Suppose you want to live a happy life. Who should you turn to for advice? We normally think that we know best about our own happiness. But recent work in psychology and neuroscience suggests that we are often mistaken about our own natures, and that sometimes scientists know us better than we know ourselves. Does this mean that to live a happy life we should ask scientists for advice rather than relying on our introspection? In what follows, we highlight ways (...) in which the science of happiness could help us live happy lives, but we also argue that, in other ways, our navel gazing will remain indispensable. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown that self‐explanation is an effective metacognitive strategy, but how can it be leveraged to improve students' learning in actual classrooms? How do instructional treatments that emphasizes self‐explanation affect students' learning, as compared to other instructional treatments? We investigated whether self‐explanation can be scaffolded effectively in a classroom environment using a Cognitive Tutor, which is intelligent instructional software that supports guided learning by doing. In two classroom experiments, we found that students who explained their steps during problem‐solving (...) practice with a Cognitive Tutor learned with greater understanding compared to students who did not explain steps. The explainers better explained their solutions steps and were more successful on transfer problems. We interpret these results as follows: By engaging in explanation, students acquired better‐integrated visual and verbal declarative knowledge and acquired less shallow procedural knowledge. The research demonstrates that the benefits of self‐explanation can be achieved in a relatively simple computer‐based approach that scales well for classroom use. (shrink)

Foundation models such as GPT-4 are fine-tuned to avoid unsafe or otherwise problematic behavior, so that, for example, they refuse to comply with requests for help with committing crimes or with producing racist text. One approach to fine-tuning, called reinforcement learning from human feedback, learns from humans' expressed preferences over multiple outputs. Another approach is constitutional AI, in which the input from humans is a list of high-level principles. But how do we deal with potentially diverging input from humans? How (...) can we aggregate the input into consistent data about "collective" preferences or otherwise use it to make collective choices about model behavior? In this paper, we argue that the field of social choice is well positioned to address these questions, and we discuss ways forward for this agenda, drawing on discussions in a recent workshop on Social Choice for AI Ethics and Safety held in Berkeley, CA, USA in December 2023. (shrink)

Background: Dementia care at home often involves decisions in which the caregiver must weigh safety concerns with respect for autonomy. These dilemmas can lead to situations where caregivers provide care against the will of persons living with dementia, referred to as involuntary treatment. To prevent this, insight is needed into how family caregivers of persons living with dementia deal with care situations that can lead to involuntary treatment. Objective: To identify and describe family caregivers’ experiences regarding care decisions for situations (...) that can lead to involuntary treatment use in persons living with dementia at home. Research design: A qualitative descriptive interview design. Data were analysed using the Qualitative Analysis Guide of Leuven. Participants and research context: A total of 10 family caregivers providing care for 13 persons living with dementia participated in in-depth semi-structured interviews. Participants were recruited by registered nurses via purposive sampling. Ethical consideration: The study protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University Hospitals Leuven and the Medical Ethical Test Committee Zuyderland. Findings: Family caregivers experience the decision-making process concerning care dilemmas that can lead to involuntary treatment as complicated, stressful and exhausting. Although they consider safety and autonomy as important values, they struggle with finding the right balance between them. Due to the progressive and unpredictable nature of dementia, they are constantly seeking solutions while they adapt to new situations. Family caregivers feel responsible and experience social pressure for the safety of persons living with dementia. They may be blamed if something adverse happens to the persons living with dementia, which increases an already stressful situation. Their experience is influenced by characteristics of the care triad such as practical and emotional support, knowledge, and previous experiences. Discussion and conclusion: To prevent involuntary treatment, professionals need to proactively inform family caregivers, and they need to support each other in dealing with complex care situations. (shrink)

The field of moral psychology has been confined to the study of social morality, resulting in a nearly exclusive focus on the primary other-regarding virtue of justice. It is argued that an understanding of personal morality, with its concern with self-regarding virtues and the dynamics of intimate relationships, is needed to complement this approach. The importance of personal morality issues to moral psychology is foreshadowed in C. Gilligan's caring ethic. This article expands on Gilligan's schematic portrayal to provide a more (...) complete theoretical understanding of personal morality. Social and personal morality are contrasted to highlight their differences and interrelatedness. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Abstract:Rorty in private exchanges and public discourse occasionally gave me remarkably bad advice (e.g., in teaching pragmatism, especially to undergrads, it is better to focus on James and Dewey to the exclusion of Peirce). He however was far better than this. As a philosopher preoccupied with meta-philosophy and intimately linked to this with issues of justification, he displayed reflexive finesse unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. As someone who identified with James and Dewey even more than Marx, Freud, Foucault, and (...) Derrida, he was animated by a pragmatic imagination oriented to the ongoing task of reconstructing the democratic ethos of our daily lives. Chris Voparil has made a painstaking and responsible case for taking the thought of Rorty to be continuous with that of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams. It is far from clear that the path forward requires us to go through, rather than ‘round, Rorty; but it is one possible route. Moreover, even if Voparil in the end offers a “weak misreading” of a “strong misreader,” he offers an engaging, erudite, and illuminating portrait of a controversial figure. (shrink)

THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN FREEDOM is one of the central and recurring issues of philosophy. Kant considered it to be at the heart of his own philosophy, the "keystone," as he called it, of the whole architecture of his system of pure reason, both of practical reason as well as of speculative reason. However, the notorious difficulties of interpreting Kant's philosophy in general, and his doctrine of freedom in particular, have made most of Kant's accomplishments in this area relatively inaccessible (...) to contemporary philosophers. In this paper I will discuss the problem of human freedom from a Kantian perspective and will make use of some of what I consider to be Kant's most significant analyses and arguments. It is not my intention to try to preserve, illuminate, or render consistent everything which Kant said about freedom; such an endeavor would probably be in vain. I do, however, want to pay him the respect of believing that there is much that is worth preserving in what he says about freedom, and that is, with a modest amount of reconstruction, quite relevant to the way many of us think about the problem of freedom today. (shrink)

This research provides an exploratory investigation of whether gift/help-receiving contexts that elicit mixed emotional variants of gratitude can be distinguished from typical gratitude-eliciting situations in their associated appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. We examined 473 participants (159 males, 312 females, 2 others; Mage = 31.07) using a one-way four-conditions between-subjects experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to complete recall tasks describing four different gratitude-eliciting situations. Emotions, cognitive appraisals, action tendencies, and general psychosocial outcomes were assessed. Relative to a control condition (...) involving receiving a gift or help (gift/help condition), receiving something at the expense of a benefactor (benefactor-inconvenience condition) elicited gratitude-guilt; receiving something with an expectation of return (return-favour condition) elicited gratitude-disappointment and gratitude-anger; while receiving a disliked gift or receiving assistance that made things worse (backfire condition) primarily elicited gratitude-disappointment while also eliciting gratitude-anger and gratitude-guilt. Each condition was differentiable from control in their appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. Notably, contexts which elicited mixed emotional variants of gratitude were characterised by the co-occurrence of conflicting appraisals such as pleasantness and unpleasantness or goal-congruence and goal-incongruence. Additionally, the return-favour and backfire conditions were most dissimilar from control, and were associated with the most negative action tendencies and psychosocial outcomes. (shrink)

Past research has provided some evidence of positive relationships between leisure and cognitive functioning, but questions remain regarding their mechanisms. We argue that specific negative emotio...

ABSTRACT Most Plato scholarship characterizes Socrates's dialectic as cooperative, reciprocal, and open ended. This orthodoxy echoes Socrates's characterizations of it, but the dialectic's dramatizations rarely confirm it. Commentators recognizing this seek to protect the dialectic's image by maligning Socrates's interlocutors. Francisco Gonzalez's description of the Protagoras's “central crisis” exemplifies this approach. When a dispute over how to conduct the discussion threatens its dissolution, Gonzalez blames Protagoras, claiming that relativism forecloses conversation and community. I argue that Gonzalez elides alternative forms of (...) community supported by other discursive practices and that Socrates's refusal to answer legitimate concerns about his methodological demands turns the dialectic into the “external, nondialogical, absolute standard” Gonzalez says it lacks. (shrink)

Dialogue, Philosophical Eroticism, Plato, Socrates, Power Dynamics, Episteme, Self-Knowledge, Eros.

Studies on captive dolphins have shown that they are capable of social learning. However, ethnographic data are less conclusive and many examples given for social learning can be explained in other ways. Before we can claim that cetacean culture is unique we need more rigorous studies which are fortunately not as difficult as Rendell and Whitehead seem to think.

This essay seeks a philosophical understanding of the nature of kairos that, in turn, discloses the nature of philosophizing. This essay claims that the kairos of philosophy is dialogue, and that dialogue is kairological in two ways: (1) Dialogue is not just a phenomenon that occurs in chronological time but, rather, imposes its own time in order to see how life (or being) itself is disclosed to us; (2) dialogue is kairological because it denotes a moment in which we are (...) pushed into the open, which demands our receptivity and response. Section I explains kairos as “circumstance” in Aristotle, as a required point of view in Heidegger, and as related to the beginning of creation in Schelling. Section II understands dialogue, as the kairos of philosophy, as a crisis—a breaking away from an ordinary understanding of and experience in the world. This destabilizing experience resonates with the untimeliness of philosophizing. (shrink)

Interorganizational information systems are information systems that cross organizational boundaries. Information managers and system developers often assume that the more integrated these information systems are, the more successful the system will be. Such an assumption is indeed intuitively appealing, and, from a technological standpoint, readily understandable. In practice, development and use of integrated information systems that cross organizational boundaries often result in confusing power struggles, politicking, and sometimes manifest sabotage. Based on economic and political organization theory, this article concludes that (...) data ownership and incentives, rather than integration, are of vital importance for the success of interorganizational information systems. (shrink)

This article deals with the control of chaos on the convective motion in a ferrofluid filled in a rotating porous medium and under the helical force effect. We performed a truncated expansion of Galerkin and found the Lorenz-type model which described the system. The dynamical system is characterized using appropriate and subsequent criteria. We noticed that the system presents regular and chaotic behaviors according to the parameters at present. A considerable reduction of the chaotic domain is noticed with the increase (...) of the intensity of the helical force and of the Darcy number, thus making it possible to delay the heat transfer in the system. The increase in the viscosity ratio and the Taylor number widen the chaotic domain leading to an acceleration of the heat transfer in the system. (shrink)

We discuss in some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottom‐up from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to a (...) type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a critique of a deeply engrained tendency to narrate the story of American pragmatism exclusively or primarily in terms of modern European philosophy. While it suggests alternative stories, it is principally a metanarrative, an intentionally polemical story about our entrenched habits of philosophical storytelling. Indeed, the pragmatics of storytelling merits, especially in reference to historical accounts of American pragmatism, critical attention. The seemingly simple question, “What are we doing when we tell the story of this movement (...) in this manner rather than that?” is a truly important one. It is also an avowedly pragmatic question. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a critique of a deeply engrained tendency to narrate the story of American pragmatism exclusively or primarily in terms of modern European philosophy. While it suggests alternative stories, it is principally a metanarrative, an intentionally polemical story about our entrenched habits of philosophical storytelling. Indeed, the pragmatics of storytelling merits, especially in reference to historical accounts of American pragmatism, critical attention. The seemingly simple question, “What are we doing when we tell the story of this movement (...) in this manner rather than that?” is a truly important one. It is also an avowedly pragmatic question. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article elaborates a deceptively simple suggestion made by Hegel. It relates Hegel's suggestion above all to Dewey's stress on looking back, looking around, and looking ahead. In this endeavor the article touches upon two seemingly contradictory facets of philosophical thought—the autonomy and heteronomy of such thought. To a greater extent, however, the article focuses on the dramatic character of philosophical efforts to think things over, once again. The drive to think things over is frequently rooted in historical crises, (...) in experiential conflicts. The actuality of philosophy cannot be adequately understood apart from such dramas and conflicts, ones taking place far outside the studies and classrooms of thinkers. (shrink)

There are various reasons for taking a second look at anything at all. One reason is to discern aspects which have been overlooked; another frequently related reason is to reappraise the value or relevance of whatever is being reconsidered. A thing might be deemed worthless or negligible because some feature or set of features has been overlooked. And this way of conceiving the thing might become so familiar, so entrenched, that it powerfully, because subtly, works against alternative conceptions. In certain (...) intellectual circles, for example, the critiques of religion have become so familiar that the religious hypothesis is not a “living option.” As John Dewey noted, familiarity is more likely to breed credulity than contempt: We take the familiar conception, containing its implicit evaluation, as worthy of our belief, simply because it is familiar. Thus, a second look undertaken from a fresh perspective is ordinarily most promising; for it is most likely to bring into focus overlooked facets and unsuspected relevancies of familiar topics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosopher and Scientist Scientific Intelligence and Theoretical Knowledge Philosophy Within the Limits of Experience Alone The Conduct of Inquiry Clarifying Meaning The Theory of Signs Absolute Chance, Brute Reaction, and Evolving Law.