Unanswered Prayers: Religiosity and the God-Serving Bias

Two self-report experiments examined how religiosity affects attributions made for a target person’s death. Online adults (Study 1, N = 427) and undergraduate students (Study 2, N = 326) read about Chris who had a heart attack, used religious or health behaviors, and lived or died. Participants made attributions to Chris and God (both studies), and reported their emotions (Study 2). Participants made more attributions to Chris when he lived than when he died, but only when he used health behaviors. The highly religious made more attributions to God, but not when Chris used religious behaviors and died (the God-serving bias); they reported the most positive emotions when Chris lived after using religious behaviors (the Hallelujah effect). Directions for future research in terms of implicit religious beliefs and normative evaluations of religion are discussed.     

The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not events

It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not actions. It argues that Collingwood’s defence of the methodological autonomy of history vis-à-vis natural science is not based on a commitment to human exceptionalism, i.e. the exclusion of human beings and their doings from the rest of nature, but on the view that explanations which appeal to norms are different in kind from explanations which appeal to empirical regularities. Given the close relationship between the method and the subject matter of a form of inquiry, actions elude any attempt to explain them through the scientific method because the application of this method entails that what is thus explained is not an action but an event.     

The Intertwinement of Propositional and Doxastic Justification

One important distinction in the debate over the nature of epistemic justification is the one between propositional and doxastic justification. Roughly, while doxastic justification is a property of beliefs, propositional justification is a property of propositions. On a rather common view, which accounts for doxastic justification in terms of propositional justification plus the so-called ‘basing relation’, propositional justification is seen as the prior notion, and doxastic justification is explained in terms of it. According to the opposing view, the direction of explanation needs to be reversed, and doxastic justification should be seen as primary. I distinguish between two notions of priority, and I argue that they give different verdicts with respect to the issue of which notion of justification comes first. The lesson may be taken to be that propositional and doxastic justification are in a relation of intertwinement.     

Ships That Pass In The Night.

A major source of tension between Staddon's The new behaviorism and Baum's Review is that the former was written for a general audience but the latter evaluates it as a technical work. Be that as it may, the central issue—Skinner's conception of the role of theory in behavior analysis—is inadequately portrayed in both the book and the review. The two primary sources of difficulty arise from failures to honor Skinner's distinction between experimental analysis and interpretation and to appreciate Skinner's views on events that are not observable at the behavioral scale of measurement.     

Moving beyond the enduring dominance of positivism in psychological research: Implications for psychology in Australia

Almost since its inception, the dominant narrative of modern psychology has embraced positivism through its insistence that psychological science is objective, generalisable, and value free (or neutral). Consequently, quantitative research and, in particular, experimental designs, are privileged over other forms of enquiry, and other epistemologies, methodologies, and methods remain marginalised within the discipline. We argue that the enduring hegemony of positivism needs to be opposed to enable psychology to genuinely understand the antecedents of, and provide meaningful sustainable solutions for, complex human issues without being constrained by a narrow focus on method. We discuss the ways in which psychology in Australia can move towards embracing a constructionist epistemology that provides the framework for methodological pluralism. We provide a number of suggestions for change across the interrelated areas of accreditation, curriculum, the Australian Psychological Society, and research.     

大力促进心理学的理论研究

虽然心理学作为一门独立的学科已有100多年的历史,但是心理学一直缺乏带有“范式”特点的心理学理论。这导致了心理学的破碎和分裂。探讨心理学的“元”理论,大力促进心理学的理论研究,是心理学发展的当务之急。     

Belief Revision,Rational Choice and the Unity of Reason

Hans Rott has argued, most recently in his book Change, Choice and Inference, that certain formal correspondences between belief revision and rational choice have important philosophical implications, claiming that the former strongly indicate the unity of practical and theoretical reason as well as the primacy of practical reason. In this paper, I confront Rott's argument with three serious challenges. My conclusion is that, while Rott's work is indisputable as a formal achievement, the philosophical consequences he wants to draw are not forthcoming. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

时间知觉理论和实验范型

回顾了时间知觉界定上的纷争．在分段综合的框架下考察了时间知觉的内涵．并基于生物模型、认知模型和综合模型对时间知觉的理论解释进行了讨论,还分析了时间知觉的实验范型．进一步指出分段综合取向对时间知觉研究的重要意义。     

政治技能的实施效果及其理论解释

政治技能(Political skill)作为一种重要的社会能力, 是组织核心竞争力的关键, 近年来受到学者广泛关注。根据内容分析法(Content analysis)要求, 深入探讨分析了政治技能的实施效果及其理论解释, 总结出5种理论视角: 社会交换理论、社会影响理论、资源保存理论、社会认知理论和社会资本理论。未来研究应关注中国组织情境下政治技能的概念和测量、探索政治技能的诱因、基于团队层面政治技能的实施效果和基于资源保存理论视角的政治技能实施效果。     

Chinese Marxist Philosophy Since Reform and Opening-Up

Since reform and opening-up began in 1978, Chinese Marxist philosophy has undertaken the double mission of enhancing the emancipation of the mind in society and of realizing its own ideological emancipation. It has gone through an evolutionary process from “extensive discussion about the criterion of truth” to “reform of philosophical textbooks”; from the proposal of the philosophical conception of “practical materialism” to reflection on “modernity”; and from the carrying-out of dialogues among Chinese, Western, and Marxist philosophies to the exploration of “new forms of civilization.” Chinese Marxist philosophy has shifted its way of doing research with practical materialism as a core conception, and it changed such modes of thinking as the intuitive theory of reflection based on na?ve realism, the theory of linear causality based on mechanical determinism, and the reductionism of essence based on abstract substantialism. As a result, it has boosted changes that were already underway in Chinese philosophy, worldviews, theories of truth, conceptions of history, and views of development, and it has further endowed the discourse system of Marxist philosophy with laudable subjectivity and originality.