Rational requirements for suspended judgment

How does rationality bind the agnostic, that is, the one who suspends judgment about whether a given proposition is true? In this paper I explore two alternative ways of establishing what the rational requirements of agnosticism are: the Lockean–Bayesian framework and the doxastic logic framework. Each of these proposals faces strong objections. Fortunately, however, there is a rich kernel of requirements of agnosticism that are vindicated by both of them. One can then endorse the requirements that belong to that kernel without thereby committing oneself to the problematic implications that stem from either of the aforementioned proposals.

Gregory of Tours and the Decem Libri Historiarum between Religious Belief and Rhetorical Habit

This study examines the rhetorical structure of the Decem libri historiarum of Gregory of Tours. Whereas previous studies have drawn attention to Gregory's habit of pairing parallel narrative threads for the purpose of comparing what he considered to be appropriate and inappropriate behavior, the inconsistencies in that rhetorical strategy (e.g., lack of criticism for Clovis' parricidal policies of expansion and uncharacteristic moments of praise for Chilperic, the “Herod and Nero” of Gregory's lifetime) have been attributed to Gregory's penchant for the ironic or satirical. This study takes the view that Gregory purposefully constructed complicated, and at times contradictory, profiles for the dramatis personae of his history in order to generate a sense of suspended judgment for which he would become the ultimate arbiter at the end of an individual's life. This style of narrating the lives of individuals made Gregory himself a dramatis persona in his own history by investing him with absolute interpretative authority and authority over the construction of historical memory. Gregory's careful development of that authority was itself a strategy for survival in a very fluid, and often volatile, political environment.

Gassendi as Critic of Descartes

Pierre Gassendi is best known today as a critic of Descartes. This chapter surveys Gassendi’s Objections to the Meditations, Descartes’s Reply, and Gassendi’s Counter-Objections in the Disquisitio Metaphysica. The central theme of this debate is methodology. Gassendi thinks that the methodology of the Meditations is hopeless: nobody can genuinely clear their mind of preconceived opinions, and if they did, they would not have discovered new foundations for the sciences, but instead be trapped in a state of suspended judgment. Gassendi’s critique is not entirely fair to Descartes, and Descartes’s reply fails to take seriously the main points of the critique.

Corrections for Criterion Reliability in Validity Generalization: A False Prophet in a Land of Suspended Judgment

The results of meta-analytic (MA) and validity generalization (VG) studies continue to be impressive. In contrast to earlier findings that capped the variance accounted for in job performance at roughly 16%, many recent studies suggest that a single predictor variable can account for between 16 and 36% of the variance in some aspect of job performance. This article argues that this “enhancement” in variance accounted for is often attributable not to improvements in science but to a dumbing down of the standards for the values of statistics used in correction equations. With rare exceptions, applied researchers have suspended judgment about what is and is not an acceptable threshold for criterion reliability in their quest for higher validities. We demonstrate a statistical dysfunction that is a direct result of using low criterion reliabilities in corrections for attenuation. Corrections typically applied to a single predictor in a VG study are instead applied to multiple predictors. A multiple correlation analysis is then conducted on corrected validity coefficients. It is shown that the corrections often used in single predictor studies yield a squared multiple correlation that appears suspect. Basically, the multiple predictor study exposes the tenuous statistical foundation of using abjectly low criterion reliabilities in single predictor VG studies. Recommendations for restoring scientific integrity to the meta-analyses that permeate industrial–organizational (I–O) psychology are offered.