In Just What Sense Should I be Critical? An Exploration into the Notion of ‘Assumption’ and Some Implications for Assessment

The current dominant approach on the assessment of critical thinking takes as a starting point a conception of criticality that does not commit to any substantive view or context of meaning concerning what issues are relevant to be critical about in society or in life. Nevertheless, as a detailed examination of the identification of assumptions shows, when going from the theory of critical thinking to the praxis of producing and evaluating arguments, the critical person will inevitably make such commitments from particular perspectives, using particular contexts of meaning. But then she may fail to take notice of relevant ones and may end up using her critical powers in a mercenary way. It is then proposed, in the context of assessment of critical thinking, to choose and use some privileged contexts of meaning, while making them available for critical scrutiny and allowing for the possibility that new ones be brought up by those being assessed.

Measuring Procedural Knowledge More Simply with a Single-Response Situational Judgment Test

Purpose  This paper describes the development of a situational judgment test (SJT) based on single-response options developed directly from critical incidents and reports a study that tested the SJT’s concurrent validity against ratings of job performance. Design/Methodology/Approach  Situational judgment test items were developed from critical incidents provided by administrators of volunteer agencies. Volunteers who worked at another agency completed the SJT and a self-report personality test. Supervisors rated their job performance on three dimensions. Findings  Situational judgment test scores representing procedural knowledge about work effort were significantly correlated with ratings of work effort performance (r = .28). Conscientiousness was correlated with work effort knowledge (r = .26), but not with work effort performance (r = −.02). Implications  These results provide some preliminary evidence that a single-response SJT format based upon critical incidents can produce valid measures of procedural knowledge and might be a useful alternative to the traditional multiple-response format. Originality/Value  This paper presents a novel way to construct SJTs using single-response options that are less laborious to develop than the multiple-response options in traditional SJT formats. Results of the validity study suggest that this new single-response format can predict job performance and encourage further research on the viability of this approach.     

Language in benign childhood epilepsy with centro-temporal spikes abbreviated form: rolandic epilepsy and language

Although Benign Childhood Epilepsy with Centrotemporal Spikes (BECTS) has a good prognosis, a few studies have suggested the existence of language disorders relating to the interictal dysfunction of perisylvian language areas. In this study, we focused on language assessment in 16 children aged 6-15 currently affected by BECTS or in remission. An important proportion of children showed moderate or more severe language impairment. The most affected domains were expressive grammar and literacy skills. We found linguistic deficits during the course of epilepsy but also persistent deficits in children in remission, suggesting possible long-term effects. Our results support the hypothesis that BECTS may be associated with impairment to language and suggest the possibility of a direct link between epileptic activity and language development, and the existence of long-term consequences.     

Critical thinking as cooperation and its relation to mental health and social welfare

The purpose of this theoretical investigation was to examine critical thinking as a realization of human cooperation, affecting both mental health and social welfare. Although critical thinking contains a critical stance toward any asserted standpoint, such a critical stance appears, paradoxically, to have developed from cooperation and the shared goals of human beings. Moreover, although critical thinking has been seen in academic literature to be anchored on culturally developed rules and principles of rational dialogue as well as on effective learning methods, investigators have not interconnected critical thinking and human cooperation comprehensively enough. To solve the dilemma, we will use available scientific knowledge to examine how cooperation and socially shared goals are realized in critical thinking, especially in a critical stance. The view of critical thinking as cooperation places it ontogenetically and phylogenetically into a wider theoretical framework which also provides a novel perspective on mental health and social welfare. The deterioration of rational thinking in the context of mental disorders may be explained by failures of cooperation, which can contain epistemic distrust and an inability to mentalize the viewpoints of others. These features may clarify some causes why some contemporary dialogues and critical contributions are divisive in worldwide, especially in social media.     

The Ethics and Politics of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023

This essay addresses the questions, “what good is religious ethics for?” and “what justification exists for the field?” in three steps. First, it canvases how religious ethicists have offered reasons for carrying out work in the field to identify an Anti-Reductive Paradigm that is guided by an Egalitarian Imperative. That imperative functions as a thin, minimal morality of inclusivity and equal respect that guides work in the field. Second, the essay considers the field's ends. Here the focus shifts from values that shape the field's methods to values that can describe the field's purposes. That shift requires us to think in terms of a thick rather than a thin morality, one with substantive rather than procedural virtues in mind. The essay offers a constructive, substantive proposal under the rubric of Critical Humanism. Critical Humanism justifies the study of religious ethics as an enterprise that can expand the moral imagination through its encounter with difference. It is shaped by four values: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Third, the essay brings the two parts of the argument together by explaining how to connect such purposes to the thin morality of inclusivity and equal respect. One upshot of the essay is to have us think not only about values, but also about power as it pertains to scholarship in the guild; hence the attention to the ethics and politics of religious ethics.     

Getting Out of the Left Lane: The Possibility of White Antiracist Pedagogy

This article maintains that knowledge of the literature on multicultural education and social justice pedagogy is indispensable for white college professors who desire to teach effectively about racial justice concerns. In exploring this literature, I have noticed that many publications either articulate theory or reflect on concrete classroom strategies, while relatively few deploy theory to evaluate specific attempts at teaching for justice. This seems to me a gap worth filling. Speaking as a white, conventionally trained, Catholic theologian, I begin by explaining why I deem it appropriate to employ antiracist pedagogy. I then demonstrate that the literature on multicultural education and social justice pedagogy is essential to this effort by utilizing both types of literature, theoretical and practical, to analyze my own strategies and goals to date. Throughout, I discuss white antiracist theological pedagogy not as an accomplished fact, but as an emerging endeavor. See a companion essay in this issue of the journal (Anna Floerke Scheid and Elisabeth T. Vasko, “Teaching Race: Pedagogical Challenges in Predominantly White Undergraduate Theology Classrooms”), and responses by the authors of both essays, also published in this issue of the journal (“Responses: Toward an Antiracist Pedagogy”).     

The Higgs Boson: An Adventure in Critical Realism

Abstract

The search for the Higgs boson has been like the search of a pirate for buried gold. Like the pirate, the physicist has a map, a conceptual map—the Standard Model (SM) made up of mathematical formulas. Without the Higgs boson in the SM, fundamental particles would be massless. Where could the mass mechanism be? The conceptual map pointed in the right direction. On July 4, 2012 the pirates found their treasure with the help of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. In this article a physicist and theologian ask: could this be critical realism (CR) at work? Could CR constitute a set of presuppositions shared by both physicists and theologians who cannot see the object of their inquiry but employ conceptual models that presuppose the reality of its referent? What role could shared CR play in the creative mutual interaction between science and theology?     

Development of a vocabulary of object shapes in a child with a very-early-acquired visual agnosia: A unique case

We report a longitudinal study of an exceptional child (S.R.) whose early-acquired visual agnosia, following encephalitis at 8 weeks of age, did not prevent her from learning to construct an increasing vocabulary of visual object forms (drawn from different categories), albeit slowly. S.R. had problems perceiving subtle differences in shape; she was unable to segment local letters within global displays; and she would bring complex scenes close to her eyes: a symptom suggestive of an attempt to reduce visual crowding. Investigations revealed a robust ability to use the gestalt grouping factors of proximity and collinearity to detect fragmented forms in noisy backgrounds, compared with a very weak ability to segment fragmented forms on the basis of contrasts of shape. When contrasts in spatial grouping and shape were pitted against each other, shape made little contribution, consistent with problems in perceiving complex scenes, but when shape contrast was varied, and spatial grouping was held constant, S.R. showed the same hierarchy of difficulty as the controls, although her responses were slowed. This is the first report of a child's visual–perceptual development following very early neurological impairments to the visual cortex. Her ability to learn to perceive visual shape following damage at a rudimentary stage of perceptual development contrasts starkly with the loss of such ability in childhood cases of acquired visual agnosia that follow damage to the established perceptual system. Clearly, there is a critical period during which neurological damage to the highly active, early developing visual–perceptual system does not prevent but only impairs further learning.     

Additive factors and stages of mental processes in task networks

To perform a task a subject executes mental processes. An experimental manipulation, such as a change in stimulus intensity, is said to selectively influence a process if it changes the duration of that process leaving other process durations unchanged. For random process durations a definition of a factor selectively influencing a process by increments is given in terms of stochastic dominance (also called “the usual stochastic order”). A technique for analyzing reaction times, Sternberg’s Additive Factor Method, assumes all the processes are in series. When all processes are in series, each process is called a stage. With the Additive Factor Method, if two experimental factors selectively influence two different stages by increments, the factors will have additive effects on reaction time. An assumption of the Additive Factor Method is that if two experimental factors interact, then they influence the same stage. We consider sets of processes in which some pairs of processes are sequential and some are concurrent (i.e., the processes are partially ordered). We propose a natural definition of a stage for such sets of processes. For partially ordered processes, with our definition of a stage, if two experimental factors selectively influence two different processes by increments, each within a different stage, then the factors have additive effects. If each process selectively influenced by increments is in the same stage, then an interaction is possible, although not inevitable.     

What Do We Compare When We Compare Religions? Philosophical Remarks on the Psychology of Studying Comparative Religion Abroad

The issue of comparison is a vexing one in religious and theological studies, not least for teachers of comparative religion in study abroad settings. We try to make familiar ideas fresh and strange, in settings where students may find it hard not to take “fresh” and “strange” as signs of existential threat. The author explores this delicate pedagogical situation, drawing on several years' experience directing a study abroad program and on the thought of figures from the Western existentialist tradition and Chinese Confucian philosophy. The article focuses particularly on “oh events” – defined as moments when one learns one has something to learn and something to unlearn. The author argues that the experience of shame that is typical of oh events can become a valuable resource for cross‐cultural learning and personal transformation, if teachers assist students to reflect on the experience as a sign of differing, but potentially harmonizable, cultural expectations. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).