Dilemma

About: Dilemma is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 16202 publications have been published within this topic receiving 250251 citations. The topic is also known as: Dilemna.

“Everybody Makes Choices” Victim Advocates and the Social Construction of Battered Women's Victimization and Agency

Abstract: Semistructured interviews with 32 domestic violence victim advocates illuminate how advocates explain "battered women who stay." The interviews show that this behavior is a source of great frustration for advocates, who struggle to simultaneously conceive of battered women as victims trapped by social, psychological, and interactional forces and as agents whose choices must be respected. The authors argue that their organizational subculture and the culture of individualism in the contemporary United States do not provide the ideological and linguistic resources necessary for managing this dilemma. This results in a tendency to overemphasize battered women's choice and thereby diminish the constraints they face.

Community Service and Civic Education

Abstract: BOYT**E. **.**** BY HARRY C. IBOYTE OMMUNITY service, wide C ly touted as the cure for young people's political ap athy, in fact teaches little about the arts of participa tion in public life. To reengage students in public affairs requires redefining pol itics to include, in addition to electoral activity, ongoing citizen involvement in solving public problems. It requires a conceptual framework that distinguishes between public life and private life. And it calls for a pedagogical strategy that puts the design and ownership of problem solving projects into the hands of young people. According to conventional wisdom, teenagers and young adults are deeply disenchanted with politics and public is sues. The Times Mirror Center reports that, for the first time since World War II, young people show less interest in public affairs than their elders. Only one in five follows major issues "very close ly."' In fact, youths today have a complex set of attitudes about the world. More detailed probing finds a generation not so much apathetic as furious at adults' ap parent inaction in the face of mounting social problems. Today's young people are jaded with Sixties-style protest and uncertain about what else there is to do. It is clear, however, that senior-class trips to Washington, D.C., or exhortations to be "good citizens" the stuff of earlier generations' civic education are not go ing to interest young people in politics. Community service is proposed as the resolution of this dilemma. Advocates

Communication and Folk Psychology

Abstract: Prominent accounts of language use (those of Grice, Lewis, Stalnaker, Sperber and Wilson among others) have viewed basic communicative acts as essentially involving the attitudes of the participating agents. Developmental data poses a dilemma for these accounts, since it suggests children below age four are competent commu- nicators but would lack the ability to conceptualise communication if philosophers and linguists are right about what communication is. This paper argues that this dilemma is quite serious and that these prominent accounts would be undermined if an adequate more minimal alternative were available. Just such a minimalist account of commu- nication is offered, drawing on ideas from relevance theory and situation theory. 1. Introduction - A Dilemma For Accounts of Communication Prominent accounts of language use and human communication face something of a dilemma. The dilemma arises because it is assumed (a) that basic communicative situations essentially involve propositional attitude-like states of the participating agents and (b) that competent language users have the conceptual abilities to represent agents as being in such states and make folk-psychological inferences about agents so represented. These assumptions conflict with one of the more robust findings in developmental psychology: that children below the age of four years do not possess these abilities. The conflict arises because it is widely agreed in research on language development that children below the age of three years are competent language users and communicators in the basic sense.