Jon Morgan

For many people across the world, experiences of depression include features that extend beyond the biopsychiatric model, which predominates in research on the relationship between religious and spiritual coping and depressive symptoms. How does attending to these diverse experiences of depression challenge our understanding of the dynamic between religiosity and depression? This paper presents thirteen qualitative interviews among economically marginalized mothers in the metro-Boston area. Analyzing these narratives presents a complex picture of the way chronic situational stress lies beneath their experiences of depression. From this expanded view of depressive experiences, we analyze the religious coping strategies of social support and meaning making to reveal the holistic, yet often ambiguous, ways these mothers engaged religious and spiritual resources to forge hope amidst chronic stress.

This paper articulates a developmental model for how individuals relate to religious difference. We begin by reviewing scholarly work on multicultural competencies and initial research on religious diversity. To provide a framework for our model, we explore the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity and its relationship to research within the psychology of religion. The review closes by examining and critiquing a preliminary model of interreligious sensitivity. From this multi-faceted review, we propose a developmental model of interreligious competence and suggest key psychological capacities that undergird the model. Two case studies ground the theory before we explore future directions for research. Throughout, we consider the philosophical issues of alterity that shape encounters with religious diversity. By developing this model of interreligious competence, this article aims to provide a framework to help psychologists and other human service professionals become more effective in their interactions across religious difference.

Those who take visual perception to be transparent face a puzzle: How does one know that she sees given that seeing is not itself an object of awareness? Most solutions to this puzzle are inferentialist in that they claim that one comes to believe that she sees on the basis of a belief that she has about the extra-mental environment. In this paper, I argue for a non-inferential alternative. I show that extant inferentialist accounts are committed to the claim that the contents of vision are inexpressible—quite literally, you can never say what you see. In light of this, I develop a non-inferential solution to the above puzzle that avoids the problem of inexpressibility. Rather than an inferential transition, I suggest that one may simply transition from the having of (but not an awareness of!) a particular visual experience to the belief that she sees thus-and-such. Properly understood, this non-inferential transition is perfectly reliable, always issuing in true belief, thereby underwriting one’s knowledge that she sees.

Many arguments against naïve realism are arguments against its corollary: disjunctivism. But there is a simpler argument—due to Mehta —that targets naïve realism directly. In broad strokes, the argument is the following. There are certain experiences that are, allegedly, in no way phenomenally similar. Nevertheless, naïve realism predicts that they are phenomenally similar. Hence, naïve realism is false. Mehta and Ganson successfully defend this argument from an objection raised by French and Gomes :451–460, 2016). However, all parties to this dispute have missed the real problem with Mehta’s argument. As I see it, the real problem is twofold. First, despite his claims to the contrary, the experiences Mehta cites are phenomenally similar. Moreover, finding experiences that are in no way phenomenally similar turns out to be a difficult task. Second, there are motivated versions of naïve realism that are immune to Mehta’s argument. The upshot is that even if Mehta’s argument is sound, the most that it can show is that one version of naïve realism is false.

A recent argument against content internalism bucks tradition: it abandons Twin-Earth-style thought experiments and instead claims that internalism is inconsistent with plausible principles relating belief contents and truth values. Call this the transparency argument. Here, it is shown that there is a structurally parallel argument against content internalism’s foil: content externalism. Preserving the transparency argument while fending off the parallel argument against externalism requires that content-determination and truth-value-determination are implausibly linked together and that eternalism about belief contents is true. Given these requirements, there may be reason to prefer simple, thought-experiment-based arguments against internalism – the sort of arguments that the transparency argument is meant to supersede.

Some have claimed that there are laws of appearance, i.e. in principle constraints on which types of sensory experiences are possible. Within a representationalist framework, these laws amount to restrictions on what a given experience can represent. I offer an in-depth defence of one such law and explain why prevalent externalist varieties of representationalism have trouble accommodating it. In light of this, I propose a variety of representationalism on which the spatial content of experience is determined by intrinsic features of conscious subjects. I conclude by considering an externalist-friendly reworking of my proposal, but suggest that the success of such a reworking is dubious.

Suppose that, while you are dreamlessly asleep, the sizes of and distances between all objects in the world are uniformly multiplied. Would you be able to detect this global inflation? Intuitively, no. But would your experience of size remain accurate? Intuitively, yes. On these grounds, some have concluded that our experiences do not represent size and instead represent modes of presentation of size. We are, in this sense, ‘cut off’ from the sizes of things in the external world. Here, I argue for a more modest conclusion: undetectable inflation reveals that our experiences represent only relative size. Call this view austere phenomenal relativism––or austere relativism, for short. I develop a framework to contrast austere relativism with its competitors, give an extended argument for the view, and then defuse a potential dilemma concerning the units in which our experiences represent size.