Has 60 Years of Research in Psychology Really Gone Astray?

The author presents several arguments against Toomela’s (Culture of science: Strange history of the methodological thinking in psychology. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2007a, doi:, History of methodology in psychology: Starting point, not the goal. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2007b, doi:) pessimistic thesis: “The last 60 years of research in psychology seems to have gone astray.” Nevertheless he admits that Toomela’s article despite the excessively categorical assessments contained in it and the undue pessimism crowing its conclusion, represents a substantial contribution to the highlighting of socio-cultural impact on various models of psychological cognition, which lurks behind the international unification of globalizing science.

Nietzche’s Echo—A Dialogue with Thomas Altizer

Prophets provoke psychological unrest, especially when exposing accepted beliefs as profound deceptions. The biblical prophets exemplify such confrontation as do certain atheists ardently opposed to the images of God created by those seers. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche dramatically illustrates this type of counterforce to the Judeo-Christian tradition. His prophet Zarathustra is intended to be a model for the modern mind, one free of superstitions inflicted by antiquated religious dogma. Nietzsche’s credo “God is dead” served as a declaration for the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it became a theological diagnosis. As a “movement,” or “tenor,” the death of God or radical theology was spearheaded by Thomas Altizer, a well-published young professor center-staged during the turbulent 1960s. His work foreshadows a new strain of atheism currently represented by biologist Richard Dawkins (2006, The God delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin), philosopher Daniel Dennett (2006, Breaking the spell. New York: Penquin), neuroscientist Sam Harris (2004, The end of faith. New York: W.W. Norton; 2008, Letter to a Christian nation. New York: Vintage), journalist Christopher Hitchens (2007, God is not great. New York: Twelve), and mathematician John Allen Paulos (Paulos 2008, Irreligion. New York: Hill & Wang). This twenty-first century crusade against belief in God is best understood as a psychodynamic ignited by Altizer’s Christian atheism. The present dialogue reflects that dynamic while the prologue and epilogue reveal evidence of Providence amidst claims of God’s demise in contemporary history.     

What time travelers may be able to do

Kadri Vihvelin, in “What time travelers cannot do” (Philos Stud 81:315–330, 1996), argued that “no time traveler can kill the baby who in fact is her younger self”, because (V1) “if someone would fail to do something, no matter how hard or how many times she tried, then she cannot do it”, and (V2) if a time traveler tried to kill her baby self, she would always fail. Theodore Sider (Philos Stud 110:115–138, 2002) criticized Vihvelin’s argument, and Ira Kiourti (Philos Stud 139:343–352, 2008) criticized both Vihvelin’s argument and Sider’s critique. I present a critique of Vihvelin’s argument different from both Sider’s and Kiourti’s critiques: I argue in a novel way that both V1 and V2 are false. Since Vihvelin’s argument might be understood as providing a challenge to the possibility of time travel, if my critique succeeds then time travel survives such a challenge unscathed.     

The Ways of Humans: The Emergence of Sense and Common Sense Through Language Production

The present paper is an extension of Elstrup (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, doi:10.1007/s12124-009-9095-x, 2009). Primarily, it is argued that the model presented in ‘The ways of humans’ describes the functional foundation of an emergent hierarchy and therefore cannot be reduced to its elements. Next, some ideas concerning the language mechanism, sense making and common sense are developed. Finally, it is argued that the scientific exploration of human development needs a unit of measurement. It is suggested that this unit can be found in time dependent sense making.     

Attesting the Aristotelian Future

Aristotelian relativism about the future (as recently defended by MacFarlane (2003)) claims that a prediction made on Monday, such as ‘It will rain’, can be indeterminate on Monday but determinate on Tuesday. A serious objection to this intuitively appealing view is that it cannot coherently be attested: for if it is attested on Monday, then our blindness to what the future holds precludes attesting that the prediction is determinate on Tuesday, and if it is attested on Tuesday (when, suppose, it rains), then the fact that it rains precludes attesting that the prediction is indeterminate on Monday. In this paper, I focus on Moruzzi and Wright (2009)’s recent development of this objection and argue that it fails. This result removes a major obstacle to defending the Aristotelian view.     

Yet Another Run around the Circle

In a recent article, D. A. Truncellito (2004, ‘Running in Circles about Begging the Question’, Argumentation 18, 325–329) argues that the discussion between Robinson (1971, ‘Begging the Question’, Analysis 31, 113–117), Sorensen (1996, ‘Unbeggable Questions’, Analysis 56, 51–55) and Teng (1997, ‘Sorensen on Begging the Question’, Analysis 57, 220–222) shows that we need to distinguish between logical fallacies, which are mistakes in the form of the argument, and rhetorical fallacies, which are mistakes committed by the arguer. While I basically agree with Truncellito’s line of thinking, I believe this distinction is not tenable and offer a different view. In addition, I will argue that the conclusion to draw from the abovementioned discussion is that validity is not a sufficient criterion of begging the question, and that we should be wary of the containment-metaphor of a deductive argument.     

An Apology for a Religion of the Melancholic

This article is a study of depression and melancholia from the psychoanalytic perspective. Starting with the issue of levels and categories involving the phenomena of depression and melancholia, it elucidates the particular nature of the melancholic loss; the fact that the melancholic’s problem has to do with language; the view of the melancholic subject as a default subject; and the question of desire in melancholia and its trajectory toward recovery, eventually leading to a hopeful imagination concerning the innermost human desire. Three Lacanian psychoanalytic theories (Darian Leader (2009); Colette Soler (2006); Slavoj Zizek (2006)) are used to support my arguments; Suah Bae (2003, 2004) provides fascinating fictional truths that witness to the melancholic’s inner world; and Donald Capps (2000) renders a decisive help in my pastoral psychological reading of all of these writers.     

The Rise of Voluntary Work in Higher Education and Corporate Social Responsibility in Business: Perspectives of Students and Graduate Employees

The Higher Education and Employment strand of the Learning for Life project focused on exploring some of the values of 169 students and graduate employees (Arthur et al. 2009a, b). A major theme suggested by participants, which arose naturally from the data and emerged from people’s accounts during in-depth interviews, involved the close relationship they felt existed between voluntary work and core values. It is this aspect of the project that is reported. There are several important and new findings that will be highlighted, including: voluntary work as a dimension for the development of character, personal development and a venue for developing people’s skills (which universities and employers often seek in their processes of recruitment); the types of voluntary work conducted by students and graduate employees; the role of ethnic minorities; people’s moral motivations behind engaging in voluntary work; the rise of the gap year volunteer; and the link between voluntary work at university and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the working world.     

Ockham Efficiency Theorem for Stochastic Empirical Methods

Ockham’s razor is the principle that, all other things being equal, scientists ought to prefer simpler theories. In recent years, philosophers have argued that simpler theories make better predictions, possess theoretical virtues like explanatory power, and have other pragmatic virtues like computational tractability. However, such arguments fail to explain how and why a preference for simplicity can help one find true theories in scientific inquiry, unless one already assumes that the truth is simple. One new solution to that problem is the Ockham efficiency theorem (Kelly 2002, Minds Mach 14:485–505, 2004, Philos Sci 74:561–573, 2007a, b, Theor Comp Sci 383:270–289, c, d; Kelly and Glymour 2004), which states that scientists who heed Ockham’s razor retract their opinions less often and sooner than do their non-Ockham competitors. The theorem neglects, however, to consider competitors following random (“mixed”) strategies and in many applications random strategies are known to achieve better worst-case loss than deterministic strategies. In this paper, we describe two ways to extend the result to a very general class of random, empirical strategies. The first extension concerns expected retractions, retraction times, and errors and the second extension concerns retractions in chance, times of retractions in chance, and chances of errors.     

Shifting Loyalties: Reconsidering Psychology’s Subject Matter

Schwarz (IPBS: Integrative Psychology & Behavioral Science 43:3, 2009) cogently demonstrates that in conjunction with scientific conventionalism psychology has developed a rather deficient view of their subject matter: the human being. Psychology based on an impoverished notion of empirical has rendered subjectivity or ‘the measuring apparatus man’ invisible. As his story implicitly demonstrates, psychologists supported by a positivistic view of science (in part to be empirical) and notion of ‘objectivity’ have learned to trust their ‘rigorous’ methods instead of their participants as capable of revealing important and interesting phenomena. If we are going to take subjectivity and experience seriously there should be a cultivation of a new attitude or orientation regarding psychology’s subject matter (i.e., the human being) and science. This commentary discusses Mark Freeman’s (2007) argument that the first requirement of science should be ‘fidelity to the phenomena’ and elaborates on the implications for psychology grounded in this view of science.     

Mother,Melancholia, and Art in Erik H. Erikson’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Toys and Reasons</Emphasis>

In three earlier articles (2007a, 2007b, 2007c), I focused on the theme of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, and suggested that the melancholic self may experience humor, play, and dreams as restorative resources. In this article, I want to make a similar case, based on Erik H. Erikson’s Toys and Reasons (1977), for art (in this particular case, a painting of the Annunciation). I have made a similar case for the restorative role of art in articles on Leonard da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (Capps, Pastoral Psychology, 53, 107–137, 2004) and James McNeill Whistler’s painting of his mother (Capps, Pastoral Psychology, 2007d). In the present article, however, I focus on the special biographical circumstances in Erikson’s own development of a melancholy self and the painting he discusses in Toys and Reasons, thereby suggesting that individuals may find a particular work of art especially relevant to their own experience of melancholy. I conclude with Erikson’s testimonial at the memorial service of a colleague and friend who translated her own melancholy into her service to others.

A Spiritual Person

When asked in a questionnaire to describe a spiritual person, William James named one instead: Phillips Brooks. This article focuses on Brooks—his life, his sermons, and his poem “O Little Town of Bethlehem”—to make the case that he exemplified James’ view of spirituality as “a susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them.” It also supports Belzen’s (Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 12:205–222, 2009) view that there is no spirituality in general but only individual manifestations of it, a point that James’ nomination of Brooks implicitly supports.     

Arguments,Meta-arguments,and Metadialogues: A Reconstruction of Krabbe,Govier, and Woods

Krabbe (2003, in F.H. van Eemeren, J.A. Blair, C.A. Willard and A.F. Snoeck Henkemans (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, Sic Sat, Amsterdam, pp. 641–644) defined a metadialogue as a dialogue about one or more dialogues, and a ground-level dialogue as a dialogue that is not a metadialogue. Similarly, I define a meta-argument as an argument about one or more arguments, and a ground-level argument as one which is not a meta-argument. Krabbe (1995, in F.H van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, J.A. Blair, C.A. Willard and A.F. Snoeck Henkemans (eds.), Proceedings of the Third ISSA Conference on Argumentation, Sic Sat, Amsterdam, pp. 333–344) showed that formal-fallacy criticism (and more generally, fallacy criticism) consists of metadialogues, and that such metadialogues can be profiled in ways that lead to their proper termination or resolution. I reconstruct Krabbe’s metadialogical account into monolectical, meta-argumentative terminology by describing three-types of meta-arguments corresponding to the three ways of proving formal invalidity he studied: the trivial logic-indifferent method; the method of counterexample situation; and the method of formal paraphrase. A fourth type of meta-argument corresponds to what Oliver (1967, Mind 76, 463–478), Govier (1985, Informal Logic 7, 27–33), and Copi (1986) call refutation by logical analogy. A fifth type of meta-argument represents my reconstruction of arguments by parity of reasoning studied by Woods and Hudak (1989, Informal Logic 11, 125–139). Other particular meta-arguments deserving future study are Hume’s critique of the argument from design in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Mill’s initial argument in The Subjection of Women about the importance of established custom and general feeling vis-à-vis argumentation.     

Conscious machines: Memory,melody and muscular imagination

A great deal of effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to developing consciousness artificially (A small selection of the many authors writing in this area includes: Cotterill (J Conscious Stud 2:290–311, 1995, 1998), Haikonen (2003), Aleksander and Dunmall (J Conscious Stud 10:7–18, 2003), Sloman (2004, 2005), Aleksander (2005), Holland and Knight (2006), and Chella and Manzotti (2007)), and yet a similar amount of effort has gone in to demonstrating the infeasibility of the whole enterprise (Most notably: Dreyfus (1972/1979, 1992, 1998), Searle (1980), Harnad (J Conscious Stud 10:67–75, 2003), and Sternberg (2007), but there are a great many others). My concern in this paper is to steer some navigable channel between the two positions, laying out the necessary pre-conditions for consciousness in an artificial system, and concentrating on what needs to hold for the system to perform as a human being or other phenomenally conscious agent in an intersubjectively-demanding social and moral environment. By adopting a thick notion of embodiment—one that is bound up with the concepts of the lived body and autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980; Varela et al. 2003; and Ziemke 2003, 2007a, J Conscious Stud 14(7):167–179, 2007b)—I will argue that machine phenomenology is only possible within an embodied distributed system that possesses a richly affective musculature and a nervous system such that it can, through action and repetition, develop its tactile-kinaesthetic memory, individual kinaesthetic melodies pertaining to habitual practices, and an anticipatory enactive kinaesthetic imagination. Without these capacities the system would remain unconscious, unaware of itself embodied within a world. Finally, and following on from Damasio’s (1991, 1994, 1999, 2003) claims for the necessity of pre-reflective conscious, emotional, bodily responses for the development of an organism’s core and extended consciousness, I will argue that without these capacities any agent would be incapable of developing the sorts of somatic markers or saliency tags that enable affective reactions, and which are indispensable for effective decision-making and subsequent survival. My position, as presented here, remains agnostic about whether or not the creation of artificial consciousness is an attainable goal.     

Keep Changing Your Beliefs, Aiming for the Truth

We investigate the process of truth-seeking by iterated belief revision with higher-level doxastic information. We elaborate further on the main results in Baltag and Smets (Proceedings of TARK, 2009a, Proceedings of WOLLIC’09 LNAI 5514, 2009b), applying them to the issue of convergence to truth. We study the conditions under which the belief revision induced by a series of truthful iterated upgrades eventually stabilizes on true beliefs. We give two different conditions ensuring that beliefs converge to “full” (complete) truth, as well as a condition ensuring only that they converge to true (but not necessarily complete) beliefs.     

Vollkommene Syllogismen und reine Vernunftschlüsse: Aristoteles und Kant. Eine Stellungnahme zu Theodor Eberts Gegeneinwänden. Teil 2

In an earlier article (see J Gen Philos Sci (2010) 41: 341–355) I have compared Aristotle’s syllogistic with Kant’s theory of “pure ratiocination”. “Ratiocinia pura” („reine Vernunftschlüsse“) is Kant’s designation for assertoric syllogisms Aristotle has called ‘perfect’. In Kant’s view they differ from non-pure ratiocinia precisely in that their validity rests only on the validity of the Dictum de omni et nullo (which, however, in Kant’s view can be further reduced to more fundamental principles) whereas the validity of non-pure ratiocinia additionally presupposes the validity of inferences which Kant calls consequentiae immediatae. I have argued that Kant’s view is in some (not in all) essential features in accordance with Aristotle’s view concerning perfect syllogisms and certainly leading to a tenable and interesting logical theory. As a result I have rejected not only the interpretation of Aristotle adopted by Theodor Ebert, but also the objections he has raised against Kant’s logical theory. As far as Aristotle is concerned, Ebert has attempted to defend his position in the first part of his reply to my article published in J Gen Philos Sci (2009) 40: 357–365, and I have argued against this defence in issue 1 of the J Gen Philos Sci (2010) 41: 199–213 (cf. Ebert’s answer in the same issue pp. 215–231). In the following discussion I deal with Eberts defence of his criticism of Kant published in the second part of his reply to my article (see J Gen Philos Sci (2009) 40: 365–372). I shall argue, that Kant’s principle ‘nota notae est nota rei ipsius’ and his use of technical vocabulary stand up to the objections raised by Ebert. His attempts to prove that Kant’s logical theory is defective are based on several misinterpretations.     

The Logic of Theory Assessment

This paper starts by indicating the analysis of Hempel’s conditions of adequacy for any relation of confirmation (Hempel, 1945) as presented in Huber (submitted). There I argue contra Carnap (1962, Section 87) that Hempel felt the need for two concepts of confirmation: one aiming at plausible theories and another aiming at informative theories. However, he also realized that these two concepts are conflicting, and he gave up the concept of confirmation aiming at informative theories. The main part of the paper consists in working out the claim that one can have Hempel’s cake and eat it too — in the sense that there is a logic of theory assessment that takes into account both of the two conflicting aspects of plausibility and informativeness. According to the semantics of this logic, α is an acceptable theory for evidence β if and only if α is both sufficiently plausible given β and sufficiently informative about β. This is spelt out in terms of ranking functions (Spohn, 1988) and shown to represent the syntactically specified notion of an assessment relation. The paper then compares these acceptability relations to explanatory and confirmatory consequence relations (Flach, 2000) as well as to nonmonotonic consequence relations (Kraus et al., 1990). It concludes by relating the plausibility-informativeness approach to Carnap’s positive relevance account, thereby shedding new light on Carnap’s analysis as well as solving another problem of confirmation theory. A precursor of this paper has appeared as “The Logic of Confirmation and Theory Assessment” in L. Běhounek & M. Bílková (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2004, Prague: Filosofia, 2005, 161–176.     

The Mother Relationship and Artistic Inhibition in the Lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Erik H. Erikson

In four earlier articles, I focused on the theme of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, and suggested that the melancholic self may experience humor (Capps, 2007a), play (Capps, 2008a), dreams (Capps, 2007c), and art (Capps, 2008b) as restorative resources. I argued that Erik H. Erikson found these resources to be valuable remedies for his own melancholic condition, which had its origins in the fact that he was illegitimate and was raised solely by his mother until he was three years old, when she remarried. In this article, I focus on two themes in Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1964): Leonardo’s relationship with his mother in early childhood and his inhibitions as an artist. I relate these two themes to Erikson’s own early childhood and his failure to achieve his goal as an aspiring artist in his early twenties. The article concludes with a discussion of Erikson’s frustrated aspirations to become an artist and his emphasis, in his psychoanalytic work, on children’s play. Donald Capps is Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary. His books include Men, Religion, and Melancholia (1997), Freud and Freudians on Religion (2001), and Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor     

Special Topic: Filial Piety: The Root of Morality or the Source of Corruption?

In recent years, Liu Qingping 劉清平 has published a series of articles criticizing Confucian ethics in its modern context (see various articles by Liu), which has drawn the attention of many scholars. My friends and I have debated with him and his allies on this issue (See Guo 2002, Yang Haiwen 2002, Yang Zebo 2003, 2004a, 2004b, Ding 2003, 2005a, 2005b, Gong 2004, Guo and Gong 2004, and Wen 2005). Most of the important articles in the debate are now collected in a volume I edited, A Collection of Contentions about Confucian Ethics: Focusing on the Mutual Concealment among Family Members (Guo 2005 [ed.]). In the following, I attempt to respond to some of Liu’s criticisms of Confucian ethics.     

The Interplay Between Post-Critical Beliefs and Anxiety: An Exploratory Study in a Polish Sample

The present research investigates the relationship between anxiety and the religiosity dimensions that Wulff (Psychology of religion: classic and contemporary views, Wiley, New York, 1991; Psychology of religion. Classic and contemporary views, Wiley, New York, 1997; Psychologia religii. Klasyczna i współczesna, Wydawnictwo Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, Warszawa, 1999) described as Exclusion vs. Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs. Symbolic. The researchers used the Post-Critical Belief scale (Hutsebaut in J Empir Theol 9(2):48–66, 1996; J Empir Theol 10(1):39–54, 1997) to measure Wulff’s religiosity dimensions and the IPAT scale (Krug et al. 1967) to measure anxiety. Results from an adult sample (N = 83) suggest that three dimensions show significant relations with anxiety. Orthodoxy correlated negatively with suspiciousness (L) and positively with guilt proneness (O) factor—in the whole sample. Among women, Historical Relativism negatively correlated with suspiciousness (L), lack of integration (Q3), general anxiety and covert anxiety. Among men, Historical Relativism positively correlated with tension (Q4) and emotional instability (C), general anxiety, covert anxiety and overt anxiety. External Critique was correlated with suspiciousness (L) by men.