How lucky can you get?

In this paper, I apply Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck epistemology to the case of knowledge through testimony. I claim (1) that Pritchard’s distinction between veritic and reflective luck provides a nice taxonomy of testimony cases, (2) that the taxonomic categories that emerge can be used to suggest precisely what epistemic statuses are transmissible through testimony, and (3) that the resulting picture can make clear how testimony can actually be knowledge-generating.     

Neurocognitive sequelae of pediatric sickle cell disease: a review of the literature.

This literature review summarizes all studies relating neuropsychological performance to neuroimaging findings in pediatric sickle cell disease (N=28; published 1991-2005). Although inconsistencies exist within and across domains, deficits in intelligence (IQ), attention and executive functions, memory, language, visuomotor abilities, and academic achievement have been identified. Overall neurocognitive compromise was revealed to be related to the level of neurological injury and the location of silent infarct. Attentional and executive dysfunction is prevalent and related to frontal lobe abnormalities.     

A pilot study of cognitive-behavioral therapy of insomnia in people with mild depression

In some cases, insomnia and depression may have a reciprocal relationship, in which each aggravates and maintains the other. To test the hypothesis that reduction of insomnia would result in reduction of depression in patients (N=10) with both disorders, a repeated-measures design was used comparing depression and insomnia levels before and after 6 sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy of insomnia. Posttreatment, 100% of completers (n=8) had a normalized sleeping pattern, and 87.5% had normalized depression scores. Significant posttreatment improvement was seen in sleep onset latency (-31 min), wake time after sleep onset (-24 min), total sleep time (+65 min), sleep efficiency (+14%), and sleep quality (+19%), which was maintained at 3-month follow-up. A decreasing trend occurred in depression scores from pre- to posttreatment, which reached significance at 3-month follow-up. Intent-to-treat analyses showed similar results.     

WHY WE NEED RELIGION TO SOLVE THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS

Scholars and practitioners addressing the global food crisis have rarely incorporated perspectives from the world's religious traditions. This lacuna appears in multiple dimensions: until recently, environmentalists have tended to ignore food and agriculture; food justice advocates have focused on food quantities, rather than its method of production; and few scholars of religion have considered agriculture. Faith‐based perspectives typically emphasize the dignity and sanctity of creation and offer holistic frameworks that integrate equity, economic, and environmental concerns, often called the three legs of sustainability. Faith‐based perspectives can provide new paradigms through which to assess food, consumption, and production and the attendant social relations; assess our scientific, economic, and social approaches; and acknowledge the moral and religious dimensions of the world food crisis.     

When does being paid an hourly wage make it difficult to be a happy volunteer?

When people willingly volunteer their time, how does the salience of the opportunity costs of their time influence their experience of the activity? Study 1 uses the American Time Use Survey Well-Being module to examine whether the subjective experience of happiness while volunteering is influenced by how people are paid and the opportunity costs of their time spent volunteering. Among hourly paid workers for whom there is a salient heuristic for the opportunity costs of time, we found that higher opportunity costs of time as indicated by income and duration of the activity were associated with diminished happiness experienced during volunteering. No differences across income and duration emerged among non-hourly workers for whom there was not a salient heuristic for the opportunity costs of time. Using a student population who all volunteered for the same charity activity, Study 2 tested whether making the opportunity costs salient caused less happiness to be reported from the activity than those in the control condition. These studies contribute to our understanding of the psychological consequences of thinking about time in terms of money and how it may influence the hedonic experience of activities people choose to undertake in the applied context of volunteering.     

What epistemologists of testimony should learn from philosophers of science

Synthese - The thesis of this paper is that, if it is construed individualistically, epistemic justification does not capture the conditions that philosophers of science would impose on justified...     

Infinite Prospects*

People with the kind of preferences that give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox are problematic—but not because there is anything wrong with infinite utilities. Rather, such people cannot assign the St. Petersburg gamble any value that any kind of outcome could possibly have. Their preferences also violate an infinitary generalization of Savage's Sure Thing Principle, which we call the Countable Sure Thing Principle, as well as an infinitary generalization of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Independence axiom, which we call Countable Independence. In violating these principles, they display foibles like those of people who deviate from standard expected utility theory in more mundane cases: they choose dominated strategies, pay to avoid information, and reject expert advice. We precisely characterize the preference relations that satisfy Countable Independence in several equivalent ways: a structural constraint on preferences, a representation theorem, and the principle we began with, that every prospect has a value that some outcome could have.     

Reading in healthy ageing: the influence of information structuring in sentences

In three experiments, we investigated the cognitive effects of linguistic prominence to establish whether focus plays a similar or different role in modulating language processing in healthy ageing. Information structuring through the use of cleft sentences is known to increase the processing efficiency of anaphoric references to elements contained with a marked focus structure. It also protects these elements from becoming suppressed in the wake of subsequent information, suggesting selective mechanisms of enhancement and suppression. In Experiment 1 (using self-paced reading), we found that focus enhanced (faster) integration for anaphors referring to words contained within the scope of focus; but suppressed (slower) integration for anaphors to words contained outside of the scope of focus; and in some cases, the effects were larger in older adults. In Experiment 2 (using change detection), we showed that older adults relied more on the linguistic structure to enhance change detection when the changed word was in focus. In Experiment 3 (using delayed probe recognition and eye-tracking), we found that older adults recognized probes more accurately when they were made to elements within the scope of focus than when they were outside the scope of focus. These results indicate that older adults' ability to selectively attend or suppress concepts in a marked focus structure is preserved.     

ÉmigrÉ analysts in Boston, 1930-1940

A brief history of the European analysts who settled in Boston during the first decade of the newly re-organized Boston Psychoanalytic Society/Institute, as part of the great intellectual migration fleeing from Hitler Germany and Austria. The term émigré was chosen as more inclusive, since not all were refugees forced to emigrate. The sequence of each analyst's arrival is traced, and their reasons for choosing Boston are identified, whenever possible.