The concept of the ‘Other’ in modern Arab thought: From Muhammad cAbdu to Abdallah Laroui

The primary condition for the progress, or indeed the survival, of human societies is their effective coalescence into one human society’ (Zurayk 1994, 96).     

Semantic activation due to synonym, antonym, and rhyme production

Semantic activation due to priming, and the time course of its dissipation, were examined. Following a word presentation, the subject performed one of three tasks: synonym, antonym, or rhyme production. The first presentation of a word together with the task was the primer. The second presentation of the same word occurred after 0 to 4 intervening words. Effects of priming were looked for in the speed of the first response to the second presentation of the word. A production facilitation occurred when synonym production was primed by antonym production to the same word, the primed word immediately following the primer. Facilitation decreased with increasing number of interpolated tasks. No effect was found when antonym production was primed by synonym production to the same word. The results are discussed in terms of spreading-activation due to active use of the associative link between the concept and its antonyms.     

Adult visual choice-reaction time, age, sex and preparedness: A test of Welford's problem in a large population sample

The relationship between age, sex and visual three-choice reaction time was investigated with a representative sample of adult subjects who participated in a large health survey in Finland (the Mini-Finland Survey). Subjects' age varied from 30 to 79 years. Reaction time increased reliably with increasing age. Men were faster than women across all age levels. The shortest of the irregularly presented inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) slowed down the performance of elderly subjects in particular. This suggests that they had more difficulty than younger subjects in getting prepared for an uncertain event. They also committed most errors at the longest ISI. This was interpreted as a result of their relative inability to maintain the optimum level of preparation. On the whole, men displayed a higher error rate than women, which suggests that the observed male superiority is at least in part due to response strategies. The importance for aging research of sampling the subjects and task types is briefly discussed.     

Gregory of Nyssa and Divine Simplicity: A Conceptualist Reading

Andrew Radde‐Gallwitz probes Gregory of Nyssa on divine simplicity, a topic that Radde‐Gallwitz treated earlier in a book‐length monograph and takes further here in response to critics. As he notes, the Cappadocians and their opponents shared belief in divine simplicity. But for Gregory, simplicity functions as part of affirming the co‐equal divinity of the Father and Son, against his opponents. Radde‐Gallwitz lists six negative claims that Gregory’s understanding of divine simplicity supports: (1) God is immaterial; (2) God is without parts; (3) God does not possess any perfection “by acquisition”; (4) God does not possess any perfection “by participation”; (5) in God, there is no mixture or conflux of qualities, especially opposite qualities; (6) in God, there are no degrees of more or less. Yet with regard to positive statements about God’s perfections—for example the relation of God’s goodness to God’s wisdom—things are more difficult, as Radde‐Gallwitz shows. Interpreters of Gregory have differed sharply on this issue, in part because Gregory does not make his position crystal clear. Radde‐Gallwitz himself earlier held that Gregory considers God to have real but non‐definitive perfections distinct from the divine essence. Indebted to Richard Cross, however, Radde‐Gallwitz here adjusts his view, distinguishing more firmly between the divine essence itself and our limited concepts. He draws upon the Platonic distinction between natural and conventional naming, which differ in their accounts of what makes words meaningful. Arguing that Gregory is a “naturalist,” he reads Gregory’s texts on divine simplicity in this light.     

The Analytic Truth and Falsity of Disjunctions

Disjunctive inferences are difficult. According to the theory of mental models, it is because of the alternative possibilities to which disjunctions refer. Three experiments corroborated further predictions of the mental model theory. Participants judged that disjunctions, such as Either this year is a leap year or it is a common year are true. Given a disjunction such as Either A or B, they tended to evaluate the four cases in its ‘partition’: A and B, A and not‐B, not‐A and B, not‐A and not‐B, as ‘possible’ or ‘impossible’ in ways that bore out the difference between inclusive disjunctions (‘or both’) and exclusive disjunctions (‘but not both’). Knowledge usually concerns what is true, and so when participants judge that a disjunction is false, or contingent, and evaluate the cases in its partition, they depend on inferences that yield predictable errors. They tended to judge that disjunctions, such as follows: Either the food is cold or else it is tepid, but not both, are true, though in fact they could be false. They tended to infer ‘mirror‐image’ evaluations that yield the same possibilities for false disjunctions as those for true disjunctions. The article considers the implications of these results for alternative theories based on classical logic or on the probability calculus.