Reasons and practical possibility

According to a common thesis about normative reasons for action, you have a reason to perform a given action only if you can act for that reason. This thesis has long had broad appeal and is intended to capture the practical character of practical reasons. I’ll call it the ‘Practicality Thesis’. Recently, however, various writers have developed subtly different objections to it, each designed to show that there can be actions you have a reason to perform even though you could not act for that reason – because, were you aware of the reason-giving facts in the ways needed to act for the reason, it would no longer be a reason for you to so act. This article defends the Practicality Thesis against such objections. It considers some extant defences but shows that these are inadequate. It then advances an alternative approach intended to counter any structurally similar objection.     

Response Timing Variability

A detailed kinematic and electromyographic (EMG) analysis of single degree of freedom timing responses is reported to (a) determine the coherence of kinematic and EMG variability to the reduced timing error variability exhibited with amplitude increments within a given criterion movement time and (b) understand the temporal organization of various movement parameters in simple responses. The data reveal that the variability of kinematic (time to peak acceleration, duration of acceleration phase, time to peak deceleration) and EMG (duration of agonist burst, duration of antagonist burst, time to antagonist burst) timing parameters decreased with increments of average velocity in a manner consistent with the variable timing error. In addition, the coefficient of variation for peak acceleration, peak deceleration, and integrated EMG of the agonist burst followed the same trend. Increasing average movement velocity also led to decreases in premotor and motor reaction times. Overall, the findings suggest a strong coherence between the variability of response outcome, kinematic, and EMG parameters.     

A Review of: “A Guide to the Books of James Hollis”

This article provides a small, personal glimpse of what occurs in a barroom subculture, both negative and positive (e.g., the camaraderie of my Friday night “family members”). I look at life in a barroom from different angles and perspectives, ultimately discovering a great deal of sadness as I try to connect barroom life to my own personal background.     

A Review of “Channeling Your Higher Self.” (1989/2007). By Henry Reed

Abstract

Mining the Soul: From the Inside Out. 2000. By Robin Robertson. York Beach: Nicholas-Hays.

The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation. 1999. By Robert Romanyshyn. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Healing Dreams. 2000. By Marc-Barasch. New York: Riverhead Books.

The Wounded Body. 2000. By Dennis Slattery. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.     

Children's night-time fears: an overview

Night-time fears are a normal developmental occurrence for most children. However, a small proportion of children may experience severe night-time fears of much greater intensity and duration, and typically meet diagnostic criteria for an anxiety or phobic disorder diagnosis. The content and developmental features of children's night-time fears are explored, highlighting the heterogeneous nature of nocturnal fears. Fears of this nature are probably due to an interaction of biological, environmental and cognitive-mediational factors, together with the involvement of family and operant learning processes. Clinical assessment procedures are briefly outlined, including the behavioural interview, the diagnostic interview, self-report inventories and home-monitoring on the part of parents. Family-based cognitive-behavioural treatment strategies are described. Although research findings are encouraging for the efficacy of these interventions, future studies need to utilize methodologies that allow for the identification of the specific mechanisms responsible for treatment, and improved diagnostic assessment of night fearful children.     

TSUNAMI: Simultaneous Understanding,Answering, and Memory Interaction for Questions

Question processing involves parsing, memory retrieval, question categorization, initiation of appropriate answer-retrieval heuristics, answer formulation, and output. Computational and psychological models have traditionally treated these processes as separate, sequential, independent, and in pursuit of a single answer type at a time. Here this view is challenged and the implications of a theory in which question processes operate simultaneously on multiple question interpretations are explored. A highly interactive model is described in which an expectation-driven parser generates multiple question candidates, including partially-specified candidates. Question candidates act as constraints for a matcher which activates memory items. An answer retrieval process examines question candidates and the active portions of memory in an attempt to generate answer candidates. Answer candidates are examined by an output process that derives the final answer. These processes run simultaneously and interact. Three experiments on human question answering are also described which provide evidence that working memory load during question reading is affected by processes related to answer retrieval.