RACE, IDEOLOGY, AND IDEAL THEORY

Abstract: Philosophers who have addressed the problems of enduring racial injustice have been suspicious of the role played by ideal theory in ethics and political philosophy generally, and in contemporary liberal political philosophy in particular. The theoretical marginalization of race in the work of Rawls has led some to charge that ideal theory is at the very least unhelpful in understanding one of the most significant forms of contemporary injustice, and is at worst ideological in the pejorative sense. To explore these concerns, I formulate five related criticisms of ideal theory and examine each as it would be applied to Rawls's political philosophy. My thesis is that the strongest criticisms—namely, that ideal theory is essentially ideological and cannot provide adequate grounds for justifying race-conscious, equality-securing measures—ultimately miss the mark. But other criticisms of ideal theory are more plausible, and most plausibly directed to an area of Rawls's thought often ignored in discussions of liberalism and race, namely, his account of citizenship and public reasoning.     

THE MAGICIAN IN THE WORLD: BECOMING, CREATIVITY, AND TRANSVERSAL COMMUNICATION

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible.     

Brainstem auditory electrical response characteristics of stutterers and nonstutterers: A preliminary report

In the present study, eight adult male stutterers and nonstutterers showed no significant latency or amplitude differences in BSERs recorded in response to monaural and binaural clicks. However, significantly greater variance was found in the stutterers' group under the monaural stimulation condition at click rates of 12/sec and 5/sec. Left and right monaural waveforms were subtracted individually from the binaural waveform. The resultant binaural interaction difference traces were examined to determine auditory tract preference for binaural stimulation. While some subjects from both groups showed no auditory tract preference, it was found that the significant variance between groups for wave V latency was attributable to the subset of stutterers without auditory tract preference. This finding is interpreted as evidence of neurological differences in stutterers' auditory processing at the brainstem level.     

A perceptual comparison: Stuttering and nonstuttering children''s nonstuttered speech

Recently, perceptual evaluation of the nonstuttered speech of stutterers has received renewed research interest. To summarize, the majority of research on this subject reported the nonstuttered speech of adult stutterers was perceptually identifiable from that produced by normal speaking individuals. A continuation of this line of research would be to determine if the nonstuttered speech of children would be equally recognizable. The results of this investigation would indicate this is not the case. The implications of the sophisticated judge's inability to identify stuttering children based on nonstuttered speech are discussed.     

Thorndike's Legacy: Learning, Selection, And The Law Of Effect

This introduction to a symposium on the centennial of Edward L. Thorndike's 1898 monograph on animal intelligence briefly considers the origins of his law of effect and the influence of Darwin's selectionism. It also provides the background for an unfinished book review by William W. Cumming of a biography of Thorndike. The review places in historical context Thorndike's position both on psychology as a science of behavior and on the vocabulary of that science.     

Evolutionary Ethics: What Can We Learn From from the Past?

In this paper I look at the question of the derivation of ethics from evolutionary biology, and I do so by considering both historical attempts to make such a derivation and contemporary work.     

Applying an occupational classification to the work histories of young men and women

Holland's occupational classification was used to analyze the work histories of a national representative sample of young men and women ages 14 through 24. Hypotheses tested were concerned with the psychological orderliness of occupational changes, the relationship between occupational experiences and aspirations, and the relationship between consistent occupational codes and the stability of work histories. The analyses supported the usefulness of the occupational classification for organizing the work histories of both young men and young women. For both sexes, the classification reflected regular patterns of job changes. The category of a person's earlier job was an efficient predictor of a person's subsequent jobs; likewise, the category of a person's current job forecasted the category of his vocational aspiration. The consistency of an occupational code was also related to job stability for whites but not for blacks.     

Dependency and fault as determinants of helping

In a natural setting, helping was investigated as a function of a female requestor's dependency on the subject for help and whether or not she was at fault for her plight. Based on previous research and the hypothesized operation of two norms, it was predicted that the negligent requestor would be more likely to receive help than the victim of circumstance when her dependency was high, but would be less likely to receive help when her dependency was low. Randomly selected telephone subscribers received a “wrong number” telephone call from a stranded women motorist. The woman asked the subject to make a phone call for her; the dependent variable was whether the subject helped by making the call. Results were consistent with predictions. When dependency is high, the victim's negligence appears to operate as an indication of greater need, whereas when dependency is low, it seems to operate as a sign that the victim is less deserving of help. Results were discussed in relation to different social norms that may be activated as a function of the dependency of the requestor.     

Perceptual study of the speech of “successfully therapeutized” stutterers

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if the fluent speech of “successfully therapeutized” stutterers and a group of partially treated stutterers was perceptually different from the fluent speech of normal speaking subjects. Tape recorded speech samples of treated stutterers were obtained from leading exponents of (1) Van Riperian, (2) metronome-conditioned speech retraining, (3) delayed auditory feedback, (4) operant conditioning, (5) precision fluency shaping, and (6) “holistic” therapy programs. All forms of disfluency were edited out of these tapes. The remaining samples were then paired with matched fluent samples of normal talkers and presented to a group of 20 sophisticated judges. The judges were instructed to select from each paired speech sample presented to them the one produced by the stuttering subject. The results of the analyses of variance for correct identification of the stutterers showed that the partially treated stutterers, as well as each group of therapeutized stutterers, were identified at levels significantly above chance. This meant that the fluent speech of the partially and successfully treated stutterers was perceptibly different from the utterances of the normal speakers sampled. In addition, the analyses of variance also revealed that all stuttering groups had a significant severity factor. This finding indicated there was a significant difference between the severity subgroup in all the samples investigated. These results were discussed in terms of their clinical implications.