Two Philosophical Problems in the Study of Happiness

In this paper two philosophical issues are discussed that hold special interest for empirical researchers studying happiness. The first issue concerns the question of how the psychological notion(s) of happiness invoked in empirical research relates to those traditionally employed by philosophers. The second concerns the question of how we ought to conceive of happiness, understood as a purely psychological phenomenon. With respect to the first, I argue that 'happiness', as used in the philosophical literature, has three importantly different senses that are often confused. Empirical research on happiness concerns only one of these senses, and serious misunderstandings about the significance of empirical results can arise from such confusion. I then argue that the second question is indeed philosophical and that, in order to understand the nature of (what I call) psychological happiness, we need first to determine what a theory of happiness is supposed to do: what are our theoretical and practical interests in the notion of happiness? I sketch an example of how such an inquiry might proceed, and argue that this approach can shed more light on the nature and significance of happiness (and related mental states) than traditional philosophical methods.     

不规则几何图形识别的取样首视点研究

用实验方法对不规则几何图形的取样首视点进行研究。作业任务有认同与匹配二种,显示条件有良好与不良二种,显示方式有旋转与不旋转二种,绩效指标用反应时与错误指数二项。结果表明：首视点的分布是非均匀的,落在轮廓部位的概率最大,落在中央或某条特定边的概率极小。首视点分布的均匀度与作业难度有关,在作业难度较大的情况下,首视点分布趋于集中。多数情况下,首视点的置位对作业绩效的影响不大。     

社会交往情境中权力和反馈对情绪的影响

以往关于权力是否影响情绪的研究存在结果争议,这意味着可能存在其它因素的作用。本研究基于权力控制理论和社会距离理论,探究了社交情境中权力和反馈对情绪的影响。研究1采用经验取样法收集了140名被试五天内的1706段社交经历,研究2采用实验法考察了148名被试的社交经历。结果表明,权力和反馈对情绪存在交互影响:(1)当个体处于低权力情境时,反馈影响情绪,反馈越积极,情绪也越积极;(2)当个体获得积极反馈时,权力不影响情绪;当个体获得消极反馈时,权力影响情绪,权力越高,情绪相对更积极。本研究有助于厘清以往研究关于权力与情绪关系的争议。     

G.E.摩尔伦理学的方法论特征

G．E．摩尔作为现代西方元伦理学的开创,他在建构其理论体系时所运用的方法不是单一的。而是针对伦理学的不同问题交错运用了直觉方法、绝对孤立法、有机统一原理和分析方法。他的这些方法对于分析伦理学的发展起了很大的作用,但终因其致命缺陷而使该流派走向衰落。     

Prototypes of Faith: Findings with the Faith Q‐Sort

Defining religion and finding ways to assess it in individual lives has long challenged psychologists of religion. At first, open‐ended questionnaires were used, but with the advent of modern statistical methods, a succession of religiosity scales was developed. But these usually brief scales were typically based on the preconceptions of their authors, who were overwhelmingly Protestant Christian and often conservative, much as were those who completed them. To provide a more adequate way of assessing “faith,” a term here encompassing both religious and nonreligious attitudes, a new assessment device was developed that incorporates the singular advantages of Q methodology. The Faith Q‐Sort consists of 101 statements that respondents sort on a nine‐category continuum, indicating the degree to which each statement describes himself or herself. Factor analysis based on correlations of the sorts rather than individual items yielded, for the initial group of participants, three major prototypes and five minor ones, accounting for 67 percent of the variance. Of the 42 participants, 31 proved to be exemplars of one or another of the eight prototypes. Subsequent explorations illustrate the wealth of possibilities the FQS offers, both as a research instrument and a counseling tool.     

Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the “Endarkenment” (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Nonspecialists need to defer to such authorities, as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time.     

Philosophical Methodology and Conceptions of Evil Action

There is considerable philosophical dispute about what it takes for an action to be evil. The methodological assumption underlying this dispute is that there is a single, shared folk conception of evil action deployed amongst culturally similar people. Employing empirical research the authors undertook, this article suggests that this assumption is false. There exist, amongst the folk, numerous conceptions of evil action. Hence, the authors argue, philosophical research is most profitably spent in two endeavours. First, in determining which (if any) conception of evil action we have prudential or moral (or both) reason to deploy and, second, in determining whether we could feasibly come to adopt that conception as the single shared conception given our psychological make‐up and the content of the conceptions currently deployed.