The deflationary aim of this book, which occupies Part I, is to show that a widely held view has little to be said for it. The constructive aim, pursued in Part II, is to make plausible a measure-theoretic account of propositional attitudes. The discussion is throughout instructive, illuminating and sensitive to the many intricacies surrounding attitude ascriptions and how they can carry information about a subject's psychology. There is close engagement with cognitive science. The book should be read by anyone (...) seriously engaged with issues about propositional attitudes.According to the widely held view, which Matthews calls the Received View, the attitude of Φing that p is a matter of standing in a computational/functional relation to an explicit Representation that expresses the proposition that p, and thinking is ‘an inferential computational process defined over one or more of these Representations that eventuates in the production of either another Representation or a behavior’. The representations are understood to be sentences in a language of thought and thus to have a compositional syntax and semantics. The theory that Matthews aims to make plausible has it that ascriptions of propositional attitudes in the form ‘X Φs that p’, ascribe a state to a person by relating that person to an abstract object that is the representative of the state in roughly the way that numbers on a scale are the measure-theoretic representations of certain physical magnitudes. We are to think of the role of ‘Jones believes that interest rates will fall’ by analogy with that of ‘Jones weighs 150lbs’. The latter depends on there being arithmetical relations defined over numbers that enable its particular assignment of a number to Jones's weight to represent physical properties that Jones has in virtue …. (shrink)

History, Philosophy and Science Teaching argues that science teaching and science teacher education can be improved if teachers know something of the history and philosophy of science and if these topics are included in the science curriculum. The history and philosophy of science have important roles in many of the theoretical issues that science educators need to address: the goals of science education; what constitutes an appropriate science curriculum for all students; how science should be taught in traditional cultures; what (...) integrated science is; how scientific literacy can be promoted; and the conflict which can occur between science curriculum and deep-seated religious or cultural values and knowledge. In part, answers to these questions hinge on views about the nature of science, views that are best informed by historical and philosophical study. Outlining the history of liberal, or contextual, approaches to the teaching of science, Michael Matthews elaborates contemporary curriculum developments that explicitly address questions about the nature and the history of science. He provides examples of classroom teaching and develops useful arguments on constructivism, multicultural science education and teacher education. The book will appeal to school and university science teachers, educators of science teachers, and historians and philosophers of science. (shrink)

The organization of the genome into topologically associated domains (TADs) appears to be a fundamental process occurring across a wide range of eukaryote organisms, and it likely plays an important role in providing an architectural foundation for gene regulation. Initial studies emphasized the remarkable parallels between TAD organization in organisms as diverse as Drosophila and mammals. However, whereas CCCTC‐binding factor (CTCF)/cohesin loop extrusion is emerging as a key mechanism for the formation of mammalian topological domains, the genome organization in Drosophila (...) appears to depend primarily on the partitioning of chromatin state domains. Recent work suggesting a fundamental conserved role of chromatin state in building domain architecture is discussed and insights into genome organization from recent studies in Drosophila are considered. (shrink)

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...) that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

“A Liberal Account of Addiction‘ is a major contribution to the discussion of addiction, its treatment, and the social and policy issues which arise from it. Questioning as it does many generally accepted assumptions about addictive behavior, particularly the use of hard drugs, it will provoke even those who do not agree with it to rethink their positions. Many of its suggestions are relevant also, in my opinion, to thinking about other areas of psychiatric interest. Nevertheless, I want to argue (...) that its authors have perhaps not freed themselves sufficiently from some common assumptions, in particular about the nature of mental disorder, and that their argument might benefit from such liberation. The central assumption that I have in mind is that understanding human actions is nothing but understanding the brain activity that accompanies them. If so, then a pattern of behavior can count as a ’mental disorder’ in any clinically or legally relevant sense only if it is the result of a brain disease, causing a breakdown in normal brain functioning. Starting from this assumption, the authors seek to show, by means of evidence from neuroscience, that addiction to drugs does not have a unique ’neural substrate,’ distinct from that of any other kind of pleasure-seeking behavior. When we have a pleasurable experience of any kind, as they point out, dopamine is normally released within the brain. This, they say, activates the ’reward’ pathways, making the person more likely to repeat the behavior that gives rise to the pleasurable experience in questionÑwhether it is eating, sex, or injecting heroin. Addiction, they argue, is therefore just a tendency to repeat an intensely pleasurable experience, whatever the nature of that experience might be. The particular chemistry of the substance involved in this particular form of pleasure is, they argue, irrelevantÑall that matters is that the experience it gives someone is pleasant. Addiction, they. (shrink)

Forty years ago Norman Malcolm presented a now-famous paper at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Burlington, Vermont. MalcolmKnowledge of Other Minds.” The paper focused on the Argument from Analogy for Other Minds, which, of course, Malcolm roundly criticized. After making a number of preliminary points, Malcolm stated.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 5-8.

In recent years, a number of philosophers have turned their attention to developments in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular to deepfakes. A deepfake is a portmanteau of ‘deep learning' and ‘fake', and for the most part they are videos which depict people doing and saying things they never did. As a result, much of the emerging literature on deepfakes has turned on questions of trust, harms, and information-sharing. In this paper, I add to the emerging concerns around deepfakes by drawing (...) on resources from vice epistemology. As deepfakes become more sophisticated, I claim, they will develop to be a source of online epistemic corruption. More specifically, they will encourage consumers of digital online media to cultivate and manifest various epistemic vices. My immediate focus in this paper is on their propensity to encourage the development of what I call ‘intellectual cynicism'. After sketching a rough account of this epistemic vice, I go on to suggest that we can partially offset such cynicism – and fears around deceptive online media more generally – by encouraging the development what I term a trained ‘digital sensibility'. This, I contend, involves a calibrated sensitivity to the epistemic merits of online content. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Against Definition. Eric Matthews. -/- Keywords: definition, mental illness, ideology -/- Varelius rightly says, in the very first sentence of his article, that 'The nature of mental disorder is a controversial issue.' But I do not think he recognizes just how deeply controversial it is. He hopes to be able to find a way of resolving the controversy by his chosen method, based on a consideration of (...) 'the goals that we have in classifying certain persons as mentally disordered.' However, not only does the adoption of that method presuppose that the controversy is resoluble, it is also somewhat circular. For to be able to set out the goals that we have in classifying some people as mentally disordered, we already have to know which persons we so classify, and so what is meant by calling them 'mentally disordered.' There are several appeals to alleged 'intuitions' and one to a 'paradigm case' in Varelius's article; but, if we had such intuitions, they would be all we needed to define the concept of mental disorder, and there would be no need for the further reference to our goals in demarcating this class of human conditions.I want to argue that any alleged 'intuitions' we might have in regard to mental disorder are philosophically useless, and that the controversy about the nature of mental disorder is intrinsically irresoluble. Any claimed intuition can always be met by a rival intuition that is irreconcilable with the first. It is this, indeed, that makes the dispute about mental disorder essentially philosophical, rather than scientific, in character. Philosophical positions have to be based on, and defended by, rational argument, but there necessarily comes a point in any philosophical dispute at which no rational argument can settle the matter one way or the other. Varelius derives his methodology of considering goals of demarcation from some work done using this method on the concept of science. But people have different goals for demarcating 'science' from 'non-science' or 'pseudo-science.' The demarcation is not made, as Varelius suggests, on the basis of such criteria as testability of hypotheses or clarity of concepts; or rather, the application of these criteria themselves is determined by the goals of demarcation. The debate about what is to count as a 'science' is irresoluble in part because what we classify as such has evaluative and practical consequences. To be a 'science,' in our culture, is to be a valued activity, to have a status to be aspired to. This makes arguments about what it is to be scientific what I would like to call 'ideological' in character. Similar considerations apply to the dispute about the nature of mental disorder. Human societies have always distinguished madness from reason, disturbed or disordered behavior, thoughts, and emotions from those that are not disordered. But the purpose of making the distinction, and thus the character of the distinction made, has varied from society to society and from one historical period to another. The historian Roy Porter, in his short work Madness: A Brief History (2002) describes some of the different images of madness which have prevailed at different times in Western culture—as a divine punishment for hubris, as [End Page 53] a source of poetic inspiration, as the inevitable result of moral excess, as diabolical possession, and so on. The modern idea of mental disorder as mental illness is only one possible way of classifying together certain sorts of deviations from normality. Varelius's method of arriving at a definition of mental illness involves 'considering the goals that we have in classifying certain persons as mentally disordered.' But we can ask who are the 'we' in question, and whether 'we' have only one set of goals in classifying people in this way. The history referred to in the preceding paragraph suggests that 'we' means those members of society who do not regard themselves as disordered—the 'normal' people whose behavior can be readily understood by other normal people. Classifying someone as mentally disordered is distinguishing them as 'not one of us,' and this can serve various purposes, for instance, treating them as objects of entertainment in a human zoo, as in Bedlam; or treating them as moral. (shrink)

Conscientious refusal involves decisions by healthcare workers, on grounds of their conscience, to refuse to provide legal, professionally permissible and safe health interventions to patients. Conscientious provision involves decisions by healthcare workers, also on grounds of conscience, to provide safe and beneficial healthcare to patients that is prohibited by law or policy. Some bioethicists believe that the moral issues governing both are identical, and that if one permits conscientious refusals, one should also permit conscientious provisions. This article argues that this (...) assumption of symmetry is incorrect. To demonstrate this, it does the following: first, it establishes why it matters that we understand the difference between them; second, it describes three recent cases of conscientious provision in Canadian healthcare to help characterize its nature and scope; third, it situates these cases in a socio-economically nuanced analysis of the role of the conscientious provider under conditions or privilege and oppression; finally, it applies insights from the cases and the intersectional analysis to common criticisms of conscientious refusal to reinforce the fundamental asymmetries between conscientious refusal and conscientious provision. (shrink)

Day-to-day life is inundated with attempts to control emotions and a wealth of research has examined what strategies people use and how effective these strategies are. However, until more recently, research has often neglected more basic questions such as whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions (i.e. emotion regulation choice). In an effort to identify what we know and what we need to know, we systematically reviewed studies that examined potential determinants of whether and how people choose to (...) regulate their emotions. Eighteen determinants were identified across 219 studies and were categorised as being affective, cognitive, motivational, individual or social-cultural in nature. Where there were sufficient primary studies, meta-analysis was used to quantify the size of the associations between potential determinants and measures of whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions. Based on the findings, we propose that people’s decisions about whether and how to regulate their emotions are determined by factors relating to the individual doing the regulating, the emotion that is being regulated, and both the immediate situation and the broader social context in which the regulation is taking place. (shrink)

My concern here is to motivate some theses in the philosophy of mind concerning the interpersonal character of intentions. I will do so by investigating aspects of shared agency. The main point will be that when acting together with others one must be able to act directly on the intention of another or others in a way that is relevantly similar to the manner in which an agent acts on his or her own intentions. What exactly this means will become (...) clearer once we understand what it is to act directly on one’s own intentions. But I take it to be a fundamental assumption of the prevailing individualism of the theory of action— one at the core of its conception of the separateness of individuals— that one person cannot act directly on another’s intention. I agree that there is an important way in which we are or can be separate and autonomous thinkers and agents. But the way the individualist tries to capture this separateness is misguided. (shrink)

In a series of exquisite examples that could only have been gathered by a professional philosopher with an extraordinary respect for young minds, Gareth...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 437-438 [Access article in PDF] Michael V. Wedin. Aristotle's Theory of Substance: The Categories and Metaphysics Zeta. Oxford Aristotle Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 482. Cloth, $55.00. Michael Wedin has written the equivalent for Aristotle of what biblical scholars would call a "harmony of the gospels." It is a wonderfully rich and argumentatively dense reconstruction of (...) Aristotle's two most important treatises on substance, the Categories and Metaphysics Zeta, works that many of our most able Aristotle scholars have declared irreconcilable.The first chapter, on "the plan" of the Categories, includes a sensible account of the role in that work of the "onymies," as Wedin calls homonymy, synonymy, and paronymy. The second chapter, which focuses on "nonsubstantial individuals" in the Categories, gives the most philosophically sophisticated reconstruction known to me of how Aristotle might have conceived this white in Socrates to be a nonrecurrent particular. Having myself contributed to the glut of recent scholarship on nonsubstantial individuals in the Categories, I have personal, as well as professional, reasons to praise the rigor and insight of this chapter.In Chapter 3 Wedin tries to pin down the ontological commitment of Aristotle's Categories. Since, if there were no primary substances there would not be anything else, the fundamental ontological commitment of the Categories is a commitment to primary substances. Individual nonsubstances exist just in case there are primary substances in which they inhere. As for species and genera of substances and species and genera of the nonsubstantial individuals that inhere in them, Wedin finds Aristotle curiously indifferent to their existence.Chapter 4, a transitional chapter, takes up a range of possible views on the relation between the Categories and Metaphysics Zeta. Incompatibilism is argued against, yet the arguments for compatibilism in recent commentaries are found to be insufficient. In the next chapter Wedin moves on to his own statement of, and justification for, compatibilism.The key to Wedin's compatibilist interpretation is the distinction he draws between being a substance and being the "substance-of" something. Zeta can then be seen to be supplementing, rather than revising, let alone contradicting, the Categories, if Zeta can be understood to be about the substance-of the primary substances of the Categories (157-8).Aristotle proposes in Z3 three candidates for what the substance of, say, Socrates, is, namely, his matter, his form, and the compound of the two. Aristotle settles on form and discusses form as essence in Z4 and Z5, which discussion Wedin takes up in his own [End Page 437] Chapter 6. Then in Chapter 7 Wedin takes on the enigmatic claim of Z6, "In the case of things that are primary and spoken of per se, it is clear that the thing and the essence of the thing are the same" (1032a4-6).Wedin makes Chapter 8, which is primarily a treatment of Z10 and Z11, a discussion of Aristotle on "compositional plasticity," that is, on whether, say, the form of human being might be realized in something other than flesh and bones. "[O]ne could grant," Wedin writes, that to be a human being is just to be a member of a determinate biological species and so to have a very specific material nature, and yet insist that the form of such creatures be realizable in quite different sorts of matter. Creatures so constituted would not be human beings but they would be entities with similar functional capacities and states... From the point of view of philosophy of mind, for example, what matters are the psychological capacities, functions, and states characteristic of persons. Just what these are is determined by a form—the form that happens to be realized in human matter. (340-41) In Chapter 9 Wedin turns to Z13, which, as he acknowledges, has often been thought to be the most confounding chapter in Zeta. Wedin draws on Z16 to help resolve the aporia with which Z13 ends (roughly this... (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on inquiry yields important results about when it is appropriate to inquire and to what extent norms on inquiry are compatible with other epistemic norms. However, philosophers have been remarkably silent on the matter of what questions we ought to take up in the first place. In this paper, I take up this question, and argue that moral considerations constitute fit-related, right-kind reasons to adopt interrogative attitudes towards, and so inquire about, particular questions. This is a conclusion (...) of more general interest, because – as I explain – we might think that moral considerations are at best wrong-kind reasons for attitudes. If my contentions are right, then there is at least one kind of attitude – namely interrogative attitudes – of which this is not true. (shrink)

Revolutionizing received opinion of Taoism's origins in light of historic new discoveries, Harold D. Roth has uncovered China's oldest mystical text--the original expression of Taoist philosophy--and presents it here with a complete translation and commentary. Over the past twenty-five years, documents recovered from the tombs of China's ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In _Original Tao,_ Harold D. Roth exhumes the seminal text of (...) Taoism--_Inward Training (Nei-yeh)_--not from a tomb but from the pages of the _Kuan Tzu,_ a voluminous text on politics and economics in which this mystical tract had been "buried" for centuries. _Inward Training_ is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the _Tao-te Ching_; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoism's affinities to other mystical traditions, notably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. Roth argues that _Inward Training_ is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century B.C. (the late Warring States period in China). These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical "inner cultivation," which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the _Chuang Tzu_ and the world-renowned _Tao-te Ching._ With these historic discoveries, he reveals the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early "philosophical" Taoism and the later Taoist religion than scholars had previously suspected. _Original Tao_ contains an elegant and luminous complete translation of the original text. Roth's comprehensive analysis explains what _Inward Training_ meant to the people who wrote it, how this work came to be "entombed" within the _Kuan Tzu,_ and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period. (shrink)

Accepting a promise is normatively significant in that it helps to secure promissory obligation. But what is it for B to accept A’s promise to φ? It is in part for B to intend A’s φ-ing. Thinking of acceptance in this way allows us to appeal to the distinctive role of intentions in practical reasoning and action to better understand the agency exercised by the promisee. The proposal also accounts for rational constraints on acceptance, and the so-called directedness of promissory (...) obligation. Finally, the proposal, conjoined with Cognitivism about intentions, addresses recent criticism of Scanlon’s expectation-based view of promissory obligation. (shrink)

This book explores both scientific and humanistic theoretical traditions in anthropology through the lens of ontology. The first part of the book examines different methods for generating valid anthropological knowledge, and proposes a shift in current consensus. Drawing on western scholars of antiquity and the medieval period and moving away from twentieth century theorists, it argues that we must first make ontological assumptions about the kinds of things that can exist (or not) before we can then develop epistemologies that study (...) those kinds of things. The book goes on to apply the ontology-first theory to a set of case studies in modern day conspiracy theories, misinformation, and magical thinking. It asserts that we need to move away from unneeded metaphysical assumptions of conspiracy theories being misinformation, and argues that reconstructing particular historical events can be a fruitful zone for application of quantitative methods to humanistic questions. Theorizing the Anthropology of Belief is an excellent supplementary suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropological theory. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

In this introduction we set out some salient themes that will help structure understanding of a complex set of intersecting issues discussed in this special issue on the work of Marc Lewis: conceptual foundations of the disease model, tolerating the disease model given socio-political environments, and A third wave: refining conceptualization of addiction in the light of Lewis’s model.

The privation account of moral evil holds that the badness of morally bad acts consists not in the positive act itself or in any positive feature of the act but rather in the act’s lack of conformity to the moral standard. Traditionally recognized for its theological usefulness, the account has been the target of at least five recent objections. In this paper I offer a positive philosophical argument for the account and then show that the objections fail.

One of the most basic questions an ontology can address is: How many things, or substances, are there? A monist will say, ‘just one’. But there are different stripes of monism, and where the borders between these different views lie rests on the question, ‘To what does this “oneness” apply?’ Some monists apply ‘oneness’ to existence. Others apply ‘oneness’ to types. Determining whether a philosopher is a monist and deciphering what this is supposed to mean is no easy task, especially (...) when it comes to those writing in the early modern period because many philosophers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries include God in their ontologies. InThe Principles,Anne Finch Conway offers an ontology that is often described as being both ‘vitalist’ and ‘monist’. I take this to mean that, for Conway, all that exists is in some way alive and that if asked ‘How many things, or substances, are there?’ Conway would say, ‘Just one’. But to what does this ‘oneness’ apply? And where does the point of disagreement between Conway and her interlocutors, Hobbes, Spinoza, More, and Descartes lie? In this paper, I argue that determining the answer to this first question turns out to be quite difficult. Nevertheless, we can still make sense of the second. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political (...) philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

One of the most striking innovations in Aristotle’s philosophical writing is also one of its most characteristic features. That feature is Aristotle’s idea that terms central to philosophy, including ‘cause’ [aition], ‘good’, and even the verb ‘to be’, are, as he likes to put it, “said in many ways.” To be sure, philosophers before Aristotle give some evidence of having recognized the phenomenon of being said in many ways. Plato, in particular, suggests that things in this world that we call (...) “just” are only namesakes of the Just Itself. But, beyond that, homonymy seems to have been, even for Plato, no more than a source of ambiguity for wordplay. Aristotle is apparently the first philosopher to propose a taxonomy of homonymy and to view the identification and analysis of homonymies as a genuinely philosophical project. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

Constructivism is one of the most influential theories in contemporary education and learning theory. It has had great influence in science education. The papers in this collection represent, arguably, the most sustained examination of the theoretical and philosophical foundations of constructivism yet published. Topics covered include: orthodox epistemology and the philosophical traditions of constructivism; the relationship of epistemology to learning theory; the connection between philosophy and pedagogy in constructivist practice; the difference between radical and social constructivism, and an appraisal of (...) their epistemology; the strengths and weaknesses of the Strong Programme in the sociology of science and implications for science education. The book contains an extensive bibliography. Contributors include philosophers of science, philosophers of education, science educators, and cognitive scientists. The book is noteworthy for bringing this diverse range of disciplines together in the examination of a central educational topic. (shrink)