The Career Human Agency Theory

The authors propose a constructivist theory of career human agency to integrate and update the existing career theoretical models to better address the current postmodern zeitgeist. The career human agency theory (CHAT) represents a metatheory of career psychology guided by the principles of Bandura’s human agency framework and informs career development practice and counseling interventions. CHAT promotes the enactment of personal, proxy, and collective agency in the face of uncertainty and adversity. This article describes 4 pillar principles of career agency and provides concrete examples for career counseling application.     

超越人权与人民主权的对峙:哈贝马斯的人民主权理论探析

人民主权是立宪国家的一项基本原则。通过对人民主权理论的历史追溯,哈贝马斯指出,无认是卢梭还是康德都没有能够确切把握人民主权理论的内涵。立足交往行动理论,哈贝马斯认为,应对人民主权理论作互为主体间性的商谈论理解。总体而言,哈贝马斯的人民主权理论虽然带有浓厚的乌托邦色彩,然而,对正致力于社会主义宪政建设的中国而言,无疑仍具有重要的启迪意义。     

Particularity and Perspective Taking: On Feminism and Habermas's Discourse Theory of Morality

Seyla Benhabib's critique of Jürgen Habermas's moral theory claims that his approach is not adequate for the needs of a feminist moral theory. I argue that her analysis is mistaken. I also show that Habermas's moral theory, properly understood, satisfies many of the conditions identified by feminist moral philosophers as necessary for an adequate moral theory. A discussion of the compatibility between the model of reciprocal perspective taking found in Habermas's moral theory and that found in Maria Lugones's essay “Playfulness,‘World’‐Travelling, and Loving Perception” reinforces the claim that his moral theory holds as yet unrecognized promise for feminist moral philosophy.     

Agency and Human Rights

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a human right? James Griffin has persuasively argued that the notion of agency should determine the content of human rights. However, Griffin's agency account faces the question of why agency should be the sole ground for human rights. For example, can Griffin's notion of agency by itself adequately explain such human rights as that against torture? Or, has Griffin offered a plausible explanation as to why one should not broaden the ground for human rights to include other elements of a good life such as freedom from great pain, understanding, deep personal relations, and so on? These concerns have been raised regarding Griffin's agency account, but in his new book, On Human Rights, Griffin has offered new arguments in support of his view that agency is the sole ground for human rights. In this paper, I examine these new arguments, and I argue that Griffin's arguments are ultimately unsuccessful.     

Generalized Quantum Theory: Overview and Latest Developments

The main formal structures of generalized quantum theory are summarized. Recent progress has sharpened some of the concepts, in particular the notion of an observable, the action of an observable on states (putting more emphasis on the role of proposition observables), and the concept of generalized entanglement. Furthermore, the active role of the observer in the structure of observables and the partitioning of systems is emphasized.     

Science and Life-World: Husserl, Schutz, Garfinkel

In this article I intend to explore the conception of science as it emerges from the work of Husserl, Schutz, and Garfinkel. By concentrating specifically on the issue of science, I attempt to show that Garfinkel’s views on the relationship between science and the everyday world are much closer to Husserl’s stance than to the Schutzian perspective. To this end, I explore Husserl’s notion of science especially as it emerges in the Crisis of European Sciences, where he describes the failure of European science and again preaches for a return to the “things themselves”. In this respect I interpret ethnomethodology’s most recent program as an answer to that call originating from a sociological domain. I then argue that the Husserlian turn within ethnomethodology marks the split between Garfinkel and Schutz. In fact I try to show that Schutz’s epistemological work is only partially inspired by phenomenology and that his conception of science retains a rationalist stance that ethnomethodology opposes. In the final section I briefly discuss Garfinkel’s most recent program as a way of closing the gap between theory and experience by linking the topics of science to the radical experiential phenomena.     

Moral Progress and Human Agency

The idea of moral progress is a necessary presupposition of action for beings like us. We must believe that moral progress is possible and that it might have been realized in human experience, if we are to be confident that continued human action can have any morally constructive point. I discuss the implications of this truth for moral psychology. I also show that once we understand the complex nature and the complicated social sources of moral progress, we will appreciate why we cannot construct a plausible comprehensive action-guiding theory of moral progress. Yet while the nature and sources of moral progress consistently thwart many theoretical hopes, the idea of moral progress is a plausible, critically important and morally constructive principle of historical interpretation.     

作为一种实在论的批判的语境经验主义

批判的语境经验主义将社会和规范方面融入对科学的理解中,实践实在论也使文化和规范方面在理解科学时发挥重要作用。对二者的比较分析表明,前者可作为实在论的一种形式。二者的结合可发展出"多元社会实在论"这一新的实在论形式。在讨论了地图类比、目标导向的经验主义对不充分决定性问题的分析之后,通过借助海伦·朗基诺的最近研究可得出,多元社会实在论尽管可能,但由于缺乏上帝视角,它在为不充分决定性问题提供决定性解决方案时并不乐观。     

Toward a Psychology of Human Agency

ABSTRACT— This article presents an agentic theory of human development, adaptation, and change. The evolutionary emergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. Social cognitive theory rejects a duality between human agency and social structure. People create social systems, and these systems, in turn, organize and influence people's lives. This article discusses the core properties of human agency, the different forms it takes, its ontological and epistemological status, its development and role in causal structures, its growing primacy in the coevolution process, and its influential exercise at individual and collective levels across diverse spheres of life and cultural systems.     

Heidegger,Sociality, and Human Agency

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being‐with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life.     

Schema Theory: A Critical Appraisal and Reevaluation

The authors replicated and extended results from the gunfight paradigm (A. Welchman, J. Stanley, M. Schomers, R. Miall, & H. Bulthoff, 2010a) in which participants moved faster when reacting to the perceived initiation of an opponent compared to initiating an action themselves. In addition to replicating these movement time effects, the authors found that time to peak velocity, peak velocity, and movement-endpoint dispersions were similarly impacted. The findings are discussed in terms of a triggering mechanism involved in ballistic and internally generated movements.     

A Stochastic Version of General Recognition Theory

General recognition theory (GRT) is a multivariate generalization of signal detection theory. Past versions of GRT were static and lacked a process interpretation. This article presents a stochastic version of GRT that models moment-by-moment fluctuations in the output of perceptual channels via a multivariate diffusion process. A decision stage then computes a linear or quadratic function of the outputs from the perceptual channels, which drives a univariate diffusion process that determines the subject's response. Conditions are established under which the stochastic and static versions of GRT make identical accuracy predictions. These equivalence relations show that traditional estimates of perceptual noise may often be corrupted by decisional influences. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

Exercise of Human Agency Through Collective Efficacy

Social cognitive theory adopts an agentic perspective in which individuals are producers of experiences and shapers of events. Among the mechanisms of human agency, none is more focal or pervading than the belief of personal efficacy. This core belief is the foundation of human agency. Unless people believe that they can produce desired effects and forestall undesired ones by their actions, they have little incentive to act. The growing interdependence of human functioning is placing a premium on the exercise of collective agency through shared beliefs in the power to produce effects by collective action. The present article analyzes the nature of perceived collective efficacy and its centrality in how people live their lives. Perceived collective efficacy fosters groups' motivational commitment to their missions, resilience to adversity, and performance accomplishments.     

Taking Our Place: Substitution,Human Agency,and Feminine Sin

Abstract

While acknowledging that church teachings about substitutionary atonement have served to disempower women, this article argues that a reconstrual of this doctrine can, in fact, promote human agency. Because Christ our Representative has taken our place in relation to that which incapacitates us, women are freed from the ‘feminine sins’ of self-deprecation and passivity to exercise power as agents. First, the author explains the importance of conceiving of substitution apart from understandings of satisfaction theory that perpetuate violence. Then she rehearses how feminist theologians have understood substitution to inhibit agency. Finally (in conversation with Dorothee Sölle and Karl Barth), she examines how a reconstrual of substitutionary atonement, understood within a representational framework, might contribute to an adequate feminist soteriology by championing women's ‘irreplaccability,’ thus ensuring their power.