The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not events

It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not actions. It argues that Collingwood’s defence of the methodological autonomy of history vis-à-vis natural science is not based on a commitment to human exceptionalism, i.e. the exclusion of human beings and their doings from the rest of nature, but on the view that explanations which appeal to norms are different in kind from explanations which appeal to empirical regularities. Given the close relationship between the method and the subject matter of a form of inquiry, actions elude any attempt to explain them through the scientific method because the application of this method entails that what is thus explained is not an action but an event.     

The Challenges of the Schooling from Cultural Psychology of Education

Education is in the core of societal change in all its different forms—from kindergartens to vocational schools and lifelong learning. Education—understood as goal-oriented personal movement—re-structures personal lives both inside school and outside the school. This special issue stems from the Cultural Psychology of Education (Marsico Culture & Psychology, 21(4), 445–454, 2015a, b, Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 40(4), 754–781, 2017)—a new approach to the field of education that examines how educational experience is culturally organized. This special issue is focused on the work of schooling as a crucial scientific arena to investigate. It is the follow up of an international workshop host by the Centre for Cultural Psychology (at Aalborg University, Demark) that was very thought provoking and from where several outcomes came out. Some of them are the papers here presented that tried to illuminate the different dimensions of the educational context in the East and West society with specific attention to the Chinese and Scandinavian educational practices. The dialogue between Chinese, European and North American scholars offered a complex view of the current educational challenges in the age of globalization. In this paper I try to focus on some of the most debated and challenging aspects in educational psychology worldwide: diversity, values and practical usability of psychology at school. I re-read these “hot topics” with the help of the themes developed by the authors of this special issue and in light of Cultural Psychology of Education. Then, I conclude by proposing a new agenda for the education of the future.     

Straight to heaven: Rectitude as spatial representation of morality

Abundant literature in cognitive sciences has shown that morality is grounded in bodily experience. Four studies tested the perceptual association between the spatial dimension of straightness and the abstract concept of morality. Study 1 (n = 61) employed an IAT and revealed an association between straight figures and moral related words. Study 2 (n = 83) employed a similar paradigm and further revealed that the effect we found in Study 1 cannot be attributable to the general association between straight figures and positivity. Study 3 (n = 64) revealed that participants showed a stronger preference for straight figures after recalling moral (vs. immoral) deeds. Study 4 (n = 183) showed the specific role of morality, in this sense, as recalling sociable (vs. unsociable) deeds had no significant influence on figure preferences. A small‐scale meta‐analysis confirmed the robustness of our findings. Results are discussed in light of the embodiment theory.     

Women's communication in Mexican organizations

This study attempts to derive a communication profile of women in Mexican organizations of the private sector. The questions that guided the study were the following: (1) Do women perceive their communication behaviors as similar to or different from those of men at their same organizational level? (2) If women do perceive differences, what is their nature? (3) Do perceived similarities to and differences from men vary by organizational level? Forty-five women in 14 Mexican organizations were intensively interviewed in the winter of 1980. The interviews were distributed equally at three organizational levels—secretarial, middle management, and upper management. It was found that women respondents perceive themselves to differ from men on 18 of 40 verbal and nonverbal communication variables. The average woman in this study perceived that verbally she is more courteous, cheerful, assertive, careful, likely to talk with males, self-confident, and directive than men, and that she expresses less agreement than men. Nonverbally, the average woman was found to look more at the eyes, smile more, give more attention to dress, be more punctual and flexible than men, and to be less rigid in posutre, touch less, invite co-workers to her home less, and take less work home. Organizational level differences were also found. The results are discussed in the light of the theoretical paradigms presented in the study.     

The Ontological Backlash: Why did Mainstream Analytic Philosophy Lose Interest in the Philosophy of History?

This paper seeks to explain why mainstream analytic philosophy lost interest in the philosophy of history. It suggests that the reasons why the philosophy of history no longer commands the attention of mainstream analytical philosophy may be explained by the success of an ontological backlash against the linguistic turn and a view of philosophy as a form of conceptual analysis. In brief I argue that in the 1950s and 1960s the philosophy of history attracted the interest of mainstream analytical philosophers because the defence of the autonomy of historical explanation championed by the likes of Collingwood, Dray, Melden, Winch, Von Wright and others was in tune with the predominant conception of philosophy as a conceptual enterprise concerned primarily with clarifying different explanatory practices. As this conception of philosophy as an essentially conceptual enterprise became recessive, the purely methodological non-reductivism advocated by defenders of the autonomy of history was accused of ontological escapism and the discussion concerning the autonomy of psychological explanations became the province of the philosophy of mind and action.     

The categorization effect in hedonic contrast: Experts differ from novices

Test stimuli are rated as less “good” when they follow very good context stimuli than when they are presented alone. This diminution in rating is called hedonic contrast. Contrast is attenuated if the context and the test stimuli are perceived as being in different categories. Because experts use as their basic-level categories what are the subordinate levels for novices, they will categorize when novices do not. Therefore, in the following studies, both experts and novices showed hedonic contrast when attractive context orchids preceded more neutral test orchids. However, only the novices showed hedonic contrast when attractive context irises preceded the test orchids. Novices viewed the irises and the orchids as “flowers” and therefore members of the same category, resulting in contrast. Experts, however, viewed the irises and the orchids as being in different categories; therefore, hedonic contrast did not occur.     

Clinical Utility of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) in the Spanish Transsexual and Nontranssexual Population

The aim of the study is to evaluate the usefulness of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974), an overall measurement of the cultural construct of masculinity and femininity, in the psychological assessment of Spanish transsexuals. Seventy male-to-female transsexuals (MF), 51 female-to-male transsexuals (FM), 77 control men, and 79 control women completed the Spanish version of the BSRI. Statistically significant differences between groups were only found on the femininity scale, on which MF transsexuals and control women scored significantly higher than FM transsexuals and control men. The results indicate that (a) only the femininity scale of the BSRI appears to be useful today for evaluating differences in the sex-role identification in Spanish controls and transsexuals; and (b) MF and FM transsexuals score as a function of their gender identity instead of their anatomical sex on the BSRI femininity scale.