Knowing How You Know: Toddlers Reevaluate Words Learned From an Unreliable Speaker

There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one’s knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and reevaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this source is proven to be unreliable. Experiment 1 replicated previous research (Koenig & Woodward, 2010): children displayed better performance in a word learning test when they learned words from a speaker who has previously revealed themself as reliable (correctly labeling familiar objects) as opposed to an unreliable labeler (incorrectly labeling familiar objects). Experiment 2 then provided the critical test for source monitoring: children first learned novel words from a speaker before watching that speaker labeling familiar objects correctly or incorrectly. Children who were exposed to the reliable speaker were significantly more likely to endorse the word mappings taught by the speaker than children who were exposed to a speaker who they later discovered was an unreliable labeler. Thus, young children can reevaluate recently learned word mappings upon discovering that the source of their knowledge is unreliable. This suggests that children can monitor the source of their knowledge in order to decide whether that knowledge is justified, even at an age where they are not credited with the ability to verbally report how they have come to know what they know.

Regulation and Regulators, 1993–2006

By the 1990s the combination of internal deregulation and globalization led to a spectacular growth in the value of financial transactions both inside countries and across borders. There was a commensurate increase in pressure on payment and settlement systems to cope with the huge volume and variety of transactions. All this was of concern to those who regulated financial systems around the world. The speed and extent of the changes taking place, assisted by the advances made in the technology of communication and data handling, forced regulators to search for new ways of coping with the consequences, as the methods of the past were becoming inadequate. Globalization meant that national boundaries could no longer define the parameters within which financial systems operated, as all became integrated into international flows of short-term money and long-term finance. The complexities arose not only from the process of globalization and technological change but also from the disappearance of the barriers that had long separated different components within national financial systems. Rather than serving separate communities banks and financial markets increasingly competed with each other. In the face of these enormous changes regulators turned to the megabanks as a safe and secure way of monitoring and policing global financial markets. There was an implicit belief that the size and sophistication of these megabanks had made them to big to fail or even require the central banks to play a role as lenders of last resort.

Knowing how you know: Toddlers re-evaluate words learnt from an unreliable speaker

There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one’s knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and re-evaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this source is proven to be unreliable. Experiment 1 replicated previous research (Koenig and Woodward, 2010): children displayed better performance in a word learning test when they learnt words from a speaker who has previously revealed themselves as reliable (correctly labelling familiar objects) as opposed to an unreliable labeller (incorrectly labelling familiar objects). Experiment 2 then provided the critical test for source monitoring: children first learnt novel words from a speaker before watching that speaker labelling familiar objects correctly or incorrectly. Children who were exposed to the reliable speaker were significantly more likely to endorse the word mappings taught by the speaker than children who were exposed to a speaker who they later discovered was an unreliable labeller. Thus, young children can re-evaluate recently learned word mappings upon discovering that the source of their knowledge is unreliable. This suggests that children can monitor the source of their knowledge in order to decide whether that knowledge is justified, even at an age where they are not credited with the ability to verbally report how they have come to know what they know

The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity †

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.

Religious Intuitions and the Nature of “Belief”

Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual’s conscious (“explicit”) religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning.

‘The way we judge’ Observers’ assessing of elder care decisions of adult children who had been abused by the parents and the ultimate attribution error

In this essay I want to concentrate on observers’ baseline assumptions on how we should be, or should have become in order to be accounted as morally ‘good.’ I will point out the significance for adult children who decided to not care for their elder parents. In three selected studies I show that observers, in trying to explain the decisions of others, or their moral development, respectively moral standing, misjudge or ignore their own implicit baseline assumptions. These assumptions are symptomatic of an implic­it belief in all of us that wishes to see that ’good begets good’ for most of us, and infers, thereafter, that ‘bad begets bad’ for some who would show ‘no good.’ It is this implicit belief that guides the observers to make assumptions about the morally doubtful upbringing of a person, or their negative behavior that they wish to explain by flaws in the person’s personality. This biased belief says “it is this way, and only this way”, but, in fact, one cannot be certain about it. The baseline assumptions that observers bring along are basically the biased observer’s points of view which can be explained with the ultimate attribution error.

Does God Speak Greek?: Pope Benedict XVI’s Euro-Supremacist Supersessionism and the Heterosexuality of Reason

Contemporary critics of Christian supersessionism rightly despise its connection to Christianity’s historical persecution of the Jewish people. But theologians and other scholars have not paid enough attention to the political work Christian supersessionism continues to do today. To this end, I examine the work of Pope Benedict XVI, arguing that what I term “Euro-supremacist supersessionism” pervades and helps to shape his theology. Benedict’s supersessionism serves to describe Europe and Christianity as inextricably linked: just as Europe is an essentially Christian continent so is Christianity an essentially European religion. Because it perceives this cultural formation as uniquely universal, Benedict’s supersessionism also advocates a type of European supremacy. But despite its roots in and resonances with German philosophical anti-Judaism, Benedict’s Eurocentric supersessionism does not advance an anti-Jewish politics. His Eurocentric supersessionism instead leads him to take political aim at three initially surprising targets: one, the growing presence of Islam within Europe; two, Europe’s intensifying embrace of lesbian and gay rights; and three, certain strands of liberation theology that originate outside of Europe. Why? I argue that, for Benedict, each of these movements both endangers the marriage he has established between Europe and Christianity—a union he deems necessary to each entity’s survival—and undermines his claim that Christianized Europe possesses a unique universality, which I argue supplies the main source of his implicit belief in its supremacy over all other cultural systems.