47,799 research outputs found
Core curriculum, general education and other nostrums
What should American educators aim at accomplishing in the closing years of the
twentieth century? Everybody agrees that major changes are desirable, but the
proposal that is most widely discussed and that is being pushed by Bloom, Bennett and
other secular theologians of a right-wing persuasion -- to resusitate "general education,"
alternatively "core curriculum," alternatively again "the liberal arts" -- would make
matters worse, not better. It would be seriously dysfunctional in our proletaritized,
polyglot society
Roles, role modulations and differential moral assessment of role performance
This paper is a further development of the second section of
Social Science Working Paper Number 410. I argue here that
disagreements over how well or how ill someone has performed in some
social role are affected by a widespread tendency to confuse public and
private roles. Those who assess performance in a given role by the
standards appropriate for private roles will never agree with those who
assess the same performance by the standards appropriate for public
roles. I illustrate this thesis by examining differing evaluations of
a number of typical policy decisions. While I do not expect that this
discussion will terminate all such disagreements, I hope it may help
disputants to understand what it is they are disagreeing about
What Do Symmetries Tell Us About Structure?
Mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers of physics often look to the symmetries of an object for insight into the structure and constitution of the object. My aim in this paper is to explain why this practice is successful. In order to do so, I present a collection of results that are closely related to (and in a sense, generalizations of) Beth’s and Svenonius’ theorems
Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?
I have expropriated the title of Prichard's 1912 paperl because, I too answer his question
affinnatively. But the mistake I detect is not the one Prichard thought he had uncovered, and his
article is a classic example of the mistake I propose to discuss. It is to believe, as some moral
philosophers still appear to do, that moral philosophy has a special domain or special method that
distinguishes it in some important way from sociology, anthropology, psychology and economics. I
shall argue that these moral philosophers are misled by the "philosophical" vocabulary they use
On the Structure of Classical Mechanics
Jill North (North, 2009) has recently argued that Hamiltonian mechanics ascribes less structure to the world than Lagrangian mechanics does. I will argue that North's argument is not sound. In doing so, I will present some obstacles that must be navigated by anyone interested in comparing the amounts of structure that different physical theories ascribe to the world
Entanglement in non-local games and the hyperlinear profile of groups
We relate the amount of entanglement required to play linear-system non-local
games near-optimally to the hyperlinear profile of finitely-presented groups.
By calculating the hyperlinear profile of a certain group, we give an example
of a finite non-local game for which the amount of entanglement required to
play -optimally is at least , for some
. Since this function approaches infinity as approaches
zero, this provides a quantitative version of a theorem of the first author.Comment: 27 pages. v2: improved results based on a suggestion by N. Ozaw
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