‘Tell us what we need to know to do this!’ Preparing a path to safe uncertainty in assignment writing on a family therapy foundation course

This article describes a single session aimed at helping participants on a family therapy foundation course to move from a position of anxiety and discomfort about completing a written assignment to a position of safe uncertainty. Evaluation from the perspectives of course participants, course facilitators and assignment markers has shown participants engaging more enthusiastically with the writing of the assignment and expressing less anxiety about the process.     

The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior at fifty

The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was founded in 1958 by a group of male psychologists, mainly from the northeastern USA and connected with either Harvard or Columbia. Fifty years later about 20% of both editors and authors reside outside this country and almost the same proportion is made up of women. Other changes in the journal include having its own website for more than a decade and now publishing online as well as on paper. A recent connection with PubMed Central of the National Library of Medicine has made possible the completely free electronic presentation of the entire archive of about 3,800 articles.     

Using Creative Writing Techniques to Enhance the Case Study Method in Research Integrity and Ethics Courses

The following article explores the use of creative writing techniques to teach research ethics, breathe life into case study preparation, and train students to think of their settings as complex organizational environments with multiple actors and stakeholders.     

探讨和完善生物医学期刊来稿中的伦理学问题

生物医学期刊来稿中最常见的伦理学问题就是受试者“知情同意”的问题。生物医学期刊通过提高编辑人员素质、加强医学伦理学宣传教育、对来稿严格把关以及协助科研机构建立和完善伦理学审查委员会,不断探讨和完善来稿中的伦理学问题,这不仅是对受试者负责,而且有利于医学科研人员素质的提高,有利于生物医学研究健康、有序的发展。     

The Argument from Moral Experience

It is often said that our moral experience, broadly construed to include our ways of thinking and talking about morality, has a certain objective-seeming character to it, and that this supports a presumption in favor of objectivist theories (according to which morality is a realm of facts or truths) and against anti-objectivist theories like Mackie’s error theory (according to which it is not). In this paper, I argue that our experience of morality does not support objectivist moral theories in this way. I begin by arguing that our moral experience does not have the uniformly objective-seeming character it is typically claimed to have. I go on to argue that even if moral experience were to presuppose or display morality as a realm of fact, we would still need a reason for taking that to support theories according to which it is such a realm. I consider what I take to be the four most promising ways of attempting to supply such a reason: (A) inference to the best explanation, (B) epistemic conservatism, (C) the Principle of Credulity, and (D) the method of wide reflective equilibrium. In each case, I argue, the strategy in question does not support a presumption in favor of objectivist moral theories.

Précis of <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Virtue Epistemology</Emphasis> (Oxford University Press, 2007)

This is a summary of A Virtue Epistemology, the book that is the subject of this book symposium.     

Replies to commentators on <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Virtue Epistemology</Emphasis> (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Paul Boghossian discusses critically my account of intuition as a source of epistemic status. Stewart Cohen takes up my views on skepticism, on dreams, and on epistemic competence and competences and their relation to human knowledge. Hilary Kornblith focuses on my animal/reflective distinction, and, along with Cohen, on my comparison between how dreams might mislead us and how other bad epistemic contexts can do so. In this paper I offer replies to my three critics.

不同自我评价方式对高中生写作的影响

本研究考察了三种不同的自我评价方式对高中二年级学生写作活动的影响。结果表明,自我评价对写作成绩有一定改善,但短期内对一般性的学习动机与效能感无显著影响。写作结果自我评价方式有助于写作结果自我评价准确性的提高,单独的写作过程自我评价方式短期内对写作活动无显著促进作用,写作结果与写作过程的综合自我评价方式显著改善了写作活动。     

Reflective Sociocultural Psychology: Lost and Found in Collaboration with Funding Agencies and ICT Experts

This paper deals with emerging kinds of collaboration between researchers, funding agencies and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) experts. The goal of this paper is to analyze the challenges and opportunities for researchers presented by such collaborations. The analysis is based on a sociocultural approach, and leads to the following conclusions: (a) the main challenges to collaboration arise from the fact that partners’ communities have different goals and use different sets of mediation tools, (b) there are different ways for researchers to cope with more powerful partners such as major funding agencies (refusing collaboration, pseudo collaboration, asymmetric collaboration, and real partnership), (c) appropriation of mediation tools developed by partners could be useful for researchers, (d) collaboration with partners could be a source of new theoretically interesting phenomenon, and (e) communication with partners who are not familiar with our routine discourses might help us to improve our own understanding.