NATURE, HISTORY, AND GOD: TOWARD AN INTEGRATED CONCEPTUALIZATION

Abstract. In this paper I attempt to bring the ancient symbol God into a meaningful and illuminating conceptual relationship with modern understandings of the development of the cosmos, the evolution of life, and the movements of human history. The term "God" is taken to designate that reality (whatever it may be) which grounds and undergirds all that exists, including us humans; that reality which provides us humans with such fulfillment or salvation as we may find; that reality toward which we must turn, therefore, if we would flourish. I suggest that the cosmos can quite properly be interpreted today in terms of two fundamental ideas: (1) a notion of "cosmic serendipitous creativity," (2) the expression of which is through "directional movements" or "trajectories" of various sorts that work themselves out in longer and shorter stretches of time. In a universe understood in these terms, the symbol "God" may be taken to designate the underlying creativity working in and through all things, and in particular working in and through the evolutionary-historical trajectory on which human existence has appeared and by which it is sustained. The symbol "God" can thus perform once again its important function of helping to focus human consciousness, devotion, and work in a way appropriate to the actual world and the enormous problems with which men and women today must come to terms; but the ancient dualistic pattern of religious piety and thinking in which God is regarded as a supernatural Creator and governor of the world—so hard to integrate with modern conceptions of nature and history—is thoroughly overcome.     

Exploitation via labour power in Marx

Marx's account of capitalist exploitation is undermined by inter-related confusions surrounding the notion of labour power. These confusions relate to [i] what labour power is, [ii] what happens to labour power in the labour market, and [iii] what the epistemic status of labour power is (the issue of appearance and reality). The central theses of the paper are [a] that property ownership is the wrong model for understanding the exploitation of labour, and [b] that the concept of exploitation is linked more fruitfully to a conception of distributive injustice than to Marx's theory of surplus value.     

Should knowledge entail belief?

The appropriateness of S5 as a logic of knowledge has been attacked at some length in the philosophical literature. Here one particular attack based on the interplay between knowledge and belief is considered: Suppose that knowledge satisfies S5, belief satisfies KD45, and both the entailment property (knowledge implies belief) and positive certainty (if the agent believes something, she believes she knows it) hold. Then it can be shown that belief reduces to knowledge: it is impossible to have false beliefs. While the entialment property has typically been viewed as perhaps the least controversial of these assumptions, an argument is presented that it can plausibly be viewed as the culprit. More precisely, it is shown that this attack fails if we weaken the entailment property so that it applies only to objective (nonmodal) formulas, rather than to arbitrary formulas. Since the standard arguments in favor of the entailment property are typically given only for objective formulas, this observation suggests that care must be taken in applying intuitions that seem reasonable in the case of objective formulas to arbitrary formulas.Research sponsored in part by the Air Force office of Scientific Research (AFSC), under Contract F49620-91-C-0080. The United States Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purposes.     

EVOLUTION,CULTURE, AND SIN: RESPONDING TO PHILIP HEFNER'S PROPOSAL

Abstract. In his recent book, The Human Factor, Philip Hefner proposes to deepen theological understanding of the natural world and the place of humans within it. He describes humans as products of converging streams of genes and culture, and as possessors of freedom that requires them to be “created cocreators.” In accordance with the requirements of “the way things really are” (God), humans are to become divine agents in enlarging the realm of freedom in the world through self-sacrificing altruism. While Hefner's insights are admirable, his work could be viewed, in part, as a covert expression of nineteenth century liberal beliefs in progress. In fact, human culture and freedom are more ambiguous products of both good and evil, and hence we must take more cognizance of the pervasiveness of what theology has termed sin.     

短时距估计中的标量特性

使用单任务研究程序,采用预期式研究范式和再现时距的研究方法,从心理物理学的视角,通过三个实验系统地考查了人类短时距估计的标量特性、变异源、时距估计中的转换点和韦伯函数的形态等问题。结果表明,刺激物的运动、变化、速度和物理时距是被试进行短时距估计的重要变异源;被试在实验中表现出高估较短时距和低估较长时距的倾向,时距估计的转换点为11.1s;计时过程中得到的韦伯函数是个分段连续函数, 韦伯函数的拐点有两个12s和21s,这两点与本研究得到的时距估计转换点具有部分一致性     

The Challenges of Qualitatively Coding Ancient Texts

We respond to several important and valid concerns about our study (“The Prevalence of Folk Dualism in Early China,”Cognitive Science 35: 997–1007) by Klein and Klein, defending our interpretation of our data. We also argue that, despite the undeniable challenges involved in qualitatively coding texts from ancient cultures, the standard tools used throughout the cognitive sciences—large quantities of data, coders as blind to the hypothesis as possible, intercoder reliability measures, and statistical analysis—allow the noise of randomly distributed interpretative differences to be distinguished from the signal of genuine historical patterns.     

Children Apply Principles of Physical Ownership to Ideas

Adults apply ownership not only to objects but also to ideas. But do people come to apply principles of ownership to ideas because of being taught about intellectual property and copyrights? Here, we investigate whether children apply rules from physical property ownership to ideas. Studies 1a and 1b show that children (6–8 years old) determine ownership of both objects and ideas based on who first establishes possession of the object or idea. Study 2 shows that children use another principle of object ownership, control of permission—an ability to restrict others’ access to the entity in question—to determine idea ownership. In Study 3 , we replicate these findings with different idea types. In Study 4 , we determine that children will not apply ownership to every entity, demonstrating that they do not apply ownership to a common word. Taken together, these results suggest that, like adults, children as young as 6 years old apply rules from ownership not only to objects but to ideas as well.     

Exploring the nature of cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is an important characteristic that helps humans pursue complex tasks, such as multitasking and finding novel, adaptable solutions to changing demands. Yet it is still a poorly understood construct. After briefly reviewing several investigations of this construct in cognitive science, I propose a unified account that considers cognitive flexibility a property of the cognitive system, rather than a cognitive skill. The emergence of cognitive flexibility is dependent on two kinds of interactions: the interaction of several cognitive mechanisms, and the interaction of sensorimotor mechanisms, cognition, and context in developmental time. The quest for a comprehensive and unified account of cognitive flexibility is highly justified given its potential usefulness in fostering efficient problem solving and creativity.     

Products of modal logics and tensor products of modal algebras

One of natural combinations of Kripke complete modal logics is the product, an operation that has been extensively investigated over the last 15 years. In this paper we consider its analogue for arbitrary modal logics: to this end, we use product-like constructions on general frames and modal algebras. This operation was first introduced by Y. Hasimoto in 2000; however, his paper remained unnoticed until recently. In the present paper we quote some important Hasimoto's results, and reconstruct the product operation in an algebraic setting: the Boolean part of the resulting modal algebra is exactly the tensor product of original algebras (regarded as Boolean rings). Also, we propose a filtration technique for Kripke models based on tensor products and obtain some decidability results.     

Excluding exclusion: the natural(istic) dualist approach

The exclusion problem for mental causation is one of the most discussed puzzles in the mind–body literature. There has been a general agreement among philosophers, especially because most of them are committed to some form of physicalism, that the dualist cannot escape the exclusion problem. I argue that a proper understanding of dualism – its form, commitments, and intuitions – makes the exclusion problem irrelevant from a dualist perspective. The paper proposes a dualist approach, based on a theory of event causation, according to which events are medium-grained, namely parsed into mental and physical property components. A theory of contrastive mental causation is built upon this theory of events, for which the problem of exclusion does not arise.