Intention, Rule Following and the Strategic Role of Wright's Order of Determination Test

I argue that Wright's constructivist action of intention is fundamentally flawed and that the source of its error can be diagnosed by locating it within its strategic context; Wright's response to Wittgenstein on rules. Wright deploys intentions as an analogy to disarm Kripkean scepticism. Since we can have direct knowledge of the content of our intentions, Kripke's claim that knowledge of the content of rules cannot be direct and must be inferential is question begging. But Wright goes on to concede that a substantial explanation should be given of how first person grasp of content is possible for which he deploys constructivism. I raise a number of criticisms to show that constructivism fails to explain our knowledge of intentions. Finally I show that Wright's failure fits into a pattern anticipated by Wittgenstein. The ongoing judgments that are supposed to determine the content of intentions are like the interpretations of rules which fail because they stand in need of further interpretation. Contra Wright I claim that the moral of the rule following considerations is precisely that no substantial answer can be given to the question of how the content of mental states can be grasped. The phenomenon of mental content must simply be presupposed and not reductively explained.     

Traditional and Nontraditional Women's Attributions of Responsibility to Physically Resistive and Nonresistive Rape Victims1

This research examined the interactive effect of women observers' sex-role attitudes and a victim's use of physical resistance on perceptions of victim responsibility for a sexual assault. Women read one of two rape scenarios in which a victim either did or did not physically resist a rapist's attack and made judgments concerning victim responsibility. The observers were categorized as being either traditionally conservative or nontraditionally profeminist in their attitudes toward women and their roles in society. An analysis of responsibility judgments indicated that traditional women perceived a victim who resisted the attack as being more responsible for her own victimization than did nontraditional women, whereas nontraditional women assigned more responsibility to a victim who did not resist than did traditional women. These results are considered from a sex-role socialization perspective; the implications of these findings for legal and health care professionals are discussed.     

Gender typing,importance of multiple roles,and mental health consequences for women

The present study examined the interactive influence of gender role typing and multiple role involvement with regard to specific mental health concerns among middle-class Caucasian women. As with previous research, depression and anxiety proved to be a function of gender role typing (feminine-typed and undifferentiated women displayed greater depression and anxiety relative to masculine-typed or androgynous women) with no differences attributable to multiple role involvement. For substance abuse, however, an interaction effect was obtained. Gender-typed (both masculine and feminine) women striving to excel across multiple roles engaged in greater substance abuse than women not gender typed (androgynous and undifferentiated); indeed, the latter displayed low risk comparable to women not similarly striving at multiple roles regardless of gender typing. A similar interaction previously has been reported with regard to disordered eating. These findings suggest that the lack of gender typing for women may enable them to cope more effectively with the conflicting demands of multiple roles and thereby reduce certain health risk behaviors (e.g., disordered eating and substance abuse), but that other mental health concerns (e.g., depression and anxiety) may not be similarly affected.     

Fakability of an empirically derived selection instrument

Fakability of an empirically derived selection instrument developed by criterion-keying for a specific occupation and organization was investigated. Ninety-four subjects completed the test under both Honest and Fake instructions. Instructions to simulate a highly motivated job applicant produced significant score increases on 7 of 10 scales and significant changes in narrative statements of predicted job performance based on these scores. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. The caveat to use tests only when the subject is motivated to answer honestly is repeated.     

Language Acquisition is Language Change

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition contend that child language matches the input, with nonadult forms being simply less articulated versions of the forms produced by adults. This paper reports several studies that provide support for the theory of Universal grammar, and resist explanation on experience-based accounts. Two studies investigate English-speaking children’s productions, and a third examines the interpretation of sentences by Japanese speaking children. When considered against the input children are exposed to, the findings of these and other studies are consistent with the continuity hypothesis, which supposes that child language can differ from the language spoken by adults only in ways that adult languages can differ from each other.