Reference to Self and Other in the Digital Public Sphere: The Case of Political Blogs

In this paper, we analyze how a political blog author (Spanish Alejo Vidal-Quadras) establishes the reference to self and other in his blog entries. We furthermore look into how the commentators to this blog react and establish reference to self and other in the digital public sphere. More concretely, we show that they not only take up the references established by the main blog author but also create new references. These allow, on the one hand, for profiling themselves as part of a group and, on the other hand, identifying their interlocutor among the variety of possible interlocutors in the digital public sphere. By addressing different interlocutors, the commentators turn the comments section into a dialogic space, a dimension that is lacking in the main blog entries. However, the fact that they almost invariably identify interlocutors other than Vidal-Quadras but address Vidal-Quadras without explicitly identifying him, shows that Vidal-Quadras remains the main ratified interlocutor in view of his ownership of the blog. This paper shows then how participants in the digital public sphere create a complex relationship of self and other reference in political blogs.     

Psychometric Properties of the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale of Hewitt in a Dutch-Speaking Sample: Associations With the Big Five Personality Traits

We administered the Dutch Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale of Hewitt and Flett (1991, 2004) in a large student sample (N = 959) and performed a confirmatory factor analysis to test the factorial structure proposed by the original authors. The existence of a method factor referring to the negatively keyed items in the questionnaire was investigated by including it in the tested models. Next, we investigated how the 3 perfectionism dimensions are associated with the Five-factor model (FFM) of personality. The 3-factor structure originally observed by the authors was confirmed, at least when a method factor that refers to the negatively keyed items was included in the model. Self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism were both distinguished by low extraversion and low emotional stability. Self-oriented perfectionism's positive relationship with both conscientiousness and openness to experience differentiated the 2 perfectionism dimensions from each other. Other-oriented perfectionism was not well-characterized by the Big Five personality traits.     

The Facts and Practices of Moral Responsibility

Strawsonians about moral responsibility often claim that our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, rather than the other way round. Many have argued that such ‘reversal’ claims have an unwelcome consequence: If our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, does this not imply, absurdly, that if we held severely mentally ill people responsible, they would be responsible? We provide a new Strawsonian answer to this question, and we explore the relation between reversal claims and (in)compatibilism.