Bird on Dispositions and Antidotes

In The Philosophical Quarterly , 48 (1998), Alexander Bird raises an objection against the conditional analysis of dispositions: where an 'antidote' is present all the supposed conditions for manifestation of a disposition are fulfilled but the manifestation does not occur. But Bird's argument suffers from equivocation. If we spell out properly whether the disposition's conditions are to include the presence of the antidote or not, the apparent counter-examples disappear. So his examples do not undermine the conditional analysis of dispositions; they show merely that we need to be careful about describing the examples consistently.     

Is viewing ostracism on television distressing?

Being ostracized can be a painful and distressing experience and can lead to subsequent aggression by the victim. However, it is unknown whether watching someone else be ostracized either in real life or on television is similarly distressing. The purpose of the current study was to examine what type of distress (if any) is induced after viewing ostracism on television. The study consisted of 50 participants, half who viewed a movie clip containing ostracism and half who viewed a control clip. Physiological and self-report data revealed that viewing ostracism was distressing to participants. In particular, participants who viewed the ostracism clip reported a lower sense of belonging, self esteem, and mood, and a greater increase in heart rate and skin conductivity than those who viewed the control clip.     

Adolescents' prosocial responses to ostracism: an experimental study

Ostracism can lead to strong behavioral responses, including diminished prosocial behavior. To date, experimental research examining this effect has only been conducted with adults. The current study consisted of 40 adolescents, half of whom were experimentally ostracized using the Cyberball paradigm. Participants' subsequent levels of pronounced prosocial behavior were measured, and personality traits were examined as possible moderators in participant behavioral responses. Results revealed that, compared to controls, ostracized adolescents showed less prosocial behavior, and this was moderated by having an "open" personality.     

A Gospel of Prosperity? An Analysis of the Relationship Between Religion and Earned Income in Ghana,the Most Religious Country in the World*

This study tests for a relationship between religious affiliation and earned income in Ghana. While microeconomic analyses have studied the relationship between religion and several socioeconomic outcomes in the United States, remarkably few have done so in developing countries, and none has explored the religion‐earnings relationship. Using the fifth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey from 2005 to 2006, we find that, among women, religious denomination correlates with earned income. Specifically, Spiritualists, Pentecostals, and Methodists earn higher income than the Presbyterian base group, while Traditionalists earn less. This article investigates the relationship and posits some of its causes, including the influence of a trend in neo‐Pentecostal religious groups that emphasizes wealth accumulation and self‐confidence.     

Tracking, Epistemic Dispositions and the Conditional Analysis

According to Nozick’s tracking theory of knowledge, an agent a knows that p just in case her belief that p is true and also satisfies the two tracking conditionals that had p been false, she would not have believed that p, and had p been true under slightly different circumstances, she would still have believed that p. In this paper I wish to highlight an interesting but generally ignored feature of this theory: namely that it is reminiscent of a dispositional account of knowledge: it invites us to think of knowledge as a manifestation of a cognitive disposition to form true beliefs. Indeed, given a general account of dispositions in terms of subjunctive conditionals, the two tracking conditionals are satisfied just in case the belief in question results from some cognitive disposition to form true beliefs. Recently, such a conditional account of dispositions has, however, been criticised for its vulnerability to so-called ‘masked’, ‘mimicked’ and ‘finkish’ counterexamples. I show how the classical counterexamples to Nozick’s theory divide smoothly into four corresponding categories of counterexamples from epistemic masking, mimicking and finkishness. This provides strong evidence for the thesis that satisfaction of the two tracking conditionals is symptomatic of knowledge and that knowledge is instead constituted by a dispositional capability to form true beliefs. The attempt to capture such a cognitive, dispositional capability in terms of the tracking conditionals, although providing a good approximation in a wide variety of cases, still comes apart from the real thing whenever the epistemic layout is characterised by masking-, mimicking- and finkish mechanisms. In the last part of the paper I explore the prospect of improving the tracking theory in the light of these findings.     

Disjunctivism, contextualism and the sceptical aporia

We know things that entail things we apparently cannot come to know. This is a problem for those of us who trust that knowledge is closed under entailment. In the paper I discuss the solutions to this problem offered by epistemic disjunctivism and contextualism. The contention is that neither of these theories has the resources to deal satisfactory with the problem.     

Sexism,rape myths and feminist identification explain gender differences in attitudes toward the #metoo social media campaign in two countries

ABSTRACT

On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano popularized the #metoo campaign, which sought to expose the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in public domains by encouraging victims to share their experiences on social media using the hashtag metoo. The online campaign rapidly grew to a global phenomenon, which was generally well supported. However, some criticized the campaign online as a battle of the sexes, which pits men against women. Our cross-cultural research investigated whether gender differences in attitudes and feelings toward #metoo are due to underlying differences in ideologies and experiences that only partly overlap with gender. We surveyed respondents in the United States, where the campaign began, and in Norway, a highly gender-egalitarian country. In both countries, men expressed less positivity toward #metoo than women and perceived it as substantially more harmful and less beneficial. These gender differences were largely accounted for by men being higher than women in hostile sexism, higher in rape myth acceptance, and lower in feminist identification. The results, hence, suggest that gender differences in attitudes to social media campaigns such as #metoo might be best characterized as dimensional ideological differences rather than fundamental group differences.     

The Continuing Role of Hardiness and Grit on Performance and Retention in West Point Cadets

Being an army reservist involves stress and uncertainty. While some individuals use exercise to cope with stress, no previous research has ever studied the relationship between army reservists exercise habits and perceived stress. The current study examined the hypothesis that Israeli army reserves in combat roles would report greater perceived stress and (to cope with the stress) exhibit more intensive exercise habits, as well as higher risk for exercise addiction, than the army reserves who are in a non-combat (i.e., office job) role and controls who are not in the army reserve. Participants (n = 277) completed questionnaires assessing their regular exercises habits, perceived stress, and risk for exercise addiction. The results showed that combat reserves scored higher on all dependent measures than non-combat reserves and controls. Perceived stress accounted for 38.8% to 56.6% of the variance in the risk of exercise addiction. Findings suggest that Israeli army reserves in combat role exercise more, for longer episodes, with greater reported intensity, and are at a greater risk for exercise addiction than the reserves in non-combat roles and controls. The higher risk for exercise addiction in the combat reserves, accompanied by a lower predictive power of the perceived stress, reflects a weaker association between these two variables in this group, most likely because combat reserves feel obliged to be physically fit in case of active deployment. This is the first study to show that differences in reservists’ roles is associated with different levels of risk for exercise addiction.     

Outline of a New Semantics for Counterfactuals

Abstract: It is argued that the so-called principles of "strong centering" and "weak centering" central to the traditional Lewis-Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals are both fallacious. A foundation for an alternative semantics without these prinsciples is outlined. The core idea is that the statistically normal worlds – rather than those worlds most qualitatively similar to the actual world – should serve as the semantical fulcrum.