The missing link: A reply to Joseph Rychlak

We oppose Rychlak's (1991a, 1991b) claim that the view of mind entailed in artificial intelligence (AD and cognitive psychology is fundamentally at odds with Kelly's (1955) personal construct theory. Kelly's model and Al have much in common: They both are centrally concerned with representation, cognitive processes and their structure, and are ultimately empirical in their methodology. Many Al researchers have usefully embraced personal construct theory as a working conceptual framework, in this article, we examine Rychlak's assertions and identify several mistakes.     

走向多元对话的中国哲学--第十二届国际中国哲学会侧记

两年一度的国际中国哲学会——第12届国际中 国哲学会,于2001年7月20—24日,在中国 北京顺利召开。这是北京继1993年主办第八届国际中国哲学会之后,第二次主办这一国际性 的中国哲学会议。出席此次会议的专家、学者约有300余位,他们分别来自祖国大陆、台湾 、香港、澳门地区和美国、英国、德国、瑞典、加拿大、澳大利亚、日本、韩国等13个国家 ,是历届出席会议人数最多的一次。与会学者向大会提交的论文有250篇,有204位学者分别 在全体大会和分场会议上发言。本次会议共有4次全体大会,8次分组会议,共五十多个分会 场;分会场最多的…     

Dialogue among Friends: Toward a Discourse Ethic of Interpersonal Relationships

Despite clear parallels between Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics and recent scholarship in feminist ethics, feminists are often suspicious of discourse ethics and have kept themselves mostly separate from the field. By developing a sustained application of Habermas's discourse ethics to friendship, Keller demonstrates that feminist misgivings of discourse ethics are largely misplaced and that Habermas's theory can be used to develop a compelling moral phenomenology of interpersonal relations.     

Toward the Fullness of Christ: A Catholic Vision of Ecumenism

This article locates the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's recent document Dominus Iesus against the background of great ecumenical advance in North America and elsewhere and a series of highly encouraging ecumenical statements published by John Paul II. Its most contentious statement is a reiteration and clarification of the Vatican II teaching in Lumen Gentium that the church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church. It distinguishes among churches in the proper sense, with valid episcopate and eucharist, and defective ecclesial communities. The church of Christ cannot subsist in them but only in the Catholic Church. The article points out, nevertheless, that since all these bodies are recognized as having elements of the church, the operation of grace is still ecclesial and not individual and secondly that a pneumatologically orientated Christology sees ecumenism as a response in grace to the divine economy.     

Object-Relations Theory: A Dialogue with Donald B. Rinsley

Object-relations (O-R) theory expands traditional psychoanalytic thinking beyond psychiatric hospitals and “patients.” This approach focuses on emotional development that leads to normal or disturbed behavior. O-R theory is presented here to acquaint counselors with its basic concepts, its practical applications, and its impact on current psychological thought.     

Introduction: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution

During the 20th century two major ventures were launched to advance Darwinian evolution theory. Both involved historic visions and were vital steps for science and society, but then something happened on the way to the millennium. By mid-century the first venture had become a virtual scientific monopoly governed by the biology of the neoDarwinian paradigm. The second venture then set out in the 1980s to remedy the inadequacies of the neoDarwinian paradigm by widening the prospects for evolution theory. But overwhelmed by the underlying mismatch between scientific abstraction and evolutionary reality the first venture established, it soon settled into a fierce attempt to further expand the territory for the neoDarwinian monopoly into what became a militant ideology for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. This special issue of World Futures contains the papers of a small "task force" of the General Evolution Research Group that set out in the summer of 2000 to try to put behind us what increasingly looms as the "old" paradigm, as well as the "old" story, of evolution.     

Toward a Psychology of Human Agency

ABSTRACT— This article presents an agentic theory of human development, adaptation, and change. The evolutionary emergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. Social cognitive theory rejects a duality between human agency and social structure. People create social systems, and these systems, in turn, organize and influence people's lives. This article discusses the core properties of human agency, the different forms it takes, its ontological and epistemological status, its development and role in causal structures, its growing primacy in the coevolution process, and its influential exercise at individual and collective levels across diverse spheres of life and cultural systems.     

人类基因组计划在西方引发的人性观思考

人类基因组计划在西方世界引起了相当广泛深入的关于人性观的思考。分子生物学的研究成果正在重新塑造人们对人类进化史和人类本身的认识。基因工程、干细胞研究等前沿领域产生的问题促使人们转向西方的传统哲学去寻找思想资源。尽管遗传决定论的陈旧观点在大众文化中仍时有所见。新的基因组学研究已开始采纳一种更全面的、兼顾历史与社会文化因素的角度。     

Life and Death Matters: Losing a Sense of the Value of Human Beings

The essay combines a specific and a more general theme. In attacking ‘the doctrine of the sanctity of human life’ Singer takes himself thereby to be opposing the conviction that human life has special value. I argue that this conviction goes deep in our lives in many ways that do not depend on what Singer identifies as central to that ‘doctrine’, and that his attack therefore misses its main target. I argue more generally that Singer’s own moral philosophy affords only an impoverished and distorted sense of the value of human life and human beings. In purporting to dig below the supposedly illusion–ridden surface of our thinking about value, Singer in fact often leads us away from the robust terrain of our lived experience into rhetorical, and sometimes brutal, fantasy.     

B. F. Skinner's Utopian Vision: Behind and Beyond Walden Two

This paper addresses B. F. Skinner's utopian vision for enhancing social justice and human well-being in his 1948 novel, Walden Two. In the first part, we situate the book in its historical, intellectual, and social context of the utopian genre, address critiques of the book's premises and practices, and discuss the fate of intentional communities patterned on the book. The central point here is that Skinner's utopian vision was not any of Walden Two's practices, except one: the use of empirical methods to search for and discover practices that worked. In the second part, we describe practices in Skinner's book that advance social justice and human well-being under the themes of health, wealth, and wisdom, and then show how the subsequent literature in applied behavior analysis supports Skinner's prescience. Applied behavior analysis is a measure of the success of Skinner's utopian vision: to experiment.     

Toward A Process-Oriented Theory of Human Skilled Performance

Skilled perceptual-motor performance should be approached from a point of view of the processing operations performed by S in a skilled task. This perspective is emphasized in recent attempts to develop analytic or computer-simulation models of tracking tasks. These models are illustrated, and it is argued that a model that has a discrete correction compensatory path and a continuously programmed pursuit path may form one starting point for a more general representation. This representation needs to incorporate as yet undefined processing and storage units to handle coherence prediction, memorized movement patterns, and compensation for external system dynamics.     

Seasoned Reflections: A Dialogue With Clayton A. Morgan

This article is an interview with Clayton A. Morgan, a distinguished rehabilitation counselor educator. The interview focuses on Dr. Morgan's experience and insight in areas such as the helping relationship, noncounseling variables in counseling, creative thinking and applied imagination, selection of graduate students, and communication.