It is easy to create classroom discipline problems. By following the ten simple rules listed below you should be able to substantially improve your skill at this popular teacher pastime.

Have you noticed that kids drop everything when T.V. commercials come on? Action ceases, conversations subside; I have even seen food fall from kids' immobilized lips. Isn't it interesting how kids can forget what we taught them yesterday, but months or even years later can remember "Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun" or how to spell relief? Wouldn't it be great if they would pay teachers the attention they give commercials?

"OLD TESTS ARE BEST FORGOTTEN!" Ay least that is what most students believe. "You finish your test, your teacher 'gives' you your grade and you'll never have to remember that stuff again!" It's too bad that students regard tests to narrowly. But aren't such attitudes cultivated by the popular treatment of tests as ends in themselves? For example, when is the last time you studied the traffic safety rules for your state? Probably it was thefirst time you studied them in (...) preparation for your driver's license exam. When you passed the test, did you seek out the correct answers to the ones you missed? Probably not; it would have seemed unnecessary, since you "passed." Ever wonder about the questions that surgeons or airplane pilots missed, but failed to inquire about afterwards? (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an important and underappreciated phenomenon associated with epistemic expressions — a phenomenon that we call (...) reversibility. We argue that the invariantist account of disagreement is incompatible with reversibility, and we go on to show that reversible sentences cast doubt on the putative data about disagreement, even without assuming invariantism. Our argument therefore undermines much of the motivation for invariantism, and provides a new source for constraints on the proper explanation of purported data about disagreement. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 31-32.

Believing that traditional Christian theism implies there is something epistemically wrong with religious unbelief, I examine John Calvin’s claim that everybody would believe in God if it weren’t for sin. I show why this claim ought to be more common than it is; develop it in terms of our naturally having certain reliable epistemic sets; utilize that development to specify exactly what is wrong with unbelief; and then argue that even unbelievers have some reason to think it is true.

To be an effective teacher, a combination of specific professional skills and psychological attributes are required. With increasingly fluid employment conditions, particularly in the international context, recruiters and schools are under considerable pressure to quickly differentiate candidates and make successful placements, which involves more than just determining if a candidate holds an appropriate qualification. Therefore, the aim of this cross-sectional study was to measure theoretically and empirically valuable psychological attributes in an international sample of schoolteachers to determine the most valuable (...) correlates of satisfaction and position duration. An international sample (N= 335) of elementary, middle and high school teachers completed an online survey to capture their workplace satisfaction, position duration and measure 15 psychological attributes using validated instruments. Linear associations were estimated using hierarchical regression with this analysis complemented and compared with follow-up non-linear neural network models. Using regression, lower agreeableness (less people-oriented) emerged as the strongest correlate of longer position duration throughout the cohort. In elementary school teachers, lower impulsivity and higher organizational commitment emerged as the strongest correlates of longer position duration. In high school teachers, better stress tolerance and higher organizational commitment emerged as the strongest correlates of longer position duration. Using neural networks to suggest predictive models, low levels of neuroticism and impulsivity were the strongest predictors of longer position duration in elementary school teachers. High stress tolerance also predicted high work satisfaction in elementary teachers, whereas it was lower impulsivity that most strongly predicted higher work satisfaction in high school teachers. Innovation tendencies, perhaps surprisingly, appeared as a consistent predictor of lower levels of workplace satisfaction across teaching levels. Honesty-humility also emerged as a predictor of shorter position duration, particularly for primary/elementary teachers scoring above the mean. Taken together the results suggest an interesting balancing act that needs to be struck between hiring people-oriented and innovative teachers who may be more effective and adaptable but also at greater risk of changing position, possibly due to an increased interest and ability to transition into new social environments. (shrink)

Has there already been a Grotian Moment for corruption? If not, what would it take for new legal rules and doctrines on corruption to crystallise? This article seeks to answer these two questions by reviewing the relevant history of international legal scholarship, the current public international law framework for anticorruption, and recent developments in international legal practice. We conclude that a Grotian Moment may have been reached for a narrow concept of corruption, focused on petty corruption and bribery, with the (...) proliferation of international anticorruption law following the Cold War. However, a Grotian Moment for a broadened understanding of corruption, based on other forms such as institutional, political, and grand corruption, ought to emerge to comprehensively address all forms of corruption. Given the range of challenges, including resistance from political elites and the indeterminacy of criminal liability, a Grotian Moment for a broadened concept of corruption remains improbable. (shrink)

Health care workers have not gone along with President Bush's request that they be vaccinated against smallpox in order to prepare the nation's health care system for a terrorist attack using the virus. But there is no professional moral obligation to receive the vaccination—either as a matter of public health or as a matter of national security.

The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvement, and translational research. Analogous limitations to sharing objective data in (...) other areas of the natural sciences have been successfully overcome by developing and using common ontologies. This White Paper presents the authors’ rationale for the use of ontologies with computable semantics for the improvement of clinical data quality and EHR usability formulated for researchers with a stake in clinical and translational science and who are advocates for the use of information technology in medicine but at the same time are concerned by current major shortfalls. This White Paper outlines pitfalls, opportunities, and solutions and recommends increased investment in research and development of ontologies with computable semantics for a new generation of EHRs. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

BackgroundAs a number of commentators have noted, SARS exposed the vulnerabilities of our health care systems and governance structures. Health care professionals (HCPs) and hospital systems that bore the brunt of the SARS outbreak continue to struggle with the aftermath of the crisis. Indeed, HCPs – both in clinical care and in public health – were severely tested by SARS. Unprecedented demands were placed on their skills and expertise, and their personal commitment to their profession was severely tried. Many were (...) exposed to serious risk of morbidity and mortality, as evidenced by the World Health Organization figures showing that approximately 30% of reported cases were among HCPs, some of whom died from the infection. Despite this challenge, professional codes of ethics are silent on the issue of duty to care during communicable disease outbreaks, thus providing no guidance on what is expected of HCPs or how they ought to approach their duty to care in the face of risk.DiscussionIn the aftermath of SARS and with the spectre of a pandemic avian influenza, it is imperative that we (re)consider the obligations of HCPs for patients with severe infectious diseases, particularly diseases that pose risks to those providing care. It is of pressing importance that organizations representing HCPs give clear indication of what standard of care is expected of their members in the event of a pandemic. In this paper, we address the issue of special obligations of HCPs during an infectious disease outbreak. We argue that there is a pressing need to clarify the rights and responsibilities of HCPs in the current context of pandemic flu preparedness, and that these rights and responsibilities ought to be codified in professional codes of ethics. Finally, we present a brief historical accounting of the treatment of the duty to care in professional health care codes of ethics.SummaryAn honest and critical examination of the role of HCPs during communicable disease outbreaks is needed in order to provide guidelines regarding professional rights and responsibilities, as well as ethical duties and obligations. With this paper, we hope to open the social dialogue and advance the public debate on this increasingly urgent issue. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of research in neuroscience is to uncover the causal structure of the brain. This focus on causation makes sense, because causal information can provide explanations of brain function and identify reliable targets with which to understand cognitive function and prevent or change neurological conditions and psychiatric disorders. In this research, one of the most frequently used causal concepts is ‘mechanism’ — this is seen in the literature and language of the field, in grant and funding inquiries that (...) specify what research is supported, and in journal guidelines on which contributions are considered for publication. In these contexts, mechanisms are commonly tied to expressions of the main aims of the field and cited as the ‘fundamental’, ‘foundational’ and/or ‘basic’ unit for understanding the brain. Despite its common usage and perceived importance, mechanism is used in different ways that are rarely distinguished. Given that this concept is defined in different ways throughout the field — and that there is often no clarification of which definition is intended — there remains a marked ambiguity about the fundamental goals, orientation and principles of the field. Here we provide an overview of causation and mechanism from the perspectives of neuroscience and philosophy of science, in order to address these challenges. (shrink)

I analyze the insights present in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s seminal work, On Death and Dying that have laid the foundation for contemporary clinical bioethics as it is practiced by clinical ethics co...

This paper examines tracer techniques in neuroscience, which are used to identify neural connections in the brain and nervous system. These connections capture a type of “structural connectivity” that is expected to inform our understanding of the functional nature of these tissues. This is due to the fact that neural connectivity constrains the flow of signal propagation, which is a type of causal process in neurons. This work explores how tracers are used to identify causal information, what standards they are (...) expected to meet, the forms of causal information they provide, and how an analysis of these techniques contributes to the philosophical literature, in particular, the literature on mark transmission and mechanistic accounts of causation. (shrink)

Talbot Brewer seeks to follow Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Alasdair MacIntyre in "retrieving" philosophical ethics from the grip of bad questions and worse answers. This is an ambitious aim, and Brewer may not entirely succeed. But if he falls short it is in an intelligent, rich, and fecund way. It is what moral philosophy can be like at its best.

"This concise, elegant essay on the roots and historical justification of philosophy marks a decisive step in posing the problem of what philosophy is.

Background As a number of commentators have noted, SARS exposed the vulnerabilities of our health care systems and governance structures. Health care professionals (HCPs) and hospital systems that bore the brunt of the SARS outbreak continue to struggle with the aftermath of the crisis. Indeed, HCPs – both in clinical care and in public health – were severely tested by SARS. Unprecedented demands were placed on their skills and expertise, and their personal commitment to their profession was severely tried. Many (...) were exposed to serious risk of morbidity and mortality, as evidenced by the World Health Organization figures showing that approximately 30% of reported cases were among HCPs, some of whom died from the infection. Despite this challenge, professional codes of ethics are silent on the issue of duty to care during communicable disease outbreaks, thus providing no guidance on what is expected of HCPs or how they ought to approach their duty to care in the face of risk. Discussion In the aftermath of SARS and with the spectre of a pandemic avian influenza, it is imperative that we (re)consider the obligations of HCPs for patients with severe infectious diseases, particularly diseases that pose risks to those providing care. It is of pressing importance that organizations representing HCPs give clear indication of what standard of care is expected of their members in the event of a pandemic. In this paper, we address the issue of special obligations of HCPs during an infectious disease outbreak. We argue that there is a pressing need to clarify the rights and responsibilities of HCPs in the current context of pandemic flu preparedness, and that these rights and responsibilities ought to be codified in professional codes of ethics. Finally, we present a brief historical accounting of the treatment of the duty to care in professional health care codes of ethics. Summary An honest and critical examination of the role of HCPs during communicable disease outbreaks is needed in order to provide guidelines regarding professional rights and responsibilities, as well as ethical duties and obligations. With this paper, we hope to open the social dialogue and advance the public debate on this increasingly urgent issue. (shrink)

The problem of the nature of color is typically put in terms of the following question about the intentional content of visual experiences: what’s the nature of the property we attribute to physical objects in virtue of our visual experiences of color? This problem has proven to be tenacious largely because it’s not clear what the constraints are for an answer. With no clarity about constraints, the proposed solutions range widely, the most common dividing into subjectivist views which hold that (...) attributed colors are mental properties or mental events} and a variety of realist views, which hold that colors are properties of physical objects. These realist views, in turn, divide into views that hold that attributed colors are dispositions of physical objects to produce color experiences (dispositionalism),° nondispositional relations between objects and perceivers (the relational view)," physical properties of physical objects (physicalism),‘ or sui generis properties of physical objects (primitivism and impressionism).‘ I’ll examine a proposed constraint which Mark Johnston (1992) calls Revelation. According to Revelation, the appearance of color in our ordinary visual experience provides us with unqualified access to the nature of color. While every proposal about the nature of color must take a stand on how the.. (shrink)

This concise, elegant essay on the roots and historical justification of philosophy marks a decisive step in posing the problem of what philosophy is. With consummate clarity and the charisma that distinguished him as a lecturer, José Ortega y Gasset re-creates "that moment when Parmenides began talking about something exceptionally strange, which he called 'being.'" How and why, he asks, did such a surprising adventure come about? Considering the human qualities that prompt a curiosity about existence and eternity, Ortega examines (...) philosophy's etymology, its connection to poetry, and its differentiation from religion and other modes of thought. He lucidly delineates radical differences of doctrine and style among early Greek thinkers, especially the "madman of reason" Parmenides and the "absolute individual" Heraclitus. He also considers philosophy's fundamental task of revealing the latent world poised behind the manifest world and discovering the relations between them. "Unable to find lodging among the philosophies of the past," Ortega observes, "we have no choice but to attempt to construct one of our own." The Origin of Philosophy argues for the vital importance of philosophy as a human endeavor, even while noting that each generation of thought reveals the past as "a defunct world of errors". (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume include studies of the history of the word scientist and the origin of the terms of electrochemistry as developed by Faraday, with the aid of the scholars Whewell and Whitlock Nicholl. In this bicentennial year of the birth of Faraday, the topic of his discovery of electromagnetic induction is timely, as described here in the story of the ten-year search that preceded it. Faraday enters also as the major proponent of the chemical theory of (...) the voltaic cell, in opposition to Volta's contact theory. There is also an essay on Sir John Herschel's discovery of hypo and its application to photography. The book covers the formative period of science as a profession in England and introduces some figures of the transition to professionalism, as exemplified by Davy, Herschel, Faraday, Talbot, Whewell, and others, in terms of their work and their attitude toward it. (shrink)

This article defends the thesis that there are multiple points of exchange between the categories of “word” and “image” in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Benjamin describes the truth of the articulate wish of the past as “graphically perceptible” and the image as “readable.” In this respect the vocabulary of “word” and “image” that Benjamin’s early work had opposed are not just deployed in concert, but specific features of the vocabulary of “word” and “image” become exchangeable. The distinctive features of this (...) exchange can be used to expound on Benjamin’s peculiar understanding of revolutionary experience and the significance of the break that it marks with his early way of opposing the word and the image. In particular, the exchange of features between word and image can explain the mechanics and intended effect of his idea that the meaning of history can be perceived in an image. The study of this exchange also shows that although the framework of “graphic perception” entails an experience of motivating meaning that is epistemologically grounded, the citation model of history is unable to secure the extension of the sought after legibility of the nineteenth century to a recipient. (shrink)

The nature of craft creativity has often been ignored in research which focuses on innovative and novel ideas and thought processes. This view of creativity casts the repetitive nature of craft as antithetical to the disruptive nature of genuine creativity. Drawing on combined enactivist and pragmatist accounts of habits and on a focused cognitive ethnography of a wooden bowl turner, this paper explores the nature of the constraints wrought by habitual action. Habitual action will be shown to be less repetitive (...) than may be initially assumed because of the uncertainty inherent in working with both the wood which forms the initial material and the tools necessary to transform it. Rather, this paper proposes habitual learned movements as an important concept in a pragmatist-informed theory of creativity since they mark the skilled co-ordination of material, tool and maker, at once constraining and enhancing the creative craft process. (shrink)

The emotional strength of his mother, Margaret Douglas, and close kinship bonds, to some degree, compensated Adam Smith for the loss of his father. In addition, he was well prepared at the Kirkcaldy burgh school for his student years, and found his vocation as a moral philosopher, in an era marked by a strong drive for advance in agriculture and other economic sectors. Most important of all, his Presbyterian inheritance, together with training in the Latin and Greek classics, instilled in (...) him the values of self‐command of a Stoic cast, frugality, diligence in his calling, and strict justice towards others tempered with benevolence, which characterized his actions and his teaching. At the same time, he seemed to have developed an independence of mind, which led him to rebel against the strict controls of Calvinism meant to check human depravity, and to set store by human goodness, and the will to enjoy natural liberty. (shrink)

Smith was not optimistic about his free‐trade policy advice being readily accepted, as prejudice and special interests stood in the way, but he must have been gratified that his views received favourable attention by some of Britain's leaders, and that translations of his great work were stirring the minds of French inquirers into political economy and supporters of the coming revolution. In Germany, the reception of his ideas was marked by translations, reviews, assimilation into university teaching, then popularizations, and afterwards (...) the fertilization of original thoughts about economics with application to the problems of the German‐speaking lands, stages that were paralleled across the globe. In 1787, Smith received the honour that gave him the greatest pleasure of his life: election as Rector of Glasgow University. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 1-2.

This paper examines the use of “pleasure” as the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience in post-Kantian philosophy. It shows how the distinctive features of aesthetic experience, such as pleasure, qualify this experience as a platform for social criticism. The key argument is that the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is not “false”, rather it is paradoxical in the strong sense that the fact of its communicative efficacy, which follows from distinctive, “autonomous” aesthetic features, necessarily loads it with functions and (...) expectations that are external to the aesthetic moment. Kant takes a complicated path to qualify aesthetic judgment as disinterested in order that it may eloquently testify for morality. He thereby sets up the cogency of the modern pattern of looking to aesthetic experience as a locus of meaningful communication for ideas that are experientially poor or remote. (shrink)

In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft accused Edmund Burke of having contempt for his political opponents. Yet she herself expressed contempt for Burke and did so unapologetically. Readers have long regarded Wollstonecraft’s decision to match Burke’s contempt with one of her own as either a tactical blunder or evidence that she sought merely to ridicule Burke rather than argue with him. I offer an interpretation and defence of Wollstonecraft's rhetorical choices by situating the Vindication within eighteenth-century (...) debates about the dangers of elite contempt and the best methods for stifling it. Rather than countering Burke’s contempt with more of the same, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication marks a distinction between two forms of contempt. The first expresses the false sense of superiority experienced by elites who owe their social elevation to arbitrary differences of wealth or family. As such, it represents both an abuse of privilege and an anxious recognition among elites that their... (shrink)

According to Part VI of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, some things matter.1 Indeed, there are normative truths to the effect that some things matter, and it matters that there are such truths. Moreover, according to Parfit, these normative truths are cognitive and irreducible. And in addition to mattering that there are normative truths about what matters, Parfit holds that it also matters that these truths are cognitive and irreducible. Indeed this matters so much that Parfit tells us that if (...) there were normative truths, but that these truths were non-cognitive or reducible, then he, Sidgwick, and Ross “would have wasted much of our lives” [OWM2 367]. That it would be a consequence of the thesis either of noncognitivism or of reductive realism that Parfit would have wasted his life is, of course, no evidence against either thesis; it is perfectly possible even for the most brilliant thinkers to waste their lives. Indeed, as any of the students from my introductory ethics course would be quick to point out, it is very difficult to think clearly and objectively about a question in which you take yourself have a large personal stake. My undergraduates readily agree that the steak they have is enough to complicate their thinking about moral vegetarianism; so certainly explosive expressions like ‘wasted my life’ give Parfit the kind of loaded stake in metaethical questions that should make us cautious of trusting his intuitive verdicts in metaethics. Fortunately, as I will argue in this paper, Parfit has not wasted his life, and he would not have wasted his life, even if it turned out that either noncognitivism or reductive realism turned out to be true. In arguing that Parfit has not wasted his life, independently of the answer to any metaethical question, I am, of course, arguing against Parfit’s own conception of what makes his life worthwhile. Parfit clearly believes that the worthwhileness of [much of]2 his life turns on the answer to questions in metaethics.. (shrink)

According to truthmaker theory, particular truths are true in virtue of the existence of particular entities. Truthmaker maximalism holds that this is so for all truths. Negative existential and other ‘negative’ truths threaten the position. Despite this, maximalism is an appealing thesis for truthmaker theorists. This motivates interest in parsimonious maximalist theories, which do not posit extra entities for truthmaker duty. Such theories have been offered by David Lewis and Gideon Rosen, Ross Cameron, and Jonathan Schaffer. But these theories (...) cannot be sustained, I’ll argue, and hence maximalism comes with a serious ontological cost. Neither Armstrong’s invocation of totality facts nor the Martin-Kukso line on absences can meet this cost satisfactorily. I’ll claim that negative facts are the best (and perhaps only) way out of the problem for the truthmaker maximalist. (shrink)