Revisiting Reichenbach’s logic

Synthese - In this paper we show that, when analyzed with contemporary tools in logic—such as Dunn-style semantics, Reichenbach’s three-valued logic exhibits many interesting features,...     

Agents of Reform?: Children’s Literature and Philosophy

Children’s literature was first published in the eighteenth century at a time when the philosophical ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on education and childhood were being discussed. Ironically, however, the first generation of children’s literature (by Maria Edgeworth et al) was incongruous with Rousseau’s ideas since the works were didactic, constraining and demanded passive acceptance from their readers. This instigated a deficit or reductionist model to represent childhood and children’s literature as simple and uncomplicated and led to children’s literature being overlooked and its contribution to philosophical discussions being undermined. Although Rousseau advocates freeing the child to develop, he does not feel that reading fiction promotes child development, which is a weakness in an otherwise strong argument for educational reform. Yet, rather ironically, the second generation of children’s writers, from Lewis Carroll onwards, more truly embraced Rousseau’s broader philosophical ideas on education and childhood than their predecessors, encouraging and freeing readers to imagine, reflect and actively engage in ontological enquiry. The emphasis had changed with the child being embraced in education and society as active participant rather than passive or disengaged recipient. Works deemed to be seminal to the canon of children’s literature such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Chronicles of Narnia challenge readers to work through conflicts many of which can be identified retrospectively as exhibiting postmodern characteristics. By exploring moral and spiritual dilemmas in their writing, Carroll, Barrie and Lewis’s works can be regarded as contributing to discussions on theodical postmodernism. The successes of The Lord of the Rings and Narnia films suggest that there is an interest in exploring moral dilemmas, fulfilling a need (perhaps for tolerance and understanding) in society at large. Children’s literature has an almost divine power to restore, to repair and to heal, all characteristics of theodical postmodernism but differing from the more widely held conception of postmodernism which pulls apart, exacerbates and exposes. Children’s literature therefore offers a healthy and constructive approach to working through moral dilemmas. In their deconstruction of childhood, these authors have brought children’s literature closer to aspects of enquiry traditionally found in the domain of adult mainstream literature. As the boundaries between childhood and adulthood become more fluid, less certain, debate is centring around whether the canon of children’s literature itself has become redundant or meaningless since there are no longer any restrictions on which subjects can be treated in children’s literature. Despite the fact that children’s literature clearly engages with difficult issues, it continues to be left out of the critical equation, not given serious attention, disregarded as simplistic and ignored in contemporary philosophical discussions concerning morality, postmodernism and the future of childhood. With children’s literature coming closer to mainstream literature, and exhibiting prominent features of postmodernism, however, it is only a matter of time before philosophical discussions actively engage with children’s literature and recognise its contribution to the resolution and reconciliation of ontological dilemmas. When this occurs, philosophy and children’s literature will re-engage, enriching contemporary investigations of existence, ethics and knowledge and fruitfully developing thought in these areas. This paper aims to contribute to this process.

Tragic Recognition: Revisiting Hegel’s Conception of Ethical Life

This paper interprets Hegel’s engagement with tragedy and especially tragic action as an interpretive model for understanding ethical life in complex societies in which independent value spheres collide. Tragic recognition, in contrast to the kind of recognition introduced in the master and slave dialectic, is not based on desire, but arises from the suffering deriving from clashing value spheres. As a coming to terms with one’s finitude, tragic recognition presents an important corrective to the account of mutual recognition that has been the reference point of contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s social and political philosophy. The paper concludes by pointing to some of the limits of tragedy as a universal interpretive framework for modern societies.     

Revisiting von Restorff’s early isolation effect

An item that is conceptually or physically different from other items in a series is often remembered well. This isolation effect has been found independent of the position of the isolated item in the list, suggesting that special attention to or processing of the isolated item is not a necessary precondition of the effect. Three experiments are reported that challenge this conclusion. In Experiment 1a, we compared memory for conceptually isolated items to memory for the same items in unrelated and homogeneous lists. Under moderately distracting conditions, isolation effects were observed with midlist but not with early isolates. In fact, early isolation impaired memory for the conceptually distinct items relative to the same items in homogeneous lists. Experiment 1b replicated this memory impairment for early conceptual isolates and extended it to nondistracting conditions. In Experiment 2, we focused on early isolation, manipulating the type of isolation and whether or not participants performed judgments of learning (JOLs). An early isolation effect was observed for numbers isolated in lists of words (and vice versa), but not for conceptual isolates. Performing the JOL task reduced the size of the early isolation effect. These results suggest that number/word stimulus contrasts are coded automatically and support an isolation effect independent of list position. However, conceptual contrasts require relational processing and will only support an early isolation effect when such processing occurs. The results of Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2 suggest that attentional resources during list presentation and a favorable retrieval environment combine to support good memory for distinctive events.     

Revisiting McGee’s Probabilistic Analysis of Conditionals

Journal of Philosophical Logic - This paper calls for a re-appraisal of McGee’s analysis of the semantics, logic and probabilities of indicative conditionals presented in his 1989 paper...     

Reflections on Averintsev’s Method

The author represents Averintsev’s thought as a response to, and commentary on, Russia’s Silver Age, and describes his particular method of seeing and understanding. The article considers his response to the cultural context in which he worked, focusing mainly on Averintsev’s language, style and syntax, and linking it with his ideal of equilibrium. Finally, the article moves on to Averintsev’s criticism of thinking in polarities.     

The lost e-mail method: Milgram’s lost-letter technique in the age of the Internet

We examined Milgram’s (1977) lost-letter technique using e-mail. In the first experiment, 79 college faculty received mock lost e-mail messages. Nineteen percent of those who received the messages responded, in all cases by returning the message to the “sender” instead of forwarding it to the “recipient.” In the second study, attitudes toward presidential candidate Ross Perot were examined by sending out two different messages to 200 randomly selected e-mail addresses in the United States. Although there was no differential response rate, examination of content revealed attitudes consistent with concurrent poll data.     

Psychology is About Persons: On Brinkmann’s Expansion of Harré’s Hybrid Psychology

Brinkmann has recently put forward an integrative theory of the mind by expanding Harré’s hybrid psychology. The theory is integrative because it establishes that in order for one to gain a full understanding of the mind—which is represented as a set of dispositions—one has to take into account theories about the brain, the body, social practices, and technological artifacts. All of these are said to be ‘mediators’ upon which the mind depends. An important claim underlying the theory is that in psychology the basic ontological unit is the person. We agree with Brinkmann both on this and on the dispositional nature of the mind. Still, he does not make a strong case for the latter. Furthermore, we believe the concept of mediation is by no means helpful to produce an integrative view in psychology, not only because the theoretical job of such a concept is unclear but also because qua unifying concept it may end up undermining the ontological primacy of the person (in psychology). In this paper we refer to these issues and suggest some ideas that may help improve Brinkmann’s (and Harré’s) proposal.     

Cohen’s Conservatism and Human Enhancement

In an intriguing essay, G. A. Cohen has defended a conservative bias in favour of existing value. In this paper, we consider whether Cohen’s conservatism raises a new challenge to the use of human enhancement technologies. We develop some of Cohen’s suggestive remarks into a new line of argument against human enhancement that, we believe, is in several ways superior to existing objections. However, we shall argue that on closer inspection, Cohen’s conservatism fails to offer grounds for a strong sweeping objection to enhancement, and may even offer positive support for forms of enhancement that preserve valuable features of human beings. Nevertheless, we concede that Cohen’s arguments may suggest some plausible and important constraints on the modality of legitimate and desirable enhancements.     

Marketing Research Ethics: Researcher’s Obligations toward Human Subjects

This paper addresses the growing concern over violation of research ethics in marketing, in particular rights of human subjects in fieldwork, notably the right to informed consent; right to privacy and confidentiality; and right not to be deceived or harmed as a result of participation in a research. The paper highlights the interaction of the three main parties involved in most marketing research: the sponsoring organization (client or user), researcher, and participant in the survey, focusing on researcher’s ethical responsibilities in interacting with human subjects in surveys. The paper stresses the importance of ethical integrity in marketing research and emphasizes the need to establish a universal model for regulatory requirements and well institutionalized practice of ethical research.     

Compassion with Justice: Harari’s Assault on Human Rights

Yuval Noah Harari contends that human rights are an outdated myth. He calls for replacing them with a new global ethic to meet crises as varied as environmental destruction, disruptive technologies, and extreme gaps between rich and poor. Toward that end, he outlines an ethics that exalts compassion and elides justice, an ethics that animates his trilogy: Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. I draw together the key elements in his personal ethics, tracing them to a combination of scientism, postmodernism, and Buddhism. I then argue that he misunderstands human rights, inflates the role of science in moral matters, and fails to reconcile his moral passion with his moral skepticism.     

A Critical Analysis of Blaustein’s Polemic Against Husserl’s Method

Husserl Studies - The aim of the article is to define and investigate an interpretative framework for the philosophy of Leopold Blaustein, a student of Twardowski in Lwów (Lvov, Lviv) and...     

Peirce’s ‘Prescision’ as a Transcendental Method

Abstract

In this Paper I interpret Charles S. Peirce’s method of prescision as a transcendental method. In order to do so, I argue that Peirce’s pragmatism can be interpreted in a transcendental light only if we use a non‐justificatory understanding of transcendental philosophy. I show how Peirce’s prescision is similar to some abstracting procedure that Immanuel Kant used in his Critique of Pure Reason. Prescision abstracts from experience and thought in general those elements without which such experience and thought would be unaccountable. Similarly, in the Aesthetics, Kant isolated the a priori forms of intuition by showing how they could be abstracted from experience in general, while experience in general cannot be thought without them. However, if Peirce’s and Kant’s methods are similar in this respect, they reached very different conclusions.     

Erikson’s Schedule of Human Strengths and the Church’s Self-Images

This article focuses on Erik H. Erikson’s schedule of human strengths presented in his essay, “Human Strength and the Cycle of Generations” (Erikson 1964) and suggests that certain images of the church support these human strengths. In supporting these human strengths, they also contribute to our understanding of the importance of the fact that the church is an intergenerational body.     

Revisiting Bion’s “Notes on Thinking”: Implications for School Psychologists

Bion’s “Notes on Thinking” (1962a) is not typically associated with the practice of school psychology. However, most of the ideas articulated in the paper, such as the need to learn to engage with what feels frustrating, the capacity to contain emotions and process experiences, and the role of the mother in enabling her child to tolerate emotional states, are applicable to the challenges school psychologists and teachers routinely face in schools. Perhaps the most prominent of these are the need to be able to tolerate and contain the reactions difficult children generate with their acts and the ability to create conditions that help school personnel reflect on the behavior of these children and thus be more attuned to their needs.     

Connecting Information with Scientific Method: Darwin’s Significance for Epistemology

Theories of epistemology make reference—via the perspective of an observer—to the structure of information transfer, which generates reality, of which the observer himself forms a part. It can be shown that any epistemological approach which implies the participation of tautological structural elements in the information transfer necessarily leads to an antinomy. Nevertheless, since the time of Aristotle the paradigm of mathematics—and thus tautological structure—has always been a hidden ingredient in the various concepts of knowledge acquisition or general theories of information transfer. We hold that Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory is the first scientific theory which consistently presupposes a non-tautological structure for the information transfer and, at the same time, keeps it strictly distinct from the tautological metric of scientific observation. The consequences of this technique—namely the dissociation of information from intentionality—have not yet been fully drawn.     

David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature

This ‘untimely review’ of Hume’s Treatise is written as if the book had just been published. I use this fiction to argue that the Treatise is a more fundamental critique of the concept of reason than most readers have thought. Hume’s analysis of human reasoning is grounded in empirical psychology, in which he made significant discoveries. He presents a non-propositional theory of desires, in which choice can be neither rational nor irrational. He shows that the idea that reason has authority, either in morality or science, has no substance. I argue that this critique remains valid and is not self-defeating.     

Women’s Right to Autonomy and Identity in European Human Rights Law: Manifesting One’s Religion

Freedom of religious expression is to many a fundamental element of their identity. Yet the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights on the Islamic headscarf issue does not refer to autonomy and identity rights of the individual women claimants. The case law focuses on Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides a legal human right to freedom of religious expression. The way that provision is interpreted is critically contrasted here with the right to personal autonomy and identity now developed by that court in interpreting Article 8 which contains a right to respect one’s private life.

Nussbaum’s Capabilities and Self-Determination Theory’s Basic Psychological Needs: Relating Some Fundamentals of Human Wellness

Research and theory concerning the nature and sources of well-being has been undertaken through varied approaches. Two such approaches are the capability approach and self-determination theory (SDT), both of which have postulated specific factors deemed necessary for human well-being and flourishing. In two studies we examine the relations between capabilities and well-being indicators, as well as the mediating role of basic psychological need satisfaction in these relations. Results indicate that both capabilities and SDT’s basic psychological needs are substantially associated with well-being, and that SDT’s basic needs partially mediate the relation between capabilities and indicators of wellness.