Intellectual Questions Research Articles

Policy Analysis

The practice of policy analysis requires an ability to understand the political context of decisions. This political sensitivity involves a readiness to address certain intellectual questions. In order to answer these questions about the political environment, a practitioner needs to have a particular cognitive style. Examination of empirical studies of planners shows understanding of the political environment among these practitioners to be associated with a distinctive cognitive map and related cognitive style. This cognitive style should be considered part of the requisite expertise for policy analysis. Practitioners without this cognitive style are likely to have little influence in decision making.

Speech at the Conference on the Question of Intellectuals Convened by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, (January 20, 1956)

Speech at the Conference on the Question of Intellectuals Convened by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, (January 20, 1956)

A Rational Approach to Fractions

Are there substantial intellectual questions worth consideration in remedial arithmetic? Could the source of our students' errors be genuine intellectual doubt, or is the problem essentially one of student deficiencies in trivially obvious areas? I believe that within arithmetic lie substantial concepts. Further the concepts are complex enough to make plausible a variety of interpretations. Many of the interpretations are appropriate, many misleading, and many, mainly those initially in the minds of students, are incorrect. The confusion from which springs such arithmetic horrors as + 2 = 1 has an obvious rational basis. It has been my experience that many arithmetic errors have some logical basis. To deal with these errors, I believe it is necessary to challenge the ideas upon which they are based. For many reasons, this is a formidable task for mathematics teachers. In light of the kind of experience that characterizes the personal mathematical development of most math teachers, it is clear where there could arise innumerable problems in remedial teaching. Many teachers of mathematics enter the profession due to a high level of ability and the personal excitement derived in the study of the discipline. In many cases intellectual success with mathematics spurs teachers to levels far beyond even their own initial expectations. They often build (though never completely) both a macroscopic view of the subject, and a strong ability to produce rigorous results. The remedial student's experience is perhaps the antithesis of what has been described for his teacher. Due to his often repeated experience of failure, most people would agree that the remedial student needs understanding, support, and concern. In addition, I contend, he needs organization, mental discipline and a sense of a developing understanding. But perhaps at the apex of all of these needs is the student's need for ongoing intellectual challenge (motivation). He must feel that what he is learning is of value. Thus the question naturally arises, is there intellectual challenge in arithmetic? Posed differently, is arithmetic worth knowing? Calculators and technology not withstanding; yes is the answer to both questions. Rather than attempting to make a case for the conceptual content of all of arithmetic, let us look specifically at fractions.

Current Directions in Midwestern Archaeology

Ten years ago James B. Griffin (62) observed that three themes dominated eastern North American prehistory: 1. the gradual evolution from hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural societies over a period of 15, 000 years; 2. the achieve­ ment of two cultura l climaxes; and 3. the strong impact on cultural evolution of cultivated plant introductions from Mesoamerica. Subsequent research in the Midwest has continued to focus primarily on these themes or on issues and problems derived from them. The historical roots of these themes reach back to a period before serious archaeology existed when the central intellectual questions were the origins and fate of the Mound Builder race. Since then, scholarly attention has turned to an anthropological concern for the processes and conditions promoting cultural evolution in the Midwest as determined by investigations based on a sound regional prehistory. The original issues, however, find echoes in those problems that revolve around the fate of Mississippian high culture in the Midwest and the relationship of historic tribes to this past stage of greater complexity. I have chosen a topical approach here in order to emphasize the central features

Convergence and Divergence in Development

After World War II there arose the intellectual question of whether or not the two blocs of developed societies, and the many less developed ones, would evolve in a common direction. Some argued for convergence around the requirements of the modern economy. Others argued for divergence along Jines set by political and cultural factors (for reviews, see Weinberg 1969, Meyer 1970, Kerr et al 1 97 1 , Millar 1972, Deutsch 1973, and Hollingsworth 1973). Recent work has transformed the issue. First, much systematic evidence, re­ viewed here, shows that most societies are rapidly shifting to modern institutional arrangements.2 Second, the increasing uniformity of, and exchange between, soci­ eties brought awareness that they may diverge or converge with respect to equality of development as well as in organizational modernity. Current disputes center on the rise or decline in international economic equality. Third, and most important, convergence and divergence are now seen as resulting from the evolution of world society, more than from the independent evolution of separate societies (Hopkins & Wallerstein 1967). The world market and society produce convergence by subjecting all societies to the same forces; they produce divergence by creating different roles for different societies in the world stratification system. Focusing on societal development within a (capitalist) world industrial structure creates at the global level of analysis a repetition of the original post-Marx debate about the homogenizing versus the stratifying effects of industrial society on individuals and classes. The current discussion is almost as politicized as the original

Emigration from the United Kingdom to the United States: 1860–1913

Between the years 1860 and 1913 approximately twelve million people took passage from the United Kingdom to extra-European countries. The bulk of the migration stream (about 125,000 people per year) was directed toward the United States; it is this movement of population that is the subject of our article. The flow of individuals from the United Kingdom to the United States in this period ranged from 38,000 in 1861 to 202,000 in 1887 with marked cyclical fluctuations. For example, in 1873 the flow was 167,000 and by 1877 it was only 45,000. Variations of this magnitude pose the interesting intellectual question of whether or not they can be explained. This is not a new question; there are frequent references in the literature to the possible causes of this movement and the emigration from the United Kingdom that it implies. Studies focus on various economic influences on emigration. There is little in this period in the socio-political environment of the United Kingdom that would prompt individuals to emigrate in order to flee intolerable religious or political persecution.

The "Consolatio" in Milton's Funeral Elegies

MILTON'S PREOCCUPATION with his role as a Christian poet is plainly reflected in the frequency of his allusions to Heaven. In addition to Paradise Lost some sixteen of the minor poems involve particularized descriptions of Heaven, either as the seat of the Deity or as the abode of the blessed in the future life. Seven poems portray Heaven as the home of the Divinity; in all these poems except Comus the description is introduced to illustrate the capacity of poetry or music to ennoble the ecstatic soul by blending it with the divine harmony, a favorite conception of Milton's. Nine other poems conclude with pictures of Heaven and the future life that are suggested by the topic of death. This paper excludes the visions in Mansus and On Time to focus on the images of Heaven presented in Milton's formal funeral elegies, which span his development from seventeen to thirty. Although in praising Lycidas Paul Elmer More could assert that always rang true when he wrote of the world to come,' we shall see that a convincing treatment of this subject was not easy and that Milton was by no means always successful. Close scrutiny of the considerable problems that these descriptions involved for him may illuminate the vexatious topic of the representation of Heaven in Paradise Lost and throw some interesting sidelights on the central intellectual question posed by the poet's thought: to what degree does his work harmonize Christian and classical influences? Although these problems should not lead us to underestimate the importance of Christian eschatology for the poet's inner religious life,2 the conclusions of the funeral elegies generally do not bespeak the rapt imagination of a Richard Baxter launched upon the grand finale to The Saints Everlasting Rest. Indeed, we must be circumspect in using the descriptions of Heaven as evidence for Milton's religious beliefs. For example, he several times endows the glorified saints with powers of intercession and mediation that, interpreted theologically rather than aesthetically, would make our staunchly Protestant bard a crypto-Catholic. Virtually dictated by the pattern governing the poet writing Christian elegy, the consolatio, as Renaissance rhetoricians like Julius Caesar Scaliger conceived of it, offered the writer a supreme opportunity to 'How to Read Lycidas, Milton's Lycidas: the Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A.

Death as a question of living

IN THE first part of this counterthesis article the question of death and its survival is examined as an intellectual question. The query is: What does the question mean cognitively? That is, What is its bearing on the objective world which, by using meanings, we propose for ourselves? In the second and third parts of the article the question of death and its survival is considered, not as an intellectual and objective question, but as a personal and subjective question: How can a person live when he finds his very existence held in question by death? The conclusion of the article is that, although the terms of the survival question are meaningless in the objective world of meanings, the question is nevertheless meaningful as a subjective question.

The Price Level Problem and Some Intellectual Grooves

This paper was initially provoked by Professor Mathews' comments on Accounting Research Study No. 6 in the Spring, 1965, number of this Journal.' Once begun it seemed an opportunity for considering several matters in a wider context; the price level problem seems to have led up many blind alleys, or perhaps in tackling it we have been unable to cast off the modes of thinking which were appropriate only for less complex questions. Almost all the writing on the subject in the decade 1946 to 1955 was against a background of rising prices of capital goods, a pent-up demand for such goods both for expansion and replacement, and high rates of taxation on business incomes. Many of the arguments for a new accounting paradigm could readily be challenged on two grounds at least; they could be said to be special pleading in the interest of business firms, their managers and their stockholders; or they could be said to be of ephemeral interest, interest which would wane when prices became stable. Both such arguments were used in rebutting proposals for change, and indeed the spate of articles dwindled as prices tended to become more stable. I joined issue with conventional processes in a series of articles between 1949 and 1955. But it seemed that if the price level problem were only a temporary one and if proponents of change could be labelled as special pleaders, there was little of substance in the matter. To be of any lasting consequence as an intellectual question, the so-called price level problem had to be seen as an integral part of accounting and not a mere appendage. I therefore switched attention from considering the question in isolation and embarked on a search for a general set of ideas which would give an accounting system

Dante and Epicurus

N VIEW of Dante's continual reconsideration of many artistic and intellectual questions, it is odd that G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli, the latest editors and most exhaustive commentators on the Convivio, should interpret Dante's references in that work to Epicurus and Epicureanism in the light of the ninth and tenth cantos of the Inferno. In both the commentary on the apposite passages and in an appendix on Dante's presumed doctrinal tolerance, they assume that the poet held the same view of Epicureanism throughout his life, and that the Epicureans of the Convivio are the archheretics of the Inferno who make the soul die with the body.' I hope to demonstrate that they read back into the Convivio what Dante clearly must have considered a correction of an early error. I shall consider Dante's various references to Epicurus and Epicureanism in the light of the sources and definitions available to him, and relate as precisely as possible his changing views to his use of different sources at different times. We shall then discover that Dante knew two

Literature on Church History, 1914–1920. IV. The Church in Modern Times (Part One: The Period of the Enlightenment)

It is a characteristic of German scholarship to see problems and to work with them in the solution of intellectual and spiritual questions. Certainly it is a praiseworthy trait in the field of history that it follows the inner relation of events and cannot rest until all the subtlest threads are discovered. Such a problem is presented in the rise of the modern world of thought and the inquiry as to the factors which have contributed to it. In von Below's book on the causes of the Reformation, referred to at the beginning of my third article (HThR, Jan. 1924, pp. 5f.), the question is discussed, among others, whether the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times is really to be found in Luther and his work.