Considerable research has demonstrated that teachers’ self-efficacy plays a major role in implementing instructional practices in classroom lessons. Only few studies, however, have examined the interplay between how teachers’ self-efficacy and the challenges that lie outside their influence are related to their implementation of cognitive-activation strategies (CAS), especially in science classrooms. Using the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015 data from Grades 4, 5, 8, and 9, we explored the extent to which teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching science and (...) the perceived time constraints explained variation in the enactment of general and inquiry-based CAS. Overall, the findings revealed that highly self-efficacious teachers reported more frequent implementation of both general and inquiry-based CAS, whereas those who perceived strong time constraints reported a less frequent use of inquiry-based CAS. We further found that these relations differed significantly between primary- and secondary-school teachers and discuss these findings in light of teachers’ professional competences and the resources for science activities in primary and secondary education. We point to the theoretical implications of this study for enhancing the conceptual understanding of generic and specific aspects of CAS and the practical implications for teacher education, professional development, and educational policy. (shrink)

Argumentation is considered crucial in numerous disciplines in schools and universities because it constitutes an important proficiency in peoples' daily and professional lives. However, it is unclear whether argumentation is understood and practiced in comparable ways across disciplines. This study consequently examined empirically how students perceive argumentation in science and language lessons. Specifically, we investigated students' beliefs about the relevance of discourse and the role of facts. Data from 3,258 high school students from 85 German secondary schools were analyzed with (...) multigroup multilevel structural equation modeling in order to disentangle whether or not differences in argumentation across disciplines exist and the extent to which variation in students' beliefs can be explained by gender and school track. Results showed that students perceived the role of facts as highly relevant for science lessons, whereas discursive characteristics were considered significantly less important. In turn, discourse played a central role in language lessons, which was believed to require less knowledge of facts. These differences were independent of students' gender. In contrast, school track predicted the differences in beliefs significantly. Our findings lend evidence on the existence of disciplinary school cultures in argumentation that may be the result of differences in teachers' school-track-specific classroom practice and education. Implications in terms of a teacher's role in establishing norms for scientific argumentation as well as the impact of students' beliefs on their learning outcomes are discussed. (shrink)

Abstract:We discuss the role that transnational corporations (TNCs) should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...) responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

In response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the implicature. In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but (...) also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory. In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not. (shrink)

How can finite creatures know an infinite God? How do the limits of our intellect and language impact how we know God and talk about God? This book explores a doctrine called divine incomprehensibility in hopes to seek how a proper understand of God's incomprehensibility protects us from both a theological despair in which there is no hope for Christian theology and a theological idolatry in which we are tempted to believe we can capture the essence of God with our (...) thoughts or words. (shrink)

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation. In addition to theoretical and methodological reflections by leading scholars in their fields, the book contains studies of the relationship between language and argumentation from two different viewpoints. While some chapters take a specific argumentative move as their point of departure and investigate the ways in which it is linguistically manifested in (...) discourse, other chapters start off from a linguistic construction, trying to determine its argumentative function and rhetorical potential. The Language of Argumentation documents the currently prominent research on stylistic aspects of argumentation and illustrates how the study of argumentation benefits from insights from linguistic models, ranging from theoretical pragmatics, politeness theory and metaphor studies to models of discourse coherence and construction grammar. (shrink)

In this paper we adopt the hypothesis that languages are mechanisms for interaction, and that grammars encode the means by which such interaction may take place, by use of procedures that construct representations of meaning from strings of words uttered in context, and conversely strings of words are built up from representations of content in interaction with context. In a review of the systemic use of ellipsis in dialogue and associated split-utterance phenomena, we show how, in Dynamic Syntax, words give (...) rise to a range of procedures for the building of representations of the content of some utterance, which both speakers and hearers use. We then extend the discussion to take account of adjuncts, showing how they contribute to content construction both in single utterances and across speakers. The same mechanisms are then shown to underlie the building of inferential extensions of meaning in context, giving rise to the creation of the ad hoc concepts expressed by phrases or single words in relation to the utterance context and ultimately to the creation of metaphorical uses of language. (shrink)

This accessible introduction to formal, and especially Montague, semantics within a linguistic framework, presupposes no previous background in logic, but takes students step-by-step from simple predicate/argument structures and their interpretation to Montague's intentional logic.

Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics If Chinese philosophy may be said to have begun around 2000 B.C.E., then it represents the longest continuous heritage of philosophical reflection. Trying to mention each philosopher or every significant thinker is not possible. This article is highly selective by choosing philosophers according to two basic principles: Those who … Continue reading Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics →.

Daoist Philosophy Along with Confucianism, “Daoism” is one of the two great indigenous philosophical traditions of China. As an English term, Daoism corresponds to both Daojia, an early Han dynasty term which describes so-called “philosophical” texts and thinkers such as Laozi and … Continue reading Daoist Philosophy →.

Laozi Laozi is the name of a legendary Daoist philosopher, the alternate title of the early Chinese text better known in the West as the Daodejing, and the moniker of a deity in the pantheon of organized “religious Daoism” that arose during the later Han dynasty. Laozi is … Continue reading Laozi →.

This article addresses both philosophers of science and process philosophers. It shows that the acceptance of Einstein's general theory of relativity by British physicists in the early 1920s, and their rejection of Whitehead's experimentally indistinguishable theory of gravity, was a matter not only of empirical evaluation but also of aesthetic preference. To philosophers of science it offers a historical case study illustrating the entangled roles of empirical and aesthetic criteria in theory evaluation. To process philosophers it offers an answer to (...) the question of why Whitehead's alternative rendering of Einstein's general relativity has been neglected both by the majority of physicists, and by the majority of philosophers. (shrink)

Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that all members (...) of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-à-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy. (shrink)

A well known logical loophole for Bell’s theorem is that it relies on setting independence: the assumption that the state of a system is independent of the settings of a measurement apparatus probing the system. In this paper the implications of rejecting this assumption are studied from an operationalist perspective. To this end a generalization of the ontic models framework is proposed that allows setting dependence. It is shown that within this framework Bell’s theorem reduces to the conclusion that no-signaling (...) requires randomness at the epistemic level even if the underlying ontology is taken to be deterministic. The ideas underlying the framework are further used to defend setting dependence against the charges of being incompatible with free will and scientific methodology. The paper ends however with the sketch of a new problem for setting dependence: a necessary gap between the ontic and the epistemic level that may prevent the formulation of a successful setting dependent theory. (shrink)

J’ai adressé de vives critiques à la pédagogie, en me démarquant de celle-ci, pour lui opposer une notion plus neutre « d’éducation ». En bref : s’il est hors de doute que l’enfance doive être éduquée, il n’est pas nécessaire ni universalisable qu’elle doive être soumise à une pédagogie, à un « dispositif pédagogique ». Je donnais une définition précise et restrictive de la pédagogie : une éducation sous la conduite d’un adulte conduisant l’enfant . Il faut remarquer, d’ailleurs, que (...) ce mot, dans son usage classique et contemporain n’a plus le même sens que dans l’antiquité grecque. De la notion de pédagogie, je retenais la notion de surveillance ; associée, ensuite, à celle de fonctions spécifiquement éducatives, et de méthodes propres à entraîner l’élève à apprendre de bon gré, à le « capturer » ou à le « capter », à le séduire. Mais, dans l’un et l’autre cas, c’est le même genre de dispositif. Seulement, inversé. Il faut concevoir – c’est ce que dit Deleuze à propos de Foucault—les dispositifs comme des lignes, des vecteurs qui vont susciter et mettre en place, à chaque fois, selon chaque problème, des institutions particulières. Ces lignes ne tracent pas de contours bien définis; elles ne cernent ni n’encerclent, mais elles parcourent, traversent et rassemblent ce qui était autrement organisé ou subsistait à l’état dispersé. Elles font ainsi apparaître une nouvelle configuration. Parmi les contemporains, il me paraît que Pasolini est le seul à avoir vu et exprimé ce qu’est le véritable processus de pédagogisation de l’enfance, qui est, en même temps, processus de subjectivation et indication d’une éventuelle possibilité de retournement de pouvoir; ou, autrement dit, d’une révolution pédagogique permettant à l’ enfant de conquérir cette autonomie qui, sans cesse, lui est promise et toujours refusée. Pasolini a esquissés une nouvelle pragmatique à opposer à toutes les doctrines d’enseignement. (shrink)

The key work of the early Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the Grundlage ser gesammten Wissenschaftslehre [Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science] of 1794-95. The very circumstances of its publication ensure that it is a rather terse and disjointed statement of Fichtean philosophy. It consists of a very short preface, a “famous” section devoted to first principles, the so-called “basic propositions of the entire doctrine of science,” and eight discourses of widely diverging length. The first discourse, devoted to the “theoretical” (...) Wissenschaftslehre is one and a half times the length of the other seven. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth are barely a few pages long. It is an extremely peculiar work and not merely due to the circumstances of its publication. Its very argumentative structure threatens to trap the reader in forming hasty and preliminary judgements on the exact nature of the philosophical claims being made, and, quite specifically, those philosophical claims which might be ascribed to the author himself. The following contends that lack of attention to the structure of a work that, admittedly, exhibits very little in an overt fashion has led to wholesale confusion about the early system and its philosophical intent. Specifically, that too much attention has been paid to the famous section on grounding principles, and, furthermore, that attention only to these sections will lead to fundamental confusion and misunderstanding. This paper will attempt to examine this peculiar Fichtean text via the readings made by Dieter Henrich and Frederick Neuhouser, respectively. (shrink)

The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been a problem since its founding days. A large contribution to the discussion of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics is given by the so-called impossibility proofs for hidden variable models; models that allow a realist interpretation. In this thesis some of these proofs are discussed, like von Neumann’s Theorem, the Kochen-Specker Theorem and the Bell-inequalities. Some more recent developments are also investigated, like Meyer’s nullification of the Kochen-Specker Theorem, the MKC-models and Conway and Kochen’s (...) Free Will Theorem. This last one is taken to suggest that the problems that arise for certain interpretations of quantum mechanics are not limited to realist interpretations only, but also affect certain instrumentalist interpretations. It is argued that one may arrive at a more satisfying interpretation of quantum mechanics if one adopts a logic that seems more compatible with the instrumentalist viewpoint namely, intuitionistic logic. The motivations for adopting this form of logic rather than classical logic or quantum logic are linked to some of the philosophical ideas of Bohr. In particular a new interpretation of Bohr’s notion of complementarity is proposed. Finally some possibilities are explored for linking the intuitionistic interpretation of quantum mechanics to the mathematical formalism of the theory. (shrink)

This volume, the first of its kind written in English, interprets the realistic-phenomenological philosophy of Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888-1966). She was a prominent figure in the Munich-Göttingen Circle, the first generation of phenomenology after Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and was known as the “first lady of German philosophy”.The articles included in this collection deal with the two main themes constituting her realistic-metaphysical phenomenology: Being and the I. The new edition includes an additional chapter opening a new path into the study of Conrad-Martius (...) with Heidegger. In addition, the collection includes a comprehensive Introduction that describes the personal background and the social and philosophical contexts behind Conrad-Martius’s thought, with an emphasis on the mutual influence and fertilization of the group of early phenomenologists in the Munich-Göttingen Circle. The book is aimed at scholars of philosophy and educated readers. (shrink)

A definition of emotion common to the affective sciences is an urgent desideratum. Lack of such a definition is a constant source of numerous misunderstandings and a series of mostly fruitless debates. There is little hope that there ever will be agreement on a common definition of emotion, given the sacred traditions of the disciplines involved and the egos of the scholars working in these disciplines. Our aim here is more modest. We propose a list of elements for a working (...) definition of emotion and discuss the justification for the inclusion of elements from our respective perspectives (philosophy and psychology). This working partial definition may at least serve as a litmus test to examine theories of emotion, old and new, across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. The Handbook brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of the relationship between the mechanisms of the brain and the psychology of mind. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. Drawing on a wide range of neuroimaging techniques, (...) neuropsychological assessment, and clinical research, scientists are beginning to understand the biological mechanisms for emotions. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as: How do people experience life emotionally? Why do people respond so differently to the same experiences? What can the face tell us about internal states? How does emotion in significant social relationships influence health? Are there basic emotions common to all humans? This volume brings together the most eminent scholars in the field to present, in sixty original chapters, the latest research and theories in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression; Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Adaptation, Culture, and Evolution; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade. (shrink)

Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between ‘civil association’ and ‘enterprise association’ has inspired international society theorists to conceive of international society as not just a ‘purposive association’ constructed by states to satisfy their interests but also as a ‘practical association’ providing formal and pragmatic rules that are not instrumental to particular goals of state policy. While this article is supportive of the Oakeshottian turn in international society theory, it suggests that somewhat different conclusions can be drawn from it. The article sketches out (...) an alternative conception of international ‘civil association’, one that transcends the boundaries of communities. It is argued that such a notion of civil association is both possible and at the same time anchored in the experiences of the modern state. It is suggested that this notion of international civil association, when sustained by an adequate legal conception, promotes the enforcement of moral and political responsibility acr... (shrink)

In this article we explore a self-regulatory perspective on the self-evaluative moral emotions, shame and guilt. Broadly conceived, self-regulation distinguishes between two types of motivation: approach/activation and avoidance/inhibition. We use this distinction to conceptually understand the socialization dimensions (parental restrictiveness versus nurturance), associated emotions (anxiety versus empathy), and forms of morality (proscriptive versus prescriptive) that serve as precursors to each self-evaluative moral emotion. We then examine the components of shame and guilt experiences in greater detail and conclude with more general (...) implications of a self-regulatory perspective on moral emotions. (shrink)

This paper was read at the First Conference of the ISSEI, ‘Turning Points in History’, 26–30 September 1988, Amsterdam. It pertains to theme 2, ‘popular and Elite Culture’.

ABSTRACT:The transition from modern to postmodern society leads to changing expectations about the purpose and responsibility of leadership. Habermas’s social theory provides a useful analytical tool for understanding current societal transition processes and exploring their implications for the responsibility of business vis-à-vis society. We argue that integrative responsible leadership, in particular, can contribute to the reconciliation of business with societal goals. Integrative responsible leadership understood in a Habermasian way is not only a strategic endeavor but also a communicative endeavor. An (...) essential part of integrative responsible leadership in light of the current societal transformation processes is the facilitation of discourses about a shared base of norms and values. This is exemplified alongside current societal developments like the European migration crisis or the emerging nationalist and fundamentalist movements in some countries. We specify how and when leadership should resort to communicative action and discuss the implications for leadership. (shrink)

How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. This book explores the relationship between music and emotion, bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers .

Models of cognitive vulnerability claim that depressive symptoms arise as a result of an interaction between negative affect and cognitive reactions, in the form of dysfunctional attitudes and negative inferential style. We present a model that complements this approach by focusing on the appraisal processes that elicit and differentiate everyday episodes of emotional experience, arguing that individual differences in appraisal patterns can foster negative emotional experiences related to depression. In particular, dispositional appraisal biases facilitating the elicitation of these emotions more (...) frequently and more intensely. This, in turn, is likely to have a negative influence on cognitive processing and emotion regulation in general. (shrink)