Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Little is known about classical Christian schools and their leaders in the United States. This study describes the headmasters of such schools and their sense of job satisfaction, job efficacy, and career aspirations. Numerous significant relationships among the variables were found, including between job satisfaction and a headmaster's relationships with the board, faculty, and parents. A regression analysis indicated that 45% of the variance in their sense of job satisfaction was predicted by transactional leadership qualities, relationships with the governing bodies, classical pedagogy, and career aspirations.     

Tokenism in Psychology: Standing on the Shoulders of Small Boys

Tokenism is a situation in which a member of a distinctive category is treated differently from other people. This article is about the situation in which Tokens (people perceived as distinctive) are considered experts on something for having the properties of a token (the thing which makes them distinctive). Tokens who differ by appearance or by being born into another culture might be considered experts on cultures grouped into the same racial/cultural category. Tokens who differ by being skilled in number-related mathematics might be considered experts on the mathematization of phenomena. Tokens might say that some result is valid for all people in some racial/cultural category without sufficient evidence, or use number-related mathematics as a mathematization of psychological phenomena without trying to find more abstract mathematizations. This harms psychological research. A possible future genesis of cultural and number tokenisms is discussed, and some suggestions to improve the discourse offered. The effect of tokenism might be diminished if psychologists focus on more proper thinking about psychological phenomena.     

The Legacy of Lawrence Kohlberg: Implications for Counseling and Human Development

Despite the great contribution by Lawrence Kohlberg to our understanding of moral development, counselors are only beginning to appreciate fully the implications of his developmental psychology for the practice of counseling and human development. Drawing on the collective body of Kohlberg's work, seven basic assumptions are shown to have direct relevance for conceptualizing counseling from a constructivist developmental approach.     

The Personal and the (Inter-)Disciplinary: Reflections on Larry Kohlberg as my Mentor

Boyd, a philosopher, describes how he came to collaborate with the psychologist Kohlberg, whose theorizing framed problems at the interface between the two disciplines.     

Reality and Philosophy: Reflections on Cora Diamond's Work

The publication of Cora Diamond's important 2002 “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Animal Life) stimulated the writing of this essay. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” attempted to show that there are experiences of reality (recounted especially in literature like John Coetzee's novels and Ted Hughes' poetry) in relation to which philosophical concepts and words encounter difficulty. The experiences resist conceptualization. By examining several of Diamond's earlier writings, I try to show that the difficulty of philosophical conceptualization of reality is due to the fact that reality does not exist external to experience. Reality being internal to experience means that reality contains an unfixed set of possibilities. Being experiential, reality is historical. The historical dimension of reality – such as the reality of animal life suffering – makes the words through we describe this reality too weak, i.e. they are not powerful enough to capture reality, hence the difficulty. Consequently, as I argue, for Diamond, the weakness of words means that words are never complete concepts. The meaning of them seems always still to come since reality seems always to have a surplus of possibilities. I suggest that because of this always still “to come” aspect of the meaning of words, we might characterise Diamond's thought as a messianism.     

学习全国宗教工作会议精神的体会

<正>习近平总书记在全国宗教工作会议上发表的重要讲话,全面总结了宗教工作的成绩经验,深入分析了宗教工作面临的形势任务,系统阐述了新时代宗教工作的新思想、新理念、新战略,明确了坚持我国宗教中国化方向、做好新时代宗教工作的指导思想、战略目标、重点任务和政策举措。习总书记的重要讲话,具有很强的政治性、     

Making sense of Turiel's dispute with Kohlberg: the case of the child's moral competence

This study attempts to make conceptual and empirical sense of Turiel's dispute with Kohlberg concerning the child's moral competence. Forty-eight children from two age-levels (24 6-year-olds, and 24 8-year-olds; Experiment 1), and 20 young adults aged between 17 and 21 years (Experiment 2) were confronted with hypothetical situations in which two apparently immoral acts (stealing and lying) were right if a principled or reversible exchange of perspectives were adopted. Contrary to what would be expected from Turiel's claim about the child's sophisticated moral competence, children, but not young adults, judged the acts at hand more in accord with a pattern of pseudo-moral necessity or fuzzy traces of morality than with a pattern of a developing idea of principled morality or “necessary” moral knowledge. The paper also argues that one is in a better position to make sense of Turiel's dispute with Kohlberg when one becomes aware of (a) Wittgenstein's idea of grammatical investigations, (b) Piaget's distinction between false, true, and necessary (cognitive) knowledge, and (c) Kohlberg's distinction between pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional moral reasoning as a distinction that, to an extent, corresponds in the moral domain to Piaget's epistemic types of knowledge in the cognitive domain.     

站在巨人的肩膀上:拉丁学的进展与视角

Ｃ .内波斯告诉我们 ,加图每每谈起战争 ,并不提及将军的名字 ,而总是以事论事 ,从不赞誉指挥者。他认为 ,重要的是战绩本身 ,而非战绩可能让贵族产生的骄傲。他们往往更看重个人成就 ,而非罗马人民的荣誉。但是加图也有例外的时候 ,并不恪守这一常规。正因为这种例外极其少见 ,他所挑选的人物才显得格外杰出。本文打算效仿一二 ,详细回顾战后以来整个知识体系的巩固发展 ,其中刻意突出总的趋势 ,不拘泥于个别成果 ;突出总体画面 ,不拘泥于个人。但是 ,如上所述 ,在谈到新思想的诞生或个人观点如何汇聚为众人的协作时 ,本文也将偶尔打破一下…     

Reflections on the Reflections

Pastoral Psychology -     

The measurement of principled morality by the Kohlberg Moral Dilemma Questionnaire

The four stages preceding the postconventional level in the Kohlberg (1958, 1971, 1976) system of moral development are described as involving moral judgments that conform to external conditions of punishment, reward, social expectation, and conformity to the law. No special level of self-control seems necessary to behave in keeping with these conditions of external reinforcement. In contrast, the two stages of postconventional (principled) mortality involve defiance of majority opinion and defiance of the law--actions that would seem to require greater self-control. This study was concerned with whether postconventional moral reasoning, as measured by the Kohlberg Moral Dilemma Questionnaire (MDQ), can be associated with higher self-control. If so, prediction of principled moral behavior from the MDQ would be based not only on postconventional moral reasoning but bolstered by the necessary level of self-control as well. College students who came the closest to postconventional moral reasoning showed better self-control than college students who were more conventional or preconventional in their moral judgments. These results support the validity of the MDQ for predicting principled moral behavior.     

The Measurement of Principled Morality by the Kohlberg Moral Dilemma Questionnaire

The four stages preceding the postconventional level in the Kohlberg (1958, 1971, 1976) system of moral development are described as involving moral judgments that conform to external conditions of punishment, reward, social expectation, and conformity to the law. No special level of self-control seems necessary to behave in keeping with these conditions of external reinforcement. In contrast, the two stages of postconventional (principled) morality involve defiance of majority opinion and defiance of the law-actions that would seem to require greater self-control. This study was concerned with whether postconventional moral reasoning, as measured by the Kohlberg Moral Dilemma Questionnaire (MDQ), can be associated with higher self-control. If so, prediction of principled moral behavior from the MDQ would be based not only on postconventional moral reasoning but bolstered by the necessary level of self-control as well. College students who came the closest to postconventional moral reasoning showed better self-control than college students who were more conventional or preconventional in their moral judgments. These results support the validity of the MDQ for predicting principled moral behavior.     

Gibbs on Kohlberg on Dewey: An essay review of John C. Gibbs's Moral Development and Reality

According to Daniel Lapsley in his foreword to John Gibbs's Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman (2003 Gibbs, J. 2003. Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), “Professor Gibbs argues that Kohlberg's stage theory fails largely because his best Piagetian insights were corrupted by his fascination with Dewey's writings on internalization and group conformity.” According to Gibbs, continues Lapsley, Kohlberg's “formulation of the preconventional, conventional, and postconventional typology can be traced to Dewey.” Lapsley observes that “to call Kohlberg's Deweyan commitments the “Procrustean bed” that distorts his developmental theory is a startling claim” (Gibbs, 2003 Gibbs, J. 2003. Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. viii). 1 All subsequent page number citations will be to Gibbs (2003 Gibbs, J. 2003. Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) unless otherwise indicated.

Indeed it is. I also believe it is false in a complex way, or at least seriously misleading. The theses of this paper are that: (1) Dewey's moral psychology includes, in any substantial way, neither (a) a three-stage developmental theory nor (b) internalization as part of that theory; that therefore either (2) Kohlberg misread Dewey, and/or (3) Gibbs misreads Kohlberg. This confusion suggests a look at what has been called a “neo-Kohlbergian approach” as a competing theory to Gibbs's “new view of life span moral judgment development” (pp. 74 – 75).