Suicidal Behavior in Iran: What Should Be Done?

Journal of Religion and Health -     

Reflexive Social Orienting in Parents of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from Gaze Cueing Paradigm

Twin and family studies have shown that Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have a strong genetic basis and are highly heritable. First degree relatives of individuals with ASD often show mild expressions of autistic traits attributed to Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP). While numerous studies investigated different aspects of BAP, less research has been done on gaze orienting especially in parents. In the present investigation, 43 parents of children with ASD and 29 parents of typically developed children completed a modified version of gaze cueing paradigm. Results demonstrated that the control group used the eye gaze in a way that their RT was affected by congruent versus incongruent cues, while this effect was not observed in parents of individuals with ASD. Findings of the current study provide further evidence on gaze orienting deficits in parents of children with ASD, which might relate to their mild difficulties in mind-reading abilities and a common cognitive phenotype with their affected children.     

Varieties of Epistemic Conservatism

According to the thesis of epistemic conservatism it would be unreasonable to change one's beliefs in the absence of any good reasons. Although it is claimed that epistemic conservatism has informed and resolved a number of positions and problems in epistemology, it is difficult to identify a single representative view of the thesis. This has resulted in advancing a series of disparate and largely unconnected arguments to establish conservatism. In this paper, I begin by casting doubt on the claim of widespread and genuine applications of the conservative policy. I then distinguish between three main varieties of epistemic conservatism, namely, differential, perseverance and generation conservatism Having evaluated various arguments that have been offered or may be considered on behalf of the conservative thesis, I close by concluding that those versions of the thesis that survive critical scrutiny fail to live up to the aspirations of the thesis as a substantive canon of rationality, that to the extent that principles of conservatism are epistemically promising, they are not plausible. While to the extent that they are plausible, they are not of much epistemic interest.     

Emotional Abuse Questionnaire (EAQ): A New Scale for Measuring Emotional Abuse and Psychological Maltreatment1

Emotional abuse is the core of all other kinds of child abuses and maltreatments. The significant and serious outcomes of other kinds of abuses are often due to the emotional aspects. Moreover, emotional abuse has several forms, and each form may lead to different adverse outcomes for children and adolescents. Unfortunately, there is not a comprehensive instrument to assess all categories of emotional abuse. A 30-item self-report questionnaire was developed for ages 12 years and older. The sample included 328 students aged 12 to 19 years selected randomly from students referred to different student counseling centers. Exploratory factor analysis categorized the scale into six subscales. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that all items were fitted with the subscales significantly. Content and concurrent validity demonstrated good validity and reliability for each subscale. Overall reliability was also significantly acceptable.     

Charity, Supervenience, and Skepticism

In a number of articles Donald Davidson has argued that the charitable nature of his method of radical interpretation rules out the possibility of massive error and thus refutes Cartesian skepticism. The diversity of such arguments and the suggestions that are all being made under the name of the principle of charity have prompted a large body of conflicting responses, adding only to the obscurity of the issues that are generally associated with the question of skepticism. In this paper I propose to consider the debate in a new light by reconstruing the principle of charity as a supervenience constraint on belief attribution. This would help explain some of the puzzling features of Davidson's arguments, like the idea of an omniscient interpreter, and the ensuing commentaries. Having provided an analysis of the limitations of Davidson's arguments, I shall then suggest an alternative explanation of the purported necessity of the principle of charity. Finally, having construed the principle of charity as a supervenience constraint, I shall examine what consequences this construal has for the logical status of the principle itself and its alleged epistemic potentials.     

On the Significance of Difference‐Making Principles

It has been claimed that difference‐making plays important roles in both metaphysics and epistemology. The idea is that facts often make a difference to other facts. Thus, causes are said to make a difference to their effects, and the world is thought to make a difference to what is believed. One way to cash out this idea is in terms of the notion of counterfactual dependence between the facts in question. It has recently been objected by some philosophers, however, that the counterfactual‐dependence account misrepresents the difference‐making idea, prompting them to offer a different, weaker construal of the idea in question, which, they claim, illuminates a number of problems in both epistemology and metaphysics. This article, while acknowledging that the difference‐making idea is a genuine constraint on some of our concepts, challenges the claim that the weaker interpretation has significant philosophical potentials and, having delineated its real function, spells out the lessons that should be drawn from its failure.     

The noetic effects of sin: a dispositional framework

One of the well-known theses of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of religious belief is his claim about the noetic effects of sin. But Plantinga does not clearly spell out how sin functions to undermine or weaken the believer’s natural knowledge of God. In this paper, I want to suggest a dispositional gloss on his account of religious epistemology that properly identifies the epistemic role of sin and other factors that may undermine knowledge of God. It will be further argued that the dispositional framework provides us with a principled basis for deriving some of the main contours of Plantinga’s general epistemology.

     

COGNITIVE PENETRATION,THE DOWNGRADE PRINCIPLE,AND EXTENDED COGNITION

It has been argued that just as, say, prejudice or wishful thinking can generate ill‐founded beliefs, the same is true of experiences. The idea is that the etiology of cognitively penetrated experiences can downgrade their justificatory force. This view, known as the Downgrade Principle, seems to be compatible with both internalist and externalist conceptions of epistemic justification. An assessment of the credentials of the Downgrade Principle is particularly important in view of the fact that not all cases of cognitive penetration are epistemically malignant. There are good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. I argue that a proper assessment of the Downgrade Principle will have to address two fundamental questions. I identify two general ways of responding to these questions and show why they fail. It will be maintained that an explanationist conception of justification has a better chance of accounting for the distinction between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. The Downgrade Principle is then discussed in the context of the extended cognition thesis (ECT). In particular, I look at the sensorimotor theory of perception, as a way of broadening the scope of (ECT) to include conscious perceptual experience, that sees senses as ways of exploring the environment mediated by different patterns of sensorimotor contingency. I suggest possible ways in which one could distinguish between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration on such a view compatible with the explanationist view of epistemic justification.     

Conceivability and possibility

We often decide whether a state of affairs is possible (impossible) by trying to mentally depict a scenario (using words, images, etc.) where the state in question obtains (or fails to obtain). These mental acts (broadly thought of as ‘conceiving’) seem to provide us with an epistemic route to the space of possibilities. The problem this raises is whether conceivability judgments provide justification-conferring grounds for the ensuing possibility-claims (call this the ‘conceivability thesis’). Although the question has a long history, contemporary interest in it was, to a large extent, prompted by Kripke's utilization of modal intuitions in the course of propounding certain influential theses in the philosophy of language and mind. The interest has been given a further boost by the recent two-dimensional approach to the Kripkean framework. In this paper, I begin by providing a detailed examination of a most recent attempt (due to Chalmers) to defend the thesis and argue that it is unsuccessful. This is followed by presenting my own gloss on Kripke's explanation of the illusions of contingency and I close by raising a general problem intended to undermine the prospects for a successful defense of the thesis.