Theoretical Commitments Research Articles

Engaged scholarship: paradigmatic and pragmatic drivers

ABSTRACT Why do scholars engage with the public? Following a brief overview of engaged scholarship, this paper addresses this question, delineating two interconnected categories of drivers: paradigmatic and pragmatic. Paradigmatic drivers are rooted in deeply held worldviews that shape scholars’ interactions with the public, encompassing theoretical commitments, epistemological orientations, and ethical considerations. On the other hand, pragmatic drivers of engaged scholarship refer to a commitment to addressing urgent societal issues and effecting tangible changes. Guided by practical questions, engaged scholars are responsive to immediate concerns of injustice and unfreedom in society. Pragmatic drivers of engaged scholarship include moments of crisis and evidence of urgency, role expectations, and personal positionality. Under the two categories of drivers, the paper puts forward six propositions that encapsulate its central claims. The two categories of drivers do not exist in isolation; rather, they often interact and influence each other. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of engaged scholarship for policy and practice, emphasising the importance of collaborative relationships with communities of interest.

Working Memory Is as Working Memory Does: A Pluralist Take on the Center of the Mind.

Working memory is thought to be the psychological capacity that enables us to maintain or manipulate information no longer in our environment for goal-directed action. Recent work argues that working memory is not a so-called natural kind and in turn cannot explain the cognitive processes attributed to it. This paper first clarifies the scope of this earlier critique and argues for a pluralist account of working memory. Under this account, working memory is variously realized by many mechanisms that contribute to the maintenance and manipulation of information across tasks. This view in effect updates one of the earliest pluralist formulations of working memory. Juxtaposing this view against deflationary descriptions allows us to delineate two gradients that help us chart various accounts of working memory and identify their respective theoretical commitments. In turn, we can isolate those accounts that fail to accord with the evidence supporting a pluralist view, and we can begin to rehabilitate working memory as a pluralist, and ultimately more informative, construct.

Structural Irrationality Does Not Consist in Having Attitudes You Ought Not to Have: A New Dilemma for Reasons-Violating Structural Irrationality

ABSTRACT This paper presents a new argument against the view that structural (or attitude-based) irrationality consists in failing to respond correctly to normative reasons. According to this view, a pattern of attitudes is structurally irrational if and only if that pattern guarantees that one has at least one attitude one ought not to have. I argue that this ought-violation view comes with three indispensable theoretical commitments. These commitments concern various relationships between normative permissions and oughts that govern beliefs and intentions, and they may appear plausible when viewed in isolation. However, once they are collectively conjoined, they imply oughts that are incompatible with the ought-violation view of structural irrationality. In particular, on the ought-violation view, these oughts entail that you are necessarily structurally irrational whenever [you intend to p ] and [you believe that it is not the case that you ought to p ]. However, since you can rationally intend things that you believe to be normatively optional (for example, merely permitted or supererogatory actions), the ought-violation view faces the following dilemma: it must either deny one of its essential commitments or accept as irrational a set of attitudes that are clearly not. Either way suffices to show that the ought-violation view cannot serve as a correct analysis of structural irrationality.

A Defense of the Obligation to Keep Promises to the Dead.

It is widely held that to break a promise that one made to a person who is now dead would be to wrong her. This view undergirds many positions in bioethics, ranging from those that concern who may access a person's medical records after she has died, to questions concerning organ procurement and posthumous procreation. Ashley Dressel has argued that there is no reason to believe that promissory obligations can be owed to people who are dead. Although her arguments are unsuccessful, others establish that neither of the promissory obligation accounts that she considers (the "Authority Account" and the "harm-based view") can justify the standard view that directed posthumous promissory obligation is possible. However, this does not mean that the received view that we should keep our promises to the dead is mistaken. First, the theoretical commitments and argumentative strategies of those who endorse the possibility of posthumous promissory obligations preclude them from grounding such on either of these accounts of directed promissory obligation. They are thus already committed to justifying such obligations in other ways. Second, the obligation to keep promises to the dead could be justified on the grounds that not to do so would adversely affect the living.

Computational psychiatry and the evolving concept of a mental disorder

As a discipline, psychiatry is in the process of finding the right set of concepts to organize research and guide treatment. Dissatisfaction with the status quo as expressed in standard manuals has animated a number of computational paradigms, each proposing to rectify the received concept of mental disorder. We explore how different computational paradigms: normative modeling, network theory and learning-theoretic approaches like reinforcement learning and active inference, reconceptualize mental disorders. Although each paradigm borrows heavily from machine learning, they differ significantly in their methodology, their preferred level of description, the role they assign to the environment and, especially, the degree to which they aim to assimilate psychiatric disorders to a standard medical disease model. By imagining how these paradigms might evolve, we bring into focus three rather different visions for the future of psychiatric research. Although machine learning plays a crucial role in the articulation of these paradigms, it is clear that we are far from automating the process of conceptual revision. The leading role continues to be played by the theoretical, metaphysical and methodological commitments of the competing paradigms.

Fallibility and Dogmatism

ABSTRACT The strongest version of the dogmatism puzzle argues that, when we know something, we should resolve to ignore or avoid evidence against it. The best existing responses are fallibilist, and hold that decisions should be governed by underlying probabilities rather than our knowledge. I argue that this is an overreaction: by paying close attention to the principles governing belief-revision, and to subtly different ways in which knowledge can govern decision-making, we can dissolve the puzzle without the need for controversial theoretical commitments. The resulting solution demonstrates fruitful and underexplored points of interaction between ‘traditional’ epistemology and ‘formal’ theories of belief-revision, and clears the ground for more systematic theorizing about how and when we should be open to changing our minds.

A double helix of critical inquiry: dialogic methods of critical pragmatism

ABSTRACT In this essay, we propose a double helix of critical inquiry; one that binds both critical theory and appreciative inquiry through critical pragmatism. We first situate the double helix within the paradigmatic, theoretical, and praxeological commitments of the critical paradigm followed by anchoring dialogue as a methodology that activates the double helix through pragmatism. We then introduce three specific methods of dialogue that bring to life how critical communication scholars can use dialogue as a means for socially situating dialogue within historical power dynamics for envisioning and creating social change. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for communication scholars to consider when conducting critical communication research and teaching this area of inquiry in their communication courses. Our hope is that this framework of a double helix produces communication inquiry that engages communities in the cocreation of a just society.

Excuse, justification and collapse

ABSTRACT For any putative excuse, why not recast it as a justification rendering one’s wrongful conduct ultimately permissible? This paper confronts the worry that many, perhaps all, excuses might collapse into justifications – either in morality or criminal law. It is an especially pressing problem for normative expectations views, on which excuses speak to a lower standard than justifications. I argue that the prospects for decisively blocking collapse within morality look bleak – at least if we adhere to an important constraint of the present project. I want to see if we can block collapse without appealing to a substantive theory of moral wrongness or taking on robust theoretical commitments about interpersonal morality. This is especially important for criminal law purposes, though I concede that blocking collapse in morality likely requires substantive commitments. Accordingly, I develop a more ecumenical way to block collapse within the criminal law, although not morality. The key is to attend to differences in how the legislature can legitimately assign weight to reasons in determining which actions it deems to be wrong vs. how individuals can fairly be expected to assign weight to reasons, which is key to assessing culpability. Institutional considerations impact the former but not the latter.

Moral landscapes and morally meaningful encounters: how interaction ritual connects conversation analysis and cultural sociology.

This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similarly rooted in Durkheim, Goffman's theory of interaction ritual provides an analytic pivot between EMCA and the strong program. The broader theoretical argument is illustrated using data from interviews with adults about their most recent encounter with a rude strangers in public space, which are here treated a breaches of the interaction ritual of civil inattention. Members readily draw on the specifics of a particular stranger interaction gone awry to reflect on the nature of life in public and to expound on their understandings of the ethics of face-to-face interaction and everyday morality more generally. Where EMCA focuses on the discoverability of the organizational features of everyday interaction, the position developed here is concerned with the organization of members' interpretations of everyday interaction. While centered on specific kinds of interactional breaches, by finding common ground between EMCA and cultural sociology, the argument advances a potentially more broadly applicable approach that treats everyday encounters as morally meaningful and everyday lifeworlds as moral landscapes. Developing a comprehensive understanding of copresent interaction as a basic building block of society requires attention to both the organizational dynamics of copresent encounters and to the interpretive resources that ordinary members use to account for and justify their own and others' conduct.

DIY academic archiving: mischievous disruptions of a new counter-movement

Against increasing injunctions in research governance to create open data, and knee-jerk rejections from qualitative researchers in response to such efforts, we explore a radical counter movement of academics engaged in what we term “DIY Academic Archiving,” the creation of open and accessible archives of their research materials. We turn to interviews with three DIY academic archivists, each drawing on an ethos of community archiving, as opposed to emerging open data schemes: Melissa Munn on The Gaucher/Munn Penal Press Collection,1 Eric Gonzaba’s Wearing Gay History,2 and Michael Goodman’s Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.3 We see these archives as engaged in a “politics of refusal,” which challenges both conventional methods and ethics in qualitative research as well as new moves toward open data. On the one hand, academics are tasked to “protect” their data by destroying it, under the guise of a supposed mode of “care.” On the other hand, open data makes quite contrary demands, to care for data by making it “open” for further extraction through (re)use. DIY Academic Archiving is a practice of refusal that supports a redirection away from this binary. In this article, we explore how DIY academic archivists play with coding as a form of mischievous disruption, and so are contributing to new data imaginaries. We offer insight into how DIY Academic Archiving supports researchers in their theoretical, methodological and political commitments, and at the same time, how it can enable researchers to take the care-full risk of archiving our research data.

English Teachers’ Perceptions and Practices of Differentiated Instruction (DI) in the Merdeka Curriculum

This research project investigated the use of DI by teachers and confirmed their practices to learn more about teachers' perceptions using a qualitative approach. Four research instruments were used to collect data in this investigation: document analyses, classroom observations, questionnaires, and interviews. Document analyses and classroom observations were employed to obtain data concerning teachers' actual practices of DI. In the meantime, a questionnaire has been used to obtain data on teachers' perceptions and practices regarding DI. Finally, interviews have also been conducted to determine teachers' perceptions of DI. The result of the study revealed that the participants exhibited high proficiency in using DI strategies in their classrooms. The assessment considered various dimensions, including understanding DI concepts and objectives, adapting instruction to diverse student needs, evaluating students through diagnostic assessments, and aligning teaching strategies with individual learning profiles. However, there was room for improvement, especially in tailoring instruction based on diverse learning profiles. Furthermore, the English teachers' perceptions of DI significantly shaped their instructional practices. While there was a solid theoretical understanding and commitment to personalized instruction, practical challenges and systemic constraints impacted the seamless integration of DI principles. The teachers' commitment to addressing these challenges, demonstrated through varied instructional practices, underscored the dynamic interplay between perceptions and the complex reality of implementing DI in the classroom.
 Keywords: English Teacher, Differentiated Instruction (DI), Merdeka Curriculum, Perceptions and Practices

Statistical prediction alone cannot identify good models of behavior.

The dissociation between statistical prediction and scientific explanation advanced by Bowers et al. for studies of vision using deep neural networks is also observed in several other domains of behavior research, and is in fact unavoidable when fitting large models such as deep nets and other supervised learners, with weak theoretical commitments, to restricted samples of highly stochastic behavioral phenomena.

The Practical Price of Pyrrhonism

Sextus Empiricus presents Pyrrhonism as a skeptical lifestyle that is appealing, in large part, because of the tranquility it appears to afford. Addressing concerns about the practicality of such a lifestyle, Sextus suggests that Pyrrhonists can lead sufficiently ordinary lives while suspending belief about everything unclear. Here, I aim to offer a partial examination of the practicality and appeal of Pyrrhonism from the Pyrrhonist’s perspective. In particular, I examine how a skeptic would likely respond if asked to consider his potential use of problematic concepts in his daily life. I argue that, even if the Pyrrhonist’s skepticism is limited to certain types of controversial theoretical commitments, consideration of this issue would likely still cause him to worry that he is relying on beliefs about things unclear in his ordinary life. Along the way, I also hope to highlight some of the difficulties that a philosophically reflective person is likely to encounter if he is resistant to taking on philosophical commitments.

The Theoretical Virtues of Theism

In this article, I seek to assess the extent to which a ‘trope-theoretic’ version of Theism is a better theory than that of a theory of Atheism, as posited by Graham Oppy. This end will be achieved by utilising the systemisation of the theoretical virtues proposed by Michael Keas (as further modified by an application of the work of Jonathan Schaffer), the notion of a trope, introduced by D.C. Williams, and an aspect, proposed by Donald L.M. Baxter, which will establish the basis of the trope-theoretic account of Theism that will be at the centre of our analysis. This assessment will ultimately show that Theism, rather than that of Atheism (Naturalism), can successfully achieve the trade-off between minimising theoretical commitments and maximising explanatory power. And thus, given this, the best theory of Theism—namely, that of ‘trope-theoretic Theism’—is to be privileged over that of the best theory of Atheism—namely, that of ‘Oppyian Naturalism’—and is able to provide grounds for a decisive reassessment of the cogency of Agnosticism.

Sufficiency and the Distribution of Burdens

ABSTRACT A common objection to sufficientarianism is that it allows large inequalities above the threshold. A sharpened form of this objection highlights that this indifference also encompasses large inequalities in the distribution of burdens. Consider the burdens that follow from climate change. A theory that does not rule out placing these burdens on the worst off (of the sufficiently well off) will appear implausible to many. This paper assesses ways of addressing this objection and defends a revised conception of sufficientarianism that can demand fair distribution of burdens (and benefits) above the sufficiency threshold, without giving up core sufficientarian theoretical commitments.

Perception and simulation during concept learning.

A key component of humans' striking creativity in solving problems is our ability to construct novel descriptions to help us characterize novel concepts. Bongard problems (BPs), which challenge the problem solver to come up with a rule for distinguishing visual scenes that fall into two categories, provide an elegant test of this ability. BPs are challenging for both human and machine category learners because only a handful of example scenes are presented for each category, and they often require the open-ended creation of new descriptions. A new type of BP called physical Bongard problems (PBPs) is introduced, which requires solvers to perceive and predict the physical spatial dynamics implicit in the depicted scenes. The perceiving and testing hypotheses on structures (PATHS) computational model, which can solve many PBPs, is presented and compared to human performance on the same problems. PATHS and humans are similarly affected by the ordering of scenes within a PBP. Spatially or temporally juxtaposing similar (relative to dissimilar) scenes promotes category learning when the scenes belong to different categories but hinders learning when the similar scenes belong to the same category. The core theoretical commitments of PATHS, which we believe to also exemplify open-ended human category learning, are (a) the continual perception of new scene descriptions over the course of category learning; (b) the context-dependent nature of that perceptual process, in which the perceived scenes establish the context for the perception of subsequent scenes; (c) hypothesis construction by combining descriptions into explicit rules; and (d) bidirectional interactions between perceiving new aspects of scenes and constructing hypotheses for the rule that distinguishes categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Body as First Teacher: The Role of Rhythmic Visceral Dynamics in Early Cognitive Development.

Embodied cognition-the idea that mental states and processes should be understood in relation to one's bodily constitution and interactions with the world-remains a controversial topic within cognitive science. Recently, however, increasing interest in predictive processing theories among proponents and critics of embodiment alike has raised hopes of a reconciliation. This article sets out to appraise the unificatory potential of predictive processing, focusing in particular on embodied formulations of active inference. Our analysis suggests that most active-inference accounts invoke weak, potentially trivial conceptions of embodiment; those making stronger claims do so independently of the theoretical commitments of the active-inference framework. We argue that a more compelling version of embodied active inference can be motivated by adopting a diachronic perspective on the way rhythmic physiological activity shapes neural development in utero. According to this visceral afferent training hypothesis, early-emerging physiological processes are essential not only for supporting the biophysical development of neural structures but also for configuring the cognitive architecture those structures entail. Focusing in particular on the cardiovascular system, we propose three candidate mechanisms through which visceral afferent training might operate: (a) activity-dependent neuronal development, (b) periodic signal modeling, and (c) oscillatory network coordination.

Black Feminism and the Failures of the Contemporary “Neoliberal” University Critique

This article interrogates critiques of the contemporary university elaborated by scholars under the umbrella of critical university studies (CUS) by grappling with the theoretical and conceptual commitments to neoliberalism as a framework to discuss the political economy of higher education and its concomitant practices. Through a Black feminist critique of CUS’s engagements with the “neoliberal function” of higher education, this article suggests the inability of neoliberalism as an analytical frame to consider the history of colonization and chattel slavery in the structuring of the contemporary university. Put another way, the emphasis on neoliberalism in many cultural critiques of the contemporary university disallows an analysis of Black fungibility as the internal logic of neoliberalism and the necessary relation that stabilizes the modern university and allows for the reproduction of post-slavery university subjects. Specifically, this argument coheres to the materialized scene of the university as a site of struggle. Reading Black student leaders’ denigration of the university through a Black feminist lens, this article invites a reconfiguration of the contemporary university critique that both constitutes the current neoliberal paradigm and exceeds the onto-epistemic configurations of the educational subject that enable the emergence of the “neoliberal critique” of the university itself.

Strengthening the Theoretical Commitments Underpinning Therapeutic Jurisprudence Research: Ontology and Epistemology

Therapeutic Jurisprudence is a legal philosophy concerned with the human effects of the law. Its scholarly work promotes greater interaction between law and the social sciences to draw attention to the therapeutic and/or anti-therapeutic side-effects of law. Despite significant headway having been made in therapeutic jurisprudence scholarship during its relatively short lifespan, there remain gaps in theory, not least, in terms of the ontological and epistemological commitments that underpin and drive its research, as well as how its methodology resonates with those from its predecessor schools: legal realism and sociological jurisprudence. This essay will respond to these gaps and, in doing so, will also acknowledge some of the key similarities and differences in the methodological underpinnings of the claims from legal realism and sociological jurisprudence (as well as legal positivism and formalism).

Frameworks in Historiography: Explanation, Scenarios, and Futures

Abstract In this paper, I analyze how frameworks shape historiographical explanations. I argue that, in order to identify a sequence of events as relevant to a historical outcome, assumptions about the workings of the relevant domain have to be made. By extending Lakatosian considerations, I argue that these assumptions are provided by a framework that contains a set of factors and intertwined principles that (supposedly) govern how a historical phenomenon works. I connect frameworks with a counterfactual account of historical explanation. Frameworks enable us to explain the past by providing a backbone of explanatory patterns of counterfactual dependency. I conclude by noting that both counterfactual scenarios and scenarios of the future require frameworks and, therefore, historiographical explanation generates a set of possible futures. Analyzing these possible futures enables us to reveal the theoretical commitments of historiography.