Online research in philosophy

Prologue: Toward a new Enlightenment -- From bounded to relational being -- Bounded being -- In the beginning is the relationship -- The relational self -- The body as relationship : emotion, pleasure and pain -- Relational being in everyday life -- Multi-being and the adventure of everyday life -- Bonds, barricades, and beyond -- Relational being in practice -- Knowledge as co-creation -- Education in a relational key -- Therapy as relational recovery -- Organizing : the precarious balance -- From the moral to the sacred -- Beyond moral pluralism -- All our relations, approaching the sacred -- Epilogue: The coming of relational consciousness.

In this article, past comparisons of learning and evolution as analogous processes are discussed and some inaccuracies and omissions in those discussions are pointed out. The evolutionary analogy is examined for its ability to suggest solutions to five fundamental theoretical issues about learning - superstitions, why a reinforcer has the effect it does, the relationship among various procedures yielding learning, the relevance of the matching law to the problem of what reinforces an avoidance response, and whether behavioral and cognitive views of learning can be reconciled. In each case it is argued that the analogy is instructive.

This paper analyses various approaches to the concept of a ‘safety culture’ in terms of their epistemological assumptions regarding the nature of learning. As a result of this analysis, the study proposes a relational-interpretive framework for the promotion of safety in health care, which is based on relational theories and the philosophy of conceptual pragmatism as this can be used to integrate the various strands of current safety research. In particular, the approach based on a relational-interpretive perspective can bridge the apparent dualist gap that exists between the rational objectivist perspective and the relativist perspective on the role of learning in developing a safety culture. According to the relational-interpretive perspective of safety management that is proposed here, organizational members need to give continuous attention to the accepted organizational norms and values, which shape the safety culture. A case study from a health care safety project in Sweden is utilized to illustrate the ideas advanced in this paper.

Perruchet & Vinter claim that with the additional capacity to determine whether two arbitrary stimuli are the same or different, their association-based PARSER model is sufficient to account for learning transfer. This claim overstates the generalization capacity of perceptual versus nonperceptual (symbolic) relational processes. An example shows why some types of learning transfer also require the capacity to bind arbitrary representations to nonperceptual relational symbols.

I argue that at least one of the reasons that philosophy is difficult is because it requires students to master “relational categories”, which contrast with “object” or “entity” categories. An object category is one whose members are united on the basis of perceptual and/ or salient properties, and a relational category is one whose members are united on the basis of a relational property. Empirical evidence shows that relational categories are more difficult to grasp than object categories. If learning philosophy consists in mastering relational categories and relational schemas, then philosophical discourse ought to be similarly difficult. Empirical evidence also shows that the activity of comparison is central to learning relational categories. This suggests that comparison ought to play a central role in the instruction of philosophy. I explore this implication and develop some examples of how comparison can be implemented in the classroom in order to promote philosophical discovery.

Clark & Thornton's conception finds an echo in implicit learning research, which shows that subjects may perform adaptively in complex structured situations through the use of simple statistical learning mechanisms. However, the authors fail to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, subjects' representations which emerge from type-1 learning mechanisms, and, on the other, their knowledge of the genuine abstract “recoding function” which defines a type-2 problem.

We argue that existing learning algorithms are often poorly equipped to solve problems involving a certain type of important and widespread regularity that we call “type-2 regularity.” The solution in these cases is to trade achieved representation against computational search. We investigate several ways in which such a trade-off may be pursued including simple incremental learning, modular connectionism, and the developmental hypothesis of “representational redescription.”.

Learning is the acquisition of knowledge, not of input/output mappings. The distinction between statistical and relational learning, as Clark & Thornton define those terms, is not useful because all human learning is relational. However, prior knowledge does influence later learning and the sequence in which learning tasks are encountered is indeed crucial. Simulations of sequence effects would be interesting.