Précis of <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Virtue Epistemology</Emphasis> (Oxford University Press, 2007)

This is a summary of A Virtue Epistemology, the book that is the subject of this book symposium.     

Replies to commentators on <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Virtue Epistemology</Emphasis> (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Paul Boghossian discusses critically my account of intuition as a source of epistemic status. Stewart Cohen takes up my views on skepticism, on dreams, and on epistemic competence and competences and their relation to human knowledge. Hilary Kornblith focuses on my animal/reflective distinction, and, along with Cohen, on my comparison between how dreams might mislead us and how other bad epistemic contexts can do so. In this paper I offer replies to my three critics.

Reflective Sociocultural Psychology: Lost and Found in Collaboration with Funding Agencies and ICT Experts

This paper deals with emerging kinds of collaboration between researchers, funding agencies and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) experts. The goal of this paper is to analyze the challenges and opportunities for researchers presented by such collaborations. The analysis is based on a sociocultural approach, and leads to the following conclusions: (a) the main challenges to collaboration arise from the fact that partners’ communities have different goals and use different sets of mediation tools, (b) there are different ways for researchers to cope with more powerful partners such as major funding agencies (refusing collaboration, pseudo collaboration, asymmetric collaboration, and real partnership), (c) appropriation of mediation tools developed by partners could be useful for researchers, (d) collaboration with partners could be a source of new theoretically interesting phenomenon, and (e) communication with partners who are not familiar with our routine discourses might help us to improve our own understanding.

Pretending to be authentic: challenges for students when reflective writing about their childhood for assessment

Critical reflection potentially allows social work and human service (SWHS) students to understand how past experiences can shape their future practice. This study of 20 Australian undergraduate SWHS students with a history of childhood adversity found reflective writing for this purpose was not a useful pedagogical practice. Rather than developing skills in critical reflection students found the task performative, linked to academic requirements, where they needed to display emotional containment. Consequently, SWHS academics need to examine reflective writing about childhood adversity for assessment as this process may not enable students to build skills in critical reflection that drive professional development.     

Introducing dental students to reflective practice: a dental educator’s reflections

There is growing consensus that being reflective and developing reflective practice is an important part of becoming a healthcare professional, adding to and enhancing our everyday professional values, knowledge and skills. For dentists, reflective practice is an essential part of dental training and professional development with dental undergraduate curricula creating and scaffolding opportunities for students to be reflective and develop reflective writing skills. This article describes the introduction of a reflective portfolio to the undergraduate Bachelor of Dental Science (BDS) programme at the University of Bristol. This will be followed by the author sharing some personal reflections, as the faculty member overseeing the assessment of these reflective portfolios, on the first year of this initiative. Lessons learned from the exercise as well as areas for future work and improvement will also be mentioned.     

Self-report measure of parental reflective functioning: A study of reliability and validity across three samples of varying clinical risk

The Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) provides an efficient way to measure a parent's capacity to recognize their child's mental states and to understand the relationship between underlying mental states and behavior. To date, limited work evaluates its psychometric properties beyond initial validation studies. Here we examined the reliability and validity of the PRFQ in three samples of varying clinical risk (e.g., community sample, previous mental health diagnosis, substance use disorder diagnosis). Across samples, the majority (e.g., 75%–78%) of mothers identified as White; all mothers were from the USA. We compared the PRFQ to task-based measures of mentalization, the Parent Development Interview (PDI), and measures of the parent-child relationship. The PRFQ was a reliable measure across samples, and it was associated in theoretically consistent ways with task-based measures of mentalization. Parental RF across the PDI and PRFQ were not highly correlated in a sample of mothers with substance use disorders. Existing RF measures may be tapping into a different component of the broader construct of parental reflective functioning (PRF). The PRFQ was further validated by demonstrating relationships with parent-report measures of the parent-child relationship. Taken together, these findings provide additional support for the reliability and validity of the PRFQ.     

Individual differences in epistemic style: A dual-process perspective

This article reports the results of using a specially designed scaled questionnaire to investigate the dualistic properties of epistemic style. The scale is introduced as a measure of individual difference in epistemic style, conceptualized within the framework of dual-process notions of cognitive function. The study examined several psychometric components of the measure, including dimensional structure, distributional characteristics, and indications of construct validity. The instrument, called the Epistemic Preference Indicator, was found to be a reliable and valid measure of two dimensions that are negatively related—each reflecting incompatible epistemic assumptions and approaches to solving knowledge-dependent problems. Theoretical speculations are made concerning the nature of epistemic dualism and the dimension of cognitive processing that may underlie the two proposed epistemic preferences or styles.     

A Sandtray a Day Keeps the Doctor at Play: Using Sandtray for Personal and Professional Development

This article details a year-long project in which the author created a series of 365 sandtrays and journaled about them as a professional and personal growth project. The author shares professional and personal lessons learned from this experience and describes how reflective practices can be used as a method to improve clinical work.