Tell me you love me: bootstrapping,externalism, and no-lose epistemology

Recent discussion of Vogel-style “bootstrapping” scenarios suggests that they provide counterexamples to a wide variety of epistemological theories. Yet it remains unclear why it’s bad for a theory to permit bootstrapping, or even exactly what counts as a bootstrapping case. Going back to Vogel's original bootstrapping example, I note that an agent who could gain justification through the method Vogel describes would have available a “no-lose investigation”: an investigation that can justify a proposition but has no possibility of undermining it. The main suggestion of this article is that an epistemological theory should not permit no-lose investigations. I identify necessary and sufficient conditions for such investigations, then explore epistemological theories that rule them out. If we want to avoid both skepticism and no-lose investigations, we must eschew either Closure or epistemic externalism.     

Math = male,me = female,therefore math not = me

College students, especially women, demonstrated negativity toward math and science relative to arts and language on implicit measures. Group membership (being female), group identity (self = female), and gender stereotypes (math = male) were related to attitudes and identification with mathematics. Stronger implicit math = male stereotypes corresponded with more negative implicit and explicit math attitudes for women but more positive attitudes for men. Associating the self with female and math with male made it difficult for women, even women who had selected math-intensive majors, to associate math with the self. These results point to the opportunities and constraints on personal preferences that derive from membership in social groups.     

See me,hear me: Using film in health-care classes

This essay argues that film deserves a place within the medical humanities curriculum and demonstrates effective strategies for employing it within medical ethics and humanities classrooms. Part One of the article emphasizes how and why medical ethics teachers can utilize documentary and fictional films, such as “Thomas Szasz and the Myth of Mental Illness,” “The Deadly Deception,”Whose Life Is It Anyway? and “Voices From the Front” in their courses. Such films encourage students to move beyond abstract debates and confront the human pain inherent in all ethical dilemmas. Part Two focuses on documentary and fiction film in the medical humanities classroom. In this section, the author details how to incorporates films, such asThe Doctor, The Waterdance andHospital, into the humanities classroom, juxtaposing them with various literary works, such asOther Women's Children, Borrowed Time, andCeremony. Part Three of the essay presents a detailed discussion ofThe Elephant Man andFrankenstein, illustrating how visual and literary texts compliment each other within the humanities classroom. Overall, the author demonstrates how films function as engaging and complex visual texts providing unique insights in the particularities of American health care and, as such, can become valuable components within medical ethics and humanities classrooms.     

The analysand and analyst team practicing reciprocal free association: Defenders and deniers

Abstract

By 1900, Freud had formulated an original and operational method of psychoanalytic treatment and research: the technique of free association. In 1912–1915 and later writings, he recommended it as a fundamental procedure and process, called the fundamental rule, in psychoanalytic therapy. In recent years, free association as a method has been variously misrepresented, misunderstood, and denied by some schools of psychoanalysis. This paper reviews the history of free associations and argues for upholding the continuity and relevance of Freud's fundamental methodology and for a renewal of interest in reciprocal, i.e., interactive and interpersonal, free association.     

You and me

Are there distinctively second-personal thoughts? I clarify the question and present considerations in favour of a view on which some second-personal thoughts are distinctive. Specifically, I suggest that some second-personal thoughts are distinctive in also being first-personal thoughts. Thus, second-personal thinking provides a way of sharing another person's first-personal thoughts.     

Lip-read me now, hear me better later: cross-modal transfer of talker-familiarity effects

There is evidence that for both auditory and visual speech perception, familiarity with the talker facilitates speech recognition. Explanations of these effects have concentrated on the retention of talker information specific to each of these modalities. It could be, however, that some amodal, talker-specific articulatory-style information facilitates speech perception in both modalities. If this is true, then experience with a talker in one modality should facilitate perception of speech from that talker in the other modality. In a test of this prediction, subjects were given about 1 hr of experience lipreading a talker and were then asked to recover speech in noise from either this same talker or a different talker. Results revealed that subjects who lip-read and heard speech from the same talker performed better on the speech-in-noise task than did subjects who lip-read from one talker and then heard speech from a different talker.     

Competition, cooperation, and the effects of others on me

Four studies were conducted to test the notion that whether one competes against or cooperates with a comparison target can serve as an important determinant of the direction (contrast or assimilation) of self-evaluative social comparison effects. In Study 1, cooperative-competitive orientation was treated as an individual difference variable, and it was shown that social comparison led to contrast for individuals with a more competitive orientation, whereas assimilation occurred for individuals with a more cooperative orientation. Study 2 replicated this result, treating cooperative-competitive orientation as a contextual variable. In Study 3, it was demonstrated that to obtain this pattern of results it is not necessary for perceivers to believe that they will be either competing or cooperating with the comparison target. Simply activating the relevant concepts is sufficient. The final studies demonstrated that competition activates a "difference" focus and cooperation activates a "similarity" focus.     

God and me,God is me: dialogue with religion as a mechanism for coping with emotional stress

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - In this article I seek to clarify the different ways in which religious ultra-Orthodox Jewish patients, accustomed to the continuous presence of God in...     

The real me: Authenticity,interpersonal goals,and conflict tactics

Dispositional authenticity is associated with positive intra- and interpersonal outcomes, yet how authenticity relates to conflict solving strategies has not been examined. The present study aims to explore the relationship between authenticity and conflict solving strategies in close friendships and proposes that interpersonal goals (i.e., compassionate goals and self-image goals) might mediate the relationship. Three hundred sixty-three Taiwanese college students completed a survey package. Results showed that authenticity was positively associated with strategies that promote the needs of both oneself and one's friend (i.e., integrating and compromising) while negatively, or not, associated with those that don't concern one's own needs (i.e., obliging) or one's friend's needs (i.e., dominating and avoiding). Further, compassionate goals mediated the relationship between authenticity and integrating, compromising, and dominating strategies, while suppressing the relationship between authenticity and avoiding and obliging strategies. Self-image goals mediated only dominating and avoiding strategies.     

Ask me why,don't tell me why: Asking children for explanations facilitates relational thinking

Identifying abstract relations is essential for commonsense reasoning. Research suggests that even young children can infer relations such as “same” and “different,” but often fail to apply these concepts. Might the process of explaining facilitate the recognition and application of relational concepts? Based on prior work suggesting that explanation can be a powerful tool to promote abstract reasoning, we predicted that children would be more likely to discover and use an abstract relational rule when they were prompted to explain observations instantiating that rule, compared to when they received demonstration alone. Five- and 6-year-olds were given a modified Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) task, with repeated demonstrations of relational (same) matches by an adult. Half of the children were prompted to explain these matches; the other half reported the match they observed. Children who were prompted to explain showed immediate, stable success, while those only asked to report the outcome of the pedagogical demonstration did not. Findings provide evidence that explanation facilitates early abstraction over and above demonstration alone.     

你跟从我来

利未,又称为马太,他是个税吏,为什么他因耶稣的一句话:“你跟从我来”就改变了自己一生的方向呢?他原来在地上是有工作的,且是很赚钱的工作,可以藉职权牟取私利,但耶稣来到他身边说:“你跟从我来。”     

Analyse me

The poem Analyse Me evolved from my desire to understand where and how the creative fitted into the scheme of military veteran mental health treatments in Australia. In 2016, as an Australian Army veteran and a creative writer, I undertook to conduct craft of writing workshops for veterans. However, I found creative arts, in all modes, were not as widely incorporated into treatments and research as I thought. The poem is a creative response to my frustration and disbelief of the results of my research and is a representation of my findings conceptualised to be the clinical and externally measurable treatment modes at one extreme, contrasted against the less definable use of the imagination or the creative at the other. The poem highlights the broad expanse between these extremes. It underlines a view on the difference of gender in treatment and the divide between the detached, clinical analysis and the more personal, intuitive creative response. Analyse Me does not deny the use of one modality over, or to the exclusion, of the other but rather indicates they both have purpose and can be mutually supportive and beneficial.     

The paradox of countertransference: you and me,here and now

Abstract

I am moved to write by Stephen Gross's article ‘Revenge of the fathers: incest and the male therapist’, which appeared in the February 1995 issue of Psychodynamic Counselling     

Show me the product,show me the model: Effect of picture type on attitudes toward advertising

We suggest that a consideration of consumer self-evaluations is fundamental to understanding the conditions under which it is more advantageous to present person or product pictures in print advertisements. We build on the basic human motives of self-enhancement and self-verification to propose that the specific self-esteem level of consumers, in the domain relevant for the category, differentially affects their responses to picture type. Specifically, for consumers with low (high) domain-specific self-esteem, depicting a product (person) in the advertisement enhances attitudes toward the advertisement more than depicting a person (product). In two studies, we demonstrate the proposed matching relationships using two different domains of consumer self-evaluation: appearance self-esteem and academic self-esteem. We also show that increased and more fluent generation of self-related mental imagery drives the observed improvement in attitudes toward the advertisement. Our findings suggest direct implications for advertising design.