Main Research Interests
- CONCEPTUAL THERAPY: reflexive proofs within an epistemological framework that show many human concepts are self-referentially self-defeating and hence in need of revision: the result is a fundamentally new and different way of understanding our experience
- GENERAL THEORY OF REFLEXIVITY: development of a metatheory for the different varieties of self-reference
- HUMAN PATHOLOGY: The first genuinely comprehensive study of the psychology of human aggression and destructiveness: human pathology in its many forms, including individual violence and cruelty, obedience to authority, war, genocide, terrorism, the phenomenology of hatred, moral intelligence, studies in ethology, &c.
- INTERNAL HUMAN LIMITATIONS: Studies of forms of internal human limitation, including pathologies of human thought, internal limitations of psychological normality, the psychology of stupidity, deficits resulting in barbaric outlook and conduct, the incapacity for culture (acedia), ecological pathology, and others
- CRITIQUE OF NORMALITY: The first book-length critique of the conventional equation of psychological normality and good mental health
- PSYCHOLOGY OF HIGHER EDUCATION & BURNOUT: The psychology of higher education and burnout among liberal arts faculty
- IS PSYCHOTHERAPY EFFECTIVE? A discussion of the effectiveness of psychotherapy
- LOGIC & PROBLEM-SOLVING: Mathematical logic, problem-solving, and protocol analysis
Philosophy as Negative Science
Starting with Kant’s undeveloped proposal of a “negative science,” the author describes how philosophy may be developed and strengthened by means of a systematic approach that seeks to identify and eliminate a widespread but seldom recognized form of systemic and propagating conceptual error.
The paper builds upon the author’s book, Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning (Studies in Theory and Behavior, 2021). The author’s purpose is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. By realizing these objectives, the boundaries of possible meaning are determined.
To download the author’s preprint of this paper, click here.
Epistemological Intelligence
Epistemological Intelligence
is an open access monograph by Steven James Bartlett, published January, 2017. The monograph has two purposes: first, to recognize epistemological intelligence as a new variety of human intelligence, one that is especially important to philosophers, and, second, to understand the challenges posed by the psychological profile of philosophers and of students of philosophy that can both impede the development and cultivation of the skills associated with epistemological intelligence, as well as limit the progress of the discipline of philosophy.
UPDATE: Appears in a revised version as Appendix II in the author’s book, Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning (2021).
For more detailed information about epistemological intelligence and to download a copy of the monograph, click here.
RAGE IN AMERICA:
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?
The extreme incidence and prevalence of rage-driven aggression and destructiveness in the United States is without parallel in any other industrialized country in the world. During 2022 alone, there were 647 mass shootings in the U.S. (in each, at least four victims were killed). Unfortunately these many killings comprise only one form of widespread rage in America. By drawing on resources of individual and social psychology, this paper seeks to answer why this is happening. To download a copy of this paper, click here.
The Dilemma of Abnormality
by Steven James Bartlett
published in
Abnormal Psychology across the Ages, Thomas G. Plante (ed.)
Volume 3, Chapter 1, pp. 1-20
Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013
A study of abnormal psychology throughout history would be incomplete without a discussion of the work of clinicians who have questioned the use of psychological normality as a diagnostic baseline to judge whether individuals and groups are mentally ill. At the core of psychiatry and much clinical psychology is the questionable assumption that psychological normality should serve as a diagnostic standard in determining whether individuals are abnormal and judged mentally ill.
For more information, click here.
Paratheism
A Proof that God neither Exists nor
Does Not Exist
Theism and its cousins, atheism and agnosticism, are seldom examined from a strictly logical-epistemological standpoint. One of the reasons for this is likely due to the “exemption” of “faith-based” human commitments that has tended to place them outside of deliberate, unbiased, rational, critical scrutiny. Richard Dawkins has challenged this “exemption” by questioning and indeed objecting to the “privileging” of religion, both by religious believers themselves, as well as by society and government. Dawkins’ challenge has contributed to a leveling of the field of current discourse about religion by reducing the automatic tendency to exempt religion from critical, evaluative analysis.
In the author’s essay “Paratheism: A Proof that God neither Exists nor Does Not Exist,” theism, atheism, and agnosticism are together examined in terms of their logical-epistemological coherence. A proof is given that shows all three of these views to be fundamentally incoherent when they are evaluated reflectively and logically. The proof’s conclusion leads to a position that the author names “paratheism.”
To download a free PDF copy (146K) of “Paratheism: A Proof that God neither Exists nor Does Not Exist” click here. Also available from PhilPapers.
The Objectivity of truth, morality, and beauty
Whether truth, morality, and beauty have an objective basis has been a perennial question for philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, while for a great many relativists and skeptics it poses a problem without a solution. In this essay, the author proposes an innovative approach that shows how cognitive intelligence, moral intelligence, and aesthetic intelligence provide the basis needed for objective judgments about truth, morality, and beauty.
To download a free PDF copy (143K) of “The Objectivity of Truth, Morality, and Beauty” click here. Also available from PhilPapers.
AMERICA'S UPSIDE-DOWN
Doctrine of Education:
ALBERT JAY NOCK'S THEORY OF WHAT HAS GONE WRONG —OR IS IT RIGHT?
The American system of education makes important and sometimes unjustified assumptions that were questioned and criticized nearly a hundred years ago by author and educational theorist Albert Jay Nock. This essay discusses Nock’s theory of American education and finds that certain of these assumptions stand greatly in need of the support of evidence.
To download a free PDF copy (191K) of this essay, click here. Also available from PhilPapers.
THE CASE AGAINST THE CONVENTIONAL PUBLICATION OF ACADEMIC AND SCIENTIFIC BOOKS
An essay that weighs the main factors that lead authors of academic and scientific books to consider conventional publication of their work, with realistic and practical recommendations for these authors so they may avoid the contractual “imprisonment” of their books after the period of initial active sales has passed.
To download a free PDF copy (72K) of this essay, click here. Also available from PhilPapers.
Outgrowing Peer Review
Peer Review—An Insult to the Reader and to Society: Milton's View
It has been nearly four hundred years since English poet John Milton weighed in against the “gatekeepers of publishing” — against those who choose to act as censors and restrict the freedom to publish. Milton was passionately opposed to restraints upon an author’s right to publish his or her thoughts, reasoning, and opinions.
During the past several decades peer review has become the largely unchallenged gold standard of academic and scientific publishing. Peer review is presumed to “pre-certify” the quality of publications. At the same time, peer review encourages publications that conform to current preferred beliefs, prevailing research paradigms, and fashion, just as it discourages the publication of works that do not.
In Milton’s view, our tendency to depend upon the pre-publication judgment of others is a sign of intellectually immaturity, or childlike dependency. Milton urges us to grow up and to take responsibility for our own capacity of critical judgment.
Milton’s arguments against pre-publication restraint through peer review are seldom remembered. For a copy of “Peer Review — An Insult to the Reader and to Society: Milton’s View,” click here.
A CODE OF CONDUCT FOR PEER REVIEWERS AND EDITORS
In the past few decades, peer review has come to dominate virtually all professionally respectable academic and scientific publications. However, despite its near-universal acceptance, no code of conduct has been developed to which peer reviewers and their editors are encouraged to adhere. This paper proposes such a code of conduct.
To download a free PDF copy (39KB) of this paper, click here. Also available from PhilPapers.
|
A PRINTED EDITION IS NOW AVAILABLE, AS WELL AS A CORRECTED 2ND EBOOK EDITION
CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON
Horizons of Possibility and Meaning
by Steven James Bartlett
with a Foreword by
renowned German philosopher
and physicist
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
« A Revolutionary Paradigm Shift in Philosophical Thought »
he Critique of Impure Reason is a major, original, and massive scholarly work that places our understanding of the preconditions of meaning, possibility, and knowledge in an entirely new and compelling light. In this sense it may come to be regarded as a complementary volume alongside Kant’s 18th century Critique of Pure Reason. This 21st century Critique asks—and answers—the question, Why has philosophy made no real progress? It sets the bold task for itself to solve a wide range of fundamental philosophical problems that have absorbed the efforts of philosophers for more than two-and-a-half thousand years. By means of a pioneering, systematically developed, and logically compelling method of analysis the study remedies many of philosophy’s shortcomings and advances the discipline by means of provable and constructive results.
For more information about the book, its recently published printed edition, and the corrected free open access edition, click here.
A Primer on Bartlett’s
Critique of Impure Reason
Some books are long and complex. The Critique of Impure Reason is such a book. It is long enough and complex enough so that it may be a service to some readers to offer a primer to introduce and partially summarize the book’s objectives and method. Here, the author of Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning provides such a guide, a vade mecum to accompany a reader should he or she embark on a study of the long and complex work. To download a copy of the primer, click here.
Image from https://tinyurl.com/y2j8m9ut under CC (S-A) license
The Human Refusal to Look in the Mirror
This paper, published in 2022, offers a philosopher-psychologist’s explanation of our species’ deeply rooted resistance to self-knowledge. The article focuses on limitations that come about when people do not possess a group of cognitive and psychological skills and competencies which the author has called “epistemological intelligence.”
When people lack these skills and competences, they become resistant to new ways of thinking which can help our species break free from self-limiting and often self-destructive ways patterns of thought and behavior.
Free access to this paper is available from the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC): https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-7bm. A free downloadable PDF of the paper which includes page numbers is also available from SERRC, https://tinyurl.com/2p98mw2b, as well as here.
the case for government by Artificial Intelligence
- Tired of election madness?
- The rhetoric of politicians?
- Their unreliable promises?
- And less than good government?
Until recently, it hasn’t been hard for people to give up control to computers. Not very many people miss the effort and time required to do calculations by hand, to keep track of their finances, or to complete their tax returns manually. But relinquishing direct human control to self-driving cars is expected to be more of a challenge, despite the predicted decrease in vehicle accidents thanks to artificial intelligence that isn’t subject to human distractions and errors of judgment.
If turning vehicle control over to artificial intelligence is a challenge, it is a very mild one compared with the idea that we might one day recognize and want to implement the advantages of human government by AI. But, like autonomous vehicle control, government by AI is likely to offer decided benefits.
In other publications, the author has studied a variety of widespread human limitations that, throughout human history, have led to much human suffering as well as ecological destruction. For the first time, these psychological and cognitive human shortcomings are taken into account in an essay that makes the case for government by artificial intelligence.
To download a free PDF copy (139KB) of “The Case for Government by Artificial Intelligence” click here.
 The Species Problem and its logic:
Inescapable Ambiguity and Framework-relativity
A research monograph
(60 pages, 2 tables, PDF, 473KB)
September, 2015
For more than fifty years, taxonomists have proposed numerous alternative definitions of species while they searched for a unique, comprehensive, and persuasive definition. This monograph shows that these efforts have been unnecessary, and indeed have provably been a pursuit of a will o’ the wisp because they have failed to recognize the theoretical impossibility of what they seek to accomplish. A clear and rigorous understanding of the logic underlying species definition leads both to a recognition of the inescapable ambiguity that affects the definition of species, and to a framework-relative approach to species definition that is logically compelling, i.e., cannot not be accepted without inconsistency. An appendix reflects upon the conclusions reached, applying them in an intellectually whimsical taxonomic thought experiment that conjectures the possibility of an emerging new human species.
To learn more about this study, click here.
MISMEASURING OUR LIVES:
The Case against Usefulness, Popularity,
and the Desire to Influence Others
This essay revisits the topic of how we should measure the things that matter, at a time when we continue to mismeasure our lives, as we hold fast to outworn myths of usefulness, popularity, and the desire to influence others.
Three central, unquestioned presumptions have come to govern much of contemporary society, education, and the professions. They are: the high value placed on usefulness, on the passion to achieve popularity, and on the desire to influence others. In this essay, the psychologist-philosopher author makes the case against these presumptions, presumptions which lead to exclusionary commitments that stand in the way of human cultural development.
To download a PDF copy of this essay (157KB), click here.
Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health
 (Praeger Publishers, 2011)
Contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology define their conception of mental health in terms of the baseline standard of psychological normality. This supposition has come to be accepted uncritically and without question, and yet it is fundamental to current clinical theory and practice, and forms the core of the psychiatric classification system of the DSM, which has become today’s diagnostic authority. Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health is the first book to question this central assumption, and to offer a constructive revision of what we should accept as a standard for good mental heatlh.
Available in hardcover and as an eBook edition. Click here for more about this book; click here for a general discussion of the issue.
The Pathology of Man:
A Study of Human Evil
 (Charles C. Thomas, 2005)
The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil is the result of ten years of research concerning the psychology of genocide and the Holocaust, the psychology of war, of terrorism, obedience, and the many other ways in which human beings behave aggressively and often cruelly toward other people, toward other species, and often even toward themselves. The Pathology of Man is the first work to apply the science of pathology to the human species and to identify and describe specific pathologies that afflict our species, often without our awareness. Its aim is to provide a solid foundation of scholarship encompassing the work of twentieth century psychologists, psychiatrists, ethologists, psychologically focused historians, and others who have studied human aggression and destructiveness.
Click here to learn more about this book.
Click here for more about this general subject.
The Worldview of Phenomenology
An invited High Table Address given before the students and faculty of Raymond College, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, December 10, 1969. An impressionistic and idealistic paper from the author’s youth suggesting how his de-projective approach to phenomenology could lead to an actual, lived, worldview. For a PDF copy with a recent Introduction, click here.
|
