2,191 research outputs found

    Critical being: a philosophical approach to understanding and expanding the scope of critical thinking in UK higher education with attention to cross-cultural diversity

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    This thesis develops a philosophically informed understanding of critical thinking applicable at an expansive scope in UK universities, with particular attention to cross-cultural diversity. I begin from the assumptions, substantiated by existing literature, that 1) UK universities should (and ostensibly do) aim to teach and practice critical thinking at an expansive scope 2) this aim is often not being met, in part due to assumptions underpinning dominant understandings of critical thinking 3) the increasingly international nature of UK higher education creates additional challenges in the theory and practice of critical thinking. I argue that addressing these issues requires renewed attention to critical thinking theory and that philosophy can meaningfully contribute to this effort. I begin by justifying the above assumptions and clarifying the aims of this project. I provide a terminological and conceptual model for understanding the idea of critical scope. This includes building on the idea of critical being put forward by Barnett (1997) as a manifestation of criticality at an expansive scope. I then show how dominant conceptions of critical thinking unintentionally narrow critical scope in theory by relying on context-specific educational aims and/or assumedly universal substantive values as defining features of critical thinking. I argue these efforts constitute uncritical impositions on critical thinking that are particularly problematic in cross-cultural contexts. I use exploration of criticality in Chinese philosophical traditions to show how resources which are often excluded from critical thinking theory can support a more expansive and inclusive understanding. This includes attention to how non-critical modes of thinking and being – such as those of wonder and wu-wei – can help expand critical thinking towards critical being without need for the imposition of predetermined aims or assumedly universal values. This leads me to argue that the context-specific and necessarily determinant aims of education cannot define the entirety of critical thinking at an expansive scope, which is a context-reflexive and indeterminant process. I contend that whatever features ‘define’ critical thinking must themselves remain open to critique. This leads me to suggest pragmatic assumptions capable of animating critical thinking at an expansive scope within and between diverse contexts while avoiding dogmatism and relativism. I conclude by considering implications for practice, including attention to how this approach to critical thinking – exemplified by critical being – can help navigate perennial tensions within the purposes, aims, curricula, pedagogies, and environments of UK universities. Ultimately, this thesis aims to support universities in cultivating criticality that draws on diversity as a resource, helping people with divergent perspectives think and speak with (instead of past) each other in constructive critical endeavours

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence

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    The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence

    Comparing the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence

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    This pilot study investigates the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence over proficiency levels of a spoken learner corpus. The results show that the formula in beginner production data is likely being recalled holistically from learners’ phonological memory rather than generated online, identifiable by virtue of its fluent production in absence of any other surface structure evidence of the formula’s syntactic properties. As learners’ L2 competence increases, the formula becomes sensitive to modifications which show structural conformity at each proficiency level. The transparency between the formula’s modification and learners’ corresponding L2 surface structure realisations suggest that it is the independent development of L2 competence which integrates the formula into compositional language, and ultimately drives the SLA process forward

    Revolution Beyond the Event

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    Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts

    Evaluating Architectural Safeguards for Uncertain AI Black-Box Components

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    Although tremendous progress has been made in Artificial Intelligence (AI), it entails new challenges. The growing complexity of learning tasks requires more complex AI components, which increasingly exhibit unreliable behaviour. In this book, we present a model-driven approach to model architectural safeguards for AI components and analyse their effect on the overall system reliability

    A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation

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    Gestures that accompany speech are an essential part of natural and efficient embodied human communication. The automatic generation of such co-speech gestures is a long-standing problem in computer animation and is considered an enabling technology in film, games, virtual social spaces, and for interaction with social robots. The problem is made challenging by the idiosyncratic and non-periodic nature of human co-speech gesture motion, and by the great diversity of communicative functions that gestures encompass. Gesture generation has seen surging interest recently, owing to the emergence of more and larger datasets of human gesture motion, combined with strides in deep-learning-based generative models, that benefit from the growing availability of data. This review article summarizes co-speech gesture generation research, with a particular focus on deep generative models. First, we articulate the theory describing human gesticulation and how it complements speech. Next, we briefly discuss rule-based and classical statistical gesture synthesis, before delving into deep learning approaches. We employ the choice of input modalities as an organizing principle, examining systems that generate gestures from audio, text, and non-linguistic input. We also chronicle the evolution of the related training data sets in terms of size, diversity, motion quality, and collection method. Finally, we identify key research challenges in gesture generation, including data availability and quality; producing human-like motion; grounding the gesture in the co-occurring speech in interaction with other speakers, and in the environment; performing gesture evaluation; and integration of gesture synthesis into applications. We highlight recent approaches to tackling the various key challenges, as well as the limitations of these approaches, and point toward areas of future development.Comment: Accepted for EUROGRAPHICS 202

    Produkce diskurzu českých mluvčích s afázií: Explorace s využitím usage-based lingvistiky

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    The research in linguistic aphasiology has been dominated by structuralist, rule-based approaches to the study of langauge. However, recent work has shown that analyses based in constructivist, usage-based frameworks can provide explanations to patterns of language processing in aphasia that are difficult to accommodate in structuralist models. The present work follows up on these findings and aims to provide additional evidence for the benefits of the usage-based model by using data from Czech speakers with aphasia, an understudied language in this context. The aims of the study were threefold: to create a collection of samples of aphasic connected speech available to other researchers, to provide a description of the patterns of aphasic discourse production in Czech, and, most importantly, to show potential benefits of usage-based construction grammar for aphasia research. A corpus of the speech of eleven persons with fluent and non-fluent aphasia of varying degrees of severity was created. The corpus consist of more than 23000 word position produced by speakers with aphasia in tasks used to elicit conversational, narrative, descriptive, and procedural discourse. The corpus is lemmatized and morphologically tagged and the transcripts are aligned with audio recordings. A smaller sample of three,...Výzkum v lingvistické afaziologii využíval po dlouhou dobu především strukturalistické přístupy založené na pravidlech. Některé výsledky z poslední doby však ukazují, že konstruktivistické přístupy založené na užívání jazyka (usage-based přístup) dokážou vysvětlit některá specifika zpracování jazyka v afázii, která jsou ve strukturalistickém rámci obtížně vysvětlitelná. Předkládaná dizertační práce navazuje na tyto výzkumy a klade si za cíl předložit další důkazy pro výhodnost usage-přístupu. Využívá přitom data z češtiny, která je v afaziologickém výzkumu značně podreprezentovaná. Práce si stanovila tři cíle: jednak shromáždit projevy českých mluvčích s afázií, které by byly přístupné dalším výzkumníkům, dále podat detailní popis produkce diskurzu v afázii v češtině a konečně ukázat některé přednosti usage-based přístupu pro afaziologii. V rámci práce byl vytvořen korpus jedenácti mluvčích s fluentní a nefluentní afázií s různými stupni závažnosti poruchy. Korpus obsahuje přes 23000 slovních pozic vyprodukovaných mluvčími s afázií sebranými s využitím úkolů, jejichž cílem bylo elicitovat konverzační, narativní, deskriptivní a procedurální diskurz. Korpus je lematizován a morfologicky označkován. Dále je v něm zahrnut menší vzorek řečové produkce tří neurotypických mluvčích se srovnatelnými...Ústav českého jazyka a teorie komunikaceInstitute of Czech Language and Theory of CommunicationFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult

    Transition 2.0: Re-establishing Constitutional Democracy in EU Member States

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    The central question of Transition 2.0 is this: what (and how) may a new government do to re-establish constitutional democracy, as well as repair membership within the European Union, without breaching the European rule of law? This volume demonstrates that EU law and international commitments impose constraints but also offer tools and assistance for facilitating the way back after rule of law and democratic backsliding. The various contributions explore the constitutional, legal, and social framework of 'Transition 2.0'.Dieser Band zeigt, dass das EU-Recht und die internationalen Verpflichtungen zwar Zwänge auferlegen, aber auch Instrumente und Hilfestellungen bieten, um den Weg zurück in die Europäische Union nach Rechtsstaatlichkeitsdefiziten und demokratischen Rückschritten zu erleichtern. Die verschiedenen Beiträge untersuchen den verfassungsrechtlichen, rechtlichen und sozialen Rahmen des "Übergangs 2.0"
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