Previous research has shown that emotionally-valenced words are given higher judgements of learning (JOLs) than are neutral words. The current study examined potential explanations for this emotional salience effect on JOLs. Experiment 1 replicated the basic emotionality/JOL effect. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we used pre-study JOLs and assessed memory beliefs qualitatively, finding that, on average, participants believed that positive and negative words were more memorable than neutral words. Experiment 3 utilised a lexical decision task, resulting in lower (...) reaction times (RTs) for positive words than for neutral words, but equivalent RTs for negative and neutral words, suggesting that processing fluency may partially account for higher JOLs for positive words, but not for negative words. Finally, we conducted a series of moderation analyses in Experiment 4 which assessed the relative contributions of fluency and beliefs to JOLs by measuring both factors in the same participants, showing that RTs made no significant contribution to JOLs for either positive or negative words. Our findings suggest that although positive words may be more fluently processed than neutral words, memory beliefs are the primary factor underlying higher JOLs for both positive and negative words. (shrink)

The article explores ethical conceptualisations of time that take the existence of the embodied Other in education into consideration. Kristeva’s time/memory paradox is discussed with regard to teachers’ everyday judgements in relation to student learning. In conclusion, learning as an unruptured endeavour is impossible when the time of the embodied Other is taken into account. In this sense, teachers need to be aware of: 1) the time gap between people, 2) the time gap between the conscious and (...) subconscious, 3) the fact that teachers’ and students’ meaning-making is always tainted by past memory, 4) the ways in which the timelessness of the subconscious crashes into conscious meaning-making in the present and creates ruptures that affect the content of learning and the life conditions of Others, 5) how frozen time can be used as a way of learning from ruptures, and 6) that processing time is just as important as ‘progressing in it’. (shrink)

Through a collection of contributions from an international team of empirical researchers and philosophers, _New Philosophies of Learning_ signals the need for a sharper critical awareness of the possibilities and problems that the recent spate of innovative learning techniques presents. Explores some of the many contemporary innovations in approaches to learning, including neuroscience and the focus on learners’ well-being and happiness Debates the controversial approaches to categorising learners such as dyslexia Raises doubts about the preoccupation with quasi-mathematical scrutiny (...) and the neglect of ethical reflection about education Discusses the possible grounds for concern, without exaggerating their similarities or offering sweeping judgements Includes contributions from empirical researchers and philosophers, including Usha Goswami, Howard Gardner, Julian Elliott, David Bakhurst, John White and Christopher Winch. (shrink)

There is an influential story about learning that retains a grip on the public mind. Main elements of this story include: the best learning resides in individual minds not bodies; it centres on propositions (true, false; more certain, less certain); such learning is transparent to the mind that has acquired it; so the acquisition of the best learning alters minds not bodies. Implications of these basic ideas include: the best learning can be expressed verbally and (...) written down in books, etc.; the process and product of learning can be sharply distinguished; and, though residing in minds and books, the best learning can be applied, via bodies, to alter the external world. The pervasive influence of this story is apparent in many writings about learning, including philosophical writings. A number of basic assumptions about learning underpin this story. The central purpose of this paper is to further delineate and then challenge each of these basic assumptions. The main implication of challenging these basic assumptions is that a somewhat different philosophical understanding of learning emerges. This different understanding of learning may offer fresh insights on current educational issues. (shrink)

ABSTRACT By integrating theories of social learning and moral judgment, we developed a theoretical model on whether and when peers imitate employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior in the workplace. The study, which involved 256 employees in a large manufacturing company in China, revealed that employees’ UPB positively predicted peers’ vicarious learning of UPB, with the effect strengthened by employees’ organizational tenure but weakened by peers’ deontic injustice. Moreover, the positive effect of employees’ UPB on their peers’ vicarious learning (...) was mitigated, and even turned negative when employees’ organizational tenure was low, but peers’ deontic injustice was high. (shrink)

There is an influential story about learning that retains a grip on the public mind. Main elements of this story include: the best learning resides in individual minds not bodies; it centres on propositions ; such learning is transparent to the mind that has acquired it; so the acquisition of the best learning alters minds not bodies. Implications of these basic ideas include: the best learning can be expressed verbally and written down in books, etc.; (...) the process and product of learning can be sharply distinguished; and, though residing in minds and books, the best learning can be applied, via bodies, to alter the external world. The pervasive influence of this story is apparent in many writings about learning, including philosophical writings. A number of basic assumptions about learning underpin this story. The central purpose of this paper is to further delineate and then challenge each of these basic assumptions. The main implication of challenging these basic assumptions is that a somewhat different philosophical understanding of learning emerges. This different understanding of learning may offer fresh insights on current educational issues. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated whether a motor-linked measure (string typing speed) and an judgment-linked measure (grammatical judgment of strings) accessed the same implicit learning mechanisms in the artificial grammar learning task. Participants first studied grammatical strings through observation or through responding to each letter by typing it and then performed typing and grammatical judgment tests. Grammatical judgment test performance was better after observation than after respond learning, whereas typing test performance on higher order relations was worse after observation (...) than after respond learning (Experiment 1). Participants transferred grammatical knowledge across letter sets on the grammatical judgment test, but not on the typing test (Experiment 2). Typing speed did not differ for hits (grammatical strings classified by participants as grammatical) and misses (grammatical strings classified as nongrammatical, Experiment 3). These results are consistent with typing and grammatical judgment tests tapping independent mechanisms and indicate that implicit learning may consist of many different forms of learning rather than being a unitary learning mechanism. (shrink)

Teachers in vocational education face two problems. (1) Learning involves the ability to transcend and modify learned knowledge to new circumstances. How should vocational education prepare students for future, unknown tasks? (2) Students should strive to produce work of good quality. How does vocational education help them develop their faculty of judgment to differentiate between better and worse quality? These two ques- tions are tightly interwoven. The paper compares the didactics of philosophy and sloyd. Both developed independently, but their (...) solutions to how one advances the capacity for reflective judgment are similar. Central to this capacity is not merely devising efficient means to work towards pre-existing aims, but to reflect in practice on what one’s aim are and should be. This implies reflection on what future problems, as well as solutions to them, demand of us cognitively, socially and morally. (shrink)

This paper uses an improved deep learning algorithm to judge the rationality of the design of landscape image feature recognition. The preprocessing of the image is proposed to enhance the data. The deficiencies in landscape feature extraction are further addressed based on the new model. Then, the two-stage training method of the model is used to solve the problems of long training time and convergence difficulties in deep learning. Innovative methods for zoning and segmentation training of landscape pattern (...) features are proposed, which makes model training faster and generates more creative landscape patterns. Because of the impact of too many types of landscape elements in landscape images, traditional convolutional neural networks can no longer effectively solve this problem. On this basis, a fully convolutional neural network model is designed to perform semantic segmentation of landscape elements in landscape images. Through the method of deconvolution, the pixel-level semantic segmentation is realized. Compared with the 65% accuracy rate of the convolutional neural network, the fully convolutional neural network has an accuracy rate of 90.3% for the recognition of landscape elements. The method is effective, accurate, and intelligent for the classification of landscape element design, which better improves the accuracy of classification, greatly reduces the cost of landscape element design classification, and ensures that the technical method is feasible. This paper classifies landscape behavior based on this model for full convolutional neural network landscape images and demonstrates the effectiveness of using the model. In terms of landscape image processing, the image evaluation provides a certain basis. (shrink)

There is a globalization trend in teacher education, emphasizing the role of teachers to make judgments based on human rights in their teaching profession. Rather than emphasizing the epistemological dimension of acquiring knowledge about human rights through teacher education, an ontological dimension is emphasized in this paper of what it means to become a professional teacher. An ontological dimension of ‘learning to become’ can be captured in critical examination of a cosmopolitan awareness of teachers in relation to judgment and (...) justice. I read the critique through studies on human rights in teacher education, which transforms notions of openness and respect in relations marked by difference. (shrink)

In Japan during the 1980s, there was an interesting debate about how to teach the area of a parallelogram effectively to primary school children. Yutaka Saeki criticized the standard method, which relies on a cut-and-paste procedure. He argued that the standard method inevitably failed to convince children because it does not provide any cogent reason for them to accept that the formula ‘base x height’ is indeed true. Saeki proposed his own method using a bundle of paper. This method, however (...) convincing at first glance, was totally dismissed by Akira Nakagaki based on his orthodox scientific methodology. There emerged a lively debate between the two. By means of a reconstruction of this debate, this paper will show how the materiality of a thing can scaffold the process of gaining understanding of the concept of geometrical space. Although Saeki and Nakagaki were both unaware of the fact, the debate between them shows clearly that the convincing points of Saeki’s method rely on its material basis. The materiality of a thing can serve as a common basis, in which acquaintance in the context of everyday life is transgressed to the mathematical context. With this transgressive structure entailed in the materiality of a thing, children can be led to understand the spatial logic of the parallelogram, while they themselves make their own reasoning and judgement based on the context of their everyday lives. (shrink)

Easy of learning judgments occur before active learning begins, and it is a prediction of how difficult it will be to learn new material in future learning. This study compared the amplitude of event-related potential components and brain activation regions between high and low EOL judgments by adopting ERPs with a classical EOL judgment paradigm, aiming to confirm the ease-of-processing hypothesis. The results showed that the magnitudes of EOL judgments are affected by encoding fluency cues, and the (...) judgment magnitude increases with encoding fluency; low EOL judgments are associated with higher N400 amplitude at the left superior frontal gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus. High EOL judgments showed enlarged slow-wave potentials than low EOL judgments at the left medial temporal lobe, right ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Our results support the ease-of-processing hypothesis, particularly, by affirming that EOL judgments are affected by encoding fluency in two processing stages. N400 reflects the process of acquiring encoding fluency cues, while slow-wave indicates that individuals use encoding fluency cues for metacognitive monitoring. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authority, Reading, Reflexivity: Pierre Bourdieu and the Aesthetic Judgment of KantKoenraad Geldof (bio)Translated by Alex Martin (bio)1. AuthorityFor some time now, Pierre Bourdieu has been a true author 1 —a producer, in other words, of an impressive number of theoretical and analytical discourses in a wide variety of research fields. 2 Whether in anthropology or ethnology, in the sociology of institutions or of the structure and workings of the (...) market of symbolic goods, or in the sociology of literature, the name Bourdieu imposes itself: it establishes authority. Contributing to this is another particularity quite typical of authority: it gets itself talked about; it generates, at accelerated speed, discourses that in one way or another (re-)produce and thus reinforce the authority of the author who was their point of departure and origin. The international proliferation of articles dealing with one aspect or another of Bourdieu’s thought, 3 essay collections, 4 and introductions to Bourdieu’s work 5 testifies to this. The intensity of metadiscursive production not only gives material form to the intrinsic analytic pertinence and richness of the discourse on which it comments—these are evident—but also shows, independent of the pieces’ intentions, that the proliferation is situated in a process of (re-)production of authority, that it is an integral part of a canonizing effort. The articles and introductions problematize, implicitly or explicitly, the direct accessibility of Bourdieu’s discourse. They make the oeuvre into a complex totality, difficult and diversified to the extreme, whose coherence can be revealed only with the help of a gradual, exegetic, and essentially submissive reading practice.To put it another way, and to examine the question more closely, the metadiscursive (re-)production of the authority of the author we call Pierre Bourdieu reveals itself to be [End Page 20] ambivalent: it is at once innovative—it invites the uninitiated to get to know a fascinating new universe of thought—and authoritarian, indeed even conservative. An introduction is never a simple mediation of discourse between an author and his or her potential readers: it provides a sort of user’s guide, it (re-)produces a reading habitus, an ideology of the correct interpretation the reader must learn and interiorize to be able to distinguish orthodox from false, heterodox, readings. Between the metadiscourse/commentary and the authority it discusses, a relationship of tautological circularity is established that surreptitiously transforms the discourse read into a legend (into what must be read): the possibility of an autonomous reading practice is erased by a pedagogy of legendary decoding. 6The authority of an author, that of Bourdieu for example, is consequently implicated in a dynamic of opening (the proliferation of metadiscourses) and closing (the tendency to discipline reading, to make it obey certain norms of legibility). It would be erroneous, however, to attribute the paradoxical aspect of authority simply to the ambivalent effect of metadiscourses/commentaries. This is because authors who establish authority can only rarely escape the canonizing efforts of which they are the object: in many cases, authors themselves participate in the production and reproduction of a mode of reading and interpretation judged to be legitimate. The fact that no authority can completely and exhaustively control its discursive and institutional space does not in any way contradict, therefore, that other distinctive and essential feature of authority: its intrinsic animation by a desire to control, by the desire to see itself respected. Authority wants to become Law and be recognized as such. Thus the tendency of certain authors to become actively involved in the modes of appropriation of their name and their discourses, to endeavor to make the reading of the author’s work not simply an act of connaissance but also a proof of reconnaissance. Authority detests being insufficiently or poorly known. Let us take the case of Bourdieu. As an author, he is first and foremost the one to whom we owe Raisons pratiques, La distinction, Homo academicus and Les règles de l’art, the producer, in other words, of a series of momentous works that, upon publication, established authority. Furthermore, Bourdieu is also the author of a considerable number of accompanying discourses, dominated by the... (shrink)

Here is a distinction that appears very simple, looks compelling and seems to be deeply rooted in our reflections on learning. 1 The distinction is between activities of learning that involve training and those that involve reasoning. In the former, the pupil is a passive recipient of habits of mind and action. The mechanism by which they acquire these habits is mimesis, not reasoning. In contrast, learning by reasoning involves considerable mental activity by the pupil who has (...) to work out what to think and do. The very mechanism by which the pupil learns is her own capacity to reason, to things work out for herself. In this paper I argue that there is no basis for this distinction. I argue that, contrary to the dominant empiricist thinking about such things, learning by reasoning is the only credible form of learning. I start with a brief characterisation of the distinction and an account of why it seems so compelling. In §2 I review the empirical evidence from developmental psychology for a rationalist account of language learning as learning by reasoning. In §§3 and 4 I provide a philosophical argument against the place of training and in favour of a rationalist model of learning by reasoning. (shrink)

In two independent yet complementary studies, the current research explored the developmental changes of young children’s conceptualization of learning, focusing the role of knowledge change and learning intention, and its association with their developing theory of mind ability. In study 1, 75 children between 48 and 86 months of age judged whether a character with or without a genuine knowledge change had learned. The results showed that younger children randomly attributed learning between genuine knowledge change and accidental (...) coincidence that did not involve knowledge change. Children’s learning judgments in familiar contexts improved with age and correlated with their ToM understanding. However, the correlation was no longer significant once age was held constant. Another sample of 72 children aged between 40 and 90 months participated in study 2, where children were asked to judge whether the story protagonists intended to learn and whether they eventually learned. The results suggested that children over-attributed learning intention to discovery and implicit learning. Stories with conflict between the learning intention and outcome appeared to be most challenging for children. Children’s intention judgment was correlated with their ToM understanding, and ToM marginally predicted intention judgment when the effect of age was accounted for. The implication of the findings for school readiness was discussed. Training studies and longitudinal designs in the future are warranted to better understand the relation between ToM development and children’s learning understanding. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1. 2. 3. 4. Notes References.

Philosophical analyses of scientific methodology have long understood intuition to be incompatible with a rule based reasoning that is often considered necessary for a rational scientific method. This paper seeks to challenge this contention by highlighting the indispensable role that intuition plays in the application of methodologies for scientific discovery. In particular, it seeks to outline a positive role for intuition and personal judgment in scientific discovery by exploring a comparison between the use of heuristic reasoning in scientific practice and (...) engineering design. While these discussions share many features, it will also be shown that the successful use of heuristics in engineering design is often considered to depend on a crucial factor that is markedly absent from accounts of the use of heuristics in scientific discovery; experienced judgment. In the final sections of this paper, I will compare attitudes to the role of computer analysis in scientific and engineering practices, with the aim of showing how the limitations of scientific discovery machines reveal the need for including intuition in philosophical accounts of heuristic reasoning in scientific discovery. (shrink)

Norman's identification of a ventral system embodying a constructivist theory of perception is rejected in favor of an ecological theory of perception and perceptual learning. We summarize research showing that a key motivation for the ventral-constructivist connection, percept-percept coupling, confuses perceptual and post-perceptual processes.

Here is a distinction that appears very simple, looks compelling and seems to be deeply rooted in our reflections on learning. The distinction is between activities of learning that involve training and those that involve reasoning. In the former, the pupil is a passive recipient of habits of mind and action. The mechanism by which they acquire these habits is mimesis, not reasoning. In contrast, learning by reasoning involves considerable mental activity by the pupil who has to (...) work out what to think and do. The very mechanism by which the pupil learns is her own capacity to reason, to things work out for herself. In this paper I argue that there is no basis for this distinction. I argue that, contrary to the dominant empiricist thinking about such things, learning by reasoning is the only credible form of learning. I start with a brief characterisation of the distinction and an account of why it seems so compelling. In §2 I review the empirical evidence from developmental psychology for a rationalist account of language learning as learning by reasoning. In §§3 and 4 I provide a philosophical argument against the place of training and in favour of a rationalist model of learning by reasoning. (shrink)

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has (...) been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense. (shrink)

This article begins by acknowledging the general worry that scholarship in the humanities lacks the rigor and objectivity of other scholarly fields. In considering the validity of that criticism, I distinguish two models of learning: the covering law model exemplified by the natural sciences, and the model of rooted particularity that characterizes the humanities. With those two models set forth, I defend the humanities against the general challenge of lack of rigor by showing how objective standards of evaluation are (...) to be understood within the particularity model. I then discuss the distinct benefits offered by that model of learning and conclude by showing how the skills and temperament associated with that model can be usefully deployed to illuminate Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse the conditions for attributing to AI autonomous systems the ontological status of “artificial moral agents”, in the context of the “distributed responsibility” between humans and machines in Machine Ethics (ME). In order to address the fundamental issue in ME of the unavoidable “opacity” of their decisions with ethical/legal relevance, we start from the neuroethical evidence in cognitive science. In humans, the “transparency” and then the “ethical accountability” of their actions as responsible moral agents is not (...) in contradiction with the unavoidable “opacity” (unawareness) of the brain process by which they perform their moral judgements on the right action to execute. In fact, the moral accountability of our actions depends on what is immediately before and after our “moral judgements” on the right action to execute (formally, deontic first order logic (FOL) decisions). I.e., our moral accountability depends on the “ethical constraints” we imposed to our judgement before performing it in an opaque way. Anyway, our moral accountability depends overall on the “ethical assessment” or explicit “moral reasoning” after and over the moral judgement before executing our actions (deontic higher order logic (HOL) assessment). In this way, in the light of the AI “imitation game”, the consistent attribution of the status of ethically accountable artificial moral agents to autonomous AI systems depends on two similar conditions. Firstly, it depends on the presence of “ethical constraints” to be satisfied in their Machine Learning (ML) supervised optimization algorithm during its training phase, to give the system ethical skills (“competences”) in its decisions. Secondly – and definitely—, it depends on the presence in an AI autonomous system of a deontic HOL “ethical reasoner” to perform an automatic, and fully transparent assessment (metalogical deontic valuation) about the decisions taken by the ethically skilled ML algorithm about the right action to execute, before executing it. Finally, we show that the proper deontic FOL and HOL for this class of artificial moral agents is Kripke’s modal relational logic, in its algebraic topological formalization. This is naturally implemented in the dissipative QFT unsupervised deep learning of our brains, based on the “doubling of the degrees of freedom” (DDF), and then in the so-called “deep-belief” artificial neural networks for the statistical data pre-processing. This unsupervised learning procedure is also compliant with the usage of the “maximin fairness principle”, used as a balancing aggregation principle of the statistical variables in Sen’s formal theory of fairness. (shrink)

Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In _Narrating Evil_, María Pía Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping (...) societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a crime can act as a filter, helping us to draw conclusions about what constitutes a moral wrong, and public debates over these narratives allow us to construct a more accurate picture of historical truth, leading to a better understanding of why such actions are possible. In building her argument, Lara considers Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's depictions of evil, Joseph Conrad's literary metaphors, and movies that portray human cruelty. Turning to such philosophers and writers as Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariel Dorfman, Lara defines a reflexive relationship between an event, the narrative of the event, and the public reception of the narrative, and she proves that the stories of perpetrators and sufferers are always intertwined. The process of disclosure, debate, and the public fashioning of collective judgment are vital methods through which we make sense not only of new forms of cruelty but of past crimes as well. _Narrating Evil_ describes the steps of this process and why they are a crucial part of our attempt to build a different, more just world. (shrink)

Musical knowledge is largely implicit. It is acquired without awareness of its complex rules, through interaction with a large number of samples during musical enculturation. Whereas several studies explored implicit learning of mostly abstract and less ecologically valid features of Western music, very little work has been done with respect to ecologically valid stimuli as well as non-Western music. The present study investigated implicit learning of modal melodic features in North Indian classical music in a realistic and ecologically (...) valid way. It employed a cross-grammar design, using melodic materials from two modes that use the same scale. Findings indicated that Western participants unfamiliar with Indian music incidentally learned to identify distinctive features of each mode. Confidence ratings suggest that participants' performance was consistently correlated with confidence, indicating that they became aware of whether they were right in their responses; that is, they possessed explicit judgment knowledge. Altogether our findings show incidental learning in a realistic ecologically valid context during only a very short exposure, they provide evidence that incidental learning constitutes a powerful mechanism that plays a fundamental role in musical acquisition. (shrink)

Legal judgments are complex in nature and hence a brief summary of the judgment, known as a headnote , is generated by experts to enable quick perusal. Headnote generation is a time consuming process and there have been attempts made at automating the process. The difficulty in interpreting such automatically generated summaries is that they are not coherent and do not convey the relative relevance of the various components of the judgment. A legal judgment can be segmented into coherent chunks (...) based on the rhetorical roles played by the sentences. In this paper, a comprehensive system is proposed for labeling sentences with their rhetorical roles and extracting structured head notes automatically from legal judgments. An annotated data set was created with the help of legal experts and used as training data. A machine learning technique, Conditional Random Field, is applied to perform document segmentation by identifying the rhetorical roles. The present work also describes the application of probabilistic models for the extraction of key sentences and composing the relevant chunks in the form of a headnote. The understanding of basic structures and distinct segments is shown to improve the final presentation of the summary. Moreover, by adding simple additional features the system can be extended to other legal sub-domains. The proposed system has been empirically evaluated and found to be highly effective on both the segmentation and summarization tasks. The final summary generated with underlying rhetorical roles improves the readability and efficiency of the system. (shrink)

The task of rhetorical role labeling is to assign labels (such as Fact, Argument, Final Judgement, etc.) to sentences of a court case document. Rhetorical role labeling is an important problem in the field of Legal Analytics, since it can aid in various downstream tasks as well as enhances the readability of lengthy case documents. The task is challenging as case documents are highly various in structure and the rhetorical labels are often subjective. Previous works for automatic rhetorical role identification (...) (i) mainly used Conditional Random Fields over manually handcrafted features, and (ii) focused on certain law domains only (e.g., Immigration cases, Rent law), and a particular jurisdiction/country (e.g., US, Canada, India). In this work, we improve upon the prior works on rhetorical role identification by proposing novel Deep Learning models for automatically identifying rhetorical roles, which substantially outperform the prior methods. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed models over documents from five different law domains, and from two different jurisdictions—the Supreme Court of India and the Supreme Court of the UK. Through extensive experiments over different variations of the Deep Learning models, including Transformer models based on BERT and LegalBERT, we show the robustness of the methods for the task. We also perform an extensive inter-annotator study and analyse the agreement of the predictions of the proposed model with the annotations by domain experts. We find that some rhetorical labels are inherently hard/subjective and both law experts and neural models frequently get confused in predicting them correctly. (shrink)

Three studies using the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition were conducted over a period of 21 years. Nurses with a range of experience and reported skill-fulness were interviewed. Each study used nurses’ narrative accounts of actual clinical situations. A subsample of participants were observed and interviewed at work. These studies extend the understanding of the Dreyfus model to complex, underdetermined, and fast-paced practices. The skill of involvement and the development of moral agency are linked with the development of expertise, and (...) change as the practitioner becomes more skillful. Nurses who had some difficulty with understanding the ends of practice and difficulty with their skills of interpersonal and problem engagement did not progress to the level of expertise. Taken together, these studies demonstrate the usefulness of the Dreyfus model for understanding the learning needs and styles of learning at different levels of skill acquisition. (shrink)

We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding of the neurobiology (...) of moral judgment in adulthood and to some extent in childhood and adolescence. Combined with rigorous evidence from psychology and careful philosophical analysis, neuroscientific evidence can even help shed light on the extent of moral knowledge and on ways to promote healthy moral development. (shrink)

Social Judgement Theory (SJT) evolved from Egon Brunswik's Probabilistic Functionalist psychology coupled with multiple correlation and regression-based statistical analysis. Through its representational device, the Lens Model, SJT has become a widely used, systems-oriented perspective for analysing human judgement in specific ecological circumstances. Judgements are assumed to result from the integration of different cues or sources of perceptual information from the environment. Special advantages accrue to the SJT approach when criterion values (or correct values) for judgement are also available, as (...) this permits the comparison of judgement processes to environmental processes and leads naturally to the generation of cognitive feedback as an aid to facilitate learning. In contrast to more prescriptive approaches to decision analysis, the SJT approach analyses judgements by decomposing the judgement process after judgements have been rendered. This a posteriori decomposition is accomplished by first using multiple regression analysis to recover prediction equations for both the judgement and ecological systems and then using the Lens Model Equation to compare those systems. SJT methods maintain close contact with ecological circumstances by employing the principle of representative design (which focuses on how the researcher obtains the stimuli for judgement) and avoiding unwarranted over-generalisations from nomothetic aggregation (e.g. averaging across judges) through the use of idiographic statistical analysis. SJT methods have proven valuable in the analysis of individual judgements as well as groupbased judgements where conflict becomes likely. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the application questions of a case study method known as casuistry. In its long tradition, it focuses on an influential variant of the early modern period and reconstructs its functionality. In the course of reading recent receptions, it is noted that some studies speak of a “casuistic revival” in moral case deliberation in health care. As a result of this revival, casuistry has been modified in such a way that it guides case discussions in practice (...) with the help of a tripartite methodology. However, as it turns out, casuistry, a case comparison method of ethical judgement based on reasoning logic, is less suitable for moral case deliberations in direct patient care. This stems from the fact that casuistry is a detailed procedure of ethical learning beneficial to institutionalized ethics committees or similar forms of ethics consultation in health care. (shrink)

Just as humans can draw conclusions responsibly or irresponsibly, so too can computers. Machine learning systems that have been trained on data sets that include irresponsible judgments are likely to yield irresponsible predictions as outputs. In this paper I focus on a particular kind of inference a computer system might make: identification of the intentions with which a person acted on the basis of photographic evidence. Such inferences are liable to be morally objectionable, because of a way in which (...) they are presumptuous. After elaborating this moral concern, I explore the possibility that carefully procuring the training data for image recognition systems could ensure that the systems avoid the problem. The lesson of this paper extends beyond just the particular case of image recognition systems and the challenge of responsibly identifying a person’s intentions. Reflection on this particular case demonstrates the importance (as well as the difficulty) of evaluating machine learning systems and their training data from the standpoint of moral considerations that are not encompassed by ordinary assessments of predictive accuracy. (shrink)

The key concept in Kant’s aesthetics is “aesthetic reflective judgment,” a critique of which is found in Part 1 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). It is a critique inasmuch as Kant unravels previous assumptions regarding aesthetic perception. For Kant, the comparative edge of a “judgment” implicates communicability, which in turn gives it a public face; yet “reflection” points to autonomy, and the “aesthetic” shifts the emphasis away from objective properties to the subjective response evoked by the (...) object. Contrary to the view he had inherited, Kant did not treat aesthetic judgments as confused perceptions or inferior cognitions, but rather put them in a category of their own. For Kant, aesthetic reflective judgments implicated not only the processes involved in understanding the empirical world but also the processes involved in ascribing ideas or meaning to experience (which go beyond what is given in perception/cognition). This “going beyond cognition” may have been referred to by Kant as non-cognitive, but it is conditioned on a way of cognizing the object. Kant describes the features of such judgments in the Analytic of the Beautiful before addressing their possibility in subtle ways throughout the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments. Kant’s critique gives rise to three apparent dichotomies: immediate intuition and prior learning; autonomy and communicability; and non-cognitive response and aesthetic ideas. An interpretation of Kant’s theory can be deemed correct to the degree that it succeeds in showing that the contradictions are only apparent. I will argue that the resulting positive account of Kant’s aesthetic theory offers an understanding of aesthetic reflective judgment that is quite different from the standard formalism that the critics of formalism usually target and by which they misrepresent Kant’s aesthetic theory. When I refer to Kant’s formalism, then, I mean something quite different by this than what is meant by “standard formalism.” The latter is the representation given Kant’s formalism by its contemporary critics and is the typical account of formalism found in the art theory and philosophy of art literature, as will be demonstrated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theory of the Apophantic Judgment According to René GirardDesiderio Parrilla Martínez (bio)introduction: criticism of judgment in rené girardIn his essay "Belief (Cultural Memory in the Present)" ("Credere di credere") Gianni Vattimo stated the conditions of possibility of a "weak and post-metaphysical Christianity" founded in René Girard´s victimary hypothesis.1 According to Vattimo, mimetic theory allows abandoning traditional metaphysics and the classical theory of truth, based on the judgment. In later (...) works, Vattimo insisted on the epistemological virtues of mimetic theory to reform the classical theory of adequacy2 and the theological implications of this reform.3 Mimetic theory definitely unmasks the violence of the "strong metaphysic," to enable the advent of a weak metaphysics and a kenotic theology based on love: "According to him, it is the survival of the victim-based mechanism, albeit in attenuated form, that explains the recurrence of violence in the history of Christianity. To complete Girard's argument, we learn from Heidegger that what Girard calls the victim-based mechanism is metaphysical objectivism."4 The Erlebnis (non-conceptualized experience) of this theological weakening [End Page 147] has occurred as an event from a previous epistemological weakening, which mimetic theory itself contributes to consolidating.5This drift toward the epistemological nihilism generated a debate between Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, who rejected this conclusion drawn from his mimetic theory.6 The transcript of this controversy first appeared in Verità o fede debole? Dialogo su cristianesimo e relativismo (2006) [Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith (2011)], a compilation of three dialogues on three fundamental concepts: truth, secularization, and relativism. In the first part, focused on the epistemological question of truth, Girard affirms he isn't accurately recognized in Vattimo´s thought, showing his distance and warning that, unlike the Italian thinker, his thinking is primarily realistic: "Personally, I agree with Vattimo when he says that Christianity is a revelation of love, but I do not exclude that it is also a revelation of truth. Because truth and love coincide and are one in Christianity."7 In the same chapter, Vattimo challenges René Girard for not having extracted the ultimate consequences of his mimetic theory, because he stays trapped in the realistic ontology of a pre-mimetic mentality: [Vattimo:] "In sum, the only thing I really can't go along with in Girard is his faith in the salvific power of truth, whether it be revealed or discovered by science."8However, in the controversy René Girard could not fail to recognize the central thesis of Gianni Vattimo, according to which his work involved a critique of the classical interpretation of judgment: "I think that there is some kind of incompatibility between traditional philosophy and mimetic theory. I feel, for instance, that scholars influenced by Thomism are handicapped in regard to mimetic theory, because they have to work with neatly distinguished categories. Philosophy is looking for logical foundation as well. It is difficult for philosophers to accept a mechanism that triggers opposite effects. Therefore, it always excludes the real anthropological foundation."9 René Girard acknowledges that in his eagerness to keep up the anthropo-genesis, he cannot avoid judging the theory of judgment from the mimetic theory.10 This critique appears since the beginning of his investigation in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, when Girard distinguishes between Heraclitus's logos and the logos of John's gospel.11 In Violence and the Sacred he proceeded to investigate the historical origins of both forms of logos and discovered that a hidden reality underlay the evidence of the canonical judicative structure, using the resources of Derridean deconstruction, of which Girard acknowledges his debt.12René Girard's relationship with philosophy is problematic. Mimetic theory criticizes all human cultural constructions, including mythology and philosophy. However, in The Scapegoat René Girard approaches the issue of "judgment" as a place of truth. His relationship with philosophy therefore needs to be [End Page 148] recognized and his contribution valued. In this work Girard exposed the evolution and transformations that have resulted in the classic judicative structure, showing the assumptions of the last supplement of logical truth.13 In Of Grammatology Derrida took up the term "suppl... (shrink)

Exploring emotions, in terms of their evolutionary origin; their basic neurobiological substratum, and their functional significance in autonomous agents, we propose a model of minimal functionality of emotions. Our aim is to provide a naturalized explanation – mostly based on an interactivist model of emergent representation and appraisal theory of emotions – concerning basic aesthetic emotions in the formation of aesthetic judgment. We suggest two processes the Cognitive Variables Subsystem (CVS) which is fundamental for the accomplishment of the function of (...) heuristic learning; and Aesthetic Appraisal Subsystem (AAS) which primarily affects the elicitation of aesthetic emotional meanings. These two subsystems (CVS and AAS) are organizationally connected and affect the action readiness of the autonomous agent. More specifically, we consider the emotional outcome of these two subsystems as a functional indication that strengthens or weakens the anticipation for the resolution of the dynamic uncertainty that emerges in the particular interaction. (shrink)