This study tests a model of students’ reflective thinking, perceived ideological bias among university faculty, and reactions to ideological bias in the college classroom. Participants were 187 undergraduates who completed the Reasoning About Current Issues Questionnaire and the Political Bias in the Classroom Survey. Structural equation modeling revealed that participants in lower ranges of re...

Research has led to broad agreement among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is happening now and likely to worsen. In contrast to scientific agreement, US public views remain deeply divided, largely along ideological lines. Science communication has been neutralised in some arenas by intense counter-messaging, but as adverse climate impacts become manifest they might intervene more p...

A major shortcoming of current models of ideological prejudice is that although they can anticipate the direction of the association between participants' ideology and their prejudice against a range of target groups, they cannot predict the size of this association. I developed and tested models that can make specific size predictions for this association. A quantitative model that used the pe...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a heterogeneous assortment of groups and individuals articulated scientific, political, and philosophical objections to vaccination. They engaged in an ongoing battle for public opinion with medical and scientific elites, who responded with their own counterpropaganda. These ideological struggles reflected fear that scientific advances were being p...

Subjects completed a contingency learning task that involved estimating the degree of personal control exerted over target light onset. In Experiment 1, subjects worked on two identical apparatuses in an attempt to turn on the target light by pressing or not pressing a button. Both apparatuses produced noncontingent onsets of the target light either frequently or infrequently. Half of the subje...

Ideology is a systemic property of cognition central to the transmission and actualization of beliefs. Ideologies take many forms including religious, philosophical, popular and scientific. They play a central role in both personal identity and in the way society holds itself together. Therefore, it is important to understand how to model identities. The article introduces ideologies as a funct...

Gödel claimed that Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is ‘what becomes of the theory of types if certain superfluous restrictions are removed’. The aim of this paper is to develop a clearer understanding of Gödel’s remark, and of the surrounding philosophical terrain. In connection with this, we discuss some technical issues concerning infinitary type theories and the programme of developing the seman...

In two papers in the mid-seventies, Quine has discussed an ontological debacle, the reduction of ontology to an ontology of pure sets only. This debacle, which weakened Quine’s interest in ontology, is the natural outcome of ontological relativity, or, more precisely, the proxy-function argument. It is explained how Quine unavoidably came to this conclusion. Moreover, it is argued that the resu...

This paper extends Ellis and Stimson’s (Ideology in America. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2012) study of the operational-symbolic paradox using issue-level measures of ideological incongruence based on respondent positions and symbolic labels for these positions across 14 issues. Like Ellis and Stimson, we find that substantial numbers—over 30 %—of Americans experience conflicted conser...