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The authors (father and daughter) debate the necessity for and the (im)possibility of scientific research in the human sciences. As a researcher, the daughter (E) completed her PhD thesis on a study of the effectiveness of online treatment for depression. The father (A) has always doubted the claim of human scientists that they were able to explain, predict, and control human behavior. The conclusion about whether to do scientific research in the human sciences or not is, to paraphrase the Dodo bird from Lewis Carroll's (1865/1962) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "Both win and both deserve prizes!" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keynesian concepts of probability and uncertainty emphasize the basis of knowledge available to economic decision makers. Conditions of uncertainty, which involve missing evidence or doubtful arguments, are distinguished from probable risk. Beyond this, on the basis of the claim that the future is yet to be created, some authors argue for further distinctions among different kinds of uncertainty. The paper reviews this particular argument, distinguishing it from Keynesian uncertainty theory generally, and provides a critique of its implication that, due to innovation, objective distributions of possible events do not generally exist at the time of economic decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology as a scholarly vocation within the university in South Africa is bedevilled with the claims of its demise. Both the discipline and a cross-section of its practitioners seem beset with 'status anxiety' and what I call 'status ambiguity.' In this presidential address, delivered to the 2005 Congress of the South African Sociological Association (SASA). I examine these claims. The paper examines the sources of the anxiety. It argues that the claims of sociology's death are grossly exaggerated, as Mark Twain might have put it. I argue that if we were to operate on a wider canvas we might have persuaded ourselves to the position that the ebbs and flows in a discipline like sociology are not evidence of 'death', 'fall' or whatever else we might want to call it: it is not even an evidence of a discipline that is yet to attain maturity. The key to doing 'sociology beyond despair' and the recovery of disciplinary nerve requires a commitment to endogeneity, with a distinct commitment to epistemic intervention in global sociology: it requires us to take our locales seriously: it requires us to take ourselves seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positivity effect in judgments of personal experiences is a well-established finding. In this article, we posit that this effect may not manifest in the case of product experiences We base this on literature that suggests that social stimuli (such as personal experiences) are more ambiguous than nonsocial stimuli (such as experiences associated with products) Because of this ambiguity, construal processes are more likely to occur for social versus nonsocial stimuli, increasing the likelihood of the operation of self-serving theories in social judgments. Experiment 1 reveals that positive personal experiences are more likely to be retrieved than negative personal experiences, however, there is no difference in recall of positive and negative product experiences Experiments 2 and 3 extend this finding to judgments of past and future experiences, respectively, and replicate the better-than-average effect for personal, but not product, experiences Experiment 4 then examines the motivational underpinnings of construal processes and shows that construals can operate even for relatively unambiguous product experiences when participants believe such experiences implicate the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]