商讨理论视野中的伦理、民主、人权和民族国家

本文根据哈贝马斯的访华演讲和相关著述,对商讨理论视野中的伦理、民主、人权和民族国家概念进行了考察,并在此基础上提出了某些基本的判断和论点。     

孔子识“鸟”、观“鸟”及其他

文章对于孔子本人提出的“多识于鸟兽草木之名”中的“识鸟”作了阐述 ,又对孔子的“观鸟”和“仁性待鸟”作了诠释。文章最后又揭示出了孔子“借物 (观鸟 )明理”的这种独特传授知识的方法和手段。     

Mental Health in the Schools

Progress is being made in the area of delivering mental health services in the schools through collaborative programs that involve combinations of schools, communities, and research-based programs. The goal of extending collaborative efforts to initiatives that prevent emotional and behavioral problems from developing or escalating is a cross-cutting theme of the National Agenda for Achieving Better Results for Children and Youth with Serious Emotional Disturbance. I discuss examples of collaborative efforts to prevent emotional behavioral problems in school children and ways by which this effort can be enhanced in schools and communities.     

The folk on knowing how

It has been claimed that the attempt to analyze know-how in terms of propositional knowledge over-intellectualizes the mind. Exploiting the methods of so-called “experimental philosophy”, we show that the charge of over-intellectualization is baseless. Contra neo-Ryleans, who analyze know-how in terms of ability, the concrete-case judgments of ordinary folk are most consistent with the view that there exists a set of correct necessary and sufficient conditions for know-how that does not invoke ability, but rather a certain sort of propositional knowledge. To the extent that one’s considered judgments agree with those of the folk (or to the extent that one is unwilling to contravene widespread judgments), this constitutes a strong prima facie case against neo-Ryleanism.

How People Can Benefit from Mental Health Consumer-Run Organizations

The goal of this study is to develop a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of the processes by which people can benefit from mental health consumer-run organizations (CROs). To accomplish this goal, the concept of roles is used to create a preliminary framework that draws connections between several established theoretical explanations. To ground theory development in empirical data, 194 CRO members from 20 CROs answered open-ended questions about what personal changes occurred as a result of their CRO involvement and what CRO participation experiences enabled personal change. Data analysis led to the identification of 18 personal change categories and 7 experiences that led to change. These categories were integrated into the preliminary theoretical framework, which needed to be extended to accommodate all categories. While inevitably tentative, the final conceptualization provides a more comprehensive understanding of the processes by which people can benefit from CRO participation.     

Intensity and orientation of reasoning: Motivational determinants of children's compliance to verbal rationales

The effects of varying the motivational content of verbal rationales on children's compliance to a prohibition were investigated. Sixty-four 7- to 10-year-old children received an explanation that focused either on the consequences of their behavior for themselves or on the consequences of their behavior for the experimenter. The intensity of these explanations was manipulated verbally by varying the severity of the self- or other-oriented consequences. Preratings of the rationales by an independent sample of 42 children indicated that children's perceptions of the aversiveness of the rationales increased as a function of intensity. Intensity was a determinant of children's compliance but females were more likely to increase in resistance to deviation as a function of intensity than males. Children who received other-oriented rationales performed a greater amount of work and were less likely to show decrements in working over time than subjects who received self-oriented rationales. The results were explained in terms of a model of reasoning effects in which the kind and amount of motivation aroused are two separable determinants of children's compliance.     

Word production and comprehension in Alzheimer's diseáse: The breakdown of semantic knowledge

Relatively mildly impaired patients with suspected Alzheimer's disease (N = 14; Verbal IQ = 96) and normal controls of similar age and education (N = 11) were administered tests requiring production (naming and fluency) and comprehension of single words. Word comprehension was assessed on a superordinate level (rating words for degree of “pleasantness”) and on a more specific level (matching abstract pictorial representations with printed words denoting objects, actions, emotions, and modifiers). Performance on standardized measures of semantic knowledge (Vocabulary and Similarities subtests of the WAIS) was also evaluated. The naming and fluency abilities of the Alzheimer's patients were found to be highly correlated (r = .80) and impaired. Naming errors often consisted of semantic field errors which were either hierarchically or linearly related to the target name. In comparison with normals, verbal fluency was characterized by a tendency to generate proportionally more category names concurrent with reduced production of items within a category. Single-word comprehension was also impaired, except when judgments of affective meaning were required. It was argued that these results suggest that Alzheimer's disease may lead to a specific disruption in semantic knowledge characterized by a difficulty in differentiating between items within the same semantic category concurrent with the relative preservation of broader categorical information.     

Auditory evoked potentials and sex-related differences in brain development

Auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) were obtained to probe tones which were delivered during the presentation of complex verbal and nonverbal auditory stimulation to 3-month-old infants. Significant sex-dependent AEP amplitude asymmetries were found. Females produced higher-amplitude responses from the left hemisphere and males produced higher-amplitude responses from the right hemisphere during both the verbal and nonverbal presentations. No significant AEP asymmetries were obtained in an independent group of infants that received only the probe tones. These findings are consistent with theories and behavioral data suggesting differences between males and females in the development of language and spatial functions.