Finding a Secret Garden in Trauma Research

Summary

This article briefly summarizes the diversity in perspectives and methodologies captured in the current volume. The authors discuss diversity in the context of the 1998 Meeting on Trauma and Cognitive Science, and the future of traumatic stress studies. In addition, future directions for research and collaborative approaches are discussed.     

A Mighty Fortress Is Our Atheism: Defining the Nature of Religiousness in the Elderly

SUMMARY

This article considers current trends in research on religion and aging. By considering the perspective of classical sociology, the author argues that we need to understand religion as a belief system with a particular function, rather than a belief system that necessarily contains certain specific beliefs or behaviors.     

Big Gods,historical explanation,and the value of integrating the history of religion into the broader academy

This article discusses critiques raised by historians of religion concerning Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), offering some defense of Norenzayan's position, but also discussing in detail the more substantive challenges. It concludes with some reflections on the current position of the history of religion within the Academy, and an argument for why large-scale explanatory projects and interdisciplinary collaboration should be part of the future of our field.     

Psychiatric diagnoses, ‘thought styles’, and ex post facto fact fallacies

Living in two-way, dialogical relations with our surroundings, rather than in monological, one-way causal relations with them, means that we can no longer treat ourselves as inquiring simply into a world of objective ‘things’ already existing in the world around us. We need to see ourselves instead as always acting ‘from within’ a still-in-process world of flowing streams of intermingling activities affecting us as much, if not more, than we can affect them. In such a world as this, instead of discovering pre-existing things in our inquiries, we continually bring such ‘things’ into existence. So, although we may talk of having discovering certain nameable ‘things’ in our inquiries, the fact is, we can only see such ‘things’ as having been at work in people’s activities after they have performed them. This, I want to argue, is also the case with all our diagnostic categories of mental distress – thus to see the ‘things’ they name as the causes of a person’s distress is to commit an ex post facto fact fallacy. Something else altogether ‘moves’ people in the performance of their actions than the nameable ‘things’ we currently claim to have discovered in our inquiries.     

Religious credence is not factual belief

I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and behavioral effects. I support this claim by presenting a range of empirical evidence that religious cognitive attitudes tend to lack properties characteristic of factual belief, just as attitudes like hypothesis, fictional imagining, and assumption for the sake of argument generally lack such properties. Furthermore, religious credences have distinctive properties of their own. To summarize: factual beliefs (i) are practical setting independent, (ii) cognitively govern other attitudes, and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences (a) have perceived normative orientation, (b) are susceptible to free elaboration, and (c) are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence.     

Descartes,Scientia and Pure Enquiry

In Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Bernard Williams supplies an interpretation of Descartes's Meditations in which the meditator's clean sweep of initial beliefs is justified by a stance that abrogates all practical pressures: the stance of pure enquiry. Otherwise, Williams explains, it would not be reasonable to set many of the initial beliefs aside. Nowhere, however, does Descartes assert that his approach is in this sense ‘pure’. It would of course be preferable if the meditator's rejection of all the initial beliefs did not require an abrogation of the conditions that govern everyday belief-formation and assessment. I supply a reading that accomplishes this. The key to this reading is recognition that Descartes is a thinker of his time, a time when the pre-modern worldview was being systematically rejected. I show, in this regard, that when Descartes characterizes a belief as ‘uncertain’, this has the implication that the belief is false. And, certainly, the rational policy, without need for any special stance, is to reject falsehoods.     

Producing the Post-Fordist Public: The Political Economy of Public Engagement with Science

The commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge and increased public participation in democratic decision-making about science and technology have emerged as the two central themes of contemporary science policy in Britain. We argue that the prominence of participatory discourse in contemporary science policy is primarily due to the close fit of this discourse with the post-Fordist and post-industrial economic strategy of the British state. Participation is a form of immaterial labour which gains currency in this phase of capitalism, blurring the distinctions between production and consumption, and between the economy and the political or communicative public sphere. Participation is cognitive, interpretative, affective, and social work which enters into the construction of technologies as bundled material artefacts and cultural meanings. Participation operates both in the production and consumption of goods and in the legitimation of social and political relations. Public engagement exercises prepare the product for the market and the market for the product. Such exercises therefore instantiate the way in which immaterial labour is both productive and political. Participation activates, but also disciplines, the subjectivities of post-Fordist publics. Contrary to the rhetoric of democratization that has accompanied public engagement efforts, these programmes potentially operate as forms of control and co-optation, and promote the shaping of publics as markets.     

The Construction of Imaginaries of the Public as a Threat to Synthetic Biology

Discipline &; Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, by Peter Dear, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 290 pp., $24.00 pb; $60.00 hb

Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, 279 pp., $12.00 pb