Unrecognized Assumptions Research Articles

What Cognitive Science Tells Us About Ethics and The Teaching of Ethics

A relatively new and exciting area of collaboration has begun between philosophy of mind and ethics. This paper attempts to explore aspects of this collaboration and how they bear upon traditional ethics. It is the author's contention that much of Western moral philosophy has been guided by largely unrecognized assumptions regarding reason, knowledge and conceptualization, and that when examined against empirical research in cognitive science, these assumptions turn out to be false -- or at the very least, unrealistic for creatures with our cognitive structures. The fundamental tension between the Western idea of morality (as basically rule-following) and the way in which people actually confront and experience moral dilemmas is a result of our failure to take the insights of cognitive psychology seriously. This failure has had a dramatic impact on not only how we teach ethics, but how we attempt to live out lives.

Pre-Instructional Minitests: An Efficient Solution to the Problem of Covering Content

This article is aimed at achieving two purposes: (a) challenging the common and often unrecognized assumption that the only way to ensure that students are exposed to course concepts is by personally going over the material in class and (b) describing how minitests (i.e., individual test -+ group test -+ appeals -- instructor input) can be used to ensure that students master basic content in a fraction of the class time that would normally be devoted to lectures. Other benefits of minitests are also described. These include increased focus on higher-level thinking and problem-solving skills, development of students' interpersonal and group interaction skills, and providing students with experience as a member of an effective team.

Does Law Have a Function? A Comment on the Two-Level Theory of Decision

WHAT, in general, is a good reason for decision by a court of law? This is the question of jurisprudence; it has been asked in an amazing number of forms, of which the classic What is Law? is only the briefest. I propose to consider, in this Comment, one recent answer to this question that supplied by Professor Richard Wasserstrom in his book, The Judicial Decision. I do so because Professor Wasserstrom's argument shares with much other recent jurisprudence some dubious and generally unrecognized assumptions about the logic of legal justification. My principal purpose is to expose these assumptions. Wasserstrom's book is distinguished from the bulk of the American literature of legal philosophy by its care and clarity. He writes with full control over his organization and so enables us to study his argument with some confidence that we understand what he is trying to prove and why. This is in refreshing contrast to other recent efforts along the same line much of American jurisprudence has consisted in nothing more rigorous than the translation of homilies into rhetoric, and back again. Wasserstrom's careful articulation of his purposes, and of the assumptions he intends to make, are indispensable aids in identifying and assessing the hidden more powerful assumptions which his argument also involves. Wasserstrom approaches the question, What is a good reason for a judicial decision, by attempting to construct the model of an ideal decisive procedure. His search for this ideal is conducted through a sort of tournament. Three principal candidates are introduced. The first two are the procedures of precedent (it prescribes that all particular cases are to be decided by an appeal to the relevant, extant legal rule, i.e., to precedent)2 and the procedure of equity (it insists that individual cases be decided by appealing to that which is just or equitable for the particular case).3 The third is Wasserstrom's own two-level procedure, modeled on the ethical doctrine of restricted utilitarianism. It counsels the judge faced with decision to proceed as follows. He must determine which of the rules of law that he might select to give in the situation, considered as a rule and not simply with respect to its present application, best promotes the function of the legal system. (It is assumed that each legal system ought to have such a function.) In making this determination, he must take *Previously printed, in slightly different form, under the title Wasserstrom:The Judicial Decision, 75 ETHIcs 47 (1964) -(University of Chicago Press) [Copyright 1964 by the University of Chicago]. tAssociate Professor of Law, Yale University. 1. WASSERSTROM, THE JUDIcIAL DEcISION (1961). 2. Id. at 6. 3. Id. at 7.

An illustration of the unrecognized assumption

Some students, parents, and teachers are puzzled by the emphasis on explicitly stated assumptions and precise definitions that mark the “new math.” “Is all this nitpicking necessary?” asked one frustrated School Mathematics Study Group teacher. Maybe it is. Unrecognized assumptions have led to false conclusions and even tragedy—engineers can think of several bridge failures and similar disasters traced to an unrecognized assumption that was false.