On misunderstanding science

Abstract

The paper examines the differences between Kuhn's account, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, of the sciences as necessarily communal activities with internally set standards of procedure and achievement, and that view of the sciences which calls itself ‘Scientific Realism’ and regards them as striving toward, and perhaps asymptotically approaching, some external and objective reality that bestows truth or falsity on scientific theories.

The main argument turns on Poincaré's demonstration that Newton's Second Law (f = ma) is not a testable, provable proposition with a truth value, but something that is simply adopted. It is adopted in the light of experience, certainly, but there is no logical necessity in the adoption. My suggestion is that it is a ‘way of looking’ and ‘a method of analysis’ and that the necessity of its adoption by any individual lies in its being a necessary condition of entry into the scientific community. That community itself adopts ways of looking or methods of analysis for their fruitfulness in dealing with old problems and defining new ones.

Incoherences in the ‘approach’ account of scientific progress are looked at, and the individualistic assumptions that motivate it. These require the sciences to be presented as the source and basis of agreement and community amongst separated individuals. This picture and its requirement inverts reality as well as Kuhn's account, which makes community and agreement the starting point. The notion of reality as a transcendental convergence point becomes redundant.

The old problem of the incommensurability of paradigms is discussed by relating them to the notions of ways of looking and methods of analysis. These may be incompatible in that one cannot look at things in two different ways at once, but at the same time they cannot be measured on any common scale.     

Educating Evolutionary Co-Leadership to Embody a Radically New Development Paradigm

The purpose here is to explore why and how to develop an emerging form of integral leadership—called evolutionary co-leadership—that is responsibly dedicated to the co-evolution of life and humanity on Planet Earth. After offering some fresh distinctions about leadership, this article calls for a shift to a radically new development paradigm, and identifies key qualities and practices of evolutionary co-leadership. It then shares some views on the multiplying effects of an integral approach to co-leadership development—in the context of transforming education—and concludes with some avenues to disseminate this emerging leadership form, mainly to deal constructively with what Barbara Marx Hubbard (2001) calls the current “birthing pains” of a new civilization.     

The effect of limited attention and delay on negative arousing false memories

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that, in comparison to neutral stimuli, false memories for high arousing negative stimuli are greater after very fast presentation and limited attention at study. However, full compared to limited attention conditions still produce comparably more false memories for all stimuli types. Research has also shown that emotional stimuli benefit from a period of consolidation. What effect would such consolidation have on false memory formation even when attention is limited at study? The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of fast presentation on false memory production for negatively-arousing and neutral items over time using the DRM paradigm. Sixty-eight participants studied Negative and neutral DRM lists with fast or slow presentation conditions. Half completed a recognition test immediately and half completed a recognition test after one-week. Results revealed that, for fast presentation, negative critical lures increased after one week and were comparable to negative critical lures in the slow presentation encoding conditions. Neutral critical lures in the fast presentation condition did not change and remained lower compared to the slow presentation condition. These findings are the first demonstration that arousing negative false memories can increase over time when attention at encoding is limited.     

Emotional and non-emotional memories are suppressible under direct suppression instructions

Research on retrieval suppression has produced varying results concerning whether negatively valenced memories are more or less suppressible than neutral memories. This variability may arise if, across studies, participants adopt different approaches to memory control. Cognitive and neurobiological research points to two mechanisms that achieve retrieval suppression: thought-substitution and direct suppression (Benoit & Anderson, 2012; Bergström, de Fockert, & Richardson-Klavehn, 2009). Using the Think/No-think paradigm, this study examined whether participants can inhibit neutral and negatively valenced memories, using a uniform direct suppression strategy. Importantly, when strategy was controlled, negative and neutral items were comparably inhibited. Participants reported high compliance with direct suppression instructions, and success at controlling awareness predicted forgetting. These findings provide the first evidence that direct suppression can impair negatively valenced events, and suggest that variability in forgetting negative memories in prior studies is unlikely to arise from difficulty using direct suppression to control emotionally negative experiences.     

When emotion does and does not impair performance: A Garner theory of the emotional Stroop effect

It takes people longer to name the ink colour of emotion or threat words than that of neutral words, the emotional Stroop effect (ESE). In three experiments with normal and patient populations, we show that the ESE is a special case of a generic attention model and effect entailed in Garner's speeded classification paradigm. Guided by the Garner model we demonstrate that task-irrelevant dimensions that differ in salience can produce the ESE and mimic it with neutral stimuli. When each word appears in a constant colour, as mandated in the correlation condition of the Garner design, the ESE is eliminated. This important result is consistent with the attention account of the ESE. We conclude that when emotion stimuli appear in a random fashion they interfere with task performance. However, when emotion stimuli are correlated with features of the ongoing task they help task performance not least due to their extreme salience.     

Gaze direction and facial expressions exert combined but different effects on attentional resources

Gaze direction and facial expressions are critical components of face processing and have been shown to influence attention deployment. We investigated whether gaze direction (direct vs. averted) combined with a neutral or angry expression modulates the deployment of attentional resources over time. In a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm participants had to decide the gender of a neutral or an angry target face with direct or averted gaze (T1) and then to judge the orientation of a target picture of a landscape (T2), following the face at different time intervals. Results showed no attentional blink effect (i.e., no deterioration in T2 accuracy) when T1 was an angry face with direct gaze, whereas it was present for angry faces with averted gaze or neutral faces with either averted or direct gaze. These findings are consistent with appraisal theories and are discussed against the background of automatic processing of threat stimuli.     

Past decisions do affect future choices: An experimental demonstration

This paper demonstrates experimentally that the mere fact that an alternative was chosen in the past increases the likelihood that it will be re-chosen in the future, when new alternatives are being offered. The experimental design consists of a new variation of the free-choice paradigm that is immune to Chen and Risen’s (2010) criticism of how results have been interpreted in previous studies of post-decision effects. An additional experiment indicates that once participants have chosen a particular alternative they view its characteristics more positively. I suggest that the new design can be used to study various aspects of the effect of past decisions on future ones. In the present paper, I apply it to show that the allocation of limited resources among various uses may be biased in favor of a particular use if it was preferred to another in a previous situation.     

Voices of African Traditional Healers: Cultural Context and Implications for the Practice of Counselling in Sub-Saharan Africa

The healing paradigm implicit in many sub-Saharan African cultures is embedded in African cosmology, and thus the recognition of this is essential for understanding Traditional African Healing practices and implementing collaborative counselling practices. To this end, this article focuses on the cultural importance, or voice, of traditional healers in sub-Saharan Africa. The current article uses an ethnographic approach to analyse systematically the cultural context of indigenous healing practices in sub-Saharan Africa. The anthropological importance of Traditional Healing practitioners, the context of healing, and the changing legal and ethical status of Traditional Healers are addressed as pivotal in furthering the development of this crucial, yet under utilized resource. The authors propose that such cultural understanding is highly relevant to the work of professional counselors.     

Dibs: In search of self

Abstract

Some ten years ago, while I was training towards ordination as a minister in the Church of England, close friends in the village where I lived took me to a talk given by Michael Jacobs to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of CCC, the Cambridgeshire Consultancy in Counselling, on whose training course my friends, Jenny and David, were then studying.     

Counterfactual reasoning and moral emotion attribution

Studies in the happy victimizer paradigm have shown that preschool children attribute positive emotions to a norm violator whereas older elementary-school children tend to attribute negative emotions. The current research explored the possibility that children's counterfactual reasoning ability (i.e., their capacity to imagine alternatives to reality) can explain this age difference in moral emotion attribution. In Study 1, 100 4- and 8-year-old children attributed significantly more negative emotions to victimizers in a counterfactual-prime condition, in which an alternative course of action was presented before the emotion attribution, than in a no-prime condition, where no counterfactual prompt was given. Counterfactual reasoning ability significantly predicted negative emotion attribution in the no-prime condition. In Study 2, the counterfactual reasoning of 143 4- and 8-year-old children significantly predicted negative emotion attribution to the victimizer. When controlling for counterfactual reasoning, focusing on the victim of a violation did not affect emotion attribution to the violator.