Mock juror's perceptions of a child witness passing or failing a truth and lies discussion or promising to tell the truth

This study examined the effect of a child passing or failing the UK truth and lies discussion (TLD) compared with the Canadian promise to tell the truth on mock jurors' decisions regarding witness credibility and truthfulness and defendant guilt. Ninety-two participants read a vignette that described a child witnessing his father physically attacking his mother. The vignette was manipulated for witness age (age 4 years and age 8 years) and TLD performance/promise. Supporting the hypotheses, participants rated the witness's credibility and truthfulness significantly higher after a witness passed a TLD and after promising to tell the truth. The age of the child witness did not significantly affect jurors' decision making. The results are discussed in relation to arguments regarding the abolition of the UK's TLD in favour of introducing a promise to tell the truth.     

Braine心理逻辑理论述评

该文对Braine提出的在推理心理学研究领域占居重要地位的“心理逻辑理论”做了综合述评。“心理逻辑理论”主要包括三方面内容:构成“心理逻辑理论”基础的一组推理规则图式、将推理规则图式应用于推理过程的推理方案、实际应用意义。Braine认为他和他的同事于1984年设计并实施的以“自然推理系统”所含各推理规则为实验材料的实验结果支持该理论的基本观点。     

WHAT IT TAKES TO LIVE PHILOSOPHICALLY: OR,HOW TO PROGRESS IN THE ART OF LIVING

This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth-directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition-based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are correct. The essay argues that these three conditions can be met by progressors as well as sages. Making progress in how one acts in the world, and improving one’s understanding and direction through being part of a community is living a philosophical way of life. The offered view acknowledges more ways to develop the art of living and enables a broader range of people to count as living philosophically.     

On the Symbiosis of Science and Religion: A Jewish Perspective

Three theses are explored, the first two historical and the third philosophical-theological: (1) throughout most of the history ofWestern civilization, science and religion have been closely connected with each other, and each has benefited from the connection; (2) the belief that science and religion have always been in conflict is not based on the actual history of either set of institutions; and (3) structurally a relationship between the two institutions is in the interest of both. By religion here I mean specifically, but not exclusively, Judaism.     

Henkin Quantifiers and the Definability of Truth

Henkin quantifiers have been introduced in Henkin (1961). Walkoe (1970) studied basic model-theoretical properties of an extension L _* ¹(H) of ordinary first-order languages in which every sentence is a first-order sentence prefixed with a Henkin quantifier. In this paper we consider a generalization of Walkoe's languages: we close L _* ¹(H) with respect to Boolean operations, and obtain the language L ¹(H). At the next level, we consider an extension L _* ²(H) of L ¹(H) in which every sentence is an L ¹(H)-sentence prefixed with a Henkin quantifier. We repeat this construction to infinity. Using the (un)-definability of truth – in – N for these languages, we show that this hierarchy does not collapse. In addition, we compare some of the present results to the ones obtained by Kripke (1975), McGee (1991), and Hintikka (1996).     

Explicating Truth: Minimalism and Primitivism

This paper pursues two goals. The first is to show that Horwich's anti-primitivist version of minimalism must be rejected because, already for formal reasons, the truth-schema does not achieve a positive explication of any property of propositions. The second goal is to develop a more moderate primitivist version of minimalism according to which the truth-schema is admittedly powerless to underpin truth with something more basic but it still succeeds in giving a complete account of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition to be true. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Truth in Applicative Theories

We give a survey on truth theories for applicative theories. It comprises Frege structures, universes for Frege structures, and a theory of supervaluation. We present the proof-theoretic results for these theories and show their syntactical expressive power. In particular, we present as a novelty a syntactical interpretation of ID₁ in a applicative truth theory based on supervaluation.     

Truth as Translation – Part A

According to Tarski's Convention T, the adequacy of a truth definition is (implicitly) defined relatively to a translation mapping from the object language to the metalanguage; the translation mapping itself is left unspecified. This paper restates Convention T in a form in which the relativity to translation is made explicit. The notion of an interpreted language is introduced, and a corresponding notion of a translation between interpreted languages is defined. The latter definition is stated both in an algebraic version, and in an equivalent possible worlds version. It is a consequence of our definition that translation is indeterminate in certain cases. Finally, we give an application of our revised version of Convention T and show that interpreted languages exist, which allow for vicious self-reference but which nevertheless contain their own truth predicate. This is possible if only truth is based on a nonstandard translation mapping by which, e.g., the Liar sentence is translated to its own negation. In this part of the paper this existence result is proved only for languages without quantifiers; in Part B the result will be extended to first-order languages.     

Imagination and Reality: On the Relations Between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea

There often appears to be a striking correspondence between mythic stories and aspects of reality. We will examine the processes of creative imagination within a neurobiological frame and suggest a theory that may explain the functions of myth in relation to the hidden aspects of reality. Myth is peppered with archetypal entities and interactions that operate to reveal hidden processes in reality that are relative to the human condition. The imagery in myths in a sense "sustains the true." That is, mythopoetic imagery keeps the interpretive process in experience closer to the actual nature of reality than the rational faculties operating alone are able to do. Indeed, whereas rationalizing can easily lead us awry, genuine myth rarely does. Explanations of events offered by cultures around the world are frequently couched in terms of mythic themes and events. An important function of myth is to provide a "field of tropes" that in-forms the lived experience of people. This paper focuses especially on those aspects of myth that represent facets of the quantum universe and give us clues as to the relationship between consciousness, symbolism, and reality.     

RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN AN ADVANCED SCIENTIFIC CULTURE

Abstract. These are reflections on the Arkansas creationist trial by a witness for the American Civil Liberties Union. The following points are stressed: First, religion took the lead in defending science at the trial. Second, the appearance of creation science is a function not only of Protestant fudamentalism but also of the establishment of science in our wider culture. It represents a "deviant science" in such a culture. Third, our century has manifested many such bizarre unions of ideological religion and modern science. This shows that science is dependent upon its humanistic, moral, and religious matrix for its social and historical health. Fourth, part of the cause of the rise of creation science has been the power, status, and self–assurance of science that it represents "the only form of truth." Fifth, religion in turn tends both to increase and to become fanatical in advanced and precarious cultures; religion, therefore, needs rational and moral criticism if it would help in the creation of social health.