What we talk about when we talk about pediatric suffering

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - In this paper I aim to show why pediatric suffering must be understood as a judgment or evaluation, rather than a mental state. To accomplish this task, first I...     

What we talk about when we talk about epistemic justification

Stewart Cohen argues that much contemporary epistemological theorizing is hampered by the fact that ‘epistemic justification’ is a term of art (rather than something we all pretheoretically understand) and one that is never given any serious explication in a non-tendentious, theory-neutral way. He suggests that epistemologists are therefore better off theorizing in terms of rationality, rather than in terms of ‘epistemic justification’. Against this, I argue that even if the term ‘epistemic justification’ is not broadly known, the concept it picks out is quite familiar, and partly because it’s a term of art, justification talk is a better vehicle for philosophical theorizing. ‘Rational’ is too unclear for our philosophical purposes, and the fact that ‘epistemic justification’ gets fleshed out by appeal to substantive, controversial theses is no obstacle to its playing the needed role in epistemological theorizing.     

What do we talk about when we talk about mentoring? Blooms and thorns

The dialogue in the field of mentoring has changed over time. In the early days mentoring was a straightforward and pragmatic means to an end: developing others. The blooms of mentoring flowered everywhere. Then thorny issues started to be encountered, both in theory and in practice. Case studies are used here to illustrate the mixed fortunes experienced in contemporary times in three different organisations. A balance between mentoring blooms and mentoring thorns is evident in each case. Three major themes are then identified from these case studies that raise questions for the mentoring discourse. These are: different views of systems thinking, different value bases for evaluating mentoring, and different ideas about the kind of relationship mentoring ought to be. In conclusion, there is a need for a balance: between on the one hand understanding these different positions to promote dialogue and on the other hand developing rivalries to animate dialogue in the first place.     

Children talk about work

To provide background for an elementary-level program of occupational information, 180 children in grades 3 through 8 were individually interviewed to learn their concepts of the world of work. The children disclosed their knowledge, interests, and attitudes related to various occupations and reasons for working. Some children were well informed and had specific vocational goals, while others were quite unaware of work. The data from the study were used to develop telecasts and other modes of presentation for occupational information.     

Young adults talk about their problems

This study aims to explore how young adults in psychotherapy and young adults in general describe their problems and how their problem formulations change over time. Two matched samples from longitudinal prospective studies were compared using thematic analysis. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted at baseline, 1.5 years after termination of psychotherapy (N=12) in the clinical sample and 3 years after baseline in the non clinical sample (N=12). Inductive thematic analysis revealed six themes: problems associated with oneself, family, intimate relationships, sense of belonging, occupation, and social roles. The psychotherapy sample was characterized by problems with oneself closely related to other problematic areas, at both pre-treatment and at follow-up 1.5 years after termination, while problematic sense of belonging was a general theme only prior to psychotherapy. However, they were less troubled by their problems after psychotherapy. Problems with oneself decreased considerably in the non-clinical sample, while problems with intimate relationships were twice as frequent at follow-up. In the psychotherapy sample, the initial experience of being passively trapped within their problems was transformed into an experience of being an active agent in their own life. However, considerable differences between the psychotherapy sample and non-clinical sample still persisted at follow-up.     

Discursive deracialization in talk about asylum seeking

In this paper we explore the extent to which ‘discursive deracialization’, the removal of ‘race’ from potentially racially motivated arguments, is taking place in talk about asylum seeking. A discourse analysis is conducted on the part of a corpus of data collected from focus groups with undergraduate students talking about asylum seeking, in which they were asked if they considered it to be racist to oppose asylum. We show that speakers use three arguments for opposing asylum that are explicitly framed as non‐racist: opposition is based on (1) economic reasons (2) religious grounds and the associated threat of terrorism and (3) the lack of asylum seekers' ability to integrate into British society. These findings are discussed with regard to the implications they have for our understanding of discursive deracialization in which it is shown that there is a common knowledge understanding, albeit one that needs qualifying, that opposition to asylum is not racist. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Disagreeing about who we are

ABSTRACT

One argument that has been suggested for conventionalism about personal identity is that it captures that certain disagreements about personal identity seem irresolvable, without being committed to the view that these disagreements are merely verbal. In this paper, I will take the considerations about disagreement used to motivate conventionalism seriously. However, I will use them to motivate a very different, novel, and as yet unexplored view about personal identity. This is the view that personal identity is a non-representational concept, the nature of which isn’t to be accounted for in terms of what entity it represents, but its non-representational role. I highlight that we find structurally very similar concerns about disagreement in another philosophical debate, namely in meta-ethics. But, in meta-ethics, such sorts of considerations are, traditionally, thought to support one distinctive view: meta-ethical expressivism, a non-representational view about normative thought and discourse. This suggests that we should take a similar view seriously for personal identity. I also develop what such an unfamiliar view might look like, using expressivism as a template. On this view, judgements about personal identity are plans that regulate who to hold accountable.     

蜂屋邦夫先生谈日本的道教研究

日本大东文化大学国际关系学部教授、日本东京大学名誉教授、《宗教学研究》学术委员会委员、日本著名中国道教研究专家蜂屋邦夫先生,于2003年11月10日至17日在四川大学道教与宗教研究所、四川道教胜地老君山等地进行实地考察并作专题讲座.其讲座内容主要有以下几个方面:     

Clients talk about their experience of seeking counselling

The purpose of this study was to explore the help-seeking behaviour of a sample of counselling clients using a questionnaire and follow-up, semi-structured interviews with 20 counselling clients who were seen at a walk-in, affordable counselling agency located in a mid-sized city in New Zealand. Specifically, clients were asked if they had received counselling previously, what efforts they had made to solve their problems before seeking counselling and with what success, why they chose this particular agency, their initial impression of their relationship with their counsellor, and their reactions to participating in the research. The data were analysed to ascertain themes associated with their decision-making and choices. Findings were discussed in relation to the literature on seeking counselling, how clients determine their need for counselling and the process they go through in deciding when and where to get it. Implications for counsellors are discussed.     

Framing how we think about disagreement

Disagreement is a hot topic right now in epistemology, where there is spirited debate between epistemologists who argue that we should be moved by the fact that we disagree and those who argue that we need not. Both sides to this debate often use what is commonly called “the method of cases,” designing hypothetical cases involving peer disagreement and using what we think about those cases as evidence that specific normative theories are true or false, and as reasons for believing as such. With so much weight being given in the epistemology of disagreement to what people think about cases of peer disagreement, our goal in this paper is to examine what kinds of things might shape how people think about these kinds of cases. We will show that two different kinds of framing effect shape how people think about cases of peer disagreement, and examine both what this means for how the method of cases is used in the epistemology of disagreement and what this might tell us about the role that motivated cognition is playing in debates about which normative positions about peer disagreement are right and wrong.     

Somatic and social: Chinese Americans talk about emotion

Empirical findings suggest that Chinese and Americans differ in the ways that they describe emotional experience, with Chinese using more somatic and social words than Americans. No one, however, has investigated whether this variation is related to differences between Chinese and American conceptions of emotion or to linguistic differences between the English and Chinese languages. Therefore, in two studies, the authors compared the word use of individuals who varied in their orientation to Chinese and American cultures (European Americans [EA], more acculturated Chinese Americans [CA], and less acculturated CA) when they were speaking English during emotional events. Across both studies, less acculturated CA used more somatic (e.g., dizzy) and more social (e.g., friend) words than EA. These findings suggest that even when controlling for language spoken, cultural conceptions of emotion may shape how people talk about emotion.