Interpretation of Scientific or Mathematical Concepts: Cognitive Issues and Instructional Implications

Scientific and mathematical concepts are significantly different from everyday concepts and are notoriously difficult to learn. It is shown that particular instances of such concepts can be identified or generated by different possible modes of concept interpretation. Some of these modes use formally explicit knowledge and thought processes; others rely on less formal case-based knowledge and more automatic recognition processes. The various modes differ in attainable precision, likely errors, and ease of use. A combination of such modes can be used to formulate an “ideal” model for interpreting scientific concepts both reliably and efficiently. Comparisons are made with the actual concept interpretations of expert scientists and novice students. The discussion elucidates some cognitive and metacognitive reasons why the learning of scientific or mathematical concepts is difficult. It also suggests instructional guidelines for teaching such concepts more effectively.     

Second person thought

There are modes of presentation of a person in thought corresponding to the first and third person pronouns. This paper proposes that there is also thought involving a second person mode of presentation of another, which might be expressed by an utterance involving ‘you’, but need not be expressed linguistically. It suggests that co-operative activity is the locus for such thought. First person thought is distinctive in how it supplies reasons for the subject to act. In co-operative action there is first person plural intending and judging. So there is a way of thinking of another, when openly co-operating with him or her, which plays the distinctive role of giving reason for contribution to the co-operative activity. In slogan form, ‘you’ is ‘we minus I’. The way children learn to use second and third person pronouns is naturally explained on this view. Contrasting less sophisticated kinds of co-operative activity with more sophisticated forms, and considering some issues about common knowledge and common purpose, help to fill out the proposal.     

Why Be an Anti‐Individualist?

Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject's environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent's commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism is an implicit part of responsible epistemic practices, we cannot abandon it without compromising our own epistemic agency. The story I tell about the regulation of one's own representational practices yields a new account of the identity conditions for anti-individualistic concepts.     

马克思哲学研究的思想史路径——以“市民社会与历史唯物主义”为案例

As to the future research on Marxian philosophy,it is vital for us to restart the exploration of its origins in the history of thought in a new way.There are two points for this.First,we should abandon the old research mode of making Marx's thought and the history of western thought in opposition to each other,and set to interpret the characters and contributions of Marxian theories in the genealogy of western thought.Second,we should change from the problem domain of metaphysics to that of political philos...     

Some considerations on the capacity to be alone

This paper considers the lack of coherence of the psychoanalytic theories of the primary and secondary process. As a consequence, the interplay of primary and secondary process modes of thought cannot be conceptualised properly. Firstly, we summarize the results of an elsewhere-made metapsychological re-examination of both principles of mental functioning, and argue that Rapaport's distinction between a drive and a conceptual organization of memory, elaborated on by Siegfried Zepf is an extremely useful means of understanding primary and secondary process activity. As a central thesis, we state that primary process operates by affects, whilst secondary process utilizes concepts. The second part of the paper makes an attempt to show the dialectical relationship of affective and conceptual thought in the functioning of the living psyche. Temporarily dominating mental functioning, primary and secondary process thinking each utilize the other as a means, but never work purely within the psychic apparatus. It is shown that it is the specific interplay of primary and secondary process activity, which produces new adaptive substitutive formations. Some basic assumptions about the concepts of regression and progression are made to elucidate the shift from secondary to primary process dominance and vice versa.     

In Defence of Conceptual Integration

According to the ‘integration approach’, interpretations of political concepts should (1) explain that they stand for rights we ought to respect and (2) be both compatible and mutually supporting. I start by clarifying what this means, and proceed to an examination of Ronald Dworkin’s latest argument for value holism. I argue that his argument fails to provide a convincing case for the integration approach. I go on to argue that we nonetheless should accept that interpretations of political concepts should be compatible, because denying it would be inconsistent with (1), and the fact that ‘ought implies can’. I then provide reasons for thinking that we also cannot really satisfy (1) for any particular concept without giving reasons in term of what fall under other concepts—that is, interpreting the concepts as mutually supporting. We thus have reasons to accept both parts of (2). Finally, I defend the integration approach from three important objections: First, that it conflates different values; secondly, that it is inconsistent with ordinary language-usage; and thirdly, that it overlooks important telic values. I conclude that none of these compels us to abandon the integration approach.     

Can a Mediator Moderate? Considering the Role of Time and Change in the Mediator-Moderator Distinction

The concepts of mediation and moderation are important for specifying ways in which psychological treatments work and for whom they are most beneficial. Historically, the terms were confused and used interchangeably, so a rich body of scholarly literature makes clear their distinction. Researchers are also becoming increasingly aware that mediation and moderation can be integrated and that such integration can advance theory development and testing. One question that has not received sufficient attention is whether a mediator can simultaneously moderate. We tackle this question in this paper, and in doing so we expand on the MacArthur conceptualizations of mediation and moderation. The result is a presentation of a meta-theoretical model that illustrates how a construct that is initially a mediator can, not simultaneously but over time, evolve into a construct that moderates. When this occurs, a construct that changed for the better as a result of an intervention can later promote more positive change during a later intervention. Various implications of this novel paradigm for future research are discussed, including the importance of this model in the emerging context of managed health care.     

The Puzzle of Metacoherence

I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense‐data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively indistinguishable perception are employed as a consequence of being related to external, mind‐independent objects or property‐instances. These concepts and nonconceptual structures are identified with modes of presentation types. Since a hallucinating subject is not related to any such objects or property‐instances, the concepts she employs remain empty. I argue that the phenomenology of hallucinations and perceptions can be identified with employing concepts and analogous nonconceptual structures. By doing so, I defend an ontologically minimalist view of the phenomenology of experience that (1) vindicates Aristotelianism about types and (2) amounts to a naturalized view of the phenomenology of experience.     

Concept Appraisal

This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts. We demonstrate that there are multiple, reliably judged, dimensions of epistemic appraisal of concepts. Four of these dimensions are accounted for by a common underlying factor capturing how well people believe they understand a concept. Further studies show how dimensions of concept appraisal relate to other aspects of concepts. First, they relate directly to the hierarchical organization of concepts, reflecting the increase in specificity from superordinate to basic and subordinate levels. Second, they predict inductive choices in category-based induction. Our results suggest that epistemic appraisals of concepts form a psychologically important yet previously overlooked aspect of the structure of concepts. These findings will be important in understanding why individuals sometimes abandon and replace certain concepts; why social groups do so, for example, during a “scientific revolution”; and how we can facilitate such changes when we engage in deliberate “conceptual engineering” for epistemic, social, and political purposes.     

Ministry with the Confused Elderly

Clergy and lay visitors often encounter the confused elderly, yet most seem to find it difficult to understand the relevance of their ministry to such persons. Many confused seniors have been active participants in their church or synagogue and have significant faith experiences. However, once they become confused, they are often seen as disruptive in services of worship and unreachable with the current tools of ministry. Thus, older adults who have Organic Brain Syndrome often become disenfranchised from the active life of their religious congregation. This article will summarize the findings of a study that culminated in the development of a model approach to ministry that combines the concepts of sensory stimulation, reality orientation, and worship to provide a focal point for ministry with the confused elderly. Once learned, this technique can be used successfully by anyone who is comfortable with leading worship. It can be applied in many settings, but is particularly useful in long-term care institutions.     

The horizontal-vertical delusion

Most people can correctly apply the concepts of horizontal and vertical in describing objects, but a simple demonstration shows that they are confused about how these concepts work. The nature of the confusion and its possible causes are briefly discussed.     

Has infantile sexuality anything to do with infants?

Classical psychoanalytic theory draws many concepts from mental processes that are assumed to arise in the infant and influence the adult mind. Still, psychoanalytic practice with mothers and infants has been integrated but little within general psychoanalytic theory. One reason is that only few analysts have utilized such practice to further theory. Another reason is that infant therapists tend to abandon classical psychoanalytic concepts in favour of attachment concepts. As a result the concept of infantile sexuality, so central to classical theory, plays an unobtrusive role in clinical discussions on infant therapy. The author argues that infantile sexuality plays an important role in many mother-infant disturbances. To function as a clinical concept, it needs to be delineated from attachment and be understood in the context of mother-infant interaction. Two examples are provided; one where the analyst's infantile sexuality emerged in a comment to the infant. Another is a case of breast-feeding problems with a little boy fretting at the breast. This is interpreted as reflecting the mother's infantile sexual conflicts as well as the boy's emerging internalization of them. Thus, to conceptualize such disorders we need to take into account the infantile sexuality in both mother and baby.     

Buddhism and Quantum Physics

Rudyard Kipling, the famous English author of The Jungle Book, born in India, wrote one day these words: ‘Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. In my paper I show that Kipling was not completely right. I try to show the common ground between Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics. There is a surprising parallelism between the philosophical concept of reality articulated by Nāgārjuna and the physical concept of reality implied by quantum physics. For neither is there a fundamental core to reality; rather, reality consists of systems of interacting objects. Such concepts of reality cannot be reconciled with the substantial, subjective, holistic or instrumentalistic concepts of reality that underlie modern modes of thought.     

MODERN ORTHODOXY IN POST-SECULAR TIMES

Post-secularism in Israel is expressed, among other ways, by the growing public acceptance of identities that are neither religious nor secular. This paper is predicated on research of individuals located on the boundaries of Orthodox Religious Zionism. It explores their attitudes on a range of issues and argues that they reflect their post-secularist identities. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with young men and women who chose to abandon the strictures of a Religious Zionist lifestyle as well as those who still remain within its bounds. Various late-modern and post-secular modes of thought and expression were identified in interviewees’ narratives. These included pluralism, relativism, egalitarianism, the personalization of relationships with God, and a disregard for theological arguments based upon scientific findings. It is argued that these attitudes are related to two late-modern social processes: (1) the rise of individual expressivism and (2) the belief in the liberal human-rights ethic. These tendencies cut across the social divide between interviewees who left Religious Zionism and those who chose to remain within the fold, traversing the previously dominant religious–secular social divide and thus serving as yet another indication for the blossoming of new post-secular spaces in Israeli Jewish society.     

Not quite neo-sentimentalism

The view that some evaluative concepts are identical to some affective concepts naturally falls out of neo-sentimentalism, but it is unstable. This paper argues for a view of evaluative concepts that is neo-sentimentalist in spirit but which eschews the identity claim. If we adopt a Peacockean view of concepts, then we should think of some evaluative concepts as having possession conditions that are affective in some way. I argue that the best version of this thought claims that possessing those concepts requires being rationally compelled to form evaluative beliefs in response to certain emotions.     

Testing reality during adolescence: the contribution of Erikson's concepts of fidelity and developmental actuality

The process of reality testing can be thought of as a lifespan developmental line, where adolescence provides a critical developmental advance but not an endpoint. Erikson's concepts of fidelity and developmental actuality provide a frame of reference for considering this. Three means of reality testing are identified--contemplation, action, and conversation--where these modes of approach can be used separately or in concert to clarify the reality status of situations and phenomena. These methods of testing reality are illustrated within four arenas of adolescent functioning-thought, time, parental representations, and the experience of the embodied self.     

The psychological reality of practical representation

ABSTRACT

We represent the world in a variety of ways: through percepts, concepts, propositional attitudes, words, numerals, recordings, musical scores, photographs, diagrams, mimetic paintings, etc. Some of these representations are mental. It is customary for philosophers to distinguish two main kinds of mental representations: perceptual representation (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile) and conceptual representation. This essay presupposes a version of this dichotomy and explores the way in which a further kind of representation – procedural representation – represents. It is argued that, in some important respects, procedural representations represent differently from both purely conceptual representations and purely perceptual representations. Although procedural representations, just like conceptual and perceptual representations, involve modes of presentation, their modes of presentation are distinctively practical, in a sense which I will clarify. It is argued that an understanding of this sort of practical representation has important consequences for the debate on the nature of know-how.