IS MODAL FICTIONALISM ARTIFICIAL?

This article examines a popular complaint against the fictionalist account of possible objects bruited by Gideon Rosen. This is the complaint that modal fictionalism is, in some sense or other, hopelessly artificial. I shall separate two different strands to this worry and examine each in turn. As we shall see, neither strand to the objection is intractable.     

Reported Speech in Talking Race on Campus

In talking race, university students sometimes report the speech of others, or themselves, to recreate what happened during an incident. Reported speech is used within narratives to vividly convey what was said, purportedly through the actor's own words or as evidence to support general claims. The speaker is not merely reporting speech but also assessing the problematic character of the actions performed through others’words. Reported speech is relevantly tied to assessment. Assessment reveals the reporting speaker's positioning toward the reported speech. The reported speech used in talking race presents the other as ignorant, biased, racist, ridiculous, or honest. African Americans discursively portray Whites as unwilling to admit racism, as stereotyping, or as duplicitous in intergroup relations. Whites, on the other hand, frame African Americans as exaggerating racism or as overemphasizing their ethnicity. Representing others’actions through invoking their words is a way of criticizing, challenging, or resisting such troublesome racialized events.     

Spiritual Empowerment: A Metaphor for Counseling

The metaphor of counseling as spiritual empowerment is presented, followed by an explanation of spiritual empowerment as a metaphor and spiritual empowerment as a theoretical framework for counselors. In the use of this metaphor, counselors initiate a spiritual experience with clients, and clients often experience a spiritual awakening in which they discover or rediscover their own spiritual power. Five conclusions are identified.     

Exploring the Emotional Side of Job Search Behavior for Younger Workforce Entrants

Using a sample of 332 younger (ages 18–23) workforce entrants broken into subsamples, Study 1 found empirical support for 2 distinct types of job search behavior, detached and interactive. These 2 dimensions seemed to represent different levels of emotional involvement in the job search process. Significant correlates for each dimension of job search behavior were found. Using a separate sample of 117 working college students, Study 2 found that extroverted individuals favored interactive job search behaviors, whereas introverted individuals favored detached job search behaviors. The implications of these results are discussed and future areas of research are identified.