Challenges in the Automatic Analysis of Students’ Diagnostic Reasoning

Diagnostic reasoning is a key component of many professions. To improve students’ diagnostic reasoning skills, educational psychologists analyse and give feedback on epistemic activities used by these students while diagnosing, in particular, hypothesis generation, evidence generation, evidence evaluation, and drawing conclusions. However, this manual analysis is highly time-consuming. We aim to enable the large-scale adoption of diagnostic reasoning analysis and feedback by automating the epistemic activity identification. We create the first corpus for this task, comprising diagnostic reasoning selfexplanations of students from two domains annotated with epistemic activities. Based on insights from the corpus creation and the task’s characteristics, we discuss three challenges for the automatic identification of epistemic activities using AI methods: the correct identification of epistemic activity spans, the reliable distinction of similar epistemic activities, and the detection of overlapping epistemic activities. We propose a separate performance metric for each challenge and thus provide an evaluation framework for future research. Indeed, our evaluation of various state-of-the-art recurrent neural network architectures reveals that current techniques fail to address some of these challenges.

Who Wants to Know?

This chapter argues that professional inquirers, including professional philosophers, are subject to special epistemic obligations which require them to meet higher standards than those that are required for knowing. Perhaps the most obvious examples come from the experimental sciences, where professionals are required to employ rigorous methodological procedures to reduce the risk of error and bias; procedures such as double-blinding are obligatory in many experimental contexts, but no parallel bias-reducing measures are generally expected in ordinary epistemic activity. To expect such would, in fact, be over-demanding. I argue that this variation in epistemic requirements cannot be accounted for adequately via the usual standard-shifting accounts of knowledge, such as contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism. Instead, it calls for a more pluralistic approach—it suggests that knowledge is simply not the only epistemic state worthy of philosophical attention.

Colloquium 2 Commentary on Barney

Rachel Barney proposes that Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul is plausibly compared to scientific theories today. I depart from Barney by proposing that the tripartite soul is a model and that its status is hypothetical. And I raise four questions: (1) What follows from the Plato-science comparison, as Barney conceives of it? (2) Which questions emerge if science is looked at in the sophisticated mode that Barney employs in her discussion of Plato? (3) Current science invokes a multitude of subsystems relevant to motivation. Why compare it with tripartition? Stoic psychology may share more fundamental ideas with current science, including the premise that all goings-on in the soul are physiological movements. (4) If tripartition is a model, why would one expect it to account for all dimensions of epistemic activity?

Geschichtsbilder. View(s) at Theatre Theory

The article is an attempt to read Stanislaw Wyspianski's plays as an epistemic activity. The author sees a historiosophical potential of his work in the consequent use of reconstruction strategies, referring both to the very popular 19th-century practice of "living images" and the contemporary practice and theory of "reenactments". The analysis of the relation between the body and the image plays a crucial role in the attempt to show Wyspański also as a precursor of modern theatrical historiography.

Suturing a Wounded Body—Wounded Mind in Red Silk on White Linen: Embodied and Hand(Y) Knowledge of Trauma

In 1830, Elizabeth Parker, daughter of a day laborer and of a teacher in Ashburnham, East Sussex, England, cross-stitched in red silk thread an extraordinarily complex text that participates in several genres, including a memoir of her then brief life of some seventeen years, a confession, a suicide note, and a prayer. These various genres cohere around one momentous event in Parker’s young life: the sexual violation and physical abuse at the hands of her employer, Lt. G. After suturing 46 lines, 1,722 words, and 6,699 characters, she stops mid-line and mid-way down her cloth with the powerful plea, “What will become of my soul[?]” This paper argues that Parker’s sampler was a robust site in which Parker was able to grapple with her wounded body and mind. To justify the claim that a woman’s stitching can be interpreted as an epistemic activity, the proposed paper turns to two key concepts “situated knowledges” and “embodied knowledge”- both of which have been posited by feminists as a way to destabilize the dominant validation of disembodied, abstract thinking where the eye serves as the mind’s tool of investigation. (Haraway; Knappett; Frank; Driver)

Naturalized Epistemology and the Normative

Gradually emerging from the so-called “linguistic turn,” philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century witnessed what we might follow P. M. S. Hacker in describing as a “naturalistic turn.” This change of direction, an abandonment of traditional philosophical methods in favour of a scientific approach, or critics would say a scientistic approach, has met with widespread approval. In the first part of the paper I look to establish the centrality of the normative to the discipline of epistemology. I then turn to examine Quine's attempt to reduce normative discourse to instrumental rationality, and the more fully developed accounts provided by Stich, Kornblith and Papineau. I argue that these accounts fail because they insist on a constitutive connection between desires and the ends of epistemic activity. I conclude with the suggestion that a more plausible position severs this connection, in favour of an objective, externalist account of ends and reasons.