WHOM TO BLAME FOR THE CHARGE OF SECULARIZATION?

Abstract. In the last century science and technology have been viewed as guilty of contributing to the modern secularization process and also to a crisis in religion. The extent of this influence is less clear today: while technology is stronger, and an easy target for any kind of social and cultural criticism, science seems weaker than it used to. The aim of this commentary is to examine in a critical way the arguments for and against scientific and technological involvement in the crisis religion faces today. In the end, a revision of the future of religion is called into question, especially in the light of a more “technological theology.”     

The effects of acoustic mismatch and selective listening on repetition deafness

Previous research (i.e., M. Miller & D. O. MacKay, 1994, 1996) has suggested that repetition deafness (RD), like repetition blindness, is robust to physical identity and that it consists in a failure to recall specifically the 2nd of the 2 critical targets (C1 and C2). However, some confounds due to memory load and response biases make available evidence inconclusive. Experiment 1 provided a strong test of RD between physically mismatching stimuli using a low memory load methodology. In Experiment 2, the same presentation method was combined with a selective recall task to find that RD is specific of C2. Experiments 3A and 3B showed, through an attentional manipulation, that RD is eliminated when people can successfully ignore C1 but not otherwise. It is argued that present data favor a perceptual interpretation of the RD. Furthermore, the present results support the hypothesis of recognition failure as opposed to the alternative token individuation failure hypothesis.     

Risky decision making across three arenas of choice: are younger and older adults differently susceptible to framing effects?

In the present study, the authors investigated the effects of framing of options on risky decision making in groups of younger adults (M = 23.8 years, n = 192) and older adults (M = 69.1 years, n = 192). The participants were assigned to one of three scenarios varying in the goods at stake (human lives, paintings, money). The authors observed a majority preference in favor of the risky options after negative, but not positive framing. They also found, as they had predicted, that the type of framing effect varied across scenarios, with a bidirectional framing effect for the life-death scenario and unidirectional (risk averse) framing effects when public property (paintings) or personal property (money) were at stake. It is important to note that these choice preference patterns were highly similar across the age groups, which reinforced the conclusion that younger and older adults are equally susceptible to framing effects.     

History and Method of Charles V. Gerkin’s Pastoral Theology: Toward an Identity-Embodied and Community-Embedded Pastoral Theology,Part I. History

The purpose of this article is to explore the legacy of Charles V. Gerkin’s pastoral theology and to construct a method of pastoral theology. In Part I, I will trace within a larger context of pastoral theology the history of Gerkin’s pastoral theology since his early clinical praxis. In Part II, I will explore his method of developing pastoral theology and construct a renewed critical and constructive method of pastoral theology, reflecting on the implications of exploring the history and method of his pastoral theology.     

Stress, glucocorticoids and ageing of the immune system

Ageing has been associated with immunological changes (immunosenescence) that resemble those observed following chronic stress or glucocorticoid (GC) treatment. These changes include thymic involution, lower number of na?ve T cells, reduced cell-mediated immunity, and poor vaccination response to new antigens. It follows that immunosenescence could be associated with changes of peripheral GC levels. Indeed, when compared with young subjects, healthy elders are more stressed and show activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. However, both beneficial and undesirable effects of GCs ultimately depend on the target tissue sensitivity to these steroids. Recent data indicate that peripheral lymphocytes from elders respond poorly to GC treatment in vitro. The present review summarizes recent findings which suggest that immunosenescence may be closely related to both psychological distress and stress hormones. Furthermore, chronically stressed elderly subjects may be particularly at risk of stress-related pathology because of further alterations in GC-immune signalling. Finally, the neuroendocrine hypothesis of immunosenescence is finally reconsidered in which the age-related increase in the cortisol/DHEA ratio is major determinant of immunological changes observed during ageing.     

Spatial orienting of tactile attention induced by social cues

Several studies have established that humans orient their visual attention reflexively in response to social cues such as the direction of someone else’s gaze. However, the consequences of this kind of orienting have been addressed only for the visual system. We investigated whether visual social attention cues can induce shifts in tactile attention by combining a central noninformative eye-gaze cue with tactile targets presented to participants’ fingertips. Data from speeded detection, speeded discrimination, and signal detection tasks converged on the same conclusion: Eye-gaze-based orienting facilitates the processing of tactile targets at the location of the gazed-at body location. In addition, we examined the effects of other directional cues, such as conventional arrows, and found that they can be equally effective. This is the first demonstration that social attention cues have consequences that reach beyond their own sensory modality.     

Understanding moral responsibility in the design of trailers

This paper starts from the presupposition that moral codes often do not suffice to make agents understand their moral responsibility. We will illustrate this statement with a concrete example of engineers who design a truck’s trailer and who do not think traffic safety is part of their responsibility. This opinion clashes with a common supposition that designers in fact should do all that is in their power to ensure safety in traffic. In our opinion this shows the need for a moral philosophy that helps engineers to interpret their responsibility and think more critically about it. For this purpose we will explore the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, which is particularly interesting because he locates the beginning of moral thinking in the daily practice of a profession. This is consistent with the history of moral codes, for codes are also the product of moral reflection by professionals. We will use MacIntyre’s philosophy to (1) explain what is wrong with the designers’ understanding of their responsibility and (2) show a possible way to bring their reflection to a more self-critical level. We will also inspect MacIntyre’s proposal critically.     

The role of spatial attention and other processes on the magnitude and time course of cueing effects

We are quite often exposed to multiple objects present in the visual scene, thus attentional selection is necessary in order to selectively respond to the relevant information. Objects can be selected on the basis of the location they occupy by orienting attention in space. In this paper, we review the evidence showing that attention can be oriented in space either endogenously, on the basis of central cues, predictive of the relevant location, or exogenously, automatically triggered by the salient properties of visual stimuli (peripheral cues). Several dissociations observed between orienting on the basis of the two types of cues have led to the conclusion that they do not represent just two modes of triggering the orienting of the very same attentional mechanism, but rather they modulate processing differently. We present a theoretical framework according to which endogenous predictive cues facilitate target processing by orienting attention, thus amplifying processing at the attended location. In contrast, apart from attentional orienting, peripherally presented discrepant cues might trigger additional cue-target event-integration and event-segregation processes, which modulate processing in a different way, thus leading to cueing effects that are exclusively triggered by peripheral cues.     

Finite basis problems and results for quasivarieties

Let src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/11225_2005_Article_3320_TeX2GIFIE1.gif" alt=" $$\mathcal{K}$$ " align="middle" border="0"> be a finite collection of finite algebras of finite signature such that SP( src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/11225_2005_Article_3320_TeX2GIFIE2.gif" alt=" $$\mathcal{K}$$ " align="middle" border="0"> ) has meet semi-distributive congruence lattices. We prove that there exists a finite collection src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/11225_2005_Article_3320_TeX2GIFIE3.gif" alt=" $$\mathcal{K}$$ " align="middle" border="0"> <sub>1sub> of finite algebras of the same signature, src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/11225_2005_Article_3320_TeX2GIFIE4.gif" alt=" $$\mathcal{K}_1 \supseteq \mathcal{K}$$ " align="middle" border="0"> , such that SP( src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/11225_2005_Article_3320_TeX2GIFIE5.gif" alt=" $$\mathcal{K}$$ " align="middle" border="0"> <sub>1sub>) is finitely axiomatizable.We show also that if src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/11225_2005_Article_3320_TeX2GIFIE6.gif" alt=" $$HS(\mathcal{K}) \subseteq SP(\mathcal{K})$$ " align="middle" border="0"> , then SP( src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/11225_2005_Article_3320_TeX2GIFIE7.gif" alt=" $$\mathcal{K}$$ " align="middle" border="0"> <sub>1sub>) is finitely axiomatizable. We offer new proofs of two important finite basis theorems of D. Pigozzi and R. Willard. Our actual results are somewhat more general than this abstract indicates.While working on this paper, the first author was partially supported by the Hungarian National Foundation for Scientific Research (OTKA) grant no. T37877 and the second author was supported by the US National Science Foundation grant no. DMS-0245622.Special issue of Studia Logica: src="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/xxlarge8220.gif" alt="ldquo" align="MIDDLE" BORDER="0">Algebraic Theory of Quasivarietiessrc="/content/ul50jk26754k7853/xxlarge8221.gif" alt="rdquo" align="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"> Presented by M. E. Adams, K. V. Adaricheva, W. Dziobiak, and A. V. Kravchenko     

Contents of Volume 138

ss="rubric">Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 138