The effects of self‐explaining when learning with text or diagrams

Self‐explaining is an effective metacognitive strategy that can help learners develop deeper understanding of the material they study. This experiment explored if the format of material (i.e., text or diagrams) influences the self‐explanation effect. Twenty subjects were presented with information about the human circulatory system and prompted to self‐explain; 10 received this information in text and 10 in diagrams. Results showed that students given diagrams performed significantly better on post‐tests than students given text. Diagrams students also generated significantly more self‐explanations that text students. Furthermore, the benefits of self‐explaining were much greater in the diagrams condition. To discover why diagrams can promote the self‐explanation effect, results are interpreted with reference to the multiple differences in the semantic, cognitive and affective properties of the texts and diagrams studied.     

Rhetoric and “doing philosophy”

By drawing new distinctions labelled appeal and response to replace traditional rhetorical modes of written discourse, the essay sketches a new perspective about what philosophers are doing rhetorically in doing philosophy. To think of philosophers as simply engaged in argument is an oversimplification and a distortion of what philosophers do. Crucial to doing philosophy are four activities: (1) definition and redefinition of problems and issues that form both the focus of the canonical historical literature of philosophy and what goes on in contemporary philosophy as a discipline, (2) the development and use of formal languages and technical vocabularies to abbreviate and label complexity and to disambiguate and precise distinctions necessary to deal with problems and issues, (3) the development and exploration of argumentative appeals for acceptance or refutation of answers to questions raised by the philosophical problematic, and (4) the development and exploration of explanatory responses to questions raised by the problematic. In so far as these four activities are driven and sanctioned by the current, self-defining philosophical problematic, contemporary philosophy as a body of knowledge is historical, cumulative, and marked by progress, and the doing of philosophy is fundamentally the making of written appeals and responses about its problematic.     

How do conspiratorial explanations differ from non-conspiratorial explanations? A content analysis of real-world online articles

The present research aims to identify unique characteristics of written conspiracy theories. In two pre-registered quantitative human-coded content analyses, we compared 36 pairs of conspiratorial and non-conspiratorial online articles about various events. As predicted, conspiratorial articles—compared to non-conspiratorial articles—contained less factual, more emotional and more threat-related information. Also, we predicted and found that conspiratorial articles presented more argumentation against the opposing standpoint and that they provided explanations that were more dispositional and less falsifiable. Contrary to our predictions, we did not consistently observe that conspiratorial articles presented less argumentation for their own standpoint. Also, we did not find consistent support that conspiratorial articles provided less information about the specific process or more information about the underlying goals of the respective events, or that conspiratorial explanations attributed the events to a lesser extent to situational factors. We discuss the relevance of our findings for the understanding of conspiracy theories.     

Adaptation, teleology, and selection by consequences

This paper presents and defends the view that reinforcement and natural selection are selection processes, that selection processes are neither mechanistic nor teleological, and that mentalistic and vitalistic processes are teleological but not mechanistic. The differences between these types of processes are described and used in discussing the conceptual and methodological significance of “selection type theories” and B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorist view that “operant behavior is the field of intention, purpose, and expectation. It deals with that field precisely as the theory of evolution has dealt with another kind of purpose” (1986, p. 716). The antimentalism of radical behaviorism emerges as a post-Darwinian extension of Francis Bacon's (and Galileo's) influential view that “[the introduction of final causes] rather corrupts than advances the sciences” (Bacon, 1905, p. 302).     

Cultural attitudes: in contexts of argumentation and explanation

Traditionally, attitudes are supposed to predict behavior. However, due to their poor performance, we are sometimes advised to abandon the notion. The present study attempts to preserve the concept but takes attitudes to be evaluative goals accomplished through interactional, especially argumentative and explanatory activities. The paper uses reasoned-discourse analysis and demonstrates the attainment of positive attitudes towards the Dutch by expatriate Chinese intellectuals in the Netherlands by attending to a variety of argumentative and explanatory strategies in their interview talk. Results suggest that there is good empirical reason to believe that attitudes are accomplishments of communicating actors' rhetorical contextualizations.     

Circular definitions,circular explanations,and infinite regresses

This paper discusses some of the ways in which circular definitions and circular explanations entail or fail to entail infinite regresses. And since not all infinite regresses are vicious, a few criteria of viciousness are examined in order to determine when the entailment of a regress refutes a circular definition or a circular explanation.I would like to thank Professors Robert Tully, Howard Sobel, and Derek Allen for their constructive comments.     

生物自然主义:塞尔对自由意志的解释

在对自由意志问题的解答中,传统的相容论和心理决定论都存在一定的缺陷,未能令人满意地回答这一问题。塞尔试图把自由意志的心理状态说明与神经生物学解释结合起来,认为在自由意志行为中存在间隔。在解释我们的自由意志行为时我们有必要先设一个不可约减的非休谟式的自我。这种阐释虽然符合我们的日常经验和科学说明,但却引发了一个新难题:我们的神经元系统的决定性是如何与意志自由行动中的间隔相一致的?     

样例设计及呈现方式对学习代数运算规则的促进

为了考察"解释法"、"解释-标记法"两种样例设计方法及其"分步呈现"方式对六年级小学生学习代数运算规则的促进作用,以六年级小学生为被试,以"完全平方和"和"平方差"代数运算样例为学习材料,进行了3项实验研究。结果表明:(1)采用"解释法"设计"完全平方和"和"平方差"的代数运算样例,明显提高了代数运算规则的样例学习效果。(2)在"解释法"设计的样例上添加"运算标记"要运用适当,如果运用不当,特别是"运算标记"过多时,容易增加样例学习的认知负荷,从而降低标记的使用效果。(3)对于运算步骤和"运算标记"过多的样例,采用被试自主控制的"分步呈现"运算步骤的样例学习方式,其学习效果显著优于整体呈现样例的学习效果。     

Setiya on reasons and causes

Setiya [2013. “Causality in Action”. Analysis Reviews, 73 (3): pp. 512–525] recently gave a novel argument in favor of a causal theory of acting for a reason. He presents three principles relating acting for a reason to psychological states of the agent and uses them to test theories of acting for a reason: theories cannot explain the necessary truth of the conditionals are to be rejected. Surveying a number of alternatives, he finds that only a causal-psychological theory passes this test, that, thus, it must be correct, and that there must be a solution to the problem of deviant causation. Setiya's challenge is forceful, but he does not establish his conclusion. The anticausalist can at this point reverse it: since deviant causation is intractable, some noncausal theory must be able to meet his challenge. This reversal has teeth: Setiya underestimates both the challenges that causal theories face and the resources available to the anticausalist to address his challenge.