Open‐ended tasks can be decomposed into the three levels of Newell's Cognitive Band: the Unit‐Task level, the Operation level, and the Deliberate‐Act level. We analyzed the video game Co‐op Space Fortress at these levels, reporting both the match of a cognitive model to subject behavior and the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) to track subject cognition. The Unit Task level in this game involves coordinating with a partner to kill a fortress. At this highest level of the Cognitive (...) Band, there is a good match between subject behavior and the model. The EEG signals were also strong enough to track when Unit Tasks succeeded or failed. The intermediate Operation level in this task involves legs of flight to achieve a kill. The EEG signals associated with these operations are much weaker than the signals associated with the Unit Tasks. Still, it was possible to reconstruct subject play with much better than chance success. There were significant differences in the leg behavior of subjects and models. Model behavior did not provide a good basis for interpreting a subject's behavior at this level. At the lowest Deliberate‐Act level, we observed overlapping key actions, which the model did not display. Such overlapping key actions also frustrated efforts to identify EEG signals of motor actions. We conclude that the Unit‐task level is the appropriate level both for understanding open‐ended tasks and for using EEG to track the performance of open‐ended tasks. (shrink)

The Turing Test is of limited use for entities differing substantially from human performance levels. We suggest an extension of Turing’s idea to a more differentiated measure - the "Turing Ratio" - which provides a framework for comparing human and algorithmic task performance, up to and beyond human performance levels. Games and talent levels derived from pairwise comparisons provide examples of the concept. We also discuss the related notions of intelligence amplification and task breadth. Intelligence amplification measures total computational efficiency (...) (the computational benefit gained relative to investment, including programmer time, hardware, and so on); we argue that evolutionary computation is a key amplifier of human intelligence. Task breadth is an attempt to weight Turing Ratios by the frequency and importance of the task they measure - doing well at a broad range of tasks is an empirical definition of “intelligence”. Measuring Turing Ratios and considering task breadth, prior knowledge, and time series of the measures may yield long-term insight into both open-ended computational approaches and the underlying task domains being measured. (shrink)

We used multiple methods to examine two questions about emotion and culture: (1) Which facial expressions are recognised cross-culturally; and (2) does the “forced-choice” method lead to spurious findings of universality? Forty participants in the US and 40 in India were shown 14 facial expressions and asked to say what had happened to cause the person to make the face. Analyses of the social situations given and of the affect words spontaneously used showed high levels of recognition for most of (...) the expressions. A subsequent forced-choice task using the same faces confirmed these findings. Analysis of the pattern of magnitude, discreteness, and similarity of responses across cultures and expressions led to the conclusion that there is no neat distinction between cross-culturally recognisable and nonrecognisable expressions. Results are better described as a gradient of recognition. (shrink)

How does skill relate to dào 道, the ethically apt path and its performance? Two early Chinese ‘masters’ anthologies that make prominent use of craft metaphors imply profoundly contrasting answers to this question. For the Mòzǐ 墨子, a key to following dào is to set forth explicit models or standards for guiding and checking performance. By learning to consistently apply the right standards, we can develop the skill needed to follow the dào of the sage-kings reliably, just as a carpenter (...) uses a set square to produce square corners or a wheelwright uses a wing compass to fashion round wheels. Following dào—and thus the ethical life—is strongly analogous to the performance of skills. Like an artisan’s craft, dào has a fixed end that can be explicitly articulated. A sharply contrasting stance is implied by the renowned skill exemplar Páo Dīng the butcher in the Zhuāngzǐ 莊子. Praised for how his every movement in carving up cattle is perfectly attuned, yielding a display of skill matching that of an exquisite dance or musical performance, the butcher responds that what he actually cares about is dào, which is ‘advanced beyond skill’. Intriguingly, most of what Páo Dīng says in explaining this point pertains to how he developed his craft, performs his work, and overcomes new challenges. The implication is that the process of acquiring, performing, and extending skills exemplifies dào, yet there is something more to dào than skill. What is this something more? A skill is the ability to competently perform a task with a specified end. In the Zhuāngzǐ, a key difference between skill and dào, I will suggest, is that dào is unlike skill in having no fixed, predetermined ends. Dào is a general, open-ended process, one that is continually shifting and transforming. We can never fully master dào, nor even know exactly where it will lead, as the nature of dào is such that we must regularly find creative ways of extending it as we proceed along it. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence have raised a basic question about human intelligence: Is human reasoning best emulated by applying task‐specific knowledge acquired from a wealth of prior experience, or is it based on the domain‐general manipulation and comparison of mental representations? We address this question for the case of visual analogical reasoning. Using realistic images of familiar three‐dimensional objects (cars and their parts), we systematically manipulated viewpoints, part relations, and entity properties in visual analogy problems. We compared human performance to (...) that of two recent deep learning models (Siamese Network and Relation Network) that were directly trained to solve these problems and to apply their task‐specific knowledge to analogical reasoning. We also developed a new model using part‐based comparison (PCM) by applying a domain‐general mapping procedure to learned representations of cars and their component parts. Across four‐term analogies (Experiment 1) and open‐ended analogies (Experiment 2), the domain‐general PCM model, but not the task‐specific deep learning models, generated performance similar in key aspects to that of human reasoners. These findings provide evidence that human‐like analogical reasoning is unlikely to be achieved by applying deep learning with big data to a specific type of analogy problem. Rather, humans do (and machines might) achieve analogical reasoning by learning representations that encode structural information useful for multiple tasks, coupled with efficient computation of relational similarity. (shrink)

Critical attention to Wilfrid Sellars’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) has focused on the dubious Peircean optimism about scientific convergence that underwrites Sellars’s talk of “the” scientific image. Sellars’s ultimate Peircean ontology has led Willem deVries, for instance, to accuse him of being a naturalistic “monistic visionary.” But this complaint of monism misplays the status of the ideal end of science in Sellars’s thinking. I propose a novel reading of PSIM, foregrounding its opening methodological reflections. On this (...) reading, the central point of the paper is to accuse figures like Wittgenstein and Strawson, whom I call “analytical quietists,” of taking the unity of intellectual endeavor as somehow given. Such unity as is forthcoming is, Sellars tells us, a task. I conclude by noting that a structurally similar accusation of too easily presumed unity emerges at the end of the paper, against a familiar sort of anti-relativistic moral theorizing. Thus, Sellars’s conception of the task of philosophy is, at least potentially, a point of surprising ethico-political significance as well. (shrink)

Background: There are few standardized measures available to assess executive function in a naturalistic setting for children. The Children’s Cooking Task is a complex test that has been specifically developed to assess EF in a standardized open-ended environment. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, sensitivity and specificity, and also convergent and divergent validity of the Norwegian version of CCT among children with pediatric Acquired Brain Injury and healthy controls.Methods: The present (...) study has a cross-sectional design, based on baseline data derived from a multicenter RCT. Seventy-five children with pABI from two university hospitals with parent-reported executive dysfunction and minimum of 12 months since injury/completed cancer therapy, as well as 59 HCs aged 10–17 years, were assessed with CCT using total errors as the main outcome measure. The pABI group completed tests assessing EF on the impairment level within the ICF framework, and on the participation level. In addition, they completed tests of intellectual ability, processing speed, attention, learning, and memory. Finally, overall functional outcome was evaluated for the children with pABI.Results: Acceptable internal consistency and good inter-rater reliability were found for the CCT. Children with pABI performed significantly worse on the CCT than the HCs. The CCT identified group membership, but the sensitivity and specificity were overall classified as poor. Convergent validity was demonstrated by associations between the CCT and performance-based tests assessing inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory, as well as teacher-reported executive dysfunction. Divergent validity was supported by the lack of association with performance-based measures of learning and memory, attention, and verbal intellectual ability. However, there was a moderate association between the CCT and performance-based tests of processing speed. Lastly, better performance on the CCT was associated with a better functional outcome.Conclusion: Our study with a relatively large sample of children with pABI and HC’s demonstrated good psychometric properties of the CCT. CCT performance was associated with the overall level of disability and function, suggesting that CCT is related to the level of activity in everyday life and participation in society. Hence, our study suggests that the CCT has the potential to advance the assessment of EF by providing a valid analysis of real-world performance. Nevertheless, further research is needed on larger samples, focusing on predictors of task performance, and evaluating the ability of CCT to detect improvement in EF over time. The patterns of error and problem-solving strategies evaluated by the CCT could be used to inform neuropsychological rehabilitation treatmentand represent a more valid outcome measure of rehabilitation interventions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Working on the Clinton Administration's Health Care Reform Task ForceNancy Neveloff Dubler (bio)This narrative is based on my understanding of the elements of the Health Security Act that may have ethical implications. I have reconstructed these elements from my experience on the Health Care Reform Task Force and they are part of the health care plan that the President presented to Congress. (At the time this article went to (...) press, the actual legislation, which should answer my remaining specific questions more clearly, had not yet been released.) I perceive the most important features of the plan to be:• The legislation will create a "right" to health care for all citizens—access to care will be universal;• The plan will involve some form of managed competition in which groups of providers (called Approved or Accredited Health Plans (AHPs)) will offer comparable benefit packages at slightly (or widely) different costs;• The AHPs will negotiate with the Health Alliance (HA) to determine the price that they will charge their consumer-patients;• There will be open enrollment with no barriers to coverage, such as exclusions for pre-existing conditions;• Community rating will be in effect in different localities and enrolled persons in any AHP will pay the same premium;• The coverage for any enrolled person will be portable;• The overall structure will be a cooperative federal/state enterprise in which the states will have quite extensive abilities to fashion variations of the basic plan to meet their particular needs;• Primary care will be encouraged and incentives for physicians to train in primary care specialties provided;• Non-physician providers will be central to the functioning of the health care plans;• Efforts will be made to develop a "person power" pool so that people with an abstract "right" to health care will have real access to providers, in their localities, who can fulfill the promise that the right creates; [End Page 421]• The goal of cost containment will be central to the organization and regulation of the system;• Administrative simplicity and quality protections will be central.Co-chairing the Bioethics Working Group (BWG) of the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform was a unique experience. Approximately 40 Task Force working groups were established by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the President, and the senior Task Force staff. Various members of the President's office and other knowledgeable members of the Executive Branch selected the participants. In our group, appointments were made largely on the recommendations of the co-chairs. The BWG, among the last of the groups formed, carried the official name "The Working Group on the Ethical Foundations of the New System" and was jointly led by me and Marion Gray Secundy, a Professor of Bioethics at Howard University. The fact that the leadership of the Task Force saw fit to establish such a group, thereby confirming that bioethics is a player in the arena of health care policy, was in itself significant and was made no less so by the lack of clarity regarding the group's aims and goals.The working groups of the Task Force were organized into clusters, determined by the relatedness of the somewhat distinct, but always overlapping, content of their investigations. Separate clusters and working groups, for example, looked at mental health, long term care, and the benefit package and coverage for low-income and non-working families. On this last issue there was also a working group that explored health policy initiatives for underserved populations. This multiple focus on related issues proved to be an excellent method for ensuring that the complexity of these topics was sufficiently explored. There was a published schedule for when these groups met together, and members of other groups who had similar or overlapping concerns were invited to attend and to participate.Every week or so, all of the working groups reported to the Task Force leadership, under the direction of Ira Magaziner, in a process called a "tollgate." Prior to the tollgate, the working groups were required to submit formal written analyses of the problems they had most recently been considering. Copies of these documents were placed in a special room so that those who were interested could review... (shrink)

This article analyzes Heidegger’s Paris lecture, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in an attempt to understand the historical “task” that Heidegger seeks to examine when confronted with the agony of philosophy today. I attempt to valorize the understanding of time and history that Heidegger stages in his reading by demonstrating its entrance to be radical and novel with respect to other moments in Heidegger’s production: history here is not of “destiny”, that is, it does not coincide (...) with the appropriating orientation of man in time already presented in Heidegger’s other texts; rather, it is understood on the basis of the opening to the future that fragilizes and suspends all hope and all historical resolution. History is thought here as the desertification of present times, the completion of metaphysical nihilism, in which there opens at the same time a “perhaps” that, repeated many times throughout the lecture, takes up in all its complexity the problem of the future’s coming, of the extraordinary, of the opening, that is, of what, from the future, exceeds destiny. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 3-9 [Access article in PDF] The Suspended Substantive On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben's The Open Leland de la Durantaye Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. [O] Trans. of L'aperto: L'uomo e l'animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. [A] With a title as enigmatic as The Open, the reader might well wonder, "the open (...) what?" Is the title's adjective to stand alone? Does it need no substantive to support it? This unfamiliar title is not what one might first guess—it is not an awkward translation from the work's original title. No substantive follows in the original, and none is meant to. The idea that gives Agamben's book its title is that of an openness which is unconditioned—and perhaps unconditional, an openness which is unspecified—and perhaps unspecifiable.If the answer to the question "the open what?" can be answered with no substantive, might we ask in what this opening occurs? Between what more substantive things has an indefinable space been opened? The first answer to the question can be found in the work's subtitle—Man and Animal. The open space in question is that which separates and distinguishes man from animal. Philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists, zoologists, chemists, taxonomists—and many others—have had no small difficulty in agreeing upon the matter.Philosophers have traditionally had a low opinion of animals [cf. de Fontenay]. Descartes had especially little respect for the minds of animals and influentially classified them as automata mechanica. As Agamben notes, the great naturalist and taxonomist Linnaeus responded to this assertion with the laconic rejoinder: "Descartes obviously never saw an ape" [cf. O 23/A 30; translation modified]. Philosophers have been more eager than taxonomists to put distance between themselves and the animals—and for this reason have been particularly interested in studying what separates man from animal. The last great philosophical attempt in this regard is that of Martin Heidegger. Despite his preference for the primordial, his openness to the woods and the wilderness, his opinion of animals' faculties was not much higher than that of Descartes. In his view, animals live in an environment in which they are receptive to various stimuli, but where they have nothing approximating what we call a "world"—animals are, as he claims, "poor in world" (weltarm)—or even "without world" (weltlos). They live in such intense and incessant proximity to their environment and its stimuli that they do not see the existential forest for the environmental trees. They can never take a step away from the immediacy of their perception and for this reason cannot be said to possess a "world" in the sense that man, in Heidegger's view, does.As mentioned above, the title The Open is, for all its strangeness, not the result of [End Page 3] an awkward translation from Agamben's Italian. Its strangeness stems, nevertheless, in large part from a translation. Or, to be more precise, from two translations. The first of these is from the German. The German in question is a special one—that of the profoundly idiosyncratic technical vocabulary that Heidegger fashioned for his philosophical purposes. For Heidegger, "the open" is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. "The open" is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a "world." "The open" is what we find ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment recedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a "world," greater and less graspable than our restricted and finite representations. This experience of "the open" is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and... (shrink)

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) conceived of himself as the Socrates of nineteenth century Copenhagen. Having devoted the bulk of his first major work, *The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates*, to the problem of the historical Socrates, Kierkegaard maintained at the end of his life that it is to Socrates that we must turn if we are to understand his own philosophical undertaking: "The only analogy I have before me is Socrates; my task is a Socratic (...) task." The overall aim of my dissertation is to examine and critically assess this claim, and ultimately to argue that the Socratic nature of Kierkegaard's endeavor finds its fullest expression in the activity and writings of one of his best-known literary creations, Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of *Philosophical Fragments* and *Concluding Unscientific Postscript*. The first part of my dissertation addresses Kierkegaard's own status as a Socratic figure. I examine Kierkegaard's claim that his refusal to call himself a Christian--in a context where it was the social norm to do so--is methodologically analogous to Socrates' stance of ignorance. I also consider how the use of a pseudonymous manner of writing allows Kierkegaard to employ a Socratic method. In the second part of my dissertation I focus on Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus and his claim that his contemporaries suffer from a peculiar kind of ethical and religious forgetfulness. I argue that Climacus adopts two Socratic stances in order to address this condition. In *Philosophical Fragments* he adopts the stance of someone who has intentionally "forgotten" the phenomenon of Christianity, whereas in the *Postscript* he adopts the stance of someone who openly declares that he is not a Christian. In the process, he develops a conception of philosophy that places a premium on self-restraint and an individual's ability to employ the first personal "I." As Climacus emerges as Kierkegaard's Socratic pseudonym par excellence, we obtain two significant results: a deeper understanding of Kierkegaard's conception of Socrates and Socratic method, and a compelling conception of philosophy rooted in Greek antiquity. (shrink)

Along with critical thinking, collaboration and communication, creativity is considered a crucial skill to prepare students for uncertain societal challenges and future jobs in the twenty-first century. Therefore, it is not enough to just encourage creativity in education, but it is also important to assess it, because assessing creativity helps to recognise and understand students' creative abilities. In this paper, we focus on mathematical creativity and link it to general definitions of creativity. We thoroughly investigate and analyse methods that foster (...) mathematical creativity and enable its assessment, highlighting innovations that result from the application of these methods. The methods we consider focus on approaches to problem posing and problem solving, including open-ended tasks. The results show that these methods not only enhance students' mathematical creativity, but also contribute to more connected mathematical knowledge and improve problem-solving skills. (shrink)

This article elucidates the significance of eschatology—particularly what may be called negative eschatology—for the task of political life. Through tracing some of the appeals to eschatological notions in recent political thinking and movements, we demonstrate some of the dangers of eschatology as a resource for political theology. The article then engages with the version of negative eschatology rendered by Vincent Lloyd, which holds out the possibility of experiencing a foretaste of the eschaton in moments of struggle against domination. The form (...) of political activity in focus here is a struggle to dismantle that which does not belong to the eschatological order of justice—that is, struggling against what the eschaton is not. We bring this account of the relationship between the eschaton and the political into conversation with Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of infinity, and offer an account of negative eschatology as an invitation into living in relation to a fullness that is ever unfolding. Political activity undertaken in this light is oriented towards opening the conditions of possibility for the contingent transformation of injustice and led by those at the margins. We suggest, therefore, that in the dismantling of what eschatology is not, it is possible to glimpse what the eschaton might be. (shrink)

This study investigated how Korean students apply principles of human rights to social issues in Korean and international contexts and how they differentiate between human rights and other values. Open-ended, task-based interviews were conducted with 22 high school students in Korea. Korean students were aware of human rights violations involved in any given social issues, but their explanations focused only on the principle of political and economic equality. However, Korean students showed contradictory reasoning when they pointed to human (...) rights issues in international or Korean settings; whereas they pointed to structural oppression as the cause of human rights violations and applied universal principles of human rights in the international context, they considered individual choices and traditional values in the Korean context. This study indicates that Korean students’ understanding of human rights is influenced by a variety of contextual factors in and out of school, and it suggests that social studies educators must challenge students’ prior experiences with and ideas about human rights issues in settings outside of school. (shrink)

Co-creativity focuses on how individuals produce innovative ideas together. As few studies have explored co-creativity using standardized tests, it is difficult to effectively assess the individual’s creativity performance within a group. Therefore, this study aims to develop a platform that allows two individuals to answer creativity tests simultaneously. This platform includes two divergent thinking tasks, the Straw Alternative Uses Test and Bottle Alternative Uses Test, and Chinese Radical Remote Associates Test A and B, which were used to evaluate their (...) open-and closed-ended creative problem-solving performance. This platform has two modes: single-player mode and paired-player mode. Responses from 497 adults were collected, based on which the fluency, flexibility, and originality of divergent thinking were measured. This study also developed a computer scoring technique that can automatically calculate the scores on these creativity tests. The results showed that divergent thinking scores from computer-based calculation and manual scoring were highly positively correlated, suggesting that the scores on a divergent thinking task can be calculated through a system that avoids time-consuming, uneconomical manual scoring. Overall, the two types of tests on this platform showed considerable internal consistency reliability and criterion-related validity. This advanced application facilitates the collection of empirical evidence about co-creativity. (shrink)

Recently, we initiated a new research line on fulfillment in life by developing a conceptual framework and a self-report measure. To enhance conceptual clarity and complement theoretical considerations and empirical findings, we investigated lay conceptions of a fulfilled life in German-speaking participants at different life stages. First, we selected a qualitative approach using an open-ended question asking participants to describe a fulfilled life. Second, for a more comprehensive understanding, quantitative data were collected about the relevance of sources in (...) providing fulfillment and ratings on a fulfilling life in the present and a fulfilled life in retrospect. Qualitative content analysis was used to assess the responses to the open-ended question. One-fifth of the data was double coded, and intercoder reliability was high. Responses comprised a variety of descriptions, and we grouped them into seven themes, three of which overlapped with the prior conceptualization, namely the core elements of general description, cognitive appraisals, and affective appraisals. Cognitive evaluations related to intrapersonal aspects, particularly having lived life fully, attained personally significant goals, and developed oneself, as well as interpersonal, generative aspects, such as having made a contribution and been able to leave something of value. These categories are mostly in line with what the Fulfilled Life Scale measures. Further themes referred to correlates—including sources—and antecedents, including resources, personal characteristics, and quality of life, all considered worthy to be the subject of empirical investigation but which were not included in the conceptual model. Qualitative and quantitative results suggest that individuals derive fulfillment from different sources. Fulfillment from a profession and having a life task was strongly associated with longer-term fulfillment. Only a few age and sex differences were found. The overarching framework developed from the qualitative results can stimulate further investigation. Our findings underscore that a fulfilled life as a distinct construct should be measured directly rather than via a proxy. Insights into the constituents, sources, and antecedents of a fulfilled life can inform practice to promote a life well lived. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Place for Healing:A Hospital Art Class, Writing, and a Researcher's TaskJulia Kellman (bio)Introduction[O]bjects transform the top of our chest into a site of memory. I think of private landscapes like this one as querencias, places that hold the heart. The word has been translated as homing instinct and affection. Expatriate Alastair Reid introduced me to it in 1965, writing about the Spanish bullfight in The New Yorker. After (...) the first wound the bull chooses his querencia, the place in the ring where he returns for a moment to rest before the fight goes on, and where he finally dies. Querencia comes from the common Spanish verb querer; among its many meanings are to love, to want, to hold, and to command. Reid spoke of hometowns and native countries as querencias; exiles cling to their memories of them.1Place, "space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious,"2 by its nature orients us to a particular perspective, to a way of looking at the world. Each place has its own local accent, its own constellation of habits, its own rhythm of language and thought. We are grounded in landscape in the same manner that we are situated in our social world, imprinted like other creatures on a typography, pattern of weather, cycle of seasons, scents, and colors.3Our hearts, too, are embedded in such places; and in this article, through this "act of personal witness," this "inscription of a self and a description of an object" as the anthropologist and writer Ruth Benhar4 describes it, we will see how the members of an art class for people with HIV/AIDS at a local hospital have similarly become grounded in their art space and in the tiny art community that has grown up around it. Additionally, we will discover the importance of a more descriptive style of writing as means for examining the role of art in the lives of people who are ill, for their various difficult [End Page 106] situations call for particular clarity and empathy that both honors and relates the stories of their lives. It will become clear as this article proceeds that the personal engagement of a researcher/writer in such a situation is critical as well. For not only must she be open—vulnerable, as Behar suggests—to the people with whom she works as a means of spanning the chasm between a life of illness and a life of health, but she must also be sensitive to the reader's needs, for she is the reader's guide and surrogate.5 This role as guide and alter-ego demands that the researcher tell the story of other lives in a manner that enables the reader to empathetically and eagerly undertake a journey with the researcher into a world unlike her own.6Personal Engagement: The Researcher/WriterHoward Brody, doctor and medical ethicist, explains the necessity for stories of illness to be descriptive.7 He asserts that the stories in which we are most interested are not merely factual recitations; they are about what the illness means to the individual—they include how that person understands events. "It is far too simple-minded" he writes, to assume that "the writer of literature presents to us a world of fantasy that never existed whereas the author of a nonfictional pathography has some special insight into the world as it really exists, even if the relevant world is nothing but his own subjective experiences."8 He concludes "in stories of that sort (stories of the meaning of things) the line between so-called truth and fiction becomes more blurred and ceases to affect the uses we make of the stories for the deeper understanding of the human response to illness."9 Further, Brody continues, one must understand stories of sickness in order to truly develop a philosophical understanding of what it means to be ill. Such an understanding, Brody suggests, not only provides ethical guidance for health care workers and others but also will lead to improved care for patients and better education of health professionals.10 This view of... (shrink)

In this article I argue that the best way to ensure that students engage with assigned reading is by having open-ended questions that require textual interpretation to accompany every class session. Although this runs contrary to a recent trend of using multiple-choice questions or true/false questions to ensure reading compliance, using questions that require written responses has four key benefits: (1) such questions result in 75 percent of students completing the assigned reading; this leads to more successful class (...) discussions, and a deeper dive into the course material. (2) Daily assignments can be used to develop specific skills that the instructor would like students to demonstrate. (3) When students come to class having completed the reading, it is much easier to assign productive group assignments. (4) When students engage in significant reading and writing tasks within a semester, critical thinking, reading and writing skills are more likely to be improved. (shrink)

This article provides a theoretical and doctrinal explanation of how the but-for test links gains to the wrong that produced them. Gain-based damages cases focus on the gain resulting from the defendant’s tortious behaviour. In these cases, the contrastive aspect of the but-for test, requiring the factfinder to consider the hypothetical result that would have occurred had the right thing happened instead of the defendant’s wrongdoing, is not confined to the question of reasonability, as it is in negligence cases. Rather, (...) in gain-based damages cases, the factfinder faces the open-ended normative task of determining the hypothetically appropriate scenario that contrasts with the wrongdoing that happened in reality. For this reason, in gain-based damages cases, the normative sensitivity of the but-for test is revealed in full. The article explains how this sensitivity influences the result of the but-for test expressing the amount of gain causally attributed to the defendant’s wrongdoing. (shrink)

Words and Life (= WL) is a bulky collection of 29 essays, edited and introduced by James Conant. Pragmatism: An Open Question (= P) is a much thinner collection, dedicated to Conant, of just three lectures. Taken together, the two books constitute an argument for pragmatism as a viable option in contemporary philosophy, and a new (pragmatic) basis for what remains viable in the philosophical and political ideals of the Enlightenment. As in a previous collection of essays (Putnam 1990), (...) Conant’s role appears to be more than just editorial. In his own lengthy introductions, he gives Putnam’s work an interpretive ‘spin’, of which Putnam, for his part, seems to approve. Together, Putnam and Conant develop a strain of pragmatism which is well worth looking into.1 Putnam’s pragmatism is best captured by the quote from Cavell (1979: p. 125) which appears as the motto on the title page of the 1994 collection, and from which its title – ‘Words and Life’ – is derived. It is the view that although philosophy is an open ended practice of reflection, rather than a purely contemplative theory of one kind or another, the practice in question is at one and the same time a part of culture (immanence) and a step beyond it (transcendence). In Cavell’s language, the task of such reflection (‘philosophizing’) is ‘to confront culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me’, where the self in question – the individual qua philosopher – appears to be engulfed by culture even as he is confronting it from the outside. On this interpretation, Putnam’s appeal to practice in philosophy is part of an attempt to keep its transcendent, or critical, dimension alive, even while recognizing philosophy’s radical embeddedness in culture and tradition, and the futility of seeking some God’s-eye view from which reality as such is to be viewed.2 The question is whether, and how, these two perspectives can be held together. If our standards of rational criticism transcend any particular culture in terms of their scope and authority, how can they also be embedded in culture and immanent to it? Can pragmatism offer a coherent synthesis of these two dimensions.. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Radical Constructivist Structural Design Education for Large Cohorts of Chinese Learners” by Christiane M. Herr. Upshot: Herr’s target article outlines a teaching approach that illustrates and explains how radical constructivism can be used to teach architectural design principles to a large cohort of students. Herr’s approach consists of a hybrid set of instructional activities whose implementation was supported by her establishment of a social climate in the classroom that encouraged the contributions of individuals (...) in the learning process. The activities included the integration of lectures with other teaching formats, the use of open‑ended problem solving tasks, and the use of small‑group projects. I will discuss each of these activities and offer a recommendation for future research. (shrink)

Creativity is a relevant yet elusive concept, and consequently there is a large range of methods to assess creativity in many different contexts. Broadly speaking, we can differentiate between creativity measures on the level of the person (such as the Torrance tests), the level of the creative product (consensual assessment), and the level of the creative process. In the recent literature on children's creativity, 80% of the studies employed measures on either the person or the product level (Kupers et al., (...) submitted). However, for parents, teachers, and employers who wish to stimulate creativity, insight in the (often socially embedded) creative process is badly needed. This move from the inter-individual to the intra-individual level of assessment is furthermore in line with research in many other domains in psychology. Although there is some research focusing more on detailed descriptions of creative processes, the studies are usually purely qualitative and therefore highly context-specific, making generalization difficult. In this paper, we present a newly developed coding frame as a systematic, generic, micro-level measure of creativity. What is unique about this coding frame is that it can be applied to observations of creative processes in many different contexts, and for different kinds of creative tasks. The core of the instrument is that it allows us to assess the two core components of creativity - novelty and appropriateness on an ordinal 4-point scale, at each moment during the creative process. The coding frame can be applied in three steps. The first step is to determine the unit of analysis, that is, the level of detail in which the creative process is assessed. The second step and third steps are coding the units on two ordinal scales of novelty and appropriateness, respectively. In order to illustrate the versatility of our instrument, we apply it to two cases of very different creative processes: a musical composition task (open-ended) and a scientific reasoning task (closed- ended). Last, we demonstrate the possibilities for analyzing this type of dense intra-individual measurements of creativity (time series analysis and state space grids) and discuss the future research that is needed to fully validate the instrument. (shrink)

If politics is understood as a foundational and open-ended activity, a general problem that arises from such a framing concerns the question of how to sustain the possibility of continuous openings without converting action into permanence and closure. In this article, we approach this problematic by treating Hannah Arendt as an exemplary figure in the current of political thought that emphasizes the indeterminate nature of action. We focus more specifically on how Arendt addressed the question of sustaining action (...) by exploring the role of forgiveness, promises, divided power, and principles of action in her thought. While we show that the task of sustaining the indeterminacy of action partly remains an unresolvable paradox for Arendt, a general force underpinning the thought of Giorgio Agamben sheds new light on this paradox. Rather than affirming radical openness and pure _praxis_ as such, Agamben’s work helps accentuate the need of a certain contamination of _praxis_ by its own limit or apparent opposite. Importantly, this allows us to interpret Arendt and the paradoxical task of bestowing some degree of permanence to the open horizon of political action in a decidedly positive light: that _praxis_ implies a moment of impurity is the very force that sustains it without sacrificing its indeterminate nature. (shrink)

To investigate possible cognitive factors influencing the cross-cultural incidence of spirit possession concepts and to develop a more refined understanding of the precise contours of 'intuitive mind-body dualism', two studies were conducted that explored adults' intuitions about the relationship between minds and bodies. Specifically, the studies explored how participants reason about the effects of a hypothetical mind-migration across a range of behaviours. Both studies used hypothetical mind-transfer scenarios in which the mind of one person is transferred into the body of (...) another person. Participants were asked to reason about the new post-transfer person's behaviours and aptitudes. In Study 1, participants were provided with a scale on which they indicated their answers; in Study 2, participants responded to open-ended questions. In both studies, the majority of participants reasoned that while the post-transfer person's performance on physical tasks would be similar to the host performance on mental tasks would be similar to the person whose mind has been transferred. Further, participants tended to assume a complete displacement of minds, such that the post-transfer person's performance on mental task items was reasoned to be identical to incoming person's performance normally. The relevance of these findings for explaining the variable incidence and spread of different possession concepts is discussed. (shrink)

This essay is a kind of sequel to an earlier one entitled "Marx's Aufhebung of Philosophy and the Foundations of a Historical-Materialist Science." Departing from the point reached in that essay, I take a Whitmanesque journey through Marx's writings and the logic of a materialist conception of history. I begin with Walt Whitman's very materialist, very dialectical, and very decentered apostrophe in his Song of the Open Road: "You objects that call forth from diffusion my meanings / And give (...) them shape." Taking this apostrophe as my cue, I proceed to elaborate the complexity and the dimensions of dialectical thinking within a historical-materialist framework. The specific purpose of the essay is twofold: to portray the "decentered" dialectical methodology follows from Marx's historical-materialist redefinition of the subject-object relation; and to map the kinds of analytical tasks, the open-ended "itineraries," that a historical-materialist science of Wissenschaft must pursue. This "dialectical cartography" is developed through a critical and hopefully productive response to poststructuralist critiques of dialectics, particularly to those approaches that exaggerate Saussure's notion of the arbitrariness of signs. In this respect my intention is to indicate how the current confrontational relation between historical materialism and poststructuralism, especially over matters of the production of meaning and the analysis of culture, might be transformed intoone of complementarity. (shrink)

Identifying optimal ways of organizing exploration in particle physics mega-labs is a challenging task that requires a combination of case-based and formal epistemic approaches. Data-driven studies suggest that projects pursued by smaller master-teams are substantially more efficient than larger ones across sciences, including experimental particle physics. Smaller teams also seem to make better project choices than larger, centralized teams. Yet the epistemic requirement of small, decentralized, and diverse teams contradicts the often emphasized and allegedly inescapable logic of discovery that forces (...) physicists pursuing the fundamental levels of the physical world to perform centralized experiments in mega-labs at high energies. We explain, however, that this epistemic requirement could be met, since the nature of theoretical and physical constraints in high energy physics and the technological obstacles stemming from them turn out to be surprisingly open-ended. (shrink)

: The study of gratitude has become an increasingly important topic among psychologists to address the nature of human flourishing. Of more recent interest is how gratitude to God specifically functions within an account of human flourishing, with theologians seeking to provide a distinctively Christian account of the nature of gratitude. This article enters into the ongoing conversation by attending to Jonathan Edwards’s theological anthropology and development of natural and supernatural gratitude. In particular, Edwards’s anthropology includes within it an account (...) of how the self can, and should, enlarge to receive another in love. This “enlargement” is the creaturely mirror of God’s self-giving and is the supernatural response to the creature who has received God’s grace and been infused with divine love. As a supernatural response based on God’s action in the soul, this account of gratitude differs from its natural counterpart. On Edwards’s account, therefore, there is a need to develop studies that differentiate natural and supernatural gratitude. Furthermore, this article ends with a suggestion for a study that could pick up this task based on recent psychological studies that attend to how gratitude affects self-relation. On Edwards’s account of the enlargement of the self, as well as his notion of supernatural gratitude, there is meaningful research to be done on how these can help assess development in the formation of gratitude and human flourishing. (shrink)

Understanding how citizens create contexts for open-ended political conversation in everyday life is an important task for social research. The lack of theoretical attention to political conversation in the current renaissance of studies of "civil society" and "the public sphere "precludes a thoroughly social understanding of civic life. Participant-observation in U. S. recreational, volunteer, and activist groups shows how the very act of speaking itself comes to mean different things in different civic contexts. It shows dramatic contextual shifts-the (...) more public the context, the less public-spirited the discourse. Institutions encouraged groups to avoid public, political conversation. One group challenged the dominant etiquette for citizenship; the others considered talking politics "out of place " almost everywhere. The ways groups relate to public speech itself are themselves meaningful; the concept of "civic practices" highlights how groups develop not just the power to make a particular political program public, but the power to make the public itself. (shrink)

In this paper, the radical view that transparent equipment is the result of an ecological assembly between tool users and physical aspects of the world is critically assessed. According to this perspective, tool users are normally viewed as plastically organized hybrid agents. In this view, such agents are able to interact with tools (artefacts or technologies) in ways that are opportunistic and fully locked to the local task environment. This intimate and flexible interaction would provide grounds for the thesis that (...) cognitive agents and tools constitute literal extended cognitive systems. By contrast, a revised understanding of tool use transparency will be attempted. In this perspective, the interplay between on-line and off-line thinking is understood in terms of a socially reified cognitive delegation that subsumes the advantages normally associated to the so-called ‘open-ended ecological controllers.’ Thus, the notion of transparent technologies can be explored on the basis of a derived or mediated cognitive delegation. This view will be complemented by the notion of communities of practice (CoP). Special sorts of CoP will be proposed as suitable and flexible cognitive environments for the development of tool transparency. (shrink)

The art of acting, drama, or theatre has been largely excluded from the debate on the nature of consciousness in the scientific community. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether acting performance benefits from a divided or unified state of consciousness. Twenty-four acting students and professionals performed a monologue three times, twice with an interference task. Two different sets of instructions were provided for this task: one that asked participants to incorporate the interference into the world of their (...) monologue (unified consciousness), and another that asked them to dissociate it from their theatrical performance (divided consciousness). The variables studied included an evaluation of performance on primary and secondary tasks, as well as responses on a creativity and dissociative experiences questionnaire and to open-ended questions. Two acting professors provided monologue ratings. There was a significant difference in interference task performance scores for the divided and unified conscious conditions, as well as for the primary rater's monologue scores. Participants performed better on both tasks when they were asked to incorporate the interference into the imagined world of their monologue. These results show that a unified conscious approach results in better performance on certain tasks, implying that unified consciousness may be more adaptive for certain daily functions such as multitasking. (shrink)

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its (...) inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or “agency detector,” whose proper domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. (shrink)

Semantic noise, the effect ensuing from the denotative and thus functional variability exhibited by different terms in different contexts, is a common concern in natural language processing (NLP). While unarguably problematic in specific applications (e.g., certain translation tasks), the main argument of this paper is that failing to observe this linguistic matter of fact as a generative effect rather than as an obstacle, leads to actual obstacles in instances where language model outputs are presented as neutral. Given that a (...) common and long-standing challenge in NLP is the interpretation of ambiguous – i.e., semantically noisy – cases, this article focuses on an exemplar ambiguity-resolution task in NLP: the problem of anaphora in Winograd schemas. The main question considered is: to what extent is the standard approach to disambiguation in NLP subject to a stagnant “image of language”? And, can a transdisciplinary, dynamic approach combining linguistics and philosophy elucidate new perspectives on these possible conceptual shortcomings? In order to answer these questions we explore the term and concept of noise, particularly in its presentation as semantic noise. Owing to its definitional plurality, and sometimes even desirable unspecificity, the term noise is thus used as proof of concept for semantic generativity being an inherent characteristic in linguistic representation, and its concept is used to interrogate assumptions admitted in the resolution of Winograd schemas. The argument is speculative and theoretical in method, and the result is an analysis which provides an account of the fundamentally dialogical and necessarily open-ended effects of semantic noise in natural language. (shrink)

The current qualitative study investigated prevalence and types of academic integrity violations in psychology graduate students and solicited student recommendations for how academic institutions, professors, and peers may act to discourage or prevent its occurrence. Students were recruited through email lists and asked to participate in an online study with a series of open-ended questions assessing integrity violations and prevention recommendations. Results revealed academic integrity violations were relatively infrequent and most were of relatively low severity. Common antecedents to (...) integrity violations included inadequate preparation, task difficulty, and external stressors such as health ailments that interfered with preparation. Most violators reported engaging in a rational decision making process, weighing the pros and cons of cheating, and most did not reveal the violation to anyone. The majority of violations resulted in no negative consequences to the student and 44 % reported they would do it again. Students recommended better dissemination of integrity policies, greater oversight of graduate students, harsher punishments for violations, and consistent reporting of violations as prevention strategies. Results highlight how academic dishonesty in psychology graduate students may be a product of multiple time and resource demands, coupled with low self-efficacy to meet or negotiate these demands. Despite reports of external pressures being the top reason for academic integrity violations, few recommendations focused on decreasing external pressures as a mechanism to curb cheating. (shrink)

Background The principles of dynamic consent are based on the idea of safeguarding the autonomy of individuals by providing them with personalized options to choose from regarding the sharing and utilization of personal health data. To facilitate the widespread introduction of dynamic consent concepts in practice, individuals must perceive these procedures as useful and easy to use. This study examines the user experience of a dynamic consent-based application, in particular focusing on personalized options, and explores whether this approach may be (...) useful in terms of ensuring the autonomy of data subjects in personal health data usage. Methods This study investigated the user experience of MyHealthHub, a dynamic consent-based application, among adults aged 18 years or older living in South Korea. Eight tasks exploring the primary aspects of dynamic consent principles–including providing consent, monitoring consent history, and managing personalized options were provided to participants. Feedback on the experiences of testing MyHealthHub was gathered via multiple-choice and open-ended questionnaire items. Results A total of 30 participants provided dynamic consent through the MyHealthHub application. Most participants successfully completed all the provided tasks without assistance and regarded the personalized options favourably. Concerns about the security and reliability of the digital-based consent system were raised, in contrast to positive responses elicited in other aspects, such as perceived usefulness and ease of use. Conclusions Dynamic consent is an ethically advantageous approach for the sharing and utilization of personal health data. Personalized options have the potential to serve as pragmatic safeguards for the autonomy of individuals in the sharing and utilization of personal health data. Incorporating the principles of dynamic consent into real-world scenarios requires remaining issues, such as the need for powerful authentication mechanisms that bolster privacy and security, to be addressed. This would enhance the trustworthiness of dynamic consent-based applications while preserving their ethical advantages. (shrink)

BackgroundApproval of the research proposal by an ethical review committee from both sponsoring and host countries is a generally agreed requirement in externally sponsored research.However, capacity for ethics review is not universal. Aim of this study was to identify opinions and views of the members serving in ethical review and ethics committees in Sri Lanka on informed consent, essential components in the information leaflet and the consent form.MethodsWe obtained ethical approval from UK and Sri Lanka. A series of consensus generation (...) meetings on the protocol were conducted. A task oriented interview guide was developed. The interview was based on open-ended questionnaire. Then the participants were given a WHO checklist on informed consent and requested to rate the items on a three point scale ranging from extremely important to not important.ResultsTwenty-nine members from ethics committees participated. Majority of participants (23), believed a copy of the information leaflet and consent form, should accompany research proposal. Opinions about the items that should be included in the information leaflets varied. Participants identified 18 criteria as requirements in the information leaflet and 19 for the consent form.The majority, 20 (69%), believed that all research need ethical approval but identified limited human resource, time and inadequate capacity as constraints. Fifteen (52%) believed that written consent is not required for all research. Verbal consent emerged as an alternative to written consent. The majority of participants rated all components of the WHO checklist as important.ConclusionThe number of themes generated for the consent form (N = 18) is as many as for the information leaflet (N = 19) and had several overlaps. This suggests that the consent form should be itemized to reflect the contents covered in the information leaflet. The participants' opinion on components of the information leaflets and consent forms proved to be similar with WHO checklist on informed consent. (shrink)

Our main goal in this article is to discuss the structural and persistent problems experienced by women academics, especially with respect to the gendered divisions of academic tasks and unequal divisions of care obligations in the domestic sphere. The analysis is based on reflexive thematic analysis of the open-ended questions of an online questionnaire on the academic work environment, work satisfaction, stress, academic duties and allocation of tasks, and thoughts on gender equality. Academics from different countries (...) voice their lived experiences, frustrations as well as worries about their future. We aim to highlight how these issues are embedded in the structures of academic capitalism and argue against the tendency to individualise these issues in a bid to inspire an informed collective resistance. (shrink)

Background Nurses tasked with providing care which they perceive as increasing suffering often experience moral distress. Response to moral distress in nurse wellbeing has been widely studied. Less research exists that probes practicing nurses’ foundations of moral beliefs. Aims The purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain understanding of nurse meaning-making of morally distressing situations, with particular attention to ethical norms, moral agency and resiliency, and nurse religious/spiritual orientation. Design This exploratory study employed semi-structured interviews using open-ended (...) questions. Qualitative data analysis was assisted by MAXQDA software. Participants and research context Nine pulmonary care nurses during COVID-19 in a tertiary care teaching hospital in the northeastern United States. Ethical considerations The study was approved by the IRB. Participants were consented before the study and confidentiality was preserved. Findings/results The study revealed three main themes of meaning-making, rooted in the identity of the “good nurse”: Being true to one’s own values, pursuing ideal patient care (“doing good”), and conforming to/challenging values of the system and culture. Tensions were found between (a) nurse’s own values (b) duty to institutional norms and duty to nurse’s personal code of ethics, and (c) perceptions of institutional support in response to nurse moral distress. Religion was described as a remote source of nurse moral values, among other sources. Spiritual practices were not experienced as sufficient in coping with moral distress at the bedside. Conclusions The study suggests nurses need more opportunities to engage in reflection on their practice and values. The findings also indicate need for accessible institutional supports for nurses experiencing moral distress and strategic use of chaplains in helping with moral distress. Further research is needed on the interplay of nurse spirituality, moral agency, and reflective practice in the face of morally challenging situations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Written on the Body, Written by the SensesJennifer L. Hansen"Explore me," you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognize myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged (...) in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.1Ever since Plato wished to banish the poets from the republic (Republic 607b2),2 philosophy has stood in a vexed relationship to literature. There seem to be at least three reasons for philosophy's traditional contempt for literature as a reliable means to truth: (a) because literature engages the passions of a reader, it may cloud the reader's ability to deliberate calmly and rationally about any given account of how things really are; (b) literature most commonly deals with the particular and concrete and therefore cannot claim to a more general or universal truth, and; (c) literature is too open-ended and ambiguous in its meaning, which, again, obstructs the reader's view of how things really are. Though the writer is imitating the world, is holding up a mirror to it—a speculum mundi—literature's images are mere appearances.Philosophy, on the contrary, aims for a kind of "transcendental vision." Either philosophy looks beyond the particular appearances of things in the world to find the one structure which unites all instances of the thing, or philosophy claims that the structure of each object is supplied by consciousness, which then delimits and bounds each object, and places it in space and time so that the scientist can better dissect, measure, and catalogue it. That is, either philosophers, in the [End Page 365] tradition of Parmenides, aim to find the one in the many—as Socrates explains in the Republic "we are accustomed to assuming one Form in each case for the many particulars" (596a4–5)—or as in Kant's Copernican revolutionary thinking, consciousness renders the object of experience a knowable thing.While this transcendental vision proves quite useful for the scientist who deals with the empirical, it proves less useful where the task would be to conceptualize what is not a possible object of experience. While the scientist can indeed dissect and probe the body to understand how it functions, the scientist is less likely to discover what it means for a body to love, or to be free. In the "The Antinomy of Pure Reason" in the first Critique, Kant, in fact, left us with a choice about what philosophy's true object should be: either we restrict philosophy to the empirical world and its logic, or we pursue metaphysical questions about God or Freedom which cannot be grasped.3 On pain of contradiction, we cannot have both. In chapter three of the Transcendental Doctrine Judgment, "The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena," Kant uses a wonderful metaphor to illustrate the dangers of Pure Reason venturing into metaphysical questions, and thereby employing the categories beyond the empirical: "This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself with unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion" (CR, 257). If we allow ourselves to be allured by the deceptive appearance of farther shores, then we are not engaged in philosophy, but speculation or mysticism. We cannot provide an account for such knowledge in universal terms, in arguments, in logic. And yet, as Kant himself very well knew, these are questions that we are, as humans, compelled to raise. At the outset of the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant makes clear that reason will ineluctably be led... (shrink)

Transactive memory theory describes the processes by which benefits for memory can occur when remembering is shared in dyads or groups. In contrast, cognitive psychology experiments demonstrate that social influences on memory disrupt and inhibit individual recall. However, most research in cognitive psychology has focused on groups of strangers recalling relatively meaningless stimuli. In the current study, we examined social influences on memory in groups with a shared history, who were recalling a range of stimuli, from word lists to personal, (...) shared memories. We focused in detail on the products and processes of remembering during in-depth interviews with 12 older married couples. These interviews consisted of three recall tasks: (1) word list recall; (2) personal list recall, where stimuli were relevant to the couples’ shared past; and (3) an open-ended autobiographical interview. We conducted these tasks individually and then collaboratively two weeks later. Across each of the tasks, although some couples demonstrated collaborative inhibition, others demonstrated collaborative facilitation. We identified a number of factors that predicted collaborative success, in particular, group-level strategy use. Our results show that collaboration may help or hinder memory, and certain interactions are more likely to produce collaborative benefits. (shrink)

Pretend play and pretense develop in distinct phases of childhood as ontogenetically adaptive responses to pressures specific to those phases, and may have evolved in different periods of human ancestry. These are pressures to assimilate cultural artifacts, norms, roles, and behavioral scripts. The playful and creative elements in both forms of pretending are dictated by the variable, open-ended, and evolving nature and function of the cultural tasks they handle. The resulting creativity of the adult intellect is likely (...) to be a distant and indirect by-product of temporary and specific ontogenetic responses to temporary and specific ontogenetic challenges, particularly cultural ones. (shrink)

In higher education, students are faced with group tasks, such as project-based learning. However, research on self-regulated learning has paid little attention to the details of collective self-regulation. In this framework, the objective of this research was to determine the impact of the feeling of collective efficacy on the performance of groups of students involved in self-regulation processes in project-based learning. The quantitative approach was adopted. The type of descriptive research and field design. The 45 volunteer participants of an (...) education program at the National University of the Altiplano completed a questionnaire that explored different aspects of self-regulation: Use of human resources, setting objectives, collective efficacy, expression of disagreements, and quality of interactions. The questionnaire comprised 20 items rated on a Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree), and included two open-ended questions aimed at understanding strategies for managing doubts and maintaining interest int the project. The results show that the feeling of collective efficiency is a significant predictor of the final grade in the project and that the group’s ability to define the objectives precisely and prioritize them contributes significantly to the development of the feeling of collective efficacy. The conclusion exposes the pedagogical implications of these results, emphasizing the essential role of tutors in fostering an environment conducive to collective efficacy by guiding students in defining, prioritizing objectives, and managing doubts effectively. This guidance is crucial, especially in the early phases of project implementation, to establish a dynamic of collective efficacy and develop individual interest in the project. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action by Mercedes ValmisaMieke Matthyssen (bio)Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action. By Mercedes Valmisa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 220, Hardcover $97.00, isbn 978-0-19-757296-2.When Mercedes Valmisa's Adapting. A Chinese Philosophy of Action (hereafter Adapting) was released, I instantly recognized it as a theme I would have loved to delve into myself. But I never did, while Valmisa stepped up to this (...) challenging task with remarkable depth. By examining a variety of master texts from several schools within the Classical Chinese philosophical corpus--including the Zhuangzi 莊子, Huainanzi 淮南子, Guanzi 管子, Shenzi 慎子, Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋, Sunzi Bingfa 孫子兵法, and Mozi 墨子, to name just a few--Adapting digs into the complexities of what Valmisa describes as "a philosophy of action" as articulated by ancient Chinese thinkers. She provides a comprehensive textual and historical overview of the evolution of action theories in Chinese philosophy, highlighting adaptability or adaptive agency as a cornerstone of these theories.To set the stage for her nuanced exploration, Valmisa introduces the overarching concept of adapting as it is primarily expressed through the character yin 因. She then expands on how adapting is deeply intertwined with traditional Chinese ideas of relatedness and interdependence. Contrary to Western action models that emphasize autonomy and control, along with static, individualistic, and intention-driven approaches, Valmisa portrays the Chinese model of adaptivity as inherently relational and context-dependent. This model situates human agency within an extensive web of relationships that includes not only other individuals but also objects, the environment, and the broader cosmos-- essentially, all things under heaven.This relationality is foundational, suggesting that individuals are continually shaped by and shaping their interactions with the world. Valmisa focuses on how humans constantly adapt to their fluctuating material and immaterial environments, including the lashes of fate (ming 命) and various visible or invisible opportunities. Taking the Guanzi-Xinshu shang 心術上 ("The Art of the Heart" I) as a source, she characterizes adapting as "abandoning oneself and taking entities as standard" (p. 5), describing this as an "open-ended strategy of action" that aligns with the contingencies of a given situation (time, place, context). In essence, the situation itself sets the parameters for evaluating the appropriateness and efficacy of a course of action. [End Page 1]Chapter 1 elaborates extensively on the notion of adapting, demonstrating through a selection of texts that adaptive agency is a form of action responsive to the specific demands of the moment emphasizing flexibility and situational responsiveness. This distinctively Chinese approach to adapting to changing circumstances rather than adhering to fixed guidelines or imposing one's will, contrasts sharply with the more prescriptive, moral, and forceful models typical of Western thought. Throughout the book, Valmisa lucidly introduces and defines key terms such as "adaptive agency," "agent-situation fit," and "co-action paradigm," often beginning with anecdotal discussions between masters and disciples from various schools. Drawing on these diverse texts, she effectively argues that although the core practices and forms of adapting in the Chinese context are traceable across different texts, their objectives, and thus success, vary by philosophical school. In texts inspired by Confucian thought, the focus is on adapting to achieve social or societal harmony, while Daoist texts emphasize achieving cosmic harmony. Summarizing this, Valmisa, referring to a story in the Zhuangzi, states: "There is no standardized model to decide on the actions that will bring success to our endeavors. One must learn to live in the all-embracing uncertainty and openness represented by the dao" (p. 17). And this dao can be Confucian, Daoist, or of any other classical school.Valmisa also introduces a critical distinction between constitutive standards and structural goals. Constitutive standards are dependent on content that is considered conducive to a good life, whereas structural goals are content-neutral, achievable through various means. From the perspective of adaptive agency, constitutive standards dissolve within the situation as agents determine the most suitable course of action to achieve structural goals. This innovative approach to differentiating goals from standards is profoundly intriguing and has significant implications. The question remains how to educate and cultivate adaptability rooted in structural goals. In line with the above framework, Valmisa... (shrink)

In this deeply probing, intellectually challenging work, Dr. JaanValsiner lays the groundwork for a dynamic new cultural-historicalapproach to developmental psychology. He begins by deconstructingtraditional developmental theory, exposing the conceptual confusionand epistemological blind spots that he believes continue toundermine the scientific validity of its methodologies. Hedescribes the ways in which embedded cultural biases shapeinterventional goals and influence both the direction researchtakes and the ways in which research data are interpreted. And hesuggests ways in which researchers and clinicians can become moreaware of (...) and transcend those biases. Dr. Valsiner then develops a hierarchical, systemic model thatportrays development as an open-ended, dialectical process. Centralto Valsiner's approach is the premise that, since each child isunique--as are his or her life conditions--deviations in functionor the rate of development from a prescribed norm are just aslikely to be constructive adaptations to changing environmentalpressures as symptoms of psychological disorder. Drawing uponsources as varied as linguistic philosophy, structuralanthropology, thermodynamics, and systems theory, as well as thework of many of the leading figures in twentieth-centurydevelopmental theory, Valsiner argues convincingly for an approachto developmental psychology mature enough to recognize thedifference between healthy variability and dysfunction. In later chapters the focus shifts from development in the abstractto the everyday challenges encountered by the developing child.Case histories illustrate the subtle interplay of cultural,physiological, and psychological factors in shaping childhoodbehavior. Called an "intellectual tour de force" by the Bulletin of theMenninger Clinic, Culture and the Development of Children's Actionis important reading for developmental psychologists, childpsychologists, and all child clinicians. "Of course, no science progresses in a linear fashion. It movesinterdependently with the society in which it is embedded, makinguse of the narrative forms in describing itself to its insiders andoutsiders. The rhetoric of scientists about their science istherefore necessarily inconsistent. Sciences are both socialinstitutions within a society and social organizations that attemptto build universal knowledge. It is a complicated task forpsychology to be both knowledge-constructing and self-reflexive atthe same time. Nevertheless, it is the latter kind of reflexivitythat guides the actual construction of knowledge." -- JaanValsiner "[This book] is a fascinating and important work that challengesmuch of contemporary developmental psychology. The Second Editionhas changed in a number of respects, and much new material has beenadded, but at root, Valsiner grapples with the question 'how shallwe understand development?' He continues to struggle also with whathe describes rather vividly as the 'epistemological windmills ofpsychology.' His challenge is summed up succinctly in two linesfrom a poem by T. S. Eliot: * Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? * Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" -- -- fromthe Foreword by Kevin Connolly. (shrink)

In matters of rights, constitutions tend to avoid settling controversies. With few exceptions, rights are formulated in open-ended language, seeking consensus on an abstraction without purporting to resolve the many moral-political questions implicated by rights. The resulting view has been that rights extend everywhere but are everywhere infringed by legislation seeking to resolve the very moral-political questions the constitution seeks to avoid. The Negotiable Constitution challenges this view. Arguing that underspecified rights call for greater specification, Grégoire C. N. (...) Webber draws on limitation clauses common to most bills of rights to develop a new understanding of the relationship between rights and legislation. The legislature is situated as a key constitutional actor tasked with completing the specification of constitutional rights. In turn, because the constitutional project is incomplete with regards to rights, it is open to being re-negotiated by legislation struggling with the very moral-political questions left underdetermined at the constitutional level. (shrink)

Excessive alcohol consumption can have adverse effects on health, and patients who suffer from alcohol use disorders are subject to much stigmatization. Nurses are often the first point of contact when patients enter the acute medical unit, and it is pivotal that this contact establishes the basis for future collaboration. The aim of this study is to elucidate nurses’ lived experience of providing care to patients suffering from alcohol use disorders. This present study has a qualitative research design, anchored in (...) phenomenological and hermeneutical methodology as described in reflective lifeworld research. Ten in‐depth, open‐ended interviews with nurses working in an acute medical unit were conducted. The analysis showed that providing care to patients suffering from alcohol use disorders was a highly complex task to accomplish. This required the nurse to engage with the patient in a sensitive cooperation in order to be dealing with the intricacy of the patient's life situation and balancing care between standardized procedures and the complexity of the patients. Further, a two‐sided feeling of responsibility emerged: a professional responsibility and a personal responsibility causing the provision of care as being caught between feelings of despondency and resignation. Nurses lack opportunities for being creative in determining how to provide care; instead, patients' perspectives of well‐being should be taken into account and should guide the provision of a meaningful care. Nurses must call for opportunities to deviate from the firmly established procedures restraining the care of this population. (shrink)

Teacher's emotions have been shown to be highly important in the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning. There is a recognized need to examine the essential role of teacher's emotions in students' academic achievement. However, the influence of teacher's displays of emotions on students' outcomes in small-group interaction activities, especially in the online environment, has received little attention in prior research. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between teacher's different emotional displays and students' perceptions (...) of the teacher's competence, as well as students' collaborative feelings and productivity in online small-group discussions. Using a three-level between-subjects design, 74 participants were randomly divided into four-member groups comprising a teacher and three other participants. All the groups were asked to discuss an open-ended realistic problem using online software, during which the teacher's display of emotions varied. The participants' self-reported questionnaire data and productivity were measured to compare the participants who were exposed to different emotional displays. As expected, the results showed that the participants who received the teacher's positive emotional display reported that they experienced higher levels of pleasure during the task. However, in contrast to our expectations, those under the negative emotional display condition showed a significantly higher level of productivity in the group task. In addition, compared to emotional display, the participants' perceptions of the teacher's competence were rated significantly higher under the neutral condition, and they reported higher levels of collaborative satisfaction and greater willingness to continue collaborating with their group. The findings have the potential benefit of informing educational practice on whether teachers should display their emotions in a small-group discussion or how they should display emotions following adjustment for the relative aim of the teaching activities. (shrink)

Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to investigate patterns of facial mimicry in response to partial facial expressions in two contexts that differ in how naturalistic and socially significant the faces are. Experiment 1 presented participants with either the upper- or lower-half of facial expressions and used a forced-choice emotion categorisation task. This task emphasises cognition at the expense of ecological and social validity. Experiment 2 presented whole heads and expressions were occluded by clothing. Additionally, the emotion recognition task is more (...) open-ended. This context has greater social validity. We found mimicry in both experiments, however mimicry differed in terms of which emotions were mimicked and the extent to which the mimicry involved muscle sites that were not observed. In the more cognitive context, there was relatively more motor matching (i.e. mimicking only what was seen). In the more socially valid context, participants were less likely to mimic only what they saw – and instead mimicked what they knew. Additionally, participants mimicked anger in the cognitive context but not the social context. These findings suggest that mimicry involves multiple mechanisms and that the more social the context, the more likely it is to reflect a mechanism of social regulation. (shrink)

Feedback plays a crucial role in the writing processes. However, in the literature on foreign language writing, there is a dearth of studies that compare the effects of teacher feedback and automated feedback on both cognitive and psychological aspects of FL writing. To fill this gap, the current study compared the effects of teacher feedback and automated feedback on both revision quality and writing proficiency development, and perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the feedback in English writing among (...) English learners as an FL in China. It also investigated students’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the two types of feedback. The study adopted a mixed-methods design. The quantitative method collected the data through a pre-test and a post-test, which measured the participants’ English writing proficiency development; a writing task, which received either teacher feedback or automated feedback; and a close-ended questionnaire, which examined students’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the feedback. The qualitative method collected the data through an open-ended questionnaire, which examined the participants’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of teacher feedback or automated feedback depending on the type of feedback they received. Chinese university EFLs in two English classes taught by the same English teacher participated in the study: one class received teacher feedback while the other received automated feedback using Pigaiwang. While the students in the two classes did not differ significantly on the pre-test of students’ writing proficiency, students who received teacher feedback scored significantly higher on revision than those who received automated feedback. Students in the teacher feedback class also had significantly higher ratings on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the feedback than those in the automated feedback class. However, students in the automated feedback class obtained significantly higher scores on the post-test of the writing proficiency. The qualitative results identified three themes of strengths and two themes of weaknesses for the teacher feedback and the automated feedback, respectively. The results suggest that while teacher feedback has a more positive effect on the psychological aspect of FL writing, automated feedback may be more effective in developing FL writing proficiency in the long run. (shrink)

This article explores the possibility that John Dewey’s silence on the matter of which democratic means are needed to achieve democratic ends, while confusing, makes greater sense if we appreciate the notion of political technology from an anthropological perspective. Michael Eldridge relates the exchange between John Herman Randall, Jr., and Dewey in which Dewey concedes “that I have done little or nothing in this direction [of outlining what constitutes adequate political technology, but that] does not detract from my recognition that (...) in the concrete the invention of such a technology is the heart of the problem of intelligent action in political matters.” Dewey’s concession could be interpreted as an admission that he was unqualified to identify political machinery or institutions suitable for realizing his vision of democracy as a way of life. Not being able to specify adequate means to achieve lofty democratic ends is not problematic, though, if we appreciate the roots of Dewey’s work (especially Human Nature and Conduct) in the anthropological writings of Immanuel Kant and Franz Boas. For then experience reflects a myriad of social and cultural conditions such that specifying explicit means to structure that experience risks stymieing the organic development of political practice. When pressured to operationalize political technology, he chose the appropriately open-ended and, at times, frustratingly vague means of education and growth. In short, Dewey did not want his ambitious democratic vision to outstrip the possibilities of practice, so he left the task of specifying exact political technology (or which democratic means are best suited to achieve democratic ends) unfinished. (shrink)