Pseudo-contractions as Gentle Repairs

Updating a knowledge base to remove an unwanted consequence is a challenging task. Some of the original sentences must be either deleted or weakened in such a way that the sentence to be removed is no longer entailed by the resulting set. On the other hand, it is desirable that the existing knowledge be preserved as much as possible, minimising the loss of information. Several approaches to this problem can be found in the literature. In particular, when the knowledge is represented by an ontology, two different families of frameworks have been developed in the literature in the past decades with numerous ideas in common but with little interaction between the communities: applications of AGM-like Belief Change and justification-based Ontology Repair. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between pseudo-contraction operations and gentle repairs. Both aim to avoid the complete deletion of sentences when replacing them with weaker versions is enough to prevent the entailment of the unwanted formula. We show the correspondence between concepts on both sides and investigate under which conditions they are equivalent. Furthermore, we propose a unified notation for the two approaches, which might contribute to the integration of the two areas

Understanding Addiction

The addiction literature is fraught with conceptual confusions, stalled debates, and an unfortunate lack of clear and careful attempts to delineate the phenomenon of addiction in a way that might lead to consensus. My dissertation has two overarching aims, one metaphysical and one practical. The first aim is to defend an account of addiction as the systematic disposition to fail to control one’s desires to engage in certain types of behaviors. I defend the inclusion of desires and impaired control in the definition, and I flesh out the notion of systematicity central to my dispositionalist framework. I engage the so-called ‘disease vs. choice’ debate, criticizing its presupposition that we are dealing here with a dichotomy and arguing that the movement towards a middle ground is the right track to take. I explain how the dispositionalist account can capture this middle ground and how it serves to expand upon existing views, in particular by filling in the metaphysical details. The second aim is to show how the account I defend can help to unify the extant views and disciplinary perspectives in the literature. Both the dispositionalist aspect of my framework and the methodology adopted (applied ontology and systematic metaphysics) can move the literature towards both substantive and methodological unification. This will help to clear up conceptual confusions, resolve (or sometimes dissolve) apparently intractable disputes, situate different research perspectives with respect to each other, facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, and help to frame important questions about addiction. Finally, I offer the beginnings of an ontology of addiction, which will provide a terminologically well-structured guide to the addiction literature in a way that will facilitate more effective and efficient communication and data management across disciplines

Career Pathway Orientation Courses and Their Influences on Student Career Decision Making

High schools must create skill- and decision-making experiences to support student college and career readiness and effective transitions to careers. However, traditional career education models have lacked effectiveness. This study examines a career pathway model that includes career orientation courses focused on developing career awareness and advising, confirming and challenging student’s career decision-making. Surveys and interviews were used to identify impacts these courses had on student career choice and the influence different aspects of the orientation course had on their decision-making. From this, best practices were identified, changes to the model were proposed and modifications to policy were developed to promote more effective career education

The appropriation and mastery of cultural tools in computer supported collaborative literacy practices

The main focus of this thesis is how language is used to construct knowledge in social interaction. A more specific aim is the investigation of the strategies of British primary school children for constructing multimodal electronic documents, and in particular for constructing collaboratively WebPages in History. In the first part of the thesis the two themes are critically explored through a literature review of sociocultural theory, literacy, and lCT, and through two pilot studies. In the first study, I investigate how language use varies according to the difficulty of tasks. In the second study, I investigate how language use in situated literacy events relates to wider cultural practices for constructing e-mails and WebPages. Drawing on the result of these studies, I evaluate the relationship between the concepts of Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, exploratory talk, and Intermental Development Zone (IDZ), arguing in favour of the usefulness of IDZ for studies in social interaction. In the second part of the thesis, I explore different approaches to discourse analysis developing an analytic strategy for the main study. I identify the ethnography of communication as a starting point, choosing the 'communicative event' as the unit of analysis to investigate, using NVivo: how participants construct categories of meaning while constructing WebPages in History, and the categories of participants in relation to the activity frames of design, History, and group work. I conclude that, in contrast to a view of "effective use of language" linked to explicitness, participants demonstrated to be communicatively competent in managing deictic terms and intertextual references.> recognizing cultural patterns, and adjusting their efforts according to a division of labour, and the collaborative nature of meaning making. Finally, the notion of 'situated activity system' is enriched by illuminating how categories of participants, activity frames, and cultural tools are interrelated in such system

The Effects of a Dialogic Pedagogy in a Hybrid Advanced Placement Environmental Science Course on Students’ Learning Experience

This action research study evolved from the sudden shift in schools and districts in response to the COVID 19 pandemic. Shifting from a traditional face-to-face AP Environmental Science classroom to a hybrid classroom required evaluating and revising the pedagogical choices made to create a positive learning experience. A hybrid classroom consists of face-to-face students in the classroom and online students attending the class simultaneously through video conferencing software. Teachers and students had little to no experience engaging in a hybrid learning model, thus creating a need to develop and implement effective instructional practices to support student learning. This qualitative action research case study analyzed the student learning experience through the lenses of Bakhtin’s dialogism, Vygotsky’s social constructivism, and Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. Student interviews, student surveys, and teacher- researcher observations were the three data sources collected and analyzed as part of the study. The resulting research of this study suggests that implementing a dialogic pedagogy positively impacts the student learning experience by increasing content understanding and student motivation compared to a monologic approach. The teacher facilitated effective dialogue by using purposeful questioning techniques, scaffolding within the lesson, cultivating small group collaboration, and an overall restructuring of the power dynamics within the classroom. These findings can support effective dialogic instruction as schools continue to progress in the digital age in either face-to-face or hybrid classrooms

Ontic Communities: Speculative Fiction, Ontology, and the Digital Design Community

This dissertation is about the digital design community, those who build cultural and artistic works primarily using digital media. This dissertation, however, is also centered around a larger argument, of which the digital arts and design community serves as a case study. In short, the larger argument is a call to examine more closely the social relationships of material objects (including, but not limited to, humans and things) and idea objects (including, but not limited to, broad cultural and social forces) that constitute the world. This dissertation forwards three major arguments: 1.) That it is often the case, particularly in the social sciences, that scholars look not at non-human objects, but instead at the ways those objects are perceived and labeled by humans/society. Scholars of materiality, then, often miss the mark, and study the conceptualizations of objects at the expense of the objects in of themselves. 2.) That it is theoretically and empirically possible to examine objects in of themselves, and that it is important to do so, as both material and non-material objects contain causal powers that impact history and society independent of the human recognition or conceptualization of these powers. 3.) That objects are also subjects, and engage in intersubjective meaning-making both with humans and other objects. Objects, then, should not be theorized as having various mechanical impacts upon human communities that they interact with, but should instead be theorized as members of the community in of themselves. Non-human entities, in other words, are themselves social beings.Ph.D., Communication, Culture, and Media -- Drexel University, 201