Two primary, interdependent goals of the NSW Higher School Certificate Aboriginal Studies course are enhancing Indigenous students’ self-concepts and educational outcome. It was considered that these would lead to increased Indigenous student participation and retention to Year 12. Yet recently there has been a decline in enrolments. Despite the introduction of Aboriginal Studies over a decade ago, no rigorous research has been undertaken to determine the impact of the course or the extent to which the aims of the course have been achieved. Research in Aboriginal Education has identified that Indigenous students are still not achieving at the same level as their non-Indigenous counterparts. However, the majority of studies to date have been theoretical and descriptive in nature. The primary purpose of the present investigation was to address some of the above issues by elucidating the (a) factors that influence Indigenous students’ decisions to participate in the HSC Aboriginal Studies course; (b) impact of the course on Indigenous students’ self-concepts and educational outcomes; and (c) strengths and limitations of the course. The research was undertaken in three NSW Department of Education and Training secondary schools, located in rural, north coast, and south coast areas. Results indicated that Indigenous students choose Aboriginal Studies based on their need to understand more about their own culture. There were also clear educational benefits in that Aboriginal Studies was considered to be a motivational factor that encouraged attendance at school and enhanced their academic self concept. Both staff and students suggested that the academic rigour of the Aboriginal Studies course contributed to declining enrolments. Overall the findings suggest that whilst the current course has some limitations, there are also many strengths; this implies there is a need to continue to refine the course to meet the needs of Indigenous students. / Master of Education (Hons)

This dissertation establishes that the methods used to generate social and political criticism are just as important as the ideas expressed. This proposition is explored in both the ideas and methods of the Indian political psychologist Ashis Nandy. For over thirty-five years Nandy has contributed extensively to a number of debates within a global academic culture, and as a public intellectual in India. His critique of Indian secularism has produced intense controversy, and is a dynamic case to explore this relationship between critique and method, and by extension the identity of the critic. This case study also allows for an analysis, of what is widely accepted, as the confronting features of his critique. In radically questioning the ways in which the ideology of secularism operates in Indian political culture, and in defining concepts of Indianness, Nandy contests dominant political ideas and ideals. Further, he confronts the role these ideas and ideals play in foreclosing understandings of national identity, national integration and Indian democracy. I argue that this confrontation demonstrates a critical and psychoanalytic engagement with the constituting features of Indian political culture, and political identities. This case study also provides a context to consider the implications of this approach for understanding and representing the identity of the critic. / Much criticism of Nandy and his work is based on beliefs that he represents the intellectual basis of anti-secularism and anti-modernism in India. According to these accounts Nandy carries forward a threatening and disruptive quality. This is evident, it is claimed, in his calls to return to a regressive traditionalism. These responses represent his ideas and his identity within a particular ideological and intellectual framework. This takes place though, at the expense of engaging with the methods operating in his work. The focus on the disruptive and threatening features of Nandy and his work creates a series of over-determined responses that undermine recognition of his psychoanalytic approach. I argue that the location of agitation and fascination for critics is in Nandy’s willingness to confront accepted identities, meanings, fantasies, projections and ideals operating in politics, and in working through the complexities of subjectivity. This aptitude for working with external and internal processes, at the border between culture and psyche is where the psychoanalytic focus of his work is located. The psychoanalytic focus, in working with and working through the complexities of human subjectivity, produces a confronting self-reflexivity that can disarm critics. Nandy’s psychoanalytic reading of secularism is the starting point for theorising and characterising the method, or mode of critique operating across his work more broadly. / This dissertation argues that Nandy’s approach or method is characterised by a psychoanalytic mode. The psychoanalytic mode of engagement is illustrated in his capacity to generate critical analytic perspectives that rupture and regenerate subjectivity, including his own. This dissertation demonstrates Nandy’s psychoanalytic commitment, and argues the importance of this approach. Therefore, this reading of Nandy and the methods that are employed to develop this inquiry, build a case for the importance of psychoanalytic concepts, as a necessary interpretive mode for social and political criticism.

La construction d'ontologies est un processus fastidieux qui nécessite un travail manuel conséquent. Les textes, en tant que sources de connaissances, peuvent optimiser les recours aux experts du domaine. Le passage des textes à l'ontologie requiert un double changement de perspective. Tout d'abord du niveau du discours vers le niveau linguistique (terminologie, hyperonymie, synonymie, etc.), à l'aide d'outils de traitement automatique des langues. La conceptualisation, manuelle, permet ensuite d'entrer dans le monde des modèles. Nous étudions dans cette thèse comment une méthode de regroupement automatique, l'analyse de concepts formels (ACF), peut se combiner aux éléments du niveau linguistique afin de faciliter la tâche de conceptualisation. Nous avons mené des expérimentations sur trois domaines différents, représentés par des corpus de taille comparable. Nous montrons que, dans l'état actuel des connaissances, la construction d'ontologies à partir de textes ne peut s'effectuer de manière totalement automatique. Nous proposons plusieurs paramétrages pour s'affranchir des problèmes inhérents à l'utilisation de l'ACF sur les données textuelles, dans l'optique de fournir à l'utilisateur à la fois des regroupements pertinents et une vue fidèle sur le matériau textuel.

This essay is about the worldview of Swedish people, who experienced healing. I presumed that concepts, which underpin healing phenomena and thereby express the healer’s worldview, could differ from many people’s concepts and worldviews. The question was, if people with a different worldview attended a healing session and experienced positive results for their health, would that give them reasons to reconsider their worldview? Four people were chosen for this research, who had experienced healing and were willing to talk about it. Based on a participating observation, I describe a personal and their healing session, to create an understanding of their experience. Moreover, the healing method Laying on of Hands, which is used during these sessions is described. With the following in-depth interviews, I documented the worldview history of the interviewees, with focus on religious aspects, and compared it with their worldviews after they were convinced, that healing was working for them. In the analysis, coping theory was applied, to describe processes around the healing, which possibly contributed to the change in the patient’s worldview. The results showed a connection between the patient’s goal to regain health and the acceptance of new concepts in their worldview.

1. Intuitions are often treated in philosophy as a basic evidential source to confirm/discredit a proposed definition or theory; e.g. intuitions about Gettier cases are taken to deny a justified-true-belief analysis of ‘knowledge’. Recently, Weinberg, Nichols & Stitch (WN&S) provided evidence that epistemic intuitions vary across persons and cultures. In-so-far as philosophy of this type (Standard Philosophical Methodology – SPM) is committed to provide conceptual analyses, the use of intuition is suspect – it does not exhibit the requisite normativity. I provide an analysis of intuition, with an emphasis on its neural – or connectionist – cognitive backbone; the analysis provides insight into its epistemic status and proper role within SPM. Intuition is initially characterized as the recognition of a pattern. 2. The metaphysics of ‘pattern’ is analyzed for the purpose of denying that traditional symbolic computation is capable of differentiating the patterns of interest. 3. The epistemology of ‘recognition’ is analyzed, again, to deny that traditional computation is capable of capturing human acts of recognition. 4. Fodor’s informational semantics, his Language of Thought and his Representational Theory of Mind are analyzed and his arguments denied. Again, the purpose is to deny traditional computational theories of mind. 5. Both intuition and a theory of concepts – pragmatic conceptualism - are developed within the connectionist computational paradigm. Intuition is a particular sort of occurrent signal, and a concept is a counterfactually defined set of signals. Standard connectionist theory is significantly extended to develop my position, and consciousness plays a key functional role. This extension – taking connectionism seriously – is argued to be justified on the basis of the failure of the traditional computing paradigm to account for human cognition. 6. Repercussions for the use of intuition in SPM are developed. Variance in intuition is characterized – and expected - as a kind of bias in the network, either inherent or externally-provoked. The WN&S data is explained in the context of this bias. If SPM remains committed to the use of intuition, then intuition must be taken as a part of a larger body of evidence, and it is from experts – not the folk – that intuitions should be solicited.

This thesis examines the effects of linguistic input on the development of children’s epistemic concepts. It draws upon two fundamental questions in the field of cognitive development: (a) whether distinctions between automatic and controlled forms of cognitive processing are indicative of underlying conceptual differences, and (b) whether language is critical to the process of concept development. To establish the background of the current research, a summary of how these theoretical questions have been addressed in other fields of cognitive psychology is first provided (Chapter 1). These questions are then re- examined within the specific domain of epistemic concept development (Chapter 2). Changes in false-belief processing that occur between infancy and the early preschool years are discussed in relation to two competing theories of false-belief development. A framework to explain how language promotes children’s transition between automatic and controlled forms of processing is then provided. It is suggested that language facilitates change by both reducing the cognitive demands associated with controlled response tasks as well as assisting with the formation of robust epistemic representations. An empirical study that was designed to examine the effects of epistemic language (i.e., verbs and syntax) on children’s automatic and controlled processing of belief is then described (Chapters 3 to 5). Eighty-four children (Mage = 3;5 years), who initially failed elicited measures of false-belief, were trained with visual contexts of true- and false-belief. The critical manipulation across three conditions was the linguistic input presented in conjunction with these contexts. Children heard narrations that contained either (a) the description of an agent’s actions without an epistemic verb, (b) a familiar epistemic verb (thinks) across both contexts, or (c) the familiar epistemic verb in contexts of true-belief and a novel epistemic verb (gorps) in contexts of false-belief. Results demonstrated a significant advantage for children who were trained with epistemic verbs on spontaneous measures of false-belief (i.e., anticipatory gaze). Significant effects of epistemic verb exposure were also demonstrated in novel contexts of belief induction. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to theories that make distinct predictions about the role of language in epistemic concept development (Chapter 6).

1. Intuitions are often treated in philosophy as a basic evidential source to confirm/discredit a proposed definition or theory; e.g. intuitions about Gettier cases are taken to deny a justified-true-belief analysis of ‘knowledge’. Recently, Weinberg, Nichols & Stitch (WN&S) provided evidence that epistemic intuitions vary across persons and cultures. In-so-far as philosophy of this type (Standard Philosophical Methodology – SPM) is committed to provide conceptual analyses, the use of intuition is suspect – it does not exhibit the requisite normativity. I provide an analysis of intuition, with an emphasis on its neural – or connectionist – cognitive backbone; the analysis provides insight into its epistemic status and proper role within SPM. Intuition is initially characterized as the recognition of a pattern. 2. The metaphysics of ‘pattern’ is analyzed for the purpose of denying that traditional symbolic computation is capable of differentiating the patterns of interest. 3. The epistemology of ‘recognition’ is analyzed, again, to deny that traditional computation is capable of capturing human acts of recognition. 4. Fodor’s informational semantics, his Language of Thought and his Representational Theory of Mind are analyzed and his arguments denied. Again, the purpose is to deny traditional computational theories of mind. 5. Both intuition and a theory of concepts – pragmatic conceptualism - are developed within the connectionist computational paradigm. Intuition is a particular sort of occurrent signal, and a concept is a counterfactually defined set of signals. Standard connectionist theory is significantly extended to develop my position, and consciousness plays a key functional role. This extension – taking connectionism seriously – is argued to be justified on the basis of the failure of the traditional computing paradigm to account for human cognition. 6. Repercussions for the use of intuition in SPM are developed. Variance in intuition is characterized – and expected - as a kind of bias in the network, either inherent or externally-provoked. The WN&S data is explained in the context of this bias. If SPM remains committed to the use of intuition, then intuition must be taken as a part of a larger body of evidence, and it is from experts – not the folk – that intuitions should be solicited.

La fouille de données est définie comme le traitement d'une grande quantité de données afin d'y extraire des connaissances non triviales et utiles. Cette analyse permet de dégager de la masse d'informations des tendances, des regroupements de données et de formuler des hypothèses. Un des domaines de la fouille de données est la recherche de règles d'association. Les algorithmes utilisés en recherche de règles d'association ont généralement l'inconvénient de ne pouvoir identifier des règles dont un des termes est infréquent, mais qui appartient à une catégorie qui, elle, l'est. Les règles d'association multi-niveaux permettent d'identifier les associations impliquant des termes dont les niveaux de généralisation/spécialisation diffèrent. Les algorithmes de recherche de règles d'association multi-niveaux présentés à ce jour ont en commun la génération d'un nombre souvent très grand de règles redondantes. Notre contribution dans cette étude est constituée de la conception de deux algorithmes de recherche de règles d'association mutli-niveaux basés sur l'analyse formelle de concepts, ce qui permet de restreindre la génération des règles d'association aux seules règles informatives maximales. Nous avons également réalisé l'implémentation de ces deux algorithmes, en plus de celle d'un autre algorithme utilisé aux fins de comparaison dans la littérature. Nous avons finalement comparé expérimentalement ces trois implémentations et les résultats obtenus confirment l'intérêt de l'approche basée sur l'analyse formelle de concepts, tout en illustrant l'effet des optimisations apportés au traitement. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Treillis de Galois (treillis de concepts), Analyse formelle de concepts, Fouille de données (data mining), Règles d'association, Base de règles, Règles d'association multi-niveaux (règles d'association généralisées), Base de règles multi-niveaux (bases de règles généralisées).

La fouille de données est l'extraction non triviale d'informations implicites, inconnues et utiles à partir des données (Piatetsky-Shapiro & Frawley, 1991). Plus récemment, la notion de systèmes de gestion de base de données inductive (SGBDI) propose l'union de la base de données traditionnelle à la fouille de données et d'une base de motifs ou patrons de données. Ces derniers sont les agents fondamentaux dans les SGBDI. Dans ce mémoire le motif examiné est le concept formel. Cependant, pour un ensemble de données (nommé contexte formel dans l'AFC) de grande taille où les données sont fortement corrélées, l'extraction peut être difficile à cause des problèmes de combinatoire inhérente à cette structure. Il est vrai que l'extraction de la collection des concepts formels fréquents, donc un iceberg plutôt qu'un treillis, est une solution. Cependant, d'une part, pour un seuil de fréquence trop faible, l'extraction des concepts formels fréquents peut demeurer difficile et la combinatoire de l'extraction demeure. D'autre part, les utilisateurs pourraient préférer conserver le treillis mais appliquer une certaine relaxation sur le formalisme des concepts formels. Cette relaxation se ferait en acceptant des exceptions dans les concepts dont les seuils sur les exceptions seraient choisis par l'utilisateur. En dernier lieu, le contexte formel pourrait bien avoir des erreurs dans ses transactions. Ces erreurs pourraient donc être la cause du nombre indu de concepts formels extraits. Une relaxation au niveau de l'extraction des concepts formels pourrait être une solution à ce problème. Notre contribution se situe au niveau d'un motif en particulier et de son mode d'extraction. Ce mémoire propose donc un concept tolérant des exceptions bornées par des seuils, soit les concepts denses et explore la possibilité d'extraire un tel motif par l'algorithme incrémentaI par cardinalité. En dépit du fait que le concept ne soit plus formel mais tolérant des exceptions, les principales notions de l'analyse formelle de concepts, (e.g. la relation de précédence, le treillis) sont fortement désirées. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Concepts formels, Concepts denses, Treillis de concepts formels, Analyse formelle de concepts, Concepts tolérant des exceptions, Algorithme d'extraction de concepts, Représentation condensée.

Over the past few decades, the dominant view by comparative psychologists of analogical reasoning in nonhuman primates was one of dichotomy between apes, including humans, and monkeys: the distinction between the analogical ape and paleological monkey (Thompson & Oden, 2000). Whereas evidence for analogy proper by representation reinterpretation in monkeys is sparse and debated, the gap between that which is analogic and paleologic has been narrowed by the studies presented here. Representation of relational concepts important for analogy proves difficult for rhesus and capuchin monkeys without the ability to rely on a greater amount of perceptual variability, implicating a perceptually-bound predisposition in problem-solving (Chapters 2-3). A shift in attention from perceptual features to abstract concepts for employment in relational matching is again difficult, but not impossible given cognitive incentive in the form of differential outcomes to refocus attention on conceptual properties (Chapter 4). Finally, chimpanzees unlike monkeys appear more apt to reason by analogy, perhaps due to a more default conceptual focus (Chapter 5). Taken together, these studies provide an account for the emergence of analogical reasoning skills throughout the primate lineage in contrast to views regarding analogy a hallmark of human intelligence.