Conversation,relevance, and argumentation

This paper deals with the explanation the maxim of relevance provides for the way utterances in argumentative discourse follow each other in an orderly and coherent fashion. Several senses are distinguished in which utterances can be considered relevant. It is argued that an utterance can be considered relevant as an interactional act, as an illocutionary act, as a propositional act, and as an elocutionary act. These four kinds of relevance manifest the rational organization of discourse, which is aimed at bringing about mutual alignment between the participants, enabling them jointly to work out certain interactional outcomes that are acceptable to both of them.     

SUBJECTIVISM,UTILITY, AND AUTONOMY

Taking as a starting point a thesis of David Gauthier's about the status of Rational Choice Theory. I discuss the relation between a subjectivist theory of value and an account of rational agency that leaves room for autonomy. I argue that if autonomy presupposes an activity of practical reason, the maximization of subjective expected utility (as prescribed by Rational Choice Theory) cannot serve as the principle of practical reason.     

Democracy, knowledge, and imagination

In public debate, we can discern amostly implicit idea that politics is an affairfor politicians. This contradicts the idea ofthe active citizen, according to which thedifference between politician and citizen ismerely accidental. This article focus upon theprerequisites of such an ideal in modernsociety and especially the classical idea ofprudence as central to good citizenship. Therole of school education is stressed. MarthaNussbaum's concept of ``narrative imagination'is seen as important as well as well aneducation aiming at the Bildung of thestudent.     

Ethology,ethogeny, etics,emics, biology,culture: On the limitations of dichotomies

Ethogeny, supposedly patterned on ethology, differs as an approach to human social behaviour in obvious respects. Ethogenists follow an emic research strategy, whereas human ethologists have strongly favoured etic research options. However, recent trends to a broader, evolutionary approach in human ethology suggest that an avoidance or rejection of verbal reports and ethogenic methods merits reconsideration, The distinctions involved in the eticlemic contrast are examined, and compared to Richer's distinction between D- and N-type agreements. It is argued that none of the distinctions are dichotomous. The useful aspects of the distinctions refer to the generality of findings, and the validity of evidence. Bearing these in mind, ethogenic methods have a place in a broader human ethology. So far as validity is concerned, the value of a comparison of information from different sources, such as verbal and non-verbal data, is stressed. So far as generality is concerned, ethogenists may consider this to be very limited because of idiosyncratic cultural factors in the causation of human social action. A reconsideration of the biology/culture dimension in terms of function rather than causation may lead to more optimism in this respect, and be more productive scientifically.     

Concepts,structures, and meanings

Concepts are basic elements of thought. Piaget has a conception of the nature of concepts as informational or computational operations performed in an inner milieu and enabling the child to understand the world in which it lives and acts. Concepts are, however, not merely logico‐mathematical but are also conceptually linked to the mastery of language which itself involves the appropriate use of words in social and interpersonal settings. In the light of Vygotsky's work on the social and interactive nature of children's thinking and the nature of language as an essentially public currency of rule‐governed signs, we are led to reconstrue conceptual mastery as the acquisition of an interactive and interpersonal repertoire of tools which introduces the child to the world of those who educate it. In this way we come to see the elements of mind as constitutively involving that activity in which the determinants of meaning constrain and direct the child's linguistic development.     

Emotions,values, and aesthetic perception

Philosophical naturalism is a suitable background for an account of aesthetic perception as an alternative to traditional aesthetic theory. Pragmatist notion of habits as meanings gives a basis for a conception of emotions and values in the framework of organism environment interaction. Any object of perception may be a carrier of meanings if some habits are involved. This holds for linguistic expressions as well as for tones of color, doors and windows, museums, galleries and other non-linguistic sign-vehicles. The outcome is a multilayered system of meanings with which aesthetic perception is interpreted.     

Approaching awe,a moral,spiritual, and aesthetic emotion

In this paper we present a prototype approach to awe. We suggest that two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures. Five additional appraisals account for variation in the hedonic tone of awe experiences: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. We derive this perspective from a review of what has been written about awe in religion, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, and then we apply this perspective to an analysis of awe and related states such as admiration, elevation, and the epiphanic experience.     

Analytic neutrality, anonymity, abstinence, and elective self-disclosure

Recent contributions to the psychoanalytic literature propose new ways of understanding analytic neutrality, anonymity, abstinence, and self-disclosure. They advocate elective self-disclosure by the analyst as an antidote to the allegedly game-playing quality of transference and resistance analysis. The analytic relationship, they assert, becomes unreal when attempts are made to observe the principles of neutrality and abstinence. Both are seen as ill-conceived because of the irreducible subjectivity and unwarranted authority of the analyst. These relational and interactional views are criticized because (1) they ignore the fact that transference and resistance analysis have from Freud onward been accepted as minimal criteria qualifying a clinical process as psychoanalytic; (2) elective self-disclosure carries metapsychological implications dismissing not only Freud's theory of motivation but motivation as a basic feature of human personality; (3) they do not recognize interpersonal relations as mental events and so do not consider the ego's ability to create intrapsychic representations of object relations; (4) elective self-disclosures within the empathic parameters of the analytic situation are themselves unreal compared to the reality of the patient's experience with other objects. Abstinence and neutrality as ideals facilitate maintenance of an internal holding environment or container for the analyst's countertransference.     

Knowledge, doubt, and circularity

Ernest Sosa??s virtue perspectivism can be thought of as an attempt to capture as much as possible of the Cartesian project in epistemology while remaining within the framework of externalist fallibilism. I argue (a) that Descartes??s project was motivated by a desire for intellectual stability and (b) that his project does not suffer from epistemic circularity. By contrast, Sosa??s epistemology does entail epistemic circularity and, for this reason, proves unable to secure the sort of intellectual stability Descartes wanted. I then argue that this leaves Sosa??s epistemology vulnerable to an important kind of skepticism.     

Egocentrism, allocentrism, and Asperger syndrome

In this paper, we attempt to make a distinction between egocentrism and allocentrism in social cognition, based on the distinction that is made in visuo-spatial perception. We propose that it makes a difference to mentalizing whether the other person can be understood using an egocentric ("you") or an allocentric ("he/she/they") stance. Within an egocentric stance, the other person is represented in relation to the self. By contrast, within an allocentric stance, the existence or mental state of the other person needs to be represented as independent from the self. We suggest here that people with Asperger syndrome suffer from a disconnection between a strong na?ve egocentric stance and a highly abstract allocentric stance. We argue that the currently used distinction between first-person and third-person perspective-taking is orthogonal to the distinction between an egocentric and an allocentric stance and therefore cannot serve as a critical test of allocentrism.     

Refraining, metaphors, myths and fairy-tales

Consideration is given to the question as to whether the change produced by refraining is mere sophistry or reflects a more fundamental alteration in the way in which a situation is construed. However, such philosophical questions touching on the nature of reality can be avoided if actions, rather than the problematical situation, are made the subject of interest. The nature of metaphor is briefly explored, exhibiting the manner in which it may be regarded as an example of refraining. Myths and fairytales may be employed as extended metaphors and can then function as vehicles for refraining. As an illustration, a case of anorexia is described where refraining occurs around a fairy-tale.     

Coincidence,historical repetition,and self-knowledge: Jung,Vico, and Joyce

Jung develops synchronicity as an a causal principle of connection by recounting various examples of meaningful coincidence from experience and by analysing various systems of divination, notably the I Ching. Philosophical theory of causality has given no significant attention to synchronicity; the events of synchronicity are regarded as chance. The Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) developed a doctrine of historical experience and of self-knowledge that grounds the phenomenon of synchronicity in a metaphysics. James Joyce employed Vico's conception of language and historical cycles as the basis of Joyce's final literary work, Finnegans Wake. Vico's metaphysical sense of synchronicity and Joyce's literary formulation offer a grounding of this principle in non-divinatory sources in modern Western thought, something which Jung's discussion does not provide. These philosophical and literary perspectives complement Jung's to offer an expanded context in which to recognize synchronicity and to make sense of it.     

Folk-Psychology,Psychopathology, and the Unconscious

Abstract

There is a ‘philosophers’ assumption that there is a problem with the very notion of an unconscious mental state.The paper begins by outlining how the problem is generated, and proceeds to argue that certain conditions need to be fulfilled if the unconscious is to qualify as mental. An explanation is required as to why we would ever expect these conditions to be fulfilled, and it is suggested that the Freudian concept of repression has an essential role to play in such an explanation. Notoriously this concept brings with it a further puzzle: it looks as though repression serves a purpose, and so requires an agent to execute this purpose, a repressor. Paradox is avoided only if repression is viewed in biologicalfunctional terms.The result is that the notion of the unconscious is saved from the a priori objections often levelled at it by philosophers.This still leaves considerable theoretical work to be done by psychological science.     

Helen Flanders Dunbar: Physician,medievalist, enigma

Helen Flanders Dunbar was a psychiatrist, an early leader in the field of psychosomatic medicine, and a prophetic proponent of supervised clinical training for clergy. She was a prolific writer educated in theology and medieval studies as well as medicine. Yet she remains largely an enigma despite her achievements. This article explores Dunbar's life and attempts an explanation of why her person and ideas are not widely recognized today.     

Fear,excitement, and financial risk-taking

Can fear trigger risk-taking? In this paper, we assess whether fear can be reinterpreted as a state of excitement as a result of contextual cues and promote, rather than discourage, risk-taking. In a laboratory experiment, the participants' emotional states were induced (fear vs. control), followed by a purportedly unrelated financial task. The task was framed as either a stock market investment or an exciting casino game. Our results showed that incidental fear (vs. control) induced risk-averse behaviour when the task was framed as a stock investment decision. However, fear encouraged risk-taking when the very same task was framed as an exciting casino game. The impact of fear on risk-taking was partially mediated by the excitement felt during the financial task.     

Compliance, conversion, and category induction

When children hear an object referred to with a label that is moderately discrepant from its appearance, they frequently make inferences about that object consistent with the label rather than its appearance. We asked whether 3-year-olds actually believe these unexpected labels (i.e., conversion) or whether their inferences simply reflect a desire to comply with the considerable experimental demands of the induction task (i.e., compliance). Specifically, we asked how likely children would be to pass an unexpected label on to another person who had not been present during the labeling event. Results showed that children who used an unexpected label as the basis for inference passed that label on to another person about as often as they could remember it. This suggests that children’s label-based inferences do reflect conversion rather than mere compliance.     

Synchronicity,the infinite unrepressed,dissociation and the interpersonal

This paper uses the logic derived by Matte Blanco to provide an Archimedean point and a mathematics, both of which Jung complained of lacking, with which to validate the notion of synchronicity and to demonstrate that it is one of the inevitable properties of an unconscious which is unrepressed such as Jung's collective unconscious, and that such an unconscious will also be affective and interpersonal as well as intrapersonal. These have important clinical implications. After an exposition of Matte Blanco's thinking, some clinical material is presented of an episode in which patient and author both suffered the same psychosomatic symptom some time just prior to a session. Correspondences between Matte Blanco's logically derived ideas and Jung's phenomenological observations are made.     

Object Perception,Attention, and Memory 2008 Conference Report 16th Annual Meeting,Chicago, IL,USA

We investigated how processing unfolds across time as adults view novel manual activity. Adults advanced through slideshows of an actor performing sleight-of-hand manoeuvres; dwell times were recorded to each slide. As in past work involving larger-scale intentional action scenarios, adults allocated more attention to slides depicting breakpoints—transitions from one event segment to the next—than slides displaying mid-stream action, indicating that dwell times are sensitive to adults' recovery of segmental structure in intricate manual activity. Adults also allocated increased attention towards slides indicative of causal structure, indicating that dwell times index processing of causally relevant information as well as segmental structure. We were additionally curious if adults' learning outcomes would differ as a function of whether they paced themselves or watched slideshows advance at a computer-controlled pace. Memory did not differ, but adults viewing computer-controlled slideshows displayed an advantage in performing the tricks. A single attentional focus may have helped adults learn to re-enact the actions, relative to a split attentional focus.