存在主义心理治疗的两个哲学教条

作为基本信念的两个哲学教条,即“存在先于本质”和“人是绝对自由”,导致存在主义心理治疗遭受各种诟病。前者造成人的存在与本质分裂,过分夸大个体选择意义和忽略人的现实性等问题;后者造成自由与必然关系的割裂,忽略自由的条件性和抽掉人的社会历史性等问题。基于对两个哲学教条的反思,存在主义心理治疗要求“抽象人”与“具体人”,“个体性”与“社会性”,“此在性”与“历史性”的辩证统一,从根本上实现对人的科学理解,进而提升实效性。

     

维特根斯坦与奎因:兼容而不对立的两种哲学

维特根斯坦和奎因都鄙视形而上学的和认识论的思辨,并且都花大力气批评传统的哲学概念和理论。但是他们在此批评之后继续从事哲学的路径是不同的。维特根斯坦把哲学等同于对传统哲学思维的批判,并且仅此而已。奎因则通过把哲学问题重塑为科学问题来尽其所能地挽救以往的哲学,并且对他重塑之后的问题做出回答。与人们对维特根斯坦和奎因的通常看法相反,我认为他们从事的哲学研究是互补的、并不是不兼容的。他们只是在表面上看是对立的;而实际上赞同其一方并不意味着拒绝另一方。     

Anomalous Monism: Oscillating between Dogmas

Davidson’s anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices.     

Minimal Empiricism Without Dogmas

John McDowell has defended a position called minimal empiricism, that aims to avoid the oscillation between traditional empiricism’s commitment to a set of contents working as external justifiers for our system of beliefs and a coherentist position where our thought receives no constraint from the world. We share McDowell’s dissatisfaction with both options, but find his minimal empiricism committed to the idea of a tribunal of experience where isolated contents are infused into our network of inferences. This commitment is prone to sceptical attacks and waters down McDowell’s holism. We propose to retain McDowell’s partial re-enchantment of nature—without appealing to McDowell’s Kantian conception of experience—, and argue that it is sufficient to avoid the oscillation and to make sense of the objectivity of thought.

Three Dogmas of Normativity

In this article, I identify and critically examine 3 dogmas of normativity that support a commonly accepted ‘Passivist View' of rational agency. I raise some questions about these dogmas, suggest what we should believe in their place, and moot an alternative ‘Activist View' of what it is to be a rational agent that grows out of rejection of the 3 dogmas. Underwriting the dogmas and the Passivist View, I suggest, is a deeply held but mistaken assumption that the normative domain is fundamentally akin to the nonnormative domain. Once we allow that the normative may be fundamentally unlike the nonnormative in certain key ways, a shift in our thinking about what it is to be rational becomes possible. I end by considering some implications of this paradigm shift in rationality from the passive to the active for various applied matters.     

Quine on translation

Against Quine's thesis of the ‘indeterminacy of translation’, in Word and Object, it is argued that the extension of terms, where determinable at all except by arbitrary decision, is determinable by empirical means other than comparison of ‘stimulus meaning’, that translation of terms does not presuppose prior translation of syncategoremata, that parallelisms of function of syncategoremata in different languages can in part be discovered on the basis of stimulus meanings, that it is incorrect to speak of bilinguals’ necessarily using ‘analytical hypotheses’, that in one form the thesis is correct and uncontroversial, that in another it is controversial but both unacceptable and at variance with Quine's own views on language.     

Quantifiers and propositional attitudes: Quine revisited

Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the problem of ‘suspended judgement with continued belief’. I argue that this criticism fails to take account of a crucial presupposition of Quine’s about the connection between thought and language. The aim of the paper is to defend the spirit of Quine’s account of attitudes by offering solutions to these two problems. See also chapters four and five of Word and Object (Quine, 1960) and ‘Intensions Revisited’ (Quine, 1977).