Christopher Berger

Lonergan has much to offer political philosophy, but as a Jesuit and theologian, the specter of theocracy haunts him. This suspicion is misplaced. To make this case, I focus on Lonergan’s use of the word “conversion.” Lonergan is a religious universalist for whom conversion is a technical term, the meaning of which ranges far beyond switching labels or religious affiliations. Communities and institutions must be converted to be legitimate, but this means conversion to a specific value goal rather than conversion to a specific religion. Nothing in Lonergan requires that all institutions be converted to religious institutions – society would then be non-functional. Religious institutions have a role, but government need not be religious for religious institutions to play that role. Rather, awareness of and adherence to the normative scale of values is implicit in the operation of any legitimate institutional subcommunity, no matter the value goal it pursues.

Can one be fooled into believing that one intended an action that one in fact did not intend? Past experimental paradigms have demonstrated that participants, when provided with false perceptual feedback about their actions, can be fooled into misperceiving the nature of their intended motor act. However, because veridical proprioceptive/perceptual feedback limits the extent to which participants can be fooled, few studies have been able to answer our question and induce the illusion to intend. In a novel paradigm addressing this question, participants were instructed to move a line on the computer screen by use of a phony brain–computer interface. Line movements were actually controlled by computer program. Demonstrating the illusion to intend, participants reported more intentions to move the line when it moved frequently than when it moved infrequently. Consistent with ideomotor theory, the finding illuminates the intimate liaisons among ideomotor processing, the sense of agency, and action production