结构实在论评析

The epistemological version of structural realism, proposed by Cao Tianyu, has great influence in the philosophy of science. Syntheses has published a special volume discussing the topic. Cao criticizes anti-realism, as well as the epistemic and ontic versions of structural realism. From the concepts of structure, ontology, and construction, he analyzes the objectivity of scientific theories as having five aspects: construction, historicity, holism, revision, and revolution. This paper systematically analyzes and comments on Cao's structural realism. The author agrees with his criticism of the under-determination thesis, is neutral to his argument against ontological discontinuity, and questions his universal language argument. Translated by Yu Jinlong from Ziran Bianzhengfa Yanjiu 自然辩证法研究 (Studies in Dialectics of Nature), 2006, (11): 34–38     

Moderate structural realism about space-time

This paper sets out a moderate version of metaphysical structural realism that stands in contrast to both the epistemic structural realism of Worrall and the—radical—ontic structural realism of French and Ladyman. According to moderate structural realism, objects and relations (structure) are on the same ontological footing, with the objects being characterized only by the relations in which they stand. We show how this position fares well as regards philosophical arguments, avoiding the objections against the other two versions of structural realism. In particular, we set out how this position can be applied to space-time, providing for a convincing understanding of space-time points in the standard tensor formulation of general relativity as well as in the fibre bundle formulation.     

Against digital ontology

The paper argues that digital ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine) should be carefully distinguished from informational ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is structural), in order to abandon the former and retain only the latter as a promising line of research. Digital vs. analogue is a Boolean dichotomy typical of our computational paradigm, but digital and analogue are only “modes of presentation” of Being (to paraphrase Kant), that is, ways in which reality is experienced or conceptualised by an epistemic agent at a given level of abstraction. A preferable alternative is provided by an informational approach to structural realism, according to which knowledge of the world is knowledge of its structures. The most reasonable ontological commitment turns out to be in favour of an interpretation of reality as the totality of structures dynamically interacting with each other. The paper is the first part (the pars destruens) of a two-part piece of research. The pars construens, entitled “A Defence of Informational Structural Realism”, is developed in a separate article, also published in this journal.     

Experience,action and representations: Critical realism and the enactive theory of vision

This paper defends a dynamic model of the way in which perception is integrated with action, a model I refer to as ‘the navigational account’. According to this account, employing vision and other forms of distance perception, a creature acquires information about its surroundings via the senses, information that enables it to select and navigate routes through its environment, so as to attain objects that satisfy its needs. This form of perceptually guided activity should be distinguished from other kinds of semi-automatic responses to visual stimuli that do not necessarily involve conscious experiences. It essentially involves inner states, which involve both the awareness of phenomenal qualities, and also a representational component. The navigational account is compared here with the enactive approach to perception, which opposes the view that perceptual experiences are inner states. This paper argues that a full account of perception raises a number of different questions. One central explanatory project concerns questions about the kinds of processes that currently enable a creature to identify and respond appropriately to distant objects: the answer, it is argued, lies in acknowledging the role of conscious inner representations in guiding navigational behaviour through complex environments. The fact that perception and action are interdependent does not conflict with the claim that inner representational states comprise an essential stage in visual processing.

Differential reactions of men and women to realism,physical damage,and emotionality in violent films

Community college students rated brief segments of violence from films selected to represent a variety of approaches to the depiction of violence. Men and women differed substantially on these sequences, men seeing them as more enjoyable, amusing, realistic, and emotional. Men also showed less inclination to restrict showing of such sequences to children, on television, or by X-rating. While no sex differences appeared in ratings of suffering or overall appraisals of violence, women' enjoyment ratings declined precipitously for the films rated as depicting more suffering, while those of men did not. However, both men and women saw more violence in sequences emphasizing suffering of characters, even when this ran counter to actual physical damage depicted. For men, enjoyment of these violent media excerpts and self-reports of recent physical violence were essentially unrelated, while women showed highly significant positive relations for the two variables. These findings suggest that the dynamics of violence for men and women may be different enough to make differential analysis by sex an especially productive research tactic.     

A SYSTEMS MODEL OF SPIRITUALITY

Within the scientific study of spirituality there are substantial ambiguities and uncertainties about relevant concepts, terms, evidences, methods, and relationships. Different disciplinary approaches reveal or emphasize different aspects of spirituality, such as outcomes, behaviors, skills, ambitions, and beliefs. I argue that these aspects interdepend in a way that constitutes a “systems model of spirituality.” This model enables a more holistic understanding of the nature of spirituality, and suggests a new definition that disambiguates spirituality from related concepts such as religion, cultural sophistication, and prosocial behavior in animals. It also exposes important open questions about the nature of spirituality. To support the emerging scientific approach to the study of spirituality, I propose the development of a “philosophy of spirituality” that can clarify the conceptual terrain, identify important research directions, and facilitate a comprehensive and interdisciplinary investigation into the nature, validity, and implications of spirituality's conceptual and practical entailments.     

Clarifying the role of impulsivity in dietary restraint: A structural equation modeling approach

This study was designed to clarify the relationship between the four dimensions of impulsivity in Whiteside and Lynam’s (2001) model and the two aspects of dietary restraint (Concern for Dieting and Weight Fluctuation) in a non-clinical sample. Data were collected from a volunteer community sample (N = 216) of women who responded to two self-report instruments related to impulsivity (UPPS Impulsive Behavior Scale, Whiteside & Lynam, 2001) and dietary restraint (Restraint Scale, Polivy, Herman, & Warsh, 1978). A structural equation model was tested. The model provided a good fit to the data (χ²/df = 1.64, p < .0001, RMSEA = 0.054, 90% CI = 0.050–0.058, p-value for test of close fit (RMSEA > 0.05) = .035) and revealed that Concern for Dieting was positively related to Urgency (standardized β = 0.25, p < .01). Weight Fluctuation was related to lack of Perseverance (standardized β = 0.25, p < .01) and tended to relate to Sensation Seeking (standardized β = 0.17, p = .056). Urgency and lack of Perseverance were found to play a significant role in predicting Concern for Dieting and Weight Fluctuation.     

Near-Death Experience,Consciousness, and the Brain: A New Concept about the Continuity of Our Consciousness Based on Recent Scientific Research on Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest

In this article first some general aspects of near-death experience will be discussed, followed by questions about consciousness and its relation to brain function. Details will be described from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet in 2001. In this study it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, or pharmacological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest. Neurophysiology in cardiac arrest and in a normal functioning brain will be explained. Finally, implications for consciousness studies will be discussed, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our consciousness. Scientific study of NDE pushes us to the limits of our medical and neurophysiologic ideas about the range of human consciousness and mind–brain relation.     

Calibration of sensory and cognitive judgments: A single model for both

In a recent issue of this journal, Winman and Juslin (34 , 135–148, 1993) present a model of the calibration of subjective probability judgments for sensory discrimination tasks. They claim that the model predicts a pervasive underconfidence bias observed in such tasks, and present evidence from a training experiment that they interpret as supporting the notion that different models are needed to describe judgment of confidence in sensory and in cognitive tasks. The model is actually part of the more comprehensive decision variable partition model of subjective probability calibration that was originally proposed in Ferrell and McGoey (Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 26 , 32–53, 1980). The characteristics of the model are described and it is demonstrated that the model does not predict underconfidence, that it is fully compatible with the overconfidence frequently found in calibration studies with cognitive tasks, and that it well represents experimental results from such studies. It is concluded that only a single model is needed for both types of task.     

Interpersonal process in psychotherapy through the lens of the structural analysis of social behavior

As psychotherapy research focuses more and more on mechanisms of therapeutic change, increased attention has naturally been directed at therapy process. Over the past several decades, a variety of researchers have successfully applied Benjamin's 1974 Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB) to the study of in-session psychotherapy events. This system for conceptualizing and analyzing interpersonal and intrapsychic processes has been shown to provide theoretically rigorous and empirically tractable instantiations of both helpful and hindering therapeutic exchanges. In this article the therapeutic alliance is conceived in terms of interpersonal processes as demarcated according to the SASB. This article also provides a review of SASB's wide-ranging applications to observing and studying the therapeutic relationship, therapy process, and client outcome. Also discussed are several data analytic and methodological considerations related to the SASB model and several new ancillary measures based on the SASB. Finally, the applied and clinical utility of the SASB system is discussed in light of a variety of contemporary empirical findings.     

Antecedents of mentoring support: a meta-analysis of individual,relational, and structural or organizational factors

The value of mentoring is growing substantially as organizations take a renewed interest in employee development to better survive in the dynamic and competitive market today. In the wake of this renewed interest, this meta-analysis was conducted to quantitatively review the multi-level antecedents (e.g., individual, relational, and structural/organizational) of different kinds of mentoring support (e.g., career, psychosocial, role modeling) in organizational settings and to revisit the theoretical underpinnings of each antecedent. Results indicated some key antecedents of mentoring support at individual (e.g., protégé's proactivity, protégé's learning goal orientation, mentor's transformational leadership), relational (e.g., affect based trust, perceived similarity), and structural/organizational levels (e.g., organizational support for mentoring, supervisory mentoring). Recommendations for future research and organizational practice of mentoring are presented.     

易卦的序结构数学模型在对策理论中的应用

通过分析人类的基本行为元素,并借助于卦象序结构数学模型的建立,从而初步讨论了一般谋略方法的产生和起源,以及谋略对策的系统核心元素结构;最后讨论了它们在应用中的初步分类.     

Toward a New Understanding of Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: A Syllabus

Adjustments in the understanding of the relation of religion and science since the Enlightenment require new considerations in epistemology and metaphysics. Constructionist theories of knowledge and process theories of metaphysics better provide the new paradigms needed both to preserve and to limit the significance of each field of human understanding. In a course taught at Moravian College, this perspective is applied to the concepts of nature, reality, and the sacred, with a view to showing how we might develop one such paradigm. Key resources for this task are to be found in the work of artist René Magritte; theologians Langdon Gilkey, Arthur Peacocke, and John Haught; philosophers and historians of science Alfred North Whitehead, Timothy Ferris, Ernan Mc Mullin, and Ian Barbour; philosopher of religion Paul Ricoeur; and historians of religion Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade. Such a new paradigm calls for an ecologically sensitive religious awareness which is both sacramental and holistic.     

Aesthetics as evaluative forms of agency to perceive and design reality: A reply to aesthetic realism

Following a naturalist-realist point of view, this paper attempts to contribute to the metaphysical question of whether or not reality includes aesthetics. During evolution, cognitive agents have constructed (goal-directed) regulatory abilities forming anticipatory contents in the form of feelings regarding opportunities for interaction. These feelings are considered to be the fundamental part of an evaluative or (what in this paper considered as aesthetic) behavior through which agents show a preference to aspects of their external world. Thus, ‘aesthetic’ denotes an agential behavior based on an organization of processes integrated in a form that identifies, evaluates, and compares sources of interaction-success or error in specific aspects of external reality. While agents approach the same aspects of reality as they all interact with the same world, our claim is that aesthetic normativity cannot be an objective feature of this reality. This model overcomes problems of correspondence in the sense that an agent's actions and thoughts ought to react to any pre-given (aesthetic) quality or norm, while at the same time it emphasizes the self-directedness of aesthetic behavior that enables the development of creative forms of cognition.     

A causal model theory of the meaning of cause, enable, and prevent

The verbs cause , enable , and prevent express beliefs about the way the world works. We offer a theory of their meaning in terms of the structure of those beliefs expressed using qualitative properties of causal models, a graphical framework for representing causal structure. We propose that these verbs refer to a causal model relevant to a discourse and that "A causes B" expresses the belief that the causal model includes a link from A to B. "A enables/allows B" entails that the model includes a link from A to B, that A represents a category of events necessary for B, and that an alternative cause of B exists. "A prevents B" entails that the model includes a link from A to B and that A reduces the likelihood of B. This theory is able to account for the results of four experiments as well as a variety of existing data on human reasoning.     

A structural determinant of hemispheric processing of pictorial material

A qualitative difference of processing type by the two cerebral hemispheres was demonstrated in a picture arrangement task which involved a concept of temporal sequence. Half the sequences were designed to rely on analytic categorical processes and half on configurational processes. The subjects were patients with unilateral hemispheric damage of vascular etiology. Using two measures of performance, latency and errors, patients with right hemisphere damage were seen to be relatively impaired on those sequences designed to employ hypothesized right hemisphere (configurational) processing and patients with left hemisphere damage were seen to be relatively impaired on those sequences designed to employ hypothesized left hemisphere (categorical) processing.     

A better best system account of lawhood

Perhaps the most significant contemporary theory of lawhood is the Best System (/MRL) view on which laws are true generalizations that best systematize knowledge. Our question in this paper will be how best to formulate a theory of this kind. We’ll argue that an acceptable MRL should (i) avoid inter-system comparisons of simplicity, strength, and balance, (ii) make lawhood epistemically accessible, and (iii) allow for laws in the special sciences. Attention to these problems will bring into focus a useful menu of novel MRL theories, some of which solve problems the original MRL theory could not. Hence we conceive of the paper as moving toward a better Best System theory of laws.

Stability of aggression among adolescents over time: A south African study

In a study spanning 5 years, data were collected on the aggressiveness of over 1,700 male and female subjects. Subjects who were the more aggressive grade 8 (standard 6) pupils at the beginning of the study were discovered to be the more aggressive grade 12 (standard 10) pupils. It is concluded that, whatever its causes, aggression can be viewed as a persistent trait that may be influenced by situational variables but reveals substantial consistency over time. The findings of studies by Huesmann and Eron in the United States as well as Olweus in Scandinavia were thus supported in this South African investigation.     

Recent Consideration of World Government in the IR Literature: A Critical Appraisal

Because recent contributions on world government in the international relations (IR) literature have focused on relatively nebulous issues, they are of limited usefulness for illuminating whether or not an actual world government would advance the human prospect. This question cannot be sensibly addressed unless in the light of a specific institutional proposal. Along the authority-effectiveness continuum separating the relatively ineffectual existent United Nations on the one hand, and the traditional world federalist ideal of the omnipotent world state on the other, there are intermediate possibilities not subject to the respective disadvantages of the extreme endpoints of this continuum.