Reasonable Hope: A Philosophical Counsellor's Approach to Post-Traumatic Stress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a philosophical perspective on contemporary Philosophical Counselling (PC), especially with respect to recovery from traumatic stress. It is argued that “reasonable hope” is an outcome of this kind of therapeutic process. In other words, “reasonable hope” characterizes philosophy’s tangible contributions to well-being and freedom for those who wish to pursue it. Contemporary PC affirms, and in some instances advocates for, the value of reasoning and the existence of criteria for valid claims of “psychological truth”. Psychological truths are achieved through processes of philosophical distinction making as well as validity and coherence evaluations. In these epistemological contexts (i.e., those that pursue psychological truths with individual therapeutic subjects) the necessity for empathy becomes apparent. Phenomenologically speaking, empathy is revealed as a tool, and cultivated skill, of therapeutic listening. Thus this brand of reasonable hope argues that contemporary PC affirms the possibility of enhanced personal agency by supporting subjects’ understandings of the social forces that shape them, as well as their experiences, emotions, motivations - and, importantly, their chosen values. The distinct philosophical investigations of the first four chapters are brought together in the conclusion to inform this specific account of “reasonable hope”. It is reasonable, therefore, to hope to be freed (or at least significantly more freed) from limited meanings often associated with the instantiating forces of psychic and emotional injuries. It is reasonable to hope to understand some aspects of one’s self. It is reasonable to hope to be understood by others. And it is reasonable to hope that discursive investigations in empathetic contexts can render less powerful the effects of psychic pains, worries, burdens, realities and traumas. Finally, it is reasonable to hope that reflexive turns extend, and enable, agency in subjects (i.e., individuals and, sometimes, groups or communities). Reason and evidence affirm that we can influence our own happiness by identifying and working with our emotions, motivations and values. In this way reason reveals both strong and weak reasonable hope. We learn too, that some hope lies at the limits of reason. Nonetheless, by reasoning we learn, and enact, not empty hopefulness but hopefulness grounded in sound investigations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".