Resource control and status as stimuli for arousing power motivation: An American-Chinese comparison

In this paper, we analyze power motivation from a cross-cultural perspective. Power motivation has been mainly studied within the Western culture. However, previous research suggests that some contours and nuances of power and power motivation may be culturally specific. In this article, we analyze cultural differences between American and Chinese students in how power motivation is aroused. Drawing from the cross-cultural literature, we propose that having decision-making control over resources increases levels of power motivation among Americans but not Chinese, whereas status-elevation increases power motivation among both Americans and Chinese. These hypotheses were tested experimentally with resource-control, status-elevation, and neutral conditions. The first hypothesis was fully supported, but the second one was only partially supported. Levels of power motivation in the neutral condition (i.e., dispositional power motives) were similar for American and Chinese participants, but power motivation arousal was greater for Americans than Chinese, in both power arousal conditions. These findings contribute to our understanding of the power motivation construct in a non-Western context.     

Doxastic Voluntarism and the Function of Epistemic Evaluations

Control of our own beliefs is allegedly required for the truth of epistemic evaluations, such as “S ought to believe that p”, or “S ought to suspend judgment (and so refrain from any belief) whether p”. However, we cannot usually believe or refrain from believing at will. I agree with a number of recent authors in thinking that this apparent conflict is to be resolved by distinguishing reasons for believing that give evidence that p from reasons that make it desirable to believe that p whether or not p is true. I argue however that there is a different problem, one that becomes clearer in light of this solution to the first problem. Someone’s approval of our beliefs is at least often a non-evidential reason to believe, and as such cannot change our beliefs. Ought judgments aim to change the world. But ‘ought to believe’ judgments can’t do that by changing the belief, if they don’t give evidence. So I argue that we should instead regard epistemic ought judgments as aimed mainly at influencing assertions that express the belief and other actions based on the belief, in accord with recent philosophical claims that we have epistemic norms for assertion and action.     

Subjects Without a World? An Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this paper, I analyze the harm of solitary confinement from a phenomenological perspective by drawing on Husserl’s account of the essential relation between consciousness, the experience of an alter ego and the sense of a real, Objective world. While Husserl’s prioritization of transcendental subjectivity over transcendental intersubjectivity underestimates the degree to which first-person consciousness is constitutively intertwined with the embodied consciousness of others, Husserl’s phenomenology nevertheless provides a fruitful starting-point for a philosophical engagement with the psychiatric research on solitary confinement.     

Crossing the Finite Provinces of Meaning. Experience and Metaphor

Schutz’s references to literature and arts in his theoretical works are manifold. But literature and theory are both a certain kind of a finite province of meaning, that means they are not easily accessible from the paramount reality of everyday life. Now there is another kind of referring to literature: metaphorizing it. Using it, as may be said with Lakoff and Johnson, to understand and to experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Literally metapherein means “to carry over”. Metaphorizing in this view is then a specific kind of border-crossing between different provinces of meaning. That poses two questions: 1. What means finiteness of those provinces of meaning, what kind of border crossings are possible? What is the ground for metaphorizing meaning? 2. Could this concept used for founding a theory of the constitution of the societal and of society, that overcomes the dichotomy of structure/agency? These questions will be answered with one example in view: Schutz’ report to Kaufmann of his first visit of Husserl describing his experience as feeling like Wilhelm Meister at the Society of the Tower. In a first step this metaphor is presented together with some crumbs of metaphor theory. In a second step these crumbs will be connected to Husserl’s concept of experience. After developing a short overview over Schutz’ “finite provinces of meaning,” the relation of experience, metaphors to the intersubjectivity of these provinces in their dependence from writing and printing is discussed.     

From Demonization of the Masses to Democratic Practice in the Work of Nietzsche,Heidegger, and Foucault

This paper argues that the dichotomy between individuals, as bearers of unique and freely chosen identities, and the masses, as the large numbers of others who are conforming and uncritical, should be understood as a constructed dichotomy. This dichotomy is both supported and dismantled in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Each of these thinkers reinforced the idea that there exist conforming and threatening masses from which individuals should separate themselves. And yet by theorizing the limitations and contextual nature of individual identity, they have also provided the foundations for revealing the dichotomy as illusory as well as problematic for reasoned thought and politics. The significance of this argument is that the fear of sameness and conformity within modern mass society creates a serious obstacle to broad based and democratic political engagement among people.     

On Latour’s Social Theory and Theory of Society,and His Contribution to Saving the World

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal.     

The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD)

The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around “problematizations” (Foucault).