Infant observation: A range of questions and challenges for contemporary psychoanalysis1

The author attempts to integrate several perspectives within the field of infant observation that reflect the analyst's personal experience as a clinician, as a professor at the analytic institute and as a researcher in the field of psychoanalysis. Can infant observation contribute to analytic technique, theory and training? If so, what would be the nature of such contribution? To answer these questions, the author reviews the literature on infant observation from Freud to the present, highlighting Latin American contributions to this subject. She makes reference to the role of technological innovations, which have allowed videotaping, repeated observations, temporal segmentation and computerized programs, thus giving rise to microanalytic research. This discussion prompts the question about the contributions made by systematic research to clinical practice. To tackle this question, the author presents both a clinical vignette taken from her personal experience, and the current debate on this subject as it appears in the work of Daniel Stern and André Green. Finally, she presents some conclusions that are part of an ongoing debate in the psychoanalytic field.     

Second-order conditioning during a compound extinction treatment

Two conditioned taste aversion experiments with rats were conducted to establish if a target taste that had received a prior pairing with illness could be subject to second-order conditioning during extinction treatment in compound with a flavor that also received prior conditioning. In these experiments, the occurrence of second-order conditioning was indicated by protection from extinction of the aversion elicited by the target taste. This possibility, although intuitive, deserves attention because current associative models [e.g., Rescorla, R. A., & Wagner, A. R. (1972). A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black & W. F. Prokasy (Eds.), Classical conditioning II: Current research and theory (pp. 64-99). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.] predict exactly the opposite outcome, namely, that compound extinction of two CSs should result in enhanced extinction.     

Why there are no good arguments for any interesting version of determinism

This paper considers the empirical evidence that we currently have for various kinds of determinism that might be relevant to the thesis that human beings possess libertarian free will. Libertarianism requires a very strong version of indeterminism, so it can be refuted not just by universal determinism, but by some much weaker theses as well. However, it is argued that at present, we have no good reason to believe even these weak deterministic views and, hence, no good reason—at least from this quarter—to doubt that we are libertarian free. In particular, the paper responds to various arguments for neural and psychological determinism, arguments based on the work of people like Honderich, Tegmark, Libet, Velmans, Wegner, and Festinger.     

《管子》与汉初法制重构

《管予》渊源于齐文化,法制思想以礼、法并重为特色,齐用之而为东方大国;秦用商、韩之法迅速强大并统一六国,但秦法严苛激进,任法而废礼,致秦二世而亡。汉承秦之弊,在历史与现实中寻求适合自己发展的道路,于偶然,也是必然中选择了礼法并重的《管子》法制思想作为治国方略,史称黄老政治,使国家逐步实现了稳定与繁荣,并开创了二千多年的秦汉制度。     

Children's perception and understanding of (dis)similarities among dynamic bodily/facial expressions of happiness, pleasure, anger, and irritation

The current study examined the abilities of children (6 and 8 years of age) and adults to freely categorize and label dynamic bodily/facial expressions designed to portray happiness, pleasure, anger, irritation, and neutrality and controlled for their level of valence, arousal, intensity, and authenticity. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses showed that children (n = 52) and adults (n = 33) structured expressions in systematic and broadly similar ways. Between 6 and 8 years of age, there was a quantitative, but not a qualitative, improvement in labeling. When exposed to rich and dynamic emotional cues, children as young as 6 years can successfully perceive differences between close expressions (e.g., happiness, pleasure), and can categorize them with clear boundaries between them, with the exception of irritation, which had fuzzier borders. Children’s classifications were not reliant on lexical semantic abilities and were consistent with a model of emotion categories based on their degree of valence and arousal.     

Representationalism,Symmetrical Supervenience and Identity

According to some representationalists (M. Tye, Ten problems of consciousness, MIT Press, Massachusetts, USA, 1995; W.G. Lycan, Consciousness and experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1996; F. Dretske, Naturalising the mind, MIT Press, Massachusetts, USA 1995), qualia are identical to external environmental states or features. When one perceives a red rose for instance, one is visually representing the actual redness of the rose. The represented redness of the rose is the actual redness of the rose itself. Thus redness is not a property of one’s experience but an externally constituted property of the perceived physical object. In this sense, qualia are out there, in the external world. Here, I argue that the main representationalist arguments to this effect, if successful, establish no more than a symmetrical supervenience relation between representational content and qualia, and that a supervenience relation alone (albeit symmetrical) doesn’t suffice for identity. This supervenience thesis between qualia and representational content leaves open the question as to the essential nature of qualia.

The Psychology of Dilemmas and the Philosophy of Morality

We review several instances where cognitive research has identified distinct psychological mechanisms for moral judgment that yield conflicting answers to moral dilemmas. In each of these cases, the conflict between psychological mechanisms is paralleled by prominent philosophical debates between different moral theories. A parsimonious account of this data is that key claims supporting different moral theories ultimately derive from the psychological mechanisms that give rise to moral judgments. If this view is correct, it has some important implications for the practice of philosophy. We suggest several ways that moral philosophy and practical reasoning can proceed in the face of discordant theories grounded in diverse psychological mechanisms.

Kant, Nonaccidentalness and the Availability of Moral Worth

Contemporary Kantians who defend Kant's view of the superiority of the sense of duty as a form of motivation appeal to various ideas. Some say, if only implicitly, that the sense of duty is always ``available' to an agent, when she has a moral obligation. Some, like Barbara Herman, say that the sense of duty provides a ``nonaccidental' connection between an agent's motivation and the act's rightness. In this paper I show that the ``availability' and ``nonaccidentalness' arguments are in tension with one another. And the ``availability' idea, although certainly supported by some passages in Kant himself, is also clearly denied in other passages. My conclusion is that Kantians will need to abandon either availability or nonaccidentalness if they wish to have a consistent set of views about the sense of duty.