MIGRANT DOMESTIC CAREWORKERS: Between the Public and the Private in Catholic Social Teaching

This essay argues that Catholic (magisterial) social teaching's division of ethics into public and private creates a structural lacuna which makes it almost impossible to envision a truly just situation for migrant domestic careworkers (MDCs) within the current horizon of Catholic social thought. Drawing on a variety of sociological studies, I conclude that it is easy for MDCs to “disappear” between two countries, two families, and, finally, two sets of ethical norms. If the magisterium genuinely wishes Catholic ethicists to address the plight of these migrant women, normative Catholic social teaching must pay more attention to household sociological realities and more fully absorb the feminist critique of the sharp line between the public and the private, between care and paid work.     

伊斯兰社会福利思想浅析

伊斯兰社会福利思想是在伊斯兰教的信仰体系下,用来指导团体和个人从事各种旨在改善和提高人民生活水平的社会福利实践的思想。这一思想如今仍然在很大程度上影响着穆斯林的福利实践。本文从救助性和发展性两个方面对伊斯兰教社会福利思想做了简单的探讨。     

The Development of Cognitive Reflection in China

Cognitive reflection is the tendency to override an intuitive response so as to engage in the reflection necessary to derive a correct response. Here, we examine the emergence of cognitive reflection in a culture that values nonanalytic thinking styles, Chinese culture. We administered a child-friendly version of the cognitive reflection test, the CRT-D, to 130 adults and 111 school-age children in China and compared performance on the CRT-D to several measures of rational thinking (belief bias syllogisms, base rate sensitivity, denominator neglect, and other-side thinking) and normative thinking dispositions (actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition). The CRT-D was a significant predictor of rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions in both children and adults, as previously found in American samples. Adults’ performance on the CRT-D correlated with their performance on the original CRT, and children's performance on the CRT-D predicted rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions even after adjusting for age. These results demonstrate that cognitive reflection, rational thinking, and normative thinking dispositions converge even in a culture that emphasizes holistic, nonanalytic reasoning.     

中西重商思想之源的跨文化阐释

15—17世纪，重商主义在西方一度盛行，极大改变了欧洲各国的经济、政治和文化形态。追溯其思想之源，最终必寻至古代希腊。在中国，虽然从来没有这一学派体系，但是重商思想在春秋时期却已经产生，战国时期则进一步发展，齐国堪称代表。本文将主要以齐国和古希腊为例，从跨文化的角度比较双方各自重商思想产生的条件、思想主张与实践结果，为我国当前的经济，文化建设提供有益的借鉴。     

The Evolution of Social Ethics: Using Economic History to Understand Economic Ethics

In the development of Roman Catholic social thought from the teachings of the scholastics to the modern social encyclicals, changes in normative economics reflect the transformation of an economic terrain from its feudal roots to the modern industrial economy. The preeminence accorded by the modern market to the allocative over the distributive function of price broke the convenient convergence of commutative and distributive justice in scholastic just price theory. Furthermore, the loss of custom, law, and usage in defining the boundaries of economic behavior led to a depersonalization of economic relationships that had previously provided effective informal means of protecting individual well-being. Hence, recent economic ethics has had to look for nonprice, nonmarket mechanisms for distributive justice. This is reflected, for example, in the shift in attitude from the medieval antipathy toward unions to the contemporary defense of organized labor on moral grounds.     

现代世界观中的意识及其哲学难题从《太玄》看量子计算数制问题的两难境遇

数制体系是描述计算过程的基础工具,传统的二进制体系在经典计算机发展中起着至关重要的作用,这是毫无疑问的。但面对新型的量子计算,如何建立与之相适应的数制体制,却成为一个疑难问题。本文主要从中国古代以《太玄》为代表的"三性"思想出发,对量子计算建立数制的两难境遇进行了分析,结果指出,量子计算在本质上与经典计算不同的根本差别是量子纠缠性,其刻画的不仅仅是物质不可分别的波粒二象本性,也同样刻画了逻辑不可描述的真假同显本性。这样一来,要建立量子计算数制描述体系,就必然落入这样一种两难境遇:要么借用经典数制体系来模拟量子计算过程的描述,但不可能真正把握量子纠缠性的本性;要么就根本找不到可以描述这种具有"和合性"特点的数制体系。     

Reliability in Dream Research: A Methodological Note

The coefficients of internal consistency and retest reliability had been rarely investigated within the methodology of dream content analysis. Analyzing a dream series of elderly, healthy persons obtained from weekly telephone interviews, the internal consistency of a series of 20 dreams and retests after 4 or 22 weeks, respectively, had been computed. The findings indicate that dream recall and dream length are quite stable, but dream characteristics such as bizarreness and emotional tone underlie large intraindividual fluctuations. In order to obtain reliable measures for these variables which will be important for correlational studies, including waking-life trait measures, one has to obtain as many dreams as possible (about 20) in a very short time period. Further research is needed to extend the present findings to diary dreams and laboratory dreams.     

What Does “Mind-Wandering” Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation

Although mind-wandering research is rapidly progressing, stark disagreements are emerging about what the term “mind-wandering” means. Four prominent views define mind-wandering as (a) task-unrelated thought, (b) stimulus-independent thought, (c) unintentional thought, or (d) dynamically unguided thought. Although theorists claim to capture the ordinary understanding of mind-wandering, no systematic studies have assessed these claims. Two large factorial studies present participants (N = 545) with vignettes that describe someone's thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to the four major accounts of mind-wandering. Dynamics explains between four and 40 times more variance in participants' mind-wandering judgments than other features. Our third study (N = 153) tests and supports a unique prediction of the dynamic framework—obsessive rumination contrasts with mind-wandering. Our final study (N = 277) used vignettes that resemble mind-wandering experiments. Dynamics had significant and large effects, while task-unrelatedness was nonsignificant. These results strongly suggest that the central feature of mind-wandering is its dynamics.     

PROCESS ECOLOGY: STEPPING STONES TO BIOSEMIOSIS

Many in science are disposed not to take biosemiotics seriously, dismissing it as too anthropomorphic. Furthermore, biosemiotic apologetics are cast in top‐down fashion, thereby adding to widespread skepticism. An effective response might be to approach biosemiotics from the bottom up, but the foundational assumptions that support Enlightenment science make that avenue impossible. Considerations from ecosystem studies reveal, however, that those conventional assumptions, although once possessing great utilitarian value, have come to impede deeper understanding of living systems because they implicitly depict the evolution of the universe backward. Ecological dynamics suggests instead a smaller set of countervailing postulates that allows evolution to play forward and sets the stage for tripartite causalities, signs, and interpreters—the key elements of biosemiosis—to emerge naturally out of the interaction of chance with configurations of autocatalytic processes. Biosemiosis thereby appears as a fully legitimate outgrowth of the new metaphysic and shows promise for becoming the supervenient focus of a deeper perspective on the phenomenon of life.     

The tendency of unconscious thought toward global processing style

This study explored whether unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally. In three experiments, a Navon task was used to activate global or local processing styles. Findings showed that in the unconscious-thought groups, those performing the local Navon task presented a poorer decision-making performance when compared to those performing the global Navon task (Experiment 1); participants reported that their judgments were made based on partial attributes (Experiment 2), and evaluated a target individual mainly based on information consistent with stereotypes (Experiment 3). These results showed that when presented with distracter tasks, conscious thought activates local processing, which impairs its ability to process information globally. However, this impairment would not happen if global processing were activated instead. This study provides support to the idea that unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally.