Sense Knowledge Research Articles

Sligo Air

The performance piece Flux in the Sligo Air is a suite for movement artists and electro-acoustic music. It was composed in response to the unique atmosphere of Sligo, a town of 16,000 inhabitants in the northwest of Ireland, and its place within the surrounding landscape. I was inspired by Sligo's architecture and the sky, landscape and sea into which the town is so naturally and uniquely integrated. My study of space perception in architectural terms and its correlation with musical processes led to a contemplation of the relationship of the town's buildings to each other and the spaces (streets) they inhabit in the same manner as tonal phrases might become related to each other, or to a drone. Flux in the Sligo Air is not an analogous translation of architecture into music, however, but an attempt to capture those ever-changing senses which one may experience within a space. The town's natural condition and evolution, the new and the old at many points in time, serve as carriers of ideas of sense and felt knowledge which transcend the purely physical.

The Case for a More Truly Social Epistemology

In his path-breaking recent book, Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman brings academic epistemology to bear on important real world issues in information technology, the media, science, law, politics, and education. Though the project that Goldman undertakes ramifies in many directions, the motivating idea is simple. Knowledge (in the weak sense of true belief) is important. Social institutions and practices can and should be evaluated on how well or how poorly they contribute to knowledge of propositions of interest. This is Goldman's criterion of veritistic value, which, he acknowledges, is only one of the criteria for evaluating social practices.1 Taken as a whole, this book is one of the most effective explanations in the philosophical literature of why truth (i.e., veritistic value) matters, both theoretically and in practice. Although Goldman's book is path-breaking, I have to admit that I wish he had broken off the main pathway of traditional epistemology even further. Goldman's traditionalism manifests itself most significantly in two ways: (1) Although the avowed topic is social epistemology, Goldman's analytical framework is largely individualistic. (2) In the theoretical second section of the book, the emphasis on proof and on general argument leads Goldman to

Enhancing Family Competence Through Literacy Activities

SUMMARY The present paper describes the range of positive family outcomes found when the parents of low-income preschoolers engage in literacy activities with their children. One hundred parents attended a series of family literacy workshops designed to instruct parents on the use of effective book sharing techniques to use with their children. The goal of the program was to increase the children's school readiness and emergent literacy skills by training parents to be more effective and self-confident “first teachers” of the type of literacy skills necessary for early school success. Parents reported that both the amount of parent-child book sharing increased and the time spent reading was more interesting and enjoyable. Children's language skills as well as their interest in books and learning increased. Personal benefits to the parent included enhanced self-esteem and self confidence, increased knowledge of normative child development and sense of efficacy as a parent, heightened understanding of the importance of parental involvement, increased feeling of literacy competence and interest in improving their own education, and sense of increased social support. Other family members (spouses and siblings) also increased their literacy activities. Family relationships, communication, and feelings of togetherness were also enhanced. Implications for individual and family competency enhancing interventions are discussed.

A concept of knowledge-based identification of nonlinear systems

A general approach combining both analytical and knowledge-based techniques to identify a nonlinear system model is proposed, with knowledge being considered within Saridis' theory of intelligent machines; and an extension of the dispersional function approach involving knowledge in the above sense is derived.

Consumer Retention of Risk Information from Direct-to-Consumer Advertising

The objective of this study was to determine if consumers retain risk information from direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA). The study design utilized a postgroup only control group design. Study participants were randomly selected from a statewide database of men between the ages of 60–75. These sampling criteria were selected because the ads used in the study were related to Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH). The 1093 participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: disease-specific institutional ad group, product-specific ad group, or the control group. Participants in the two treatment groups were sent ads at one-week intervals for three weeks. A self-administered mailed questionnaire was used for data collection and mailed one week after the last ad was sent. The results show there was no statistically significant difference among the three groups regarding the correct answering of any of the risk information questions. A post hoc analysis of the data by whether the respondents indicated they had seen an ad for the product or had used the product in the past, however, yielded different results. Respondents who reported they had seen an ad for the product could have seen the ad from some other media source other than the intervention used in this study. These results show that having seen an ad for the product in the past does increase risk information retention. Past experience in taking the product, however, provides an even greater degree of retention of risk information, but may also provide a false sense of knowledge regarding some types of risk information.

The Role of Transport Phenomena in Polymer Science

Very often a contrast is constructed between so-called applied research and basic research. According to the present author, not only is basic knowledge in the usual sense (in physics, chemistry, etc.) of importance for engineers. The inverse situation can also occur. Branches of science, which typically emerged from technological problems, can become of particular interest for the solution of fundamental problems. One can almost say that many problems of a fundamental nature have not been solved because of a lack of feeling for technical problems at the hand of the pertinent expert. For many years the author has pointed to relations between, say, the measurement of flow birefringence of dilute polymer solutions (for the purpose of polymer characterization), polymer melt processing, and aspects of crystallization from polymer melts.

Developing meaningful links between higher education and training

Abstract: This paper examines ways in which inter‐relationships between knowledge and skills can lead to important links between education and training to the considerable benefit of each. In particular it reviews the variety of ways in which the acquisition of knowledge (in the widest sense of the term) can contribute to the development of competences and conversely the variety of ways in which the development of a broad range of skills (including competences) can contribute to the acquisition of knowledge.

Ciencia y género: autoridad y medida en la enseñanza

The report begins with the division which exists between teaching and research, which is considered to be a result of science's incapacity for speaking about itself and transmitting the sense of knowledge which it develops. Attention is drawn to the negligible relationship between those who carry out research and those who teach and the lack of authority which this causes. It is the root of the problem which many teachers encounter in establishing proper limits for themselves and for their own teaching of disciplinary knowledge. As a result of this lack of mediation, there is on the one hand an oscillation between blind subjection and impotent criticism which characterizes the relation of those who are not scientifically qualified, and the other hand the dual excess of arrogance and silence on the part of those who are qualified and who thus severely limit communication between science and society. In this situation, one sees a condition shared by many women with regaid to work, politics and science. It is in the political practice of female relationships and in the theoretical elaboration of how authority is formed and evolves that the place where appropriate questions have found order and meaning is revealed.From information regarding the need for mediation efforts to encourage communication between teaching and research, the report goes on to evaluate those which already exist, discussing the conditions under which a science of education might unite the nurturing of such a relation with the objectivity which is necessary.

Understanding the Lexicon: Meaning, Sense and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics

Understanding the Lexicon: Meaning, Sense and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics

Understanding the lexicon: Meaning, sense and world knowledge in lexical semantics knowledge in lexical semantics. Ed. by Werner Hüllen and Rainer Schulze (review)

Understanding the lexicon: Meaning, sense and world knowledge in lexical semantics knowledge in lexical semantics. Ed. by Werner Hüllen and Rainer Schulze (review)

Conceptual and Logical Aspects of the ‘New’ Evolutionary Epistemology

The implications of evolutionary theory for a theory of knowledge have been explored by numerous writers in the period since Darwin. (See, for example: Spencer [1857]; Toulmin [1967, 1972]; Popper [1965, 1972, 1974]; Campbell [1974].) In general, these writers have developed theories of knowledge development by analogy with evolutionary theory. That is, they have developed theories which apply the mechanism of differential selection on variation to the growth of knowledge. In this sense knowledge is seen to be a function of success (often understood in pragmatic terms) in a field of alternative ideas. Knowledge evolves in much the same way as organisms with more robust ideas or ideas with greater verisimilitude or greater explanatory power or greater problem solving ability, etc. surviving from one generation to the next in the struggle for acceptance. Hence, the title ‘evolutionary epistemology.’

Frege, sense and mathematical knowledge

Frege, sense and mathematical knowledge

Notes and Discussions: >The Subjective Element in Scientific Discovery: Popper versus ?Traditional Epistemology'�

The explanation [of scientific change and problem solving] must, in the final analysis, be psychological or sociological. It must, that is, be a description of a value system, an ideology, together with an analysis of the institutions through which that system is transmitted and enforced. Thomas Kuhn (1) Traditional epistemology with its concentration… on knowledge in the subjective sense, is irrelevant to the study of scientific knowledge. Karl Popper (2)

Soziologische Relativität

Abstract Ethnomethodology criticises sociological objectivism in a double sense: a) concerning the idea of “objectively” given social facts; b) concerning the idea of objectivity as a realistic claim of common sense and scientific knowledge. The theoretical alternative presented by Garfinkel and his followers consists a) in an analysis of the interpretative procedures, by which common sense beliefs in the objectivity of reality are constituted; b) in the intention, to take practical reasoning not as a source, but as a topic of empirical study. The paper argues that while the proposed analysis of practical activities conveys a useful approach, its epistemological implications lead to inconsistencies and problematical consequences.

Infological models and information user views

The study of data systems as information systems put into focus the role of data as representations of information in the sense of knowledge about some slice of the world. This information system-view—or infological view—made it clear that the data alone cannot “carry” information. They can only, at best, give rise to information in the minds of people and only in those people who hold a suitable frame-of-reference or world view, or “receiving structure”, in their mind. Thus the infological perspective had to be widened successively from a concern merely with information representation, structuring, and exploitation to the study of social, sociopsychological and socio-linguistical aspects and of “object system”, job design and other socio-technical issues. The term “user view” is employed widely in recent data base work. The use of the term “user view” suggests such an “infological” perspective. However, a closer look at how the term is actually used indicates a much more delimited interpretation which focuses on representational aspects and processing. This is also made explicit, to some degree, by the usual formulation “user view of the data” rather than, for instance, “user view of the world”. In this paper a brief study is made of the two aspects of user views, 1. (i) the infological/conceptual aspect, which is concerned with how conception relates to data and information, and to reality, and 2. (ii) the “ datalogical” aspect, which is concerned with the selection of data from a data base and the rearrangement of them to suit a “user view” of the data (as seen from the application programmer). The infological aspect is illustrated through a discussion of some of my own earlier results which are here brought together. The datalogical aspect is exemplified by some quotations from the most recent data base literature, as well as by some earlier results of my own. The term “user view” is frequently used in the datalogical sense whereas the infological or information-system-theoretical studies often have addressed questions that have to do with the infological/conceptual aspects of “user views”, without employing that term. In this paper some aspects of the problem of infological/conceptual user views are treated with a view to gain understanding of how both aspects of user views affect the design and use of information systems and data bases. Illustrations are taken from the author's own earlier work, for three reasons: 1. (i) they were most easily available, 2. ii) they are directly associated with the problem at hand, and 3. (iii) they have earlier been scattered over several works and it was useful, for the purpose of the present discussion, to bring them together.

St. Augustine and Sense Knowledge

St. Augustine and Sense Knowledge

Hintikka and a Strange Aristotelian Doctrine

II. n a brilliant paper,' Hintikka succeeded, apparently for the first time, in explaining in an entirely convincing manner the (prima facie strange) doctrine which we find in both Plato and Aristotle, viz., that knowledge (in the true sense of the word, which excludes such phrases as 'apparent knowledge,' let alone 'false knowledge,' as self-contradictory) can be had only of entities belonging to the realm of the changeless. Ultimately, Hintikka's explanation reads like this: because the Greeks were inclined to interpret knowledge (im '[Ir) as a kind of vision (intuition, Anschauung, witnessing), every assertion, regardless of the subject to which it might refer, implicitly contained for them a temporal index, a 'now,' this 'now' referring to the moment of the original vision by a particular speaker. We have learned to distinguish tenseless assertions (e.g., 'two is an even number'), in which what from the viewpoint of ordinary grammar is a present tense ('is'), is actually a timeless or omnipresent or tenseless tense, so that the whole assertion is tenseless, from tensed ones (e.g., 'Socrates walks'). But the Greeks were inclined to consider even tenseless assertions as being actually tensed. Therefore, to them, no knowledge of changeable entities was possible, as they might have changed since the moment when on the basis of an intuition somebody had asserted something about them. Thus, when I say 'Socrates sits,' somebody can refute me by saying 'Socrates walks' which obviously means that no such assertion can claim to be knowledge. In other words, all knowledge is ultimately intuitive (though the existence of discursive or dianoetic knowledge is admitted). But the objects of intuition are of two kinds, and so are the corresponding intuitions. Either these objects belong to the realm of the sensible and therefore changeable, and they are intuited by our senses. Or they are unchangeable, and they are intuited by some other mental faculty mostly called vok, i.e., intelligence; these objects themselves are

Historical Sense and Historical Knowledge

Historical Sense and Historical Knowledge

Lord Action and Latin America

Lord Acton's detachment, keen historical sense and vast knowledge reveal an insight applicable to recent Latin-American events. As Acton warned, “History must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own”.John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton was born in Naples in 1834. His paternal grandfather had made his career in the service of the King of Naples whose Prime Minister he was during the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon. His maternal grandfather was a noble of the Holy Roman Empire who served Napoleon and sat as a peer of France and a colleague of Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna. His maternal great-uncle had been Archbishop Elector of Mainz, and his wife's family, the Arco Valleys, were active in French politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Acton's step-father was Lord Granville, several times British Foreign Secretary.

Power-factor testing for finding insulation values

THE DIELECTRIC-LOSS and power-factor method of testing insulation has been in use by many operating companies for almost 20 years for determining when new equipment meets minimum requirements for insulation and to keep equipment in use in good operating condition through adequate maintenance. The equipment for making dielectric-loss and power-factor tests consists of means for supplying a-c potential to insulation and meters, from the readings of which the power factor of the current through the insulation may be determined. This test will detect moisture, dirt, carbon deposits, carbonization of wood and other organic material, corrosion of bushing leads due to corona, and almost all insulation defects. The test is not a destructive test since voltages below operating voltage generally are used. The test sets are sufficiently rugged for field use and can be transported easily. Highly technical personnel are not required to make tests and analyze the results, but test engineers must have common sense, intelligence, and thorough knowledge of the apparatus being tested.