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Counselor education programs have a responsibility to ensure that individuals are competently trained, demonstrate understanding of ethical guidelines, and are free of observable psychological issues that may affect their ability to provide adequate counseling services. Counselor trainees who do not reach or maintain these professional standards may exhibit problems of professional competence (PPC). This position paper provides a review of the issues related to PPC among counselor trainees. It offers guidelines to counselor education programs for developing PPC policies and procedures. Future directions for research and training practice are discussed.

In a sense, this book is an exercise in paradox. On the one hand, constructivist, social constructionist, and narrative approaches to psychotherapy-with their emphasis on the inevitably personal and social processes of meaning making-characteristically avoid the stigmatizing implications of psychological "diagnosis" and the unequal power relationships between therapist and client that sustain this pracrice. On the other hand, all therapists, those from these "postmodem" perspectives included, regulate their engagement with clients on the basis of Some conceptualization of human distress, whether implicit or explicit. We therefore decided to invite prominent theorists associated with this increasingly influential tradition to articulate the implicit order in their approach to clinical 'idisorder" and its implications for psychotherapeutic strategy and technique. The chapters that constitute this volume represent the creative responses of 24 leading cone structivist, narrative, and social constructionist scholars and therapists to this invitation.Our decision as editors to undertake this project stemmed from both personal and professional factors. O n a personal level, we, like the other contributors to this book, live in two worlds: the world of constructivist theory and that of clinical and counseling practice. This uncomfortable dual membership in two rather different systems of discourse challenges us daily 3

An approach to formal and computational treatments of humor VICTOR RASKIN AND SALVATORE ATTARDOThe paper is devoted to the study of humor as an important pragmatic phenomenon bearing on cognition, and, more specifically, as a cooperative mode of non-bona-fide communication. Several computational models of humor are presented in increasing order of complexity and shown to reveal important cognitive structures in jokes. On the basis of these limited implementations, the concept of a full-fledged computational model for the understanding and generation of humor is introduced and discussed in various aspects. The model draws upon the authors ' General Theory of Verbal Humor, with its six knowledge resources informing a joke, and on SMEARR, a sophisticated semanticnetwork-based computational lexical environment. The relevance of the approach to the interpretation, generation, and cognitive structure of humor is discussed in the broader context of the nature of the cooperative non-bona-fide modes of communication. 32 VICTOR RASKIN AND SALVATORE ATTARDOAn unsophisticated, pre-theoretical list of non-literal phenomena would include: metaphor, simile, metonymy, idiom, indirect speech acts, implicature, exaggeration, understatement, humor, irony, and sarcasm. In general, non-literal meaning is non-compositional in that it is not derived wholly from the sum of the meanings of its parts or from the activated (syntactic) relations. This loose definition of non-literalness encompasses, therefore, a wide range of phenomena which stand in various relations to Grice's category of bonafide communication. Grice's (1975Grice's ( , 1989; see also Levinson 1983) cooperative principle, based on the four maxims (quantity, quality, relation, and manner), attempts to define the essential fact-conveying, "no-nonsense" mode as a mode in which the speaker and hearer are mutually committed to the truth of what is said and to the most straightforward and efficient methods for conveying that truth. Literal language, that is, using sentences only in their literal meanings, can indeed be viewed as the main venue for such bona-fide communication. Such a view will, however, be complicated by a number of factors.First, Grice himself muddied the waters by denying the existence of literal meaning (1957), true to his ordinary-language-philosophy party line, and by having only a passing interest in bona-fide communication on the way to implicature, the focus of his research. While bona-fide communication is delimited by the mandatory non-violation of any maxim, it also uncomfortably accommodates the deliberate flouting or exploitation of a maxim explicitly or implicitly signaled to the hearer and resulting in implicatures. When flouting a maxim, the speaker/hearer dyad can "recoup" the violation by honoring another maxim. Thus, for instance, when referring to a human being as "the cream in my coffee" (Grice 1989: 34)

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