When people retell stories, what guides their retelling? Most previous research on story retelling and story comprehension has focused on information accuracy as the key measure of stability in transmission. This paper suggests that there is a second, affective, dimension that provides stability for retellings, namely the audience affect of surprise. In a large-sample study with multiple iterations of retellings, we found evidence that people are quite accurate in preserving all degrees of surprisingness in serial reproduction – even when the (...) event that produced the surprisingness in the original story is dropped or changed. Thus, we propose that the preservation of affect is an implicit goal of retelling: not merely do retellers recall highly surprising events better, but rather they register all levels of surprisingness precisely and aim to surprise their implied audience to same degree. This study used 2,389 participants. (shrink)

This article argues that Karl Rahner’s theme of “eschatological ignorance” should be retrieved to facilitate and to fortify the enactment of Catholic theology’s prophetic commitments in a U.S. context. First, the article presents and defends Rahner’s famous distinction between eschatology and apocalyptic. Second, it characterizes Rahner’s distinction as representative of his conviction of a need for docta ignorantia futuri, which stems from his theology of God as Absolute Mystery, and which, though Rahner recommends it to twentieth-century Europeans, seems particularly well (...) suited for theological application in the twenty-first-century United States. Third, it suggests how Rahner’s eschatological ignorance might make a prophetic impact on the American socio-religio-political climate. (shrink)

Examination of attempts at theory reduction shows that a process of cognitive emergence is involved in which concepts of S, Cs, emerge from T. This permits the ‘bridge laws’ to be stated. These are not in conflict with incommensurability of the Cs with the CT. Cognitive emergence may occur asymptotically or because of similarities of mathematical expressions; it is not necessarily holistic. Mereologically and nonmereologically related theory pairs are considered. Examples are chosen from physics. An important distinction is made between (...) ‘theory reduction’ and ‘reductive explanation’. (shrink)

The book series Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) publishes high-quality work in linguistics that addresses current issues in synchrony and diachrony, theoretically or empirically oriented.

We challenge Johnson et al.'s assumption that people reduce unclear situations to a single narrative explanation and that such reduction would be adaptive for decision-making under radical uncertainty. Instead, we argue that people imagine and maintain multiple narrative possibilities throughout the decision-making process and that this process provides cognitive flexibility and adaptive benefits within the proposed model.

Überblicken wir noch einmal das ganze riesige Gebiet des Geistesgeschehens vor und nach der Jahrhundertwende, soweit es darwinistische Züge erkennen läßt, so können wir eines feststellen : Ausgenommen die Konservativen und die Kirchen, die beide angesichts des stürmischen Vorwärtsdrängens darwinistischer Gedankengänge in die Defensive gehen müssen, bedienen sich so gut wie alle geistigen Strömungen des Darwinismus: Die Sozialisten, weil Darwins "Naturtheorie" mit ihrer Gesetzlichkeit des biologischen Fortschritts Gewähr zu bieten scheint, daß auch im Gesellschaftlichen eherne Gesetze des Fortschritts walten, und (...) weil sie aus dem Darwinismus den Beweis für die Gleichheit aller Menschen herauslesen. Die Sozialdarwinisten, weil ihnen Darwins Lehre vom Kampf ums Dasein und von der Auslese der Lebensfähigsten angeblich den Beweis liefert für die Ungleichheit der Menschen und für die Notwendigkeit einer Menschenzucht. Nicht zufällig sprießen um 1890 so viele Zuchtvereine aus dem Boden, weil man in Charles Darwin den großen Pflanzen-, Tier- und Menschenzüchter sah. Die Atheisten, weil mit der Affenabstammung jegliches göttliche Wirken beim Werden des Menschengeschlechts widerlegt sei. Die pantheistischen Schwärmer von Friedrichshagen, weil sie ein Entwicklungsgesetz am Werk zu sehen glauben, das ganz folgerichtig zu immer Besserem, Edlerem, Vollkommnerem, Vergeistigterem führen müsse. Die Verteidiger einer "Leistungsaristokratie". (shrink)

Hugh Gash’s target article is characterized as an attempt to free sustainable-development discourse from its preoccupation with naïve realism. While this is, even today, an honorable and ….

Contemporary analytical philosophy has not provided historians with an adequate account of their causal reasoning. Attempts to apply the laws of scientific explanation to history have occasioned an artificial split between historical interpretation and historical explanation. The lawlike generalizations of the natural sciences are both perfectly universal and perfectly delimited, whereas the typical generalizations of the historian are imperfectly universal and imperfectly delimited. In historical analysis, a particular development is hypothetically posited as the ordinary course of events, or as the (...) established "trend," and an intervening process or set of conditions is identified as the cause of some alteration in the expected outcome. It is important to differentiate between historical events and the actions of historical figures. The analysis of historical actions requires attention to a second layer of interpretation, that of intention. In a good narrative, everything "important" for the actual outcome will be clearly displayed and cogently ordered in a network of interacting causal sequences; for that is what the historian means when he proposes to "tell the whole story.". (shrink)