Arthur I. Miller is a historian of science whose approach has been strongly influenced by current work in cognitive science, and in this book he shows how the two fields might be fruitfully linked to yield new insights into the creative process.

I propose to support these replies with actual episodes in late nineteenth and twentieth century physics. The historical record reveals that meaning does change but not in the Kuhnian manner which is tied to descriptive theories of meaning. A necessary part of this discussion is commentary on realist versus antirealist conceptions of science.

A major problem of teaching philosophy to children, in both the public and private sectors, is that the large proportion of children who could benefit by such instruction are never exposed to it. This is the result of many factors including teachers who are not prepared in philosophy, the resistance or inability of schools to offer such instruction, and the unwillingness of philosophers to involve themselves in these kinds of enterprises. Many times the only exposure prospective teachers receive is an (...) undergraduate course in the philosophy of education. And in many instances where even this course is not required, teachers are not introduced to philosophical thinking until they begin their graduate studies. Even here there is often only a one course requirement, and, in any case, the applicability of philosophy to educational practice is often lost by this time. (shrink)

Arthur I. Miller is a master at capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence. He did it with Einstein and Picasso, and now he does it with Pauli and Jung. Their shared obsession with the number 137 provides a window into their genius. --Walter Isaacson.

It is a little understood fact that the system of formal logic presented in Wittgenstein’s Tractatusprovides the basis for an alternative general semantics for a predicate calculus that is consistent and coherent, essentially independent of the metaphysics of logical atomism, and philosophically illuminating in its own right. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to describe the general characteristics of a Tractarian-style semantics, to defend the Tractatus system against the charge of expressive incompleteness as levelled by Robert Fogelin, and to (...) give a semantics for a formal language that is the Tractarian equivalent of a first-order predicate calculus. Of note in regard to the latter is the fact that a Tractatusstyle truth-definition makes no appeal to the technical trick of defining truth in terms of the satisfaction of predicates by infinite sequences of objects, yet is materially equivalent to the usual Tarski-style truth-definitions. (shrink)

Abstract Taking the integrated viewpoints of causal theory of reference, cognitive science and the notion of correspondence principles from physics, this paper addresses the problems of creativity, the nature of visual imagery and the manner in which science progresses.

American psychologist and pragmatist philosopher James (1842- 1910) is generally considered too individualistic to have had any interest in politics, but Miller argues that political concerns were in fact central to his intellectual work. He finds in James a theorist of action, explores the complexities of his theory, and related his thought to Miller's own experience as a political activist and scholar. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The discrepancy between measures of preferred and actual participation in decision making was used as a measure of ecological dissonance for an organization and then used to assess its relationship to job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. Questionnaires were administered to 143 faculty and staff members of Mississippi State University. Correlational analyses indicated mild relationships between the measures of ecological dissonance and job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization, thus providing support for ecological dissonance theory (...) (see Miller, Topping, & Wells-Parker, 1989). It was concluded that ecological dissonance in participation in decision making was a predictor of workers’ job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. (shrink)

A scenario is conjectured for Einstein's invention of the special theory of relativity that receives support over the widest possible number of archival, primary and secondary sources. This scenario takes into account the philosophical-physical-technological currents of 1905.

abstract This article attempts to illustrate the continuing need to pay attention to ontological issues connected with the conduct of empirical research and subsequent policy making. Failure to do so leads to the conflation of social constructions with ideas about the thesis of an independent reality. Such category mistakes often lead to dilemmas in which culturally sensitive constructs may, on the one hand, be worthy of study because they do tell us how socially constructed categories do predict social phenomena; but, (...) on the other hand, such constructs may illustrate an unwillingness on the part of the research community to recognize the objective nature of such constructs. Some recommendations are suggested for addressing the social policy consequences of these dilemmas. (shrink)

The analysis here is an attempt to show how the current epistemological theory of response‐dependence (R‐D) may be relevant to understanding putative ontological claims of the empirical social sciences. To this end I argue that the constitutive features of human response, central to R‐D theory, can be made explicit for social science. I conclude that for the empirical social sciences the implication of combining R‐D and certain forms of statistical analyses leads to the possibility of an events‐based ontology.

The cultures here in question are those of mathematics and of physics that I shall interpret with the goal of exploring different modes of creativity. As case studies I will consider two scientists who were exemplars of these cultures, the mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) and the physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The modes of creativity that I will compare and contrast are their notions of aesthetics and intuition. In order to accomplish this we begin by studying their introspections.

The movement to assess teacher competency is becoming a central concern for professional educators, state departments of education, and the public. The major underlying assumption of this concern is that primary and secondary school-aged children are falling far behind in basic skills as compared with their counterparts in other countries. A further concern is that, within this country, variability in teacher competency may exacerbate differences among children of various socioeconomic, racial and ethnic backgrounds and thus perpetuate long-term educational and economic (...) inequalities. To support these assumptions, critics of teacher preparation institutions cite declining SAT and ACT test scores of those entering teacher training, and also this constitutes sufficient grounds for assuming that becoming a teacher is less intellectually demanding than preparing for other fields. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to extend the meaning of the concept of indeterminacy for the human sciences. The authors do this by coining the term methodological indeterminacy and arguing that indeterminacy is better understood when linked to specific methodological techniques. Paradoxically, while specific research techniques demonstrate that the issue of indeterminacy is complex, yielding the possibility of types and degrees, it does not eliminate the problem of translation first raised by Quine. However, the authors go on to argue that, (...) from a research perspective, indeterminacy can and must be approached in such a way that it is possible to reduce cases of it, even though never completely eliminating it in the human sciences. (shrink)

In the still highly politicized question of rupture or continuity between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, elements of continuity are not hard to find, nor should this be a surprise, since a new state arose in the same geographical space and made use of the economic, intellectual, and demographic resources inherited from the Russian Empire. At the same time, the Soviet Union could not have been more different than the Russian Empire. It rejected a number of key elements (...) of the sociopolitical project that underlay the nationalizing tsarist empire and introduced radically new political and social principles for organizing that space. In particular, the Bolsheviks purposefully engaged in dismantling the tsarist efforts to build a great ethnic-Russian nation to stand at the center of the Russian Empire’s nationalities policy. The irreversible disintegration of post-Soviet space into separate nationalizing states became possible only toward the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, the imperial nature of the modern post-Soviet Russian core permits us to say that the imperial logic has survived. This is where we can find an element of inescapable continuity. We present studies of “continuities” and “ruptures” in modern academic discourse and in an updated format, gravitating toward “empirically nuanced” tools for analyzing multiple historical temporalities. (shrink)