The patient's private construction of meaning and canons of science: Freud's case studies noch einmal1

Starting from Freud's classical case studies, the author highlights the tension between the psychoanalytical starting point in the subject's own meaning construction and the claims of the professional expert to objectivity, privileged knowledge and interpretative precedence. Psychoanalytic investigation of subjective phenomena came into existence parallel with Freud's magnifi cent project to furnish ‘a psychology that shall be a natural science’. The privileged knowledge of the specialist was substituted by the explicit intention to listen to the individual's own stories and private explanatory constructions. In order to investigate the territory of the unconscious, Freud had to develop various strategies for uncovering and correcting errors, and for testing clinically anchored hypotheses. However, Freud regularly failed to follow his own intentions. The thesis the author presents here is that departures from the explicit ambition to follow the subject's own meaning construction, and departures from the scientifi c attitude, easy to trace in Freud's case studies, accompany each other. These departures have had far‐reaching consequences for the present status of the psychoanalytic knowledge.     

Modal Platonism: an Easy Way to Avoid Ontological Commitment to Abstract Entities

Modal Platonism utilizes “weak” logical possibility, such that it is logically possible there are abstract entities, and logically possible there are none. Modal Platonism also utilizes a non-indexical actuality operator. Modal Platonism is the EASY WAY, neither reductionist nor eliminativist, but embracing the Platonistic language of abstract entities while eliminating ontological commitment to them. STATEMENT OF MODAL PLATONISM. Any consistent statement B ontologically committed to abstract entities may be replaced by an empirically equivalent modalization, MOD(B), not so ontologically committed. This equivalence is provable using Modal/Actuality Logic S5@. Let MAX be a strong set theory with individuals. Then the following Schematic Bombshell Result (SBR) can be shown: MAX logically yields [T is true if and only if MOD(T) is true], for scientific theories T. The proof utilizes Stephen Neale’s clever model-theoretic interpretation of Quantified Lewis S5, which I extend to S5@.     

Taking Law Seriously: Starting Points of the Hart/Devlin Debate*

The famous mid-20th century debate between Patrick Devlin and Herbert Hart about the relationship between law and morality addressed the limits of the criminal law in the context of a proposal by the Wolfenden Committee to decriminalize male homosexual activity in private. The original exchanges and subsequent contributions to the debate have been significantly constrained by the terms in which the debate was framed: a focus on criminal law in general and sexual offences in particular; a preoccupation with the so-called “harm principle,” a sharp delineation of the realms of law and morality, and a static conception of the relationship between them. This article explores the limitations imposed by these various starting-points and argues for a holistic and symbiotic understanding of the relationship between law and morality. * Thanks to Tony Connolly, Leighton McDonald and Niki Lacey for penetrating and suggestive comments on previous versions.     

C. S. Lewis and the Rejection of the Tao

When asking about the worldview and ethics behind such stories as The Chronicles of Narnia, readers should try to understand C.S. Lewis's work in light of the Tao or moral Natural Law. Even though our modern culture affirms a relativism in values, Lewis affirms a non-relativist universal ground for moral judgment. Lewis's theological work, Mere Christianity, provides the clue for this interpretation. Despite the apparent negativity or violence in even some of the most memorable scenes in the Chronicles, the underlying moral is hopeful and positive, reflecting a 'mere Christian' worldview.     

Do Split Brains Listen to Prozac?

Abstract. Cognitive science challenges our understandings of self and freedom. In this article, adapted from a chapter in Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences (Peterson 2003), I review some of the scientific literature with regard to issues of self and freedom. I argue that our sense of self is a construct and heavily dependent on the kind of brain that we have. Furthermore, understanding the issue of freedom requires an understanding of the findings of cognitive science. Human beings are constrained to be free; our biology in no small way determines the kinds of freedom that we are able to have.     

Ghost and self: Jung's paradigm shift and a response to Zinkin

Abstract :  Zinkin's lucid challenge to Jung makes perfect sense. Indeed, it is the implications of this 'making sense' that this paper addresses. For Zinkin's characterization of the 'self' takes it as a 'concept' requiring coherence; a variety of abstract non-contextual knowledge that itself has a mythical heritage. Moreover, Zinkin's refinement of Jung seeks to make his work fit for the scientific paradigm of modernity. In turn, modernity's paradigm owes much to Newton's notion of knowledge via reductionism. Here knowledge or investigation is divided up into the smallest possible units with the aim of eventually putting it all together into 'one' picture of scientific truth. Unfortunately, 'reductionism' does not do justice to the resonant possibilities of Jung's writing. These look forward to a new scientific paradigm of the twenty-first century, of the interactive 'field', emergence and complexity theory. The paper works paradoxically by discovering Zinkin's 'intersubjective self' after all, in two undervalued narratives by Jung, his doctoral thesis and a short late ghost story. However, in the ambivalences and radical fictional experimentation of these fascinating texts can be discerned an-Other self, one both  created and found .     

Extending the Three- and Four-Headed Eagles: The Foreign Policy Orientations of American Elites During the 80s and 90s

With the breakdown of the foreign policy consensus of the Cold War years, there has been a resurgence in examining the beliefs of the public and their role in U.S. foreign policy. The most extensive of these studies has been conducted by Holsti and Rosenau who have found first three and then four competing schools of thought. Our purpose is to build off Holsti and Rosenau's analyses and extend their argument. Research based on the content analysis of foreign policy and national opinion journals from 1980 to 1989 demonstrates that there is more diversity and complexity in the range and content of beliefs held by American leaders than Holsti and Rosenau have yet been able to capture through their "three-" and "four-headed eagles." Although the three-headed eagle serves as a useful scheme for categorizing the broad foreign policy perspectives of American leaders, it de-emphasizes important differences in beliefs and ignores at least two foreign policy orientations that exist within their general categories. This is not a mere academic exercise, for it sheds light on the level of diversity and complexity of elite beliefs, which enriches an understanding of the politics of U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam. A preliminary examination of foreign policy and national opinion journals from 1990 to 1994 indicates that American elites are changing and adapting while at the same time, they are absorbing profound global changes into their prevailing belief systems, as predicted by the political psychological literature. This suggests that the diversity and complexity present in the 80s is likely to persist and grow throughout the 90s. Our research also suggests the importance of developing alternative methods to complement reliance on survey research in order to capture more fully the diversity and complexity of the foreign policy beliefs of Americans.     

Vivid memories

Fifty-eight undergraduates each recorded their three clearest autobiographical memories and answered questions about them. The resulting 174 memories were almost all rated to be of high personal importance, but low national importance. In contrast to published results of flashbulb memories cued by events which were specific, nationally important, surprising, and consequential, the ratings collected here covered the scales of surprise and consequentiality in a fairly uniform manner. The subjects also answered questions about memories cued by 20 events. For each subject, some of these memories were of ‘flashbulb’ clarity and some were not. The clearer memories were more surprising, consequential, and emotional, indicating that these factors are associated with, though not necessary for, vivid memories.     

Acquisition of cognitive compiling

Language involves both structure and process. Giving each its due, we present a cognitive process model and show how its empirical success is related to claims about syntactic structure. Innate constraints on syntax are a central issue in linguistic theory, so it is a matter of concern that a widely accepted view of phrase structure constraints (X-bar theory) appears to be violated in some recent comprehension experiments with children. However, what is directly observed in the experiments is not a syntactic structure but the execution of a plan. We present a language of process for representing such plans and thereby provide a unified explanation of several developmental phenomena, including the results of the above experiments and of new experiments suggested by our approach. The explanation is in terms of the cognitive resources required to formulate and execute a plan. Since the explanation is based on nonsyntactic processing, the children's syntax need no longer be held faulty. This conclusion invigorates the claim that the range of phrase structures available to children is biologically constrained.