Social Constructionist Approach to Suffering and Healing: Juxtaposing Cassell, Gergen and Kleinman

To understand the experiences of suffering (overwhelming somatic pain or illness and its anticipation and other forms of severe distress arising in the socio-moral context) and facilitate healing (developing an enabling meaning and value for one??s experiences when faced with suffering) have been the focus of medicine as a social institution throughout human history. However, the goals of Western biomedicine in the last few centuries shifted from taking care of these experiential concerns of the sufferers to predominantly the diagnosis and treatment of the symptoms of a disease. This article attempts to illustrate how the assumptions of the social constructionist paradigm (with its deconstructionist and reconstructionist facets highlighted in the writings of Kenneth J. Gergen) serve as a suitable metatheoretical framework to understand human experiences of suffering and healing. A critical review of the writings of Eric J. Cassell and Arthur Kleinman on endorsing and researching such experiences resulted in four themes that reaffirmed the utility of this new paradigm. These themes help comprehend that biomedicine??s ontological claims may enhance human suffering, suffering and healing experiences are socio-historically contextualized, such experiences are performances within human interaction and dialogic partnership between the researcher and the participant becomes a meaningful medium to study such experiences.     

关于"自我"的社会建构论学说及其启示

从后现代主义的立场出发,社会建构论认为传统心理学有关自我的研究都是本质主义的．社会建构论以“关系的自我”取代“本质的自我”,认为自我并非行为背后的精神实体,而是人际互动的产物,是一种文化的建构物。这种观点对于我们正确认识自我具有一定的启发意义。     

Pieces of Minds in Psycholinguistics: Steven Pinker,Kenneth Wexler,and Noam Chomsky A Series of Interviews Conducted by Jean A. Rondal

This is the third of a series of interviews featuring Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and Kenneth Wexler, three giant figures in the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. The first two interviews appeared in earlier issues of this journal (Vol. 28, Issue 4, pp. 459–480; Vol. 29, Issue 1, pp. 85–104). Kenneth Wexler teaches and does his experimental work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is well known for his innovative work on language learnability (i.e. the problem of how correct linguistic representations can be attained given the limited data available to the child), which has led to considerable changes in linguistic and psycholinguistic theories and research orientations. More recently, Professor Wexler (in association with Hagit Borer) developed what they call a maturation theory of syntax, suggesting basically, in opposition to the continuity hypothesis, that the formal principles available to the child to fix his grammar mature (i.e. different principles are available at different stages of development). In the interview, Kenneth Wexler speaks about his learnability work, its origins, and how he sees linguistic and psycholinguistic research and theories today. He comments on questions about his maturational point of view in syntax development. The interview took place in Irvine (California) in May of 1988, and was subsequently revised. I am very grateful to Ken Wexler for his kind collaboration. Along with the text of the interview, the reader will find some information on Professor Wexler's background as well as a selected list of his publications.     

The PMS Illusion: Social Cognition Maintains Social Construction

This article reports the results of a preliminary study of ways that self-serving biases contribute to the maintenance of the cultural stereotype of the premenstrual woman. Self-serving biases such as illusory optimism and the false uniqueness effect lead individuals to believe that they are better than average and less likely to have negative experiences. Thus, even though individual women’s premenstrual symptoms are mild to moderate, they accept the stereotype because they believe that other women’s symptoms are worse than their own. Participants were 92 undergraduate women from two small colleges in southern New England. They completed measures of optimism, locus of control, and premenstrual symptoms and answered a series of questions about the incidence of PMS. Participants showed a significant tendency to believe that other women’s premenstrual symptoms are worse than their own. In addition, women who were high in optimism were significantly less likely to believe that they could be diagnosed with PMS, and they had significantly lower scores on the pain and behavior change subscales of the Menstrual Distress Questionnaire than did those low in optimism.     

Contentious Freedom: Sex Work and Social Construction

In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but it also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women (who may choose to engage in sex work) and the freedom of others (who may be harmed by the contribution of such work to the social construction of categories such as “women” and “sex”).     

Social Construction and Grounding

The aim of this paper is to bring recent work on metaphysical grounding to bear on the phenomenon of social construction. It is argued that grounding can be used to analyze social construction and that the grounding framework is helpful for articulating various claims and commitments of social constructionists, especially about social identities, e.g., gender and race. The paper also responds to a number of objections that have been (or could be) leveled against the application of grounding to social construction from Elizabeth Barnes (2014), Mari Mikkola (2015), and Jessica Wilson (2014).     

论社会公正与社会发展

社会公正与社会发展密切相关。以目的与手段的统一、权利与义务的统一、平等与差异的统一、自由与秩序的统一、竞争与协作的统一、民主与集中的统一、内容与程序的统一为特征的新时代的社会公正是社会发展的核心价值,是确立社会发展目标,构建社会发展框架的根本原则,也是保持社会活力和推动社会发展的强大力量。坚持社会公正与社会发展的统一是社会公正理论进步和社会健康发展的需要。     

Gender, Personality, and Prejudice: The Display of Authoritarianism and Social Dominance in Interviews with College Men and Women

One hundred fifty-five men and 256 women were assessed on authoritarianism, social dominance, and other personality traits. Authoritarianism showed few correlations with personality measures; however, social dominance correlated with disagreeableness, coldness, vindictiveness, and aggressiveness for all participants and with masculine interests for men. Ninety-three questionnaire participants (47 men and 46 women) were interviewed and rated on various personality traits. Both authoritarianism and social dominance were highly judgable from interviews. Authoritarian individuals, especially men, were judged to be defensive, maladjusted, and prejudiced. Socially dominant individuals, especially women, were judged to be disagreeable, cold, and prejudiced. Authoritarianism correlated particularly strongly with negative attitudes toward homosexuality, and social dominance with the endorsement of gender inequality. Results are discussed in terms of two kinds of dispositional prejudice.     

On Kantians and Pragmatists: Kenneth Baynes's Habermas

In this article I lay out Kenneth Baynes's interpretation of Habermas's social and political philosophy, and develop three lines of criticism. The first concerns the question of whether, and if so in what respect, Habermas's political theory counts as a critical social theory. I argue that it is not clear in what sense Habermas's political theory is a ‘critical’ social theory, and that Baynes's interpretation throws little light on this issue. The second related issue is to what extent it can be fairly claimed that on Habermas's account of democracy, political legitimacy rests on a “core morality”. While there is a possible reconstruction of Habermas along these lines, I argue that it conflicts with the central tenets of Habemras's political theory. Finally, I question whether Baynes is right to align Habermas's ideal of public reason so closely with Rawls's.