The Meontic and the Militant: On Merleau-Ponty’s Relation to Fink∗

Abstract

This paper clarifies the relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation with regard to ‘the idea of a transcendental theory of method’. Although Fink’s text played a singularly important role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, contrary to recent claims made by Ronald Bruzina this influence was not positive. Reconstructing the basic methodological claims of each text, in particular with regard to the being of the phenomenologist, the nature of the productivity that makes phenomenology possible, and the problem of methodological self-reference, I show that Phenomenology of Perception is premised on a decisive rejection of the main theses affirmed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. In contrast to Fink’s speculative reinterpretation of phenomenology as an absolute science, Merleau-Ponty viewed it as participating in the historical realization of the world, and hence as ultimately based on a practical faith. Albeit with a Marxian inflection, Merleau-Ponty thus related phenomenology much more closely to Kant. This may not be a better philosophical position, but circa 1945 it was Merleau-Ponty’s, whose work must be approached accordingly.     

Hierarchical models for relational event sequences

Interaction within small groups can often be represented as a sequence of events, each event involving a sender and a recipient. Recent methods for modeling network data in continuous time model the rate at which individuals interact conditioned on the previous history of events as well as actor covariates. We present a hierarchical extension for modeling multiple such sequences, facilitating inferences about event-level dynamics and their variation across sequences. The hierarchical approach allows one to share information across sequences in a principled manner—we illustrate the efficacy of such sharing through a set of prediction experiments. After discussing methods for adequacy checking and model selection for this class of models, the method is illustrated with an analysis of high school classroom dynamics from 297 sessions.     

Examining the effects of perceived social support on momentary mood and symptom reports in asthma and arthritis patients

Objective: Social support has been linked to beneficial effects on health directly (main effect) and as a buffer to stress. Most research, however, has examined these relationships using global and retrospective assessments of health and stress, which may be subject to recall biases. This study used ambulatory ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods to test the main and stress-buffering effects of social support on the daily health and well-being of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients.

Design: Community volunteers with asthma (n?=?97) or RA (n?=?31) responded to EMA prompts five times daily for one week.

Main outcomes: Baseline perceived social support was obtained, and then, participants reported mood, stress and symptoms using EMA. Multilevel mixed-modelling examined whether social support predicted mood and symptoms directly or via stress-reducing effects.

Results: Supporting a main effect, more perceived social support predicted decreased negative mood and stress severity. Supporting a stress-buffering effect, more perceived social support resulted in fewer reported symptoms when stress was present.

Conclusion: Results suggest perceived social support directly relates to better ambulatory status and dynamically buffers individuals against the negative effects of stressors, and highlight the importance of studying social support across different temporal and contextual levels.     

Development of decisional balance and self-efficacy measures for adolescent sedentary behaviors

Writing about traumatic events can produce health benefits, yet emotionally non-expressive or cognitively avoidant individuals may be unwilling or unable to express their emotions. This study examined non-expression, cognitive avoidance, response to writing, and subsequent health. As part of a larger study, participants ( N = 71) with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis (RA) wrote about traumatic experiences for 20 min on three consecutive days. Alexithymia, denial, behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement, focus on/venting of emotions, avoidant thoughts, and health status were assessed at baseline, health status again 4 months after writing. Essays were coded for how personal and how emotional they were, and for narrative structure. Non-expression and cognitive avoidance were neither related to how personal or emotional essays were, nor to affective response to writing. High levels of denial or avoidant thoughts predicted less narrative structure. Avoidant thinking marginally predicted health improvements in RA patients. Results suggest that non-expression and cognitive avoidance do not interfere with writing in terms of emotional engagement, but may influence narrative use.     

Sport and Thought. Football as therapy: A year in the life of an inner city project

‘Sport and Thought. Football as therapy, A year in the life of an inner city project’ is a paper based on a way of working that fuses football and psychodynamic thinking. The project was set up at inner city all-boys secondary school in London and was created in response to the growing need for a therapeutic intervention which was accessible to adolescent boys who would not engage via more traditional therapeutic routes. The project works with adolescents experiencing behavioural and emotional difficulties. Sport and Thought is a way of working with adolescents that fuses the sport of football, psychodynamic thinking and theory to create a space to encourage thought and act as a catalyst to promote emotional and behavioural change. Sport and Thought believes an individual’s reactions within a sporting context are no different to a societal one, and thus the sport of football can be used to enable participants to consider their own emotional and behavioural traits, and the underlying reasoning behind them.     

Movement and working memory: Patterns and positions in space

Five experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to remember short, visually presented sequences of whole body movement patterns, words, and spatial positions. The items were recalled in order in a memory span paradigm. During presentation of the items to be remembered subjects simply watched, or they carried out a concurrent activity involving articulatory suppression, movement to external spatial targets, or body-related movement. When the movement patterns to be remembered were familiar to subjects, movement span was not disrupted by articulatory suppression or movement to spatial targets but was disrupted by body-related movement. This movement suppression task, however, did not interfere with performance on a spatial span task or on verbal span. It is concluded that the memory for patterns of limb movement differs from memory for movement to spatial targets and that accounts of visuo-spatial processes in working memory involve the latter type of movement.     

Unraveling the race paradox of achievement and self-views

Considerable evidence indicates that African American students achieve less academically than European American students. Yet, African American students hold more positive self-views than their European American counterparts. Previous studies that address these seemingly paradoxical findings focus on students in a relatively narrow age range and/or convenience samples. Therefore, the current study examines two common explanations for these seemingly paradoxical findings, among a large and diverse sample of African American and European American students (N = 1, 493) from elementary to post-secondary school and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Results indicate that among a diverse group of students and conceptualized in two different ways, African American students do not devalue academics. However, African American students are more likely than European American students to discount academic feedback.     

Subjective Well-Being of China’s Off-Farm Migrants

Existing research applying the personal wellbeing index (PWI) in China is restricted to urban and rural samples. There are no studies for Chinese off-farm migrants. The specific aims of this study are: (a) ascertain whether Chinese off-farm are satisfied with their lives; (b) investigate the equivalence of the PWI in terms of its psychometric properties; and (c) examine whether the responses to the PWI from participants falls within the normative range predicted by the Theory of Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis. The PWI demonstrated good psychometric performance in terms of its reliability and validity and was consistent with previous studies for Western and non-Western samples. The data revealed a moderate level of subjective well-being (PWI score = 62.6). While Chinese off-farm migrants lead hard lives, the PWI was within the normative range predicted for Chinese societies by the Theory of Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis. A likely explanation for this finding rests with the circular nature of migration in China. When China’s off-farm migrants find it too difficult to cope in the cities, most have the fallback position that they can return to their homes in the countryside. This option provides an external buffer to minimize the inherent challenges of life which would otherwise impinge on the life satisfaction of China’s off-farm migrants.     

Awareness in contextual cuing with extended and concurrent explicit tests

The term contextual cuing refers to improved visual search performance with repeated exposure to a configuration of objects. Participants use predictive cues-derived from learned associations between target locations and the spatial arrangement of the surrounding distractors in a configuration--to efficiently guide search behavior. Researchers have claimed that contextual cuing can occur implicitly. The present experiments examined two explicit measures--generation and recognition. In Experiment 1, we found that contextual cuing information was consciously retrievable when the number of trials used in a generation test was increased, and the results also suggested that the shorter tests that were used previously were not statistically powerful enough to detect a true awareness effect. In Experiment 2, concurrent implicit and explicit (generation and recognition) tests were employed. At a group level, learning did not precede awareness. Although contextual cuing was evident in participants who were selected post hoc as having no explicit awareness, and for specific configurations that did not support awareness, we argue that awareness may nevertheless be a necessary concomitant of contextual cuing. These results demonstrate that contextual cuing knowledge is accessible to awareness.