Dangerousness and death: a nexus in search of science and reason

An assertion that a capital offender will engage in future acts of criminal violence is a factor in determining "death worthiness" in many jurisdictions of the United States. The legislative conception and court affirmation of this issue as a capital consideration were products of the parole policy and prison capability of an earlier era as well as of the limitations of risk assessment methodology and findings at that time. The intuitive assumptions that support assertions of future dangerousness as a death penalty issue have been rendered irrelevant by changing prison conditions and parole policies or have been refuted by current findings. This raises important questions for a reasoned public policy in capital sentencing. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).     

A neglected triangle: Grandmother,mother, and daughter

This paper reports on exploratory research and therapeutic work with a neglected but highly important family triangle, the grandmother-mother-daughter triangle. Some characteristic relationships are described from a clinical sample of 18 daughters for whom such a triangle was important. The triangle may signal both problems and strengths for therapy and the daughters.     

The cosmological argument,sufficient reason,and why-questions

Summary To sum up the main results of this study: I have disentangled two distinct patterns of argument that Taylor runs together in his attempt to show that there is a reason or explanation for the world as a whole. The first is based on the causal dependency of things in the world, the second is based on their logical contingency. It seems to make the most sense of Taylor's discussion if we interpret him not as invoking the principle of sufficient reason at the crucial juncture, but as using these arguments to give backing to that principle by showing that it applies to the world in its totality. However, these arguments do not succeed in doing that. The first fails because it depends on a remote analogy between the world as a whole and the physical objects in the world. Concerning the second, an analysis of the logic of why-questions about the existence of things has revealed that the logical contingency of something is not a ground for thinking it has an explanation. The only promising interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason that we have found is as a causal principle pertaining to things in nature.     

The rationality of science,critical thinking,and science education

This paper considers two philosophical problems and their relation to science education. The first involves the rationality of science; it is argued here that the traditional view, according to which science is rational because of its adherence to (a non-standard conception of) scientific method, successfully answers one central question concerning science's rationality. The second involves the aims of education; here it is argued that a fundamental educational aim is the fostering of rationality, or its educational cognate, critical thinking. The ramifications of these two philosophical theses for science education are then considered, and a science education which takes reasons in science as its fundamental feature is sketched.It is notwhat the man of science believes that distinguishes him, buthow andwhy he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition (Russell 1945, p. 527).I believe ... that all teaching [in science] on the University level (and if possible below) should be training and encouragement in critical thinking (Popper 1970, pp. 52–53).This paper is mainly drawn from other publications. The first section is taken from my (1985); the second from (1988), Chapter 2; and the third from (1988), Chapter 6. Since what appears here are truncated versions of those discussions, I urge interested readers to look to those other works for fuller treatments of the issues here discussed.     

Seeing connections: reason,faith, and education

The article explores some of the congruencies of thought and resonances in phrasing in the work of Janet Erskine Stuart, John Henry Newman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These three writers have in common their resistance to philosophers of religion who are preoccupied with proposing arguments for the existence of God and grounds for believing in God. They also share a belief in the importance of assent and that reason and faith cannot be easily separated; that faith is always there in the background. The article is concerned primarily with the interrelationship between reason and faith across human practices and the relevance to education and how we live our lives.     

Review Essay: The Fate of Romance Over Time

Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time by Stephen A. Mitchell (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002, 224 pp.)

This review of Stephen Mitchell's posthumously published book details the intelligence, vitality, and emotional depth that so many found in Mitchell as writer, teacher, colleague, analyst, friend, and family member. The review also notes the loss that Mitchell's death brought to the lives of individuals and to the life of the psychoanalytic movement.     

Love,Sex, Romance,and Psychoanalytic Goals

There are many ways for people to have meaningful relationships and satisfying lives, which may differ from the implicit Freudian psychoanalytic ideal of the couple that sustains love, intimacy, romance, and genital sexual passion throughout life. An alternative is proposed, based on the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, which examines the ability of the person to find love, sexual satisfaction, security, and happiness in a combination and arrangement that feels satisfying and that allows for interpersonal intimacy without coercing or harming another person. Good clinical work also considers what John Money called the “lovemap,” a cluster of relational and sexual patterning for the individual that can be relatively enduring throughout the lifespan.     

Intuition, reason, and metacognition

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by a metacognitive experience, called the Feeling of Rightness (FOR), which can signal when additional analysis is needed. In separate experiments, reasoners completed one of four tasks: conditional reasoning (N = 60), a three-term variant of conditional reasoning (N = 48), problems used to measure base rate neglect (N = 128), or a syllogistic reasoning task (N = 64). For each task, participants were instructed to provide an initial, intuitive response to the problem along with an assessment of the rightness of that answer (FOR). They were then allowed as much time as needed to reconsider their initial answer and provide a final answer. In each experiment, we observed a robust relationship between the FOR and two measures of analytic thinking: low FOR was associated with longer rethinking times and an increased probability of answer change. In turn, FOR judgments were consistently predicted by the fluency with which the initial answer was produced, providing a link to the wider literature on metamemory. These data support a model in which a metacognitive judgment about a first, initial model determines the extent of analytic engagement.     

The Ethics and Economics of Middle Class Romance

This article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery—things that get in the way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women. Men are vain about their wealth, power and status; women about their appearance. Added to this is the fact that most middle class women are both uneducated and encouraged by the conduct literature of their day to be sentimental and irrational. The combined economic and moral considerations of Wollstonecraft and Smith show that there is very little room for love in commercial society as they conceived it.

     

Like mother,like daughter: similarities in narrative style

Children (2-5-year-olds and 8-13-year-olds) and their parents were independently interviewed about highly salient events: injuries serious enough to necessitate hospital emergency room treatment. Free recall narratives were scored using 14 measures of length, elaborative detail, cohesion, coherence,and provision of context. Mothers' narratives were more cohesive and coherent than fathers', and girls' narratives differed from boys' in parallel ways. Parent and child measures were correlated, and narratives of mother-daughter dyads (for the older daughters) showed striking similarity in all 5 properties, whereas there was no narrative similarity within father-son, mother-son, or father-daughter dyads. This suggests a special status for mother-daughter dyads in terms of how events come to be linguistically represented in narrative.