The Fundamental Theorem of World Theory

The fundamental principle of the theory of possible worlds is that a proposition p is possible if and only if there is a possible world at which p is true. In this paper we present a valid derivation of this principle from a more general theory in which possible worlds are defined rather than taken as primitive. The general theory uses a primitive modality and axiomatizes abstract objects, properties, and propositions. We then show that this general theory has very small models and hence that its ontological commitments—and, therefore, those of the fundamental principle of world theory—are minimal.     

Predicting Response to Intensive Multimodal Inpatient Treatment: A Comparison of Single- and Multiple-Class Growth Modeling Approaches

In a modest body of research, personality functioning assessed via performance-based instruments has been found to validly predict treatment outcome and, to some extent, differential response to treatment. However, state-of-the-science longitudinal and mixture modeling techniques, which are common in many areas of clinical psychology, have rarely been used. In this article, we compare multilevel growth curve modeling (MLM) and latent class growth modeling (LCGM) approaches with the same data set to illustrate the different research questions that can be addressed by each method. Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scores collected at 6 points during the course of a long-term multimodal inpatient treatment of 58 severely and persistently mentally ill adults were used to model the trajectory of treatment outcome. Pretreatment Rorschach-based markers of personality functioning and other markers of psychiatric severity were examined as covariates in each modeling approach. The results of both modeling approaches generally indicated that more psychologically impaired clients responded less favorably to treatment. The LCGM approach revealed 2 unique trajectories of improvement (a persistently low group and a higher starting, improving group). Personality functioning and baseline psychiatric variables significantly predicted group membership and the rate of change within the groups. A side-by-side examination of these 2 methods was found to be useful in predicting differential treatment response with personality functioning variables.     

Religious Perspectives on the Use of Psychopharmaceuticals as an Enhancement Technology

The use of psychopharmaceuticals as an enhancement technology has been the focus of attention in the bioethics literature. However, there has been little examination of the challenges that this practice creates for religious traditions that place importance on questions of being, authenticity, and identity. We asked expert commentators from six major world religions to consider the issues raised by psychopharmaceuticals as an enhancement technology. These commentaries reveal that in assessing the appropriate place of medical therapies, religious traditions, like secular perspectives, rely upon ideas about health and disease and about normal human behavior. But unlike secular perspectives, faith traditions explicitly concern themselves with ways in which medicine should or should not be used to live a “good life”.     

Priority and position

Positional goods are goods whose relative amount determines their absolute value. Many goods appear to have positional aspects. For example, one’s relative standing in the distribution of education and wealth may determine one’s absolute condition with respect to goods like employment opportunities, self-respect, and social inclusion. Positional goods feature in recent arguments from T.M. Scanlon, Brian Barry, and Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift that assert that we should favor egalitarian distributions of positional goods even if we reject equality as a fundamental principle of distributive justice. With respect to positional goods, worsening the better off is required to better the worse off. Thus, we have reason to “level down” goods such as education and wealth in order to benefit those worse off with respect to the value of those goods. I argue that the allegedly positional aspects of the goods in question are not actually positional. Moreover, leveling down these goods risks self-defeat: it may produce a net decrease in the value of the shares of individuals with less of such goods. If so, leveling down measures would fail on their own terms.     

Event-causal libertarianism,functional reduction,and the disappearing agent argument

Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s freely bringing about a choice is reducible to states and events involving him bringing about the choice. Agent-causal libertarians demur, arguing that free will requires that the agent be irreducibly causally involved. Derk Pereboom and Meghan Griffith have defended agent-causal libertarianism on this score, arguing that since on event-causal libertarianism an agent’s contribution to his choice is exhausted by the causal role of states and events involving him, and since these states and events leave it open which decision he will make, he does not settle which decision occurs, and thus “disappears.” My aim is to explain why this argument fails. In particular, I demonstrate that event-causal libertarians can dismantle the argument by enriching the reductive base in their analysis of free will to include a state that plays the functional role of the self-determining agent and with which the agent is identified.     

Analogical Arguments for Egalitarianism

Egalitarians sometimes analogize socioeconomic opportunities to starting gates, playing fields, and the results of a lottery. A fair game is one in which all have an equal opportunity to succeed; egalitarians propose that the same is true of a fair society. A second type of argument for egalitarianism appeals to intuitions about the distribution of found resources. A just division of manna discovered on a strange planet seems to be an equal one. Both types of argument share a crucial feature: they concern the once‐off division of a fixed sum of goods. I argue that the most compelling reasons to depart from an equal division of goods derive from the economic activity involved in producing more of those goods, e.g., Pareto improvements due to efficiency gains that result from incentives that encourage production. We cannot conclude that game analogies and found resources cases arbitrate in favour of equality against non‐egalitarian principles because they exclude precisely those considerations that provide the strongest reasons to reject equality.     

How to avoid inconsistent idealizations

Idealized scientific representations result from employing claims that we take to be false. It is not surprising, then, that idealizations are a prime example of allegedly inconsistent scientific representations. I argue that the claim that an idealization requires inconsistent beliefs is often incorrect and that it turns out that a more mathematical perspective allows us to understand how the idealization can be interpreted consistently. The main example discussed is the claim that models of ocean waves typically involve the false assumption that the ocean is infinitely deep. While it is true that the variable associated with depth is often taken to infinity in the representation of ocean waves, I explain how this mathematical transformation of the original equations does not require the belief that the ocean being modeled is infinitely deep. More generally, as a mathematical representation is manipulated, some of its components are decoupled from their original physical interpretation.     

Use of social knowledge in tacit coordination: Social focal points

Social focal point theory predicts that, in matching, people search for a shared characteristic that makes one decision option salient whereas, in mismatching, they search for complementary characteristics that make different options salient for each of the coordinating parties. In two studies, participants learned about a partner’s activity preferences and then tried to either match or mismatch choices on a series of pictures that were remotely associated with one of these preferences. Being the same on a relevant preference facilitated matching whereas being different facilitated mismatching. In the second study, participants also used overall perceived similarity to supplement specific trait information. Coordination performance also affected interpersonal impressions: successful matching increased interpersonal attraction whereas successful mismatching did not. These downstream effects were obtained even when participants had considerable prior social information about their partners. Tacit coordination is compared with mimicry and synchrony, and the implications for coordinated team performance are discussed.