This paper challenges current dominant thinking in Universities about the processes of ethical appraisal of research studies in the Social Sciences. It considers this to be founded on unjustifiable and inappropriate principles, the origins of which are presented before discussing alternative, more inclusive and ethically defensible approaches. The latter are based on dialogic processes to sustain respectful and empowering ethical reviews which appreciate the situated nature of research. The empirical evidence for this comes from papers about ethnographic studies with children (...) and adults in various educational spaces in Western Europe, originally a symposium on the practice of ethics in educational ethnography at ECER, 2017, now forming a book published by Routledge, 2019. The dialogic processes help researchers to carry out culturally-appropriate research with the demonstrable ethical integrity that participants and stakeholders reasonably expect. The authors argue that currently risk-averse Universities need to change their research cultures to support all research methodologies and fieldwork practices that have ethical integrity and create valuable research that is socially beneficial, to enhance their lustre. (shrink)

This paper challenges current dominant thinking in Universities about the processes of ethical appraisal of research studies in the Social Sciences. It considers this to be founded on unjustifiable and inappropriate principles, the origins of which are presented before discussing alternative, more inclusive and ethically defensible approaches. The latter are based on dialogic processes to sustain respectful and empowering ethical reviews which appreciate the situated nature of research. The empirical evidence for this comes from papers about ethnographic studies with children (...) and adults in various educational spaces in Western Europe, originally a symposium on the practice of ethics in educational ethnography at ECER, 2017, now forming a book published by Routledge, 2019. The dialogic processes help researchers to carry out culturally-appropriate research with the demonstrable ethical integrity that participants and stakeholders reasonably expect. The authors argue that currently risk-averse Universities need to change their research cultures to support all research methodologies and fieldwork practices that have ethical integrity and create valuable research that is socially beneficial, to enhance their lustre. (shrink)

Providing theoretical grounding, case studies and practical solutions, Implementing Ethics in Educational Ethnography examines how researchers can overcome ethical dilemmas associated with and encountered during ethnographic research. From the initial stages of research design such as consideration from regulatory bodies, through research occurring in the field to project completion and reporting, it explores many of the factors associated with ensuring culturally sensitive and ethical studies. The book covers key questions including: What can researchers expect of ethical review boards? Where and (...) with whom should dialogue take place about ethicality within research? What effect does a research focus have on regulation and research practice? What is the effect of context on ethical practices? Does the positionality of a researcher have an effect on ethical practices? How do we ensure that ethicality supports the trustworthiness of research projects? Using a range of international case studies, Implementing Ethics in Educational Ethnographyprovides researchers and students with invaluable details about how to navigate the field, ensuring that they can sustain good ethical practice throughout the life of a research project. have an effect on ethical practices? How do we ensure that ethicality supports the trustworthiness of research projects? Using a range of international case studies, Implementing Ethics in Educational Ethnographyprovides researchers and students with invaluable details about how to navigate the field, ensuring that they can sustain good ethical practice throughout the life of a research project. (shrink)

Summary This paper considers the effect of the introduction of market forces into teacher education both in terms of the loss of autonomy on the part of the providers, the teacher educators, and in terms of the growth of ownership by the consumers, the student teachers, of their learning. Specifically it identifies the paradigms of teacher education which are absent from the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE) criteria, such as enquiry?oriented teacher education, but which are important for (...) promoting professional self?awareness amongst teachers. This paper describes and evaluates an exercise undertaken by student teachers on a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) course which both promotes self?reflection and meets some of the criteria set by CATE. It concludes that it is possible to promote self?reflective teaching within the confines of the CATE criteria so long as certain procedures are followed. (shrink)

This paper considers the arguments put forward for the closure of small schools in rural areas. The debate, which is firmly rooted in the Plowden Report, has involved both educational and economic arguments. The research on which this paper draws examines these arguments in the light of the implementation of the Local Management of Schools in three local authorities in the UK since 1988 and discusses the impact which this policy has had on resource provision, on the changing role of (...) staff and on the daily functioning of small rural schools. (shrink)

Creation and the Sovereignty of God brings fresh insight to a defense of God.

Some authors reject what they call the "Simple View"---i.e., the principle that anyone who A's intentionally intends to A. My purpose here is to defend this principle. Rejecting the Simple View, I shall claim, forces us to assign to other mental states the functional role of intention: that of providing settled objectives to guide deliberation and action. A likely result is either that entities will be multiplied, or that the resultant account will invite reassertion of reductionist theories. In any case, (...) the account must drive a wedge between intention and practical rationality, by forbidding agents to intend goals it is rational to seek. Worse yet, the states it "substitutes" for intention turn out to be subject to the same constraints that prompted the substitution, and hence are indistinguishable from intention in the very respect in which they are alleged to differ. Thus, I shall argue, there is no evidence to justify such supposed distinctions, and the Simple View is to be preferred. (shrink)

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

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Contemporary argumentation theory has developed an impressive array of norms, goals and virtues applicable to ideal argument. But what is the moral status of these prescriptions? Is an interlocutor who fails to live up to these norms guilty of a moral failing as well as an epistemic or cognitive error? If so, why? In answering these questions, I argue that deliberation’s epistemic and cognitive goods attach to important ethical goods, and that respect for others’ rationality, the ethics of joint action, (...) and the importance of consensus join forces with these goods to provide strong reasons for cleaving to high standards of argument. I sketch an illustrative continuum of argument practices of different deliberative-cum-ethical standards, and consider how one should ethically respond when faced with an interlocutor employing less than ideal standards. (shrink)

Most philosophers have given up George Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God as a lost cause, for in it, Berkeley seems to conclude more than he actually shows. I defend the proof by showing that its conclusion is not the thesis that an infinite and perfect God exists, but rather the much weaker thesis that a very powerful God exists and that this God’s agency is pervasive in nature. This interpretation, I argue, is consistent with the texts. It is (...) also an important component of Berkeley’s philosophical project, which consists of launching many small arguments against his philosophical and theological opponents. (shrink)

Libertarian treatments of free will face the objection that an uncaused human decision would lack full explanation, and hence violate the principle of sufficient reason. It is argued that this difficulty can be overcome if God, as creator, wills that I decide as I do, since my decision could then be explained in terms of his will, which must be for the best. It is further argued that this view does not make God the author of evil in any damaging (...) sense. Neither does it impugn my freedom. God’s creative activity does not put in place any secondary causes that determine my decision; and his will does not stand as an independent determining condition either, since it is fully expressed in my decision alone. (shrink)

The results of this paper concern the effective cardinal structure of the subsets of [ω1]<ω1, the set of all countable subsets of ω1. The main results include dichotomy theorems and theorems which show that the effective cardinal structure is complicated.

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

No natural rights theory justifies strong intellectual property rights. More specifically, no theory within the entire domain of natural rights thinking – encompassing classical liberalism, libertarianism and left-libertarianism, in all their innumerable variants – coherently supports strengthening current intellectual property rights. Despite their many important differences, all these natural rights theories endorse some set of members of a common family of basic ethical precepts. These commitments include non-interference, fairness, non-worsening, consistency, universalisability, prior consent, self-ownership, self-governance, and the establishment of zones (...) of autonomy. Such commitments have clear applications pertaining to the use and ownership of created ideas. I argue that each of these commitments require intellectual property rights to be substantially limited in scope, strength and duration. In this way the core mechanisms of natural rights thinking ensure a robust public domain and categorically rule out strong intellectual property rights. (shrink)

In the first part of this article an attempt was made to clear the ground for a functional theory of knowledge, and the discussion of structure and function with which it concluded enables us to approach the problem of cognition. If the view already set forth is sound, it seems clear that the relation of the mind to its object is a function and not a structure of the mental processes involved. The mere existence of a mental content, however complex (...) it may be, however decorated with fringes or set off by a background, does not constitute an act of knowledge or give the content a meaning. In order to see a mental act as cognitive we must consider its function, its origin, its results, and in general the circumstances in which it stands. (shrink)

In everyday English usage, the words ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are normally taken to be opposite in meaning. It is an opposition with very ancient roots. One of its forbears was the medieval theory of Scriptural hermeneutics, which distinguished among the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses of Scripture. This itself had an ancestry in pre-Augustinian times: Augustine tells in his Confessions how he learned from Ambrose the trick of interpreting Scripture figuratively, thus eliminating the problems and contradictions created by a (...) literal reading. Earlier still, the distinction and the opposition were at least implicit in Poetics 21, where Aristotle differentiated between the standard or normal name for a thing, and various other types of name among which he listed metaphor. The antonymy of the literal and the figurative is therefore deeply embedded in our intellectual history, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has remained, to a large extent, unexamined and unquestioned. (shrink)

Libertarian treatments of free will face the objection that an uncaused human decision would lack full explanation, and hence violate the principle of sufficient reason. It is argued that this difficulty can be overcome if God, as creator, wills that I decide as I do, since my decision could then be explained in terms of his will, which must be for the best. It is further argued that this view does not make God the author of evil in any damaging (...) sense. Neither does it impugn my freedom. God’s creative activity does not put in place any secondary causes that determine my decision; and his will does not stand as an independent determining condition either, since it is fully expressed in my decision alone. (shrink)

There is a familiar argument based on the principle that the past is fixed that, if God foreknows what I will do, I do not have the power to act otherwise. So, there is a problem about reconciling divine omniscience with the power to do otherwise. However the problem posed by the argument does not provide a good reason for adopting the view that God is outside time. In particular, arguments for the fixity of the past, if successful, either establish (...) His timelessness independently of the problem, or mean that the problem could not be solved by adopting the view that He is timeless. (Published Online April 7 2006). (shrink)

I argue there is a distinct and integrated property-concept applying directly, not to things, but to actions. This concept of Property in Activities describes a determinate ethico-political relation to a particular activity – a relation that may (but equally may not) subsequently effect a wide variety of relations to some thing. The relation with the activity is fixed and primary, and any ensuing relations with things are variable and derivative. Property in Activities illuminates many of the vexing problem cases arising (...) in property theory. Communal, intangible, fugacious, hunting, fishing, customary and recreation property rights are not ersatz instances of owning things – they are paradigms of Property Protected Activities. The same is true of the functioning of property in various aspects of contemporary law, its application in philosophical arguments such as Locke’s, and much of its historical application prior to the Nineteenth Century. By illustrating how one stable concept can resolve this myriad of otherwise puzzling cases, I argue that Property in Activities is as important and influential a concept as Ownership of Things. (shrink)

Healthcare ethics has become part of the standard curriculum of students in the health professions. The goals of healthcare ethics education are to give students the skills they need to identify, assess, and address ethical issues in clinical practice and to develop virtuous practitioners. Incorporating the medical humanities into medical school, for example, is intended to foster empathy and professionalism among students and to provide mechanisms for enhanced physician well-being. Yet, despite the long-standing inclusion of the humanities in nursing curricula, (...) increases in the amount and kinds of scientific knowledge essential for clinical practice has resulted in the erosion of the “humanistic arts” from nursing education. One potential solution to this challenge comes with the increase in interprofessional education, where students in a variety of healthcare professions programs come together to learn about issues common to all healthcare fields. (shrink)