Intellectual Dispositions Research Articles

Knowledge transfer, not just true beliefs: virtue epistemology as a philosophical basis for education

Introduction. Modern pedagogical practice is being reformed due to systemic changes in the ways of social interaction. Knowledge transfer is being significantly modified under the influence of technical innovations, although it remains traditionally one of the main tasks of the educational process. The development of artificial intelligence, neural networks and other analytical computer systems shows that propositional knowledge is not the privilege of the human mind. This state of affairs changes the idea of knowledge as such. In this regard, the participants of the educational process face the task of revising the philosophical basis of modern learning in terms of finding a new definition of knowledge. It is also necessary to develop new methodological recommendations that would correspond to modern epistemological theories of knowledge, belief and understanding. Materials and research methods. The article uses the methods of conceptual analysis and comparative study characteristic of philosophy. The research materials are sources on theory of knowledge, education and also on applied epistemology. Results. Virtue epistemology is one of the most actively developing theories of knowledge in contemporary philosophy and humanities. It is based on the idea that knowledge cannot be an accidental belief, but must be the merit of a cognitive agent. This approach solves many problems of the philosophical theory of knowledge and creates a subjectoriented view of the nature of the cognitive process. This attitude allows us to use virtue epistemology in debates about applied issues, including those related to the explanation of the tasks and content of education. Discussion. A feature of the analysis within virtue epistemology is attention to cognitive skills (reliabilism) and sustained intellectual dispositions (responsibilism) in their relationship to the process of formation of true beliefs. Virtue epistemology defines knowledge through the notion of merit in the manifestation of subjective qualities, so the student's motivation and the context of belief formation should be taken into account when developing specific methodological recommendations. Such an approach explains why standardized testing cannot serve as the sole and primary means of assessing learners. At the same time, the general semantic peculiarity of the notions of virtue allows us to appeal to examples of individuals as ideal types of certain qualities (this is called exemplarism). At the same time, it is necessary to explain why these traits are the excellences that make their bearer better in epistemic terms. Conclusion. In explaining the knowledge transfer, pedagogy can be based on the philosophical principles of virtue epistemology. Such integration enriches both disciplines: pedagogy gets a conceptual scheme adequate to the modern social and technological situation, and epistemology gets a practical application.

Linking Sustainability and Spirituality: The University with a Soul

ABSTRACT: Higher education institutions were intended to nurture the creative potential of individuals and assist in the development of civilization. After 1945, the number of modern universities expanded, but their original purpose changed. Universities have become more business-oriented institutions. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has changed almost every area of human activity at an unpredictable pace, challenging old paradigms and frameworks. Society scaled back education to meet market demands, and people lost their moral and intellectual dispositions. The general focus is on developing a workforce, inventive spirit, and high-tech machinery based on innovation and technology, resulting in weak ethical standards and a dangerous lack of trust in the community. Educators need to explore new and creative approaches to educational innovation to improve future learning. The need is for an education with a soul. Educators must cultivate the dual consciousness that humanizes technology through bold visions of moderation. They should help students develop a higher sense of purpose. Knowledge must be viewed from a new perspective. Knowledge must be wholesome or holistic, inclusive, sustainable and equitable in the sense that everyone has access to this special knowledge and can develop a sense of mercy, compassion and benevolence.

Narratives in the educational process of critical thinking

In modern higher education, the number of educational programs aimed at improving the quality of thinking, reasoning abilities, and creativity is growing. The campus course «Logic and Critical Thinking» is aimed at improving the intellectual dispositions of students involved in the professional and personal sphere. Narrative in the educational process is considered as a didactic technique in teaching logic and critical thinking. The purpose of the article is to analyze the narrative as a supporting construct of the emerging discursive model, to study the possibility of the narrative as a role model in the process of forming their own mental practice of the project participants. The flexible narrative model used for interpretation is designed to awaken the deep curiosity of the student, the subjective need to solve logical problems and form the skill to think critically. The author studies the experience of narrative in the concept of an oral narrative of such a form of education as a seminar lesson. The trigger mechanism of students’ reflexive activity is a narrative text, the value of the narrative is shown in the recognition of qualitative questions, their clear formulation and the direction of their own research. It is concluded that an effective pedagogical narrative is content-variable and subject-oriented. Narrativization of the educational process is important not only for the development of critical thinking of students, but also for the teacher who reflects on the issues of building a more effective educational strategy.

Second-person Perspective in Interdisciplinary Research: A Cognitive Approach for Understanding and Improving the Dynamics of Collaborative Research Teams

In this paper, we argue that to reverse the excess of specialization and to create room for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, it seems necessary to move the existing epistemic plurality towards a collaborative process of social cognition. In order to achieve this, we propose to extend the psychological notion of joint attention towards what we call joint intellectual attention. This special kind of joint attention involves a shared awareness of sharing the cognitive process of knowledge. We claim that if an interdisciplinary research team aspires to work collaboratively, it is essential for the researchers to jointly focus their attention towards a common object and establish a second-person relatedness among them. We consider some of the intellectual dispositions or virtues fostered by joint intellectual attention that facilitate interdisciplinary exchange, and explore some of the practical consequences of this cognitive approach to interdisciplinarity for education and research.

Agricultural productivism, cosmopolitan plant-breeding, and the severed roots of agroecological thought

ABSTRACT This article provides a historical account of the emergence of crop ecology, a precursor of modern agroecology, in the twentieth century. It focuses on the transnational career of agronomist Ioannis Papadakis, a founding figure in this scientific discipline, while contextualizing his work as part of broader state-led projects of agricultural modernization in Europe and Latin America. This study has two implications concerning the history of agroecology. First, that agricultural productivism and a cosmopolitan outlook on plant breeding, often considered to be at odds with agroecology’s principles, were in fact necessary elements for the emergence of crop ecology, and therefore of agroecological thought more generally. Second, we argue that the excesses of the Green Revolution, against which agroecology reacted in the last decades of the twentieth century, did not just stem from a disregard for the agricultural knowledge of indigenous peasants. They also resulted from the marginalization of intellectual dispositions that had taken shape in peripheral areas within the global geography of scientific production. A third implication, specific to the history of Greek agriculture, is that the claim that interwar Greece’s rural economy failed to substantially develop needs to be nuanced when the priorities of Greek agronomists are taken into consideration.

Sustainable Stories: Managing Climate Change with Literature

Literary and cultural texts are essential in shaping emotional and intellectual dispositions toward the human potential for a sustainable transformation of society. Due to its appeal to the human imagination and human empathy, literature can enable readers for sophisticated understandings of social and ecological justice. An overabundance of catastrophic near future scenarios largely prevents imagining the necessary transition toward a socially responsible and ecologically mindful future as a non-violent and non-disastrous process. The paper argues that transition stories that narrate the rebuilding of the world in the midst of crisis are much better instruments in bringing about a human “mindshift” (Göpel) than disaster stories. Transition stories, among them the Parable novels by Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), offer feasible ideas about how to orchestrate economic and social change. The analysis of recent American, Canadian, British, and German near future novels—both adult and young adult fictions—sheds light on those aspects best suited for effecting behavioral change in recipients’ minds: exemplary ecologically sustainable characters and actions, companion quests, cooperative communities, sources of epistemological innovation and spiritual resilience, and an ethics and aesthetics of repair.

De-idealising the educational ideal of critical thinking

It is widely recognised among educational theorists, educators and policy makers alike, that critical thinking should claim a superordinate place in our system of educational objectives. In the philosophical literature on this topic, critical thinking is often conceptualised as the educational cognate of rationality, which in turn is analysed as being comprised of the relevant skills and abilities to assess reasons and evidence, together with the intellectual dispositions to actively use these proficiencies in practice. The resulting picture is in many respects normative and idealised, following the style of philosophical theorising commonplace in the tradition of analytic philosophy of education. In contrast, certain recent empirical findings related to the rational performance of actual human beings seem to cast doubts on the extent to which we can expect people to fulfil these idealised normative standards of rationality. After introducing the relevant philosophical theories and psychological results, I ruminate on the implications these ideas have on our pedagogical views pertaining to critical thinking education.

„...mér má finnast öðruvísi...“ Hugleikur – samræður til náms í leikskóla

Í þessari grein er fjallað um starfsþróunarverkefnið Hugleik – samræður til náms í leikskóla. Um er að ræða verkefni sem unnið var í samstarfi leikskólans Lundarsels á Akureyri, Miðstöðvar skólaþróunar og kennaradeildar Háskólans á Akureyri. Megintilgangur verkefnisins var að starfsfólk leikskólans lærði um samræður og efldi leikni sína til að nota samræðuaðferðir með börnum í daglegu skólastarfi með það að markmiði að efla með börnum hæfni til að draga ályktanir, taka afstöðu og efla rökhugsun. Margvíslegar rannsóknir hafa farið fram á samræðum sem sýna að þær hvetja börn til að ígrunda og skerpa vitund þeirra um eigin hugsunaraðferðir. Samræðuaðferðir fela t.d. í sér að spyrja spurninga sem hvetja til ígrundunar í þeim tilgangi að efla með börnum gagnrýna hugsun og hæfni til að ræða saman. Verkefnið fellur vel að hæfniáherslum Aðalnámskrár leikskóla (2011) eins og þær birtast í almennum hluta þar sem lögð er áhersla á að skólar efli með börnum og ungu fólki hæfni til að afla gagna og upplýsinga og beita gagnrýninni hugsun við mótun og miðlun hugmynda á skapandi hátt. Í Aðalnámskrá leikskóla (2011) er m.a. lögð áhersla á að í leikskóla sé skapaður vettvangur þar sem allir taki virkan þátt í samræðum um almenn málefni, hlusti hver á annan, skiptist á skoðunum og taki þátt í heimspekilegum samræðum. Starfsþróunarverkefnið náði yfir tveggja ára tímabil og voru alls haldnar 8 samræðusmiðjur, auk þess sem starfsfólk leikskólans skráði niður valdar samræðustundir og tók þátt í rýnihópaviðtölum. Sagt verður frá hugmyndafræðilegum grunni verkefnisins, umfangi, inntaki, aðferðum og verkfærum. Auk þess verður greint frá niðurstöðum skráninga og rýnihópaviðtala. Niðurstöður gefa starfsfólki leikskóla tilefni til að ígrunda og endurskoða starfshætti með það að markmiði að efla samræður með börnum í skólastarfinu.

Critics, Moralists and Intellectuals: The Transformation of the Udabāʾ in the Arab Nahḍah: a Historical-Conceptual Approach

Abstract This article analyzes the importance of the Nahḍah (Arabic Renaissance) for current developments in the field of Arabic literature. In particular it links the contemporary debate concerning the role and nature of writers and intellectuals (udabāʾ) in Arabic society to the semantic transformations undergone by the term adīb during the Nahḍah. The study analyses a number of statements made by Egyptian writers in the historical cultural press, critical essays, and ̩̩literary works, in which the term adīb is discussed, using R. Koselleck’s method of conceptual history. It shows that, during the Nahḍah, the term absorbed the European concepts of “author”, “man of letter”, “intellectual”. Nonetheless, the classical meanings of adīb as a subject associated with eloquence, encyclopaedic knowledge and moralistic attitude, were also revived, and this spurred a lively debate characterized by plurality of views and intellectual dispositions. Linking the nahḍawī debates to the debate concerning writers and intellectuals (udabāʾ) in contemporary society, the article shows how these same meanings are being re-disputed today in the midst of global and local cultural transformations.

Evaluative Thinking as a Collaborative Social Practice: The Case of Boundary Judgment Making

AbstractEvaluative thinking is often portrayed as an individual undertaking requiring cognitive capacities for analytical and critical thinking along with a set of intellectual dispositions. This chapter reviews that perspective and, without denying its importance, suggests that evaluative thinking can also be depicted as a collaborative social practice. That idea is explained and then illustrated using the example of boundary setting in evaluation.

John Keats in Context ed. by Michael O’Neill

Reviewed by: John Keats in Context ed. by Michael O’Neill Jonathan Mulrooney (bio) John Keats in Context. Michael O’Neill, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 373. £75. John Keats in Context is the latest in the Literature in Context series from Cambridge University Press, volumes designed to provide comprehensive accounts of the historical, literary, and personal circumstances that inform a writer’s work, as well as evaluations of the lasting effects the work has had. As Michael O’Neill’s concise introduction makes clear, this particular addition to the in Context list takes on the considerable task of reaching both academic and non-academic readers of Keats, even as it recognizes “that he possesses the inexhaustibility of those few writers who are necessary” (2). The volume’s six sections move with readable speed through the poet’s personal history, the development of his intellectual interests and poetic projects, his responses to wider cultural and historical events, his literary [End Page 329] influences, and his critical reception from the beginning through the present day. As a wide-ranging but coherent compendium of ongoing scholarly conversations addressing all of these topics, the book will be indispensable to Keats scholars for years to come. Part One, “Life, Letters, Texts,” begins with Sarah Wootten’s straightforward account of how biographies and films must face a “Keats of creative contingencies” whose multiplicities “run counter to more traditional forms of life writing” (15). Wootten is on to something with this insight, not just about biographical engagements with Keats but about how the figurations of his poems and letters set in motion uncountable readerly imaginings. The seven chapters that follow in the section contend with that challenge by viewing the poet through different but connected lenses, making a strong case that any division between Keats’s lived experiences and his writings must be viewed as an arbitrary imposition. Thus John Barnard’s thorough recounting of Keats’s publishing history—while Keats was alive and after—dovetails with other historical considerations in the section as well as with more conceptually driven essays such as Shahidha Bari’s thoughtful discussion of Keatsian “Mortality” and Madeleine Callaghan on the letters. Part Two, “Cultural Contexts,” widens the book’s scope to include a revaluation of Keats in the Cockney School, accounts of his life in London’s political and artistic scenes, and, in Anthony John Harding’s final chapter, a consideration of how those experiences shaped Keats’s inheritance of religious and mythological traditions. Parts Three and Four are the lynchpin of the volume, thirteen chapters where personal and poetic contexts (on the one hand) and legacies (on the other) converge. Part Three, “Ideas and Poetics,” brings the history of ideas to bear most squarely on the poems and letters themselves, offering six essays focused on the ways in which Keats’s intellectual dispositions and concepts informed his poetry. Porscha Fermanis’s opening discussion of how Keats imbricated a critique of Enlightenment with an insistence on empirical experience revises our understanding of how the poet engaged various and often competing strains of thought. Fermanis’s essay echoes throughout five following chapters that take on Hazlitt, the poetical character, sense, sensation, imagination, beauty, truth, and, in a concluding chapter that displays Michael O’Neill’s superb close reading skills, Keats’s prosody and versification in the odes. Having given us a primer on the poems themselves, the volume shifts in Part Four, “Poetic Contexts,” to consider how Keats’s engagement with precursors and contemporary influences played out in the multiple genres in which he worked. This section is notable for its distillation—in chapters by Susan Wolfson, Andrew Bennett, and Christopher Miller—of some of the finer recent readings of Keats’s formal innovations. Part Five, “Influence,” extends Keatsian afterlives through the [End Page 330] Victorian age and into the twentieth century with readings of Stevens, Bishop, and Heaney, among others. The volume concludes with Part Six, “Critical Reception,” which follows responses to Keats’s poems from contemporary reviews through the present moment. O’Neill shows a disciplined editorial hand throughout all these sections, dropping in himself from time to time with chapters on prosody, on Keats’s poetic...

Critical Reflection and Common-Sense Beliefs

I explore the connection between pragmatism and common sense by reflecting upon two seemingly contrasting Peircean remarks about the pragmatic method: (a) its “basis on the doctrine of common sense” and (b) the recommendation that a proposition p be explicated in light of critical, deliberate, or “self-controlled” conduct ensuing from a belief that p. I show that Peirce’s focus on phenomena of self-control is situated within his broader interest in the nature of reasoning. The “secret of rational consciousness,” according to Peirce, does not consist in the reflective or self-conscious nature of our most deliberate forms of conduct, per se, “as in the review of the process of self-control in its entirety.” The rationality of an inference consists in its capacity to restore the stability our “acritical” beliefs enjoyed before being unsettled by doubts. On this view, Peirce’s pragmatic theory of rational inquiry as aiming at the fixation of belief depends on a conception of belief as constituted by a tendency toward stability. In the rest of the paper, I argue that this conception avoids the shortcoming of purely “motivational” accounts of belief without denying this status of belief to our acritical intellectual dispositions – a denial which is often implied by standard “truth-directed” accounts.

Grading of Pupils in History: One-Year Research in the Czech Republic

AbstractIntroduction: The aim of the research was to point to a wide range of factors of the pupils’ grading in History classes and to find out if this grading on the given sample corresponds with the context of the independently selected variables: pupils’ weight, inclination to the Socratic type of values, type of family, and parents’ education. Methods: A sample of 1819 7th grade pupils was made up of the pupils of randomly addressed primary schools willing to cooperate. In the course of one school year, a questionnaire survey was carried out on this sample: each of the 14 regions of the Czech Republic was represented by 5 to 9% of the respondents. Data were evaluated at a 5% level of significance by means of the Chi-squared test. Results: In all the monitored cases, a statistically significant link was demonstrated between the dependent variable (pupils’ grading) and independent variables, i.e. the results in History have a wide-spectrum effect. Discussion: The research findings correspond with the results obtained by other scholars, and external factors (independent variables) significantly affect the pupils’ school success regardless of their mental and intellectual dispositions. Limitations: School success is simply monitored through numerical grading of pupils, which does not always and completely reflect the pupils’ progress in terms of their development. It was not a longitudinal survey but only a single one-year research from which no major conclusions can be drawn. Conclusions: It was confirmed that the results of pupils in History, or their historical knowledge, represent a broad-spectrum matter in which the multiplication effect of external influences must be counted. In the future, research should be carried out in longer time ranges and with a greater emphasis on the causality of the phenomena.

Identifying Dispositions That Matter: Reaching for Consensus Using a Delphi Study

ABSTRACTThis article describes how one institution used the Delphi technique to identify and operationalize key professional dispositions to be addressed in its teacher education program. Participants included teacher educators, methods course instructors, and school administrators. Data collection occurred in three phases, with the results of each phase informing the next one. Consensus was achieved regarding nine dispositions: Responsive, Challenging, Reflective, Ethical, Scholarly, Caring, Student-Centered, Fair, and Resourceful. Three categories represent the nine dispositions: Professional, Relational, and Intellectual dispositions. These categories also correspond with the university values of Integrity, Inclusiveness, and Inquiry. Each of the dispositions was matched with Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium standards, and rubrics were developed that identified the behaviors associated with each disposition. This study demonstrates how universities can respond proactively and professionally to accreditation requirements; the process engaged all stakeholders, invigorated and broadened the discussion about teaching effectiveness, and provided a professional alternative to mere compliance.

The split between Gall and Spurzheim (1813–1818)

ABSTRACTAn acerbic footnote in Volume 3 (1818) of the five-volume great work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of the Brain in Particular with Observations on the Possibility of Understanding the Many Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Man and Animals by the Configuration of Their Heads, marked the end of the collaboration between Gall, the founder of organologie, and Spurzheim, promoter of phrenology. We discuss the background of this note and the nature of the rift that marked the end of Gall and Spurzheim’s collaboration.

What Preservice Social Studies Teachers (Don't) Know About Politics and Current Events—And Why It Matters

This article reports findings from a 3-year study on preservice middle and secondary social studies teachers' common content knowledge of politics and current events. Surveys showed that both groups were generally uninformed about these issues, and on almost all measures, the middle-grades preservice teachers performed worse than those in the secondary program. Interviews were conducted with preservice teachers in both groups, and although they articulated a vision of teaching social studies that included relating content to politics and current events, most of the preservice teachers admitted that their habits related to acquiring this type of content knowledge were not sufficient to enact that vision in their classrooms. The author argues that these preservice teachers' lack of political and social awareness is a product of their intellectual dispositions as opposed to a deficiency in their content preparation.

Strong agents and weak systems: University support for school level improvement

This study examined individual and school level factors that advance and suppress the traits of high performing schools. Based on action plans and reflective journals of 28 school level practitioners in 14 schools across 10 school districts, researchers tracked the progress of each practitioner from participation in a university-based school improvement institute through the initial 5 months of action plan implementation at the school site. This study also presents a conceptual model for a strong system, based on an extensive literature review. Findings are as follows: (1) Internal, school-level change agents who are knowledgeable and skillful with the traits of strong systems were able to make significant inroads within weak systems. (2) School and district level leadership knowledgeable and skillful with the traits of strong systems were crucial to the sustainability of improvement efforts. (3) The effectiveness of change agents in initiating improvement did not necessarily align with positional power, confirming prior complexity research findings that posit non-linearity of change. (4) Effective change agents focused in their work with colleagues on the cultivation of intellectual dispositions and complex skills. Such activity stands in contrast to much contemporary Professional Learning Community (PLC) work (so called) that focuses on “training” teachers in scripted procedures and suggests that much contemporary PLC work needs to be redirected from the learning of procedural skills to the cultivation of intellectual dispositions and complex skills. University colleges of education, whose signature traditions include inquiry, analysis, and reflection, are well-positioned to support such work.

Intelektualizm etyczny w staropolskiej myśli moralnej

The task of the present article is to present those thoughts in the ideas of polish ethical writers of XVI and XVII century, who refer to, although to a different extent, to the Socratic idea of ethical intellectualism. In the light of conducted studies, the intellectualism should be considered as one of the most distinct features of the Old Polish ethical thought. An explicit acceptance of the idea of a close relationship between the knowledge and morality, wisdom and virtue, reason and ethics is noticeable in writings of many thinkers of that period. Sometimes the ethical intellectualism occurred in a relatively truthful form, otherwise, it was modified on various ways. However, its basic sense was accepted by polish writers of this epoch. It was mentioned for example that the acquisition of virtue itself, requires the engagement of the intellect on the other hand, the accomplishment of virtue proceeds in conjunction with the intellectual development. It has being proven that the person of the firm virtues is equipped with intellectual dispositions with, especially highly appreciated, prudence and sagacity, which allow for correct judgements and decisions. It was underlined that the correct intellectual discrimination between the good and the bad is a prerequisite for making right moral appraisals. It was pronounced for a broad ethical education resting on rational premises.

Critical thinking in the Oxford tutorial: a call for an explicit and systematic approach

This paper summarises a study focusing on the extent to which the Oxford tutorial fosters critical thinking in students. In doing so, it aims to contribute to a largely ignored area of research regarding teaching pedagogy and classroom practice. The results of this study successfully reveal that participating tutors were primarily concerned with fostering students’ abilities to clarify central questions, define key terms and question important assumptions (principally within the writing of essays). Participating tutors were less focused on fostering other essential critical thinking skills and dispositions including: (1) intellectual analysis and the internalisation of new ideas, (2) intellectual evaluation and (3) intellectual traits of mind. The primary hypothesis suggested by this study is that students are more likely to internalise those intellectual skills and dispositions that are explicitly and systematically discussed and required than those that remain implicit (and seem optional).

Reshaping Human Intelligence: The Debate about Genetic Enhancement of Cognitive Functions

Given the technical feasibility, not only scientists but also moral philosophers approve of an intervention in the genetic basis of our intellectual dispositions. Among the features not related to illnesses, intelligence seems to be an especially promising candidate for genetic enhancement, for intelligence is valued in every culture. The paper presents some of the arguments for and against genetic enhancement of intelligence. The author analyses what kind of good increased intelligence is: an instrumental good for the wellbeing of mankind, a positional good for a given society or an individual, or something that is appreciated by the individual subject because of the positive experience the subject has by making use of it. Since such experiences are not bad in themselves the means of genetic enhancement have to be assessed and compared with accepted practices like education. The author comes to the conclusion that there are morally significant differences between genetic enhancement and accepted practices to enhance intelligence.