Psychologist Richard Nisbett argues that fundamental aspects of critical thinking and logic are culturally conditioned. Nisbett’s claims, if correct, have substantial implications for the teaching of logic and critical thinking. In this paper I examine Nisbett’s arguments and conclude that he overstates the degree to which his empirical work justifies his theories about cultural difference. I will argue that we have good reason to be cautious about revising our pedagogy on the basis of assumptions about cultural difference, and that Nisbett’s (...) work does not provide convincing enough evidence to justify setting that caution aside. (shrink)

While ante rem structuralism offers a promising account of mathematical truth and mathematical ontology, several of the most prominent formulations of the view seem to be subject to significant difficulties involving the identity conditions of the objects they posit. In this paper I argue that those difficulties can be overcome by adopting encoding structuralism, a version of realism about mathematical objects developed by Bernard Linsky, Uri Nodelman and Edward Zalta.

Six articles discuss the benefits and disadvantages of postmodern philosophy as a foundation for social work and human service practice. Simultaneously co-published as Social Thought, v.18, no.3 1998. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This chapter corrects for Susan Sontag's undeserved neglect by contemporary moral philosophers by bringing awareness to some of the unique metaethical insights born of her reflections on photographic representations of evil. I argue that Sontag's thought provides fertile ground for thinking about: (1) moral perception and its relation to moral knowledge; and (2) the epistemic and moral value of our emotional responses to the misery and suffering of others. I show that, contrary to standard moral perception theory (e.g. Blum 1994), (...) Sontag holds that we can have general moral perceptual knowledge. I then explore Sontag's idea that certain emotional responses, like sympathy and compassion, can sometimes be impertinent, in virtue of their having false or illusory content. I explain why this is so, and show the epistemic and motivational problems it poses for moral sentimentalism. (shrink)

Plato. Crito.--Mill, J. S. Utilitarianism.--Rawls, J. Two concepts of rules.--Kant, I. Fundamental principles of the metaphysic of morals.--Rawls, J. Justice as fairness.--Benn, S. I. and Peters, R. S. Society and types of social regulation.--Hobbes, T. Leviathan, abridged.--Hayek, F. A. The principles of a liberal social order.--Marx, K. Alienation and its overcoming in Communism.--Lukes, S. Alienation and anomie.--Garver, N. What violence is.--Zinn, H. The force of nonviolence.--Caudwell, C. Pacifism and violence; a study in bourgeois ethics.--Bennett, J. Whatever the consequences.--Foot, P. Abortion (...) and the doctrine of the double effect.--Benn, S. I. Punishment.--Mill, J. S. Selection from On liberty.--Mill, J. S. Selection from Considerations on representative government.--Marcuse, H. The new forms of control.--Mill, J. S. The subjection of women, abridged.--Dickinson, J. A working theory of sovereignty, abridged.--Rawls, J. The justification of civil disobedience. (shrink)

We agree with Jones & Love (J&L) that much of Bayesian modeling has taken a fundamentalist approach to cognition; but we do not believe in the potential of Bayesianism to provide insights into psychological processes. We discuss the advantages of associative explanations over Bayesian approaches to causal induction, and argue that Bayesian models have added little to our understanding of human causal reasoning.

MEDIEVAL LOGICS LAMBERT MARIE DE RIJK (ed.), Die mittelalterlichen Traktate De mod0 opponendiet respondendi, Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlagigen Texte. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge Band 17.) Miinster: Aschendorff, 1980. 379 pp. No price stated. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MARTA FATTORI, Lessico del Novum Organum di Francesco Bacone. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1980. Two volumes, il + 543, 520 pp. Lire 65.000. VIVIAN SALMON, The study of language in 17th century England. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory (...) and History of Linguistic Science, Series 111: Studies in theHistory of Linguistics, Volume 17.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1979.x + 218 pp. Dfl. 65. Theoria cum Praxi. Zum Verhaltnis von Theorie und Praxis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. (Akten des 111. Internationalen Leibnizkongress, Hannover, 12. bis 17.November 1977, Band 111: Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Wissenschaftstheorie, Metaphysik, Theologie.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980. vii + 269 pp. DM 48. CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL LOGICS MICHAEL CLARK, The place of syllogistic in logical theory. Nottingham: University of Nottingham Press, 1980. ix + 151 pp. £3.00. A.F. PARKER-RHODES, The theory of indistinguishables. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. xvii + 216 pp. Dfl.90.00/$39.50. NICHOLAS RESCHER and ROBERT BRANDOM, The logic of inconsistency. Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1980. x + 174 pp. f 11.50. MISCELLANEOUS J. ZELENY, The logic of Marx. Translated from the German by T. Carver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. xcii + 247 pp. £12.50. FELIX KAUFMANN, The infinite in mathematics. Edited by Brian McGuinness. Introduction by E. Nagel. Translation from the German by Paul Foulkes. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978. xvii + 235 pp. Dfl 85/$39.50 (cloth); Dfl 45/$19.95 (paper). PAMELA MCCORDUCK, Machines who think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1979. xiv + 275 pp. $14.95. J. MITTELSTRASS (ed.), Enzyklopadie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie Bd. 1 : A-G. Mannheim, Wien, Ziirich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1980. 835 pp. DM 128. (shrink)

Woods et al. (2015) claim that secular Simple Reaction Time (SRT) slowing (Woodley et al. 2013), disappears once modern studies are corrected for software and hardware lag, and once Galton’s data are corrected for fastest-response selection. Here, this is challenged with a reanalysis of the secular slowing of SRT in the UK amongst large (N>500), population-representative age-matched (≊18-30 years) studies. Starting with Galton’s sample, this is assigned the simulated value estimated by Dodonova and Dodonov (2013, who like Woods et al. (...) were critical of secular SRT slowing, owing to measurement issues) on the basis that he collected the fastest of three trials (207.5ms). The two sexes in Galton’s study are combined (as in Woods et al.), raising the weighted sample mean to 208.5ms. Next is the Wilkinson and Alison (1989) study, which attempted to replicate Galton’s study one century later, collecting SRTs as part of an exhibit in the London Science Museum. An electronic chronoscope recorded SRTs on magnetic tape, and sampled over eight trials with micro-processor-determined variable foreperiods. The mean SRT value for the 1,189 participants aged between 20 and 29 is 245ms. The presence of long and variable foreperiods necessitates a penalty of 10ms (Dodonova & Dodonov, 2013). Another 10ms should be deducted based on key-pressing time (Dodonova & Dodonov, 2013), reducing the mean to 225ms. The studies of Deary and Der (2005) and Der and Deary (2006) are also included. The first utilized the highly representative Scottish Twenty-07 cohort. Dodonova and Dodonov (2013) identified a 53ms lag stemming from liquid crystal stimulus onset delay. This is subtracted from the weighted average of the two sexes (300.8ms), along with another 10ms for key-pressing time. The resultant mean is 237.8ms.Dodonova and Dodonov (2013) cleaned the male data in the Der and Deary (2006) study, collected from the representative UK Health and Lifestyle Survey, by removing cases for which SRT standard deviations exceeded those for choice RT. This reduced the N from 834 to 661, and also reduced the mean from 300ms to 284ms. The estimate was also penalized for LCD onset delay and key-pressing time, reducing the mean to 221ms. When the SRT value for the female sample is penalized equivalently the resulting value is 239ms. In order to simulate the female N for the purposes of taking a weighted average of both sexes, the actual female N is reduced in proportion to the male N (79.3%=881), yielding a weighted mean of 230.9ms for a combined sample-size of 1,472. Table 1 presents the data used in the analysis.Table 1 SRT means, sample sizes and sampling years for four large, age-matched UK samples[Table 1 here]Consistent with Dodonova and Dodonov (2013), N-weighted regression is employed, as the only data on sample variability is sample size. Figure 1 illustrating the secular trend in UK SRT over 100 years.[Figure 1 here] Figure 1. Secular SRT slowing across four large, representative studies from the UK spanning a century. Bubble-size is proportional to sample size. Combined N=6,622. The secular slowing between UK studies is statistically significant (β=0.97; 95% CI=0.969 to 0.971, N=6,622), at –22.8ms a century. Additional evidence for generational SRT slowing comes from Verhaeghen (2014), who suggested that the ratio of longitudinal to cross-sectional age-related slowing might tentatively infer generational changes in processing speed. Verhaeghen reports ratios for two SRT studies (0.91 and 1.15), implying both secular losses and gains. For the study of Deary and Der (2005), the SRT ratios are “censored because they were excessively large” (p. 256). In this study, the ratio of the cross-sectional slowing trend (taking the weighted average of all paired between-cohort differences rescaled in terms of change per decade for males and females), to the weighted average decadal longitudinal slowing trend for both the males and females is 0.73, for an N of 1,926 (cf. Woodley et al., 2014b, for a detailed reanalysis of this dataset). The weighted average of the three SRT ‘Verhaeghen ratios’ is 0.9 (N=4,078) – tentatively consistent with generational declines (i.e. a ratio of <1). In conclusion Woods et al. (2015) have undoubtedly made an important contribution to the debate concerning the role of software and hardware lag in the inflation of contemporary estimates of SRT, however the evidence for generational SRT slowing remains quite compelling. ReferencesDeary, I.J., & Der, G. (2005). Reaction time, age, and cognitive ability: Longitudinal findings from age 16 to 63 years in representative population samples. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 12, 187–213.Der, G., & Deary, I.J. (2006). Age and sex differences in reaction time in adulthood: Results from the United Kingdom Health Lifestyle Survey. Psychology and Aging, 21, 62–73.Dodonova, Y.A., & Dodonov, Y.S. (2013). Is there any evidence of historical slowing of reaction time? No, unless we compare apples and oranges. Intelligence, 41, 674–687.Galton, F. (1890). Exhibition of instruments (1) for testing the perception of differences of tint, and (2) for determining reaction-time. Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 19, 27–29.Verhaeghen, P. (2014). The elements of cognitive aging: Meta-analyses of age-related differences in processing speed and their consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Wilkinson, R.T., & Allison, S. (1989). Age and simple reaction time: Decade differences for 5,324 subjects. Journal of Gerontology, 44, 29–35.Woodley, M.A., Madison, G., & Charlton, B.G. (2014b). Possible dysgenic trends insimple visual reaction time performance in the Scottish Twenty-07 cohort: Areanalysis of Deary & Der (2005). Mankind Quarterly, 55, 110-124.Woodley, M.A., te Nijenhuis, J., & Murphy, R. (2013). Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time. Intelligence, 41, 843–850.Woods, D.L., Wyma, J.M., Yund, E.W., Herron, T.J., & Reed, B. (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9:131. (shrink)

I. Wesen und entwicklung des humanitätsgedankens.--II. Der socialismus.--III. Der individualismus.--IV. Der utilitarianismus.--V. Der pessimismus.--VI. Der evolutionismus.--VII. Der positivismus.--VIII. Nietzsches uebermensch.--IX. Die hauptgrundsätze einer modernen humanitätsethik.

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