WITTGENSTEIN AND STRONG MATHEMATICAL VERIFICATIONISM

Wittgenstein is accused by Dummett of radical conventionalism, the view that the necessity of any statement is a matter of express linguistic convention, i.e., a decision. This conventionalism is alleged to follow, in Wittgenstein's middle period, from his 'concept modification thesis', that a proof significantly changes the sense of the proposition it aims to prove. I argue for the assimilation of this thesis to Wittgenstein's 'no-conjecture thesis' concerning mathematical statements. Both flow from a strong verificationist view of mathematics held by Wittgenstein in his middle period, and this also explains his views on the law of excluded middle and consistency. Strong verificationism is central to making sense of Wittgenstein's middle-period philosophy of mathematics.     

Fathering Self-Efficacy, Marital Satisfaction and Father Involvement in Hong Kong

We examined the predictability of fathering self-efficacy and marital satisfaction on father involvement. The moderating effect of marital satisfaction on the relationship between father efficacy and father involvement was also explored. A cross-sectional survey was conducted using the convenience sampling method. A total of 2,029 valid questionnaires were collected from fathers with children aged 2–6 from 48 nurseries in Hong Kong. The fathers’ mean age is 39.1. 72.9 % of the fathers graduated from secondary school and 86 % had full-time jobs. Measures including self-efficacy subscale in the Parenting Sense of Competency Scale, the Index of Marital Satisfaction, the Inventory of Father Involvement were adopted in the present study. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that fathering self-efficacy and marital satisfaction were significant positive predictors of father involvement, whereas marital satisfaction moderated the effect of fathering self-efficacy on father involvement. It is thus important to improve martial satisfaction and enhance fathering self-efficacy for promoting father involvement. To gain a more comprehensive picture, future studies of father involvement may benefit by adopting a longitudinal research design, including the mothers and children as informants, and addressing other parenting correlates such as parenting stress and spousal support.     

Racial Identity Development in Middle School: A Case for School Counselor Individual and Systemic Intervention

In middle school, counselors should promote optimal development as students navigate the formative stage of puberty. A search for identity is an important developmental task in early adolescence, but school counselors often neglect racial identity development. Through an actual case of an 8th‐grade student, both individual and systemic strategies that can promote racial identity development are highlighted.     

Are Bivocational Clergy Becoming the New Normal? An Analysis of the Current Population Survey, 1996–2017

Transitions in the American religious landscape including religious nonaffiliation, congregational and seminary enrollment declines, and the proliferation of megachurches have reshaped the clergy labor market and increased the precariousness of this type of work. One potential indication of this growing instability is the supposedly increasing number of bivocational clergy who depend on a second job to supplement their income. There are few reliable data, however, that can trace out national‐level trends of bivocational clergy. Using the Current Population Survey, this study tests whether there has been any proportional increase in bivocational clergy and to what extent such an increase has been localized to certain groups. We find that the percentage of clergy who report having a second job has not increased since 1996. However, clergy who are female, unmarried, or working in the American northeast are increasingly likely to report working a second job. These trends suggest that clergy who receive occupational advantages—due to gender or marital status—or who live in highly religious/low cost‐of‐living regions of the country may be protected from taking on a second job whereas those clergy without these advantages increasingly must depend on additional sources of income.     

Exploring lexical co-occurrence space using HiDEx

Hyperspace analog to language (HAL) is a high-dimensional model of semantic space that uses the global co-occurrence frequency of words in a large corpus of text as the basis for a representation of semantic memory. In the original HAL model, many parameters were set without any a priori rationale. We have created and publicly released a computer application, the High Dimensional Explorer (HiDEx), that makes it possible to systematically alter the values of these parameters to examine their effect on the co-occurrence matrix that instantiates the model. We took an empirical approach to understanding the influence of the parameters on the measures produced by the models, looking at how well matrices derived with different parameters could predict human reaction times in lexical decision and semantic decision tasks. New parameter sets give us measures of semantic density that improve the model’s ability to predict behavioral measures. Implications for such models are discussed.     

The Price of the Calling: Exploring Clergy Compensation Using Current Population Survey Data

Previous research shows that clergy make less money than others with similar levels of education. We use Current Population Survey data to offer five contributions to knowledge about clergy compensation. First, we document and take into account the shift in clergy compensation from the provision of free housing to the payment of housing allowances. Second, although the clergy earnings disadvantage appears to have increased over the last 40 years relative to their educational peers, the picture changes when we exclude the highest income occupations. Clergy have lost ground to doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers, but they have gained ground relative to everyone else. Third, these gains are largely because of decline in the number of hours clergy report working. Fourth, we show that clergy working in churches earn less than clergy working elsewhere. Fifth, we document immediate wage penalties for those who become clergy and, among clergy, for those who begin to work in congregations. Overall, although clergy still earn less than comparable workers, their position has improved in recent decades relative to all but the highest earning occupations.     

Understanding the Rise of Born-Again Catholics in the United States: The Role of Educational Attainment

Having a “born-again” experience has historically been a marker of sectarian or evangelical Protestantism. Yet the percentage of American Catholics reporting a born-again experience has nearly doubled in the past few decades—from 14% in 2004 to 27% in 2016—a much faster increase than that of evangelicals or any other religious group. How do we explain the disproportionate rise of born-again Catholics? Drawing on data from the 2004–2016 waves of the General Social Survey, this research note tests four potential mechanisms: (1) evangelicals converting to Catholicism; (2) born-again Catholics immigrating to the US; (3) evangelical-to-Catholic diffusion due to growing conservative-political alliances; and (4) having a born-again experience (both an indicator of sectarian religious piety and loose affiliation with more standard Catholic self-perceptions) is becoming more common among Catholics with less formal education. After testing alternative explanations, we show that reporting a born-again experience has increased almost solely among Catholics without a college degree. This suggests that the born-again experience is increasing primarily among those Catholics who tend to be more marginalized within society at large (potentially making sectarian religious experiences like being “born-again” more attractive) and less versed in more mainstream identity-markers of their own religious tradition.