Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the study of the history of philosophy. In general, there is an enormous difference between those who concern themselves with ancient philosophy, those who concern themselves with medieval philosophy, and the students of the history of modern philosophy. And, across this distinction, there is a great variety of approaches. One should not forget that the historiography of philosophy itself in many ways is a product of history and reflects the historical context in which it is pursued. Nevertheless, what this book is interested in is not the factual question of why historians of philosophy do what they do, but the theoretical question, the question of how one ought to conceive of and explain what they do; though they themselves in this work may not in fact be guided by these assumptions and principles, there must be such principles to the extent that their activity is a rational activity. It is also important to note that philosophers tend to criticize historians of philosophy as being unduly historical and not sufficiently philosophical.

Factual Question Generation System Using Pro Semantic Ranker

In today’s internet world the amount of materials available to learn and gain knowledge is immense in numbers, which has given access to a lot of people to gain knowledge easily. Is it possible to find out if someone has read this sentence? To arrive at a conclusion of whether or not someone has read something, we can ask them to summarize its contents or question them about it. We can start with basic questions that deal with the title or the abstract, and progress to more challenging questions. A good example of this process would be a primary school teacher questioning his or her students on the basics of what they are reading to make sure that they are learning. It is a time-consuming process to create the basic questions and reading assessments that are commonly used, and can be quite taxing on the educator. This paper focuses on automating that time-intensive process. To be precise, this paper deals with the problem of generation of the factual questions in an automated manner from stand-alone texts.

The Problems Faced by Physiotherapy Students and Their Causes in Completing Reading Comprehension Section of ITP TOEFL

TOEFL is an important English test that should be taken by all university students from all the study programs in Indonesia. Each student needs to know all English skills tested and master those skills as well. This study was conducted to investigate the difficulties faced by non-English students, namely students of physiotherapy study program with section three reading comprehension of International Testing Program (ITP) TOEFL as well as the causes of difficulties encountered. The type of this research was descriptive quantitative. Using total sampling technique, all of 36 physiotherapy students in the University of Fort De Kock Bukittinggi were chosen as the samples. The data were collected through a multiple-choice test consisting of 50 questions with four options and questionnaire. The data were then analyzed using Roger’s 2011 theory on the seven types of questions of reading tested in ITP TOEFL. The results showed that all of the students had problems with main idea (24.0%), factual question (26.1%), inference question (26.3%), vocabularies in-context (29.4%), and negative question (34.4%) (difficult questions, scanning (13.8%) and reference question (18.0%) (the most difficult questions. These problems are caused by a number of factors such as feeling panic to face long passages, limitation of vocabularies, lack of practice, and less motivation. Therefore, English teachers and trainers are strongly encouraged to pay more attention to the reading problems faced by the students in ITP TOEFL as well as the causes of the problems by facilitating and providing more study exercises and practice.

Enhanced or distorted wisdom of crowds? An agent-based model of opinion formation under social influence

We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom of crowds states that the average of all opinions is close to the truth, i.e., the correct answer. But if agents have the chance to adjust their opinion in response to the opinions of others, this effect can be destroyed. Our model investigates this scenario by evaluating two competing effects: (1) agents tend to keep their own opinion (individual conviction), (2) they tend to adjust their opinion if they have information about the opinions of others (social influence). For the latter, two different regimes (full information vs. aggregated information) are compared. Our simulations show that social influence only in rare cases enhances the wisdom of crowds. Most often, we find that agents converge to a collective opinion that is even farther away from the true answer. Therefore, under social influence the wisdom of crowds can be systematically wrong.

The Application of Questioning Skill as a Scientific Approach in Microteaching Practice

This study aims to know the pre-service teachers� skill in teaching by using scientific approach for providing their teaching performance in Internship Program 3. The population of this study was the students of English Education Study Program. Meanwhile, the sample of this study was the students of sixth semester taking Microteaching. This study used qualitative descriptive research. The steps of this study were collecting the data from the sample containing observation and questionnaire. Besides, the data analysis method of this study was data collection and tabulation, they were coding and arranging the data. Hence, the arranged data was interpreted descriptively. The specific goal of this study was to know how the students applied their potential in questioning skill while practicing Microteaching. From the result of question lists in teaching scenario created by the students of Microteaching, it can be concluded that not all of six types of questions were applied by the students. Only four types of questions, they were direct question 34.2%, general and open questions 28.1%, rhetorical question 10.3%, and factual question 27.4%. In other hand, for the types of feedback questions and leading questions were not used at all by the students. For the three main aspects of difficulties faced by the students in questioning aspect skill were the conducive teaching atmosphere 16%, improving students� activity 14,2%, and the overall spread questions 13.5%.

Exploring the validity evidence of a high-stake, second language reading test: an eye-tracking study

The current study aims to explore the cognitive validity of the iBT TOEFL reading test by investigating test takers’ eye movements on individual items. It is assumed that successful test takers would adopt the intended reading processes, the same types and levels of cognitive processes that they would use for real-world reading tasks. Forty-seven Chinese ESL students participated in the study, in which they took the TOEFL reading practice testlet on a computer, completed comprehension subskill tasks, and had stimulated recall interviews. Results showed that test takers tend to rely heavily on careful reading skills, while expeditious reading skills were rarely activated. The scope of reading was often restricted to the local level; learners hardly read more than a paragraph to answer questions. In some factual question items, successful readers were more efficient in reading and locating key information, whereas such group differences were not found in other items. Lastly, the gaze plots suggest that learners’ eye movements manifest various interactions between comprehension subskills, primarily subject to bottom-up linguistic processing. The limitations and implications of learners’ eye-tracking data for test validation will be further discussed.

TRUSTING SMART SPEAKERS: A TYPOLOGY OF INVOCATIONARY ACTS

Smart speakers such as the Google Home have the seemingly magical capacity to respond to user invocations in natural language. I argue that these are invocationary acts. In terms of Austin’s speech act theory, smart speakers interpret what the user says (locutionary: speech-to-text), what their statement does (illocutionary: artificial intelligence), and attempt fulfil the obligation of the user’s command (perlocutionary: AI & text-to-speech). The smart speaker responds with its own speech acts; in Searle’s terms it might assert facts (representatives: e.g. answering a factual question), ask the user to do something (directive, e.g. asking a question in a quiz game) communicate a psychological state (expressive: e.g. answering the question ‘Do you love me?’), commit to a future action (commissive: e.g setting a timer) or make a declaration (such as confirming a purchase). User invocations are most often directives, and are most often initiated with the ‘wake word’ ‘Hey Google’. The computer’s response comes automatically through what I call invocationary acts. In this case, the user’s invocation is answered by the evocation of synthesised speech, sound, music and/or images. Drawing on an analysis of 300 commands drawn from online publications, I developed a typology of invocationary acts: Search, Lookup, Error, Media, Third party search, Location, User data, Random, Scripted response (often randomly selected from multiple answers), Interaction (applications such as a tutorial or a game), Device (controlling media, or smart home devices) and Clock. This analysis points to the limitations of the voice user interface paradigm.

Scientific Models and Metalinguistic Negotiation

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that, at least, some metaphysical debates are ‘metalinguistic negotiations’ (to employ a recent term coined by David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell). I will take the dispute between the dominant approaches of realism and the anti-realism ones (especially Fictionalism) about the ontological status of scientific models as a case-study. I will argue that such a debate may be better understood as a disagreement, at bottom normatively, motivated, insofar as a normative and non-factual question may be involved in it: how the relevant piece of language ought to be used. Even though I will generally assess the prospects for a broadly deflationist approach, I shall outline a sense in which the dispute can be recast as ‘minimally substantive’.