Human Arenas

Uttl (this issue) argues that scores from Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) must not be used for making high-stakes career decisions because they are not predictive of effective teaching or of teacher effectiveness. I note in this article that teaching effectiveness can be operationalized with reference to outcomes like student test performance, with reference to processes like student engagement and motivation, or with reference to personal experiences like student satisfaction with courses and teachers. I argue that the latter of these alternatives is prioritized in today’s higher education marketplace, and this explains developments like grade inflation and course workload deflation because both are effective in elevating student satisfaction rating. By contrast to Uttl, I argue that as indicators of students’ satisfaction with courses and teachers, SET scores are valid and their use for career decision-making is understandable and defensible.

Exactly 100 years ago, Max Weber outlined in his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” what the material and above all the inner meaning of scientific action comprises. We would like to question some of Weber’s basic concepts and further develop some of his basic ideas in order to see more clearly what we as professors and social scientists are doing—in the present field of science, out of which reality is more and more displaced, or better: people’s concrete practice of life seems to have been thinned out. At the center of our considerations are the terms “progress,” “rationalization,” and “meaning,” and we will try to show how they are based on the self-conception of science and what consequences this has for scientific practice. Our central argument is that scientific practice takes part in the production of social reality and that it is only in the awareness of this in which scientific practice renders “intellectual accountability” (intellektuelle Rechenschaft) (Weber).

This article draws on the author’s engagement with, and writing about, his mother’s dementia as a vehicle for exploring the nature of relational research ethics. The philosophical foundations of such research may be found in the seminal work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, whose reflections on the “I-Thou” relationship and “the face of the Other,” respectively, serve to illuminate the contours of such an ethics. Central to the broad perspective being considered is the idea of responsibility, both to and for other persons, and the kind of ethical attitude it entails. As the author avows, adopting and maintaining this attitude is challenging and difficult. By examining the trajectory of the relationship in question, with attention to both the challenges encountered and the ethical attitude required to meet them, we have in hand a potentially useful vehicle for advancing an Other-inspired form of relational research ethics.

Our everyday lives are full of encounters that we classify as services. They include dialogues with others that are socially normative and personally meaningful. By following the historical growth of humanity, it becomes increasingly more crucial to elaborate the interconnectivity of human interactions. While experiencing our everyday life, we are generating meaning that is used for interactions with other beings, “interpretation and interaction.” By elaborating the meaning of dialogue and the historical roots of service, it seems crucial to point out the baseline meaning behind both constructs and how these can be seen as identical phenomenon. Such a bonding of constructs is allowing us to reconstruct the generated meaning in form of a new model: the “Human Identification Dialogue” (HID), highlighting the core dimensions of both constructions. The HID can be described as connection and extension of the strongly influencing theoretical understandings, about dialogues, by Bühler (1934) and Rommetveit in (The Dialogical Alternative: Towards a Theory of Language and Mind, 19, 44, 1992). Furthermore, the cultural psychological view allows us to include the importance of individual perception in a core process of the business field. A process that will be bonded in simple everyday life examples, able to visualize the importance of the phenomena, while underlining its potential and characteristics. In this context, the cultural psychological field and the service psychology will be connected by the basic Semiotic understanding of the core process dialogue.

In the theoretical thinking of González Rey, the acknowledge of the generating character of emotions and their infinite unfolding associated with symbolic productions, which are not of the order of meaning, has represented an essential step for a theory of cultural-historical subjectivity capable of transcending the limitations associated with the treatment of this subject in the modern period. Emotions must be understood in their generating capacity, not as effects, but as processes that maintain a recursive relationship with other psychic processes, as opposed to understanding the psychic coming from other elements, which are at the base, until today, of all atomistic psychology of empirical orientation. In this work, we review different investigations carried out in the field of emotions by Fernando González-Rey, which will allow us to understand better the role of emotions in the production of subjective senses that always anticipate the actions of the subject, actions that can have very different forms of expression. Therefore, those subjective senses associated with the subject can be corroded, distorted, or even modified in the process of production of new subjective senses that is developing in the course of the subject’s action.

Trong công trình của Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) và Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), bản thân được khái niệm hóa như một hiện tượng nảy sinh trong một tập hợp các mối quan hệ về ý tưởng, xã hội và biểu tượng. Qua lăng kính của những ý tưởng được thể hiện trong lý thuyết của cả hai tác giả, một bức tranh về ý thức đáng kể phụ thuộc vào các cơ sở tâm lý mở rộng, tương tác một cách hiệu quả với chủ thể, nhằm hình thành và duy trì danh tính được hình thành. Nghiên cứu tập trung vào khái niệm ‘Objet petit a’ của Lacan (1973) như một công cụ khái niệm để hiểu sự hình thành danh tính trong bối cảnh sự thỏa mãn hoặc không thỏa mãn mong muốn. Ngoài ra, việc sử dụng ‘niềm tin sai lầm’ của Sartre (1956) trong việc nhấn mạnh sự tự lừa dối của chủ thể trong việc xây dựng ý nghĩa trong danh tính thông qua những con đường hành động và niềm tin chưa được kiểm chứng cũng được xem xét. Những sự sụp đổ đột ngột và không thể kiểm soát của các cơ sở đã mang lại và duy trì các điều kiện cần thiết cho sự xuất hiện của danh tính đại diện cho một nguy cơ lớn đối với sự toàn vẹn tâm lý của chủ thể tâm lý. Một cuộc xem xét lại gần gũi về danh tính như được thể hiện qua những nguyên tắc lý thuyết được đưa ra trong nghiên cứu được đề nghị là chính yếu trong việc giải quyết nỗi bất an của chủ thể.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the misrepresented and repressed agenda of Wundt’s psychology—and to pay an overdue tribute to Wundt. Wundt will be analyzed within the history of psychology, i.e., how his views on psychology are represented in textbooks on the history of psychology (Boring, Fancher, Heidbreder, Woodworth and Sheehan) in comparison with his views as expressed in his published works. In the next step, the first attempts to question the traditional historiographic accounts of Wundt will be examined (Blumenthal, Danziger, Greenwood, Woodward). The textual analysis will be embedded in a broader cultural context in order to understand sources of different forms of epistemic injustices committed against Wundt (repression of his ideas, misrecognition, partial reception, even conversion into the opposite of his own views). At the end, some general hermeneutic questions on conditions of understanding and misunderstandings of human subjects and their symbolic products will be addressed, accompanied by a moral appeal to contribute to an academic culture of a just remembrance.