Real Hallucinations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Do So

Real Hallucinations is a philosophical study of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how its integrity depends on interpersonal relations. It focuses on the beguilingly simple question of how we manage to routinely distinguish between our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. This question is addressed via a detailed philosophical study of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow experiencing one’s own thoughts as someone else’s). The book shows how thought insertion, and also a substantial proportion of auditory verbal hallucinations, consist of disturbances in the structure of experience and –more specifically - in our sense of the various types of intentional state, such as believing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining, as distinct from one another. It is further argued that episodic and seemingly localized experiential disturbances such as these usually occur against a backdrop of less pronounced but much wider-ranging alterations in the structure of intentionality. To do so, the book addresses types of experience associated with trauma, schizophrenia, and profound grief. The outcome of this is a more generally applicable account of how the integrity of human experience, including the most basic sense of self, is inseparable from how we relate to other people and to the social world as a whole.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Modal Structure ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social

This chapter outlines the overall argument of the book, emphasizing its two principal theses. First of all, it sketches the position that thought insertion, and also a substantial proportion of auditory verbal hallucinations, consist of disturbances in the sense of being in one or another kind of intentional state, in the modal structure of intentionality (meaning our grasp of the various modalities of intentionality, such as believing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining, as distinct from one another). Second, it introduces the view that the integrity of human experience, including what we might term the most basic experience of self, depends on ways of relating to other people and to the social world as a whole. The chapter concludes with summaries of the seven chapters that follow.

Postmodernism and Sociology: From the Epistemological to the Empirical

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rekha Mirchandani
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Research Programs ◽  
Time Space ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Postmodern Ethics ◽  
Do So

This article investigates the place of postmodernism in sociology today by making a distinction between its epistemological and empirical forms. During the 1980s and early 1990s, sociologists exposited, appropriated, and normalized an epistemological postmodernism that thematizes the tentative, reflective, and possibly shifting nature of knowledge. More recently, however, sociologists have recognized the potential of a postmodern theory that turns its attention to empirical concerns. Empirical postmodernists challenge classical modern concepts to develop research programs based on new concepts like time-space reorganization, risk society, consumer capitalism, and postmodern ethics. But they do so with an appreciation for the uncertainty of the social world, ourselves, our concepts, and our commitment to our concepts that results from the encounter with postmodern epistemology. Ultimately, this article suggests that understanding postmodernism as a combination of these two moments can lead to a sociology whose epistemological modesty and empirical sensitivity encourage a deeper and broader approach to the contemporary social world.

The Social World of Self-Actualizing People: Reflections by Maslow’s Biographer

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 908-933 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Humanistic Psychology ◽  
Intellectual Style ◽  
Counseling Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
Future Theory

Maslow’s concept of self-actualization has been a bulwark of humanistic psychology for more than 50 years, and has increasingly gained international appeal beyond its original nexus within the United States. His description of the high achieving characteristics of self-actualizing men and women has influenced theorists and practitioners in such fields as counseling, education, health care, management, and organizational psychology. Through these same decades, Maslow’s formulation has also been criticized as promoting a hyperindividualistic, even narcissistic, orientation to personality growth. Because Maslow by temperament and intellectual style expressed himself in an ever-evolving set of speeches and writings that were seldom explicit about interpersonal relations, his actual outlook on the social world of self-actualizers has remained elusive. The focus of this article, therefore, is how Maslow depicted self-actualizing people with regard to five major interpersonal dimensions of life: friendship, romantic love, marriage and lasting intimacy, parenthood, and communal service. By pulling together Maslow’s comments primarily in his published works, and secondarily in his unpublished works-in-progress, it is possible to explicate his tacit viewpoint. Doing so will not only help dispel the misconception that Maslow depicted self-actualizers as loners or even hermits but also guide future theory and research on personality growth.

scholarly journals Perspective-taking is spontaneous but not automatic

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathleen O'Grady ◽  
Thom Scott-Phillips ◽  
Suilin Lavelle ◽  
Kenny Smith
Keyword(s):  
Visual System ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Social World ◽  
Computationally Efficient ◽  
Classic Result ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Do So

Data from a range of different experimental paradigms -- in particular (but not only) the dot perspective task -- have been interpreted as evidence that humans automatically track the perspective of other individuals. Results from other studies, however, have cast doubt on this interpretation, and some researchers have suggested that phenomena that seem like perspective-taking might instead be the products of simpler behavioural rules. The issue remains unsettled in significant part because different schools of thought, with different theoretical perspectives, implement the experimental tasks in subtly different ways, making direct comparisons difficult. Here, we explore the possibility that subtle differences in experimental method explain otherwise irreconcilable findings in the literature. Across five experiments we show that the classic result in the dot perspective task is not automatic (it is not purely stimulus-driven), but nor is it exclusively the product of simple behavioural rules that do not involve mentalizing. Instead, participants do compute the perspectives of other individuals rapidly, unconsciously and involuntarily, but only when attentional systems prompt them to do so (just as, for instance, the visual system puts external objects into focus only as and when required). This finding prompts us to clearly distinguish spontaneity from automaticity. Spontaneous perspective-taking may be a computationally efficient means of navigating the social world.

Adult attachment styles and negativistic beliefs about the social world: The role of self-image and other-image

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-520
Author(s):  
Krystyna Skarżyńska ◽  
Piotr Radkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Adult Attachment ◽  
Attachment Styles ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Social Beliefs ◽  
Negative Beliefs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adult Attachment Styles ◽  
High Level

Abstract This article is concerned with the relationship between adult attachment styles and generalized negativistic social beliefs (i.e. pessimistic expectations concerning human nature and interpersonal relations). Two general dimensions of attachment styles, avoidance and anxiety, are considered to be manifestations of an individual’s image of other people and of the self, respectively. We suggest that both dimensions may be a substantial basis for formulating negative beliefs about the social world. Firstly, we believe that a high level of negativistic social beliefs can be positively predicted by the growth of avoidance (negative image of others) and anxiety (negative image of self). Secondly, we formulate an expected interaction effect. Although the nature of such an interaction is ambiguous, it may be argued as having a synergistic as well as antagonistic pattern. These hypotheses were tested and supported (in favor of an antagonistic pattern of interaction in the case of the second hypothesis) on a representative sample of adult Poles (N = 853).

Education as Relational Process

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-49
Author(s):  
Kenneth J. Gergen ◽  
Scherto R. Gill
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social World ◽  
Assessment Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Assessment Orientation ◽  
Ways Of Life ◽  
Do So ◽  
Relational Process

Replacing the assessment orientation requires an alternative to the idea of schools as sites of production. To do so, the authors challenge the conception of schools as composed of individual actors whose performance can be measured independently of their lodgment in the social world. They argue that our understandings of the world, along with our ways of life, come about within a process of relating. It is out of coordination among participants that beliefs, values, and meaningfulness of actions originate. Thus the process of co-creation is essential to knowledge, understanding, and learning. Significant distinctions are drawn among various forms of relational process, with contrasts between conventional conversations (valuable in sustaining tradition) degenerative interchange (leading to the destruction of meaning-making) and generative relating (that inspires innovation and enriches relationship). Measurement-based assessment practices in education foster alienation, suspicion, self-centeredness, and an instrumental orientation to relating. Vitally needed is the development of a relationally enriching orientation to evaluation.

scholarly journals A Model of How Shifting Intelligence Drives Social Movements

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Noah F. G. Evers ◽  
Patricia M. Greenfield
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Social World ◽  
Practical Intelligence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Do So

Based on the theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development, we propose a mechanism whereby increased danger in society causes predictable shifts in valued forms of intelligence: 1. Practical intelligence rises in value relative to abstract intelligence; and 2. social intelligence shifts from measuring how well individuals can negotiate the social world to achieve their personal aims to measuring how well they can do so to achieve group aims. We document these shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic and argue that they led to an increase in the size and strength of social movements.

The Horizons of Experience

2012 ◽  
pp. 252-272
Author(s):  
Tony Hines
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Social Study ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Life World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rational Thought

Social researchers consciously and intentionally set out to understand the life-world (Lebenswelt). It is different than knowing the inanimate world of objects. Social study is systematic and as rigorous as natural science but focuses on human experience. The social world we inhabit cradles all human experience. It is the context for meaning, for all being and becoming. Life is a temporal stream of experience that, if we are to understand it, needs to be kept at bay (bracketing it). In doing so, it is as Husserl said at the ‘horizon of experience,’ pre-theoretical. It is only through critical reflection that we understand our lived experience in relation to others, present and past. This chapter reflects on Husserl’s notion of ‘horizon of experience’ to intentionally understand the limits of rational thought on irrational objects. It offers insights through these reflections and possibilities for researching information systems applying phenomenology.

Voices of Anxiety

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Inner Speech ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Inner Dialogue

This chapter develops a detailed account of what auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) consist of and how they arise. It focuses, to begin with, on those that involve a quasi-perceptual experience of ‘inner speech’ or ‘inner dialogue’. Such experiences are often preceded by heightened social anxiety, and it is argued that anxious anticipation of one’s own thought contents as they arise can constitute an experience of thought content as ‘alien’. This approach is then broadened to accommodate not only inner dialogue but also imagination and memory. The chapter further proposes that other kinds of AVH, which are experienced as external in origin and more akin to veridical auditory experiences, can likewise be accounted for in terms of anxious anticipation, but that they come about in a different way. It is also made clear how AVHs can fall somewhere in between the ‘internal, non-auditory’ and ‘external, auditory poles’, rather than fitting neatly into one or the other category. The chapter concludes by noting that AVHs tend to be associated with wider-ranging disturbances in a person’s relationship with the social world, which are often preceded by unpleasant interpersonal circumstances.

scholarly journals Perspective-taking is spontaneous but not automatic

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (10) ◽  
pp. 1605-1628
Author(s):  
Cathleen O’Grady ◽  
Thom Scott-Phillips ◽  
Suilin Lavelle ◽  
Kenny Smith
Keyword(s):  
Visual System ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Social World ◽  
Computationally Efficient ◽  
Classic Result ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Do So

Data from a range of different experimental paradigms—in particular (but not only) the dot perspective task—have been interpreted as evidence that humans automatically track the perspective of other individuals. Results from other studies, however, have cast doubt on this interpretation, and some researchers have suggested that phenomena that seem like perspective-taking might instead be the products of simpler behavioural rules. The issue remains unsettled in significant part because different schools of thought, with different theoretical perspectives, implement the experimental tasks in subtly different ways, making direct comparisons difficult. Here, we explore the possibility that subtle differences in experimental method explain otherwise irreconcilable findings in the literature. Across five experiments we show that the classic result in the dot perspective task is not automatic (it is not purely stimulus-driven), but nor is it exclusively the product of simple behavioural rules that do not involve mentalising. Instead, participants do compute the perspectives of other individuals rapidly, unconsciously, and involuntarily, but only when attentional systems prompt them to do so (just as, for instance, the visual system puts external objects into focus only as and when required). This finding prompts us to clearly distinguish spontaneity from automaticity. Spontaneous perspective-taking may be a computationally efficient means of navigating the social world.

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