Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure takes sociology in a new direction. It examines key aspects of social structure by using a fresh understanding of emotions categories. Through that synthesis emerge new perspectives on rationality, class structure, social action, conformity, basic rights, and social change. As well as giving an innovative view of social processes, J. M. Barbalet's study also reveals unappreciated aspects of emotions by considering fear, resentment, vengefulness, shame, and confidence in the context of social structure. While much (...) has been written on the social consequences of excessive or pathological emotions, this book demonstrates the centrality of emotions to routine operations of social interaction. Dr Barbalet also re-evaluates the nature of social theory, for once the importance of emotions to social processes becomes clear, the intellectual constitution of sociology, and therefore its history, must be rethought. (shrink)

What is the phenomenology of hope? A common view is that hope has a generally positive and pleasant affective tone. This rosy depiction, however, has recently been challenged. Certain hopes, it has been objected, are such that they are either entirely negative in valence or neutral in tone. In this paper, I argue that this challenge has only limited success. In particular, I show that it only applies to one sense of hope but leaves another sense—one that is implicitly but (...) widely employed in the hope literature—untouched. Moreover, I argue that hope construed in this latter sense is inherently positively valenced. The paper concludes by discussing some of the implications of this defense of hope's positive phenomenology, including the ontological question of whether hope is an emotion. (shrink)

According to the standard account, to hope for an outcome is to desire it and to believe that its realization is possible, though not inevitable. This account, however, faces certain difficulties: It cannot explain how people can display differing strengths in hope; it cannot distinguish hope from despair; and it cannot explain substantial hopes. This paper proposes an account of hope that can meet these deficiencies. Briefly, it argues that in addition to possessing the relevant belief–desire structure as allowed in (...) the standard account, a hopeful person must also be able to see a way in which the desired outcome can come about and to see such a way to the outcome as a genuine possibility. (shrink)

In order to better understand the topic of hope, this paper argues that two separate theories are needed: One for hoping, and the other for hopefulness. This bifurcated approach is warranted by the observation that the word ‘hope’ is polysemous: It is sometimes used to refer to hoping and sometimes, to feeling or being hopeful. Moreover, these two senses of 'hope' are distinct, as a person can hope for some outcome yet not simultaneously feel hopeful about it. I argue that (...) this distinction between hoping and hopefulness is not always observed or fully appreciated in the literature and has consequently caused much confusion. This paper then sketches what theorizing about hope looks like in light of this clarification and discusses some of its implications. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new framework for thinking about hope, with certain unexpected consequences. Specifically, I argue that a shift in focus from locutions like “x hopes that” and “x is hoping that” to “x is hopeful that” and “x has hope that” can improve our understanding of hope. This approach, which emphasizes hopefulness as the central concept, turns out to be more revealing and fruitful in tackling some of the issues that philosophers have raised about hope, such as the (...) question of how hope can be distinguished from despair or how people can have differing strengths in hope. It also allows us to see that many current accounts of hope, far from being rivals, are actually compatible with one another. (shrink)

This conceptual paper explores the role that wisdom plays in social work. In the literature, this topic is primarily discussed in terms of ‘Practice Wisdom’, a kind of implicit and intuitive-based body of knowledge that is acquired through practice experience. After reviewing some formulations of it, we argue that practice wisdom faces a number of difficulties and is a misguided approach. To replace it, we propose a novel framework called ‘Practitioner Wisdom’, which emphasises that the proper subject of wisdom is (...) not some sub-personal construct like a body of knowledge or a set of skills but the social work practitioner. Drawing from virtue theory in philosophy, we theorise that being a wise practitioner is a matter of acquiring and cultivating a character that is constituted by the relevant social work virtues and values. We conclude by discussing some benefits of practitioner wisdom, including how it can be taught to social work students and entrants, and suggest some future areas of research. (shrink)

This collection of ten original essays was first published in 1977. It engages the 'crisis in sociology' at the most fundamental level of thought and experience. Existential sociology is defined as the study and understanding of all forms of human existence. Without seeking to erect a pristine philosophical sanctuary of its own, Existential Sociology examines and criticizes the underlying philosophical assumptions of previous theories of social science, while elaborating its own approach to human understanding. The contributors are concerned with constructing (...) practical as well as theoretical truths about social life - how we feel, think and act. In contrast to most other sociologies, the emphasis is on the independence and dominance of human feelings over the evaluative and cognitive features of social actions. Students and teachers of sociology and people in related fields interested in the connection between social science and their own subjects will find Existential Sociology useful and absorbing. (shrink)

Open-mindedness is an under-explored topic in virtue epistemology, despite its assumed importance for the field. Questions about it abound and need to be answered. For example, what sort of intellectual activities are central to it? Can one be open-minded about one's firmly held beliefs? Why should we strive to be open-minded? This paper aims to shed light on these and other pertinent issues. In particular, it proposes a view that construes open-mindedness as engagement, that is, a willingness to entertain novel (...) ideas in one's cognitive space and to accord them serious consideration. (shrink)

Open-mindedness is widely regarded as an epistemic virtue and, more recently, a moral one: its exercise is supposed to be conducive not only to the acquisition of epistemic goods such as truth, knowledge, and understanding, but also to the development of moral goods such as the promotion of social cohesion and the fostering of people’s respect and care for one another. This glossy view of open-mindedness, however, has come under challenge. Critics have argued that adopting a default stance of openness (...) can be detrimental to our epistemic and moral selves, especially in today’s world where fake news, attacks on the idea of truth, and blatant lies abound. The articles in this symposium by Howard Curzer and Jessica Gottlieb and by Matt Ferkany represent some of these challenges. Concerned with the question of when it is safe to exercise open-mindedness, both seek to identify the potential hazards that may arise as a result being open-minded and to propose ways to curtail those hazards. In this paper, I will assess each of their arguments in turn. (shrink)

A key feature of the lambda model is the hypothesis of a local spring-like muscle-reflex system defined by a central control variable that has units of position. This is intriguing, especially for a study of postural stability in large-scale systems, but it has limited direct application to skilled everyday movements. If movement is considered as a goal-directed, neuro-optimization problem, however, theavailabilityof lambda-like peripheral models (vs. conventional musculoskeletal models) deserves exploration.

This article describes law's encounter with deconstruction, and how it changed deconstruction. In the hands of lawyers, deconstruction became a set of rhetorical strategies for critiquing legal distinctions and showing their ideological character. Legal scholars used deconstructive arguments to offer normative prescriptions in ways quite different from literary critics or philosophers. Although in theory all texts and distinctions are deconstructable, legal scholars assumed that some interpretations were better than others. Legal deconstruction thus became a set of repeatable rhetorical practices used (...) for pragmatic purposes; and it revealed that these rhetorical and pragmatic features were already present in literary and philosophical deconstruction. Deconstruction's encounter with law also overturned several popular assumptions about deconstruction. First, legal deconstruction does not assert that legal texts have no meaning or that their meanings are indecipherable. Rather, it argues that texts are overflowing with meanings that point in different directions and emerge over time. Second, one deconstructs conceptual oppositions not to show that legal concepts have no boundaries, but that their boundaries are fluid and appear differently as the conceptual opposition is placed into new interpretive contexts. Legal deconstruction asserts that legal distinctions are nested oppositions - conceptual oppositions whose terms bear a relation of mutual dependence and differentiation; this complicated relationship is revealed as interpretive contexts change. Ideological drift, in which concepts change their political valence as they are repeatedly invoked at different points in history, is a special case of this phenomenon. Third, instead of asserting that legal doctrine is radically indeterminate, legal deconstruction suggests that social construction places ideological constraints on legal decisionmaking and helps produce the sense that some arguments are better than others. Finally, far from denying the existence of fundamental human values, legal deconstruction presupposes a transcendent value of justice which law attempts to express but always fails fully to articulate. (shrink)

This paper proposes to examine Daniel Cohen’s recent attempt to apply virtues to argumentation theory, with special attention given to his explication of how open-mindedness can be regarded as an argumentational or critical virtue. It is argued that his analysis involves a contentious claim about open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue, which generates a tension for agents who are simultaneously both an arguer and a knower (or who strive to be both). I contend that this tension can be eased or resolved (...) by clarifying the nature of open-mindedness and by construing open-mindedness in terms of its function. Specifically, a willingness to take a novel viewpoint seriously is sufficient for making open-mindedness both an epistemic and a critical virtue. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

Using Brehm's (1999) intensity of emotion paradigm, we investigated whether basic positive or negative affect operates like a motivational state. We focused on one of the most basic affects, the sensory affect experienced when eating food. Participants tasted a delicious chocolate truffle (Study 1) or some bitter chocolate (Study 2) and were exposed to either a weak, moderately strong, or a very strong reason for feeling an opposing-valence affect or to no reason. In line with the predictions, the affect that (...) participants reported in response to chocolate functioned like a motivational state as its intensity was a cubic function of the importance of the reason for feeling an opposing affect. We discussed the implications of these findings for the conceptualisation of affect and consider several applications for food advertising and consumer rating research. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that hope is polysemous in that it sometimes refers to hoping and other times to being hopeful. That it has these two distinct senses is reflected in the observation that a person can hope for an outcome without being hopeful that it will occur. Below, I offer a new argument for this distinction. My strategy is to show that accepting this distinction yields a rich account of two distinct ways in which hope can be lost, (...) ways that map onto the two senses of hope: A person can lose hope either by ceasing to hope for an outcome (hopelessness) or by ceasing to be hopeful that it will obtain (despair). Thinking about these negative attitudes in these two ways, I contend, is explanatorily rich and fruitfully reveals how they differ in phenomenology, behavioral differences, and the ways in which a person can escape them. (shrink)

Conceptual atomism is the view according to which most lexical concepts lack ‘internal’ or constituent structure. To date, it has not received much attention from philosophers and psychologists. A centralreason is that it is thought to be an implausible theory of concepts, resulting in untenable implications. The main objective of this paper is to present conceptual atomism as a viable alternative, with a view toachieving two aims: the first, to characterize and to elucidate conceptual atomism; and the second, to dispel (...) some misconceptions associated with it. My aim is to show that the prospect of conceptualatomism is a promising one. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the recent resurgence of interest in what we call “fabriculture.” Three dimensions of fabriculture are explored: the gendered spaces of production around new domesticity and the social home; the blurring of old and new media in digital craft culture; and the politics of popular culture that emerge in the mix of folk and commercial culture. Ultimately, we conceptualize craft as power, as a way of understanding current activist possibilities.