Religion as Orienting Worldview

Religions are complex, and any attempt at defining religion necessarily falls short. Nevertheless, any scholarly inquiry into the nature of religion must use some criteria in order to evaluate and study the character of religious traditions across contexts. To this end, I propose understanding religion in terms of an orienting worldview. Religions are worldviews that are expressed not only in beliefs but also in narratives and symbols. More than this, religions orient action, and any genuine religious tradition necessarily is concerned with normative behavior, whether ethical or religious in character. Such an understanding of religion has several advantages, one of which is its natural relation to current forms of the science-religion dialogue. Not only can the findings of cognitive science and related areas inform us about the nature of religion; scientific discoveries also prove to be important for any religious synthesis that attempts to construct a worldview for the twenty-first century.     

心理学研究中社会阶层的操作化界定及其衍生问题

个体的社会阶层反映了其所掌控的客观社会资源(即客观社会阶层)和其主观上所感知到的自身社会地位(即主观社会阶层)的水平。收入(或财产)、职业、受教育程度是研究中常用来反映客观社会阶层的操作化指标。而主观社会阶层的操作化界定既包括对主观阶层进行问卷测量,也包括对其加以实验操纵。心理学研究要基于研究目的以及要考察的具体效应与机制对不同的操作化界定加以取舍,有时也要综合兼顾多种操作化方式。通过选取典型群体来代表不同阶层,这种做法宜慎重采用。同时研究的信效度问题有必要更多加以重视。未来研究应加强关注阶层认同偏差与阶层纵向流动等基础问题,以及因取样偏差而带来的阶层效应被简化的现象,并结合跨文化视角分析不同文化下社会阶层的内涵差异。     

Counselling psychology in the United States

Counseling psychology (CP) emerged in the US as the result of the convergence of a number of trends in early applied psychology, a number of social factors, as well as changes in the organizational structure of the American Psychological Association. We offer an overview of the history of counseling psychology in the US, focusing on key events that have helped establish and shape the profession. Struggles over the definition of CP as a specialty and its relations with clinical psychology and professional counseling are discussed, as are matters related to the licensing of CP practitioners, and the profession’s relationships with counseling-related professional organizations. The educational and professional preparation of CPs, the profession’s core values that affect both training in and the practice of counseling psychology, and the settings in which CPs work are briefly described. We close with a discussion of several of the challenges facing CP as it is organized and institutionalized in the US.     

Quest for optimum human population per nation

The world is being saturated with population to a point where its life‐support systems may be in danger of losing their ability to maintain environmental stability. Thus, there is an urgent need for scientists and decision makers to develop working models in which information about the population, resource exhaustion, and pollution of each nation is contained. The criteria for determining optimum human population are reviewed, and a bionomic model that incorporates the complex web of economic and political systems within an ecological framework is presented to solve the problem of how large a population each nation should have.     

Meno's Paradox in Context

I argue that Meno's Paradox targets the type of knowledge that Socrates has been looking for earlier in the dialogue: knowledge grounded in explanatory definitions. Socrates places strict requirements on definitions and thinks we need these definitions to acquire knowledge. Meno's challenge uses Socrates' constraints to argue that we can neither propose definitions nor recognize them. To understand Socrates' response to the challenge, we need to view Meno's challenge and Socrates' response as part of a larger disagreement about the value of inquiry.     

Spiritual But Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion

“Spirituality” often has been framed in social science research as an alternative to organized “religion,” implicitly or explicitly extending theoretical arguments about the privatization of religion. This article uses in‐depth qualitative data from a religiously diverse U.S. sample to argue that this either/or distinction not only fails to capture the empirical reality of American religion, it does no justice to the complexity of spirituality. An inductive discursive analysis reveals four primary cultural “packages,” or ways in which people construct the meaning of spirituality in conversation: a Theistic Package tying spirituality to personal deities, an Extra‐Theistic Package locating spirituality in various naturalistic forms of transcendence, an Ethical Spirituality focusing on everyday compassion, and a contested Belief and Belonging Spirituality tied to cultural notions of religiosity. Spirituality, then, is neither a diffuse individualized phenomenon nor a single cultural alternative to “religion.” Analysis of the contested evaluations of Belief and Belonging Spirituality allows a window on the “moral boundary work” being done through identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” The empirical boundary between spirituality and religion is far more orous than is the moral and political one.     

Affirming 'That's not psycho-analysis!' On the value of the politically incorrect act of attempting to define the limits of our field

This paper is concerned with the value of the act of defining the field of psychoanalysis. It examines the reasons why adopting and especially giving voice to a definition that excludes approaches considered by some analysts to be analytic is commonly regarded as unacceptable within psychoanalytic discourse. It then explains the value and advantages of putting forth exclusive definitions. The author argues that clarifying the pros and cons of such acts of definition contributes to the understanding of the nature of psychoanalysis and the possibility of dialogue between opposing understandings of it. It may also contribute to greater freedom of thought and expression which is essential to the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice.     

Constructs, operational definition, and operational analysis

We argue that a certain picture of the relationship between language and the world informed Meehl’s outlook on how science worked. That picture authorized talk about constructs and has led to construct proliferation and other problems. Operational analysis offers an alternative view and suggests that a major shortcoming of soft psychology is its lack of disciplined limits on acceptable verbal behavior.