Saying and Doing: Speech Actions,Speech Acts and Related Events

The question which this paper examines is that of the correct scope of the claim that extra‐linguistic factors (such as gender and social status) can block the proper workings of natural language. The claim that this is possible has been put forward under the apt label of silencing in the context of Austinian speech act theory. The ‘silencing’ label is apt insofar as when one's ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is ‘blocked’ by one's gender or social status then one might justly be said to be silenced. The notion that factors independent of any person's linguistic competence might block her ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is of considerable social as well as theoretical significance. I shall defend the claim that factors independent of a person's linguistic competence can indeed block her ability to do things with words but I will show that the cases that have been previously considered to be cases of illocutionary failure are instances of rhetic or locutionary act failure instead. I shall refine the silencing claim as previously advanced in the debate in at least one fundamental respect. I also show that considering the metaphysics of speech acts clarifies many of the issues previously appearing as thorny bones of contention between those who hold that the only notion of silencing that is coherent is that of physically preventing someone from speaking or writing and those who hold the opposite sort of claim sketched above.     

Doing Ontology and Doing Justice: What Feminist Philosophy Can Teach Us About Meta-Metaphysics

Abstract

Feminist philosophy has recently become recognised as a self-standing philosophical sub-discipline. Still, metaphysics has remained largely dismissive of feminist insights. Here I make the case for the value of feminist insights in metaphysics: taking them seriously makes a difference to our ontological theory choice and feminist philosophy can provide helpful methodological tools to regiment ontological theories. My examination goes as follows. Contemporary ontology is not done via conceptual analysis, but via quasi-scientific means. This takes different ontological positions to be competing hypotheses about reality’s fundamental structure that are then assessed with a loose battery of criteria for theory choice. Such criteria make up the constitutive values of ontology (e.g. providing a unified, coherent, non-circular, simple, parsimonious total theory). These values are distinguished from contextual values of a practice: the political and moral values embedded in the social context of inquiry. Although we may be frank about some meta-metaphysical value commitments, bringing in feminist contextual values is viewed as an unacceptable move when thinking about ontological theory choice. This paper then asks: is this move unacceptable? I think not and I aim to motivate this methodological insight here by examining recent work on grounding.     

Habitual Prospective Memory and Aging: Remembering Intentions and Forgetting Actions

Routine or habitual prospective memory tasks (e.g., taking medication) have the potential for creating confusions regarding whether or not an action has already been performed. We developed a laboratory paradigm for examining the kinds of processes thought to be operating in these kinds of tasks. Younger and older participants were asked to perform an action once and only once on each of 11 trials. The results showed that age and divided attention contributed to both omission and repetition errors. This new paradigm reveals memory failures in a habitual prospective memory task, and the results demonstrate that older adults are particularly susceptible to these memory problems.     

Given What I Know: Seeing the Past as a Portal to an Intentional Future

Dr. Terrence Roberts is our second guest for the Hearing Our Elders series. Dr. Roberts is one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American students to attend Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Interview segments are woven into the article, providing a historical and political context from which to understand the current national climate with regard to social justice and multicultural responsiveness. Dr. Roberts's interview revealed 6 critical themes: resilience, understanding context in the face of the status quo, reimagining language, choice as key to good mental health, use of the self as an intervention tool, and the importance of being historical in one's thinking. Intentionality is identified as a metatheme that asks the question of where one falls on the status quo versus change agent continuum. Dr. Terrence Roberts es nuestro segundo invitado en la serie Escuchar a Nuestros Mayores. El Dr. Roberts es uno de los Little Rock Nine, el primer grupo de estudiantes afroamericanos que estudiaron en la escuela Little Rock Central High School en 1957. Se insertan fragmentos de la entrevista en el artículo, lo que proporciona un contexto histórico y político desde el que se puede comprender el clima nacional actual respecto a la justicia social y la sensibilidad multicultural. La entrevista con el Dr. Roberts reveló 6 temas críticos: la resiliencia, comprender el contexto frente al status quo, reimaginar el lenguaje, la capacidad de elección como clave para una buena salud mental, el uso del autoconcepto como herramienta de intervención y la importancia de ser histórico en el pensamiento personal. La intencionalidad se identifica como un metatema que formula la pregunta de dónde se sitúa uno mismo a lo largo del continuo entre status quo y agente de cambio.     

Memory for Actions of an Event: Older and Younger Adults Compared

Previous studies have shown increased false memory effects in older compared to younger adults. To investigate this phenomenon in event memory, in the present study, the authors presented younger and older adults with a robbery. A distinction was made between verbal and visual actions of the event, and recognition and subjective experience of retrieval (remember/know/guess judgments) were analyzed. Although there were no differences in hits, older adults accepted more false information as true and, consequently, showed less accurate recognition than younger adults. Moreover, older adults were more likely than younger adults to accompany these errors with remember judgments. Young adults accepted fewer false verbal actions than visual ones and awarded fewer remember judgments to their false alarms for verbal than for visual actions. Older adults, however, did not show this effect of type of information. These results suggest that aging is a relevant factor in memory for real-life eyewitness situations.     

Ambivalent Versus Univalent Voters: Perceived Media Influences and Third-Person Perceptions

By differentiating “ambivalent” from “univalent” voters, this study argues that ambivalent voters need information to reach a decision, which implies they are more open to persuasion through media coverage than are univalent voters. In turn, they may infer that election coverage exerts a greater influence on them, resulting in smaller self–other perceptual discrepancies in terms of their coverage susceptibility. Conversely, univalent voters have made their voting choices early during the campaign; for them, only when the intended influence seems desirable does the perceived influence of campaign news on them increase, leading to a smaller self–other perceptual gap. In other words, ambivalent voters engage in motivated inferences to reduce their ambivalence-aroused discomfort, whereas univalent voters engage in motivated inferences to avoid dissonance. The results of a survey conducted during the official campaign for the 2012 Taiwanese presidential election support these predictions, demonstrating the utility of categorizing voters as ambivalent or univalent when examining the perceived effects of election campaign news.     

Why I did Not do What I Felt Like Doing When I Felt Hurt: An REBT-Based Investigation of Reasons Why Hurt-Based Action Tendencies are Not Acted On

In our previous study (Dryden and Hurton in J Ration Emot Cogn Behav Ther 29, 2013), we investigated the action tendencies that 100 people reported having, but did not act on in specific episodes where they felt hurt. In this study, we examine the reasons given by this same group of people for not so acting. Understanding the types of reasons why people do not act on their hurt-based action tendencies will first help REBT therapists to distinguish between constructive and unconstructive factors contained in these expressed reasons and thence to use this information to encourage their clients to act on their constructive tendencies and to discourage their clients from acting on their hurt feelings when it is unconstructive for them to do so.     

虚拟团队中交互记忆系统理论研究现状述评

交互记忆系统(Transactive Memory System,TMS),团队成员在交流的过程中形成的一种合作性分工系统,简单来说就是团队成员对于“谁知道什么”的一种共同认知.通过TMS,团队成员能够协调彼此的专长从而提高团队知识整合和共享水平.文章回顾了TMS和虚拟团队的相关概念,重点从虚拟团队中TMS的形成、效用以及虚拟性与TMS的关系三个角度对虚拟团队中TMS的相关研究进行了归纳,最后指出未来不仅需要深入研究团队输入、输出和调节因素的影响,还需考虑到不同的信息技术的影响以及研究方法和范围的完善.     

What I Felt Like Doing, but did Not Do When I Felt Hurt: An REBT-Based Investigation of Action Tendencies that are Not Acted On

In this questionnaire-based study, we investigated the action tendencies that 100 people reported having, but did not act on, in specific situations in which they felt hurt. An awareness of these types of unacted-on tendencies will help rational emotive behavior therapy therapists to be alert to the possible presence of hurt feelings and hurt-related motivational states that clients do not readily report experiencing in ABC analyses of hurt-related emotional episodes.     

What Psychologists Know and Believe about Memory: A Survey of Practitioners

We surveyed 858 licensed psychologists, members of the Norwegian Psychological Association, about their knowledge and beliefs about human memory. The results were compared to the results of parallel surveys of legal professionals and lay persons, and evaluated in the light of the results of current memory science. The results indicate that psychologists are not memory experts qua psychologists; as a group, psychologists do not score above the level of knowledge of lay persons or trial judges on issues of eyewitness memory, and a substantial minority of the sample of respondents harbours scientifically unproven ideas of memory. The implications of these findings for psychological practice, with special reference to the court room, are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sunk Cost Effects: The Influences of Instruction and Future Return Estimates

Normative principles imply that decision makers′ choices should be affected solely by the prospective future consequences of the options. Previous work, however, has demonstrated the occurrence of sunk cost effects, whereby decision makers are reluctant to abandon options in which they have made prior investments. The present research shows that, contrary to earlier findings, there exist conditions under which sunk cost effects are reduced significantly by instruction in pertinent economic principles. Additional findings indicate that sunk cost effects are mitigated by an important factor that is often present in real-world decision situations but omitted in most sunk cost research paradigms-explicit estimates of the future returns the given options might yield. Theoretical and practical implications are developed and discussed, including possibly common ambiguities about what normative sunk costs principles imply and how they should be applied.     

Doing What Comes Naturally: Recent Work on Thomas Aquinas and the New Natural Law Theory

John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, xxi+385 pp., $55.00 (hardback) ISBN 0 19 87808 42, $18.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 19 878085 0.

Robert P. George, In Defense of Natural Law. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, 343 pp., $65.00 (hardback) ISBN 0 19 82677 11, $19.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 19 92429 92     

Feeling Closer to the Future Self and Doing Better: Temporal Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Academic Performance

This research examined the function of future self‐continuity and its potential downstream consequences for academic performance through relations with other temporal psychological factors and self‐control. We also addressed the influence of cultural factors by testing whether these relations differed by college generation status. Undergraduate students enrolled at a large public university participated in two studies (Study 1: N = 119, M_age = 20.55, 56.4% women; Study 2: N = 403, M_age = 19.83, 58.3% women) in which they completed measures of temporal psychological factors and psychological resources. In Study 2, we also obtained academic records to link responses to academic performance. Future self‐continuity predicted subsequent academic performance and was related positively to future focus, negatively to present focus, and positively to self‐control. Additionally, the relation between future focus and self‐control was stronger for continuing‐generation college students than first‐generation college students. Future self‐continuity plays a pivotal role in academic contexts. Findings suggest that it may have positive downstream consequences on academic achievement by directing attention away from the present and toward the future, which promotes self‐control. Further, the strategy of focusing on the future may be effective in promoting self‐control only for certain cultural groups.     

Just Tell Us What Happened to You: Autobiographical Memory and Seeking Asylum

When someone flees their country and seeks the protection of another state, they usually have to describe what happened to make them afraid to return. This task requires many psychological processes, a key one being autobiographical memory. Memory for events of a specific time and place in one's personal past is the subject of a huge literature, much of it showing that recall is vulnerable to distortions and biases. We review selected areas of this literature, shedding light on some of the processes at work when someone seeks to be recognised as a refugee—in particular, the effects of emotion, including emotional disorder. We then turn to the differing types of memory styles seen in different cultures. Crucial to this area, we briefly examine the current literature on deception. Finally, we draw on the reviewed literature to present conclusions about the reliance on autobiographical memories in the asylum process. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.