The Spirit(s) of Science: Paradoxical Positivism as Religious Discourse among Spiritualists

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott has argued. This resistance arises from the fact that evolution by natural selection lacks proper narrative entities and narrative events and that it relies on two parallel narrative levels, the levels of species and organism. This paper explores how two popular science books on evolution negotiate this narrative dilemma by introducing a third narrative level. Both texts appropriate characteristics from the narrative levels of species and organism and project them on molecular and minute scales by portraying evolution as a micro-narrative that takes place in chromosomes, genes, cells and microscopic details of human organs. While this textual strategy produces a coherent and compelling narrative that for the most part succeeds in masking the structural gap between the narrative levels of species and organism, it also risks naturalizing cultural imagery. In particular, this micro-narrative tends to represent popular gender ideologies as biological truths embedded in molecular processes within our bodies.     

Future of counseling psychology research

The author offers a critique on current counseling psychology research from her perspective as a US counseling psychology researcher and editor. She notes that unless something happens to change the trajectory, future US counseling psychology research will be open to the same criticisms. She summarizes counseling psychology values and argues that counseling psychology research reflects those values. She then identifies five ways that counseling psychology could be different in the future by: building theory-based research, embracing diversity of populations, research questions and methodologies, informing (and being informed) by other psychological disciplines, and informing policy and practice.     

Kant's Criticisms of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

According to recent commentators like Paul Guyer, Kant agrees with Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1) that physico-theology can never provide knowledge of God and (2) that the concept of God, nevertheless, provides a useful heuristic principle for scientific enquiry. This paper argues that Kant, far from agreeing with Hume, criticizes Hume's Dialogues for failing to prove that physico-theology can never yield knowledge of God and that Kant correctly views Hume's Dialogues as a threat to, rather than an anticipation of, his own view that the concept of God provides a useful heuristic principle for science. The paper concludes that Kant's critique of physico-theology reflects Kant's deep dissatisfaction with Hume's manner of argumentation and suggests that Kant's attempt to provide a more successful critique of physico-theology merits continued philosophical attention.     

Boys’ and girls’ involvement in science learning and their self‐efficacy in Taiwan

This cross‐sectional study investigated the significant differences in students’ self‐efficacy and their involvement in learning science. Nine hundred and twenty‐two elementary school fifth graders, 499 junior high school eighth graders, and 1455 senior or vocational high school eleventh graders completed the students’ questionnaire. Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) and independent t‐tests compared the significant similarities and differences across school levels and genders. The initial findings were as follows: A sharp decline in boys’ and girls’ self‐efficacy scores from elementary to secondary school levels; boys have significantly higher self‐efficacy scores than girls at vocational and senior high school levels; students with more involvement in science learning presented significantly higher self‐efficacy scores than those with less involvement. The significant discrepancies in terms of gender and age in students’ self‐efficacy and involvement in learning science need to be addressed. Implications and limitations are provided.     

Acceptance of Evolution and Support for Teaching Creationism in Public Schools: The Conditional Impact of Educational Attainment

Public acceptance of evolution remains low in the United States relative to other Western countries. Although advocates for the scientific community often highlight the need for improved education to change public opinion, analyses of data from a national sample of American adults indicate that the effects of educational attainment on attitudes toward evolution and creationism are uneven and contingent upon religious identity. Consequently, higher education will only shift public attitudes toward evolution and away from support for teaching creationism in public schools for those who take non‐“literalist” interpretive stances on the Bible, or to the extent that it leads to fewer people with literalist religious identities.     

In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy

Experimental philosophy is often presented as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. This article distinguishes two views of experimental philosophy: a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions, and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the colocation in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly distinguished in the literature about experimental philosophy, both pro and con. The article argues, first, that the broader view is the only plausible one; discussions of experimental philosophy should recognize that the narrow view is a caricature of experimental philosophy as it is currently done. It then shows both how objections to experimental philosophy are transformed and how positive recommendations can be provided by adopting a broad conception of experimental philosophy.     

Evaluating OVal-9, An Instrument for Detecting Experiences of Value in Daily Occupations

The drastic increase of psychosocial ill health may point to the fact that current lifestyles produce longer lives, but with increased chronic disorders rather than greater health. Focus on current lifestyles, that is, on peoples' daily environments, are thereby warranted to develop models and methods for tracing health promoting factors inherent in people's daily participation and experiences. This study tests the content validity of OVal-9, an instrument based on the new concept; Occupational Value, among a sample of experts, students and clients. The result shows a good ability to assess the value that people experience in their daily occupations. We are convinced that measuring Occupational Value might be of importance in developing future strategies for intervention and prevention needed for the increasing incidence of mental ill-health.     

The natural history of information processors

By spanning the traditional scientific theories in the search for an epistemological home for information it is found that Physics (together with some inputs from Automata Theory) provides the criteria to identify the universals that characterize information processors. It is well known, however, that Physics and Mathematics alone are insufficient to answer some fundamental questions that arise in further speculations on the subject of information. It seems that Biology, in the realm of Evolution Theory and in terms of Natural Selection, is at present the only place able to offer the objective context required to properly characterize information as an object of scientific inquiry.

In this communication we intend to show, by establishing a working equivalence between the epistemological questions that should characterize a theory of information and those questions that characterize the science of Biology, how a science of information can be more objectively characterized. It is only by referring to selective pressures that we can solve the otherwise unanswerable philosophical question of whether it is possible to know if two players of a game are, in fact, playing the same game (the semantic question). It is also shown that it is possible, by using conventional criteria, to establish a phylogenesis of information processors from where we conclude that every information processor now existing in the universe (even computers and robots) has an ancestor that has once been a living being.

It is here suggested, however, that Biology is only a provisory epistemological ground for laying the foundations of an information science. A more inclusive theory should be founded on a generalization of the Theory of Evolution where mutation and natural selection should be described, not in terms of the characteristic media and mechanisms of biological systems, but of the identified universals of information processors.     

REFLECTIONS: EDUCATION AND OUR SHARED FUTURE

Based on a comparative study, this paper highlights and analyses commonalities and differences between an Oriental systems approach, WSR, and two Western counterparts, TOP and MMD. It is suggested that cultural differences among systems approaches might probably have been overshadowed by both commonalities between Western and Eastern traditions and differences within the same cultural tradition. It will be further proposed that by being more consciously open to and learning from each other, systems approaches in the East and the West may have more to offer for dealing with the complexity which confronts humankind.     

Science and its applications: INSERM reflections

The history of science must be introduced onto the curriculum, scientific culture must be developed if the young are to receive a global, healthy understanding of science and technology.

The experiment pioneered by INSERM clubs is, from this point of view, exemplary.