当代西方道德人格研究的两类取向

道德人格研究是西方道德心理学的新主题,主要有两类取向：特质取向和社会认知取向。特质取向把道德人格理解为与道德有关的人格特质,对道德榜样的自然概念和真实道德榜样的人格特征进行了大量研究。社会认知取向以社会认知图式、知识结构和认知－情感机制来解释道德人格,揭示了个体内部动态的心理过程。未来的道德人格研究要强调两类取向的结合,加强发展过程和影响因素研究,并注重多水平与多学科的整合。     

Grasping psychoanalysts’ practice in its own merits1

The central objective of this presentation is to reflect on the obstacles involved in the task proposed by the Chicago Congress, which is to explore convergences and divergences in psychoanalytic practice. The author discusses two major obstacles. First, the epistemological and methodological problems in relation to the construction of theory in psychoanalysis and especially the inaccessibility, in any reliable way, of what psychoanalysts really do in the intimacy of their practice. He proposes to separate, at least in part, theory from practice in psychoanalysis, in an attempt to grasp psychoanalysts' practice in its own merits. He then outlines a phenomenology of the practice of psychoanalysis, which reveals that, in their work with patients, analysts are guided more by practical reasons than theoretical reasons; that is, their interventions are predictions rather than explanations. Since these practical reasons need to be validated constantly in the analytic relationship based on their effects, he discusses the subject of validation in the clinical context of the core theory of therapeutic change in psychoanalysis, that is, the conditions required for clinical practice to satisfy the thesis of an inseparable union between gaining knowledge and cure. He ends by challenging the core of the psychoanalytic theory of change, arguing that it neither does justice to the practice of psychoanalysts nor to contemporary knowledge of processes and mechanisms of therapeutic change. Finally, he proposes that we detach practice from theory, in order to study the former in its own merits, utilising a plurality of methods ranging from systematic investigation to the recent methodology of the Working Party.     

Enabling conditions and children’s understanding of pretense

Two experiments examined whether preschoolers’ difficulties on tasks that required relating pretending and knowledge (e.g., Lillard, A. S. (1993a). Young children’s conceptualization of pretense: Action or mental representational state? Child Development, 64, 372-386) were due to children’s inability to appreciate the causal mechanism behind enabling conditions. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were told about a character who knew about one kind of animal and did not know about another. The character acted in a manner consistent with both animals. Children were asked whether the character was pretending to be the animal of which he was ignorant. The character’s knowledge was either represented in a generic manner (as a picture) or in a manner that suggested a particular enabling condition relation that children found accessible (as a battery, which most 4-year-olds recognize is critical for making toys work). Children were more successful at relating knowledge and pretending in the battery condition. This improvement in performance extended to another task in which children had to identify the enabling condition relation between knowledge and identification, in which there were reduced demands on the inhibitory mechanisms necessary for success. Experiment 2 found that the results in Experiment 1 were not due to demands of the procedure used in Experiment 1. These results are discussed in the context of recent theories of theory of mind that focus on the importance of causal relations among mental states.     

DUTIES OF JUSTICE TO CITIZENS WITH COGNITIVE DISABILITIES

Abstract: Many social practices treat citizens with cognitive disabilities differently from their nondisabled peers. Does John Rawls's theory of justice imply that we have different duties of justice to citizens whenever they are labeled with cognitive disabilities? Some theorists have claimed that the needs of the cognitively disabled do not raise issues of justice for Rawls. I claim that it is premature to reject Rawlsian contractualism. Rawlsians should regard all citizens as moral persons provided they have the potential for developing the two moral powers. I claim that every citizen requires specific Enabling Conditions to develop and exercise the two moral powers. Structuring basic social institutions to deny some citizens the Enabling Conditions is unjust because it blocks their developmental pathways toward becoming fully cooperating members of society. Hence, we have a duty of justice to provide citizens labeled with cognitive disabilities with the Enabling Conditions they require until they become fully cooperating members of society.     

LOT,CTM, and the Elephant in the Room

According to the language of thought (LOT) approach and the related computational theory of mind (CTM), thinking is the processing of symbols in an inner mental language that is distinct from any public language. Herein, I explore a deep problem at the heart of the LOT/CTM program—it has yet to provide a plausible conception of a mental symbol.     

Aggressive and prosocial children's emotion attributions and moral reasoning

Aggressive and prosocial children's emotion attributions and moral reasoning were investigated. Participants were 235 kindergarten children (M=6.2 years) and 136 elementary-school children (M=7.6 years) who were selected as aggressive or prosocial based on (kindergarten) teacher ratings. The children were asked to evaluate hypothetical rule violations, attribute emotions they would feel in the role of the victimizer, and justify their responses. Compared with younger prosocial children, younger aggressive children attributed fewer negative emotions and were more likely to provide sanction-oriented justifications when evaluating rule violations negatively. Furthermore, age-, gender- and context-effects in moral development occurred. The context-effects included both effects of transgression type (i.e., prosocial morality vs. fairness) on emotion attributions and moral reasoning and the effects of the context of moral evaluation and emotion attribution on moral reasoning. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of emotion attributions and moral reasoning as antecedents of children's aggressive and prosocial behavior.     

Extended Life

This paper reformulates some of the questions raised by extended mind theorists from an enactive, life/mind continuity perspective. Because of its reliance on concepts such as autopoiesis, the enactive approach has been deemed internalist and thus incompatible with the extended mind hypothesis. This paper answers this criticism by showing (1) that the relation between organism and cogniser is not one of co-extension, (2) that cognition is a relational phenomenon and thereby has no location, and (3) that the individuality of a cogniser is inevitably linked with the question of its autonomy, a question ignored by the extended mind hypothesis but for which the enactive approach proposes a precise, operational, albeit non-functionalist answer. The paper raises a pespective of embedded and intersecting forms of autonomous identity generation, some of which correspond to the canonical cases discussed in the extended mind literature, but on the whole of wider generality. In addressing these issues, this paper proposes unbiased, non-species specific definitions of cognition, agency and mediation, thus filling in gaps in the extended mind debates that have led to paradoxical situations and a problematic over-reliance on intutions about what counts as cognitive.

Enactivism and the Extended Mind

According to the view that has become known as the extended mind, some token mental processes extend into the cognizing organism’s environment in that they are composed (partly) of manipulative, exploitative, and transformative operations performed by that subject on suitable environmental structures. Enactivist models understand mental processes as (partly) constituted by sensorimotor knowledge and by the organism’s ability to act, in appropriate ways, on environmental structures. Given the obvious similarities between the two views, it is both tempting and common to regard them as essentially variations on the same theme. In this paper, I shall argue that the similarities between enactivist and extended models of cognition are relatively superficial, and the divergences are deeper than commonly thought.

Intentionality,Cognitive Integration and the Continuity Thesis

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition.

ABUNDANT NATURE'S LONG-TERM OPENNESS TO HUMANE BIOCULTURAL DESIGNS

Not by Genes Alone excellently explains Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd's important ideas about human gene‐culture co‐evolution to a broader audience but remains short of a larger vision of civilization. Several decades ago Ralph Burhoe had seen that fertile possibility in Richerson and Boyd's work. I suggest getting past present reductionistic customs to a scientific perspective having an integral place for virtue. Subsystem agency is part of this view, as is the driving role of abundance, whose ultimate origins are in the mysterious, quintessentially energetic Big Bang. The free‐rider problem may not impede higher social organization as inexorably as Richerson and Boyd believe; “the tragedy” of enervating leakage from “the commons” may often be less influential than an invigorating flow of externalities to the commons. Eukaryotic origins mark the origin of inevitable wider sharing as higher living systems evolve. I use a metaphor of flesh and spirit in drawing a parallel between that turning point and the wide sharing that occurs in civilization. This helps solve the enigma of the demographic transition. Why do so many productive participants in first‐world societies severely restrict their selfish‐gene reproduction to below replacement birth rate? It is not because culture is maladaptive but because civilization's brain and womb have become partially differentiated in distinct populations. Considerations of social boundaries, myths of sacrifice, and human creativity help in understanding how human social evolution taps potentials present in reality. Human beings' diverse vigorous activities—the organized ones and the inadvertent ones, the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the carefully thoughtful and the merely playful—provide the ground of being, or primordial soup, for cultural entities that transcend our intentions. If we have it right for the most part and are fortunate, we will continue to emerge at higher levels.