Qualitative Investigation into Pre- and Post-Natal Experience of Parents of Triplets

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Although parents of triplets experience substantial mental distress, research about this increasing population has primarily focused on physical health risks...     

PRAGMATISM,REALISM, AND RELIGION

Pragmatism is often thought to be incompatible with realism, the view that there are knowable mind‐independent facts, objects, or properties. In this article, I show that there are, in fact, realist versions of pragmatism and argue that a realist pragmatism of the right sort can make important contributions to such fields as religious ethics and philosophy of religion. Using William James's pragmatism as my primary example, I show (1) that James defended realist and pluralist views in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion, and (2) that these views not only cohere with his pragmatism but indeed are basic to it. After arguing that James's pragmatism provides a credible and useful approach to a number of basic philosophical and religious issues, I conclude by reflecting on some ways in which we can apply and potentially improve James's views in the study of religion.     

The role of goals and goal barriers in predicting the outcomes of intentional actions in the contexts of narrative text

ABSTRACT

Predictions about human behaviour can be influenced by the presence and status of goals. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of an active goal and barriers to that goal on predictions about outcomes experienced by agents. Participants read stories describing characters with goals. The extent that there were barriers to those goals was varied. Participants predicted what happens next in the story, both prior to and after barrier removal. There was support for a goal barrier hypothesis, where the conditions for predicting goal completion involved removing conditions that prevent a goal being achieved (Experiments 1 and 2). At the same time, unachieved goals were more accessible to working memory than completed goals, regardless of a barrier (Experiment 3). These results suggest that participants deliberately decided when it was appropriate to use goal information to predict outcomes of intentional actions conducted by the agents in the stories.     

Two Rival Interpretations of Xunzi's Views on the Basis of Morality

This essay examines the textual evidence and arguments for two rival ways of interpreting Xunzi's accounts of the origins and normative bases of ritual and the Way: a human‐centered line of interpretation which maintains that the moral order constituted by the Confucian Way and its ritual tradition was the artificial creation of a group of ancient sages, and a Heaven‐centered line of interpretation which maintains, in contrast, that those same sages based the Confucian Way and its ritual tradition on a cosmic moral order that they discovered already existing in the world. It argues that the weight of textual evidence best supports a version of the former view, and shows that three representative versions of the latter view do not withstand critical scrutiny.