Kinds Of Contexts Research Articles

Precis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility

The leading idea of our theory of moral responsibility is that responsibility is associated with control. But we contend that there are two distinct kinds of control. Regulative control involves alternative possibilities: it is a kind of dual power of free action. In contrast, guidance control does not, by its nature, involve alternative possibilities. Whereas typically it might be thought that regulative and guidance control go together, the Frankfurt-type cases show that they are separate and distinct sorts of control. And, whereas typically it is thought that moral responsibility requires regulative control, we claim that moral responsibility-for actions, omissions, and consequences-simply requires guidance control.' Thus, although we do not believe that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities, we preserve the traditional association of moral responsibility with control. But what, exactly, does guidance control consist in? On our view, guidance control should be understood in terms of two elements: the agent's ownership of the mechanism that actually issues in the relevant behavior, and the reasons-responsiveness of that mechanism. So, for example, an agent is morally responsible for an action, on our account, to the extent that this action issues from the agent's own, reasons-responsive mechanism. We contend that individuals make certain kinds of mechanisms their own by taking responsibility for them. (When we speak of taking responsibility for a kind of mechanism, we understand this as shorthand for taking responsibility for behavior that issues from that kind of mechanism.) It is useful to distinguish two kinds of context in which an agent might take responsibility for the kind of mechanism that leads to his behavior. The typical case is one

Fear of the Dark

Meditating on the liturgy of Holy Week, Aemiliana Lohr insisted that “the real Christian Pasch remains the mysterium of night”. The Christian mysterium is “always entire”, but its entirety we can never directly state or see; the darkness of our circumstance wans and waxes. We fear the dark, but what kind of fear is compatible with the command to “fear not”? Exploring this question in relation to Mark's passion narrative, the paper considers the kinds of context in which such reassurance as the first Christians sought might still be needed, for what is required of Christians is “patience”: the of staying awake in the dark. The paper concludes with remarks on the trinitarian grounds and christological character of patience.

The successful use of consultancies in aid-financed public sector management reform: a consultant's eye view of some things which matter

Independent consultants, often contracted through consultancy firms, are important players in donor attempts to trigger and guide institutional change processes in recipient government structures and practices. However, little is known about the efficacy or ‘success’ of such consultancies. This article explores some of the issues involved. Following a discussion of the problems of defining ‘success’, we present an analytical framework which can be used in all kinds of contexts to generate information relevant to institutional change programmes, and to the design of consultancies to help carry the change processes along. Such information can be used to predict the likely success of intervening at all, for designing the elements of an intervention, and for ongoing monitoring of implementation. We apply the framework to eight consultancies which were undertaken in three different change contexts: post-communist regimes in the early transitional period; aid-dependent regimes committed to ‘politics-as-usual’ and the longer-term highjacking of donor funds by patron – clientelist structures. We summarize the main lessons which emerge from our case studies in the form of criteria for judging whether and how (responsible) donors and/or consultants should get involved in change projects. Donors, consultancy companies and consultants should all be thinking of ways to exclude irresponsible parties and behaviour from aid-financed institutional transformation processes. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How Principled are Guidelines?

> The burgeoning of codes, criteria and guidelines in recent years results from a number of factors, including the client's right to know, preoccupations with notions of consistency and fairness and the fear of litigation. These are explored and interpreted with regard to codes in three kinds of context. First, a survey of the assessment of higher degrees and dissertations in 12 British universities is evidence of the displacement of academic judgement and experience by objective schemes that have largely to do with format and procedure rather than traditional notions of quality. Second, an examination of two groups of guidelines for teachers and university lecturers indicates an instinct for professional self‐interest and exposes ways in which guidelines shift responsibility to individuals without assuming responsibility in professional direction. Third, an examination of current codes for researchers in the social sciences illustrates the tendency of codes to be prescriptive in the letter but not in the spirit: they may control procedures in order to indemnify the professional without honouring the rights of the subjects or clients in whose interest they are said to be framed.

WebQuest: Substantiating education in edutainment through interactive learning games

In educational contexts the WWW can be viewed as source of edutainment that is quite effective on the entertainment side because most students are highly motivated to use the web but is much less successful on the educational side. Without a structuring mechanism that allows focus on specific learning domains, the usefulness of the web may be similar to having 500 channels of TV. Learning in these kinds of contexts is not impossible but relies too much on the ability to follow a glut of hyperlinks, and passive information absorption. The effectiveness of the web as a learning tool can be significantly increased by combining it with more constructive tools. These tools should not only allow students to create representations that are interesting to themselves but are also interesting enough to share with other students. This paper presents WebQuest, a system combining the WWW with the notion of an interactive quest game. Instead of just creating their own homepages, that may be interesting to other students for only social reasons, students turn into authors of their own interactive quest games. They set up complex worlds containing interesting landscapes and tricky obstacles linked to real websites. Players of the game answer questions to acquire important objects needed to solve the quest. This approach provides several learning opportunities to author and players of the games. Authors learn by doing. They create the worlds, come up with challenging yet solvable questions, and provide relevant links to clues on the web. The players, in turn, learn from solving the quest. They can use the links provided by the authors as clues but can also follow their own intuition and use the entire web as a resource to solve the quest. Author and players can start a dialog facilitating reflective learning, for instance, helping authors to understand what makes good or bad questions, how much information should be given in a clue, and how to find new topic-related websites. The system is described, roles of teachers and students are outlined, and we report on our initial classroom uses and ongoing development of WebQuest.

Children's Use of Context in Interpreting "Big" and "Little"

In order to use the words "big" and little" appropriately, adults use 3 kinds of contexts: normative (the size of the object is compared to a stored mental representation), perceptual (the object is compared to another physically present object of the same kind), and functional (the object is judged with regard to its intended use). In 3 experiments, we examined how flexibly children switch from one context to another. 2-4-year-olds judged a series of everyday objects as "big" or "little". To answer correctly, children had to judge each object twice, once in a normative context and once in a perceptual or functional context. Results showed that switching from one context to another was not inherently difficult, even for 2-year-olds. However, the direction of switch was important: children throughout the age range tested switched easily from a normative context but made errors when asked to switch to a normative context. We suggest that the normative context differs from the perceptual and functional contexts in that it is unmarked, and that unmarked contexts are accessible only when no other context has been recently experienced. When context is marked more explicitly, children shift flexibly among different meanings.

Actions, contexts, memory—what is the relation?

Whole list contexts have been found to influence action memory differently than item‐specific contexts. Usually there is no recall enhancement with item‐specific contexts, but considerable improvement with whole‐list contexts. Three experiments investigated the effect of both kinds of context upon action memory. The results showed that whole‐list contexts gave the beneficial effect, probably through their ability to string together actions within a common frame. Contrary to expectation the effects of item‐specific contexts were not found to differ between motor and nonmotor encoding conditions, irrespective of whether these contexts were self‐generated or provided by the experimenter. The experimental results suggest that the function of item‐specific contexts has more to do with helping item differentiation than relational encoding. Since action events possess a high degree of distinctiveness, there is not much to gain by the addition of item‐specific contexts in action memory tasks.

Metaphors and Folk Classification

Most work in the field of ethnographic semantics has concentrated on the determination of referential correspondences between folk categories and objective experience. Here, it is argued that the relationship of words to referents varies in different kinds of contexts; and a properly contextual account of naming requires that we admit "metaphorical" considerations in a description of the meaning of words. The data to be considered concern the use and naming of plants in the magical spells of the Ilongots, a hill people of Northern Luzon, Philippines.

Contextual Determinants of Personality

An approach is developed that relies on the principle that an individual's personality is best described and understood in terms of various contexts in which that individual is embedded. Five different kinds of contexts are considered: historical, cultural (and subcultural), developmental, organizational, and interpersonal. Each is illustrated with findings from two national sample surveys (one done in 1957; the other in 1976) that measured social motives through thematic apperceptive techniques. This contextual approach implies that personality is dynamically accumulative over the life span and that it is best assessed by subdividing a given personality characteristic into variants of that characteristic, which, if measured, can accurately pick up the contextual effects on the characteristic.

Logika ir šių laikų lingvistinka

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama su logikos ir šiuolaikinės lingvistikos santykiu susiję klausimai, svarstoma, koks kalbos vaidmuo mąstyme, pažinime, kaip kuriama pasaulio samprata. Analizuojant šiuolaikinę mokslinę kalbą, itin būdinga naudoti formalius metodus ir procedūras. Klasikinių loginių skaičiavimų priemonėmis formaliai aprašomi kalbos fragmentai bei samprotavimų rūšys tėra maža dalis to konceptualaus aparato, kurį žmogus nuolat panaudoja samprotaudamas. Formaliuose lingvistiniuose tyrinėjimuose siekiama kur kas gilesnio natūralios kalbos formalizavimo, kurio tikslas – formaliai aprašyti santykį tarp garsų ir reiškinių, kuriais tas garsas koduojamas, formalizuoti sąvoką, taisyklingai sudaryti natūralios kalbos išraišką bei sukurti bendrą samprotavimų, išreiškiamų natūralia kalba, teoriją. Daroma išvada, kad plačiau taikant formalizavimą (bet nepretenduojant apimti juo visų galimų kontekstų) neišsprendžiamas pagrindinis uždavinys, kurį mėgina spręsti formalios kalbos teorijos – atskleisti žmogaus gebėjimą suprasti kalbos išraiškas ir nustatyti jų semantines ypatybes bei santykius.

The effectiveness of context before, after, and around a missing word

The probability of correctly guessing a missing word was measured using lour different kinds of context: all words before the missing word (forward context), all words after the missing word (backward context), all words before and the one word after the missing word (surround context), and just the one word after the missing word. The probability of correctly guessing a missing word was greater with the forward than with the backward context. The probability of guessing correctly with the surround context was much greater than would be predicted from the independent combination of its forward and one word after components. The results provide evidence that expectations are formed continuously during comprehension, but not in a strict word-by-word order. Implications for information theory are noted.

The effects of context upon the frequency of short-term changes in affective states.

Individual‐centred experiments were carried out on two subjects in order to investigate the effects of two kinds of context upon short‐term changes in the intensity of feelings. One context was termed ‘referential’, i.e. the feelings were related to circumstances outside the subject himself and to times other than the present. An example is ‘I feel depressed because I am not needed’. The other context was termed ‘non‐referential’, i.e. the feelings were not related to anything but the subject in the immediate present. An example is ‘I feel depressed’. Each patient assessed the intensity of a number of her affective states immediately before and immediately after situations such as behaviour therapy and psychotherapy sessions. Each of three situations was presented on between 6 and 10 occasions to each patient. Each affect was assessed in both referential and non‐referential contexts. In accordance with expectation, referential states produced less frequent reductions of intensity than non‐referential states. Similar results for increases of intensity were produced by one patient and inconsistent results by the other. These results have implications for a theory of affective change and for the development of treatment strategies.

Metaphors and Folk Classification

Most work in the field of ethnographic semantics has concentrated on the determination of referential correspondences between folk categories and objective experience. Here, it is argued that the relationship of words to referents varies in different kinds of contexts; and a properly contextual account of naming requires that we admit "metaphorical" considerations in a description of the meaning of words. The data to be considered concern the use and naming of plants in the magical spells of the Ilongots, a hill people of Northern Luzon, Philippines...

Reaction of Intermediate Grade Children to Contextual Clues

For some time, authorities have recognized the need for contextual clue instruction in reading. However, with some exceptions, much of the research on contextual clues has been based on more or less arbitrarily derived lists of clues rather than clue categories stemming from the empirical investigation of reader responses. Also, many studies have been based on a generalized concept of response to context rather than a highly specific response to particular kinds of context. Little is known about the specific clues which exist in reading materials at different grade levels, or the utilization of specific clues at various grade levels. The purpose of this study was to investigate the sensitivity of intermediate grade pupils to contextual clues described by Ames' (1965) Classification Schema of Contextual Aids.