Religion,Reductionism, and the Seduction of Epistemology

This paper examines phenomenology and its psychological relationship to religious education. It comments on this relationship in the light of the critique of phenomenology which Piaget himself made towards the end of his life (Piaget, 1965), though it also draws attention to other aspects of phenomenology theory which are dissonant with Piagetian psychology. This paper, therefore, is not a broad philosophical critique of phenomenology, though an element of this is included. but concentrates on the philosophical and developmental factors which impede the capacity of young people to perform either of the ‘reductions’ demanded by the phenomenological method.     

Consumer spaces as political spaces: A critical review of social,environmental, and psychogeographical research

The purpose of this review is to critique the social and environmental psychology literature on spaces and places with a focus on consumer culture and neoliberalism. By drawing on social theory and the Continental philosophical literature, the review argues that an alternative approach to knowledge production is required. To this end, recommendations are provided for what a psychogeographical approach in social and environmental psychology could look like. It argues that such work could be of benefit to academic and local communities by exposing the social costs and consequences associated with consumer culture and neoliberalism.     

Reply to Dr. Lambert

Psychologism in logic holds that logic is a branch of psychology. This view has been vigorously defended by John Stuart Mill and by a number of German philosophers of logic, notably Erdmann. Its chief critics have been Husserl and Frege and, to a lesser extent, Russell. Husserl set forth a profound and detailed critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations. This paper examines this critique. First, I explain why the psychologistic theory is attractive. Then I show that Husserl's critique is not convincing, partly because he does not take the theory in its most plausible form and partly because he ignores certain important distinctions (for example, between what a statement is about and what it is true in virtue of). Then I raise two new objections to the psychologistic theory. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the psychologistic theory remains an important and serious position from which we can learn much about the status of logic.     

Motivation,steady-state,and structural development

Stagner's homeostatic-discrepancy theory integrates a wide range of theory and data concerning the mobilization of energy in human motivation. It does not, however, deal directly with energetic and motivational bases for developmental changes in the level of organization of psychological structures or for the persistence of organisms in pursuing particular paths of individual development despite repeated negative external reinforcement. A broader conceptual model is therefore proposed in which both level and path of structural development are themselves treated as steady states. The homeostatic assumptions of motivational psychology and the structural assumptions of developmental psychology are thus seen as but different aspects of a single set of explanatory assumptions. Stagner's model then becomes that special case in which both level and path of structural development are held constant. The works of Freud, Werner, and Piaget and those of Prigogine, Waddington, and Thom are considered insofar as they bear upon these issues.This work was supported in part by a sabbatical leave grant from Wayne State University and in part by the University of Michigan-Wayne State University Institute of Gerontology. I wish to express my appreciation to Prof. Ross Stagner for his critical comments on his conceptualization of homeostasis as I have discussed it in this paper. His comments resulted in a significant clarification of my understanding of his position on the basic issues involved in this critique. Prof. Joel Ager and Ms. Kathryn Domurath also offered useful suggestions. However, I alone am solely responsible for the contents of this paper and especially for any deficiencies or inaccuracies that still remain.     

Parallel lines in life,divergent lines in science: Complexity encompasses different worlds

This paper has two major parts. The first recounts the beginning and growth of the friendship between Siegfried Streufert and Peter Suedfeld, who in the mid-1960s were graduate students in Harold M. Schroder's social psychology laboratory at Princeton University. Each continued to develop a different line of theory and research on cognitive aspects of personality and social psychology while maintaining their contacts and friendship. The second part describes the background, characteristics, and applications of the integrative complexity (IC) work of Peter Suedfeld and his collaborators and students.     

Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience

Abstract

A radical embodied cognitive neuroscience (RECN) based on ecological psychology requires the understanding of the brain, its structure, and its functions to be compatible with the main tenets of the Gibsonian theory. In this paper, we propose neural reuse as a promising candidate to achieve such understanding. We base our proposal on two fundamental ideas. In section two, we review what we take to be the two central requirements for a RECN based on ecological psychology: compatibility with the explanation of perception and action at the ecological scale and the rejection of computation as a paradigm for the explanation of the activity of the brain. In section three, we show how neural reuse meets the two requirements and, furthermore, we evaluate its theoretical parallelism with ecological psychology. Finally, after developing these ideas, in the conclusion we put forward further aspects and research possibilities that follow from the coalition of neural reuse and ecological psychology for a Gibsonian neuroscience.     

近50年来发展心理学生态化研究的回顾与前瞻

该论文从五方面回顾和展望了发展心理学生态化运动到今天50年的发展历程。这五方面包括发展历史、主要理论成就、研究范式和方法、对过去研究特点的评价和问题、对今后研究方向的展望。主要从理论的源头和创立并与实证研究作为线索,对生态系统理论和后来的生物生态模型进行了初步的探索与展望。     

A theory of intelligence: I. span and the complexity of stimulus control

A theory of intelligence is couched in stimulus-response terms, bridging the gap between S-R and cognitive psychology. The chief theoretical concepts are span ability (a capacity notion), response string (sequentially cued responses), and complexity of stimulus control (task complexity). Span is equated with the ability to respond appropriately when several cues are conjunctively relevant for correct performance (complex stimulus control). So defined, span is consistently and broadly related to many aspects of intelligent behavior.     

Future of counseling psychology research

The author offers a critique on current counseling psychology research from her perspective as a US counseling psychology researcher and editor. She notes that unless something happens to change the trajectory, future US counseling psychology research will be open to the same criticisms. She summarizes counseling psychology values and argues that counseling psychology research reflects those values. She then identifies five ways that counseling psychology could be different in the future by: building theory-based research, embracing diversity of populations, research questions and methodologies, informing (and being informed) by other psychological disciplines, and informing policy and practice.     

自我提升的利与弊：理论、实证及应用

自我提升的适应价值问题目前备受心理学家关注。进化与认知神经科学研究者认为自我提升在演化史中具有潜在的适应价值, 它具有生物遗传性; 而社会心理学家发现, 自我提升在现实中的表现是利弊参半的, 主要存在三种理论解释：调节因素论、生态比拟论、多维多功能模型; 临床咨询心理学家在实践中提出的发展适应性自我提升的建议, 有助于趋利避害地将自我提升加以应用。未来的研究将聚焦于测量的改进、文化、发展及内隐研究等领域。     

Kierkegaard's Critique of Eudaimonism: A Reassessment

Interpreters are less univocal than one might think in assessing Søren Kierkegaard's attitude toward eudaimonism. Through an analysis of several key texts from across Kierkegaard's authorship, I argue that existing interpretations do not convincingly address the relationship between Kierkegaard's critique of eudaimonism and his mid‐nineteenth‐century context, which was dominated by post‐Kantian idealists. While I am sympathetic to aspects of deontological and aretaic interpretations, a contextual reading shows that his critique centers on what he diagnoses as the enclosure of the modern self. This puts his critique of eudaimonism in the purview of his moral psychology and in continuity with his critique of romanticism.     

David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature

This ‘untimely review’ of Hume’s Treatise is written as if the book had just been published. I use this fiction to argue that the Treatise is a more fundamental critique of the concept of reason than most readers have thought. Hume’s analysis of human reasoning is grounded in empirical psychology, in which he made significant discoveries. He presents a non-propositional theory of desires, in which choice can be neither rational nor irrational. He shows that the idea that reason has authority, either in morality or science, has no substance. I argue that this critique remains valid and is not self-defeating.     

Choice Environment, Market Complexity, and Consumer Behavior: A Theoretical and Empirical Approach for Incorporating Decision Complexity into Models of Consumer Choice

Most empirical models of choice in economics and consumer research assume that the decision maker assesses all alternatives and information in a perfect information-processing sense. The complexity of the choice environment, the ability of the individual to make complex decisions, and the effect of choice context on the decision strategy are generally not considered in statistical model development. One of the reasons for this omission is that theoretical literature on choice complexity and imperfect ability to choose that has developed in psychology and behavioral decision theory (BDT) literatures has not been translated into empirical econometric analysis. Second, the data used in economics and consumer research studies tend to be somewhat different from the data structures used in psychology and BDT literatures. In this paper we outline a theoretical model that simultaneously considers task complexity, effort applied by the consumer, ability to choose, and choice. We then construct a measure of task complexity and incorporate this in an analysis of a number of data series based on the random utility framework. We also examine the performance of our measure of task complexity in a composite data set that allows for increased variability in factors affecting decision context. Our approach provides a mechanism to link research in BDT and econometric modeling of consumer choice. Our findings suggest that task complexity does affect inferences about choice model parameters and that context effects, such as complexity, have a systematic impact on the parameters of econometric models of choice. The modeling approach provides a mechanism for inclusion of results from psychology and BDT in traditional economic models of consumer choice.     

Conceptual Structure and the Emergence of the Language Faculty: Much Ado about Knotting

Abstract

One perspective in contemporary linguistic theory defends the idea that the language faculty may result from the combinations of diverse systems and principles. As a case study, I critique a recent proposal by Juan Uriagereka and colleagues according to which the evolutionary emergence of the language faculty can be identified through studying the computational structure of knots as present within the fossil record. I here argue that the ability to conceptualize and, thereby, create knots is not parasitic on the ability to conceptualize and create language. On the contrary, these two domains are entirely distinct, unrelatable in terms of their computational complexity, expressive power or, most importantly, in terms of their requisite mental operations and principles. The overall approach defended here can profitably be employed in the study of the relationship between language and thought, as I briefly discuss in the case of the role of language in spatial reorientation.     

试论乔姆斯基对认知心理学发展的重要贡献

乔姆斯基是当代著名的语言学家和公共知识分子,但他对认知心理学的贡献,却很少为学术界所研究。实际上,乔姆斯基是两次认知革命的代表性人物。他对斯金纳行为主义的批评为认知心理学的发展扫除了障碍;他所提出的哲学思想和语言学理论已成为认知心理学的一个重要理论源头;而其创立的转换-生成语法理论,为揭示人类的心智和语言能力的形成提供了一种理想的解释框架。在两次认知革命的学术转型历程中,乔姆斯基的理论一直影响着认知科学家们不断地探索前行。     

An Ecological Approach to Behavioral Development: Insights From Comparative Psychology

In this article, I review recent work from comparative psychology, highlighting several conceptual and methodological insights drawn from comparative research and exploring their value to an ecological approach to behavioral development. In particular, I consider examples of a major focus of comparative psychology, the search for developmental mechanisms and processes underlying the expression of species-typical behavior. This focus has provided several insights regarding behavioral development that have supported an ecological approach and provided a richness and depth of perspective on behavior complementary to that found in ecological psychology. Specifically, I review the related notions of probabilism, equifinality, nonlinearity, and distributed control and discuss their applicability to and support of ecological theory.     

复杂性理论在心理学研究中的价值

复杂性哲学和复杂性研究为科学研究开辟了一条蹊径,使得人们能够以一种全新的、复杂性的视角来重新认识他们所“熟知、熟悉”的人类世界。复杂性理论的世界观为当前心理学的转向提供了理论支持,而且它的一些具体的研究方法如“黑箱”的方法以及功能模拟方法已经在心理学研究中体现出其价值。可以说,复杂性理论为心理学摆脱当前困境及实现整合开启了一扇光明之门。     

Ecological Psychology and Social Psychology: It is Holt,or Nothing!

What is the greatest contribution that ecological psychologists can offer social psychology? Ideally, ecological psychologists could explain how people directly perceive the unique properties of their social partners. But social partners are distinguished from mundane objects because they possess mental traits, and tradition tells us that minds cannot be seen. When considering the ideal possibility, we reject that doctrine and posit minds as perceivable. For ecological psychology, this entails asserting that minds are the types of things able to structure ambient energy. Contemporary research and theory suggests distinctly ecological ways of attacking this problem, but the problem is not new. Almost 100 years ago, Holt argued for the visibility of minds. Thus when considering these ideas, ecological psychologists face a choice that is at once about their future and their past. Extending ecological psychology’s first principles into the social realm, we come to the point where we must either accept or reject Holt’s arguments, and the wider context they bring. In doing so, we accept or reject our ability to study the uniquely social.     

Evolution, selection and cognition: from "learning" to parameter setting in biology and in the study of language

Most biologists and some cognitive scientists have independently reached the conclusion that there is no such thing as learning in the traditional "instructive" sense. This is, admittedly, a somewhat extreme thesis, but I defend it here in the light of data and theories jointly extracted from biology, especially from evolutionary theory and immunology, and from modern generative grammar. I also point out that the general demise of learning is uncontroversial in the biological sciences, while a similar consensus has not yet been reached in psychology and in linguistics at large. Since many arguments presently offered in defense of learning and in defense of "general intelligence" are often based on a distorted picture of human biological evolution, I devote some sections of this paper to a critique of "adaptationism," providing also a sketch of a better evolutionary theory (one based on "exaptation"). Moreover, since certain standard arguments presented today as "knock-down" in psychology, in linguistics and in artificial intelligence are a perfect replica of those once voiced by biologists in favor of instruction and against selection, I capitalize on these errors of the past to draw some lessons for the present and for the future.     

Virtues,Values, and the Good Life: Alasdair MacIntyre's Virtue Ethics and Its Implications for Counseling

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of modern ethics and his virtue‐centered alternative suggest that counseling can be considered a form of applied virtue ethics, helping clients cultivate the qualities necessary to live the good life. Although similar to developmental theory and positive psychology, this perspective also questions whether counseling is value neutral and suggests that counseling should account for the (often hidden) traditions, virtues, and practices of the good life it promotes. Comparison with spiritual direction suggests ways counseling can apply the insights of this model ethically within a pluralistic setting.