Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague which brought back memories of similar conversations in the past. This individual was required to teach a course in informal logic for the first time. His background was in formal logic and he did not understand the nature of this course, the curriculum, nor the skills to be taught. This lack caused him to disparage the course as not worthy of his attention, not consisting of any recognized area of expertise and of (...) little value to students. This situation would not be a problem were it atypical. I believe this bias against an understanding of argumentation is, in part, due to a lack of awareness of the theories, issues, and approaches that inform the dynamics of critical thinking. Like most other areas in philosophy, there is controversy; there are different approaches and arguments. Those who have an understanding of ongoing research in this area rarely disparage the field of informal logic, or fail to acknowledge the developing area of expertise and its history. (shrink)

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment (...) of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research. (shrink)

Over the past half century, our best scientific understanding of the immune system has been transformed. The immune system has turned out to be extremely sophisticated, densely connected to the central nervous system and cognitive capacities, deeply involved in the production of behaviour, and responsive to different kinds of psychosocial event. Such results have rendered the immune system part of the subject-matter of psychology and cognitive science. I argue that such results, alongside the history of psychoneuroimmunology, give us good reason (...) to be sceptical about the characterization of cognitive science and psychology as studying the mind and the mental. (shrink)

Among those living systems, which are cognizers? Among the behaviours of, and causes of behaviour in, living systems, which are cognitive? Such questions sit at the heart of a sophisticated, ongoing debate, of which the recent papers by Corcoran et al. ( 2020 ) and Sims and Kiverstein ( 2021 ) serve as excellent examples. I argue that despite their virtues, both papers suffer from flawed conceptions of the point of the debate. This leaves their proposals ill-motivated—good answers to the (...) wrong question. Additionally, their proposals are unfit to serve the legitimate roles for characterizations of cognition. (shrink)

The fallacy of composition involves differing relationships of parts to wholes complicated by the problem of group ambiguity. Our discussion begins with a brief diagnosis of important features of the fallacy. We consider a common implicit assumption and the main factors that contribute to its acceptability. Our focus will be on illuminating some common strategies rather than formal material conditions for the fallacy. This is to facilitate the critical discussion of possibilities for this fallacy.

This essay juxtaposes concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with worlds imagined by Ursula Le Guin in a performance of ‘rhizosemiotic play’ that explores some possible ways of generating and sustaining what William Pinar calls ‘complicated conversation’ within the regime of signs that constitutes an increasingly internationalized curriculum field. Deleuze and Guattari analyze thinking as flows or movements across space. They argue, for example, that every mode of intellectual inquiry needs to account for the plane of immanence upon (...) which it operates—the preconceptual field presupposed by the concepts that inquiry creates. Curriculum inquiry currently operates on numerous nationally distinctive planes of immanence. I argue that the internationalization of curriculum studies should not presume a singular transnational plane of immanence but, rather, envisage a process performed by curriculum scholars with the capacities and competencies to change planes—to move between one plane of immanence and another and/or to transform their own planes. My essay is a ‘narrative experiment’ that takes seriously Deleuze’s argument that a work of philosophy should be, in part, a kind of science fiction, and also takes inspiration from Le Guin’s science fictional stories of ‘changing planes’ to generate productive and disruptive transnational agendas in curriculum inquiry. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic theory can be regarded as a cogent extension of commonsense psychology by interpretive means internal to it.

In recent discussions of the so-called “value of truth,” it is assumed that what is valuable in the relevant way is not the things that are true, but only various states and activities associated with those things: knowing them, investigating them, etc. I consider all the arguments I know of for this assumption, and argue that none provide good reason to accept it. By examining these arguments, we gain a better appreciation of what the value of the things that are (...) true would be, and why it would matter. We also encounter three indications that what is true really is valuable, each of which provides a promising starting point for a serious argument with that conclusion. (shrink)

Mark Mason, in his ‘A Justification, After the Postmodern Turn, of Universal Ethical Principles and Educational Ideals’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 37 , attempts to justify transcultural multiculturalism. In this paper I argue that he fails to refute moral relativism, and that multiculturalism as he interprets it is not morally acceptable.

Mark Mason, in his ‘A Justification, After the Postmodern Turn, of Universal Ethical Principles and Educational Ideals’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 37 (2005), attempts to justify transcultural multiculturalism. In this paper I argue that he fails to refute moral relativism, and that multiculturalism as he interprets it is not morally acceptable.

This paper is a reply to David Carr's two recent articles on religious education in this Journal. It argues that the examples Carr cites as distinctively religious are not, and that the present emphasis in schools on education about (rather than in) religion is justified.

This paper is a reply to David Carr's two recent articles on religious education in this Journal. It argues that the examples Carr cites as distinctively religious are not, and that the present emphasis in schools on education about (rather than in) religion is justified.

In bringing together leading scientists from a variety of disciplines to share their experiences and observations of developing and testing hypotheses, this ...

The paper adopts the co-evolutionary perspective on the human society/natural environment relationship developed, particularly, by the economist Richard Norgaard. This implies that human environmental knowledge is necessarily dynamic and incomplete. By extension, it is also fragmentary, in the sense that what may hold true when considering particular spatial and/or temporal scales may otherwise be false. The paper briefly explores the implications for rationality and belief, focusing particularly on the powerful role of metaphor in our collective and individual sense-making. The implications (...) of one particular metaphor—that of natural capital—are explored. Tentative conclusions about useful educational design are proposed, drawing on recent research. (shrink)

Research on adolescent wellbeing in Developmental Language Disorder has previously been examined through measures of parent or self-reported wellbeing, but never has a study included both and enabled comparison between the two. The current study reports parent and self rated wellbeing of adolescents with DLD and Low Language ability, as well as their typically developing peers. It also examines consistency between raters and factors influencing correspondence. Adolescents aged 10–11 with DLD, LL or TD were recruited from eight UK primary schools. (...) A battery of standardized language, psychosocial and wellbeing assessments, including the KIDSCREEN-27 were administered. Adolescent ratings of wellbeing were similar across groups on three of the five wellbeing dimensions, but those with DLD had lower self-reported Autonomy and Parental Relations than their TD peers, and both the DLD and LL group had lower School Environment scores than their TD peers. By parental report, the DLD and LL group were considered to have lower wellbeing on all five wellbeing dimensions relative to their TD peers. Paired sample t-test analyses indicated a high level of variance between parent and adolescent reported wellbeing for multiple wellbeing domains, especially Psychological Wellbeing. Importantly, predictors of the level of agreement between parent and adolescent reported psychological wellbeing differed between groups: cognitive reappraisal and sociability predicted this level of agreement for adolescents with LL, while social competence predicted agreement in DLD and TD. This study emphasizes the necessity of allowing adolescents of all language abilities to report their own wellbeing, as their perspective does not align with that of their parents. It also highlights the importance of including the full spectrum of need when investigating the impact of language ability on consistency between proxy and self-reported wellbeing. (shrink)

Chapman & Huffman (C&H) offer a theory of why we humans want to believe that we are different: to justify our cruelty to animals. This commentary offers further supporting evidence of this and examines more closely what the claim that humans are ‘different’ amounts to. It also considers some methodological issues in animal psychology closely related to C&H ‘s theory. These problems result from a common strategy for defending hypotheses about human difference.

Much of the world will be living in broadly "liberal" societies for the foreseeable future. Sustainability and security, however defined, must therefore be considered in the context of such societies, yet there is very little significant literature that does so. Indeed, much ecologically-oriented literature is overtly anti-liberal, as have been some recent responses to security concerns. This book explores the implications for sustainability and security of a range of intellectual perspectives on liberalism, such as those offered by John Rawls, Robert (...) Nozick, Frederick Hayek, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Oakeshott, Amartya Sen and Jrgen Habermas. (shrink)

In putting forward the modern concept of mind, Descartes identified the mind with the self. Recently, communitarian and feminist scholars have argued in favor of a conception of the self according to which it includes relations to the social world and parts of the body. If they are correct, it initially seems damning for the view that the self is the mind. I examine whether this is so, by considering whether the identification of self and mind can be saved by (...) recent views of the mind according to which it is partly constituted by aspects of the body other than the brain and by the world beyond the skin. I argue that it cannot, before considering what this means for the mind and its relationship to selves and persons. (shrink)

Originally put forward to defend history from the encroachment of physics, the distinction between understanding and explanation was built into the foundations of Karl Jaspers’ ‘phenomenological’ psychiatry, and it is revised, used and defended by many still working in that tradition. On the face of it, this is rather curious. I examine what this notion of ‘understanding’ amounts to, why it entered and remains influential in psychiatry, and what insights for contemporary psychiatry are buried in the notion. I argue that (...) it is unhelpfully associated with the view that the mental is epistemologically and methodologically autonomous, but that it nevertheless highlights an important lacuna in many views of psychiatry and the scientific study of humans more generally. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis provides the best explanation of a range of empirical phenomena; epistemic criics do not take this fully into account.

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

When we start with the wrong question, no matter how good an answer we get, it won’t give us the results we want. Rather than joining the throngs who are asking, When will this economic crisis be over? Jim Wallis says the right question to ask is How will this crisis change us? The worst thing we can do now, Wallis tells us, is to go back to normal. Normal is what got us into this situation. We need a new (...) normal, and this economic crisis is an invitation to discover what that means. Some of the principles Wallis unpacks for our new normal are . . . • Spending money we don’t have for things we don’t need is a bad foundation for an economy or a family. • It’s time to stop keeping up with the Joneses and start making sure the Joneses are okay. • The values of commercials and billboards are not the things we want to teach our children. • Care for the poor is not just a moral duty but is critical for the common good. • A healthy society is a balanced society in which markets, the government, and our communities all play a role. • The operating principle of God’s economy says that there is enough if we share it. • And much, much more . . . In the pages of this book, Wallis provides us with a moral compass for this new economy—one that will guide us on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street. Embracing a New Economy Getting back to "the way things were" is not an option. It is time we take our economic uncertainty and use it to find some moral clarity. Too often we have been ruled by the maxims that greed is good, it’s all about me, and I want it now. Those can be challenged only with some of our oldest and best values—enough is enough, we are in it together, and thinking not just for tomorrow but for future generations. Jim Wallis shows that the solution to our problems will be found only as individuals, families, friends, churches, mosques, synagogues, and entire communities wrestle with the question of values together. (shrink)