Measuring responsiveness to gain accurate diagnosis in populations with disorders of consciousness (DOC) is of central concern because these patients have such complex clinical presentations. Due to the uncertainty of accuracy for both behavioral and neurophysiological measures in DOC, combined assessment approaches are recommended. A number of standardized behavioral measures can be used with adults with DOC with minor to moderate reservations relating to the measures’ psychometric properties and clinical applicability. However, no measures have been standardized for use with pediatric (...) DOC populations. When adapting adult measures for children, confounding factors include developmental considerations for language-based items included in all DOC measures. Given the lack of pediatric DOC measures, there is a pressing need for measures that are sensitive to the complex clinical presentations typical of DOC and that can accommodate the developmental levels of pediatric populations. The music therapy assessment tool for awareness in disorders of consciousness (MATADOC) is a music-based measure that has been standardized for adults with DOC. Given its emphasis on non-language based sensory stimuli, it is well-suited to pediatric populations spanning developmental stages. In a pre-pilot exploratory study, we examined the clinical utility of this measure and explored trends for test-retest and inter-rater agreement as well as its performance against external reference standards. In several cases, MATADOC items in the visual and auditory domains produced outcomes suggestive of higher level functioning when compared to outcomes provided by other DOC measures. Preliminary findings suggest that the MATADOC provides a useful protocol and measure for behavioral assessment and clinical treatment planning with pediatric DOC. Further research with a larger sample is warranted to test a version of the MATADOC that is refined to meet developmental needs of pediatric DOC populations. (shrink)

As of this writing, twenty‐one states have passed laws barring transgender youth‐athletes from competing on public‐school sports teams in accordance with their gender identity. Proponents of these regulations claim that transgender females in particular have inherent physiological advantages that threaten a “level playing field” for their cisgender competitors. Existing evidence is limited but does not support these restrictions. Gathering more robust data will require allowing transgender youth to compete (rather than preemptively barring them), but even if trans females are shown (...) to retain some advantage, this would not have greater moral significance than the many other “fair” physical and economic advantages found across sports. These regulations deprive transgender youth, an exceptionally vulnerable population, from the vast physical, mental, and social benefits of sports. While we advocate for transgender inclusion under our current, gender‐segregated model of sport, we propose changes to the overarching structure that would promote a more inclusive and fairer athletic environment. (shrink)

This collection of essays and excerpts gives a comprehensive overview of Alvin Plantinga 's seminal work as a Christian philosopher of religion.

The aim of this paper is to study interpretation, specifically, to work toward an account of interpretation that seems descriptively and explanatorily correct. No account of interpretation can be philosophically helpful, I submit, if it is incompatible with a correct account of what people actually do when they interpret others. My question, then, is: how does the (naive) interpreter arrive at his/her judgments about the mental attitudes of others? Philosophers who have addressed this question have not, in my view, been (...) sufficiently psychological, or cognitivist, even those who are otherwise psychologically inclined. I shall defend some proposals about the activity of interpretation that are, I believe, psychologically more realistic than their chief competitors. (shrink)

Plantinga examines the nature of epistemic warrant; whatever it is that when added to true belief yields knowledge. This volume surveys current contributions to the debate and paves the way for his owm positive proposal in Warrant and Proper Function.

This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, (...) thus, insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true. (shrink)

Kim argues that weak and global supervenience are too weak to guarantee any sort of dependency. Of the three original forms of supervenience, strong, weak, and global, each commonly wielded across all branches of philosophy, two are thus cast aside as uninteresting or useless. His arguments, however, fail to appreciate the strength of weak and global supervenience. I investigate what weak and global supervenience relations are functionally and how they relate to strong supervenience. For a large class of properties, weak (...) and global supervenience are equivalent to strong supervenience. I then offer a series of arguments showing that it is precisely because of their strength, not their weakness, that both weak and global supervenience are useless in characterizing any dependencies of interest to philosophers. (shrink)

A radical metaphysical theory typically comes packaged with a semantic theory that reconciles those radical claims with common sense. The metaphysical theory says what things exist and what their natures are, while the semantic theory specifies, in terms of these things, how we are to interpret everyday language. Thus may we “think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar.” This semantic accommodation of common sense, however, can end up undermining the very theory it is designed to protect. This paper (...) is a case study, showing in detail how one popular version of temporal parts theory is self-undermining. This raises the specter that the problem generalizes to other metaphysical theories. (shrink)

Introduction to ethics -- The counselor as a person and professional identity -- Ethical decision making -- Ethics & diversity -- Clients' rights and counselors' responsibilities -- Confidentiality and privileged communication -- Ethics in theory, practice, and professional relationships -- Appropriate boundaries and multiple relationships -- Ethics and technology -- Ethics in group work, couples, and families -- Ethics in school counseling -- Ethics in counselor education -- Ethics in supervision -- Ethics in research and publications.

Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales and Commentary. Translated and introduced by Wilt l. Idema. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 254. $30.

Weak and global supervenience are equivalent to strong supervenience for intrinsic properties. Moreover, weak and global supervenience relations are always mere parts of a more general underlying strong supervenience relation. Most appeals to global supervenience, though, involve spatio-temporally relational properties; but here too, global and strong supervenience are equivalent. _Functionally_ we can characterize merely weak and global supervenience as follows: for A to supervene on B requires that at all worlds an individual’s A properties be a function of its B (...) properties, where this function varies from world to world. But what are the. (shrink)

What is a good argument? That depends on what is meant by 'argument'. In formal logic, an argument is a set of sentences or propositions, one designated as conclusion and the remainder as premises. On this conception of argument, there are two kinds of goodness. An argument is good in a weak sense if the conclusion either follows deductively from the premises or receives strong evidential support from them. An argument is good in a strong sense if, in addition to (...) this, it has only true premises. Thus, in the strong sense, the paradigm of a good argument is a sound argument. (shrink)

Findings and theories in cognitive science have been increasingly important in many areas of philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The time is ripe to examine its potential applications to moral theory as well. This article does not aspire to a comprehensive treatment of the subject. It merely aims to illustrate the ways in which research in cognitive science can bear on the concerns of moral philosophers. For present purposes the label 'cognitive science' is used fairly (...) broadly, encompassing, for example, the study of emotion or "hot" cognition as well as "cold" cognition. (shrink)

Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is a (...) bold, timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society. (shrink)

It is common in recent epistemology to distinguish different senses, or conceptions, of epistemic justification. The proposed oppositions include the objective/subjective, internalist/externalist, regulative/nonregulative, resource-relative/resource-independent, personal/verific, and deontological/evaluative conceptions of justification. In some of these cases, writers regard both members of the contrasting pair as legitimate; in other cases only one member. In this paper I want to propose another contrasting pair of conceptions of justification, and hold that both are defensible and legitimate. The contrast will then be used to construct (...) a modified version of reliabilism, one which handles certain problem cases more naturally than my previous versions of reliabilism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most university students have engaged in some form of academic dishonesty. These actions can have detrimental consequences for the student, the university, and society at large. It is important to understand factors that contribute to academic dishonesty as well as to identify potential predictors of this behavior. This study employed an experimental design with 361 undergraduate students in a laboratory setting. Deception was used during the experiment to determine the impact of peer influence, personality, and an honor code on (...) cheating behavior. Results revealed that peer influence had the largest impact on cheating behavior. In addition, personality, specifically, individuals who scored high on the openness trait were significantly more likely to cheat than those who scored lower on this trait. Implications of these findings for addressing academic dishonesty in higher education are provided. (shrink)

Against the traditional view, Alvin Goldman argues that logic, probability theory, and linguistic analysis cannot by themselves delineate principles of rationality or justified belief. The mind's operations must be taken into account.

Epistemology has historically focused on individual inquirers conducting their private intellectual affairs independently of one another. As a descriptive matter, however, what people believe and know is largely a function of their community and culture, narrowly or broadly construed. Most of what we believe is influenced, directly or indirectly, by the utterances and writings of others. So social epistemology deserves at least equal standing alongside the individual sector of epistemology.

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation theory, which (...) starts from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis. (shrink)

The central mission of cognitive science is to reveal the real nature of the mind, however familiar or foreign that nature may be to naive preconceptions. The existence of naive conceptions is also important, however. Prescientific thought and language contain concepts of the mental, and these concepts deserve attention from cognitive science. Just as scientific psychology studies folk physics (McCloskey 1983, Hayes 1985), viz., the common understanding (or misunderstanding) of physical phenomena, so it must study folk psychology, the common understanding (...) of mental states. This subfield of scientific psychology is what I mean by the phrase 'the psychology of folk psychology'. (shrink)

Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols advance the debate over folk psychology with their vivid depiction of the contest between the simulation theory and the theory-theory (Stich & Nichols, this issue). At least two aspects of their presentation I find highly congenial. First, they give a generally fair characterization of the simulation theory, in some respects even improving its formulation. Though I have a few minor quarrels with their formulation, it is mostly quite faithful to the version which I have found (...) attractive (Goldman, 1989).Second, I concur with Stich and Nichols in their assertion that the theory-theory and the simulation theory are the only two games in town. Where I disagree, of course, is in Stich and Nichols’s contention that their arguments so dim the prospects of the simulation theory that it should no longer be taken seriously. On the contrary, I shall maintain, the simulation theory remains a very plausible contender, and should receive careful and respectful consideration in the continuing investigation. (shrink)

This chapter considers how imagination generates emotion. ‘Supposition-imagination’ (S-imagination) is distinguished from ‘enactment-imagination’ (E-imagination). The former kind of imagination involves entertaining or supposing various hypothetical scenarios; with the latter kind of imagination, one tries to create a kind of facsimile of a mental state. Thus, one might try to create a perception-like state as in visual imagination or motoric imagination. It is argued that this much richer form of imagination generates typical emotional reactions to fiction. Emotional reactions to fiction are (...) generated in several different ways, including a process in which we E-imagine being a hypothetical reader or observer of fact. (shrink)

This volume illustrates how the methodology of metaphysics can be enriched with the help of cognitive science. Few philosophers nowadays would dispute the relevance of cognitive science to the metaphysics of mind, but this volume mainly concerns the relevance of metaphysics to phenomena that are not themselves mental. The volume is thus a departure from standard analytical metaphysics. Among the issues to which results from cognitive science are brought to bear are the metaphysics of time, of morality, of meaning, of (...) modality, of objects, and of natural kinds, as well as whether God exists. A number of chapters address the enterprise of metaphysics in general. In traditional analytical metaphysics, intuitions play a prominent role in the construction of, and assessment of theories. Cognitive science can be brought to bear on the issue of the reliability of intuitions. Some chapters point out how results from cognitive science can be deployed to debunk certain intuitions, and some point out how results can be deployed to help vindicate certain intuitions. (shrink)

I begin with some familiar conceptions of epistemic relativism. One kind of epistemic relativism is descriptive pluralism. This is the simple, non-normative thesis that many different communities, cultures, social networks, etc. endorse different epistemic systems (E-systems), i.e., different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states. Communities try to guide or regulate their members’ credence-forming habits in a variety of different, i.e., incompatible, ways. Although there may be considerable overlap across cultures in certain types of (...) epistemic norms (e.g., norms for perceptual belief), there are sharp differences across groups in other types of epistemic norms. (shrink)

The formal study of both astronomy and astrology in later medieval Europe was firmly based in the universities. Instruction in astrology is attested by the presence of an educational board game, known as the ludus astronomorum, in several university-related miscellanies of fifteenth-century English provenance. William Fulke also published an edition of the game a century later , which is attested in a number of Elizabethan libraries. The game serves to rehearse for its players the celestial motions and astrological principles described (...) by Ptolemy. It also employs principles of stellar rays described by al-Kindi in his De radiis stellarum. (shrink)

The failure of conventional quantum theory to recognize time as an observable and to admit time operators is addressed. Instead of focusing on the existence of a time operator for a given Hamiltonian, we emphasize the role of the Hamiltonian as the generator of translations in time to construct time states. Taken together, these states constitute what we call a timeline. Such timelines are adequate for the representation of any physical state, and appear to exist even for the semi-bounded and (...) discrete Hamiltonian systems ruled out by Pauli’s theorem. However, the step from a timeline to a valid time operator requires additional assumptions that are not always met. Still, this approach illuminates the issues surrounding the construction of time operators, and establishes timelines as legitimate alternatives to the familiar coordinate and momentum bases of standard quantum theory. (shrink)

What is the connection between mirror processes and mindreading? The paper begins with definitions of mindreading and of mirroring processes. It then advances four theses: (T1) mirroring processes in themselves do not constitute mindreading; (T2) some types of mindreading (“low-level” mindreading) are based on mirroring processes; (T3) not all types of mindreading are based on mirroring (“high-level” mindreading); and (T4) simulation-based mindreading includes but is broader than mirroring-based mindreading. Evidence for the causal role of mirroring in mindreading is drawn from (...) intention attribution, emotion attribution, and pain attribution. Arguments for the limits of mirroring-based mindreading are drawn from neuroanatomy, from the lesser liability to error of mirror-based mindreading, from the role of imagination in some types of mindreading, and from the restricted range of mental states involved in mirroring. “High-level” simulational mindreading is based on enactment imagination, perspective shifts, or self-projection, which are found in activities like prospection and memory as well as theory of mind. The role of cortical midline structures in executing these activities is examined. (shrink)

It is often said that philosophical analysis is an a priori enterprise. Since it prominently features thought experiments designed to elicit the meaning, or semantic properties, of words in one's own language, it seems to be a purely reflective inquiry, requiring no observational or empirical component. I too have sometimes acquiesced in this sort of view. While arguing that certain phases of epistemology require input from psychology and other cognitive sciences, I have granted that the more 'conceptual' stages of epistemology (...) are strictly philosophical and (hence) non-empirical (Goldman, 1986). In this paper I want to qualify this position. I shall suggest that psychological theories can have a bearing on philosophical analysis; they can support the plausibility or implausibility of specific analyses. To many philosophers, of course, the thesis that empirical cognitive sciences can help shed light on lexical meanings is hardly newsworthy. However, I hope that some of the details of my considerations will be instructive. (shrink)

Can belief in God be rationally justified? Reviewing in detail traditional and modern arguments for and against the existence of God, Professor Plantinga concludes that they must all be judged unsuccessful. He then turns to the related philosophical problem of the existence of other minds, and defends the so-called analogical argument against current criticisms. He goes on to show, however, that although this argument affords us the best reasons we have for belief in other minds, it finally succumbs to the (...) same malady that afflicts the teleological argument of God. (shrink)

This paper consists of two sections. In section one, I explore Val Plumwood's description of the features of normative dualism, and briefly discuss how these features are manifest in Immanuel Kant's view of nature. In section two, I evaluate the claims of Holly L. Wilson, who argues that Kant is not a normative dualist. Against Wilson, I will argue that Kant maintains normative dualisms between humans/nature, humans/animals, humans I culture, and men/women. As such, Kant's philosophy is antithetical to the aims (...) of ecofeminism, which seeks to expose and dismantle such dualistic thinking. (shrink)

Knowledge of God takes the form of a debate between Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley. Plantinga opens the batting with a seventy-page laying out of his case ‘that theism has a significant epistemic virtue: if it is true, it is warranted; this is a virtue naturalism emphatically lacks’. Indeed, Plantinga argues that ‘if naturalism were true, there would be no such thing as knowledge’. It will be recalled [e.g. Plantinga and Plantinga ] that Plantinga's position is that warrant, understood (...) as whatever it is that needs to be added to true belief to …. (shrink)

Puzzles about persistence and change through time, i.e., about identity across time, have foundered on confusion about what it is for ‘two things’ to be have ‘the same thing’ at a time. This is most directly seen in the dispute over whether material objects can occupy exactly the same place at the same time. This paper defends the possibility of such coincidence against several arguments to the contrary. Distinguishing a temporally relative from an absolute sense of ‘the same’, we see (...) that the intuition, ‘this is only one thing’, and the dictum, ‘two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time’, are individuating things at a time rather than absolutely and are therefore compatible with coincidence. Several other objections philosophers have raised ride on this same ambiguity. Burke, originating what has become the most popular objection to coincidence, argues that if coincidence is possible there would be no explanation of how objects that are qualitatively the same at a time could belong to different sorts. But we can explain an object’s sort by appealing to its properties at other times. Burke’s argument to the contrary equivocates on different notions of ‘cross-time identity’ and ‘the statue’. From a largely negative series of arguments emerges a positive picture of what it means to say multiple things coincide and of why an object’s historical properties explain its sort rather than vice versa – in short, of how coincidence is possible. (shrink)