Cognitive Profile Patterns Are Affected by Measurement Precision

A necessary, albeit tacit assumption underlying pattern analysis of cognitive profiles is that an examinee’s profile pattern is not affected by the level of precision used in measuring the subtest, index or factor scores. We empirically test the truth of this assumption across various precision levels, such as IQ points (1/15SD), T-scores (0.1SD), scaled scores (1/3SD) and stanines (0.5SD). The results clearly refute the pattern stability assumption. They question the very uniqueness of profile patterns as a stable individual characteristic and challenge their use in both clinical practice and scientific research. Possible solutions are suggested and critically examined.

Corrigendum to “Best match graphs”

Two errors in the article Best Match Graphs (Geiß et al. in JMB 78: 2015–2057, 2019) are corrected. One concerns the tacit assumption that digraphs are sink-free, which has to be added as an additional precondition in Lemma 9, Lemma 11, Theorem 4. Correspondingly, Algorithm 2 requires that its input is sink-free. The second correction concerns an additional necessary condition in Theorem 9 required to characterize best match graphs. The amended results simplify the construction of least resolved trees for n-cBMGs, i.e., Algorithm 1. All other results remain unchanged and are correct as stated.

Where Did Life Begin? Testing Ideas in Prebiotic Analogue Conditions

Publications related to the origin of life are mostly products of laboratory research and have the tacit assumption that the same reactions would have been possible on the early Earth some 4 billion years ago. Can this assumption be tested? We cannot go back in time, but we are able to venture out of the laboratory and perform experiments in natural conditions that are presumably analogous to the prebiotic environment. This brief review describes initial attempts to undertake such studies and some of the lessons we have learned.

Conclusion

The hangman/surprise-examination/prediction paradox is solved. It is not solved by denying knowledge closure (although knowledge closure is false). It is not solved by denying KK or denying that knowing p implies other iterated knowing attitudes (although these are false). It is not solved by misleading evidence causing the students to lose knowledge because students cannot lose knowledge this way. It is solved by showing that a tacit assumption (what is being said to the students/prisoner is informative) is overlooked and that inferences by contradiction are invalid if assumptions are left out. The phenomenology of the surprise-exam paradox is explored to explain why this solution has been missed. Crucial is that in many cases the students/prisoner know(s) there will be a surprise exam/execution because of an inference from what the teacher/judge meant to say, and not directly by the literal application of what he did say.

Popularizing linguistic relativity

This paper distinguishes three phases in the popularization of linguistic relativity: the phase initiated by Benjamin Lee Whorf himself; a second phase during which linguistic relativity was formulated and tested as a research hypothesis; and the current phase during which language-relativistic assumptions have penetrated the mass media. To diagnose the spread of relativistic assumptions, 560 articles in both English and Greek print and electronic media were considered. The articles were published over the period 2010–2019. They fall, roughly, into eighteen categories. Some of the articles report explicitly on linguistic relativity research, while others presuppose language-relativistic ideas in handling issues as disparate as the effectiveness of managerial discourse, the appropriateness of political correctness, or the possibility of communicating with aliens. The large number of article categories as well as the tacit assumption of linguistic relativity in a growing number of articles are indicators of how popular linguistic relativity has become in folk-linguistic discourse.

Economics Is Founded Upon Property, Not Property Rights

This chapter discusses the implications for economics and its treatment of property rights, not property. The language of “property rights” contains a tacit assumption about how we think they work. Property, not property rights, is a fundamental principle of economics. Property rights are the expectations defined by property, not the content of property. In other words, property effects property rights. Such a view challenges the felicitousness of the bundle-of-sticks metaphor, which inverts how humans cognize property. We can no longer think about the rules of property as mere external constraints imposed upon an individual. The alternative theory this book presents situates the idea of property in a bidirectional relationship that extends to and from the minds of individuals and the moral scheduling pattern of their community. Property, not property rights, is the very foundation of economics.

Thinking Ecologically, Knowing Responsibly

This essay extends my engagements with questions of epistemic agency and the politics of epistemic location, in Epistemic Responsibility and in Ecological Thinking to consider how questions of understanding and of certainty play diversely into human and other ecological circumstances. In so doing, it opens lines of inquiry not immediately available in standard western-northern approaches to epistemology with their concentration on medium-sized physical objects in their presupposed neutrality and replicability. Working from a tacit assumption that knowing and knowers are always situated, and that they are enabled or restricted in so being, the book engages with specific epistemic situations in order to show how “situatedness” indeed makes knowledge possible, while regarding it as an enabling rather than a constraining modality.

The Effects of Unexpected Circumstances—Impossibility, Impracticability, and Frustration

In unexpected circumstances cases relief normally should be granted to the adversely affected party if the parties shared a tacit incorrect assumption that the nonoccurrence of some circumstance during the life of the contract was certain rather than problematic, and the incorrectness of that assumption would have provided a basis for judicial relief if the assumption had been explicit rather than tacit. Relief should also normally be granted to the adversely affected party if as a result of a dramatic and unexpected general rise in prices, and therefore costs, performance would result in an unbargained-for loss to a promisor. Where judicial relief is based on a shared tacit assumption the promisor should not be liable for expectation damages. Where relief is based on an unbargained-for risk the promisor should be liable for a modified form of expectation damages.

The Christian faith and evolution: An evolving, unresolved debate

This article sketches how the debate on Christian faith and evolution has evolved. Seven challenges are identified and described in the debate, namely, regarding a recognition of deep (geological) time (challenging the historicity of the biblical creation narratives), understanding the role of chance in natural selection (posing questions about the nature of divine action, e.g., providence), human descent (challenging presumed human distinctiveness), a recognition of natural suffering (challenging the benevolence of the Creator), identifying the evolutionary roots of evil (challenging Christian views on the fall of humanity), a recognition of natural disselection (challenging notions of divine election) and, finally, evolutionary explanations of the emergence of morality and of religion (reiterating the challenge of atheism). It is argued that with each of these challenges, some of the underlying problems were provisionally resolved, only to reappear later in an even more challenging form.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The contribution describes shifts in Christian discourse on evolution and challenges the tacit assumption that any one aspect of the debate has been fully resolved by articulating some of the questions that have been resolved and others that remain unresolved.