Women as authority figures: The use and nonuse of authority

This paper reports the results of two experiments designed to investigate the effect of sex-role stereotypes on evaluations of authority figures. Female and male subjects read short accounts of various situations in which an authority figure confronted a subordinate who had transgressed in some way and then evaluated the authority figure on a variety of dimensions. Sex of the authority figure and of the subordinate were varied factorially. In Experiment 1, where the authority figure took a hard line with the transgressing subordinate, it was found that a female authority figure being firm with a male subordinate was evaluated most negatively. In Experiment 2, where the authority figure was lenient with the subordinate, it was found that a female authority figure being lenient with a female subordinate was evaluated most negatively. Implications of the results are discussed.     

On regulatory authority: Insights from durkheim

Émile Durkheim is recognized for his analysis of horizontal division of labor (that is, task specialization differentiating de jure equals). Vertical differences can also develop with structural differentiation, often taking the form of authority vested in regulatory agencies. But according to Durkheim, the conditions sufficient to produce specialized division of labor are not sufficient in themselves to produce regulatory structures. New regulatory agencies tend to emerge in environments characterized by directly attributable cost interdependence among a plethora of otherwise independent units.     

Parental authority questionnaire

A questionnaire was developed for the purpose of measuring Baumrind's (1971) permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative parental authority prototypes. It consists of 30 items per parent and yields permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative scores for both the mother and the father; each of these scores is derived from the phenomenological appraisals of the parents' authority by their son or daughter. The results of several studies have supported the Parental Authority Questionnaire as a psychometrically sound and valid measure of Baumrind's parental authority prototypes, and they have suggested that this questionnaire has considerable potential as a valuable tool in the investigation of correlates of parental permissiveness, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness.     

Epistemic authority: preemption through source sensitive defeat

Modern societies are characterized by a division of epistemic labor between laypeople and epistemic authorities. Authorities are often far more competent than laypeople and can thus, ideally, inform their beliefs. But how should laypeople rationally respond to an authority’s beliefs if they already have beliefs and reasons of their own concerning some subject matter? According to the standard view, the beliefs of epistemic authorities are just further, albeit weighty, pieces of evidence. In contrast, the Preemption View claims that, when one discovers what an authority believes, it is not permissible to rely on any of one’s own reasons concerning the subject matter. The original version of this view, as proposed by Linda Zagzebski, has recently been severely criticized for recommending blind trust and for abandoning even minimal standards for critical thinking. In our paper, we defend a new version of the Preemption View—Defeatist Preemptionism—in a way that differs radically from Zagzebski’s. We argue that our view can be derived from certain widely accepted general epistemic principles. In particular, we claim that preemption can be identified as a special case of source sensitive defeat. Moreover, we argue that Defeatist Preemptionism does not lead to the undesirable consequences that critics ascribe to the Preemption View. The paper thus articulates the foundations and refinements of the Preemption View, such that it adequately captures the phenomenon of epistemic authority and the rational requirements related to it.

     

Knowledge and authority: the godfather fantasy.

Three strategies are tentatively proposed by which human beings try to assuage the need for transcendence: (1) seizing the godhead; (2) submission to God; and (3) the godfather fantasy, whereby an attempt is made to clothe a mere mortal in the cloak of godly power. These strategies are connected to our innate, often conflicted, tendencies to obedience and rebellion, later elaborated into submission to authority or resistance to or cooptation of authority. These psychic tendencies are illustrated in Dostoevsky's "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" and in Mario Puzo's The Godfather, both brilliant demonstrations of social hierarchical control. The almost universal pull to obedience is demonstrated in the research of Stanley Milgram on obedience in hierarchical situations and theorized by Freud in his formulation of "the thirst for obedience" as a product of infantile life. It is proposed that the function of the group mind, in the form of ideology, is to counter anxieties generated throughout life, not only the remnants of childhood anxiety but also fears of death and oblivion. That a person's will to power can get out of hand and lead to disaster hardly needs saying; yet the will to submission, when connected to a shared ideology, can lead to results no less devastating. More people are killed in the name of an ideological cause run amok than are destroyed by virtue of thwarted passion, personal vendettas, criminality, or greed.     

良心和启蒙:真善判断权问题

There were two prevailing sentiments in Europe after the Reformation: One opposing papal authority and one advocating individual freedom. This paper analyzes these two sentiments and finds that the concept of conscience is crucial in understanding them. The issue of conscience is about judging truth and good, and in initiating the Reformation, Martin Luther heavily appealed to his conscience while countering Catholic attacks. With the wide dispersal of the Reformation, Luther’s notion of conscience was well received among his supporters throughout Europe. Descartes later transformed Luther’s conscience into an epistemological being (the cogito), and argued that its existence was the only valid thing that survived his thorough skepticism — and as such is the foundation of human knowledge. Rousseau continued this line of thinking, which we call subjectivism, and re-employed the term conscience as a replacement for cogito, holding that conscience is the final authority in judging good and bad; that, as the starting point of human existence, it cannot be withheld from any human being; and that it therefore constitutes an inalienable human right. This paper argues that the Enlightenment was a subjectivist movement propelled by this conscience-cogito-conscience conceptualization, and that it sought to enlighten this inalienable conscience. __________ Translated from Qiushi xuekan 求是学刊 (Seeking Truth), 2008, (1): 47–54     

Mere formalities: fictional normativity and normative authority

It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus on what makes standards like etiquette ‘not really normative’. I defend a fictionalist theory on which etiquette is ‘not really normative’ in roughly the same way that Sherlock is ‘not really a detective’, and show that fictionalism about some normative standards helps us explain the possibility of normative authority.     

Wolff on legitimate authority

Philosophical Studies -     

Questioning the psychoanalyst's authority

Sources of the trend to question not just the analyst's authority to interpret, but the analyst's use of authority in general, are explored. Out of a wish to circumvent the potentially detrimental effects an analyst's interpretations can have on patients, certain psychoanalysts have modified their analytic techniques with an eye to downplaying the role of their authority. When taken to extremes, this has led analysts to act as if they have little to offer patients in the way of an alternative point of view, and to privilege patients' accounts and interpretations by treating them as if they were objectively true. It is argued that one need not go so far in order to protect patients from the analyst's less than careful use of authority. It is argued further that the judicious use of authority remains an indispensable tool in helping to ready the patient's mind for a consideration of constructs different from those on which the patient has always relied. Finally, becoming comfortable with the aggressive aspect of the use of one's authority may determine the extent to which one is willing to employ one's authority with patients.     

Externalism and first-person authority

Externalism in the philosophy of mind is threatened by the view that subjects are authoritative with regard to the contents of their own intentional states. If externalism is to be reconciled with first-person authority, two issues need to be addressed: (a) how the non-evidence-based character of knowledge of one's own intentional states is compatible with ignorance of the empirical factors that individuate the contents of those states, and (b) how, given externalism, the non-evidence-based character of such knowledge could place its subject in an authoritative position. This paper endorses a standard strategy for dealing with (a). The bulk of the paper is devoted to (b). The aim is to develop an account of first-person authority for a certain class of intentional states that is capable of explaining (1) why knowledge of one's own intentional states is peculiarly authoritative, and (2) why such authority is compatible with externalism.     

The authority of pleasure

The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non‐contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non‐contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don't advance conclusive arguments for the affective view in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors’ power to please), and (3) introducing some observations on the practice of art in support of it. Given that the objections I discuss miss their target, and given the observations in support of it, I conclude that the affective view is worth serious reconsideration.