Coping with intractable controversies: The case for problem structuring in policy design and analysis

Intractable controversies and other types of policy disagreements correspond to policy problems with a different structure. The more structured a problem is, the more consensus there is about which values and information are at stake in the process of problem solving. Policymakers like to treat problems in as structured a way as possible. Three policy strategies are described to move away from the unstructured to the more structured problem type. However, policymakers run the risk of oversimplifying an ill-structured problem, which means that elements of the problem situation relevant to other actors are overlooked or denied. Hence, policy controversies may become intractable. The remedy is a fourth strategy, characterised by problem structuring. This strategy requires political participation of actors with different views on the problem, and an argued political problem choice. His main research areas are problem structuring in public policy, knowledge use, environmental risk, technology and democracy. He is currently working on knowledge-based policy strategies for addressing the issue of climate change. His research interest is to develop and apply discursive and/or argumentative approaches to the policy process.     

„Ist eine Allgemeine Psychotherapie notwendig, sinnvoll und machbar”?

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

View dependence in scene recognition after active learning

Human spatial encoding of three-dimensional navigable space was studied, using a virtual environment simulation. This allowed subjects to become familiar with a realistic scene by making simulated rotational and translational movements during training. Subsequent tests determined whether subjects could generalize their recognition ability by identifying novel-perspective views and topographic floor plans of the scene. Results from picture recognition tests showed that familiar direction views were most easily recognized, although significant generalization to novel views was observed. Topographic floor plans were also easily identified. In further experiments, novel-view performance diminished when active training was replaced by passive viewing of static images of the scene. However, the ability to make self-initiated movements, as opposed to watching dynamic movie sequences, had no effect on performance. These results suggest that representation of navigable space is view dependent and highlight the importance of spatial-temporal continuity during learning.     

Introduction: Some Remarks on History,Philosophy, and Education

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Zur Psychotherapie der Depression

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Thoughts on the 7th world congress of the IPPNW (International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War) in Moscow

The authors discuss the international campaign of doctors in opposition to nuclear warfare, "the ultimate scourge of mankind", and give their impressions of the seventh international IPPNW congress held in Moscow from May 29 to June 1, 1987.     

Structure of the hypochondriacal and hysteroid personality

Hypochondriacal and hysteroid personalities are considered the extreme variants of defined emotional and motivational dimensions. The hysteroid personality is mainly characterized by a strong need for social attention and respect as well as by a lack of emotional genuiness. For the diagnosis of hypochondriacal and hysteroid personality tendencies, a Hypochondria-Hysteria Inventory was developed and employed in 13 different samples with a total of 1206 persons. The index scores of the individual degrees of hypochondriacal and hysteroid tendencies were demonstrated to be of sufficient reliability. There was no important relationship between the individual degrees of hypochondriacal and hysteroid tendencies. Hypochondriacal tendencies are significantly correlated with general anxiety, neuroticism, depression, inhibition and psychasthenia as well as with a general negative self-concept. There is only a weak and partial significant relationship to the degree of introversion. The intensity of hypochondriacal tendencies increases with age. Hysteroid personality tendencies are significantly associated with extraversion, a certain degree of aggressiveness as well as with unconcern and sociability. The intensity of hysteroid tendencies in older adults is lower than in adolescents and young adults.     

Freud, psychoanalysis and the psychosomatic problem

According to the author an unbroken hallucination of the pleasure principle is underlying the vision of mankind as in biotechnical medicine as well as in a concept of science that is reduced to technical progress. Psychosomatics is to overcome the false rationality of such thought.     

Processing empty categories: A parallel approach

In many current theories of human sentence processing, the mechanisms and principles proposed to account for data related to processing (1) long-distance dependencies and (2) structural ambiguities, such as garden-path sentences, are independent, despite the fact that deciding whether or not to posit a gap is just a special case of ambiguity resolution. In this paper we demonstrate how the parallel parsing theory proposed by Gibson (1991, in press)—which was developed to account for nongap ambiguity resolution data—also explains a number of gap-positing facts, without additional strategies. In particular, we show how this theory correctly explains filled-object-gap effects and the lack of filled-subject-gap effects in English, as well as certain gap-processing effects in Dutch.