Virtue or Art?: Political Friendship Reconsidered

In Talking to Strangers (2004), Danielle Allen argues that democratic citizens will need to acquire new habits for contending with distrust in order to prolong the democratic experiment. Though Allen's solution recalls her reading of the Republic, it is to Aristotle, not Plato, that she turns for help theorizing those habits. Drawing upon the Nicomachean Ethics, she proposes arts or techniques that might substitute for and outpace justice by enabling democratic strangers to treat one another like friends. While I endorse Allen's analysis of the problems posed by rising levels of distrust, I propose a different solution. First, I argue that the habits Allen describes would have to be virtues and not merely techniques in order to effect real political change. Then, second, I identify those habits as “piety” and “gratitude”—virtues which, I contend, are not so much substitutes for as supplements to justice. My argument thus elaborates Thomas Aquinas's account of justice and its “potential parts” in the Summa Theologiae.     

A learning system for adjustment processes based on human sensory perceptions

Creating, designing and adjusting products are essential decision processes underlying creative industries, such as painting, perfume, food and beverage industries. These processes require the participation and continuous supervision of professionals with highly-developed expert sensory abilities. Training of these experts is very complex due to the difficulty of transmitting intuitive knowledge obtained from perception. A new methodology for capturing this sensory expert knowledge that relies on a machine learning tool, previously trained with ‘state-action’ type patterns, jointly with an actions generator module, is proposed in this work. The method is based on a closed loop architecture together with the decomposition of complex sensory knowledge into basic elements capable of being handled by standard machine learning systems. A real case application to color-adjustment in the automotive paint manufacturing industry is presented showing the potential benefits of the method.     

MARGARET THATCHER'S CHRISTIAN FAITH: A Case Study in Political Theology

Throughout the 1980s Margaret Thatcher dominated British and global politics. At the same time she maintained an active Christian faith, which she understood as shaping and informing her political choices and policies. In this article I argue that we can construct from Thatcher's key speeches, her memoirs, and her book on public policy a cultural “theo‐political” identity which guided her political decisions. Thatcher's identity was as an Anglo‐Saxon Nonconformist. This consisted of her belief in values such as thrift and hard work, care for the family and local neighbor, and charitable generosity; her belief in the renewal of the national British Christian spirit; and her notion of morality as the opportunity for free choice. Without a recognition of the centrality of her theo‐political identity, it is difficult to understand the values and beliefs which were central to her political life. The methodological issues raised by the construction of this theo‐political identity are examined in this article. The aim of the proposed methodology is to develop theological insights into a political phenomenon like Thatcher rather than make policy judgments or recommendations.     

The relationship between strategic control and conscious structural knowledge in artificial grammar learning

We address Jacoby’s (1991) proposal that strategic control over knowledge requires conscious awareness of that knowledge. In a two-grammar artificial grammar learning experiment all participants were trained on two grammars, consisting of a regularity in letter sequences, while two other dimensions (colours and fonts) varied randomly. Strategic control was measured as the ability to selectively apply the grammars during classification. For each classification, participants also made a combined judgement of (a) decision strategy and (b) relevant stimulus dimension. Strategic control was found for all types of decision strategy, including trials where participants claimed to lack conscious structural knowledge. However, strong evidence of strategic control only occurred when participants knew or guessed that the letter dimension was relevant, suggesting that strategic control might be associated with – or even causally requires – global awareness of the nature of the rules even though it does not require detailed knowledge of their content.     

Do examples of failure effectively prepare students for learning from subsequent instruction?

Studies on the productive failure (PF) approach have demonstrated that attempting to solve a problem prepares students more effectively for later instruction compared to observing failed problem-solving attempts prior to instruction. However, the examples of failure used in these studies did not display the problem-solving-and-failing process, which may have limited the preparatory effects. In this quasi-experiment, we investigated whether observing someone else engaging in problem solving can prepare students for instruction, and whether examples that show the problem-solving-and -failing process are more effective than those that only show the outcome of this process. We also explored whether the perceived model–observer similarity had an impact on the effectiveness of observing examples of failure. The results showed that observing examples effectively prepares students for learning from instruction. However, observing the model's problem-solving-and-failing process did not prepare students more effectively than merely looking at the outcome. Studying examples were more effective if model–observer similarity was high.     

多层次知识隐藏行为的形成与后果:基于地位竞争的视角

知识隐藏指组织中个体面对同事知识请求时故意隐瞒或刻意掩饰的行为, 具体包括拖延隐藏、装傻和合理隐藏。知识隐藏不利于个体间知识分享行为的产生, 是知识领域的反生产行为, 对组织效能具有严重破坏作用。针对这一问题, 基于调节定向理论, 从动态视角出发拟通过探究地位动机的维度结构并开发测量工具来探究个体和团队层次中知识隐藏的心理机制及边界条件, 以有助于深化对知识隐藏的规律性认识, 有利于组织更好地应对知识隐藏现象。     

Ontology in Cognitive Perspective

Ontology cannot be left to the natural sciences, if only because it deals also with hypothetical and fictional objects. It pivots about proto-categorical issues relating to the features of objects of any and all kinds. This brings into its range issues that test the limits of knowledge by asking questions that are inherently unanswerable (for example: “What is an instance of an occurrence that no one ever mentions?”). And it raises issues of norms and values that science (in its usual configuration) does not address.     

Emotion knowledge and autobiographical memory across the preschool years: a cross-cultural longitudinal investigation

Knowledge of emotion situations facilitates the interpretation, processing, and organization of significant personal event information and thus may be an important contributor to the development of autobiographical memory. This longitudinal study tested the hypothesis in a cross-cultural context. The participants were native Chinese children, Chinese children from first-generation Chinese immigrant families in the U.S., and European American children. Children's developing emotion knowledge and autobiographical memory were assessed three times at home, when children were 3, 3.5, and 4.5 years of age. Children's emotion knowledge uniquely predicted their autobiographical memory ability across groups and time points. Emotion knowledge further mediated culture effects on autobiographical memory. The findings provide important insight into early autobiographical memory development, and extend current theoretical understandings of the emotion-memory interplay. They further have implications for the phenomenon of infantile amnesia and cross-cultural differences in childhood recollections.     

论《尘埃落定》中的道家文化蕴含

《尘埃落定》是藏族作家阿来的作品,长期以来人们对它的解读,往往从藏民族民间文化和宗教文化角度切入,其实如果我们把作家的文人身份和作品中弘扬的人文精神结合起来研读,就会发现在文本中有着浓郁的道家文化身影。