Research on teachers’ professional identity integrates many constructs that are treated independently in most cases. This study described the associations between components of teacher professional identity and their association with teachers’ general pedagogical beliefs. Secondary teachers completed a survey about several components of their identity and general pedagogical beliefs. Multidimensional scaling revealed that the components could be mapped on two dimensions: form of motivation and degree of subject specificity. The resulting map revealed four meaningful groups of components. Furthermore, whereas direct (...) transmission general pedagogical beliefs were found to be strongly tied to an identity grounded in the subject taught, constructivist beliefs were independent of identity components. This study provides new insight into the stru... (shrink)

Modernity is Apocalyptic in essence. This assertion is stated nowhere in The Triumph of Human Empire by Rosalind Williams, nor in l’Apocalypse Joyeuse by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. But it is everywhere on the pages of these books, which recount the ambivalence with which the project of Modernity and its technological feats has been received in specific times and places, notably nineteenth century Europe. Essence here is not to be understood as transcendental a-historical necessity, but as unfolding historical ontology. Despite contingencies, (...) the project of Modernity has continued to realise a secular ending of the world by continuing to conquer and destroy it.In The Triumph of Human Empire we encounter ambivalence through the biographies and works of three European writers, who employed the genre of romance to express their uneasiness with modern civilisation and progress: Jules Verne, William Morris and Louis Stevenson. Verne is perhaps the writer which we would least expect to have probl .. (shrink)

Les écrits manuscrits ou imprimés du chirurgien accoucheur Jean-Louis Baudelocque et ceux de ses principaux rivaux, éclairent les enjeux de pouvoir et les stratégies d’occupation de l’espace pédagogique et éditorial dans le domaine obstétrical dans les années 1770-1780. L’établissement d’un stemma explicitant les modes de production des écrits de Baudelocque, puis l’analyse comparative de ces différents écrits, enfin celle des accusations de plagiat et des jugements contemporains portés sur son œuvre et sur ce qu’il doit à son maître (...) Solayrés de Renhac, permettent de comprendre la production par Baudelocque d’un savoir obstétrical propre associée à de nouvelles stratégies éditoriales. (shrink)

The first comprehensive presentation of the dynamical approach to cognition. It contains a representative sampling of original, current research on topics such as perception, motor control, speech and language, decision making, and development.

According to the dominant computational approach in cognitive science, cognitive agents are digital computers; according to the alternative approach, they are dynamical systems. This target article attempts to articulate and support the dynamical hypothesis. The dynamical hypothesis has two major components: the nature hypothesis (cognitive agents are dynamical systems) and the knowledge hypothesis (cognitive agents can be understood dynamically). A wide range of objections to this hypothesis can be rebutted. The conclusion is that cognitive systems may well be dynamical systems, (...) and only sustained empirical research in cognitive science will determine the extent to which that is true. (shrink)

A great deal of philosophy of mind in the modern era has been driven by an intense aversion to Cartesian dualism. In the 1950s, materialists claimed to have succeeded once and for all in exorcising the Cartesian ghost by identifying the mind with the brain. In subsequent decades, cognitive science put scientific meat on this metaphysical skeleton by explicating mental processes as digital computation implemented in the brain's hardware.

In 1988 Fodor and Pylyshyn issued a challenge to the newly-popular connectionism: explain the systematicity of cognition without merely implementing a so-called classical architecture. Since that time quite a number of connectionist models have been put forward, either by their designers or by others, as in some measure demonstrating that the challenge can be met (e.g., Pollack, 1988, 1990; Smolensky, 1990; Chalmers, 1990; Niklasson and Sharkey, 1992; Brousse, 1993). Unfortu- nately, it has generally been unclear whether these models actually do (...) have this implication (see, for instance, the extensive philosophical debate in Smolensky, 1988; Fodor and McLaughlin, 1990; van Gelder, 1990, 1991; McLaughlin, 1993a, 1993b; Clark, 1993). Indeed, we know of no major supporter of classical orthodoxy who has felt compelled, by connectionist models and argu- ments, to concede in print that connectionists have in fact delivered a non-classical explanation of systematicity. (shrink)

Les écrits manuscrits ou imprimés du chirurgien accoucheur Jean-Louis Baudelocque et ceux de ses principaux rivaux, éclairent les enjeux de pouvoir et les stratégies d’occupation de l’espace pédagogique et éditorial dans le domaine obstétrical dans les années 1770-1780. L’établissement d’un stemma explicitant les modes de production des écrits de Baudelocque, puis l’analyse comparative de ces différents écrits, enfin celle des accusations de plagiat et des jugements contemporains portés sur son œuvre et sur ce qu’il doit à son maître (...) Solayrés de Renhac, permettent de comprendre la production par Baudelocque d’un savoir obstétrical propre associée à de nouvelles stratégies éditoriales. (shrink)

When the various disciplines participating in cognitive science are listed, philosophy almost always gets a guernsey. Yet, a couple of years ago at the conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Boulder (USA), there was no philosophy or philosopher with any prominence on the program. When queried on this point, the organizer (one of the "superstars" of the field) claimed it was partly an accident, but partly also due to an impression among members of the committee that philosophy is basically (...) a waste of time. Philosophy, they thought, is mostly obscure bullshit that does little to help, and much to hinder, real progress in cognitive science. (shrink)

b> Critical thinking is highly valued but difficult to teach effectively. The Reason! project at the University of Melbourne has developed the Reason!Able software as part of a general method aimed at enhancing critical thinking skills. Students using Reason!Able appear to make dramatic gains. This paper describes the challenge involved, the theoretical basis of the Reason! project, the Reason!Able software, and results of intensive evaluation of the Reason! approach.

A defense of the Dynamical Hypothesis against the charge that one of its major supports, the argument from time, is rotten.

systematicity is. Until systematicity is adequately systematicity. Most contributors to these debates have clarified, we cannot know whether classical paid little or no attention to the alleged empirical.

Paper presented at Cognition, Evolution and Rationality: Cognitive Science for the 21st Century. Oporto, September 2002. To appear in a volume based on that conference edited by Antonio Jose Teiga Zilhao.

“There is a familiar trio of reactions by scientists to a purportedly radical hypothesis: (a) “You must be our of your mind!”, (b) “What else is new? Everybody knows _that_!”, and, later—if the hypothesis is still standing—(c) “Hmm. You _might _be on to something!” ((Dennett, 1995) p. 283).

The traditional mind‐body debate is chronically unwell. Its problems are largely due to unwitting acceptance of four deep metaphysical assumptions. Rejecting those assumptions leads to a pluralist conception of the ontology of mind and a correspondingly complex account of the fit between mind and world.

Old age is not normally associated with innovativeness and technical prowess. To the contrary, when treating age as a distinct category, policy makers, innovation scholars, and companies typically regard younger people as drivers of innovation, and the early adoption of new technology. In this paper, we critically investigate this link between age, ineptness, and technology adoption using a case study of the diffusion of electric bikes in the Netherlands. We demonstrate how, during the first wave of e-bike acceptance, old age (...) was constructed as an arena in which important learning processes took place, and where older persons became early adopters of e-bikes. Theoretically, this paper speaks critically to the prolific literature on innovation diffusion and its treatment of adopter categories as generic concepts. Using age as a central dimension, our research highlights the situated and constructed nature of adopter categories, and thus challenges age-based assumptions about innovation and technology use by younger and older persons. These insights about what we term the rejuvenation of e-bikes help us rectify existing biases of older persons as an inherently problematic group of technology users. (shrink)

The goal of the Reason! project is to develop an effective and affordable method for improving informal reasoning. In this paper we sketch the background to the project, briefly describe the Reason! software, and report positive results from a detailed study of the first full-scale trial.

Argument mapping is a way of diagramming the logical structure of an argument to explicitly and concisely represent reasoning. The use of argument mapping in critical thinking instruction has increased dramatically in recent decades. This paper overviews the innovation and provides a procedural approach for new teaches wanting to use argument mapping in the classroom. A brief history of argument mapping is provided at the end of this paper.

Department of Computer Science Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences University of Skövde, S-54128, SWEDEN Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200.

1. Consider the basic outlines of the mind-body debate as it is found in contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The central question is “whether mental phenomena are physical phenomena, and if not, how they relate to physical phenomena.”1 Over the centuries, a wide range of possible solutions to this problem have emerged. These are the various “isms” familiar to any student of the debate: Cartesian dualism, idealism, epiphenomenalism, central state materialism, non- reductive physicalism, anomalous monism, and so forth. Each purports to (...) specify, among other things, the metaphysical relationship between the mental and the physical. They do so by specifying whether, or in what way, mental entities are identical to, reducible to, realized by, supervenient upon, or in causal interaction with physical entities. Thus, a convenient way to survey the range of positions is to enter them in a table. Rows correspond to the major kinds of metaphysical relation which might obtain between mental and physical entities. Each columns corresponds to one of the generic positions available in the debate. The particular theories defended by individual philosophers are usually just specific versions of generic positions. Thus Malebranche’s occasionalism is a version of causal dualism, distinguished by a peculiar account of the way in which causal interaction between mental and physical is actually effected. The central philosophical challenge is to determine which of these positions correctly describes the mental/physical relationship. Positions are evaluated for internal consistency, their fit with “intuitions,” their compatibility with scientific developments, and so forth. The mind-body debate, in this simple form, is set out in any number of. (shrink)

been to define various notions of distribution in terms of represented by one and the same distributed pattern (Mur- structures of correspondence between the represented items dock 1979). For example, it is standard in feedforward and the representational resources (e.g., van Gelder 1992). connectionist networks for one and the same set of synap- This approach may be misguided; the essence of this alter- tic weights to represent many associations between input native category of representation might be some other prop- (...) and output. erty entirely. For example, Haugeland (1991) has suggested • Equipotentiality In some cases, an item is represented by. (shrink)

Lachman claims that the Dynamical Hypothesis (DH) is “untenable.” His own position is a version of the “The DH is epistemological, not ontological,” objection to the target article, which is dealt with in section R2.3 of my original response (van Gelder 1998r). Additional objections are that the coverage of the hypothesis is “vast” and that the DH presupposes we have reached the end point of scientific theorizing. Indeed, the DH is very broad, but it does not presuppose that science (...) has ended; that's why we call it a “hypothesis.”. (shrink)

, which uses the intuitionistic propositional calculus, with the only connective →. It is very important, because the well known Curry-Howard correspondence between proofs and programs was originally discovered with it, and because it enjoys the normalization property: every typed term is strongly normalizable. It was extended to second order intuitionistic logic, in 1970, by J.-Y. Girard [4], under the name of system F, still with the normalization property.More recently, in 1990, the Curry-Howard correspondence was extended to classical logic, following (...) Felleisen and Griffin [6] who discovered that the law of Peirce corresponds to control instructions in functional programming languages. It is interesting to notice that, as early as 1972, Clint and Hoare [1] had made an analogous remark for the law of excluded middle and controlled jump instructions in imperative languages.There are now many type systems which are based on classical logic; among the best known are the system LC of J.-Y. Girard [5] and the λμ-calculus of M. Parigot [11]. We shall use below a system closely related to the latter, called the λ c -calculus [8, 9]. Both systems use classical second order logic and have the normalization property.In the sequel, we shall extend the λ c -calculus to the Zermelo-Frænkel set theory. The main problem is due to the axiom of extensionality. To overcome this difficulty, we first give the axioms of ZF in a suitable (equivalent) form, which we call ZF ɛ. (shrink)

People generally develop some degree of competence in general informal reasoning and argument skills, but how do they go beyond this to attain higher expertise? Ericsson has proposed that high-level expertise in a variety of domains is cultivated through a specific type of practice, referred to as ‘deliberate practice’. Applying this framework yields the empirical hypothesis that high-level expertise in informal reasoning is the outcome of extensive deliberate practice. This paper reports results from two studies evaluating the hypothesis. University student (...) participants completed 12 weeks of deliberate practice in informal reasoning. Quantity of practice was recorded by computer, and additionally assessed via self report. The hypothesis was supported: students in both studies showed a large improvement, and practice as measured by computer, was related to amount of improvement in informal reasoning. These findings support adopting a deliberate practice approach when attempting to teach or learn expertise in informal reasoning. (shrink)