The Method of Levels of Abstraction in Pluralism and Governance of Dialogical Interaction

This paper deploys elements of the philosophy of information (PoI) in order to explore ideas of dialogical governance. Dialogue in the governance of contentious issues is at least partly a response to the recognition of pluralism among perspectives on various issues. This recognition is prevalent in the context of European governance. However, it is a first step to a better understanding of diverging opinion, rather than an end point. This paper argues that the PoI offers a fruitful path to follow up this first step. Specifically, PoI provides epistemological tools that can be used to clarify the meanings of terms and relevance of perspectives at issue in dialogical scenarios. Importantly, this approach revises the enlightenment view of the individual, offering a more nuanced and ultimately more accurate view of the self as internally complex. This represents a step beyond the status quo wherein these things are taken as unproblematic. This paper argues that PoI’s resources ought to feature as a methodological background to a reinvigorated dialogical governance paradigm. This method and these resources can inform an improved view of dialogical governance in Europe and, in their generality, beyond.     

The Divine Pedagogy as a Model for Online Education

Abstract. In addition to the pragmatic concerns that often drive the use of technology in theological education, there is a need to develop theological justification and direction for online education. Several Roman Catholic Church documents propose the “divine pedagogy,” the manner in which God teaches the human race, as a model for catechesis or religious education. This can provide a rich resource for developing a theological pedagogy for online education. This is especially relevant to the justification for online education, because critics sometimes refer to the incarnational character of the divine pedagogy to argue against the disembodied nature of virtual education. This article addresses such criticisms and more constructively, relates several aspects of the divine pedagogy such as adaptation, community, and participation to teaching and learning in the online environment. (This paper was presented at Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace II conference in Evanston, Ill. on April 17, 2004.)     

Social Research in the Advancement of Children's Rights

This article argues that investigators doing developmental and social research with children have, for the most part, failed to acknowledge the inherent implications of their work for children's rights. The impact of these studies upon children's rights occurs at every stage; from hypothesis formulation to hypothesis testing to dissemination of findings. This paper addresses the issue in the context of developmental research on children's ability to report experienced events accurately. This particular research area has generated data that has been extrapolated to legal contexts and created a foundation for assumptions about the credibility of child witnesses. This in turn has had profound effects on children's right to be heard and the weight given to their testimony. The argument is made that there is a need for social scientists to explicitly articulate how their work may impact upon children's rights and what is in fact the social agenda in this regard underlying their research.     

Reconceptualising parental monitoring within a model of goal-directed parental action

The concept and operationalisation of parental monitoring in adolescent behavioural research is idiosyncratic, and often conflates multiple concepts. This hinders study and understanding of its role in the distinct processes of adolescent development and behaviour. This paper introduces a model of Goal-Directed Parental Action, applied to adolescent crime, in order to situate and thus define the concept of parental monitoring. This model draws on Situational Action Theory to both prioritise motivation and specify a parental action process. This process distinguishes parental goals from the means by which to achieve them and from the knowledge gathering required to evaluate progress towards such goals. Within this framework, parental monitoring is defined as the employment of active information-gathering behaviours by parents to help them to gain knowledge about and evaluate their child's progress towards a range of parentally selected developmental and behavioural goals. In addition to facilitating this definition of parental monitoring, the model of Goal-Directed Parental Action has future potential to clarify other parenting concepts and processes.     

The contradictions of islandness: The small island of St Helena and the emotions of transnationalism

This paper investigates the emotions of transnationalism, when coming from the small, remote British Overseas Territory of St Helena. This paper captures how St Helenian islanders migrate for new opportunities and to escape island monotony. Even though dispersed, the St Helenian islanders retain a strong sense of attachment and belonging to their island, often establishing emotional and material ties in two hemispheres. This paper thus captures the emotions of feeling torn and the contradictory emotions of islandness. This research draws from 68 in-depth interviews with St Helenian islanders between 2006 and 2008, following the return of British citizenship in 2002, but before the island had a functioning airport in 2017. This research captured the emotions of transnationalism when travel was expensive, complex and arduous, due to a fickle British national identity as well as the island's dependence on one single ship. At the point of publishing this research however, the UK was negotiating deals for Brexit and international air travel was limited due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility for this transnational small island community, thus remains uncertain and complicated, due to their post-colonial national identity and geographical isolation.     

The disintegrative factor in therapeutic groups as illuminated by kibbutz life

This article deals with the way individuals cope with the threat they experience in the framework of psychodynamic group psychotherapy. This threat, which is understood to be a disintegrative threat, is intensified in the therapeutic group. We see the therapeutic group as possessing attributes of a potential space, in which the participants are enabled to process the defense and coping mechanisms intended to preserve the sense of integration. This will be illustrated by the experiences of individuals who grew up in a kibbutz (an Israeli society in which infants were raised with their peer group) and participated in psychodynamic groups.     

民胞物与--对人的类本质关系的思考

生产作为运用知识的活动这一点昭示了人类关系的本质。由于知识是达于主体间、主客体间相互作用内在性质的信息,所以,运用知识进行生产就是在按主体间、主客体间相互作用的性质建立相互关系。显然,这是人类关系所独具的形式;由此建立起来的关系必定具有和谐的品质。而这种关系乃是人类的本质关系。借用北宋张载的说法,可以称之为“民胞物与”。     

Moral Perception and the Pursuit of Medical Philosophy

This paper begins by examining the claim that the practice of medicine is essentially a moral endeavor. According to this view, all clinical practice has moral content, and each clinical situation has a moral dimension. I suggest that in order to recognize this moral dimension, clinicians must engage in an interpretive process, and that they must be able to interpret clinical data in ethical terms. However, clinicians often lack the ‘moral perception’ required to appreciate this moral dimension. I will argue that physicians lack moral perception when the clinical data they are given do not offer sufficient opportunity for interpretation. This paper draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty to suggest that this loss of interpretation is, paradoxically, the result of the way that patients experience illness. This thesis may be productive, first, because it suggests opportunities to explore the process of moral perception. This thesis also suggests ways for ethicists and educators to enhance clinicians' perception of the ethical dimensions of clinical practice. Finally, the concept of moral perception, when grounded in the patient's experience of illness, creates a fruitful area of inquiry that warrants inclusion in what may someday be the philosophy of medicine's canon. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Homo moralis strikes back

Restorative justice presents a morally relevant method for alternative conflict resolution. However, this potential is not always applied fully. Instead, the practice may be used in ways foreign to it. This claim comes to the fore in the practice of restorative justice in domestic violence cases. Despite the persistent feminist critique of it the practice is widely offered. This suggests that the practice can cater to needs not originally depicted in the rationale of it. This paper works out of a wittgensteinian approach and argues that there is a confusing language use going on around mediation. The argument is based on an analysis of public talk of mediation in Finland which shows that it is predominantly conducted in the light of homo economicus. This is problematic. The paper suggests that instead of referring to mediation in terms of homo economicus, the value of it should be counted in terms of homo moralis. This is what restorative justice originally intended to do. The paper establishes a new perspective on the critique of restorative justice in general and offers a fruitful way forward.     

Who stops the sweatshops? Our neglect of the injustice of maldistribution

Researchers have attempted to hold fashion, beauty, and toy industries' promotion of narrow beauty ideals responsible for the injustice of body dissatisfaction. We advocate for reform by calling upon the industries to represent plus‐sized and older models (e.g., on catwalks) as antidotes to narrow beauty ideals, citing evidence that the use of such models are no less profitable. This attempts to address what Fraser ( 1995 ) calls the injustice of misrecognition. This advocacy however not only masks another injustice these industries perpetuate: maldistribution (Fraser, 1995 ), but it can actively worsen it. This is most poignantly exemplified by the 250 million sweatshop workers in the Global South working in these industries. Those of us advocating against these industries' injustices are encouraged to join People and Planet in their campaign to use universities' vast purchasing power for sweatshop reform. This is one small way to advocate against maldistribution, redressing the imbalance.     

Argumentation and Evidence

This essay explores the role of informal logicand its application in the context of currentdebates regarding evidence-based medicine. This aim is achieved through a discussion ofthe goals and objectives of evidence-basedmedicine and a review of the criticisms raisedagainst evidence-based medicine. Thecontributions to informal logic by StephenToulmin and Douglas Walton are explicated andtheir relevance for evidence-based medicine isdiscussed in relation to a common clinicalscenario: hypertension management. This essayconcludes with a discussion on the relationshipbetween clinical reasoning, rationality, andevidence. It is argued that informal logic hasthe virtue of bringing explicitness to the roleof evidence in clinical reasoning, and bringssensitivity to understanding the role ofdialogical context in the need for evidence inclinical decision making.     

Introducing an existential-phenomenological approach Part 2—theory for practice

Part one of this paper concentrated on phenomenological theory and research. This second section seeks to describe how existential-phenomenological therapy developed, and how the concepts apply in sessions. This direction for therapy could be called making conscious the preconscious, in the production of new information by reinterpreting the same scenes and experiences. This approach is compared to the psychoanalytic style of working. The existential-phenomenological approaches of Binswanger, Boss and Sartre, three key existential writers, are briefly mentioned, each of which evolved from the work of Husserl, Heidegger and Freud. But much detail is omitted in the aim of providng a succinct overview. This paper shows part of the sources of counselling and humanistic psychotherapy in the existential critique of psychoanalysis.     

La perception de la responsabilité sociale des Entreprises : adaptation et validation française de l’échelle de Maignan et Ferrell, 1999

This study proposes to apply the paradigm of Churchill in the case of the adaptation in french and validation of the Maignan and Ferrell scale (1999) based on the model developed by Carroll (1979). This model proposes to distinguish four principles of social responsibility: economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibility. Four factors were highlighted in a first exploratory study conducted among 320 workers. This structure was confirmed during a second confirmatory investigation among 287others workers. If the four identified factors do not match exactly to the theoretical chosen model, they bring value to support the differences in social responsibility between the internal actors and external actors.     

PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF ITS HISTORY

Abstract: This article's goal is to outline one approach to providing a principled answer to the question of what is the proper relationship between philosophy and the study of philosophy's history, a question arising, for example, in the design of a curriculum for graduate students. This approach requires empirical investigation of philosophizing past and present, and thus takes philosophy as an object of study in something like the way that contemporary (naturalistic) philosophy of science takes science as an object of study. This approach also requires articulating a sense in which philosophy might make, or might have made, progress.     

A rational analysis of rule-based concept learning

This article proposes a new model of human concept learning that provides a rational analysis of learning feature-based concepts. This model is built upon Bayesian inference for a grammatically structured hypothesis space—a concept language of logical rules. This article compares the model predictions to human generalization judgments in several well-known category learning experiments, and finds good agreement for both average and individual participant generalizations. This article further investigates judgments for a broad set of 7-feature concepts—a more natural setting in several ways—and again finds that the model explains human performance.     

职业性别刻板印象研究模型及方法综述

近年来对职业性别刻板印象的探讨成了刻板印象研究领域的新研究方向,职业性别刻板印象成为社会认知领域的新课题。职业性别刻板印象与我们的生活休戚相关,是指人们对职业进行性别划分和性别归类的趋向。目前国内此方面的研究相当有限,采用的实验和调查研究也停留在起步阶段。本文对职业性别刻扳印象研究的模型及方法进行综述。     

Making Mayhew and Frisby effortlessly discriminable

Mayhew and Frisby (1978) demonstrated that patterns which differ markedly in their spatial-frequency content may be very hard to discriminate. This they took as evidence against any model which proposes that the processes underlying texture discrimination have direct access to some local piecewise Fourier analysis of the patterns performed by spatial-frequency channels. It is shown that Mayhew and Frisby's patterns can be discriminated easily if their components have been incorporated into a pattern-contingent colour aftereffect. This demonstration suggests that the location in the visual pathway for contingent aftereffect adaptation must lie before the construction of the raw primal sketch, to which, according to Marr, we have conscious access. This location must also allow the orientation specificity seen in the aftereffect. This points to a locus in the striate cortex.     

Stuttering theory,research, and therapy: A five-year retrospective and look ahead

This article reviews events in stuttering theory, research, and therapy that have transpired during the past 5 years. After the retrospective review, current work in the area of stuttering is examined. This analysis of the past and present was conducted in an effort to give clearer direction to future efforts to understand the disorder, and to study and treat it more effectively.     

The Constitutional Theatre

Constitutionalism is a typically modernist project in that it seeks to dictate social order by means of institutional design. This project, however, fails in two ways. Empirically, constitutionalism is confronted with the fact that constitutions have limited control over their social environment. Epistemologically, constitutionalism has great difficulty in finding a convincing foundational relation between abstract constitutional provisions and constitutional norms for concrete situations. On the basis of this poor record, it is hard to comprehend how constitutionalism remains such an influential factor in our polity. This article tries to explain our adherence to the philosophy of constitutional ordering by analysing its function in constitutional discourse. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.