In the article, the development of intercultural readiness of university students for intercultural communication by using the developed multifunctional model is considered. The definition of intercultural readiness of students, the units of the developed model, as well as the content of each unit are presented in detail. Moreover, the components of development of readiness for intercultural communication are fully described. The aim of this work is to assess both the approaches of the multifunctional model and the pedagogical conditions of development (...) of students’ intercultural readiness. The authors analyze the results of technical universities students’ survey aimed at finding out the respondents’ levels of intercultural readiness. (shrink)

Abela accepts Fine’s account of realism and instrumentalism, but thinks that we can reject the Natural Ontological Attitude by distinguishing the theoretical attempt to make sense of scientific practice from choosing the attitude we bring to the debate, or to science itself. But Abela’s attitudes are vulnerable to Fine’s criticisms of the philosophical positions. However, if we take attitude as contrastive and as full‐blooded enough to lead to different behaviour we can see a gap in Fine’s position. He cannot tell (...) us why it is science that he trusts. When we look more widely, the philosophical positions might be seen as ways of justifying that trust. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1987, examines the notion of truth and then discusses knowledge and the way in which much of our knowledge revises or rejects the common-sense we start from. The author argues that our knowledge is not as secure as some would like to think and that there are important limits to the possibility for explanation. He shows how values permeate our ordinary thinking and argues against the objectivity of these values, showing the practical consequences of this (...) argument for teaching in schools. This stimulating approach to a fundamental educational issue does not require previous experience of formal philosophy and will be useful to both education students and teachers in schools. (shrink)

Michael Williams has frequently considered and rejected approaches to "our knowledge of the external world" that see it as the best explanation for certain features of experience. This paper examines the salience of his position to approaches such as Mackie’s that do not deny the presentational directness of ordinary experience but do permit a gap between how things appear and how they are that allows for sceptical doubts. Williams’ main argument is that, to do justice to its place in a (...) foundationalist strategy, the external world as hypothesis must offer an explicandum that does not invoke concepts of objects but is rather purely experiential. He next claims that no coherent regularities are available at such a level so there is nothing to be explained. Coherence only comes with objects, not as something objects could explain. Confronting this with Mackie’s Lockean theory of perception, we find that Mackie decisively rejects the first claim about the nature of the explicandum, since he sees ordinary perception as involving intentional objects which are distinct from the persisting objects they present. He is also committed to rejecting Williams’ line on purely experiential regularities, though this plays a subordinate role in his general position. The crucial issue then becomes the tenability of Mackie’s intentional object analysis and the extent to which it might yet tilt the argument in favour of realism against a global sceptic. In formulating his own epistemological strategies Williams might appear to countenance a version of Mackie’s view divorced from foundationalism. But while Williams’ contextualism in its minimal version might do so, in practice it retains the lessons derived from his skirmishes with scepticism and thus disallows certain types of enquiry. I conclude by contrasting Mackie’s response to scepticism with that of Williams in his diagnostic vein. (shrink)

Informal logicians recognise the frequent use of unstated assumptions; some (e.g. Fisher) also recognise entertained arguments and recommend a suppositional approach (such as Mackie's) to conditional statements. It is here argued that these two be put together to make argument diagrams more accurate and subtle. Philosophical benefits also accrue: insights into Jackson's apparent violations of modus tollens and contraposition and McGee's counterexamples to the validity of modus ponens.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Timeline of Medieval Logicians A Guide to the Literature.