Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science最新文献

In this paper, we articulate a functional approach to cognitive capacities. It is a restricted functionalism for various reasons, but especially because it does not claim that all cognitive (and/or mental) entities and processes are functional in the sense of a systemic capacities approach. One of the central aims of a cognitive theory consists in providing explanations of behavioral phenomena of (human and non-human) animals, and of the phenomena that are involved in those explanations. We accept that part of what lies at the heart of these explanations are certain functional entities -we call them "cognitive functional systems" -which in our view stand for most of the cognitive capacities of an organism; that is, systems that are individuated primarily by the main cognitive functions they undertake. Additionally, in the paper, we go into further detail concerning these functional systems, their internal organization, the nature of their causal interactions, etc. We also argue that some of these classes of cognitive functional systems (i.e., cognitive capacities) can be construed as "natural kinds" whenever their kinds of functional organizations are understood as kinds of hierarchically ordered classes of information processing events that are related among each other in regular (often complex) ways.

In this paper, I grapple with the question of why we, at times, experience ourselves as not free. In doing so I outline a crude theory of agency (and our experience of ourselves as free) as a dynamic process happening in irreversible time. In attempting to answer this question, I define agency as the ability to pursue our desires, and I claim that we experience ourselves as free as long as we can do this - with the caveat that the ability to reason is a necessary criterion. I show that agency is a sociocultural development that manifests as the ability to reason gradually develops through social interaction during infancy and into adulthood. Crucially, I point out that reason is a double-edged sword: It allows us to question our actions and desires and whether they are worth pursuing, which is what elevates us to agentic beings. However, it also allows us to alienate ourselves from our actions and desires, and thus rob ourselves of our experience of freedom. Lastly, I show how our subjective freedom is lost and gained in a constant process, generated by a reflexive-relating-to ourselves. As we act, we continually encounter constraints (physical and psychological) that bar us from acting upon our desires. This compels us to reflect on our actions and desires, and so, our feeling of freedom evaporates. However, through a retrospective forgetting, or reconstruction, of the constraints we encounter, we may regain our experience of being free.

This article presents a Deweyan reading of the processes of critique, experimentation, and reform that took hold of a minority of psychiatric institutions in Western Europe during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, under the influence of the so-called Italian and British antipsychiatry movements. Framed within a specific understanding of the sixties, the article examines these complex theoretical and institutional operations against the background of John Dewey's idea of democracy, which it interprets, above all else, as the constant provision of material, intellectual, and human resources for the people to directly transform their environment and themselves in increasingly complex and creative ways. After acknowledging the historical and conceptual discontinuities that exist between these two autonomous bodies of knowledge, the first section presents a summary of Dewey's philosophy. Next the article sheds light on Basaglia's and Laing's antipsychiatric projects by interpreting them as a sustained effort to distinguish between schizophrenia as a first and a second disease, an epistemological search in the midst of which each of them ended up creating new institutions that necessarily embarked their inmates on a radical process of Deweyan growth. The key role of the sixties counterculture is emphasized at this point, and examples from Gorizia's and Trieste's asylums, as well as British community households, are read in terms of Basaglia's and Laing's negative and affirmative dialectics, respectively. Finally, in the last two sections, the article argues that antipsychiatry's analysis of psychotic behavior significantly enlarges Dewey's understanding of the circuit of growth and experience, and that Dewey's ideas of growth and experience provided, in turn, a missing criterion for defining mental health and deriving coherent therapeutic and institutional concretions.

Resuming the theoretical and historical conceptualization of mindfulness research is of utmost importance if we want to transcend the positivistic and instrumental trend in the present field and to understand better what mindfulness is and how mindfulness works. Based on von Fircks (2023)'s introduction of Daosim's wu wei into Meadian Social Psychology, this commentary continues dialoguing the two different traditions for understanding mindfulness's functioning by exploring the systematic principle underlying wu wei. From the systematic perspective, we can distinguish: 1) two focus of meaning in wu wei: (a) not forcing/interfering and (b) the existence of a spontaneously evolving system; 2) two positions a person can take faced with the spontaneous system: (a) as stepping back and not interfering; (b) as actively connecting and cultivating new relations into systems. Based on the two positions, the dynamic emergence of altered I from mindfulness is also approached in two different ways.

This essay aims to discuss the meaning and purpose of work by adopting an approach in cultural psychology that emphasizes the centrality of the meaning-making process. The central thesis of the paper is to demonstrate that the meaning and purpose of work is a paradox. On the one hand, work represents a set of actions of the human agent for producing things. That is to say, the purpose of work is located outside of it. On the other hand, work is an activity in itself, carried out as a way of developing human potentialities. In this case, the purpose of the actions performed at work coincides with the result of working (developing human potentialities). The paradox arises because, in current work conditions, the unity of human agency represented by these two dimensions of work is fragmented, meaning that not all forms of work permit the convergence among purposes, actions, and the results of these actions. We analyze how some cultural markers, which are products of the process of meaning-making of the human agent in culture, suggest dealing with this paradox. We explore its limits and propose the need for new cultural markers capable of reaffirming the integrality of the human agent at work.

Part of a larger project aimed at performing an empirical meta-theoretical analysis of the entire corpus of scientific literature on Social Representations Theory (SRT), this research presents the state of the art of the anthropological and ethnographic approaches to SRT. Applying the Grid for Meta-Theoretical Analysis on 295 publications selected from the So.Re.Com"A.S. de Rosa"@-library, we compiled a rich set of meta-data and data illustrative of how SRT was conceptualized and operationalized within the anthropological and ethnographic approaches, as well as its positioning among other theoretical and disciplinary frameworks. The data was submitted to textual analysis, followed by a Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components analysis. The empirical results suggest that from a theoretical standpoint, the anthropological and ethnographic approaches - inspired by its main exponents Jodelet (1991, 2016) and Duveen and Lloyd, (1986, 1993) - are consistent with the dynamic conceptualization of social representations set out by Moscovici (1961/1976, 1984/2003, 1988, 2000, 2013), as revolutionary paradigm that has shifted the emphasis of social psychology from looking at isolated variables in individuals in the abstract, towards a supra-disciplinary integrative vision of a social science, that investigates the genesis, transformation and negotiation of social representations in the communicative actual contexts (Billig 1991; de Rosa 2013a, b; Sammut et al. 2015a). From an empirical perspective, the variety of qualitative methods employed were open to investigate socio-cultural dimensions and symbolic universes, reflecting the integrative tradition of SRT that bridges diverse neighbouring disciplines in an effort towards a multifaceted perspective on the object of study.

The article draws from critical psychology to discuss the rising debate on brain determinism and free will in the legal domain. As free will also corresponds to the context and culture, it can have both the public and private space of expressions. The rise of neuroscience and its influence in the legal domain offers a holistic and sociocultural meaning of responsibility. Even one becomes entitled to take free will as a 'necessary illusion' in order to be in the zone of 'moral as well as legal-social life forming activities'. In the criminal justice system free will is not taken as any kind of 'necessary illusion' but the conscious will and action of the person. This further throw light on how the wilful control of any criminal act is a social act and our brain is not separate from our collective will.

Current criticism of theoretical psychology concerns, in particular, the state of its foundations and the construction of theories, while the evolution of the discipline leads to its disunity. According to one of the points of view discussed, psychological knowledge must be unified in order to overcome theoretical fragmentation. Those who are concerned about the lack of a unified theory in psychology explore various aspects of disunity and the possibility of unifying theoretical psychology. In recent decades, a number of approaches to unification have been developed, and now theoretical studies of unification need to be harmonized. I believe that in order to develop a solid framework, it makes sense to reach a consensus on the general, conceptual and methodological ideas of unification. On this basis, it would be possible to develop a program for creating an approach to unification in theoretical psychology, and I propose an outline of three possible ones.