The following is an attempted answer to the question: in what kind of world is learning from experience possible? The method is to build up imaginatively a world until what has in general outline been constructed is such as to permit the kind of learning by experience with which we are all familiar. We may hope that some interesting facts even now may emerge from a consideration of this trite subject. Not all that we know has (...) been learnt from experience, though, no doubt, anything we know, if it has come to our notice, has done so in the course of experience. With this truth we are not concerned. Our subject is what is called “empirical science”; but by sometimes calling it by the homelier name appearing in the title of this paper, we may remind ourselves that we are not dealing with a specialist branch of knowledge or a technical subject, but with what is a necessary feature of even the most commonplace experience. (shrink)

Richard Smith; Learning from Experience, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 37–46, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Polybius’ work is the frequency with which the historian pauses his historical narrative and embarks upon digressions, including entire books devoted to the topics of geography, historiography and, most famously, the discussion of the Roman constitution in Book 6. Such digressions have naturally drawn the attention of modern scholars, but in the past the tendency in Polybian scholarship had been to read such digressions in isolation, and even to deny their relevance outside of their (...) immediate context. While it is true that these digressions cannot be regarded as strict blue-prints upon which Polybius’ historical narrative is to be precisely mapped, more recent scholarship has suggested that such passages are not as irrelevant to this narrative as they had for a long time appeared. Moreover, a parallel trend in Polybian scholarship is currently calling for a renewed focus into the composition of his historical narrative in order to apply the level of scrutiny to the text of Polybius previously reserved, for example, for his more famous predecessors, Herodotus and Thucydides. An appropriate recognition of the relationship between the more famous passages of Polybius’ work found in his digressions and the broader narrative of historical events will help to alleviate this deficiency. Careful study of the text of Polybius in this manner will reveal that his historical narrative does not simply represent a bare record of historical facts but is rather composed by the historian in a way that demonstrates and reinforces the principles presented in the more abstract digressions, which have attracted more attention. (shrink)

Bayesianism can be characterized as the following twofold position: (i) rational credences obey the probability calculus; (ii) rational learning, i.e., the updating of credences, is regulated by some form of conditionalization. While the formal aspect of various forms of conditionalization has been explored in detail, the philosophical application to learning from experience is still deeply problematic. Some philosophers have proposed to revise the epistemology of perception; others have provided new formal accounts of conditionalization that are more in (...) line with how we learn from perceptual experience. The current investigation argues that Bayesian epistemology is still incomplete; the epistemology of perception and the epistemology of rational reasoning have not been reconciled. (shrink)

In Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, becoming is one of central metaphors; and the concept of becoming resonates with a number of contemporary debates in educational theory (Semetsky 2006, 2008). Several of Deleuze's philosophical works were written together with practicing psychoanalyst Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; 1994), such a collaboration bringing theoretical problematic into closer contact with practical concerns and socio-cultural contexts. Deleuze and Guattari conceptualized their philosophical method as Geophilosophy, privileging geography over history and stressing the value of the present-becoming, (...) that is, a possibility for becoming-other in each and every present moment. In this chapter we explore Deleuze's dynamics of becoming-other situated within a larger milieu of informal education in terms of learning from experience as a mode of cultural pedagogy. Deleuze's pedagogy implicit in his philosophy entails the reading of signs, symbols, and symptoms that lay down the dynamical structure of experience. Experience cannot be limited to what is immediately perceived; still, the Deleuzian line of flight or becoming is real even if "we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things" (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45). We are affected by experience, and thinking enriched with its affective dimension is always experimental, like a process of trying, testing, and creating. Experience is future-oriented, lengthened and enfolded, representing an experiment with what is new, or coming into being, becoming. (shrink)

Reflecting on the past is often a critical ingredient for successful learning. The current research investigated how counterfactual thinking, reflecting on how prior experiences might have been different, motivates effective learning from these previous experiences. Specifically, we explored how the structure of counterfactual reflection – their additive (‘‘If only I had”) versus subtractive (‘‘If only I had not”) nature – influences performance in dyadic-level strategic interactions. Building on the functionalist account of counterfactuals, we found across (...) two experiments that generating additive counterfactuals about a previous negotiation produced an advantage for negotiators over their previous performance compared to subtractive counterfactuals, both in terms of obtaining value for oneself and conceiving creative agreements. Additive counterfactuals enabled negotiators to more effectively extract lessons from past experiences to improve their current negotiation performance. (shrink)

In 1981 Unruh proposed that fluid mechanical experiments could be used to probe key aspects of the quantum phenomenology of black holes. In particular, he claimed that an analogue to Hawking radiation could be created within a fluid mechanical `dumb hole', with the event horizon replaced by a sonic horizon. Since then an entire sub-field of `analogue gravity' has been created. In 2016 Steinhauer reported the experimental observation of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in a Bose-Einstein condensate analogue black (...) hole. What can we learn from such analogue experiments? In particular, in what sense can they provide evidence of novel phenomena such as black hole Hawking radiation? (shrink)

More than 1.5 billion students experienced disruption to education as a result of COVID-19, representing the most substantial interruption to global education in modern history. Many educational institutions transitioned to emergency remote teaching (ERT) overnight, which has presented an array of distinct challenges for educators. Using virtual interviews and an experiential approach to thematic analysis, the study examined Scottish primary teachers’ (n = 10) lived experiences of adapting to ERT practice. Findings demonstrated three main themes; ‘Meeting Learners’ Needs,’ ‘Influencing (...) Engagement’, and ‘The Impact of ERT on Teachers’. Key findings suggested that differentiating learning, engaging, and communicating with learners is more difficult during ERT than face-to-face teaching. Parental engagement is vital, however, is influenced by several mitigating factors. Finally, ERT is likely to have substantial effects on the wellbeing of those involved. Implications of these findings are considered and discussed. (shrink)

According to a popular account, literary works can give a sense of the “inside” feel of various human experiences, literature thereby supplementing the external and objective perspective on the world that the different sciences aim at. This paper extends this understanding of literature's cognitive value, usually called “experiential knowledge,” with some key ideas of John Dewey's philosophy. It is argued that Dewey's general take on experience, as well as three of his central concepts—undergoing, inquiry, and growth—can significantly contribute to (...) our understanding of how experiential knowledge emerges from literary engagements and of the general cognitive significance of this type of knowledge. A particularly important goal of the paper is to show, against some skeptics, that experiential knowledge can have genuine epistemic weight, despite its nonpropositional and subjective character. It is also argued that experiential knowledge does not require a complete overlap between real-world experiences and literary experiences, as one recent criticism assumes. (shrink)

Color is an incredibly controversial topic. Here is a sample of views taken seriously: colors are dispositions to look coloured; colors are physical properties of surfaces or of light; colors are properties of certain mental states, which get projected onto the surfaces of objects or onto reflected or transmitted light; colors are an illusion; colors are sui generis. One hopes to break the impasse by finding a compelling starting point—one drawing on obvious points that are common ground—which naturally evolves into (...) the theory of color one likes. I start with remarks about the utility of having mental states with a phenomenology, remarks which are, I urge, non-controversial. I develop them into the theory of color I favor. According to it, colors are properties of objects as objective as their shapes. The final section explains how the theory handles the best argument for subjectivism about color. (shrink)

Analogue experiments have attracted interest for their potential to shed light on inaccessible domains. For instance, ‘dumb holes’ in fluids and Bose–Einstein condensates, as analogues of black holes, have been promoted as means of confirming the existence of Hawking radiation in real black holes. We compare analogue experiments with other cases of experiment and simulation in physics. We argue—contra recent claims in the philosophical literature—that analogue experiments are not capable of confirming the existence of particular phenomena in inaccessible target systems. (...) As they must assume the physical adequacy of the modelling framework used to describe the inaccessible target system, arguments to the conclusion that analogue experiments can yield confirmation for phenomena in those target systems, such as Hawking radiation in black holes, beg the question. (shrink)

In contrast to the empiricist view, which states how all learning involves general strategies that can be applied in various fields and learning from experience, the nativist view explains how the acquisition of some knowledge cannot be associated with the domain-neutral empiricist model. In 1960, Noam Chomsky made his claims regarding how human beings are innately bestowed of knowledge of natural languages. This chapter attempts to provide an overview of Chomsky's explanation of language acquisition and how this (...) has once again gained the attention of both American Structuralist linguistics and psychological behaviorism. Looking into such would allow the establishment of a taxonomic framework for a better examination of linguistic nativism. (shrink)

Engaging civil society actors as knowledgeable dialogue partners in the development and governance of emerging technologies is a new challenge. The starting point of this paper is the observation that the design and orchestration of current organized interaction events shows limitations, particularly in the articulation of issues and in learning how to address the indeterminacies that go with emerging technologies. This paper uses Dewey’s notion of ‘publics’ and ‘reflective inquiry’ to outline ways of doing better and to develop requirements (...) for a more productive involvement of civil society actors. By studying four novel spaces for interaction in the domain of nanotechnology, this paper examines whether and how elements of Dewey’s thought are visible and under what conditions. One of the main findings is that, in our society, special efforts are needed in order for technology developers and civil society actors to engage in a joint inquiry on emerging nanotechnology. Third persons, like social scientists and philosophers, play a role in this respect in addition to external input such as empirically informed scenarios and somewhat protected spaces. (shrink)

Storytellers and their audiences over many millennia have thought that we can learn from fiction. Philosopher Gregory Currie challenges that supposition. He doubts knowing can be founded on imagining, and claims that what we think we learn from fiction is not reli­able in the way science or philosophy is, because not tested through peerreview, experi­ment, and argument. He underrates the role of the imagination in understanding all hu­man language, in fictionality outside formal fictions, and in science. Science is (...) not “reliabilist” as Currie assumes: it aims at bold imaginative discoveries that often overturn what had previously been thought secure and may well be displaced by still newer discov­eries. Fiction may not have peer review, but it is tested on the highly developed intuitions of audiences, on the expertise of critics, and through the corrective competition and inno­vations of other storytellers, as Joyce challenges Homer, or David Sloan Wilson’s recent Atlas Hugged challenges Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. There are strong reasons for predicting that fiction has a prosocial bias from which humans over many millennia have learned to expand their sociality. That does not mean that all exposure to fiction is beneficial. (shrink)

There are several possible ways for investigating the creative process in musical composition in order to induce certain assumptions about the nature of the compositional experience that may provide a certain philosophical framework for shaping compositional experiences in music educational settings at all levels. By taking an approach mainly based on writings and interviews of twentieth and twenty-first century composers, such as Boulez, Ferneyhough, Foss, Ligeti, Xenakis, Reich, Reynolds, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, and Varèse, among others, Eleni Lapidaki illustrates certain parameters (...) about their actual compositional process. Implications for music education are suggested for immersing student composers in learning experiences that respect their intuitions, search for their individuality, and place emphasis on innovation and creative freedom as inseparable from expression in their compositions. (shrink)

One way for an experience to provide an effective scaffold for learning is when the concepts and theories it is intended to help students grasp and understand can be used to productively analyze, make sense of, and discuss the experience itself. In this essay I propose that games and game mechanics can be used to create learning experiences amenable to this kind of scaffold.

What can Western feminism hope to learn from women whose feminisms were originally shaped by experiences behind the ‘Iron Curtain’? In the first instance, an acute sensitivity to the importance of a politics that is responsive to needs. In its social democratic heyday, Western feminism had embraced a politics of contested need interpretation. Now, though, a neoliberal version has converted feminism into an attitudinal resource for the individual woman who is bent upon success. The takeover was made easy (...) by the poor self-understanding of social democratic feminism. My paper will compare Agnes Heller’s theory of ‘radical needs’ and Maria Márkus’s account of the ‘politicization of needs’ and apply both to the normative clarification of endangered feminist agendas. We look to the Budapest School women for more than just a way of conceptualizing the political radicalism of modern feminism as a social movement. Women need heroes too and a reflection upon the dignified and admirable lives of Agnes Heller and Maria Márkus has much to contribute to an ongoing search for a feminist ethic of the self. (shrink)

Learning from the profound challenge of dementia is an urgent priority. Success will require a critical deconstruction of current cultural and linguistic representations of this condition, and a kindling of novel and courageous approaches to re-conceptualise dementia's meaning and experience. This symposium collects provocative ideas arising from various discourses, theoretical perspectives, and methodolgical approaches to explore new ways to understand dementia.

The emergence of nanotechnology, and specifically nanobiotechnology, raises major oversight challenges. In the United States, government, industry, and researchers are debating what oversight approaches are most appropriate. Among the federal agencies already embroiled in discussion of oversight approaches are the Food and Drug Administration , Environmental Protection Agency , Department of Agriculture , Occupational Safety and Health Administration , and National Institutes of Health . All can learn from assessment of the successes and failures of past oversight efforts aimed (...) at emerging technologies. This article reports on work funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at learning the lessons of past oversight efforts. The article offers insights that emerge from comparing five oversight case studies that examine oversight of genetically engineered organisms in the food supply, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, chemicals in the workplace, and gene therapy. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors present a new way of evaluating oversight. (shrink)

The rhetoric of decolonising feminism has been increasingly connected to reformism rather than a radical intervention. Problematising the idea of finality in the calls to decolonise, I suggest that decolonial feminism should be understood as an experiment, a risky, unfinished project rather than a fixed location, and I argue that it should be based on a more radicalised notion of what María Lugones calls ‘learning from other resisters’. I draw on my experience working with feminists across the vast (...) and diverse Indonesian nusantara and reflect on Lugones’s concept of ‘other resisters’ in her essay ‘Toward a decolonial feminism’. Learning from feminists from places such as Nusa Tenggara and West Papua who challenge the singular imagination of the Global South, I advocate shifting the debate away from Euro-American academia as the locus of knowledge production by centring other resisters on the path towards decolonial feminism. I propose three aspects in learning from other resisters: actively engaging in the process of creating feminist linkages, acknowledging borders and friction within the Global South and interrogating the notion of resistance. (shrink)

How should we shape the practice of pastoral care, especially in the context of bioethical counseling? Martin Luther grounded it in a mutual dialogue of brethren. Friedrich Schleiermacher transformed this Protestant understanding according to the modern ideals of freedom and responsibility for oneself. In response to the other basic question of pastoral care: What is the human soul?, Sigmund Freud overcame the Platonic model undergirding Schleiermacher's account. Whoever seeks to care for his own soul and the soul of the other (...) should learn from Freud. One of the most fruitful consequences of such study lies in the formation of a mature religiosity. Another such consequence concerns the pastor's aspiring to an attitude of self-control in counseling. Building one's own competence on the experience and the knowledge of Freud can help one counteract the temptation to transfer one's own (unconscious) wishes onto the conversation partner and conversely to ward off transference from the other onto oneself. On the level of ideals and ultimate principles, however, Christian pastors, unlike Freud, will not see fate and the anonymous forces of Eros and Thanatos, as the ultimate last horizons of human self-understanding. Instead, the good news of sinful man's justification by God transcends even the limits of human existence imposed by fate. (shrink)

. The general issue addressed in this paper is the relation between the rule of law as a matter of national law, and as a matter of international law. Different institutional conceptions of this relationship give rise to different attitudes towards international law. Nonetheless, questions arise that cast doubt on age-old tenets of certain Western countries concerning the radical separability between the rule of law within the domestic system and in the international realm. The article will start considering some recent (...) developments in the United States' treatment of alien detainees. Then it shall address the relation between domestic constitutions and international legal systems, pointing out the challenge coming from the development of "super partes" international law and jus cogens. The question concerning the appeal to the rule of law will be made: Can our attitude to the rule of international law be exempted from consistency with the rule of law that we claim for our domestic system? In order to answer this question (in the negative), an appropriate theoretical perspective is eventually proposed and displayed. (shrink)

Existing research shows that people can improve their decision skills by learning what experts paid attention to when faced with the same problem. However, in domains like financial education, effective instruction requires frequent, personalized feedback given at the point of decision, which makes it time‐consuming for experts to provide and thus, prohibitively costly. We address this by demonstrating an automated feedback mechanism that allows amateur decision‐makers to learn what information to attend to from one another, rather than (...) class='Hi'>from an expert. In the first experiment, eye movements of N = 100 subjects were recorded while they repeatedly performed a standard behavioral finance investment task. Consistent with previous studies, we found that a significant proportion of subjects were affected by decision bias. In the second experiment, a different group of N = 100 subjects faced the same task but, after each choice, they received individual, machine learning‐generated feedback on whether their pre‐decision eye movements resembled those made by Experiment 1 subjects prior to good decisions. As a result, Experiment 2 subjects learned to analyze information similarly to their successful peers, which in turn reduced their decision bias. Furthermore, subjects with low Cognitive Reflection Test scores gained more from the proposed form of process feedback than from standard behavioral feedback based on decision outcomes. (shrink)

Speakers often use gesture to demonstrate how to perform actions—for example, they might show how to open the top of a jar by making a twisting motion above the jar. Yet it is unclear whether listeners learn as much from seeing such gestures as they learn from seeing actions that physically change the position of objects (i.e., actually opening the jar). Here, we examined participants' implicit and explicit understanding about a series of movements that demonstrated how to move (...) a set of objects. The movements were either shown with actions that physically relocated each object or with gestures that represented the relocation without touching the objects. Further, the end location that was indicated for each object covaried with whether the object was grasped with one or two hands. We found that memory for the end location of each object was better after seeing the physical relocation of the objects, that is, after seeing action, than after seeing gesture, regardless of whether speech was absent (Experiment 1) or present (Experiment 2). However, gesture and action built similar implicit understanding of how a particular handgrasp corresponded with a particular end location. Although gestures miss the benefit of showing the end state of objects that have been acted upon, the data show that gestures are as good as action in building knowledge of how to perform an action. (shrink)

On an account of virtue as skill, virtues are acquired in the ways that skills are acquired. In this paper I focus on one implication of that account that is deserving of greater attention, which is that becoming more skillful requires learning from one’s failures, but that turns out to be especially challenging when dealing with moral failures. In skill acquisition, skills are improved by deliberate practice, where you strive to correct past mistakes and learn how to overcome (...) your current limitations. A similar story applies to virtue acquisition, as moral failures will be a part of anyone’s life, and we will all have to learn from these experiences. However, despite the importance of being able to learn from our mistakes, this is very difficult in practice, given that failure of any kind can be distressing, and especially so for moral failure. The distress created by a recognition of moral failure often prompts responses of anger, avoidance, or defensiveness; rather than attempts to make amends and when necessary to work on self-improvement. The most potentially distressing response to moral failure is shame, as it is often associated with defensiveness. It is here where emotion regulation will be important to manage that distress, and I focus on the skill of emotion differentiation. I argue that emotion differentiation is a promising strategy for distinguishing the emotions we may experience in the wake of failure, including shame, and to encourage those emotions that motivate self-improvement. Thus, emotion regulation is important for virtue acquisition. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and digital ignorance in efforts to improve digitalized health care. Design/methodology/approach. A two-year qualitative field study was conducted in the context of a public health-care organization working with digital patient communication. The data consisted of participant observation, semistructured interviews and document data. Inductive coding and a theoretically informed generation of themes were applied. (...) Findings. The findings show that both health-care and digital communication professionals learn through experiences with digital “rule-” and “knowledge-based” errors in patient communication and develop negative knowledge and awareness of digital ignorance. In their joint efforts, they use negative knowledge to “bend the rules” and to explore digital ignorance in efforts to improve patient communication. Originality/value. This study provides insight into the importance of collaboration between professionals with varying experience of errors in digitalizing patient communication. Such collaboration is required to acknowledge own shortcomings and create complementary negative knowledge to improve digital patient communication. This is particularly important when working with innovative digitalization in health care. (shrink)

Does life have meaning? What is flourishing? How do we attain the good life? Philosophers, and many others of us, have explored these questions for centuries. As Eva Feder Kittay points out, however, there is a flaw in the essential premise of these questions: they seem oblivious to the very nature of the ways in which humans live, omitting a world of co-dependency, and of the fact that we live in and through our bodies, whether they are fully abled or (...) disabled. Our dependent, vulnerable, messy, changeable, and embodied experience colors everything about our lives both on the surface and when it comes to deeper concepts, but we tend to leave aside the body for the mind when it comes to philosophical matters. Disability offers a powerful challenge to long-held philosophical views about the nature of the good life, what provides meaning in our lives, and the centrality of reason, as well as questions of justice, dignity, and personhood. These concepts need not be distant and idealized; the answers are right before us, in the way humans interact with one another, care for one another, and need one another--whether they possess full mental capacities or have cognitive limitations. We need to revise our concepts of things like dignity and personhood in light of this important correction, Kittay argues. This is the first of two books in which Kittay will grapple with just how we need to revisit core philosophical ideas in light of disabled people's experience and way of being in the world. Kittay, an award-winning philosopher who is also the mother to a multiply-disabled daughter, interweaves the personal voice with the philosophical as a critical method of philosophical investigation. Here, she addresses why cognitive disability can reorient us to what truly matters, and questions the centrality of normalcy as part of a good life. With profound sensitivity and insight, Kittay examines other difficult topics: How can we look at the ethical questions regarding prenatal testing in light of a new appreciation of the personhood of disabled people? What do new possibilities in genetic testing imply for understanding disability, the family, and bioethics? How can we reconsider the importance of care, and how does it work best? In the process of pursuing these questions, Kittay articulates an ethic of care, which is the ethical theory most useful for claiming full rights for disabled people and providing the opportunities for everyone to live joyful and fulfilling lives. She applies the lessons of care to the controversial alteration of severely cognitively disabled children known as the Ashley Treatment, whereby a child's growth is halted with extensive estrogen treatment and related bodily interventions are justified. This book both imparts lessons that advocate on behalf of those with significant disabilities, and constructs a moral theory grounded on our ability to give, receive, and share care and love. Above all, it aims to adjust social attitudes and misconceptions about life with disability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 357-359 [Access article in PDF] Learning From Disunity Jennifer Radden In describing his four cases, Lloyd Wells (2003) throws out a challenge. He asks his readers to recognize similarities between their own more ordinary self-identity and the discontinuous narrative and seeming absence of a steady authorial subject resulting from disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). In (...) light of these cases, he implies, the unity of the self we have unreflectively assumed until now to be universal requires reconsideration. Psychopathology seems to force a sharpening, clarification, and closer conceptualization of our philosophical theories of self-identity.While acknowledging that philosophical categories and theories of narrative identity can help us to assess the ravages wrought by mental disorder, James Phillips (2003) is also respectful of the contribution of psychopathology to theorizing about identity: he ends his thoughtful discussion of Wells' cases by looking not at how philosophy can enlighten us about psychopathology but at how cases such as these can illuminate philosophical categories. Speculating on the tragic absence of narrative identity in schizophrenia and advanced Alzheimer's disease, Phillips concludes that, as he puts it, psychopathology "reconfigures the contours of our notion of narrative identity and requires a looser, minimized, nonsubstantial notion of the narrative self" and argues for a self that "transcends the limits and loss of narrative identity" (2003, 326).I also support the approach, shared by Wells and Phillips, that allows psychopathology to clarify and illuminate philosophical concepts and categories. Here, in a handful of footnotes to their insights, I want to point out ways that cases from psychopathology reveal distinguishable elements or aspects of self-identity often confused because, in the normal case, they form an unquestioned and apparently indissoluble unity. One of these is the difference between synchronic and diachronic subjective unity. Another is the difference between the elements of authorship and temporality in conceptions of narrative identity. And last is the difference between what I shall call constitutional identity and self-identity. Synchronic and Diachronic Identity The difference between synchronic and diachronic identity, elements so seamlessly blurred in more ordinary subjectivity, is nicely illustrated by Wells' cases. Mary's dissociative states leave her with interruptions in her diachronic identity: the memory of her experiences is fragmented and incoherent. Yet at any given moment, her synchronic unity is unimpaired. She recognizes and can describe the oneness of her experiences and their boundaries; she is aware which are her experiences and which are not. For all her scatteredness and dissociation, as Phillips puts it in describing Mary's case: "there is a strong and [End Page 357] articulate narrator... the fact remains that this I is there" (2003, 318).In contrast, the shy and self-conscious adolescent Edward seems to suffer not from diachronic but from synchronic disunity. (And if anything, as Melvin Woody [2003] points out, Edward's "narrative" seems to fuel the comparisons which so distress him about his uncomfortable and distressing subjective experiences.) Edward struggles to "delineate what's inside my mind and what's outside it... " When he thinks about what he sees as a firm boundary around the self in others which is not well demarcated in his own case, he remarks "... I completely lose any sense of myself" (p. 330).Thought insertion or "made" feelings in psychosis provide similar instances of such fracturing of their sufferer's synchronic identity (it is perhaps such experiences that Edward alludes to here; Wells' quotations are too sparse for us to tell). Just as Edward complains of losing any sense of himself, so other sufferers from these alarming conditions complain of losing a sense of the self's boundaries, of possession and mind control, and of being the unwelcome host to alien thoughts, feelings, and intentions.In normal experience diachronic and synchronic unity—my oneness across time and at a time—form a seamless whole. These cases, where one or the other is compromised, vividly remind us that these two forms of unity must be distinguished. Narrative Identity Phillips (2003) explicates an analysis of narrative identity which comprises entwined but distinguishable features: a narrating... (shrink)

(2013). A Review of “Out of the Classroom and into the World: Learning from Fieldtrips, Educating from Experience, and Unlocking the Potential of Our Students and Teachers”. Educational Studies: Vol. 49, No. 6, pp. 567-572.

A common finding is that information order influences belief revision (e.g., Hogarth & Einhorn, 1992). We tested personal experience as a possible mitigator. In three experiments participants experienced the probabilistic relationship between pieces of information and object category through a series of trials where they assigned objects (planes) into one of two possible categories (hostile or commercial), given two sequentially presented pieces of probabilistic information (route and ID), and then they had to indicate their belief about the object category before (...) feedback. The results generally confirm the predictions from the Hogarth and Einhorn model. Participants showed a recency effect in their belief revision. Extending previous model evaluations the results indicate that the model predictions also hold for classification decisions, and for pieces of information that vary in their diagnostic values. Personal experience does not appear to prevent order effects in classification decisions based on sequentially presented pieces of information and in belief revision. (shrink)

A framing bias shows risk aversion in problems framed as “gains” and risk seeking in problems framed as “losses,” even when these are objectively equivalent and probabilities and outcomes values are explicitly provided. We test this framing bias in situations where decision makers rely on their own experience, sampling the problem's options and seeing the outcomes before making a choice. In Experiment 1, we replicate the framing bias in description-based decisions and find risk indifference in gains and losses in experience-based (...) decisions. Predictions of an Instance-Based Learning model suggest that objective probabilities as well as the number of samples taken are factors that contribute to the lack of framing effect. We test these two factors in Experiment 2 and find no framing effect when a few samples are taken but when large samples are taken, the framing effect appears regardless of the objective probability values. Implications of behavioral results and cognitive modeling are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning from Examples of Civic Responsibility:What Community-Based Art Centers Teach Us about Arts EducationJessica Hoffmann Davis (bio)Introduction/QuestionThroughout the United States, beyond school walls, there struggles and soars a sprawling field of community art centers dedicated to education.1 Most frequently clustered on either coast in bustling urban communities, these centers provide arts training that enriches or exceeds what is offered in schools. They serve artists who need space (...) for work or performance, students who crave instruction and direction, and the broader community that enjoys attendant cultural enrichment. At the core, they create safe havens for arts learning that has been marginalized elsewhere.Unfettered by the demands and constraints of school administrations, these self-designed centers have been of considerable interest to arts education researchers over the last twenty years.2 Largely conceived and staffed by artists, they demonstrate artful alternatives to mainstream education: creative visions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Moreover, the positive impact these centers have had on students considered at risk across a number of variables has caught the attention of researchers looking for better ways to serve our youth.3The location of these centers beyond school walls, like their operation beyond the hours of the school day, would naturally seem to cast them as positive opportunities for extending arts learning that goes on in school. But with school art curricula scarce or in danger of elimination, supplementary options can seem threatening to school arts specialists. Administrators have regarded the opportunities that outside artists and centers provide as sufficient substitutes for a school-based course of sequential instruction in the arts. While vital funding sources encourage and sustain collaboration, a tension persists between the autonomy of outsider arts centers and the integrity [End Page 82] of insider school arts programs. For students disenfranchised from schools, the "otherness" of centers has a certain cachet. For centers unable to afford their own space, school classrooms in after-school hours offer a home base for their offerings and easy access for students. The back and forth across school walls raises opportunities and concerns that have resulted in a range of creative solutions.4 But my interest here is not in the cross-wall meeting of services, but rather in the differences in arts learning on either side of school walls. In the pages that follow, I pose the question, What can schools learn from the arts education provided in the community?In addressing this question, I first mark the differences between arts learning in schools and in the community as a need for justification versus an opportunity for demonstration. I then describe the research from which my thinking and discussion draw and offer a brief overview of the history of community art centers as inspired by and illustrative of civic responsibility. With an eye to what educators and advocates can learn from these community-based efforts, I focus next on three common objections to prioritizing the arts in our schools: value, measurement, and autonomy. Each objection is introduced from a school-based perspective and then reconsidered in light of community-based attitudes and activities.5 In conclusion, I delineate the insights derived from a consideration of community arts education as stimulus for the redirection of educational objectives and advocacy rationales for arts learning in schools.Justification vs. DemonstrationIn its struggle for recognition and place in school settings, arts education has sought justification in terms of its potential to serve the broader educational scene. We ask of classes that provide mounting skills in visual arts, music, or theater, "Yes, but what else does arts learning do? Can it improve student skills in reading, mathematics, or any other subjects that are more traditionally valued?" Such demands may seem unfair. When has math ever been defended for its ability to improve arts performance? Beyond a sense of injustice, claims for arts learning's causal impact on measurable extraneous outcomes (such as improvements in test scores in nonarts academic subjects) are at best most difficult to prove.6In community centers where art is the chosen heart of the matter, students come specifically to study the arts and to benefit from their enhancement of more generalized experience... (shrink)