Supervenience and explanation

This paper explores the explanatory adequacy of lower-level theories when their higher-level counterparts are irreducible. If some state or entity described by a high-level theory supervenes upon and is realized in events, entities, etc. described by the relevant lower-level theory, does the latter fully explain the higher-level event even if the higher-level theory is irreducible? While the autonomy of the special sciences and the success of various eliminativist programs depends in large part on how we answer this question, neither the affirmative or negative answer has been defended in detail. I argue, contra Putnam and others, that certain facts about causation and explanation show that such lower-level theories do explain. I also argue, however, that there may be important questions about counterfactuals and laws that such explanations cannot answer, thereby showing their partial inadequacy. I defend the latter claim against criticisms based on eliminativism about higher-level explanations and sketch a number of empirical conditions that lower-level explanations would have to meet to fully explain higher-level events.     

An attributional analysis of excuse giving: studies of a naive theory of emotion

We conducted four studies that pertained to excuses given for a broken social contract. In an initial field investigation, participants recalled occasions in which they had given true and false reasons for not fulfilling a social obligation. Communicated reasons tended to be external to the person, uncontrollable, and unintentional (e.g., "My car broke down"), whereas withheld reasons tended to be internal, controllable, and either intentional (e.g., "I did not want to go") or unintentional (e.g., "I forgot"). The external uncontrollable excuses were anticipated to lessen the anger of the wronged party. In a subsequent simulation study, excuses based on the categories detected in Experiment 1 were manipulated and related to anger ratings. The same pattern of results was displayed, with intent and negligence provoking the highest anger ratings. The final two studies involved laboratory manipulation of a communicated reason for coming late to an experiment. In Experiment 3, a confederate conveyed either an internal controllable, an external uncontrollable, or no reason for making a subject wait, whereas in Experiment 4, subjects were detained and created their own good, bad, any, or no excuse for being tardy, which was communicated to a second, waiting subject. A consistent pattern of good excuse/external uncontrollable reason and bad excuse/internal controllable reason was displayed; offering no excuse resulted in the same judgments as giving a poor excuse. Relative to the external uncontrollable reasons, internal controllable excuses for being late augmented aversive emotional reactions, increased negative personality ratings, and resulted in a desire for no further social contact.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Separation and loss in psychoanalytic therapy with borderline patients: Further remarks

This paper is a continuation of an earlier one concerning borderline patients, and I can recapitulate only a few of the many areas touched upon here. The borderline individual is faced continually with the threat of loss, either of his tenuously established individual identity, through fusion with the other person, or of his fragile interpersonal relatedness, through uncontrollable flight into autism of psychotic degree. A basic theme in one's work with these persons is that of unconscious, fantasied omnipotence, variously an aspect of the patient's unconscious self-image or projected into the therapist. The acting-out which the patient does consists in his inflicting loss, deprivation, and other forms of injury upon his introjects of part-aspects of the therapist. The grief involved in the relinquishment of so-called bad introjects is discussed. The patient early in therapy is aware of his inability to grieve, and endeavors to conceal this deficiency by spurious emotionality. I give examples of patients' manifesting regressive dedifferentiation to fusion with elements of the nonhuman environment, as an unconscious defense against feelings of separation and loss. Effective therapy with these patients involves the therapist's deeper working through of his own losses. The significant losses occurred so early in these patients' lives that the therapeutic exploration of these areas may enable the therapist to gain access to comparably early losses on his own part, losses from a developmental era which many a training analysis may not have explored at all adequately.