B. F. Skinner's claim that "operant behavior is essentially the field of purpose" is systematically explored. It is argued that Charles Taylor's illuminating analysis of the explanatory significance of common-sense goal-ascriptions (1) lends some (fairly restricted) support to Skinner's claim, (2) considerably clarifies the conceptual significance of differences between operant and respondent behavior and conditioning, and (3) undercuts influential assertions (e.g., Taylor's) that research programs for behavioristic psychology share a "mechanistic" orientation. A strategy is suggested for assessing the plausibility of (...) Skinner's broader claims about the adequacy of the operant behaviorist program for the analysis of purposive behavior. (shrink)

The chief concepts involved are those of piety and impiety, and after a thorough analysis of the philosophical texts Mikalson offers a refined definition of ...

It is widely assumed that disposition predicates do not designate entities which could be causal factors in the production of natural phenomena. Yet, the fact that an object has a given dispositional property is often taken to help explain behavior exhibited by objects to which the disposition is ascribed. Instrumentalist, realist, and rationalist analyses of disposition predicates embody three quite distinct views of how both assumptions could be correct. It is argued that the instrumentalist fails to capture basic intuitions concerning (...) the explanatory import of disposition ascriptions, the rationalist tries unsuccessfully to locate necessary connections in nature, and the realist provides an account which is intuitively satisfying without introducing otiose entities into the ontology of empirical science. (shrink)

¿Cómo reacciona la ciudadanía en un sistema político polarizado ante una emergencia como la pandemia de la COVID-19?, ¿cómo procesa la ciudadanía las narrativas polarizadas que están en conflicto?, y ¿qué imagen se forman de la gestión política de la amenaza de la pandemia? En EE. UU, hay que retrotraerse a la epidemia de la polio de hace 70 años para encontrar una emergencia sanitaria como la pandemia de la COVID-19. No obstante, hay importantes diferencias; en la década de 1950, (...) el clima político de los EE.UU. era mucho más uniforme y consensuado que el actual, profundamente dividido y polarizado. Este trabajo utiliza datos de un estudio longitudinal realizado durante 35 años en personas jóvenes de la Generación X (ahora ya en la cuarentena) y datos provenientes de encuestas realizadas en Estados Unidos durante tres décadas, con el propósito de examinar los patrones de adquisición de la información en la comprensión de una nueva amenaza. Nuestro análisis de los últimos 35 años de la Generación X muestra que, en las elecciones de 2020, el factor predictivo del voto individual que tuvo más fuerza fue una ideología política polarizada, pero, aquellas personas que contaban con una mejor comprensión del coronavirus fueron más críticas con la gestión de la pandemia de la COVID-19 que realizó la administración de Donald Trump y estuvieron más predispuestas a votar por Joe Biden que a votar por Trump. Un análisis paralelo de una muestra probabilística representativa de personas adultas estadounidenses en 2020 reveló el mismo patrón de influencia del partidismo ideológico, la comprensión del coronavirus y la evaluación de la administración de Trump. Los resultados muestran que el conocimiento y la comprensión pueden proporcionar un efecto moderador crítico en un sistema político polarizado y dividido. (shrink)

Jay Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why and its Netflix adaptation have enjoyed widespread popularity. While they draw needed attention to issues like bullying and teen estrangement, they may have an unintended effect: they mislead about the etiology of suicide and even glamorize it to a degree. The medical literature has shown that suicide is almost always the result of psychiatric disorder, not provocative stress, in much the same way an asthmatic crisis is primarily the result of an underlying medical condition, (...) not an allergic stimulus. Both the novel and Netflix series ignore this premise and even belittle the idea. Thus, while the story has artistic merits, it also has the potential to be destructive if accessed by young readers and viewers seeking guidance. Approximately ten percent of teens suffer from depression, and suicide recently surpassed homicide as the second-leading cause of death among persons ages ten to twenty-four in the United States. A more balanced view addressing these misconceptions is provided for teens, parents, and mental health professionals. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to character education have been viewed by many educators as an attempt to establish self control within students to habituate them to prescribed behaviour and as nothing more than a ‘bits‐and‐pieces’ approach to moral education. While this is accurate for many character education programmes, integrated multi‐dimensional character education embraces both moral education and character formation. Students learn to identify and process social conventions within the core values of the school and community and have opportunities to learn practical reasoning (...) skills in schools where character education is integrated into all aspects of the schooling process. Reported in this article are several studies, including two large‐scale experimental investigations, that show integrated character education results in an improved school environment, student pro‐social and moral behaviour, and reading and maths test scores. Schools become more caring communities; student discipline referrals drop significantly, particularly in areas related to bullying behaviour; and test scores in moderately achieving schools increase nearly 50%. (shrink)

The rights concerning ownership to, and inheritance of, property are generally looked to as natural and taken for granted. In this article we ask why the rights of inheritance usually priorities consanguine bonds and how this arrangement originated. As rights to property and inheritance was non-existent or only of minor importance in ancient hunter and gathering societies, we assume that these phenomena arose or became socially significant only with the development of agriculture and livestock breeding. In different agricultural societies the (...) institutionalisation (and naturalisation) of inheritance rights took form in accordance with the kinship and symbolic systems of each. Here we take a closer look at two legal institutions in two different societies: the Jubilee of the Ancient Israelites (as accounted for in the Book of Leviticus) and the allodial rights of early mediaeval Norway (as represented in the Gulathing Law). We interpret these two institutions in terms of local kinship and symbolic systems and compare them to the ideas on natural law forwarded by John Locke, which in modern times has served as the foundation on which laws on property and inheritance are legitimised. (shrink)