Teaching self-modification in an adjustment course

This article reports a project in which students in a college level adjustment course were taught to apply a model of behavior change in order to gain greater control over their own behavior. Pilot data suggest that students found the experience worthwhile, that many of them learned to make substantial changes in their behavior, and that some of them maintained a high degree of transfer to new problems that confronted them after the class had ended. The approach appears to have a great deal of potential for those who would like to extend their counseling beyond the confines of their offices and who would like to combine their counseling and teaching interests.     

Accidentally Factive Mental States

Knowledge is standardly taken to be belief that is both true and justified (and perhaps meets other conditions as well). Timothy Williamson rejects the standard epistemology for its inability to solve the Gettier problem. the moral of this failure, he argues, is that knowledge does not factor into a combination that includes a mental state (belief) and an external condition (truth), but is itself a type of mental state. Knowledge is, according to his preferred account, the most general factive mental state. I argue, however, that Gettier cases pose a serious problem for Williamson's epistemology: in these cases, the subject may have a factive mental state that fails to be cognitive. Hence, knowledge cannot be the most general factive mental state.