Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.     

Lifelong Learning: A Pacification of ‘Know How’

A tendency of previous studies of lifelong learning to focus on learning and learning subjectivities may have led to an underestimation of potential effects in terms of a system of knowledge constitutive processes that operates powerfully to shape our societies. In this paper we explore lifelong learning and practices in the construction of knowledge at the point where a new relationship is being attempted between university courses and workplaces through programmes for learning. Drawing from Foucault and others we argue a strategic relation between discourses of lifelong learning and knowledge practices in such locations. Discourses of lifelong learning appear to support the reaching out of disciplinary practices into the workplace where theoretical knowledge is combined with knowledge derived from work experience, as a new form of knowledge that has use value. Discipline as a modality of power appears reconfigured and multiplied in new power-knowledge constellations which aim to subdue the desire and power of know how. Rather than lifelong learning as learning apparatus and strategy in the promotion of a will to learn as has been suggested elsewhere, we offer an alternative account. Here the promotion of a will to learn articulates with the will to knowledge in part through discourses of lifelong learning. Practices of knowledge constitution support the pacification of know how through its reconfiguration as knowledge that can be codified and mobilized for economic innovation.     

Subjectivist – observing and objective – participant perspectives on the world: Kant,aquinas and quantum mechanics

Theological thinking is influenced by perspectives on the relation of scientific knowledge to reality. Two paradigms for understanding the nature of human knowledge are considered in relation to quantum mechanics: the subjective-observing perspective of Kant, and the objective-participant perspective of Thomas Aquinas. I discuss whether quantum mechanics necessarily implies a subject centered perspective on reality, and argue, with reference to d'Espagnat's notion of veiled reality, that quantum non-separability challenges this view. I then explore whether the objective-participant perspective of Thomas Aquinas provides a more fruitful context for understanding quantum mechanics. I discuss quantum measurement in terms of the transition from potentiality to actuality, and knowledge as the latent intelligibility of the world realized. However, the negative nature of our knowledge of quantum non-separability also challenges this perspective. Our theological thinking in response to quantum knowledge must therefore proceed tentatively, balancing a via positiva, with a via negativa.     

Longitudinal Associations of Parental Emotion Socialization and Children’s Emotion Regulation: The Moderating Role of ADHD Symptomatology

Theory and research suggest that parents’ reactions to children’s emotions play a critical role in teaching children effective emotion regulation (ER) skills, but no studies have directly examined the role that parent emotion socialization plays in the development of ER in children with ADHD. Gaining insight into the causes of impaired ER, particularly in youth with ADHD who are known to have poor ER, has important theoretical and translational significance. The present study is the first to longitudinally examine whether emotion socialization predicts later physiological and adult-reported measures of ER in children with and without ADHD. It also sought to determine if these relations are moderated by ADHD symptoms. Participants were 61 children (31 girls, 30 boys; M = 10.67 years, SD = 1.28) with and without clinically significant ADHD symptoms. At Time 1, parent reports of emotion socialization and parent- and teacher-report of child ADHD symptoms were collected. At Time 2, child ER measures were collected based on parent- and teacher-report and physiological reactivity during an impossible puzzle and a social rejection task. Physiological measures included respiratory sinus arrhythmia and skin conductance level (SCL). Supportive parenting practices were associated with better parent-rated emotion regulation skills for all children and greater SCL reactivity for children with high ADHD symptoms. Non-supportive parenting reactions were associated with greater adult-rated emotional lability for children with high ADHD symptoms. Results highlight the importance of considering multiple aspects of ER, including physiological manifestations. Findings suggest that parents’ use of adaptive emotion socialization practices may serve as a protective factor for children’s ER development and may be particularly critical for youth with ADHD. Our findings support the use of interventions addressing parent emotion socialization to help foster better ER in children.     

A problem concerning the word order in the new testament

Beginning with a critical evaluation of the expression “post-secular society” by Habermas, I continue to a presentation of four recent genealogies of the secular (Asad, Lilla, Taylor and Agamben) and a short deliberation on their consequences for theological discourse. Proceeding from this debate, I suggest a new approach to the question of secularity that combines the genealogical perspective with a topological inquiry into the conditions for social space, geographical space, and power relations, including their origin and emergence (geneatopics). I argue that it will also have to take into account the problem of the unplaceable and the unclassifiable (the atopia). Hence I offer a contribution to the geneatopology of secularity and religion, based on examples from the Nordic context.     

Emergence of relations and the essence of learning: a review of Sidman's Equivalence relations and behavior: a research story. Book review

The author reviews and comments on the book Equivalence relations and behavior: a research story by Murray Sidman. Sidman's book reports his research about equivalence relations and competencies in children with mental retardation and how it relates to behavior. Sidman used the idea of stimulus-stimulus relations among features of the environment to develop his theories about equivalence relations. Experimental work with children and animals demonstrated their ability to use equivalence relations to learn new tasks. The subject received feedback and reinforcement for specific choices made during training, then was presented with new choices during testing. Results of the tests indicate that subjects were able to establish relations and retrieve them in different situations.     

A postmodern critical theory of research use

The knowledge use field is in a state of conceptual disarray that has contributed to problems in the dissemination and use of knowledge. Examining the nature of knowledge in a critical realist epistemology results in a reconceptualization of knowledge use from a postmodern critical theorist perspective. This theory takes as its focus the study of research, dissemination, and use as cultural structure, ritual, and ideology; and addresses concerns about knowledge use by articulating a conceptual frame-work that triangulates among issues related to knowledge construction, power and action, and ethics and ideology, as integral to any concept of knowledge and its use. John M. Watkins is a private consultant atInquiry and Learning for Change. His primary work is in the area of action research and critical inquiry with schools and communities.     

Epistemology and artificial intelligence

In this essay we advance the view that analytical epistemology and artificial intelligence are complementary disciplines. Both fields study epistemic relations, but whereas artificial intelligence approaches this subject from the perspective of understanding formal and computational properties of frameworks purporting to model some epistemic relation or other, traditional epistemology approaches the subject from the perspective of understanding the properties of epistemic relations in terms of their conceptual properties. We argue that these two practices should not be conducted in isolation. We illustrate this point by discussing how to represent a class of inference forms found in standard inferential statistics. This class of inference forms is interesting because its members share two properties that are common to epistemic relations, namely defeasibility and paraconsistency. Our modeling of standard inferential statistical arguments exploits results from both logical artificial intelligence and analytical epistemology. We remark how our approach to this modeling problem may be generalized to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of epistemic relations.     

自恋型领导对团队创造力形成过程的多视角研究

领导自恋是组织中的普遍现象, 自恋型领导是否能有效地整合团队知识形成创新是管理者不可回避的问题。在回顾已有研究基础上, 采用聚合观、过程观和社会网络三种视角, 全面地厘清自恋型领导对团队创造力的影响。其中, 聚合观强调个体创造力对形成团队创造力的重要作用, 过程观强调团队成员之间的交互作用在团队创造力形成过程中不可或缺, 而社会网络视角注重团队成员的相对位置和内外关系。三种视角相互补充, 明确了自恋型领导和团队创造力之间关系的内在机制以及边界条件。研究结论将为存在自恋型领导的团队干预策略提供参考, 有助于为管理者提高自恋型领导对团队作用的有效性提供借鉴。     

Artificial Intelligence and the New Issue of Cognitive Subject

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technology renders the issue of the cognitive subject in epistemology a prominent one. It challenges the epistemological consensus that humankind is the only cognitive subject. With the development from weak AI to strong AI, the significance of humankind being the cognitive subject will undergo new changes. At present, AI technology does not possess the cognitive ability that humans do. As a result, considering the existing AI technology, the issue related to the cognitive subject to which we must give more attention ultimately concerns the epistemological labor division between human and machine. This division of labor requires the foundation that the technical possibility is governed by the value orientation. From the value perspective of regarding human beings as the purpose, machine intelligence, and the direction and limit of the power that technology brings to cognitive subjects will be clarified. This will let the information technology do what it is meant to do, while people will always be able to reserve the subject status for themselves.     

Understanding Liberals and Conservatives

It is helpful to teach students of religion and theology that it's not just the teachings and practices of a religion that are important, but the way in which these beliefs and practices are handled that's critical, whether in a liberal or a conservative way. Recent work in Cognitive Linguistics has helped pastors and religion teachers introduce this other dimension of their subject in new ways.     

On the Knowledge of Politics and the Politics of Knowledge: How a Social Representations Approach Helps Us Rethink the Subject of Political Psychology

Fifty years ago, Serge Moscovici first outlined a theory of social representations. In this article, we attempt to discuss and to contextualize research that has been inspired by this original impetus from the particular angle of its relevance to political psychology. We argue that four defining components of social representations need to be taken into account, and that these elements need to be articulated with insights from the social identity tradition about the centrality of self and group constructions in order to develop original insights into political psychological phenomena. First, social representations are shared knowledge, and the way interpretations of the world are collectively elaborated is critical to the way people are able to act within the world. Second, social representations are meta‐knowledge, which implies that what people assume relevant others know, think, or value is part of their own interpretative grid, and that collective behavior can often be influenced more powerfully at the level of meta‐representations than of intimate beliefs. Third, social representations are enacted communication, which means that social influence is exerted by the factors that constrain social practices as much as by the discourse that interprets these practices. Fourth, social representations are world‐making assumptions: collective understandings do not only reflect existing realities but often bring social reality into being. Put together, these four components provide a distinctive theoretical perspective on power, resistance and conflict. The added conceptual value of this perspective is illustrated by showing how it allows revisiting ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. We conclude with implications for research practices and discuss how the proposed model of social representations invites us to define new priorities and challenges for the methods used to study political psychological phenomena.     

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: perspectives from neuroimaging

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common childhood behavioral disorder most often characterized by inattentiveness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Current etiologic theories suggest that ADHD stems from abnormalities in dopaminergic and possibly noradrenergic brainstem nuclei that act to regulate a cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical network, believed to be critical for executive functions and the regulation of behavioral responses such as arousal, attention, and inhibition. Noninvasive structural and functional neuroimaging techniques provide a new avenue for exploring the validity of these theories. Despite their limitations, neuroimaging studies have provided a unique and otherwise inaccessible, biological perspective of ADHD. Collectively, the studies reviewed here reveal that dysfunction in arousal, behavioral inhibition, and attention associated with ADHD may result from structural abnormalities in frontostriatal regions that in turn result in diminished activity essential for normal function.     

The application of Michel Foucault's philosophy in the problem externalizing discourse of Michael White

This paper examines how Michael White's theoretical and practice orientation can be mapped onto the work of French philosopher/historian Michel Foucault. Specifically, Foucault's analysis of his three modes of the objectification of the subject and the inseparability of power and knowledge will be viewed as similar to, and shaping of, White's conceptions of externalizing internalized problem discourse.
Where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge
Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization     

Sales-as-practice: an introduction and methodological outline

There are strong indications that sales practices are currently being redefined from the ground up and that many of the inherited conceptual models of selling will not hold into a future that is defined by new selling techniques and technologies. This paper introduces a research perspective that can provide an important source of insight into how sales work and salespeople are currently being reconstituted: the sales-as-practice approach. In common with ‘practice turns’ evident in other business literature, such as the recent marketing-as-practice or the by now well-established strategy-as-practice approach, sales-as-practice requires of researchers to develop a sensitivity towards salespeople's ways of doing and being in social and material contexts. While acknowledging potential limitations, we identify some significant benefits of adopting this approach for our conceptual understanding of the sales domain, particularly in understanding persistence and transformation in sales practices, in paying attention to the role of material objects in configuring these practices and in appreciating the role of such practices in producing salespeople's ways of being. Moreover, we argue that becoming more closely acquainted with sales professionals' lifeworlds can aid in bridging the perceived divide between academic and practitioner knowledge in our domain.     

Moving beyond ethical decision-making: a practice-based view to study unethical sales behavior

Changes in the business environment are rapidly transforming sales practice and pressuring the integrity of key actors in sales. Given that unethical sales behavior is a social activity produced and reproduced by various actors in a complex sales task environment, we introduce a novel research perspective to the study of unethical sales behavior, namely a practice-based view. With knowledge from a systematic literature review and a practice-based view from organization research, we suggest that unethical behavior should be studied as a practice formed through socialization and interaction with relevant others. This view provides an important alternative as well as a complementary perspective to the ethical decision-making paradigm that has dominated the field for several decades. The study answers scholars’ recent calls to strengthen the theoretical foundation of sales ethics research and further extend its perspective toward the social context of sales. With a focus on dynamics, social relations, and the enactment of practices, the practice-based view produces new types of knowledge on unethical behavior and potential new means for addressing it. The article makes suggestions for future practice-based research and proposes several theories for use in studying unethical behavior in currently important sales contexts.     

Narrative and the Stability of Intention

This paper addresses a problem concerning the rational stability of intention. When you form an intention to φ at some future time t, you thereby make it subjectively rational for you to follow through and φ at t, even if—hypothetically—you would abandon the intention were you to redeliberate at t. It is hard to understand how this is possible. Shouldn't the perspective of your acting self be what determines what is then subjectively rational for you? I aim to solve this problem by highlighting a role for narrative in intention. I'll argue that committing yourself to a course of action by intending to pursue it crucially involves the expectation that your acting self will be ‘swept along’ by its participation in a distinctively narrative form of self‐understanding. I'll motivate my approach by criticizing Richard Holton's and Michael Bratman's recent treatments of the stability of intention, though my account also borrows from Bratman's work. I'll likewise criticize and borrow from David Velleman's work on narrative and self‐intelligibility. When the pieces fall into place, we'll see how intending is akin to telling your future self a kind of story. My thesis is not that you address your acting self but that your acting self figures as a ‘character’ in the ‘story’ that you address to a still later self. Unlike other appeals to narrative in agency, mine will explain how as narrator you address a specifically intrapersonal audience.     

Fiat's cultural revolution: TQM as functional integration

The opening decade of this millennium witnessed genome scientists, policy makers, critical race theorists and world leaders standing together to pronounce the anti-racist democratic potential of human genomics. Understanding and assessing this rise of ‘anti-racist, democratic genomics’ requires distinguishing between two problems of power and science: the first characterized by what Michel Foucault labeled states of domination; the second by what he described as relations of power. When states of domination exist, as in the case of Nazi science, liberal efforts to extend new powers of participation and autonomy to research subjects may play important roles in redressing power imbalances between researchers and their subjects. However, when distinctions between scientist and research subject blur, as in the case of much human genomics, efforts to extend liberal rights to subjects of genomic studies—or genomic liberalism—may produce novel problems, including: (1) human genome scientists' loss of capacity to describe their objects of study; (2) disruption of research subjects' abilities to define themselves; and (3) lack of accountability for the unintended effects of efforts to democratize genomics. In these ways genomic liberalism may foster, at the same that it impedes, the co-constitution of knowledge and democratic subjects. It may create new forms of racism at the very moment that it explicitly seeks anti-racist ends. Addressing the problems created by this paradoxical position will require more sustained attention to and critique of the anti-racist and democratic imaginaries that increasingly animate technoscience.     

Twenty-First Century Science as a Relational Process: From Eureka! To Team Science and a Place for Community Psychology

In this paper we maintain that twenty-first century science is, fundamentally, a relational process in which knowledge is produced (or co-produced) through transactions among researchers or among researchers and public stakeholders. We offer an expanded perspective on the practice of twenty-first century science, the production of scientific knowledge, and what community psychology can contribute to these developments. We argue that: (1) trends in science show that research is increasingly being conducted in teams; (2) scientific teams, such as transdisciplinary teams of researchers or of researchers collaborating with various public stakeholders, are better able to address complex challenges; (3) transdisciplinary scientific teams are part of the larger, twenty-first century transformation in science; (4) the concept of heterarchy is a heuristic for team science aligned with this transformation; (5) a contemporary philosophy of science known as perspectivism provides an essential foundation to advance twenty-first century science; and (6) community psychology, through its core principles and practice competencies, offers theoretical and practical expertise for advancing team science and the transformation in science currently underway. We discuss the implications of these points and illustrate them briefly with two examples of transdisciplinary team science from our own work. We conclude that a new narrative is emerging for science in the twenty-first century that draws on interpersonal transactions in teams, and active engagement by researchers with the public to address critical accountabilities. Because of its core organizing principles and unique blend of expertise on the intersection of research and practice, community psychologists are well-prepared to help advance these developments, and thus have much to offer twenty-first century science.