Objective and epistemic gradability: Is the new angle on the Knobe effect empirically grounded?

According to the New Angle, any explanation of the Knobe effect must be gradable and asymmetric. It has been argued that only Hindriks’ approach meets both criteria. First, we argue that Holton’s hypothesis also meets the criteria. Second, we show that the authors are not justified in taking the criteria to be empirically justified. We have failed to replicate the asymmetry result in two experiments. Moreover, gradability can be objective or epistemic. We show that the New Angle presupposes objective gradability. In our experiments, the patterns of responses to questions about epistemic and objective gradability are the same, irrespective of whether the feature is objectively gradable (e.g., blameworthiness) or not (e.g., intentionality). Our results thus question the extent to which the New Angle is empirically grounded. Moreover, they raise doubt whether the answers to questions about epistemic and objective gradability can be taken at face value at all.

Abbreviations: NRH - normative reasons hypothesis; NVH - norm violation hypothesis; DQ - degree question; DAQ - degree of agreement question     

What is being revealed in 2020?

The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing how humans have long related to nature, and revealing aspects of classism and racism that have long been ignored. Drawing on spiritual resources, such as Luther, might the polarizing, self versus other tendencies be overcome and the long pandemic rooted in economic class and racism more effectively addressed today? Can this result in a “new normal”?     

Energy and spirit: Extraction,thermodynamics, and change

This article suggests new ways to think about energy and thermodynamics beyond an extractive, fossil-fuel model. The predominant economic model of the modern world has been driven by the extraction and exploitation of fossil fuels—first coal and then oil. These are powerful forces, although their development is more complicated than we might suspect. At the same time, they influence the new science of thermodynamics, which is tied to heat and heat engines that are fueled by carbon-based inputs extracted from the earth. By attending to the work of Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, however, we can see how energy and thermodynamics can be linked to a different economic model that is not primarily extractive. And this opens up to new perspectives on energy and change, including one that views energy more explicitly in terms of spirit. We can think about energy as something that avoids the dichotomy of matter and spirit in a way such that it participates in both.     

Altars for the Morrigan: the legitimizing agency of a goddess in the networked flow of authority of a YouTube sub-culture

ABSTRACT

The Pagan YouTube e-community is an informal, amorphous collectivity within which small sub-cultures evolve around more specific common practices, such as worship of a deity. One such sub-culture is that of altar-creation for the Irish goddess the Morrigan and the mediation of these altars through the recording and uploading of videos on YouTube. A clear culture and consistent aesthetic can be observed in the analysis of the altars mediated in this sub-culture. This article examines the operating authorities that can be traced across its development. Evidence for the networked nature of the group’s social formation—along with the aesthetically conservative nature of the culture evident therein—suggests that the authority structure of the e-community is networked and thus ‘horizontal’: a co-creation of the individuals within the collective. However, the formative influence of a prominent individual demonstrates a ‘vertical’ influence. This article thus argues that an axial horizontal–vertical theoretical model of authority most accurately describes the dynamics of this e-community. Ultimately, it is the implied authority of the Morrigan herself that mediates the flows of authority. It is due to the devotees’ understanding of the Morrigan as the legitimating force that the vertical influences are denied or deflected through a discourse of individualism.     

VOCATION AND CREATION: BEYOND THE GENTILE‐HOMOSEXUAL ANALOGY

One strand of the church's conversation about homosexuality compares present‐day acceptance of homosexuals to the church's acceptance of Gentiles in Acts 15. In a previous article, “Gentiles and Homosexuals,” I presented the history of that strand. In a reply to my article, Olson proposes to reimagine the analogy via the “radical new perspective on Paul” and argues that doing so exposes problems with my original analysis. I defend myself against these criticisms, while also entering into the spirit of Olson's reimagined analogy. Expanding the scope beyond Acts to Paul opens up important facets that might otherwise be obscured. In particular, it includes voices that are sometimes silenced, and presses both sides for an account of sexuality grounded in vocation and God's purposes in creation.     

STAGE‐TWO SECULARITY AND THE FUTURE OF THEOLOGY‐AND‐SCIENCE

Charles Taylor has recently provided an in‐depth exploration of secularity, with a central characteristic being the understanding that religious commitment is optional. This essay extends this analysis, considering the possibility that American society may be entering a second stage of secularity, one in which the possibility of religious commitment ceases to be an option at all for many. The possible implications of such a development are considered for the theology‐and‐science dialogue.     

OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY AND THE OTHER OF WE IN ANTHROPOCENTRIC POSTHUMANISM

The object-oriented ontology group of philosophies, and certain strands of posthumanism, overlook important ethical and biological differences, which make a difference. These allied intellectual movements, which have at times found broad popular appeal, attempt to weird life as a rebellion to the forced melting of lifeforms through the artefacts of capitalist realism. They truck, however, in a recursive solipsism resulting in ontological flattening, overlooking that things only show up to us according to our attunement to them. Ecology and biology tend to get lost in the celebration of “thingness,” which puts on par artifacts, trash, and living beings. Such abstractions fail to understand the political, ethical, and ontological implications of eliding the animate/nonanimate distinction, which from the opposite direction (of flattening) reproduce the same violences of historical colonialism (hierarchical humanism). I argue that ontological flattening entails epistemological narcissism, fails to take into account plural (interspecies) perspectives, and propose biosemiotics can address these shortcomings through becoming-with nonhuman knowledge.     

Familiarity and categorization processes in memory search

A fundamental distinction in tasks of memory search is whether items receive varied mappings (targets and distractors switch roles across trials) or consistent mappings (targets and distractors never switch roles). The type of mapping often produces markedly different performance patterns, but formal memory-based models that account quantitatively for detailed aspects of the results have not yet been developed and evaluated. Experiments were conducted to test a modern exemplar-retrieval model on its ability to account for memory-search performance involving a wide range of memory-set sizes in both varied-mapping (VM) and consistent-mapping (CM) probe-recognition tasks. The model formalized the idea that both familiarity-based and categorization-based processes operate. The model was required to fit detailed response-time (RT) distributions of individual, highly practiced subjects. A key manipulation involved the repetition of negative probes across trials. This manipulation produced a dramatic dissociation: False-alarm rates increased and correct-rejection RTs got longer in VM, but not in CM. The qualitative pattern of results and modeling analyses provided evidence for a strong form of categorization-based processing in CM, in which observers made use of the membership of negative probes in the “new” category to make old–new recognition decisions.