Interest has recently been shown in causal theories of perception, memory, inference, reference, truth, justification and belief, as well as in a more general “causal theory of knowledge” which would embrace and connect all of these concepts within a broad epistemological framework. The burden of this paper is that prospects are poor for an interesting and general enough causal theory of knowledge. A threat to generality arises from the causal theory's difficulties with knowledge of general truths. A threat to interest arises when attempts to accommodate general truths lead to a weakening of the notion of “causal connection” appealed to, making dubious the explanatory force of such an appeal.

Can we succeed in giving consciousness a naturalistic explanation, that is, an explanation in “broadly physical terms” (p. 23)? This is the “problem of consciousness” which, along with other aspects of the mind-body problem, is explored by McGinn in a collection of eight independently written but related, sometimes overlapping papers, all but two previously published. The papers span a decade and divergent approaches. The resulting juxtaposition of two contrasting “resolutions” of the problem by the same author invites their comparison.

Early in the Great Depression, Gerald W. Johnson remarked on the “fathomless pessimism” that had overtaken the American People: “The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis … We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes.” Film developments of the decade were entwined with the ongoing economic crisis. This article offers an analysis of the extreme shifts in confidence in this period and argues for their relationship with the evolution of film noir, which had its roots in two film genres prominent in the period, the gangster and fallen-woman films, but which breaks with these genres, not after the onset of World War II, which has long been believed, but in the closing years of the 1930s.

Reduced protein intake during pregnancy decreased maternal hepatic and plasma docosahexaenoic acid concentrations and impaired docosahexaenoic acid accumulation into fetal brain in the rat. The present study investigated whether restriction of maternal protein intake during pregnancy in the rat alters membrane phospholipid fatty acid composition in the offspring after weaning. Female rats (six per group) were mated and fed diets containing either 180 or 90 g protein/kg throughout pregnancy. Mothers were transferred to standard chow after delivery and the litters reduced to eight pups. Weaning was at 28 d and pups were killed 5 to 6 d later. Tissue weights or membrane total phosphatidylcholine (PC) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) concentrations in the offspring did not differ between dietary groups. There were significant differences between the 180 and 90 g/kg groups in liver, brain, lung and heart fatty acid composition that differed between tissues and phospholipid classes. For example, docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acid concentrations were 23 and 10 % lower respectively in hepatic PC, but not PE, in the 90 g/kg group. In brain, docosahexaenoic acid concentration was 17 % lower in PC, but not PE, while arachidonic acid content was 21 % greater in PE but unchanged in PC. The greatest differences were in unsaturated fatty acids, which suggests alterations to desaturase activities and/or the specificity of phospholipid biosynthesis. These results suggest that restricted maternal protein intake during pregnancy results in persistent alterations to membrane fatty acid content.

Our films preserve a record of popular beliefs about the sources of human violence, yet sometimes explain their characters' actions with theories of violence that have been challenged or discarded as untenable. The 1992 film, Basic Instinct, in its title and in its characters' actions embraces Freud's concept of an instinctual link between sexual desire and aggressive violence. In the film the two merge, as in the bedroom scenes between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, where boundaries between sex and violence blur, or, in the opening scene in which a retired rock star's sexual climax converges with Stone's character murdering him with an ice pick (placing a phallic image side by side with a phallus). Violence, this film tells us, has as its source the same instinctual well as sexual desire.

Dan Dennett and Jerry Fodor have recently offered diametrically opposed estimations of the relevance of the theory of natural selection to an adequate theory of intentionality. In this paper, I show, first, how this opposition can be traced largely to differences both in their respective understandings of what the theory of natural selection includes, and in their respective ‘pre-theoretic’ takes on the datum to be explained by a theory of intentionality. These differences, in tum, have been ‘pre-selected’ by contrasting outlooks on the general nature of the explanatory enterprise. While no final adjudication of these large issues is attempted, I argue, second, that it is important to distinguish two rather different questions about the relevance of natural selection to the nature of intentionality, and that, having done so, one can see that, from standpoints purely internal to their respective projects, Dennett and Fodor each in his own way misconstrues the relevance of natural selection.

By a ‘semantic determinant’ I will mean“…a structural feature of the world necessary for the determination of truth and falsity …,” or briefly, “Semantic determinants are things that determine valuations.” (Thomason (1972), pp. 301, 302), where such determination is functional and where valuations are themselves functions from sentences into truth values. A familar example is the ‘domain of individuals’ relative to which truth conditions are given for sentences containing “all,” “some,” and related expressions, where these can be construed as ‘quantifiers.’ Thus, e.g., “Some men are albinos” is true just in case at least one individual in the domain which is a man is also an albino. For this truth condition to be making a definite claim we must suppose that the domain is a definite (though not necessarily finite) set of individuals fixed in advance.