The place of play in the education of young children has been the focus of much interest in the past. But the findings from this research project demonstrate that there remains a significant amount of confusion about the role that play has in young children's education. In particular we found that there is a clear distinction between the rhetoric and reality of play in the reception class. Further, there was evidence of real anguish for some early years workers who were (...) failing to offer the play activities that they knew should be provided. These findings are particularly interesting at present, since the debate on the role of play has once again emerged as fundamental in the attempt to define a curriculum appropriate to the needs of the 3-6 year olds who, from the year 2000, will be required to work within the highly contentious Foundation Stage of the National Curriculum. (shrink)

Roderick Chisholm has proposed a novel theory of reference and belief involving the undefined notion of directly attributing a property. He uses direct attribution to account for Castañeda’s “he, himself” puzzle and for beliefs de re. He affirms as an axiom of his theory principle P1: if x directly attributes z to y, then x is identical to y. I shall argue that principle P1 is defective in that it prevents the identification of x with y and thus renders Chisholm’s (...) theory incapable of expressing a wide range of psychological phenomena. Thus the theory is an inadequate model of psychological reality. (shrink)