Must most psychotherapists remain as incompetent as they now are?

Although psychotherapy often is effective or helpful for groups of people, it is frequently inefficient and therefore is wasteful for many clients and actually contributes to harming a sizable minority of them. Some of the main aspects of therapeutic inefficiency are discussed in this paper, including: overemphasis on past experience; encouraging dependency and the dire need for love; overemphasis on modeling; the stressing of insight; the use of catharsis and abreaction; the use of cognitive distraction; self-efficacy suggestions; operant conditioning; gradual desensitization; and unselective eclecticism. Specific suggestions for increasing the efficiency of psychotherapy are given.     

Is moral phenomenology unified?

In this short paper, I argue that the phenomenology of moral judgment is not unified across different areas of morality (involving harm, hierarchy, reciprocity, and impurity) or even across different relations to harm. Common responses, such as that moral obligations are experienced as felt demands based on a sense of what is fitting, are either too narrow to cover all moral obligations or too broad to capture anything important and peculiar to morality. The disunity of moral phenomenology is, nonetheless, compatible with some uses of moral phenomenology for moral epistemology and with the objectivity and justifiability of parts of morality.     

Cartesian or condillacian linguistics?

This paper intends to deal with Condillacian Linguistics. Although the Condillacian philosophy of mind and analysis of language were the most important in the late eighteenth century, none of them is mentioned in Chomsky's work (1966, Cartesian Linguistics). It would be useful for the history of Western thought if Chomsky's monumental error were generally recognized and if Condillacian Linguistics were at last to find the place it rightly deserves. The main thesis of Condillac's linguistic ideas (language is the first step in the analysis of thought) is briefly presented with reference to its context and consequences.     

Must naive realists be relationalists?

Relationalism maintains that perceptual experience involves, as part of its nature, a distinctive kind of conscious perceptual relation between a subject of experience and an object of experience. Together with the claim that perceptual experience is presentational, relationalism is widely believed to be a core aspect of the naive realist outlook on perception. This is a mistake. I argue that naive realism about perception can be upheld without a commitment to relationalism.     

Must overlearned lists be scanned?

Ss were presented given names as test items and asked either to indicate whether each test name was a member of a previously memorized list of names or whether each test name was the name of one of their siblings. The data indicated that the memorized hst of names was scanned in a serial fashion but that (disregarding the case where S had just one sibling) S did not have to scan the list of his own siblings’ names to decide about a test name.     

Must boxing verdicts be biased?

A model of judgment made by sports judges is outlined. Its main assumptions are as follows. (1) From the beginning a judge tries to form a hypothesis about which of the two competitors should be awarded the victory. (2) The advantages of both competitors are assessed, and these values are changed according to successive observations. (3) However, the meanings assigned to successive actions are not impartial: the greater the initial advantage of one competitor, the more his gains are enhanced and his losses de-emphasized. Both statistical analysis of judgments made at a boxing championship and in a special experiment with boxing judges revealed several regularities which seem to fit the outlined model, including a pervasive primacy effect. This effect seems to be a consequence of early preselection of the potential winner and a subsequent one-sided processing of sequentially presented information. Possible ways of avoiding partiality in boxing assessments are briefly discussed.     

A teleological account of Cartesian sensations?

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have.     

How Kantian Must Kantian Constructivists Be?

Kantian constructivists locate the source of normativity in the rational nature of valuing agents. Some further argue that accepting this premise thereby commits one to accepting the intrinsic or unconditioned value of rational nature itself. Whereas much of the critical literature on this “regress on conditions” argument has focused either on the cogency of the inference from the value‐conferring capacity of the will to the unconditional value of that capacity itself or on the plausibility of the initial constructivist premise, my aim is to press the argument from a different direction by asking just how Kantian the constructivist needs to be in order to support a regress on conditions argument. Specifically, I maintain that the argument succeeds only given a full‐fledged Kantian moral psychology, including a presupposition of transcendental freedom. If correct, this could have implications regarding the compatibility of Kantian ethics and philosophic naturalism.     

Must a hermeneutical psychoanalysis exclude science?

The work on this article was made possible in part by a grant to all three authors from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-91-0422) and a St. Paul University research award. All three authors contributed equally to the text. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association annual meeting, August 1990. We are grateful to James Pambrun, Ph.D., Ted O'Grady, and Bertram P. Karon, Ph.D. for their advice and encouragement. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul Rigby, St. Paul University, 223 Main St. E., Ottawa, Ont, Canada K1S 1C4.