No description available.

Autism awareness has increased in recent years in part because it is marked by confusion and controversy. The confusion and controversy stem from the fact that there are many beliefs about autism but little agreement. In this dissertation I examined the rhetoric produced by three primary groups?professional autism experts, caregivers to children with autism and mainstream media. In particular, I studied how each group explains autism. Explanations are vehicles for persuasion; they advance particular viewpoints about an illness. I conducted a rhetorical analysis of the three discourses produced by these groups, highlighting the most cohesive themes to emerge from the discourse. To study professional autism experts? explanations, I analyzed articles in autism?s flagship research journal and research articles from other journals and key books for additional insight. A computer metaphor guided expert explanations of autism. To define autism through one of most advanced and culturally accepted technological devices lent significant credibility to the explanations. Next, I studied the caregiver explanations, first conducting interviews with 19 parents to children with autism and then I analyzed the transcripts. Caregivers described autism as a social pathology; their children with autism were different and distant, or alien-like. The pathology affected people with autism, their caregivers and their families, many other neuro-typical people, and it also determined the course of treatment for the person with autism. Finally, mainstream media often explained autism in terms of its conflicts, framing its explanations of autism with a war metaphor. The vaccine debate received a significant attention, recharacterizing the role of medical institutions and health practitioners. Caregivers became the heroes, using their personal experiences as weapons against healthcare practitioners and their science. Caregivers also dealt with the invasion of autism, struggling for ways to return their children closer to the boundary that exists between the child with autism and the neuro-typical child.

Extending recent advances in attribution theory, this thesis aims to develop and apply an analytic framework within which the social constitution of explanations might be better accommodated. To this end, Part I draws on three theoretical trends: generative social psychology; critical theory; and Foucauldlan discourse analysis. Respectively, these provide: the rationale for the critique of and the alternatives to orthodox social psychology, critical reflection on the social field, and the means to locate and analyze ordinary explanations. It is shown how: conventional cognitivist analyses tend to ignore the social contingency of explanations; intergroup theory cannot adequately deal with the influence of role; script theory does not address explanations' mediation of power. By contrast, the present thesis analyzes explanations in the context of numerous intertwined factors. Including role, intergroup and power relations, and institutional, representational and material influences. In this, role’. constituted in a network of discourses and practices, is the principal conceptual tool. Packaged with a repertoire of explanations, cognitions, identities and functions, role interacts with situational factors to shape explanations. It is suggested that, through their mediation of power, explanations serve to reproduce the explainer’s role and related roles and structures. Part II applies this approach to the explanation of rape. Detailed analysis of gender stereotypes, rape myths, the the professional, polemical and lay explanation of rape produced three ideal types: the dimensional, typological and schismatic. These served to tie particular explanatory forms to their corresponding frameworks of discourse/practice and to role. The function of such rape explanations was further explored with respect to 'traditional' and 'anti-sexist' male roles, and to the role of policeman- In the latter case, it was shown that explanations tended to distance rape from 'normal’ sexuality, thereby recursively conditioning the police role and its legal, organizational and cultural delineants.

The subject matter of this thesis are some aspects of the expression of explanations in spoken discourse. The study of explanations has occupied the attention of many researchers in social psychology and in neighbouring disciplines; the study of talk has occupied an even greater number. In the thesis I try to integrate certain areas of these two fields. Chapter one sketches the history of the concern with language which has characterised developments in the social sciences this century. This chapter is incidentally an introduction to some of the key themes of the thesis and to why I think research based on naturally occurring discourse is important. Research on explanations in social psychology has been dominated by research which has gone on under the heading of attribution theory. In chapter two I address a controversy in the application of concepts drawn from attribution theory to clinical psychology, namely whether or not people have fixed styles in the way that they attribute causes for outcomes. Studying family therapy sessions and interviews with parents with a coding procedure I show that the variety of possible styles is broader than has been suggested previously. Chapter three further pursues causal expressions as cases of explanations by asking what a causal statement is. The chapter opens with a discussion of how causes relate to reasons concluding that reasons are a species of cause. I then go on to use data from earlier work to study what expressions speakers use to make causal utterances. The direction of enquiry has been to suggest that rather than studying causal beliefs it is causal utterances that are under study. An utterance is, if you like, "situated", that is to say, what a speaker says is context-bound. I talk of "communicative constraints" operating here. Chapter four reviews some work in the study of conversation with an eye to elucidating the sense in which a speaker's utterances are a product of the situation in which they occur and to look at the researchability of this intuition. Practical and conceptual reasons suggest that the approach generally known as conversation analysis stemming from the study of ethnomethodology is the most interesting and fruitful way toproceed (in this context). Chapters five and six report studies of a computing advisory centre showing 1, the range of accounting procedures which occur as part of the business-at-hand in these sessions, 2, how speakers' utterances, can change within a single conversation. Chapter six looks at the integration of non-vocal behaviour and by considering data on this argues that the idea of normativity, rather than a quasi grammatical notion, is the appropriate level of explanation for the regularities which we find in human interaction. In moving away from beliefs as the object of analysis I could be accused of taking an anti-cognitive stance. Chapter seven explores cognitive versus interactional perspectives in communication. Chapter eight reflects on the approach which I have adopted and suggests how inspite, indeed through, its focus on situational events an account of the capacities drawn on in offering explanations can itself illuminate phenomena seen as beyond its grasp

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Five studies were conducted examining a pattern of interaction children use as a mechanism for learning from others. The three components of this interaction pattern consisted of children’s questions, adults’ explanations and children’s follow-up. I was interested in how individual differences might influence this interaction pattern. In Study 1, I performed a secondary data analysis to explore the entire pattern of interaction. Analyses revealed that children across diverse socioeconomic groups asked a similar proportion of information seeking questions in daily conversations with caregivers. However, when looking at the responses children received, caregivers from low-SES families offered significantly fewer exemplary responses (those that include explanations) to causal questions than mid-SES caregivers. When exploring the quality of explanations that caregivers offered, low-SES caregivers provided more circular explanations while mid-SES caregivers provided more non-circular explanations. Finally, when exploring children’s follow-up to unsatisfactory responses, no differences were found when looking at fact-based questions. Indeed, children from low-SES and mid-SES families were most likely to re-ask their original question which indicates that children across diverse backgrounds purposely use their questions to acquire new knowledge. Significant differences were found when looking at follow-up to unsatisfactory responses to causal questions. Mid-SES children were significantly more likely to provide their own explanations. These findings extend previous work and suggest that this interaction pattern may not look the same across diverse backgrounds. Studies 2, 3 and 4 explored the first half of this interaction pattern: questions and adult explanations. Here I focused on 3- and 5-year-olds’ evaluation of non-circular and circular explanations, and their use of such explanations to determine informant credibility. Whereas 5-year-olds demonstrated a selective preference for non-circular over circular explanations (Study 2: long explanations; Study 3: short explanations), 3-year-olds only demonstrated a preference for the non-circular when the explanations were shortened (Study 3). Children’s evaluation of the explanations extended to their inferences about the informants’ future credibility. Both age groups demonstrated a selective preference for learning novel explanations from an informant who had previously provided non-circular explanations – although only 5-year-olds also preferred to learn novel labels from her. However, when looking at individual differences in these preferences by socioeconomic status (Study 4) children from low-SES families selectively preferred informants who provided circular explanations, whereas mid-SES children showed a preference for non-circular explanations. Study 5 explored the second half of the interaction pattern: adult explanations and children’s follow-up. Here I explored individual differences in epistemological beliefs and their impact on caregiver’s explanations and children’s subsequent learning. Epistemological stance predicted children’s learning. Children of caregivers who adopted an evaluativist stance learned more than children of caregivers who used an absolutist stance. Taken together, these results have the potential to inform caregivers, daycare providers and classroom teachers about the importance of the responses they offer to children’s questions. These responses are integral to the question, explanation, follow-up pattern of interaction that children use when acquiring new knowledge from others. Understanding how individual differences impact this interaction pattern may help decrease cognitive disparities between children across sociocultural contexts before the onset of formal schooling.

In the past few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved into a powerful tool applied in multi-disciplinary fields to resolve sophisticated problems. As AI becomes more powerful and ubiquitous, oftentimes the AI methods also become opaque, which might lead to trust issues for the users of the AI systems as well as fail to meet the legal requirements of AI transparency. In this report, the possibility of making a credit-card fraud detection support system explainable to users is investigated through a quantitative survey. A publicly available credit card dataset was used. Deep Learning and Random Forest were the two Machine Learning (ML) methodsimplemented and applied on the credit card fraud dataset, and the performance of their results was evaluated in terms of their accuracy, recall, sufficiency, and F1 score. After that, two explainable AI (XAI) methods - SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) and LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations) were implemented and applied to the results obtained from these two ML methods. Finally, the XAI results were evaluated through a quantitative survey. The results from the survey revealed that the XAI explanations can slightly increase the users' impression of the system's ability to reason and LIME had a slight advantage over SHAP in terms of explainability. Further investigation of visualizing data pre-processing and the training process is suggested to offer deep explanations for users.

Proponents of mechanistic explanation have argued that dynamical models are mere phenomenal models, in that they describe rather than explain the scientific phenomena produced by complex systems. I argue instead that dynamical models can, in fact, be explanatory. Using an example from neuroscientific research on epilepsy, I show that dynamical models can meet the explanatory demands met by mechanistic models, and as such occupy their own unique place within the space of explanatory scientific models.

Esta pesquisa, vinculada à concessão da bolsa CNPq e intitulada \"Modelos e Explicações: a apropriação de entidades científicas e o uso que os alunos fazem delas\", assume a importância dos modelos tanto na ciência quanto no ensino, destaca que a produção de explicações se dá por meio dos modelos e propõe investigar a relação entre a construção de modelos na ciência e no ensino de ciências por meio das entidades. Enquanto representações eficazes do mundo físico, os modelos científicos precisam passar pela transposição didática para constituírem-se como objetos de ensino. Deste modo este trabalho tem também como objetivo compreender quais aspectos da construção de modelos na ciência pode/deve ser transposto para o contexto escolar. Avançaremos em relação à ideia de que uma adequada definição de modelo, tanto na ciência quanto em seu ensino, se relaciona com a necessidade de explicar e permite uma descrição satisfatória dos procedimentos empregados por pessoas em busca de uma explicação de um sistema físico. Assim, a esta pesquisa, são adicionadas duas questões importantes à investigação: como os alunos usam os modelos da ciência para a produção de explicações e como as entidades presentes no mundo cotidiano e no mundo da ciência participam da construção dessas explicações? Esta investigação encontra apoio no filósofo Mario Bunge (1974; 1985) e justifica discussão sobre modelos e modelagem em sua perspectiva pelo fato dele considerar que o papel fundamental da ciência é a construção de modelos e seu principal objetivo é produzir explicações para os fatos reais. O processo de construção de modelos e explicações pressupõe que as explicações produzidas pela ciência pertençam a um cenário pré-definido, no qual cada entidade desempenhe papéis que atendam as expectativas e exigências delimitadas pelo contexto. Sendo assim, continua por procurar uma aproximação entre a ideia de entidades e de objetos-modelo definido por Bunge. Para isso, são apresentadas duas estratégias metodológicas que se concentram em elaborar, implementar e analisar atividades de ensino-aprendizagem sobre duas entidades físicas escolhidas: carga e campo. / This research, linked to the granting of the CNPQ scholarship and entitled \"Models and explanations: the appropriation of scientific entities and students\' use of it\", assumes the importance of models in both science and education, highlights that the production of explanations is given by models and proposes to investigate the relationship between the construction of models in science and science education through entities. While effective representations of the physical world, the scientific models need to pass the didactics transposition in order to constitute itselves as teaching objects. Thereby this research has also as a target to comprehend which aspects of models\' construction in science may/must be transposed to the educational context. We will proceed the idea that a suitable model definition, both in science as in its teaching, is related with the need to explain and permits a satisfactory description of the procedures applied by people searching an explanation of a physical system. Therefore, to this research, we add two important questions to the investigation: how do students use the models of science in producing explanations and how do the entities present in the everyday world and in the world of science participate in the construction of these explanations? This investigation is supported by the philosopher Mario Bunge (1974; 1985) and justifies the discussion of models and modeling in his perspective by the fact that he considers that the fundamental role of science is the construction of models and its main objective is to produce explanations to real facts. The process of construction of models and explanations presuppose that explanations produced by science belong to a predefined scenario, in which each entity perform roles that attend the expectation and the demands delimited by its context. Therefore, it continues to look for an approximation between the idea of entities and model-objects defined by Bunge. To do so, we present two methodological strategies that concentrates in elaborate, implement and analyze activities of teaching-learning about two Physical entities chosen: charge and field.

Esta pesquisa, vinculada à concessão da bolsa CNPq e intitulada \"Modelos e Explicações: a apropriação de entidades científicas e o uso que os alunos fazem delas\", assume a importância dos modelos tanto na ciência quanto no ensino, destaca que a produção de explicações se dá por meio dos modelos e propõe investigar a relação entre a construção de modelos na ciência e no ensino de ciências por meio das entidades. Enquanto representações eficazes do mundo físico, os modelos científicos precisam passar pela transposição didática para constituírem-se como objetos de ensino. Deste modo este trabalho tem também como objetivo compreender quais aspectos da construção de modelos na ciência pode/deve ser transposto para o contexto escolar. Avançaremos em relação à ideia de que uma adequada definição de modelo, tanto na ciência quanto em seu ensino, se relaciona com a necessidade de explicar e permite uma descrição satisfatória dos procedimentos empregados por pessoas em busca de uma explicação de um sistema físico. Assim, a esta pesquisa, são adicionadas duas questões importantes à investigação: como os alunos usam os modelos da ciência para a produção de explicações e como as entidades presentes no mundo cotidiano e no mundo da ciência participam da construção dessas explicações? Esta investigação encontra apoio no filósofo Mario Bunge (1974; 1985) e justifica discussão sobre modelos e modelagem em sua perspectiva pelo fato dele considerar que o papel fundamental da ciência é a construção de modelos e seu principal objetivo é produzir explicações para os fatos reais. O processo de construção de modelos e explicações pressupõe que as explicações produzidas pela ciência pertençam a um cenário pré-definido, no qual cada entidade desempenhe papéis que atendam as expectativas e exigências delimitadas pelo contexto. Sendo assim, continua por procurar uma aproximação entre a ideia de entidades e de objetos-modelo definido por Bunge. Para isso, são apresentadas duas estratégias metodológicas que se concentram em elaborar, implementar e analisar atividades de ensino-aprendizagem sobre duas entidades físicas escolhidas: carga e campo. / This research, linked to the granting of the CNPQ scholarship and entitled \"Models and explanations: the appropriation of scientific entities and students\' use of it\", assumes the importance of models in both science and education, highlights that the production of explanations is given by models and proposes to investigate the relationship between the construction of models in science and science education through entities. While effective representations of the physical world, the scientific models need to pass the didactics transposition in order to constitute itselves as teaching objects. Thereby this research has also as a target to comprehend which aspects of models\' construction in science may/must be transposed to the educational context. We will proceed the idea that a suitable model definition, both in science as in its teaching, is related with the need to explain and permits a satisfactory description of the procedures applied by people searching an explanation of a physical system. Therefore, to this research, we add two important questions to the investigation: how do students use the models of science in producing explanations and how do the entities present in the everyday world and in the world of science participate in the construction of these explanations? This investigation is supported by the philosopher Mario Bunge (1974; 1985) and justifies the discussion of models and modeling in his perspective by the fact that he considers that the fundamental role of science is the construction of models and its main objective is to produce explanations to real facts. The process of construction of models and explanations presuppose that explanations produced by science belong to a predefined scenario, in which each entity perform roles that attend the expectation and the demands delimited by its context. Therefore, it continues to look for an approximation between the idea of entities and model-objects defined by Bunge. To do so, we present two methodological strategies that concentrates in elaborate, implement and analyze activities of teaching-learning about two Physical entities chosen: charge and field.