Many of the errors that occur in children' subtraction are due to the use of incorrect strategies rather than to the incorrect recall of number facts. A production system is presented for performing written subtraction which is consistent with an earlier analysis of the nature of such a cognitive skill. Most of the incorrect strategies used by schoolchildren can be accounted for in a principled way by simple changes in the production system, such as the omission of individual rules or (...) the inclusion of rules appropriate to other arithmetical tasks. The production system model is evaluated against a corpus of over 1500 subtraction problems done by 10‐year olds and is shown to account for about two‐thirds of the (nonnumber fact) errors. It also provides an alternative, simpler interpretation of the subtraction errors analysed by Brown and Burton (1978). Some implications for teaching are discussed. (shrink)

Unbelievable Errors defends an error theory about all normative judgements: not just moral judgements, but also judgements about reasons for action, judgements about reasons for belief, and instrumental normative judgements. This theory states that normative judgements are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, but that normative properties do not exist. It therefore entails that all normative judgements are false. -/- Bart Streumer also argues, however, that we cannot believe this error theory. This may seem to be a problem for the theory. (...) But he argues that it makes this error theory more likely to be true, since it undermines objections to the theory and it makes it harder to reject the arguments for the theory. -/- He then sketches how certain other philosophical theories can be defended in a similar way. He concludes that to make philosophical progress, we need to make a sharp distinction between a theory's truth and our ability to believe it. (shrink)

We present a taxonomy of errors in the scientific literature and an account of how the errors are distributed over the categories. We have developed the taxonomy by studying substantial errors in the scientific literature as described in retraction notices published in the journal Science over the past 35 years. We then examine how the sorts of errors that lead to retracted papers can be prevented and detected, considering the perspective of collaborating scientists, journal editors and referees, and readers of (...) the published articles. (shrink)

We provide a full characterization of computational error states for information systems. The class of errors considered is general enough to include human rational processes, logical reasoning, scientific progress and data processing in some functional programming languages. The aim is to reach a full taxonomy of error states by analysing the recovery and processing of data. We conclude by presenting machine-readable checking and resolve algorithms.

In this paper we are going to show that error coping strategies play an essential role in linguistic pragmatics. We study the effect of noisy speaker strategies within a framework of signalling games with feedback loop. We distinguish between cases in which errors occur in message selection and cases in which they occur in signal selection. The first type of errors affects the content of an utterance, and the second type its linguistic expression. The general communication model is inspired by (...) the Shannon–Weaver communication model. We test the model by a number of benchmark examples, including examples of relevance implicatures, quantity implicatures, and presupposition accommodation. (shrink)

As of January 25, 2006, readers have identified the following errors in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. (I have considered other criticisms offered by readers, but decided that they were in error. Further criticisms are, of course, invited.).

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal (...) of the task, leading to a characteristic pattern of errors. Specifically, participants were asked to memorize two types of novel facts: quantified facts about sets of kind members and generic facts about entire kinds. Moreover, half of the facts concerned properties that are typically generalizable to an animal kind, and half concerned properties that are typically more idiosyncratic. We predicted that—because of the hypothesized bias—participants would spontaneously generalize the quantified facts to the corresponding kinds, and would do so more frequently for the facts about generalizable properties. In turn, these generalizations would lead to a higher rate of quantified-to-generic memory errors for the generalizable properties. The results of four experiments supported this prediction. Moreover, the same generalizable-versus-idiosyncratic difference in memory errors occurred even under cognitive load, which suggests that the hypothesized bias operates unnoticed in the background, requiring few cognitive resources. In sum, this evidence suggests the presence of a powerful bias to draw generalizations about kinds. (shrink)

Peter Gardner; Some Errors in Moral Education, or D. Z. Phillips and the‘Educational Argument’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 1, 30 May 2.

Perception of the external world is an essential part of the animal (including human) life, both as a source of knowledge and as a way to survive. Medieval authors accepted this view, and despite general concerns about the reliability of the senses in the acquisition of certain and objective knowledge, they thought that for the most part our perceptual system gets things right when it comes to the perceptual features of things—but not always. Our article focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century (...) philosophical discussions of illusions and other types of perceptual errors. Reception of incorrect information, misjudgments concerning perceptual objects, the binding problem, and similar cases that explain perceptual errors will be analyzed. We discuss what might be called medieval Aristotelian/Avicennian theories of perception and the internal senses (drawing mainly from Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas), as well as the so-called perspectivist accounts of perception, especially that by Alhacen. Finally, we take up a debate between Peter Auriol and his critics, which contains elements that can be seen as precursors of later skeptical worries. The concern here is that, just like in contemporary discussions leading to disjunctivism, the absence of a secure way to distinguish between veridical and non-veridical perception leads to a general worry about the reliability of our experience of the world. (shrink)

Medication error is the most common and consistent type of error occurring in hospitals. This article attempts to explore the ethical issues relating to the nursing management of medication errors in clinical areas in Macau, China. A qualitative approach was adopted. Seven registered nurses who were involved in medication errors were recruited for in-depth interviews. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using content analysis. Regarding the management of patients, the nurses acknowledged the mistakes but did not disclose the incidents to (...) patients and relatives. Concerning management of the nurses involved by senior staff, most participants experienced fairness, comfort and understanding during the process of reporting and investigation. The ethical issues relating to the incidents were discussed, particularly in the Chinese context. There is a need for further study relating to the disclosure of medication incidents to patients and some suggestions were made. (shrink)

home page other lists my email address Philip Dorrell, 6 September 2005 At talk.origins there is a list of creationist claims with links to accompanying responses. The responses attempt to refute the corresponding claims, but there are errors in some of the refutations. Each item below starts with a link to the section of the talk.origins site that responds to a particular creationist claim.

This study seeks to explore the major errors that frequently emerge when novice translators translate technical texts, namely legal documents released by the Department of Lands and Survey in Jordan. The goal behind this investigation is to improve legal translation training, develop students’ drafts based on the types of their mistakes, and deliver a message to curricula designers in the field of legal translation. To this end, 20 Jordanian novice translators (MA students) are chosen from two private universities to translate (...) three legal documents from Arabic into English. The main findings revealed that different problems emerged, namely the participants’ inability to translate near-synonym technical terms, grammatical problems, and stylistic problems at both lexical level and sentence level. These findings are hoped to be insightful for both learners and teachers. A number of pedagogical recommendations are proposed by the researchers to develop learners’ competence and reach a professional level and open the venue for trainers to achieve advances in the quality of the target text and in the translation teaching–learning process. (shrink)

The definition and measurement of the quality audit work has been the subject of many studies. Since the quality of auditors' work could not be observed directly except in ex post audit failures, prior researches adapted different proxies for measuring it. These proxies include firm size, reputation, auditor tenure, audit fees and other measures. This article reviews empirical studies over the past decades from all over the world in order to assess what researchers have done about measuring the quality of (...) auditors' work. Prior measurements are classified into two main groups; direct and indirect measure of quality audit and actual quality audit versus perceptions. This article contributes to the quality audit literature by proposing new measurement, which is developed based on the quality of auditors' work definition and theory of planned behaviour. (shrink)

Very young children occasionally commit scale errors, which involve a dramatic dissociation between planning and control: A child's visual representation of the size of a miniature object is not used in planning an action on it, but is used in the control of the action. Glover's planning–control model offers a very useful framework for analyzing this newly documented phenomenon.

In this chapter I give an account of how our judgments of anger often play out in certain political instances. While contemporary philosophers of emotion have provided us with check box guides like “fittingness” and “size” for evaluating anger, I will argue that these guides do not by themselves help us escape the tendency to mark or unmark the boxes selectively, inconsistently, and erroneously. If anger—particularly anger in a political context—can provide information and spark positive change or political destruction, then (...) we have moral reasons to evaluate it properly. But can we? And what are the limitations and errors we often face when evaluating anger? -/- I will begin by laying out the ways in which we evaluate emotions and the moral and epistemic errors we attribute to the angry agent in judgments of disapproval. Then I attempt to answer the question: How do we judge political anger improperly? An improper evaluation, in my view, does not take into account relevant information that is needed to evaluate the anger. An overly generous, uninformed, biased, or selfish process of evaluation produces an improper evaluation. We see this occur when we immediately evaluate anger. I will also identify two social discursive practices of improper evaluation as well as the moral and epistemic errors committed when anger evaluators participate in these practices. (shrink)

Experimental procedures routinely violate the cooperative principle of conversational conduct by presenting irrelevant information in a way that implies its relevance to the task at hand. This contributes to an overestimation of the prevalence of judgment errors relative to natural contexts. When research participants are aware that the usual norms of conversational conduct do not apply, the emerging errors are attenuated or eliminated.

I examine error diagnosis (model-model disagreement) in climate model intercomparisons including its difficulties, fruitful examples, and prospects for streamlining error diagnosis. I suggest that features of climate model intercomparisons pose a more significant challenge for error diagnosis than do features of individual model construction and complexity. Such features of intercomparisons include, e.g., the number of models involved, how models from different institutions interrelate, and what scientists know about each model. By considering numerous examples in the climate modeling literature, I distill (...) general strategies (e.g., employing physical reasoning and using dimension reduction techniques) used to diagnose model error. Based on these examples, I argue that an error repertoire could be beneficial for improving error diagnosis in climate modeling, although constructing one faces several difficulties. Finally, I suggest that the practice of error diagnosis demonstrates that scientists have a tacit-yet-working understanding of their models which has been under-appreciated by some philosophers. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays exclusively devoted to knowledge from non-knowledge and related issues. It features original contributions from some of the most prominent and up-and-coming scholars working in contemporary epistemology. There is a nascent literature in epistemology about the possibility of inferential knowledge based on premises that are, for one reason or another, not known. The essays in this book explore if and how epistemology can accommodate cases where knowledge is generated from something other than knowledge. Can (...) reasoning from false beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from unjustified beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from gettiered beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from propositions one does not even believe generate knowledge? The contributors to this book tackle these and other questions head-on. Together, they advance the debate about knowledge from non-knowledge in novel and interesting directions. Illuminating Errors will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Introduction Errors are inevitable in medical practice and this issue has attracted the attention of healthcare systems worldwide. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to pay attention in educational systems. The present study aimed to investigate the frequency and cause of nursing students’ errors. Methods This descriptive study conducted based on a cross-sectional design. The researcher provided nursing students with a questionnaire. The participants were selected through a purposive sampling method. Eventually, the collected data were analyzed by SPSS17. Results The (...) mean value of errors in students was 32.83 ± 28.5 and the prevalence rate of the errors ranged from 0 to 175. In total, 2922 errors were reported by the students, the most frequent of which were wearing the same pair of gloves for the care of more than one patient, negligence to wash the hands and clean the thermometer before utilization. Moreover, errors in oxygen therapy and medication obtained the lowest frequency. Furthermore, most of the students’ errors were due to not having enough knowledge about medicines, lack of appropriate equipment, and poor clinical skills. Discussion and conclusion: The most frequent nursing students’ errors are related to hand hygiene and personal protection. In addition, the lack of enough skills and appropriate equipment are prevalent causes of nursing students’ errors. Authorities in this field should attend to these errors in nursing education, clinical practice, and nursing studies in order to promote this profession in all of these three dimensions. (shrink)

This paper examines the suggestion that infinitivaltoomission errors in English-speaking children can result from competition between two constructions (Kirjavainen et al., First Language 29: 313–339, 2009a). Kirjavainen et al. suggested that the acquisition of two (or more) constructions (e.g., WANT-X and WANT-to) for verbs takingto-infinitival complement clauses can lead to infinitivaltoomissions, reflecting the relative frequencies of the constructions in the input. In the present study we analysed 13 English children's corpora to determine whether the presence of a variety of utterance (...) types in the immediate discourse context preceding WANT-to-VP (e.g.,I want to eat it) and erroneous *WANT-zero-VP (e.g., *I want__drink it) constructions was associated with infinitivaltoproduction/omission. This was done separately for the children's own and their interlocutors' discourse utterances. The data show that the occurrence of WANT-toand WANT-X constructions in the prior discourse was associated with differing proportions of infinitivaltoprovision in the WANT-to/zero-VP construction. This together with Kirjavainen et al.'s (First Language 29: 313–339, 2009a) data suggests that children are learning at least two constructions for the verb WANT, that competition contributes to infinitivaltoomissions, and that the strength of competing representations is affected by overall input frequencies and the preceding discourse. (shrink)

In his response to my paper ?The Error in the Error Theory? criticizing his and J. L. Mackie's moral error theory, Richard Joyce finds my treatment of his position inaccurate and my interpretation of morality implausible. In this reply I clarify my objection, showing that it retains its force against their error theory, and I clarify my interpretation of morality, showing that Joyce's objections miss their mark.

For much of 2021, allocating the scarce supply of Covid‐19 vaccines was the world's most pressing bioethical challenge, and similar challenges may recur for novel therapies and future vaccines. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) identified three fundamental ethical principles to guide the process: maximize benefits, promote justice, and mitigate health inequities. We argue that critical components of the recommended protocol were internally inconsistent with these principles. Specifically, the ACIP (...) violated its principles by recommending overly broad health care worker priority in phase 1a, using being at least seventy‐five years of age as the only criterion to identify individuals at high risk of death from Covid‐19 during phase 1b, failing to recommend place‐based vaccine distribution, and implicitly endorsing first‐come, first‐served allocation. More rigorous empirical work and the development of a complete ethical framework that recognizes trade‐offs between principles may have prevented these mistakes and saved lives. (shrink)

The ability to explain the occurrence of errors in children's speech is an essential component of successful theories of language acquisition. The present study tested some generativist and constructivist predictions about error on the questions produced by ten English-learning children between 2 and 5 years of age. The analyses demonstrated that, as predicted by some generativist theories [e.g. Santelmann, L., Berk, S., Austin, J., Somashekar, S. & Lust. B. (2002). Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions: (...) dissociating movement and inflection, Journal of Child Language, 29, 813-842], questions with auxiliary DO attracted higher error rates than those with modal auxiliaries. However, in wh-questions, questions with modals and DO attracted equally high error rates, and these findings could not be explained in terms of problems forming questions with why or negated auxiliaries. It was concluded that the data might be better explained in terms of a constructivist account that suggests that entrenched item-based constructions may be protected from error in children's speech, and that errors occur when children resort to other operations to produce questions [e.g. Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: the acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Liguistics, 11, 83-102; Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. (2000). Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: What children do know? Journal of Child Language, 27, 157-181; Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. However, further work on constructivist theory development is required to allow researchers to make predictions about the nature of these operations. (shrink)