Marking Twain

The first of the following two narratives is a personal reflection by the instructor of “Narrative Approaches to Bioethics,” an elective in the PhD program at the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. The author argues that perhaps the primary goal of medical ethics education should be to show how to construct plausible and defensible interpretations of human experience and sensibly resolve the problems that these happenings occasion. To that end, the author engaged the sympathetic reading capacities of his students by “thwarting” their expectations for medicalized case studies to “dissect” and instead chose works that invited careful readings of morally-complex literary works. One such reading was Huckleberry Finn, which the class read on the book’s 100^th anniversary. Huckleberry Finn chronicles Huck’s search for truth, goodness and justice on the Mississippi River–a location the class explored on a field trip. The second narrative is the personal reflection of one of the students in this class and attests to the moral pedagogical power of Huck Finn. He relates the insights gleaned from a particular passage where Huck confronts moralistic dogmas.     

The pessimistic induction and the exponential growth of science reassessed

My aim is to evaluate a new realist strategy for addressing the pessimistic induction, Ludwig Fahrbach’s (Synthese 180:139–155, 2011) appeal to the exponential growth of science. Fahrbach aims to show that, given the exponential growth of science, the history of science supports realism. I argue that Fahrbach is mistaken. I aim to show that earlier generations of scientists could construct a similar argument, but one that aims to show that the theories that they accepted are likely true. The problem with this is that from our perspective on the history of science we know their argument is flawed. Consequently, we should not be impressed or persuaded by Fahrbach’s argument. Fahrbach has failed to identify a difference that matters between today’s theories and past theories. But realists need to find such a difference if they are to undermine the pessimistic induction.     

INTERPRETING THE VISIBLE TRACES OF THERESIENSTADT 1

Starting from the citation of a notorious Nazi propaganda film about Theresienstadt in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, this article proceeds to inquire into that film itself and then into Un Vivant qui Passe, Claude Lanzmann’s filmed interview with the official representative of the International Red Cross, who filed a report in 1944 verifying the conditions in Theresienstadt. Not only because the Nazi propaganda film was made with the participation of a Jewish director, but also because the Jews in the film had to perform their daily lives for the cameras, it is difficult to make conclusive statements about the attitudes of the persons depicted; there are a number of obstructions to coming to terms with the visual evidence. With reference to the work of Giorgio Agamben, Primo Levi and others, this article addresses the question of how this filmed document complicates traditional tendencies in readings of Holocaust images.     

Priming Risky Choice: Do Risk Preferences Need Inferences?

The notion that subtle influences, often falling outside awareness, can bias behaviour has a strong grip on both theoretical perspectives and the public imagination. We report three experiments that examined this idea in the context of risky choice. Experiment 1 (N = 100) appeared to find evidence for an interaction whereby participants primed but not reminded of the prime showed an assimilation effect (e.g. participants primed to be risk seeking became more risk seeking) whereas those who were primed and reminded showed a contrast effect (e.g. became less risk seeking). However, two further experiments (N = 180, N = 128) failed to find any evidence for this interaction, and none of the experiments found evidence for the asymmetry in awareness predicted by an ‘unconscious’ assimilation but ‘conscious’ contrast account. The data were analysed using both Null Hypothesis Significance Testing and Bayesian methods, and the implications of the conclusions arising from each are discussed. Whatever one's statistical predilection, the results imply a reduction of confidence in the belief that risk preferences need no inferences. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stakes and beliefs

The idea that beliefs may be stake-sensitive is explored. This is the idea that the strength with which a single, persistent belief is held may vary and depend upon what the believer takes to be at stake. The stakes in question are tied to the truth of the belief—not, as in Pascal’s wager and other cases, to the belief’s presence. Categorical beliefs and degrees of belief are considered; both kinds of account typically exclude the idea and treat belief as stake-invariant, though an exception is briefly described. The role of the assumption of stake-invariance in familiar accounts of degrees of belief is also discussed, and morals are drawn concerning finite and countable Dutch book arguments.     

Generativity,the Big Five,and Psychosocial Adaptation in Midlife Adults

ABSTRACT The study examines the extent to which 2 sets of personality variables—(1) dispositional traits (and their facets) within the Big Five taxonomy and (2) the adult developmental construct of generativity—are associated with psychosocial adaptation in midlife adults (N=128), conceived as the combination of individual well‐being and positive societal involvements. Generativity is conceived as an adult's concern for and commitment to promoting the well‐being of future generations. Multiple regression analyses showed that dispositional traits were more strongly associated with individual well‐being than was generativity, but generativity was much more strongly associated with positive societal engagement than were the traits. Correlations between dispositional traits and generativity revealed that highly generative adults were elevated on most of the facets of Extraversion and Openness. For the other 3 traits, generativity was positively related to facets of competence, achievement striving, dutifulness, altruism, and trust and negatively related to vulnerability, anxiety, depressiveness, and modesty.     

Concurrent Validity of the Child Behavior Checklist DSM-Oriented Scales: Correspondence with DSM Diagnoses and Comparison to Syndrome Scales

This study used receiver operating characteristic (ROC) methodology and discriminative analyses to examine the correspondence of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) rationally-derived DSM-oriented scales and empirically-derived syndrome scales with clinical diagnoses in a clinic-referred sample of children and adolescents (N = 476). Although results demonstrated that the CBCL Anxiety, Affective, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity, Oppositional and Conduct Problems DSM-oriented scales corresponded significantly with related clinical diagnoses derived from parent-based structured interviews, these DSM-oriented scales did not evidence significantly greater correspondence with clinical diagnoses than the syndrome scales in all cases but one. The DSM-oriented Anxiety Problems scale was the only scale that evidenced significantly greater correspondence with diagnoses above its syndrome scale counterpart —the Anxious/Depressed scale. The recently developed and rationally-derived DSM-oriented scales thus generally do not add incremental clinical utility above that already afforded by the syndrome scales with respect to corresponding with diagnoses. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

The appeal of violent video games to lower educated aggressive adolescent boys from two countries.

The objective of this study was to test the effect of individual differences on appeal and use of video games. Participants were 299 adolescent boys from lower and higher secondary schools in the Netherlands and Belgium. In general, boys were most attracted to violent video games. Boys that scored higher in trait aggressiveness and lower in empathy were especially attracted to violent games and spent more time playing video games than did boys lower in trait aggressiveness. Lower educated boys showed more appreciation for both violent and nonviolent games and spent more time playing them than did higher educated boys. The present study showed that aggressive and less empathic boys were most attracted to violent games. The fact that heavy users of violent games show less empathy and higher aggressiveness suggests the possibility of desensitization. Other studies have shown that playing violent games increases aggressiveness and decreases empathy. These results combined suggest the possibility of a violence cycle. Aggressive individuals are attracted to violent games. Playing violent games increases aggressiveness and decreases empathy, which in turn leads to increased appreciation and use of violent games.