Troubles on moral twin earth: Moral queerness revived

J. L. Mackie argued that if there were objective moral properties or facts, then the supervenience relation linking the nonmoral to the moral would be metaphysically queer. Moral realists reply that objective supervenience relations are ubiquitous according to contemporary versions of metaphysical naturalism and, hence, that there is nothing especially queer about moral supervenience. In this paper we revive Mackie's challenge to moral realism. We argue: (i) that objective supervenience relations of any kind, moral or otherwise, should be explainable rather than sui generis; (ii) that this explanatory burden can be successfully met vis-à-vis the supervenience of the mental upon the physical, and in other related cases; and (iii) that the burden cannot be met for (putative) objective moral supervenience relations.This paper is thoroughly collaborative. The order of authorship is alphabetical. During its evolution from early drafts to its present form, we have written several related papers; see Horgan and Timmons (1991 and forthcoming), and Timmons (1990).     

Speech disfluencies under normal and delayed auditory feedback conditions

20 male and 20 female adults, matched by age, read under conditions of normal and 113-, 152-, 200-, 253-, 307-, and 347-msec. delayed auditory feedback. Disfluency counts were correlated with delayed auditory feedback reactions which were changes in disfluencies under delay conditions. Pearson product-moment and Spearman's rbos were negative and significant for delay times of 113, 153, 200, and 253 msec. The Pearson product-moment correlation for 307 msec. was also negative and significant. Two groups of 11 adults were selected from the original sample on the basis of high and low initial disfluency counts. Their reactions to delayed auditory feedback were compared, using a 2-way analysis of variance with repeated measures (groups X delay times). Both main effects were significant but not their interaction.     

Associative links between discrete memories in early infancy

The specificity and independence of two successively established memories were assessed in two studies with 6-month-olds. On different days, infants learned two paired-associate tasks, each involving a specific cue-response pair, in a common distinctive context. Retention of each pair was tested either 3 days later, when both memories were still highly accessible (Experiment 1), or 22 days later, when a reminder was necessary to reactivate them (Experiment 2). In both instances, infants produced only the response associated with the test cue; neither retroactive nor proactive interference occurred. Surprisingly, the cue from one task indirectly reactivated the forgotten memory of the other task, revealing that they were linked in an associative network.