Herbert H. Krauss

Perspectives on violence

Abstract:  The worldwide rise in violence, especially that directed against females of all ages, led the World Health Organization (WHO) to undertake steps to deal with that problem. To do so, WHO adopted a public health approach. This entailed (1) developing a definition of violence, (2) devising a typology of violent acts, (3) creating a uniform database for reporting violence, and (4) promulgating a model for understanding violence and its attendant phenomena. This essay reviews, analyzes, and critiques those efforts.

A Protoscientific Master Metaphor for Framing Violence

Abstract:  Every new field of investigation requires a guiding scheme or frame. Its purpose is to provide a heuristic for discovery and a structure for organizing information. Neither the World Health Organizations public health nor a biosocial model of violence are adequate for providing a protoscientific frame for conceptualizing violent acts. This essay suggests a master metaphor—Burkes Dramatism—through which to deepen and expand our knowledge of violence and what must be done to reduce its toll. An illustrative example is presented.

The Postmodern Self Personal Persistence and Its Absence in Contemporary Life Narratives

Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, and Hallett created the Personal Persistence Interview in an effort to determine how persons defend their sense of personal persistence. In other words, these researchers wanted to determine the means by which one’s present self and past self can remain subjectively similar in spite of change. A modified version of that research tool is presently used to obtain narratives not only of personal persistence but also of its absence. As of yet, there are no open-ended descriptions of how and why one’s past and present self-experience could be wholly different. These narratives are colloquially presented as they relate to change, time, and culture. Maturation and perspectival changes putatively induced more than half the sample of 177 college-aged participants to report an absence of personal persistence. Still, others, also acknowledging substantial change, continued to feel personally persistent. Change within early and late modernity, as well as change as it is expressed in theories of self, will be compared with change as it is present in these life narratives.

Assessing Diachronic Reasoning: Exploratory Measures of Perceived Self-Change in Young Adults

Personal persistence, the subjective perception of self-sameness through time, is implied or explicitly asserted in nearly all modern theories of self and identity. Recently, personal persistence has become the subject of inquiry and argument, most directly due to Galen Strawson, who recently described himself as experiencing a distinct series of non-defective and non-pathological selves, each phenomenologically independent of the other. Using a combination of previously published, modified, and newly constructed measures, the present study, in an attempt to provide empirical information relevant to the theoretical treatments of personal persistence, assembled an assessment battery of assumptively intercorrelated personal persistence measures, which collectively provided dichotomous, linear, quantitative, and qualitative information about the experience of self-persistence in a sample of 177 mostly female college students between the ages of 18 and 44 years.