Page has done connectionist researchers a valuable service in this target article. He points out that connectionist models using localized representations often work as well or better than models using distributed representations. I point out that models using distributed representations are difficult to understand and often lack parsimony and plausibility. In conclusion, I give an example – the case of the missing fundamental in music – that can easily be explained by a model using localist representations but can be explained (...) only with great difficulty and implausibility by a model using distributed representations. (shrink)
Rose seems to be arguing against an extreme ultra-Darwinism that probably has no adherents. He incorrectly argues that a number of psychological traits are very difficult to measure. This is not the case. Rose argues that intelligence has no biological correlates. In fact, it is correlated with brain size, EEG evoked potentials, and cerebral glucose uptake during problem solving. Data that Rose should be aware of are omitted when they do not fit the case he is trying to make.
Do undergraduate students perceive that it is more acceptable to ‹cheat’ using information technology (IT) than it is to cheat without the use of IT? Do business discipline-related majors cheat more than non-business discipline-related majors? Do undergraduate students perceive it to be more acceptable for them personally to cheat than for others to cheat? Questionnaires were administered to undergraduate students at five geographical academic locations in the spring, 2006 and fall 2006 and spring, 2007. A total of 708 usable questionnaires (...) were returned including 532 from students majoring in business-related disciplines and 139 from students majoring in non-business related disciplines (37 were undecided). It appears that in terms of intellectual property violations, undergraduate students in general find cheating using IT more acceptable than cheating without the use of IT. It also appears that undergraduate students perceive that it is relatively more acceptable for them to personally cheat when using IT than for others to cheat when using IT, although this is reversed when IT is not involved. No significant differences on these issues were found between undergraduate students having business discipline-related majors and those having non-business discipline-related majors. (shrink)
In this work, Kathleen V. Wider discusses Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of consciousness in Being and Nothingness in light of recent work by analytic philosophers ...
Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional principles as well as to the more local engagements with multiple publics. Knight Abowitz sketches this bifocal nature, exploring both the unitary ideal and its parameters, as well (...) as the less understood forms of multiple, organic publics that come into being in response to localized problems in schools or districts. These publics often fail to realize their potential in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning. The essay ultimately points to a practical application: that educational leadership of all types, and with some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public schools. (shrink)
The vast changes in family life--the rise of single, same-sex, and two-paycheck parents--have often been blamed for declining morality and unhappy children. Drawing upon pioneering research with the children of the gender revolution, Kathleen Gerson reveals that it is not a lack of "family values," but rigid social and economic forces that make it difficult to live out those values. In the controversial public debate over modern American families, The Unfinished Revolution takes a measured approach, looking at the young (...) adults who grew up in the tumultuous post-feminist period. Despite the entrance of women into the workforce and the blurring of once clearly defined gender boundaries, men and women live in a world where the demands of balancing parenting and work, autonomy and commitment, time and money are left largely unresolved. Gerson finds that while an overwhelming majority of young men and women see an egalitarian balance within committed relationships as the ideal, today's social and economic realities remain based on traditional-and now obsolete-distinctions between breadwinning and caretaking. In this equity vacuum, men and women develop conflicting strategies, with women stressing self-reliance and men seeking a new traditionalism. With compassion for all perspectives, Gerson argues that whether one decides to give in to traditionally imbalanced relationships or to avoid marriage completely, these approaches are second-best responses, not personal preferences or inherent attributes, and they will shift if new options can be created to help people achieve their egalitarian aspirations. The Unfinished Revolution makes clear recommendations for the kinds of workplace and community changes that would best bring about a more egalitarian family life--a new flexibility at work and at home that benefits families, encourages a thriving economy, and helps women and men integrate love and work. (shrink)
Throughout history, humans have attempted to influence and control the thoughts of others. Since the word 'brainwashing' was coined in the aftermath of the Korean War, it has become part of the popular culture, served as a topic for jokes, and been exploited to create sensational headlines. It has also been the subject of learned discussion from many disciplines: including history, sociology, psychology, and psychotherapy. But until now, a crucial part of the debate has been missing: that of any serious (...) reference to the science of the human brain. Descriptions of how opinions can be changed, whether by persuasion, deceit, or force, have been almost entirely psychological. -/- In Brainwashing, Kathleen Taylor brings the worlds of neuroscience and social psychology together for the first time. In elegant and accessible prose, and with abundant use of anecdotes and case-studies, she examines the ethical problems involved in carrying out the required experiments on humans, the limitations of animal models, and the frightening implications of such research. She also explores the history of thought-control and shows how it still exists all around us, from marketing and television, to politics and education. (shrink)
In the controversial public debate over modern American families, the vast changes in family life--the rise of single, two-paycheck, and same-sex parents--have often been blamed for declining morality and unhappy children. Drawing upon pioneering research with the children of the gender revolution, Kathleen Gerson reveals that it is not a lack of "family values," but rigid social and economic forces that make it difficult to have a vibrant and committed family and work life. -/- Despite the entrance of women (...) into the workforce and the blurring of once clearly defined gender boundaries, men and women live in a world where the demands of balancing parenting and work, autonomy and commitment, time and money are left largely unresolved. Gerson finds that while an overwhelming majority of young men and women see an egalitarian balance within committed relationships as the ideal, today's social and economic realities remain based on conventional--and now obsolete--distinctions between breadwinning and caretaking. In this equity vacuum, men and women develop conflicting strategies, with women stressing self-reliance and men seeking a new traditionalism. -/- With compassion for all perspectives, Gerson argues that whether one decides to give in to traditionally imbalanced relationships or to avoid marriage altogether, these approaches are second-best responses, not personal preferences or inherent attributes, and they will shift if new options can be created to help people achieve their egalitarian aspirations. The Unfinished Revolution offers clear recommendations for the kinds of workplace and community changes that would best bring about a more egalitarian family life--a new flexibility at work and at home that benefits families, encourages a thriving economy, and helps women and men integrate love and work. -/- Praise for the Hardcover: -/- "Over the past three decades, social change has blown apart the old-fashioned ideal of the nuclear family--and Gerson has set out to map where the pieces have landed." --New York Post -/- "Valuable for the abundance and candor of the testimony from this unmoored generation pioneering through radically altered conceptions of personal and professional life." --Publishers Weekly -/- "This is not a battle that can be won with legal challenges or legislation. Yes, it would undoubtedly be greatly aided by the passage of major social policies such as universal child care. But at its core, this is a fight that plays out within homes and between partners. And as Gerson's research makes clear, the fight has not changed all that dramatically in the past 30 years." --The American Prospect. (shrink)
"The publication of the revised edition of Kathleen Marie Higgins's Nicizscbe's Zarathustra is a great boon to Nietzsche scholars and Zarathustra specialists alike, for Higgins's consistently subtle analysis of Nietzsche's bold experiment ...
In this thoughtful exploration of a painful subject, Kathleen Taylor seeks to bring together the fruits of work in psychology, sociology, and her own field of neuroscience to shed light on the nature of cruelty and what makes human beings cruel. The question of cruelty is inevitably tied to questions of moral philosophy, the nature of evil, free will and responsibility. Taylor's approach is ambitious, but little work has been done in this area and this wide-ranging discussion, considering the (...) roles of emotion, belief, identity and 'otherizing'; evolved instincts and differences in brains; callousness and sadism; seeks to begin to identify how we might reduce or limit cruelty in our societies by a greater understanding of its causes, and the circumstances in which it can grow. -/- As with her highly regarded previous book, Brainwashing, Taylor draws in examples from history and literature in her study, making this a rich and multifaceted analysis that should be of interest to a wide readership, and provoke much thought, debate, and further research. (shrink)
This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating ...
This paper is an engagement with Equality by John Baker, Kathleen Lynch, Judy Walsh and Sara Cantillon. It identifies a dilemma for educational egalitarians, which arises within their theory of equality, arguing that sometimes there may be a conflict between advancing equality of opportunity and providing equality of respect and recognition, and equality of love care and solidarity. It argues that the latter values may have more weight in deciding what to do than traditional educational egalitarians have usually thought.
This paper concerns the familiar topic of whether we can have genuinely emotional responses such as pity and fear to characters and situations we believe to be fictional1. As is well known, Kendall Walton responds in the negative (Walton (1978); (1990): 195-204 and Chapter 7; (1997)). That is, he is an ‘irrealist’ about emotional responses to fiction (the term is Gaut’s (2003): 15), arguing that such responses should be construed as quasiemotions (Walton (1990): 245), of which their possessor imagines that (...) they are genuine emotions. This is not to deny that an experience in response to a fiction may have a phenomenology very like a given emotion, but to insist that, nonetheless, such responses are not real instances of the emotions which they resemble (Walton (1997)). So, in his most famous example, Charles, who experiences fear-like emotion in relation to a film which depicts the approach of evil slime, does not, despite appearances, experience genuine fear towards the slime, but only quasi-fear (Walton (1990): 195-204)2. Walton’s view presupposes the following view about the nature of emotion3. (shrink)
This volume provides an up to date and comprehensive overview of the philosophy and neuroscience movement, which applies the methods of neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and uses philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience. At the heart of the movement is the conviction that basic questions about human cognition, many of which have been studied for millennia, can be answered only by a philosophically sophisticated grasp of neuroscience's insights into the processing of information by the human brain. Essays in (...) this volume are clustered around five major themes: data and theory in neuroscience; neural representation and computation; visuomotor transformations; color vision; and consciousness. (shrink)
The paper discusses the utility of the notion of consciousness for the behavioural and brain sciences. It describes four distinctively different senses of 'conscious', and argues that to cope with the heterogeneous phenomena loosely indicated thereby, these sciences not only do not but should not discuss them in terms of 'consciousness'. It is thus suggested that 'the problem' allegedly posed to scientists by consciousness is unreal; one need neither adopt a realist stance with respect to it, nor include the term (...) and its cognates in the sciences' conceptual apparatus. The paper briefly examines Nagel's [1974] article, since this presents the strongest counter to the thesis proposed. (shrink)
Recently, philosophers have identified certain fictional propositions with which one does not imaginatively engage, even where one is transparently intended by their authors to do so. One approach to explaining this categorizes it as 'resistance', that is, as deliberate failure to imagine that the relevant propositions are true; the phenomenon has become generally known (misleadingly) as 'the puzzle of imaginative resistance'. I argue that this identification is incorrect, and I dismiss several other explanations. I then propose a better one, that (...) in central cases of imaginative failure, the basis for the failure is the contingent incomprehensibility of the relevant propositions. Why the phenomenon is especially commonplace with respect to moral propositions is illuminated along the way. (shrink)
This paper explores the relationship between common-sense psychology (CSP) and scientific psychology (SP) — which we could call the mind-mind problem. CSP has come under much attack recently, most of which is thought to be unjust or misguided. This paper's first section examines the many differences between the aims, interests, explananda, explanantia, methodology, conceptual frameworks, and relationships to the neurosciences, that divide CSP and SP. Each of the two is valid within its own territory, and there is no competition between (...) them — primarily because CSP is not, and has no interest in being, a scientific theory. In the second section some implications are drawn. First, neither CSP nor SP has the mind-body problem in its familiar form. Second, CSP, for excellent reasons, is not equipped to handle irrational or non-rational behaviour; there are some grounds for believing that this can and should be the task of SP. Third, philosophical psychology, or armchair theories of action, perception, etc., are doomed to failure. And, fourth, the realm of the psychological is so heterogeneous that no single model for either CSP or SP is likely to succeed. (shrink)
