36,877 research outputs found
An Epistemological Foundation of Concpetual Modeling
In a business environment, making the right decisions is vital for the success of a company. Making right decisions is inevitably bound to the availability and provision of relevant information. Information systems are supposed to be able to provide this information in an efficient way. Thus, within information systems development a detailed analysis of information supply and information demands has to prevail. Based on Szyperski’s information set and subset-model we will give an epistemological foundation of information modeling in general and show, why conceptual modeling in particular is capable of developing effective and efficient information systems. Furthermore, we derive conceptual modeling requirements based on our findings
NEXUS/Physics: An interdisciplinary repurposing of physics for biologists
In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science
curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010,
Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an
interdisciplinary team has created NEXUS/Physics: a repurposing of an
introductory physics curriculum for the life sciences. The curriculum interacts
strongly and supportively with introductory biology and chemistry courses taken
by life sciences students, with the goal of helping students build general,
multi-discipline scientific competencies. In order to do this, our two-semester
NEXUS/Physics course sequence is positioned as a second year course so students
will have had some exposure to basic concepts in biology and chemistry.
NEXUS/Physics stresses interdisciplinary examples and the content differs
markedly from traditional introductory physics to facilitate this. It extends
the discussion of energy to include interatomic potentials and chemical
reactions, the discussion of thermodynamics to include enthalpy and Gibbs free
energy, and includes a serious discussion of random vs. coherent motion
including diffusion. The development of instructional materials is coordinated
with careful education research. Both the new content and the results of the
research are described in a series of papers for which this paper serves as an
overview and context.Comment: 12 page
Beyond deficit-based models of learners' cognition: Interpreting engineering students' difficulties with sense-making in terms of fine-grained epistemological and conceptual dynamics
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students'
troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as
epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them
from activating and integrating productive knowledge they have. In this case
study of an engineering major solving problems (about content from his
introductory physics course) during a clinical interview, we show that "Jim"
has all the mathematical and conceptual knowledge he would need to solve a
hydrostatic pressure problem that we posed to him. But he reaches and sticks
with an incorrect answer that violates common sense. We argue that his lack of
mathematical sense-making-specifically, translating and reconciling between
mathematical and everyday/common-sense reasoning-stems in part from his
epistemological views, i.e., his views about the nature of knowledge and
learning. He regards mathematical equations as much more trustworthy than
everyday reasoning, and he does not view mathematical equations as expressing
meaning that tractably connects to common sense. For these reasons, he does not
view reconciling between common sense and mathematical formalism as either
necessary or plausible to accomplish. We, however, avoid a potential "deficit
trap"-substituting an epistemological deficit for a concepts/skills deficit-by
incorporating multiple, context-dependent epistemological stances into Jim's
cognitive dynamics. We argue that Jim's epistemological stance contains
productive seeds that instructors could build upon to support Jim's
mathematical sense-making: He does see common-sense as connected to formalism
(though not always tractably so) and in some circumstances this connection is
both salient and valued.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of Engineering Educatio
Relating the philosophy and practice of ecological economics: The role of concepts, models, and case studies in inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research
We develop a comprehensive multi-level approach to ecological economics (CML-approach) which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a specific combination of inter- and transdisciplinary research, and discuss the epistemological position on which this approach is based. In accordance with this understanding of inter- and transdisciplinarity and the underlying epistemological position, we develop an operationalization which comprises simultaneous analysis on three levels of abstraction: concepts, models and case studies. We explain these levels in detail, and, in particular, deduce our way of generic modeling in this context. Finally, we illustrate the CML-approach and demonstrate its fruitfulness by the example of the sustainable management of semi-arid rangelands. --ecological economics,interdisciplinarity,philosophy of science,transdisciplinarity
Concrete utopianism in integrated assessment models: Discovering the philosophy of the shared socioeconomic pathways
The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are at the forefront of climate change science today. As an influential methodology and method, the SSPs guide the framing of numerous climate change research questions and how these are investigated. Although the SSPs were developed by an interdisciplinary group of scientists in a well-documented process, there is no apparent consensus in the literature that answers the question, "What is the philosophy of science behind the SSPs?" To investigate, the paper applies a systematic thematic qualitative content analysis to the dataset of published papers that establish the rules and expectations for using the SSPs. The research determines that there is no obvious and concise statement on the epistemological and ontological foundation of the SSPs. However, based on the evidence identified in the dataset, SSPs are implicitly, though not explicitly, consistent with a critical realist and concrete utopian philosophy as coined by Roy Bhaskar. This is the first paper to discuss the philosophical underpinning of the SSPs
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History repeats itself: current traps in complexity practice from a systems perspective
This paper discusses the history of systems scholarship and how this has been translated
into particular forms of purposeful action, like complexity practice. Both systems and
complexity approaches have something to offer when the situation is no longer amenable
to analysis based on linear causality or reductionist approaches. In the hands of aware
practitioners both offer epistemological devices for shifting our mental furniture and both
are rich sources of metaphors, which have the capacity to trigger new and emergent
understandings. In the last 70 or so years of systems scholarship those involved have
diverged into a plethora of traditions or lineages, conserving, knowingly or not, one of
two epistemological positions: the objectivist or positivist position and the constructivist
or interpretivist position. These two epistemological positions constitute two language
communities even though many who participate in them are unaware that they do. The
trap in all of this is that so many people act without awareness of the positions that they
hold or uphold and the historicity of their thinking and acting, resulting in conflict,
rejection, lack of valuing of difference, bifurcation into smaller and smaller communities
of practice, unethical practice, etc. Based on examples coming from academic practice,
research management, modeling practice, policy praxis, among others, the implications of
this lack of awareness are discussed
Relating the Philosophy and Practice of Ecological Economics. The Role of Concepts, Models, and Case Studies in Inter- and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research
We develop a comprehensive multi-level approach to ecological economics (CML-approach) which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a specific combination of inter- and transdisciplinary research, and discuss the epistemological position on which this approach is based. In accordance with this understanding of inter- and transdisciplinarity and the underlying epistemological position, we develop an operationalization which comprises simultaneous analysis on three levels of abstraction: concepts, models and case studies. We explain these levels in detail, and, in particular, deduce our way of generic modeling in this context. Finally, we illustrate the CML-approach and demonstrate its fruitfulness by the example of the sustainable management of semi-arid rangelands.ecological economics, interdisciplinarity, philosophy of science,transdisciplinarity
Emergent processes as generation of discontinuities
In this article we analyse the problem of emergence in its diachronic
dimension. In other words, we intend to deal with the generation of
novelties in natural processes. Our approach aims at integrating some
insights coming from Whitehead’s Philosophy of the Process with the
epistemological framework developed by the “autopoietic” tradition.
Our thesis is that the emergence of new entities and rules of interaction
(new “fields of relatedness”) requires the development of discontinuous
models of change. From this standpoint natural evolution can be
conceived as a succession of emergences — each one realizing a novel
“extended” present, described by distinct models — rather than as a
single and continuous dynamics. This theoretical and epistemological
framework is particularly suitable to the investigation of the origin of
life, an emblematic example of this kind of processes
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