On being stuck in time

It is sometimes claimed that non-human animals (and perhaps also young children) live their lives entirely in the present and are cognitively ‘stuck in time’. Adult humans, by contrast, are said to be able to engage in ‘mental time travel’. One possible way of making sense of this distinction is in terms of the idea that animals and young children cannot engage in tensed thought, which might seem a preposterous idea in the light of certain findings in comparative and developmental psychology. I try to make this idea less preposterous by looking into some of the cognitive requirements for tensed thought. In particular, I suggest that tensed thought requires a specific form of causal understanding, which animals and young children may not possess.

Experience and self-consciousness

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.     

Systematicity redux

One of the main challenges that Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn (Cognition 28:3–71, 1988) posed for any connectionist theory of cognitive architecture is to explain the systematicity of thought without implementing a Language of Thought (LOT) architecture. The systematicity challenge presents a dilemma: if connectionism cannot explain the systematicity of thought, then it fails to offer an adequate theory of cognitive architecture; and if it explains the systematicity of thought by implementing a LOT architecture, then it fails to offer an alternative to the LOT hypothesis. Given that thought is systematic, connectionism can offer an adequate alternative to the LOT hypothesis only if it can meet the challenge. Although some critics tried to meet the challenge, others argued that it need not be met since thought is not in fact systematic; and some claimed not to even understand the claim that thought is systematic. I do not here examine attempts to answer the challenge. Instead, I defend the challenge itself by explicating the notion of systematicity in a way that I hope makes clear that thought is indeed systematic, and so that to offer an adequate alternative to the LOT hypothesis, connectionism must meet the challenge.     

管子经济思想散论

管仲的经济思想主要体现在《管子》中的《轻重》诸篇中。管予经济思想的特点是：重视人民普遍的生活需求,把国库存在的意义与人民的生活需求联系在一起考虑,对于暴富现象,他们认为是造成贫富不均的因素,国家的作用是要限制暴富,均衡人民的生活水平,这些都与现代西方的经济观点接近。     

The European school of MCDA: Emergence,basic features and current works

Multiple-criteria decision analysis has evolved considerably since its birth during the 1960s. As part of this evolution, several schools of thought have developed emphasizing different techniques and, more generally, different attitudes as to the way of supporting or aiding decision making. One of these schools is now commonly referred to as the ‘European School’, its members being part of a European Working Group entitled ‘Multicriteria Aid for Decisions’. In the first part of this paper (Section 1) we follow a historical perspective in order to trace the emergence of the European School. Its distinctive features and main ideas are then outlined in Section 2. Finally we provide a general review of the current major research topics developed within this framework (Section 3).     

自孟庙修建看孟子地位的变迁——兼论孟子形象的多面性

孟庙是为奉祀孟子而建的人文景观,与孟子的命运息息相关。探讨孟子地位的变迁,不能不考察孟庙修建的情况。文章通过爬梳历代历次修庙碑记,考察宋以来孟子地位的变迁历程,认为孟子的地位宋以后经历一个曲折中上升的过程,其权威地位初步形成于宋,正式确立于元,至明清方彻底巩固下来;学者、皇帝、官吏、孟氏后裔和普通民众共同塑造了孟子的权威地位。孟子形象在不同时期、不同阶层中也是流变纷呈的。     

运动决策中的无意识思维研究

本研究以81名篮球专业的大学生为被试,通过决策篮球视频,考察运动决策中的无意识思维效应。实验1探讨了不同运动决策信息下的无意识思维决策差异,发现呈现直觉性决策信息时,无意识思维组的决策效果好于意识思维组。实验2在无意识思维阶段通过启动被试的加工方式,考察直觉性决策信息下,启动不同的加工方式对运动决策的无意识思维效应的影响,发现整体加工组的无意识思维决策效果最佳。研究结果表明,直觉性决策信息下,启动被试的整体加工方式,其无意识思维的决策效果会有所提升。     

Empathy and the Limits of Thought Experiments

This article criticizes what it calls perspectival thought experiments, which require subjects to mentally simulate a perspective before making judgments from within it. Examples include Judith Thomson's violinist analogy, Philippa Foot's trolley problem, and Bernard Williams's Jim case. The article argues that advances in the philosophical and psychological study of empathy suggest that the simulative capacities required by perspectival thought experiments are all but impossible. These thought experiments require agents to consciously simulate necessarily unconscious features of subjectivity. To complete these experiments subjects must deploy theory‐theoretical frameworks to predict what they think they would (or ought to) do. These outputs, however, systematically mislead subjects and are highly prone to error. They are of negligible probative value, and this bodes poorly for their continued use. The article ends with two suggestions. First, many thought experiments are not problematically perspectival. Second, it should be possible to carry out “in‐their‐shoes” perspectival thought experiments by off‐loading simulations onto virtual environments into which philosophers place subjects.     

Constructive Thought Strategies and Job Satisfaction: A Preliminary Examination

In order to examine the potential of constructive thought strategies for enhancing employee job satisfaction, an existing dispositional model of job satisfaction was expanded and tested. Structural equation modeling techniques indicated significant relationships among constructive thought strategies, dysfunctional thought processes, subjective well-being, and job satisfaction. In addition, two competing models were examined to test for the full or partial mediation of the effects of constructive thought strategies on job satisfaction. The implications of these findings for constructive thought strategy training interventions are discussed, along with directions for future research efforts.     

Thinking with,and about,patients too scared to think: Can non‐interpretive maneuvers stimulate refl ective thought?

Patients incapable of higher-order (symbolic) thinking can often not tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate existence, particularly when that 'otherness' becomes evident in the process of the analyst's refl ecting upon and interpreting how the patient experiences or represents the analyst. The patient's intolerance of the analyst's efforts to think (refl ect upon and interpret) renders the usual psychoanalytic maneuvers employed to stimulate refl ective thought ineffective with such patients. Such patients have to learn to tolerate multiple perspectives before they can allow the analyst, or themselves, to think in the other's presence. The author presents two clinical vignettes that illustrate how the analyst's efforts to think about the patient were experienced by the patient as both intolerably distancing and as rejecting of an aspect of the patient's subjective reality. Working psychoanalytically with such patients requires the analyst to forgo the use of narrow interpretations that elucidate unconscious meanings and motives in favor of alternate technical maneuvers capable of facilitating the development of symbolic thinking and refl ective thought (insightfulness). These maneuvers include a demonstration of the analyst's willingness and ability to withstand (rather than 'interpret away') how he is being psychically represented by the patient, without becoming destroyed by, or lost within, the patient's characterization of him. Beside modeling a tolerance of alternate perspectives of one's self, other non-interpretive maneuvers that help facilitate the development of self-refl ective thought include: stimulating the patient's curiosity about the workings of his own mind by identifying incompletely understood behaviors or reactions worthy of greater psychological understanding, and insinuating doubt about the adequacy of the patient's explanations of such phenomena.