Self as verb and the metaphor of dance: An explanation of the self discovery experience within a constructivist framework

The concept of self discovery within a constructivist framework is difficult to explain given the central assumption of constructivism that self is a created construct rather than an entity to be discovered. Two problems are identified as impediments to constructivist accounts of the self discovery experience: first, their failure to adequately account for the embodied experience of self, and second, the difficulties inherent in using self as a noun to express a process.
It is proposed that if self is considered as a verb, as the action of a body-subject, the verbal contortionism of referring to self as a process in a language that places self as an entity may be overcome. The notion of self as verb places the individual firmly in the role of active embodied participant in the experience of self. The metaphor of "self'" as "dance" is explored to emphasize the materiality of the human animal that is argued to be central to the experience of self discovery.     

Children's spirituality with particular reference to a Norwegian context: some hermeneutical reflections

Spirituality has become an issue in many domains of the Norwegian society, but this is not reflected in public education. This paper discusses why this is so, and suggests some hermeneutical approaches to understanding spirituality that can include pre‐school children's spirituality, with particular reference to a Norwegian context. Central to this discussion is a case study of children in ‘sacred space’, and an understanding of spirituality as cultural learning. Education in schools as well as in kindergartens is dominated by a secular outlook on life as ‘default’, or a cultural and collective forgetfulness. Children's spirituality challenges adults to explore and rearticulate what is forgotten, in terms of nurturing what it is to be human, of caring for what is really important, and of cultivating hope – in Norway as well as in other countries.     

Taking a children’s rights perspective on children’s spirituality

Abstract

The right to spiritual development has had little attention in public educational policy. This is more challenging, considering the fact of increasing religious diversity and the focus on spirituality and religion in that context, as well as the way the spiritual is mentioned in documents on children’s rights. This article traces the development from the first documents on the rights of the child and responses to these documents. It is argued that educational policy and practice should pay more attention to the way children’s spirituality is included in the documents. This is an issue of general education as well as of moral philosophy. The article concludes with a claim: spiritual development is a matter of survival and flourishing as human beings, and considering this in the framework of children’s rights could mean exploring spiritual sources in one’s own faith as well as in other faiths.     

The morality of weapons research

I ask whether weapons research is ever justified. Weapons research is identified as the business of the engineer. It is argued that the engineer has responsibility for the uses to which the tools that he designs can be put, and that responsibility extends to the use of weapons. It is maintained that there are no inherently defensive weapons, and hence there is no such thing as ‘defensive’ weapons research. The issue then is what responsibilities as a professional the engineer has in regard to such research. An account is given to ground the injunction not to provide the means to harm as a duty for the engineers. This account is not, however, absolutist, and as such it allows justifiable exceptions. The answer to my question is thus not that weapons research is never justified but there must be a strong assurance that the results will only be used as a just means in a just cause.     

A Chinese perspective on Kohlberg's theory of moral development

This essay uses the Chinese culture as an example to underline the culturally specific contextual problems regarding Kohlberg's theory of moral development and to point to a new direction for cross-cultural research in this area. The Western view of man as an autonomous being who makes free and rational choices as a moral agent is clearly reflected in Kohlberg's stages of moral development as well as his methodology. The Confucian view of man as an integral part of an orderly universe with an innate moral sense to maintain harmony is quite different. Further, the preferred mode of resolving human conflict in China is reconciliation and collective decision making rather than individual choice, commitment, and responsibility as in the West. In the light of these fundamental differences in the two cultural traditions, an alternative to Kohlberg's theory is suggested.     

A Modest Solution to the Problem of Rule-following

A modest solution to the problem(s) of rule-following is defended against Kripkensteinian scepticism about meaning. Even though parts of it generalise to other concepts, the theory as a whole applies to response-dependent concepts only. It is argued that the finiteness problem is not nearly as pressing for such concepts as it may be for some other kinds of concepts. Furthermore, the modest theory uses a notion of justification as sensitivity to countervailing conditions in order to solve the justification problem. Finally, in order to solve the normativity problem, it relies on substantial specifications of normal conditions such as those that have been proposed by Crispin Wright and Mark Johnston, rather than on Philip Pettit's functionalist specification. This theory is modest in that it does not meet the demands of Kripke's sceptic in full. Arguments are provided as to why this is not needed.     

Aesthetics,information and meaning

Aesthetics has been defined relative to objective and subjective values; its historical and cultural world views are referenced. The author's view of beauty as communication is also introduced, where chance and necessity, the two antithetical realities produce the informa‐tion processes of modern time. That is, “difference” is associated with chance, the irrational, the spontaneous and the individual aspect of reality as opposed to necessity, the rational, the formal, and the universal aspects of things. Information is introduced as, the origin, as well as essence, of life. It is what produces information and is the only agent which produces both matter and psyche. Order and disorder, and the laws of “opposites” are considered building blocks of identity and difference and information. Information and Communication as an interconnecting agent are also considered a bridge between Eastern and Western philosophy, i.e., in its deconstruction of the particular into a web or field of energies in the West, and in Eastern thought in its becoming one with Nirvana or Brahman, the Sufi or the Tao, the ultimate one and all. Because goodness and truth under the influence of reason and science had failed, Eastern philosophy as an alternative to Western models is recommended. It is suggested that all that is left objectively is beauty, thus reason as basic is giving way to rules of beauty. And its principles are capable of describing man's evolution and his culture, as well as his aesthetic experience, which is nothing but information processes and communication. In conclusion, design as aesthetic communication is introduced as a model to reflect the above principles.     

Executive dysfunction in autism

"Executive function" is an umbrella term for functions such as planning, working memory, impulse control, inhibition and mental flexibility, as well as for the initiation and monitoring of action. The primacy of executive dysfunction in autism is a topic of much debate, as are recent attempts to examine subtypes of executive function within autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders that are considered to implicate frontal lobe function. This article will review cognitive behavioural studies of planning, mental flexibility and inhibition in autism. It is concluded that more detailed research is needed to fractionate the executive system in autism by assessing a wide range of executive functions as well as their neuroanatomical correlates in the same individuals across the lifespan.     

Reasons for Reason-giving in a Public-Opinion Survey

This paper explores why respondents to a telephone public-opinion survey often give reasons for answering as they do, even though reason-giving is neither required nor encouraged and it is difficult to see the reasons as attempts to deal with disagreement. We find that respondents give reasons for the policy claims they make in their answers three times as frequently as they give reasons for value or factual claims, that their reasons tend to involve appeals to personal experience, and that they often talk about their thought processes, especially when the evidentiary stakes are high. We then explore several ways of explaining these findings. We suggest that one useful approach is to see the reason-giving in the survey interviews as deliberative, reflexive argumentation of the sort described as `critical thinking. We further suggest that the reason such argumentation is often conducted out loud in the interviews, rather than internally, is that it functions in the service of rhetorical ethos, in particular the need to display the fact that one is human, with human autonomy and agency. Doing this may be particularly important in contexts such as anonymous survey interviews in which people are at risk of being treated like machines.     

It's Personal—Or Not At All: On God as Love/r

Abstract : Henriksen discusses what it means that God is personal, with special regard to the claim that God is love. If God is love, God must be understood as personal. This approach is related to different elements concerning human life and human freedom, and how to engage in human life. Also the radical alternative is suggested: instead of understanding God as love, the alternative is considered that death is God (as the final and strongest power there is). This alternative shows that it is the most likely interpretation of actual human conduct to opt for the alternative that God is love. Hence, to understand God as love is part of what it means to relate humanely and with hope to what is taking place in human life.     

Expectancy and intermittency

When a human subject responds to the second of two closely succeeding stimuli, his reaction time to the second stimulus tends to increase sharply as the interstimulus interval decreases. Controversy has centred on the issue of whether this increase is mainly due to the effects of the first stimulus in producing some kind of block in the central analysing systems or whether it is mainly due to the temporal uncertainty of the second signal, as determined by the distribution of interstimulus intervals used.

By substituting for the first stimulus a spontaneous response on the part of the subject and holding the distribution of interstimulus intervals constant, it is shown that the delays in responding to the succeeding signal are eliminated, even at intervals as short as 50 millisec. This is interpreted as evidence in support of the intermittency hypothesis and as a clear indication that the increase in reaction times normally observed is not a result of the distribution of interstimulus intervals.     

Amnestic episodes. (Isolated episodes of confusion with amnesia, amnesic ictus, transient global amnesia)]

The author, by giving an outline of one particular case as well as a survey of the relevant literature on transient global amnesia, describes the characteristic clinical picture that is characterized by a sudden loss of what is known as the short-time memory, which usually lasts for several hours, as well as by retrograde amnesia which sometimes dates back to many years. The condition gradually fades away within a few hours or during a night's sleep, and what remains is lack or loss of memory for the episodic period or sometimes retrograde amnesia. Relapses were not observed in the majority of patients. The disease usually develops in people in their sixth to eighth decades of life. The cause of the disease is not yet fully understood. Accordingly, it is justified to use such terms as autochthonous or cryptogenic amnestic episodes. The disease is also discussed from a differential diagnosis point of view.     

On Maraun's Deconstructing of Factor Indeterminancy with Constructed Factors

The nonlinear random coefficient model has become increasingly popular as a method for describing individual differences in longitudinal research. Although promising, the nonlinear model it is not utilized as often as it might be because software options are still somewhat limited. In this article we show that a specialized version of the model can be fit to data using SEM software. The specialization is to a model in which the parameters that enter the function in a linear manner are random, whereas those that are nonlinear are common to all individuals. Although this kind of function is not as general as is the fully nonlinear model, it still is applicable to many different data sets. Two examples are presented to show how the models can be estimated using popular SEM computer programs.     

The Constitution as an Axiomatic System

The Constitution is considered as an informal axiomatic system. The strategy proposed by the authors rests on the following propositions: (1) axioms are considered as contextual definitions of those concepts by means of which they are formulated; and (2) the main requirement for this type of system is internal consistency. The first proposition is necessary for considering the Constitution as an informal axiomatic system, while the second is sufficient, because the approach proposed, apart from consistency, must certainly consider the requirements for formal axiomatic systems, such as independence and completeness. The authors argue that the Constitution can be compared to axiomatic constructions in modern science in the sense that is given in the research on the logic and methodology of deductive sciences. This analogy is appropriate to the extent to which constitutional provisions are interpreted as the basic elements of the legal system, just as in the formal sciences axioms are regarded as basic principles that define the main features of the formal system. This means that the Constitution itself is seen as coherent, consistent discourse that contextually defines the meaning of the basic terms of the legal system.     

Voice as Materialistic Principle

In this reply, three core notions from Schürmann’s comment The materiality of the abstraction “voice” are picked out and discussed: the ethos, the so called trialogical self and vocality as principle. The notion of ethos is explored through the word’s history, coming to say that ethos develops in relation to a certain geographical place and is determined by the social practices of a historically situated community. Thus, the concept allows to see how current scientific activities are rooted in reality, taken in the socio-cultural sense. The “trialogical self” is discussed in its implications, leading to firmly retain “dialogical self” as sign of a movement leading through the other to self. Schürmann’s distinction of voice as phenomenon and vocality as principle is seen as fruitful supplement to own ideas, especially as it highlights the fact that it is the act of uttering in different modes which matters for a language notion based in addressivity.     

Tango and Enactivism: First Steps in Exploring the Dynamics and Experience of Interaction

Tango dancing is not just ethnographically interesting, but might actually provide a way to study interaction as such. An orientation to this improvisational dance as an embodied practice and experience is given. Enactivism is proposed as an adequate framework for further study. It is argued that approaching tango in terms of participatory sense-making, mutual incorporation and consensually coordinated action helps in clarifying its possible contributions to (cultural) psychology. Possible contributions such as facilitating the study of the dynamics of interaction, of intersubjectivity and of culture as joint activity.     

“Pure Joy”: Spinoza on Laughter and Cheerfulness

Laughter is a significant topic for Renaissance and seventeenth-century philosophers. Still, the latter rarely approved of laughter but endorsed it as useful mockery for theological or philosophical purposes. Benedict Spinoza’s view of laughter stands out as an exception to this attitude as well as to previous and later ones. Spinoza differentiates between mockery and laughter, denounces the former as evil, and characterizes the latter as “pure joy”: laughter is about oneself rather than another and originates in noticing something good, rather than base or ugly. In contrast to melancholy, cheerfulness is “always good” and is a precondition of our liberation as it furthers the use of reason. Not only is Spinoza’s view original, but it is an important source of the eighteenth-century notions of good-natured laughter and good humor through a more than probable influence on their proponent, the Earl of Shaftesbury. Whilst Spinoza’s view of cheerfulness is briefly addressed in recent studies, his view of laughter goes unnoticed in most commentaries and is misrepresented in humor studies. Contrary to what is assumed in the philosophy of laughter, I argue that the most important defense of laughter comes not from a British Enlightenment thinker, but from the Dutch Jewish seventeenth-century philosopher.     

Resisting Explanation

Although explanation is widely regarded as an important concept in the study of rational inquiry, it remains largely unexplored outside the philosophy of science. This, I believe, is not due to oversight as much as to institutional resistance. In analytic philosophy it is basic that epistemic rationality is a function of justification and that justification is a function of argument. Explanation, however, is not argument nor is belief justification its function. I argue here that the task of incorporating explanation into the theory of rational inquiry poses a serious challenge to our basic concept of epistemic rationality as well as the a priori method of inquiry that still lies at the heart of analytic philosophy. Specifically, it pushes us toward a much stronger form of naturalism than is generally thought necessary, one in which argument and explanation are recognized as distinct and equally fundamental cognitive processes whose dynamic relationship is one of the central issues in the theory of rationality.     

Of Means and Ends: Religion and the Search for Significance

This article attempts to depolarize the concepts of means and ends in the psychology of religion. It is argued that everyone uses his or her religion. However, religion can be used in constructive as well as destructive ways. The critical question is not whether religion is lived or used, as Allport suggested, but how religion is used and to what ends. Thinking about religion as means and ends rather than means or ends offers a framework for organizing the richly diverse forms and functions of religious life, spiritual as well as nonspiritual. It provides a way to conceptualize and study the widely used but poorly defined notion of religious orientation. It also offers a way to evaluate the efficacy of religion in living.