Hoisted by their own petards: Philosophical positions that self-destruct

Philosophers have not resisted temptation to transgress against the logic of their own conceptual structures. Self-undermining position-taking is an occupational hazard. Philosophy stands in need of conceptual therapy.The author describes three conceptions of philosophy: the narcissistic, disputatious, and therapeutic. (i) Narcissistic philosophy is hermetic, believing itself to contain all evidence that can possibly be relevant to it. Philosophy undertaken in this spirit has led to defensive, monadically isolated positions. (ii) Disputatious philosophies are fundamentally question-begging, animated by assumptions that philosophical adversaries reject. (iii) The intention of therapeutic philosophy is to study philosophical positions from the standpoint of their internal consistency, or lack of it. In particular, its interest is in positions that either compel assent, because they cannot be rejected without self-referential inconsistency, or self-destruct because self-referential inconsistency cannot be avoided. The article's focus is on the latter. Several examples of self-undermining positions are drawn from the history of philosophy, exemplifying two main varieties of self-referential inconsistency: pragmatical and projective.     

The Power to Detect and Predict Individual Differences in Intra-Individual Variability Using the Mixed-Effects Location-Scale Model

Our goal is to provide empirical scientists with practical tools and advice with which to test hypotheses related to individual differences in intra-individual variability using the mixed-effects location-scale model. To that end, we evaluate Type I error rates and power to detect and predict individual differences in intra-individual variability using this model and provide empirically-based guidelines for building scale models that include random and/or systematically-varying fixed effects. We also provide two power simulation programs that allow researchers to conduct a priori empirical power analyses. Our results aligned with statistical power theory, in that, greater power was observed for designs with more individuals, more repeated occasions, greater proportions of variance available to be explained, and larger effect sizes. In addition, our results indicated that Type I error rates were acceptable in situations when individual differences in intra-individual variability were not initially detectable as well as when the scale-model individual-level predictor explained all initially detectable individual differences in intra-individual variability. We conclude our paper by providing study design and model building advice for those interested in using the mixed-effects location-scale model in practice.     

方差分析的统计检验力和效果大小的常用方法比较

本文对用方差分析统计检验力和效果大小进行估计的几种不同方法作了简要的介绍和比较。     

Principles for Designing Randomized Preventive Trials in Mental Health: An Emerging Developmental Epidemiology Paradigm

An emerging population-based paradigm is now being used to guide the design of preventive trials used to test developmental models. We discuss elements of the designs of several ongoing randomized preventive trials involving reduction of risk for children of divorce, for children who exhibit behavioral or learning problems, and for children whose parents are being treated for depression. To test developmental models using this paradigm, we introduce three classes of design issues: design for prerandomization, design for intervention, and design for postintervention. For each of these areas, we present quantitative results from power calculations. Both scientific and cost implications of these power calculations are discussed in terms of variation among subjects on preintervention measures, unit of intervention, assignment, balancing, number of pretest and posttest measures, and the examination of moderation effects.     

Young children combine sensory cues with learned information in a statistically efficient manner: But task complexity matters

Human adults are adept at mitigating the influence of sensory uncertainty on task performance by integrating sensory cues with learned prior information, in a Bayes‐optimal fashion. Previous research has shown that young children and infants are sensitive to environmental regularities, and that the ability to learn and use such regularities is involved in the development of several cognitive abilities. However, it has also been reported that children younger than 8 do not combine simultaneously available sensory cues in a Bayes‐optimal fashion. Thus, it remains unclear whether, and by what age, children can combine sensory cues with learned regularities in an adult manner. Here, we examine the performance of 6‐ to 7‐year‐old children when tasked with localizing a ‘hidden’ target by combining uncertain sensory information with prior information learned over repeated exposure to the task. We demonstrate that 6‐ to 7‐year‐olds learn task‐relevant statistics at a rate on par with adults, and like adults, are capable of integrating learned regularities with sensory information in a statistically efficient manner. We also show that variables such as task complexity can influence young children's behavior to a greater extent than that of adults, leading their behavior to look sub‐optimal. Our findings have important implications for how we should interpret failures in young children's ability to carry out sophisticated computations. These ‘failures’ need not be attributed to deficits in the fundamental computational capacity available to children early in development, but rather to ancillary immaturities in general cognitive abilities that mask the operation of these computations in specific situations.     

Realism in energy transition processes: an example from Bohmian quantum mechanics

In this paper we study in details a system of two weakly coupled harmonic oscillators from the point of view of Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. This system may be viewed as a simple model for the interaction between a photon and a photodetector. We obtain exact solutions for the general case. We then compute approximate solutions for the case where one oscillator is initially in its first excited state (a single photon) reaching the other oscillator in its ground state (the photodetector). The approximate solutions represent the state of both oscillators after the interaction, which is not an eigenstate of the individual hamiltonians for each oscillator, and therefore the energies for each oscillator do not exist in the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. We use the approximate solutions that we obtained to compute Bohmian trajectories and to study the energy transfer between the oscillators. We conclude that, even using the Bohmian view, the energy of each individual oscillator is not well defined, as the nonlocal quantum potential is not negligible even after the coupling is turned off.     

Explanation and the Hard Problem

This paper argues that the form of explanation at issue in the hard problem of consciousness is scientifically irrelevant, despite appearances to the contrary. In particular, it is argued that the ‘sense of understanding’ that plays a critical role in the form of explanation implicated in the hard problem provides neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition on satisfactory scientific explanation. Considerations of the actual tools and methods available to scientists are used to make the case against it being a necessary condition, and work by J.D. Trout that exploits psychological research on the hindsight and overconfidence biases is used to show that it is not a sufficient condition. It is argued, however, that certain intellectual and moral concerns give us good reason to still try to meet the hard problem’s explanatory challenge, despite its extrascientific nature.     

中国医科大学附属盛京医院312项科研课题中标情况统计分析

对我院2001年~2005年中标的312项科研课题级别与数量,获经费资助情况,中标科研课题的学科(专业)分布,课题负责人的年龄结构进行系统地统计分析,表明我院承担科研课题的能力在逐年提高,取得了很好的科研成绩。中青年科研人员已成为我院科研发展的主力军,促进了学科的发展。     

Towards a Pan‐cultural Personality Structure: Input from 11 Psycholexical Studies

The purpose of the present study is to find the common kernel of different trait taxonomic studies and find out how the individual structures relate to this common kernel. Trait terms from 11 psycholexically based taxonomies were all translated into English. On the basis of the commonalities in English, the 11 matrices were merged into a joint matrix with 7104 subjects and 1993 trait terms. Untranslatable terms produced large areas with missing data. To arrive at the kernel structure of the joint matrix, a simultaneous component analysis was applied. In addition, the kernel structures were compared with the individual taxonomy trait structures, obtained via principal component analysis. The findings provide evidence of a structure consisting of three components to stand out as the core of the taxonomies included in this study; those components were named dynamism, affiliation, and order. Moreover, the relations between these three kernel components and those of a six‐component solution (completing the six‐factor model) are provided. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology