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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Parental Division of Household Labour and Sibling Relationship Quality: Family Relationship Mediators

Research examining antecedents to sibling relationship quality have explored factors such as parenting and temperament (Brody, 1998); however, there has been no previous research on the topic of the current study. The present study used a cross‐informant approach to examine parent–child and marital relationships as potential mediators of links between parents' gendered attitudes and behaviours and sibling relationship quality. One hundred and twenty‐four families with older (M = 7.4 years) and younger (M = 5.2 years) siblings were assessed. Parents reported on division of household labour, gender‐role attitudes and marital satisfaction. Each child reported on sibling relationship quality and parental warmth and hostility. Results revealed a link between more egalitarian division of household labour and more positive sibling relationship quality. Furthermore, this association was not mediated by the marital nor parent–child relationship. We conclude that families with a more egalitarian division of household labour may model positive interactions for siblings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

The Asymmetry Objection Rides Again: On the Nature and Significance of Justificatory Disagreement

Political liberalism offers perhaps the most developed and dominant account of justice and legitimacy in the face of disagreement among citizens. A prominent objection states that the view arbitrarily treats differently disagreement about the good, such as on what makes for a good life, and disagreement about justice. In the presence of reasonable disagreement about the good, political liberals argue that the state must be neutral, but they do not suggest a similar response given reasonable disagreement about what justice requires. A leading political liberal, Jonathan Quong, has recently offered a rebuttal to this asymmetry objection. His reply rests on an innovative distinction between justificatory and foundational disagreement. Quong claims that disagreements about justice in a well ordered society are justificatory while disagreements about the good are foundational, and suggests that this fact blocks the asymmetry objection. We assess Quong's solution and argue that it fails to justify legitimate state action on matters of justice but not the good. We conclude that the asymmetry objection continues to undermine political liberalism.     

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.     

Knowledge and Justice: A Comment

ABSTRACT

Epistemic justice projects are now one of the most important sites of science studies scholarship and engagement. The papers in this collection make clear that we divorce science and technology from questions of power at our peril, if we are to understand what generates and remediates the inequalities that past and extant knowledge creation and distribution systems have wrought. Expertise and experts are the conceptual anchors for these articles, and they offer quite different perspectives on whether expertise and counter-expertise are the terrain on which epistemic justice struggles ought to be fought. Some challenge older conceptualizations of expertise as narrow and specific, providing new evidence and frameworks for treating epistemes that are heterogeneous and boundary-crossing as means to justice; others demonstrate that acting on concerns as purely technical matters can provide strategic advantages; and others make clear that formally trained experts are neither welcome nor visible in technopolitical justice struggles. Reflected in the innovative approaches that the papers take, a second major contribution of the collection is to show why inclusion is itself a just goal, and a means to uncovering stories of injustice, technical innovations, and visions of the future that can offer new pathways to justice. The collection inspires new directions in sts, including which stories, and by whom, matter and why, and how attention to innovation can be balanced with attention to the extant, and to history.