Nominalizing Quantifiers

Quantified expressions in natural language generally are taken to act like quantifiers in logic, which either range over entities that need to satisfy or not satisfy the predicate in order for the sentence to be true or otherwise are substitutional quantifiers. I will argue that there is a philosophically rather important class of quantified expressions in English that act quite differently, a class that includes something, nothing, and several things. In addition to expressing quantification, such expressions act like nominalizations, introducing a new domain of objects that would not have been present in the semantic structure of the sentence otherwise. The entities those expressions introduce are of just the same sort as those that certain ordinary nominalizations refer to (such as John's wisdom or John's belief that S), namely they are tropes or entities related to tropes. Analysing certain quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers will shed a new light on philosophical issues such as the status of properties and the nature of propositional attitudes.     

自我同一性与相关概念的辨析

自我同一性是一个多层次、多维度的心理学概念．这一概念自提出后就面临着概念澄清的问题．尤其是与相关概念的边界划分问题。因此．要把握自我同一性的概念就需要对与自我同一性相关联的概念进行辨析。这主要涉及到(1)自我与同一性;(2)自我同一性与自我概念;(3)自我同一性与个人同一性、角色同一性和社会同一性。     

大学生论文自然阅读的策略研究

本文探讨大学生论文自然阅读所采用的策略。包括两个实验,实验1对大学生在自然阅读,采用信息阅读策略与采用结构阅读策略等三种情况下把握文章信息的情况进行比较,探讨大学生自然阅读的策略特点;实验2对大学生在上述三种策略情况下把握文章重点信息的情况进行比较,进一步探讨大学生自然阅读的策略特点。研究结果表明,大学生自然阅读与采用信息阅读策略进行阅读两种情况下,无论是对文章一般信息还是文章重要信息的把握,都表现出基本相同的模式,而与采用结构阅读策略的结果不同,初步说明大学生论文自然阅读采用的策略是信息阅读策略而非结构阅读策略。     

跨通道语义启动对视觉注意的影响

采用生活中的真实客体,考察了跨通道语义相关性对视觉注意的影响以及跨通道促进的时程。结合启动范式和点探测范式,实验1发现在听觉启动600ms后,被试对高相关视觉刺激的反应比对低相关刺激的反应更快,而在视觉启动下没有发现启动效应。实验2发现在启动刺激呈现900ms后跨通道启动效应消失。研究证明了基于先前经验的视、听语义相关能够促进视觉的选择性注意。     

Discussing Racial Justice in Light of 2016: Black Lives Matter,a Trump Presidency,and the Continued Struggle for Justice

The broad fields of ethical reflection on racialization, racial justice, black liberation theology, and queer theology of color must come to terms with the year 2016, which can be framed on one side with the Black Lives Matter movement, and on the other side with a presidential election cycle in which racism and racial justice played particularly salient roles. Against this backdrop, this book discussion looks at recent literature on racial justice asking three questions. How does historical consciousness shape contemporary ethical thought on racial justice? In what ways do the intersectionalities of gender and sexuality, immigration and transnationality, class, and contemporary culture present particular challenges and new possibilities? And how do the ethical frameworks of religious traditions contribute to the development of public theology for racial justice? The conclusion considers how religious ethics concerned with racial justice does harm or contributes to religiously grounded responses to racial injustice. Reflection on these questions points to the need for ongoing engagement with the black experience—broadly construed and within the context of multiple intersections—in the United States and globally in ethical analysis. However, this in turn makes particular and critical demands on how it is that we are to both teach and read religious ethics and political theology at our institutions, as well as in the churches.     

Against Teleological Essentialism

In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey-making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. Here, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences.     

MUST ETHICS BE THEOLOGICAL? A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW PRAGMATISTS

In the last decade there has been a pragmatic turn in the work of those doing Christian ethics, especially as represented by the work of Jeffrey Stout and Franklin Gamwell. The pragmatic turn represents a critique of the highly influential work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, which argues for a strongly intra-church ethics. The pragmatists are correct in arguing that Christian ethics must engage the public sphere. However, I argue that they are deeply mistaken in their claim that this engagement must rest on a weak or non-existent theology. I show that the claim that robust theology adds nothing to ethics, and that we can get along without it, is unsustainable.     

Response to Ranganathan

This essay responds to Bharat Ranganathan's “Comment” on my essay, “The Concept of Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (2011). Addressing key criticisms in this “Comment,” I make the following points. First, neither the idea of inherent dignity being “imparted” to humans, nor the Universal Declaration's implication—through its use of terms such as “inherent” and “inalienable”—that humans participate in transcendent reality, necessarily presuppose a Christian metaphysics. Second, a concept such as “inherent dignity” must be affirmed to be intrinsically heuristic unless we are to assume that its meaning can be completely known within the conditions of existence; but this affirmation does not render such concepts “indeterminate of sense.” Finally, Ranganathan's distinction between“weak” and “strong” senses of transcendence is untenable. If human truths beyond all contingencies are knowable (“weak” transcendence), then there must be a real dimension of meaning that transcends all contingencies (“strong” transcendence).     

JUSTICE AS INHERENT RIGHTS: A RESPONSE TO MY COMMENTATORS

The critical comments by my fellow symposiasts on my book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs , have provided me with the opportunity to clarify parts of my argument and to correct some misunderstandings; they have also helped me see more clearly than I did before the import of some parts of my argument. In his comments, Paul Weithman points out features of the right order conception of justice that I had not noticed. They have also prodded me to clarify in what way rights are trumps; and both his comments and Bernstein's have prodded me to clarify certain aspects of the theistic account of human rights that I offered. Attridge's comments lead me to see that I was perhaps over-zealous in emphasizing the objective aspects of the semantic range of dikaiosunê as used in the New Testament and downplaying the subjective aspects. And O'Donovan's comments have provided me with the opportunity to make clear that my account of rights is not an immunities account that presupposes nominalism, and to emphasize the ways in which it is not an asocial individualistic account.