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In this chapter, theology is portrayed as a form of inquiry, a kind of therapy, and a mode of praxis. These are not perfectly separable roles for theology but can be distinguished for purposes of analysis. Peirce’s theory of inquiry, adapted here for theosemiotic purposes, is shown to be more complex than the standard account, organized around doubt as the stimulus for inquiry, tends to suggest. After a lengthy survey of the links between philosophical pragmatism and certain forms of contemporary psychotherapy, a theosemiotic grounded in pragmatic insights is presented as potentially therapeutic in its strategy and effects. The chapter concludes with an analysis of theology as praxis, as it must be conceived if it is grounded in pragmatism; the resonance of such a conception with liberation theology is also explored here.

This chapter revisits earlier accounts of distributed cognition in cultural environments and practices. It extends the notion of designer environment (i.e. spatial and procedural arrangements that amplify and scaffold cognition) beyond the usual focus on problem-solving and the task at hand. For outlining the complex capacities that come into play with the linguistic, cultural and literary contexts of literary designer environment, it draws on the critical and literary writings developed by Jesuits in eighteenth-century France. In particular, these literary designer environments enable fictional extensions of thought where immersive experience and abstract reflection can be combined. The article discusses individual literary texts and the larger intertextual net of literature in terms of the designer environment and suggests to broaden the perspectives from distributed cognition, the cognitive niche and scaffolded learning to include these.

Moral agency, as opposed to mere agency, is the agency that underlies distinctly moral action. This is in contrast to other sorts of agency. For example, “mere” agency is the sort of agency one sees in animal behavior as well as a good deal of human behavior. This is agency that produces action that is the result of features of psychology such as beliefs and desires, motives, intentions. However, mere agency is not regulated in the same way as moral agency. Moral agency is regulated by approval/disapproval of our mental states and/or the mental states of others. The chapter’s claim is not that the capacity for meta-order approval or disapproval is a necessary condition for moral agency. Rather it’s claim is that it is very important—given other features of our psychology—for effective moral agency.

This chapter discusses key developmental milestones considered fundamental to understanding adolescents with hearing loss. Knowledge of adolescent physical, neurobiological, socio-emotional, and executive functioning milestones can assist practitioners in planning and implementing (re)habilitation goals and selecting useful teaching strategies. It is helpful if practitioners understand some developmental risk and protective factors, including those learning disorders often demonstrated by adolescents with hearing loss.

This chapter describes how practitioners can design activities to improve adolescent skills via assessment, counseling, education, and guidance. It explains how to encourage adolescents to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses so that skills can be developed to effectively cope with challenging situations. Adaptive coping strategies for facilitating auditory-based spoken communication skills are provided; this chapter specifically includes those repair strategies needed for effective interpersonal relations and telephone usage.

Just as some Buddhists deny that the external world is ultimately real, so other Buddhists deny the ultimate reality of consciousness. This chapter examines the debate among different Buddhist schools over the status of cognition. This grows out of a debate over the problem of meta-cognition: if there is no self, then what is it that cognizes cognition? Momentariness and the irreflexivity principle pose obstacles to a satisfactory account. This leads the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti to develop the theory that every cognition is self-cognizing, but that irreflexivity is not violated since noetic and noematic poles of a cognition are non-distinct. Their reflexivity account is challenged by a higher-order thought account developed in the Madhyamaka school. According to this account, cognition is posited as a useful way of explaining bodily and verbal behavior, and so is not to be thought of as ultimately real. There is also some discussion of the difficulty for the reflexivist of explaining the existence of other minds.

Standard ways of thinking about self-awareness in animals—the mirror test and the debate over metacognition—assume self-awareness must take an intentional form, where a bodily or psychological facet of an individual is taken as an intentional object of a mental act of that same individual. There are several reasons for supposing that this intentional model of self-awareness is inadequate. These include Wittgenstein’s analysis of the idea of knowing one is in pain, Shoemaker’s arguments that much self-awareness is immune to error through misidentification, and Perry’s argument for the non-eliminability of an indexical component of self-awareness. These cases show that, in self-awareness, what one is aware of is often not independent of the act of awareness, and this is something that cannot be accommodated by the intentional model.