Psychology

"Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?"

"The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion.""

"All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements. Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs often show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the possible the blame is solely ours, but when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task."

"With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves."

"The most profound breach in this country is not between the rich and the poor, but between the people and the intellectuals. In their view of life, the American people are predominantly Apollonian. The mainstream intellectuals are Dionysian. This means the people are reality-oriented, common sense-oriented, technology-oriented. The intellectuals call this "materialistic," and "middle-class." The intellectuals are emotion-oriented, and seek in panic an escape from a reality they are unable to deal with, and from a technological civilization that ignores their feelings."

"[Solipsism is] the doctrine that all existence is experience, and that there is only one experient. The Solipsist thinks that he is the one. ...that the 'absolute idealist' is a Solispsist need only be barely stated. ...He is a Solipsist because he believes that the Absolute is the sole experiment, and that he is himself the incarnate Absolute.""

"If I felt reckless or strong enough to shoulder the responsibility, I might not object to a solipsism that made me the all by emphasising the inevitable relation of experience to an experient; the trouble comes when other experients claim a monopoly of this relation in the face of conflicting claims, and propose to reduce me to incidents in their cosmic nightmare."

"All the inclinations together (which can be reduced to a tolerable system, in which case their satisfaction is called happiness) constitutes self-regard, (solipsismus). This is either the self-love that consists in an excessive fondness for oneself (philautia), or satisfaction with oneself (arrogantia). The former is called particularly selfishness; the latter self-conceit."

"What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone."

"W. T. Krug follows Kant's usage in identifying solipsism with moral egoism ('making one's own self the end of all one's actions')... This identification is still repeated as late as 1890 by F. Kirchner. Meanwhile, some time during the 19th cent., solipsism was transferred from moral or practical egoism to theoretical (either epistemological or metaphysical) egoism, i.e. to the theory that I can know nothing but my own ideas and that I and my ideas are all that exists. This view was called simply 'egoism' by Wolf (who treats it, rightly, as an extreme species of idealism), Mendelssohn, Tetens, and other 18th cent. writers."

"Solipsism has no real ground to stand on and the pragmatist is the very last in the line of those who may be accused of even seeming to have taken, or to have tried to take, his stand there."

"The argument in favor of Solispsism, put most simply, is as follows: "I cannot transcend experience, and experience is my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond myself exists; for what is experience is its (the self's) states." The argument derives its strength, in part, from false theory, but to a greater extent perhaps, from thoughtless obscurity."

"Solipsism need not be positive, it need not assume any burden of proof. The defender of solipsism may proceed as follows: "You mistake my purpose; I am not trying to prove the truth of solipsism. I say merely that the situation is ambiguous and capable of two explanations, and I see nothing but sentiment which obliges me to reject the solipsistic one. ...logically we are left with a sort of negative solipsism on our hands which we can not get rid of. Actually we simply toss it away. We can not stand that kind of suggestion. Our whole being rebels. We simply banish solipsism out of court. But I submit that this is not a logical nor a philosophical way of escape."

"Bertrand Russell remarked that he was cured of solipsism for life by receiving a letter from a woman saying, 'I'm so glad you think there may be something in solipsism. I wish there were more of us.'"

"Kant has said that there are some questions which should never be asked, and there is apostolic authority for the injunction "to avoid foolish questions." Only the fool has said in his heart that he is alone in the universe; but since philosophy has seriously raised the question of the existence of my neighbor and of the way in which I may come to know him, it may be not without interest to notice (i) how the problem has emerged, (ii) the importance of the problem for modern philosophy, and (iii) some leading solutions that have been offered."

"Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion."

"We had to assume that solipsism was nonsense because otherwise everything else around us was nonsense and irrelevant, and the result of a kind of self-inflicted deceit."

"Whenever one was struck by a previously unlikely-seeming idea that had come to appear plausible or even sensible, one ought to apply that test: was it inherently any more likely than solipsism? If solipsism seemed to make just as much sense, then the idea could be dismissed."

"Now, our tutor pointed out that there was a weakness in the hard-line or extreme solipsist’s position which came down to the question why, if they were all that existed, they bothered to deceive themselves so? Why did it appear to the solipsistic entity that there was an external reality in the first place, and, more to the point, why this one specifically? Why did the solipsist appear to be constrained in any way by that supposedly physically non-existent and therefore utterly pliable reality?"

"Solipsism... is sometimes spoken of as the philosophical term for insanity. It certainly seems to stand for metaphysics run mad, or, in politer language, for subjective idealism carried to extremes. The solipsist claims to be the sole inhabitant of the universe, and all manifestations to the contrary are merely subjective states of his own. As with so many other mentally unbalanced persons, his cosmos is all ego."

"The term “Cognitive Architectures” indicates both abstract models of cognition, in natural and artificial agents, and the software instantiations of such models which are then employed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The main role of Cognitive Architectures in AI is that one of enabling the realization of artificial systems able to exhibit intelligent behavior in a general setting through a detailed analogy with the constitutive and developmental functioning and mechanisms underlying human cognition."

"has been designed to provide guidelines intended to assist in the presentation of information in a manner that encourages learner activities that optimize intellectual performance. The theory assumes a limited capacity working memory that includes partially independent subcomponents to deal with auditory/verbal material and visual/2- or 3-dimensional information as well as an effectively unlimited long-term memory, holding schemas that vary in their degree of automation. These structures and functions of human cognitive architecture have been used to design a variety of novel instructional procedures based on the assumption that working memory load should be reduced and schema construction encouraged. This paper reviews the theory and the instructional designs generated by it."

"When taken as a way of modeling cognitive architecture, really does represent an approach that is quite different from that of the classical cognitive science that it seeks to replace. Classical models of the mind were derived from the structure of Turing and Von Neumann machines. They are not, of course, committed to the details of these machines as exemplified in Turing's original formulation or in typical commercial computers—only to the basic idea that the kind of computing that is relevant to understanding cognition involves operations on symbols.. In contrast, connectionists propose to design systems that can exhibit intelligent behavior without storing, retrieving, or otherwise operating on structured symbolic expressions. The style of processing carried out in such models is thus strikingly unlike what goes on when conventional machines are computing some function."

"A cognitive architecture specifies aspects of an intelligent system that are stable over time, much as in a building’s architecture. These include the memories that store perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge, the representation of elements that are contained in these memories, the performance mechanisms that use them, and the learning processes that build on them. Such a framework typically comes with a programming language and software environment that supports the efficient construction of knowledge-based systems."

"Research on cognitive architectures varies widely in the degree to which it attempts to match psychological data. (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and EPIC (Kieras & Meyer, 1997) aim for quantitative fits to reaction time and error data, whereas Prodigy (Minton et al., 1989) incorporates selected mechanisms like means-ends analysis but otherwise makes little contact with human behavior. Architectures like Soar (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom, 1987; Newell, 1990) and Icarus (Langley & Choi, in press; Langley & Rogers, 2005) take a middle position, drawing on many psychological ideas but also emphasizing their strength as flexible AI systems. What they hold in common is an acknowledgement of their debt to theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology and a concern with the same intellectual abilities as humans."

"We attempt to use the phenomenologist's approach to arrive at personalized constructs which have a wide range of meaning for the given individual; then we attempt to piece together this high-level type of data with what we know about other persons."

"While we could agree with the psychological phenomenologists and assign an important place to generalization within the realm of the individual, we were quite sure that some data must be lifted from the realm of the individual and construed nomothetically that is, in a realm comprising many individuals."

"To begin, image theory assumes that decision makers use three different schematic knowledge structures to organize their thinking about decisions. These structures are called images, in deference to Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960), whose work inspired image theory. The first of the three is the value image, the constituents of which are the decision maker's principles. These are the imperatives for his or her behavior or the behavior of the organization of which he or she is a member and serve as rigid criteria for the rightness or wrongness of any particular decision about a goal or plan. Principles serve to internally generate candidate goals and plans for possible adoption, and they guide decisions about externally generated candidate goals and plans."

"A new fundamental science, pure phenomenology, has developed within philosophy: This is a science of a thoroughly new type and endless scope. It is inferior in methodological rigor to none of the modern sciences. All philosophical disciplines are rooted in pure phenomenology, through whose development, and through it alone, they obtain their proper force."

"Briefly stated, image theory assumes that people "adopt and implement plans to reach goals in order to satisfy principles" (Mitchell & Beach, 1990, p. 16)"

"Images are defined to be information structures, with different kind of images representing different kind of information about what the actor is doing, why and how, and what kind of progress is being made."

"Within image theory (e.g., Beach, 1990; Mitchell & Beach, 1990), it is suggested that important components of decision-making processes are the different “images” that a person may use to evaluate choice options. Images may represent a person's principles, goals, or plans. Decision options may then match or not match these images and be adopted, rejected, considered further, depending on circumstances."

"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs... The theory recognises that decisions occur in steps such as screening out unacceptable options followed by choosing the best option from the survivors... The interesting point being that screening focuses on what is wrong with options and choosing focuses on what is right, which are two quite different activities. Once adoption choices have been made, decision makers routinely revisit the progress of the implementations of their decisions to test if they remain compatible with the achievement of their goal. Image theory has been adapted to describe both individual decision making and organisational decision making."

"People define themselves in terms of both unique individualizing attributes and collective attributes of the groups to which they belong."

"The invasion of technique desacralizes the world in which man is called upon to live. For technique nothing is sacred, there is no mystery, no taboo."

"There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules … intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? … Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?"

"The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual — that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked — is surely at the core of our culture’s fascination with pornography."

"At a certain point power becomes very frightening, and to really begin to reconstruct civilization means to really act in a powerful way. And power is the thing that women have been taught is a real taboo."

"Acts that offer a glimpse of transcendence to one group are condemned by another. We are pressured from every side - by peers, by church, by state - to accept the consensual definition of taboo; though so often what excites our imaginations most is the violation of taboo."

"There are many taboos, intolerance and extremism. And our task is — to destroy them. I believe that clever and artistic, reasoned and convincing humor can push more and more walls in our world. And it can be done without insult or aggression."

"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."

"While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind – in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially when its discrediting effect is very extensive; sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a handicap. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity."

"Kelley’s (1967) paper on attribution theory in social psychology is generally considered the first systematic and general treatment of lay causal explanations. Kelley’s self-ascribed goal in the paper was “to highlight some of the central ideas contained in Heider’s theory” (Kelley, 1967, p. 192). Specifically, the two central ideas on which Kelley focused were:"

"In social psychology, the term attribution has two primary meanings. The first refers to explanations of behavior (i.e., answers to why questions); the second refers to inferences or ascriptions (e.g., inferring traits from behavior, ascribing blame to a person). What the two meanings have in common is a process of assigning: in attribution as explanation, a behavior is assigned to its cause; in attribution as inference, a quality or attribute is assigned to the agent on the basis of an observed behavior."

"All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion."

"Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal."

"Every living thing loves its own kind,"

"The study of perceived causation is identified by the term "attribution theory," attribution referring to the perception or inference of cause. As we will see, there is not one but many attribution "theories" and the term refers to several different kinds of problem. The common ideas are that people interpret behavior in terms of its causes and that these interpretations play an important role in determining reactions to the behavior."

"Administration is both social engineering and applied psychology. It is apparatus and mechanics, incentives and human nature. Let no one think it is merely the former. Nowhere is the need for psychology greater than in the organization, direction, and inspiration of men working in large groups. Outstanding administrative results are produced by spirit, morale, atmosphere; these, in turn, are the product of psychological mainsprings and invigorating incentives. As Benjamin Lippincott has recognized, both governmental and business administration resolve fundamentally into the role played by effective incentives."

"War has given applied psychology a tremendous impulse. This will, on the whole, do good, for psychology, which is the largest and last of the sciences, must not try to be too pure."