The role of appraisal purpose: Effects of purpose on information acquisition and utilization

Past research on the role of appraisal purpose in the appraisal decision-making process has concentrated on the motivational role of purpose. Research has found that raters are less willing to give poor ratings when appraisals are to be used for some purposes rather than others. The present paper describes two experiments which explore how appraisal purpose might affect rater cognitive activities as well. The first experiment investigated how appraisal purpose and outcomes affect how raters differentially utilize information to make appraisal decisions. Few differences were found. The second experiment investigated how raters differentially search for performance information to make appraisal decisions for different purposes and outcomes. Raters were found to search for more comparative information when they had to select one of several ratees for some treatment. The results also indicated a discrepancy between how information is collected and how it is used. Implications for defining the role of purpose in the appraisal process, as well as for recent process approaches to performance appraisal, are discussed.     

Mackie on Practical Reason

I argue that John Mackie’s treatment of practical reason is both attractive and unjustly neglected. In particular, I argue that it is importantly different from, and much more plausible than, the kind of instrumentalist approach famously articulated by Bernard Williams. This matters for the interpretation of the arguments for Mackie’s most famous thesis: moral scepticism, the claim that there are no objective values. Richard Joyce has recently defended a version or variant of moral scepticism by invoking an instrumentalist theory like Williams’. I argue that this is a serious strategic mistake.

Integrity and Demandingness

I discuss Bernard Williams’ ‘integrity objection’ – his version of the demandingness objection to unreasonably demanding ‘extremist’ moral theories such as consequentialism – and argue that it is best understood as presupposing the internal reasons thesis. However, since the internal reasons thesis is questionable, so is Williams’ integrity objection. I propose an alternative way of bringing out the unreasonableness of extremism, based on the notion of the agent’s autonomy, and show how an objection to this proposal can be outflanked by a strategy that also outflanks the ‘paradox of deontology.’

The development of contrast constancy

The mature visual system possesses mechanisms that enable invariant perception of the contrast of an object and its features as the object undergoes changes in distance. This phenomenon, which has been called contrast constancy, obtains at suprathreshold contrasts only. Some models of contrast constancy assume the presence of narrowband spatial-frequency channels. An implication of M.S. Banks, B.R. Stephens, and E.E. Hartmann (1985, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 40, 501-527) is that contrast constancy should not be observed at 6 weeks but may be observed at 12 weeks. We examined this implication by investigating the development of contrast constancy in 6- and 12-week-old infants. Two sine wave gratings, differing in spatial frequency by a factor of 3, were presented side-by-side. The contrast of one grating was varied in order to estimate the contrast at which preference for the two gratings was equal. The equal preference points for 6-week-olds were predictable from their contrast thresholds. The 12-week-olds' equal preference points for low-contrast stimuli were predictable from their contrast thresholds, but those for intermediate and high-contrast stimuli were not. Thus, if one accepts the assumption that equal preference in infants is analogous to apparent contrast matches in adults, these data imply that contrast constancy is observed at 12 weeks but not 6 weeks. The perceptual consequences of this developmental transition are discussed.     

Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger's Protopractical Ontology 1923–25: The French Occupy the Ruhr

Abstract

¹ 1 I am grateful to audiences at the University of California, Riverside, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association at the University of East Anglia, and at Dalhousie University for helpful questions. Sincere thanks go to two anonymous referees and the editors of this Journal. For written comments, detailed discussion and encouragement, I am particularly grateful to Duncan MacIntosh, Susan Sherwin, Richmond Campbell, Lorraine Code, Steven Burns, Guy Longworth, Gary Watson, Margaret Chapman and Guy Blanchard. This paper makes a preliminary case for a central and radical claim. I begin with Bernard Williams’ seldom-faced argument that integrity cannot be a moral virtue because it lacks two key ingredients of moral virtues, namely a characteristic thought and motivation. Whereas, for example, generosity involves the thought that another could use assistance, and the motivation to actually give assistance, integrity lacks these two things essential to morally excellent responses. I show that several maneuvers aimed at avoiding Williams’ challenge fail and that others are likely to remain unpersuasive. The paper concludes by offering an argument to the best explanation: Williams’ important insight is best explained by the supposition that integrity is an epistemic virtue, and an epistemic virtue of a practical sort.     

A cross-syndrome study of the development of holistic face recognition in children with autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome

We report a cross-syndrome comparison of the development of holistic processing in face recognition in school-aged children with developmental disorders: autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome. The autism group was split into two groups: one with high-functioning children and one with low-functioning children. The latter group has rarely been studied in this context. The four disorder groups were compared with typically developing children. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare development in a modified version of Tanaka and Farah’s part–whole task. Trajectories were constructed linking part–whole performance either to chronological age or to several measures of mental age (receptive vocabulary, visuospatial construction, and the Benton Facial Recognition Test). In addition to variable delays in onset and rate of development, we found an atypical profile in all disorder groups. These profiles were atypical in different ways, indicating multiple pathways to, and variable outcomes in, the development of face recognition. We discuss the implications for theories of face recognition in both atypical and typical development, including the idea that part–whole and rotation manipulations may tap different aspects of holistic and/or configural processing.     

Remembrance of things past: Cultural process and practice in the analysis of career stories

Stories can be a valuable tool for the career researcher. Questions arise, though, about how best to approach stories analytically such that their insights can be fully realised. In this paper I apply cultural theorist Raymond Williams’ analysis of cultural processes as dominant, residual and emergent (1977) to the narratives generated in a recent study into the careers of research scientists. I examine how these overlapping meaning systems are elucidated in individuals’ career narratives and consider implications for developing understanding.