How Not to Criticise Scientism

This paper argues that the main global critiques of scientism lose their punch because they rely on an uncharitable definition of their target. It focuses on epistemological scientism and divides it into four categories in terms of how strong (science is the only source of knowledge) or weak (science is the best source of knowledge) and how narrow (only natural sciences) or broad (all sciences or at least not only the natural sciences) they are. Two central arguments against scientism, the (false) dilemma and self-referential incoherence, are analysed. Of the four types of epistemological scientism, three can deal with these counterarguments by utilizing two methodological principles: epistemic evaluability of reliability and epistemic opportunism. One hopes that these considerations will steer the discussion on scientism to more fruitful pastures in the future. For example, there are interesting methodological considerations concerning what evaluability or reliability and epistemic opportunism entail.     

Development and Validation of the Personal Values Dictionary: A Theory-Driven Tool for Investigating References to Basic Human Values in Text

Estimating psychological constructs from natural language has the potential to expand the reach and applicability of personality science. Research on the Big Five has produced methods to reliably assess personality traits from text, but the development of comparable tools for personal values is still in the early stages. Based on the Schwartz theory of basic human values, we developed a dictionary for the automatic assessment of references to personal values in text. To refine and validate the dictionary, we used Facebook updates, blog posts, essays, and book chapters authored by over 180 000 individuals. The results show high reliability for the dictionary and a pattern of correlations between the value types in line with the circumplex structure. We found small to moderate (r_s = .1–.4) but consistent correlations between dictionary scores and self-reported scores for 7 out of 10 values. Correlations between the dictionary scores and age, gender, and political orientation of the author and scores for other established dictionaries mostly followed theoretical predictions. The Personal Values Dictionary can be used to assess references to value orientations in textual data, such as tweets, blog posts, or status updates, and will stimulate further research in methods to assess human basic values from text.     

The Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity: Sustainability Science and Problem-Feeding

Traditionally, interdisciplinarity has been taken to require conceptual or theoretical integration. However, in the emerging field of sustainability science this kind of integration is often lacking. Indeed sometimes it is regarded as an obstacle to interdisciplinarity. Drawing on examples from sustainability science, we show that problem-feeding, i.e. the transfer of problems, is a common and fruitful-looking way of connecting disparate disciplines and establishing interdisciplinarity. We identify two species of problem-feeding: unilateral and bilateral. Which of these is at issue depends on whether solutions to the problem are fed back to the discipline in which the problem originated. We suggest that there is an interesting difference between the problem-feeding approach to interdisciplinarity and the traditional integrative perspective suggested by among others Erich Jantsch and his colleagues. The interdisciplinarity resulting from problem-feeding between researchers can be local and temporary and does not require collaboration between proximate disciplines. By contrast, to make good sense of traditional integrative interdisciplinarity we must arguably associate it with a longer-term, global form of close, interdisciplinary collaboration.     

Cur deus caro: Jesus and the Cosmos Story

Abstract

There seems to be a vast gulf between the grand-scale story of the world of creation, cosmic in scope and pitiless in its operations, and the small-scale story of Jesus as embodying divine empathy. The concept of deep incarnation offers a bridge by arguing that God's own Logos or Wisdom, when assuming the particular life story of Jesus, also conjoins the material conditions of God's world of creation at large (“all flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (“grass and lilies”), and experiences the pains of all sentient creatures (“sparrows and foxes”). Incarnation is thus the story of God's reach into the very tissue of material and biological existence. In the embodied Logos, the “flesh” of Jesus Christ is co-extensive with his divinity. Otherwise, the incarnation would be skin deep, confined to a historical figure of the past, or merely an external appendix to divine life.     

Hope and athlete burnout: Stress and affect as mediators

ObjectiveIn this study we examined the relationship between trait hope and burnout in elite junior soccer players and whether stress and positive and negative affect mediated this relationship.MethodsParticipants were 238 Swedish soccer players (166 males, 71 females; one did not indicate gender) aged 15–19 years who completed questionnaires measuring trait hope, perceived stress, positive and negative affect, and athlete burnout (i.e., emotional/physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and sport devaluation).ResultsBivariate correlations were consistent with hope theory contentions indicating significant negative relationships between hope and all three burnout dimensions. The relationship between hope and emotional/physical exhaustion was fully mediated by stress and positive affect. For sport devaluation and reduced sense of accomplishment, stress and positive affect partially mediated the relationship with hope. In contrast, negative affect did not mediate the relationship between hope and any of the burnout dimensions.ConclusionThe results support earlier findings that hope is negatively related to athlete burnout. Support was also found for the hypothesis that high hope individuals would experience less stress and therefore less burnout. Promoting hope may be relevant in reducing the likelihood of this detrimental syndrome.     

Word learning does not end at fast-mapping: evolution of verb meanings through reorganization of an entire semantic domain

This paper explores the process through which children sort out the relations among verbs belonging to the same semantic domain. Using a set of Chinese verbs denoting a range of action events that are labeled by carrying or holding in English as a test case, we looked at how Chinese-speaking 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds and adults apply 13 different verbs to a range of carrying/holding events. We asked how children learning Chinese originally divide and label the semantic space in this domain, how they discover the boundaries between different words, and how the meanings of verbs in the domain as a whole evolve toward the representations of adults. We also addressed the question of what factors make verb meaning acquisition easy or hard. Results showed that the pattern of children’s verb use is largely different from that of adults and that it takes a long time for children to be able to use all verbs in this domain in the way adults do. We also found that children start to use broad-covering and frequent verbs the earliest, but use of these verbs tends to converge on adult use more slowly because children could not use these verbs as adults did until they had identified boundaries between these verbs and other near-synonyms with more specific meanings. This research highlights the importance of systematic investigation of words that belong to the same domain as a whole, examining how word meanings in a domain develop as parts of a connected system, instead of examining each word on its own: learning the meaning of a verb invites restructuring of the meanings of related, neighboring verbs.     

Does life satisfaction change with age? A comparison of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Sweden

In this study, the relationship between age and life satisfaction was examined over a period of 27 years (1982-2009) in four countries—Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Sweden—using nationally representative samples of adults between the ages of 15 and 100 from the European Value Survey, the World Values Survey, and the European Social Survey (total N = 39,420). Unlike in Finland and Sweden, the relationship between age and subjective well-being in Estonia and Latvia was best described as curvilinear, with younger and older people having higher levels of life satisfaction. The observed age differences in life satisfaction in Estonia and Latvia, however, seem to be due to an interaction of cohort and period differences.     

Does retrieval strategy disruption cause general and specific collaborative inhibition?

The purpose of the experiment on collaborative memory was to investigate if the collaborative inhibition is due to collaborating pair's disruption of each others' retrieval strategies (the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis, RSD). The participants' (N = 36) task was to recall a list of 60 words individually and collaboratively. Retrieval strategies were manipulated by presenting word lists organised either by categories or by country of origin and adoption of retrieval strategies were examined by the adjusted ratio of clustering score. Half of the dyads received word lists organised by the same strategy and half of the dyads received word lists organised by different strategies. The results revealed a main effect of collaboration, i.e., collaborative recalled items were significantly fewer than the sum of the non-redundant individually recalled items. Both conditions (same strategies vs different strategies) suffered to the same extent from collaboration, which did not support the RSD hypothesis. However, focusing on words recalled individually but not collaboratively, dyads with different strategies, as predicted by the RSD, forgot more items during collaboration than did dyads with the same strategy. Additional results suggest that collaborative forgetting is mainly manifested by forgetting of non-overlapping items (as measured by individual recalls).