Measurement instruments assessing multiple emotions during epistemic activities are largely lacking. We describe the construction and validation of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, which measure surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration, and boredom occurring during epistemic cognitive activities. The instrument was tested in a multinational study of emotions during learning from conflicting texts. The findings document the reliability, internal validity, and external validity of the instrument. A seven-factor model best fit the data, suggesting that epistemically-related emotions should be conceptualised in terms (...) of discrete emotion categories, and the scales showed metric invariance across the North American and German samples. Furthermore, emotion scores changed over time as a function of conflicting task information and related significantly to perceived task value and use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. (shrink)

Verifying that conceptualisations of emotions are consistent across languages and cultures is a critical precondition for meaningful cross-cultural research on emotional experience. For achievement...

1. Introduction; Elisabeth A. Lloyd and Eric Winsberg.- Section 1: Confirmation and Evidence.- 2. The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?; Naomi Oreskes.- 3. Satellite Data and Climate Models Redux.- 3a. Introduction to Chapter 3: Satellite Data and Climate Models; Elisabeth A. Lloyd.- Ch. 3b Fact Sheet to "Consistency of Modelled and Observed Temperature Trends in the Tropical Troposphere"; Benjamin D. Santer et al..- Ch. 3c Reprint of "Consistency of Modelled and Observed (...) Temperature Trends in the Tropical Troposphere"; Benjamin D. Santer et al..- 4. The Role of ’Complex’ Empiricism in the Debates about Satellite Data and Climate Models; Elisabeth A. Lloyd.- 5. Reconciling Climate Model/Data Discrepancies: The Case of the Trees That Didn’t Bark; Michael Mann.- 6. Downscaling of Climate Information; Linda O. Mearns et al..- Section 2: Uncertainties and Robustness.- 7. The Significance of Robust Model Projections; Wendy S. Parker.- 8. Building Trust, Removing Doubt? Robustness Analysis and Climate Modeling; Jay Odenbaugh.- Section 3: Climate Models as Guides to Policy.- 9. Climate Model Confirmation: From Philosophy to Predicting Climate in the Real World; Reto Knutti.- 10. Uncertainty in Climate Science and Climate Policy; Jonathan Rougier and Michel Crucifix.- 11. Communicating Uncertainty to Policy Makers: The Ineliminable Role of Values; Eric Winsberg.- 12. Modeling Climate Policies: A Critical Look at Integrated Assessment Models; Mathias Frisch.- 13. Modelling Mitigation and Adaptation Policies to Predict their Effectiveness: The Limits of Randomized Controlled Trials; Alexandre Marcellesi and Nancy D. Cartwright. (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles two (...) apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)

The expression ‘Like’ has a wide variety of uses among English and American speakers. It may describe preference, as in (1) She likes mint chip ice cream. It may be used as a vehicle of comparison, as in (2) Trieste is like Minsk on steroids.

Psychoanalytica Elisabeth Young-Bruehl gaat nader in op de bewering van Jonathan Sacks in diens openingslezing dat het Verbond van Noach gold voor alle mensen, niet slechts een groep uitverkorenen, en dat het daarmee ruim baan gaf tolerantie en vrijheid van godsdienst. Young-Bruehl is eerder van het tegendeel overtuigd: het Verbond legt wetten op die al wie ze niet gehoorzaamt, uitsluiten. De monotheïstische godsdiensten blijven daarmee bij uitstek intrinsiek autoritair en sadomasochistisch van aard.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates the psychological and intellectual demands writing biography makes on the biographer and explores the complex and frequently conflicted relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and what areas - theory of character, for instance - must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory. Psychoanalytic theory used for biography, she argues, can yield insights for psychoanalysis itself, particularly in the understanding of (...) creativity. (shrink)

As a founding father of Existentialism, Karl Jaspers has been seen as a twentieth-century successor to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; as an exponent of reason, he has been seen as an heir of Kant. But studies tracing influences upon his thought or placing him in the context of Existentialism have not dealt with Jaspers's concern with the political realm and how we think in it and about it. In this study Elisabeth Young-Bruehl explicates Jaspers's practical philosophizing, his search for ways (...) in which we can orient ourselves toward our world and its political questions. (shrink)

Transfers of critically ill neonates are frequent phenomena. Even though parents’ participation is regarded as crucial in neonatal care, a transfer often means that parents and neonates are separated. A systematic review of the parents’ experiences of neonatal transfer is lacking. This paper describes a meta‐study addressing qualitative research about parents’ experiences of neonatal transfer. Through deconstruction and reflections of theories, methods, and empirical data, the aim was to achieve a deeper understanding of theoretical, empirical, contextual, historical, and methodological issues (...) of qualitative studies concerning parents’ experiences of neonatal transfer over the course of this meta‐study (2000–2017). Meta‐theory and meta‐method analyses showed that caring, transition, and family‐centered care were main theoretical frames applied and that interviewing with a small number of participants was the preferred data collection method. The meta‐data‐analysis showed that transfer was a scary, unfamiliar, and threatening experience for the parents; they were losing familiar context, were separated from their neonate, and could feel their parenthood disrupted. We identified ‘wavering and wandering’ as a metaphoric representation of the parents’ experiences. The findings add knowledge about meta‐study as an approach for comprehensive qualitative research and point at the value of meta‐theory and meta‐method analyses. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor — most especially, open-endedness, evocativeness, imagery and affective power. However, the qualities themselves are neither necessary nor sufficient for metaphor. I argue that many of the distinctively “poetic” qualities of metaphor are in fact qualities of aspectual thought, which can also be exemplified by parables, “telling details,” and “just so” stories. Thinking about these other uses of language to produce aspectual thought forces us to pinpoint what is distinctive about metaphor, and also (...) thereby reveals the weaknesses of three established views of metaphor. (shrink)

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating (...) from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought--she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool. (shrink)