Justice at the Margins: The Social Contract and the Challenge of Marginal Cases

Attempts to justify the special moral status of human beings over other animals face a well‐known objection: the challenge of marginal cases. If we attempt to ground this special status in the unique rationality of humans, then it becomes difficult to see why nonrational humans (infants, the severely cognitively disabled, and so on) should be treated any differently than other, nonhuman animals. We respond to this challenge by turning to the social contract tradition. In particular, we identify an important role for the concept of recognition in attempts to secure rights through a social contract. Recognition, which involves identifying with or seeing ourselves as others, is the key to establishing the scope of justice, and we argue that this scope extends to all humans—even the so‐called marginal cases—but not to other animals. If this is correct, then we have a principled reason for why all humans have certain rights that other animals lack.     

Flirting with Death: Variables Affecting Risk Taking at Intersections1

A series of four field studies were conducted to examine how motorists behaved at intersections. In each study, the proportion of drivers who pulled out in front of oncoming cars at varying temporal distances was recorded. In the first study, it was found that the proportion of turns in front of an approaching car was related to the log of the temporal distance between the subjects and the oncoming cars by a normal ogive. The remaining studies examined the effects that the presence of various types of audiences had on this risk-taking function. It was found that being forced to wait in a line of cars before being allowed to turn substantially increased the risks that drivers took, whereas the presence of other cars behind and/or beside the subject's car had no effect on the risk-taking function. A hypothesis explaining these effects in terms of the frustration of being forced to wait was supported while a social facilitation hypothesis was not. It was also discovered that males take more risks than females, a fact which could explain the higher accident rate for males.     

The Intersections of Sexuality, Gender, and Race: Identity Research at the Crossroads

Psychology’s engagement with an intersectional perspective on social identities continues to grow. This special issue is significant in its use of intersectionality to complicate thinking about sexual orientation as a singular, homogenous category. Furthermore, it spotlights how intersectional positions within the range of sexual minority identities articulate with multiple other dimensions of identity, including gender, racial ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and age. In addition to recognizing the important contributions of this issue’s authors, in this commentary we relate their efforts to current trends in intersectionality research, including the contrasting ways intersectionality is applied in psychology. We observe that the authors portray intersectionality as either primarily concerned with multiple marginalized identities or as a more generalized theory of identity, and the authors use intersectionality as a framework, a theory, and an approach to social justice. We then address critiques of intersectionality theory that appear in the field of feminist/gender studies, showing how articles in this special issue both exemplify and challenge those critiques. Last, we focus on next steps in intersectionality research, focusing especially on the question of how intersectionality can best inform theory and methods in psychology.     

What I Talk About When I Talk About Teaching and Learning

In this text I discuss two events in which I learned something important about life and about education in order to formulate in a precise manner two propositions for my pedagogical creed. In focus for both are the interrelatedness of theory and life. The stories are told through the lenses of Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jacques Rancière’s thinking, but the stories also are shown to be essential in my understanding of their thinking. The first story is about learning ethics as a consequence of meeting an old man on a remote island and the second story is about teaching, when a young girl in a situation of war taught me something important about political life. In a final section I discuss briefly what those theoretical/practical experiences and memories bring to my understanding of education.     

Teaching Children About Revision in Writing

We investigated effects of instruction in the process of revision on children's knowledge of the revision process, on their ability to make revisions on paper, and on the quality of their writing. Fifteen sixth graders received instruction in the process of revision; 15 controls read good literature. After instruction, each child wrote a story, was interviewed about potential revisions, and was given an opportunity to make changes on the first copy and then write another draft. The main variables for knowledge of the revision process were number of spots suggested for revision and average specificity of suggested changes. The main variable for ability to make revisions on paper was total number of revisions made. A quality score was obtained for the first and final drafts. Instruction did affect knowledge of the revision process, and it enhanced revision efforts. Quality judgments tended to increase across drafts for the revision group, whereas they remained stable for the controls.     

Facing the Music: Voices from the Margins

Recent philosophy of music in the Anglophone analytic tradition has produced many fine-grained analyses of musical practices within the context of the Western fine-art tradition. It has not for the most part, however, been self-conscious about the normative implications of that orienting tradition. As a result, the achievements of recent philosophical discussions of music have been unnecessarily constricted. The way forward is to enrich the range of musical practices philosophy takes as its target of examination.     

Heterotopias of Homelessness: Citizenship on the Margins

The concept of heterotopia challenges political theory, which has often focused on utopic thinking. Foucault describes a heterotopia as a heterogenous space that juxtaposes in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Streets, squares and parks form heterotopias when their utopic purity as public space is juxtaposed with the private spaces created by the cardboard boxes and other temporary shelters of homeless people. Since citizenship has traditionally been thought of as participation in a democratic public sphere, how do heterotopias of homelessness challenge the ideas about citizenship? Based on narrative research with homeless people in Poland, I show how the homeless conceive of their marginality. Their participation or non-participation in democracy is not hidden but, on the contrary, very visible in public spaces where they are included as excluded.     

功能性便秘

功能性便秘是常见的慢性便秘,罗马III提出了新的诊断标准。功能性便秘的一般治疗包括定期排便、增加活动、增加纤维素摄取,改变生活方式和调整情绪。慢传输型便秘的药物选择膨胀性泻药、渗透性泻剂、促动力剂、氯通道激活剂等。功能性排便障碍型患者可选择生物反馈治疗。治疗成功后应调节剂量,维持疗效。外科治疗应有严格的适应证。进一步研究结肠动力与排便生理,以提高对疾病的认识和提出有效的治疗。     

Neuroscience and Ethics: Intersections

This essay will address the ethical issues that have emerged in the first considerations of the newly emerging stem cell technology. Many of us in the field of bioethics were deliberating related issues as we first learned of the new science and confronted the ethical issues it raised. In this essay, I will draw on the work of colleagues who were asked to reflect on early stages of the research (members of the IRBs, the Geron Ethicist Advisory Board, and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission) as the field debated the issues of consent, moral status, use of animal tissues, abortion, use of fetal tissue, and the nature and goals of entrepreneurial research. In this new capacity, ethicists weighed the problem of privacy, the role of justice considerations, and the issues of the marketplace in science. At this point, it is clear that far more issues remain unresolved than are settled, that there is largely unexplored territory ahead, and that the single most important task that faces us as a field is a steady call for ongoing conversation and public debate.     

Revision from the Margins: Fromm's Contributions to Psychoanalysis

Fromm's important contributions to the modern development of psychoanalytic thought are often ignored and frequently misunderstood. An early proponent of revisions of psychoanalytic theory and therapy similar to recent trends in object relations, self-psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis, Fromm was a visionary for a Freudian theory built upon orthodoxies of the past but going beyond them. It is argued here that Fromm's unique role in helping create a new version of psychoanalysis for the 21st century was as sociological as it was intellectual. Fromm's contributions were intimately linked to his institutional positioning close to the center but on the relative margins of the discipline. This paper will outline how sociological dynamics shaped Fromm's revision of psychoanalysis. We will conclude by discussing how Fromm was able to have a more dramatic influence than other Freudian revisionists who were less favourably positioned.     

在学科交叉点上创新--访物理化学家唐有祺院士

在寒冬已过,春意昂然的早春,《科学与无神论》杂志记者,访问了我国著名的物理化学家北京大学教授唐有祺院士。86岁的唐院士精神矍铄地接受了记者的采访,本来相约只有20分钟的采访, 唐院士侃侃而谈一个多小时。话题是从19世纪末、 20世纪初的物理化学革命谈起,不仅谈到了科学发     

Margins for Error: A Reply

I address Peter Mott's 'Margins for Error and the Sorites Paradox' ( The Philosophical Quarterly , 48 (1998), pp. 494–503). Mott criticizes my account of inexact knowledge, on which it satisfies margin for error principles of the form 'If one knows in a given case, one avoids false belief in sufficiently similar cases'. Mott's arguments are shown to be fallacious because they ignore the fact that our knowledge of inexact knowledge is itself inexact. In the examples discussed, the first-level inexact knowledge is perceptual. Since my defence of an epistemicist theory of vagueness explains our ignorance of truth-values in borderline cases as the result of knowledge the inexactness of which has a conceptual source, the paper also contributes to the defence of epistemicism about vagueness.     

Sexual Identification in the United States at the Intersections of Gender,Race/Ethnicity,Immigration, and Education

Sex Roles - Sexual identification is shaped by social processes that vary across multiple axes of marginalization and social position—including gender, race/ethnicity, immigration status, and...     

Epistemological Development and Judgments and Reasoning About Teaching Methods

Children's, adolescents’, and adults’ (N = 96 7–8, 10–11, and 13–14-year-olds and university students) epistemological development and its relation to judgments and reasoning about teaching methods was examined. The domain (scientific or moral), nature of the topic (controversial or noncontroversial), and teaching method (direct instruction by lectures versus class discussions) were systematically varied. Epistemological development was assessed in the aesthetics, values, and physical truth domains. All participants took the domain, nature of the topic, and teaching method into consideration in ways that showed age-related variations. Epistemological development in the value domain alone was predictive of preferences for class discussions and a critical perspective on teacher-centered direct instruction, even when age was controlled in the analysis.     

Of Alchemy and Authenticity: Teaching About Daoism Today

Abstract. The authors discuss the complexities and responsibilities of teaching about Daoism in contemporary North American colleges and universities. Expanding and revising the findings of Kirkland (1998) , they argue that enough has changed in educational and cultural contexts to warrant new strategies for teaching about Daoism. Textbooks are now available that offer more accurate and responsible presentations of Daoist history, and this enables a richer appreciation of Daoist culture and religion, and its significance within broader areas of Chinese culture such as art, politics, and science. On the other hand, students have a far greater possibility of interacting outside the classroom with North Americans of Chinese and European background who claim affiliation to the Daoist tradition especially through techniques of moving meditation such as Qigong and internal alchemy. This situation poses challenges in the classroom concerning claims of authenticity, tradition, and representation. Rather than shying away from these contemporary North American cultural forms, the authors argue that the skilled teacher can use these interactions to facilitate a deeper inquiry into questions of authenticity and tradition. Moreover, the authors discuss the use of an interactive website designed specifically to assist in reflecting on these issues in the classroom.