Reasons, Relevance and Salience: A Response to Hookway

This paper responds to Christopher Hookway’s article, “Reasons for Belief, Reasoning, Virtue.”     

Defending Particularism

In this brief response I argue that Sinnott-Armstrong has underestimated the complexities that moral principles will have to circumvent if they are to survive particularist criticism. I also argue that we cannot yet accept Gert's accounts of moral relevance and of how a sound moral rule can survive exceptions.     

IGT-Open: An open-source,computerized version of the Iowa Gambling Task

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is commonly used to understand the processes involved in decision-making. Though the task was originally run without a computer, using a computerized version of the task has become typical. These computerized versions of the IGT are useful, because they can make the task more standardized across studies and allow for the task to be used in environments where a physical version of the task may be difficult or impossible to use (e.g., while collecting brain imaging data). Though these computerized versions of the IGT have been useful for experimentation, having multiple software implementations of the task could present reliability issues. We present an open-source software version of the Iowa Gambling Task (called IGT-Open) that allows for millisecond visual presentation accuracy and is freely available to be used and modified. This software has been used to collect data from human subjects and also has been used to run model-based simulations with computational process models developed to run in the ACT-R architecture.     

A Comparison of the Evolution of Men's and Women's Dreams in Daniel Levinson's Theory of Adult Development

This article examines an important difference in the adult development of men and women never stated by Levinson, but implicit in his two books, The Seasons of a Man's Life (1978) and The Seasons of a Woman's Life (1996). The task of forming a Dream that generated a sense of vitality and excitement was central to Levinson's adult development theory in his book on men. Often occupational in nature, the men's Dreams were usually formed in their late teens and 20s. Yet, careful examination of the interviews in Levinson's last book reveals a dearth of vitalizing Dreams among his women subjects, including the career women, during the same period: None had long-term career goals and nearly all gave precedence to marriage and family. Development of individualistic animating Dreams was complicated by this a priori commitment, and usually delayed until the women's Age 30 Transitions (28–33), often provoking crisis then and subsequent instability.