Mental States and Processes

One variety of love is familiar in everyday life and qualifies in every reasonable sense as a reactive attitude. ‘Reactive love’ is paradigmatically (a) an affectionate attachment to another person, (b) appropriately felt as a non-self-interested response to particular kinds of morally laudable features of character expressed by the loved one in interaction with the lover, and (c) paradigmatically manifested in certain kinds of acts of goodwill and characteristic affective, desiderative and other motivational responses (including other-regarding concern and a desire (...) to be with the beloved). ‘Virtues of intimacy’ as expressed in interaction with the lover are agent-relative reasons for reactive love, and like other reactive attitudes, reactive love generates reasons in its own right. Within a broad conception of the virtues, reactive love sheds light on the reactive attitudes more generally. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyze the controversies surrounding ADHD and the process whereby this psychiatric unit was formed and constituted as a social and scientific fact. We focus mainly on the arguments around ADHD in the United States – this is dictated by significant differences between the ways to define and treat this disorder between various countries . The abovementioned controversies make us conscious of the fact that despite what a considerable number of psychiatrists, scientists and other (...) “spokespeople” for the entity that is ADHD claim, the dominating approach to this disorder has not been based on self-evident, irrefutable scientific findings. What is more important, however, is that the quarrelling actors reveal the circumstances and the way in which the definition, as well as the methods of researching and treating ADHD were formed. (shrink)

A two-stage sequential choice model is studied, the first stage being defined by q-Pareto multicriterial choice rule, and the second stage being defined by scalar extremization model. In this model, at the first stage the q-Pareto rule choses alternatives which are not only undominated in terms of Pareto comparison, but also includes into choice the alternatives which are dominated by no more than q alternatives. Since the choice set of the first-stage usually contains too many elements, obtained set is used (...) as a presentation for the second stage constructed by a scalar extremization model. The properties of the model are studied as well as its representability to one-stage scalar extremization model. (shrink)