Schadenfreude and just world belief

The present study tested the hypothesis that a threat of a just world belief intensifies experience of schadenfreude (i.e., pleasure at another's misfortune). The participants read scenarios which were designed to threaten or maintain their just world belief. Subsequently, they were transferred to an online magazine presenting funny stories about other peoples' failures. As presumed, the participants exposed to the threat of just world belief spent more time on reading. These results confirmed the existence of a link between just world threat and schadenfreude.     

Chapter 8: “Always Green and Full of Sap”: Facilitating Wholeness in Aging

SUMMARY

Wholeness in aging is difficult to define, especially in the face of physical disability or catastrophic illness. How one meets the challenges of aging depends upon numerous physical, emotional, and spiritual factors. Rehabilitation may play an important role in restoring wholeness to those with physical disabilities. Likewise, a physical fitness program may lessen some of the effects of aging, helping the older person maintain a higher quality of life. The lived theologies of the older patients and their caregivers also interact, providing an important ground of connection in rediscovery of wholeness as well. Ultimately, our most important role as healthcare providers is to help our older patients regain and maintain this multidimensional wholeness even in times of physical challenge.     

对环保行为的心理学解读——规范焦点理论述评

社会规范对个体行为的影响常被低估.通过将社会规范区分为描述性规范和命令性规范,并强调注意焦点的作用,规范焦点理论重新强调了社会规范的重要作用.根据规范焦点理论,不同类型的社会规范有不同的作用,恰当地使用相应的社会规范信息对环保行为进行干预,可以减少乱丢垃圾、促进垃圾分类,改善节能、节约和保护资源等行为.立足于环保应用,总结了运用这种既科学又省力的措施时应注意的问题.最后,从文化差异和我国社会现阶段特征两个方面,论述了规范焦点理论及其所倡导的措施对我国环保工作的适用性.     

Afterword: some reflections on implicit religion and ordinary theology

This brief piece relates Edward Bailey's concept of implicit religion, together with some themes from the papers published in this special issue, to Astley's concept of ordinary theology. In particular, it attends to their different, but overlapping, focal concerns and their shared emphasis on a spiritual core of personal meaningfulness.     

A Moorean paradox of desire

A prevalent assumption among philosophers who believe that people can intentionally deceive themselves (intentionalists) is that they accomplish this by controlling what evidence they attend to. This article is concerned primarily with the evaluation of this claim, which we may call ‘attentionalism’. According to attentionalism, when one justifiably believes/suspects that not-p but wishes to make oneself believe that p, one may do this by shifting attention away from the considerations supportive of the belief that not-p and onto considerations supportive of the belief that p. The details of this theory are elaborated, its theoretical importance is pointed out, and it is argued that the strategy is supposed to work by leading to the repression of one's knowledge of the unwelcome considerations. However, I then show that the assumption that this is possible is opposed by the balance of a relevant body of empirical research, namely, the thought-suppression literature, and so intentionalism about self-deception cannot find vindication in the attentional theory.     

Do social norms,false belief understanding,and metacognitive vocabulary influence irony comprehension? A study of five- and seven-year-old children

This study explores the effects of violating socially shared versus situationally defined norms on the understanding of ironic statements in 70 Italian-speaking five- and seven-year-old children. We also considered the possible relationships between irony understanding, receptive and metacognitive vocabulary, and false belief understanding. The results showed that violating socially shared norms does not benefit younger children's understanding of irony, although it does help older children's understanding. Ironic utterances that violate situationally defined norms were understood similarly across the two age groups. First- and second-order false belief understanding did not predict children's ability to interpret irony, although metacognitive vocabulary did predict interpretation for the seven-year-old group in instances of violating a situationally defined norm.     

The Intrinsic Value of Sport: A Reply to Culbertson

Leon Culbertson's recent contribution, ‘Does Sport Have Intrinsic Value?’ objects to the account of the value of sport as intrinsic value I had developed in my Sport, Rules and Values; in particular, as this occurs in my argument that the value of some sports resided in the possibility of their functioning as a moral laboratory. He identifies two accounts of intrinsic value; and shows that neither would fit my purposes seamlessly. He urges that my account of the place of normative reasons cannot generate intrinsic value: rather, the person whose reasons they are somehow imports that value. Yet he has misunderstood my particularist conception of values; and the place occupied by my contextualism – these, rather than a residual commitment to essentialism, are what generates an apparent inconsistency he identifies. But they also explain it away. As a result, much of his concern to find some exact account of the term ‘intrinsic’ is misplaced: we need to look contextually. Further, the project of my discussion was limited to showing, first, how the moral laboratory idea might explain the value of some sport (on the assumption that sport had intrinsic value); and, second, how failures of realisation of that intrinsic value might be traced to the distinction between motivating reasons and normative ones.     

Transfers between Logics and their Applications

In this paper, logics are conceived as two-sorted first-order structures, and we argue that this broad definition encompasses a wide class of logics with theoretical interest as well as interest from the point of view of applications. The language, concepts and methods of model theory can thus be used to describe the relationship between logics through morphisms of structures called transfers. This leads to a formal framework for studying several properties of abstract logics and their attributes such as consequence operator, syntactical structure, and internal transformations. In particular, we treat Belief Revision Systems (BRS) as our main example, defining the Wide Belief Revision Systems (WBRS's). This generalization allows us to define BRS's in an abstract setting for classical and non-standard logics. We also show how the concept of translation between logics can be obtained as a particular case of transfers.     

Free belief

The main goal of this paper is to show that Pettit and Smith's (1996) argument concerning the nature of free belief is importantly incomplete. I accept Pettit and Smith's emphasis upon normative constraints governing responsible believing and desiring, and their claim that the responsibly believing agent needs to possess an ability to believe (or desire) otherwise when believing (desiring) wrongly. But I argue that their characterization of these constraints does not do justice to one crucial factor, namely, the presence of an unreflective, sub-personally constituted, ability to spot the kind of situations in which the reflective critical abilities constitutive of responsible believing (and desiring) should be deployed.     

Are there degrees of belief?

John Maynard Keynes claimed that not all probabilities were comparable. Frank Ramsey argued that they were, and that Keynes's views to the contrary rested on a confusion of degree of entailment and degree of belief. We will argue that Keynes and Ramsey largely talked past each other, and yet that there are issues of great significance underlying their dispute. In particular, the simple principle of maximizing expected utility may be seen in a new light as one step of a rich and complex process.