The Organization of Justificatory Discourse in Interaction: A Comparison Within and Across Cultures

Previous scholarship has focused on inductive and deductive patterns as the two predominant modes of reasoning. In this paper, we argue that there are many ways that people from diverse cultures organize their justificatory reasoning in conversation with others and that these patterns are connected, in part, to cultural beliefs and values. We report on a study of people who identify themselves as being in one of four cultural groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Asians, and European Americans. The types of organization they used in their conversations included deductive, inductive, abductive, and narrative patterns. Abduction occurred as often as induction and deduction across groups. Narratives were used equally by all of the groups, but they occurred less frequently than the other types. Asian Americans used inductive patterns more than other types, and Asians were most likely to reason deductively. These choices did not appear to have an effect on partners' judgments, although Asians received the lowest appropriateness ratings, and both Asians and Asian Americans were given the lowest effectiveness ratings.     

Anglo-American Postmodernity: A Response to Clayton and Robbins

In Anglo-American Postmodernity I call attention to recent intellectual shifts in epistemology (from foundationalism to holism), philosophy of language (from reference to use), and metaphysics (from reductionism to nonreductionism), and pursue the consequences of these changes for science, theology, and ethics. Wesley Robbins criticizes the book for making overly optimistic claims for the intellectual status of theology; Philip Clayton criticizes it for giving up the quest for general standards of rational progress. Both criticisms miss the mark in not taking on the account of rationality that I have developed from resources in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre.     

Unpacking Intuition: A Conjecture

ABSTRACT— Can intuition be taught? The way in which faces are recognized, the structure of natural classes, and the architecture of intuition may all be instances of the same process. The conjecture that intuition is a species of recognition memory implies that human intuitive decision making can be enormously enhanced by virtual simulation.     

Reasonable Partiality in Professional Ethics: The Moral Division of Labour

Attention is given to a background idea that is often invoked in discussions about reasonable partiality: the idea of a moral division of labour. It is not only a right, but also a duty for professionals to attend (almost) exclusively to the interests of their own clients, because their partial activities are part of an impartial scheme providing for an allocation of professional help to all clients. To clarify that idea, a difference is made between two kinds of division of labour, a technical one and a social one. In order to assess the applicability of the idea of a moral division of labour to professional ethics, journalism is contrasted with other professions.     

Cooperative Division of Cognitive Labour: The Social Epistemology of Photosynthesis Research

Journal for General Philosophy of Science - How do scientists generate knowledge in groups, and how have they done so in the past? How do epistemically motivated social interactions influence or...     

社会分工与道德普世

现代性是一种复杂的后传统秩序。与传统周而复始、简明稳定的等差结构相比,现代性展现出一种往而不复、复调流动的不确定特征。这一特征是如何造成的?在表面看来,最为明显的特征莫过于在宗教、道德和政治权威代表的传统价值趋向外,经济一脉异军突起,成为瞩目中心,并且侵向各个领域;而在传统文化中,经济理论和实践向来被置于知识和社会文化的边缘。这一经济变调是如何实现的?更为重要的是,既然现代性并非出自真空,而是从传统中生长出来,它就必然影响并受到道德的评判;从另一角度说,经济全球化过程中现代性也必然遭到地方性道德的支持和抵触。那么,现代化经济最终取得了何种程度的道德合理性?现代化经济在现代化的道德体系中扮演什么角色？     

Seasoned Reflections: A Dialogue With Clayton A. Morgan

This article is an interview with Clayton A. Morgan, a distinguished rehabilitation counselor educator. The interview focuses on Dr. Morgan's experience and insight in areas such as the helping relationship, noncounseling variables in counseling, creative thinking and applied imagination, selection of graduate students, and communication.     

Stevens vs Fechner: A plea for dismissal of the case

Fechner's Law is based on the assumption that jnd's can be concatenated in order to get a measure of sensation. Stevens contended this assumption; he argued that measurement of sensation by measuring jnd's is ‘indirect’. His ‘direct’ methods, however, appear to be much less direct than originally assumed. Especially Stevens' (implicit) assumption that subjects use numbers on an absolute scale appears to be unwarranted. Ratio scaling is therefore nothing more than cross-modality matching between the number scale and another modality. This view has two consequences. Firstly, it is quite natural to find power functions by cross-modality matching, even when Fechner's Law holds for both modalities. Secondly, if Stevens' power law is true, there will be an overestimation of all exponents by a factor 2.5. All typical power functions will be concave downward after correction for this effect. The discussion boils down to a discrimination between two quite similar curve families: log functions and power functions with an exponent below 0.6. The practical significance of this discussion is doubted.     

Hanly on Coase: A Comment

ABSTRACT Ken Hanly's recent article in this Journal (Vol. 9, No. 1, 1992) takes issue with Ronald Coase's approach to resolving problems of externalities, as set forth in his classic paper 'The Problem of Social Cost'. I argue that Hanly's discussion of Coase misinterprets or inappropriately rejects certain aspects of Coase's analysis, specifically, with regard to the reciprocal nature of externalities and the economic role of government. The resolution of externality problems is presented as an issue of selective normative choice as to whose interests are to count; neither efficiency nor morality claims are uniquely dispositive of the issue.     

A behavioristic analysis of Stevens magnitude estimation method

A procedure independently proposed by Oyama and Lewis for treating the data of magnitude estimation is discussed in relation to the Graham-Stevens controversy on the psychophysical methods. In this procedure, the critical value of the stimulus needed to make the subject report numbers equal to or greater than each integral number is sought, instead of the median or geometrical mean of numbers reported for each level of stimulus intensity. Stevens’ magnitude estimation method has no special advantage over the other cross-modality matching methods, and the subjective magnitude of number should be estimated if one wants to know real relations between stimulus intensities and sensory magnitudes in various modalities.     

Contextual Effects on the Gendered Division of Housework: A Cross-Country and Cross-Time Analysis

Individuals who espouse an egalitarian gender ideology as well as economically independent women benefit from a more egalitarian division of housework. Although these two individual-level characteristics affect the gender division of housework, each suggests a different mechanism; the former is anchored within an economic logic and the latter within a cultural one. Using data of 25 countries from the 2002 and 2012 “Family and Changing Gender Roles” modules of the International Social Survey Program, we examine whether a country’s mean gender ideology and women’s labor force participation (WLFP) rate have a distinct contextual effect beyond these individual-level effects. We predict that the division of housework between married or cohabitating partners will be more egalitarian in countries with higher WLFP rates and in countries with more egalitarian attitudes, even after controlling for the two variables at the individual level. Given the cross-country convergence in WLFP, but not in gender ideology, we expect the effect of WLFP to decline over time and the effect of gender ideology to remain salient. Indeed, our multi-level analysis indicates that the net effect of WLFP, which was evident in 2002, had disappeared by 2012. By contrast, the net contextual effect of gender ideology, which was not significant in 2002, had become an important determinant of housework division by 2012. We conclude that further changes will depend on a country’s prevalent gender ideology because the equalizing effect of WLFP on the division of housework may have reached its limit.