Many contemporary logicians acknowledge a plurality of logical theories and accept that theory choice is in part motivated by logical evidence. However, just as there is no agreement on logical theories, there is also no consensus on what constitutes logical evidence. In this paper, I outline Jean Piaget’s psychological theory of reasoning and show how he used it to diagnose and solve one of the paradoxes of material implication. I assess Piaget’s use of psychology as a source (...) of evidence for logical theory in light of reservations raised by psychologism, and I highlight some ramifications for exceptionalism and anti-exceptionalism about logic by considering his use of psychology as logical evidence in the framework of genetic epistemology, Piaget’s research programme. I conclude that Piaget’s psychological theory of reasoning not only plausibly serves as a source of evidence for logical theory but also makes a strong case for anti-exceptionalism about logic. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars has often be proclaimed the father of the "theory theory" of psychological knowledge. This article exposes what is true and and what is false in this claim.

David Danks. Psychological Theories of Categorizations as Probabilistic Models.

The article is a study into the advent of the ‘systems approach’ in Soviet psychology in the 1970s. This arose mainly through the theoretical publications of B. F. Lomov, written after he had been appointed director of the newly established Institute of Psychology. These publications are examined as reflections of those interests related to the sociopolitical role of the director of this leading psychology institution, which was officially charged with building a common theoretical and methodological framework for all Soviet psychology. (...) The main goal of these texts, predetermined by the role of their author, was to advance a theoretical scheme that made possible a formal unification of the schools of psychology, and which at the same time promoted an image of psychology as a research field that was both capable of achieving practically applicable results and compatible with the new ‘big science’ trend. (shrink)

A new phenomenological framework for the characterization of human consciousness is presented. The theory is introduced in several stages - making distinctions concerning types of consciousness, levels, parameters, functional features and dynamic operations. The phenomenology encompasses both ordinary and non-ordinary states of mind. It appears that in its totality the phenomenology of human consciousness comprises a well- structured system exhibiting coherence and internal structure. In addition, this framework presents a new approach for cognitive research, methodologically as well as theoretically. (...) Observations concerning the intellectual challenge of consciousness are. (shrink)

Psychologists and moral philosophers have much to say about self-awareness and so it is no surprise that in leadership research self-awareness also has come to play an important role. For some time now, leadership research has been dominated by psychologists and we argue that their version of the self-awareness is very thin. It is empty of morality and therefore offers only a partial understanding of humanity. That make its conclusions for leadership ineffective and unethical. Psychology-driven approaches to leadership stress effectiveness: (...) leaders make followers work towards a given goal in an effective manner. Self-awareness, to them, is a thorough understanding of one’s strengths, weaknesses, values, how others see one, all with the goal of turning people into followers. Since ethics is excluded, this view of self-awareness lacks a foundational moral concept: respect/dignity and is closer to self-assessment. Building on Immanuel Kant and other German Idealists, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel proposed a theory of the development of self-awareness that is more holistic as it situates the individual in a social and moral context and thus transcends the purely functional view of the self-other relationship propagated in psychological approaches. We concretely argue that psychological approaches to leadership systematically drive managers into a catastrophic situation that Hegel describes in the Master-Slave Dialectic. Understanding Hegelian self-awareness prevents leaders becoming self-less masters. Truly self-aware leaders heed the warning of the Humanity Formulation of Kant’s Categorial Imperative, namely that they must always treat humanity, whether in their own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. They understand their self, they understand its social and moral dimension, and they see their self-reflected in the other. (shrink)

The book moves from descriptive through to more interpretative phenomenological methods to enable the reader to learn to use the main approaches to ...

From the PREFACE. The aim of this work is given in its title. First, it is an "introduction" only, and does not go into the details or the literature of the subject. The aim is to point out the highways of psychology, rather than its myriad byways. Secondly, it is an "introduction to psychological theory," and aims less at a knowledge of facts than at an understanding of principles. Until principles are settled there is no bar to the (...) most fantastic theories and interpretations. These principles being illustrated in the most common facts of experience, it is not necessary to psychological insight to make an anthology of madhouse and hospital stories. Such a procedure has about the same relation to psychology that the various books of "wonders" or the "brilliant experiments" of the popular lecturer have to sober physical science. An odor of quackery is perceptible in both cases. The plan of the work precludes much attention to physiological psychology. Whatever the merits of this science may be, it presupposes pure psychology. If our aim is to give a physiological explanation of psychological facts, we must' first know the facts. Or if our aim is the more modest one of finding the physical conditions or attendants of mental facts, again we must know the facts. But this knowledge is not possible by the way of physiology, and in any case the mental facts remain what they always were. Their likenesses and differences and essential nature would not be changed if physiology were supreme. Even the "new psychology " would not give us new mental facts, but only a new interpretation of the old facts. The Zeitgeist itself begins at last to see this; and the naive onslaughts on the "old psychology" are happily growing fewer. Psychological literature shows very marked progress in this respect within the last twenty years. Physiology remains a most estimable science, but the physiological reconstruction of psychology has been postponed. The study of the physical conditions of our mental life has a pathological and practical importance; but it does not promise any valuable psychological results, at least for those who can distinguish between the physical conditions and the mental facts which they condition. The limitation of plan involves many omissions; and in these there will seem to be a measure of arbitrariness. Hence many will not find here what they want, and probably still more will find what they do not want. There seems to be no way of adjusting so grave a difficulty except by maintaining, on the one hand, freedom to publish, and, on the other, freedom not to read. (shrink)

Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing (...) a theory of the meaning of generics, since it takes speakers’ judgments at face value and ignores the non-semantic factors that might affect these judgments. Leslie’s theory therefore overfits the data of our linguistic intuitions. I present a reconceptualised version of the Psychological Theory of Generics as a theory of how heuristics affect our judgements of the truth values of generics and discuss the application of this reconceptualised theory to some of the puzzles posed by generics, including their apparent content-sensitivity, their inferential asymmetry and their association with stereotyping and prejudice. (shrink)

In this book Frank Dumont presents personality psychology with a fresh description of its current status as well as its prospects. Play, sex, cuisine, creativity, altruism, pets, grieving rituals, and other oft-neglected topics broaden the scope of this fascinating study. This tract is imbued with historical perspectives that reveal the continuity in the evolving science and research of this discipline over the past century. The author places classic schemas and constructs, as well as current principles, in the context of their (...) socio-political catalysts. He further relates this study of the person to life-span developmental issues and to cultural, gender-specific, trait-based, genetic/epigenetic, and evolutionary research findings. Personality psychology has recently reconciled itself to more modest paradigms for describing, explaining, and predicting human behaviour than it generated in the 19th and 20th centuries. This book documents that transformation, providing valuable information for health-service professionals as well as to teachers, researchers, and scientists. (shrink)

This is an introductory text on psychological theories and psychotherapy that approaches the topic from a multidisciplinary perspective. Written for psychiatry residents, but of notable relevance to other students and practitioners in medical and mental health fields, this book lays out a specific sequence for learning psychotherapy that emphasizes the fundamental importance of acquiring an appropriate foundational knowledge base in addition to learning the specific techniques of psychotherapies.Beyond emphasizing the details of major treatment models as well as the (...) class='Hi'>theory and research findings that inform the field of psychotherapy in general, a specific learning sequence is laid out that will guide the reader toward developing beginning competence as a psychotherapist. Psychoanalytic theory and behavior theory are each presented in historical context, with explanations and clear distinctions made among categories of each. These include classical psychoanalytic theory, ego psychology, object relations, the interpersonal school, intersubjective and relational approaches, learning theory, cognitive theory, and mindfulness-based approaches. (shrink)

The subject matter of psychology is humans and their experiences and actions. This subject matter differs from the subject matter of physical science by being more highly contextualized, uncertain, and morally saturated. As a consequence, psychological theory must concern itself with context and moral significance and with the formulation of principles rather than causal laws. The development of psychological theory can be assisted by programs of inquiry that emphasize conceptual clarification and moral consideration, in addition to (...) empirical demonstration. Programs of inquiry in psychology also should place a high value on reasoned criticism derivative from a wider array of scholarly methods and traditions. In all of this, psychology should be guided first and foremost by the nature of its subject matter. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This book proposes a series of interconnected arguments against the view that interpersonal understanding involves the use of a 'folk' or 'commonsense' psychology. Ratcliffe suggests that folk psychology, construed as the attribution of internal mental states in order to predict and explain behaviour, is a theoretically motivated and misleading abstraction from social life. He draws on phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology to offer an alternative account that emphasizes patterned interactions between people in shared social situations.

This article outlines links between cybernetics and psychology through the black box metaphor using a tripartite narrative. The first part explores first-order cybernetic approaches to opening the black box. These developments run parallel to the decline of radical behaviorism and advancements in information processing theory and neuropsychology. We then describe how cybernetics migrates towards a second-order approach (expanding and questioning features of first-order inquiry), understanding applications of rule-based tools to sociocultural phenomena and dynamic mental models, inspiring radical constructivism, and (...) also accepting social constructivism. Psychology, however, enters the cognitive revolution, adhering to the computer metaphor of first-order cyberneticians to streamline human consciousness. The article concludes by outlining how second-order cybernetic approaches emerging in the 1990s may provide cues to psychologists to adopt mixed methods, and bioecological models in the information age, uniting understandings of observable human activity, inner perceptions, and physiological processes across contexts to understand consciousness. (shrink)

Causal Bayes nets have been developed in philosophy, statistics, and computer sciences to provide a formalism to represent causal structures, to induce causal structure from data and to derive predictions. Causal Bayes nets have been used as psychological theories in at least two ways. They were used as rational, computational models of causal reasoning and they were used as formal models of mental causal models. A crucial assumption made by them is the Markov condition, which informally states that variables (...) are independent of other variables that are not their direct or indirect effects conditional on their immediate causes. Whether people’s inferences conform to the causal Markov and the faithfulness condition has recently been investigated empirically. A review of respective research indicates that inferences frequently violate these conditions. This finding challenges some uses of causal Bayes nets in psychology. They entail that causal Bayes nets may not be appropriate to derive predictions for causal model theories of causal reasoning. They also question whether causal Bayes nets as a rational model are empirically descriptive. They do not challenge, however, causal Bayes nets as normative models and their usage as formal models of causal reasoning. (shrink)

First published in 1974, this book presents a coherent collection of major articles by Richard Stanley Peters. It displays his work on psychology and philosophy, with special attention given to the areas of ethical development and human understanding. The book is split into four parts. The first combines a critique of psychological theories, especially those of Freud, Piaget and the Behaviourists, with some articles on the nature and development of reason and the emotions. The second looks in historical order (...) at ethical development. The third part combines a novel approach to the problem of understanding other people, whilst the fourth part is biographical in an unusual way. The volume can be viewed as a companion to the author’s _Ethics and Education _and will appeal to students and teachers of education, philosophy and psychology, as well as to the interested non-specialist reader. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 74-76.

To what extent can philosophical thought experiments reveal norms? Some ethicists have argued that certain thought experiments reveal that people draw a morally significant distinction between "doing" and "allowing". I examine one such thought experiment in detail and argue that the intuitions it elicits can be explained by "prospect theory", a psychological theory about the way people reason. The extent to which such alternative explanations of the results of thought experiments in philosophy are generally available is an (...) empirical question. (shrink)

Tamara Horowitz criticizes the use of thought experiments by Warren Quinn and others to support a version of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. She argues that because a competing empirical explanatory hypothesis for our common agreement on the correct outcome in those thought experiments is true we should conclude that our intuitions concerning those examples do not provide support for the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. Other authors have reached similar conclusions. I argue that the argument misconstrues the role (...) of higher order reflection on first order intuitive moral judgements in moral thinking. Appropriately appreciating that role will require us to reject Horowitz's claim that she has undermined arguments from Quinn's examples to the conclusion that there is a morally significance difference between doing and allowing. (shrink)

The question is raised whether the methods of psychology are adequate to provide an account of human behavior in terms meaningful for human existence. Also, The relationship between psychological theory and the evidence upon which it rests is discussed. "correlationism" and "constructuralism" are presented as two opposite orientations to theory in psychology. The author questions whether experience should be accepted as legitimate evidence and concludes that there should be acceptability of inner experience as legitimate scientific evidence in (...) its own right. The author thinks the methodologies of operation-Ism and behaviorism to be limited. The scientific method, As used on the person and their experience, Must remain at the descriptive level for some time to come. (staff). (shrink)