60 research outputs found
Properties
Panorama aggiornato delle principali teorie filosofiche su propriet\ue0 e relazioni intese come universal
Team Teaching for Discourse: Perspectives of Instructors and a Student in an Online Probability and Statistics Course for Preparing Mathematics Specialists
Team teaching is a form of collaborative work where teachers plan lessons and/or teach together. We discuss the strengths of discourse in the planning stage for an intensive, team-taught, three-week probability and statistics course for mathematics specialists as a way to create and sustain a sense of community and show multiple perspectives in an online course. We delve into two cases of lessonsââone about stem-and-leaf plots and another on averagesââto describe the interactions of and reflections from three online instructors and a preparing mathematics specialist across the phases of planning, enactment, and the resulting student learning. The conversations about our understandings of probability and statistics concepts that arose between the three instructors with differing arenas of expertiseââa mathematics educator, a probability instructor, and an expert teacherââoften were predictors of conversations that occurred among candidates during class. Through these mirrored conversations, we were able to build off of and expand candidatesâ conceptions regarding probability and statistics. We argue that when preparing mathematics specialists, having a team with diverse domain expertise but enough overlap to push each otherâs thinking was crucial to successful planning and enactment in the team teaching setting
The bearable lightness of being
How are philosophical questions about what kinds of things there are to be understood and how are they to be answered? This paper defends broadly Fregean answers to these questions. Ontological categories-such as object, property, and relation-are explained in terms of a prior logical categorization of expressions, as singular terms, predicates of varying degree and level, etc. Questions about what kinds of object, property, etc., there are are, on this approach, reduce to questions about truth and logical form: for example, the question whether there are numbers is the question whether there are true atomic statements in which expressions function as singular terms which, if they have reference at all, stand for numbers, and the question whether there are properties of a given type is a question about whether there are meaningful predicates of an appropriate degree and level. This approach is defended against the objection that it must be wrong because makes what there depend on us or our language. Some problems confronting the Fregean approach-including Frege's notorious paradox of the concept horse-are addressed. It is argued that the approach results in a modest and sober deflationary understanding of ontological commitments
The turn of the valve: representing with material models
Many scientific models are representations. Building on Goodman and Elginâs notion of representation-as we analyse what this claim involves by providing a general definition of what makes something a scientific model, and formulating a novel account of how they represent. We call the result the DEKI account of representation, which offers a complex kind of representation involving an interplay of, denotation, exemplification, keying up of properties, and imputation. Throughout we focus on material models, and we illustrate our claims with the Phillips-Newlyn machine. In the conclusion we suggest that, mutatis mutandis, the DEKI account can be carried over to other kinds of models, notably fictional and mathematical models
Predictive coding and representationalism
According to the predictive coding theory of cognition (PCT), brains are
predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottomâup, externally-generated sensory signals and topâdown, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It
is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such statusâthat is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structuresânamely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detectionâthat play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system
The interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences
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This working paper precedes our full article entitled âThe evolution of Wrightâs (1932) adaptive field to contemporary interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciencesâ as published in the journal Biology & Philosophy (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-014-9450-2). The working paper features an extended literature overview of the ways in which fitness landscapes have been interpreted and used in the social sciences, for which there was not enough space in the full article. The article features an in-depth philosophical discussion about the added value of the various ways in which fitness landscapes are used in the social sciences. This discussion is absent in the current working paper. Th
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