"A Pilgrim Press book." Bibliography: p. 241-244.

THEOLOGIES OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION explores the interactive relationships between religious education and thirteen widely different current schools of theologies. Central to this volume is the basic question of whether theology exercises determinative conrol over all phases of religious educaion theory and practice, OR whether theolgy is simply an important contributor to the field of religous educaiton. Does theology in itself possess the capability of directly generating teaching procedures and verifying the instrucitonal effects of these procedures?

The ‘Standard View’ regarding computer-based medical diagnostic decision support programs is that, while such systems may be useful adjuncts to human decision-making, they cannot replace human diagnosticians. Mazoué (1990) disputes this viewpoint. He notes that human diagnosis is prone to a variety of errors, and claims that the processes of data collection for diagnosis and the intellectual task of making a diagnosis are independent. Mazoué believes that recent progress in computer-based diagnosis has been encouraging enough to consider the concept of (...) “human-assisted computer diagnosis”. This commentary explains why the Standard View should remain standard. Diagnosis is a complex process more involved than producing a nosological label for a set of patient descriptors. Efficient and ethical diagnostic evaluation requires a broad knowledge of people and of disease states. The state of the art in computer-based medical diagnosis does not support the optimistic claim that people can now be replaced by more reliable diagnostic programs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is Literature Self-Referential?Eric MillerIIs literary language necessarily self-referential? And does this put paradox at the heart of literature? For at least two decades now, affirmative answers to both questions have been articles of faith among critics in the structuralist and poststructuralist mainstream. Literature’s ineluctable paradoxicality attracts us so because a paradox suggests that there are limits to human rationality, and thus strikes a blow for literature and against science. (...) Paradox ensures literature its own special realm, safe from the culturally imperialistic inroads of science’s orderly, rational-empirical constructions. Literature thus gets to be seen as “bigger” than reason, because only literature can live with paradox, and thus only literature reveals those “deeper” truths of contradiction-ridden human existence, whereas science can never penetrate beyond rational manipulations of phenomenal surfaces. Indeed, for anyone who holds all human existence to be fundamentally paradoxical, this special capacity makes literature the only genuine, demystified species of human knowledge. In the war between C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, a war humanists are now losing badly, we like to regard paradox as our ultimate weapon.Belief in the paradoxicality of literature may also be found among the New Critics, 1 and in fact goes back at least to the Romantics, 2 but they did not derive this belief from a necessary self-referentiality of literary language. This newer way of deriving paradox appears to offer several competitive advantages. Self-reference seems to be the ultimate version of “art for art’s sake”: if all literary language is necessarily self-referential, then literature must be something totally self-contained, and is thus legitimized solely in and through itself. In addition, deriving [End Page 475] literature’s paradoxicality from self-reference seems to ground it in the same conceptual realm as mathematical logic, and thus tempts us to claim for literature a “rigor” normally conceded only to logic, mathematics, and theoretical physics. Self-referentiality would thus seem both to protect literature’s autonomy and to raise its cultural status into the company of mathematics and science.But it is a trap. For behind this new strategy lurks a capitulation to the underlying conceptual scheme of natural science, and literature thus comes to be conceived, in effect, as a science. Self-reference is, after all, still a kind of reference; paradox is still a kind of truth-relational construction;—and truth-relations built around reference constitute the correspondence theory of truth. From such a foundational commitment to reference and correspondence-truth, flows the rest of the scientific worldview: the dualism of referring expression and referent, word and object, sentence and fact, theory and data, language and world, culture and nature. The presentation of literature as a quasi-negation of this ontology changes nothing. The dualism of reference still functions as literature’s conceptual starting point, as its arche. We only appear to be defining a peculiar and radically distinct sphere for literature when we insist on its self-referentiality, on the (recursive) identity, for it, of referring expression and referent. For, this is still to treat the conceptual distinction between the two as foundational, and literature thereby tacitly assimilates science’s fundamental categorial division: the referential language-world duality of correspondence truth. Indeed, literature thus comes to live even more completely in the margins of science: it will have no essence of its own; it will differ at most in being a photo-negative image of science’s positiv(istic) project. In Snow’s war, self-reference is a Trojan horse.With self-reference as the essence of literature, we are thus staking our reputations on literature’s being a special field of formalizable “knowledge about...,” rather than, say, a quality or kind or realm of possible experience—which is to adopt science’s understanding of what is important. Matters are only made worse by that other attempt to define literary studies as a negation of the theory-data dualism of natural science: the poststructuralist denial of the distinction between criticism and literature. For the institutional need professional critics have to be seen as a discipline with a method and a subject, as a form of “knowledge about,” hardly disappears with... (shrink)

The constructs of behavioral mass in research on the momentum of operant behavior and associative strength in Pavlovian conditioning have some interesting parallels, as suggested by Savastano & Miller. Some recent findings challenge the strict separation of operant and Pavlovian determiners of response rate and resistance to change in behavioral momentum, renewing the need for research on the interaction of processes that have traditionally been studied separately. Relatedly, Furedy notes that some autonomic responses may be refractory to conditioning, but (...) a combination of operant contingencies and enriched Pavlovian stimulus-reinforcer relations may prove effective. (shrink)

This chapter in the Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind surveys issues concerning free will. Topics include the compatibility question, compatibilist accounts, and libertarian accounts of free will.

The processes mediating dynamic and flexible responding to rapidly changing task-environments are not well understood. In the present research we employ a Stroop procedure to clarify the contribution of context-sensitive control processes to online performance. In prior work Stroop interference varied as a function of probe location context, with larger Stroop interference occurring for contexts associated with a high proportion of congruent items [Crump, M. J., Gong, Z., & Milliken, B. . The context-specific proportion congruent stroop effect: location as (...) a contextual cue. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 316–321.] Here, we demonstrate that this effect does not depend on awareness of the context manipulation, but that it can depend on attention to the predictive context dimension, and on the relative salience of the target and predictive context dimensions. We discuss the implications of our results for current theories of cognitive control. (shrink)

The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs (...) but to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine Myles Brand’s criticisms of what he calls the Standard View of the role and value of intercollegiate athletics. According to Brand, the Standard View, held by most faculty members, undervalues college sports and should be replaced by the Integrated View that properly stresses the educational value of participating in athletics. I claim that Brand’s analogical argument has a variety of problems. I show that Brand’s conclusion, derived from his attempt to compare the experiences of (...) student-musicians and student-athletes is unpersuasive, yet his argument forces us to confront persistent and important questions about liberal arts education and the role and value of the arts, especially music, in higher education. (shrink)

Emotions can be explained as specialized states, shaped by natural selection, that increase fitness in specific situations. The physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics of a specific emotion can be analyzed as possible design features that increase the ability to cope with the threats and opportunities present in the corresponding situation. This approach to understanding the evolutionary functions of emotions is illustrated by the correspondence between (a) the subtypes of fear and the different kinds of threat; (b) the attributes of happiness (...) and sadness and the changes that would be advantageous in propitious and unpropitious situations; and (c) the social emotions and the adaptive challenges of reciprocity relationships. In addition to addressing a core theoretical problem shared by evolutionary and cognitive psychology, explicit formulations of the evolutionary functions of specific emotions are of practical importance for understanding and treating emotional disorders. (shrink)

In 1933, Ethel Thompson Overby became the first African American female principal in Richmond, Virginia. Her motto was ?It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness? (Overby 1975, 1). Before becoming principal, Overby had been a teacher in the southern urban de jure segregated schools of the city. How did the racially segregated context impact her understanding of democracy as an African American woman? As a teacher, what educational practices did she subscribe to? What educational theorizing (...) underpinned her educational practices as a teacher and as a principal? Who was she? These were the questions that guided this research into the educational theorizing of Ethel T. Overby. This research seeks to further the understanding of the theorizing that underpinned the educational practices of African American female teachers and principals who taught and led in public urban de jure segregated southern schools (Charron 2009; Johnson 2000; May 2007; Walker 2009). This historical qualitative research provides knowledge about the educational theorizing of African American educators and how past practices can support the educational fortitude of African American students today. ?To be a teacher, you had to be a good citizen.??Ethel Thompson Overby (1975, 10). (shrink)

Participants were given 3 ethical dilemmas, asked to generate their own solutions, and asked to make judgments about a number of provided alternatives. Students were asked either to make decisions after seeking consultation or to make decisions independently of consultation. There were few significant between-group differences along a number of dimensions including participants' ratings of acceptability of provided alternatives and levels of certainty, justification, and satisfaction with personally generated solutions. For one of the vignettes, individuals using consultation, when compared with (...) the control group, were significantly more likely to prefer their own solution to that of provided alternatives. The study was viewed as a needed first step in investigating a cherished assumption in clinical practice. (shrink)

In a new study, Ben-Haim et al. use subliminal stimuli to separate conscious and unconscious perception in macaques. A programme of this type, using a range of cognitive tasks, is a promising way to look for conscious perception in more controversial cases.

This article examines the issue of nonsexual relationships between psychologists and their former therapy clients. What little research is available concerning nonsexual relationships with former clients suggests that psychologists have clear reservations about some of these relationships, especially personal ones and intentional social interactions. Relationships immediately following termination are seen as particularly suspect. Drawing on the literature dealing with multiple relationships in general, and sexual relationships with former clients in particular, a number of arguments are made outlining why psychologists should (...) avoid significant nonsexual relationships with former clients for at least some period of time following termination. (shrink)

We consider the relationship between neural and behavioural evidence for animal consciousness. We critically examine two recent studies: one neural and one behavioural. The first, on crows, finds different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus is reported as seen or unseen. However, to implicate this neural activity in consciousness, we must assume that a specific conditioned behaviour is a report of conscious experience. The second study, on macaques, records behaviours strikingly similar to patterns of conscious and unconscious perception in (...) humans. However, confounds are only ruled out in human subjects, presupposing substantial neural similarity between humans and macaques. Taken together, the two studies reveal a sense in which neural and behavioural research rely on each other. Looking ahead, these two types of evidence could prove to be either mutually reinforcing or mutually undermining. The science of animal consciousness needs both neural and behavioural evidence, ideally obtained as part of a single coordinated programme. (shrink)

This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtly explores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, one that integrates agent (...) causation and nondeterministic event causation. He defends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct--one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism--then no libertarian account is entirely adequate. (shrink)

The results of four experiments provide evidence for controlled processing in the absence of awareness. Participants identified the colour of a neutral distracter word. Each of four words was presented in one of the four colours 75% of the time or 50% of the time . Colour identification was faster when the words appeared in the colour they were most often presented in relative to when they appeared in another colour, even for participants who were subjectively unaware of any contingencies (...) between the words and the colours. An analysis of sequence effects showed that participants who were unaware of the relation between distracter words and colours nonetheless controlled the impact of the word on performance depending on the nature of the previous trial. A block analysis of contingency-unaware participants revealed that contingencies were learned rapidly in the first block of trials. Experiment 3 showed that the contingency effect does not depend on the level of awareness, thus ruling out explicit strategy accounts. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that the contingency effect results from behavioural control and not from semantic association or stimulus familiarity. These results thus provide evidence for implicit control. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of agency have focused primarily on actions and activities. But, besides acting, we often omit to do or refrain from doing certain things. How is this aspect of our agency to be conceived? This book offers a comprehensive account of omitting and refraining, addressing issues ranging from the nature of agency and moral responsibility to the metaphysics of absences and causation. Topics addressed include the role of intention in intentional omission, the connection between negligence and omission, the distinction (...) between doing and allowing, and the distinction in law between act and omission. (shrink)

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

This chapter outlines the main ideas of my book National responsibility and global justice. It begins with two widely held but conflicting intuitions about what global justice might mean on the one hand, and what it means to be a member of a national community on the other. The first intuition tells us that global inequalities of the magnitude that currently exist are radically unjust, while the second intuition tells us that inequalities are both unavoidable and fair once national responsibility (...) is allowed to operate. This conflict might be resolved either by adopting a cosmopolitan theory of justice (which leaves no room for national responsibility) or by adopting a ?political? theory of justice (which denies that questions of distributive justice can arise beyond the walls of the sovereign state). Since neither resolution is satisfactory, the chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and proposes a new theory of global justice, whose main elements are the protection of basic human rights worldwide, and fair terms of interaction between independent political communities. (shrink)

Altruism can be understood in terms of traditional principles of reinforcement if an outcome that is beneficial to another person reinforces the behavior of the actor who produces it. This account depends on a generalization of reinforcement across persons and might be more amenable to experimental investigation than the one proposed by Rachlin.

Waiting for Godot’s many commentators have emphasized the absurdity of hope in the play, but there has not been an account of how the play reprises hope’s historical transformation and weakening in modernity. This essay provides that account, arguing that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot sponsors a form of hope appropriate to the predicaments of modern societies. Godot stages the blockage of hope by reflecting the obsolescence and fragmentation of the religious and progressive legitimations for the concept that used to be (...) broadly convincing. Despite this blockage, however, Godot does not give in to nihilism. It, rather, models a form of responsible, self-aware hope appropriate to an historical situation where hope does not admit of rational justification. To develop this interpretation of the play and to defend its minimalist conception of hope, the essay draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and aesthetics. (shrink)

Magda Arnold is recognised as one of the pioneers of modern cognitive approaches to the study of emotion. Indeed, her definition of appraisal is still employed more or less unchanged by many researchers. Somewhat less well known is Arnold's broader theory of emotion, personality, and human development that formed the context for her ideas about appraisal. In this paper, I examine the influence of the psychology of Thomas Aquinas on Arnold's thinking about appraisal, emotion, the self and self-actualisation. I then (...) critique current conceptions of appraisal in the light of her ideas about emotion and the person. I end with a plea to broaden our conception of what constitutes a moral emotion. (shrink)