Imaginative Transportation

Actors, undercover investigators, and readers of fiction sometimes report “losing themselves” in the characters they imitate or read about. They speak of “taking on” or “assuming” the beliefs, thoughts, and feelings of someone else. I offer an account of this strange but familiar phenomenon—what I call imaginative transportation

Beauty and Testimony

I ask whether, and how far, it is possible legitimately to acquire the belief that a given item is beautiful on the basis of someone's testimony that it is. This is an issue that concerned Kant. Kant held that testimony could never be a legitimate source of such judgements, and clearly took his account of aesthetic judgement to explain this fact. I argue that Kant's theory does not, in fact, provide the materials for a satisfactory explanation. Was Kant at least right about the explanadum? While broadly sympathetic to his views on that, I also suggest ways in which they need qualifying. I consider alternative explanations of why testimony should, in general, not be a legitimate source of aesthetic judgement, especially those rooted in anti-realism about the aesthetic. I find these two no more obviously correct, at least in their current state of development

Saul Bellow and the Role of the Intellectual in 20th Century Society

As contemporary readers constantly “lower the bar”, writers tend to follow the same trend, thus creating a vicious circle. Their novels become more and more “unintellectual” in order to appeal to the common man. And this happens not as much because the writers wish to remain loyal to their readers as it happens out of fear of rejection. The role of the modern writer is therefore to resist the temptation of writing for the masses and to assume the higher responsibility of forcing the masses out of their ignorance, of reorienting the self towards knowledge, exchange of ideas in order to create the ability to filter what an impure society might confront us with. The evolution from rights to liberty and from liberty to openness needs to be constantly adjusted and only the intellectuals can alert his fellow citizens of the danger behind the famous statement “the right to the pursuit of happiness”: that of transforming oneself into a simple consumer, getting satisfaction from a fake reality, a simulacra, complacent about himself/herself and always willing to choose the easiest way around. Most modern readers simply do not take the challenge, they just wish to be entertained. But entertainment without intellectual effort creates not a reality, but an illusion and Bellow is aware of the growing need for illusion of the contemporary society: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”; “You could see the suicidal impulses pushing strongly. You wondered whether this Western culture could survive universal dissemination – whether only its science and technology or administrative practices would travel, be adopted by other societies”. (Bellow, Sammler…, p. 34).modern intellectual, contemporary society, Saul Bellow

Information Outlook, September 2001

Volume 5, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2001/1008/thumbnail.jp

Epistemology of the Obvious: A Geometrical Case

Articl

Non‐Classical Knowledge

The Knower paradox purports to place surprising a priori limitations on what we can know. According to orthodoxy, it shows that we need to abandon one of three plausible and widely-held ideas: that knowledge is factive, that we can know that knowledge is factive, and that we can use logical/mathematical reasoning to extend our knowledge via very weak single-premise closure principles. I argue that classical logic, not any of these epistemic principles, is the culprit. I develop a consistent theory validating all these principles by combining Hartry Field's theory of truth with a modal enrichment developed for a different purpose by Michael Caie. The only casualty is classical logic: the theory avoids paradox by using a weaker-than-classical K3 logic. I then assess the philosophical merits of this approach. I argue that, unlike the traditional semantic paradoxes involving extensional notions like truth, its plausibility depends on the way in which sentences are referred to--whether in natural languages via direct sentential reference, or in mathematical theories via indirect sentential reference by Gödel coding. In particular, I argue that from the perspective of natural language, my non-classical treatment of knowledge as a predicate is plausible, while from the perspective of mathematical theories, its plausibility depends on unresolved questions about the limits of our idealized deductive capacities

Development and Validation of the Mathematical Problem-solving Dispositions and Beliefs Scale

Mathematical problem solving has received recent attention and been recognized as central to analysis and application in everyday life. Mathematical problem solving has often been characterized by traditional word problems. From the models-and-modeling perspective, students problem solve mathematically by engaging in conceptual development through interaction with communities of practice that produce artifacts that are continually under design. Productive problem-solving dispositions and beliefs mold students who are confident and willing to take on new tasks. Attitudes, feelings, dispositions, and beliefs are manipulatable, and thus individuals’ problem-solving identity is complex. To date, there are no empirical studies that have measured students’ levels of mathematical problem-solving dispositions and beliefs. This study describes the development and validation of a measure of mathematical problem-solving dispositions and beliefs (MPSDB), based on the models-and-modeling perspective of problem solving. An initial pool of 72 items represented six different dimensions of the model. Data were collected from 575 middle grade students to validate and examine the MPSDB scale. Through a series of phases including a pilot study, expert panel, and exploratory factor analysis, a final 40-item MPSDB scale was validated with strong reliability. The validation study showed that scores on the 40-item measure: (a) established construct validity as the MPSDB scores correlated with two of the theoretically related constructs, including math anxiety and self-efficacy and the usefulness of mathematics; (b) established content validity as there was a high degree of agreement between the expert panel’s review of items; (c) established criterion validity as MPSDB scores were positively correlated with GPA and mathematics class average; and (d) established incremental validity as the MPSDB added significant predictive capacity to the model