Creativity is something that everyone talks about but how did this concept originate? With roots in nineteenth century philosophy, our current idea of creativity has emerged largely from psychological theories since the early twentieth century. Michael Hanchett Hanson has woven together the history of the development of the psychological theories of creativity with social constructivist views of power dynamics and pragmatic insights into the use of this powerful concept. Worldmaking: Psychology and the Ideology of Creativity provides an (...) engaging and thought-provoking analysis of interest to anyone who uses the idea of creativity, from psychologists and philosophers to artists, educators and business leaders. (shrink)

By definition irony is surprising, an undermining of assumptions in comparing alternative scenarios. It should, therefore, contribute to innovative planning, especially when questioning assumptions is important. Using creative thinking about new types of international conflict as examples, this article considers roles of irony in developing innovative plans. The research compares a detailed analysis of Bernard Shaw's prescient insights at the beginning of WWI to current discourses on international conflicts. The Shaw study identifies the overt irony in an early essay about (...) the Great War, using a protocol designed to isolate ironies in comparisons of expected and unexpected situations (scripts and script anomalies). It then examines the integration of the identified ironies with nonironic thinking in Shaw's 1914 proposal for a Western European mutual defense pact. This example shows how irony can be part of a complex and ongoing thought process, playing pivotal roles in the movement from widely held assumptions to innovative plans. The discussion then considers the importance of such ironic thinking in current American discourse. (shrink)

A question dating to Mardešić and Prasolov’s 1988 work [S. Mardešić and A. V. Prasolov, Strong homology is not additive, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 307(2) (1988) 725–744], and motivating a considerable amount of set theoretic work in the years since, is that of whether it is consistent with the ZFC axioms for the higher derived limits [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] of a certain inverse system [Formula: see text] indexed by [Formula: see text] to simultaneously vanish. An equivalent formulation (...) of this question is that of whether it is consistent for all [Formula: see text]-coherent families of functions indexed by [Formula: see text] to be trivial. In this paper, we prove that, in any forcing extension given by adjoining [Formula: see text]-many Cohen reals, [Formula: see text] vanishes for all [Formula: see text]. Our proof involves a detailed combinatorial analysis of the forcing extension and repeated applications of higher-dimensional [Formula: see text]-system lemmas. This work removes all large cardinal hypotheses from the main result of [J. Bergfalk and C. Lambie-Hanson, Simultaneously vanishing higher derived limits, Forum Math. Pi 9 (2021) e4] and substantially reduces the least value of the continuum known to be compatible with the simultaneous vanishing of [Formula: see text] for all [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cultivating the PossibleKseniya Fiaduta Prokharchyk and Luciana Dantas de PaulaReimagining Education and Society / 3rd International Conference of Possibility Studies, All Hallows Campus, Dublin City University, Dublin, 07 17–21, 2023[End Page 290]Since its inaugural conference in May 2021, the Possibility Studies Network (PSN) has emerged as a vibrant space of hope, inspiring scholars, and practitioners around the globe to revive, (re)discover, and (re)imagine a central dimension of human existence: (...) the possible. Following the success of the first two conferences online, in 2023 the network organized its first fully inperson event on the theme of Cultivating the Possible: Reimagining Education and Society. Hosted by the School of Psychology at Dublin City University, in partnership with Creative Ireland, the latest conference brought together more than 150 participants from over twenty-five countries with the aim of "advancing the theoretical and practical understanding of how individuals and collectives become aware of and explore possibilities in the realm of the psychological, material, technological, social, cultural and political." 1In his inaugural keynote speech, Vlad Glăveanu (Dublin City University), the founder and president of PSN, outlined five key questions for the emergent, transdisciplinary field of possibility studies: (1) what kinds of psychological, social, material, technological and cultural resources and processes enable our engagement with the possible?; (2) how do individual differences, environmental contexts, and situational factors "collaborate" in shaping experiences of the possible?; (3) what is the relation between individual, group, community, and societal forms of becoming aware of and exploring possibilities?; (4) how do power relations structure our imagination of the possible, and with what consequences for how self and society are constituted?; and [End Page 291](5) what is our guide for deciding which possibilities to enact and which to reject, which possibilities are valuable, and which are harmful?These questions guided the conference experience, while still leaving space for other challenging questions to emerge. The five days of engaging discussions were due to not only the diversity in themes but also the variety of formats for presentations, workshops, and debates. The first three days of the conference were organized around keynote speeches by global scholars, who represented a wide range of disciplines from cognitive psychology to creative writing. The keynotes were followed by paper presentations and symposia—as well as "Principles of Circus" workshops by the National Circus School of Montréal, 2—and presentations from Creative Ireland. Finally, the last two days of the conference featured a debate between Michael Hanchett Hanson (Columbia University) and Giovanni Corazza (University of Bologna) on the status of "the real" in possibility studies, interactive workshops, 3the presentation of possibility hubs, and ample networking opportunities.The ethos of the conference was explicitly multidisciplinary, featuring contributions from many possibility-related fields, including creativity, imagination, serendipity, utopias/dystopias, psychology, futures studies, education, philosophy, ethics, literary and narrative studies, queer and (trans)gender studies, health and well-being research, environmental studies, and the arts, among other disciplines. While some of these fields count on their own rich and long-standing traditions of reflections on the possible, the conference provided a unique space where diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives could engage, nurture, and challenge each other in open, dialogic, and transdisciplinary encounters.As highlighted by the conference co-organizer Wendy Ross (London Metropolitan University) in her keynote lecture "Cultivating the Possible," such genuine interdisciplinary encounters represent an opportunity to push ourselves beyond the limits of our disciplines, to develop more comprehensive theoretical frameworks and methodologies, and to formulate new questions, advancing the study of possibility in exciting new directions. Given the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of the possible, this inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary ethos lies at the very heart of PSN's annual conferences. Moreover, the polyphonic nature of the event was anchored by a set of common themes and questions that held diverse voices and disciplinary perspectives in both collaborative harmony and reciprocal tension. [End Page 292]Pedagogies of the Possible I: Educating in a VUCA WorldMany papers explored the connections between possibility studies, education, and pedagogy in a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). 4Most contributions emphasized the urgency of reimagining traditional educational systems... (shrink)

Providing theoretical and applied analyses of Michel Henry's practical philosophy in light of his guiding idea of Life, this is the first sustained exploration of Henry's practical thought in anglophone literature, reaffirming his centrality to contemporary continental thought. This book ranges from the tension between his methodological insistence on life as non-intentional and worldly activities to Henry's engagement with the practical philosophy of intellectuals such as Marx, Freud, and Kandisky to topics of application such as labor, abstract art, education, political (...) liberalism, and spiritual life. An international team of leading Henry scholars examine a vital dimension of Henry's thinking that has remained under-explored for too long. (shrink)

The UK government has recently committed to adopting a new policy—dubbed ‘Martha’s Rule’—which has been characterised as providing patients the right to rapidly access a second clinical opinion in urgent or contested cases. Support for the rule emerged following the death of Martha Mills in 2021, after doctors failed to admit her to intensive care despite concerns raised by her parents. We argue that framing this issue in terms of patient rights is not productive, and should be avoided. Insofar as (...) the ultimate goal of Martha’s Rule is the provision of a clinical service that protects patient safety, an approach that focuses on the obligations of the health system—rather than the individual rights of patients—will better serve this goal. We outline an alternative approach that situates rapid clinical review as part of a suite of services aimed at enhancing and protecting patient care. This approach would make greater progress towards addressing the difficult systemic issues that Martha’s Rule does not, while also better engaging with the constraints of clinical practice. (shrink)

Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across academia. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how it is created, especially not in a multidimensional sense. By ‘created’ we do not mean its influencing factors, for which there is extensive research, but how it actually forms in the person. The work that has been done in this arena tends to focus on physiological dynamics, which are certainly part of the puzzle. But they are not the whole picture, with (...) psychological, phenomenological, and socio cultural processes also playing their part. As a result, this paper offers a multidimensional overview of scholarship on the ‘architecture’ of happiness, providing a stimulus for further work into this important topic. (shrink)

Vernor Vinge's “singularity” is a worthy contribution to the long tradition of contemplations about human transcendence. Throughout history, most of these musings have dwelled upon the spiritual – the notion that human beings can achieve a higher state through prayer, moral behavior, or mental discipline.

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

I respond to criticisms of my book, Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses (Westview, 2000), by Mark Migotti and Phil Hanson.

This essay deals with the medical recipe as an epistemic genre that played an important role in the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge. The article first compares the development of the recipe as a textual form in Chinese and European premodern medical cultures. It then focuses on the use of recipes in the transmission of Chinese pharmacology to Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. The main sources examined are the Chinese medicinal formulas translated—presumably—by the Jesuit Michael Boym (...) and published in Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), a text that introduced Chinese pulse medicine to Europe. The article examines how the translator rendered the Chinese formulas into Latin for a European audience. Arguably, the translation was facilitated by the fact that the recipe as a distinct epistemic genre had developed, with strong parallels, in both Europe and China. Building on these parallels, the translator used the recipe as a shared textual format that would allow the transfer of knowledge between the two medical cultures. (shrink)

Does general validity or real world validity better represent the intuitive notion of logical truth for sentential modal languages with an actuality connective? In (Philosophical Studies 130:436–459, 2006) I argued in favor of general validity, and I criticized the arguments of Zalta (Journal of Philosophy 85:57–74, 1988) for real world validity. But in Nelson and Zalta (Philosophical Studies 157:153–162, 2012) Michael Nelson and Edward Zalta criticize my arguments and claim to have established the superiority of real world validity. Section (...) 1 of the present paper introduces the problem and sets out the basic issues. In Sect. 2 I consider three of Nelson and Zalta’s arguments and find all of them deficient. In Sect. 3 I note that Nelson and Zalta direct much of their criticism at a phrase (‘true at a world from the point of view of some distinct world as actual’) I used only inessentially in Hanson (Philosophical Studies 130:436–459, 2006), and that their account of the philosophical foundations of modal semantics leaves them ill equipped to account for the plausibility of modal logics weaker than S5. Along the way I make several general suggestions for ways in which philosophical discussions of logical matters–especially, but not limited to, discussions of truth and logical truth for languages containing modal and indexical terms–might be facilitated and made more productive. (shrink)

A formula is a contingent logical truth when it is true in every model M but, for some model M , false at some world of M . We argue that there are such truths, given the logic of actuality. Our argument turns on defending Tarski’s definition of truth and logical truth, extended so as to apply to modal languages with an actuality operator. We argue that this extension is the philosophically proper account of validity. We counter recent arguments to (...) the contrary presented in Hanson’s ‘Actuality, Necessity, and Logical Truth’ (Philos Stud 130:437–459, 2006 ). (shrink)

Analyses of Theories and Methods of Physics and Psychology was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This is Volume IV of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, a series published in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota and edited by Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell. Dr. Feigl was the (...) director of the Center.In a preface to the first volume in the series, Professors Feigl and Michael Scriven noted the extensive concern of the Center with "the meaning of theoretical concepts as defined by their locus in the 'nomological net' and the related rejection of the reductionist forms of operationism and positivism." In this volume, several contributors are again concerned with philosophical, logical, and methodological problems of psychology. As before, some papers deal with broad philosophical issues, others with more specific problems of method or interpretation. However, a deep concern for logical and methodological problems of special relevance to the physical sciences is reflected in a number of essays.The contents are arranged in two sections, the first part being based on the papers and discussion from a conference held at the Center on the problems of correspondence rules. Contributors are Herbert Feigl, Paul K. Feyerabend, N.R. Hanson, Carl G. Hempel, Mary Hesse, Grover Maxwell, and William Rozeboom. The second group of essays, by various members of the staff of the Center and some of its visitors, reflects current issues and controversies of great interest. The contributors are William Demopoulos, Keith Gunderson, Paul E. Meehl (three essays), and Michael Radner. (shrink)

On ‘Mismatch’ and ‘Metabolic Ghettos:’ The Conceptualization of Global Health Differences in Research on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Epigenetic approaches to human health have received growing attention in the past two decades. They allow to view the development of human organisms as plastic, i.e. as open to influences from the social and material environment such as nutrition, stress, and trauma. This has lent new credence to approaches in biomedicine that aim to draw attention to the importance of (...) development for later life health. Some scholars in the social sciences and humanities have welcomed such approaches as a departure from gene‐centric perspectives and as an opportunity for highlighting the social and political determinants of health and illness. Others have warned that they might lead to new forms of biological reductionisms and determinisms. In this article, we explore how research on developmental plasticity addresses and articulates global health disparities, specifically in the context of postcolonial India. We discuss two prominent approaches from the field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) that build on epigenetic perspectives on health and illness and view different global rates of disease susceptibility as the result of developmental processes: first, the ‘mismatch paradigm’ by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson and second, the ‘metabolic ghetto’ concept by Jonathan Wells. We highlight how both approaches render historical and social factors meaningful for the development of global health disparities, but emphasize how they at the same time remain prone to determinisms and reductionisms reminiscent of a gene‐centric perspective. DOHaD actors themselves are critical of these tendencies, and in conclusion we explore novel opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations enabled by this critical potential. (shrink)

This is a welcome book, for it challenges intelligently the conventional view that Proust's novel is strictly a narrative of metaphor and memory. Nicola Luckhurst's project here is to demonstrate that, with its profoundly legislative impulses and knowledge‐seeking, theory‐laden tone, A la recherche du temps perdu is as much about hypothesis, experiment, and scientific law making as about nostalgia and reminiscence.The entry point for Luckhurst's discussion is a perceptive chapter on Proust's maxims, those abundant sententiae that on the one hand (...) link him to the moralistic tradition of La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld and on the other demonstrate his need to generate laws that explain behavior and experience. She offers chapters on the novelist's use of hypothesis, modeling, and retroduction; the last notion is especially revelatory in a Proustian context. Borrowing from Aristotle, the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce coined the term “retroduction” to describe a type of inference that contains within itself the nascent theory, the hypothesis, and the data being examined. Later Norwood Hanson spoke of the simultaneous “dawning of an aspect and a dawning of an explanation [that] both suggest what to look for next” . Applied to A la recherche, retroduction aptly describes the main structure of cognition in Proust: intuitions about a singulative event and hypotheses about that event's relationship to a broader law or theory are always co‐present, with Proust's narrator representing both the datum being examined and the voice speculating on the resulting science.Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus in large part on the narrative's fascination with male and female homosexuality and assess the models and theories applied to each. The botanical analogy for male homosexuality has of course been widely discussed. But with the help of Antoine Compagnon's notes to Sodome et Gomorrhe , Luckhurst provides a convincing account of the impact made on Proust by the reading of Darwin, Maurice Maeterlinck's L'intelligence des fleurs, various essays by Jules Michelet, the zoologist/embryologist Elie Metchnikoff's Etudes sur la nature humaine: Essai de philosophie optimiste, and Remy de Gourmont's Physique de l'amour. However, as she notes, lesbianism in Proust's novel is an epistemological dead end. No model can account for it, and Proust's narrative, in Albertine disparue, becomes bogged down and “embalmed.” Here, Luckhurst's own narrative loses momentum because of the space it devotes to this nonsignificance.But the central, and persuasive, argument of this study concerns the converging attempts within the scientific and literary communities of the early twentieth century to narrate and conceptualize creativity. The tendency in literature toward what David S. Luft has called “essayism”—so clear cut in Proust—affected a generation of writers convinced that theory and story must converge, that “the tasks of philosophy, literature and cultural criticism” had come together . In parallel, within the scientific community, intuition, analogy, and a kind of aesthetic sense were becoming acknowledged methodological tools, especially in the work of the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, whose speculations on the role of the unconscious in cognition closely parallel those of Proust . Luckhurst's study demonstrates above all that underlying Proust's adamant distinctions between the particular and the general, between the intuitive/instinctive and the intellectual, is a deep esteem for science and an attraction to its laws. Metaphor itself, the Proustian cognitive device par excellence, must in his own words be exact enough to create a relationship “analogous in the artistic world to the unique relationship of the law of causality in the scientific world.” It is the empowerment offered Proust by scientific truth that this study brings so nicely into focus. (shrink)

A review of Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R. Kelly, eds., Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought (London: Continuum, 2012), 177 pp.

In this book Christopher Norris develops the case for scientific realism by tackling various adversary arguments from a range of anti-realist positions. Through a close critical reading he shows how they fail to make adequate sense on any rational, consistent and scientifically informed survey of the evidence. Along the way he incorporates a number of detailed case-studies from the history and philosophy of science. Norris devotes much of his discussion to some of the most prominent and widely influential source-texts of (...) anti-realism. Also included are the sophisticated versions of verificationism developed by thinkers such as Michael Dummett and Bas van Fraassen. Central to Norris's argument is a prolonged engagement with the once highly influential but nowadays neglected work of Norwood Russell Hanson. This book will be welcomed especially by readers who possess some knowledge of the background debate and who wish to deepen and extend their understanding of these issues beyond an introductory level. (shrink)

Michael Smith has written a series of seminal essays about the nature of belief and desire, the status of normative judgment, and the relevance of the views we take on both these topics to the accounts we give of our nature as free and responsible agents. This long awaited collection comprises some of the most influential of Smith's essays. Among the topics covered are: the Humean theory of motivating reasons, the nature of normative reasons, Williams and Korsgaard on internal (...) and external reasons, the nature of self-control, weakness of will, compulsion, freedom, responsibility, the analysis of our rational capacities, moral realism, the dispositional theory of value, the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative, the error theory, rationalist treatments of moral judgment, the practicality requirement on moral judgment and non-cognivist. This collection will be of interest to students in philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

What we might usefully call “playing full-stop” and playing games plausibly figure in a well-lived life. Yet there are reasons to worry that the two not only do not naturally go hand in hand, but are in fact deeply opposed. In this essay I investigate the apparent tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games. I argue that the nature of this tension is easily exaggerated. While there is a psychological tension between simultaneously engaging in earnest competitive game play and (...) playing fullstop, there is no logical contradiction between the two. Somewhat surprisingly, seeing how this tension is best understood teaches us something about the nature of willing an end and the “guise of the good.” With a resolution of the apparent tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games, I turn to the practical worry that playing competitive games is destructive precisely for the very reasons it is opposed to playing full-stop. Here I develop a positive proposal to mitigate the tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games. This proposal draws on the idea of “striving play” as recently developed by Thi Nguyen and some ideas from classical Stoicism. (shrink)

"Sovereignty or submission: Restoring national identity in the spirit of liberty," a symposium organized by The New Criterion and the Center for American Greatness, took place on October 16, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Participants were Michael Anton, David Azerrad, Chris Buskirk, Tucker Carlson, Angelo M. Codevilla, John Fonte, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Daniel McCarthy, Balázs Orbán, John O'Sullivan, James Piereson, and Kiron Skinner. Discussion revolved around earlier versions of the essays presented in this book.

Leibniz states that 'metaphysics is natural theology', and this is especially true of his metaphysics of modality. In this book, Michael V. Griffin examines the deep connection between the two and the philosophical consequences which follow from it. Grounding many of Leibniz's modal conceptions in his theology, Griffin develops a new interpretation of the ontological argument in Leibniz and Descartes. This interpretation demonstrates that their understanding God's necessary existence cannot be construed in contemporary modal logical terms. He goes on (...) to develop a necessitarian interpretation of Leibniz, arguing that Leibniz, like Spinoza, is committed to the thesis that everything actual is metaphysically necessary, but that Leibniz rejects Spinoza's denial of God's moral perfection. His book will appeal to scholars of early modern philosophy and philosophers interested in modal metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityThe ancient concept of ‘self-cultivation’ with its roots in Confucianism and Hellenistic philosophy can also be utilised as tool for understanding the prac...

To most people it seems obvious that there are major mental differences between ourselves and other species, but there is considerable debate over exactly how special our minds are, in what respects, and which were the critical evolutionary events that have shaped us. Some researchers claimlanguage as a solely human, even defining, attribute, while others claim that only humans are truly conscious. These questions have been explored mainly by archaeologists and anthropologists until recently, but this volume aims to show what (...) psychologists have to say on the evolution of mind. The book begins with a thorough overview of what is known of the non-primate mind and its evolution. Following this, an international range of experts discuss in temporal sequence the human mind at various stages of evolution, beginning with the pre-hominids of 20 million years ago and ending withcontemporary human behaviour. Accessible to students and researchers alike in psychology, anthropology, evolution, archaeology, and ethology, The Descent of Mind provides a range of provocative answers to the timeless question of what it means to be human. (shrink)

"The collection of essays assembled in this volume constitute the bulk of the annual editorials I [Michael Freeden] penned as founder of the Journal of Political Ideologies and its editor for twenty-five years from 1996 to 2020"--Introduction page.

This article makes a contribution to interface criticism through the notion of chrono-design: the deliberate shaping of experiences of temporality and time through contemporary software techniques and digital technologies. This notion is articulated through discussions of network optimisation, user experience design, behavioural tracking, Hansen’s work on 21st-century media and Hayles’ framework of cognitive assemblages. In particular, the argument considers how contemporary user interfaces complicate conventional notions of the rational, self-reflexive subject by operating beyond consciousness at vast environmental dimensions and accelerated (...) micro-temporal speeds. These conditions, we argue, provide opportunities for new forms of behavioural suspense and captivation best exemplified through the figure of the trap. The politics and aesthetics of captivation, accordingly, should be considered as central to any expanded ecology of cognition. The article then concludes with a short demonstration of experimental uses of chrono-design methods applied critically to political economies of user tracking and data capture as a prompt for further interdisciplinary applied research in this domain. (shrink)

This study uses evidence from the press and from the parliamentary record to examine the extent to which, and the ways in which, people involved in the public debate over laboratory experiments on human embryos in Britain during the 1980s drew on images from science fiction. It is shown that negative images from science fiction were used in the debate, but that these images could be transformed into resources for defending, as well as attacking, this form of scientific endeavor. It (...) is also shown that other fictional structures were present in the debate and that both sides relied heavily on fictional components to justify their competing appraisals of embryo research. (shrink)

Daniel, Michael E Review of: Martin Griver unearthed, by Odhran O'Brien, Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls, 2014, pp. 261, hardback, $39.95; paperback, $35.95.

Daniel, Michael E Review of: Wehrmacht priests: Catholicism and the Nazi war of Annihilation, by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 255, hardback, $79.00.

In contexts of exposure to atypical stress or adversity, individual and collective resilience refers to the process of sustaining wellbeing by leveraging biological, psychological, social and environmental protective and promotive factors and processes. This multisystemic understanding of resilience is generating significant interest but has been difficult to operationalize in psychological research where studies tend to address only one or two systems at a time, often with a primary focus on individual coping strategies. We show how multiple systems implicated in human (...) resilience can be researched in the same study using a longitudinal, six-phase transformative sequential mixed methods study of 14- to 24-year-olds and their elders in two communities dependent on oil and gas industries. Data collection occurred over a 5-year period, and included: community engagement and the identification of youth health and well-being priorities; participatory youth-centric qualitative research using one-on-one semi-structured interviews and arts-based methods; survey of 500 youth at three time points to assess psychosocial health indicators and outcomes; collection of hair samples to assess stress biomarkers over time; youth-led ecological data collection and assessment of historical socio-economic development data; and community resource mapping with community elders. Analyzing data from these multiple systems will allow us to understand the interrelationship and impact of PPFPs within and across systems. To date, we have undertaken thematic and narrative qualitative analyses, and descriptive analyses of the preliminary ecological and survey data. As we proceed, we will combine these and grounded theory approaches with innovative techniques such as latent transition analysis and network analysis, as well as modeling of economic conditions and spatial analysis of human geographies to understand patterns of PPFPs and their inter-relationships. By analyzing the complexity of data collected across systems we are demonstrating the possibility of conducting multisystemic resilience research which expands the way psychological research accounts for positive development under stress in different contexts. This comprehensive examination of resilience may offer an example of how the study of resilience can inform socially and contextually relevant interventions and policies. (shrink)

Michael Devitt tells us that metaphysical realism has a kind of immunity from considerations concerning the nature of truth. Part of this immunity comes from Devitt’s insistence that realism is a metaphysical issue, not a semantic one. Most of Devitt’s critics have focused on this point, arguing that a proper understanding of the realism question necessarily involves semantic considerations :65–74, 1991; Miller in Synthese 136:191–217, 2003; Putnam in Comments on Michael Devitt’s ‘Hilary and Me’, in: Baghramian Reading Putnam. (...) Taylor and Francis, Hoboken, 2012; Taylor in Models, truth, and realism. Oxford University Press, New York, 2006). But Devitt also argues at length that semantic considerations should not lead us to give up on realism regardless of whether we admit that the correct characterization of realism is metaphysical in character or not. Devitt’s view hinges on the viability of a strategy which he calls Putting Metaphysics First, which essentially involves giving “a certain temporal and explanatory priority to metaphysical concerns”. Fully explicated, Devitt’s strategy is seen to be based on an epistemological naturalism in the vein of Quine. The main idea is that if we assume a naturalism according to which the only way to know anything is empirically through experience, then we will be able to establish a version of metaphysical realism early on in our investigations. According to Devitt, the empirical evidence for this realism is much stronger than the empirical evidence for the numerous semantical and epistemological views which are put forward in favor of antirealism. So, Devitt argues, we should hold on to the realism that we establish first and build our other theories on top of it. After detailing Devitt’s approach, I offer two objections. The first problem for Devitt is that in the process of putting metaphysics first, he puts epistemological naturalism first. This fact is in tension with his claim that epistemology is a weak starting place and a poor basis of theoretical revision. The second problem is that while our experiences of objects give us evidence that those objects exist, our experiences do not tell us that the objects exist mind-independently in all the ways required for metaphysical realism, or so I contend. Thus, I argue, even if we do put naturalized metaphysics first as Devitt recommends, realism is not secured as a starting point. (shrink)