The New Age paradox: spiritual consumerism and traditional authority at the Child of Nature festival in Russia

This article addresses the paradox of contemporary New Age spirituality, which combines the individualist ideology of the capitalist market with traditional truth claims. The underlying assumption of the New Age—that there is one universal Truth in many guises—supports this type of legitimation. I argue that this paradox can be illuminated from a transcultural ethnographic perspective with the help of the concept of vernacular belief. The emphasis on lived experience reveals the New Age as a mutable and diverse set of practices from which we cannot expect ideological coherence. Analysing the plural ideological landscape of the Child of Nature festival in St Petersburg, this article investigates how its participants deal with competing narratives of universal truth, all of which pivot on one term: ‘Vedic wisdom’.     

Making sense of agency: Belief in free will as a unique and important construct

Belief in free will is the general belief that human behavior is free from internal and external constraints across situations for both self and others. In the last decade, scholars in social‐cognitive psychology and experimental philosophy have made progress in defining free will terms, exploring how laypersons think of free will, discovering related cognitive processes and biases, and examining the behavioral outcomes of believing in free will. The growing interest in this construct raises the need for a discussion of what is new about free will beliefs, and how this construct differs from and relates to other well‐known agency constructs in the literature. In this review, we integrate conceptual discussions and empirical findings in the existing literature to highlight the belief in free will as a separate and important construct, different from existing constructs in the literature, and capturing unique aspects of agency. We conclude by calling researchers to recognize these differences and to leverage the potential in the construct of the belief in free will as a predictor of cognition and behavior.     

Epistemic Contextualism: An Idle Hypothesis

Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that ‘know’ is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to speakers’ statements about their own mental states. My evidence consists in results from several behavioural experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and I propose some general methodological lessons.     

Probability,Approximate Truth,and Truthlikeness: More Ways out of the Preface Paradox

The so-called Preface Paradox seems to show that one can rationally believe two logically incompatible propositions. We address this puzzle, relying on the notions of truthlikeness and approximate truth as studied within the post-Popperian research programme on verisimilitude. In particular, we show that adequately combining probability, approximate truth, and truthlikeness leads to an explanation of how rational belief is possible in the face of the Preface Paradox. We argue that our account is superior to other solutions of the paradox, including a recent one advanced by Hannes Leitgeb (Analysis 74.1).     

Who Knows? Knowledge Activation,Belief in Certainty of Knowledge,Maximization Tendencies and Need for Cognition in Answerability Judgments

In this study, investigating answerability judgments, 123 participants judged whether each of 46 general knowledge questions could currently be answered by themselves, by someone else, or by no one. There were 26 consensus questions (high expected consensus about their answerability) and 20 non-consensus questions. Before each question, half of the participants rated the extent of their knowledge related to the question. Results showed that answering consensus questions compared with non-consensus led to a lower proportion of “No one knows” answers. Moreover, in the knowledge rating condition compared with the control condition, participants choose “No one knows” proportionally less. Participants’ ratings of belief in certainty of knowledge were associated with more “Someone else knows” for the non-consensus questions. Moreover, tendency to maximization led to a higher proportion of “Someone else knows” options for the non-consensus questions. Finally, high need for cognition was associated with fewer choices of “Someone else knows.”     

The Salto Vitale Method in Philosophy

Did G. E. Moore prove the existence of things outside us? Philosophers have objected to his proof, but not for good reasons. Since when, for instance, has absolute certainty been the mark of philosophy? But Moore's proof was superfluous, as its conclusion had already been proved previously. (If immanent critique were the only acceptable way to refute a philosophy rationally, “Nothing exists” would be immune from refutation—which is preposterous.)     

The caregiving relationship under stress: foster carers’ experience of loss of the sense of self

This paper is an account of a piece of research which involved interviewing six foster carers who had ended a placement with a child under the age of five with an early experience of abuse and neglect. The paper describes one of the themes that emerged from the data analysis, the loss of the sense of self in the foster carers, and argues that the experience of attempting to provide care for these children led to internal shifts in the carers that reverberated throughout the network around the child. The paper suggests that knowing about the external reasons for placement breakdown is not enough without taking into account the impact on the internal world of the foster carers and the emotional impact of attempting to provide care for a child who has experienced abuse and neglect.     

Belief,trust, and relationality: a Simmelian approach for the study of faith

Religion has been conceptualised as personal belief in the transcendent. Anthropologists of religion have critiqued such a construct for decades for being based on a Christian Protestant model and one that reflected subsequently modern rationalist Western culture. This construct has increasingly been shown to fail to account for the religiosity of contemporary Christians. Drawing on the sociology of Georg Simmel and based on ethnographic research in a Christian evangelical church, the article proposes a reconceptualisation of religious belief that is experiential and relational. Evangelicals in this case study show that propositional belief plays increasingly a secondary role to belief intended as trust in God and forming a relationship with God and others. Relationships mediate personal religious experience and are shown to be essential to the conversion process, the life of faith, and Christian identity. The study thus bridges the separation between theoretical and empirical works by operationalising Simmel’s sociology.     

The just world hypothesis as an argumentative resource in debates about unemployment benefits

The concept of the “just world” is established as a key explanation for how people make sense of inequality so that those deemed to score high in belief in a just world are more likely to hold prejudicial beliefs and to blame people in poverty for their situations. However, this is an inadequate explanation for such complicated and controversial issues. To better understand talk about the just world and the controversial issue of the distribution of unemployment benefits (an issue of inequality), a discursive psychological approach to the just world is used. Therefore, a discourse analysis focusses on 2 feature length British televised discussions about benefit claimants called “The Big Benefit Row: Live” (Channel 5 3/2/2014) and “Benefits Britain: the Debate” (Channel 4 17/2/2014). The analysis demonstrates that people draw on both just and unjust world arguments simultaneously and also topicalise what counts as just so as to support their positions on unemployment benefits, rather than in the consistent way that just world theory would predict. It is therefore argued that the just world should be recast as a cultural value that facilitates arguments about benefits, rather than an internally held belief.     

Paranormal belief and errors of probabilistic reasoning: The role of constituent conditional relatedness in believers' susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy

The present study examines the extent to which stronger belief in either extrasensory perception, psychokinesis or life-after-death is associated with a proneness to making conjunction errors (CEs). One hundred and sixty members of the UK public read eight hypothetical scenarios and for each estimated the likelihood that two constituent events alone plus their conjunction would occur. The impact of paranormal belief plus constituents’ conditional relatedness type, estimates of the subjectively less likely and more likely constituents plus relevant interaction terms tested via three Generalized Linear Mixed Models. General qualification levels were controlled for. As expected, stronger PK beliefs and depiction of a positively conditionally related (verses conditionally unrelated) constituent pairs predicted higher CE generation. ESP and LAD beliefs had no impact with, surprisingly, higher estimates of the less likely constituent predicting fewer - not more - CEs. Theoretical implications, methodological issues and ideas for future research are discussed.