Claims that representatives of both sides of the psi debate (e.g., J. E. Alcock; K. R. Rao and J. Palmer [see PA, Vol 76:10501 and 10507]) have implicitly adopted the empirical epistemology without spelling out or systematically applying the rational epistemology, an essential step for both psychology and parapsychology. ((c) 1997 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved).

Nine lead papers, all with two or three commentators, and six with replies to the commentators. It is the Identity theorists cum cybernetician versus the "non-Cartesian dualists" and C. D. Broad-style interactionists. The most sparks are generated with MacKay's paper, "From Mechanism to Mind," and the ensuing exchange between MacKay and Beloff; MacKay's paper is intended as a summary of his work in cybernetics as it relates to the philosophy of mind, and Beloff's criticisms range from the (...) cautious to the devastating. Beloff's own paper is a well-ordered, rear-guard action against the Identity theory, which fastens on the dual nature of consciousness and para-psychological phenomena as the theory's present obstacles. Flew's "A Rational Animal" is an incisive challenging of what he dubs the "Co-existence Thesis," i.e., the view defended by such people as Winch and MacIntyre, that explanations by reasons and explanations by causes, or, in another idiom, teleological and mechanical explanations, can exist together in irreducible harmony—even given the ideal of a unified science. It should be mentioned that Price's paper is the bulk of his 1952 lecture before the Members of the Society for Psychical Research, "Survival and the Idea of 'Another World.'"—E. A. R. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like (...) white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)

§1. The origins of recursion theory. In dedicating a book to Steve Kleene, I referred to him as the person who made recursion theory into a theory. Recursion theory was begun by Kleene's teacher at Princeton, Alonzo Church, who first defined the class of recursive functions; first maintained that this class was the class of computable functions ; and first used this fact to solve negatively some classical problems on the existence of algorithms. However, it was Kleene who, in his (...) thesis and in his subsequent attempts to convince himself of Church's Thesis, developed a general theory of the behavior of the recursive functions. He continued to develop this theory and extend it to new situations throughout his mathematical career. Indeed, all of the research which he did had a close relationship to recursive functions.Church's Thesis arose in an accidental way. In his investigations of a system of logic which he had invented, Church became interested in a class of functions which he called the λ-definable functions. Initially, Church knew that the successor function and the addition function were λ-definable, but not much else. During 1932, Kleene gradually showed1 that this class of functions was quite extensive; and these results became an important part of his thesis 1935a. (shrink)

The Health Protection Agency has recently attempted to create a postmortem tissue archive to determine the prevalence of abnormal prion protein. The success of this archive was prevented because the Health Protection Agency could not convince coroners to support the study’s methodology and participate on that basis. The findings of this paper detail and support the view that the Coroners’ Society of England and Wales’s refusal to participate was misguided and failed to appreciate that coroners have a moral obligation to (...) protect public health. Measures to assist coroners in fulfilling this role are proposed. (shrink)

Who are you, God? -- Who made you, God? -- I want to find you, God -- I can't see you, God -- How much do you know, God? -- Where is truth, God? -- The shadow doesn't turn -- The just judge -- The invincible power -- Can I trust you, God? -- The love that will not let us go -- The name above all names.

This book charts new ground, specifically, in its negotiation of a definition of animal welfare, in its systematic discussion of the organizations actually ...

Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips (...) of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p <.001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p <.001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p <.001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p <.001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits. (shrink)