Activation of emotion information in text among younger and older adults

The ability to represent emotions is an important capacity for the understanding of discourse. In the current literature, it is unclear whether older adults represent emotion information in the course of language processing, in particular as it relates to developing an adequate mental model of characters in narratives. We addressed this issue in two studies, one assessing emotion activation at the word level and the other at the mental model level. In the first experiment, subjects performed a lexical decision task in which words were drawn from both logic- and emotion-based categories. For both category types, priming was evident for young and old. In the second experiment, subjects read passages with emotion information that was consistent or inconsistent with the implied emotional tone. Both age groups showed an increase in reading time in response to inconsistent emotion information, indicating that the protagonist's emotional state was represented while reading. Results of these studies generally suggest age preservation in the activation of emotion information in language processing.     

Consistency Orientation and Models of Social Behavior: Is It Not Time for West to Meet East

The study examined the cultural differences in inconsistency-reducing behaviors by testing the reactions of 110 Japanese and 169 American college students to the inconsistencies arising from a difference of opinion with a significant other on ego-involving issues. It was predicted that (1) the Japanese sample would show more inconsistency support than will an American sample; (2) The American sample will show more preference for active inconsistency-reducing responses than will the Japanese sample; (3) on the hypothesis that contemporary social psychology's models of humans is based upon the American stereotype of the "typical American," the first two predictions will be more strongly confirmed by comparing the American subjects' stereotype of the "typical American" than by comparing their own reported choices. The findings generally supported the first two predictions and strongly supported the third one.     

An Unfinished Debate: What Are the Aims of Religion and Science?

I discuss the kinds of fundamental questions that must be addressed by people who develop theories about how religion and science are (or should be) related. After categorizing these questions as axiological, epistemological, ontological, or semantic, I focus on those that concern the goals of religion and science (the axiological issues). By distinguishing between epistemic and practical goals, individual and collective goals, and manifest and latent goals, I identify seven axiological questions. The various answers that religion/science theorists give or presuppose to these axiological questions help to explain why such deep, ongoing differences continue among them.     

Hoisted by their own petards: Philosophical positions that self-destruct

Philosophers have not resisted temptation to transgress against the logic of their own conceptual structures. Self-undermining position-taking is an occupational hazard. Philosophy stands in need of conceptual therapy.The author describes three conceptions of philosophy: the narcissistic, disputatious, and therapeutic. (i) Narcissistic philosophy is hermetic, believing itself to contain all evidence that can possibly be relevant to it. Philosophy undertaken in this spirit has led to defensive, monadically isolated positions. (ii) Disputatious philosophies are fundamentally question-begging, animated by assumptions that philosophical adversaries reject. (iii) The intention of therapeutic philosophy is to study philosophical positions from the standpoint of their internal consistency, or lack of it. In particular, its interest is in positions that either compel assent, because they cannot be rejected without self-referential inconsistency, or self-destruct because self-referential inconsistency cannot be avoided. The article's focus is on the latter. Several examples of self-undermining positions are drawn from the history of philosophy, exemplifying two main varieties of self-referential inconsistency: pragmatical and projective.     

The Challenge of Amoralism

According to unconditional motivational internalism, there is an a priori constraint on an agent's forming a sincere moral judgement, namely that she is, at least to some minimal extent, motivated to act as it dictates. In order to undermine this internalist position, proponents of motivational externalism typically appeal to the possibility of the amoralist—i.e. an individual who makes sincere moral judgements, but who is completely unmoved to act accordingly. This strategy is known as the challenge of amoralism. Against this strategy, I will argue that in order to represent a genuine case of amoralism, and a credible counterexample to unconditional motivational internalism, an agent would have to simultaneously satisfy an epistemically inconsistent set of conditions. Thus, the conclusion I will attempt to defend in this paper is that the challenge of amoralism does not succeed in posing a legitimate threat to unconditional motivational internalism.     

Metaphors can give life meaning

Conceptual metaphor theory offers a perspective on how and when people find meaning in life. Whereas life’s meaning can be difficult to grasp, metaphor compares life to a relatively more concrete and structured concept. Supporting this account, American adults (Study 1) and German undergraduates (Study 2) who framed life as a journey reported more meaning in life. The journey metaphor was particularly beneficial for individuals with low levels of perceived coherence in life (Study 2). Study 3 further explored this pattern of moderation: An accessible metaphor, compared to other life framings, benefited participants who lack a strong meaning framework. Study 4 focused on the mechanism behind metaphor’s influence. Participants who imagined events from their life journey perceived stronger interrelatedness among those events as measured with an analog spatial organization task. Perceived interrelatedness in turn predicted meaning in life, particularly for individuals with a strong preference for well-structured knowledge. Finally, participants who applied their own metaphor to life expressed greater meaning (Study 5), especially those high in personal need for structure (Study 6). An internal meta-analysis of these findings provides cumulative evidence for metaphor’s influence on perceived meaning in life and reveals moderating features of the individual.     

Partial Monotonic Protothetics

This paper has four parts. In the first part, I present Leniewski's protothetics and the complete system provided for that logic by Henkin. The second part presents a generalized notion of partial functions in propositional type theory. In the third part, these partial functions are used to define partial interpretations for protothetics. Finally, I present in the fourth part a complete system for partial protothetics. Completeness is proved by Henkin's method [4] using saturated sets instead of maximally saturated sets. This technique provides a canonical representation of a partial semantic space and it is suggested that this space can be interpreted as an epistemic state of a non-omniscient agent.