Science and Religion: Getting Ready for the Future

I explore three challenges for the current dialogue between science and religion: the challenges from hermeneutics, feminisms, and postmodernisms. Hermeneutics, defined as the practice and theory of interpretation and understanding, not only deals with questions of interpreting texts and data but also examines the role and use of language in religion and in science, but it should not stop there. Results of the post‐Kuhnian discussion are used to exemplify a wider range of hermeneutical issues, such as the ideological potential of scientific concepts, the dynamics of interdisciplinarity, and the significance of the socioeconomic situatedness of science and religion. Feminist research analyzes the consequences of the interplay of masculine, feminine, and gender typologies in religion and science. Examples from the history of science as well as current scientific conceptualizations indicate that beliefs in the inferiority of woman form part of our inherited scientific, religious, and metaphysical framework. It is argued that postmodernism in its most constructive form shares the best fruits of modernity, especially of the Enlightenment, while avoiding some of its most serious mistakes. In conclusion, reflecting on the three publics engaged in the dialogue between science and religion—academe, religious communities, and societies—I offer constructive suggestions and critical observations concerning the future of this dialogue.     

Transformations of the Concept of Reason

This outline of the transformations of the concept of reason is based on the idea that this can be presented/illustrated by means of a historical sketch of the criticism of reason, because all essential differentiations in that concept can be understood as consequences of critical arguments. In Kant's work, the Critique of Speculative Reason reaches its first conclusion; it was followed by a Critique of Critical Reason by Hegel and his followers, and Schopenhauer established a new type of critical argument: the Critique of Functional Reason which dominates the radical criticism of reason in our time. This radical criticism is the great challenge for the philosophy of reason today.     

Predicting Short‐Term Remembering as Boundedly Optimal Strategy Choice

It is known that, on average, people adapt their choice of memory strategy to the subjective utility of interaction. What is not known is whether an individual's choices are boundedly optimal. Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that an individual's decisions about the distribution of remembering between internal and external resources are boundedly optimal where optimality is defined relative to experience, cognitive constraints, and reward. The theory makes predictions that are tested against data, not fitted to it. The experiments use a no‐choice/choice utility learning paradigm where the no‐choice phase is used to elicit a profile of each participant's performance across the strategy space and the choice phase is used to test predicted choices within this space. They show that the majority of individuals select strategies that are boundedly optimal. Further, individual differences in what people choose to do are successfully predicted by the analysis. Two issues are discussed: (a) the performance of the minority of participants who did not find boundedly optimal adaptations, and (b) the possibility that individuals anticipate what, with practice, will become a bounded optimal strategy, rather than what is boundedly optimal during training.     

中国传统经济伦理思想的近代演变初论

中国传统经济伦理核心内容是对营利和私有产权的价值合理性的否定,中国传统经济伦理思想的近代(演变)可界定为鸦片战争前后至五四新文化运动时期资本主义性质的反传统衍变;其现代(演变)则是“五四”之后,资本主义和社会主义经济伦理思想相互交锋、消长、排斥与“融合”的历史进程。传统经济伦理思想近代演变的实质是为资本活动方式或资本的利益寻求工具价值和伦理合理性的过程,中国传统经济伦理的近代演变最终否定了资本主义经济制度的伦理价值合理性、确立了社会主义经济制度的伦理价值合理性。     

Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the “Endarkenment” (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Nonspecialists need to defer to such authorities, as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time.     

Too good to be true? Psychological responses to uncommon options in risk–reward environments

Risks and rewards, or payoffs and probabilities, are inversely related in many choice environments. We investigated people's psychological responses to uncommon combinations of risk and reward that deviate from learned regularities (e.g., options that offer a high payoff with an unusually high probability) as they evaluated risky options. In two experiments (N = 183), participants first priced monetary gambles drawn from environments in which risks and rewards were negatively correlated, positively correlated, or uncorrelated. In later trials, they evaluated gambles with uncommon combinations of risk and reward—that is, options that deviated from the respective environment's risk–reward structure. Pricing, response times, and (in Experiment 2) pupil dilation were recorded. In both experiments, participants took more time when responding to uncommon compared to foreseeable options or when the same options were presented in an uncorrelated risk–reward environment. This result was most pronounced when the uncommon gambles offered higher expected values compared to the other gambles in the set. Moreover, these uncommon, high‐value options were associated with an increase in pupil size. These results suggest that people's evaluations of risky options are based not only on the options' payoffs and probabilities but also on the extent to which they fit the risk–reward structure of the environment.     

“THINGS COUNTER,ORIGINAL, SPARE,STRANGE”: DEVELOPING A POSTFOUNDATIONAL TRANSVERSAL MODEL FOR SCIENCE/RELIGION DIALOGUE

This second of three articles outlining the development and practice of a different approach to neurotheology discusses the construction of a suitable methodology for the project based on the work of J. Wentzel van Huyssteen. It explores the origin and contours of his concept of postfoundational rationality, its potential as a locus for epistemological parity between science and religion and the distinctive and unique transversal space model for interdisciplinary dialogue which he builds on these. It then proposes a further development of the model which has the potential to produce a very different type of additional and original dialogical outcome. While such “transversal” outputs may initially seem counter and strange they not only flow naturally from the models’ own inherent dynamics but also open up the possibility of a distinctively different form of neurotheology.     

What’s the matter with Huck Finn?

This paper explores some key commitments of the idea that it can be rational to do what you believe you ought not to do. I suggest that there is a prima facie tension between this idea and certain plausible coherence constraints on rational agency. I propose a way to resolve this tension. While akratic agents are always irrational, they are not always practically irrational, as many authors assume. Rather, “inverse” akratics like Huck Finn fail in a distinctively theoretical way. What explains why akratic agents are always either theoretically or practically irrational? I suggest that this is true because an agent’s total evidence determines both the beliefs and the intentions it is rational for her to have. Moreover, an agent’s evidence does so in a way such that it is never rational for the agent to at once believe that she ought to Φ and lack the intention to Φ.     

The illusion of replacement in research into the development of thinking biases: the case of the conjunction fallacy

The conjunction fallacy is a violation of a very basic rule of probability. Interestingly, although committing the fallacy seems irrational, adults are no less susceptible to the fallacy than young children. In Experiment 1, by employing tasks where the conjunctive response option involved two non-representative items, we found a large reduction in fallacy rates as compared to traditional conjunction fallacy problems. Nevertheless, fallacy rates remained relatively high in both adolescents and adults, although adults showed more consistency in their normative responses. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that children’s relatively good performance on the task was not the consequence of their missing knowledge of social stereotypes. Additionally, children were more strongly affected by explicitly presented frequency information than adults. Indeed, adults only took frequency information into account when frequencies were made relevant by a training in probabilistic reasoning. Overall, the results suggest that whereas the potential for normative reasoning increases with development, this potential is often overshadowed by a pervasive tendency in adolescence and adulthood to rely on contextual information, knowledge, and beliefs, even when conflicting information is available. By contrast, children are more strongly influenced by explicitly presented information than relevant knowledge cued by the tasks.