Between Addition and Difference: A Place for Religious Understanding in a World of Science

Among contemporary religious believers, some follow in the footsteps of Newton, allowing their religious understanding to fill in gaps left by the sciences. Others take a more Wittgensteinian approach, discretely separating religious from scientific ways of thinking. Because neither of these relatively irenic positions captures the important element of cultural reform that is prevalent in so much of the religious life of the past, George Lakoff's recent work in cognitive studies is used to suggest ways that religious ideas may be used to challenge and enrich scientific thought. A scrutiny of Richard Dawkins's biological analyses of human behavior reveals the distorting limitations of exclusively scientific understanding, thereby clearing conceptual space for genuinely religious values, actions, responsibilities, and forms of human life.     

Stages-of-learning analysis of developmental interactions in memory,with illustrations from developmental interactions in picture-word effects

Although Age × Treatment interactions have been widely viewed as key results in theories of memory development, most examples of such results (e.g., Age × Treatment interactions in the effects of item concreteness, item elaboration, and organizational context) have been identified in list-learning experiments where children of different ages receive a small, fixed number of study-test cycles on the target list. A stages-of-learning analysis reveals that such designs confound a treatment's potential interactions with age and its potential interactions with stage of learning. The analysis also reveals specific situations in which such designs will produce converging, diverging, and crossover Age × Treatment interactions even though the treatment does not interact with age in any way. A series of experiments is reported in which a mathematical model that incorporates stages-of-learning distinctions is applied to the well-known interaction between age and item concreteness (pictures versus words) in cued recall. Although a diverging Age × Treatment interaction has been observed in previous research, it was found that there are at least four different interactions between the picture-word manipulation and age; (a) a diverging interaction at storage that operates throughout elementary school; (b) a diverging interaction localized within retrieval learning and operating during the first half of the elementary school; (c) a converging interaction localized within retrieval learning and operating during the second half of elementary school; and (d) a diverging interaction localized within retrieval performance and operating throughout elementary school.     

Wittgenstein,education and religion

Conclusion Wittgenstein's approach to religion is an important part of any assessment of the significance of his thought as a whole for educational thinking and practice. As we have seen, although his view of religion is elusive and stands in need of definitive evaluation, it offers a number of insights and challenges.Whilst Wittgenstein's approach conflicts in important respects with the LR view of education in religion, because that view is based on important social and cultural realities which are significant for Wittgensteinian principles, it is not supplanted. The Wittgensteinian approach both supplies important perspectives which will enrich the LR view, whilst giving support to a greater pluralism in the way in which education in religion is conceived, including forms of substantial religious upbringing and schooling.     

神经网络模型对内隐学习的探索

近几年来,研究者们借助人工神经网络模型的方法对内隐学习研究中突出的争论性问题进行了新的探索。针对内隐学习的无意识问题,模拟研究发现确实存在一种无意识的内隐学习,然而这种无意识加工的发生与否要取决于规则的难易程度;针对内隐学习的抽象性问题,人工神经网络模型所主张的分布式概率表征能较好地加以解释。可见,神经网络模型的原理和模拟研究可能为真正地解决内隐学习的无意识性和抽象性等目前争论较多的领域提供一个全新的视角和研究方向。     

Art from a Wittgensteinian Perspective: Constitutive Norms in Context

This article offers a detailed textual reexamination of the ‘family resemblance’ passages to reconsider their implications for understanding art. The reassessment takes into account their broader context in the Philosophical Investigations, including the rule following considerations, and draws on a realist interpretive framework associated principally with the work of Cavell, Diamond, McDowell, and Putnam. Wittgensteinian “realism with a human face” helps us discern that the primary issue is not whether certain concepts are definable, posing a stark opposition between essentialism and its denial about kinds such as language or games. What is at issue is keeping uses of language in view in their variety and their broader life contexts. Focus on rules suggests more broadly that norms and values inhere in practices and play a constitutive role in determining the entities integral to those practices. From this perspective, a Wittgensteinian framework explains art as locally overlapping practices, each with their own constitutive norms and values for the works integral to them. What makes something art has normative force specific to a practice. This recognizes the historically contingent nature of art practices in a way that relational definitions or disjunctive ‘cluster’ explanations do not.     

Wittgenstein and contemporary theories of word learning

Wittgenstein's positions on word learning, rules of use, and the impossibility of a private language, as expounded in his Philosophical Investigations, are examined in relation to issues of early child word learning. Current theoretical positions in the cognitivist mode are contrasted with the social cultural pragmatic approach, and each is compared to the principles that Wittgenstein advanced. Bloom's [(2000). How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] version of the cognitivist theory rejects most of the principles that Wittgenstein advanced, relying on innate cognitive endowments to explain children's success in word learning, using the word-referent mapping paradigm. Nelson's “use without meaning” and Tomasello's [(2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] social-pragmatic model of learning from use are presented as representative of Wittgensteinian principles that meaning exists in and is inferred from the uses of words within communal activities (“language games” in “forms of life”).     

幼儿园师生交往类型的研究

师生交往是当前教师与儿童发展研究的前沿领域。对幼儿园师生交往类型的探讨已成为近年来国内外研究与关注的焦点。本研究通过对105名幼儿教师的师生交往所进行的因素分析与聚类分析,较深入地揭示了幼儿园师生交往的四种类型：严厉型、民主型、开放学习型、灌输型及其各自所具有的特征．并指出开放学习型是我国幼儿园师生交往的一种特有类型。     

The Journey from Discovery to Scientific Change: Scientific Communities,Shared Models,and Specialised Vocabulary

Scientific communities as social groupings and the role that such communities play in scientific change and the production of scientific knowledge is currently under debate. I examine theory change as a complex social interaction among individual scientists and the scientific community, and argue that individuals will be motivated to adopt a more radical or innovative attitude when confronted with striking similarities between model systems and a more robust understanding of specialised vocabulary. Two case studies from the biological sciences, Barbara McClintock and Stanley Prusiner, help motivate the idea that sharing of models and specialised vocabulary fill the gap between discovery and scientific change by promoting the dispersal of important information throughout the scientific community.     

The debate over drug testing in the workplace: A novel opportunity for public scientific education

In several respects, American evidence law has an anti-scientific bias. A number of the admissibility and legal sufficiency rules in American evidence law reflect this bias. The assumption underlying the bias is that the typical citizen–-the potential juror–-is incapable of critically evaluating technical evidence. The results of national educational tests demonstrate that scientific illiteracy is widespread in the United States. However, the current controversy over drug testing presents forensic scientists with a unique opportunity to educate the average citizen about some of the rudiments of scientific proof. In the course of the debate, the scientific community can help familiarize the American public with such concepts as the limited nature of scientific findings, experimentation as the means of scientific validation, and the importance of proper test protocol. Perhaps more than any other scientific controversy, the debate over drug testing is of intense personal interest to the average citizen. This article pleads with the participants in the drug testing debate to capitalize on that interest and conduct their debate at a high level to aid the citizenry to develop a broader understanding of scientific evidence.     

Two Types of Externalism

A contrast is drawn between two types of externalism, one based on ideas of Wittgenstein, the other on arguments from Putnam. Gregory McCulloch's attempt to combine the two types is then examined and criticized. Putnamian externalism is ambiguous. It can be interpreted either as the empirical claim that we give priority to scientific as opposed to other forms of discourse, or as a metaphysical claim that our language attempts to conform to the structure of the world 'in itself'. But the first claim is simply false, and the second involves a form of metaphysical realism that a Wittgensteinian must reject as unintelligible. McCulloch's attempted synthesis of the two types is therefore either incoherent, or else simply adds an empirical falsehood to Wittgenstein's conceptual point. It is also noted that Putnam himself has progressively retreated from his original claims, and now appears to be a Wittgensteinian, but not a 'Putnamian', externalist.     

The notion of happiness in early Wittgenstein: towards a non-contentful account of happiness

This paper examines the notion of ‘happiness’ in the writings of the early Wittgenstein as a notion that does not involve any particular content or states of mind. The main question that the paper addresses is how we can retain a non-contentful account of happiness without turning happiness into an abstract notion, isolated from our concrete lives in language. The paper examines two pivotal components of the Wittgensteinian account of happiness: the ‘good exercise of the will’ and the ‘artistic way of seeing’. In both cases, I try to stress their non-contentful dimension, while simultaneously trying to understand them through language. The central concept for such a non-contentful aspect of language is the notion of ‘meaningfulness’. Thus the paper examines the pivotal components of the Wittgensteinian account of happiness in relation to the notion of ‘meaningfulness’: happiness is then explained as seeing a world against the background of possibilities of meaning.     

Counting on Whiteness: Religion,race, ethnicity,and the politics of Jewish demography

American Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and schema and Jewish communal concerns has resulted in decisive omissions regarding how best to account for the racial and ethnic diversity of American Jews. An analysis of survey instruments used in 175 American Jewish population studies and community portraits conducted since 1970 reveals a focus on questions of religious practice and an avoidance of those about race and ethnicity, resulting in a “religio-racial formation” of American Jews as White. This approach to studying American Jewish life has marginalized or excluded non-White Jews while ensuring ongoing Jewish communal access to Whiteness without having to claim it explicitly.     

Popper versus Wittgenstein on Truth, Necessity, and Scientific Hypotheses

Most philosophers of science maintain Confirmationism's central tenet, namely, that scientific theories are probabilistically confirmed by experimental successes. Against this dominant (and old) conception of experimental science, Popper's well-known, anti-inductivistic Falsificationism (’Deductivism’) has stood, virtually alone, since 1934. Indeed, it is Popper who tells us that it was he who killed Logical Positivism. It is also pretty well-known that Popper blames Wittgenstein for much that is wrong with Logical Positivism, just as he despises Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophers for abdicating philosophy's true mission. What is not well-known, however, especially because Popper neglected to tell us in 1934, is that Wittgenstein is very much an ally. It was Wittgenstein who rejected induction in the strongest possible terms as early as 1922, and it was Wittgenstein who similarly rejected Confirmationism approximately four years prior to Popper. The aims of this paper are to illuminate the substantial agreements between Popper and Wittgenstein and, by doing so, to clarify their important disagreement regarding the status of “strictly universal,” scientific theories (or hypotheses). This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Learning from implicit learning literature: Comment on Shea, Wulf, Whitacre, and Park (2001)

In their analysis of complex motor skill learning, Shea, Wulf, Whitacre, and Park (2001) have overlooked one of the most robust conclusions of the experimental studies on implicit learning conducted during the last decade--namely that participants usually learn things that are different from those that the experimenter expected them to learn. Weshow that the available literature on implicit learning strongly suggests that the improved performance in Shea et al.'s Experiments 1 and 2 (and similar earlier experiments, e.g., Wulf & Schmidt, 1997) was due to the exploitation of regularities in the target pattern different from those on which the postexperimental interview focused. This rules out the conclusions drawn from the failure of this interview to reveal any explicit knowledge about the task structure on the part of the participants. Similarly, because the information about the task structure provided to an instructed group of participants in Shea et al.'s Experiment 2 did not concern the regularities presumably exploited by the standard, so-called implicit, group, Shea et al.'s claim that explicit knowledge may be less effective than implicit knowledge is misleading.     

World‐Pictures and Wittgensteinian Certainty

Although certainty is a fundamental notion in epistemology, it is less studied in contemporary analytic epistemology than other important notions such as knowledge or justification. This paper focuses on Wittgensteinian certainty, according to which the very basic dimension of our epistemic practices, the elements of our world‐pictures, are objectively certain, in that we cannot legitimately doubt them. The aim of the paper is to offer the best philosophical way to clarify Wittgensteinian certainty, in a way that is consonant with Wittgenstein's fundamental insights. The paper critiques two alternative proposals for clarifying Wittgensteinian certainty that are philosophically unsatisfying: the rule view and the proposition view. Finally, it instead shows how viewing world‐pictures as pictures, in the sense of unclear conceptions, is a more philosophically fruitful approach to understanding world‐pictures.     

Wittgenstein on Happiness: Harmony,Disharmony and Antitheodicy

This paper investigates Wittgenstein's remarks on happiness and harmony in the context of Wittgensteinian antitheodicy. Philosophers of religion inspired by Wittgenstein's philosophy often criticize theodicies seeking to justify apparently meaningless evil and suffering within God's overall harmonious plan. The paper analyses Wittgenstein's early views on happiness as harmony with the world, examining whether they are incompatible with an antitheodicist approach abandoning the very project of theodicy by acknowledging a certain kind of disharmony. However, antitheodicy may also, at the transcendental meta‐level, be considered a “harmonious” way of “seeing the world aright,” which raises a reflexive problem for any Wittgenstein‐inspired antitheodicy.     

Underpowered samples,false negatives,and unconscious learning

The scientific community has witnessed growing concern about the high rate of false positives and unreliable results within the psychological literature, but the harmful impact of false negatives has been largely ignored. False negatives are particularly concerning in research areas where demonstrating the absence of an effect is crucial, such as studies of unconscious or implicit processing. Research on implicit processes seeks evidence of above-chance performance on some implicit behavioral measure at the same time as chance-level performance (that is, a null result) on an explicit measure of awareness. A systematic review of 73 studies of contextual cuing, a popular implicit learning paradigm, involving 181 statistical analyses of awareness tests, reveals how underpowered studies can lead to failure to reject a false null hypothesis. Among the studies that reported sufficient information, the meta-analytic effect size across awareness tests was d _z = 0.31 (95 % CI 0.24–0.37), showing that participants’ learning in these experiments was conscious. The unusually large number of positive results in this literature cannot be explained by selective publication. Instead, our analyses demonstrate that these tests are typically insensitive and underpowered to detect medium to small, but true, effects in awareness tests. These findings challenge a widespread and theoretically important claim about the extent of unconscious human cognition.     

Inwardness and Sociability: A Reply to Carter

Carter argues that Wittgensteinian moral philosophy – typified by the work of Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner – rests on shaky foundations because it vacillates between grounding moral judgements in grammar and in a form of life. In this article, I respond to Carter's criticism. I defend Wittgensteinian moral philosophy by showing that Gaita and Cordner specifically repudiate the purported dichotomy between grammar and a form of life. I then go on to explain why Wittgensteinian moral philosophers are right not to try to ground moral judgements in features of a shared form of life.     

Welcoming Design – Hosting a Hospitable Online Course

Abstract. A discussion about how instructors can host a hospitable online learning environment can address one of the fundamental philosophical and theological concerns frequently expressed about online learning – the loss of face-to-face interaction and, with it, the loss of community building (cf. Delamarter 2005 , 138). This perceived link between physical presence and community creation, sometimes articulated, frequently assumed, often stands in the way of instructors, administrators, and even institutions fully embracing online learning. This article will argue that when one gives due attention to hospitality, the potential for building online community is greatly enhanced, and with it comes a more effective pedagogical strategy for deep learning. It will conclude with some general recommendations for employing hospitality for building online learning communities.