21,405 research outputs found
Aristotle's Foundationalism
For Aristotle, demonstrative knowledge is the result of what he calls ‘intellectual
learning’, a process in which the knowledge of a conclusion depends on previous knowledge of
the premises. Since demonstrations are ultimately based on indemonstrable principles (the
knowledge of which is called ‘νοῦς’), Aristotle is often described as advancing a foundationalist
doctrine. Without disputing the nomenclature, I shall attempt to show that Aristotle’s
‘foundationalism’ should not be taken as a rationalist theory of epistemic justification, as if the first
principles of science could be known as such independently of their explanatory connections to
demonstrable propositions. I shall argue that knowing first principles as such involves knowing
them as explanatory of other scientific propositions. I shall then explain in which way noetic and demonstrative knowledge are in a sense interdependent cognitive states – even though νοῦς remains distinct from (and, in Aristotle’s words, more ‘accurate’ than) demonstrative knowledge
Geoscience after IT: Part J. Human requirements that shape the evolving geoscience information system
The geoscience record is constrained by the limitations of human thought and of the technology for handling information. IT can lead us away from the tyranny of older technology, but to find the right path, we need to understand our own limitations. Language, images, data and mathematical models, are tools for expressing and recording our ideas. Backed by intuition, they enable us to think in various modes, to build knowledge from information and create models as artificial views of a real world. Markup languages may accommodate more flexible and better connected records, and the object-oriented approach may help to match IT more closely to our thought processes
Delivering manufacturing technology and workshop appreciation to engineering undergraduates using the flipped classroom approach
Delivery of manufacturing technology and practical workshop-based work, on undergraduate engineering courses that engage the learners, is challenging. The paper presents an experimental method of workshop delivery using the flipped learning approach, a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Video lectures are viewed by students prior to class. In-class time can be devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions as in this case. Learners were asked to observe three audiovisual clips in preparation for class. The objective was to determine whether the flipped classroom approach can enhance the learning experience, through better engagement with the students, compared to conventional classroom-based learning. The level of student participation and level of success have been established by means of feedback questionnaires from more than 100 participants and peer observation. The results are encouraging and demonstrate that this approach is favoured by the students
Reinventing College Physics for Biologists: Explicating an epistemological curriculum
The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMd-PERG)
carried out a five-year research project to rethink, observe, and reform
introductory algebra-based (college) physics. This class is one of the Maryland
Physics Department's large service courses, serving primarily life-science
majors. After consultation with biologists, we re-focused the class on helping
the students learn to think scientifically -- to build coherence, think in
terms of mechanism, and to follow the implications of assumptions. We designed
the course to tap into students' productive conceptual and epistemological
resources, based on a theoretical framework from research on learning. The
reformed class retains its traditional structure in terms of time and
instructional personnel, but we modified existing best-practices curricular
materials, including Peer Instruction, Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, and
Tutorials. We provided class-controlled spaces for student collaboration, which
allowed us to observe and record students learning directly. We also scanned
all written homework and examinations, and we administered pre-post conceptual
and epistemological surveys. The reformed class enhanced the strong gains on
pre-post conceptual tests produced by the best-practices materials while
obtaining unprecedented pre-post gains on epistemological surveys instead of
the traditional losses.Comment: 35 pages including a 15 page appendix of supplementary material
Recommended from our members
A quantum geometric model of similarity
No other study has had as great an impact on the development of the similarity literature as that of Tversky (1977), which provided compelling demonstrations against all the fundamental assumptions of the popular, and extensively employed, geometric similarity models. Notably, similarity judgments were shown to violate symmetry and the triangle inequality, and also be subject to context effects, so that the same pair of items would be rated differently, depending on the presence of other items. Quantum theory provides a generalized geometric approach to similarity and can address several of Tversky’s (1997) main findings. Similarity is modeled as quantum probability, so that asymmetries emerge as order effects, and the triangle equality violations and the diagnosticity effect can be related to the context-dependent properties of quantum probability. We so demonstrate the promise of the quantum approach for similarity and discuss the implications for representation theory in general
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
Evoke: Evoking Critical Thinking Abilities in LLMs via Reviewer-Author Prompt Editing
Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in natural
language processing. These models rely on proper human instructions (or
prompts) to generate suitable responses. However, the potential of LLMs are not
fully harnessed by commonly-used prompting methods: many human-in-the-loop
algorithms employ ad-hoc procedures for prompt selection; while auto prompt
generation approaches are essentially searching all possible prompts randomly
and inefficiently. We propose Evoke, an automatic prompt refinement framework.
In Evoke, there are two instances of a same LLM: one as a reviewer
(LLM-Reviewer), it scores the current prompt; the other as an author
(LLM-Author), it edits the prompt by considering the edit history and the
reviewer's feedback. Such an author-reviewer feedback loop ensures that the
prompt is refined in each iteration. We further aggregate a data selection
approach to Evoke, where only the hard samples are exposed to the LLM. The hard
samples are more important because the LLM can develop deeper understanding of
the tasks out of them, while the model may already know how to solve the easier
cases. Experimental results show that Evoke significantly outperforms existing
methods. For instance, in the challenging task of logical fallacy detection,
Evoke scores above 80, while all other baseline methods struggle to reach 20
An Online Multimedia Resource in Behavioral Neuroscience
The advance of web-based technology has stimulated
innovation in education. This paper discusses the
development and evaluation of an online multimedia
resource for undergraduate-level behavioral neuroscience
education. This resource surveys four major subject areas:
language, attention and perception, thinking, and autism. It
employs audio and video streaming, online demonstration
experiments, computer simulation, and internet links. This
online resource has two distinct advantages over a paper
textbook. First, a considerable proportion of the content is
conveyed using multimedia, thus making the learning
experience more vivid and dynamic. Second, its
interactive components provide opportunities for students
to participate in the various experimental tasks introduced
in the text and to compare their own performance with
those of others. This hands-on experience not only
enables students to gain in-depth procedural knowledge of
the tasks but also has positive effects on their motivation.
Feedback from three undergraduate classes that used this
resource as supplementary material showed that students
were highly positive about its pedagogical values. This
free resource is available on the web at
http://psych.rice.edu/mmtbn/
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