Acquisition and maintenance of trusting behavior

This study determined whether a two-person exchange situation contained natural contingencies for trusting behavior or whether external contingencies were necessary. Pairs of college students worked matching-to-sample problems for money. On each trial there was one problem and the subjects determined which of them would solve it. Trusting behavior was defined as an increase in the number of consecutive problems each subject allowed his partner to work during sessions that also ended with an equitable distribution. Simply, trust was a temporary deviation from equity. A subject could give the problem to the other person (cooperate), or not respond and let the other person take the problem (share). Other possibilities were for both subjects to try to take the problem (complete), or for neither subject to respond and thereby let the person who worked the last problem also work the next one (passive trust). When only four lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (no external contingencies to reach either equity or trust) subjects reached equity, but only minimal trust (strict alternation of single problems) developed in 18 sessions. When 30 or 60 lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (smaller response requirement for passive trust and therefore a contingency for trust), trusting behavior developed after a few sessions (fixed ratio 30) or after several trials of the first session (fixed ratio 60) and it ordinarily expanded gradually to 10 to 15 consecutive problems through passive trust. The aversiveness of the inequity involved in trusting appears to necessitate a contingency for acquisition. Once trust develops, however, this aversiveness is reduced as subjects learn the inequity is only temporary (e.g., once trust was acquired at fixed ratio 60 it was maintained at fixed ratio 4, which would not initially produce it), and the direction of the inequity appears to become of questionable importance (e.g., being behind was alternated over rather than within sessions and usually not in a systematic manner).     

PANTHEISM RECONSTRUCTED: ECOTHEOLOGY AS A SUCCESSOR TO THE JUDEO‐CHRISTIAN,ENLIGHTENMENT, AND POSTMODERNIST PARADIGMS

The Judeo‐Christian, Enlightenment, and postmodernist paradigms have become intellectually and ethically exhausted. They are obviously failing to provide a conceptual framework conducive to eliminating some of humanity's worst scourges, including war and environmental destruction. This raises the issue of a successor, which necessitates a reexamination of first principles, starting with our concept of God. Pantheism, which is differentiated from panentheism, denies the existence of a transcendent, supernatural creator and instead asserts that God and the universe are one and the same. Understood via intuition, modern cosmology, and other natural sciences, it offers an alternative worldview that posits the divine and sacred nature of the universe/creation. By asserting the fallacy of the creator/creation dichotomy and any attempts to anthropomorphize or personalize God, pantheism precludes hubris stemming from erroneous notions of divine favoritism. The links between Judeo‐Christianity and the Enlightenment are traced and a case made that the latter has resulted in the equally erroneous and hubristic notion of human ascendancy to a Godlike status, with the concept of progress providing a secular version of the Christian belief in salvation. By reestablishing the natural sciences’metanarrative, even as it asserts the divinity of the material universe, pantheism simultaneously demotes postmodernism and reconciles science with religion. Pantheism provides a theological foundation for deep ecology and also stakes out a viable third position in relation to the ongoing dispute between advocates of intelligent design and the scientific establishment.     

The logic of turmoil: some epistemological and clinical considerations on emotional experience and the infinite

The idea of the infinite has its origins in the very beginnings of western philosophy and was developed significantly by modern philosophers such as Galileo and Leibniz. Freud discovered the Unconscious which does not respect the laws of classical logic, flouting its fundamental principle of non-contradiction. This opened the way to a new epistemology in which classical logic coexists with an aberrant logic of infinite affects. Matte Blanco reorganized this Freudian revolution in logic and introduced the concept of bi-logic, which is an intermingling of symmetric and Aristotelic logics. The authors explore some epistemological and clinical aspects of the functioning of the deep unconscious where the emergence of infinity threatens to overwhelm the containing function of thought, connecting this topic to some of Bion's propositions. They then suggest that bodily experiences can be considered a prime source of the logic of turmoil, and link a psychoanalytic consideration of the infinite to the mind-body relation. Emotional catastrophe is seen both as a defect-a breakdown of the unfolding function which translates unconscious material into conscious experience-and as the consequence of affective bodily pressures. These pressures function in turn as symmetrizing or infinitizing operators. Two clinical vignettes are presented to exemplify the hypotheses.     

An Approach to Glivenko’s Theorem in Algebraizable Logics

In a classical paper [15] V. Glivenko showed that a proposition is classically demonstrable if and only if its double negation is intuitionistically demonstrable. This result has an algebraic formulation: the double negation is a homomorphism from each Heyting algebra onto the Boolean algebra of its regular elements. Versions of both the logical and algebraic formulations of Glivenko’s theorem, adapted to other systems of logics and to algebras not necessarily related to logic can be found in the literature (see [2, 9, 8, 14] and [13, 7, 14]). The aim of this paper is to offer a general frame for studying both logical and algebraic generalizations of Glivenko’s theorem. We give abstract formulations for quasivarieties of algebras and for equivalential and algebraizable deductive systems and both formulations are compared when the quasivariety and the deductive system are related. We also analyse Glivenko’s theorem for compatible expansions of both cases. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

Cosmology: What One Needs to Know

Cosmology, the study of the universe, has a past, which is reviewed here. The standard model—the Big Bang, or the hot, dense early universe that is still expanding—is based on observations that are basically consistent but which require additional input to improve the agreement. Out of the early universe came the galaxies and stars that shine today. The future of the universe depends on the density of matter: too much mass leads to the Big Crunch; too little leads to eternal expans ion and cooling. The dark-matter problem prevents us from knowing which will be the fate of the universe. Thelimits of what may be called "scientific" are addressed.     

Agendas,Relevance and Dialogic Ascent

E. C. W. Krabbe characterizes a metadialogue as a dialogue about a dialogue, which in turn, is characterized as a ground level dialogue. Krabbe raises a number of interesting questions about this distinction, of which the most pressing is whether the difference between ground level and metadialogues can be drawn in a principled and suitably general way. In this note, I develop the idea that something counts as a metadialogue to the extent that it stands to its ground level counterpart in a relation of irrelevance. The irrelevance in question subsumes a triple of subconcepts: strategic relevance, agenda-relevance and irredundancy-relevance.     

Higher-order approximations to the distributions of fit indexes under fixed alternatives in structural equation models

Higher-order approximations to the distributions of fit indexes for structural equation models under fixed alternative hypotheses are obtained in nonnormal samples as well as normal ones. The fit indexes include the normal-theory likelihood ratio chi-square statistic for a posited model, the corresponding statistic for the baseline model of uncorrelated observed variables, and various fit indexes as functions of these two statistics. The approximations are given by the Edgeworth expansions for the distributions of the fit indexes under arbitrary distributions. Numerical examples in normal and nonnormal samples with the asymptotic and simulated distributions of the fit indexes show the relative inappropriateness of the normal-theory approximation using noncentral chi-square distributions. A simulation for the confidence intervals of the fit indexes based on the normal-theory Studentized estimators under normality with a small sample size indicates an advantage for the approximation by the Cornish–Fisher expansion over those by the noncentral chi-square distribution and the asymptotic normality. The author is indebted to the reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which have led to the improvement of the previous versions of this paper. This work was partially supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology.     

Expansion of arbitrary stimulus classes and function-transfer measured by sorting performances

Sorting (SRT) and matching-to-sample (MTS) tests have measured the formation of arbitrary stimulus classes. This experiment used SRT and MTS tests to document the expansion of class size. Thirty-two participants learned 12 conditional discriminations with a linear series training structure (A➔B➔C➔D➔E). SRT tests documented the formation of 5-member classes by 17 of the participants. Thereafter, 6-member class expansion was implemented by FC training. Nine of these 17 participants showed class expansion when tracked with a sequence of an SRT, MTS, and a final SRT test, and the other 8 showed expansion when tracked with a sequence of MTS and SRT tests. Thus, SRT tests documented class expansion, and the sequence of tests did not influence class expansion. The 15 participants who did not form the 5-member classes learned the baselines for new 3-member classes (A➔B➔C) and formed them as documented by an SRT test. Then, 4-member class expansion was implemented by FB training. Expansion was assessed using the above-mentioned testing sequences. All 15 showed class expansion with 100% correspondence between the SRT and MTS performances. Sorting documented the expansion of arbitrary stimulus classes, while the MTS tests showed that the stimuli also functioned as members of equivalence classes.     

(Non)Issues of Infinite Regress in Modeling Motor Behavior

In the past, infinite regress criticisms that have been raised about models of motor behavior have been reserved for executive-type models (e.g., Beek & Meijer, 1988). On the basis of Gödel's (1930/1986) proof that an algorithm cannot prove its own validity, the authors reason that executive- as well as self-organized-type explanatory models of motor behavior have infinite regress difficulties. The conclusion offered in the present article is that judgments on a model's theoretical importance should be based not on issues of infinite regress but on other relevant characteristics, such as its propensity for falsification (Popper, 1959).     

On Musical Cognition and Archaic Meaning Schemata

In clinical psychoanalytic work, one often encounters psychical material that is devoid of form or shape. This kind of material is often manifest as concrete somatic sensations on the border of the body and mind. At the same time, it is a primitive body-related self-experience that functions as a background, an essential requirement for more developed, differentiated self-experiences. Bi-logic is a theoretical method by which one can outline these early, partially formless processes and states of mind. This paper includes an overview of the main hypotheses of Matte Blanco's bi-logical vertex, which focuses on the extreme symmetrization of mental phenomena that emanate from the body. Clinical vignettes illustrate ways in which analysis can gradually bring forth such form from the previously formless, dissociated traumatic material into the range of the conscious mind. In this way, the capacity for thinking and reflection increases and the early elements of self-experience are enlivened.