Fact Sheet: Polling the American Public on Climate Change (2015)

This fact sheet provides information on climate change polling in the United States over the last eight months from a variety of sources. Overall the studies show:The number of Americans saying that climate change is happening and is caused by human actions continues to rise, but still has not reached a level comparable to the 2007 peak.There is a disparity among party lines when it comes to climate change, with a large majority of Democrats believing that human actions are changing the climate, while fewer Republicans hold the same belief. However, strong majorities of self-described liberal and moderate Republicans say climate change is happening.There is bipartisan support for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases

COMPARISON ANALYSIS OF CLIMATE IMPACT AND ADAPTATION OPPORTUNITIES FOR URBAN CLUSTERS IN THE NORTHEAST UNITED STATES

This project has been in the making for over four years. I came to this program with an emphasis on National Security Studies and how global climate change would impact future national planning and acquisition decisions. The curriculum that I chose to undertake was a balance between scientific reasoning, innovation or renewable energy sources, energy policy and law, international organization & integration, and the ways and means that people can effectively improve their quality of life through awareness and understanding of the environment. I started with the belief that large organizations and significant government influence would alter the outcome of the climate change dilemma. I no longer fully believe this. The greatest emphasis upon change certainly resides with global leadership, but ultimately the success resides with individual decisions and community organizations at the grass root levels. Changing minds about climate change risks and vulnerabilities must begin and end at the local level. This is also true across developed, developing, and less developing nations. Of assistance are Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s), Associations and Clubs, and independent watch-dog organizations. What inspired me to conduct a comparison of two urban clusters in the United States was to better understand how small governments organize, prioritize requirements, and view the uncertain future. The findings here could be replicated and identified globally, and in most cases the solutions are often the same. I entered this program believing that large well financed governments would have to react to the negative externalities of a changing climate, but I now believe that the best solution is to affect incremental change at the lowest level of government – the urban clusters

Mission: Vol. 20, Nos. 1 and 2

Mission: Vol. 20, Nos. 1 and 2. The articles in this issue include: A Thread of Faith from the Editor, Coping With Change In Religious Belief: Genesis and Overview by Herbert A. Marlowe, Jr., On Not Jumping Without a Parachute: Transitions, Tensions and Traumas of Active Faith by Kathy J. Pulley, Coping When Different by Dwayne D. Simmons, Changing Without Leaving by Mary Lou Walden, Dear Diary: Snapshots of Transition by Diana Caillouet, PERSONAL RESPONSES TO EDITOR\u27S REQUEST: We Have Chosen to Stay by Larry and Jacquelyn Floyd, and God is Bigger Than The Problems by Everett and Helen Champney. Everlasting Life by Karen Lashley, Falling But Believing by David Henderson, and Voices of Concern: A Book Whose Time Had Come by David N. Elkins. A WORD FOR OUR TIMES: Experiencing the Stages of Love by Harold Straughn, History Bears Out More Than Fiction by Neil DeCarlo, A Fast Day by Paul Fromberg, and Our Outrageous God by Larry James. Mission and the Church: The Quest For Unity by Robert M. Randolph, and Forum

A study of superstitious beliefs among bingo players

This study was conducted in order to examine the beliefs players have regarding superstition and luck and how these beliefs are related to their gambling behaviour. A self-completion questionnaire was devised and the study was carried out in a large bingo hall in Nottingham, over four nights. 412 “volunteer” bingo players completed the questionnaires. Significant relationships were found in many areas. Many players reported beliefs in luck and superstition; however, a greater percentage of players reported having “everyday” superstitious beliefs, rather than those concerned with bingo

For better or for worse? Investigating the meaning of change

For most, change makes a regular appearance in everyday life and has the capacity to usher in excitement, growth, and chaos. Due to the variable nature of change, people may hold subjective definitions of what “change” typically means. Across four studies, we examine the possibility that there are meaningful individual differences in the dominant subjective definitions people hold about the nature of change. Study 1 and 2 investigated the spontaneous associations participants make when asked to think about change, and found that holding a positive or negative general view about change (as measured by the Nature of Change scale, developed by the researchers) predicts the valence of self-generated associations. Studies 1 and 2 also demonstrate that people with an implicit entity theory of change (believing that people largely cannot change) report more negative and less positive dominant definitions of change than incremental theorists who believe people’s attributes are changeable. Study 3 expands on this finding to demonstrate a link between beliefs about the Nature of Change and beliefs about the role of effort in attributions of success. Participants who believe change is positive, predictable and controllable are more likely to believe that success is a product of effort than participants who believe change is negative, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Definitions of change predict success attributions over and above people’s implicit incremental or entity theories, which have previously been shown to predict attributions. Finally, Study 4 investigates the possibility that more precise definitions of change (as improvement, decline, or random) would alter people’s responses to the implicit theories scale, demonstrating that responses are somewhat contingent on definitions of change Further, change defined as improvement, decline, or random differentially predicted success attributions, which are also again predicted by people’s Nature of Change definitions. Overall, the current set of studies demonstrates that individual differences in people’s reactions to change are important to consider and may be as dynamic and diverse as change itself

Aesthetic Rationality

We argue that the aesthetic domain falls inside the scope of rationality, but does so in its own way. Aesthetic judgment is a stance neither on whether a proposition is to be believed nor on whether an action is to be done, but on whether an object is to be appreciated. Aesthetic judgment is simply appreciation. Correlatively, reasons supporting theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgments operate in fundamentally different ways. The irreducibility of the aesthetic domain is due to the fact that aesthetic judgment is a sensory-affective disclosure of, and responsiveness to, merit: it is a feeling that presents an object, and is responsive to it, as worthy of being liked. Aesthetic judgment is thus shown to be, on the hand, first personal and non-transferable; and, on the other hand, a presentation of reality. We thereby capture what is right in both subjectivist and objectivist conceptions of aesthetic judgment

Beliefs and Blameworthiness

In this paper, I analyze epistemic blameworthiness. After presenting Michael Bergmann’s definition of epistemic blameworthiness, I argue that his definition is problematic because it does not have a control condition. I conclude by offering an improved definition of epistemic blameworthiness and defending this definition against potential counterexamples

Belief and Credence: Why the Attitude-Type Matters

In this paper, I argue that the relationship between belief and credence is a central question in epistemology. This is because the belief-credence relationship has significant implications for a number of current epistemological issues. I focus on five controversies: permissivism, disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, doxastic voluntarism, and the relationship between doxastic attitudes and prudential rationality. I argue that each debate is constrained in particular ways, depending on whether the relevant attitude is belief or credence. This means that epistemologists should pay attention to whether they are framing questions in terms of belief or in terms of credence and the success or failure of a reductionist project in the belief-credence realm has significant implications for epistemology generally

Radical moral encroachment: The moral stakes of racist beliefs

Historical patterns of discrimination seem to present us with conflicts between what morality requires and what we epistemically ought to believe. I will argue that these cases lend support to the following nagging suspicion: that the epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. We can resolve these seeming conflicts by adopting a framework wherein standards of evidence for our beliefs to count as justified can shift according to the moral stakes. On this account, believing a paradigmatically racist belief reflects a failure to not only attend to the epistemic risk of being wrong, but also a failure to attend to the distinctively moral risk of wronging others given what we believe

I'll Bet You Think This Blame Is About You

There seems to be widespread agreement that to be responsible for something is to be deserving of certain consequences on account of that thing. Call this the “merited-consequences” conception of responsibility. I think there is something off, or askew, in this conception, though I find it hard to articulate just what it is. The phenomena the merited-consequences conception is trying to capture could be better captured, I think, by noting the characteristic way in which certain minds can rightly matter to other such minds—the way in which certain minds can carry a certain kind of importance, made manifest in certain sorts of responses. Mattering, not meriting, seems to me central. However, since I cannot yet better articulate an alternative, I continue in the merit-consequences framework. I focus on a particular class of consequences: those that are non-voluntary, in a sense explained. The non-voluntariness of these reactions has two important upshots. First, questions about their justification will be complex. Second, they are not well thought of as consequences voluntarily imposed upon the wrongdoer by the responder. By focusing on merited consequences and overlooking non-voluntariness, we risk misunderstanding the significance of moral criticism and of certain reactions to moral failure