On Being a Lone Dissenter

Asch's (1956) research on group pressure to conform implied that it is difficult to be a lone dissenter. Extending this to the analysis of voting patterns in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1953-2001 terms, it was found that of 4,178 decisions, the 8-1 split was the least common (10%). Unanimous decisions were most common (35%), followed by 5-4 splits (21%), 6-3 splits (20%), and 7-2 splits (14%). Large differences were found among the 29 Justices serving during this period as to how often they were lone dissenters, led by Justice William Douglas, who issued lone dissents on about 6% of the decisions on which he voted.     

Living Being and Speaking Being: Toward a Dialogical Approach to Intentionality

One of the main goals of cognitive science is to shed light on human knowledge. This paper states that, if daily conversations, literature, and private thought, are proper expressions of human behavior, then cognitive sciences ought to elaborate a concept of knowledge suited to this kind of activities. I draw upon the notion of discourse in Bakhtin to specify the attributes of knowing needed to account for human behavior, whose manifestations in everyday life are not reduced to representing objects but essentially oriented toward responding to others. As a central aspect of knowledge, I focus on intentionality and offer a discussion about different aspects of it. Specifically, I examine the difference between intentionality as the faculty of representation (aboutness) and intentionality as the subjective positioning toward contextually relevant ideological perspectives (meaning).

On Being a Feminist and a Psychotherapist

No abstract available for this article.     

The Perks of Being Relational: Reviewing The Perks of Being a Wallflower

This article reviews The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Halfon, Smith, Malkovich, & Chbosky, 2012), a coming-of-age film about 3 high school students attempting to survive school, find themselves, and connect with others. The authors provide a synopsis of various portions of the film and identify important aspects of relational-cultural theory (RCT) within its plot, such as growth-fostering relationships, controlling images, and relational images. Various characters’ plotlines are discussed in relation to what RCT identifies as paramount tenets of human development and mental health. The authors also briefly discuss other counseling issues touched on within the film (i.e., affectional identity, sexual assault, and relational violence).     

Being a person in psychoanalytic culture

The author argues that schools of care are really cultures whose practices and teachings are only minimally based in science. Although the early link of mental-health care to medicine was historically fortuitous, bestowing a debatable authority on the field, these schools' consuming preoccupation with scientific legitimacy has severely limited mental-health care professionals' own ability to understand and think wisely about these schools of care. Students of these schools become enculturated into the ideology of a particular school, its notions of what is normal and what is ill, of how life works, and of what patients need to do to become well. The listening tradition of psychoanalysts is admirable, but its discounting of external factors, like an individual's upbringing, race, or even friendships, constitutes a major flaw.Dr. Fancher is author of the forthcoming bookCultures of Healing: Correcting the Image of American Mental Health Care (W.H. Freeman and Co., 1995), from which this article is excerpted with permission.     

作为一种规范学科的信息伦理学

在信息伦理学领域 ,存在着两种不同的研究取向 :有些学者将信息伦理学作为一门非规范的伦理学来研究 ,而另一些学者则偏重于信息伦理学的规范性质。信息伦理学作为一门规范学科 ,应当研究不同类型的信息活动中已经存在或可能发生的伦理问题 ,而不能成为计算机伦理学、媒体伦理学、生物信息伦理学、网络伦理学的集装箱。规范的信息伦理学可以参考义务论、美德论、效果论的分析框架 ,而且要综合运用多种学科的方法。各国的信息伦理学有本土化的问题 ,但在全球性的信息沟通中 ,应当实现不同的信息伦理学的整合。     

Being in a position to know

The concept of being in a position to know is an increasingly popular member of the epistemologist’s toolkit. Some have used it as a basis for an account of propositional justification. Others, following Timothy Williamson, have used it as a vehicle for articulating interesting luminosity and anti-luminosity theses. It is tempting to think that while knowledge itself does not obey any closure principles, being in a position to know does. For example, if one knows both p and ‘If p then q’, but one dies or gets distracted before being able to perform a modus ponens on these items of knowledge and for that reason one does not know q, one is still plausibly in a position to know q. It is also tempting to suppose that, while one does not know all logical truths, one is nevertheless in a position to know every logical truth. Putting these temptations together, we get the view that being in a position to know has a normal modal logic. A recent literature has begun to investigate whether it is a good idea to give in to these twin temptations—in particular the first one. That literature assumes very naturally that one is in a position to know everything one knows and that one is not in a position to know things that one cannot know. It has succeeded in showing that, given the modest closure condition that knowledge is closed under conjunction elimination (or ‘distributes over conjunction’), being a position to know cannot satisfy the so-called K axiom (closure of being in a position to know under modus ponens) of normal modal logics. In this paper, we explore the question of the normality of the logic of being in a position to know in a more far-reaching and systematic way. Assuming that being in a position to know entails the possibility of knowing and that knowing entails being in a position to know, we can demonstrate radical failures of normality without assuming any closure principles at all for knowledge. (However, as we will indicate, we get further problems if we assume that knowledge is closed under conjunction introduction.) Moreover, the failure of normality cannot be laid at the door of the K axiom for knowledge, since the standard principle NEC of necessitation also fails for being in a position to know. After laying out and explaining our results, we briefly survey the coherent options that remain.

     

The Student as a Physical Being

A pretty freshman, feeling “in a bind” because of academic demands, broke out with hives on her buttocks as she sat at her desk studying; a few days later she was hospitalized with mononucleosis. … Shortly before Christmas vacation a group of coeds noted that the occurrence of menstrual discomforts had suddenly increased in their living units. … A junior, who was experiencing difficulties with her roommate and also her fiancé, developed a constant craving for food and became anxious when her food binges started getting out of hand. …     

The World Is a Necessary Being

Philosophia - A standard conception of metaphysical modality accepts that (i) Some de re modal claims are true, (ii) These should be understood in terms of a possible worlds semantics, and (iii)...     

A New Argument for a Necessary Being

I present a new argument for the thesis that there is a necessarily existing, causally powerful entity—a necessary being. The outline of the argument is this: (i) necessarily, every beginning of a certain sort S (which I'll specify) can have a cause; (ii) a beginning to the existence of all non-necessarily existing things would be of sort S; (iii) such a beginning can obtain; (iv) such a beginning cannot be caused unless there is a necessary being; therefore, (v) there is a necessary being. The argument uses a causal principle that is more modest than causal principles previously used in arguments for a necessary being.     

Being Right,and Being in the Right

This paper presents a critique of a prevailing conception of the relation between moral reasoning and judgment on the one hand, and moral goodness on the other. I argue that moral reasoning is inescapably vulnerable to moral, as opposed to merely theoretical, failure. This, I argue, means that there is something deeply misleading in the way that Kant's moral theory, and some of its main rivals, have invited us to conceive of their subject matter.