Interventions on causal exclusion

Two strains of interventionist responses to the causal exclusion argument are reviewed and critically assessed. On the one hand, one can argue that manipulating supervenient mental states is an effective strategy for manipulating the subvenient physical states, and hence should count as genuine causes to the subvenient physical states. But unless the supervenient and subvenient states manifest some difference in their manipulability conditions, there is no reason to treat them as distinct, which in turn goes against the basic assumption of nonreductive physicalism. On the other hand, one can preserve the distinction between the two by introducing asymmetric manipulability conditions that the supervenience thesis entails. But this response can be used to argue that mental causes never have physical effects. However, this argumentation can also be used to show that mental causes can have mental effects.     

Thoughts and oughts

Many now accept the thesis that norms are somehow constitutively involved in people's contentful intentional states. I distinguish three versions of this normative thesis that disagree about the type of norms constitutively involved. Are they objective norms of correctness, subjective norms of rationality, or intersubjective norms of social practices? I show the advantages of the third version, arguing that it improves upon the other two versions, as well as incorporating their principal insights. I then defend it against two serious challenges: (1) If content is constituted by others' normative judgments, how can content be causally efficacious? (2) This account appears to make having contentful thoughts a matter of people having contentful thoughts about your thoughts. That appears to be viciously circular and so can't be naturalistic.     

Life satisfaction across adulthood: different determinants at different ages?

It is likely that with aging and changing life circumstances, individuals’ values shift in systematic ways, and that these shifts may be accompanied by shifts in the determinants of their subjective judgments of well being. To examine this possibility, the relations among the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) and a number of personality, affect, demographic, and cognitive variables were examined in a sample of 818 participants between the ages of 18 and 94. The results indicated that although many variables had significant zero-order correlations with the SWLS, only a few variables had unique utility in predicting life satisfaction. Invariance analyses indicated that while the qualitative nature of life satisfaction remains constant across adult age, the influence of fluid intelligence on judgments of life satisfaction declines with age. In contrast, negative affect is negatively associated with life satisfaction consistently across the adult age span.     

School Effectiveness Findings 1979–2002

The London studies of school effectiveness in the 1970s provided evidence that the qualities of schools made a significant difference to pupil progress, after taking account of the characteristics and backgrounds of the pupils at the time of school entry. The purpose of this article is to review the further evidence that has accumulated since then in order to assess how far the findings have been confirmed or refuted, what new questions have arisen and what key challenges remain. The continuing areas of research and debate include school effects on behavioral outcomes, the effects of class size, the importance of parental involvement, the impact of intake mix, peer influences, and level of resources. There has been greater agreement on the many features fostering school effectiveness. However, questions remain on how to bring about desired changes. The paper concludes by drawing attention to 10 largely unanswered questions that matter for policy and practice.     

Computation and Causation

The computer's effect on our understanding of causation has been enormous. By the mid-1980s, philosophical and social-scientific work on the topic had left us with (1) no reasonable reductive account of causation and (2) a class of statistical causal models tied to linear regression. At this time, computer scientists were attacking the problem of equipping robots with models of the external that included probabilistic portrayals of uncertainty. To solve the problem of efficiently storing such knowledge, they introduced Bayes Networks and directed graphs. By attaching a causal interpretation to Bayes Networks, the philosophy of causation changed dramatically. We are now able to be extremely general about how causal structure connects to data, and systematic about when causal structures are empirically indistinguishable. In this essay I try to motivate and describe this synthesis.     

Review

Book reviewed in this article:
David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts     

潜变量交互效应分析方法

简要回顾了分析显变量交互效应的常用方法。详细讨论了目前分析潜变量交互效应的主要方法,包括用潜变量的因子得分做回归分析、分组线性结构方程模型分析、加入乘积项的结构方程模型分析和两步最小二乘回归分析,并比较和评价了这些方法的优缺点。最后归纳了潜变量交互效应分析方法的研究趋势,并介绍了新近进展(包括LMS方法和GAPI方法)。     

儿童早期数学认知能力的结构及其特点

从北京市10所幼儿园中选取234名3、4岁的儿童为被试,采用个别测查的方法对儿童早期数学认知能力的结构及其特点进行了考察。经验证性因素分析发现：(1)儿童早期数学认知能力的结构模型是合理的,可接受的,具有较好的构想效度,具体讲,数、计算、测量、空间／几何和模式认知能力五个维度共同解释着儿童早期的数学认知能力;(2)不同年龄儿童早期数学认知能力的结构具有稳定性,但是结构模型并不完全一致,某些项目的解释率有所不同;(3)男、女儿童早期数学认知能力的结构模型具有一致性。