In this article, we report a study in which 109 research-active mathematicians were asked to judge the validity of a purported proof in undergraduate calculus. Significant results from our study were as follows: (a) there was substantial disagreement among mathematicians regarding whether the argument was a valid proof, (b) applied mathematicians were more likely than pure mathematicians to judge the argument valid, (c) participants who judged the argument invalid were more confident in their judgments than those who judged it valid, (...) and (d) participants who judged the argument valid usually did not change their judgment when presented with a reason raised by other mathematicians for why the proof should be judged invalid. These findings suggest that, contrary to some claims in the literature, there is not a single standard of validity among contemporary mathematicians. (shrink)

Background If trials of therapeutic interventions are to serve society's interests, they must be of high methodological quality and must satisfy moral commitments to human subjects. The authors set out to develop a clinical - trials compendium in which standards for the ethical treatment of human subjects are integrated with standards for research methods. Methods The authors rank-ordered the world's nations and chose the 31 with >700 active trials as of 24 July 2008. Governmental and other authoritative entities of the (...) 31 countries were searched, and 1004 English-language documents containing ethical and/or methodological standards for clinical trials were identified. The authors extracted standards from 144 of those: 50 designated as ‘core’, 39 addressing trials of invasive procedures and a 5% sample of the remainder. As the integrating framework for the standards we developed a coherent taxonomy encompassing all elements of a trial's stages. Findings Review of the 144 documents yielded nearly 15 000 discrete standards. After duplicates were removed, 5903 substantive standards remained, distributed in the taxonomy as follows: initiation, 1401 standards, 8 divisions; design, 1869 standards, 16 divisions; conduct, 1473 standards, 8 divisions; analysing and reporting results, 997 standards, four divisions; and post-trial standards, 168 standards, 5 divisions. Conclusions The overwhelming number of source documents and standards uncovered in this study was not anticipated beforehand and confirms the extraordinary complexity of the clinical trials enterprise. This taxonomy of multinational ethical and methodological standards may help trialists and overseers improve the quality of clinical trials, particularly given the globalisation of clinical research. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to identify which peer collaboration characteristics may be accountable for conceptual change through interaction. We focus on different socio‐cognitive aspects of the peer dialog and relate these with learning gains on the dyadic as well as the individual level. The scientific topic that was used for this study concerns natural selection, a topic for which students’ intuitive conceptions have been shown to be particularly robust. Learning tasks were designed according to the socio‐cognitive conflict instructional paradigm. (...) After receiving a short instructional intervention on natural selection, paired students were asked to collaboratively construct explanations for certain evolutionary phenomena while engaging in dialectical argumentation. Two quantitative coding schemes were developed, each with a different granularity. The first assessed discrete dialog moves that pertained to dialectical argumentation and to consensual explanation development. The second scheme characterized the dialog as a whole on a number of socio‐cognitive dimensions. Results from analyses on the dyadic as well as the individual level revealed that the engagement in dialectical argumentation predicted conceptual learning gains, whereas consensual explanation development did not. These findings open up new venues for research on the mechanisms of learning in and from peer collaboration. (shrink)

IT IS SHOWN IN DETAIL THAT RECENT ACCOUNTS FAIL TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN INTENTIONALITY AND MERELY CAUSALLY DISPOSITIONAL STATES OF INORGANIC PHYSICAL OBJECTS—A QUICK ROAD TO PANPSYCHISM. THE CLEAR NEED TO MAKE SUCH A DISTINCTION GIVES DIRECTION FOR FUTURE WORK. A BEGINNING IS MADE TOWARD PROVIDING SUCH AN ACCOUNT.

This paper examines the effects of employees’ sense that they work for a purpose-driven company on their workplace sustainability behaviors. Conceptualizing corporate purpose as an overarching, relevant, shared ethical vision of why a company exists and where it needs to go, we argue that it is particularly suited for driving employee sustainability behaviors, which are more ethically complex than the types of employee ethical behaviors typically examined by prior research. Through four studies, two involving the actual employees of construction companies, (...) we demonstrate that purpose drives the sustainability behaviors of employees by causing them to take psychological ownership of sustainability. In addition, we show that the sustainability-enhancing effect of purpose is stronger when employees perceive that they have higher autonomy in enacting their sustainability actions and for those employees for whom being moral is more central to their sense of self. (shrink)

Joan of Arc was as a mere 13-year-old girl when she first heard voices and saw visions of the Archangel Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch in her fathers garden. Both of her female saints were popular in the Middle Ages when these hallucinations began and she would have been familiar with their images as displayed in the local church in Domremy. But it is difficult to understand how a young and inexperienced girl could produce, accept, (...) and follow through on the daunting charge to save France from English incursion during the Hundred Years War, notably in the Battle of Orleans. Was she divinely inspired, mentally ill, or an intuitive genius with paranormal powers of perception? This paper will discuss previous theories by literary figures, as well as by scientists, both past and present, to shed modern neuroscientific insights onto her powers of perception. (shrink)

This study explored drug users’ attitudes toward and understanding of randomized controlled trials testing addiction therapies. A video portraying a fictional consent conference for a randomized controlled trial with placebo arm was shown to poor male and female drug users of diverse ethnic status and sexual orientation. The video stimulated focus group discussion in which participants’ comments often reflected “experimental realism”—a realistic view of the trial—and adequate understanding of the uncertain efficacy of the treatment being tested, as well as the (...) concepts of randomization and placebo control. However, participants’ comprehension of the nature of placebos was compromised by the widespread view that placebos are a way of testing a subject’s willpower and personal control over his or her addiction. Comments also showed a mistrust of the video investigator’s integrity and competence and signs of therapeutic misconception and misestimation. The study’s findings underscore the importance of tailoring informed consent encounters to the personal and sociohistorical context of participants’ lived experiences. (shrink)

What are the most fundamental features of the world? Do minds stand outside the natural order? Is a unified picture of mental and physical reality possible? The Mind in Nature provides a staunchly realist account of the world as a unified system incorporating both the mental and the physical.

Mr. Mure, the Warden of Merton, does not conceal his entire lack of sympathy with contemporary British, and particularly Oxford, philosophy. His last words are: “At present, if I had an intelligent son coming up to Oxford, I should not regret it if he turned his face away from all the three Honours Schools that include philosophy, even from Greats.” Such words are not lightly spoken by a man whose life has been bound up with philosophy and with Oxford. He (...) was University lecturer in philosophy from 1929 to 1937, and has been Warden of Merton since 1947. He has written two works on Aristotle and two on Hegel: an Introduction to Hegel and A Study of Hegel’s Logic. He obviously belongs, therefore, to a different generation and a different philosophical world from that of contemporary Oxford teachers of philosophy. Judging the latter by the standards of his own generation and tradition, he finds their work devoid of all virtue or value. (shrink)

Niebuhr saw that several paragraphs had been lost from the beginning of the Caesar; Ziegler suggested that the lacuna extended to the end of the Alexander. Both hypotheses are confirmed, if the identification of two new fragments is admitted.At 10. 11 p. 368, Zonaras is epitomizing the text of Caes.; he recounts the Story of Caes. 60. 3, and continues: Editors leave the provenance of the passage unspecified: ‘addita sunt pauca de nomine Caesaris‘. The correction of the vulgar error might (...) perhaps be an inference of Zonaras himself—though such an original contribution to historical polemic would be unique; but the erroneous version, at least, must come from somewhere. It is not found in any of Zonaras' sources for this period, nor in any surviving book which he certainly knew. Nor is it likely to be an addition from his own general knowledge. (shrink)

These guide-lines were produced for the Social Concern Track at Lausanne II. Their aim is to enable people who are engaged in evangelism in social action ministries to write up their experiences so that they and others can reflect on the theology underlying their approach. The guide-lines have since been widely used by people in different parts of the world. The findings of the case studies at Lausanne II were published in Transformation, January 1990.

Too much is claimed for this book by its title and by the blurb. The essays published in it were prepared in connection with a course of lectures, organized by the British Council, for non-British philosophy teachers, and held at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the summer of 1953. The course was a good one; but it did not amount to an adequate picture of British Philosophy in 1953; and it is too much to claim that “it is not only an authoritative (...) review of some of the outstanding recent developments in British Philosophy, but also a significant contribution to these developments.” As a record of what the most vocal British philosophers are saying to-day, it is not so helpful as the less pretentious B.B.C. and Oxford symposia, The Revolution in Philosophy, and The Nature of Metaphysics. As a guide to what is going on in British philosophy to-day, it compares very unfavourably with H. D. Lewis’s symposium, Contemporary British Philosophy. (shrink)

'Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their distinctive (...) accounts cover many of the issues surrounding dispositions such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation. Dispositions illuminates this central topic in analytic philosophy and at the same time highlights deeper concerns of metaphysics. (shrink)

Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno (Counterfactuals and Context, ANALYSIS 68 (2008): 39-46) argue that the standard Stalnaker-Lewis counterexamples to hypothetical syllogism, strengthening the antecedent, and contraposition trade on a failure to hold fixed the context in which truth values are determined for the premises and conclusion in each counterexample. I argue that no contextual fallacy is committed in the standard counterexamples, and I offer a different view of what it is for a fact to be held fixed by a counterfactual (...) antecedent. On my view, for a fact to be held fixed is an epistemological matter, not a semantic matter. (shrink)

The paper interprets Peirce's philosophy as a critical revival of Kant's idea of transcendental philosophy. The paper adopts, clarifies and extends the Peirce interpretation of the German philosopher K O Apel. In so doing, it shows Peirce to have articulated insights into meaning, knowledge and truth still of relevance today and to have identified important problems to which he proposed novel and still instructive solutions. (edited).