The postmodern counsellor: Some implications for practice,theory, research and professionalism

What is postmodernism? What are the implications of the death of God, science and the subject for counselling? Further questions include: To what extent does postmodernism, show that behavioural, humanistic, existential, and most psychoanalytic theories are delusional in that they would have the clients/patients believe that they are the core, the centre, the subject? What are the dangers of seeing ‘others’ practically, theoretically and when conducting research as either enhancing our narcissism and/or the counselling order? In terms of an ethical practice, can the postmodern counsellor stop counselling from reverting to a technique orientated mechanism of professional vested interests, and instead find a better way for us all to put the other first?     

Three problems regarding medical triage

This paper presents preliminary solutions to three conceptual problems posed by the use of triage to sort candidates for scarce medical resources: (1) By what criteria are the candidates grouped? (2) To what extent can triage be justified? (3) Under what conditions are different versions of triage equivalent? Four explicit methods of applying triage are described and compared, with the aid of examples. The extent to which they either maximize expected utility or show cost-benefit dominance is discussed. And cases in which one triage method reduces to another are contrasted with others where no such reduction occurs.     

“The Grand Experiment”: Modeling Adult Learning with Adult‐Ministry Students

Abstract. Adult‐learning theory challenges faculty to adapt their teaching to certain characteristics of adult learners, including self‐direction: if adults direct the bulk of their lives outside of school, they should be permitted to direct their own educational experiences. To what extent is self‐directed learning an optimal, or even realistic, methodology for seminary teaching? Does it matter what subjects we are teaching? This essay details an experiment with self‐directed learning in a seminary ministry class: what worked, what might be improved, and how it challenges our view of ourselves as faculty to teach in this way. Student feedback from the course in question enhances our understanding of the best (and most challenging) features of the experiment.     

Jurors' Use of Instructions on Negligence1

At the end of a trial, the judge gives jurors a set of instructions that explain the laws that are applicable to the case and that direct jurors to reach a verdict in accordance with those laws. Little is known about how well jurors understand instructions in civil cases. We assess the extent to which jurors understand judicial instructions in negligence cases. We address 3 issues: (a) To what extent do they understand these instructions? (b) To what extent is their comprehension enhanced by access to a written copy of the instructions? and (c) What effect does deliberation have on jurors' comprehension levels? Overall comprehension was approximately 64% and access to written instructions did not enhance comprehension, but the opportunity to deliberate did.     

Scaling of theory-of-mind understandings in Chinese children

Prior research demonstrates that understanding of theory of mind develops at different paces in children raised in different cultures. Are these differences simply differences in timing, or do they represent different patterns of cultural learning? That is, to what extent are sequences of theory-of-mind understanding universal, and to what extent are they culture-specific? We addressed these questions by using a theory-of-mind scale to examine performance of 140 Chinese children living in Beijing and to compare their performance with that of 135 English-speaking children living in the United States and Australia. Results reveal a common sequence of understanding, as well as sociocultural differences in children's developing theories of mind.     

Civil commitment: A review of empirical research

This article presents a comprehensive review of empirical micro-level research which has attempted to evaluate changes in civil commitment law in the United States. It groups studies by category of the general question they address: Who are being processed through civil commitment and who are being committed? How dangerous are civil commitment candidates on admission, in the hospital, and after release? To what extent are court officers adhering to procedural protections in form and in intent? To what extent have restrictive criteria influenced the behavior of medical professionals in processing individuals through civil commitment? and What happens to individuals after their civil commitment experience and their involuntary hospitalization? The article points to needed research and concludes by summarizing existing research from the perspective of finding a balance between civil liverty and benevolence.     

Mechanism Discovery and Design Explanation: Where Role Function Meets Biological Advantage Function

In the recent literature on explanation in biology, increasing attention is being paid to the connection between design explanation and mechanistic explanation, viz. the role of design principles and heuristics for mechanism discovery and mechanistic explanation. In this paper we extend the connection between design explanation and mechanism discovery by prizing apart two different types of design explanation and by elaborating novel heuristics that one specific type offers for mechanism discovery across species. We illustrate our claims in terms of two lines of biological research on the biological advantages of organismal traits, one on the eye-size of giant squid, the other on foraging habits of specific bat species. We argue that this research illustrates useful heuristics for mechanism discovery across species, viz. reasoning strategies to infer likely mechanisms for a certain biological role based on assessments of the environmental conditions in which the role is performed efficiently (i.e., offers a biological advantage) and less or in-efficiently. We bring out the novel features of our analysis in terms of a comparison with mechanistic approaches to mechanism discovery, amongst which graph-theoretical ones, and by comparing the different types of design explanation and the discovery heuristics they support.     

Social influence on physics and mathematics: local or attributive?

Summary  The article is devoted to the nature of science. To what extent are science and mathematics affected by the society in which they are developed? Philosophy of science has accepted the social influence on science, but limits it only to the context of discovery (a “locational” approach). An opposite “attributive” approach states that any part of science may be so influenced. L. Graham is sure that even the mathematical equations at the core of fundamental physical theories may display social attributes. He has used the investigations of the famous Soviet physicist V. Fock on the General Theory of Relativity which were under the influence of Marxism. The Goal of the article is to demonstrate: 1) Why Soviet science is not an appropriate subject-matter for testing the thesis of social constructivism, 2) That differnt levels of science and different stages in the development of science undergo social influences in different degrees ranging from very significant and unavoidable to absolutely trivial and easy eliminated.     

The Breadth of Glory: A Trinitarian Eschatology for the Earth through Critical Engagement with Hans Urs von Balthasar

This article asks to what extent non-human creatures might share in eschatological promises of wonder in the mode of glory understood in a trinitarian perspective. Widening Hans Urs von Balthasar's notion of theodrama raises important theological questions about the meaning and significance of creation. Balthasar portrays creation as imago Trinitatis . I argue that the way he envisages trinitarian notions of difference, sexuality and freedom is anthropocentric and androcentric, straining his analogy of being between creator and created. I propose a more qualified trinitarian eschatology that is more modest in its epistemological claims, but more inclusive in relation to creaturely beings.     

Comparing Swedish and Norwegian teachers' professional development: How human capital and social capital factor into teachers' reading habits

The present study compares how Swedish (n = 340) and Norwegian (n = 236) teachers' human capital and social capital support reading habits as an aspect of professional development. The overall aim was to describe how teachers' human and social capital support their professional development as measured by the aspect of reading habits during leisure time. Our research questions were: To what extent do Swedish and Norwegian teachers differ in their reading habits during leisure time? To what extent do young and old Swedish and Norwegian teachers differ in their reading habits during leisure time? To what extent does Swedish and Norwegian teachers' social capital (collegial talk, principal talk) predict their reading habits during leisure time? To what extent does Swedish and Norwegian teachers' human capital (based on their age, education, and work years) predict their reading habits during leisure time? We compared teachers' reading habits between countries. Older teachers read, on average, more fiction, nonfiction, and newspapers. However, younger teachers in both countries are more prone to read digital texts than older teachers. By contrast, teachers' social capital only seemed to matter in Sweden, while talks with the principal had no effect in either country.     

Closing the gap? Some questions for neurophenomenology

In his 1996 paper “Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem,” Francisco Varela called for a union of Husserlian phenomenology and cognitive science. Varela's call hasn't gone unanswered, and recent years have seen the development of a small but growing literature intent on exploring the interface between phenomenology and cognitive science. But despite these developments, there is still some obscurity about what exactly neurophenomenology is. What are neurophenomenologists trying to do, and how are they trying to do it? To what extent is neurophenomenology a distinctive and unified research programme? In this paper I attempt to shed some light on these questions.     

Mediating between international knowledge and local knowledge: The critical role of local field officers in an HIV prevention intervention

The outcomes of health interventions are co‐constructed through negotiation between the competing knowledges of different stakeholders. In such a context, local implementing partners – who mediate between international donors/programme managers and local beneficiary communities – have a critical ‘knowledge brokering’ role to play. With appropriate support, they can facilitate integration of internationally established knowledge with local beliefs and practices in ways that support health‐enhancing behaviour change. This paper focuses on the local field officers of an HIV prevention programme with Cambodian military couples. The paper asks: (1) what are the outcomes of knowledge encounters between international organizations and local field officers, as expressed in field officers' interpretation of programme goals, strategies and messages? (2) To what extent does the intervention context support the field officers' knowledge brokering efforts? Data collected includes semi‐structured interviews, observations of programme meetings and activities, and textual materials. The findings demonstrate that field officers privilege international knowledge, particularly in interactions with international manager–partners. However, in the field, they both hybridize programme messages and struggle to resolve dilemmas provoked by conflicting international and local knowledges. Material and symbolic asymmetries within the intervention context are shown to undermine their knowledge brokering efforts, as field officers attempt to claim identities and futures as health development professionals. Implications for programme practices and accountability systems are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Laboratory Replication of Scientific Discovery Processes

Fourteen subjects were tape-recorded while they undertook to find a law to summarize numerical data they were given. The source of the data was not identified, nor were the variables labeled semantically. Unknown to the subjects, the data were measurements of the distances of the planets from the sun and the periods of their revolutions about it—equivalent to the data used by Johannes Kepler to discover his third law of planetary motion. Four of the 14 subjects discovered the same law as Kepler did (the period varies as the 3/2 power of the distance), and a fifth came very close to the answer. The subiects' protocols provide a detailed picture of the problem-solving searches they engaged in, which were mainly, but not exclusively, in the space of possible functions for fitting the data, and provide explanations as to why some succeeded and the others failed. The search heuristics used by the subjects are similar to those embodied in the BACON program, computer simulation of certain scientific discovery processes. The experiment demonstrates the feasibility of examining some of the processes of scientific discovery by recreating, in the laboratory, discovery situations of substantial historical relevance. It demonstrates also, that under conditions rather similar to those of the original discoverer, a law can be rediscovered by persons of ordinary intelligence (i.e., the intelligence needed for academic success in a good university). The data for the successful subjects reveal no “creative” processes in this kind of a discovery situation different from those that are regularly observed in all kinds of problem-solving settings.     

Novels as Social Media: How Literature Helped Shape Notions of Sexual Liberation

In the historiography of sexual liberation, the role of cultural artefacts like novels and films has either been taken for granted or not received much attention at all. This article discusses these cultural dimensions of sexual liberation, using the Netherlands as a case study, arguing that these dimensions are important to research in order to better understand the (self-)fashioning of a sexually liberated subject. The seemingly close ties between literature and societal transformations in the sixties is remarkable and points to the function of literature in the 1945–1980 period, when novels functioned as an important social platform for broaching moral controversies and articulated seminal cultural repertoires for identity construction. The article analyses the ways literature functions in Dutch cultural memory of the sexual revolution nowadays, and looks at the specific historical constellation and literary culture that provided important channels for the spreading of new ideas in the 1960s. Guiding questions to investigate the specificities of this literary culture and its function in articulating and disseminating notions of sexual liberation are: what are the functions ascribed to writers and their works in sexual transformations of the 1960s/70s? To what extent are these transformations captured in terms of national identity, or do they travel across national borders? What role do they play in cultural memory, nationally and internationally?     

Language integration in bilingual sentence production

To what extent are processes used in sentence production integrated between the different languages of a bilingual and to what extent are they kept separate? We consider three models that differ in their assumptions about the degree of integration: De Bot's [De Bot, K. (1992). A bilingual production model: Levelt's Speaking model adapted. Applied Linguistics, 13, 1-24] bilingual blueprint of the speaker, Ullman's [Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: The declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 105-122] declarative/procedural model of bilingualism, and Hartsuiker et al.'s [Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish/English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 15, 409-414] integrated model. A review of the evidence from bilingual sentence production studies shows that Hartsuiker et al.'s predictions are supported, but argues against the other two models. We discuss some repercussions for bilingual language use.     

Little Hans and the thought police: the 'policeman fantasies' as the first reported supervisory transference fantasies

The ‘policeman fantasies’ in Freud ’s case of Little Hans, famous for being Freud ’s most direct evidence for specifically sexual oedipal desire by Hans for his mother, are reconsidered. The Hans case is the first recorded instance of psychoanalytic supervision, and recent studies suggest that it is common for patients in supervised treatment to experience fantasies about the supervisor. It is argued that the policeman fantasies are the first recorded instances of such transference fantasies about psychoanalytic supervision and the patient–therapist–supervisor triangle. The explanatory power of this interpretation is supported by the nuances of the features of the fantasies themselves, as well as by the context in which they occurred that might serve as ‘day residues’. Moreover, this interpretation provides an answer to the central mystery of the two fantasies, which goes unaddressed by Freud ’s oedipal interpretation: Who is the policeman?     

Fast and frugal heuristics: rationality and the limits of naturalism

Gerd Gigerenzer and Thomas Sturm have recently proposed a modest form of what they describe as a normative, ecological and limited naturalism. The basic move in their argument is to infer that certain heuristics we tend to use should be used in the right ecological setting. To address this argument, we first consider the case of a concrete heuristic called Take the Best (TTB). There are at least two variants of the heuristic which we study by making explicit the choice functions they induce, extending these variants of TTB beyond binary choice. We argue that the naturalistic argument can be applied to only one of the two variants of the heuristic; we also argue that the argument for the extension requires paying attention to other “rational” virtues of heuristics aside from efficacy, speed, and frugality. This notwithstanding, we show that there is a way of extending the right variant of TTB to obtain a very well behaved heuristic that could be used to offer a stronger case for the naturalistic argument (in the sense that if this heuristic is used, it is also a heuristic that we should use). The second part of the article considers attempts to extending the naturalistic argument from algorithms dealing with inference to heuristics dealing with choice. Our focus is the so-called Priority Heuristic, which we extend from risk to uncertainty. In this setting, the naturalist argument seems more difficult to formulate, if it remains feasible at all. Normativity seems in this case extrinsic to the heuristic, whose main virtue seems to be its ability to describe actual patterns of choice. But it seems that a new version of the naturalistic argument used with partial success in the case of inference is unavailable to solve the normative problem of whether we should exhibit the patterns of choice that we actually display.     

Causal discovery and the problem of psychological interventions

Finding causes is a central goal in psychological research. In this paper, I argue based on the interventionist approach to causal discovery that the search for psychological causes faces great obstacles. Psychological interventions are likely to be fat-handed: they change several variables simultaneously, and it is not known to what extent such interventions give leverage for causal inference. Moreover, due to problems of measurement, the degree to which an intervention was fat-handed, or more generally, what the intervention in fact did, is difficult to reliably estimate. A further complication is that the causal findings in psychology are typically made at the population level, and such findings do not allow inferences to individual-level causal relationships. I also discuss the implications of these problems for research, as well as various ways of addressing them, such as focusing more on the discovery of robust but non-causal patterns.