There is a lack of exhaustively investigation for the public speech and the modality of politicians’ speech is been researched for the very first time. The society is highly interested in politics and it has a big influence on the users of language. The paper deals with the modality conception and its expression ways in politicians’ speech. The political discussions program’s “Spaudos klubas” materials are used for studies. After analysis of politicians spoken language was made, some bents for modality usage came to light. In a case of epistemic modality possibility and reality, that embrace real facts, are expressed in politicians’ speech. And in a case of deontic modality possibility and necessity, that encompass will acts, are expressed. The usage of dynamic modality in politicians’ speech is very rare. Realis is put into words by indicative mood and irrealis – by subjunctive and imperative mood. Another way politicians express irrealis is future tense. All basic senses of primary modality - reality, possibility and necessary, are introduced in politicians’ spoken language. In discussions programs politicians mostly use reality meaning sentences (65,35 percent). In telecasts people in politics use all types of basic modal sentences. Direct sentences are used in the most part, it is evade a usage of incentive sentences and the number of interrogative sentences is the least. Secondary modality categorical reliability expression cases are more frequent than the problematic... [to full text]

This thesis examines the role of epistemic cognition within the context of a Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) curriculum for secondary science. The study employs a new form of design-based research, called Model-Based Design Research (MBDR), which first maps a formal pedagogical model onto the curriculum design, and then assesses how the enacted curriculum adheres to the design. The curriculum design was a ten-week Grade 11 Biology unit that met the Ontario Ministry requirements for evolution and biodiversity, and included activities situated within a unique immersive environment called EvoRoom. The thesis includes an assessment of students' epistemological views about science and science learning, and evaluates the epistemic commitments of KCI using a relevant theoretical framework of epistemic cognition. The analysis reveals the complex interconnections amongst the epistemological, pedagogical and technological elements of the design, resulting in recommendations for future design iterations as well as theoretical insights concerning the KCI model.

This thesis examines the role of epistemic cognition within the context of a Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) curriculum for secondary science. The study employs a new form of design-based research, called Model-Based Design Research (MBDR), which first maps a formal pedagogical model onto the curriculum design, and then assesses how the enacted curriculum adheres to the design. The curriculum design was a ten-week Grade 11 Biology unit that met the Ontario Ministry requirements for evolution and biodiversity, and included activities situated within a unique immersive environment called EvoRoom. The thesis includes an assessment of students' epistemological views about science and science learning, and evaluates the epistemic commitments of KCI using a relevant theoretical framework of epistemic cognition. The analysis reveals the complex interconnections amongst the epistemological, pedagogical and technological elements of the design, resulting in recommendations for future design iterations as well as theoretical insights concerning the KCI model.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine Richard Rorty’s arguments in favour of a limited role for religion in the public sphere, both with regard to their practical value and their consistency with Rorty’s other philosophical commitments. A brief description of Rorty’s various philosophical commitments is followed by a detailed analysis of the negative practical consequences that can be foreseen resulting from Rorty’s approach to the topic of religion and any attempt to enforce his proposed treatment of religion. After looking at the practical problems with Rorty’s position, a closer look was taken at Rorty’s consistency across his philosophical writings. With a particular focus on Rorty’s pragmatism and his epistemic relativism the author concludes that Rorty’s arguments for reducing the influence of religion in the public sphere remain of questionable practicality and, furthermore, are at odds with his epistemological commitments. Rorty’s commitment to liberal democracy entails a commitment to protecting citizens’ rights to voice their opinions in hopes of influencing public policy. Despite his controversial writings with regards to the role of religion in society, authors such as Jeffrey Stout and Nicholas Wolterstorff provide alternative approaches to the appropriate treatment of religion in society that remain consistent with an anti-foundational commitment to liberal democracy and can expect to produce more favourable practical outcomes. / Graduate

In this thesis I scavenge the history of philosophy for answers to the question ‘How are claims to knowledge justified?’. I argue that Plato’s psychological doctrine of knowledge marks the starting point of a philosophical inquiry motivated by the possibility to discover foundations of knowledge through investigating the nature of mind. At the core of this inquiry lies the hypothesis that if the psychological mechanisms that govern the capacity for knowledge acquisition is fully understood, then answers will follow about why judgements are true or false. The prospective result of the inquiry is a theory of universal epistemic justification which demarcates epistemically warranted beliefs from unwarranted beliefs. I suggest that there is a historically persistent case of cognitive dissonance within the epistemological enterprise — a tension between two of its central theses — which is caused by the persistence of the of the hitherto unsuccessful but ongoing quest for universal epistemic justification, and its inciting promises. The contradicting theses are those of certain justification (that one is justified in believing that p only if p is entailed by evidence) and proportional justification (that one is proportionally justified in believing that p to the extent that evidence makes p credible). I discuss the consequences of giving up one of the respective theses. I conclude that the thesis of certain justification cannot be given up unless an adequate theory of proportional justification is proposed, and that the legacy of searching for universal epistemic justification will continue unless epistemologists are able to construct one.

This dissertation reports on the results of a study into the characteristics of epistemic topoi and the methods of their identification in a corpus of biomedical publications. The study was conceived in response to the need for a systematized description of the organization of argumentative text and discourse. This need is well recognized in knowledge-intensive fields: information processing, storage, and retrieval; corpus analysis and natural language processing; data mining, knowledge management and translation; professional training and education. The study followed the design of a situated study combined with a methodological inquiry. I used inductive methods to describe the features and functions of recurrent patterns of argumentative and linguistic organization. This part of the study consisted in close reading of a corpus of fifty-five NTG papers and rhetorical and linguistic annotation of seventeen clinical studies (45,599 words) selected from the corpus. The data was generated by means of rhetorical and linguistic analysis. Visual annotation played an essential role in the identification and description of the argumentative patterns, complementing the traditional methods of corpus analysis. Forty-eight basic and nine composite epistemic topoi forming the superstructure of the papers were identified in the corpus. The topoi were found to be loosely associated with the IMRD structure and signalled with configurations of lexicogrammatical, semantic, deictic, and coreferential features. The topoi were classified according to the modes of reasoning and textual and discursive functions. The obtained results confirmed earlier insights into the links of linguistic patterning with text and discourse semantics. A significant outcome of the linguistic analysis is a catalogue of linguistic features that were found to have regular links with the topoi in the corpus. The role of linguistic configurations as identifiers of argumentative meanings makes them a valuable medium of text and discourse analysis. By linking the argumentative meanings to the surface features of text and discourse, the analysis of linguistic configurations presents informatics practitioners with an alternative to the current methods of natural language processing and knowledge management. The catalogue of linguistic features and a detailed description of the study design make the presented findings amenable to secondary analysis, extrapolation, and generalization. The auxiliary objectives of this study were a survey of argumentative practices represented in the corpus and a review of the state of epistemic research. The results of the survey and review suggest that agonistic reasoning practices and over-reliance on reductionist models have negative implications for research writing and communication. Specifically, they hamper analysis of argumentative organization of natural text and discourse. As an alternative to agonistic argumentation, I propose an argumentation model based on Aristotle’s and Kneale’s conceptions of situated knowledge and learning. The model of textual and discursive organization that accommodates situated knowledge and learning is political stasis. This model can be used as a heuristic and analytic tool. In this dissertation I use it as an explanatory conception and as a system of reference points for identifying significant research trends both in argumentation studies and in clinical NTG research.

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No description available.

Le concept de plasticité est progressivement devenu un concept théorique essentiel dans la biologie depuis le début du XXe siècle. Les biologistes s'y réfèrent aussi bien en biologie du développement, pour caractériser la potentialité des cellules à se diviser et à se différencier, en écologie, pour décrire la pluralité des formes observables pour une espèce donnée en fonction des environnements dans lesquels elle se développe, ou encore en génétique, pour préciser la manière dont l'information génétique peut être régulée. Certains auteurs en sont même venus à se demander si le concept de plasticité n'avait pas acquis aujourd'hui l'importance théorique qui avait été accordée au concept de gène en biologie au début du siècle précédent. Dans cette étude, nous proposons une analyse historique et épistémologique du concept de plasticité dans les sciences du vivant. Nous montrons que si le concept opératoire de plasticité sert à caractériser un paradigme épistémique donné - c'est-à-dire le maintien d'un usage singulier, désormais daté, du concept, fortement lié à l'émergence de la génétique -, la récurrence de l'idée générale de plasticité, tout au long de l'histoire des sciences du vivant, signale son caractère essentiel pour envisager certains phénomènes du vivant. Cette étude montre également que si le concept de plasticité est devenu un élément-clé pour penser une « synthèse étendue» de l'évolution, son importance heuristique pour la biologie contemporaine ne se limite pas à cette seule ambition: tel qu'il est mobilisé dans la biologie contemporaine, le concept de plasticité cherche le plus souvent à rendre compte d'une spécificité du vivant. / Since the early twentieth century, plasticity has gradually become an important theoretical concept in biology. Biologists refer to it either in developmental biology, to characterize cells potential to divide and differentiate, or in ecology to describe the diversity of observable forms for a given trait in environments in which the species develop, or even in genetics to describe how genetic information can be regulated. Some authors have even come to wonder whether the concept of plasticity have not nowadays acquired the theoretical importance that was given to the concept of the gene in biology at the beginning of the previous century. In this study, we propose a historical and epistemological analysis of plasticity in life sciences. We show that if the operating concept of plasticity characterizes a given epistemic paradigm - that is to say, the continuity of a certain use, now dated, of the concept, closely linked to the emergence of genetics - the recurrence of the general idea of plasticity, throughout the history of life sciences, indicates its essential role in the way we think of life processes. The study also shows that although plasticity has become a key element in order to think about an "Extended Eynthesis" in evolution, its heuristic importance for contemporary biology is not limited to this single ambition: as it is mobilized in contemporary biology, the concept of plasticity most often seeks to account for the specificity of living systems.

This research is a practitioner inquiry into change in concepts in contexts of task based discourse in teacher education classrooms. The particular concepts selected for study are epistemic beliefs about knowledge in history. A hypothesis that there is a relationship between a perception of agency in task based discourse and change in concepts is proposed for research on the basis of a review of Kuhn's arguments for paradigm change and those of others on the problems of convergence of meaning between paradigms.1 Four of five quasi experimental studies conducted find tentative support for the alternative hypothesis and demonstrate how the relationship could be tested in the field. Change in epistemic beliefs from pre-test to post-test is significant in both groups, Control and Experimental, and consistently more and better change with moderate effect sizes is seen in the Experimental groups. A matched pedagogical method, experience of a range of suitable examples, Skemp (1971) was provided to both Control and Experimental groups and this is found to be effective in developing beliefs. The experimental construct, a perception of agency in task based discourse was enhanced in Experimental groups alone, which is used to explain the difference in change. A rubric, the Categories of Beliefs about Knowledge in History, CBKH, is developed and employed to examine responses to open ended questions. Likert Scales are also used and conclusions are drawn with a final quantitative analysis of data. Excerpts from a focus group discussion illustrate the process.