Yang Chen

This article criticizes the pragmatist theory of progress developed by Rahel Jaeggi and argues for a psychologist alternative. In her theory, Jaeggi rejects both moralist and historicist understandings of progress, arguing that progress should be regarded as a non-teleological process of experience enrichment. However, by identifying progress with problem-solving activities, Jaeggi explicitly makes a parallelist argument between social-moral and scientific progress, which is highly questionable. In this analysis, I argue that Jaeggi's analogy fails. And by referring to Kuhn's notion of incommensurability, I demonstrate a more radical, psychologist approach, which departs from any idea of experience enrichment in history. The lack of a sufficient account of progress is not the failure of Kuhn. In contrast, it is his very own insight.

In the Introduction, I have sketched the proposal that social consciousness, as a concept inherited from Karl Marx’s historical materialism, could be reinterpreted in light of the collective intentionality hypothesis. Moreover, by understanding social consciousness as a constituent part of collective intentionality, we can reconstruct the theoretical fruits of the young Marx and develop a naturalist theory of society with respect to the “essential power” of human conscious and sensuous activities. This proposal, I believe, is helpful not only for studying social consciousness but also for studies of collective intentionality. However, before we directly apply the collective intentionality hypothesis to the reinterpretation, some explanations regarding the issue “what is the Intentionality, and how is collective intentionality brought about?” are needed. To answer these questions, a historical examination of the conception of Intentionality is necessary.

The aim of this chapter is to further reconstruct Searle’s theory of Intentionality. By proposing his principle of psychological reduction and the basic intentional states of belief and desire, Searle also analyzes the intentional characters in other human activities. The most important forms of intentional activities are intentional perception and intentional action. Searle’s elaborations on perception and action conclude with two crucial theses about Intentionality. First, Intentionality immanently involves a special kind of causal relation. Second, intentional activities are possible only under the condition of the preexistence of background. These two theses jointly lead the studies of Intentionality to the issues of normativity.

When Marx tried to interpret human history as the self-creation and movement of human practices, he “opposes [his theory] to both idealism and the older forms of materialism” (Wellmer 1976, p. 231). Unfortunately, the approach Marx developed in his early years is abandoned by himself. His understanding of human practices was confined to a narrow perspective of material production. Instead of developing the conception of “naturalism,” he argues later that human individuals are fully determined by their social relations and modes of production. In the end, the concepts of material production and human labor are “materialized” further as the continuous development of productive force, which is independent of human will. In the orthodox version of Marxism, social consciousness has nothing to do with the natural capacities of humans. It is fully dependent on social existence, in which economic production is the determining basis of all superstructures.

Habermas’s discourse ethics implies a cognitivist assumption that normative claims are justifiable on the basis of communicative reason. This assumption makes an analogy between factual claim to truth and normative claims to rightness. In the communicative action, we can defend or repudiate the legitimacy of one’s normative statement, just as we can defend or repudiate the correctness of one’s factual statement in the instrumental action. Cognitive parallelism is the very foundation of Habermas’s argument. Then, the question is, is this parallelism plausible?

The conclusion of the former part is that collective intentionality and the intersubjective perspective are insufficient to ensure the norms that can form our entire social life. The universal validity of normativity should be found beyond the objective scale of Intentionality. For Searle, that means an ultimate constitution of political institution. He believes that the state’s authority builds the foundation of other social norms. Under political domination, all social institutions and members can be controlled and guided to the rules that the state has made. In this sense, the universal validity of norms is ensured by the universal exercise of political power. Searle’s view is similar to Hegel’s, who also claims that the state means the highest realization of human ethical life. To summarize their common ideas, we can conclude a “Searle–Hegel thesis,” which proposes that the political authority is the highest and ultimate form of normative order.

Searle’s theory of social construction eventually indicates that normativity must be sustained through the intentional exercise of power between agents. Only under the constant influence of power relations can we evolve a series of dispositions that are sensitive and responsive to the rules of institutional facts. However, Searle himself does not explicitly account for how the exercise of power operates. He describes the power relation as existing in the background behind normativity but fails to clarify it further.

The previous chapters analyze the theoretical developments of authors ranging from Austin and Searle to Moya, pointing out the achievements and shortcomings of their approaches to intentionality on the subjective level. This analysis shows how preexisting normative rules or conventions can shape the subject’s capacity for intentionality. Put briefly, subjective intentionality may face normative criteria that influence its formation. Therefore, studies of subjective intentionality eventually come to studies of normativity.

Trait self-esteem (TSE) is an important personality resource for emotion regulation, yet the neural correlates of TSE and emotion regulation remain unclear. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the neural correlates of TSE with different emotion regulation strategies and identify different brain areas involved in the particular strategies. We accordingly adopted the resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) analysis to uncover the neural pathways linking TSE and emotion regulation. 235 young adults (45.9% females, Mage = 21.58) were guided to undergo the MRI scans and then complete the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire formed by two dimensions: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. The results showed that TSE was positively correlated with left superior frontal gyrus (lSFG)-right middle frontal gyrus (rMFG) rsFC. Further mediation analysis indicated a mediated role of lSFG-rMFG rsFC in the link between TSE and cognitive reappraisal. In contrast, TSE was negatively correlated with the right frontal pole (rFP)-right precentral gyrus (rPrcG) rsFC, which played a mediated role in the link between TSE and expressive suppression. Overall, our findings suggest the neurofunctional underpinnings behind the preference for cognitive reappraisal in individuals with higher TSE, while individuals with lower TSE exhibit a greater propensity towards employing expressive suppression.

The rapid development of computer vision technologies and applications has brought forth a range of social and ethical challenges. Due to the unique characteristics of visual technology in terms of data modalities and application scenarios, computer vision poses specific ethical issues. However, the majority of existing literature either addresses artificial intelligence as a whole or pays particular attention to natural language processing, leaving a gap in specialized research on ethical issues and systematic solutions in the field of computer vision. This paper utilizes bibliometrics and text-mining techniques to quantitatively analyze papers from prominent academic conferences in computer vision over the past decade. It first reveals the developing trends and specific distribution of attention regarding trustworthy aspects in the computer vision field, as well as the inherent connections between ethical dimensions and different stages of visual model development. A life-cycle framework regarding trustworthy computer vision is then presented by making the relevant trustworthy issues, the operation pipeline of AI models, and viable technical solutions interconnected, providing researchers and policymakers with references and guidance for achieving trustworthy CV. Finally, it discusses particular motivations for conducting trustworthy practices and underscores the consistency and ambivalence among various trustworthy principles and technical attributes.

With the advent of the era of artificial intelligence, “scenario” frequently appears in new product development and has gradually become an effective tool for analyzing user needs. However, the reasons for this phenomenon have not been explored in depth. New product development is a creative activity that requires product designers to imagine how people will live in the near future. So, we speculated that a familiar scenario that matches designers’ background can spark their entrepreneurial imaginativeness by empathic simulation and conducted an experiment to research the impact of scenarios on the performance of entrepreneurial imaginativeness. Results of this study confirmed that a familiar scenario did indeed inspire entrepreneurial imaginativeness more than an unfamiliar scenario, especially for high entrepreneurial imaginativeness. This study provided a new respective for understanding the relationship between the empathy process and entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and evaluation processes and had practical implications for entrepreneurial practice, especially those that make human life better based on new digital technologies. Finally, we gave some suggestions on enhancing individuals’ entrepreneurial imaginativeness through different familiar scenarios and improving the team performance on creative tasks.

​This book focuses on the formation of human social consciousness and develops a naturalist approach to social normativity. Beginning from Marx's uncompleted concept of social consciousness, the book retrospects the studies about collective intentionality in the area of philosophy of mind and social ontology. Specifically, a reinterpretation of social consciousness with respect to collective intentionality can offer us a new, naturalistic approach to the social formation and normativity. According to the naturalistic approach, we can discern the inner structure of social consciousness as a systematic pattern of Intentionality. Social consciousness involves three levels of development: subjective, objective and absolute. With this new pattern of social consciousness, the “naturalism” of the young Karl Marx can be revived. And by grasping the most essential ability of human Intentionality as the source of social formation, it also makes an interdisciplinary study of social philosophy and philosophy of mind possible.

This study examines the relationship between Islam and democracy with emphasis on the issue of whether and how Islam has bearings on democratic adjustment speed. Using comprehensive data on 17 Asian countries from 1996 to 2010, the study demonstrates that religion is a significant factor for determining democracy. Results indicate that the level of democracy in Islamic countries is generally lower than that in non-Islamic countries. However, the level of democracy in Islamic countries exhibits an upward trend, whereas that in non-Islamic countries displays a downward trend. Moreover, when benchmark variables are controlled, democratic adjustment in Islamic countries is faster than in non-Islamic countries. Hence, despite the current lower level of democracy in Islamic countries, the results of this study refute the conventional wisdom that Islam hinders democracy. Instead, Islamic countries are highly malleable and exhibit a potential for faster democratic development compared with non-Islamic countries. Results further suggest that Islamic countries can effectively promote democracy by improving education, minimizing the gender gap, controlling population growth, or becoming an oil exporter similar to non-Islamic countries. However, Islamic countries likely own an additional unique advantage in effectively improving democracy – that is, promoting urbanization. This aspect is in contrast to non-Islamic countries where urbanization plays no role in determining democracy.Export citation Request permission.

Adolescents have gradually become a vital group of interacting with social media recommendation algorithms. Although numerous studies have been conducted to investigate negative reactions (both psychological and behavioral reactance) that the dark side of recommendation algorithms brings to social media users, little is known about the resistance intention and behavior based on their agency in the daily process of encountering algorithms. Focusing on the concept of algorithm resistance, this study used a two-path model (distinguishing resistance willingness and resistance intention) to investigate the algorithmic resistance of rural Chinese adolescents (N = 905) in their daily use of short video apps. The findings revealed that the perceived threat to freedom, algorithmic literacy, and peer influence were positively associated with the resistance willingness and intention; while the independent psychology on algorithmic recommendations significantly weakened resistance willingness and intention. Furthermore, this study verified the mediating role of resistance willingness and intention between the above independent variables and resistance behavior. Additionally, the positive impact of resistance willingness on resistance intention was confirmed. In conclusion, this study offers a comprehensive approach to further understanding adolescents’ algorithmic resistance awareness and behavior by combining psychological factors, personal competency, and interpersonal influences, as well as two types of resistance reactions (rational and irrational).