Notion Of Explanation Research Articles

Examining The Quality Of The Evidence In Preservice Teacher Portfolios

In this study, the authors examine the quality of the evidence represented in preservice teacher portfolios and the inferences drawn from them. Questions of purpose and representation of teaching in the portfolios are also addressed. The study is based on three teacher education programs in which students develop portfolios in preparation for initial licensure. Program guidelines, portfolios, and other assessment materials were analyzed. Interviews were conducted with students and faculty members; focus groups with students and surveys were also used for this study. What emerges is a pressing concern among teacher educators to rally evidence that the students are "meeting the standards" without much opportunity for meaningful dialogue and debate about education, teaching, and learning. In constructing portfolios, students use evidence and artifacts interchangeably to mean something tangible used to display a particular teaching activity, belief, or skill, and their notions of explanation and reflection are quite problematic.

On explaining phenomenal consciousness

Over the last two decades, doubts have been expressed about the adequacy of materialism as the correct framework for explaining phenomenal consciousness (the experience of saturated greenness one has when looking at a lush lawn, for example). This paper reconstructs a generic form of the various arguments that have been used to defend the view of the materialistically inexplicable nature of consciousness (MINC). This reconstruction reveals that the arguments turn on an impoverished notion of explanation. By discussing some examples from the history of science, the paper shows that a reasonable notion of explanation has to be wider than the one utilized in the argument for MINC, which opens the possibility for the materialistic explicability of consciousness. The author ends the paper by raising a question about the very intelligibility of the project of trying to explain the so-called nature of consciousness as opposed to the regularities characteristic of the relation between states of consciousness and brain states.

Explaining Psychotherapy and Psychotherapeutic Explanation

The Editorial shows how all four papers move in their different ways from a narrower to a more extended notion of explanation in the human realm, which is named in the last of the papers, moving from explanation in terms of causes to explanation in terms of reasons, and how we have to encompass both to work with our full humanity as practitioners,--whether in the realm of trauma work; thinking about human existential development; the use of humour in our work; or causes and reasons themselves; the themes of the four papers.

Developing Thinking Skills: a Pedagogy Based on the Notion of Explanation

Courses in ‘thinking skills’ are being greeted with the same level of enthusiasm that once heralded the introduction of Nuffield Science, programmed learning, modem maths, Initial Teaching Alphabet, calculators, cooperative group work, real books, SMP maths, investigations, ‘advance organisers’ and much else. All of these have several things in common. They were accepted on the evidence of work with experimental groups that recorded better results than ‘control’ groups; the experimental studies were all conducted with enthusiasts doing the teaching: when the methods and materials were disseminated the de-facto programme differed markedly from the intended programme (it was in each case simplified). And they all fell into obscurity. The following article offers an explanation of why this could have happened.

The hypothesis of ether and Reid's interpretation of Newton's first rule of philosophizing

My object is to question a recurrent claim made to the point that Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was hostile to ether theories and that this hostility had its source in his distinctive interpretation of the first of Newton's regulae philosophandi. Against this view I will argue that Reid did not have any quarrel at all with unobservable or theoretical entities as such, and that his objections against actual theories concerning ether were scientific rather than philosophical, even when based on Newton's first rule. I argue further that Reid's insistence on Newton's rule concerns, not direct observation, but rather the notion of explanation itself.

The Perils of Epistemic Reductionism

1. Crispin Wright advocates generic conception of truth involving two key features. First, particular species of human discourse can involve genuine assertions, and can be apt for proper and correct application of truthpredicate, even if the right metaphysical construal of that discourse is antirealist rather than realist. Thus truth-aptness per se, as feature of given discourse (e.g., humor discourse, moral discourse, mathematical discourse, scientific discourse, etc.), is neutral about questions of realism and antirealism. But second, questions of realism vs. anti-realism are closely intertwined with truth, because they largely turn on the specific constraints governing proper assertibility, and hence the truth-predicate, within specific mode of discourse. The extent to which different discourses manifest such features can be matter of degree: the local constraints on the truth predicate can be stronger than minimal, but weaker than the kind that reflect industrialstrength realist commitments. He also advocates specific way of implementing this generic approach to truth. His proposed implementation is epistemically reductive: although it does not simply equate truth with warranted assertibility, it does suppose that the only fundamental norms governing truth are epistemic norms. (The phrase 'epistemically reductive' is mine, not his.) This epistemic reductionism has two principal components. First is the contention that for any truthapt discourse, truth in that discourse is superassertibility; this property, although it is not simply identical with warranted assertibility, is a property constructible out of [warranted] assertibility (p. 47). Second is the epistemic construal of realism-relevant constraints on truth (i.e., on superassertibility) within local discourses. The Cognitive Command constraint is overtly epistemic: the core idea is that our epistemic norms preclude idiosyncratic divergence, between cognitively competent persons who have comparable evidence and information, about what is warrantedly assertible. And wide cosmological role, if it is to comport with the contention that truth is always superassertibility, must be interpreted in an evidentially constrained way-i.e., the notion of explanation, which figures centrally in wide cosmological role, must be construed as not presupposing any non-epistemic conception of truth.

On the role of abduction

The notion of explanation is basilar in many human behaviors and indeed in many elds (such as philosophy or psychology) there is a long tradition in the study of such a notion. In particular, reasoning towards explanation is a basic task in many of the problem solving activities investigated by the AI community. For example, it is the core of diagnostic problem solving (whose goal is to explain symptoms observed in a system with the presence of some faults) or of interpretation activities (e.g., image or story interpretation or plan recognition), and it is a basic component of machine learning (where the goal is to produce some theory that accounts for and generalizes some phenomena). Following a logicist tradition, many AI researchers working on explanation reduced such a notion to deduction: a phenomenon is explained when it can be deduced from a domain theory, possibly after some assumptions. Indeed, the interesting case is the one where the observed phenomenon does not follow from the original theory and some assumptions have to be made; in particular, one may either assume the truth of some facts mentioned in the theory or extend the theory itself. The term \abduction has been often used to characterize the type of inference performed in the former case (while \induction is closer to the latter case); as a consequence, the basic pattern of abduction can be seen as the ability of assuming a fact A in case A is a possible explanation for another fact B to be explained. From a logical point of view, this corresponds to the unsound inference concluding A from A! B and B. Abduction is thus a form of non-classical inference whose properties (e.g., non-monotonicity) are similar to those of other non-classical logics proposed and studied in the AI literature. Given such premises, one would expect that abduction played a central role in the logical approaches to AI. In fact, however, many researchers are quite di dent about such a form of reasoning and some criticisms have arisen in the

Representing Policy Constructions and Interests in SSK

Kleinman's exchange with Cambrosio, Limoges and Pronovost (CLP) over their paper, 'Representing Biotechnology',' can be seen as another rehash of the debate between discourse-focused and interests-based explanations in social studies of science and technology. CLP berate Kleinman for assuming that their goal was explanation of how Quebec's policy for biotechnology came into being, rather than an account of the contingent nature of the construction of that policy. They suggest that their aim was not to give a causal explanation, which would be naive in their view, but to provide the resources for a different kind of (eventual) explanation. What they did not clarify is the fundamental difference between their notion of explanation and that of Kleinman; in particular, theirs embodies a far greater recognition of the essential contingency, or indeterminacy, in the construction of'natural' or 'rational' policy commitments. In defending their discourseor representations-based analytical approach, CLP are surely right to deny that they were ever naive enough to claim that representations unilinearly 'cause' policies, any more than they cause anything else. However, their self-defensive concern does tend to reduce into a false unilinear causation the processes of mutual constitution between representations and political actors (interests, or 'sides') to which they are otherwise fully sensitive. Thus, for example, for CLP, the positing and bounding of sides (in policy negotiations or conflicts) 'are consequences, not causes, of representational practices in an agonistic field'.2 Although they rightly criticize Kleinman's gratuitous assumption of 'sides' with 'winners' and 'losers', and his presumption that these

ASSUMPTION‐BASED REASONING AND CLAUSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

A truth maintenance system is a subsystem that manages the utilization of assumptions in the reasoning process of a problem solver. Doyle's original motivation for creating a truth maintenance system was to augment a reasoning system with a control strategy for activities concerning its nonmonotonic state of beliefs. Hitherto, much effort has been invested in designing and implementing the concept of truth maintenance, and little effort has been dedicated to the formalization that is essential to understanding it. This paper provides a complete formalization of the principle of truth maintenance. Motivated by Reiter and de Kleer's preliminary report on the same subject, this paper extends their study and gives a formal account of the concept of truth maintenance under the general title of assumption‐based reasoning. The concept of assumption‐based theory is defined, and the notions of explanation and direct consequence are presented as forms of plausible conclusions with respect to this theory. Additionally, the concepts of extension and irrefutable sentences are discussed together with other variations of explanation and direct consequence. A set of algorithms for computing these conclusions for a given theory are presented using the notion of prime implicates. Finally, an extended example on Boolean circuit diagnosis is shown to exemplify these ideas.