Varieties of Religious Naturalism

This article opens with two generic definitions of religious naturalism in general: one by Jerome Stone and one by Rem Edwards used by Charley Hardwick. Two boundary issues, humanism and process theology, are discussed. A brief sketch of my own "minimalist" and pluralist version of religious naturalism follows. Finally, several issues that are, or should be, faced by religious naturalists are explored.     

More Than A Feeling: The Communicative Function of Regret

Rüdiger Bittner argues that regret is not useful and so it is always unreasonable to feel and express it. In this paper, I argue that regret is often reasonable because regret has a communicative function: it communicates where we stand with respect to things we have done and outcomes that we have caused. So, I not only argue that Bittner’s argument is unsuccessful, I also shed light on the nature and purpose of regret.     

Having reasons

What is it to have a reason? According to one common idea, the Factoring Account, you have a reason to do A when there is a reason for you to do A which you have—which is somehow in your possession or grasp. In this paper, I argue that this common idea is false. But though my arguments are based on the practical case, the implications of this are likely to be greatest in epistemology: for the pitfalls we fall into when trying to defend the Factoring Account reflect very well the major developments in empiricist epistemology during the 20th century. I conjecture that this is because epistemologists have been—wrongly—wedded to the Factoring Account about evidence, which I conjecture is a certain kind of reason to believe.     

Integration and authority: rescuing the ‘one thought too many’ problem

Four decades ago, Bernard Williams accused Kantian moral theory of providing agents with ‘one thought too many’. The general consensus among contemporary Kantians is that this objection has been decisively answered. In this paper, I reconstruct the problem, showing that Williams was not principally concerned with how agents are to think in emergency situations, but rather with how moral theories are to be integrated into recognizably human lives. I show that various Kantian responses to Williams provide inadequate materials for solving this ‘integration problem’, and that they are correspondingly ill-positioned to account for the authority of morality, as Williams suspected all along.     

Research note: The accuracy of group majorities for disjunctive and conjunctive decision tasks

For complex group decision tasks which can be described in terms of establishing the truth value of conjunctive (and) or disjunctive (or) composite propositions, the advantage for group judgmental accuracy of disaggregating the decision task into separate individual evaluations of the truth value of each component atomic proposition in the composite is investigated. For true propositions it is shown that disaggregation is preferable for conjunctive tasks, but not for disjunctive tasks; while the reverse is true for false propositions.     

Moral education: An act-utilitarian view1

In this essay, I distinguish two significant act-utilitarian theories of moral education: the traditional rule of thumb view and the Harian intuition view. I argue that there are problems with the traditional view and that an act-utilitarian ought to adopt a version of the Harian view. I then explain and respond to a major objection to the intuition view given by Bernard Williams. Williams argues that the system of moral thought which the Harian view advocates we teach is inherently unstable and is certain to undermine itself. I argue that there is reason to expect a great deal of stability in this system.I wish to thank Richard Brandt, William Frankena and R.M. Hare for their conversation on this and other topics and for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the Association for the Philosophy of Education and the Northwest Philosophy conference for the opportunity to read and discuss versions of the essay.     

The nonverbal mediation of self-fulfilling prophecies in interracial interaction

Two experiments were designed to demonstrate the existence of a self-fulfilling prophecy mediated by nonverbal behavior in an interracial interaction. The results of Experiment 1, which employed naive, white job interviewers and trained white and black job applicants, demonstrated that black applicants received (a) less immediacy, (b) higher rates of speech errors, and (c) shorter amounts of interview time. Experiment 2 employed naive, white applicants and trained white interviewers. In this experiment subject-applicants received behaviors that approximated those given either the black or white applicants in Experiment 1. The main results indicated that subjects treated like the blacks of Experiment 1 were judged to perform less adequately and to be more nervous in the interview situation than subjects treated like the whites. The former subjects also reciprocated with less proximate positions and rated the interviewers as being less adequate and friendly. The implications of these findings for black unemployment were discussed.     

Clinician's molar and molecular stuttering analyses of expanded and nonexpanded speech

Twenty speech pathologists measured total words and completed molar and molecular stuttering analyses from audio-recorded contrived samples of stuttered speech. Each subject completed a criterion referenced test prior to performing the experimental tasks. Analyses were performed under two conditions: Condition I consisted of samples presented at 100 wpm as recorded (nonexpanded); Condition II consisted of parallel samples recorded at 100 wpm as recorded (nonexpanded condition); Condition II consisted of parallel samples recorded at 100 wpm but presented at 59 wpm via a speech time expander. Results indicate that presentation of expanded samples (Condition II) significantly increased subject accuracy for the specific disfluency form-types word repetitions and part-word repetitions. Similar trends were noted for sound prolongations and hard contacts. Theoretical, experimental, and clinical implications are offered.     

JOHN POLKINGHORNE AND BERNARD LONERGAN ON THE SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF THEOLOGY

On the basis of his acquaintance with theoretical elementary particle physics, and following the lead of Thomas Torrance, John Polkinghorne maintains that the data upon which a science is based, and the method by which it treats those data, must respect the idiosyncratic nature of the object with which the science is concerned. Polkinghorne calls this the “accommodation” (or “conformity”) of a discipline to its object. The question then arises: What should we expect religious experience and theological method to be like if they are accommodated to the idiosyncratic nature of God? Polkinghorne's methodological program is typical of postcritical positions in the theology‐science dialogue in holding that the fiduciary element in theological method is simply a species of the fiduciary element that is a de facto part of all knowing—in other words, theological method does not differ in fundamental kind from the methods of the natural sciences. But this program may contain the seeds of an alienation of theological method from the transcendence of God similar to the double self‐alienation of theology described by Michael Buckley in At the Origins of Modern Atheism. I contend that something like Bernard Lonergan's position on how the method of faith seeking understanding is related to the methods of the natural sciences is exactly the sort of thing that one should expect on the supposition of Polkinghorne's principle of accommodation, at least if the God who is the object of theological science is transcendent. The way in which the divine differs from all other objects ought to be disclosed or reflected in religious experience and theological method. Polkinghorne charts the course for an accommodated theology, but it seems to be Lonergan who is more intent on following it.     

The ‘Constitutive Thought’ of Regret

In this paper I defend and develop Bernard Williams’ claim that the ‘constitutive thought’ of regret is ‘something like “how much better if it had been otherwise”’. An introductory section on cognitivist theories of emotion is followed by a detailed investigation of the concept of ‘agent-regret’ and of the ways in which the ‘constitutive thought’ might be articulated in different situations in which agents acknowledge casual responsibility for bringing about undesirable outcomes. Among problematic cases discussed are those in which agents have caused harm through no fault of their own, or have been constrained to choose the lesser of two evils or to act against their moral values. R. Jay Wallace’s ‘bourgeois predicament’ and related cases, in which we recognize that our present advantages have flowed from regrettable antecedents, further show that regret is often not a simple emotion, and it is argued that conflicted regrets are sometimes unavoidable. Finally, the paper looks at Descartes’ account of regret as a form of sadness engendered by the recollection of irrecoverable happy experiences, to which the ‘constitutive thought’ does not readily apply. It is suggested that what Descartes is discussing is a different genre of emotion for which ‘nostalgia’ might be a better name.