In her thought-provoking symposium contribution, ‘What Is Impostor Syndrome?’, Katherine Hawley fleshes out our everyday understanding of that concept. This response builds on Hawley’s account to ask the ameliorative question of whether the everyday concept best serves the normative goals of promoting social justice and enhancing well-being. I raise some sceptical worries about the usefulness of the notion, in so far as it is centred on doxastic attitudes that include doubt about one’s own talent or skill. I propose instead that (...) a narrower conception emphasizing the debilitating emotional and behavioural consequences of such beliefs might be preferable, and that the causes of such consequences would be better thought of as unjustified rather than false beliefs about one’s own competence. (shrink)

The author argues for a non-sensual reality, basing his arguments on parapsychology, a consideration of prophecies, and not quite digested aspects of modern scientific developments. As Hawley points out, his views may be those of the future; unfortunately his arguments will not make them so.--K. H.

How is metaphysics related to the empirical sciences? Should metaphysics in general be guided by the sources, methods and results of the sciences? And what about the special case of the metaphysics of the social world: should it likewise be guided by the sources, methods and results of the social sciences? In her paper “Social Science as a Guide to Social Metaphysics?”, K. Hawley raises the question: If we are sympathetic to the project of naturalising metaphysics, how should we approach (...) the metaphysics of the social world? She proceeds by discussing three approaches to social metaphysics: inference to the best explanation from current social science, descriptive conceptual analysis, and normative, especially ‘ameliorative’ projects. At the end of her discussion, she reaches a rather pessimistic conclusion, especially as regards the IBE approach: “a number of phenomena indicate that the prospects for securely basing social metaphysics via inference to the best explanation from social science are currently faint. […] We need to look elsewhere if we are to develop a metaphysics of the social world.” In my comments on her paper, I try to re-animate the program of an inductive metaphysics by defending the idea that the method of inference to the best explanation should be the central method of justification for metaphysics in general and for social metaphysics in particular. (shrink)

A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

When people go shopping for gametes, their first and most important criterion is the donor's race. In so choosing, they are making wrong and invidious assumptions about what race is. They are also assuming that their child will develop her sense of self within those parameters. The effect is harmful both for children and for society at large. People should be able to recognize racial categories as they construct their own identities, but those categories should not limit their self‐identification from (...) the very outset. (shrink)

In _I Can Learn from You_, Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley—the authors of _Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys_—set out to probe deeply into the relational dynamics that help boys succeed as learners. Drawing on interviews with students and teachers in thirty-five schools across six countries, they examine the particular ways boys extend and receive empathy—modes of interaction that remain consistent across a wide range of schools, teachers, countries, and cultures. The book shows how teachers can help boys form productive learning relationships (...) and how schools can support the development of teachers’ relational capacities. At the heart of the book is the belief that educators must—and can—put relational teaching at the center of school life. (shrink)

Student-generated video creation assessments are an innovative and emerging form of assessment in higher education. Academic staff may be understandably reluctant to transform assessment practices without robust evidence of the benefits and rationale for doing so and some guidance regarding how to do so successfully. A systematic approach to searching the literature was conducted to identify relevant resources, which generated key documents, authors and internet sources which were thematically analysed. This comprehensive critical synthesis of literature is presented here under the (...) headings of findings from literature, relevance of digital capabilities, understanding the influence of local context and resources, and pedagogical considerations. Student-generated video creation for assessment is shown to have several benefits, notably in supporting development of digital and communication skills relevant to today’s world and in enhancing learning. As an emerging innovation within assessment, intentionally planning and supporting a change management process with both students and staff is required. The importance of alignment to learning outcomes, context and resources, choice of video format to desired skills development, and to relevance beyond graduation is emphasised for video creation in assessment to be used successfully. Video creation for assessment is likely to grow in popularity and it is hoped the evidence of benefits, rationale and guidance as to how to do this effectively presented here will support this transformation. Further research to consider video creation for assessment with individuals rather than collaborative group assessments, and to establish academic rigour and equivalence would be beneficial. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

This article considers the extent to which health promotion strategies pose a threat to individual freedom. It begins by taking a look at health promotion strategies and at the historical development of health promotion in Britain. A theoretical context is then developed in which Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty is used alongside the ideas of John Stuart Mill, Charles Taylor and T.H. Green to discuss the politics of health promotion and to identify the implications of conflicting perspectives on (...) freedom. The final section looks at current health promotion policy in Britain and beyond and argues that, if freedom is seen in terms of empowerment, health promotion can enhance individual freedom. (shrink)

The best arguments for the 1/3 answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem all require that when Beauty awakes on Monday she should be uncertain what day it is. I argue that this claim should be rejected, thereby clearing the way to accept the 1/2 solution.

Aaron Cotnoir does all sorts of interesting things in his contribution to this volume. He makes a helpful distinction between syntactic and semantic objections to the thesis that composition is identity, and outlines some empirical points relevant to the syntactic issue. But the centrepiece is his development of a formal framework for addressing the semantic objections.

The digital era has brought many opportunities - and many challenges - to teachers and students at all levels. Underlying questions about how technologies have changed the ways individuals read, write, and interact are questions about the ethics of participation in a digital world. As users consume and create seemingly infinite content, what are the moral guidelines that must be considered? How do we teach students to be responsible, ethical citizens in a digital world? This book shares practices across levels, (...) from teaching elementary students to adults, in an effort to explore these questions. It is organized into five sections that address the following aspects of teaching ethics in a digital world: ethical contexts, ethical selves, ethical communities, ethical stances, and ethical practices. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * "w e r e ' ' e d F (...) D C s like ' If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby': an account on which both of these types of FDCs are grouped with the indicatives for semantic treatment and on which, while conditionals of both types are properly used in means/ends deliberations, those of the ' were'ed-up variety are especially well suited for that purpose. (shrink)

In the traditional form of canonical quantization, certain field components (not having “conjugate” momenta) must be regarded as noncanonical. This long-known distinction enters modern gauge theories, when they are canonically quantized as by Kugo and Ojima. We avoid that peculiarity by not using any conjugate “momenta” at all. In our formulation, canonical quantization can be related to Feynman's path integral.

Capturing a scientific change in thinking about personality and individual differences that has been building over the past 15 years, this volume stands at an important moment in the development of psychology as a discipline. Rather than viewing individual differences as merely the raw material upon which selection operates, the contributing authors provide theories and empirical evidence which suggest that personality and individual differences are central to evolved psychological mechanisms and behavioral functioning. The book draws theoretical inspiration from life history (...) theory, evolutionary genetics, molecular genetics, developmental psychology, personality psychology, and evolutionary psychology, while utilizing the theories of the "best and the brightest" international scientists working on this cutting edge paradigm shift. In the first of three sections, the authors analyze personality and the adaptive landscape; here, the authors offer a novel conceptual framework for examining "personality assessment adaptations." Because individuals in a social environment have momentous consequences for creating and solving adaptive problems, humans have evolved "difference-detecting mechanisms" designed to make crucial social decisions such as mate selection, friend selection, kin investment, coalition formation, and hierarchy negotiation. In the second section, the authors examine developmental and life-history theoretical perspectives to explore the origins and development of personality over the lifespan. The third section focuses on the relatively new field of evolutionary genetics and explores which of the major evolutionary forces--such as balancing selection, mutation, co-evolutionary arms races, and drift--are responsible for the origins of personality and individual differences. Existing as a seminal work in the newly emerging evolutionary psychology field, this book is a "must-read" for anyone invested in the development of psychology as a field. (shrink)

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)