This paper provides an analysis of the ideas of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead with regards the relationship between experience, meaning, language and thinking. It discusses how experience, meaning, language and thinking are based on the creative and constructive actions of individuals. Unlike what is the case in so-called radical constructivism, it is argued that the actions of the individual should be understood in a transactional way. The paper shows the implication of a transactional constructivism for education, arguing that (...) education is the medium in which the creative and constructive actions of individuals come together in a social environment. (shrink)

The study explored the role of moral identity in the civic engagement of youth through ethical ideology. A total of 217 individuals comprising of 104 girls and 113 boys completed three scales, namely, moral identity scale, ethics position questionnaire and civic engagement scale.The results showed that moral identity internalization significantly predicted civic engagement attitude and moral identity symbolization significantly predicted civic engagement behaviour. Furthermore, idealism partially mediated the relationship between moral identity and civic engagement.

Numerical simulations have come to be widely used in scientific work. Like experiments, simulations generate large quantities of numbers that require analysis and constant concern with uncertainty and error. How do simulationists convince themselves, and others, about the credibility of output? The present analysis reconstructs the perspectives related to performing numerical simulations, in general, and the situations in which simulationists deal with uncertain output, in particular. Starting from a distinction between idealized and realistic simulations, the paper presents the principal methods (...) of evaluation in relation to these practices and how different audiences expect different methods. One major challenge in interpreting output data is to distinguish between “real” and “numerical” effects. Within the practice of idealized simulations, simulationists hold the underlying model accountable for results that manifest “real” effects, but because “numerical” and “real” effects cannot be distinguished on the basis of what they derive from, attempted causal explanations are rather justifications for their conclusions. At the same time, simulationists’ explanations are part and parcel of their contradictory perspectives, according to which they believe in simulations largely due to the underlying model, while painfully recognizing everything they have to add to make computations doable on the basis of this model. (shrink)

This paper explores the question concerning the relationship between basic and higher layers of experience and self-experience. The latter distinction implicitly presupposes the idea of a univocal foundation. After explaining the formal ontological law of foundation, an attempt is made to clarify how the idea of foundation may be suitable to understand the relationship among moments, or layers, of self-experience. To this aim, the phenomenological descriptions of self- and world-experience in dementia and schizophrenia are compared. The comparison between these two, (...) in many ways radically different, pathologies allows us to highlight both the potentialities and the limits of resorting to the foundational relationship for the description of lived experience. Taking the challenges coming from the description of dementia and schizophrenia into serious consideration, the meaning of the “stratified” account of self-experience will be eventually reassessed, and a way to complement the idea of foundation among layers will be proposed. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to motivate and outline a dialogical perspective on agency that accommodates centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in current cultural theories of agency. To complement approaches that assume a high degree of integration and clarity, we emphasise the diversity of agency as it is experienced in the open-ended dialogical relationship with a particular other. While these former approaches to agency provide us with the means to examine the influence of social processes such as division of labour (...) and reproduction of community, they tend to underplay the importance of agency as it is embodied and experienced in the lives of particular people. To reflect on this aspect of agency, we will draw extensively on Bakhtin's work, which crosses boundaries between philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, and which is concerned to understand what is personal in activity. In terms of agency, his work draws our attention to the sense of responsibility and potentiality that imbues our dialogues with particular others, the aesthetics and ethics involved in dialoguing with the other, and the sense of dilemmatic choice and intonation that is involved in our dialogue with the other. (shrink)

I here explore the educational potential of cinema and TV-series through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. To illustrate, I read the Norwegian web-based TV-series Skam, which reached out to millions of Nordic teens by a broad distribution, easy access and speaking a language young people could relate to. The series portrays the many faces and ambiguities of shame and shaming embedded in Nordic youth culture. In bringing the question of the pedagogy of cinema and TV-series to the (...) forefront, I here read Skam on three analytical levels. First, to explore the TV-series capability to captivate the viewers through a doubling of the real. Second, to examine Badiou’s idea of cinema as an ontological art, revolving around the question of the relationship between being and appearing. Third, I read Skam analytically, to consider Badiou’s claim that cinema is a democratic emblem. In sum, what may be the series’ potential for shaping the viewers’ ethical–political awareness? (shrink)

Philosophy is a radical inquiry whose task is to interrogate the fundamental assumptions of some given activity, discipline, or set of beliefs. In doing so, philosophical inquiry must attempt to delineate a problem and to develop a method for resolving that problem. However, to be true to its intention, philosophy must be able to examine not only the object of its inquiry but also its own method of interrogation. To accomplish this task, philosophical inquiry must be able to create a (...) distance not only from the assumptions under investigation but also from its own assumptions, which is to say, that it must be able to raise questions about its own method. This self-reflexivity requires that any given philosophical investigation must be examined from an alternative vantage point. Since the assumptions which inform the inquiry are deeply imbedded within a given culture, immanent critique is insufficient. The only way to step outside the boundaries of these cultural presuppositions is to reflect on the given problem from the vantage point of another culture's philosophical tradition. Thus, I argue that philosophical inquiry is unable to go beyond certain limits without being cross-cultural philosophy. I illustrate the way in which cross-cultural philosophy does this with respect to the problem of the self by placing the Western philosophical approach to this problem in dialogue with the Indian Hindu-Buddhist narrative. (shrink)

This paper reports on a micro-ethnography of social interaction in an urban plaza in Colombia, focusing on the plaza’s role as an arena for the acquisition of interaction skills. We investigate how children of different ages initiate and sustain interactions with same-age and older peers and the efforts they make to be recognized and ‘visible’. We interpret our data in light of three theories of socialization: Corsaro’s conception of childhood as “interpretive reproduction”, Vygotsky’s model of the “zone of proximal development”, (...) and the “structural approach” to social cognition and development. While a social form like the plaza, which is collectively enacted by members of all age groups of the local community, provides children with an extraordinarily rich array of opportunities to develop social communication skills by interacting with older and younger peers, our analysis also demonstrates that children, as they are building zones of proximal development for themselves, play a central role in assembling, integrating, and sustaining the neighborhood as a face-to-face society. In this fashion, the paper illustrates how the micro-analysis of social interaction can contribute to the analysis of social ‘macro’ forms. (shrink)

People often talk to others about their personal past. These discussions are inherently selective. Selective retrieval of memories in the course of a conversation may induce forgetting of unmentioned but related memories for both speakers and listeners (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). Cuc et al. (2007) defined the forgetting on the part of the speaker as within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WI-RIF) and the forgetting on the part of the listener as socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF). However, if the forgetting associated with (...) WI-RIF and SS-RIF is to be taken seriously as a mechanism that shapes both individual and shared memories, this mechanism must be demonstrated with meaningful material and in ecologically valid groups. In our first 2 experiments we extended SS-RIF from unemotional, experimenter-contrived material to the emotional and unemotional autobiographical memories of strangers (Experiment 1) and intimate couples (Experiment 2) when merely overhearing the speaker selectively practice memories. We then extended these results to the context of a free-flowing conversation (Experiments 3 and 4). In all 4 experiments we found WI-RIF and SS-RIF regardless of the emotionalvalence or individual ownership of the memories. We discuss our findings in terms of the role of conversational silence in shaping both our personal and shared pasts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Whether at the executive or the line-management levels, businesspeople face moral decisions that cannot be easily resolved with reference to a shared ethos, whether because of diversity of ethea in the organization or its environment, or because the organization's ethos is inadequate for the problem at hand. These decisions are made more common by the changing norms of a pluralistic business environment, and require collective moral deliberation to be adequately resolved. Discourse ethics ideally characterizes the form of valid collective moral (...) deliberation. I argue that accommodation for the limitations of actual discourse makes discourse ethics, conceived in terms of the rules of practical discourse, practical for realizing improvements in the openness and validity of moral decision-making over states in which these rules are flagrantly violated. These rules have normative implications at the organizational level for the integrity approach to corporate ethics programs, and at the individual level for ethical leadership. (shrink)

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, as (...) based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (1986). Proceeding from this basis, aspects of a Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care can be defined. (shrink)

Certification is a crucial part of the organic farming system to protect the integrity of the whole organic sector. Process-oriented on-site auditing by skilled inspectors is the central element of the certification procedure to protect the organic sector against fraud. However, little is known about the role of the inspectors in the certification scheme. In recent years, the requirements and challenges for the organic certification system have changed significantly. The aim of the present study is to get insights into strategies (...) and action patterns used by organic inspectors and thus to better understand their behaviour. Due to the exploratory character of the study, a qualitative approach was chosen. Twenty narrative expert interviews with organic inspectors were conducted. The evaluation was carried out with the narration analysis, which was basis for a typology analysis. The results of the study show that all organic inspectors develop strategies and behavioural patterns, which can be structured in two levels: an interpersonal and a professional level. On the interpersonal level, the results indicate that the inspectors’ behaviour patterns lie between goodwill and demonstration of power. At the professional level, the organic inspectors work with a risk or a checklist-oriented control approach. A risk-oriented control is characterised by the intrinsic motivation of the organic inspector to maintain the integrity of the organic sector. Risk-oriented inspectors set a control focus on the detection of fraud. The aspect of personal ethical involvement and interpersonal actions in control systems should be included when considering improvements in the organic sector. (shrink)

This paper is an account of the co-construction of categorical identity and personal identity among human beings. As people recognize themselves within a socially sanctioned categorical scheme, they reproduce that scheme, and hence institutional and personal reflexivity occur as a joint movement that, at the same time, can be seen as an exercise in social control. The inspirations for this account are lan Hacking's view about the distinctiveness of social kinds from natural kinds, and Dan Sperber's idea about cultural communication (...) as a form of social epidemiology. (shrink)

Social science requires a dual ontology: one for the physical realm, and one for the symbolic realm of meaning. Much research produced in social science remains based in an old paradigm, which entirely neglects the symbolic realm. While social scientists attempting to forge a new paradigm have embraced a discursive approach, this approach lacks a coherent framework that can be systematically applied in the analysis of meaning. This paper presents the positioning diamond as a framework that can be employed in (...) discourse analysis across social science disciplines. The four facets of the diamond—storylines, identities, rights and duties, and the social force of acts—can be analyzed at three levels of discourse: the content, narrator-interlocutor, and ideological levels. The framework can be employed to provide explanations of most types of human thought and action. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility that the human mind underwent substantial changes in recent history. Assuming that consciousness is a substantial trait of the mind, the paper focuses on the suggestion made by Julian Jaynes that the Mycenean Greeks had a "bicameral" mind instead of a conscious one. The suggestion is commonly dismissed as patently absurd, for instance by critics such as Ned Block. A closer examination of the intuitions involved, considered from different theoretical angles , reveals that the idea (...) of 'Greek zombies' should be taken more seriously than is commonly assumed. (shrink)

Wittgenstein is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious going on inside people's heads, but with us simply going on with each other; that is, with us being able to inter-relate our everyday, bodily activities in unproblematic ways in with those of others, in practice. Learning to communicate with clear and unequivocal meanings; to send messages; to fully understand each other; to be able to reach out, so to speak, from within language-game entwined forms of life, and to talk in theoretical (...) terms of the contacts one has made., as an individual, with what is out there; and so on — all these abilities are, or can be, later developments. Wittgenstein's investigations into our pre-individual, pre-theoretical, embodied, compulsive activities are utterly revolutionary. They open up a vast new realm for empirical study to do with the detailed and subtle nature of the bodily activities in the background to everything that we do. The relational character of such pre-theoretical, Ur-linguistic, spontaneous bodily activities—and the way in which they display us as seeing connections from within a synopsis of trivialities — is explored through the paradigm of currently fashionable 3–13 random dot autostereograms. (shrink)

Feeling that they must aim for certainty in their claims, each side presents its version of reality, monologically, simply for acceptance or rejection by the other. In this form of argumentation, one individualistically formulated, systematic, finished version is pitted (in an essentially Neo-Darwinian struggle) against another. By its very nature, such a form of rational argumentation prevents the construction of a shared version of things; it is not dialogical. In attempting to recover what has been rendered ’rationally-invisible‘ by our modern (...) modes of (monological) reasoning, I first explore the "structures of passion and feeling" (Raymond Williams) embodied in the ways in which people in a community interrelate themselves. Attention to such structures illuminates the nature of argument in a novel, dialogical, light: those who share in such structures do not share in a system of foundational principles or a logical framework, but in a "living tradition" (MacIntyre) or "living ideology" (Billig et al.). Bakhtin‘s concept of the utterance is then explored as the basic unit for understand dialogical communication and argument within such living traditions. (shrink)

As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate their inadequacies (...) in a clear and forceful manner. However, within most of our forms of life, we have a first-person right to express how our individual circumstances seem to us. And by the use of special forms of poetic, gestural talk—talk that can originate new language-games—we can offer to make our own ‘inner lives’ public. In this paper, I want to claim that this is just what Wittgenstein is attempting to do in his later philosophy: by use of the self-same methods that anyone might use to express aspects of their own world picture, he is offering us his attempts to make the background ‘landscape’ of our lives more visible to us. These methods are explored below. (shrink)

I criticize Carpendale and Lewis's attempt to produce a Wittgensteinian theory, as an alternative to work in the “theory of mind” tradition, not because I disagree with it as theory, but because Wittgenstein would be critical of any attempt to make such a use of his work. Theories are concerned with discovering rules, principles, of lawful regularities hidden behind appearances. Wittgenstein's whole latter philosophy is inimical to such an aim. His concern is not with theories but with descriptions—which can be (...) explanatory, but in a relational or orientational rather than a causal fashion. Below, I give some initial examples to show what Wittgensteinian investigations in developmental psychology might look like. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara ('betweenness') in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as 'Critical Buddhism'. The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from 'topical' or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) 'critical' thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of 'reason' vs 'intuition' in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison (...) of Watsuji's 'ontological quest' with that of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Watsuji's primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an 'ontology of social existence' undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the 'return' of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism. (shrink)

During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the ‘body pedagogics’ of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific ‘ways of life’. Focused on practical issues associated with ‘knowing how’ to operate within specific cultures, however, body pedagogic analyses have been less effective at accounting for the incarnation of (...) cultural values. Addressing this limitation, with reference to the radically diverse norms involved historically and contemporarily in ‘vélo worlds’, I develop Dewey’s pragmatist transactionalism by arguing that the social, material and intellectual processes involved in learning physical techniques inevitably entail a concurrent entanglement with, and development of, values. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено аналізу становлення феноменологічної соціології як синтезу класичної феноменології та елементів методології символічного інтеракціонізму – на прикладі розгляду проблеми пошуку адекватного методологічного підходу до дослідження соціальної ідентичності. Зроблено припущення, що соціальна ідентичність, відповідно до логіки феноменологічної соціології Альфреда Шюца, закріплюється при переході від одних «Ми-зв’язків» до інших «Ми-зв’язків» зі збереженням наступності життєсвіту. Цю ситуацію Пітер Бергер і Томас Лукман назвуть переходом до інституалізації у процесі кристалізації соціальних зв’язків, як основним шляхом вторинної соціалізації. Логіка становлення методології феноменологічної соціології у дослідженні (...) соціальної ідентичності підводить до необхідності аналізу цієї ідентичності засобами інституційного аналізу. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative to classical hermeneutics, which focuses on discursive products and grasps meaning as the play of difference between linguistic signs. Pragmatist hermeneutics reconstructs meaning through an indefinite triangulation, which brings symbols, icons, and indices to bear on each other and considers a meaningful occasion as an embodied semiotic process. To illuminate the word-body-action nexus, the discussion identifies three basic types of signifying media: (1) the symbolic-discursive, (2) the somatic-affective, and (3) the behavioral-performative, each one marked by (...) a special relationship between signs and their objects. An argument is made that the tension between various type-signifying media is unavoidable, that the pragmatic-discursive misalignment is an ontological condition, and that bridging the gap between our discursive, affective, and behavioral outputs is at the heart of ethical life. (shrink)

Abstract:Moral imagination is a reasoning process thought to counter the organizational factors that corrupt ethical judgment. We describe the psychology of moral imagination as composed of the four decision processes identified by Rest (1986), i.e., moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral intention, and moral behavior. We examine each process in depth, distilling extant psychological research and indicating organizational implications. The conclusion offers suggestions for future research.The majority of men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others—terribly objective sometimes—but the real (...) task is in fact to be objective toward one’s self and subjective toward all others. (shrink)

This article identifies and explores the realm of ‘social nothingness’: objects, people, events and places that do not empirically exist, yet are experienced as subjectively meaningful. Taking a phenomenological approach, I investigate how people perceive, imagine and reflect upon the meanings of unlived experience: whatever is significantly not present, never appeared or cannot happen to them. These ‘negative symbolic social objects’ include no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places: for example, rejected roles, unpursued careers or absent people. Reversing some key concepts (...) from phenomenology, I examine the process of ‘negative noesis’ in three aspects. ‘Negative intentionality’ describes people’s motivational stance towards absent things, such as feelings of missing, wishing, haunting, avoidance or surrender. ‘Negative embodiment’ is the corporeal grounding of negational acts, through experiences of impairment, incapacity, severance, disturbance and decline. ‘Negative temporality’ describes the recognition of past or future impossible selves and their place within biographical identity stories. (shrink)

Although it is conceded that distinct knowledge domains do presentparticular problems of coming to know, in thispaper it is argued that it is possible to construct a domain independent modelof the processes of coming to know, one inwhich observers share understandings and do soin agreed ways. The model in question is partof the conversation theory of Gordon Pask. CT, as a theory of theory construction andcommunication, has particular relevance forfoundational issues in science and scienceeducation. CT explicitly propounds a ``radicalconstructivist'' epistemology. (...) A briefaccount is given of the main tenets of RC andCT's place in that tradition and the traditionsof cybernetics. The paper presents a briefnon-technical account of the main concepts ofCT including elaborations by Laurillard andHarri-Augstein and Thomas. As part of CT, Pask also elaborated a methodology – knowledgeand task analysis – for analysing the structureof different knowledge domains; thismethodology is sketched in outline. (shrink)

This article criticizes Bourdieu's and Giddens's overintellectualizing accounts of human activity on the basis of Wittgenstein's insights into practical under standing. Part 1 describes these two theorists' conceptions of a homology between the organization of practices (spatial-temporal manifolds of action) and the governance of individual actions. Part 2 draws on Wittgenstein's discussions of linguistic definition and following a rule to criticize these conceptions for ascribing content to the practical understanding they claim governs action. Part 3 then suggests an alternative, Wittgensteinian (...) account of the homology between practices and actions that avoids this pitfall. (shrink)

The human adventure in education is one of imperfect expression, punctuated by moments of insight. Education cultivates these epiphanies and nurtures their possible continuation. But even without major or minor insights, education cultivates the appreciation of the good, the beautiful, and the true. An experimentalist's sensibility lies amid the humanist's grasp of the myriad ways of trying to understand our existence. To bridge discourse is to appreciate the languages of other cultures, which reveal the nuances of life and experience.

The terms ‘interactivity’ and ‘interactive media’ became significant buzzwords during the late 1980s and early 1990s when the multi-media euphoria fascinated politicians, economists, and researchers alike. However, right from the beginning of the scientific debate, the inconsistent usage of the term ‘interactivity’ massively complicated the comparability of numerous empirical studies. This is where this article joins the discussion. First, the article sheds light on the terminological origins of ‘interactivity’ and distinguishes the term from cognate expressions. Further, it restructures and extends (...) existing findings on the basis of a new analysis framework which considers three levels of interactive communication. Finally, it delivers a systematic overview of specific criteria of interactive communication. (shrink)