Epistemology Factualized: New Contractarian Foundations for Epistemology

Many epistemologists are interested in offering a positive account of how it is that many of our common sense beliefs enjoy one or another positive epistemological status (e.g., how they are warranted, justified, reasonable, or what have you). A number of philosophers, under the influence of Wittgenstein and/or J. L. Austin, have argued that this enterprise is misconceived. The most effective version of this argument is to be found in Mark Kaplan’s paper “Epistemology on Holiday”. After explaining what this criticism amounts to and why it is important, I then respond to it. My response is based upon, and is intended to display the explanatory power of, a contractarian account of our practice of epistemic appraisal.     

Reproducing the End Location of a Positioning Movement

Two experiments were conducted in an attempt to determine the conditions under which shifts in the starting position of a linear positioning response influenced the reproduction of the end location of movements of various lengths. In Experiment 1, response bias (i.e., shift in constant error) was affected by the direction of the shift in starting position between presentation and recall. For short (20 cm) and medium (50 cm) length movements, this relationship was evident regardless of hand used (left or right), direction of the movement (left to right or right to left), and length of the retention interval (5 or 45 s). However, no relation between response bias and the direction of starting position shifts was apparent for long (80 cm) movements. The results of Experiment 2 in which more movement lengths were used revealed a response bias that corresponded to shifts in starting position primarily during the first few reproductions of the two shortest movements (20 and 30 cm). However, no systematic bias was evident for any length movement after three reproduction attempts. Possible strategies used by subjects to reproduce the end location of movements of various lengths were discussed.     

Living and Learning: Reproducing Beliefs in Selective Experience

People's decisions shape their experience. For example, a recruitment officer decides between job applicants and cannot evaluate the suitability of rejected applicants. The selection decisions thus affect the content of the officer's experience of suitable and unsuitable applicants, and experiential learning is achieved from a selective sample of experiences. It is suggested that people's beliefs are sensitive to the content of the experienced sample, but the mind cannot adjust for the selectivity of the sample even when it results from the individual's own decisions. Two experiments with a recruitment task showed that incorrect prior beliefs survive experiential learning when the beliefs are reproduced and thus appear to be confirmed, in actual experience. When the task was to achieve high performance, incorrect prior beliefs persisted because they were reproduced in a smaller sample of selected job applicants. In contrast, when the task was focused on learning, a greater number of applicants were selected, and a more representative experience therefore revised incorrect beliefs. The actual content of the experienced sample is thus crucial for the persistence, as well as for the revision, of incorrect beliefs. Further, as predicted by the hypothesis of constructivist coding, when feedback was absent for rejected applicants, participants constructed “internal feedback” in line with the expectation that the rejected applicant was unsuitable. Thus, when fewer applicants were hired, participants came to believe that the actual proportion of suitable applicants was low. Finally, the implications for efforts to reduce bias and improve experiential learning are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reproducing gender in counseling and psychotherapy: Understanding the problem and changing the practice

In this article I argue that the concept of gender is misunderstood by the majority of psychologists. Increasingly the term “gender” is mindlessly replacing the term “sex,” obfuscating decades of theory and research that elucidated gender as a complex social-psychological variable rather than a bifurcated individual-difference variable tied to biological sex. As a consequence, gender is largely ignored as an “active” variable in counseling research and practice. Current theory and research on gender as they apply to counseling and psychotherapy are first described. Then ways in which gender processes are often reproduced in counseling and psychotherapy and factors contributing to this practice are illuminated. Finally, areas particularly vulnerable to reproducing gender are described and some examples provided of the reproducing, and the disrupting, of gender processes in counseling.     

Reproducing the Motherboard: The Invisible Labor of Discourses that Gender Digital Fields

Within the digital workforce, women are disappearing. While there are many factors that could be ‘blamed’ for this phenomenon, this article takes issue with the sexist and patriarchal discourses that are deployed within the digital workforce. In many ways, sexist discourses are taken for granted within the digital workplace; and in that way, the discourses themselves are rendered invisible through a lack of concerted uncovering of the ways that these sexist discourses produce—and reproduce—women as sexual objects and outsiders in this field of work. The sexist and patriarchal discourses I address in this article validate the gender binary even as there is gendered play. It is this ‘play’ that also makes counter-hegemonic discourse and discursive acts productive (and reproductive), as I argue toward the end of the paper. Schools are a place where counter-hegemonic discourses and acts can be nurtured and, hopefully, affect and counteract the disappearance of women in digital fields.     

Reproducing the end location of a positioning movement: the long and short of it

Two experiments were conducted in an attempt to determine the conditions under which shifts in the starting position of a linear positioning response influenced the reproduction of the end location of movements of various lengths. In Experiment 1, response bias (i.e., shift in constant error) was affected by the direction of the shift in starting position between presentation and recall. For short (20 cm) and medium (50 cm) length movements, this relationship was evident regardless of hand used (left or right), direction of the movement (left to right or right to left), and length of the retention interval (5 or 45 s). However, no relation between response bias and the direction of the starting position shifts was apparent for long (80 cm) movements. The results of Experiment 2 in which more movement lengths were used revealed a response bias that corresponded to shifts in starting position primarily during the first few reproductions of the two shortest movements (20 and 30 cm). However, no systematic bias was evident for any length movement after three reproduction attempts. Possible strategies used by subjects to reproduce the end location of movements of various lengths were discussed.     

Distributive Justice and Co-Operation in a World of Humans and Non-Humans: A Contractarian Argument for Drawing Non-Humans into the Sphere of Justice

Various arguments have been provided for drawing non-humans such as animals and artificial agents into the sphere of moral consideration. In this paper, I argue for a shift from an ontological to a social-philosophical approach: instead of asking what an entity is, we should try to conceptually grasp the quasi-social dimension of relations between non-humans and humans. This allows me to reconsider the problem of justice, in particular distributive justice. Engaging with the work of Rawls, I show that an expansion of the contractarian framework to non-humans causes an important problem for liberalism, but can be justified by a contractarian argument. Responding to Bell’s and Nussbaum’s comments on Rawls, I argue that we can justify drawing non-humans into the sphere of distributive justice by relying on the notion of a co-operative scheme. I discuss what co-operation between humans and non-humans can mean and the extent to which it depends on properties. I conclude that we need to imagine principles of ecological and technological distributive justice.     

Challenging Discourse Themes Reproducing Gender in Heterosexual Dating: An Analog Study

Societal discourses tied to gender play apowerful role in shaping ideas and views about normalsexual experience. This study investigated whether“male sexual drive” discourse themes inheterosexual dating could be reproduced in a laboratorysetting, and whether these themes could be disrupted bymeans of a laboratory intervention. Young, single,heterosexual adults, most of whom were Caucasian and middle class, role played a series of datingscenarios. In half of the 37 dyads, male participantswere instructed to initiate a first date and then latergreater sexual intimacy, to which their female partners were instructed to say they were notready (the condition designed to reproduce dominantdiscourse themes). In the other half, the instructionsfor the male and female partners were reversed (the condition designed to change or disruptdominant discourse themes). Analysis of the role-playeddialogues indicated that dominant discourse themesassociated with the male sexual drive discourse wereprevalent in both experimental conditions. Ways ofbroadening our understanding of how gender processes arereproduced and disrupted are discussed in the context ofheterosexual dating relationships.     

The Use of Location and Distance in Reproducing Different Amplitudes of Movement

Experiments have demonstrated that in order to reproduce a standard movement, subjects can move for a certain distance or move to a certain location. Available evidence tentatively suggests the use of distance for short movements and location for long movements. However, this evidence is in conflict with the motor short-term memory characteristics of short and long movements. An experiment is reported which demonstrates that subjects spontaneously use distance for short movements and location for long movements, the procedure adopted being to shift by small amounts the starting-point of the estimation movements and test for a consequent shift in the end-point of the estimation. The experiment also revealed that using distance or location to reproduce a 40° movement resulted in equal accuracy, suggesting that the use of large amplitudes of movement has caused previous investigators to find that distance is less accurate than location.     

复兴国家:国家理论的新形态

民族国家的架构尽管日益式微,但它在组织全球化经济、全球化政治和正在形成的全球公民社会中仍然占有首要地位。民族国家不是在消亡,而是正在被重新想象、重新设计、重新调整方向以回应一系列挑战。相应地,对国家的研究在现时代仍然具有重要意义,在全球化背景下,全球资本、全球公民社会、全球治理与民族国家的关系研究构成了国家理论的新形态。     

State of the Art

The relationship between public and private self-consciousness and self-report questionnaires, clinician ratings, and various measures derived from an individualized simulation of an anxiety-provoking situation was examined in a sample of men and women seeking treatment for social phobia. As predicted, public, not private, self-consciousness was generally related to self-report and naive observer ratings of anxiety and to behavioral disruption during the simulation. The predicted relationship between public self-consciousness and how accurately subjects evaluated their performance in the anxiety-provoking situation was marginally supported. Hypotheses regarding the relationship between private self-consciousness and self-reported anxiety during an anxiety-provoking situation, and between private self-consciousness and the correspondence between physiological assessment and self-report, were not supported. The discussion focuses on methodological issues and the theoretical implications of the relationship between self-consciousness and social anxiety.     

Inside Out: The State of the Analyst and the State of the Patient

This paper presents my work with a man before and after my undergoing an emergency, life-threatening surgical episode, and subsequent experience of living with a temporary colostomy, that shifted me to a more ungrounded, bodily aware, vulnerable, nonlinear, spontaneous and risk-taking, and affectively intensified “right brain” state. My story represents one instance of how the contingent nature of the analyst's life and existential exposure, and the various chancy life circumstances governing the analyst's self-state, may constitute an impingement on clinical process with potential for inadvertent positive or negative impact on the therapeutic relationship and work. Much has been written about the causes and consequences of shifts in the analyst's self-state induced within the relational dynamics of the transference-countertransference matrix. Here I specifically consider that side of the intersubjective therapeutic equation generated by the effects of the analyst's own state on the patient and the dyad's interactive process.     

Reproducing gender in public places: Adults' attention to toddlers in three public locales

Adults of different sex interact differently with toddlers. In home and laboratory, fathers/adult males are the primary agents of sex typing and mothers/adult females are the primary caretakers, especially in the managerial aspects of child care. Little is known about the public display of childcare. Observations were made of 1588 adults (794 males and 794 females) and 1122 toddlers at: 1) a zoo, 2) an amusement park featuring rides, and 3) a theme park based on nursery rhymes. The subjects were family parties of one adult male, one adult female and one or more toddler(s). Adult males were more likely to carry toddlers and adult females were more likely to push empty strollers. Location differences were minor, as were differences in the way male and female adults interacted with toddlers of different sex. There was a toddler-of-like-sex preference in parent-toddler interaction.We wish to acknowledge the help of Michelle Dwyre, Leanne Dimungo, Tod Nirk, Bonnie Mackenzie, Sean Benedict, Keith Booth, and Lisa Dole in data collection. We are especially grateful to the staff of the Sacramento Zoo (Maria Baker, Director; Fred LaRue, former Curator of mammals; Cheryl Winn, former Education Curator and Laurie Neville and Leslie Field, Primate Department) for their encouragement. This research was supported in part by a University of California Faculty Research grant.     

审美境界与道德境界

审美境界和道德境界分属美学和伦理学两个学科领域,但又都是人生的正面价值体现,也是人生的一种理想状态。二者之间不应混淆,却又有着内在的相通之处。审美境界不是纯然客观的形态,而是主体在审美对象召唤下产生的整体性心灵状态,其中包含着道德情感,古人称之为“胸襟”。人的审美活动之所之能臻于“境界”,恰恰是由于有道德价值的介入,否则无法达到境界;道德境界体现了最高的道德价值,以“至善”为其核心价值,儒家的“仁”或“诚”等都是达到了至高的道德境界。道德境界不是外在的约束而致,而是以内心的自觉来践行来达到,其中包含着精神的幸福感和悦畅感,同时,也有审美的因素在其中。     

Reproducing affective norms with lexical co-occurrence statistics: Predicting valence,arousal, and dominance

Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are available for only a small number of English words, are not available for proper nouns in English, and are sparse in other languages. This paper investigated whether affective ratings can be predicted from length, contextual diversity, co-occurrences with words of known valence, and orthographic similarity to words of known valence, providing an algorithm for estimating affective ratings for larger and different datasets. Our bootstrapped ratings achieved correlations with human ratings on valence, arousal, and dominance that are on par with previously reported correlations across gender, age, education and language boundaries. We release these bootstrapped norms for 23,495 English words.