Psychics,aliens, or experience? Using the Anomalistic Belief Scale to examine the relationship between type of belief and probabilistic reasoning

A growing body of research has shown people who hold anomalistic (e.g., paranormal) beliefs may differ from nonbelievers in their propensity to make probabilistic reasoning errors. The current study explored the relationship between these beliefs and performance through the development of a new measure of anomalistic belief, called the Anomalistic Belief Scale (ABS). One key feature of the ABS is that it includes a balance of both experiential and theoretical belief items. Another aim of the study was to use the ABS to investigate the relationship between belief and probabilistic reasoning errors on conjunction fallacy tasks. As expected, results showed there was a relationship between anomalistic belief and propensity to commit the conjunction fallacy. Importantly, regression analyses on the factors that make up the ABS showed that the relationship between anomalistic belief and probabilistic reasoning occurred only for beliefs about having experienced anomalistic phenomena, and not for theoretical anomalistic beliefs.     

Preventive Wars, Just War Principles, and the United Nations

This paper explores the question of whether the United Nations should engage in preventive military actions. Correlatively, it asks whether UN preventive military actions could satisfy just war principles. Rather than from the standpoint of the individual nation state, the ethics of preventive war is discussed from the standpoint of the UN. For the sake of brevity, only the legitimate authority, just cause, last resort, and proportionality principles are considered. Since there has been disagreement about the specific content of these principles, a third question also is explored: How should they be formulated? Moreover, these questions are addressed in the context of a particular issue: the goals of the non-proliferation and the abolition of weapons of mass destruction.     

关于健康观认知构造的中日比较研究

本研究的目的是揭示大学生关于健康观的认知构造,并对中日大学生健康观的认知构造进行比较。通过对收集到的日常生活的健康观数据进行处理,制成了一个包含50个项目的问卷,然后对收集到的儿8名日本大学生和81名中国大学生的数据进行了因子分析,得到了健康观认知构造的五个因子,即“自律性”(因子Ⅰ)、“主观自我”(因子Ⅱ)、“身体因素”(因子Ⅲ)、“心理因素”(因子Ⅳ)、“健康习惯”(因子Ⅴ)。中日学生的健康观认知结构在Ⅰ、Ⅲ、Ⅳ因子上存在差异。     

Misreading Islamist Terrorism: The "War Against Terrorism" and Just-War Theory

Abstract: The Bush administration's military war on terrorism is a blunt, ineffective, and unjust response to the threat posed to innocent civilians by terrorism. Decentralized terrorist networks can only be effectively fought by international cooperation among police and intelligence agencies representing diverse nation‐states, including ones with predominantly Islamic populations. The Bush administration's allegations of a global Islamist terrorist threat to the national interests of the United States misread the decentralized and complex nature of Islamist politics. Undoubtedly there exists a “combat fundamentalist” element within Islamism. But the threat posed to U.S. citizens by Islamist terrorism neither necessitates nor justifies as a response massive military invasions of other nations. Not only does the Bush administration's war on alleged “terrorist states” violate the doctrine of just war, but in addition these wars arise from a new, unilateral, imperial foreign‐policy doctrine of “preventive wars.” Such a doctrine will isolate the United States from international institutions and long‐standing allies. The weakening of these institutions and alliances will only weaken the ability of the international community to deter terrorism.     

A Sequent Formulation of Conditional Logic Based on Belief Change Operations

Peter Gärdenfors has developed a semantics for conditional logic, based on the operations of expansion and revision applied to states of information. The account amounts to a formalisation of the Ramsey test for conditionals. A conditional A > B is declared accepted in a state of information K if B is accepted in the state of information which is the result of revising K with respect to A. While Gärdenfors's account takes the truth-functional part of the logic as given, the present paper proposes a semantics entirely based on epistemic states and operations on these states. The semantics is accompanied by a syntactic treatment of conditional logic which is formally similar to Gentzen's sequent formulation of natural deduction rules. Three of David Lewis's systems of conditional logic are represented. The formulations are attractive by virtue of their transparency and simplicity.     

Terrorism and Innocence

This paper begins with a discussion of different definitions of “terrorism” and endorses one version of a tactical definition, so-called because it treats terrorism as involving the use of a quite specific tactic in the pursuit of political ends, namely, violent attacks upon the innocent. This contrasts with a political status definition in which “terrorism” is defined as any form of sub-state political violence against the state. Some consequences of the tactical definition are explored, notably the fact that (unlike the political status definition) it allows for the possibility of state terrorism against individuals, sub-state groups and other states. But a major problem for the tactical definition is the account to be given of “the innocent.” In line with justwar thinking, the idea of “the innocent” is unpacked in terms of the concept of non-combatants and this in turn is treated as the category of those who are not prosecuting the harm that allows for a legitimate violent response. Problems with this approach are explored, with particular reference to criticisms made by Gregory Kavka. The recent drive to expand the class of those who may be legitimately attacked is subjected to scrutiny. Particular attention is paid to the role of “collective responsibility” and “deserving your government” in these arguments. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

心理健康素质测评系统·中国成年人生活信念量表的编制

本研究的目的是编制适合中国社会文化特点的生活信念量表。通过搜集整理已有相关文献,并考虑《心理健康素质测评系统》的整体结构,确定了该量表的合理性和可控性两维度的理论构想。通过参考国外同类量表项目以及在心理学专家中征集项目的方式形成初始量表,并通过预测筛选确定量表的最终项目。测试结果表明,生活信念量表具有较高的重测信度、内部一致性信度和较高的结构效度、内容效度、聚合效度以及同时效度。结论：生活信念量表具备令人满意的心理测量学特征,可以被用来评估中国成年人的生活信念。     

General belief in a just world and resilience: Evidence from a collectivistic culture

Previous research showed that in the individualistic culture, adults endorse the personal more than the general belief in a just world (PBJW vs. GBJW). Comparatively little is known about the prevalence character and adaptive functions of GBJW, especially in the collectivistic culture. We conducted three surveys among the Chinese adults and adolescents. We found that (1) Chinese adults and adolescents endorsed more GBJW than PBJW; (2) Adult survivors with high exposure to post‐earthquake trauma and adolescents in the poverty‐stricken area maintained high GBJW, with relatively lower PBJW. (3) GBJW predicted the psychological resilience in all the three samples independent of PBJW. The results imply that in contrast to populations from the individualistic culture, people from the collectivistic culture endorse a robust GBJW, which allows them to resiliently confront harsh realities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

论《易经》的英译与世界传播

翻译是人类交流与传播史上最古老最复杂的文化现象,从17世纪以来,世界上各种语言和风格的不同<易经>翻译版本就层出不穷.<易经>英语翻译对世界影响重大,但长期以来存在多方面的有待解决的问题.本论旨在通过探讨<易经>英译的相关问题以寻找在新世纪全球化语境下<易经>翻译的改进与<易经>世界传播的新思路.     

Levels of modality for BDI Logic

The use of rational agents for modelling real world problems has both been heavily investigated and become well accepted, with BDI (Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions) Logic being a widely used architecture to represent and reason about rational agency. However, in the real world, we often have to deal with different levels of confidence in the beliefs we hold, desires we have, and intentions that we commit to. This paper extends our previous framework that integrated qualitative levels of beliefs, desires, and intentions into BDI Logic. We describe an expanded set of axioms and properties of the extended logic. We present a modular structure for the semantics which involves a non-normal Kripke type semantics that may be used for other agent systems. Further, we demonstrate the usefulness of our framework with a scheduling task example.