My Country,Right or Wrong: Education,Accumulated Democratic Experience,and Political Socialization of Blind Patriotism

Although educational attainment has been identified as a significant factor that reduces uncritical positive attachment to one's country (i.e., blind patriotism), little is known about whether the remedial effect of education on uncritical patriotism is universal across countries with different histories of democratic rule. This article examines the extent to which democracy stock (the accumulated amount of democratic traditions, legacies, and experiences consolidated over time) conditions the relationship between education and blind patriotism. Using international data from 33 countries, the article shows that the remedial effect of education is more pronounced in countries with larger stocks of democracy than in countries with higher levels of democracy (current or recent). The results imply that the political socialization of critical patriotism is a cumulative process in which citizens internalize their potentially democratic competencies (e.g., knowledge, skills, and dispositions) and develop a sense of national attachment based on critical reflection on government policy and practice (i.e., critical loyalty) over an extended period of time.     

Truth and democratic education

The connection of education to democracy is an issue of central importance to communities committed to liberty and justice. In her influential book Democratic Education Amy Gutmann addresses this connection. In doing so she takes up a position regarding democracies and the teaching of truth which is indefensible, and which removes any ban on manipulating citizens. Also indefensible is Gutmann's position concerning publicly-funded community colleges and universities. These she deems nonselective institutions; a mistake that obscures the unequal distribution of opportunities for democratically-required education. The outcome is to reveal Gutmann's analysis of democratic education and democratic participation to be, in important respects, inadequate.     

Aquinas and the Virtues of Hope: Theological and Democratic

A prominent political historian has recently identified unwarranted optimism and unwarranted pessimism as democracy's “dual dangers.” While this historical analysis highlights the difficulties that accompany democratic hope, our prevailing conceptual vocabulary obscures the resources needed to address them. This essay attempts to recover these resources by excavating insights from Thomas Aquinas, who supplies one of the most systematic accounts of hope in the history of religious and political thought. By appropriating the conceptual structure of Thomas's theological virtue of hope, this essay reconstructs a democratic virtue that perfects acts of hoping in fellow citizens to achieve democratic goods and thereby enables citizens to respond properly to difficulties that tempt presumption and despair.     

Between certainty and uncertainty--observations on psychoanalysis in Russia

'Diversity', the theme of our conference, carries a subversive sub-text in totalitarian societies. This is one of the themes presented as the current revival of psychoanalysis in the more democratic post-Communist Russia is explored. The history of psychoanalysis in Russia is summarized with a focus on its politicization, which led to initial interest in its theory (by way of a misapprehension of its tenets), and then to ultimate suppression of psychoanalytic thinking as an ideology deemed antagonistic to the totalitarian regime. In contrast, features of psychoanalysis and democracy are explored for their mutual affinities. The background of the resourceful new generation of analytic therapists is discussed, especially in regard to their experience of the parallel meanings of the word 'repression' (political, psychological). There is a persistence of some traits in patients and practitioners alike that are referable to past repression, such as the newness of verbal treatments, the inhibition of psychological curiosity, the ambivalent lure of certainty, and the pressure of authoritarian introjects. It is noted that psychoanalysis has its own history of a posture opposed to pluralism and diversity, which deepens the dialogue on the mutual engagement between psychoanalysis and the vicissitudes of its history in Russian culture.     

The Incoherence of the Patriotic State: A Critique of ‘Constitutional Patriotism’

Habermas proposes a new solution to the problematic relation between republican values and democracy. He asserts that a new model of social cohesion is needed and he suggests that the sense of community in a democratic society should be founded exclusively on the acceptance and support of a system of constitutionally established rules which are the logical result of the historical evolution of constitution-making. He argues that an account of the constitutional process which led to the formation of the modern republican state should provide the criteria for a rational set of norms which will exclude nationalism from the political arena. In this article, I point out the democratic hazards and the internal incoherence of Habermass alternative to the national state and I argue that a theoretical substitute should consider the existence of national identities as one of the aspects of modern pluralistic society.I should like to thank Zenon Bankowski, Bob Brecher, Emilios Christodoulidis, Alasdair Fay, Peter Fitzpatrick, Stefania Morandini, Rick Mohr and Res Publicas anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.     

Transitive responding in hooded crows requires linearly ordered stimuli

Eight crows were taught to discriminate overlapping pairs of visual stimuli (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-). For 4 birds, the stimuli were colored cards with a circle of the same color on the reverse side whose diameter decreased from A to E (ordered feedback group). These circles were made available for comparison to potentially help the crows order the stimuli along a physical dimension. For the other 4 birds, the circles corresponding to the colored cards had the same diameter (constant feedback group). In later testing, a novel choice pair (BD) was presented. Reinforcement history involving stimuli B and D was controlled so that the reinforcement/nonreinforcement ratios for the latter would be greater than for the former. If, during the BD test, the crows chose between stimuli according to these reinforcement/nonreinforcement ratios, then they should prefer D; if they chose according to the diameter of the feedback stimuli, then they should prefer B. In the ordered feedback group, the crows strongly preferred B over D; in the constant feedback group, the crows' choice did not differ significantly from chance. These results, plus simulations using associative models, suggest that the orderability of the postchoice feedback stimuli is important for crows' transitive responding.     

Spatial imagery of novel places based on visual scene transformation

The hippocampus is known to maintain memories of object-place associations that can produce a scene expectation at a novel viewpoint. To implement such capabilities, the memorized distances and directions of an object from the viewer at a fixed location should be integrated with the imaginary displacement to the new viewpoint. However, neural dynamics of such scene expectation at the novel viewpoint have not been discussed. In this study, we propose a method of coding novel places based on visual scene transformation as a component of the object-place memory in the hippocampus. In this coding, a novel place is represented by a transformed version of a viewer’s scene with imaginary displacement. When the places of individual objects are stored with the coding in the hippocampus, the object’s displacement at the imaginary viewpoint can be evaluated through the comparison of a transformed viewer’s scene with the stored scene. Results of computer experiments demonstrated that the coding successfully produced scene expectation of a three object arrangement at a novel viewpoint. Such the scene expectation was retained even without similarities between the imaginary scene and the real scene at the location, where the imaginary scenes only functioned as indices to denote the topographical relationship between object locations. The results suggest that the hippocampus uses the place coding based on scene transformation and implements the spatial imagery of object-place associations from the novel viewpoint.     

Epistemic Norms and Democracy: a Response to Talisse

John Rawls argued that democracy must be justifiable to all citizens; otherwise, a democratic society is oppressive to some. In A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy ( 2007 ), Robert B. Talisse attempts to meet the Rawlsian challenge by drawing from Charles S. Peirce's pragmatism. This article first briefly canvasses the argument of Talisse's book and then criticizes its key premise concerning (normative) reasons for belief by offering a competing reading of Peirce's “The Fixation of Belief” ( 1877 ). It then proceeds to argue that Talisse's argument faces a dilemma: his proposal of epistemic perfectionism either is substantive and can be reasonably disagreed about or is minimal but insufficient to ground a democratic society. Consequently, it suggests that the Rawlsian challenge can only be solved by abandoning Rawls's own notion of reasonableness, and that an interesting alternative notion of reasons can be derived from Peirce's “Fixation.”     

Normative Ethics after Pragmatic Naturalism

Philip Kitcher presents an ambitious account of pragmatic naturalism that incorporates an explanatory story of the emergence and development of ethics, a metaethical perspective on progress, and a normative stance for moral theorizing. This article contends that Kitcher's normative stance is incompatible with the explanatory and metaethical components of his project. Instead, pragmatic naturalists should endorse a normative ethics that is experimental, grounded in practice, and acutely aware of cognitive and informational limitations. In particular, the ethical project would benefit from endorsing empirical work on participatory democracy for the identification of mechanisms to guide us on deep moral conflicts.