Showing papers on "Antecedent (grammar) published in 1969"

An empirically-based formulation of hypnotism.

Abstract: A formulation is presented which does not invoke a special state of consciousness (“hypnosis” or “trance”) to account for the behaviors that have been historically associated with the word hypnotism. Instead, so-called hypnotic behaviors—e.g., “analgesia,” “hallucination,” “age-regression,” and “amnesia”—are conceived to be functionally related to denotable antecedent variables which are similar to those that control performance in a variety of interpersonal test-situations. The antecedent variables which determine behavior in a “hypnotic” situation include Ss' attitudes, expectancies, and motivations with respect to the situation, and the wording and tone of instructions-suggestions and of questions used to elicit subjective reports. The formulation is exemplified by several dozen experimental studies, and prospects for further research are delineated.

Human Acts and Moral Judgments

Abstract: The concept of human action bridges, in an extremely interesting way, problems concerning both the explanation of physical phenomena and the evaluation of the details of human life. Questions arise, on the one hand, about the reduction of human actions to physical events and about the relationship between causal explanations and explanations by way of reasons, motives, intentions, purposes, and the like and, on the other, about the analysis of human responsibility and freedom and about the grounds for the criteria by which human behavior is assessed. It is unlikely, therefore, that a theory of human action confined to the data of the moral domain can be expected to be completely adequate: the concept of action, though notably associated with moral issues, appears to service a significantly varied and unsystematized range of interests. This may be seen at a stroke by considering, quite simply, that one may be held responsible, morally or legally, for what one has not done by way of performing an action or committing an act and that questions of responsibility, praise, blame, and the like need not arise in cases in which, clearly, what one has done is properly characterized as an act or action. Thus, for instance, one may be responsible for one's children's actions and held responsible for them-or even for events in inanimate nature-and, as in arbitrarily placing one foot in front of the other, questions of responsibility for a bona fide act do not automatically arise. The ascription of morally relevant predicates and the identification of genuine acts and actions are deployed not along congruent but rather along intersecting lines of use. The implication is that one must be extremely circumspect in speaking of the conceptual role of acts and actions in the moral domain, in theorizing about the nature of human action itself. Nevertheless, there are some extremely revealing features of our discourse about actions, features that illuminate a great many of the traditional puzzles of moral philosophy. It has been suggested' that, as a general rule, "an action is called an act only when it can be described in a proposition with a personal subject; the actions of signing a cheque or killing a rival are acts, for one can say, 'I signed the cheque,' or 'He killed his rival'; but the beating of the heart and the working of the liver are not acts." An alternative version of the rule is that "one may substitute 'act' for 'action' only when the action may be spoken of as 'my action'."2 But this is not entirely satisfactory. For one thing, the rule is conditional on the antecedent identification of bona fide actions: 'I bled' and 'my bleeding' meet the tests but are not acts or actions.3 And, for another, the satisfaction of the test may be due merely to accidents of language; we might, for instance possess a verb 'to coronate,' meaning 'to beat, as in particular in the heart's beating'; in that case, we might possess the expressions 'I coronated' and 'my coronating'-which would complicate our sorting out acts and actions from what merely happens to us. Acts and actions form a certain subset of the things termed events (or occurrences, happenings, episodes, and the like). We may, in fact, order an informal series of related subsets of apparently decreasing extension that bear on questions of human responsibility and behavior, as follows: events, deeds, actions, acts. In this series, 'deeds' is a relatively technical term. It is quite often used as a synonym for 'acts,' but I shall use it as the substantive answering to the verb 'do' (in grammatically suitable tenses), where the subject is a personal agent. It seems reasonable to hold that, inasmuch as deeds include not only acts and actions but also such happenings as one's bleeding, the considerations on which things are sorted out as deeds and actions are, to some extent, not quite systematically related to one another. I suggest that