Initiating the creation of a procedurally secular society through dialogic RE. The three realms

ABSTRACT

The interim report of the Commission on Religious Education drew attention to the use of ‘safe space’ within schools to encourage the exchange of differing world-views. The doctoral research discussed herein builds upon previous action research that analysed the development of dialogic skills within a school’s safe space. This new research examines two types of talk – cumulative (building consensus) and exploratory (constructive criticism) – that are held to be at the heart of human reasoning. Sixty-five students from 10 different secondary schools in the UK undertook paired conversations that were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, the students completed questionnaire surveys with respect to deep learning and these were analysed by means of a Chi-Square Test for statistical significance. The positive findings indicate that dialogic RE within a school’s safe space is an appropriate pedagogy for the creation of a procedurally secular society, such as the three realms model, that envisages a renewed public sphere in which citizens are encouraged to exchange world-views through reasoning.     

Teachers as informants: countering extremism and promoting violence

ABSTRACT

This article is a response to Muslim students reporting that they had been silenced by fear of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy. By adopting a Critical Realist stance, real generative mechanisms of this actual phenomenon are investigated and theorised. Recognition of changing definitions of both ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ in different versions of PREVENT results in the discursive aspect of these real generative mechanisms being investigated using critical discourse analysis (CDA). This analysis identifies the emergence of a violent discourse of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ (RadEx) that it is theorised has the capacity to promote rather than prevent violence. Finally, a process by which this production of violence in the classroom might have been avoided is explored and this indicates that critique of government efforts to counter ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ is a vital aspect of pedagogy in the context of PREVENT and the War on Terror.     

Toward a New Covenant: Embracing a Dialogue and Decision Culture to Address the Challenges of the Agoras of the 21st Century

Twenty-first century agoras, unlike their historical counterparts, are not comprised of villages populated by individuals who know each other and share the same past, environment, and culture. Contemporary agoras are diverse and global. Their dialogue is often conducted across geographical and cultural boundaries. Additionally, they often address challenges and issues that are far more complex than those of the early agoras. This article seeks to identify such challenges and summarize a variety of appropriate dialogue methodologies.     

Generation and evaluation of user tailored responses in multimodal dialogue

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners’ comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving higher level goals such as changing the listener’s beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice-giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi-attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness.     

HISTORY AND THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Philip Hefner identifies three settings in which to assess the future of science and religion: the academy, the public sphere, and the faith community. This essay argues that the discourse of science and religion could improve its standing within the secular academy in America by shifting the focus from theology to history. In the public sphere, the science‐and‐religion discourse could play an important role of promoting tolerance and respect toward the religious Other. For a given faith community (for example, Judaism) the discourse of science and religion can ensure future intellectual depth by virtue of study and ongoing interpretation. The essay challenges the suggestion to adopt irony as a desirable posture for science‐and‐religion discourse.     

AFTER LYNN WHITE: RELIGIOUS ETHICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

The fields of environmental ethics and of religion and ecology have been shaped by Lynn White Jr.'s thesis that the roots of ecological crisis lie in religious cosmology. Independent critical movements in both fields, however, now question this methodological legacy and argue for alternative ways of inquiry. For religious ethics, the twin controversies cast doubt on prevailing ways of connecting environmental problems to religious deliberations because the criticisms raise questions about what counts as an environmental problem, how religious traditions change, and whether ethicists should approach problems and traditions with reformist commitments. This article examines the critiques of White's legacy and presents a pluralist alternative that focuses religious ethics on the contextual strategies produced by moral communities as they confront environmental problems.     

Intention, interpretation and the computational structure of language

I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical knowledge precisely in terms of rich primitives of interpretation. Primitives of interpretation can be correctly viewed intentionally, as explanations of our choices of linguistic actions; the model therefore fits our intuitions about meaning in conversation. Nevertheless, interpretations for complex utterances can be built from these primitives by simple operations of grammatical derivation. In bridging analyses of meaning at semantic and symbol-processing levels, this account underscores the fundamental place for computation in the cognitive science of language use.     

Appropriating and Re-Appropriating the Arabian Horse for Equestrian Sport: The Complexities of Cultural Transfer

ABSTRACT

For the past few decades a concern with heritage in the countries of the Arab Gulf has led to the reclamation of the purebred Arabian horse as one of the iconic animals of the Bedouin identity and to developing a thriving horse breeding industry in the region. While stud farms and equestrian sport events are intended to reinforce the Arabian identity of the breed, a closer look at its history demonstrate in fact the complexity of its identity. The complexity of cultural transfers with respect to horse breeding between the East and the West from the Early Modern period on, highlights the connected history of both the Arabian horses and the Thoroughbreds, and the ongoing cultural re-appropriation of both breeds as ‘native’ to the Arabian Peninsula.