Flannery O'Connor and religious epistemology

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-369
Author(s):  
JASON BAEHR
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Epistemic Virtue ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Southern Gothic ◽  
Intellectual Character ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
Intellectual Skills

AbstractWhat are the demands of religious inquiry? It can be tempting to think of these demands in strictly epistemic terms, e.g. as a function of the inquirer's background beliefs, cognitive faculties, natural cognitive ability, intellectual skills, and intellectual character. In this article, I extrapolate an alternative model of religious inquiry from three stories by the Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964). According to the model, a person's fitness for religious inquiry also depends on whether she possesses a certain moral posture. In particular, I argue that something like moral humility functions as an epistemic virtue in the theistic domain.

A Good Man is a Trickster to Find

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Tye
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
American South ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Southern Gothic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The American South ◽  
Over The Top ◽  
Traditional Storytelling

In my presentation, I will demonstrate the contrast between the pioneer of the Southern Grotesque, Flannery O’Connor, and her famous story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with Taylor’s use of the gothic in his YA novel. O’Connor adapted her version of the gothic from her predecessors such as Shelley and Poe. But she veers away from the creation of a fantastical monster tradition of the Romantics to drive the focus of the “monstrous” to the very human but harmful behaviors of her characters. Similarly, Taylor’s narrative does away with the over-the-top fantasy of the Romantic tradition and instead chooses to set the narrative in a realistic space with relevant characters. The difference between O’Connor and Taylor is that in O’Connor’s Southern Gothic the setting is the pinnacle of her story while Taylor’s Indigeneity shines through with his humor, traditional storytelling, and orality in his narrative. Differences aside, it is clear that the motive of each text is a call for social reform in O’Connor’s criticism of the social structure of the American South and in Taylor’s criticism of colonization.

scholarly journals Epistemic situationism and cognitive ability

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Intellectual Virtue ◽  
Epistemic Virtue ◽  
Empirical Psychology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Deliberate Effort ◽  
Over Time

Leading virtue epistemologists defend the view that knowledge must proceed from intellectual virtue and they understand virtues either as refned character traits cultivated by the agent over time through deliberate effort, or as reliable cognitive abilities. Philosophical situationists argue that results from empirical psychology should make us doubt that we have either sort of epistemic virtue, thereby discrediting virtue epistemology’s empirical adequacy. I evaluate this situationist challenge and outline a successor to virtue epistemology: abilism . Abilism delivers all the main benefts of virtue epistemology and is as empirically adequate as any theory in philosophy or the social sciences could hope to be.

scholarly journals Divine Methodology: A Lawful Deflection of Kantian and Kantian-esque Defeaters

Open Theology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Dalton McNabb ◽  
Erik Daniel Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
The Family ◽  
Cognitive Faculties

AbstractImmanuel Kant argues that though Divine revelation is ontologically possible, given phenomenal level constraints on our cognitive faculties, it isn’t epistemically possible for us to know or to recognize Divine revelation on the noumenal level of reality. We call this Kant’s Epistemological Objection Against Divine Revelation (EOADR). Contra Kant, in this paper, we argue that the EOADR doesn’t undermine the Reformed tradition’s view of Divine revelation because it has resources that make knowledge of Divine revelation intelligible. The primary way of establishing our argument is by articulating and furthering Alvin Plantinga’s religious epistemology. After doing this, we tackle two objections to our approach that are in the family of Kant‘s objection, namely Stephen Law‘s X-Argument Against Religious Belief and Erik Baldwin‘s Multiple Viable Extensions Objection. Similar to Kant‘s argument, these arguments attempt to show, that the Reformed epistemologist is in danger of acquiring an undercutting defeater for trusting her religious belief. We respond to each in turn.

Epistemic Values

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Value ◽  
Epistemic Virtue ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Epistemic Values ◽  
Gettier Problem ◽  
Intellectual Autonomy ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
Subject Areas ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

This book collects twenty papers in epistemology by Linda Zagzebski, covering her entire career of more than twenty-five years. She is one of the founders of contemporary epistemology and is well-known for broadening the field and re-focusing it on epistemic virtue and epistemic value. The subject areas of most of epistemology are included in these papers: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem.

Tinkering with cognitive gadgets: Cultural evolutionary psychology meets active inference

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Benjamin Badcock ◽  
Axel Constant ◽  
Maxwell James Désormeau Ramstead
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Active Inference ◽  
Innovative Research ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Cognitive Gadgets offers a new, convincing perspective on the origins of our distinctive cognitive faculties, coupled with a clear, innovative research program. Although we broadly endorse Heyes’ ideas, we raise some concerns about her characterisation of evolutionary psychology and the relationship between biology and culture, before discussing the potential fruits of examining cognitive gadgets through the lens of active inference.

A Latent State-Trait Analysis of Current Achievement Motivation Across Different Tasks of Cognitive Ability

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 318-327
Author(s):  
Philipp Alexander Freund ◽  
Vanessa Katharina Jaensch ◽  
Franzis Preckel
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Achievement Motivation ◽  
Fear Of Failure ◽  
Specific Task ◽  
Test Taker ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Probability Of Success ◽  
Ability Tests ◽  
Perceived Challenge

Abstract. The current study investigates the behavior of task-specific, current achievement motivation (CAM: interest in the task, probability of success, perceived challenge, and fear of failure) across a variety of reasoning tasks featuring verbal, numerical, and figural content. CAM is conceptualized as a state-like variable, and in order to assess the relative stability of the four CAM variables across different tasks, latent state trait analyses are conducted. The major findings indicate that the degree of challenge a test taker experiences and the fear of failing a given task appear to be relatively stable regardless of the specific task utilized, whereas interest and probability of success are more directly influenced by task-specific characteristics and demands. Furthermore, task performance is related to task-specific interest and probability of success. We discuss the implications and benefits of these results with regard to the use of cognitive ability tests in general. Importantly, taking motivational differences between test takers into account appears to offer valuable information which helps to explain differences in task performance.

Sex Differences in Childhood Associations between DNA Markers and General Cognitive Ability

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Arden ◽  
Nicole Harlaar ◽  
Robert Plomin
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Dna Markers ◽  
Community Sample ◽  
Nucleotide Polymorphisms ◽  
General Cognitive Ability ◽  
Single Nucleotide ◽  
The Difference

Abstract. An association between intelligence at age 7 and a set of five single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) has been identified and replicated. We used this composite SNP set to investigate whether the associations differ between boys and girls for general cognitive ability at ages 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, and 10 years. In a longitudinal community sample of British twins aged 2-10 (n > 4,000 individuals), we found that the SNP set is more strongly associated with intelligence in males than in females at ages 7, 9, and 10 and the difference is significant at 10. If this finding replicates in other studies, these results will constitute the first evidence of the same autosomal genes acting differently on intelligence in the two sexes.

A Meta-Analysis of Interviews and Cognitive Ability

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip L. Roth ◽  
Allen I. Huffcutt
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Incremental Validity ◽  
Employment Interviews ◽  
Moderator Analysis ◽  
The Future ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Meta Analyses ◽  
The Relationship

The topic of what interviews measure has received a great deal of attention over the years. One line of research has investigated the relationship between interviews and the construct of cognitive ability. A previous meta-analysis reported an overall corrected correlation of .40 ( Huffcutt, Roth, & McDaniel, 1996 ). A more recent meta-analysis reported a noticeably lower corrected correlation of .27 ( Berry, Sackett, & Landers, 2007 ). After reviewing both meta-analyses, it appears that the two studies posed different research questions. Further, there were a number of coding judgments in Berry et al. that merit review, and there was no moderator analysis for educational versus employment interviews. As a result, we reanalyzed the work by Berry et al. and found a corrected correlation of .42 for employment interviews (.15 higher than Berry et al., a 56% increase). Further, educational interviews were associated with a corrected correlation of .21, supporting their influence as a moderator. We suggest a better estimate of the correlation between employment interviews and cognitive ability is .42, and this takes us “back to the future” in that the better overall estimate of the employment interviews – cognitive ability relationship is roughly .40. This difference has implications for what is being measured by interviews and their incremental validity.

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