Having a voice and getting a hearing: An educational perspective on free speech in a plural society

This paper examines Ronald Dworkin's claim that the right to free speech does not include a right to circumstances that encourage citizens to speak nor a right to competent and sympathetic understanding on the part of listeners. Drawing on familiar arguments for the existence of other human rights, the paper challenges Dworkin's claim. Even if, however, the challenge fails and it is not possible to show that there is such a right, that is not the end of the story. It is argued that democratic societies should try to foster conditions in which citizens are encouraged to speak and are listened to sympathetically in the interests of the well-being and flourishing of the polity. The important role education has to play in this is explored.     

Choice and Logic

There is a little known paradox the solution to which is a guide to a much more thoroughgoing solution to a whole range of classic paradoxes. This is shown in this paper with respect to Berrys Paradox, Heterologicality, Russells Paradox, and the Paradox of Predication, also the Liar and the Strengthened Liar, using primarily the epsilon calculus. The solutions, however, show not only that the first-order predicate calculus derived from Frege is inadequate as a basis for a clear science, and should be replaced with Hilbert and Bernays conservative extension. Standard second-order logic, and quantified propositional logic also must be substantially modified, to incorporate, in the first place, nominalizations of predicates, and whole sentences. And further modifications must be made, so as to insist that predicates are parts of sentences rather than forms of them, and that truth is a property of propositions rather than their sentential expressions. In all, a thorough reworking of what has been called logic in recent years must be undertaken, to make it more fit for use.Portions of this paper have previously been published in Logical Studies, vol. 9, http://www.logic.ru/LogStud/09/No9-06.html, and the Australasian Journal of Logic, vol. 2, http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/ajl/2004/2004_4.pdf.     

Corporal Punishment

This paper examines the reasons why corporal punishment in the judicial sphere has fallen into moral disfavour in recent decades. Standard objections to the practice, both practical and ethical, are considered and found to be inconclusive. It is argued that corporal punishment is not inevitably more cruel or demeaning than conventionally preferred punitive methods and that consideration should be given to its limited experimental reintroduction.     

Students’ knowledge about the value of discussions for teaching and learning

We are particularly interested in looking at teaching and learning from students perspectives. Focussed interviews and written responses from a number of linked investigations with middle-school and tertiary students highlighted that students perceive discussion to be a valuable teaching -- learning technique. This paper provides text extracts, organised into six key themes, to illustrate students understandings about how discussion helps them to learn. We conclude that, across the whole participant group, knowledge about the various potentials of discussion for learning is wide ranging. However, at the individual level, some students perspectives appear limited. We propose that specific attention to enhancing students pedagogical knowledge about techniques such as discussion should accompany subject matter instruction.     

Unintelligibility or Defeat: The Issue of Engagement in Philosophical Debates

A recognition of the acutely terministic and agonistic character of philosophizing has led to the perception of a dilemma in philosophical debates: differing positions are capable of being maintained only at the expense of mutual unintelligibility, and a real contact of minds could never be achieved without one side of the controversy abandoning its position and the enabling argumentative tension ceasing to exist. This perception is sustainable, however, only if we continue to accept the assumption that a direct, unmediated confrontation between disputants personifying two sets of rigidly defined terms is the mode of philosophical argumentation. A triadic rather than diadic conception of a typical debate between opposing schools of thought, which differentiates between the opponent and the audience, would address the theoretical misgivings caused by the perceived predicament.     

Stress, Rewards, and Change in the Centrality of Women’s Family and Work Roles: Mastery as a Mediator

Although research suggests that stress and rewards experienced in a social role are associated with changes in the centrality (or personal importance) of that role over time, little attention has been given to the mechanisms that account for this relationship. This study was conducted to examine change in role mastery as a mediator in the relationship between changes in role experiences (stress and rewards) and changes in centrality among 195 women who simultaneously occupied the roles of parent care provider, mother, wife, and employee. Regression analyses indicated that increases in parent care, mother, and employee stress eroded mastery in those roles. In addition, increases in rewards were associated with a bolstered sense of mastery in each of the four roles. Mastery was found to be a mediating mechanism in the relationship between stress/rewards and centrality in one of the four roles examined, the employee role. However, changes in womens perceptions of mastery were unrelated to the extent to which women changed the importance of their three family roles. These findings extend prior research by demonstrating that mastery is a mechanism through which stress and rewards are associated with centrality in the employee role.     

The Tacit–Explicit Connection: Polanyian Integrative Philosophy and a Neo-Polanyian Medical Epistemology

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an approach to clinical practice aiming to resolve the dilemma of choosing between a mechanistic and a phenomenological model. The approach is an extension of Polanyi's epistemology. Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), devised an epistemology of science which overcomes the problem of detachment, inherent in the mechanistic approach, and resolves the problem of subjectivity troubling phenomenologists. His epistemology is known as Personal Knowledge. An extension of this epistemology, a Neo-Polanyian proposal, is offered as a more successful model for clinical practice than previous suggestions addressing the dilemma.     

Peace and Justice: A Limited Reconciliation

This paper aims to relax the tension between the political requirements of making peace and the moral demands of doing justice, in light of the ‘peace processes’ in South Africa and Northern Ireland. It begins by arguing that criminal justice should be reconceived as consisting primarily in the vindication of victims, both direct and indirect. This is not to deny the retributive punishment of perpetrators any role at all, only to insist that it be largely subservient to the goal of vindication. Why should we take such an account of justice to be true? The paper offers two reasons. First, Christians – and even secularist liberals – have a prima facie reason in the consonance of this account with the Bible's eudaimonistic conception of justice as ordered to the restoration of healthy community. Second, since all concepts of criminal justice share the basic notion of putting right what is wrong, it would be odd if the repair of damage done to victims (i.e., their ‘vindication’) were not prominent among its concerns; and there are reasons to suppose that this vindication should actually predominate in relation to the other principles of justice (the retributive ‘balancing’ of crime and punishment, and the reform of the criminal for his own sake). In its final sections, the paper applies the proposed conception of criminal justice to the ‘peace processes’ in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and concludes that in both cases, notwithstanding concessions to the politics of peace-making, considerable justice has been done.     

Anti-Judaism in the Gospels According to Matthew,Mark, Luke,John, and Mel

Mel Gibsons film, The Passion of the Christ, has elicited great response, both positive and negative. The purpose of this article is to explore one controversial aspect of the movie, anti-Judaism. After addressing problems inherent in the term, anti-Judaism, the article highlights elements of the New Testament gospels that have been interpreted as anti-Jewish, offers an analysis of Gibsons interpretation of the role of the Jews in the death of Jesus, and closes with a discussion of the implications of Gibsons presentation of the Jews on contemporary Jewish/Christian relations.     

The Shaping of Family Therapy Education: An Update

The preparation and credentialing of marital and family therapists in the United States and Canada continues to be significantly affected by the role of accreditation in MFT graduate education. This report on a study of Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education accredited degree programs and non-accredited programs shows some significant differences between the two paths to preparation and credentialing. Accredited programs tend to have more faculty, lower faculty-student ratios, more Approved Supervisors, more financial aid, more programs requiring practica and internships, and more emphasis on professional identification with marital and family therapy. Nonaccredited programs provide more emphasis on psychopathology, psychodiagnostic testing, and cognitive behavioral therapy.     

A narwhal is an animal: partial word knowledge biases adults' decisions

Adults' accuracy on a sentence verification task was measured to assess reliable biases in their responses as a function of their level of knowledge about the target words, as well as adults' ability to reject incorrect ontological category membership for their partially known words. Three levels of word knowledge (known, frontier, and unknown) were assessed in two experiments. Results indicated that participants were conservative decision-makers about sentences using the vocabulary words and that the conservative bias increased in strength as their level of knowledge about the target word increased. When biased guessing was discouraged, results indicated that participants were able to accurately identify both correct and incorrect sentences using targets at all three levels of knowledge, including their partially known words, but were least reliable at rejecting false sentences using unknown targets. Implications for the role of knowing not in adults' vocabulary acquisition are discussed.     

The Impact of ‘the Dream’ on Women's Experience of the Midlife Transition

Daniel Levinson's claim for the universality of age-linked periods is considered highly controversial considering that his theory evolved from a study consisting of males only. Theories relating to women's development, particularly at midlife, are somewhat scarce and restricted. Using Levinson's theory of adult development as a framework, the present study retrospectively examined the Dream and its impact on women's psychological health and adjustment to the Midlife Transition. Three hundred midlife women completed a questionnaire examining Dream Status, Dream Content, Dream Success, and the psychological health variables, depression, anxiety, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. Dream Success was significantly related to psychological health on dimensions of well-being and composure, and interesting changes were observed in Dream Content across the early and current Dream. Our findings revealed that, despite the overall greater complexity of women's Dreams, Levinson's theory is largely applicable to women's development.     

Treating the “Wise Baby”

In a previous examination of Ferenczis concept of the Wise Baby (1996), I had noted both its applications and its limitations in the analytic treatment of an unusually intelligent adult. Ferenczis concepts of the origin of intellect in trauma and of the wise baby have often left the indistinct impression of being interrelated phenomena. In this paper, I regard as arguable the notion that very high intelligence is pathological when it is precocious. This return visit to the territory of the wise baby extends Ferenczis ideas about the origin and use of the intellect to include a consideration of what may constitute effective treatment for those who suffer from giftedness.Judith E. Vida, M.D. edits On the Arts for this journal. She is a Founding Member and Faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, CA, a member of both American and International Psychoanalytic Associations, and of the Sándor Ferenczi Society of Budapest. Her private practice is in Pasadena, CA.Address correspondence to Judith E. Vida, 301 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Suite 406A, Pasadena, CA 91105, USA; e-mail: jvida@spence.net     

Inferential Intensionality

The paper is a study of properties of quasi-consequence operation which is a key notion of the so-called inferential approach in the theory of sentential calculi established in [5]. The principal motivation behind the quasi-consequence, q-consequence for short, stems from the mathematical practice which treats some auxiliary assumptions as mere hypotheses rather than axioms and their further occurrence in place of conclusions may be justified or not. The main semantic feature of the q-consequence reflecting the idea is that its rules lead from the non-rejected assumptions to the accepted conclusions.First, we focus on the syntactic features of the framework and present the q-consequence as related to the notion of proof. Such a presentation uncovers the reasons for which the adjective inferential is used to characterize the approach and, possibly, the term inference operation replaces q-consequence. It also shows that the inferential approach is a generalisation of the Tarski setting and, therefore, it may potentially absorb several concepts from the theory of sentential calculi, cf. [10]. However, as some concrete applications show, see e.g.[4], the new approach opens perspectives for further exploration.The main part of the paper is devoted to some notions absent, in Tarski approach. We show that for a given q-consequence operation W instead of one W-equivalence established by the properties of W we may consider two congruence relations. For one of them the current name is kept preserved and for the other the term W-equality is adopted. While the two relations coincide for any W which is a consequence operation, for an arbitrary W the inferential equality and the inferential equivalence may differ. Further to this we introduce the concepts of inferential extensionality and intensionality for q-consequence operations and connectives. Some general results obtained in Section 2 sufficiently confirm the importance of these notions. To complete a view, in Section 4 we apply the new intensionality-extensionality distinction to inferential extensions of a version of the ukasiewicz four valued modal logic.     

Assessing Parental Satisfaction with Children’s Mental Health Services with the Youth Services Survey for Families

We assessed parent satisfaction with childrens mental health services with a new instrument: The Youth Services Survey for Families (YSSF). The Dillman method was used to administer the survey to a random sample of 1,500 parents of Medicaid youth from Kentuckys 14 community mental health centers (CMHCs). The response rate was 37% (n = 534 parents). A factor analysis of YSSF identified five parent-perceived factors: (a) Appropriateness, (b) Outcome, (c) Participation in Treatment, (d) Access, and (e) Cultural Sensitivity. About 70% of parents reported a high level of endorsement with the Appropriateness factor, but only 47% reported high levels of endorsement with the Outcome factor. Results were interpreted as providing support for the reliability of the YSSF in evaluating childrens mental health services in CMHCs.     

Mel Gibson’s Big Gamble: <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Passion of Christ</Emphasis>

Mel Gibsons film is a creative reworking of opportunities provided by migrating to Australia as a boy and a life-long desire to be reconciled to his father, Hutton Gibson. If the film is read as a study in psychology and biography, then biblical and theological critiques, along with contemporary politically correct stances towards what Gibson did, can be set temporarily aside in search of a larger trajectory of meaning implicit in the film. The embodied nature of the film, along with other violent films in which Gibson starred in the past three decades, points to wellsprings of power in the blood. Violence becomes an idiom of reconciliation with authority. Gibsons relationship to his father plays a major role in such a reading of the film. A continuous reconciliation with his father is evident not only in thematic continuities over the course of Mel Gibsons professional acting career and starring roles. It also structures the directors construction of Christs Passion. A desire not to be forsaken gives rise to this idiosyncratic and controversial film, itself a cinematic statement about Gibsons own personal spiritual torment.Richard A. Hutch is Director of Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Reader in Religion and Psychological Studies in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia 4072.     

Quasi-varieties: A special access

Quasi-equational logic concerns with a completeness theorem, i. e. a list of general syntactical rules such that, being given a set of graded quasi-equations Q, the closure Cl Q = Qeq Fun Q can be derived from by the given rules. Those rules do exist, because our consideration could be embedded into the logic of first order language. But, we look for special (quasi-equational) rules. Suitable rules were already established for the (non-functorial) case of partial algebras in Definition 3.1.2 of [27], p. 108, and [28], p. 102. (For the case of total algebras, see [35].) So, one has to translate these rules to the (functorial) language of partial theories .Surprisingly enough, partial theories can be replaced up to isomorphisms by partial Dale monoids (cf. Section 3), which, in the total case are ordinary monoids.Special issue of Studia Logica: Algebraic Theory of Quasivarieties Presented by M. E. Adams, K. V. Adaricheva, W. Dziobiak, and A. V. Kravchenko     

Set-Theoretic Absoluteness and the Revision Theory of Truth

We describe the solution of the Limit Rule Problem of Revision Theory and discuss the philosophical consequences of the fact that the truth set of Revision Theory is a complete 1/2 set.