How stable is common sense psychology and can it be transcended? Reply to Valsiner

Common sense is defined as the set of implications that all members of a given culture take for granted. The stability of common sense as a necessary condition for the maintenance of human relationships and societies is emphasized. Changes may and do occur. However, they can only take place in a very slow and piecemeal fashion in order to maintain intelligibility at all times. Transcendence of common sense by scientific psychology is difficult to envisage, since the phenomena studied are structured by that same common sense, and since communication about them also presupposes common sense. llanscendence through direct negation literally makes no sense.     

人类意識的起源和发展

人类意識的起源和发展問題在現代科学中占有重要的地位,哲学的基本問題是意識对存在的关系問題,它如何解决,是唯物主义和唯心主义的根本分界綫。唯物主义者认为物貭是第一性的;意識是第二性的,是物貭长期发展的結果,是派生的。因此,研究人类意識的起源和发展,对馬克思主义哲学是有着重大意义的。 人类意識的起源和发展問題,是心理学的基本理論,它涉及到广泛的科学领域,只有在馬克思主义指导下,心理学联合人类学、考古学、語言学、历史学以及其它許多学科,进行綜合性的研究才能得到解决。现代科学对于这个問題已经积累了相当重要的資料和科学論据。     

Non-empirical and empirical components in the hypotheses of five social psychological experiments

Five studies published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and selected without advance knowledge of their contents, were analyzed with respect to the epistemic and modal status of their hypotheses. It was found that the general hypotheses were a priori and noncontingent (necessarily true), whereas the local auxiliary hypotheses were empirical and contingent. Hence, the data were only relevant for the latter. It is conjectured that such pseudoempirical studies may abound in contemporary psychology. They remain undiscovered because researchers unreflectively believe that all propositions that can be related to data are empirical and that psychological terms need not be defined. Only when terms are defined and presuppositions (axioms) are stated, can one determine the epistemic and modal status of a given proposition, and, hence, whether or not a study is pseudoempirical.     

The logic of psychological treatment

Empirical studies of technical and therapist variables in treatment cannot yield valid generalizations because of the uniqueness of each case. Professional practice must, instead, be seen as an application of a psychological "calculus", which follows logically from definitions of given concepts. Seven necessary rules are suggested for psychological treatment: 1. Regard the client-in-her/his-surroundings-system (cs-system) as your unit of reference and get to know this system. 2. Tolerate initial ambiguity and do not generalize from other persons in other life situations. 3. In matters relevant for treatment, do not objectivize, i.e. pronounce something to be true or false, good or bad, right or wrong, but always subjectivize, i.e. emphasize that FOR P something is true or false, etc. 4. Maintain your independence relative to the cs-system you work with. 5. Understand the persons in the cs-system. 6. Respect the persons in the cs-system. 7. Care for the persons in the cs-system.     

The psychologic of forgiving

Psychologic is an attempt to systematize the commonsense psychology embedded in ordinary language. In this system, the concepts of respect, anger, and guilt, are directly linked, since messages of disrespect, and only those, create anger in the receiver and guilt in the sender. This paper deals with the process of forgiving, whereby respect is reaffirmed and anger and guilt are alleviated. Forgiving depends on clarification of misunderstanding as well as on apology and atonement. The distinction between forgiving others and forgiving oneself is treated. It is concluded that what goes on inside persons and between persons has the same structure.     

Limitations of Skinner's concept of an 'operant': A theoretical note

It is argued that even if an operant can be defined formally as the "interrelationships among S^D , R , and S ^rein", specific operants require delimitations of emitted behaviour and stimuli in terms of specific sets of contingencies of reinforcement. It is argued that the class membership of operant responses can be determined neither by reference to S^D , response topography, S^R , nor the supposed interrelationships among these, the contingencies of reinforcement. Functional analysis seems to require knowledge rejected by radical behaviourists. It is argued that operant behaviouristic analyses of human behaviour presuppose a common-sense understanding of actions, which–until explicated and shown to be reducible to a technichal behavioural language–must be taken as the point of departure in these analyses.