环境美学的兴起与自然美的难题

一 伴随方兴未艾的环境运动,自然审美(the aesthetic appreciation of nature)已成为当今人们新的审美时尚.与此相应,环境美学(environmental aesthetics)成为当今美学的热门话题.     

Human Nature and Moral Sprouts: Mencius on the Pollyanna Problem

This article responds to a common criticism of Aristotelian naturalism known as the Pollyanna Problem, the objection that Aristotelian naturalism, when combined with recent empirical research, generates morally unacceptable conclusions. In developing a reply to this objection, I draw upon the conception of human nature developed by the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, and build up an account of ethical naturalism that provides a satisfying response to the Pollyanna Problem while also preserving what is most attractive about Aristotelian naturalism.     

Extent of Hostility in Educated Indian Unemployed Youth: A Micro Analysis

This study was designed to ascertain the level of hostility in educated unemployed youth (N = 150) as against employed youth (N = 150) at micro level by employing an Indian adaptation of the Buss-Durkee Hostility Scale. Results of statistical comparison revealed a significant difference between the two groups in terms of hostility and its various dimensions barring indirect aggression, negativism, and verbal aggression. However, both the groups tended to have a moderate amount of hostility and its dimensions. The results further showed the relative standing of the two groups on the dimensions of hostility, positing the job-seekers as possessing a high sense of guilt and low indirect aggression, and the employed youth, being high on irritability, and, like their counterparts, low on indirect aggression. Also, the study indicated a correlation among the dimensions of hostility with one another and with the total scale scores.     

规定问题的哲学分析

在现代科学和哲学的理论深处,描述问题使作为其前提的规定全面凸显。而大数据基础上的创构,则使在先规定的研究居于优先地位。作为人类为认识对象所作的关于量和质、方式、方法和模式等的规范性设定,规定成了哲学研究至关重要的内容。在语言学和哲学中,"规定主义"和"描述主义"构成了一种强大的张力。语言学中的规定主义致思,反映了语言的生命就是语言的使用。在信息文明时代,语法的变异甚至成了网络语言的标志性特征。现代科学中的规定问题集中凸显在量子力学中,它表明关于自然的科学理论只是对它的描述,从而描述的规定基础问题典型地表现在当代自然科学前沿。而在当代哲学前沿,由于涉及对象的内容,约定论和预设理论研究事实上转向规定问题的哲学研究。由于所有理论基石都具有规定的性质,规定研究将涉及规则和规律的共同哲学基础。关于规定问题的哲学分析表明,随着人类认识的发展,特别是大数据开启的信息文明的到来,关于规定的反思日益凸显,规定论研究呼之欲出。规定论研究的内容主要有规定的形成、规定的性质、规定的发展和层次、规定的合理性和合理化等。     

The Nature of External Representations in Problem Solving

This article proposes a theoretical framework for external representation based problem solving. The Tic-Tac-Toe and its isomorphs are used to illustrate the procedures of the framework as a methodology and test the predictions of the framework as a functional model. Experimental results show that the behavior in the Tic-Tac-Toe is determined by the directly available information in external and internal representations in terms of perceptual and cognitive biases, regardless of whether the biases are consistent with, inconsistent with, or irrelevant to the task. It is shown that external representations are not merely inputs and stimuli to the internal mind and that they have much more important functions than mere memory aids. A representational determinism is suggested—the form of a representation determines what information can be perceived, what processes can be activated, and what structures can be discovered from the specific representation.     

Heuristic research as a vehicle for personal and professional development

This paper reports one aspect of a more extensive narrative inquiry into how two counsellors experienced their involvement in heuristic research and the contribution it made to their personal development. The paper is located within stories of Becoming a Reflexive Researcher: Using Our Selves in Research (2004) and shows how reflexive conversations enabled participants to co‐construct meaning and create what Rosanna Hertz called ‘reflexive knowledge’ (1996).     

Homeokinetics/Homeodynamics: A Physical Heuristic for Life and Complexity

This essay addresses the puzzlement, the missing piece, sensed when attempts are made to build a bridge from the synchronic, informational genotype to the diachronic, dynamic phenotype—a regular mapping that seems to be extraphysical. There is no formal, dynamic foundation for the bridge. Albert Einstein, Max Delbrück, and Erwin Schrödinger all expressed acute awareness of limitations of contemporary physics when considering biology because physics addresses much simpler sysems. As a proposed remedy, a new physical heuristic, homeokinetics, developed by Arthur Iberall and Harry Soodak (and later recast for biology by me as homeodynamics) is introduced here as a foundation for comprehending energy flows and transformations in complex systems, including those in metabolic networks of living systems. Their individual dynamic stability is flexible and marginal—it must allow for adaptations and changes in physiological and behavioral states to occur in an orderly fashion as external circumstances change. At the population level, stability must allow for evolvability of chemical networks that have energized terrestrial living systems for about 3.9 billion years. Homeokinetics/homeodynamics emphasizes that persistent, marginally stable metabolic networks, as open thermodynamic systems, necessarily organize energy processing as cyclic, physical action modes. Conceptually, that organization is under 2 kinds of biological time pressure—time as a cycle that daily closes the thermodynamic books and time as an arrow orthogonally pressing the cyles into the future, creating joint time as a helix. In most animals, after maturity, the helix is additionally shaped into a tapered ellipsoid by a senesence process that gains influence as dynamic degrees of freedom are frozen out by the constructions of development.     

Why the Negation Problem Is Not a Problem for Expressivism

The Negation Problem states that expressivism has insufficient structure to account for the various ways in which a moral sentence can be negated. We argue that the Negation Problem does not arise for expressivist accounts of all normative language but arises only for the specific examples on which expressivists usually focus. In support of this claim, we argue for the following three theses: 1) a problem that is structurally identical to the Negation Problem arises in non‐normative cases, and this problem is solved once the hidden quantificational structure involved in such cases is uncovered; 2) the terms ‘required’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’ can also be analyzed in terms of hidden quantificational structure, and the Negation Problem disappears once this hidden structure is uncovered; 3) the Negation Problem does not arise for normative language that has no hidden quantificational structure. We conclude that the Negation Problem is not really a problem about expressivism at all but is rather a feature of the quantificational structure of the required, permitted, and forbidden.     

推理的再认启发模式研究

采用“高校配对比较任务”和“城市配对比较任务”检验Goldstein等2002年提出的推理的再认启发模型,结果证明:人们在相关信息不足、知识和时间都有限的情况下,采用再认启发策略进行推理的比率相当高,并且出现了“少即是多”效应。本研究还探讨了Goldstein等没有考虑的因素,结果发现:在压力作用下,人们仍然会采用再认启发策略进行推理;再认启发中被试会运用无关信息进行推理;在操作时间上也会出现“少即是多”效应。     

宽容:在人性比较中透析

在观念学意义上,宽容通常被用来描述对异己的思想和行为容忍的价值准则."宽容"观念被理解的过程,实际上也是附加上不同人性观照、价值立场、人生态度和政治策略的过程.研究核心概念、词汇的语义演变是观念史研究的一个重要传统[1],从语用学的立场分析,一个单词进入不同类型的历史话语系统时,其实映照着特定的社会、历史过程,词义的删减和增生、曲折与转化也是不同价值观的微观呈现.     

宠物与人类的关系:心理学视角的探讨

作为人类的忠实伙伴,宠物为人类的身心健康带来了多种积极影响。宠物的"人格"研究显示,宠物并非单纯的动物,而是具有独立社交功能的伙伴。它是人际支持系统外的补充,而非补偿。它们通过激发人类的照料行为,为人类带来快乐和安慰。已有宠物研究尚存取样不够合理,行为实验匮乏等问题。未来研究的样本选择应该尽量多而细,在拓展已有实验范式的同时,还可借鉴婴儿认知神经科学的技术,进一步探索和验证宠物影响人类的内在机制。     

A Tabu-Search Heuristic for Deterministic Two-Mode Blockmodeling of Binary Network Matrices

Two-mode binary data matrices arise in a variety of social network contexts, such as the attendance or non-attendance of individuals at events, the participation or lack of participation of groups in projects, and the votes of judges on cases. A popular method for analyzing such data is two-mode blockmodeling based on structural equivalence, where the goal is to identify partitions for the row and column objects such that the clusters of the row and column objects form blocks that are either complete (all 1s) or null (all 0s) to the greatest extent possible. Multiple restarts of an object relocation heuristic that seeks to minimize the number of inconsistencies (i.e., 1s in null blocks and 0s in complete blocks) with ideal block structure is the predominant approach for tackling this problem. As an alternative, we propose a fast and effective implementation of tabu search. Computational comparisons across a set of 48 large network matrices revealed that the new tabu-search heuristic always provided objective function values that were better than those of the relocation heuristic when the two methods were constrained to the same amount of computation time.     

Gender and Nature: A Psychological Analysis of Ecofeminist Theory1

For ecofeminists, the logic of domination (Warren, 1990) subserves the interconnected oppressions of patriarchy (i.e., sexism) and the anthropocentric domination of nature (i.e., naturism). Given this premise, it was hypothesized that interconnections would be found across instruments that assessed the following constructs: right-wing authoritarianism, attitudes toward women, social-dominance orientation, and attitudes toward the environment. As predicted, a correlation was found between attitudes toward women and the environment. Regression analyses indicate that authoritarianism reliably predicted sexism in men and women. Authoritarianism also predicted naturism in women. These results are interpreted as an initial rapprochement between psychology and the ecofeminism framework delineating the social attitudes that are inherent in the oppressive systems of sexism and naturism.     

A Heuristic Framework for Understanding the Role of Participatory Decision Making in Community-Based Non-Profits

This paper explores the role of member participation in decision-making (PDM) from an organizational learning (OL) perspective. Community-based organizations (CBOs) serve as mediators between the individual and the local community, often providing the means for community member participation and benefiting organizationally from members' input. Community psychologists have recognized these benefits; however, the field has paid less attention to the role participation plays in increasing CBOs' capacity to meet community needs. We present a framework for exploring how CBO contextual factors influence the use of participatory decision-making structures and practices, and how these affect OL. We then use the framework to examine PDM in qualitative case study analysis of four CBOs: a youth development organization, a faith-based social action coalition, a low-income neighborhood organization, and a large human service agency. We found that organizational form, energy, and culture each had a differential impact on participation in decision making within CBOs. We highlight how OL is constrained in CBOs and document how civic aims and voluntary membership enhanced participation and learning.     

A New Problem for the A-theory of Time

I offer a new approach to the increasingly convoluted debate between the A- and B-theories of time (the 'tensed' and 'tenseless' theories). It is often assumed that the B-theory faces more difficulties than the A-theory in explaining the apparently tensed features of temporal experience. I argue that the A-theory cannot explain these features at all, because on any physicalist or supervenience theory of the mind, in which the nature of experience is fixed by the physical state of the world, the tensed properties of time posited by the A-theory could play no role in shaping temporal experience. It follows that the A-theory is false; even a priori arguments for it fail, because they still require the tensed vocabulary which is used to describe temporal experience.     

The Problem of Patriotism: A Psychoanalytic and Theological Analysis

In this article, I examine patriotism from psychoanalytic and theological perspectives, arguing that it is a deeply problematic form of love and devotion. After providing a brief overview of the discourse vis-à-vis patriotism, I depict the characteristics of a dominant form of patriotism (self-state) in the U.S. Given this, I argue that, while patriotism has a variety of forms, the most prevalent form tends toward tragic consequences and it is this tragic tendency that I depict from psychoanalytic and theological perspectives. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the extant form of patriotism in the U.S. represents a self-state that signifies an idealized, omnipotent, and imaginary identification, which is accompanied by and contingent upon a devaluation of the Other. Moreover, the dominant form of patriotic self-states is secured by weak dissociation, omnipotent thinking and, in most cases, a collapse of the symbolic equation. From a Christian theological perspective, patriotism signifies absolutizing the relative and contingent. This form of idolatry manifests a distortion of reason and will, which contributes to corrupted and corrupting forms of love and devotion.     

Heuristic Implementation of Dynamic Programming for Matrix Permutation Problems in Combinatorial Data Analysis

Dynamic programming methods for matrix permutation problems in combinatorial data analysis can produce globally-optimal solutions for matrices up to size 30×30, but are computationally infeasible for larger matrices because of enormous computer memory requirements. Branch-and-bound methods also guarantee globally-optimal solutions, but computation time considerations generally limit their applicability to matrix sizes no greater than 35×35. Accordingly, a variety of heuristic methods have been proposed for larger matrices, including iterative quadratic assignment, tabu search, simulated annealing, and variable neighborhood search. Although these heuristics can produce exceptional results, they are prone to converge to local optima where the permutation is difficult to dislodge via traditional neighborhood moves (e.g., pairwise interchanges, object-block relocations, object-block reversals, etc.). We show that a heuristic implementation of dynamic programming yields an efficient procedure for escaping local optima. Specifically, we propose applying dynamic programming to reasonably-sized subsequences of consecutive objects in the locally-optimal permutation, identified by simulated annealing, to further improve the value of the objective function. Experimental results are provided for three classic matrix permutation problems in the combinatorial data analysis literature: (a) maximizing a dominance index for an asymmetric proximity matrix; (b) least-squares unidimensional scaling of a symmetric dissimilarity matrix; and (c) approximating an anti-Robinson structure for a symmetric dissimilarity matrix. We are extremely grateful to the Associate Editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and corrections.     

A Comparison of Heuristic Procedures for Minimum Within-Cluster Sums of Squares Partitioning

Perhaps the most common criterion for partitioning a data set is the minimization of the within-cluster sums of squared deviation from cluster centroids. Although optimal solution procedures for within-cluster sums of squares (WCSS) partitioning are computationally feasible for small data sets, heuristic procedures are required for most practical applications in the behavioral sciences. We compared the performances of nine prominent heuristic procedures for WCSS partitioning across 324 simulated data sets representative of a broad spectrum of test conditions. Performance comparisons focused on both percentage deviation from the “best-found” WCSS values, as well as recovery of true cluster structure. A real-coded genetic algorithm and variable neighborhood search heuristic were the most effective methods; however, a straightforward two-stage heuristic algorithm, HK-means, also yielded exceptional performance. A follow-up experiment using 13 empirical data sets from the clustering literature generally supported the results of the experiment using simulated data. Our findings have important implications for behavioral science researchers, whose theoretical conclusions could be adversely affected by poor algorithmic performances.