Are country level prevalences of rule violations associated with knowledge overclaiming among students?

Cultural norms of behaviour influence desirable and problematic behaviours of individuals. In particular, cultural norms should influence individuals' dishonesty. In a recent Nature study, prevalence of rule violations was introduced as a new country‐level measure of behavioural norms. However, information on individuals' actual honesty was not available due to characteristics of the experimental design. Overcoming this limitation, we show that country‐level behavioural norms are related to individual‐level knowledge overclaiming behaviour (i.e., claiming to know concepts that do not exist, a measure of individuals' actual behavioural dishonesty) among 290,954 students from 57 countries (from the 2012 PISA study). Our study represents a crucial test of the argument that cultural norms influence individual's behaviour and of the validity of the measurement of countries' prevalences of rule violations. These results imply that shaping the behaviour of today's students may result in new behavioural norms that emphasise honesty and rule adherence more strongly.     

Personal and parents’ life stories in patients with borderline personality disorder

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display disturbances in understanding self and others. We examined whether these disturbances extended to how patients described their personal and parents’ life stories and to measures of identity, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Thirty BPD patients and 30 matched control participants described personal and parents’ life stories and completed measures of identity disturbance, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Compared to the controls, patients with BPD described their personal and their parents’ life stories more negatively and with fewer themes of agency and communion fulfillment. Patients and controls showed equally complex reasoning about their personal life stories, but patients displayed less complexity and more self‐other confusion, when reasoning about their parents’ stories. Patients also differed from controls on identity disturbance, alexithymia, and empathy. The results suggest that patients’ storied understanding of themselves and others are disturbed and should be taken into account to better understand BPD.     

The Scandal of Deduction

This article provides the first comprehensive reconstruction and analysis of Hintikka’s attempt to obtain a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences. The reconstruction is detailed by necessity due to the originality of Hintikka’s contribution. The analysis will turn out to be destructive. It dismisses Hintikka’s distinction between surface information and depth information as being of any utility towards obtaining a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences. Hintikka is right to identify the failure of canonical information theory to give an account of the information yield of deductions as a scandal, however this article demonstrates that his attempt to provide such an account fails. It fails primarily because it applies to only a restricted set of deductions in the polyadic predicate calculus, and fails to apply at all to the deductions in the monadic predicate calculus and the propositional calculus. Some corollaries of these facts are a number of undesirable and counterintuitive results concerning the proposed relation of linguistic meaning (and hence synonymy) with surface information. Some of these results will be seen to contradict Hintikka’s stated aims, whilst others are seen to be false. The consequence is that the problem of obtaining a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences remains an open one. The failure of Hintikka’s proposal will suggest that a purely syntactic approach to the problem be abandoned in favour of an intrinsically semantic one.     

Development of the self-concept during adolescence

Adolescence is a period of life in which the sense of 'self' changes profoundly. Here, we review recent behavioural and neuroimaging studies on adolescent development of the self-concept. These studies have shown that adolescence is an important developmental period for the self and its supporting neural structures. Recent neuroimaging research has demonstrated that activity in brain regions associated with self-processing, including the medial prefrontal cortex, changes between early adolescence and adulthood. These studies indicate that neurocognitive development might contribute to behavioural phenomena characteristic of adolescence, such as heightened self-consciousness and susceptibility to peer influence. We attempt to integrate this recent neurocognitive research on adolescence with findings from developmental and social psychology.     

Distinguishing Disadvantage from Ill-Being in the Capability Approach

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - Central capabilitarian theories of well-being focus exclusively on actual opportunities to attain states of being and doing that people have reason to value....     

A revised blocked-trial procedure for establishing arbitrary matching in children

The present study evaluated a modified blocked-trial procedure in the learning of arbitrary matching tasks (A1-B1, A2-B2) by children. The procedure consisted of five steps. In Step 1, the comparisons (B1 and B2) were presented simultaneously with the samples (A1 and A2). The comparisons were presented at fixed locations (B1 left and B2 right), and the samples, A1 and A2, were randomly presented in successive trials. Subjects were reinforced for placing A1 on B1 and A2 on B2. Step 2 was the same except that the locations of B1 and B2 were reversed. Step 3 was the same as Steps 1 and 2 but with reversed B1-B2 locations after every fourth trial. Step 4 was the same as Step 3 except that the B1-B2 locations randomly changed over trials. Step 5 was the same as Step 4 except that subjects were required to point to the B stimuli. The procedure was highly effective—far more so than the traditional blocked-trial procedure.     

Nietzsche on Kant and teleology in 1868: ‘“life” is something entirely dark … ’

ABSTRACT

We know from Nietzsche’s posthumously published notebooks and correspondence of his plan in 1868 to compose a doctoral dissertation in philosophy on the subject of teleology in nature and the concept of the organic, with reference to Kant. The bulk of my discussion represents an attempt to extrapolate from Nietzsche’s letters and preparatory notes the view he arrived at. Since the notes do not defend explicitly any single definitive thesis, their interpretation is unavoidably conjectural. I argue that, if Nietzsche’s remarks are considered with close reference to the philosophers who at that point dominated his horizons, namely Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lange, with Goethe also playing a key role, a plausible account can be given of the broad conclusions Nietzsche reached as a result of his early engagement with the problem of teleology. This outlook maintains the necessity and distinctiveness of philosophical reflection, but takes a skeptical view of its basis. In 1868 Nietzsche had no clear idea of how to proceed from this point, but in the end I propose, as others have done, that Nietzsche’s reflections on Kant and teleology helped to lay the ground for The Birth of Tragedy. In conclusion, I hypothesize that Nietzsche’s later philosophy involves no change of metaphilosophical standpoint.