Locally-developed measures represent great tools for institutions to use in assessing student outcomes. Such measures can be easy to administer, can be cost-effective, and can provide meaningful data for improving student learning. However, many institutions struggle with questions surrounding the quality of their locally-developed assessments. Are their instruments reliable? Are their instruments valid? Can the data generated from these instruments be trusted to drive change and improvement? The good news for faculty, staff, and assessment professionals is that there are steps (...) they can take to address these concerns and help to ensure the validity and reliability of their processes. This article describes the development and testing of a novel research instrument of students’ attitudes and abilities relating to critical thinking, metacognition, and intellectual humility. Using a $1,000 assessment grant from Sam Houston State University (SHSU), Dr. Glenn Sanford and Dr. David Wright devised the early drafts of the instruments, collaborated with colleagues, and joined with Mr. Jeff Roberts, Director of Assessment at SHSU, to develop and to test this new instrument. What follows is a description of the development of the resulting research instrument, results from the factor analysis and reliability testing of that instrument, and an overview of how those results have been used to make further instrument improvements. (shrink)

The central conflicts of the world today are closely related to cultural, traditional, and religious differences between nations. As we move to a globalized world, these differences often become magnified, entrenched, and the cause of bloody conflict. Growing out of a conference of distinguished scholars from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, this volume is a singular contribution to mutual understanding and cooperative efforts on behalf of peace. The term paideia, drawn from Greek philosophy, has to do with (...) responsible education for citizenship as a necessary precondition for effective democracy. (shrink)

The central conflicts of the world today are closely related to cultural, traditional, and religious differences between nations. As we move to a globalized world, these differences often become magnified, entrenched, and the cause of bloody conflict. Growing out of a conference of distinguished scholars from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, this volume is a singular contribution to mutual understanding and cooperative efforts on behalf of peace. The term paideia, drawn from Greek philosophy, has to do with (...) responsible education for citizenship as a necessary precondition for effective democracy. (shrink)

In 'on the analysis of causation' ("synthese", Volume 21, 1970), We argued that any analysis of causation entailing that "a" caused "b" only if "a" is the set of conditions necessary and sufficient for "b" yields a formal contradiction. In 'causal necessity and logical necessity' ("philosophical studies", Volume 28, 1975), David sanford objects to that argument, Concentrating his attack on the notions of causal necessity and total sets of antecedent conditions. We reply in this paper that, Although sanford's (...) objections help clarify the issues, They are not telling. (shrink)

The book is divided into two parts, representing modern and postmodern periods. Willmott examines McLuhan's relationship to critical and aesthetic modernism, and political and historical sense of modernity in North America, from the early 1930s to the 1950s.

Myles Brand and Marshall Swain advocate the principle that if A is the set of conditions individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the occurrence of B, then if C is a set of conditions individually necessary for the occurrence of B, every member of C is a member of A. I agree with John Barker and Risto Hilpinen who each argue that this principle is not true for causal necessity and sufficiency, but I disagree with their claim that it (...) is true for logical necessity and sufficiency. The original appeal of the principle may be due to confusing two kinds of totality: to say that when every member of set A obtains, then every condition necessary for E obtains is not to say that every condition necessary for E is a member of A. All the authors mentioned believe that causal necessity precludes logical necessity. I deny this on the basis of an example from kinematics. Hume has not refuted definitions of causation in terms of logically necessary and sufficient conditions, nor have Brand and Swain. (shrink)

Hume's arguments for the contention that causal necessity precludes logical necessity depend on the questionable principle that a cause must precede its effect. Hobbes' definition of entire cause, although it fails to account for causal priority, is not refuted by Hume. The objections of Myles Brand and Marshall Swain (Philosophical Studies, 1976) to my counterexample against Hume (Philosophical Studies, 1975) are ineffective. Their other objections to my criticisms of their argument against defining causation in terms of necessary and sufficient (...) conditions (Synthese, 1970) are also mostly ineffective. (shrink)

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice (...) environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business. (shrink)

School choice has lately risen to the top of the list of potential solutions to America's educational problems, particularly for the poor and the most disadvantaged members of society. Indeed, in the last few years several states have held referendums on the use of vouchers in private and parochial schools, and more recently, the Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of a scholarship program that uses vouchers issued to parents. While there has been much debate over the empirical and methodological aspects (...) of school choice policies, discussions related to the effects such policies may have on the nation's moral economy and civil society have been few and far between. School Choice, a collection of essays by leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, and theologians, redresses this situation by addressing the moral and normative side of school choice.The twelve essays, commissioned for a conference on school choice that took place at Boston College in 2001, are organized into four sections that consider the relationship of school choice to equality, moral pluralism, institutional ecology, and constitutionality. Each section consists of three essays followed by a critical response. The contributors are Patrick McKinley Brennan, Charles L. Glenn, Amy Gutmann, David Hollenbach, S. J., Meira Levinson, Sanford Levinson, Stephen Macedo, John T. McGreevy, Martha Minow, Richard J. Mouw, Joseph O'Keefe, S. J., Michael J. Perry, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Rosemary C. Salomone, Joseph P. Viteritti, Paul J. Weithman, and Alan Wolfe. (shrink)

Every day, in many situations, we use expressions which seem only vaguely to provide us with information. The weather forecaster tells us that "some showers are likely in Northern regions during the night", a statement which is vague with respect to number of showers, location, and time. Yet such messages are informative, and often it is not possible for the producer of the message to be more precise. A tutor tells his students that "only a few students fail their exams (...) outright". This does not give a precise incidence. Yet it might be equally misleading to do so. For example, to say that 12% failed outright last year says nothing about other years, while to say an average of 8% over the last five years says nothing about variability. We argue that a precise, numerical statement can be sometimes more misleading in reality than a vague statement. Many researchers in psychology have attempted to capture the meaning of quantities by relating them to scales of quantity. The book explores this idea in detail and shows with original studies how these expressions also serve to control attention and to convey information about the expectations held by those involved in the communication. The book works towards a psychological theory of the meaning of quantifiers and similarly vague terms. New links are drawn between formal theories of quantification and psychological experimentation. (shrink)

Since the publication of Between Facts and Norms, Habermas’s concept of communicative power has been the topic of significant discussion. This article contributes to this conversation by examining Habermas’s account of what makes communication powerful. I argue that Habermas’s conception of communicative power describes a nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of acting and being with others in language. This mode of engagement underwrites a conception of power that is structurally different from willing, one that builds meaningful worlds and (trans-)forms those engaging (...) in communicative procedures. In drawing out this aspect of Habermas’s conception, I show that he is not a rationalist and proceduralist whose account of communicative procedures protects decision-making from irrational aesthetic powers. Rather, he presents communication as a mimetic achievement, a set of aesthetic practices and experiences that affectively alter its participants. With this position, Habermas makes an important contribution to and not just against the analysis of the aesthetic dimensions of political life. In casting communication as a mimetic achievement, Habermas presents an account of how communication opens worlds and forms subjects. Yet since these aspects of communication arrive in linguistic form, he can also examine affective and aesthetic experiences within discursive procedures. We can understand world-opening and aesthetic (trans-)formation as an essential part of democratic politics while also identifying the perspectives and resources by which actors can reflect on and critically evaluate whether an opinion is justified or whether a political project is worth pursuing. (shrink)

A long history of research has revealed many neurophysiological changes and concomitant behavioral impacts of sleep deprivation, sleep restriction, and circadian rhythms. Little research, however, has been conducted in the area of computational cognitive modeling to understand the information processing mechanisms through which neurobehavioral factors operate to produce degradations in human performance. Our approach to understanding this relationship is to link predictions of overall cognitive functioning, or alertness, from existing biomathematical models to information processing parameters in a cognitive architecture, leveraging (...) the strengths from each to develop a more comprehensive explanation. The integration of these methodologies is used to account for changes in human performance on a sustained attention task across 88 h of total sleep deprivation. The integrated model captures changes due to time awake and circadian rhythms, and it also provides an account for underlying changes in the cognitive processes that give rise to those effects. The results show the potential for developing mechanistic accounts of how fatigue impacts cognition, and they illustrate the increased explanatory power that is possible by combining theoretical insights from multiple methodologies. (shrink)

Natural beauty has often been viewed as a somewhat vague and subjective matter. Even theorists who view disputes concerning the aesthetic value of artworks as involving correct and incorrect judgements have argued that, in many disputes concerning natural beauty, there are no correct or incorrect judgements. In this essay, I consider recent attempts to develop a more objectivist view of nature appreciation based on the role of scientific knowledge in such appreciation. In response to recent criticisms of this approach, I (...) argue that, when developed, it does provide a viable conception of objectivity for nature aesthetics. (shrink)

James D Marshall; Wittgenstein on Rules: implications for authority and discipline in education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May.

ABSTRACT After a brief review of environmental ethics this paper examines how terrestrial environmental values can be developed into policies to protect extraterrestrial environments. Shallow environmentalism, deep environmentalism and the libertarian extension of rights are compared and then applied to the environmental protection of extraterrestrial bodies. Some scientific background is given. The planet Mars is used as a test case from which an ethical argument emerges for the protection of environments beyond Earth. The argument is based on the necessity to (...) recognise the intrinsic value of all living species and natural environments. At present, the treatment of extraterrestrial environments by makers of space policy is ethically undernourished. This paper explains why such an attitude endangers those environments and calls for the policy‐makers to incorporate non‐anthropocentric ethics into extraterrestrial environmental policy. (shrink)

James D Marshall; Wittgenstein on Rules: implications for authority and discipline in education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May.

The evolutionary theory of artefact proper function holds that an artefact’s proper function is that effect which explains the reproduction of past instances of the artefact type. This theory has many sources but received its clearest presentation in Beth Preston’s essay “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon?”. More recently, Preston has raised an objection to the theory, based on the phenomenon of ‘phantom functions’: these are functions that an artefact type is unable to perform, but which nonetheless apparently constitute (...) its proper function. Deflecting qi energy, for example, is the proper function of feng shui mirrors, even though no feng shui mirror is able to do this. Preston concludes that the existence of phantom functions refutes the evolutionary theory of artefact proper function. In this paper, the evolutionary theory is defended, by arguing that it can adequately account for phantom function cases. (shrink)

Humans use their spatial information processing abilities flexibly to facilitate problem solving and decision making in a variety of tasks. This article explores the question of whether a general strategy can be adapted for performing two different spatial orientation tasks by testing the predictions of a computational cognitive model. Human performance was measured on an orientation task requiring participants to identify the location of a target either on a map (find‐on‐map) or within an egocentric view of a space (find‐in‐scene). A (...) general strategy instantiated in a computational cognitive model of the find‐on‐map task, based on the results from Gunzelmann and Anderson (2006), was adapted to perform both tasks and used to generate performance predictions for a new study. The qualitative fit of the model to the human data supports the view that participants were able to tailor a general strategy to the requirements of particular spatial tasks. The quantitative differences between the predictions of the model and the performance of human participants in the new experiment expose individual differences in sample populations. The model provides a means of accounting for those differences and a framework for understanding how human spatial abilities are applied to naturalistic spatial tasks that involve reasoning with maps. (shrink)

The exportation of Western biomedicine throughout the world has not resulted in a systematic homogenization of scientific ideology but rather in the proliferation of many forms and practices of biomedicine. Similarly, in the last decade, bioethics has become increasingly an international enterprise. Although there may be consensus regarding the inherent value of ethical discourse as it relates to health and medical care, there are disagreements about the nature and parameters of medical morality. This lack of consensus exists because our beliefs (...) about morality are culturally constituted, embedded in social, religious, and political ideologies that influence particular individuals and communities at specific historical moments. (shrink)

Wegner and colleagues have offered an explanation of the sense of agency over one’s bodily actions. If the orthodox view is correct and there is a sense of agency deficit associated with delusions of alien control, then Wegner and colleagues’ model ought to extend to an explanation of this deficit. Data from intentional binding studies opens up the possibility that an abnormality in representing the timing of mental events leads to a violation of the principle of priority in those suffering (...) from delusions of alien control. However, the model ultimately fails as it is unable to accommodate action monitoring deficits associated with delusions of alien control, in particular the theory of mind deficiencies predicted by such accounts have not materialised. There are theory of mind problems associated with schizophrenia but they are not associated with delusions of alien control. Such accounts thereby fail to adequately explain delusions of alien control. (shrink)

The theory presented in my book, Natural Beauty , is syncretic in that it denies the exclusivity of any one model of aesthetic appreciation of natural objects and instead insists: (1) that there is a tight, reciprocating connection between talents of perception that we develop in relation to arts and to natural objects; and (2) that the appreciation of natural beauty is intimately connected to the appreciation of other social values, including ethical values. In this paper, I respond to criticisms (...) of my syncretic approach---chiefly that it fails to reconcile objective and subjective elements in aesthetic judgment, that it fails to marshal its many modes of judgment into rational consistency, and that it fails to take proper stock of the role of scientific knowledge in these judgments---offered by Arnold Berleant, Stephanie Ross, and Glenn Parsons. (shrink)

Aesthetic preservation is the idea of sparing natural areas from development because of their aesthetic value. In this article I discuss a problem for aesthetic preservation that I call the ‘hidden gems problem’: in certain cases, the natural area under consideration is so remote and/or fragile that few people can actually experience it. In these cases, it becomes unclear how nature's aesthetic value can justify its preservation when development promises practical human benefits. After rejecting some potential responses to the hidden (...) gems problem, I offer a different solution. I argue that we have an aesthetic reason to preserve nature's hidden gems because they are required to produce ‘true judges’ of aesthetic value, who are capable of improving the general quality of taste for landscape. I develop this argument using the example of recent preservationist efforts to save the isolated landscape of Sable Island, Nova Scotia. (shrink)

The propagation of errors in physics research is studied, with particular attention being paid to the effectiveness of the erratum in avoiding error propagation. We study the citation history of 17 physics papers which have significant errata associated with them. It would appear that the existence of an erratum does not significantly decrease the frequency with which a paper is cited and in most cases the erratum isnot cited along with the original paper. The authors comment on implications for the (...) responsibilities of authors. (shrink)

This article investigates the forms of respect and responsiveness that must be present in the process of practical reason. Drawing upon Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theory and his incidental remarks about aesthetics, I identify two modes of respect. The first is the mutual respect and equality that emerges in the process of coming to agreement on proposed norms; the second is the call to infinite responsibility that emerges in opening to the transcendent character of others. However, Habermas makes an error in (...) treating these two types of response as appropriate for different classes of beings when he suggests that mutual respect is appropriate for humans, but asymmetry is appropriate when humans deal with animals or others who are incapable of communicative action. Rather, drawing upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that both responses are always present in all encounters with the world. There is therefore an aporia at the heart of the process of practical reason: the responsiveness required in the exercise of practical reason demands that participants be open not just to another's opinions and claims, but also to precisely that which is not understood, which entails the idea of infinite responsibility. It is the movement between these orientations that enacts the main features of ethical life. (shrink)

This article presents an approach to understanding human spatial competence that focuses on the representations and processes of spatial cognition and how they are integrated with cognition more generally. The foundational theoretical argument for this research is that spatial information processing is central to cognition more generally, in the sense that it is brought to bear ubiquitously to improve the adaptivity and effectiveness of perception, cognitive processing, and motor action. We describe research spanning multiple levels of complexity to understand both (...) the detailed mechanisms of spatial cognition, and how they are utilized in complex, naturalistic tasks. In the process, we discuss the critical role of cognitive architectures in developing a consistent account that spans this breadth, and we note some areas in which the current version of a popular architecture, ACT-R, may need to be augmented. Finally, we suggest a framework for understanding the representations and processes of spatial competence and their role in human cognition generally. (shrink)

This article explores how people can come to experience constitutional conversations as meaningful. To this end, I reinterpret Habermas’s account of deliberative constitutionalism. For Habermas, constitutional discourses are not only rational procedures of opinion- and will-formation, but also sites at which a “world” gets generated. Deliberative politics, therefore, involves unruly and uncontrollable efforts to solicit others into the roles, orientations, and principles of constitutional practices. The result is a novel account of the relationship between constitutional procedures and the “anarchistic” politics (...) that radical democrats celebrate. Ungovernable inventions of and affective identifications with roles, images, and peoples occur within articulate forms, including constitutional procedures. These aspects of Habermas’s thought push past binary oppositions between legitimate constitutional procedure and radical democratic uprisings. Habermas provides a framework for examining the forms of attentiveness by which actors can come to experience constitutional rules, roles, principles, and procedures as part of their world. (shrink)

While most people may initially agree that justice is fairness, as an evangelical Protestant I argue that, for many religious comprehensive doctrines, the Rawlsean model does not possess the resources necessary to sustain tolerance in moral decision making. The weakness of Rawls's model centers on the reasonable priority of convictions that arise from private comprehensive doctrines. To attain a free and pluralistic society, people need resources sufficient to provide reasons to tolerate actions that are otherwise intolerable. In addition to arguing (...) for the deficiency of the Rawlsean political model, I sketch out a preliminary model of ambassadorship that offers religious communities, and in particular Protestant evangelicals, the necessary resources to engage the broader society tolerantly while maintaining their religious convictions. As a citizen of the church and a member of another kingdom, Christians serve as ambassadors to those who are not of the heavenly kingdom. I take this model to be more ambitious than that of a sojourner who lives in the land but is isolated as much as possible from society, while more modest than that of reconstructionists who seek to implement their own sacred law on all others. (shrink)

The idea that there are some things which we should not talk about is most commonly dealt with in the context of debates about rights to free speech, and other contexts in which the value of talking is typically understood in instrumental terms. This paper explores ways of grounding that idea which do not depend upon instrumental values, in particular in the context of self-revelatory and confessional talk.

The human dimension of nosocomial wound infection: a study in liminalityNosocomial wound infection is a disease that has to date been primarily understood through the language of science and biomedicine. This paper reports on findings from a sociological, interpretive study that focused on the experiential dimension of this phenomenon. The illness experience of a nosocomial wound infection is examined within a cultural milieu that values the smooth, untroubled body and alternatively ascribes cultural meaning to a body that has a definable (...) illness. Within this context the person with a chronic wound from nosocomial infection defies normative categorisation and is thus situated outside the patterning of society. The human dimension of nosocomial wound infection includes the private, existential and embodied aspects of living with a chronic, infected wound. This report indicates that the experiential dimension is characterised by an embodied state of liminality. People with this illness live an indeterminate existence that is in‐between health and illness, cure and disease. As such they have no recognised place in the medical or social world. (shrink)