In this qualitative study, we explored how students understood "culture." Participants defined culture and wrote narratives regarding specific cultural encounters. The sample comprised both nursing (n=14) and non-nursing (n=8) students to allow for comparison groups. Content analysis of the narratives revealed two broad paradigms of cultural understanding: essentialist and constructivist. Essen...

For centuries cross-cultural comparisons have contributed to attempts to understand human behavior (Herodotus being an often-quoted early example). Specialized journals for publishing cross-cultural psychological studies have been in existence for less than 20 years, however. The founding of the International Journal of Psychology took place in 1966. The first Annual Review article on culture a...

Frege famously held that each act of utterance expresses a complete thought, and that each thought is true or false absolutely. Until a few years ago, analytical philosophers have sided with their most venerable ancestor: traditionally, relativism about truth has been dismissed as an extravagant and confused piece of semantic nonsense. But in recent times several writers have proposed relativis...

Ideas about ‘culture’ have often been used to explain, or excuse, acts of corruption. Gift giving, it is sometimes said, is ‘part of our culture’. Outsiders should not confuse it with bribery or corruption. Such a relativistic approach has been strongly criticized by academic writers on corruption, such as Sayed Alatas in his classic Sociology of Corruption, and by activists, such as Transparen...

Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. Howeve...

An ethical ideologies model based on relativism and idealism was tested. Subjects judged the morality of an individual who produced a mildly or extremely positive or negative consequence by conforming to or violating a common moral norm. As predicted, an averaging model with differential weights accounted for situationists' (high relativism and idealism) and absolutists' (low relativism and hig...

Moral relativism is an attractive position, but also one that it is difficult to formulate. In this paper, we propose an alternative way of formulating moral relativism that locates the relativity of morality in the property that makes moral claims true. Such an approach, we believe, has significant advantages over other possible ways of formulating moral relativism. We conclude by considering ...

Relativism is one of the most tenacious theories about truth, with a pedigree as old as philosophy itself. Nearly as ancient is the chief criticism of relativism, namely the charge that the theory is self-refuting. This paper develops a logic of relativism that (1) illuminates the classic self-refutation charge and shows how to escape it; (2) makes rigorous the ideas of truth as relative and tr...