Why leave the teaching profession? A longitudinal approach to the prevalence and persistence of teacher turnover intentions

Social Psychology of Education - Teacher turnover has been recognized as a significant problem in the education worldwide. This study focuses on exploring reasons behind the turnover intentions,...     

New Light on Peirce's Conceptions of Retroduction,Deduction, and Scientific Reasoning

We examine Charles S. Peirce's mature views on the logic of science, especially as contained in his later and still mostly unpublished writings (1907–1914). We focus on two main issues. The first concerns Peirce's late conception of retroduction. Peirce conceived inquiry as performed in three stages, which correspond to three classes of inferences: abduction or retroduction, deduction, and induction. The question of the logical form of retroduction, of its logical justification, and of its methodology stands out as the three major threads in his later writings. The other issue concerns the second stage of scientific inquiry, deduction. According to Peirce's later formulation, deduction is divided not only into two kinds (corollarial and theorematic) but also into two sub-stages: logical analysis and mathematical reasoning, where the latter is either corollarial or theorematic. Save for the inductive stage, which we do not address here, these points cover the essentials of Peirce's latest thinking on the logic of science and reasoning.     

How does it feel to become a teacher? Emotions in teacher education

Academic emotions are central ingredients in student teachers’ learning. They have been shown to affect cognitive performance, motivation and achievement (e.g. Linnenbrink-Garcia et al. in Contemp Educ Psychol 36(1):13–24, 2011). However, until recently the role of emotions in student teachers’ learning has largely been neglected (e.g. Ketonen and Lonka in Proc Soc Behav Sci 69(24):1901–1910, 2012). The study focused on exploring the spectrum of academic emotions experienced by 19 student teachers in different academic activities. The results showed that student teachers experience a wide variety of emotions during their studies. A total of 18 different positive emotions and 20 different negative emotions were reported. They explicated more positive than negative emotions. Further investigations showed that student teachers reported more emotional experiences embedded in individual activities than in social activities. The results implied that the spectrum of academic emotions experienced by student teachers is wider than previous literature suggests, and that student teachers experience a wide range of academic emotions in various academic activities provided by teacher education.     

Compositionality,Relevance, and Peirce’s Logic of Existential Graphs

Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatist theory of logic teaches us to take the context of utterances as an indispensable logical notion without which there is no meaning. This is not a spat against compositionality per se , since it is possible to posit extra arguments to the meaning function that composes complex meaning. However, that method would be inappropriate for a realistic notion of the meaning of assertions. To accomplish a realistic notion of meaning (as opposed e.g. to algebraic meaning), Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (RT) may be applied in the spirit of Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim (PM): the weighing of information depends on (i) the practical consequences of accommodating the chosen piece of information introduced in communication, and (ii) what will ensue in actually using that piece in further cycles of discourse. Peirce’s unpublished papers suggest a relevance-like approach to meaning. Contextual features influenced his logic of Existential Graphs (EG). Arguments are presented pro and con the view in which EGs endorse non-compositionality of meaning.     

Emotionally engaged or feeling anxious and cynical? School experiences and links to school achievement among Finland-Swedish general and special education students

Social Psychology of Education - The aim of the study was to enhance understanding of how seventh graders vary in emotional engagement and experienced well-being at school in terms of anxiety and...     

Existential Graphs: What a Diagrammatic Logic of Cognition Might Look Like

This paper examines the contemporary philosophical and cognitive relevance of Charles Peirce's diagrammatic logic of existential graphs (EGs), the ‘moving pictures of thought’. The first part brings to the fore some hitherto unknown details about the reception of EGs in the early 1900s that took place amidst the emergence of modern conceptions of symbolic logic. In the second part, philosophical aspects of EGs and their contributions to contemporary logical theory are pointed out, including the relationship between iconic logic and images, the problem of the meaning of logical constants, the cognitive economy of iconic logic, the failure of the Frege–Russell thesis, and the failure of the Language of Thought hypothesis.     

Clinical Equipoise and Moral Leeway: An Epistemological Stance

Clinical equipoise (CE) has been proposed as an ethical principle relating uncertainty and moral leeway in clinical research. Although CE has traditionally been indicated as a necessary condition for a morally justified introduction of a new RCT, questions related to the interpretation of this principle remain woefully open. Recent proposals to rehabilitate CE have divided the bioethical community on its ethical merits. This paper presents a new argument that brings out the epistemological difficulties we encounter in justifying CE as a principle to connect uncertainty and moral leeway in clinical ethics. The argument proposes, first, that the methodology of hypothetical retrospection (HR) is applicable to the RCT design and that it can accommodate uncertainty. As currently understood, however, HR should give up its reliance on the assumption of uncertainty transduction, because the latter assumes the principle of indifference, which does not accommodate uncertainty in the right way. The same principle is then seen to distort also the received interpretations of CE.

     

THE LAW OF CATEGORICAL JUDGMENT AND THE MEASUREMENT OF COLOR CONSTANCY

The scaling method used by von Fieandt, Ahonen & Järvinen (1964) for measuring color constancy is discussed. It is argued that (i) the underlying scaling model and the experimental procedure they employed are incompatible, and that (ii) the analytical procedure they applied to the data for obtaining the empirical scale values is incorrect. The data are reanalyzed, and the goodness of fit of both the original and the present results is evaluated.