Empiricist Model Research Articles

The Use of the Empirical Method by John Henry Newman and Arthur Conan Doyle

The Use of the Empirical Method by John Henry Newman and Arthur Conan Doyle Jeffrey Dirk Wilson (bio) Sir arthur ignatius conan doyle (1859–1930) and Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–1890) lived at a time when it seemed that science could answer all of life’s questions. Empiricism—the philosophy of basing all conclusions on experience, of which the experimental method is an obvious scientific expression—not only provided the intellectual background for both men, but they both embraced it with opposite outcomes. Empiricism led Doyle out of the Catholic Church and Newman into it. Perhaps contrary to expectation, Newman in the Catholic Church was at peace with empiricism, while Doyle out of the Catholic Church was restless about empiricism to the point of rupture, leading him to embrace occult spiritualism. In short, Newman was more thoroughly Holmesian in his deployment of the empirical method than was the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Thus, Newman concludes empirically that the foundational claims of Christianity and the truth of the Catholic Church are warranted. By comparison with Newman’s empiricism, the limits of Doyle’s deployment of the empirical method become clear. This essay arises primarily from a juxtaposition of texts by Doyle and Newman. In the case of Doyle, the texts considered are from the Sherlock Holmes corpus and his autobiographical writings. In Newman’s case, the text considered is his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. While secondary material is occasionally referenced, the aim here is to guide the reader in a consideration of how the empirical method plays out in the thought of Doyle and Newman when their texts are read together.1 [End Page 5] Doyle created two competing exemplars of the experimental method in the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, both men of science but in two sharply different ways. Holmes is embodied logic, rigorously submitting every twinge of passion and appetite to the dictates of reason. He is the perfect Cartesian man for whom “I” is the “thinking thing,” and whatever does not think is not essentially part of “me.” When Holmes has no grist for his mill of thinking, he is at a loss. Bored at the beginning of The Sign of Four, he descends to the seven-percent solution of cocaine, self-administered intravenously. When the case is solved, he reaches for the cocaine once again.2 Even if the most benign view of cocaine in the nineteenth century is assumed (i.e., that it was a useful medicine) for what illness was Holmes treating himself but ennui? We find this exchange at the end of “The Red-Headed League,” Watson addressing Holmes: “You reasoned it out beautifully,” I exclaimed in unfeigned admiration. “It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.” “It saved me from ennui,” he answered yawning. “Alas! I already feel it closing upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from commonplaces of existence.” These little problems help me to do so.” “And you are a benefactor of the race,” said I. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some use,” he remarked. “‘L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout,’ as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand.”3 [End Page 6] Therein is the problem: in the empiricist model, “the work” does not point outside itself. The discovery, the conclusion, in and of itself, has nothing to say about the meaning of life. For the human as scientist, there is no difference between walking a little old lady across the street and shoving her under a bus. For science, they are naked facts, devoid of value. It is instructive that Doyle was increasingly drawn to occult spiritualism during and after World War I with forty million people dead, both military and civilian. The scientific method had nothing to say to a world in anguish. In those years, Doyle—unlike Holmes—realizes the limits of materialism, so why was Doyle unable to reclaim the heritage of his youth? Why could Doyle as author not rescue Sherlock Holmes from ennui? By contrast with Holmes, Watson was a man of science in...

Objectivity and orgasm: the perils of imprecise definitions

Lloyd (The case of the female orgasm: bias in the science of evolution, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2005) analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffers from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases: androcentrism and adaptationism. This paper begins by arguing that the explanation Lloyd favors—the by-product account—is guilty of the androcentrism which supposedly implicates the other explanations of female orgasm with numerous evidential discrepancies. This suggests that there is another error afflicting orgasm research in addition to the biases Lloyd identities. I attempt to diagnose and characterize this additional error. In short, I think the error is using an imprecise definition of the trait in question. Further, Lloyd takes her analysis to support Longino’s (Science as social knowledge: values and objectivity in scientific inquiry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1990) contextual empiricist model of scientific objectivity. I consider what implications this analysis has for contextual empiricism. Finally, I argue that theorizing about female orgasm should be done from a conceptual engineering approach.

The origins of mindreading: how interpretive socio-cognitive practices get off the ground

Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: (1) the standard evolutionary psychology model (Carruthers), (2) the individualist empiricist model (Wellman, Gopnik), (3) the cultural empiricist model (Heyes), and (4) the radical socio-cultural constructivist model, which we favor. We motivate model (4) by arguing that many forms of mental state ascription do not serve the function of simply describing inner states causally responsible for the behavior of a cognitive agent; rather, they relate the agent to her environment by characterizing her practical commitments. Making these practical commitments explicit has an important regulatory function in that it supports action coordination and alignment on joint goals. We propose a model of how the ascription of mental states may have evolved as a linguistic device to perform exactly this function of making agents’ practical commitments explicit.

Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick

Reviewed by: Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick Regina Janes Jonathan Kramnick. Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. Chicago: Chicago, 2018. Pp. x + 198. $25.00 Ecology? Consciousness? I wanted this book to be a shoo-in for the Gauss, kicking away the literary biographies that always win, restoring literary criticism to a place on university press lists and on the touted university-for-a-day lecture circuits. Its claim is large: literary studies have a disciplinary contribution to make to understanding consciousness, including the “hard problem.” How can the brain, a mass of matter, produce the experience of consciousness? Why does it persist in propagating fictions, the falser the better? Alas, the argumentation is too subtle and the appropriation of other disciplinary perspectives too tactful to elevate our discipline by its bootstraps. (In the event, Paper Minds made the Gauss short list, but lost to a biography of Lorraine Hansberry.) A collection of essays rather than unified argument, Paper Minds embraces new models of perception that move perception “out of our heads” (Alva Noe’s phrase) into a transaction between a whole body and the world, making consciousness something we do rather than something we have. Elevating form, it enacts the open-endedness of literary enquiry, toying with the changing stories neuroscientists and novelists tell about our minds. Two elegant and rigorous essays defend the methodological status quo in literary studies, and a strong account of the “hard problem” of consciousness introduces modern novelists (McEwan and McCarthy) interpreted as reframing consciousness as bodily process. For Scriblerians, Cowper’s sofa in “The Task” turns into a James J. Gibson “affordance,” viz. “a Newtonian object in space,” that may be climbed or sat or rested on if one is a creature of a particular shape, able to turn knee-high physical objects into the affordance called “a seat,” a.k.a. bench, chair, stool, sofa, or low wall, used to sit rather than to kneel or squat. Affordances are specific both to culture and species. For a cat, sofas afford a scratching post, for bugs nesting areas or food. More generally, an affordance is “an external [End Page 85] phenomenon covered by the laws of nature and a potential for action held from a point of view,” not unlike a sonnet or a couplet. In the chapter “Presence of Mind,” direct perception confronts a “representational interface,” the dominant eighteenth-century empiricist model. Hobbes represents external objects as aggressive, pressing themselves on the sense organs to create a phantasm of the object, while Locke posits a litter of images in a camera obscura, and Hume cuts us off from objects altogether. The dialectical opposition turns up in Addison’s astonishingly elegant and supple account of vision “as a diffusive kind of touch” (reminding us what an extraordinary stylist Addison was); Berkeley’s more worried version; and Reid’s contorted, but vigorous, insistence that the mind really perceives what is there. Addisonian vision reaches out to bring things close and delights in the fluctuations of novelty: objects are “ever in Motion, and sliding away from beneath the Eye of the Beholder.” Thomson’s persuasive tactile vision invites to feeling curvature, and Sterne in his black coat looks through a window at yellow, green, and blue, longing to be there, somewhere, with a gris-set. Like his starling, Sterne wants out—to the there that is there. “On Beauty and Being at Home” returns to an elegant act of literary criticism on Defoe, performed first in the introduction, over the ambiguity of “handsome” (attractive) and “handy” (close to hand). Crusoe begins his journal only when he has created the conditions for his “paper mind”: putting his mind down on paper once he possesses a “handsome” arrangement of his materials and living space. Aesthetics as action or craft, in georgic, Cyder, Swift, Jonathan Richardson, Hogarth, and Cowper, is contrasted with Shaftes-bury’s and Granville’s aesthetics of spectatorship. Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” is mined for its creation of a poem like its world, adding to a whole rather than representing an original from which it derives. Its iconic, traveling couplet exemplifies “almost pure form...

Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. Jonathan Kramnick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. ix+198.

Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. Jonathan Kramnick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. ix+198.

Learning to structure sentences through the acquisition of grammatical words: Introduction to the special issue on the role of grammatical words in young children’s syntactic development

Until recently, grammatical words such as determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions have been considered marginal for the early stages of syntactic development. Lately the trend has turned, and recently some authors have been arguing for the opposite view, according to which grammatical words or functional words (FWs) have a central role in syntactic development. This special issue is devoted to the hypothesis that FWs bootstrap syntactic development in children. The first article, by Dye et al., sets the background with a thorough literature review. The second article, by Ninio, offers evidence that functional categories (FCs) may be the source of transfer and facilitation of major syntactic principles. The remainder of the special issue is devoted to five studies that offer an empiricist model of learning a vocabulary of FWs and its connection to syntactic structure. The major conclusion is that this interrelated complex system is not innate but learned from the linguistic input. Evidence comes from studies of development of several languages: French (Le Normand), German (Szagun et al.), English, Spanish and Bantu (Demuth); of development in typically and atypically developing child populations (Leonard); and of monolingual as well as bilingual development (Kedar). Each of the studies examines a different aspect of such a learning theory. The special issue provides important theoretical insights into the process of acquisition, and may contribute to various applied uses by serving as the basis for remedial teaching and intervention.

Self-Deception and the Second Factor: How Desire Causes Delusion in Anorexia Nervosa

Empiricist models explain delusional beliefs by identifying the abnormal experiences which ground them. Recently, this strategy has been adopted to explain the false body size beliefs of anorexia nervosa patients. As such, a number of abnormal experiences of body size which patients suffer from have been identified. These oversized experiences convey false information regarding the patients’ own bodies, indicating that they are larger than reality. However, in addition to these oversized experiences, patients are also exposed to significant evidence suggesting their bodies are in fact thin. This situation poses a conundrum: why do patients appear strongly influenced by the former kinds of evidence while the latter has little effect? To solve this conundrum, I suggest a two-factor account. First, I discuss research on the biases patients exhibit in how they gather, attend to and interpret evidence related to their own body size. Such biases in evidence treatment, I suggest, cause oversized experiences to be sought out, attended to and accepted, while veridical body size experiences are ignored or explained away. These biases constitute the second factor for this empiricist model, accounting for the unwarranted conviction with which these beliefs are held. Finally, in line with recent research into self-deception, I propose that, paradoxically, these biases in evidence treatment arise from patients’ own desires.

Explaining body size beliefs in anorexia

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Cognitive neuropsychiatry has had much success in providing theoretical models for the causal origins of many delusional beliefs. Recently, it has been suggested that some anorexia nervosa patients’ beliefs about their own body size should be considered delusions. As such, it seems high time the methods of cognitive neuropsychiatry were turned to modelling the false body size beliefs of anorexics.Methods: In this paper, I adopt an empiricist approach to modelling the causal origins of false body size beliefs in anorexia. Within the background of cognitive neuropsychiatry, empiricist models claim that abnormal beliefs are grounded by abnormal experiences bearing similar content.Results: I discuss the kinds of abnormal experiences of body size anorexics suffer from which could ground their false beliefs about body size. These oversized experiences come in three varieties: false self-other body comparisons, spontaneous mental imagery of a fat body and distorted perception of affordances.Conclusions: Further theoretical and empirical research into the oversized experiences which anorexics suffer from presents a promising avenue for understanding and treating the disorder.

“Swallowed Up In Impression”: Humphry Davy's Materialist Theory of Embodied Transcendence and William Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey”

Transcendent experiences depicted in Romantic poetry are understood as instances in which the mind leaves the body to touch upon an immaterial realm that exists independently of the material world. This concept of transcendence, which relies on substance dualism or German idealism, posits an ahistorical version of a reality that is eternal. In contrast to this common view, Humphry Davy offers a materialist account of transcendence based on embodied cognition. Davy argues against a transcendental realm. He theorizes that transcendent experiences are not disembodied, but moments of intense emotion. He provides an empiricist model of embodied transcendence that offers new ways to understand Romantic poetry. This article elucidates Davy's theory in relation to British Romantic cognitive science and analyzes Wordsworth's “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” in light of these findings. It challenges traditional readings of the poem and raises questions about body's role in theories of imagination more broadly.

HERMENEUTIKOS METODO TAIKYMAS ŠIUOLAIKINIAME EDUKOLOGIJOS MOKSLE

Profesorė socialinių mokslų (edukologija) habilituota daktarė Šiaulių universiteto Edukacinių tyrimų mokslinio centro direktorė P. Višinskio g. 25–108, LT-76351 Šiauliai El. paštas: etmc@cr.su.ltEdukologijos magistras, Valstybinio Maskvos M. V. Lomonosovo universiteto doktorantas El. paštas: antanas.savickis@gmail.comHermeneutikos metodas nagrinėjamas remiantis bendrąja mokslo, kaip žmogaus veiklos, susiju­sios su socialinių ir humanitarinių mokslų kaita, tradicionalizmas vs šiuolaikiškumas paradigma. Remiantis tokia paradigma aiškinama, kad mokslas nėra kildinamas iš faktų, nes jis reiškia inter­pretacijas, turimų žinių taikymą naujiems tyrimo objektams. Straipsnyje pagrindžiama toji mokslo funkcija, kuri yra neatsiejama nuo sąmoningo vertybių ir prasmių kūrimo. Šiuolaikinės edukolo­gijos mokslas taip pat grindžiamas pažįstančiojo žmogaus ir pasaulio sąveika. Taip vienaip ar ki­taip humanizmo idėjoms atstovaujantiems socialiniam, humanitariniam ar net gamtos mokslui svarbus tampa ne tiek duomenų rinkimas ir stebėjimas, kiek teorinių modelių paieška, leidžianti atsižvelgiant į situaciją tinkamai paaiškinti ir interpretuoti tyrimo duomenis.

Secondary Qualities and Masculine Form in Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison

This article aligns the formal strategies of the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson with eighteenth-century empirical science. In his mechanical or corpuscular philosophy, the chemist Robert Boyle theorizes the difference between imperceptible particulate materiality and perceptible attributes like colour, later renamed by John Locke the difference between primary and secondary qualities. Primary-secondary difference structures Richardson's formal approach to the problem of masculine desirability as it is broached in his second novel Clarissa and imaginatively resolved in his third novel Sir Charles Grandison. While Lovelace, the protagonist of Clarissa, adheres to an empiricist model of objecthood and its apprehension, Sir Charles Grandison cannot be resolved into primary and secondary qualities, offering a collapse of primary-secondary difference that transforms masculine virtue into immediately perceptible appearance. This article argues that Richardson's engagement with empirical philosophy reflects the importance of the discourse of secondary qualities to the formal development of the eighteenth-century novel.

Secondary Qualities and Masculine Form in Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison

This article aligns the formal strategies of the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson with eighteenth-century empirical science. In his mechanical or corpuscular philosophy, the chemist Robert Boyle theorizes the difference between imperceptible particulate materiality and perceptible attributes like colour, later renamed by John Locke the difference between primary and secondary qualities. Primary-secondary difference structures Richardson’s formal approach to the problem of masculine desirability as it is broached in his second novel Clarissa and imaginatively resolved in his third novel Sir Charles Grandison . While Lovelace, the protagonist of Clarissa , adheres to an empiricist model of objecthood and its apprehension, Sir Charles Grandison cannot be resolved into primary and secondary qualities, offering a collapse of primary-secondary difference that transforms masculine virtue into immediately perceptible appearance. This article argues that Richardson’s engagement with empirical philosophy reflects the importance of the discourse of secondary qualities to the formal development of the eighteenth-century novel.

Facility Maintenance Performance Perspective to Target Strategic Organizational Objectives

While facility design is increasingly playing a role addressing strategic organizational objectives, issues pertaining to facility maintenance have typically been left out of the decision-making process. Reasons include the traditional disconnection between facility design and facility maintenance, mainly originating from the lack of a modality to meaningfully represent facility maintenance information during design decision making. This paper discusses two sets of facility maintenance indicators that have the potential to bridge this traditional divide. The objective of this paper is threefold: (1) to illustrate how maintenance performance indicators can support higher-level decision making; (2) to explain how the methodology could be mapped across building sectors; and (3) to show how facility maintenance could play a crucial role in informing strategic decision making. Two types of indicators are introduced based on: (1) normative models in biophysics and physiology and (2) empiricist models of environment-behavior studies. Using examples from hospital, courthouse, and office building design, the paper articulates the manner in which facility performance indicators could be developed and used to support organizational strategic decision making. The paper demonstrates that facility maintenance indicators could be developed for all types of buildings and could be meaningfully represented for consideration during strategic decision making. Moreover, using an example of a healthcare setting, the paper emphasizes how facility maintenance strategies have an impact on higher-level organizational objectives, and vice versa, thereby underscoring the importance to consider maintenance performance during strategic decision making. The paper shows how the two sets of key performance indicators—the hard and the soft—are designed to address different scales of decision making, thereby allowing facility maintenance performance to be considered at all phases of a procurement cycle.

Seeking a Mnemonic Turn: Interior Reflections in Gadamer's Post-Platonic Thought

Seeking a Mnemonic Turn: Interior Reflections in Gadamer's Post-Platonic Thought This paper reflects on trajectories and pathways for philosophical hermeneutics, now, after the death of its founder, Hans-Georg Gadamer in 2002. More specifically, it challenges the notion that Gadamer's thought is simply tied to the linguistic turn of the 20th century. Instead, it considers the possibility that Gadamer's thinking makes for an implicit declaration of its own kind, calling for a mnemonic turn in modern philosophy and present day hermeneutics. Some reference will be made to both rationalist and empiricist models of inquiry insofar as Gadamer attempts to take philosophy beyond, for example, the Ur-grammar of Chomsky's linguistic theories, and into a world of post-Platonic memory.

Roles of quantified expressions of building performance assessment in facility procurement and management

This paper treats rational expressions of building performance in order to better support dialogues between stakeholders. These expressions are based on the notion of objectively quantifiable performance measures, which are introduced through a set of “performance indicators”. The indicators can be used to quantify expectations and fulfillments in structured dialogues between different stakeholders. The focus of the paper is on the introduction of two types of indicators: (1) based on normative models in biophysics and physiology and (2) based on empiricist models of Environment–Behavior studies. The treatment is positioned to support rational decision making during different stages of building delivery and use. The focus of this paper is specifically on informing decisions during design evolution, and facility and portfolio management phases of a building's lifecycle.

Sublime experience and politics: Interview with Professor Frank Ankersmit

The interview concerns, first, Frank Ankersmit's last book on Sublime Historical Experience and, second, his ideas on political philosophy and his opinions on the current political situation of the European Union. In the first part Ankersmit clarifies several ambiguities concerning his notion of historical experience. How does it relate to the transcendental epistemology? Where does the sublimity of experience come from? What does its relationship with the empiricist model of experience look like? Why is it able to overcome the traditional separation of subject and object? What is the difference between subjective and collective experience? The interviewee also explains the role of historical experience in Western history and historiography. He discusses the positive role it has played and still may play in historical writing, arguing for a more romanticized approach towards the past. Afterwards Ankersmit elucidates his main ideas on political philosophy and the role and nature of political representation, expressing his critical attitude towards ‘scientific’ politics. He speaks about his engagement in Dutch politics, issues concerning the recent privatization of the public sphere, the phenomenon of Quangos and the significance of the state. He also comments on the failed European Constitution and the problems of political responsibility Europe is presently facing. At the end Ankersmit expresses his views on the future of the European Union, pondering several possible solutions to its current predicament.

The Historiography of Gender and Progressive Education in the United States

This article examines the feminist historiography of the progressive education movement over the past 25 years using the Foucauldian conception of genealogy and the theoretical approach of critical feminism. Gender has largely been ignored as a significant category of historical analysis in the historiography of progressive education in the United States. The defining history of progressive education in the United States is still Lawrence Cremin’s 1961 work, The Transformation of the School. For Cremin, gender is not a significant question. Later historians of the progressive education movement have tended to follow Cremin’s approach and have failed to address the gendered nature of progressive ideas of citizenship and democratic education. Early responses to this historiographic tradition by feminist historians of education influenced by the women’s movement sought to rescue and celebrate the women of the progressive education movement. They followed what might be called the ‘women’s recovery project’. This body of work has made an important contribution in uncovering the contributions of women educators but in many cases these studies have taken an uncritical and even romantic approach to their subjects. Moreover, they have tended to replicate a kind of individualistic biographical history, focusing on the achievements of individual women and ignoring the ways in which male/female binaries have worked to create difference and gendered structures of power. Although there are some significant exceptions to this feminist approach, much feminist history of education has failed to consider this process of difference‐making or to challenge an empiricist model of history. This article examines the way historians have examined gender in the progressive education movement by looking at two areas: the role of gender in John Dewey’s life and work and the lives and work of progressive women school leaders. It argues that gender difference, like race and other subject positions, should not be understood as referring to fixed categories and unchanging reality, but as reflecting the work of difference‐making. This entails looking not only at how difference is constructed in the institutional practices of the state and the legal system, but also how it is called forth in the scholarly interpretation of the past. The article suggests that historians of education need to go beyond the recovery project of writing the stories of those who have been ‘hidden from history’, in Sheila Rowbotham’s words, to an analysis of the process of gendering – in the educational sites we study and in the writing of history as an intellectual enterprise.

Modeling category coordination: comments and complications

consideration of color alone can give a misleading impression of the three approaches to category coordination: the nativist, empiricist and culturalist models. empiricist models can benefit from a wider range of correlational information in the environment. also, all three approaches may explain a set of perceptual categories within the human repertoire. finally, a suggestion is offered for supplementing the naming game by varying the social status of agents.

Roles of building performance assessment in stakeholder dialogue in AEC

This paper treats rational expressions of building performance in order to better support dialogues between stakeholders in the design process. These expressions are based on the notion of objectively quantifiable performance measures, which are introduced through a set of “performance indicators”. The indicators can be used to quantify expectations and fulfillments in structured dialogues between different stakeholders. Two types of indicators are introduced based on: (1) normative models in biophysics and physiology; and (2) empiricist models of Environment-Behavior studies. The treatment is positioned to support rational decision-making during different stages of building delivery and use. The focus is specifically on the fulfillment of client expectations during design evolution.

Purpose and Meaning in Highly Active Seniors

The authors investigated the sources of meaning for active seniors. Results indicated that seniors who were most active were relatively high in a wide range of sources of meaning as well as in life satisfaction in general. The importance of meaning and purpose in relation to counseling with older adults is discussed. ********** The United States and other nations are witnessing a rapid rise in the numbers of retired, older adults (i.e., those who are 65 years old or older). This global phenomenon is predicted to be a demographic transformation with wrenching economic and social costs (Peterson, 1999, p. 4). In considering the needs of older adults, developmental psychologists, gerontologists, counselors, and professionals who focus on long-term care are giving more attention to the role and development of personal meaning in late adulthood. The need for such perspectives is a major theme of the present article. The greatest demands in the growing population of older adults are expected to come from the even greater proportionate growth in older individuals who describe themselves as thriving and healthy. Two thirds of adults over 65 years old describe themselves as having good or excellent health, and that percentage is expected to rise (Rubinstein, 2002b; Verbrugge, 1989). Retirees at age 62 can expect to experience another 20-30 years of challenges and transitions in which purpose and meaning take on greater importance. There are many advantages for counselors to adopt teleological approaches that emphasize meaning and purpose in the planning, treatment, and care of older persons. A focus on meaning and purpose provides a positive, optimistic perspective that is counter to disempowering views of based on losses and deficits. Bleak and pessimistic images of growing old as a sad and negative occurrence have typically prevailed (Sperry, 1992, p. 387). Strategies to maintain purpose will be especially important when the transitions of old age center around losses of role or function in life, such as the loss of the parenting role, widowhood, chronic physical conditions, and retirement (Solis & Brink, 1992). Gerontologists and developmental psychologists have long thought that personal meaning is a key aspect of successful (Birren, 1964; Butler, 1973; Erikson, 1963). This is especially true because old age is a time when one's sources of meaning are at greatest risk by virtue of the losses of personal relationships as well as the loss of career and community roles. In fact, professionals in treatment and caregiving arenas are paying more attention to the maintenance of purpose and meaning in old age. Health fields such as nursing and health education, through their focus on wellness, have also grasped the importance of perspectives that emphasize the maintenance of personal meaning throughout the life span. Hospice care programs have a primary mission of maintaining meaning in later stages of life. The Eden Alternative approach to long-term care helps individuals in nursing homes to maintain a purposeful life by reducing loneliness, helplessness, and boredom (Thomas, 1996). The successes of the leisure industry aimed at seniors, continuing education programs for the retired, and the efforts of senior centers to provide meaningful activities for individuals who have retired all demonstrate the significance of meaningful pursuits. Prager (1996) has praised calls for more symbolic, philosophical, and heuristic orientations toward ... the process ... Though still in an embryonic stage, epistemological, idealist, or humanist models of gerontological inquiry are coming into their own, complementing and supplementing the empiricist models of the natural sciences. (p. 118) Leder's (2002) suggestions for conscious aging encourage meaning and purpose in passages through later life. Counselors have a role and a responsibility in assisting individuals in late adulthood to continue to define themselves in terms of having meaningful life goals and a sense of purpose. …