Social Externalism and First-Person Authority

Social Externalism is the thesis that many of our thoughts are individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of the thinker’s community. After defending Social Externalism and arguing for its broad application, I turn to the kind of defeasible first-person authority that we have over our own thoughts. Then, I present and refute an argument that uses first-person authority to disprove Social Externalism. Finally, I argue briefly that Social Externalism—far from being incompatible with first-person authority—provides a check on first-personal pronouncements and thus saves first-person authority from being simply a matter of social convention and from collapsing into the subjectivity of “what seems right is right.”

---

Being-There-With-and-For: Contemporary Psychoanalysis Characterizes Notions of Being Religious

Diverse religious communities and traditions share certain common notions among the ways of life they seek to cultivate, notions that contemporary psychoanalysis can illumine. This essay offers three contributions: (a) substantive—characterizing features of a way: being-there-with-and-for; (b) methodological—outlining genres of relating psychology and religion; (c) philosophical—discussing relations between epistemology and ontology (that is, between maps and territory).

East–West European Project: Transforming and Shaping Research Through Collaboration

This article tells the story of the journey made by an international research group of social psychologists in their collaborative projects carried out over a number of years after the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989. The article explores some relations between the aims of research conducted during a period of rapid political, social and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe, and the ways these studies were shaped and transformed through collaboration. It shows how the collaboration of researchers in the team affected the development of theoretical concepts and methodological ideas over the years, as well as how the team learned from mistakes. Collaborative efforts cannot be viewed separately from the content of research. Moreover, this international collaborative research has shown that the relationships between institutional and cultural changes cannot be understood by means of comparing phenomena across different countries but by case studies in individual countries.

Philosophy, Psychology, and Public Policy Aspects of Well-Being All Wrapped in One Book Designed to Ruffle Your Feathers

This is a book review of Daniel M. Haybron’s book titled The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, published by Oxford University Press, 2008.

The Role of Ideal Affect in the Experience and Memory of Emotions

According to Affect Valuation Theory (Tsai et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1031–1039), culture influences how people want to feel (ideal affect). Integrating Affect Valuation Theory with the Time-sequential Framework of Subjective Well-being (Kim-Prieto et al. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 261–300), we proposed that cultural norms influence the memory, but not the experience, of emotion. The present study examined the role of ideal affect in relation to experience sampling and retrospective reports of emotion. Ideal affect correlated with retrospective reports but not experience sampling reports. Extraversion and neuroticism were more strongly related to experience sampling reports than to ideal levels of emotion. Results suggest that retrospective reports of emotion involve a dynamic process that incorporates cultural information into the reconstruction whereas on-line emotions are more constrained by temperament.

Transforming Consciousness

Robert Preece’s The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra and Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche’s Everyday Consciousness and Primordial Awareness are reviewed. Both books address Tibetan Buddhism, and their common threads underscore this discussion. Even when separated from their original contexts, the Tibetan Buddhist teachings offer understandings about a common human nature and a method of transforming consciousness through awareness.

Risky Subjectivity: Antigone,Action, and Universal Trespass

In this paper, I draw on the mutually implicated structures of tragedy and self-formation found in Hegel’s use of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology. By emphasizing the apparent distinction between particular and universal in Hegel’s reading of the tragedies in Antigone, I propose that a tragedy of action (which particularizes a universal) is inescapable for subjectivity understood as socially constituted and always already socially engaged. I consider universal/particular relations in three communities: Hegel’s Greek polis, his community of conscience, and my reading of certain feminist communities. The position I propose establishes a ground from which to approach subjects, and implies that all subjects may be understood as the result of relations embodying potential tragedy. This speaks to contemporary concerns about marginalization, identity articulation, and relations of recognition.

The moderating effect of passion on the relation between activity engagement and positive affect

The present diary study investigates the moderating effect of passion on the relation between activity engagement and daily positive affect. In line with past research (Vallerand et al. 2003, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 756) it is suggested that people with an obsessive passion have more difficulties putting their passion aside to invest themselves in other activities, to a point where they fail to experience positive affect during these activities. A sample of 154 college students reported their daily activity engagement and positive affect over a 2-week period. HLM analyses show that the more people have an obsessive passion the more they experience accentuated decreases in positive affect during days when they do not engage in their passion compared to days when they do. In contrast, harmonious passion predicts daily positive affect on days when people engage in their activity. These results are discussed in light of previous research on passion and positive affect.

European Regulatory Issues in Nanomedicine

The paper is intended to focus on peculiarities of nanomedicine and the importance of social concerns implicated, in order to understand if existing regulations are appropriate to maintain its safety or if a new ad hoc regulatory framework is needed. Consideration of social challenges will underline the crucial role of medical ethics in regulatory discussion.

Private Interests Count Too

Along with concerns about the deleterious effects of politically driven government intervention on science are the intrusion of private sector interests into the conduct of research and the reporting of its results. Scientists are generally unprepared for the challenges posed by private interests seeking to advance their economic, political, or ideological agendas. They must educate and prepare themselves for assaults on scientific freedom, not because it is a legal right, but rather because social progress depends on it.

Are There Stable Factors in Preadolescent Girls’ Externalizing Behaviors?

Relatively little is known about the factor structure of disruptive behavior among preadolescent girls. The present study reports on exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of disruptive girl behavior over four successive data waves as rated by parents and teachers in a large, representative community sample of girls (N = 2,451). Five factors were identified from parent ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems, inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, relational aggression, and callous-unemotional behaviors), and four factors were identified derived from teacher ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems/callous-unemotional behaviors, inattention, hyperactivityimpulsivity, and relational aggression). There was a high degree of consistency of items loading on equivalent factors across parent and teacher ratings. Year-to-year stability of factors between ages five and 12 was high for parent ratings (ICC = 0.70 to 0.88), and slightly lower for teacher ratings (ICC = 0.56 to 0.83). These findings are discussed in terms of possible adjustment to the criteria for children's disruptive behavior disorders found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.

---

Does Microcredit “Empower”? Reflections on the Grameen Bank Debate

Recent debates about the Grameen Bank’s microlending practices depict participating female borrowers as having fundamentally empowering or disempowering experiences. I argue that this discursive framework may be too reductive: it can conceal how technique and technology simultaneously facilitate relations of dependence and independence; and it can diminish our capacity to understand and assess innovative development initiatives.

Gert on Subjective Practical Rationality

The purpose of this paper is to consider Joshua Gert’s novel view of subjective practical rationality in his book Brute Rationality. After briefly outlining the account, I present two objections to his view and then consider his own objections to a rival approach to understanding subjective rationality which I take to be much more plausible.

Bird and the Dispositional Essentialist Account of Spatiotemporal Relations

The basic principles of dispositional essentialism do not require that the fundamental spatiotemporal relations are dispositional in nature. Nevertheless, Bird (who defends dispositional monism) argues that they possess dispositional essences in virtue of the fact that the obtaining of these relations can be characterised by the satisfaction of a certain counterfactual. In this paper I argue that his suggestion fails, and so, despite his attempt, the case of the spatiotemporal relations remains the ‘big bad bug’ for the thesis of dispositional monism.

Religiousness and College Student Alcohol Use: Examining the Role of Social Support

The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating role of social support in the relationship between religiousness and alcohol use in a sample of college students. Two dimensions of religiousness: religious commitment and religious coping were examined as predictors of alcohol use. Participants were male and female college students (N = 221); the majority of the sample was Christian (73.8%). Emotional social support was tested as a mediator. Both religiousness dimensions and emotional social support were related to less frequent alcohol use; however, mediation was not supported. These findings indicate that religious commitment and dispositional religious coping are protective against alcohol use, yet social support does not account for this relationship.

The Phenomenal Field: Ethnomethodological Perspectives on Collective Phenomena

The aim of my paper is twofold. First, I show how the notion of phenomenal field can be used to examine, describe and understand particular collective patterns pertaining to the everyday domain of our common social experience. Secondly, I outline the role of the notion of “phenomenal field” in ethnomethodology. I briefly discuss Gurwitsch’s notion of functional meaning. After presenting the argument, I show “the locally achieved ordinariness of a common task”, that is the lining up of the player of the two teams in the pitch, as an embodied coherence of figural contexture in its empirical perceptual details, as Garfinkel says.

Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics

In this introduction we discuss the motivation behind the workshop “Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics” of which this special issue constitutes the proceedings. We elaborate on historical and empirical aspects of the desired new epistemology, connect it to the public image of mathematics, and give a summary and an introduction to the contributions to this issue.

---

God and The Possibility of Random Creation

In this paper I discuss a number of problems associated with the suggestion that it is possible for God to randomly select a possible world for actualization.

Law, Convention and Objectivity: Comments on Kramer

Since I do not disagree with the line of argument taken by Kramer and the distinctions he draws between the different ways rules can be ‘mind-independent’, my comments focus on some of the complexities involved in the application of his distinctions. I suggest that law, properly understood as a system of rules/conventions is both existentially and observationally weakly mind independent, but nonetheless objective.

An argument against Fregean that-clause semantics

I develop a problem for the Fregean Reference Shift analysis of that-clause reference. The problem is discussed by Stephen Schiffer in his recent book The Things We Mean (2003). Either the defender of the Fregean Reference Shift analysis must count certain counterintuitive inferences as valid, or else he must reject a plausible Exportation rule. I consider several responses. I find that the best response relies on a Kaplan-inspired analysis of quantified belief reports. But I argue that this response faces some serious problems.