Intrinsic Dispositions Research Articles

Proposing an Islamic virtue ethics beyond the situationist debates

ABSTRACT I begin the first part by showing how situationism should make us question traditional understandings of virtues as intrinsic dispositions. I concentrate specifically on situationist experiments related to mood. I then introduce Islamic virtue ethics and the dawa movement. In parts two and three I examine ethnography of the dawa movement to explore how they deal with worries about the influence of mood on their virtue. In part two I show how they train their habits in very traditional virtue ethics ways in order to be more resilient when faced with virtue-diminishing affective situations. In part three I show how the situation, rather than hindering practitioners, is recruited into helping these women achieve piety. I conclude, in part four, by showing the dawa movement's creative use of the Islamic veil as a way to help these women deal with the objection that one cannot avoid all bad situations. Going beyond social psychological experiments, I examine two methodological sources not found in situationist debates. First, I argue for ethnography as an empirical method through which to study virtue. I draw on ethnography of the Islamic women's dawa movement. Secondly, the work in the philosophy of mind on ‘affective scaffolding’.

Wisdom of the Established Pattern

Wisdom of the Established Pattern

Visuo-Motor Affective Interplay: Bonding Scenes Promote Implicit Motor Pre-dispositions Associated With Social Grooming-A Pilot Study.

Proximity and interpersonal contact are prominent components of social connection. Giving affective touch to others is fundamental for human bonding. This brief report presents preliminary results from a pilot study. It explores if exposure to bonding scenes impacts the activity of specific muscles related to physical interaction. Fingers flexion is a very important component when performing most actions of affectionate contact. We explored the visuo-motor affective interplay by priming participants with bonding scenes and assessing the electromyographic activity of the fingers flexor muscle, in the absence of any overt movements. Photographs of dyads in social interaction and of the same dyads not interacting were employed. We examined the effects upon the electromyographical activity: (i) during the passive exposure to pictures, and (ii) during picture offset and when expecting the signal to perform a fingers flexion task. Interacting dyads compared to matched non-interacting dyads increased electromyographic activity of the fingers flexor muscle in both contexts. Specific capture of visual bonding cues at the level of visual cortex had been described in the literature. Here we showed that the neural processing of visual bonding cues reaches the fingers flexor muscle. Besides, previous visualization of bonding cues enhanced background electromyographic activity during motor preparation to perform the fingers flexion task, which might reflect a sustained leakage of central motor activity downstream leading to increase in firing of the respective motor neurons. These data suggest, at the effector level, an implicit visuo-motor connection in which social interaction cues evoke intrinsic dispositions toward affectionate social behavior.

On Intrinsic Information Content of the Physical Mind in Quantized Space: Against Externalism

If the physical mind is located in quantized space of the brain then how does the physical mind become the self? This remains an unresolved problem. It can be restated as how mental representations or mental states get their informational contents, and of doing so in terms of the natural functions brain states have? We call these natural brain functions not teleosemantic functions, but rather teleological functions. This is because teleosemantics portrays mental representations which must have informational contents that track “operational explanations of cognitive capacities” while teleological functions (or “teleofunctions”) do not as they are hidden in quantized space, suggesting that mind is physical. Specifically teleonomic capacities have been built into us by natural selection, which naturally leads to a teleogical notion of function. Our claim is that teleofunctionality as unification of mental states has natural functions that carry intrinsic dispositions that may be broadly defined as ‘subjectivity’ or intrinsic information content of mental states. Mental states have intrinsic dispositions to change their functions, producing correspondences to the world that includes further layers of subtlety hidden in quantized space. How does intrinsic information self-replicate content in cases of mental misrepresentation? The putative special virtue of teleosemantics and its ability to give a theory of error through ‘uncertainty’ is discussed based on a teleological functionalist epistemology.

A New Perspective of Salesperson Motivation and Salesforce Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Salesperson-Brand Identification

The purpose of this study is to develop and empirically test the mediating role of salesperson brand identification in the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational dispositions and three salesforce outcomes–sales performance, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. We find salesperson brand identification mediates salesperson motivation’s impact on outcomes for extrinsically motivated salespeople. We combine motivational and social identification theories to provide a better understanding of the relationship between salesperson innate motivational dispositions and salesforce management outcomes. We provide additional insight as to how salesperson identification with the brand can boost performance, gain commitment, and increase job satisfaction among salespeople.

Parochial Compliance: Young Children's Biased Consideration of Authorities' Preferences Regarding Intergroup Interactions.

Prosocial behavior is arguably influenced by an interaction between intrinsic dispositions (e.g., group bias) and extrinsic factors (e.g., institutional regulations). The current study investigated this interaction developmentally. Preschoolers (3- to 4-year-olds) and kindergarteners (5- to 6-year-olds; N=111) participated in a resource distribution task in which they had to consider both the recipients' group membership (minimal color-based groups), and their own teachers' preferences regarding how to distribute (give "all" or "none"). The results revealed that only kindergarteners were influenced by the experimental factors and differently across genders. Specifically, when the recommendation was to give "none," girls followed it indiscriminately toward in- and out-group recipients, but boys did so only toward out-group recipients. Thus, boys exploited an authority's legitimization to act antisocially, according to a parochial bias.

Abilities to do otherwise

In this paper I argue that there are different ways that an agent may be able to do otherwise and that therefore, when free will is understood as requiring that an agent be able to do otherwise, we face the following question: which way of being able to do otherwise is most relevant to free will? I answer this question by first discussing the nature of intrinsic dispositions and abilities, arguing that for each action type there is a spectrum of intrinsic abilities. I suggest that recognising this allows us to articulate two ways in which an intrinsic ability is general. And I argue that the abilities most relevant to free will need to be nongeneral in both of the ways identified. Along the way I show why these points threaten to undermine Vihvelin’s (Causes, laws, and free will: why determinism doesn’t matter, Oxford University Press, New York, 2013) dispositionalist account of free will.

Agents and causes: dispositional intuitions as a guide to causal structure.

Currently, two frameworks of causal reasoning compete: Whereas dependency theories focus on dependencies between causes and effects, dispositional theories model causation as an interaction between agents and patients endowed with intrinsic dispositions. One important finding providing a bridge between these two frameworks is that failures of causes to generate their effects tend to be differentially attributed to agents and patients regardless of their location on either the cause or the effect side. To model different types of error attribution, we augmented a causal Bayes net model with separate error sources for causes and effects. In several experiments, we tested this new model using the size of Markov violations as the empirical indicator of differential assumptions about the sources of error. As predicted by the model, the size of Markov violations was influenced by the location of the agents and was moderated by the causal structure and the type of causal variables.

Causes, laws, and free will: why determinism doesn't matter

CONTENTS Chapter 1 The Problem Introduced: Would Determinism Rob us of Free Will? 1. Free Will, Ability to do Otherwise, and the Basic Argument 2. Determinism and some Distinctions 3. Narrow Ability, Wide Ability, and the No Choice Argument 4. The Basic Argument Extended and Two Ways of Replying: Metaphysical Compatibilism and Moral Compatibilism 5. How I propose to Navigate the Treacherous Waters of the Free Will/Determinism Problem: A First Road Map of the Book Chapter 2 The Problem Distinguished: Is it Possible for Us to Have Free Will? Do We Have Free Will? 1. Two Questions about Free Will: The Possibility Question and the Determinism Question 2. Some Remarks about Methodology 3. The Existential Question and Common Sense Compatibilism 4. Impossibilism: Five Arguments for Fatalism 5. Hard Determinism or Impossibilism? Five Versions of the Clarence Darrow Argument Chapter 3 Abilities, Choices, and Agent Causation 1. What This Chapter is About and Why 2. The Common Sense View (and the Limits of Common Sense) 3. Two Steps Beyond Common Sense: Limited Laws Indeterminism and Agent Causation 4. Are Events the only Causes? Could an Object be a Cause? 5. Could an Agent be a Cause? 6. Where We Are Now Chapter 4 The Unavoidability of Metaphysics: Moral Responsibility and Ability to do Otherwise 1. Alternatives, Choice, and Moral Responsibility 2. Frankfurt's Bold Gambit and the Long Debate that Followed 3. Two Ways of Getting Someone to Do What you Want 4. Heads I Win, Tails you Lose 5. Why There is No Middle Way (Why Putting the Pre-Emptor on the Scene Doesn't Help) 6. Freedom of Action, Freedom of Will, and Three Ways of Having a Choice 7. Frankfurt's Intuition Reconsidered: Why the Subtraction Argument Fails, Why the Supervenience Argument Fails 8. Lessons for Compatibilists Chapter 5 Arguments for Incompatibilism 1. No Forking Paths Argument 2. No Present Causes Argument 3. No Agent Causes Argument 4. No Inner Commander Argument 5. Manipulation Arguments 6. The Consequence Argument Chapter 6 The Abilities and Dispositions of our Freedom 1. The Big Picture: the Bundle View 2. Abilities and Dispositions 3. Dispositions and Counterfactuals 4. The Intrinsic Dispositions Thesis and Frankfurt's Argument 5. Wide Abilities, Choice, and the Consequence Argument 6. Historical Interlude: Objections to the Simple Conditional Analysis Reconsidered 7. Virtues of the Bundle View Chapter 7 Laws, Counterfactuals, and Fixed Past Compatibilism 1. What this Chapter is About and Why 2. How the Laws Constrain 3. Counterfactuals and Our Experience of Choice 4. Counterfactuals: From Goodman to Lewis 5. Choice Counterfactuals and Fixed Past Compatibilism 6. Concluding Remarks Notes References Index

Stability of parental care across siblings from undisturbed and challenged pregnancies: Intrinsic maternal dispositions of female rhesus monkeys.

The concept of fetal programming is based on the idea that the developmental trajectory of infants is adjusted in response to in utero conditions. In species with extended parental care, these prenatally derived tendencies are further substantiated by behavioral attributes of the mother during the postnatal period. We investigated the stability of maternal behavioral interactions with infant monkeys and carefully varied prenatal conditions across siblings reared by the same mother. We hypothesized that effects of prenatal disturbance and the infant's susceptibility would be differentially affected by maternal attributes. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we analyzed observational data on 121 rhesus macaques reared by a total of 35 multiparous mothers. A portion of the variance in 5 dyadic behaviors was statistically driven by the infant (or was unique to a particular mother-infant pair), but stable maternal propensities and a consistent style of care across siblings also substantially influenced behavioral interactions. Moreover, the magnitude and direction of the prenatal effects were contingent on a female's intrinsic dispositions. When mothers typically exhibited high levels of a corresponding behavior, responsiveness to infants was enhanced as a consequence of prenatal disturbance. The opposite was true for less expressive females. Challenges to the well-being of pregnancy thus served to accentuate maternal predispositions and served to magnify the range of variation in mother-infant behavior across the whole population.

The Conditional Analysis of Dispositions and the Intrinsic Dispositions Thesis

The idea that dispositions are an intrinsic matter has been popular among contemporary philosophers of dispositions. In this paper I will first state this idea as exactly as possible. I will then examine whether it poses any threat to the two current versions of the conditional analysis of dispositions, namely, the simple and reformed conditional analysis of dispositions. The upshot is that the intrinsic nature of dispositions, when properly understood, doesn’t spell trouble for either of the two versions of the conditional analysis of dispositions. Along the way, I will propose an extensionally correct and practically useful criterion for identifying nomically intrinsic dispositions and criticize one objection raised by Lewis against the simple conditional analysis of dispositions.

Implications of Self-Deception for Self-Reported Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivational Dispositions and Actual Learning Performance

The authors explored implications of individuals' self-deception (a trait) for their self-reported intrinsic and extrinsic motivational dispositions and their actual learning performance. In doing so, a higher order structural model was developed and tested in which intrinsic and extrinsic motivational dispositions were underlying factors that were each manifested in four distinct propensities that were measured. The authors also tested whether controlling for self-deception influenced predictive relationships. Analyses of data from 429 college students supported the validity of the higher order model and indicated that self-deception was positively related to intrinsic and negatively related to extrinsic motivational dispositions. Self-deception was negatively related, whereas intrinsic and extrinsic motivational dispositions were positively related, to learning performance. Removing the influences of self-deception altered some of the predictive relationships.

The influence of culture upon consumers’ desired value perceptions: A research agenda

Although consumer consumption occurs globally, the value that consumers perceive from buying and using a product or service likely differs across cultures. We show that consumer perceptions of product/service value are determined not only by intrinsic dispositions, but also by internalized cultural values and norms, and external contextual factors. This article conceptually examines how and where culture influences consumer value. Following a review of the literature on consumer value and culture, we offer an integrative model that conceptualizes culture as a metaphorical lens influencing the meaning and relative importance of the content and structure of a consumer’s means-end value hierarchy. We discuss the implications for a future research program.