Incomplete information is a commonly cited barrier to the adoption of new innovations. We present a decision-making experiment, conducted with farmers in the field, that explores the extent to which information which reduces ambiguity may be provided as a public good. In the experiment, participants make a series of decisions between a risky gamble and an ambiguous gamble. An initial private decision is followed by second choice in which participants know that their chosen gambles and outcomes will be publicly but (...) anonymously revealed. Selection of the ambiguous option in this decision thus provide public good information which can be used to update beliefs about the ambiguous gamble. After the public revelation, participants make one final choice between the two options which we use to assess learning. We also test communication as a mechanism to increase provision of the public good. We find evidence that people with preference to avoid ambiguity contribute to public good information while risk averse people free ride. Communication does not affect the overall public good provision, either in a positive or negative direction. Finally, we find that people draw appropriate inference from the information that the public good provides. We relate our findings to the issue of new technology adoption in agriculture which is of particular importance for our participants. (shrink)

Against the background of the Deweyan tradition of Democracy and Education, we discuss problems of complexity and reductionism in education and educational philosophy. First, we investigate some of Dewey’s own criticisms of reductionist tendencies in the educational traditions, theories, and practices of his time. Secondly, we explore some important cases of reductionism in the educational debates of our own day and argue that a similar criticism in behalf of democracy and education is appropriate and can easily be based on Deweyan (...) terms. Thirdly, we draw some more general conclusions about complexity and reductionism as challenges for democracy and education. Among other things, we argue that powerful social tendencies of capitalist competition and social Darwinism support reductionisms in education and put the democratic project at risk. The tensional relation between democracy and capitalism constitutes a major challenge for educational philosophy in our own time as much as in Dewey’s. (shrink)

Conventional discussion of research methodology contrast two approaches, the quantitative and the qualitative, presented as collectively exhaustive. But if qualitative is taken as the understanding of lifeworlds, the two approaches between them cover only a tiny fraction of research methodologies; and the quantitative, taken as the routine application to controlled experiments of frequentist statistics by way of the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing Procedure, is seriously flawed. It is contrary to the advice both of Fisher and of Neyman and Pearson, the (...) two sources from which it is drawn. (shrink)

This study examines the contestability of “relevance” as an abstract construction with no fixed meaning when applied, and questions its usage in the research quality debate. It finds that different research agendas and approaches have their own idiosyncratic logic and that any logic has its own criteria for assessing quality which cannot be applied to assess the quality of others. This is illustrated by delineating practitioner-led research from academic-led research and by comparing and contrasting research perspectives as examples. The research (...) quality debate becomes meaningless when it is limited to a singular research agenda or approach as in practice these are invariably combined. Having said this, however, every agenda and approach can be argued to be legitimate as potentially each can find what otherwise cannot be noticed. As a result, this study challenges the conventional unitarist wisdom that conceptualises knowledge as commodity, and suggests instead that heterogeneity, linked to tolerance and relative independence of means and mind, free from the control or influence of others to enable critical distance from context and status quo and facilitate judgement, is the key to those seeking a meaningful research quality debate that acknowledges tolerance of the diversity of knowledge, difference, contestation and struggle. Although such heterogeneity may at first appear to add confusion rather than clarity, without first looking at this heterogeneity it is not possible to develop a dialogue, in the context of the present neo-liberal post-political drift that emphasises consensus, the annulment of dissensus and diverts attention from relationships of power, through which a positive contribution can be made to the research quality debate. (shrink)

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

A controversy rages over the question of how should controversial topics be taught. Recent work has advanced the “epistemic criterion” as the resolution to this controversy. According to the epistemic criterion, a matter should be taught as controversial when contrary views can be entertained on the matter without the views being contrary to reason. When an issue is noncontroversial, according to the epistemic criterion, the correct position can be taught “directively,” with the teacher endorsing that position. When there is a (...) legitimate controversy, the view should be taught “nondirectively,” with the teacher remaining neutral. In response, Bryan Warnick and Spencer Smith argue that the proponents of the epistemic criterion fail to recognize the multidimensional nature of what it means to learn to be rational. Recognizing this complexity undermines the link between the epistemic status of the controversy and directiveness of one's teaching, suggesting more flexibility in how teachers approach controversial issues. It also implies the need for a new category of teaching, which Warnick and Smith call “soft-directive” teaching. (shrink)

Trois poèmes en résonance avec ce mot « autislangue », une « langue que nous parlons, nous qui pouvons parler sans sons », et que lae militanz pour la neurodiversité Jim Sinclair a nommé dans le 1 er numéro de Our Voice: The Newsletter of Autism Network International.

Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim had a major impact on aesthetics and the philosophy of art when it was first published in 1968. Of the arguments offered in response to Wollheim’s essay, Jerrold Levinson’s intentional-historical theory of art has been one of the most enduring. Levinson was influenced by three key sections of Wollheim’s enquiry: Section 40, which considers the claim that works of art fall under a concept of art, or that we are disposed to regard certain (...) things as works of art; and Sections 60 and 61, which deal with art as a historical phenomenon, and problems arising from its identification and interpretation. To date, these claims have been raised as points of contention in the philosophy of art. This paper takes a different perspective. Wollheim’s understanding of art’s historicity draws explicitly on the literature of theoretical art history. Via Wollheim, old art-historical problems will reappear as new philosophical questions. (shrink)

This article proposes an approach to educational distribution that attempts to minimise enduring tensions among conflicting values. At the foundation of this approach is a threshold of educational adequacy based on what is needed for citizens to participate in a democratic society. This threshold is justified because it minimises conflict with parental rights and because it better manages ‘the bottomless pit’ problem of educational distribution. This threshold is then modified to stipulate that, after the threshold has been reached, public resources (...) should be distributed equally across students from all backgrounds. While this modification is essential to sending messages of equal citizenship, it also leaves a ‘moral residue’ because it allows wealthy parents to invest greater private resources in their children, thus preserving their children's competitive advantage. Minimising this harm requires policy mechanisms outside of schools that more aggressively break the link between educational outcomes, success in market competition, and social goods. Something ‘external’ to educational institutions is necessary, then, for the achievement of educational justice. (shrink)

In the United States, targeted school shootings have become a distinct genre of violence. In this essay, Bryan Warnick, Sang Hyun Kim, and Shannon Robinson examine the social meanings that exist in American society that might contribute to this phenomenon, focusing on the question: “Why are schools conceptualized as appropriate places to enact this form of gun violence?” The authors analyze the social meaning of American schooling by using empirical data, everyday observations, films, and poetry, and then connect these (...) points of meaning to stories of individual school shooters. Through this analysis, three aspects of school stand out. First, schools are places of both real and symbolic violence, where force and power often rule the day. Second, schools are places connected to expectations of hope and refuge, friendship and romance, and when these expectations are not met, bitter resentment flows against schools. Third, suburban schools are seen as places of expressive individualism, which, in rare cases, is manifest in terms of “expressive violence.” Together, these points of meaning can make schools, for some youth, seem like appropriate places to express violent intentions. The essay concludes by speculating about how this analysis can be applied to prevent school shootings. (shrink)

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. (...) This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it i... (shrink)

This article reconstructs R. S. Peters' underlying theory of ritual in education, highlighting his proposed link between ritual and the imitation of teachers. Rituals set the stage for the imitation of teachers and they invite students to experience practices whose value is not easily discernable from the outside. For Peters, rituals facilitate the transmission of values across time, create unity in schools, and affirm authority relations. There is a tension, however, between this view of ritual and imitation, on the one (...) hand, and Peters' views of liberal education and the ‘criteria of an educational process’, on the other. This article suggests how the processes of ritual and imitation can be reconciled with liberal education, and it identifies school rampage shootings as an area in which Peters' work on ritual might prove useful. (shrink)

In this essay Bryan Warnick examines two recent analyses of the practice of paying students for grades, with a focus on educational justice. Philosopher Derrick Darby argues against cash-for-grades programs on the grounds that such programs leave educational inequality intact. Warnick contends that Darby's arguments are incomplete. Increasing levels of educational “adequacy” is morally desirable, Warnick argues, even if inequality remains unchanged. There is also an obligation to engage in “localized practice reforms” that benefit small groups of (...) disadvantaged students, even if such reforms do not change the structural problems that lead to inequality. At the same time, engaging in a close analysis of “cash” as an incentive does reveal specific reasons why the inequality that persists under cash-for-grades might be particularly troublesome. In contrast to Darby, Alexander Sidorkin argues that paying students for learning is not only allowed, but ethically obligatory. Schooling, for Sidorkin, is a form of labor and labor demands fair compensation. Warnick challenges the idea that schooling is a form of exploited labor by looking across a range of issues, including the nonpecuniary benefits of schooling. At the same time, it seems that schooling could become a form of exploited labor, given current trends. Overall, the justice of cash incentive programs remains an open question. The essay concludes with a discussion about how we can move forward with a philosophical analysis of cash-for-grades programs. (shrink)

If we are to posit, as do many liberal theorists, that autonomy is an educational goal that the state should endorse across cultural difference, key questions remain: What type of autonomy should we strive for, exactly, and how should this goal be achieved? Many liberal philosophers of education have argued that autonomy should enable cultural choice and that the development of autonomy requires students to be exposed to different beliefs and traditions. Shelley Burtt has challenged this dominant position, however, insisting (...) that autonomy (properly understood) can be developed within a “comprehensive education” that does not seek to sympathetically expose students to cultural difference. In this essay, Bryan Warnick responds that Burtt's arguments are inconsistent and lack cultural imagination, and that her underlying concept of autonomy is inadequate, primarily because it lacks a compelling picture of cultural self-criticism. There is a lack of appreciation, he argues, for how frameworks of cultural comparison are necessary in the development of this self-criticism. At the same time, Warnick argues that there is much to be learned from Burtt's analysis about the tough choices that need to be made as liberals seek to champion autonomy as an educational end across cultural difference. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

Nurses working in outreach capacities frequently encounter disaffiliated or ‘hard to reach’ populations, such as those experiencing homelessness, those who use substances, and those with mental health concerns. Despite best efforts, nurses regularly fail to find meaningful engagement with these populations. Mobilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will critically examine conventional outreach nursing practices as rooted in the royal science of psychiatry, which many ‘survivors’ of psychiatric interventions reject. The field of Mad Studies offers an understanding of (...) patient resistance to outreach nursing interventions. Delueze and Guattari's concepts of packs and sorcerers provide a framework to envision alternative nursing practices as a form of resistance and creativity, where new alliances may be formed outside the coercive confines of traditional practices. In response to patient resistance, outreach nurses themselves must assemble packs and engage in acts of sorcery. (shrink)

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing what (...) is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. (shrink)

This paper suggests and discusses an answer to the following question: What distinguishes causal from non-causal or coincidental co-occurrences? The answer derives from Elizabeth Anscombe’s idea that causality is a highly abstract concept whose meaning derives from our understanding of specific causally productive activities, and from her rejection of the assumption that causality can be informatively understood in terms of actual or counterfactual regularities.Keywords: Elizabeth Anscombe; Causality; Explanation; Inhibition.

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

In this essay Bryan Warnick explores how rights to religious expression should be understood for students in public schools. Warnick frames student religious rights as a debate between the conflicting values associated with the Free Exercise Clause and the values associated with the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution. He then asks how the special characteristics of the school environment should guide us in prioritizing those values. The overall weight of the considerations, particularly concerns about civic education, (...) leads to a two-pronged approach to religious rights. The first prong involves a robust protection of student religious exercise; the second involves an equally robust regime of school disassociation from student religious exercises. (shrink)

It is likely that the process of global climate change will continue to accelerate. There is a lack of political will to confront the problem and the consequences for humanity — including widespread suffering and institutional destabilization — will be disastrous. How should educators respond to a catastrophic future? Here, Bryan Warnick argues that two criteria should guide the educational response. The response should not (1) undermine efforts to find an “unprecedented solution” to climate change, or (2) leave students (...) unprepared to adapt to a global catastrophe. Using these criteria, he analyzes several possible ways to help students adapt to disaster, including teaching survivalism, encouraging forms of emotional resilience (like the Stoic apatheia), and helping students to appreciate the current moment. These adaptive responses seem to violate the first criterion. At the same time, an educational response focused entirely on climate activism seems to violate the second criterion. Warnick ends by exploring ways to accommodate the need for both adaptation and social engagement, finding promise in the idea of a tragic activism. (shrink)

In this essay, Jim Garrison explores the emerging scholarship establishing a Hegelian continuity in John Dewey’s thought from his earliest publications to the work published in the last decade of his life. The primary goals of this study are, first, to introduce this new scholarship to philosophers of education and, second, to extend this analysis to new domains, including Dewey’s theory of inquiry, universals, and creative action. Ultimately, Garrison’s analysis also refutes the traditional account that claims that William James converted (...) Dewey from Hegelian idealism, after which Charles Sanders Peirce inspired him to rebuild his instrumentalism along radically different lines. (shrink)

This paper examines the discrepancy between the attitudes of many historians of mathematics to sixteenth-century geometry and those of museum curators and others interested in practical mathematics and in instruments. It argues for the need to treat past mathematical practice, not in relation to timeless criteria of mathematical worth, but according to the agenda of the period. Three examples of geometrical activity are used to illustrate this, and two particular contexts are presented in which mathematical practice localised in the sixteenth (...) century takes on a special historical significance. (shrink)

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)

In his 1993 article George Bealer offers three separate arguments that are directed against the internal coherence of empiricism, specifically Quine’s version of empiricism. In doing so, Bealer identifies three fundamental principles of Quine’s empiricism. First, the principle of empiricism states that.

This paper provides an account of the development of the logos concept in Heidegger’s writings on language and examines the implications of logos for a philosophy of language. In Being and Time/ Heidegger described logos as prelanguage, a preliminary perception of the world which often finds expression in verbal communication. This view is made clear by Heidegger's account of the act of speaking in which formless prior understanding (logos) is shaped into verbal expression. Heidegger's analysis of the communicative act in (...) Being and Time viewed logos as one of the ways in which man can experience his world. In his later writings, however, logos is the path to Being. Language precedes man and is the "house of Being." By this Heidegger means that man lives in language which is the major force in the creation of his world. Heidegger's view of language, then, is a protest against the modern tendency to view language as a mere tool, thereby stripping it of its value and connotative dimensions. (shrink)

Using Jim Woodward's Counterfactual Dependency account as an example, I argue that causal claims about indeterministic systems cannot be satisfactorily analysed as including counterfactual conditionals among their truth conditions because the counterfactuals such accounts must appeal to need not have truth values. Where this happens, counterfactual analyses transform true causal claims into expressions which are not true.

How best to introduce philosophical ideas? Is the best and only way by studying the history of philosophy and its rational arguments and discussions? But can literature, usually hived off from philosophy, be used instead and can this be as effective as rational argument? This paper explores these questions. First it considers a text which introduces philosophy through the analysis of literature, in particular James Joyce's ‘Araby’, arguing that the traditional analytic approach employed by the text, by concentrating on epistemology, (...) obscures other philosophical insights offered by Joyce. It then turns to French philosophy and literature and suggests that Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus by ‘blurring’ the analytic distinction between philosophy and literature have much to offer to the grasping and understanding of philosophical ideas and principles. (shrink)

Do fetuses have a right to life in virtue of the fact that they are potential adult human beings? I take the claim that the fetus is a potential adult human being to come to this: if the fetus grows normally there will be an adult human animal that was once the fetus. Does this fact ground a claim to our care and protection? A great deal hangs on the answer to this question. The actual mental and physical capacities of (...) a human fetus are inferior to those of adult creatures generally thought to lack a serious right to life, and the mere fact that a fetus belongs to our species in particular seems morally irrelevant. Consequently, a strong fetal claim to protection rises or falls with the appeal to the fetus's potentiality, for nothing else can justify it. (shrink)

This paper side-steps the question of whether ‘the’ concept of sport exists, or can be usefully analysed. Instead, I try to explain the much more modest aim of exhibition-analysis, which is to seek a description of an actually existing example of some concept of sport internal to a normative position. My example is that of Olympic-sport. I try to set out its logically necessary conditions, which of course are conditioned by its context within a theory that emphasises the values of (...) formal competition, citius-altius-fortius, and excellence in contest, as well as rule-based procedural values related to fairness, justice and equality. In so doing, I readily accept that other kinds of sport can be similarly analysed, and I do not press the value claims of Olympic-sport. Instead, I try to show how Olympic-sport, properly construed, can accommodate the concerns of my critics with regard to sport’s play and game-like characteristics. (shrink)

Frege claims that the laws of logic are characterized by their “generality,” but it is hard to see how this could identify a special feature of those laws. I argue that we must understand this talk of generality in normative terms, but that what Frege says provides a normative demarcation of the logical laws only once we connect it with his thinking about truth and science. He means to be identifying the laws of logic as those that appear in every (...) one of the scientific systems whose construction is the ultimate aim of science, and in which all truths have a place. Though an account of logic in terms of scientific systems might seem hopelessly antiquated, I argue that it is not: a basically Fregean account of the nature of logic still looks quite promising. (shrink)

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, “what makes a person the same over time?” as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, following Strohminger & Nichols (2014), has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a critique by (...) Starmans & Bloom (2018) suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone’s morality or memories influence perceptions of identity change, and perceptions of moral duties towards the target of the change. We present participants with a classic ‘body switch’ thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity. (shrink)