Kind Of Stance Research Articles

Echoing Retorts in Hárbarðsljóð and Lokasenna

Echoing Retorts in <i>Hárbarðsljóð</i> and <i>Lokasenna</i>

WHAT’S VOLUNTARY IN STANCE VOLUNTARISM?

Stance voluntarism highlights the role of the will in epistemic agency, claiming that agents can control the epistemic stances they assume in forming beliefs. It claims that radical belief changes are not compelled by the evidence; they are rationally permitted choices about which epistemic stances to adopt. However, terms like “will”, “choice”, and “stance” play a crucial role while being left as vague notions. This paper investigates what kind of control rational agents can have over epistemic stances. I argue that whether epistemic stances are voluntary depends on what kind of stance is being assessed. Sometimes epistemic stances are taken to be evaluative attitudes about how to produce knowledge. This kind of stance is not directly controllable, since it is essentially connected to beliefs, and believing is not voluntary. But sometimes epistemic stances are taken to be styles of reasoning and modes of engagement, expressing ways of approaching the world in order to produce knowledge, which can be voluntary. Overall, this supports a formulation of stance voluntarism as a dual-systems theory of epistemic agency, where epistemic rationality is compounded by a dynamic interplay between involuntary processes of belief formation and voluntary processes of cognitive guidance.

Psychology: a Discipline in Need of Reflective Foundations.

Zagaria, Andó and Zennaro (2020) provide a useful analysis of the current state of affairs in the discipline of psychology. They conclude that psychology is in a messy and unproductive pre-pragmatic state and suggest that evolutionary psychology can provide a needed metatheoretical perspective to enable psychology to move forward as a science. In my commentary I move to another direction and suggest that psychology does not need more solid foundations, but rather foundations characterized by reflective stance towards its phenomena, theories, methods and data production processes. I suggest that this kind of stance would be in accordance with the process ontological perspective that allows focusing on meaningful human experience as central object of study for psychology, together with an idiographic approach to research. I thus suggest that psychology will endure only by turning its reflective gaze towards oneself, by thinking about its past, imagining its future and constructing novelty from the creative assemblage of the two.

Epistemic, interpersonal, and moral stances in the construction of us and them in Christian metal lyrics

Religious groupings and subcultures both tend to have well-articulated interests, aims, and values that unite certain people but also alienate those who do not share their interests. The case is then made for the construction of difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This paper examines the construction of such a group boundary in the previously little studied context of the Christian metal (CM) music subculture. The focus of analysis is on the kinds of stances that are taken and attributed to ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the English lyrics of Finnish CM groups. The particular types of stance are related to questions of epistemology, interpersonality, and morality. The paper shows that the borderlines between CM and its Other are drawn on the basis of stance on being right/wrong, heading for heaven/hell, and having a better/worse divinity as an object of worship. The use of binary opposites, together with the practice of elevating ‘us’ and devaluing ‘them’, constructs CM as a categorical movement which relies on conservative Christian values. CM can thus be seen as resistance or perhaps even a counterattack against the general religo-cultural trend of abandoning Christianity in Western societies.

Right in Singapore English

ABSTRACT: Singapore English has been, and still is, an enigma for many scholars and researchers. In recent years, much attention has been given to the analysis of its particles. However, rather than focusing on the analysis of one particle or several particles and how they operate at the level of the sentence, this paper looks at a particular phenomenon in Singapore English at a discursive level. Specifically, it examines right and its use as a discourse marker in Singapore English interactions. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how it contributes to the alignment of two kinds of stances between speakers, namely, the epistemic stance and the interpersonal stance. This is done with supporting data from naturally occurring Singaporean conversations. Furthermore, this paper also briefly suggests that the familiar particles in Singapore English can be analysed not only as particles, but also as discourse markers at an interactional level.

Forgotten Border Actors: the Border Reinforcers. A Comparison Between the U.S.–Mexico Border and South American Borders

This article is a critique of two different types of essentialisms that have gained widespread acceptance in places as distant as the U.S.-Mexico border and different Mercosur frontiers. Both essentialisms rely on metaphors that refer to the concept of "union," and put their emphasis on a variety of "sisterhood/brotherhood" tropes and, in particular, the "crossing" metaphor. This kind of stance tends to make invisible the social and cultural conflict that many times characterizes political frontiers. The article wants to reinstall this conflictive dimension. In that regard, we analyze two different case studies. The first is the history of a bridge constructed between Posadas, Argentina and Encarnación, Paraguay. The second is the community reaction toward an operation implemented by the Border Patrolin 1993 ("OperationBlockade") in a border that for many years was considered an exemplar of the "good neighbor relationships" between Mexico and the United States, the frontier between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Key Words: U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Blockade, Mercosur frontier, political frontier, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, United States, Posadas, El Paso , Encarnación, Ciudad Juárez, Border Patrol.

The voices people read: Orthography and the representation of non‐standard speech

Combining features of matched guise tests with sociolinguistic interviewing and oral performance, this study investigates the social meanings carried by non‐standard orthographies. Participant evaluations of the personas represented by non‐standard orthographies showed that people connected orthography to social identities. Specifically, we found that people uncritically and spontaneously read non‐standard orthographies as indices of low socioeconomic status. When we asked participants to read texts out loud, we found marked shifts in their reading performances of texts in standard versus non‐standard orthographies. Through a case study analysis of participants' readings and attitudes, we identify two kinds of stances taken by participants towards stigmatized identities indexed by non‐standard orthographies. Finally, we use these case studies to argue for the necessity of contextually rich qualitative research methods for the study of language attitudes.

The Case of the Singing Scientist

This article, based on a year-long project in an urban K/1 classroom offers a case study of a young child who used school writing activities to perform rather than simply to communicate. A performer differs from a mere communicator in both the nature of language produced and in the kind of stance taken toward an audience. Although the child's language resources contributed to his success with written language, they did not always fit comfortably into the “writing workshop” used in his classroom; in fact, his assumptions about written language and texts conflicted in revealing ways with those undergirding a workshop approach. Thus, the study helps make explicit many unexamined assumptions of current written language pedagogies, particularly those involving the nature of literary sense, the relationship between writers' “audience” and their “helpers,” and most important, the links between oral performance, literacy pedagogy, and the use of the explicit, analytic language valued in school.

Environment and the federal government in Malaysia

The human impact on the natural systems of Malaysia has proceeded apace in recent decades. Rapid rural development at the expense of the rainforest, selective logging of hardwoods, processing of agricultural products and urbanization are among the processes that account for environmental change. The federal government has responded to the widening circle of environmental problems by introducing new legislation, creating a Department of Environment, including environmental considerations in certain of its national development plans and adopting certain kinds of stances in environmental disputes. Following a discussion of these responses, it is argued that the government has given insufficient attention to the relations between environmental change on the one hand and population growth and poverty, pace and scale of rural development, role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), indigenous knowledge systems and institutional arrangements on the other. It is concluded that the federal government should cooperate with NGOs, consider adopting a new fiscal relationship with the states and, in certain cases, place greater reliance on its constitutional powers.

The Analyst's Participant Observation as Influenced by the Patient's Transference

Concerning the psychotherapist's role my earliest concept, developed prior to my coming to Washington, and based largely upon medical training coupled with my predominantly obsessive-compulsive psychodynamics, required of me that I maintain myself and my feelings in a kind of stance which had essentially nothing to do with the individual patient. My egoideal, as regards my functioning as therapist, required that I endeavor always to be helpful to the patient, that I be unflaggingly interested in him, and that I experience no negative emotions whatsoever toward him—let alone express such feelings to him openly. I regarded my personal identity as changeless, and my therapist-role as similarly fixed and absolute. I have described elsewhere that, in the course of subsequent years of personal analysis and clinical experience, … my sense of identity has become … my most reliable source of data as to what is transpiring between the patient and myself, and within the patient. I have described … the 'use' of such fluctuations in one's sense of identity as being a prime source of discovering, in work with a patient, not only counter-transference processes but also transference processes … (Searles, 1966-67) The main point of the present remarks is analogous to the one just quoted: as with the analyst's over-all sense of personal identity, so the customary style of participant observation which he has developed over the years, his observation of the ways wherein he finds himself departing from this normative style, in his work with any one patient, provides him with particularly valuable clues to the nature and intensity of this patient's transference-responses and -attitudes toward him. Beyond the analyst's privately observing such variations in his customary mode of participant observation, he can find it constructive, with increasing frequency as the analysis progresses, to share these data with the patient. If one has some superego-based, professionally-ingrained standard for oneself (as did I initially to an almost paralyzing degree), such as evenly-hovering attentiveness or unflagging interest and helpfulness, one will fail to note the patient's-transference-derived vicissitudes in one's interest, participativeness, and so on, which are occurring. In one's attempt to achieve and maintain some personally idealized, superego-imposed participant observer position, one is apt never to notice that the patient may be perceiving or experiencing, on the basis of his transference-distortions, the analyst's position and functioning to be quite different from those the analyst is experiencing these as being. The patient may be reacting to one's subjectively helpful participativeness in terms of