The Term “Self-Directed Learning”—Back to Knowles,or Another Way to Forge Ahead?

The term self-directed learning has since its seminal definition in 1975 by Malcolm S. Knowles acquired a range of meanings, which has led to communication difficulties about this subject. Examination of self-directed learning from a biblical ontological–anthropological perspective reveals that, although the notion of self-directed learning as a mechanistic or deterministic process should be questioned, Knowles and colleagues were correct in ameliorating the “process part” of the definition of self-directed learning by emphasizing the freedom and agency of the learner as steward of creation. Researchers wishing to deviate from the approach by Knowles and colleagues are compelled to explain what the term designates in their particular project.     

Psychology and Culture: Back to the Future?

Psychology has a poor record in addressing cultural phenomena. One response is to turn to ancient concepts from local traditions and to use these as alternative analytic categories to explain behavior. However, there are problems with such an approach. These concepts will be read from the vantage point of the present and interpreted differently so as to propose different diagnoses (and solutions) for contemporary social problems. As an alternative, rather than using ancient resources as analytic categories in the explanation of behavior, we could instead examine how they are used as categories of practice as people actively make sense of their social context and themselves. Attending to such contemporary ‘lay’ usage (and the contestation it entails) allows for a more dynamic conception of cultural processes than is typical in psychology. More generally, I believe that it is possible to use our psychological constructs so that we can see the distinctive particularities of the phenomena before us in new and interesting ways, and in ways that respect their cultural specificity. This claim is illustrated through reference to recent work using the concept of social identity to illuminate aspects of Hindu pilgrimage.     

Was Kant a nonconceptualist?

I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one’s representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment.

No Route to Material Origin Essentialism?

In the last 30 years repeated attempts have been made to develop a proof-sketch Kripke gave for essentialism about material origins into a cogent argument. I argue that there are general reasons that all such attempts have failed, and so we should likewise expect future attempts to fail.     

Did Kant Respect Persons?

The illusion that Kant respects persons comes from ascribing contemporary meanings to purely technical terms within his second formulation of the categorical imperative, “[A]ct so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only”. When we realize that “humanity” means rational nature and “person” means the supersensible self (homo noumenon), we find that we are to respect, not human selves in all their diversity (homo phaenomenon), but rational selves in all their sameness, in their unvarying conformity to the universal principles of pure practical reason. Contemporary individualism gets no support from Kant. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Kant Can’t Get No . . . Contradiction

Philosophia - According to Kant, the universalization of the maxim of false promising leads to a contradiction, namely, to everyone adopting the maxim of false promising which would in effect make...     

Is it Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?

Kant marks a watershed in the history of theology, after which the anxious questions, “Can we speak of God? How can we?” have continually haunted modern theologians, insisting on being addressed before any others. Feeling compelled not to say about God what they want to say without first establishing that they are justified or entitled in saying those things, theologians have experienced both frustration and anxiety. However, the widespread assumption that one must experience the Kantian agony in order to be a modern theologian is challenged. Wolterstorff contends that one can move beyond Kant by rejecting the mental representationalist picture required by the latter’s account of intuitions and concepts. Conceiving of our intuitions as ’inputs’ which are then mentally represented according to concepts, is not only unnecessary but misleading. Theologians are better off rejecting the assumption that awareness always represents input and adopting instead the view that perceptual awareness, for example, is not so much an input but an action – the actualization of one of our human powers. Such an alternate pathway (opened up by Thomas Reid) would allow modern theologians to appropriate Kant without being appropriated by Kant.     

Society for Personality Assessment — Which Way to Go?

As a result of a mandate by the membership, the Society for Personality Assessment has emerged as an old association with a new name. The decision on this issue was made by the membership at the same time that the question of its future affiliation was voted upon. Approximately two-thirds of the membership expressed the desire to have our group affiliate in some manner with the American Psychological Association. However, the exact manner was not specified in the referendum. At the last meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Personality Assessment, there was a division of opinion as to whether joining as a division or as a section of an already existing division was the better move. The two most articulate exponents, Drs. Little and Farberow, were asked to prepare the position paper below in order to give the membership some information about the issues involved. On a subsequent occasion the members will be asked to take a formal position on this issue. If anyone, after reading the material below, wishes to comment further, I would be happy to publish his views in subsequent issues of the Journal.

Walter G. Klopfer Executive Editor     

Back to the Consideration of Future Consequences Scale: Time to Reconsider?

Abstract

The Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC) Scale is a measure of the extent to which individuals consider and are influenced by the distant outcomes of current behavior. In this study, the authors conducted factor analysis to investigate the factor structure of the 12-item CFC Scale. The authors found evidence for a multiple factor solution including one completely present-oriented factor consisting of all 7 present-oriented items, and one or two future-oriented factors consisting of the remaining future-oriented items. Further evidence indicated that the present-oriented factor and the 12-item CFC Scale perform similarly in terms of internal consistency and convergent validity. The structure and content of the future-oriented factor(s) is unclear. From the findings, the authors raise questions regarding the construct validity of the CFC Scale, the interpretation of its results, and the usefulness of the CFC scale in its current form in applied research.     

No Blame No Gain? From a No Blame Culture to a Responsibility Culture in Medicine

Healthcare systems need to consider not only how to prevent error, but how to respond to errors when they occur. In the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, one strand of this latter response is the ‘No Blame Culture’, which draws attention from individuals and towards systems in the process of understanding an error. Defences of the No Blame Culture typically fail to distinguish between blaming someone and holding them responsible. This article argues for a ‘responsibility culture’, where healthcare professionals are held responsible in cases of foreseeable and avoidable errors. We demonstrate how healthcare professionals can justifiably be held responsible for their errors even though they work in challenging circumstances. We then review the idea of ‘responsibility without blame’, applying this to cases of error in healthcare. Sensitive to the undesirable effects of blaming healthcare professionals and to the moral significance of holding individuals accountable, we argue that a responsibility culture has significant advantages over a No Blame Culture due to its capacity to enhance patient safety and support medical professionals in learning from their mistakes, while also recognising and validating the legitimate sense of responsibility that many medical professionals feel following avoidable error, and motivating medical professionals to report errors.     

Normalizing Unemployment: A New Way to Cope with Unemployment?

Although the literature suggests that the massive unemployment statistics of the last decade have resulted in changes in the way people view unemployment, no study to date has precisely identified this phenomenon and its effects on individuals. This study brings to light the connection between these new perceptions of and experiences with unemployment and health. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we developed and validated the Unemployment Normalization Questionnaire and correlated it with health. Thus, 938 unemployed people from two economic contexts (France and Luxembourg) completed both the Unemployment Normalization Questionnaire and the General Health Questionnaire. This study confirmed the existence of the psychological concept of unemployment normalization among actual job seekers and its relation to perceived well-being.     

Kant’s Solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma

Are our actions morally good because we approve of them or are they good independently of our approval? Are we projecting moral values onto the world or do we detect values that are already there? For many these questions don’t state a real alternative but a secular variant of the Euthyphro dilemma: If our actions are good because we approve of them moral goodness appears to be arbitrary. If they are good independently of our approval, it is unclear how we come to know their moral quality and how moral knowledge can be motivating. None of these options seems attractive; the source of moral goodness unclear. Despite the growing literature on Kant’s moral epistemology and moral epistemology the question remains open what Kant’s answer to this apparent dilemma is. The Kantian view I attempt to lay out in this paper is supposed to dissolve the secular version of the Euthyphro dilemma. In responding to this dilemma we need to get clear about the source or the origin of our moral knowledge: Voluntary approval or mind-independent moral facts? Projectivism or detectivism? Construction or given? I believe that all these ways of articulating the problem turn out, on closer inspection, to be false alternatives.