Certain Kinds Of Experiences Research Articles

The digital pregnancy: A qualitative study of Danish women’s use of pregnancy apps

Based on an interview study with Danish women, this article explores how the frequent use of pregnancy mobile applications shapes the lived or experienced pregnancy. More specifically, we look at a reported dilemma between, on one hand, using the information of pregnancy apps on bodily and fetal developments to gain a sense of control over individual pregnancies and, on the other hand, an experience of the apps becoming something of a controlling factor in the lives of pregnant women. Respondents reported that the information of the apps created different kinds of concerns and that they became almost obsessed with comparing their own symptoms with the apps’ standardized information on what they could expect to experience at specific stages of the pregnancy. Our analysis draws on a socio-material perspective that acknowledges the ability of technology to enact certain kinds of experiences and shape concerns. We argue that the power of the apps (so to speak) is related, in part to the abundance of information they provide, which may contribute to a sensation of never knowing enough, but also in part to the use of apps becoming an integrated part of everyday cell phone routines.

Joyful by nature: approaches to investigate the evolution and function of joy in non-human animals.

The nature and evolution of positive emotion is a major question remaining unanswered in science and philosophy. The study of feelings and emotions in humans and animals is dominated by discussion of affective states that have negative valence. Given the clinical and social significance of negative affect, such as depression, it is unsurprising that these emotions have received more attention from scientists. Compared to negative emotions, such as fear that leads to fleeing or avoidance, positive emotions are less likely to result in specific, identifiable, behaviours being expressed by an animal. This makes it particularly challenging to quantify and study positive affect. However, bursts of intense positive emotion (joy) are more likely to be accompanied by externally visible markers, like vocalisations or movement patterns, which make it more amenable to scientific study and more resilient to concerns about anthropomorphism. We define joy as intense, brief, and event-driven (i.e. a response to something), which permits investigation into how animals react to a variety of situations that would provoke joy in humans. This means that behavioural correlates of joy are measurable, either through newly discovered 'laughter' vocalisations, increases in play behaviour, or reactions to cognitive bias tests that can be used across species. There are a range of potential situations that cause joy in humans that have not been studied in other animals, such as whether animals feel joy on sunny days, when they accomplish a difficult feat, or when they are reunited with a familiar companion after a prolonged absence. Observations of species-specific calls and play behaviour can be combined with biometric markers and reactions to ambiguous stimuli in order to enable comparisons of affect between phylogenetically distant taxonomic groups. Identifying positive affect is also important for animal welfare because knowledge of positive emotional states would allow us to monitor animal well-being better. Additionally, measuring if phylogenetically and ecologically distant animals play more, laugh more, or act more optimistically after certain kinds of experiences will also provide insight into the mechanisms underlying the evolution of joy and other positive emotions, and potentially even into the evolution of consciousness.

Training naive subjects in using micro-phenomenological self-inquiry to investigate pain and suffering during headaches.

Micro-phenomenology is a method that generates rich and reliable reports of singular experiences in their pre-reflective dimension. Usually it is employed using a second-person interviewer. In this study we attempted to train naïve subjects in using self-inquiry version of the method. 13 subjects met twice over the course of one week, investigating their experiences of headaches, looking specifically into the pain experience itself, the experience of suffering, and the experience of absence of suffering. The analysis showed that the subject reports increase the richness of description, measured by the increase in the amount of categories described and the number of words needed to give an on target description. The analysis, informed by the participant's ideas, showed that it was possible to distinguish the experience of pain from the experience of suffering. We compare the analysis to other phenomenological studies of headaches. This reveals the strength and weakness of the micro-phenomenological method: By de-focusing on contextual factors it enables in-depth descriptions of singular moments of experience, but the bracketing of interpretations may result in overlooking overarching meaning dimensions. We conclude that micro-phenomenological self-inquiry may potentially be employed successfully in a clinical setting with initially untrained subjects for describing certain kinds of experiences and answering complex phenomenological questions.

‘The Unconscious was Another Word for Inspiration’: Adam Phillips on Marion Milner

‘The Unconscious was Another Word for Inspiration’: Adam Phillips on Marion Milner

Let’s be Liberal: An Alternative to Aesthetic Hedonism

Abstract Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value empiricism. This alternative is aesthetic liberalism. On this view, an object’s aesthetic value is fully grounded in any value—not just the hedonic value—of a correct and complete experience of its sensory features. To demonstrate the advantages of liberalism over hedonism, I apply both views to analyze the aesthetic value of the Spring Temple Buddha and Anselm Kiefer’s Seraphim. I detail four advantages of liberalism over hedonism, and I conclude by defending liberalism from two kinds of objection.

Wielding a gun increases judgments of others as holding guns: a randomized controlled trial

The gun embodiment effect is the consequence caused by wielding a gun on judgments of whether others are also holding a gun. This effect could be responsible for real-world instances when police officers shoot an unarmed person because of the misperception that the person had a gun. The gun embodiment effect is an instance of embodied cognition for which a person’s tool-augmented body affects their judgments. The replication crisis in psychology has raised concern about embodied cognition effects in particular, and the issue of low statistical power applies to the original research on the gun embodiment effect.Thus, the first step was to conduct a high-powered replication. We found a significant gun embodiment effect in participants’ reaction times and in their proportion of correct responses, but not in signal detection measures of bias, as had been originally reported. To help prevent the gun embodiment effect from leading to fatal encounters, it would be useful to know whether individuals with certain traits are less prone to the effect and whether certain kinds of experiences help alleviate the effect. With the new and reliable measure of the gun embodiment effect, we tested for moderation by individual differences related to prior gun experience, attitudes, personality, and factors related to emotion regulation and impulsivity. Despite the variety of these measures, there was little evidence for moderation. The results were more consistent with the idea of the gun embodiment effect being a universal, fixed effect, than being a flexible, malleable effect.

Measure Learning Environments, Not Just Students, to Support Learning and Development

Background Young people are more likely to develop into effective learners, productive adults, and engaged citizens when their learning environments afford them certain kinds of experiences. For example, students are more likely to succeed when they experience a sense of belonging in school or experience schoolwork as personally relevant. Purpose How can schools systematically ensure they provide every one of their students with the important developmental experiences they need to succeed and thrive? To answer this question, we offer a conceptual framework that integrates insights from empirical literatures in education, psychology, and developmental science; innovations from early warning indicator methods; and our own experiences as researchers working in partnership with practitioners to build more equitable and developmentally supportive learning environments. Research Design Integrative Perspective Recommendations We posit that schools currently pay a great deal of attention to the results of effective learning (e.g., high test scores), but not nearly enough attention to the causes of effective learning (e.g., assignments that are relevant enough to motivate students). We propose that schools could foster learning and development more systematically and more equitably if they started to measure, not just downstream learning outcomes, but also the upstream developmental experiences that make those outcomes more likely to unfold.

Language, Ethics and "The Merits of Being Involved in Meaning". Review of Maria Balaska: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning and Astonishment

Working through Balaska’s deeply perceptive, elegantly written, and profoundly honest book, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, a reader steeped in the recent academic literature about either or both of its main figures may come to feel herself placed at what is, itself, a certain kind of limit. The limit I mean is the limit of a familiar type of theoretical discourse about the constitution and structure of language and subjectivity as Wittgenstein and Lacan treat them: it includes the discourses that seek, for instance, to articulate how language and sense are constituted in the Tractatus, and thus what is really meant by “logical form” and “nonsense” there; or those that aim to comprehend the true relationship of our biological nature to language, culture, and the advent of freedom in Lacan; or, again, those that try to find, in either thinker’s works (or both), the precise location of the delicate logical buttonhole that would alone permit us entry, from within everyday language and life, to the absoluteness of an ineffable beyond. These discourses all treat of language and life, but handle these phenomena (so we might say) at arm’s length, theorizing the structure of each and the form of their relationship in such a way as to establish, ultimately, their mutual convertibility to one another, their mutual absorption into a third, more inclusive term (such as “nature” or “biology), or adduce translations from the dense theoretical matrices of one thinker’s treatment of them to the other’s (for instance, from the terminology of logic to that of psychoanalysis, or back again). Balaska’s book, doing none of these things, rather succeeds in bringing out how an interconnected reading of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Lacan may speak to and inform our response to a certain kind of experience that is characteristic for both thinkers, and typical as well of those moments and occasions of our lives in which we may find ourselves drawn to reflect on what meaning is and how we relate to it.

To sell or not to sell: the impact of managers' sales experience on organisational financial performance

Selecting a manager is an important decision for any organisation. If done right, the organisation should thrive with strong productivity and financial performance. If the wrong person is selected, negative issues such as low employee morale and low productivity can lead to poor sales and profits. While experience is an important factor in hiring, some organisations place a disproportionate amount of weight on certain kinds of experience. In particular, this study examined a Fortune 500 firm in North America that anecdotally believed that those individuals with prior experience in sales made better managers. Thus, we quantitatively examined if managers at this firm with prior sales experience produced higher sales revenue, profitability (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation; EBITDA), and return on controllable assets (ROCA) compared to those managers without prior sales experience. The results of our analysis indicate that skill sets, other than those provided by prior sales experience, are necessary for managers to generate and manage revenue.

War of the Worldviews

486 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) no one with a serious interest in one of the most accomplished of all sf writers will want to miss this volume.—Carl Freedman, Louisiana State University War of the Worldviews. Richard Grigg. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. viii+151 pp.£90.00/$120.00 hc, £28.99/$39.95 pbk., £31.30/$35.95 ebk. Grigg’s approach to past scholarship on science fiction, theology, and religious studies is to appeal to the handful of thinkers he finds useful and ignore the rest. This style of scholarship gives him the freedom to advance his argument without critical resistance and with great creativity and efficiency; however, it simultaneously limits its use for other scholars. SFS readers may find its lack of engagement with sf scholarship frustrating, but a subset of scholars who teach courses on “religion and science fiction” could find Grigg’s work interesting and pedagogically useful. The primary value of this work lies in the classroom discussions it might enable, and it is written with the classroom in mind. Unlike the trajectories that contemporary sf studies have taken (looking at global sf, queer sf, Afrofuturism, and so on), Grigg’s text assumes a normative liberal, Western perspective. Christianity is the prototypical traditional “world religion,” with light engagement with an idealized Buddhism, and the primary questions are those of a (post-Christian) theology actively engaged with the contemporary world. To be used responsibly as a foundational text for a class on “religion and science fiction,” one should encourage students to read this text critically, actively engaging with how categories such as the “sacred,” “secular,” and “world religions” have been constructed. Such a class would also do well to interrogate Grigg’s definition of “science fiction” in terms of technology (for an example of Grigg’s running up against his own definition, see 77-78). One of the still-prominent approaches to the study of “religion” regards a certain kind of experience as distinctively characteristic of the phenomenon: a sui generis sense of the “sacred,” “numinous,” “transcendent,” “divine,” “incalculable,” “sublime,” “Other,” “eternal,” and so on. This experience is regarded by relevant members of the phenomenological, perennialist, or experiential school as temporally and geographically panhuman and innate, immediately given to consciousness as opposed to socially constructed and contingent, and lying at the heart of all the “world religions.” This is not the place to go into the details of the critical literature on this subject, but its existence is relevant because of Grigg’s extensive dependence on the category of the “sacred.” Experiences are generated in an interplay of bottom-up and topdown cognitive processes; with the neurotheological authors whom Grigg cites, one can acknowledge a substratum of relatively consistent bottom-up input accessible to at least most humans, while also noting that every experience will be constituted in culturally contingent ways using distinctive attributional systems. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred assumes a robust metanarrative of secularization that prioritizes ideas of loss and nostalgia, and 487 BOOKS IN REVIEW that assume secularization’s success and God’s nonexistence; in this context and given Grigg’s use of the concept of “imitation,” it would have been nice to see him engage with the literature on the relationship of concepts such as simulation, hyperreality, spectacle, and virtuality to conditions of secularity and postmodernity. That said, Grigg’s critical attitude toward the notion that the imaginative art of science fiction gives access to the sacred or transcendent, as reflected in his insistence on its being an “imitation,” is a refreshing, if only partial, turn away from the virtually universal romanticism under the influence of which most other studies of “religion and science fiction” are developed. Grigg uses the concept of “imitation” to indicate the non-reality of the “sacred” supplied by science fiction; it is not “genuine” (3). His text assumes that past humans experienced a sacred or divine that was given to them without mediation, a sacred that possessed all the attributes described in their sacred texts. He does not seem to think of ancient peoples as engaging with their own experiences and narratives in...

TO SELL OR NOT TO SELL: THE IMPACT OF MANAGERS’ SALES EXPERIENCE ON ORGANIZATIONAL FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE

Selecting a manager is an important decision for any organisation. If done right, the organisation should thrive with strong productivity and financial performance. If the wrong person is selected, negative issues such as low employee morale and low productivity can lead to poor sales and profits. While experience is an important factor in hiring, some organisations place a disproportionate amount of weight on certain kinds of experience. In particular, this study examined a Fortune 500 firm in North America that anecdotally believed that those individuals with prior experience in sales made better managers. Thus, we quantitatively examined if managers at this firm with prior sales experience produced higher sales revenue, profitability (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation; EBITDA), and return on controllable assets (ROCA) compared to those managers without prior sales experience. The results of our analysis indicate that skill sets, other than those provided by prior sales experience, are necessary for managers to generate and manage revenue.

Waiting for a future in Lisbon: borders, migrations and biographies

Based on a long-term research among Bangladeshis in Lisbon, this article ethnographically explores the perspectives and experiences of my interlocutors about waiting for documents and regularisation in Portugal and how this waiting is frequently perceived as a radical uncertainty about one's own future. As my interlocutors emphasise it creates a feeling of being stuck, of going nowhere, of being tested. These experiences of waiting, and its corresponding dilemmas and anxieties, have to be interpreted in relation to the governmentalities of migrations and its relations with the spatialisation effect of states, namely, the displacement of border making processes through which states continuously produce sovereignty. Such bordering dynamics, this article argues, produce a certain kind of experience that can be interpreted through the concept of border biographies.

True religion in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

ABSTRACTMany think that the aim of Hume’s Dialogues is simply to discredit the design argument for the existence of an intelligent designer. We think instead that the Dialogues provides a model of true religion. We argue that, for Hume, the truly religious person: (1) believes that an intelligent designer created and imposed order on the universe; (2) grounds this belief in an irregular argument rooted in a certain kind of experience, for example, in the experience of anatomizing complex natural systems such as the eye; and (3) retains this belief, on the basis of these reasons, even after careful scrutiny. We argue that two of the Dialogues’s characters, Philo and Cleanthes, exhibit true religion. A third character, Demea, exhibits false religion and a persistent impiety. Taken as a whole, we see the Dialogues as an educational performance for the benefit of Pamphilus, Cleanthes’s ward, as well as for the benefit of readers of the Dialogues. Specifically, we think, given that its lessons concern theology and the principles of religion, the dynamics of the Dialogues’s discussion and the interplay between its characters can be seen as a demonstration of a method for becoming truly religious.

Experiencing spiritual aspects outdoors in the winter: a case study from the Czech Republic using the method of systemic constellations

The article focuses on spirituality on two semantic levels: the first one analyses participants’ experiences during a winter expeditionary course on snowshoes and considers the question of whether residing in the winter landscape with a community of other people may acquire a spiritual dimension in spite of the non-religious environment. The second level verifies whether the trans-rational method of systemic constellations may be used as a research tool, that is, as a specific source for data collection (different from other sources and methods). The research applied a phenomenological approach to the analysis of unstructured interviews (n = 12) and constellation insights; the result confirmed indisputably that certain kinds of experiences obtained in a completely non-religious environment (namely, during a winter expedition on snowshoes in the mountains) can be considered spiritual. The answer to the second question is also positive, since the application of systemic constellations results in different data in comparison with their verbal acquisition. Symbolic images that point out the system and its unaccepted elements deepen the understanding of both the individual and the nature of their spiritual experience.

Imaginative Rationalisation and Speculative Archiving. Thoughts about language in media art database archives.

El discurs contemporani se sol referir a l’especulació d’una manera negativa: a apostes arriscades i transaccions perilloses en economia i a afirmacions que no es poden demostrar en el llenguatge quotidià. En filosofia, l’especulació és una manera de generar coneixement quan els mètodes tradicionals arriben als límits: el seu sentit original era ‘observar’; la interpretació llatina derivava de la paraula grega per designar la teoria. Aquesta noció del terme s’oposa al seu ús predominant actual. La noció que m’estimo més ve de la meva àvia. Era una bohèmia en el sentit geogràfic, no pas d’estil de vida. Era grangera i molt pràctica. En comptes de «Haig de pensar una cosa», deia «Haig d’especular sobre això». Al mateix temps mirava al sostre, com si pogués veure i comparar mentalment diferents situacions que podia acostar o allunyar, rebobinar o avançar, examinar, canviar i reordenar amb tot detall. En imagineriar (imagineering) i preveure opcions de futur, posava a prova una línia de pensament i n’avaluava els efectes. Adoptava un enfocament iteratiu per a arribar a un cert tipus d’experiència i triar una opció en la qual pogués basar a continuació les seves accions d’una manera segura: una combinació de racionalització i pensament creatiu, comparable amb el que ara anomenem recerca-acció.

KINDS AND CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE: IS THERE ANYTHING THAT IT IS LIKE TO BE SOMETHING?

Abstract: In this article I distinguish the notion of there being something it is like to be a certain kind of creature from that of there being something it is like to have a certain kind of experience. Work on consciousness has typically dealt with the latter while employing the language of the former. I propose several ways of analyzing what it is like to be a certain kind of creature and find problems with them all. The upshot is that even if there is something it is like to have certain kinds of experience, it does not follow that there is anything it is like to be a certain kind of creature. Skepticism about the existence of something that it is like to be an F is recommended.

Vision and Voice: Phenomenology and Theology in the Work of Jean-Luc Marion

The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it serves is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion’s clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion’s phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion’s account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being.

Expertise and Inability

Material culture, as a concept, is suggestive of control. Yet, when we acknowledge it, it becomes clear that all the physical things we handle have a degree of independence. Indeed, by exploring the ways in which this independence is intimately accommodated, a richer understanding of certain kinds of experience could follow. With this argument in mind, this article travels to some domestic gardens in north London to reconsider the human activities associated with the plants that are found there. In these sites it seems that amicable arrangements of entity only ever become possible through fully embracing the fact that those people involved own only one, amongst many, of the agencies in evidence there. In fact, whilst an idea of a successful gardener can connote an efficient exercise of power, I want to argue that the opposite is actually the case. My contention, therefore, is that, to fully find pleasure from plants, people must become enjoyably expert in understanding that any complete control is always unlikely, and this is a contention with some potentially important implications for current patterns of practice.

Pragmatist Value Inquiry

This essay concerns relationships among value experience, value inquiry, and value theory. Five stages of value experience are distinguished, comprising a narrative of the attempt to enhance certain kinds of experience. A multi-level model of value inquiry is presented, beginning with improvement of immediate situations and moving to meta-level inquiry. Six pragmatist methods for conducing value inquiry are explained, which culminate in informed judgments of preference among qualitative experiences.

Redescribing ‘Education’ in Complex Terms

Education—so we might say—is different from untutored learning or unguided enculturation in that it directs the kind of learning that takes place. In this way education purposely shapes the subjectivity of those being educated. We could, therefore, say that the function of education is to ensure that people have certain kinds of experiences in order that they may achieve certain prespecified educational ends and so become certain kinds of people (such as people who can be creative, people who can solve problems, or work with scientific knowledge, or be politically responsible, and so on). Since, with education, it would seem that people are always socialized into a particular way of life, education can therefore be understood as planned enculturation. Educational environments are designed specifically to move a person— intellectually—from point A to point B. To do this we must know what the starting point is and what the finishing point is. For example to produce ‘creative’ people, or ‘politically responsible’ people we must first of all know the nature of the human subjects we are dealing with. Second, we must know what it means to be ‘creative’ or ‘politically responsible.’ Then we must have a plan or method to move A to B.