The group member's view of inner and outer reality: The Janus phenomenon applied to the group

This paper surveys some theoretical aspects of psychodynamic group treatment from the vantage point of the Janus phenomenon. This focus may provide some clarification in understanding how group therapy facilitates growth, especially in the relationships between inner realities and the realities of the external world. The paper explores and seeks bridges and connections between the dynamics of the group and intrapsychic dynamics. The inner view may be understood as intimately connected with intrapsychic concerns, whereas the issues for patients in groups do, to a degree, concern interpersonal processes in and projections onto the external world. The paper concludes that, thus far, we must accept less than perfect integration of theory and settle for limited domain reasoning (Scheidlinger, 1982). Erlebnis is the term coined by Paul Federn (1952) to refer to subjective experience of the self.     

Variations in use of the term “or”

Two studies showed that adults' responses to questions involving the term or varied markedly depending upon the type of question presented. When presented with various objects (A's and B's) and asked to circle all things which are A or B subjects tended to circle A's as well as B's, whereas when asked to circle all the A's or B's subjects showed a relatively stronger tendency to circle one or the other. Moreover the nature of the sets of objects (As and Bs) influenced behavior as well. There was also evidence that the effects due to question wording or set type transferred.     

Yes,Virginia, Lemons are Yellow

This paper discusses a number of themes and arguments in The Quest for Reality: Stroud's distinction between philosophical and ordinary questions about reality; the similarity he finds between the view that coloris unreal and the view that it is subjective; his argument against thesecondary quality theory; his argument against the error theory; and the disappointing conclusion of the book.     

The ‘will to believe’ in science and religion

Conclusion The Will to Believe defines the religious question as forced, living and momentous, but even in this article James asserts that more objective factors are involved. The competing religious hypotheses must both be equally coherent and correspond to experimental data to an equal degree. Otherwise the option is not a live one. If I say to you Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan, it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. Analogously, in A Pluralistic Universe James is at pains to convince the reader that his own religious hypothesis is just as objective, makes just as much sense, etc. as alternative possibilities: the only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it [pluralistic pantheism] is a fully coordinate hypothesis with monism. This world may, in the last resort, be a block universe; but on the other hand, it may be a universe only strung along, not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist. Here, once again, before the will to believe can be employed, the objective factors of competing hypotheses, their equal coherence and correspondence, must be brought out.When reconstructed, James' overall outlook has a qausi Kuhnian taint to it- though obvious differences remain. Much of what goes on in evaluating competing scientific hypotheses is either not forced, or not living, or not momentous, but rather typical, dead, and avoidable, in short very normal. But there are moments in the history of science where the decision between hypotheses might well be forced, living and momentous, and sometimes James comes close to recognizing this.Analogously, a good deal of what goes on in religion is not forced, not living or not momentous - in short it is all too normal. In The Varieties of Religious Experience for example, James proposes to ignore the institutional branch of the religious domain and to concentrate on personal and psychological factors, his reason being that the institutional aspect concentrates on the routine, the normal. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. and again The word religion, as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to organize themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word religion nowadays, we think inevitably of some church or other.Clearly here religion has a normal, i.e. trivial side, just as does science. On the other hand, there are revolutionary moments in religion, such as that of choosing between theism and materialism in Pragmatism, or choosing among theism, monistic pantheism and pluralistic pantheism in A Pluralistic Universe. Such moments involve the will to believe and are clearly more personal than their counterparts in the domain of normal institutionalized religion. Going further, there are no doubt differences of degree between the will to believe decisions in science and the will to believe decisions in religion. These have been explicated in more specific terms by Ian Barbour in his article, Paradigms in Science and Religion. ...each of the subjective features of science... is more evident in the case of religion: (1) the influence of interpretation on data, (2) the resistance of comprehensive theories of falsification, and (3) the absence of rules for choice among paradigms. Each of the corresponding objective features of science is less evident in the case of religion: (1) the presence of common data on which disputants can agree, (2) the cumulative effect of evidence for or against a theory, and (3) the existence of criteria which are not paradigm-dependent. It is clear that in all three respects religion is a more subjective enterprise than science. But in each case there is a difference of degree - not an absolute contrast between an objective science and a subjective religion. Barbour correctly notes that the ...choice is not between religion and science, but between theism, pantheism, and naturalism, let us say, as each is expressed in a particular historical tradition. No basic beliefs are capable of demonstrable proof. James sometimes comes close to recognizing this but his oscillation on the status of the everyday world of common sense, or the perceptual world, causes him not to see the issue clearly. When the animated world of the perceptual is taken as the all inclusive really real, science is viewed as an abstract, second class citizen. But James offers what we would consider a more sophisticated and adequate perspective when he views the world of common sense, having become linguistified, as itself suspicious, and consequently views all three tiers - common sense, scholastic philosophy, and science - as regional ontologies, or language games in Wittgenstein's terminology - and opposes all three to a more primordial or prereflexive level. When James takes this second approach it is easier to see that the basic distinction he began to make in The Will to Believe was between the scientific and religious domain where the will to believe was to be employed, and the domain of ordinary religion and science. Finally this position anticipates his ultimate metaphysical outlook, viz. pure experience as approachable through language on a series of diverse regional levels, but nonetheless not completely describable within language.It is important to recall that in The Varieties of Religious Experience James distinguishes between the science of religions and what he calls living religion: [T] he science of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith. The study of religion, in short is not the activity of religion; the latter is animated, personal, and, we would argue, necessitates a commitment in terms of the will to believe. Once again, however, James hesitates over offering the same two-fold delineation in other areas of science. On the one hand he tells the reader that science-has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. On the other hand, he offers the following comment a few pages later on in a footnote: ...the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to forsee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitely triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be. The burden of this paper has been to indicate that when James' two-fold outlook on perception and/or common sense is properly reconstructed, the raproachment between science and religion is not so impossible to forsee.

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The endorsement of irrational beliefs in a general clinical population

Burgess' Attitude and Belief Scale, a measure of Ellis' irrational beliefs, was administered to a large sample of outpatients. All 13 subscales demonstrate very adequate internal consistency. A factor analysis yielded one factor accounting for 83% of the variance, which was labeled irrationality. Clients endorsed focused items more than overgeneralized items, self-referential items more than non-self-referential items, and preferential items more than irrational items. Clients also received higher scores on the irrational process of demandingness than they did on the irrational process of awfulizing, self-worth and low frustration tolerance. The results were consistent with new formulations in Rational-Emotive theory. Suggestions were made for the construction of measures of irrational beliefs.     

Modal logic with names

We investigate an enrichment of the propositional modal language with a universal modality having semanticsx iff y(y ), and a countable set of names — a special kind of propositional variables ranging over singleton sets of worlds. The obtained language _c proves to have a great expressive power. It is equivalent with respect to modal definability to another enrichment () of, where is an additional modality with the semanticsx iff y(y x y ). Model-theoretic characterizations of modal definability in these languages are obtained. Further we consider deductive systems in _c. Strong completeness of the normal _c-logics is proved with respect to models in which all worlds are named. Every _c-logic axiomatized by formulae containing only names (but not propositional variables) is proved to be strongly frame-complete. Problems concerning transfer of properties ([in]completeness, filtration, finite model property etc.) from to _c are discussed. Finally, further perspectives for names in multimodal environment are briefly sketched.     

A New Representation Theorem for Contranegative Deontic Logic

The logic of an ought operator O is contranegative with respect to an underlying preference relation if it satisfies the property Op & (¬p)(¬q) Oq. Here the condition that is interpolative ((p (pq) q) (q (pq) p)) is shown to be necessary and sufficient for all -contranegative preference relations to satisfy the plausible deontic postulates agglomeration (Op & OqO(p&q)) and disjunctive division (O(p&q) Op Oq).     

O pojęciu zdania analitycznego

Rezultaty przedstawione w pracy niniejszej pokrywaj si czciowo z wynikami osignitymi przezR. Wójcickiego w pracy:Analityczne komponenty definicji arbitralnych. Studia Logica, t. XIV. Dotyczy to gównie rezultatów zawartych w czci pierwszej. Chciabym podkreli, i wyniki R. Wójcickiego uzyskane zostay cakowicie niezalenie od rezultatów przedstawionych w pracy obecnej.Allatum est die 16 Aprilis 1962     

Listening to the adolescent therapy group

This article reviews traditional psychodynamic views of listening to the manifest and latent content of the patient's communication. It then reviews the literature on the application of such listening in group treatment. The particular application of such listening and intervention in groups for adolescents with significant ego deficits is explored.     

On seeing oneself as “left out”: The chronically complaining patient in psychotherapy

A clinical observation regarding patients who complain about feeling left out and/or second best provides the framework for this paper. What is expressed is a form of separation anxiety coupled with a loser self-concept. It is suggested that these patients represent a milder form of the moral masochism. Early theoretical formulations include Freud and his emphasis on the superego and Reich's emphasis on the masochist's fear of being left alone. Kramer's little man phenomenon is an example of a more current theoretical formulation which takes account of the complexities of the ego, and composite self and identity in the clinical phenomena observed. A case of a latency-aged child is provided.     

Positive und negative Rückmeldung bei Alternativdiskriminationen

Zusammenfassung Die Untersuchungen befassen sich mit dem Einfluß der verbalen Rückmeldungen richtig und falsch auf das Erlernen von Alternativdiskriminationen in Blank-trial-Experimenten. Dabei wird insbesondere die Wechselwirkung der Rückmeldungskombinationen (richtig/fehlende Rückmeldung vs. falsch/fehlende Rückmeldung) mit der Rückmeldungsproportion untersucht. Die Rückmeldungsproportion ist definiert als das Verhältnis der Anzahl der S-R-Verbindungen einer Lernliste, auf die eine verbale Rückmeldung erfolgt, und der Anzahl der S-R-Verbindungen, bei denen die verbale Rückmeldung fehlt. Die Rückmeldungsproportion wird zwischen 119 und 191 systematisch variiert. Unsere Experimente ergeben u. a., daß bei kleiner Rückmeldungsproportion die Kombination richtig/fehlende Rückmeldung und bei großer Rückmeldungsproportion die Kombination falsch/fehlende Rückmeldung die Lernleistung erhöhen. Dieser Befund wurde nach theoretischen Annahmen über die Lernstrategie der Vpn erwartet. Eine alternative theoretische Interpretation der Befunde wird nach einem Zusatzexperiment verworfen. Insgesamt bestätigen die Untersuchungen, daß (a) die relative Wirksamkeit von Rückmeldungskombinationen stark von den jeweiligen experimentellen Randbedingungen abhängt, daß (b) von einer automatischen Wirksamkeit verbaler Rückmeldung keine Rede sein kann und daß (c) theoretische Annahmen über die kognitive Verarbeitung verbaler Rückmeldungen und über entsprechende Lernstrategien für die Interpretation der untersuchten Lernvorgänge erfolgversprechend sind.

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Positive and negative feedback in discrimination between alternativesFeedback proportion and learning strategy

Summary This study is concerned with the influence of the verbal feedback modes of right and wrong on the acquisition of alternative discriminations in blank-trial experiments, with special reference to the interaction between the feedback combinations (right/non-feedback as against wrong/non-feedback) and feedback proportion is investigated. Feedback proportion is defined as the ratio of the S-R connections of a learning list succeeded by verbal feedback to the S-R connections succeeded by non-feedback. Feedback proportion was systematically varied between the ratios of 119 and 191.Results showed that at a low feedback proportion learning score is increased with the combination right/non-feedback while in contrast at a high feedback proportion learning score is increased with the combination wrong/non-feedback. These results are in accordance with theoretical expectations on learning strategies of Ss. An alternative interpretation was not confirmed by the results of an additional experiment.In general, our investigations showed that (a) the relative effectiveness of feedback combinations is strongly dependent on the particular experimental conditions; (b) an automatic effect of verbal feedback cannot be assumed; (c) a cognitive interpretation of verbal feedback effects in terms of learning strategies seems very promising.

     

An effective fixed-point theorem in intuitionistic diagonalizable algebras

Summary Within the technical frame supplied by the algebraic variety of diagonalizable algebras, defined by R. Magari in [2], we prove the following:LetT be any first-order theory with a predicate Pr satisfying the canonical derivability conditions, including Löb's property. Then any formula inT built up from the propositional variables q, p₁, ..., p_n, using logical connectives and the predicate Pr, has the same fixed-points relative to q (that is, formulas (p₁ ..., p_n) for which for all p₁, ..., p_n T((p₁, ..., p_n), p₁, ..., p_n) (p₁, ..., p_n)) of a formula ^* of the same kind, obtained from in an effective way.Moreover, such ^* is provably equivalent to the formula obtained from substituting with ^* itself all the occurrences of q which are under Pr. In the particular case where q is always under Pr in , ^* is the unique (up to provable equivalence) fixedpoint of .Since this result is proved only assumingPr to be canonical, it can be deduced that Löb's property is, in a sense, equivalent to Gödel's diagonalization lemma.All the results are proved more generally in the intuitionistic case.The algebraization of the theories which express Theor, IXAllatum est die 19 Decembris 1975     

Understanding the Self in Self-Transcendence

Based on the work of William James and Bernard Lonergan, this article proposes an understanding of the self as a duplex, dialectical, first-person reality constituted by consciousness and experienced as I and me.     

Modifying Violent Communities by Enhancing Altruism: A Vision of Possibilities

A model for diagnosing and treating violent communities is outlined. The treatment consists of enhancing a form of pragmatic altruism by building relationships and mutual understanding between community leaders who are derived from task groups called community stabilizing systems, defined as groups essential for peaceful, creative stability in a community. Two examples of an intervention derived from this theory are described.     

The concept of a proposition in classical and quantum physics

A proposition is associated in classical mechanics with a subset of phase space, in quantum logic with a projection in Hilbert space, and in both cases with a 2-valued observable or test. A theoretical statement typically assigns a probability to such a pure test. However, since a pure test is an idealization not realizable experimentally, it is necessary — to give such a statement a practical meaning — to describe how it can be approximated by feasible tests. This gives rise to a search for a formal representation of feasible tests, which leads via mixed tests (weighted means of pure tests) to vague tests (convex sets of mixed tests). A model is described in which the latter form a continuous lattice; the pure and mixed tests are the maximal elements and the feasible tests form a basis. Each type of test has its own logic; this is illustrated by the passage from mixed tests to pure tests, which corresponds to the transition from L to classical logic.This work was supported by a grant from the National Research Council of Canada.     

The logic of linear tolerance

A nonempty sequence T₁,...,T_n of theories is tolerant, if there are consistent theories T ₁ ⁺ ,..., T _n ⁺ such that for each 1 i n, T _i ⁺ is an extension of T_i in the same language and, if i n, T _i ⁺ interprets T _i+1 ⁺ . We consider a propositional language with the modality , the arity of which is not fixed, and axiomatically define in this language the decidable logics TOL and TOL. It is shown that TOL (resp. TOL) yields exactly the schemata of PA-provable (resp. true) arithmetical sentences, if (A₁,..., A_n) is understood as (a formalization of) PA+A₁, ..., PA+A_n is tolerant.     

Is “some-other-time” sometimes better than “sometime” for proving partial correctness of programs?

The main result of this paper belongs to the field of the comparative study of program verification methods as well as to the field called nonstandard logics of programs. We compare the program verifying powers of various well-known temporal logics of programs, one of which is the Intermittent Assertions Method, denoted as Bur. Bur is based on one of the simplest modal logics called S5 or sometime-logic. We will see that the minor change in this background modal logic increases the program verifying power of Bur. The change can be described either technically as replacing the reflexive version of S5 with an irreflexive version, or intuitively as using the modality some-other-time instead of sometime. Some insights into the nature of computational induction and its variants are also obtained.This project was supported by the Hungarian National Foundation for Scientific Research, Grant No. 1810.     

Modal Logics of Succession for 2-Dimensional Integral Spacetime

We consider the problem of axiomatizing various natural successor logics for 2-dimensional integral spacetime. We provide axiomatizations in monomodal and multimodal languages, and prove completeness theorems. We also establish that the irreflexive successor logic in the standard modal language (i.e. the language containing and ) is not finitely axiomatizable.     

Construction of monadic three-valued Łukasiewicz algebras

The notion of monadic three-valued ukasiewicz algebras was introduced by L. Monteiro ([12], [14]) as a generalization of monadic Boolean algebras. A. Monteiro ([9], [10]) and later L. Monteiro and L. Gonzalez Coppola [17] obtained a method for the construction of a three-valued ukasiewicz algebra from a monadic Boolea algebra. In this note we give the construction of a monadic three-valued ukasiewicz algebra from a Boolean algebra B where we have defined two quantification operations and ^* such that ^*x=^*x (where ^*x=-^*-x). In this case we shall say that and ^* commutes. If B is finite and is an existential quantifier over B, we shall show how to obtain all the existential quantifiers ^* which commute with .Taking into account R. Mayet [3] we also construct a monadic three-valued ukasiewicz algebra from a monadic Boolean algebra B and a monadic ideal I of B. The most essential results of the present paper will be submitted to the XXXIX Annual Meeting of the Unión Matemática Argentina (October 1989, Rosario, Argentina).