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In recent years, situationism in psychology has caught the attention of philosophers. Some have defended it. Some have argued against it. The situationist has challenged the traditional view shared by personality psychology and virtue ethics that people differ in terms of character or character traits and that we can explain and predict people's behavior by character traits people have. Previous responses to situationism try to show that experiments from social psychology do not undermine the traditional view. I agree and will further argue that the fact that experiments do not undermine the traditional view is not sufficient to warrant the attribution of character traits, and that some philosophical arguments are needed given that not enough empirical data that show a high degree of behavioral consistencies are available. I first offer an account of the ordinary attribution of character traits according to which having character traits is a matter of degree, and argue that the ordinary attribution account comes from the Aristotelian moral psychology and is consistent with a long-standing tradition, the trait paradigm, in personality psychology. Second, I argue that although situational factors play some role in explaining and predicting behavior, the attribution of character traits plays a primary and indispensable role. Third, I argue that ordinary attribution of character traits has important functions in our moral life, which cannot be fulfilled by the attribution of local traits suggested by the situationist. I also argue that the ethical management of situations recommended by the situationist can help in getting things right, but is not sufficient to be the adequate foundation for our normative discourse. © 2016 American Psychological Association.
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It is an assumed view in Chinese philosophy that the grammatical differences between English or Indo-European languages and classical Chinese explain some of the differences between the Western and Chinese philosophical discourses. Although some philosophers have expressed doubts about the general link between classical Chinese philosophy and syntactic form of classical Chinese, I discuss a specific hypothesis, i. e., the mass-noun hypothesis, in this essay. The mass-noun hypothesis assumes that a linguistic distinction such as between the singular terms and the predicates is sufficient to justify or necessarily leads to a specific ontological distinction such as the distinction between the particular and the universal. I argue that one cannot read off semantic properties simply from syntactic ones and hence the syntactic differences do not automatically translate into the semantic differences between languages, that the syntactic features of Chinese nouns do not have explanatory significance in explaining why the particular-universal problem does not arise in the classical period of Chinese philosophy, and that the part-whole ontology allegedly informed by the mass-noun-like semantics does not provide a natural or intuitive picture of the language-world relation. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V.2011.
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