Figuring Matter: Quantum Physics as a New Age Rhetoric

The language through which scientific advancements are relayed reflects specific social, political, and cultural needs and expectations, as well as specific constellations of hopes and anxieties. Constructions and applications of atomic discourse provide a material touchstone that is no less tangible than any other aspect of scientific enquiry. The 1970s New Age movement saw the deployment of quantum concepts with the publication of Fritjov Capra's (1975) widely popular The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's (1979) The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and from these publications the notions of quantum consciousness and quantum mysticism were born. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the post-New Age concept of quantum healing began to structure a cluster of self-help programs, while at the same time quantum ‘get-rich’ schemes developed a presence on the internet. In these reconfigurations of the quantum, atomic particles have been transformed into vivified ‘agents’ whose unique movements and interactions promise to secure health, happiness, and wealth to self-directed and depoliticized consumers. The commodification inherent in this process extends increasingly to encompass areas of subjectivity—for example, spirituality—that historically have been considered immune to overt commercialization. This extension of the commodification process is evidenced in the way that quantum methodologies are commercialized and then sold to people as a means of advancing, not just their financial interests, but their spiritual well-being as well. The new economy of the atom also emerges from the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century retreat from the public sphere and the attendant atrophy of the public sphere as a site of interpersonal engagement. At the same time, the invocation and application of quantum rhetoric touches on a deep contemporary sense of being unmoored and the need for structured guidance as a means toward a renewed sense of control over one's life. The nomadic quality of quantum language and concepts ensures that, no matter what an individual's complaint or desire, there exists a quantum strategy to ameliorate or realize it. This remarkable adaptability marks twenty-first century quantum language as unique, not only within the discipline of physics, but also relative to all fields of scientific inquiry.     

Do production patterns influence the processing of speech in prelinguistic infants?

The headturn preference procedure was used to test 18 infants on their response to three different passages chosen to reflect their individual production patterns. The passages contained nonwords with consonants in one of three categories: (a) often produced by that infant (‘own’), (b) rarely produced by that infant but common at that age (‘other’), and (c) not generally produced by infants. Infants who had a single ‘own’ consonant showed no significant preference for either ‘own’ (a) or ‘other’ (b) passages. In contrast, infants’ with two ‘own’ consonants exhibited greater attention to ‘other’ passages (b). Both groups attended equally to the passage featuring consonants rarely produced by infants of that age (c). An analysis of a sample of the infant-directed speech ruled out the mothers’ speech as a source of the infant preferences. The production-based shift to a focus on the ‘other’ passage suggests that nascent production abilities combine with emergent perceptual experience to facilitate word learning.     

Evaluative conditioning depends on higher order encoding processes

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is commonly conceived as stimulus-driven associative learning. Here, we show that internally generated encoding activities mediate EC effects: Neutral conditioned stimuli (CS) faces were paired with positive and negative unconditioned stimuli (US) faces. Depending on the encoding task (Is CS a friend vs. enemy of US?), Experiment 1 yielded either normal EC effects (CS adopting US valence) or a reversal. This pattern was conditional on the degree to which encoding judgements affirmed friend or enemy encoding schemes. Experiments 2a and 2b replicated these findings with more clearly valenced US faces and controlling for demand effects. Experiment 3 demonstrated unconditional encoding effects when participants generated friend or enemy relations between CS and US faces. Explicitly stated friend or enemy relations in Experiment 4 left EC effects unaffected. Together, these findings testify to the importance of higher order cognitive processes in conditioning, much in line with recent evidence on the crucial role of conditioning awareness.     

Internal Realism and the Problem of Religious Diversity

This article applies Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism to the issue of religious plurality. The result of this application – ‘internalist pluralism’ – constitutes a paradigm shift within the Philosophy of Religion. Moreover, internalist pluralism succeeds in avoiding the major difficulties faced by John Hick’s famous theory of religious pluralism, which views God, or ‘the Real,’ as the noumenon lying behind diverse religious phenomena. In side-stepping the difficulties besetting Hick’s revolutionary Kantian approach, without succumbing to William Alston’s critique of conceptual-scheme dependence, internalist pluralism provides a solution to significant theoretical problems, while doing so in a manner that is respectful of cultural diversity and religious sensitivities.

Reasoning from Classifications and Definitions

In this paper we analyze the uses and misuses of argumentation schemes from verbal classification, and show how argument from definition supports argumentation based on argument from verbal classification. The inquiry has inevitably included the broader study of the concept of definition. The paper presents the schemes for argument from classification and for argument from definition, and shows how the latter type of argument so typically supports the former. The problem of analyzing arguments based on classification is framed in a structure that reveals the crucial role it plays in the persuasion process. The survey of the literature includes the work of Hastings, Perelman, Kienpointner and Schiappa, but still finds much of value in Aristotle. Lessons drawn from Aristotle’s Topics are shown to be useful for developing new tools for assessing definitions and arguments from definition.

个人影响力在群体决策整合过程中的作用：对SDS理论的扩展

以往社会决策图式理论没有考虑决策群体中成员的地位、成员的价值取向和专长知识分布等决策者影响力因素对群体决策整合过程的影响。本文在考虑上述诸因素影响的前提下构建了决策者影响力函数,通过投资决策模拟实验,综合使用决策影响力函数和个体偏好分布来预测群体决策的结果。研究表明综合运用决策者影响力函数和修改后的社会决策图式理论比传统的理论能更准确和有效的预测群体决策。     

Internal Realism,Religious Pluralism and Ontology

Internalist pluralism is an attractive and elegant theory. However, there are two apparently powerful objections to this approach that prevent its widespread adoption. According to the first objection, the resulting analysis of religious belief systems is intrinsically atheistic; while according to the second objection, the analysis is unsatisfactory because it allows religious objects simply to be defined into existence. In this article, I demonstrate that an adherent of internalist pluralism can deflect both of these objections, and in the course of so arguing, I deploy a distinction between “conceptual-scheme targetability” and “successful conceptual-scheme targeting”.

On the origin of normative argumentation theory: The paradoxical case of the Rhetoric to Alexander

The Rhetoric to Alexander (second half of the fourth century B.C.) is among the oldest contributions to the study of argumentation. From antiquity on, this treatise, which abounds in opportunistic advice, has come under heavy criticism on normative grounds. And yet, as I shall maintain here, it clearly takes into account the requirements of rational argumentation which are still in use today. Moreover, it contains the seeds of a whole series of doctrines found in modern normative argumentation theory. There are reasonable grounds for maintaining that some of these modern doctrines stem indirectly from the tradition to which the Rhetoric to Alexander belongs.