中国大学生的自我建构、利己归因偏好与自我增强

本研究验证了我国大学生的自我建构的个体间差异对利己归因偏好与自我增强的影响。我国大学生被试首先完成一个虚拟的能力测验,然后对其自我建构等进行测量,最后被试得到成绩反馈并进行归因与课题评价。结果表明被试表现出显著的利己归因偏好,独立型比依存型自我建构者表现出更显著的自我增强,同时独立性对自我增强起着极重要作用。本研究结果支持自我增强的文化普遍论的观点。     

My heart is on my tongue: the untranslated self in a translated world

Abstract: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first body to provide translation in all the languages of the country, setting people free from groping around with distorted tongues, unable to see, talk or hear one another … After three centuries of silence South Africans could daily hear the black voice talking and being translated; for the first time white South Africans could hear and listen. Through translation we could access our deepest emotions and feelings. But among the two thousand testimonies there were some that were incomprehensible, that confirmed every racial stereotype built up over many years of apartheid. What does one do with these ‘untranslatable’ narratives? This paper looks at one TRC testimony and one Bushmen story, both of them translated from indigenous languages and both posing enormous moral dilemmas. Read in a particular way, the Bushmen story seems to say that they had no sense of responsibility. I will look at the story in its cultural context as revealed through translation to see if another conclusion is possible. In the TRC testimony, I and two colleagues looked at the slippages between the original Xhosa testimony and the interpreted version and explore the consequences thereof. I want to make the point that a narrative can be experienced as discriminatory and ethically problematic when read through a particular, in this case a western, perspective. But the moment there is an attempt to interpret the narrative via its embeddedness in an indigenous worldview, it becomes breathtakingly ethical, fair and logical.     

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。     

Reconciliation and Forgiveness in an Unjust Society

Justification by faith necessarily leads to justice in society. IN post–apartheid South Africa, reconciliation has required truth telling plus confession and, most importantly, land redistribution. Failure at land redistribution in Zimbabwe has reduced the effectiveness of the post–colonial reconciliation program and perpetuated previous injustice.     

Who is the Addressee of Philosophical Argumentation?

Chaim Perelman invokes the idea of “universal audience” for explaining the nature of philosophical argumentation as rational rhetoric. As opposed to this view, centuries before Perelman, Socrates argues that philosophy should be conducted as a dialogue between concrete individuals with very specific qualities. The paper presents these different views in order to claim that the philosopher addresses neither a universal audience nor a particular other, but mainly and essentially the philosopher herself/himself. This brings to light the problem of self-deception as a central problem of philosophical thinking. In posing this view the paper uses Nietzsche’s definition of “the will to truth” as the will not to deceive, not even myself.

Life Satisfaction is not a Balanced Estimator of the Good Life: Evidence from Reaction Time Measures and Self-Reported Emotions

A widespread belief in happiness research is that measures of life satisfaction capture the variety of an individual’s experiences along a single favorable—unfavorable dimension. The current article points to a possible violation of this assumption. With a combination of data and theory it argues that life satisfaction is not a balanced reflection of subjective experiences because the evaluation that drives judgments of life satisfaction is tilted towards pleasure and away from engagement. We postulate that feelings of pleasure are overrated in statements of life satisfaction, whereas feelings of engagement are underrepresented. Feelings of engagement and interest are further supposed to be indicators of personal growth. Measures of personal growth and life satisfaction should thus be unrelated. Empirical evidence for our model is provided by self-report and reaction time data from a Norwegian convenience sample (N = 30). Detection latencies for pleasant stimuli correlated significantly with life satisfaction but not with measures of personal growth. Life satisfaction correlated significantly with pleasant experiences, but not with engagement. Personal growth correlated significantly with feelings of engagement. Life satisfaction and personal growth were uncorrelated.     

Comparing Fixed-Point and Revision Theories of Truth

In response to the liar’s paradox, Kripke developed the fixed-point semantics for languages expressing their own truth concepts. (Martin and Woodruff independently developed this semantics, but not to the same extent as Kripke.) Kripke’s work suggests a number of related fixed-point theories of truth for such languages. Gupta and Belnap develop their revision theory of truth in contrast to the fixed-point theories. The current paper considers three natural ways to compare the various resulting theories of truth, and establishes the resulting relationships among these theories. The point is to get a sense of the lay of the land amid a variety of options. Our results will also provide technical fodder for the methodological remarks of the companion paper to this one.     

Is knowledge a natural kind?

The project of treating knowledge as an empirical object of study has gained popularity in recent naturalistic epistemology. It is argued here that the assumption that such an object of study exists is in tension with other central elements of naturalistic philosophy. Two hypotheses are considered. In the first, “knowledge” is hypothesized to refer to mental states causally responsible for the behaviour of cognitive agents. Here, the relational character of truth creates a problem. In the second hypothesis “knowledge” is hypothesized to refer to mental states causally responsible for the evolutionarily successful behaviour of cognitive agents. Here, the problem lies in the fact that evolution by natural selection is not necessarily conducive to truth. The result does not necessarily amount to eliminativism, however, since the naturalist may consistently reject the condition of truth that lies behind these problems.     

Epistemology without metaphysics

The paper outlines a view of normativity that combines elements of relativism and expressivism, and applies it to normative concepts in epistemology. The result is a kind of epistemological anti-realism, which denies that epistemic norms can be (in any straightforward sense) correct or incorrect; it does allow some to be better than others, but takes this to be goal-relative and is skeptical of the existence of best norms. It discusses the circularity that arises from the fact that we need to use epistemic norms to gather the facts with which to evaluate epistemic norms; relatedly, it discusses how epistemic norms can rationally evolve. It concludes with some discussion of the impact of this view on “ground level” epistemology.

Commonsense Realism and Triangulation

Realism about the external world enjoys little philosophical support these days. I rectify this predicament by taking a relatively pragmatist line of thought to defend commonsense realism; I support commonsense realism through an interpretation and application of Donald Davidson’s notion of triangulation, the triangle composed of two communicators coordinating and correcting their responses with a shared causal stimulus. This argument is important because it has a crucial advantage over the often used abductive argument for realism. My argument avoids unwarranted conclusions, whereas the abductive argument is “inflationary” because it reaches beyond the limits of evidence for its realist conclusion. To illustrate the problems of the abductive argument and motivate my Davidsonian approach, I take a brief look at the abductive argument for realism in Frederick Will’s work.