Putnam,Searle, and externalism

Summary To sum up, then, both kinds of Putnam's arguments established externalism, though they suffer from several defects. Yet, I think Searle's discussion of these arguments contributes to our understanding of what makes externalism true, and forces us to accept a moderate version of externalism. Searle's own account of the TE story shows us, within a solipsistic outline, how two identical mental states can be directed towards different objects, and further, that the content-determination of indexical thoughts does not necessarily involve external factors. We are thus led to search elsewhere (i.e., not in the nature of indexical thoughts nor in the mere fact of there being identical thoughts with different intentionalities) for what makes the thoughts in question external. Searle formulates the thesis that intension determines extension as asserting that intension sets certain conditions that anything has to meet in order to fall under its extension. I showed that this is a trivial and implausible understanding of that thesis. Yet, it leads us to distinguish between an intension's setting conditions for falling under its extension and its fully determining such conditions, and thus to see in what sense externalism is true: in the sense that there are intensions that do not fully determine the conditions for falling under their extensions. Rather, they leave indeterminacies. This version of externalism is a moderate one, since though the intensions do not fully determine extensions, they, so to speak, determine their indeterminacies, by specifying the possible external facts that can complete the determination of extension. (The intensions, as I said, function like open sentences, and can be viewed as narrow contents.) So what's in the head plays a much more important role in determining content than Putnam takes it to play. Searle's pointing out that Hilary's concepts elm and beech are different also contributes to seeing this phenomenon: we realize that in that case the difference between the concepts is what is responsible for the fact that the completions of the extension-determinations are different. I think that this way of viewing the facts shows that the externalist turn is not a great revolution, and that with the help of the concept of narrow content we can accept it without abandoning the traditional views about the mind as the source of content, and without being embarrassed by the very idea of (realistic) belief-desire psychology.     

PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIETY IN ISRAEL*

The development of psychology in Israel is presented as a reflection of its society's aims and needs. Until the early 50′s, the major orientation of Israel's population was geared towards achieving national and ideological goals. Scientific as well as applied psychology was not perceived as being able to fulfill or even being in line with these goals. However, starting from the early 50′s, Israel's ideological orientation as well as its practical needs changed dramatically. Mass immigration, housing problems, ethnicity, urbanization, industrialization, the emergence of underprivileged groups and a more individualistically oriented ideology raised new problems and strongly required the services of psychology. This paper tries to show how different branches of psychology - scientific as well as applied ones - developed as a direct function of the country's social needs and problems and its search for appropriate ways of dealing with them.     

Exploring the mediating role of integrative self-knowledge in the relationship between mindfulness and well-being in the context of a mindfulness-based stress reduction program

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an effective program for improving well-being. A growing body of studies is exploring the mechanisms mediating its beneficial effects. Integrative self-knowledge (ISK) is the construct of focus in this study. The primary goal of the current study was to investigate the mediating role of ISK in the relationship between improved mindful observing (MO), non-judging inner experience (NJ), and well-being following an MBSR program with an Iranian sample. Participants (n = 118) enrolled in MBSR and completed depression, anxiety, stress (DASS), Bartone Symptoms Checklist (BSC), Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, and ISK scale before and after the program. Results showed significant reductions in BSC, DASS, and improvements in MO, NJ, and ISK at the end of the program. Mediation analyses revealed that changes in ISK significantly mediated the relationship between changes in MO and NJ and symptoms (MO indirect effect on DASS: β = 0.11, confidence interval [CI] [0.003, 0.29]; NJ indirect effect on DASS: β = 0.12, CI [−0.16, 0.45]; MO indirect effect on BSC: β = 0.08, CI [0.001, 0.27]; NJ indirect effect on BSC: β = 0.09, CI [0.01, 0.22]). Improvements in MO and NJ may provide a pathway to cultivating ISK in MBSR, which may lead to enhanced well-being.     

On the Very Idea of (Real) Content Derivation

Philosophia - According to an idea which is widespread among philosophers, linguistic entities derive their intentionality from the intentionality of mental entities by virtue of some relation...     

Salient Volunteering Behavior Increases Monetary Risk‐taking

Research finds that engaging in prosocial behavior has many positive psychological outcomes (e.g., enhanced well‐being, optimism, perceived control, and a boost in self‐concept), and research on monetary risk‐taking reveals these psychological outcomes are associated with increased risk‐taking. Merging these findings, we propose that when people's volunteering behavior is made salient in their minds, they take more monetary risks. Making research participants’ volunteering behavior salient by having them recall an act of prior volunteering (studies 1 and 3), choosing whether to volunteer (study 2), or choosing one of two volunteering activities (study 4), four experiments (and a fifth reported in the Appendix S2) reveal increased risk‐taking across several monetary‐risk outcomes (incentive‐compatible gambles, allocation of a windfall gain, and a behavioral risk‐taking measure involving escalating risk). Lastly, when the decision maker attributes a decision to volunteer to an external source, the effect of salient volunteering on monetary risk‐taking attenuates.     

The influence of positive affect on the components of expectancy motivation

The influence of positive affect on expectancy motivation was investigated in 2 studies. The results of Study 1 indicated that positive affect improved people's performance and affected their perceptions of expectancy and valence. In Study 1, in which outcomes depended on chance, positive affect did not influence people's perceptions of instrumentality. In Study 2, in which the link between performance and outcomes was specified, positive affect influenced all 3 components of expectancy motivation. Together, the results of Studies 1 and 2 indicated that positive affect interacts with task conditions in influencing motivation and that its influence on motivation occurs not through general effects, such as response bias or general activation, but rather through its influence on the cognitive processes involved in motivation.     

The Late Life Reconstruction of Selfhood Analyzed in Peter Hall's Film She's Been Away

The film She's Been Away tells the story of an old woman who had been locked in a mental asylum while a teenager, for willfully violating repressive sexual codes. Sixty years later her ward is closed and she moves in with her nephew and his wife. Faced with what appears to be a hopeless situation, she manages to forge a sense of a meaningful closure to a misspent life. Through narrative, story structure, and characterization the film throws into focus coping mechanisms and ego strategies deployed by a triple disadvantaged person (woman, old, and mad) in her ascent to a reconstructed selfhood. As the protagonist ties both ends of her life, and faces the abyss in between she makes genuine adaptive use of so-called regressive, late-life development assets (available to a lesser degree to elderly people in normal life circumstances), primarily the abolition of linear time. Through this abolition she makes reminiscing an actual reality while still maintaining a functional separation between the real and the remembered. Her portrayal is a valuable document for gerontologists as it explores, through artistic imagination and intuition, the workings of an aging mind in search for a meaningful sense of closure.     

Implicit memory bias for threat-relevant information in individuals with generalized social phobia

The authors used a noise judgment task to investigate implicit memory bias for threat in individuals with generalized social phobia (GSP). Participants first heard neutral sentences (e.g., "The manual tells you how to set up the tent.") and social-threat sentences (e.g., "The classmate asks you to go for drinks."). Implicit memory for these sentences was then tested by asking participants to rate the volume of noise accompanying the presentation of these "old" sentences intermixed with "new" sentences that had not been previously presented. Implicit memory for old sentences is revealed when participants rate the noise accompanying old sentences as less loud than the noise accompanying new sentences. Those with GSP demonstrated an implicit memory bias for social-threat sentences, whereas controls did not. This differential priming effect suggests that information about threat may be automatically accessed in GSP.