Anything is possible

This paper criticises necessitarianism, the thesis that there is at least one necessary truth; and defends possibilism, the thesis that all propositions are contingent, or that anything is possible. The second section maintains that no good conventionalist account of necessity is available, while the third section criticises model theoretic necessitarianism. The fourth section sketches some recent technical work on nonclassical logic, with the aim of weakening necessitarian intuitions and strengthening possibilist intuitions. The fifth section considers several a prioristic attempts at demonstrating that there is at least one necessary proposition and finds them inadequate. The final section emphasises the epistemic aspect of possibilism.     

Life-narrative and word-cued autobiographical memories in centenarians: comparisons with 80-year-old control,depressed, and dementia groups

Centenarians provided autobiographical memories to either a request for a life narrative or a request to produce autobiographical memories to cue words. Both methods produced distributions with childhood-amnesia, reminiscence-bump, and recency components. The life-narrative method produced relatively more bump memories at the expense of recent memories. The life-narrative distributions were similar to those obtained from 80-year-old adults without clinical symptoms and from 80-year-old Alzheimer's dementia and depression patients, except that the centenarians had an additional 20-year period of relatively low recall between the bump and recency components. The centenarians produced more emotionally neutral memories than the other three groups and produced fewer and less detailed memories than the non-clinical 80-year-old sample.     

Heterogeneity of treatment changes after psychodynamic therapy within a one year follow‐up: A replication study

Naturalistic psychotherapy effect studies commonly report effect sizes for the total sample. However, a previous study of SCL‐90 Global Severity Index (GSI) improvement in a large outpatient sample used a cluster analytic strategy and reported clinical relevant outcome trajectories that could be grouped into early within‐treatment improvement, late improvement in the follow‐up period, and deteriorating patients with slight improvement that was lost at follow‐up. We explore GSI outcome trajectories and clinical significant change in a sample of 320 patients at a public psychiatric outpatient psychodynamic group therapy unit, the majority with anxiety, personality, and mood disorders. The study revealed large discharge and follow‐up effect sizes but more than one third of the patients were without measurable improvement. The major clusters described above were confirmed, and revealed unique clinical and socio‐demographic characteristics. Late improvers, as compared with early improvers, were characterized by anxiety symptoms and lack of network support after controlling for GSI at admission. Similarly, deteriorating patients had longer duration of illness and less favourable social characteristics compared with the other two groups. Early improving patients were less likely to have participated in short‐term groups, and only one third participated in additional treatment compared with more than 69% of the other patients. Severe and socially affected psychiatric patients, and patients with anxiety and agoraphobic symptoms may be less optimally treated in short‐term time limited psychodynamic groups. There is an obvious need for diversity of treatment offers, better integration of psycho‐social treatment components, and long‐term open ended treatment.     

Prior and rennie on times and tenses

One of Arthur Prior’s constructions of the relational calculus for times within tense logic plus propositional quantifiers is considered using Malcolm Rennie’s multimodal semantics and found wanting in two respects: Prior’s use of an independent necessity operator was both incorrect and unnecessary, and his system imported an objectionable metaphysics namely temporal relationism.When these defects are repaired it is shown that temporal relationism is not entailed by the modified system.Finally, there is considered the possibility of describing an inconsistent temporal structure in which distinct, classically incompatible conceptions of time can be unified within an inconsistent framework     

What is Happening to Global Christianity?

Abstract :  Following Philip Jenkins's analysis of "the next Christendom" it is argued that when the centre of Christianity is moving southwards Christianity will change. As a translation movement, Christianity is a religion made to travel. The consequences of this development are dramatic. In the West and North the mainline churches are in decline. The diversification within Christianity will continue in a certain tension to a trend towards uniformity. This leads to new priorities in mission. The discipline, theology of religions, will gain in importance as the churches are confronted with the life and death choice between a "clash of civilisations" or a peaceful multicultural and multireligious co‐existence.     

Full-Cycle Social Psychology for Theory and Application

Experimental lab-based research has the ability to carefully control variables and establish causality, but also possesses accompanying weaknesses. Most prominent is its inability to determine the strength or prevalence of phenomena in the natural environment. As a solution, we present a full-cycle approach to social psychology, whereby researchers use naturalistic observation to determine an effect's presence in the real world, theory to determine what processes underlie the effect, experimentation to verify the effect and its underlying processes, and a return to the natural environment to corroborate the experimental findings. We also discuss ways in which the full-cycle approach lends itself to applied research, how observing the lack of an effect where one is expected can lead to fruitful research, and how field research can offset some of the limitations of carefully controlled laboratory research.