Ordinary Facts Research Articles

А.П. ЧЕХОВ И «БИОГРАФИИ С БОРОДАВКАМИ»: ГЕНЕЗИС, АЛГОРИТМЫ СОЗДАНИЯ И СПЕЦИФИКА ЖАНРА

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of “desacralizing” biography at the example of several studies of A.P. Chekhov’s life and works, and to the reasons of popularity of such biographies among the mass readers. This way to describe Chekhov’s life is partly connected with the memoir tradition, in particular, with the essay by N.M. Yezhov “Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (An attempt of characteristics)” (1909). N.M. Yezhov tried to create an objective yet creative psychological portrait of the writer, based on the experience of personal communication with A.P. Chekhov. The attempt was reduced to a many unprovable invectives and was perceived by the majority of contemporaries with a lot of skepticism. Today this genre of Chekhovian studies and literary criticism can be considered as an example of a postmodern approach to culture, which is characterized by de-canonizing of studies and depiction of classical cultural heritage. A book, which demonstrates all peculiar treats of the postmodern “desacralizing” way of cultural research, is the book written by D. Rayfield “Anton Chekhov: a life”. On the example of D. Rayfield’s book, we can see all the specific features of the phenomenon of “warts-and-all biography” (as the author describes the essence of this approach in one of his interviews): polemical references to the Chekhovian studies researches, quasi-scientific way of the presentation of the facts, the illusion of an objective presentation, combination of proven facts with the biographer’s unprovable assumptions. A careful analysis of all the components of desacralizing biographies allows us to conclude that the main target audience of their creators is the popular readers, which perceive de-canonizing works (pretending to be academic books) as a fully scientific evidence-based new look at certain aspects of Chekhov’s biography. In D. Rayfield’s work, this impression is also formed by the purposeful transformation of some ordinary facts of Chekhov’s biography into the crucial events in the writer’s life. The study of such works and the reaction of the wide readers to them is necessary for academic science to approach theoretically the contemporary cultural trends.

Predicting future community intrusions using a novel type and encryption mechanism architecture for attack node mitigation

The recent exponential rise in the number of cyber-attacks has demanded intensive study into community intrusion detection, prediction, and mitigation systems. Even though there are a variety of intrusion detection technologies available, predicting future community intrusions is still a work in progress. Existing approaches rely on statistical and/or superficial device mastery techniques to solve the problem, and as a result, feature selection and engineering are required. The truth is that no single classifier can provide the highest level of accuracy for all five types of training data set. Cyber-attack detection is a technique for detecting cyber-attacks as they emerge on a laptop or network device, intending to compromise the gadget's security. As a result, using a novel type and encryption mechanism, this paper offered a unique architecture for attack node mitigation. The input UNSW-NB15 dataset is first acquired and divided into training and testing statistics. First and foremost, the information is pre-processed and capabilities are retrieved in the training section. The Taxicab Woodpecker Mating Algorithm (TWMA) is then used to select the critical characteristics. The attacked and non-attacked information are then classified using the BRELU-ResNet (Bernoulli's Leaky Rectified Linear Unit - Residual Neural Community) classifier. The encrypted at Ease Hash Probability-Based Elliptic-Curve Cryptography (ESHP-ECC) technique is used to encrypt the ordinary facts, which are subsequently kept in the security log report. Following that, using Euclidean distance, the shortest course distance is estimated. Finally, the records are decrypted using a set of principles known as Decrypted Relaxed Hash Probability-Based Elliptic-Curve Cryptography (DSHP-ECC). If the input appears in the log file during testing, it is regarded as attacked data and is prevented from being transmitted. If it isn't found, the procedure of detecting cyber-attacks continues.

Impact of Work Stress on Employee Performance: A Study among the Executive Officers of State Universities in Sri Lanka

Stress is a one of the challenges that employees experience in a work place almost everywhere in the world. In the world today, work is the primary cause for stress in any kind of job since it is demanding and changing in the competitive world. for its employees to perform their job effectively and efficient manner. Work stress may attribute to employee’s life imbalance which may tend to depression and conflicts such as workplace conflict, role conflict, role ambiguity and workload. Main purpose of the present study was to explore the impact of work stress on employee performance among executive officers of State Universities in Sri Lanka. Five (5) stress factors; such as role ambiguity, underutilization of skills, work overload, organizational climate and relationships in organization and personality factors were identified as the independent variables as per literature review. Selected method for conducting the research was survey method. All the executive officers attached to state universities (17 conventional universities functioning under University Grants Commission) comprised the population for the study and convenient sampling technique was used. Primary data was gathered though self-administered questionnaire with 5 point Likert scale range of strongly agree (5) as highest range and strongly disagree (1) as lowest range and the questionnaire was distributed as a google form via WhatsApp groups and emails. 77 responses from executive officers were collected and analysed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, logistic regression analysis (with ANOVA) and Cronbach Alpha. As per reliability statistics, it indicates that data set is more reliable (Cronbach alpha value = 0.9292) in the study. The level of stress on employee performance as per respondents’ feedback was identified that the almost all the respondents expressed their view as neutral (neither agree nor disagree). It interprets that stress is somewhat ordinary fact and executive officers in the State Universities in Sri Lanka may not consider the stress as an influencing factor that affect their work performance. Correlation Analysis results of the study shows strong correlation (r=0.891) between work stress and employee performance at significance level of 0.05. As per regression analysis, stress factors of role ambiguity (p=0.036) and personality factors (p=0.002) have significant impact on employee performance while there is no significant relationship between other 3 work stress factors: underutilization of skills (p=0.941), work overload (p=0.668) and organizational climate and relationships in organization (0.500) and employee performance.

Daniel Bensaïd, le pari mélancolique.

Parmi les mérites de Daniel Bensaïd figure en bonne place celui d’avoir introduit dans le lexique marxiste un concept nouveau : la bifurcation. Certes, Rosa Luxemburg avait déjà parlé, dans la Brochure Junius de 1915, de socialisme ou barbarie. Mais la démarche de Bensaid va plus loin. Sa relecture de Marx, à la lumière de Blanqui, de Benjamin et de Charles Péguy, le conduit à concevoir l’histoire comme une suite d’embranchements et de bifurcations, un champ de possibles où la lutte des classes occupe une place décisive, mais dont l’issue est imprévisible. Réfractaire au déroulement causal des faits ordinaires, la revolution est interruption. Elle n’est pas garantie par les « lois de l’histoire » et doit faire l’objet d’un pari, au sens pascalien, revu et corrigé par le marxiste Lucien Goldmann, lui même revue et corrigé par le marxiste Daniel Bensaïd.

Networks with Benefits

Networks with Benefits Stephanie Burt (bio) A network may be any system in which "connective configurations follow knowable rules and patterns" (Levine 2015, 112). Yet the term tends to be used, these days, in the study of literature and culture, for systems that have no single, controlling center, and no unchanging, obvious outer bounds: instead, to quote Caroline Levine, networks tend to reveal nodes of varying centrality, "hubs" with "a role in more than one cluster of nodes; and hinges, nodes that connect otherwise separate groups" (216). Persons, places, offices, literary works, and parts of those works—as well as traffic signals, scientific hypotheses, tubes of lipstick and games of basketball—may play roles in "multiple networks, which is a far more ordinary fact of social life—and a more unsettled and unsettling one—than literary and cultural studies has recognized" (217). Drawing on terms imported from sociology, social theory, biology, and philosophy (among them the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour), many literary critics have now examined the overlapping and heterogeneous networks—and the circulation through them of money, prestige, affection, and technique—that link writers, editors, publishers, works, and the institutions that enable, or impede, their circulation. Critics of modern and Victorian novels (Levine among them) have shown how networks of character and [End Page 213] influence run throughout, and change over the course of, crowded large-scale novels such as Bleak House, Middlemarch or Infinite Jest. Less attention has been paid, so far, to the way that models of networks—multiple, heterogeneous networks, with nodes, hinges, hubs and overlaps of their own—emerge within poems, where (more than in other literary genres) their nodes may be characters, ideas, forms, sounds, phrases, or individual words. At a sufficient level of generality, of course, we can find some notion of network in any text at all: it almost follows from the meaning of "text." Yet if we are interested not in what all texts share, but in what sets some texts apart, we can learn a great deal about networks—and about certain modern poets, and about their identities, and (as it turns out) about sexuality and family and commitment—by following particular heterogeneous, overlapping networks through a handful of stellar recent poems. During the life of James Merrill (1926–1995) his reputation as a creator of perfect or masterful lyric poems was gradually overshadowed, in the academy, by the demands of his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1976–1982), whose three books (plus an epilogue) record the communications that Merrill and his partner David Jack-son ("JM" and "DJ") received, via Ouija board, from dead friends, from the classical past, and from ancient, bat-like quasi-demonic entities. The Book of Ephraim, the first—and least science-fictional—part of that trilogy, has recently appeared in a newly edited and annotated edition from one of Merrill's literary executors, Stephen Yenser, who emphasizes not only the poem's craft and finish, but also its heterogeneous networks. Chapters, entitled (after the letters of the alphabet, the letters on a Ouija board) "A" through "Z," record events in Merrill and Jackson's life, events in Merrill's lost, unfinished novel, and dictates from the spirit world. In consequence, as Yenser writes, "events do not follow chronologically but rather have a serendipitous presentation," as in "a network such that the poet could begin and end a section at any point" (Merrill 2018, 10). "The fabric is a mesh, a network made to a great extent of details," assembled (the poem insists) not by Merrill alone but by their congeries of real-life friends and by Merrill and Jackson "as the cup moved … under their two hands" (19). Links among personages, events, and phrases come from the linguistic forms (couplets, sonnets, terza rima, prose collage, puns) adopted and repeated in one or another chapter, and from the ties of friendship, sex, and blood that bind together the many people in Merrill's poem. [End Page 214] How does it feel to read a long poem that presents itself, not as a unified narrative, nor as a species of modernist collage, but as a network, or a congeries of networks? For...

Изучение лингвистических особенностей письменного судебного дискурса Великобритании: формальное и содержательное обоснование подхода

The aim of the work is to present a comprehensive approach to the study of linguistic features of the UK written judicial discourse, describe its features in terms of professional communication and social practice. We give a consistent analysis of the major factors which scaffold judicial discourse as a whole – the formal structure of the legal discourse and the formal content (textual sources) of judicial discourse. We believe the legal sources (texts of previous decisions and texts of legislative acts) contribute to the multi-faceted nature of the judicial legal discourse in which we can observe various processes: legal interpretation, recontextualization of ordinary facts in the professional legal field, statutory treatment and nominalization of facts and deeds etc. These and other characteristics created the dynamic nature of judicial discourse which is commonly seen as a static relic. Proper analysis and understanding of the formal structure of the legal discourse and its formal content (textual sources) bears major importance when addressing the analysis of linguistic features of written judicial discourse. Based on the analysis, the main characteristics of the written judicial discourse of Anglo-Saxon system are identified and the framework for further study of its linguistic features is determined. From our point of view, the study of the phenomenon of professional discourse is interdisciplinary in nature, in particular, the study of written judicial discourse is based on the positions of sociologists, linguists, philosophers and legal scholars. We use description and synthesis methods, as well as comparative and contextual methods. The theo-retical significance of the study lies in the development of the comprehensive approach to the lin-guistic analysis of professional discourses as a means of actualizing a certain social practice.

Tenant Unions for the Future

With the arrival of the pandemic, staying home became emergency work for a failing state. Amid disastrous negligence at every level of government, one of the most ordinary facts of life in capitalism—rent—suddenly appeared clearly as an affront. "One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very right to live on the earth," Marx wrote of landlords. In the early spring, with state-level and nationwide eviction moratoriums and tenant protections in place, it seemed like there had never been a better time to refuse these bad terms

The electronic magazine “A Bioquímica como ela é” as a learning tool in science communication

The online journal "A Bioquímica como ela é" is a scientific divulgation magazine that is currently being published with texts produced mainly by undergraduate students of Biological Sciences course-UFRGS (disciplines of Biochemistry I-A and Biochemistry Ecology I). The purpose of this project is to use the texts as a scientific literacy tool for students of the public and private elementary school, providing a different way to discover the universe of Science. In addition, motivate undergraduate students in the production of materials for scientific divulgation. In the development of the work, several texts and materials were produced, which after being created, edited, published and divulgated to the general public, were selected and applied in the elementary school classes of the public network of Porto Alegre city. As examples we can name: "Why do dogs smell?" "(N ° 6 - Ecological Biochemistry) and "Why do we dream "? (No. 6 - Biochemistry I). In schools, students received a text corresponding to their series and a questionnaire with objective questions and a dissertation. Through the answers it was possible to notice difficulties of textual comprehension and development of the writing by the participants, because sometimes the objectives and subjective answers did not coincide. There was a good verbal feedback from the participants, showing interest in texts and subjects, probably due to the awakening of curiosity to understand ordinary facts by a light scientific explanation. In addition, the return of the participants and their difficulties helped us to guide the production of the Biological Sciences Course students aiming at a better adaptation of the texts and audiovisual materials produced. Therefore, this project fulfills its objectives of both stimulating and training undergraduate students to participate in projects of school / university interaction and scientific divulgation, as well as to develop scientific tools for fundamental education.

Fundamental truthmakers and non-fundamental truths

Recently, philosophers have tried to develop a version of truthmaker theory which ties the truthmaking relation (T-REL) closely to the notion of fundamentality. In fact, some of these truthmaker-fundamentalists (TF-ists), as I call them, assume that the notion of fundamentality is intelligible in part by citing, as central examples of fundamentals, truthmakers, which they understand necessarily as constituents of fundamental reality. The aim of this paper is first to bring some order and clarity to this discussion, sketching how far TF is compatible with orthodox truthmaking, and then critically to evaluate the limits of TF. It will be argued that truthmaker theory cannot directly help with articulating the nature of fundamental reality and that T-REL does not necessarily relate truths with anything more fundamental, unless what is fundamental is what the truthbearers in question are about. I shall argue that TF faces a rather thorny dilemma and some general problems. I shall present two exhaustive types of fundamentalism on which a version of TF can be based: deflationary and inflationary. It will be argued that each version of TF runs into significant troubles accounting for all truth, specifically ordinary truths and metaphysical truths about the relations between ordinary facts and fundamental facts. I shall not attempt to solve these problems, but rather, at the end, diagnose the issues with TF as lying in the difficulties with reconciling the manifest image with the scientific and metaphysical images of reality.

Asymmetric Effects of the Effect of Oil Price on Stock Markets in Four Asian Countries: Markov Switching Analysis

The Markov switching vector autoregressive model is a dynamic stochastic system with stochastic autoregressive parameters. This model able to measure a time varying problem when the variables undergoing regime switching. Structural change or shock is an ordinary fact in time series data. Some shocks have an important role under specific regimes in examining the business cycle contraction. Excluding changes in regime for the measurement of variance decomposition may produce biased results. Moreover, the parameters in the time series model might also have a structural change. Therefore, linear models are no longer suitable to be used in analyzing the financial model; and nonlinear time series models that are Markov switching models are proposed to solve these kinds of problems. A two regimes Markov switching vector autoregressive model is used in this study to analysis the time series data. The regime is dependent heterogeneous with varying the variance to detect every change of the business cycle. The correlations between oil price, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia stock price are examining using Markov switching model. The result shows that the regimes dependent models suitable to employ in study the asymmetric business cycle; and oil price have a negative relationship with the changes of the four selected Asian stock markets.

Constitutionalism, Cheap Indeterminism and the Grounding Problem

Abstract Thomas Sattig has argued recently that constitutionalism renders determinism about the actual world false, just in virtue of ordinary facts about ordinary middle-sized material objects. However, it seems that, if determinism about the actual world is false, this should be so for reasons of physics rather than in virtue of ordinary facts about ordinary objects. This is the problem of cheap indeterminism. Sattig also claims, however, that constitutionalists can solve this problem if they abandon an attractive and promising solution to the classical grounding problem affecting their view. In this paper I argue that, against his claims, constitutionalists can solve the problem of cheap indeterminism and the grounding problem simultaneously.

Bodies, morals, and religion

Abstract Although Thomas More’s description of the Utopians’ ‘Epicurean’ position in philosophy nominally coincides with Erasmus’s defence of the Philosophia Christi, More shows no concern for the arguments Erasmus gave in support of this view. Taking its starting point from Erasmus’s depreciations of the body and More’s intellectual as well as physical preoccupations with the bodily sphere, this article presents the theme of the human body and its moral and religious significance as a test case for comparing Erasmus and More. The treatises both men wrote on Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane confirm that both authors dealt with the notion of the body in contrasting ways: Erasmus shows a tendency to address the moral-psychological question of mentally conquering the worldly self, whilst More highlights the way in which ordinary facts and physical things may carry spiritual and religious meaning. Paradoxically, Erasmus consistently applied his spiritualized ideal of man to this-worldly moral and social concerns, whereas More focused on the physical domain out of a religious interest in transcendent truths. In line with Giulia Sissa’s thesis, our hypothesis is that More ostensibly appropriated an Erasmian type of idealism in Utopia, but, contrary to Erasmus himself, focused on the exterior form of a virtuous society, rather than on its moral and spiritual preconditions. While Erasmus advocated a mental transformation towards reason, More’s Utopia envisioned what might come of this.

A Model for Weibull deteriorate items with price dependent demand rate and Inflation

The present paper deal with an inventory model which is developed for most of the physical goods undergoes decay or deterioration over time. Commodities such as fruits, vegetables and foodstuffs suffer from depletion by direct spoilage while kept in store. The deterioration rate follows the Weibull distribution with two parameters. Demand rate is assumed as price dependent in linear form. It is an ordinary fact that unique price of items attracts more customers. The model is solved numerically by when shortages are partially backlogged with inflation. Analytical and numerical solution of the model is obtained to verify the optimal solution. Comprehensive sensitivity analysis has been given for viewing the result of variation in the parameter. The model is solved analytically by maximizing the total profit.

The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies

What Mystery of Moral Experience?

According to Michael Smith, a “central organizing problem” in contemporary meta-ethics concerns a particular way in which our moral thought and practice is or at least appears mysterious. Our “ordinary moral practice” and the “facts of ordinary moral experience,” he says, contain features which are incontrovertible but mutually incompatible. The features, taken individually, account for some of the basic and inalienable characteristics of our moral thought but they are, on his view, jointly inconsistent. Broadly speaking the features are objectivity and practicality. As Smith puts it: “The problem is that the objectivity and the practicality of moral judgment pull in quite opposite directions from each other…. The objectivity of moral judgement suggests that there are moral facts [and we have] beliefs about what these facts are … but it leaves entirely mysterious how or why having a moral view is supposed to have special links with [motivation]…. The practicality of moral judgement suggests just the opposite, that our moral judgements express our desires…. While this enables us to make good sense of the link [with motivation], it leaves entirely mysterious what a moral argument is supposed to be an argument about.” Let us understand what is meant by the mystery or problem in line with the intention Smith expresses as something which has an explanation, if baffling at first. But the formulation Smith gives of the problem, its standard formulation, involves a problematic psychological account of moral experience. The psychological account involves assuming that moral experience, and what is manifest in ordinary practice, can be accounted for in terms of propositional attitudes, an assumption which drives how the problem is characterized and proposed solutions to it. We need not deny that moral experience can be problematic or mysterious. The principal issue is that the standard view of what constitutes the mystery casts the problem in psychological terms, where the source of the problem is an alleged incompatibility of mental states. The idea is that although our moral thought and practice is apparently coherent, it is, mysteriously, made up of elements that cannot be coherently combined. On an alternative view, moral experience and the ordinary facts which constitute it are not exhausted by our mental states and cannot be exhausted by them. Much of the basic stuff of moral experience has nothing to do with our mental life at all. The ordinary facts of moral thought, discourse, and experience are not well accounted for, let alone exhausted by facts about our mental states or propositional attitudes.

UMA ARMADILHA PERFEITA: O OLHAR EXOTÓPICO EM “JE NE PARLE PAS FRANÇAIS” DE KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Endowed with extreme lyricism and keen sensitivity, Katherine Mansfield's work marked a generation of writers of the early twentieth century and solidified her base among literary productions in English. In a time when private and intimate universe was reserved to women’s social relationships, the writing of Katherine Mansfield comes to reveal the hidden side of this public universe, so essential to the knowledge of ourselves. From this psychological clarification, ordinary facts of everyday life take on new perspectives in focus of a character in constant self-assertion. This is the case of the short story “Je ne parle pas Francais”, whose character-narrator Raoul Duquette presents an ambiguous and seductive speech, therefore, fraught with subliminal traps able to attract fragile and innocent preys. Based on the discursive manipulation from one who tells his own story and on the distance in space / time between the experience and the reporting, this paper aims to analyze the short story with regard to the point of view and to the symbolism of the dog and the mouse to, finally illustrate the (de)construction of the notion of gender. For this purpose, we apply the concept of exotopia, by Mikhail Bakhtin, in order to check the exceeding view in the space / time of a first-person narrator.

Introducing undergraduate students to science

Understanding the scientific method fosters the development of critical thinking and logical analysis of information. Additionally, proposing and testing a hypothesis is applicable not only to science, but also to ordinary facts of daily life. Knowing the way science is done and how its results are published is useful for all citizens and mandatory for science students. A 60-h course was created to offer undergraduate students a framework in which to learn the procedures of scientific production and publication. The course's main focus was biochemistry, and it was comprised of two modules. Module I dealt with scientific articles, and Module II with research project writing. Module I covered the topics: 1) the difference between scientific knowledge and common sense, 2) different conceptions of science, 3) scientific methodology, 4) scientific publishing categories, 5) logical principles, 6) deductive and inductive approaches, and 7) critical reading of scientific articles. Module II dealt with 1) selection of an experimental problem for investigation, 2) bibliographic revision, 3) materials and methods, 4) project writing and presentation, 5) funding agencies, and 6) critical analysis of experimental results. The course adopted a collaborative learning strategy, and each topic was studied through activities performed by the students. Qualitative and quantitative course evaluations with Likert questionnaires were carried out at each stage, and the results showed the students' high approval of the course. The staff responsible for course planning and development also evaluated it positively. The Biochemistry Department of the Chemistry Institute of the University of São Paulo has offered the course four times.

How Could There Be True Causal Claims Without There Being Special Causal Facts in the World?

Some philosophers of physics recently expressed their skepticism about causation (Norton 2003b, 2007). However, this is not new. The view that causation does not refer to any ontological category perhaps can be attributed to Hume, Kant and Russell. On the other hand, some philosophers (Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe) view causation as a physical process and some others (Cartwright) view causation as making claims about capacities possessed by objects. The issue about the ontological status of causal claims involves issues concerning the ontological status of capacity, modality and dispositional claims. In this paper, my goal is to show that without engaging metaphysical debates about the ontological status of causal claims, it can be shown that we can objectively assign truth values to these statements. I argue that for causal claims to be objective we don't need to postulate the existence of special facts (specific to causal claims) in addition to ordinary physical facts described by physical theories. This, I think, is enough to justify the usefulness of this concept in certain branches (may be all) of science. Once this is achieved, there is no need to engage in unnecessary metaphysical debates. So, even if advanced physical theories don't mention this notion, causal reasoning can still be important in understanding the world not in the sense that science discovers special ontological category called causation but in the sense that we come to know certain facts about the world.

THE WILL AS REASON

I hope here to defend an account of the will as practical reason—or, using Kant’s phrase, as “reason in its practical employment”—as against a view according to which practical reason issues in judgments, and the will, as a capacity in addition to reason, executes those judgments in action. The opposing view gains credibility largely because certain commonplaces (such as so-called “Buridan’s ass” cases and certain cases of weakness of the will) show distance between judgment and action; they thus seem to reveal the need for a capacity, in addition to reason, by which we execute judgment in action. However, another ordinary fact pushes in the other direction: the activities of the will are activities for which the person is answerable in a very distinctive sort of way. This answerability is hard to understand unless willing is itself an activity of our capacity for reasoning. I will suggest that we can accommodate the troublesome commonplaces while understanding willing as an exercise of our capacity to reason if we abandon the

The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief

BackgroundWhile religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and others have looked specifically at religious belief [2]. However, no research has compared these two states of mind directly.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects—fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers—as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of “true” vs judgments of “false”) was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.Conclusions/SignificanceWhile religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world.