Plenty of room left for the Dogmatist

Barnett provides an interesting new challenge for Dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. The challenge is that such accounts, by accepting that a perceptual experience can provide a distinctive kind of boost to one’s credences, would lead to a form of diachronic irrationality in cases where one has already learnt in advance that one will have such an experience. I show that this challenge rests on a misleading feature of using the 0–1 interval to express probabilities and show that if we switch to using Odds or Log-Odds, the misleading appearance that there is only ‘a little room’ for one’s credences to increase evaporates. Moreover, there are familiar, independent reasons for taking the Log-Odds scale to provide a clearer picture of the confirmatory effect of evidence. Thus the Dogmatist can after all escape the charge of diachronic irrationality

Using specialist software for qualitative data analysis. [Closing seminar]

This paper is divided in four parts. The first part provides some background information on the analysis of non-numerical data, specifically the content analysis of text, including approaches such as ‘grounded theory’ and ‘recursive comparative analysis’. In the second section, the use of computers for qualitative data analysis is discussed, with particular reference to its general advantages and misconceptions. The third section outlines the possibilities of some specialist software programmes for qualitative data analysis (NVivo and MAXqda). Finally, an example of the use of specialist software in a recently completed research project funded by the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme is examined