Practical Judgment Research Articles

Introducing a practice perspective on monitoring for adaptive management

Abstract Adaptive management (AM) is one of the most prominent ways ecologists contribute to ecosystem management, policy, and planning. AM treats management actions as experiments to monitor and learn from, creating a central role for ecologists in constructing the monitoring programs intended to guide learning. Yet, ecologists have found monitoring for AM challenging. They face a daunting series of dilemmas: How to produce monitoring programs that are responsive to management goals and provide clear signals for action, in ever‐changing social‐ecological contexts, and in light of impending deadlines, limited funding and available skills? The applied ecological literature has so far struggled to account for the ways in which these dilemmas are experienced and resolved “on the ground.” We address this problem by using contemporary practice theory to develop a practice perspective on monitoring for AM. Practice theory foregrounds the activities of science, viewing knowledge and context as products of practical action. We develop our practice perspective, rooted in pragmatist philosophy and relational thinking, through an empirical case study of a group of ecologists tasked with developing an adaptive approach to the restoration of threatened vegetation in an Australian national park. A practice perspective enables us to trace in real time the myriad experiential, situated, practical judgments made by the scientists to navigate the tricky dilemmas they encounter. We thus highlight the messy complexities of scientific knowledge production, while retaining a commitment to the value of science for management. Our work is relevant for ecologists working at the science‐policy interface because it reveals the embodied competencies essential for the production of usable knowledge. Our focus on the temporality of ecological fieldwork—the progression of monitoring in unfolding time—helps to extend practice‐based research in environmental management. By providing a relational account of practice, knowledge, and context in applied scientific research, we contribute to efforts in the environmental and sustainability sciences to develop relational understandings of people and nature. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Safety assessment of explosions during gas stations refilling process

Petrol stations are normally located close to residential areas where a large population is present. Therefore, explosion accidents at service stations may lead to significant human losses. This study presents an application of a Bayesian-network-based (BN) quantitative risk analysis (QRA) method to modelling gas explosion process from an initial release to consequent explosions and human losses as the BN is able to reveal complicated mechanisms with complex interrelationships between parameters. The proposed BN of explosion events at petrol stations contains 14 nodes and 18 links, which consider several critical risk factors, including spill, ignition, explosion, evacuation and human loss. Meanwhile, to reduce uncertainties caused by data shortage and improve the reliability and accuracy of the proposed method, three kinds of data—practical information, computational simulations and subjective judgements—are involved in the quantification of the proposed BN. A case study is provided in this paper, and sensitivity studies are also conducted. The result indicates that human loss can be influenced significantly by release scenarios, ignition sources and time of day. It also proves that the risk-based method is able to provide an effective and reliable assessment of human safety when explosion events occur at petrol stations.

The New Learning Organisation

Purpose This paper aims to revive the old idea of the Learning Organisation by providing a fresh conceptualisation and illustration. The New Learning Organisation is conceptualised, focussing on the common good through responsible action. It is positioned as responding to the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, Bennett and Lemoine, 2014) conditions with a VUCA approach to Learning Leadership fostering Institutional Reflexivity and High Agility Organising . Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a new organisational learning framework – the 8As – Sensuous Organisational Learning framework. It illustrates the operationalisation of this framework in PART II through the educational practices and learning culture of the Norwegian Defence University College, Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy’s (RNoAFA) approach to growing (Military) leaders. Findings The Sensuous Organisational Learning – 8As – framework illustrates how attentiveness, alertness, awareness, appreciation, anticipation, alignment, activation and agility form an integral part of the New Learning Organisation. Their unique contribution as aspect of a Sensuous Organisational Learning framework is that they explicate how the three principles of Institutional Reflexivity, High Agility Organising and Learning Leadership can be operationalised to serve the common good. Research limitations/implications The paper presents a novel way of reviving the Learning Organisation beyond an ideology as a practical approach to responding to VUCA conditions. It introduces a new learning theory and injects a fresh perspective in our understanding of the role and impact of learning in the workplace. Practical implications By focussing on Learning Leadership practices that extend previous Organisational Learning frameworks, The New Learning Organisation promoted here focuses on responsible action to serve the common good through Institutional Reflexivity and High Agility Organising. Social implications By focussing on how the common good can be better served, the New Learning Organisation becomes a mantra for social change to identify the higher purpose that social actions must serve. Originality/value The need for fresh contributions in the Organisational Learning debate is long overdue. This paper marks a new chapter in Organisational Learning research and practice by demonstrating the value of sensousness as a foundation for improving the practical judgements across professional practices.

Understanding and improving discretionary judgment and decision-making in child protection practice: Towards a whole-of-system policy evaluation

Discretionary judgment is a necessary and desirable attribute of child protection practice and decision-making. Increasingly, approaches towards accountability in child protection services act to constrain the use of practitioner discretionary judgement through ever increasing layers of standardisation and technical-rational approaches to practice. This situation is at odds with the need for professionals to adaptively respond to practice environments that are characterised by uncertainty and complexity. At the same time, there are known weakness and problems that are reported in the decision-making literature, begging questions about how to best support and evaluate for effective and accountable discretion and decision-making across a whole system. In this paper discretion is conceptualised as a structural and epistemic phenomena that is constrained and restricted under the weight of standardisation. A five-part conceptual framework for a systems approach to policy evaluation is presented, and it is argued that this framework would support the capacity for effective discretionary judgement and decision-making to emerge as a property of the system overall. This paper is a theoretical and conceptual argument for a systemic policy evaluation framework that is supportive of discretionary judgment and decision-making in child protection systems shifting the emphasis away from technical-rational compliance.

“It might be this, it should be that…” uncertainty and doubt in day-to-day research practice

This paper examines how scientists conceptualize their research methodologies. Do scientists raise concerns about vague criteria and genuine uncertainties in experimental practice? If so, what sorts of issues do they identify as problematic? Do scientists acknowledge the presence of value judgments in scientific research, and do they reflect on the relation between epistemic and non-epistemic criteria for decisionmaking? We present findings from an analysis of qualitative interviews with 63 scientific researchers who talk about their views on good research practice. We argue that analysts of science should care about scientists’ conceptualizations of the criteria and of the practical judgments that scientific inquiry involves. While scientists’ accounts of their own research methodologies alone do not give us a full picture of how science really works, they can point us to areas of concern. They can inspire and direct philosophical reflections about how science works. Throughout the interviews, the participating researchers provided specific examples from their own research contexts as illustrations of their methodological points. These examples reveal that scientists often struggle to evaluate the quality of their data, to figure out whether the available evidence confirms their hypothesis, whether a replication was successful, or to what extent they can rely on peer-reviewed papers. General ideas about good research methods do not directly translate into specific evaluation criteria or strategies that can guide research and help validate empirical data.

Project leaders in transition: Manifestations of cognitive and emotional capacity

This research contributes to a dearth of research into leadership that focuses explicitly on senior leaders of complex projects. It identifies five transitions that were seen as essential as these project leaders developed their capacity to lead, including transitions towards: orchestrating dialogue between the right people, at the right time, about the right issues; guiding collaborative meaning-making to align key stakeholders; drawing on practical wisdom and judgment to progress complex project challenges; developing a range of power sources, and sensing a pathway through power dynamics; and negotiating project success for key stakeholders based on a broad concept of value. Instead of merely seeing this as the development of new skills, we argue that these transitions are manifestations of an increase of a more deeply rooted capacity to deal with cognitive and emotional complexity. This difference matters as learning a new skill requires a very different approach to stepping up an order of constructive development. A constructive developmental perspective appears particularly helpful for understanding how senior project leaders of complex projects learn to deal with the relentless onslaught of challenges that their projects can bring.

Exploring The Role Of Phronesis In Social Innovation: A Case Study Of Dr. Ruth Pfau

Although recent literature on social innovation proclaims its virtue in addressing unmet social needs. Yet little is known about the relationship between phronesis and social innovation. This paper aims to explore how a social entrepreneur uses phronesis in addressing a social problem. Taking case study as qualitative research inquiry, this paper uses the interviews and life account of Dr. Ruth Pfau (Late) on how she incorporated her phronesis in treating patients suffering from leprosy. The empirical evidences collected were analyzed using GIOIA data analysis. The results of the data analysis show that a social entrepreneur employs his/her practical wisdom, experiential knowledge, and value judgment in combating a social issue, and in doing so, uses phronesis in addressing a social problems and creating social innovation.

T.I.M.E. to improve patient outcomes: use of a clinical decision support tool to optimise wound care.

Patients with wounds pose an important healthcare challenge. Many of these wounds are managed in community care and can take weeks or months to resolve. Delays in wound healing can be perpetuated by clinicians who make poor treatment choices, fail to recognise complications and/or do not seek timely advice. Improving patient outcomes requires a proactive approach to care that includes accurate and timely assessment and re-assessment, treatment of the underlying cause using a multidisciplinary team approach and the use of evidence-based practice and clinical judgement to develop an appropriate treatment plan. A structured approach to care, such as the newly developed T.I.M.E. clinical decision support tool, has the potential to improve wound healing outcomes and reduce the burden of chronic wounds in community nursing services.

Of Cyberliberation and Forbidden Fornication: Hidden Transcripts of Autonomous Mobility in Finland

While autonomous mobility technology is developing, comparatively less is known about how a sociotechnical system of autonomous mobility may impact our urban living conditions. Using Finland as a case study, this research aims to identify the possible implications of changing power relations created by autonomous mobility technology. This study uses a theoretical and conceptual approach grounded in the planning research tradition of Aristotelian practical judgement (phronesis). Drawing from political theory of technology, it investigates the social relations that may be afforded by autonomous mobility technology. Adapting a concept drawn from geography of power, it examines how power is expressed in terms of transcripts of dominant technological agency and hidden social context. 31 interviews of extended users in the transition (intermediaries) revealed three dominant transcripts of technological agency associated with the philosophy of cyberlibertarianism (liberation of the driver, safety of the driver and customer accessibility), and four hidden transcripts of social context (restrictions on sharing street space, loss of social safety, vulnerability of passengers, and loss of privacy). The phronetic research tradition that was used in the study revealed several things. The impact of autonomous mobility technology goes beyond the purely systemic, affecting the very fabric of our connection with place and society. Failure to consider autonomous mobility technology as a sociotechnical system that will restructure society unperceptively (technological somnambulism) may bring profound societal changes.

Basic human needs as values: exploring John Dewey’s normative perspective on social philosophy

O projeto de John Dewey sobre a filosofia social não tem sido considerado como uma peça importante de seu pensamento. Entretanto, seus textos sobre esse tópico constituem um notável esforço para articular diversos novos conceitos e ideias, os quais não podem ser encontrados em outra parte de sua extensa obra filosófica. Inserida nesse contexto, a nova edição de suas “Palestras em filosofia política e social” – série de palestras que Dewey apresentou quando esteve na China – fornece um material único para revisar seu ponto de vista social. Levando-se em consideração que o pragmatista introduz uma “figura normativa” e que ele identifica um conjunto de necessidades humanas básicas de maneira a compreender plenamente esse critério normativo. Como hipótese, considero (i) que a filosofia social está principalmente associada com juízos práticos e (ii) que é plausível interpretar essas necessidades humanas básicas como valores. Para sustentar essas afirmações, primeiro, reconstruo a proposta de Dewey sobre um terceiro tipo de pensamento social. Segundo, examino sua posição sobre valores e normas. Terceiro, analiso a “figura normativa” e considero a “leitura antropológica” apresentada por Roberto Frega (2015). Por fim, ofereço uma análise complementar, argumentando que é possível explicar o padrão normativo de Dewey de maneira coerente com respeito aos propósitos do seu pensamento social – e, além disso, que é possível evitar qualquer compromisso essencialista.

A Simulation-Based Workshop to Improve Residents' Collaborative Clinical Practice.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education expects residents to attain competency in systems-based practice by advocating for quality patient care, working in interprofessional teams, and implementing system solutions to prevent errors. Diabetes in pregnancy was identified as an area for improvement through comprehensive interdisciplinary and interprofessional care. An interdisciplinary and interprofessional workshop was created by 3 regional academic institutions to improve collaborative practice, clinical knowledge, and clinical judgment of residents. A workshop consisting of 4 clinical simulation stations for ultrasound assessment, glycemic control, hyperglycemic emergencies, and macrosomia complications was designed to address gaps in quality of care. Workshop participants were residents from 6 programs and students in nursing, pharmacy, and sonography. Attitude and clinical knowledge were measured preworkshop and postworkshop, and at 3-month and 6- to 7-month follow-up. There were increases in average clinical knowledge scores across time points from residents: 56.4% preworkshop, 64.8% postworkshop, 66.0% at 3-month follow-up, and 68.1% at 6- to 7-month follow-up. Additionally, participants reported positive attitudes toward interprofessional education and indicated high overall satisfaction. Residents demonstrated improved knowledge and attitudes toward interprofessional training after participating in a large-scale simulation workshop focused on the care of patients with diabetes in pregnancy.

The New Learning Organisation: PART II - Lessons from the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper – PART II – is to present the lived experiences of Sensuous Organisational Learning drawn from the educational practices and learning culture of the Norwegian Defence University College, Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy’s (RNoAFA) approach to growing (Military) leaders.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reflects the co-creation of actionable knowledge between military officers, academics at the RNoAFA and international scholars engaged as research collaborators. The objective is to present the benefits of “practising knowing through dialogical exchange” (MacIntosh et al., 2012) as an approach to co-creating knowledge for responsible action. In this case, the authors present the conceptualisation and illustration of the idea of the New Learning Organisation they advance.FindingsThe Sensuous Organisational Learning – 8As framework explains how Attentiveness, Alertness, Awareness, Appreciation, Anticipation, Alignment, Activation and Agility form an integral part of the educational strategy that enables the RNoAFA to respond to the wider Educational Reforms and Modernisation programme of Norwegian Defence. The RNoAFA is presented as an illustration of how the New Learning Organisation serves the common good if Institutional Reflexivity and High Agility Organising were key aspects of the Learning Leadership it fosters.Research limitations/implicationsConsistent with MacIntosh et al.’s (2012) dialogical exchanges the authors present the relational and intersubjective nature of meaningful dialogue between the co-authors that provides scope for integrative stories of practice. The resulting illustrative example of the New Learning Organisation, is an account of the learning experienced. Hence, this paper is presented neither as a traditional empirical paper nor as a self-disclosing or even auto-ethnographic account. Instead, it is one of a series of research outputs from innovative research collaboration between the authors all committed to “practising knowing”.Practical implicationsThe New Learning Organisation promoted here focuses on responsible action to serve the common good. Investing in Institutional Reflexivity becomes critical in continuing to broaden the ways of being and becoming. As individuals, communities and organisations, that comprise the institution (in this case Norwegian Defence) grow and elevate their practical judgements to serve the common good the capacity to engage in reflexive critique heightens organisational agility and leadership.Social implicationsEmbedding care as the essence of learning not only enables accepting mistakes and owning up to these mistakes, but reinforcing the strength of character in doing so demonstrating what it means to be resilient, flexible and ready to respond to the VUCA. This is what permits High Agility Organising to foster learning on an ongoing basis driving the commitment to continually renew operational and professional practices. By focussing on how the common good can be better served, the New Learning Organisation cares to pursue the higher purpose that social actions must serve.Originality/valueAdvancing leadership as a personal, relational and organisational quality supported by an orientation towards practising goes beyond single, double and triple loop learning. In doing so, the Learning Leadership that drives the New Learning Organisation energises Attentiveness, Alertness, Awareness, Appreciation, Anticipation, Alignment, Activation and Agility. This paper marks a new chapter in Organisational Learning research and practice by demonstrating the value of sensuousness as a foundation for improving the practical judgements across professional practices.

Kant on Practical Judgment

Kant on Practical Judgment

Intelligibility of legal documents: legal fiction or presumption?

««Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Право» — международный научно-теоретический рецензируемый журнал, публикующий материалы в следующих рубриках: Публичное и частное право: прикладные исследования Криминология Криминалистика Судебная экспертиза Исследования права с позиций социальных и гуманитарных (неюридических) наук Правовая жизнь: научно-практические заключения, комментарии и обзоры Сравнительное право Зарубежное право

Are there dead persons?

AbstractSchechtman’s ‘Person Life View’ (PLV) offers an account of personal identity whereby persons are the unified loci of our practical and ethical judgment. PLV also recognises infants and permanent vegetative state patients as being persons. I argue that the way PLV handles these cases yields an unexpected result: the dead also remain persons, contrary to the widely-accepted ‘Termination Thesis.’ Even more surprisingly, this actually counts in PLV’s favor: in light of our social and ethical practices which treat the dead as moral patients, PLV gives a more plausible account of the status of the dead than its rival theories.

MANN: A Multichannel Attentive Neural Network for Legal Judgment Prediction

Recent years have witnessed an opportunity to improve trial efficiency and quality by predictive analysis of massive judgment documents. A practical legal judgment prediction (LJP) system should provide a judge with feasible judgment suggestions, including the charges, applicable law articles, and prison term, whereas most existing works focus on only part of the LJP task. Inspired by the impressive success of deep neural networks in a wide range of application scenarios, we propose a multichannel attentive neural network model, MANN, which learns from previous judgment documents and performs the integrated LJP task in a unified framework. In general, MANN takes the textual description of a criminal case as the input for attention-based neural networks to learn its latent feature representations oriented to the case fact, the defendant persona, and relevant law articles. Moreover, we adopt a two-tier structure to empower attentive sequence encoders to hierarchically model the semantic interactions from different parts of case description at both the word and sentence levels. The experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets of criminal cases in mainland China. The experimental results demonstrate that MANN achieves state-of-the-art LJP performance on all evaluation metrics.

Neo-epicureanism

By looking at its history, this article emphasizes the importance of practical judgment for materialism. This sense of practical judgment is traced back to the function of phronesis in one of the ancient schools of materialism, namely, the Epicureans.

LOGIC METHODS OF EXPRESSION IN HUMANITARIAN KNOWLEDGE

Purpose: finding out the features of logical methods for obtaining conclusions on humanitarian subjects. The task of this scientific research is to analyze the logical paradigmatic aspects of humanitarian knowledge, such as the differences in the formation of sets, logical forms and conclusions, and so on. Methods: a set of logical methods such as analysis, synthesis, abstraction and generalization, informal logic of understanding, etc. Scientific novelty: the logic of humanitarian knowledge is formed on the basis of the logic of historical knowledge, the specificity of which is manifested in the special meaning of individual sets that receive direct and indirect meaning, form the corresponding logical connections in obtaining conclusions. When obtaining conclusions on humanitarian subjects, the formation of an exemplary individual is a plurality. Its ideal qualities are transferred to an unnamed set. Thus, the integrity of the humanitarian subject is created. In the transition from parts to the whole there is a “logical jump”, which is also the difference in the procedure for obtaining a conclusion. Widely used rational understanding by identifying the value of the whole. Understanding can be strong or weak. The difference in the logic of humanitarian knowledge is primarily due to the peculiarity of the work of human thinking, which uses specific tools in formatting various scientific disciplines and organizing the cognitive process. Among the many new approaches and methods of the humanities developed in phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of life, structuralism, postmodernism, etc., hermeneutics should be noted. It is hermeneutics that occupies a special place in humanitarian knowledge due to its ontology and logic. Conclusions: the logic of humanitarian knowledge is formed on the basis of historical consciousness, relies on ontology and has signs of the logic of practical thinking. In its formation, it is advisable to use the theory of practical judgments and conclusions, taking into account subjective values of life experience, obtaining the logical values of truth and falsehood. The terms of deductive and non-deductive forms are based on judgments about values. The logic of humanitarian knowledge to a large extent is hermeneutical logic, which, in turn, is the logic of rational understanding.

Techno-Satyagraha

Gandhi scholars agree that he was a critic of capitalism, if not capital or capitalists. Nevertheless, they disagree about his relationship to socialism. Some emphasize Gandhi’s claim that the modern Western canon of socialism is incompatible with the philosophy of nonviolence. Others emphasize his occasional affirmation that he is a socialist, regarding socialism as a beautiful ideal of equality. Gandhi moves back and forth between conditional endorsements of capitalists and socialism’s beautiful ideal. In this article, I ask why Gandhi never specifies any clear economic preference for the philosophy of nonviolence. Is he confused and incapable of reaching practical judgments about what nonviolence demands in terms of economics? I answer this question in two ways. First, I argue that passing back and forth over the partial and fallible viewpoints of capitalists and socialists of various stripes is consistent with Gandhi’s method of experiments in truth. The passing-over method extends from experiments in devotion to constructive experiments in economics, laying the foundation for integrating distinctively human life goals or puruṣārthas. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, I consider the background to Gandhi’s use of this method as applied to economics in Kauṭilya’s classical Arthaśāstra. Scholars often characterize Kauṭilya as both a socialist and a realist. While establishing the world’s first welfare state, his Arthaśāstra is also tied deeply into the material-spiritual concerns of the puruṣārthas, combining economics with duty, earthly pleasure, and transcendence. In this latter respect, however, Kauṭilya’s realism concedes too much to the contextual realities of his time concerning imperial conquest and caste. Gandhi emerges from this inquiry as another kind of realist in his constructive experiments with diverse economic perspectives, equally attuned to the contextual realities of his age. Gandhi succeeded—where Kauṭilya failed—to integrate economics with the spiritual goals of the puruṣārthas. I contend that Gandhi’s back and forth method in economics provides contemporary Gandhians with a way to address new contextual realities of the digital or “gig” economy through techno-satyagraha.

Another Look at Kant and Degrees of Responsibility

In “Kant and Degrees of Responsibility,” Joe Saunders claims that “Degrees of responsibility are important for both our moral and legal practices” (p. 1) and argues that “transcendental idealism precludes Kant from vindicating these judgments [about degrees of responsibility]” (p. 11); thus, we have reasons to reject Kant’s transcendental idealism. In this paper, I show how Kant’s transcendental idealism can accommodate and provide a metaphysical account for degrees of responsibility. Whether this “vindicates” such judgments depends upon how much one expects a philosophical account to do; I defend modesty there while admitting a reasonable desire for reflection on how we can and should make such judgments. Finally, I raise the question of just how important judgments of moral responsibility are. Rather than looking to metaphysics to figure out how to vindicate judgments about degrees of responsibility, I suggest we look to the practical purposes such judgments serve.