Educating for Intellectual Virtue: a critique from action guidance

Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology (e.g., Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996; Battaly 2006; Baehr 2011) – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists (most notably Baehr, 2013) have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover that we should reconceive the primary epistemic aim of all education as the inculcation of the intellectual virtues. Baehr’s picture contrasts with another well-known position – that the primary aim of education is the promotion of critical thinking (Scheffler 1989; Siegel 1988; 1997; 2017). In this paper – that we hold makes a contribution to both philosophy of education and epistemology and, a fortiori, epistemology of education – we challenge this picture. We outline three criteria that any putative aim of education must meet and hold that it is the aim of critical thinking, rather than the aim of instilling intellectual virtue, that best meets these criteria. On this basis, we propose a new challenge for intellectual virtue epistemology, next to the well-known empirically-driven ‘situationist challenge’. What we call the ‘pedagogical challenge’ maintains that the intellectual virtues approach does not have available a suitably effective pedagogy to qualify the acquisition of intellectual virtue as the primary aim of education. This is because the pedagogic model of the intellectual virtues approach (borrowed largely from exemplarist thinking) is not properly action-guiding. Instead, we hold that, without much further development in virtue-based theory, logic and critical thinking must still play the primary role in the epistemology of education

Monstrous branes

We study D-branes in the bosonic closed string theory whose automorphism group is the Bimonster group (the wreath product of the Monster simple group with Z_2). We give a complete classification of D-branes preserving the chiral subalgebra of Monster invariants and show that they transform in a representation of the Bimonster. Our results apply more generally to self-dual conformal field theories which admit the action of a compact Lie group on both the left- and right-moving sectors.Comment: 31 pages, references adde

Managerial Overconfidence and Corporate Policies

Miscalibration is a standard measure of overconfidence in both psychology and economics. Although it is often used in lab experiments, there is scarcity of evidence about its effects in practice. We test whether top corporate executives are miscalibrated, and whether their miscalibration impacts investment behavior. Over six years, we collect a unique panel of nearly 7,000 observations of probability distributions provided by top financial executives regarding the stock market. Financial executives are miscalibrated: realized market returns are within the executives' 80% confidence intervals only 38% of the time. We show that companies with overconfident CFOs use lower discount rates to value cash flows, and that they invest more, use more debt, are less likely to pay dividends, are more likely to repurchase shares, and they use proportionally more long-term, as opposed to short-term, debt. The pervasive effect of this miscalibration suggests that the effect of overconfidence should be explicitly modeled when analyzing corporate decision-making.

Equivariant Gerbes on Complex Tori

We explore a new direction in representation theory which comes from holomorphic gerbes on complex tori. The analogue of the theta group of a holomorphic line bundle on a (compact) complex torus is developed for gerbes in place of line bundles. The theta group of symmetries of the gerbe has the structure of a Picard groupoid. We calculate it explicitly as a central extension of the group of symmetries of the gerbe by the Picard groupoid of the underlying complex torus. We discuss obstruction to equivariance and give an example of a group of symmetries of a gerbe with respect to which the gerbe cannot be equivariant. We survey various types of representations of the group of symmetries of a gerbe on the stack of sheaves of modules on the gerbe and the associated abelian category of sheaves on the gerbe (twisted sheaves)

An adiabatic mechanism for the reduction of jet meander amplitude by potential vorticity filamentation

The amplitude of ridges in large-amplitude Rossby waves have been shown to decrease systematically with lead time during the first 1-5 days of operational global numerical weather forecasts. These models also exhibit a rapid reduction in the isentropic gradient of potential vorticity (PV) at the tropopause during the first 1-2 days of forecasts. This paper identifies a mechanism linking the reduction in large-scale meander amplitude on jet streams to declining PV gradients. The mechanism proposed is that a smoother isentropic transition of PV across the tropopause leads to excessive PV filamentation on the jet flanks and a more lossy waveguide. The approach taken is to analyse Rossby wave dynamics in a single-layer quasi-geostrophic model. Numerical simulations show that the amplitude of a Rossby wave propagating along a narrow but smooth PV front do indeed decay transiently with time. This process is explained in terms of the filamentation of PV from the jet core and associated absorption of wave activity by the critical layers on the jet flanks, and a simple method for quantitatively predicting the magnitude of the amplitude reduction without simulation is presented. Explicitly-diffusive simulations are then used to show that the combined impact of diffusion and the adiabatic rearrangement of PV can result in a decay rate of Rossby waves which is 2-4 times faster than could be expected from diffusion acting alone. This predicted decay rate is sufficient to explain the decay observed in operational weather forecasting models

Factors influencing distribution and habitat associations in an endemic group of temperate Western Australian reef fishes over a latitudinal gradient

Similarities and differences in the density, distribution and habitat associations of 3 species from the pomacentrid genus Parma (Parma mccullochi, P. occidentalis, P. victoriae) were identified across 2000 km of temperate coastline in Western Australia. For P. mccullochi, fine-scale habitat associations were also assessed using the position of individual fish as observation points. A fourth species, the endemic P. bicolor, was rarely encountered. Satellite-derived sea-surface temperature was a good predictor of the distribution of the 3 commonly encountered species over the survey area. P. occidentalis were northerly distributed in warmer waters, P. victoriae were southerly distributed in cooler waters, while P. mccullochi were cosmopolitan over the survey area, with the highest densities recorded towards the centre of the study area. These findings suggest that eco-physiological theory may be applicable to describing the distribution of these, and similar, species. Similar habitat associations were observed for the 3 commonly encountered species and, in the case of P. mccullochi, at a range of spatial scales. All species were associated with vertical or overhanging rock walls and avoided areas of continuous algal canopy. P. occidentalis and P. mccullochi were associated with turfing and understorey algal forms. As the species use similar habitats, we suggest that where their distributions overlap they will experience niche overlap and resource competition. While each species may occupy different fundamental niches defined by different sea-surface temperature requirements, further study may reveal that competition for resources between these species leads to competitive displacement on both local and geographical scales