Religion as Political Tribalism

Is religion a form of political tribalism? Conventional wisdom suggests it is. Discussion of religion and American politics generally focuses on the “God Gap”—the tendency for religious Americans to vote Republican, while the non-religious vote Democratic. However, there is also reason to argue that religion cannot be reduced to political tribalism. The God Gap is found mostly among white voters; among people of color, religiosity is a far weaker predictor of the vote. Even among white voters, the size of the God Gap varies across different religious traditions. Furthermore, there is more nuance to the non-religious population than suggested by the standard account of the God Gap. When the analysis includes the full scope of the American religious landscape, religion is not as “tribal” as conventional wisdom suggests.

Verb-second and the verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis debate

Verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), when a verb is stranded outside of the VP-sized ellipsis site in which it originated, has been identified in a number of languages (Irish, McCloskey 1991; Hebrew, Doron 1991, Goldberg 2005; Greek, Merchant 2018; Uzbek, Gribanova 2019, i.a.), and has been invoked productively in analyses investigating the position to which verbs move and the timing of verb movement in the grammar. Recently, Landau (2018, 2019, to appear) proposes a phase-based negative licensing condition on head-stranding ellipsis that precludes verb-stranding VPE altogether. He claims that apparent verb-stranding VPE must be reanalyzed either as Argument Ellipsis (Oku 1998; Kim 1999; Takahashi 2008), or a clause-sized ellipsis that strands main verbs (Gribanova 2017). This article approaches this debate through an analysis of head movement and head-stranding ellipsis in the Indic verb-second (V2) language Kashmiri, arguing that Landau’s phase-based approach encounters empirical challenges in accounting for variation in the presentation of ellipsis in V2 languages and requires an unconventional approach to V2, at odds with recent accounts of Kashmiri V2 (Bhatt 1999; Munshi and Bhatt 2009; Manetta 2011) and mainstream views of V2 generally (e.g. Holmberg 1986; Travis 1991; Vikner 1995; Zwart 1997). While the present article argues in favor of the standard account of ellipsis (Merchant 2001, 2008), we affirm the important contribution of Landau’s work in identifying challenges facing any account of head-stranding ellipsis licensing. At issue is the larger question of whether and how verb-stranding ellipses can be used to better understand head movement.

Elementos para una poética de la esperanza: contenido proposicional y autonomía de la imagen

El objetivo del artículo consiste en presentar las bases para una poética de la esperanza, conforme a una estrategia de tres fases: en primer lugar, se estudia la discusión contemporánea del concepto de esperanza en el marco de la filosofía analítica y, en particular, se discuten las principales fortalezas y debilidades de la «descripción estándar» (standard account), conceptualización que goza de rango canónico; tras presentar las principales deficiencias del modelo, se discute, a continuación, el estatuto de las imágenes mentales como criterio definitorio en la definición de la esperanza a propósito de un trabajo de Luc Bovens sobre las deficiencias de la aproximación estándar, con el objetivo de poner de manifiesto la naturaleza proposicional del contenido mental de la esperanza; resuelta ya la neta separación entre las imágenes mentales adscritas a la esperanza y los respectivos contenidos discursivos consustanciales a ella, se propone y justifica la licencia de una poética de la esperanza en sus lineamentos básicos.

Why Hope Cannot Be an Intellectual Virtue: Rationality of Hope Considered from an Analytic Perspective

There are two aims of the paper. The first is to critically analyse the claim that hope can be regarded as an intellectual virtue, as proposed by Nancy E. Snow (2013) in her recent account of hope set within the project of regulative epistemology. The second aim is to explore the problem of rationality of hope. Section one of the paper explains two different interpretations of the key notion of hope and discusses certain features to be found in hope-that and hope-in. Section two addresses the question of whether hope could be interpreted as an intellectual virtue. To develop an argument against that view, a brief account of the notion of epistemic virtue is provided. Section three analyses the problem of rationality of hope and the parallels between rational belief and rational hope; the section focuses on what exactly makes a particular hope-that a rational and justified hope. Belief that p is possible/probable is part of the meaning of hope that p; therefore, it is assumed that rationality of hope cannot be considered in isolation from rationality of belief. It is argued that the “standard account” of the reasonableness of hope, which is found in the analytic literature, does not meet the standards of epistemic responsibility and needs rectifying.

The way worship works in mission: Proposing an alternative to the standard account

This article examines the relationship of worship to mission in the life of the church. How does worship shape the Christian for mission and the work of God’s justice in the world? The article sketches what the author contends to be “the standard account” of how worship works within North American mainstream evangelical Protestantism, drawing on several authors who write on spiritual formation, liturgy, and cultural engagement. Exemplary of this standard account is the influential theology of church and culture found within neo-Calvinism. By parsing the social architecture of these authors, this article reveals its strengths and weaknesses—an analysis that can be applied more widely to Protestantism as a whole in North America. Then, the article moves on to propose an alternative account for the relationship of worship to mission that overcomes the weaknesses of the standard account. This alternative approach is labeled “faithful presence,” an approach which has affinities with an Anabaptist approach to worship and mission.

Conclusion

This chapter explains how the modified logic of delegation differs from the standard account in the treatment of the main parties to the relationship. The principal is a more untrustworthy and at times unresponsive figure in her relationship with the agents. The agent, likely a professional agent, is more complicated than portrayed. Professional responsibility is a mechanism to overcome the trust gap in a delegation relationship, according to principal-agent theorists. But overlooked are the side effects of professionalism, where the loyalties it fosters create tenacious control problems. It has a pronounced form in the church and the army, but other security and police forces may find punishing and controlling rogue agents a complicated process. While the boundaries to delegation are uncertain and some may choose not to delegate as much as they should, blame is one task that will be delegated.

Statistically responsible artificial intelligences

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes ubiquitous, it will be increasingly involved in novel, morally significant situations. Thus, understanding what it means for a machine to be morally responsible is important for machine ethics. Any method for ascribing moral responsibility to AI must be intelligible and intuitive to the humans who interact with it. We argue that the appropriate approach is to determine how AIs might fare on a standard account of human moral responsibility: a Strawsonian account. We make no claim that our Strawsonian approach is either the only one worthy of consideration or the obviously correct approach, but we think it is preferable to trying to marry fundamentally different ideas of moral responsibility (i.e. one for AI, one for humans) into a single cohesive account. Under a Strawsonian framework, people are morally responsible when they are appropriately subject to a particular set of attitudes—reactive attitudes—and determine under what conditions it might be appropriate to subject machines to this same set of attitudes. Although the Strawsonian account traditionally applies to individual humans, it is plausible that entities that are not individual humans but possess these attitudes are candidates for moral responsibility under a Strawsonian framework. We conclude that weak AI is never morally responsible, while a strong AI with the right emotional capacities may be morally responsible.

The Battle of Bemis Heights

This chapter discusses the battle of Bemis Heights. While Burgoyne waited in vain for Clinton to arrive, he was forced to reduce rations. On October 7 he led a 1,700-man reconnaissance force to forage for food to gather intelligence on Gates’s left flank. Contrary to the standard account of the battle, Gates and Arnold had reconciled to the point where they could work with each other. Gates ordered Arnold to send Morgan’s riflemen to attack. More American units were sent into the battle, and finally Arnold asked Gates for more men to finish the enemy. Gates agreed. The Americans mortally wounded Fraser and Burgoyne’s force fled back to their fortifications. Arnold personally led an attack that seized Breymann’s fortified camp on Burgoyne’s far right flank. Arnold was seriously wounded but Burgoyne, with Americans on his flank, had no choice but to fall back. The next day he ordered a retreat.

The Model of a True Demonstrative: Extra-linguistic Effects on Situated Meaning

This chapter introduces the standard account of context-sensitivity, focusing on true demonstratives, the model for most context-sensitive expressions. The account involves an idealization that utterances are interpreted in a single, unchanging context. But this is problematic: it has a consequence that demonstratives are either indefinitely lexically ambiguous, or indefinitely ambiguous at the level of logical form. The chapter argues this is theoretically problematic. Relaxing this idealization, we could let the context change between occurrences of demonstratives. A demonstrative could then have an unambiguous meaning, selecting the prominent interpretation in the current context. However, if prominence is determined extra-linguistically, as the traditional model assumes, we would still lack a systematic account of context-change, facing much of the same problems. An alternative account is outlined, which the chapter argues avoids the problems: the context is shifty, but the mechanisms of context-change are linguistic, and so the content of demonstratives is fully linguistically determined.

Improvisation, Transposition, and Elaboration

Chapter 4 jettisons the standard account of Altman’s “transpositional” script-to-screen strategy, in which he is said to have casually discarded the script in favor of the anarchic possibilities of communal filmmaking. Comparing preproduction scripts with final films, this chapter clearly establishes these films’ “improvisatory ceilings,” revealing the extent to which Altman’s approach depends on retaining rather than rejecting his scripts’ scenic and narrative structures. It is around these causal chains that Altman economizes, rejecting redundancy as well as thematic and dramatic cliché. This makes room for multiple forms of elaboration—including constrained versions of the improvisatory flourishes and reimagining of character traits that underwrite his reputation, but also involving the improvisation of thematic motifs, the multiplication of “middleground” characters, and the creation of affordances for favored stylistic techniques. While Altman’s practices are remarkably consistent throughout the early 1970s, later scripts display interesting innovations anticipating and accommodating Altman’s practice-oriented preferences.