐based candidate evaluation.     

Professional Counselors’ Interest in Counseling Older Adults

The authors surveyed professional counselors (N = 956) to examine self‐efficacy in counseling older adults, contact with older adults, and ageism as related to their interest in working with older adults. Higher self‐efficacy, contact, and positive ageism predicted increased interest. These results and implications for counseling older adults are discussed.     

Interpolation and Definability in Guarded Fragments

The guarded fragment (GF) was introduced by Andréka, van Benthem and Németi as a fragment of first order logic which combines a great expressive power with nice, modal behavior. It consists of relational first order formulas whose quantifiers are relativized by atoms in a certain way. Slightly generalizing the admissible relativizations yields the packed fragment (PF). In this paper we investigate interpolation and definability in these fragments. We first show that the interpolation property of first order logic fails in restriction to GF and PF. However, each of these fragments turns out to have an alternative interpolation property that closely resembles the interpolation property usually studied in modal logic. These results are strong enough to entail the Beth definability property for GF and PF. Even better, every guarded or packed finite variable fragment has the Beth property. For interpolation, we characterize exactly which finite variable fragments of GF and PF enjoy this property.