Free Will as a Psychological Accomplishment

I offer analyses of free will in terms of a complex set of psychological capacities agents possess to varying degrees and have varying degrees of opportunities to exercise effectively, focusing on the under-appreciated but essential capacities for imagination. For an agent to have free will is for her to possess the psychological capacities to make decisions—to imagine alternatives for action, to select among them, and to control her actions accordingly—such that she is the author of her actions and can deserve credit or blame for them. For an agent to act of her own free will is for her to have had (reasonable) opportunity to exercise these capacities in making her decision and acting. There is a long philosophical tradition of treating free will as the set of capacities that, when properly functioning, allow us to make decisions that contribute to our leading a good or flourishing life. On this view, free will is a psychological accomplishment. Free will allows us to be the causal source of our actions in a way that is compatible with determinism and naturalism

Performability modeling with continuous accomplishment sets

A general modeling framework that permits the definition, formulation, and evaluation of performability is described. It is shown that performability relates directly to system effectiveness, and is a proper generalization of both performance and reliability. A hierarchical modeling scheme is used to formulate the capability function used to evaluate performability. The case in which performance variables take values in a continuous accomplishment set is treated explicitly

Professional Learning Portfolios for Argumentation in School Science

This paper reports on the use of portfolios in a continuing professional development programme to advance teachers’ skills in their pedagogy of argumentation. The programme adopted a cyclical process of expert input- teacher practice- sharing practice, in order for professional learning to include reflective analysis of growing accomplishment. Accomplishment was initially defined according to previous research and development on the teaching of argumentation, but was redefined during the programme as teachers shared practice and discussed their achievements. Portfolios were used to help teachers apply their learning, collate evidence of their accomplishment and share reflective analysis of practice with other colleagues on the programme. The paper includes extracts of two teachers’ portfolios; these provide evidence of each teacher’s developing accomplishment in the teaching of argumentation. Portfolios are idiosyncratic and are constructed according to an individual teacher’s motivations, interpretations and situations. Teachers need structure and guidance in creating purposeful portfolios that enhance reflective practice

Output Accomplishment and the Design and Monitoring Framework

{Excerpt} The designand monitoring framework is a logic model for objectives oriented planning that structures the main elements in a project, highlighting linkages between intended inputs, planned activities, and expected results. Logic models (results frameworks) neither guarantee a good project (or program) design nor replace other instruments of project management. But they help to analyze problems; identify desired outcomes; establish a logical hierarchy of means by which the desired outcomes will be reached; identify clusters of outputs; determine how accomplishments might be monitored and evaluated, and planned and actual results compared; flag the assumptions on which a project is based and the associated risks; summarize a project in a standard format; build consensus with stakeholders; and create ownership of the project

Professional Learning Portfolios for Argumentation in School Science

This paper reports on the use of portfolios in a continuing professional development programme to advance teachers’ skills in their pedagogy of argumentation. The programme adopted a cyclical process of expert input- teacher practice- sharing practice, in order for professional learning to include reflective analysis of growing accomplishment. Accomplishment was initially defined according to previous research and development on the teaching of argumentation, but was redefined during the programme as teachers shared practice and discussed their achievements. Portfolios were used to help teachers apply their learning, collate evidence of their accomplishment and share reflective analysis of practice with other colleagues on the programme. The paper includes extracts of two teachers’ portfolios; these provide evidence of each teacher’s developing accomplishment in the teaching of argumentation. Portfolios are idiosyncratic and are constructed according to an individual teacher’s motivations, interpretations and situations. Teachers need structure and guidance in creating purposeful portfolios that enhance reflective practice

Accomplishment

The concepts of knowledge and of accomplishment have many similarities. In fact they are duals, in a sense that I explain. Similar issues arise about both of them, deriving from the functions they serve in everyday evaluation of inquiry and action

Goal accomplishment tracking for automatic supervision of plan execution

It is common practice to break down plans into a series of goals or sub-goals in order to facilitate plan execution, thereby only burdening the individual agents responsible for their execution with small, easily achievable objectives at any one time, or providing a simple way of sharing these objectives amongst a group of these agents. Ensuring that plans are executed correctly is an essential part of any team management. To allow proper tracking of an agent's progress through a pre-planned set of goals, it is imperative to keep track of which of these goals have already been accomplished. This centralised approach is essential when the agent is part of a team of humans and/or robots, and goal accomplishment is not always being tracked at a low level. This paper presents a framework for an automated supervision system to keep track of changes in world states so as to chart progress through a pre-planned set of goals. An implementation of this framework on a mobile service robot is presented, and applied in an experiment which demonstrates its feasibility

Adaptive planning for distributed systems using goal accomplishment tracking

Goal accomplishment tracking is the process of monitoring the progress of a task or series of tasks towards completing a goal. Goal accomplishment tracking is used to monitor goal progress in a variety of domains, including workflow processing, teleoperation and industrial manufacturing. Practically, it involves the constant monitoring of task execution, analysis of this data to determine the task progress and notification of interested parties. This information is usually used in a passive way to observe goal progress. However, responding to this information may prevent goal failures. In addition, responding proactively in an opportunistic way can also lead to goals being completed faster. This paper proposes an architecture to support the adaptive planning of tasks for fault tolerance or opportunistic task execution based on goal accomplishment tracking. It argues that dramatically increased performance can be gained by monitoring task execution and altering plans dynamically