An Examination of Modern Psychology Through Two Philosophies of Knowledge

Plato was one of the world’s greatest thinkers. The philosophy of knowledge that he formulated has dominated Western thought for about 2,400 years. This article will suggest that Einstein’s philosophy of knowledge, which includes Plato’s philosophy as a limited case, may help us better understand the fundamental problems in modern psychology.

     

Religious coping,drinking motivation,and sex

The relations for religious coping with types of drinking motivation were examined in 178 college students. Participants completed the Ways of Religious Coping Scale and the Drinking Motives Questionnaire. As expected, correlations suggested that amount of alcohol used as well as social and enhancement motives for using were negatively related to religious coping scores. These relations were more clearly evident among women than among men. Coping motivation for alcohol use and religious coping were not significantly correlated.     

Psychology and Modern Science

Modern science, since Galileo, has been founded upon the conviction that a scientific theory must be both empirical and logical. Modern cognitive psychologists, however, tend to oscillate between empiricism and logiC., as is characteristic of dualistic approaches, rather than to emphasize both criteria at the same time. Unfortunately, some of these cognitivists have argued that modern physics is completely in agreement with cognitive psychology. This argument has produced confusion in modern psychology.

     

Anti-foundation and self-reference

This note argues against Barwise and Etchemendy's claim that their semantics for self-reference requires use of Aczel's anti-foundational set theory, AFA, and that any alternative would involve us in complexities of considerable magnitude, ones irrelevant to the task at hand (The Liar, p. 35).Switching from ZF to AFA neither adds nor precludes any isomorphism types of sets. So it makes no difference to ordinary mathematics. I argue against the author's claim that a certain kind of naturalness nevertheless makes AFA preferable to ZF for their purposes. I cast their semantics in a natural, isomorphism invariant form with self-reference as a fixed point property for propositional operators. Independent of the particulars of any set theory, this form is somewhat simpler than theirs and easier to adapt to other theories of self-reference.I thank John Mayberry for discussions of axiomatics which inspired this paper. Jon Barwise's criticism of an earlier draft improved this one as did an anonymous referee.