Motivated reasoning occurs when we reason differently about evidence that supports our prior beliefs than when it contradicts those beliefs. Adult participants (N = 377) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) system completed written responses critically evaluating strengths and weaknesses in a vignette on the topic of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). The vignette had two fictional scientists present prototypical arguments for and against anthropogenic climate change that were constructed with equally flawed and conflicting reasoning. The current study tested and found support (...) for three main hypotheses: cognitive style, personality, and ideology would predict both motivated reasoning and endorsement of human caused climate change; those who accept human-caused climate change will be less likely to engage in biased reasoning and more likely to engage in objective reasoning about climate change than those who deny human activity as a cause of climate change. (144 words). (shrink)

Although the influence of affect on creativity has received some theoretical and empirical attention, the role of affect as a consequence of creative problem solving has been neglected. This study is the one of the first to examine empirically the affect that results from creative problem solving. In a 2 (group) × 3 (time period) × 2 (task) factorial design, 122 art and science students were randomly assigned to complete an art or science task and to report on the kind (...) and intensity of affect before, during, and after creative problem solving. It was predicted that art and science students would report different levels of affect only after the insight, not before or during, and that the effects of task, not just group, would contribute to affective variability between art and science students. Science students reported similar levels of (positive) affective intensity before and during creative insight as art students. It was only after the insight that art students reported more intense affective experiences than science students. Task differences accounted for a significant amount of variance in affective intensities, but primarily for art-oriented subjects. These findings suggest that viewing affect as a dependent variable of cognition, rather than primarily as an independent variable, is a direction that would benefit the field of empirical work on cognition and emotion. Current cognitive theories of emotion offer much potential in understanding the affective consequences of creative problem solving. (shrink)

Although the influence of affect on creativity has received some theoretical and empirical attention, the role of affect as a consequence of creative problem solving has been neglected. This study is the one of the first to examine empirically the affect that results from creative problem solving. In a 2 (group) × 3 (time period) × 2 (task) factorial design, 122 art and science students were randomly assigned to complete an art or science task and to report on the kind (...) and intensity of affect before, during, and after creative problem solving. It was predicted that art and science students would report different levels of affect only after the insight, not before or during, and that the effects of task, not just group, would contribute to affective variability between art and science students. Science students reported similar levels of (positive) affective intensity before and during creative insight as art students. It was only after the insight that art students reported more intense affective experiences than science students. Task differences accounted for a significant amount of variance in affective intensities, but primarily for art-oriented subjects. These findings suggest that viewing affect as a dependent variable of cognition, rather than primarily as an independent variable, is a direction that would benefit the field of empirical work on cognition and emotion. Current cognitive theories of emotion offer much potential in understanding the affective consequences of creative problem solving. (shrink)

As individual subjects, creativity and personality have been the focus of much research and many publications. This Cambridge Handbook is the first to bring together these two topics and explores how personality and behavior affects creativity. Contributors from around the globe present cutting-edge research about how personality traits and motives make creative behavior more likely. Many aspects of personality and behavior are examined in the chapters, including genius, emotions, psychopathology, entrepreneurship, and multiculturalism, to analyse the impact of these on creativity. (...) The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research will be the definitive resource for researchers, students and academics who study psychology, personality, and creativity. (shrink)

Understanding how impactful scientific articles were funded informs future funding decisions. The structural significance of articles is broken down into two submeasures: citation count and “generativity”. Generativity is an attempt to provide a quantitative operationalization of transformativeness, a concept often used as a funding criterion despite not being a well-defined construct. This report identifies highly impactful and generative publications indexed in the subject area of psychology in the Web of Science in the year 2002. Publications that reported funding sources were (...) found to be more generative than those that did not, and research that was privately funded was found to be more generative than publicly funded research. This analysis is exploratory, and hopefully contributes to a foundation for future empirical investigations into the structure and nature of transformative science that granting agencies would want to fund. (shrink)

One formative idea behind the workshop on expertise in Berkeley in August of 2010 was to develop a viable “trading zone” of ideas, which is defined as a location “in which communities with a deep problem of communication manage to communicate” (Collins et al. 2010, p. 8). In the current case, the goal is to have a trading zone between philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists who communicate their ideas on expertise such that productive interdisciplinary collaboration results. In this paper, I review (...) Harry Collins' three-dimensional model of expertise and provide a very brief and non-inclusive overview of a psychological response. In addition, I propose an addendum to the model by adding a fourth—natural talent—dimension. (shrink)

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) may have been the most influential and insightful American thinker of the twentieth century. In dealing with the intricacies of human nature, society, politics, ethics, theology, racism and international relations, Niebuhr the teacher, preacher, philosopher, social critic and ethicist, was highly influential and difficult to ignore during the Second World War and Cold War eras because of his intellectual heft and the novel manner in which he addressed the economic, spiritual, social and political problems of his time. (...) This book distils Niebuhr's disparate and now difficult to access work into one volume, making it more easily accessible than ever before, at the same time bringing his work into the twenty first century. It argues that if he were alive today Niebuhr would be a champion of the U.N, a supporter of globalization, a fierce opponent of America's 2003 Iraq War (for all the reasons he opposed the Vietnam War), an advocate of the Responsibility to Protect, and a pragmatic hawk on China as it rises today. It also highlights his many contributions to international relations theory, from Realism to Liberalism to existentialism to the English School to constructivism. This is the first book that focuses exclusively on the international relations thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of Classical Realism's most important figures, one whom diplomat and Realist George Kennan called, "the father of us all.". (shrink)

The focus of this book is to explore teachers' evolving personal epistemologies, or the beliefs we hold about the origin and development of knowledge in the context of teaching. The chapters focus on a range of conceptual frameworks about how university and field-based experiences influence the connections between teachers' personal epistemologies and teaching practice. In an earlier volume we investigated ways in which we might change preservice teachers' beliefs and teaching practice (Brownlee, Schraw and Berthelsen, 2011). While we addressed the (...) nature of teachers' personal epistemology, learning and teaching practices, and approaches for changing beliefs throughout teacher education programs, the volume did not address conceptual frameworks for the development of teacher's personal epistemologies. The book is focused on teacher educators, teachers and teacher education programmers in universities with an overall aim of highlighting how we might support students to engage in learning that is challenging and to engage in professional experiences that promote changes in teaching practice. We argue that students need to be encouraged to question their beliefs and develop increasingly sophisticated beliefs about their knowledge and their students' knowledge that facilitate learning and intellectual growth. (shrink)

This edited volume examines the role of personal epistemology in teaching across early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary contexts, and the implications for teacher education, incorporating the most up-to-date research and ...

Findlay & Walker give voice to several common lines of thought regarding oculomotor control but do not provide sufficient detail for a critical evaluation of their theory. I argue that arbitrary spatial and temporal saccade metrics can be produced simply by manipulating the initial activation values in their model – values that the authors never specify. This lack of detail makes it difficult to anticipate the model's specific oculomotor behavior, or to compare this behavior to models opting for a more (...) quantitative framework. (shrink)

Karl Jaspers was one of the greatest European philosophers and humanists of the twentieth century. He demonstrated a broad range of philosophical thinking that makes his work relevant for the twenty-first century. Coming to philosophy from medicine and psychiatry, Jaspers's views encompass a vast and creative range of empirical, philosophical, social, historical, and poltical ideas. Hannah Arendt described Jaspers as one of the greatest interpreters of Kant in the German tradition. In the 1950s, Jaspers spoke of his "philosophy of reason" (...) and his debt to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Weber, and others. His philosophy, however, has often been misunderstood by Anglophone readers and interpreters, both with respect to his so-called existentialism, as well as to the originality, creativity, depth, and scope of this thinking and method. The contributors to this fascinating volume offer fresh expositions and interpretations of Jaspers's philosophy. All are prominent experts in Jaspers research from three continents (Europe, North America, and Asia). Six major parts reveal the significant contribution of Jaspers's thought to the philosophy of psychiatry and science, philosophy of history, metaphysics, philosophy of education, philosophy of humanity, philosophy of politics, philosophy of religion, and intercultural philosophy. Key concepts of Jaspers's philosophy are highlighted and interpreted from a fresh and timely perspective: "boundary situations," existential communication, existential truth, transcendence, philosophical faith, the axial age in world history, new politics and the role of a moral and political conversion, the idea of the university, and Jaspers's fascination with and interpretation of Asian thought. The accessible essays will help readers overcome the intimidation often felt when faced with the work of a major German philosopher. The editors introduce and summarize Jaspers's published works, while offering an overview of his basic themes and concerns. New readers and researchers alike will find this collection instrumental in understanding recent developments in the interpretation of Jaspers. (shrink)

This article is a response to Frank Hindriks’ “Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World.”.

"The author tells a history of the study of cancer-causing viruses from the early twentieth century to the development of an HPV vaccine for cervical cancer in 2006. He profiles the "cancer virus hunters" who made breakthroughs in tumor virology"--.

This article discusses John Searle’s status function account of human rights and Åsa Burman’s “A Critique of the Status Function Account of Human Rights.” While recognizing the validity of part of the critique, based on the distinction between types and tokens, the author argues that, nonetheless, one is not compelled to accept Burman’s conclusion, that “one must give up the status function account of human rights to explain how a human right can exist without collective recognition”. Specifically, the author accepts (...) Burman’s critique of Searle’s attempt to preserve the intuition that human rights have existed without collective recognition, but concludes offering three ways to understand human rights even in the absence of collective recognition, all of which preserve the status function account. (shrink)

College of Medicine, University of South Alabama Mobile, AL 36688-0002, USA wbp501{at}jaguar1.usouthal.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Recent work in viral genomics has shown that bacteriophages exhibit a high degree of mosaicism, which is most likely due to a long history of prolific horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Given these findings, we argue that each of the most plausible attempts to properly classify bacteriophages into distinct species fail. Mayr's biological species concept fails because there is (...) no useful viral analog to sexual reproduction. Phenetic species concepts fail because they obscure the mosaicism and the rich reticulated viral histories. Phylogenetic species concepts, even when extended to take into account reticulation, fail because there is no non-arbitrary distinction between recombination events that create a new viral species and those that do not. There is good reason to think that bacteriophages, arguably the Earth's most abundant biological agent, evolve without forming species. Introduction The Biology of Viruses 2.1 Bacteriophage life cycles 2.2 Mechanisms of HGT The Species Problem and Species Concepts 3.1 Phenetic species concepts 3.2 The biological species concept 3.3 Phylogenetic species concepts 3.4 The ecological species concept 3.5 Homeostatic property cluster species Viruses and Species Taxonomy Reticular Phylogenies Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against John Beatty’s position in his paper “The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis” by counterexample. Beatty argues that there are no distinctly biological laws because the outcomes of the evolutionary processes are contingent. I argue that the heart of the Caspar–Klug theory of virus structure—that spherical virus capsids consist of 60T subunits (where T = k 2 + hk + h 2 and h and k are integers)—is a distinctly biological law even if the existence of spherical (...) viruses is evolutionarily contingent. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 132 - 148 A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool most worth (...) considering is the covert, long-term Fool. Then I advance and critically assess two psychological arguments according to which the Fool’s policy of self-interested covenant breaking is prudentially irrational. The first argument holds that, taken together, the deep guilt from early-stage covenant breaking, the cumulative guilt from continued covenant breaking, and the high statistical risk of detection during high-volume covenant breaking render the Fool’s policy irrational. The second argument holds that the Fool’s policy is irrational because it puts him at risk of adopting a psychologically intolerable view of his fellow covenanters and, specifically, the extent to which they can be trusted. (shrink)

This accessible book gives a new, detailed and elementary explanation of the Gödel incompleteness theorems and presents the Chaitin results and their relation to the da Costa-Doria results, which are given in full, but with no ...

Surprisingly few articles have focused on Aquinas’s particular conception of necessary beings in the Third Way, and many scholars have espoused inaccurate or incomplete views of that conception. My aim in this paper is both to offer a corrective to some of those views and, more importantly, to provide compelling answers to the following two questions about the necessary beings of the Third Way. First, how exactly does Aquinas conceive of these necessary beings? Second, what does Aquinas seek to accomplish (...) in the third stage of the Third Way? In answering these questions, I challenge prominent contemporary understandings of the necessary beings of the Third Way. (shrink)

This article introduces the Normative Representativeness Requirement (NRR) on any moral objection to a decentralized, profit-oriented system of political economy. I develop and defend the NRR and then show why the most important recent critique of the profit system—which I call The Moderate Critique (developed by, for instance, Elizabeth Anderson)—fails to meet the NRR. This article also defends the radical claim that no objection to the profit system itself, rather than just key aspects or salient instances of it, succeeds in (...) meeting the NRR. Critics of the profit system should not seek an alternative to the profit system, but, at most, an alternative within it. (shrink)

Recent work in viral genomics has shown that bacteriophages exhibit a high degree of mosaicism, which is most likely due to a long history of prolific horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Given these findings, we argue that each of the most plausible attempts to properly classify bacteriophages into distinct species fail. Mayr's biological species concept fails because there is no useful viral analog to sexual reproduction. Phenetic species concepts fail because they obscure the mosaicism and the rich reticulated viral histories. Phylogenetic (...) species concepts, even when extended to take into account reticulation, fail because there is no non-arbitrary distinction between recombination events that create a new viral species and those that do not. There is good reason to think that bacteriophages, arguably the Earth's most abundant biological agent, evolve without forming species.1. Introduction2. The Biology of Viruses2.1. Bacteriophage life cycles2.2. Mechanisms of HGT3. The Species Problem and Species Concepts3.1. Phenetic species concepts3.2. The biological species concept3.3. Phylogenetic species concepts3.4. The ecological species concept3.5. Homeostatic property cluster species4. Viruses and Species Taxonomy5. Reticular Phylogenies6. Conclusion. (shrink)

The recent conception of biodiversity proposed by James Maclaurin and Sterelny was developed mostly with macrobiological life in mind. They suggest that we measure biodiversity by dividing life into natural units (typically species) and quantifying the differences among units using phenetic rather than phylogenetic measures of distance. They identify problems in implementing quantitative phylogenetic notions of difference for non-prokaryotic species. I suggest that if we focus on microbiological life forms that engage in frequent, promiscuous lateral gene transfer (LGT), and their (...) associated reticulated phylogenies, we need to rethink the notion of species as the natural unit, and we discover additional problems with phylogenetic notions of distance. These problems suggest that a phenetic approach based on morphospaces has just as much appeal, if not more, for microbes as they do for multi-cellular life. Facts about LGT, however, offer no new insight into the additional challenge of reconciling units and differences into a single measure of biodiversity. (shrink)

The tomb of the ancient Pharaoh, Tut-ankh-Amen, was opened some years ago. Lord Carnarvon, who financed the investigations, died shortly after the opening. Lord Westbury fell to his death from the high window of a London flat on February 21, 1930. His son, the Hon. Richard Bethell, had been found dead in his room the previous November. He was secretary to Mr. Howard Carter, one discoverer of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb. Many persons who had been connected with the excavations had died previously—M. (...) Benedite, for example, died after participating in the research, and Mrs. Greely committed suicide after visiting the tomb. The Hon. Richard Bethell was the thirteenth person connected with Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb, directly or indirectly, to die, and his father, Lord Westbury, was the fourteenth. The death of Lord Carnarvon, a few weeks after the tomb was opened, stirred the notion that a curse had been placed on the mummy of the Pharaoh, or in his tomb, to menace violators. Succeeding deaths kept the notion alive, and the thirteenth death, of the Hon. Richard Bethell, wrung an opinion from Dr. Mardus, the eminent French Egyptologist. He was convinced that the ancient Egyptians could surround “their mummies with some dynamic force.” Such a force lurked in the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen. Its nature was unknown, but it had manifested itself in the series of deaths. (shrink)

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Volume 51, Issue 6, Page 555-573, December 2021. John Searle’s social ontology distinguishes between linguistic and non-linguistic institutional facts. He argues that every instance of the latter is created by declarative speech acts, while the former are exceptions to this far-reaching claim: linguistic phenomena are autonomous, their meaning is “built in,” and this is necessary, Searle argues, to avoid “infinite regress.” In this essay I analyze Searle’s arguments for this linguistic exceptionalism and reveal its flaws. (...) My method is to follow Searle’s argument closely and comprehensively so as to avoid, insofar as is possible, a selective reading of his argument in my favor. Against Searle’s position, I argue that linguistic phenomena are not exceptions to his general theory of institutional facts, for they too always require supplementary representations in order to exist. Language itself is analogous to all other institutions and infinite regress turns out to be unavoidable. (shrink)

This article will take up Deleuze and Guattari’s allusive yet insightful writings on ‘the secret’ by considering the secret across three intermingling registers or modulations: as content, as form, and as expression. Setting the secret in relation to evolving modes of technological mediation and sociality as respectively pocket, pooling, and plasma, the article works through a trio of examples in order to understand the contemporary movements of secrets: the memories of secrets evoked in an intimately interactive music video by the (...) band Arcade Fire ; the movements of secrecy turned fabulative in the scopic-doublings of airport full-body scanners ; and, finally, the collective secretions that come to saturate and stretch around the globe as expressed by liquidity-seeking financial innovations. These three instantiations of contemporary secrecy are framed by a discussion of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook – truly a couple for our age: each intent, in their own way, upon bringing an end to secrets. Throughout, we try to maintain close attention to the emerging rhythms and dissonances that engage secrecy in a dance between the half-voluntary and the half-enforced. (shrink)

Members of modern, digital societies experience a tremendous number and diversity of stimuli from sources such as computers, televisions, other electronic media, and various forms of advertising. In this paper, I argue that the presence of a wide range of stimulating items in modern societies poses a special risk to the welfare of members of modern societies. By considering the set of modern stimuli in a more comprehensive way than normative theorists have done so far—as part of a complex system (...) with which members of modern societies cannot reasonably avoid interacting—we can see why the perceptual and informational spaces in which modern life occurs can be sources of disvalue for members of modern societies. This seems true even though the technological innovations that produce these stimuli add great value to the lives of members of modern societies. (shrink)

Commentaries surrounding Skinner were re-examined and applied to Hull et al. Hull et al. were found to address many of these concerns by paying attention to neuroscience, by providing some discussion of the origins of behavior, and by forwarding a deterministic account that may prove as revolutionary as that of Copernicus and Darwin.