Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Dignity is a universal principle that requires us to treat every person as having worth beyond who a particular person is or what they do. Dignity is a complex and sometimes contested idea, that at times can be compromised in health care and allegedly also within the practice of outdoor therapy. Outdoor therapies comprise a range of therapeutic approaches including nature-based therapy, adventure therapy, animal-assisted therapy, forest therapy, wilderness therapy, surf therapy, and more. Within the literature of (...) class='Hi'>outdoor therapies there has been limited research on ethics related to common understandings of care concepts such as relational dignity and human rights. The aim of this paper is therefore to unravel briefly whether dignity in general, and relational qualities of dignified care more particularly, might be a useful concept to apply in order to support an ethical practice in outdoor therapies. (shrink)

The old adage has two people out hiking who run into a bear. One starts running while the other asks ‘why are you running? You can’t outrun a bear’. To which the other responds, ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you’. Hiking/trekking is not typically a competitive endeavor characterized by contests but, like many endeavors/pursuits/activities, competition can be injected into it; thereby sportifying it. Swimming is a sport (under certain conditions). At the same (...) time, it is also a recreational activity and a form of physical exercise; likewise angling/fishing, climbing, cross-country skiing, mountain biking, kayaking, rowing, surfing, et al. The categorization of many activities under the umbrella of sport has it uses to understand the wider concept of what is sport, but the purpose of why one engages in ‘physical activities taking place in a natural environment’ can sometimes be more important than whether some activities might or might not qualify to be classified under the rubric of sports at all. Indicators exist to show whether participants are actually engaged toward—driven in a way, even—to further their skills in their focused activity (if it is a focused activity at all!––i.e. a ‘serious leisure’ pursuit or just a recreational hobby). From this perspective (of looking at sport-like and sporting activities in other than Olympic-style forms) this paper explores the differentiations between sport (including nature sport) contests, nature challenge activities (NCAs) and outdoor recreation from the standpoint of the most relevant factors that distinguish them: rules, skill development, purpose for engaging in them. This paper also makes the case that differentiating participants in the above activities by purpose (as either nature challenge recreationalists or nature sport devotees) has utility; to better help research into people’s engagement in physical activities in natural environments. (shrink)

Nature & the seasons -- Outdoor pursuits -- The spirit of self-sufficiency -- The joy of fika -- The Nordic kitchen -- Healthy hedonism -- Design & home -- Kinship, conviviality & openness -- How to hygge-at a glance.

This article reconsiders the presence and value of danger in outdoor and adventurous activities and sports in safety-conscious societies, especially in relation to the education of children and youth. Based on an original analysis of the relation between the concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’, we offer an account of the relation between challenge, adventure, risk and danger, and emphasise the importance of teaching risk recognition, risk assessment, risk management and risk avoidance to children and youth, without the necessity of (...) exposing them to jeopardy in dangerous situations. Our conclusion is that ‘Safe Danger’ describes what educators should seek, namely: the educational benefits of the challenges set by risk-taking and the demands of risk-facing, including those in adventurous situations, which are obtainable in the absence of significant danger, and which contribute to risk education. The educational value of adventurous and outdoor pursuits lies elsewhere than in the opportunities that they present for danger-facing, for example in their promotion of self-reliance, confidence, ability to team-work, and especially in their promotion of risk education, as an integral aspect of everyday life planning, as preparation for the day’s adventurous challenges, and as an instrument of task completion. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Kevin Krein’s Philosophy and Nature Sports. Gunnar Breivik, Jim Parry and Irena Martínková, and Rebekah Humphreys provide critical commentary on the text. The critical comments are followed by a response from Krein. The discussion covers a broad range of topics. These include the definition of “sport,” comparisons between nature sports and friluftsliv, the role of risk in nature sports, the experience of flow and the sublime in nature sports, and the understanding of nature. Krein (...) argues, as he does in the book and elsewhere, that nature sports provide a framework that facilitates intimate and meaningful interactions with nature. He argues further that the discussion included here shows how deeply our understanding of nature, and our understanding of nature sports, influence both our experiences within those sports and our broader experience of the world. (shrink)

Captured in narrative textual form through open-ended and tape-recorded interview conversations, visitor experience was interpreted to construct a description of visitors' relationships to place while at the same time providing insights for those who manage the national park. Humans are conceived of as meaning-makers, and outdoor recreation is viewed as emergent experience that can enrich peoples' lives rather than a predictable outcome of processing information encountered in the setting. This process-oriented approach positions subjective well-being and positive experience in the (...) ongoing processes and activities that comprise our life pursuits rather than in particular end states toward which behaviors might be directed as in the case of end state frameworks. Several themes emerged in the interpretation across narratives including a relationship of stewardship/sense of respectful mitigation, socially constructed dimensions of the wilderness concept, which both converged with and deviated from definitions in The Wilderness Act of 1964, humans positioned as both part of wilderness and separate from it, description of a process whereby people form a relationship to protected places, and an awareness among visitors of the overarching management dilemma of how to balance human visitation with protection. Management insights and general implications that emerged from the overall interpretation such as using narrative illustration to enhance visitor education were summarized. It is suggested that the particularities of the setting, in conjunction with the process-oriented creation of meaning via varying levels of physical and social interaction with the setting each play important roles, perhaps at different times, for visitors' relationships to places within the Park. The process of forming long-term relationships to places is highlighted as the common thread running through the interpretation. The value of the national park is seen to lie in these relationships, which are time and context dependent, not necessarily in the attributes of the park, many of which are generic to other protected areas in North America. The dissertation concluded with an evaluation of this interpretation based on these implications and insights and provided direction for further research to learn about the processes involved with forming relationships to protected places. (shrink)

Approximately at the turn of the nineteenth century, the visual encounter between humans and birds, which has been going on since both forms of life have existed, began to solidify into a hobby, into something that a middle-class citizen of American might spend a morning doing. Certain technologies—optics , field guides, and later, automobiles—helped to enable this pursuit. In the twentieth century, bird watching became an immense industry. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one report claims that in America (...) "an estimated 70.4 million people now go out-of-doors to watch birds one or more times per year" . Much has been written on how and why bird watching has grown in popularity during the last 150 years or so. 2 This essay will look instead at the effects produced by the nearly infinite acts of looking inherent to a hobby that has been described as one of "Americans' most-favored [outdoor] activities". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Death Zone Summiteers Mountaineers Conclusion Notes.

Outdoor Education (OE) refers to organized experiential education that takes place in the outdoor, characterized by action-centered and thematic learning processes. Literature shows how OE may have beneficial effects on different areas of child development, including cognitive abilities, social skills and motor development. This relationship is not necessarily linear, but moderated by different variables. Until now, few studies have examined, using rigorous methods, the role of OE in children’s development and studies of preschool aged children remain lacking. The (...) current study aimed to explore teachers’ perceptions of children’s developmental trajectories over 2 school years, investigating whether teachers’ perceptions differed between two kindergartens, one characterized by a consolidated OE approach and the other one characterized by a more traditional method of education. The sample was composed of 20 teachers, evaluating 93 children aged 3-5 (M= 46.95 months, SD= 6.73; 42 males): 13 teachers were from a traditional kindergarten (Traditional Group- TG) and evaluated 52 children; 7 teachers were from an OE kindergarten (Outdoor Group – OE) and observed 41 children. All the teachers completed the Kuno Beller Developmental Tables (Beller, 1995), in order to describe specific child developmental areas in 4 consecutive moments during 2 school years (T1-T2: January-May 2014; T3-T4: October 2014-May 2015). The 20 teachers also completed the “Outdoor Activities/Trips Diary”, an instrument created for this study to collect qualitative data on the characteristics of outdoor activities. Results showed that, in all the developmental areas, OE teachers perceived higher scores over time were found for the Outdoor Group compared to the Traditional one. Specifically, GLM ANOVAs Repeated Measures revealed a significant interaction of the 2 variables Time and Groups (p<0.001): contrast analyses showed that OE children, compared to the TG children, were perceived by their teachers with higher levels in all developmental areas at T1 and T2, but not at T3 and T4. The findings suggest that the OE activites, compared to indoor ones and according to teachers' perceptions, offer greater opportunities to promote the child’s development at different levels. especially when children are younger. Future studies are recommended analyzing possible moderating variables and long term effects of OE. (shrink)

One of the main priorities of current educational systems is a strong connection between education provided by schools and the requirements of a successful integration in the social life and work field. This article offers the teachers’ perspective on the various ways in which outdoor learning can be useful in creating teaching-learning situations that prepare pupils to be active citizens and to have smoother integration in the social life and this way, on the labor market. The findings of a (...) brief study among teachers from Arad County is presented. The method that was used is the survey based on a questionnaire. The main instrument that used was the questionnaire, which was based on a number of 12 variables. The quantitative data obtained was processed in the SPSS statistical program. The preliminary results show that even if teachers have some knowledge on the benefits of outdoor education regarding future involvement of pupils in social life, they tend to rarely use it in their educational practice. This happens because of the lack of correct and valid information they have on this type of education, and also because of the misconceptions of parents, who refuse to cooperate regarding this issue. The present study brings and important contribution in this research field, highlighting the values of outdoor education, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

The physical boundaries of office work have become increasingly flexible. Work is conducted at multiple locations outside the office, such as at clients’ premises, at home, in cafés, or when traveling. However, the boundary between indoor and outdoor environment seems to be strong and normative regarding how office work is performed. The aim of this study was to explore how office work may be conducted outdoors, understanding how it is being experienced by office employees and identifying its contextual preconditions. (...) Based on a two-year interactive research project, the study was conducted together with a Swedish municipality. Fifty-eight participants engaged in the collaborative learning process, including 40 half-day workshops and reflective group discussions, co-interviews, and participants’ independent experimentation of bringing work activities outdoors. Data was collected via interviews, group discussions and a custom-made mobile application. The results showed that a wide range of work activities could be done outdoors, both individually and in collaboration with others. Outdoor work activities were associated with many positive experiences by contributing to a sense of well-being, recovery, autonomy, enhanced cognition, better communication, and social relations, but also with feelings of guilt and illegitimacy. Conditions of importance for outdoor office work to happen and function well were found in the physical environment, where proximity to urban greenspaces stood out as important, but also in the sociocultural and organizational domains. Of crucial importance was managers’ attitudes, as well as the overall organizational culture on this idea of bringing office work outdoors. To conclude, if working life is to benefit from outdoor office work, leaders, urban planners and policymakers need to collaborate and show the way out. (shrink)

Describe a successful classroom teaching tactic that could be replicated by other instructors. -/- The context: This activity was used in a required undergraduate introductory theology course at a Catholic college. I tried this exercise a month into class, at the start of a section on creation in Genesis. -/- The pedagogical purpose: The activity encourages students to deepen the skill of reading and understanding the Bible. It also invites students to use their imagination in recognizing the goodness and variety (...) of creation described in Genesis 1. It takes place mostly outdoors, in a natural setting that mirrors the richness of the text, and encourages students to observe their surroundings in light of the text. Doing this as a group creates a positive learning environ- ment; for example, the more active students act as role models of paying attention to detail, observing closely, and taking photos. The exercise mirrors the typical proclamation of Scripture within a communal context. (shrink)

" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...

In "Pursuits of Wisdom," John Cooper brings this crucial question back to life. This marvelous book will shape the way we think about and engage with ancient philosophical traditions.

It's time to see Photoshop as a tool of your craft This book is not about "fixing it in Photoshop." It's about how you, the serious nature photographer, can use technology to enhance your art. Rob Sheppard sees Photoshop not as an eraser for mistakes and the effects of careless shooting, but as an artist's tool, one that assists you in the craft of producing art from your digital camera. He shows you how to use Photoshop CS2 to extend tonal (...) range, remove color haze, correct lens distortions, create multi-frame panoramas, and so much more--all to reveal the work of art you knew was there all along. * Learn to apply Photoshop techniques to the unique requirements of landscape and nature photography * Be aware of correct exposure when shooting for Photoshop * Use layers to enhance images and correct tonality and color for optimum images * Discover a better way of dodging and burning * Understand midtones and manage color correction with an eye to the finished product * Process images twice in Camera Raw for better shadow and highlight detail * Explore how Photoshop CS2 can support proven techniques used by the masters of traditional nature photography Photoshop offers great power for controlling color so you can get natural, realistic colors that best express what you see in nature Unsharp Mask is unmasked so that you can get the most from this powerful sharpening tool Utilize the best methods of black-and-white conversion. (shrink)

This book adds to the theoretical development of the emerging fields of experiential learning and outdoor education by examining the central concept, 'experience', and interrogating a central claim of experiential learning: whether, and if so how, a short-term singular experience can transform a participant's life as a whole and in a permanent way. While such a possibility has been corroborated by the personal testimonies of participants, and the activities of instructors over many years, the book argues that we must (...) go beyond this kind of 'evidence'. In comparing Anglophone and continental approaches and drawing on the work of Dewey, Dilthey and Merleau-Ponty in the philosophy of experience, Experiential Learning and Outdoor Education presents the first detailed review of the concept of 'experience' in European philosophy, as applied to outdoor experiential learning. A vital insight into the field, this is important reading for students and researchers working in the philosophy of sport, and pedagogical theory, especially in areas relating to the outdoors, but also to experiential education more generally."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Sometimes inquirers may rationally pursue a theory even when the available evidence does not favor that theory over others. Features of a theory that favor pursuing it are known as considerations of promise or pursuitworthiness. Examples of such reasons include that a theory is testable, that it has a useful associated analogy, and that it suggests new research and experiments. These reasons need not be evidence in favor of the theory. This raises the question: what kinds of reasons are provided (...) by pursuitworthiness considerations? Are they epistemic reasons or practical reasons? I argue that pursuitworthiness considerations are a kind of non-evidential epistemic reason, which I call an inquisitive reason. In support of this, I first point out two important similarities between the traditional pursuitworthiness considerations discussed in philosophy of science, which I call promise reasons, and certain social epistemic reasons that I call social inquisitive reasons. Specifically, both kinds of reason (1) favor pursuing a theory in a non-evidential way, and (2) concern promoting successful inquiry. I then propose recognition of a new category of normative reason: inquisitive reasons. This category contains both promise and social inquisitive reasons. Finally, I argue that inquisitive reasons share three essential features with previously recognized epistemic reasons: a connection to epistemic aims, explanatory independence, and the presence of a specific right-kind/wrong-kind reasons distinction. Each of these features have been used to argue that evidence should be treated as part of a distinct, independent domain of epistemic normativity. Since inquisitive reasons share these features, they too should be considered part of this independent epistemic domain. Thus, inquisitive reasons, including pursuitworthiness considerations, are epistemic reasons. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism aims to define access to reality of the natural world apart from its giveness to sentient subjects. This world apart is designated by Meillassoux as the “Great Outdoors” which was marginalized as a topic of philosophy after Kant’s critiques. The question of the incommensurability of human subjects and physical objects is taken up by Meillassoux and addressed by allowing mathematizable properties of physical objects to be referred to objectively in mathematical statements. In this paper we follow (...) the discussion with speculative materialism conducted by Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in The Ends of the World (2017). These authors show that Meillassoux’s conception of the “Great Outdoors” includes, yet insufficiently explores, the notion of ancestral humanity in Amerindian myth – and intimately related to the practice of hallucinogenic trance – as the means to address the problem of said incommensurability. (shrink)

What marks emergence as a metaphysically interesting idea is that many macro-level entities and their properties are ontologically and causally autonomous in relation to the micro-level entities and properties they depend on---or so argues Jessica Wilson in Metaphysical Emergence (2021). To do so, she adopts a “metaphysically highly neutral” (p. 32) approach to questions about powers, causation, properties, and laws. That is, while explaining what emergence is and arguing that there is indeed emergence in the natural world, she doesn’t restrict (...) her analyses and arguments to any specific metaphysical accounts of these concepts, and she doesn’t commit to any controversial theses about them. In this article, I assess Wilson’s project against this methodological ideal of metaphysical neutrality. (shrink)

Background The purpose of this systematic review is to examine cooling intervention research in outdoor occupations, evaluate the effectiveness of such interventions, and offer recommendations for future studies. This review focuses on outdoor occupational studies conducted at worksites or simulated occupational tasks in climatic chambers. -/- Methods This systematic review was performed in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta‐Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science were searched to identify original research on intervention (...) studies published in peer‐reviewed journals that aimed at reducing heat stress or heat‐related illness from January 2000 to August 2020. -/- Results A systematic search yielded a total of 1042 articles, of which 21 met the inclusion criteria. Occupations with cooling intervention studies included agriculture (n = 5), construction (n = 5), industrial workers (n = 4), and firefighters (n = 7). The studies focused on multiple types of cooling interventions cooling gear (vest, bandanas, cooling shirts, or head‐cooling gel pack), enhanced heat dissipation clothing, forearm or lower body immersion in cold water, water dousing, ingestion of a crushed ice slush drink, electrolyte liquid hydration, and modified Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommendations of drinking water and resting in the shade. -/- Conclusion Current evidence indicates that using multiple cooling gears along with rest cycles may be the most effective method to reduce heat‐related illness. Occupational heat‐related illnesses and death may be mitigated by targeted cooling intervention and workplace controls among workers of vulnerable occupational groups and industries. (shrink)

Dan Haybron presents an illuminating examination of well-being, drawing on important recent work in the science of happiness. He shows that we are remarkably prone to error in judgements of our own personal welfare, and suggests that we should rethink traditional assumptions about the good life and the good society.

There is growing interest in nature-based interventions to improve human health and wellbeing. An important nascent area is exploring the potential of outdoor therapies to treat and prevent common mental health problems like depression. In this conceptual analysis on the nature–depression nexus, we distil some of the main issues for consideration when NBIs for depression are being developed. We argue that understanding the mechanisms, or ‘active ingredients’ in NBIs is crucial to understand what works and for whom. Successfully identifying (...) modifiable mediating intervention targets will pave the way for interventions with increased efficacy. We highlight a non-exhaustive list of five clinically relevant putative, candidate mechanisms which may underly the beneficial effects of NBIs on depression: stress, rumination, mindfulness, sleep and exercise. We also make the case that when developing NBIs it is important to not neglect young people, explore personalised approaches and focus on both treatment and prevention approaches. To achieve these aims methodologically rigorous programmes of clinical research are needed that include well-powered and controlled experimental designs including randomised controlled trials, qualitative research, longitudinal studies and large prospective cohorts. (shrink)

This paper explores one organisation’s journey into non-financial reporting, initially motivated by a crisis in public confidence that threatened the organisation’s legitimacy to the present with the organisation embracing integrated reporting. The organisation’s journey is framed through a legitimation lens and is illustrated by aligning internal reflections with external outputs guided by predominant paradigms of good practice, such as the GRI guidelines and more recently integrated reporting 〈IR〉. We find that the organisation’s relationship with external guidelines has evolved from pragmatic (...) adoption as a means of seeking external legitimation to the present position where those that prepare external reports are informed by the organisation’s strategic positioning and not constrained by the promulgation of voluntary guidelines. From the case study, we suggest that the International Integrated Reporting Council may face two hurdles: First, organisations may define social norms based on a broader definition of stakeholders than the definition currently published by the IIRC. The second hurdle is to convince report preparers that adopting integrated reporting 〈IR〉 will positively impact on capital flows. (shrink)

Aesthetic Pursuits is a new collection of essays from Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, focusing on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing issues of humour, beauty, and the emotions. More than half of the essays in the volume are previously unpublished.

Modern reflection about the good life and the good society has been dominated by a spirit of liberal optimism, according to which people typically know what’s good for them and make prudent choices in pursuit of their interests. As a result, people tend to do best, and pretty well at that, when given the greatest possible freedom to live as they wish. This appealing doctrine rests on a bold assumption about human psychology: namely, that people have a high degree of (...) aptitude for securing their well-being given arbitrarily high levels of “option freedom.” Yet a large body of empirical research suggests that people are systematically prone to make a variety of serious errors in the pursuit of happiness. These errors are probably serious enough to place liberal optimism’s psychological assumptions in doubt. If people do tend to fare best in the option-rich environments traditionally favored by liberal moderns, notably classical economists, this may not be mainly through the prudent exercise of choice. Or perhaps human beings actually benefit from certain constraints or burdens on choice. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is one of the most famous ethical doctrines, based on the ideal of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. But Utilitarians and their opponents lack a clear scientific and philosophical understanding of its foundations, the measurement and aggregation of utility. This is what The Pursuit of Happiness now offers.

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from (...) naturalistic corpora of parent-child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross-situational word-learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross-situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co-occurring referent world is at its greatest. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, UK government policy exhortations to promote and increase exercise and physical activity levels in the population have increased in volume. In recent years, too, there has been growing sociological interest in exercise and physical activity embodiment issues, including within phenomenologically-inspired research into lived-body experiences. This article contributes original insights to a developing body of phenomenological-sociological empirical work in this domain, in addressing the lived experience of organised exercise in outdoor environments, and specifically in theorising (...) the role of ‘lived weather’ in contouring these experiences. It thus addresses the call by Vannini et al. (2012) to remedy the notable ‘absent-presence’ of weather in much social science research. Drawing upon data from a two-year multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional ethnographic study of a nationwide exercise programme in Wales, UK, this article examines participants’ (n = 146) lived experience of weather, and theorises their ‘weather learning’, and ‘weather work’, both of which emerged as highly salient in the findings. (shrink)

In this essay review of Wattchow and Brown's (2011) A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor Education for a Changing World, the meaning of outdoor education is explored in relation to parallel traditions such as environmental and place-based education. I examine the relative usefulness of adjectival educations related to the environment, and suggest the need for greater dialogue and understanding between like traditions, with an emphasis on the correspondences between nature (land)/culture, local/global, indoors/outdoors.

This book is a venture in constructive clarification of several basic topics in current humanities and social science discourses that are badly muddled. The heart of the clarification is contained in Barber's definition of culture, derived from social system theory, that provides us with a better understanding of today's debate on intellectuals and the pursuit of science. Barber examines the ways in which intellectual culture is defined, the construction of ideologies and ideologists, and the structure of cultural sub-systems.

This new book prints a collection of updated lectures and papers written and delivered by Lord Woolf since 1986, following his retirement in 2005 from the office of Lord Chief Justice and a judicial career that has covered part or all of the last four decades. Lord Woolf expresses his personal views and provides a panoramic insight into the main law reforms over this period. The title The Pursuit of Justice reflects Lord Woolf's determination to see that justice is done (...) in the English courts. (shrink)

A recent special issue in the Journal of Business Ethics gathered together a variety of papers addressing the challenges of putting virtue ethics into practice :563–565, 2013). The editors prefaced their outline of the various papers with the assertion that exploring the practical dimension of virtue ethics can help business leaders discover their proper place in working for a better world, as individuals and within the family, the business community and society in general :563–565, 2013). Scholars are yet to explore (...) the role of virtuous organisational leaders in the pursuit of Eudaimonia. This paper is a qualitative study which considered company directors’ self-understandings in light of a virtue ethics conceptual framework. The aim of the study is to explore whether virtue ethics rather than deontology and consequentialism is a better vehicle for expressing directors’ self-understandings about their ideals and role. (shrink)

The thesis that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities has putatively been refuted many times by so-called ‘triviality results’, although it has also enjoyed a number of resurrections. In this paper I assault it yet again with a new such result. I begin by motivating the thesis and discussing some of the philosophical ramifications of its fluctuating fortunes. I will canvas various reasons, old and new, why the thesis seems plausible, and why we should care about its fate. I will (...) look at some objections to Lewis’s famous triviality results, and thus some reasons for the pursuit of further triviality results. I will generalize Lewis’s results in ways that meet the objections. I will conclude with some reflections on the demise of the thesis—or otherwise. (shrink)

A prominent feature of late nineteenth-century psychology was its intense preoccupation with precision. Precision was at once an ideal and an argument: the quest for precision helped psychology to establish its status as a mature science, sharing a characteristic concern with the natural sciences. We will analyse how psychologists set out to produce precision in 'mental chronometry', the measurement of the duration of psychological processes. In his Leipzig laboratory, Wundt inaugurated an elaborate research programme on mental chronometry. We will look (...) at the problem of calibration of experimental apparatus and will describe the intricate material, literary, and social technologies involved in the manufacture of precision. First, we shall discuss some of the technical problems involved in the measurement of ever shorter time-spans. Next, the Cattell-Berger experiments will help us to argue against the received view that all the precision went into the hardware, and practically none into the social organization of experimentation. Experimenters made deliberate efforts to bring themselves and their subjects under a regime of control and calibration similar to that which reigned over the experimental machinery. In Leipzig psychology, the particular blend of material and social technology resulted in a specific object of study: the generalized mind. We will then show that the distribution of precision in experimental psychology outside Leipzig demanded a concerted effort of instruments, texts, and people. It will appear that the forceful attempts to produce precision and uniformity had some rather paradoxical consequences. (shrink)

"Socrates' Pursuit of Definitions" examines the manner in which Socrates pursues definitions in Plato's early definitional dialogues and advances the following claims. Socrates evaluates definitions (proposed by his interlocutors or himself) by considering their consistency with conditions of the identity of F (F-conditions) to which he is committed. In evaluating proposed definitions, Socrates seeks to determine their truth-value. Socrates evaluates the truth-value of a proposed definition by considering the consistency of the proposed definition with F-conditions that F he believes to (...) be true. (For instance, a proposed definition's inconsistency with one of these gives Socrates reason to believe that the definition is false.) Socrates' belief in the truth of a given F-condition to which he is committed may be based on self-evidence, its endoxic status, experience, or deduction from premises to which he is committed on the basis of any of the previous three. However, Socrates does not consider the epistemological grounds of his commitments to his F-conditions. This is part of a general avoidance of metaethical and ethical epistemological issues. Due to his avoidance of these, Socrates' pursuit of true definitions is theoretically naïve. However, Socrates recognizes a certain limitation to his manner of pursuing definitions. These results are applied to advancing the following further points. (1) Although Socrates has a distinctive manner or style of pursuing definitions, it is inappropriate to ascribe to him a method of doing so in the following sense. The concept of method implies a certain theoretical conception of procedure that Socrates lacks. Moreover, according to Socrates' own conceptual framework, only one who possessed the relevant τέχνη would have a method. (2) Furthermore, Socrates' manner of pursuing definitions is not elenctic just insofar as the word "elenchus" is interpreted to have adversarial connotations; that is inconsistent with Socrates' motives and interests. (3) Socrates' manner of pursuing definitions is consistent among the early definitional dialogues. More specifically, there is no "demise of the elenchus" in a set of transitional dialogues, as Vlastos describes it. First, Socrates' manner of pursuing definitions is not "elenctic" (in the sense described). And, second, the fact that Socrates himself proposes definitions in allegedly post-elenctic dialogues (that is, Lysis and Hippias Major) is consistent with his manner of pursuing definitions. (4) In the early definitional dialogues, Socrates does not have a theory of definition. In particular, he lacks a general theoretical ontology. Moreover, while his comments and implicit commitments entail beliefs about some conditions for a satisfactory definition (for example, that the definiens must be a uniquely identifying true verbal description), such conditions do not constitute a theory. (5) Although in other early dialogues and in other parts of the definitional dialogues Socrates may express concern over the psychological states and well-being of his interlocutors, in the process of pursuing definitions, Socrates' principal concern is the evaluation of definitions, not the psychologies or lives of his interlocutors. (6) Finally, Socrates is committed to the epistemological priority of definitional knowledge for pertinent non-definitional knowledge. This does present a methodological problem of the kind to which Geach first drew attention. Specifically, according to the manner in which Socrates pursues definitions, it is unclear how he can get from belief that p to knowledge that p. Although this problem is genuine, Socrates himself is not unaware of such limits of his approach. (shrink)

Drawing on diverse historical cases, this paper describes and examines various aspects of a modality of scientific appraisal which has remained largely unexplored, theory pursuit. Specifically, it addresses the following issues: the epistemic and pragmatic commitments involved in theory pursuit, including how these differ from those characteristic of theory acceptance; how the research interests of scientists enter into their pursuit decisions; some of the strategies for the refinement and extension of a theory's empirical abilities which typify theory pursuit; and the (...) need to distinguish between individual and community rationality in contexts of pursuit. (shrink)