A Work in Progress

After expressing gratitude to each contributor, and briefly commenting on each, I probe several main themes of my work, addressing the question of the apparent difference between my earlier philosophical and later clinical writings. Central to both is the reflexivity of the human agent, and that each exhibits a form of practice regardless of the specific aims embedded in each. I then address the theme of narrative writing as my work has developed over the past several decades – at the heart of which are questions of self and integrity.     

Partially-Ordered (Branching) Generalized Quantifiers: A General Definition

Following Henkins discovery of partially-ordered (branching) quantification (POQ) with standard quantifiers in 1959, philosophers of language have attempted to extend his definition to POQ with generalized quantifiers. In this paper I propose a general definition of POQ with 1-place generalized quantifiers of the simplest kind: namely, predicative, or cardinality quantifiers, e.g., most, few, finitely many, exactly , where is any cardinal, etc. The definition is obtained in a series of generalizations, extending the original, Henkin definition first to a general definition of monotone-increasing (M) POQ and then to a general definition of generalized POQ, regardless of monotonicity. The extension is based on (i) Barwises 1979 analysis of the basic case of M POQ and (ii) my 1990 analysis of the basic case of generalized POQ. POQ is a non-compositional 1st-order structure, hence the problem of extending the definition of the basic case to a general definition is not trivial. The paper concludes with a sample of applications to natural and mathematical languages.     

Response to Gracia Fay Ellwood's “Religious Experience,Religious Worldviews,and Near-Death Studies”

After a brief glance at religious wars that now embroil the field of near-death studies, I respond to Gracia Fay Ellwood's commentary on Light & Death (Sabom, 1998), in which she alleges serious problems with my discussion of Raymond Moody's research, my views on the psychic and the occult, my use of the Bible as an authoritative document, my research methodology, and my definition of Christianity.     

Linear programming techniques for multidimensional analysis of preferences

This paper offers a new methodology for analyzing individual differences in preference judgments with regard to a set of stimuli prespecified in a multidimensional attribute space. The individual is modelled as possessing an ideal point denoting his most preferred stimulus location in this space and a set of weights which reveal the relative saliences of the attributes. He prefers those stimuli which are closer to his ideal point (in terms of a weighted Euclidean distance measure). A linear programming model is proposed for external analysisi.e., estimation of the coordinates of his ideal point and the weights (involved in the Euclidean distance measure) by analyzing his paired comparison preference judgments on a set of stimuli, prespecified by their coordinate locations in the multidimensional space. A measure of poorness of fit is developed and the linear programming model minimizes this measure overall possible solutions. The approach is fully nonmetric, extremely flexible, and uses paired comparison judgments directly. The weights can either be constrained nonnegative or left unconstrained. Generalizations of the model to consider ordinal or interval preference data and to allow an orthogonal transformation of the attribute space are discussed. The methodology is extended to perform internal analysis,i.e., to determine the stimuli locations in addition to weights and ideal points by analyzing the preference judgments of all subjects simultaneously. Computational results show that the methodology for external analysis is unbiased—i.e., on an average it recovers the true ideal point and weights. These studies also indicate that the technique performs satisfactorily even when about 20 percent of the paired comparison judgments are incorrectly specified.The authors wish to express their deep appreciation to J. Douglas Carroll and Joseph B. Kruskal for their most valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Fusing Horizons: Exploring Qualitative Research and Psychotherapeutic Applications of Social Constructionism

This article describes how social constructionist theory can be applied to the processes of data collection and analysis in qualitative research. In doing so, we borrow from previous discussions of social constructionism within the psychotherapeutic literature. Social constructionist theory, particularly the idea of a not-knowing stance, addresses the methodological concern of validity. Furthermore, because a not-knowing stance entails a leveling of the hierarchy and minimizing of the power differential between researcher and participant, there is also the potential for turning the research process into an freeing experience for both the researcher and participant.     

Pacifism as a moral ideal

Conclusion In conclusion I would like to forestall one potential misunderstanding. As I have described it the pacifist ideal may seem so difficult to attain that it may seem closed off from the aspirations of ordinary human beings; and there is no doubt that few people are likely to attain this ideal to any great degree. This accords with our intuition that true, by which I think we mean paradigm pacifists, are rare indeed. But ideals can be sought, as well as attained, to greater or lesser degrees. So there are many ordinary people who regard themselves as pacifists because they avoid violence more scrupulously than most. On my analysis their claim might well be true.This paper was originally written for the Gandhi-King Society Meeting held in April of 1984 at the Western Division Meeting of the APA. I am greatful to Greg Rich, Albert Flores, and others who have helped me with their comments.     

Multidimensional rotation and scaling of configurations to optimal agreement

An integrated method for rotating and rescaling a set of configurations to optimal agreement in subspaces of varying dimensionalities is developed. The approach relates existing orthogonal rotation techniques as special cases within a general framework based on a partition of variation which provides convenient measures of agreement. In addition to the well-known Procrustes and inner product optimality criteria, a criterion which maximizes the consensus among subspaces of the configurations is suggested. Since agreement of subspaces of the configurations can be examined and compared, rotation and rescaling is extended from a data transformation technique to an analytical method.     

Micro-economic models of problem choice in basic science

This paper describes the way in which a certain representation of basic scientific knowledge can be coupled with traditional microeconomic analysis to provide an analysis of rational research planning or agenda setting in basic science. Research planning is conceived as a resource allocation decision in which resources are being allocated to activities directed towards the solution of basic scientific problems. A structuralist representation of scientific knowledge is employed to provide a relatively precise characterization of a basic scientific problem.The research reported here was partially supported by a grant from the EXXON Foundation.     

The Web and the Quilt: Alternatives to the Heroic Journey Toward Spiritual Development

This paper poses a feminist challenge to stage models of spiritual development and suggests alternative metaphors to the common image of a heroic journey. Women's spirituality is typically more intuitive and relational than rational and individualistic and to express this, we employ metaphors of the web and the quilt. Support for the relevance of these metaphors comes from the spiritual autobiography of Jane Goodall, an anthology of African American women's writings about spirituality, and two qualitative research investigations of older women's spirituality. We conclude with an autobiographical account of our own spiritual development and engage in a dialogue-on-the-page in which we respond to each other's narratives.     

A thurstonian pairwise choice model with univariate and multivariate spline transformations

A probabilistic choice model is developed for paired comparisons data about psychophysical stimuli. The model is based on Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment Case V and assumes that each stimulus is measured on a small number of physical variables. The utility of a stimulus is related to its values on the physical variables either by means of an additive univariate spline model or by means of multivariate spline model. In the additive univariate spline model, a separate univariate spline transformation is estimated for each physical dimension and the utility of a stimulus is assumed to be an additive combination of these transformed values. In the multivariate spline model, the utility of a stimulus is assumed to be a general multivariate spline function in the physical variables. The use of B splines for estimating the transformation functions is discussed and it is shown how B splines can be generalized to the multivariate case by using as basis functions tensor products of the univariate basis functions. A maximum likelihood estimation procedure for the Thurstone Case V model with spline transformation is described and applied for illustrative purposes to various artificial and real data sets. Finally, the model is extended using a latent class approach to the case where there are unreplicated paired comparisons data from a relatively large number of subjects drawn from a heterogeneous population. An EM algorithm for estimating the parameters in this extended model is outlined and illustrated on some real data.The first author is supported as Bevoegdverklaard Navorser of the Belgian Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. The authors are indebted to Ulf Böckenholt and Yoshio Takane for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Private events revisited: Does unobservable mean private?

This paper presents a discussion on the misapplication of the concept private events in traditional psychotherapy interpretation. Shown is that, logically, the term privacy is contradictory to principles of science and it further inhibits anaturalistic approach to observation. Evidence of so-called private clinical events are presented within an alternative model that obviates the role of privacy and encourages primarily an objective outlook on the events.     

Gender and gender-role identity influences upon self- and other-reports of communicative competence

This study examines the influence of gender-role identity on interpersonal perceptions of communicative competence in a natural setting over an extended period of time. After working in small task-oriented groups for 15 weeks, 146 students (74 females, 72 males) completed a questionnaire containing measures of gender-role identity (Bem Sex Role Inventory) and communicative competence [J. M. Wieman, Explication and test of a model of communicative competence. Human Communication Research, 1977, 3, 195–213]. A three-way ANOVA (masculinity, femininity, gender) was used for analysis. Predictions based on prior models were only partially supported. Findings suggest that gender-role identity functions in more complex ways than prior models suggest. For all dimensions of communicative competence, gender-role identity resulted in different patterns for males and females. Furthermore, comparisons of self- vs other-perceptions indicate the possibility that one model may hold for self-perceptions and another for other-perceptions.The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments contributed by Kenneth R. Wilson and Kristina Troost.     

Poetry in Existential Psychotherapy with Couples and Families

The use of poetry during the process of existential psychotherapy with couples and families is described and illustrated. In this approach, poems can be utilized to help the couple and/or family notice meaning potentials in the future, actualize and make use of such meaning potentials in the here and now, and re-collect and honor meanings previously actualized and deposited in the past.     

A Translation of Intuitionistic Predicate Logic into Basic Predicate Logic

Basic Predicate Logic, BQC, is a proper subsystem of Intuitionistic Predicate Logic, IQC. For every formula in the language {, , , , , , }, we associate two sequences of formulas 0,1,... and 0,1,... in the same language. We prove that for every sequent , there are natural numbers m, n, such that IQC , iff BQC n m. Some applications of this translation are mentioned.     

“Soul-making” in a schizophrenic saint

Soul-making (cf. Jung and Hillman) is the process of integrating spiritual and bodily imagery into an intimated wholeness transcending conscious comprehension. Pierre Janet's case of the psychotic mystic, Madeleine, reveals that the patient had been making her own-soul even though his theory had no provision for soul. Janet's soul-stripping theory is contrasted with a soul-making approach, primarily in their respective interpretations of Madeleine's altered states of consciousness. Religious ecstasy is a stretching of soul, an expansion into the realm of spirit, which requires a subsequent descent into and reconciliation with tradition, society, outer world, and body.     

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.     

Identity in modal logic theorem proving

THINKER is an automated natural deduction first-order theorem proving program. This paper reports on how it was adapted so as to prove theorems in modal logic. The method employed is an indirect semantic method, obtained by considering the semantic conditions involved in being a valid argument in these modal logics. The method is extended from propositional modal logic to predicate modal logic, and issues concerning the domain of quantification and existence in a world's domain are discussed. Finally, we look at the very interesting issues involved with adding identity to the theorem prover in the realm of modal predicate logic. Various alternatives are discussed.