Case-based instruction has been regarded by many as a viable alternative to traditional lecture-based education and training. However, little is known about how case-based training techniques impact training effectiveness. This study examined the effects of two such techniques: (a) presentation of alternative outcome scenarios to a case, and (b) conducting a structured outcome evaluation. Consistent with the hypotheses, results indicate that presentation of alternative outcome scenarios reduced knowledge acquisition, reduced sensemaking and ethical decision-making strategy use, and reduced decision ethicality. Conducting (...) a structured outcome evaluation had no impact on these outcomes. Results indicate that those who use case-based instruction should take care to use clear, less complex cases with only a singular outcome if they are seeking these types of outcomes. (shrink)

Case-based reasoning has long been used to facilitate instructional effectiveness. Although much remains to be known concerning the most beneficial way to present case material, recent literature suggests that simplifying case material is favorable. Accordingly, the current study manipulated two instructional techniques, incremental case presentation and forecasting outcomes, in a training environment in an attempt to better understand the utility of simplified versus complicated case presentation for learning. Findings suggest that pairing these two cognitively demanding techniques reduces satisfaction and detracts (...) from the effectiveness of the learning approach. Implications regarding the use of instructional techniques in training programs are discussed. (shrink)

Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what it is to (...) be a mental action in terms of intentional action. Section 3 argues that the fact that we can perform mental actions has some striking consequences concerning mental content. Section 4 shows how mental action helps to explain some important facts about self-knowledge and the normativity of thought. The conclusion mentions two further fruitful avenues for philosophical research on mental action. (shrink)

This paper is a report on the viability, both technical and ethical, of negative emissions technologies (NETs) in climate change mitigation. Given present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, NETs are almost certainly required in order to avoid the most serious consequences of anthropogenic carbonization. Critics argue that we should not rely on the promise of future NETs because that could be taken as an excuse to avoid decarbonization in the near term. The concern is genuine, but if the prima facie (...) arguments for drawing down carbon as soon as possible are correct, ways must be found to counter the incentives to defer the immediate deployment of NETs and other forms of mitigation. A policy instrument is sketched which could help accomplish that task. (shrink)

Being Known is a response to a philosophical challenge which arises for every area of thought: to reconcile a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of statements in a given area with a credible account of how we can know those statements. Christopher Peacocke presents a framework for addressing the challenge, a framework which links both the theory of knowledge and the theory of truth with the theory of concept-possession.

Christopher Peacocke presents a new theory of subjects of consciousness, together with a theory of the nature of first person representation. He identifies three sorts of self-consciousness--perspectival, reflective, and interpersonal--and argues that they are key to explaining features of our knowledge, social relations, and emotional lives.

There is a set of principles, the Principles of Possibility, that constrains whether a description picks out a genuinely possible world. To grasp the concept of metaphysical necessity is to have tacit knowledge of this set of Principles and to apply them in evaluating modal statements and thoughts. For a statement to be necessary is for it to hold in all descriptions that are not excluded as possible by the principles of possibility. This integrates the metaphysics and epistemology of necessity, (...) without collapsing into mind‐dependence and without a commitment to modal realism. The treatment of the metaphysics validates the modal systems T and S4. (shrink)

Is the human species itself the ultimate Untenable Absurdity? This paper will be a serious (for which I apologize) but rambling philosophical reflection on the grim prospects for our species in the face of peak oil, climate change, warfare, overpopulation, and other looming ecological catastrophes.

Philosophers from Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein to the recent realists and antirealists have sought to answer the question, What are concepts? This book provides a detailed, systematic, and accessible introduction to an original philosophical theory of concepts that Christopher Peacocke has developed in recent years to explain facts about the nature of thought, including its systematic character, its relations to truth and reference, and its normative dimension. Particular concepts are also treated within the general framework: perceptual concepts, logical concepts, and (...) the concept of belief are discussed in detail. The general theory is further applied in answering the question of how the ontology of concepts can be of use in classifying mental states, and in discussing the proper relation between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts. Finally, the theory of concepts is used to motivate a nonverificationist theory of the limits of intelligible thought. Peacocke treats content as broad rather than narrow, and his account is nonreductive and non-Quinean. Yet Peacocke also argues for an interactive relationship between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, and he plots many connections with work in cognitive psychology. (shrink)

The aesthetic value of an object is fully grounded in the distinctive value of the proper experience of that object.

Basic actions are those intentional actions performed not by doing any other kind of thing intentionally. Complex actions involve doing one kind of thing intentionally by doing another kind of thing intentionally. There are both basic and complex mental actions. Some complex mental actions have a striking feature that has not been previously discussed: they have several distinct contents at once. This chapter introduces and explains this feature, here called “content plurality.” This chapter also argues for the philosophical significance of (...) this feature. The existence of content plurality offers a new explanation of transparent self-knowledge and suggests a new theory of inference. It also opens up a new conception of the relation between decisions to act and judgments about what ought to be done. (shrink)

I explore the application of the “no-go” theorems of quantum mechanics to the problem of the openness of the future. The notion of fatalism can be made precise if we think of it as a claim that the future has a Boolean property structure. However, if this is correct, then it may be the case that by the “no-go” theorems of quantum mechanics the future must be at least partially open in the precise sense that there cannot be a fact (...) of the matter at a given time about some events at later times. (shrink)

George Bernard Shaw once fancied a dramatic rebuke against the garish religiosity of Lourdes: “I should like to bring a huge procession of atheists and unite myself to Jane Harrison by civil regist...

The introduction introduces the subject matter and the main argument of The Realm of Reason and situates the work in relation to a number of the author's previous works.

Judgement, perception, and other mental states and events have a minimal objectivity in this sense: making the judgement or being in the mental state does not in general thereby make the judgement correct or make the perception veridical. I offer an explanation of this minimal objectivity by developing a form of constitutive transcendental argument. The argument appeals to the proper individuation of the content of judgements and perceptions. In the case of the conceptual content of judgements, concepts are individuated by (...) their fundamental reference rules. Properly developed, this resource can be used against various forms of idealism, and to defend a conception of transcendental arguments that presupposes neither verificationism nor transcendental idealism. The article contrasts its approach with other recent transcendental treatments. It also addresses the relation between its argument and Principles of Significance. I close with a discussion of the right way of handling the extreme generality necessarily involved in transcendental reasoning. (shrink)

A stellar line-up of leading philosophers from around the world offer new treatments of a topic which has long been central to philosophical debate, and in ...

In his fascinating new book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen endorses an experiential requirement on aesthetic judgment: apt aesthetic judgment requires phenomenal experience. His own aesthetics of agency captures three phenomenally manifest and aesthetically significant harmonies (and corresponding disharmonies). But his view can be significantly extended to capture much more of the rich texture of human agency. In this discussion, I argue that emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and affordances all can be phenomenally experienced as aspects of agency, and (...) that each has genuine aesthetic significance. (shrink)

Are human beings motivated exclusively by self-interest? The orthodox theory of rational choice in economics thinks that they are. Amartya Sen disagrees, and his concept commitment is central to his vision of an alternative to mainstream rational choice theory. This book examines commitment as it has evolved in Sen's critique of orthodox rational choice theory. The in-depth focus on commitment reveals subtleties in the concept itself as well as in its relationships with other concepts which Sen develops in his critique (...) of rational choice theory, for example preference, sympathy, weakness of will, agency, personhood, social norms, rights, self-welfare goal and self-goal choice. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of commitment and offers novel interpretations of the term as a way of strengthening its plausibility. Broadly in support of Sen's conceptualization of rational choice, the book nevertheless reveals ambiguities and weaknesses in Sen's conceptual framework, and it reformulates Sen's concepts when doing so strengthens the claims he makes. The book also engages with critics of Sen and argues for the importance of commitment as a component in the theory of rational choice. (shrink)

The question must arise whether a doctrine which is attributed to all of Quine, Putnam, Davidson, Rorty, Gadamer, and Heidegger is possibly a doctrine which comes in more than one version. Even the most ardent taxonomist is likely to draw back from classifying the various actual and possible positions which emerge from the very tangled history of recent discussions of holism. This chapter approaches the matter by addressing a series of questions, starting with those which are most likely to arise (...) in the mind of those philosophers who regard holism with a mixture of fascination and suspicion. It shows whether the Duhem‐Quine Thesis true and it supports meaning holism if it is true. The rational revisability of statements has loomed large in discussions of holism. It is plausible that semantic values are assigned to expressions in such a way that canonical methods involving those expressions are always truth‐preserving. (shrink)

Introduction This book is about the nature of the content of psychological states. Examples of psychological states with content are: believing today is a ...

Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model (...) of intentional judgment does not stand in tension with the fact that judgment is causally regulated for truth, and that it is correct only if it is true. On the contrary, the structure of intentional action explains how an intentional judgment has these features. An extended example is developed, and sufficient conditions on intentional judgment are laid out. (shrink)

Tyler Burge, Christopher Peacocke; Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 117–158, h.