The purpose of this thesis is to provide a brief examination of the historical accounts of philosophical theories of personal identity and show the influence that each has had on the development of contemporary theories. In doing so, the thesis explores the problems associated with these theories, attempting to establish a meta-theory (i.e. a theory about theories) of personal identity. What is demonstrated is that the fundamental problems of personal identity arise from issues related to the use of language, as well as assumptions involving the concept of personhood. By demonstrating that our understanding of personhood is relative to frameworks of understanding based on assumption, the meta-theory states that propositions made about persons are not factual statements, but are, rather, matters of contingency. As such, propositions about persons contain truth-value only within a particular frame of reference that is based on these assumptions. Therefore, the problems that traditionally arise in theories of personal identity -- problems with dualism, the mental criterion, and bodily criterion -- result from a flawed approach to the problem altogether. The conclusion is that it is possible to construct a theory of personal identity (a relative theory), but not the theory of personal identity (one which is definitive and strictly conclusive).

The most common method of diagnosing Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, which measures the severity of symptoms without regard to compulsions. However, this scale is limited to only considering the quantifiable time and energy lost to compulsions. Conversely, current systems of brain imaging arrest mobility and thus make it virtually impossible to observe compulsions at all, focusing instead on neurological responses to external stimuli. There is little research which merges both approaches, to consider the neuro-physiological effects of obsessions as well as the physical response through compulsions. As such, this research is focused on developing a model of compulsivity based upon neurological chemical pathways. The objective is to develop a model which would predict, given a set of environmental parameters, the probability of an individual with OCD performing compulsive behavior and the prevalence of such behavior. By applying this concept to a neural system known as the worry circuit, a computer program was composed and simulations run by this program suggest that the likelihood of compulsive behavior can be predicted using a function of the number of compulsions performed previously. In this model, each neurological agent in the worry circuit, represented by an automaton, has a certain probability of reacting to a stimulus and moving into one of two distinct excited states. Based on the final state of the automaton, the agent will send excitatory or inhibitory signals to surrounding agents, which also have a certain probability of changing states. If the final agent within the cycle shifts into an excited state, the subject will perform a compulsion. These results may be considered preliminary, given the sample size of the case study and the primitive nature of the model.

In art and education, theorists dispute the concept of visuality, or how meaning occurs from what we see. This study examines two opposed and acrimoniously entrenched theoretical perspectives adopted internationally: visual culture and aesthetics. In visual culture, visual experience, including perception is mediated by background cultural discourses. On this approach, subjectivity is explained as conventional, the role of the senses in making meaning is strongly diminished or rejected and from this, accounting for visuality precludes indeterminate and intuitive aspects. Differently, aesthetic perspectives approach visual meaning as obtaining through direct perceptual and felt aspects of aesthetic experience. Here, subjectivity remains discrete from language and the role of cultural discourse in making meaning diminishes or is excluded. Each description is important to the explanation of visuality in art and education, but problematic. To start, the study outlines the central explanatory commitments of both visual culture and aesthetics. The study identifies problems in each with their explanations of subjectivity or self. Both positions maintain from earlier explanations of cognition that separate theoretically and practically the senses, cognitive processes, and context. The study looks at approaches to mind and representation in accounts of visuality and provides some background from the cognitive sciences to understand the problem further. Contemporary explanation from science and philosophy is revising the separation. However, some approaches from science are reductive of mind and both aesthetics and visual culture theorists are understandably reluctant to adopt scientistic or behaviourist approaches for the explanation of visual arts practices. The aim of the study is to provide a non-reductive realist account of visuality in visual arts and education. To accomplish this aim, the study employs philosopher John R. Searle's explanation of consciousness because it explores subjectivity as qualitative, unified, and intrinsically social in experience. By doing this, the study addresses a gap in the theoretical understanding of the two dominant approaches to visuality. The key to relations between subjectivity and the world in reasoning is the capacity for mental representation. From this capacity and the rational agency of a self, practical reasoning is central to the creation, understanding, and appreciation of art and imagery. This account of consciousness, its aspects, and how it works includes description of the Background, as capacities enabling the uptake and structuring of sociocultural influence in mind. Crucially, the study shows how the capacity for reasoned action can be represented without dualism or reduction to the explanatory constraints of behavioural or physical sciences, an important commitment in the arts and education. In this explanation, the study identifies epistemic constraints on the representation of mental states, including unconscious states, in accounting for practices as reasoned activities. Centrally, the study looks at how, from the capacities of consciousness and the self's freedom of will, visuality is unified as qualitative, cognitive, and social. In exploring Searle's explanation of consciousness, some account of current work on cognition extends discussion of a reconciliation of visuality on these terms.

This thesis examines the development of reflective skills. Reflection has been recognised as a prime mode of creating knowledge for project managers. Reflection literature indicates that reflective skills do not develop naturally; guidance, encouragement and facilitation is usually required for managers to reach their highest learning potential. Among the tools suggested to aid this development are written project journals. While there has been research on some aspects of journals, there was little found on the design of reflective journals relevant to developing project management reflection skills. This study has examined the effect or influence of various designs of reflective journals on different facets of reflective learning. The research question was: ????Are there facets of reflection that can be influenced by journal design????? Evidence for the study was first gathered through literature then from journal content and interviews. Literature on reflective learning revealed the facets relevant to the study: definition of reflection, consequences, emotions, temporal factors and individual and organisational culture. Issues identified in journal literature that needed to be applied to the study of reflection development included the journal audience, assessment and format. Participants in the study were final year undergraduates and Masters students who worked on industry based projects over several months. They were requested to keep journals for the duration of the projects, to submit them for examination and then asked to offer feedback on the various journal designs on completion of the projects. The research was conducted over four years, through seven projects, with thirty students taking part. The journal design went through six modifications. The primary findings from the study were: the majority of participants followed the predicted development hierarchy of reflective development; development of reflective skills is dependent on individual and organisational culture; audience does have an impact on reporting of and reflection on concerns; and journal design can facilitate development of some levels of reflection but has no influence on the development of critical reflection. / Masters by research thesis

In this thesis I will argue that it is irrational to anticipate the future. I do not claim that the future will not exist, but rather that our current selves will never experience that future. Support for this seemingly implausible thesis begins when consider the problems posed by personal identity puzzle cases. When we consider hypothetical cases such as fission, where one existing person will divide into two future people (for example through brain transplants or teletransportation), we instinctively wonder which of the two post-fission bodies the pre-fission person would 'wake up' in. Could it be the case that our subject of experience does not in fact 'go' anywhere? I initially consider the interdependency between personal identity and the displacement of our current selves into the past or future. Ultimately, I will argue that self displacement is not based on personal identity, but rather the reverse that is, that personal identity is based on our hard-wired tendency to displace our current selves into the past or future. I then present the crux of my argument, that it is irrational to anticipate the future. I will do this by presenting cases in which it is clearly irrational to anticipate 'waking up' in a certain body and demonstrating that these cases are comparable to 'waking up' in the same physically or psychologically continuous body. Contrary to our most deeply held beliefs, it is not rational to expect that our present subject of experience will somehow be there in the future. This astonishing conclusion removes our most obvious reason for concern about future selves. I will argue that if this conclusion is correct, we have relatively weak reasons for prudential concern about the future. One of the key objectives of this thesis will therefore be to determine whether it is rational for our current self to be concerned about a future self that it will never experience being. I will show that if we are irrational to anticipate the future, then we must radically rethink the sort of prudential concern we have for our future selves. I argue that our reasons to be concerned about future selves are much weaker than (or at least very different than) those we might have originally imagined. I will also show that it is not against reason to be unconcerned about future selves, unless we believe that we are morally obliged to be concerned for all future people.

The term ‘restitution narrative’ describes the hope we all have when illness or accidental impairment befalls us to be returned to a pre-morbid condition of health as soon as possible, and in modern Western society we expect the miracle of restitutions to be mediated by medical science. Medicine is still unable to cure a wide range of illness and disability. For these people the restitution narrative fails. This study attempts to create space between health and illness, the space of the failed patient, within which to explore the iatrogenic and disabling effects on bodies and minds living in a society that has come to expect not to suffer when illness or disability is incurable and chronic. Through the medium of a purpose built website, people who are chronically ill and disabled discussed the ‘wicked issues’ that make lives already challenged unnecessarily difficult. Application of the findings of research in psychobiology is applied to speculate whether health may be worsened by being a failed patient in a culture for which health has become the ultimate good. Ideas of social fuzziology are brought into play to help imagine ways in which the dualities of health and illness, normal and abnormal, are broken down and the normalizing ideologies of medicine resisted. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Motion is a fundamental activity for the healthy functioning human organism. Its importance, however, is increasingly de-valued in Western cultures as they speed toward adopting technologies and virtual experiences as adjuncts to, and even replacements for7 traditional educational structures and processes that involve physical activity. Organised and reflective experience of human motion is becoming increasingly marginalised in teaching methodologies and learning programs in educational institutions at all levels around the globe. This inquiry sets out to gain a greater understanding of why people and human motion become disconnected, particularly during periods of formal education. A central question and two sub-questions form the basis of the inquiry. The central question asks why human motion is not valued and more utilised in education. In particular, why do learning areas that directly represent involvement with human motion, such as physical education, continually struggle in education programs. It directs the investigation to focus on the causes rather than the symptoms of the disuse and devaluation of human motion in Australian education. The two sub-questions split the praxis of the study. The first seeks to understand how the causes of devaluation work in the educational context lo affect the lack of acknowledgement; and the second considers ways to counter the disuse of human movement in education programs. To address these questions, the research focuses on rebutting the notion of a mind-body dualism. Rather, it seeks to better understand how humans learn and function as monists - integrated beings, acquiring self-knowledge in their 'world of being' in which bodily and emotional experiences, and reasoning are inextricably intertwined. I have approached this qualitative research as an ethnographic sociologist examining the issues from a critical high modernist perspective in order to demonstrate the pervading influence in Australian education of strong beliefs and values from the era of Enlightenment. Narrative analysis of 'memoir' in the form of self-defining memories was selected to gain a sensibility of the connectedness between human emotion, motion and reasoning in the lived experiences of students in three primary and three secondary schools across Years 2-12. An opportunity for human movement to be more valued and utilised in emerging educational frameworks that have life knowledge, dispositions and capabilities at their core is identified. The inquiry proposes a conceptualisation of human motion in education for new times characterised by the need for people to develop personal resources and strong positive identities in order to cope with a world of rapid change and uncertainty.

One of the most interesting developments in recent psychological theorising has been a growing appreciation of the need for a viable theory of mental causation. Hitherto, the prospects for reconciling what seems to be the uniquely rational character of human thought and action with the non-rational mechanistic workings of the natural world have appeared to be limited or even illusory, and the pursuit of reconciliation of this sort has therefore formerly been dismissed as being either impossible of completion or inappropriate for contemplation. Much of the scepticism concerning the role of causal processes in human thought and action was dispelled, however, by the philosopher Donald Davidson, who argues that not only is human action capable of being caused by the actor�s thoughts and desires, but that only when such action is so caused, can it be rational. Davidson�s proposal for the reconciliation of human rationality with causal necessitation is articulated in his theory of Anomalous Monism. According to this theory, there exists what may be termed an ontological-conceptual distinction between events themselves and the characters or properties that are attributed to events by human observers, and it is through recognition of this distinction that one discovers how mental events, that is, events that are amenable to description in the psychological vocabulary, are causally efficacious yet free from the constraints typically associated with the necessity and sufficiency of causal laws. Anomalous Monism, if it were workable, would therefore resolve the paradox according to which human mentality is at once integrated in, and yet unconstrained by, the mechanistic natural world, by demonstrating the compatibility of the facts of causation with the intuitions of folk psychology. However, close examination of Anomalous Monism reveals it to rely on logically flawed anti-realist principles concerning the characters of events, properties and causation. It follows from this that the theory itself must be rejected, but the task that it was devised to undertake, the formulation of a viable theory of mental causation, need not be similarly discarded. Rather, what remains is the challenge of delineating an alternative theory, one that withstands logical scrutiny whilst addressing what is characteristic of human mental processes, and thereby what is characteristic of mental causation. The theory of Direct Realism that is derived from the broader philosophical realism of John Anderson provides the materials for meeting this challenge. According to Direct Realism, mental phenomena are relational situations obtaining between certain organisms (including humans) and their environments. As such, mental phenomena are included in the range of phenomena occurring in the natural world and they are therefore subject to all of its ways of working, including its deterministic mechanisms. The particular challenge that a Direct Realist theory of mental causation faces, that of demonstrating that relational situations can be causal, is revealed upon examination of the character of causation to be unproblematic. Furthermore, the seeming incompatibility between human rationality and natural necessitation is resolved when it is acknowledged that, rather than be an inherent feature of thought and action, logical structure is a characteristic of the natural environment that organisms are at times sensitive to, as revealed by its effects on the characters of their thoughts and actions. Far from being remote or illusory, the prospects for reconciling human mentality with the causal mechanisms of the natural world are discovered in the present thesis to be favourable when a realist approach to the characters of both mental events and causation is adopted.

<p><p><em>Bakgrund</em></p><p>Forskning har visat att personer med autism har svårigheter med "theory of mind", förmågan att sätta sig in i andra personers tankar och känslor. Det leder till en annorlunda förståelse av sociala sammanhang. Tankestilen påverkar samspelet med pedagoger och kräver ett anpassat bemötande.</p><p><em>Metod</em></p>Sju halvstrukturerade intervjuer med pedagoger som arbetar i särskolan och undervisar elever med autism. Flertalet pedagoger undervisar i grundsärskolan. Deltagarna uppmuntrades bland annat att beskriva elever med utmanande beteende och berätta om vad de anser är ett bra bemötande. Intervjuerna kretsade mycket kring olika former av kravsituationer.<p><em>Resultat</em></p>Pedagogerna anpassar bemötande och undervisning på en rad sätt för att passa elever med svag "theory of mind". Framför allt anpassas kommunikationen på ett genomtänkt sätt. Pedagogerna skiljer sig i hur de bemöter elever i kravsituationer. Flera pedagoger förespråkar ett bemötande som inte utgår från pedagogens eget sätt att tänka. Studien visar hur pedagogerna trots den utgångspunkten återgår till att förstå utmanande beteende som medvetet och provokativt.<p><em>Diskussion</em></p>Studien diskuterar möjliga samband mellan den pedagogiska miljön och hur pedagoger beskriver och tolkar utmanande beteende. Idén att ostrukturerade och/eller stränga miljöer hänger ihop med en förståelse av eleverna som medvetet "testande" och manipulerande förs fram. Studien utmynnar i ett förslag på ny definition av utmanande beteende, som bygger på omgivningens svårighet att förstå och tolka beteendet.</p>

<p>W. Ickes, L. Stinson, V, Bisonette och S. Garcia (1990) standard stimulus paradigm är en metod för att mäta avläsning av en individs tankar och känslor. För att undersöka tjejer och killars empatiska avläsningsförmåga testades gymnasieelever med Ickes metod. Nittioåtta elever fick se en film som stannades av undersökningsledarna vid tio tillfällen. Deltagarna skulle vid varje stopp försöka läsa av kvinnan i filmens tankar och känslor och skriva ner dessa. Resultaten visade att tjejer är bättre än killar på att läsa av andra. Betyg i svenska och samhällskunskap, men inte matematik hade positivt samband med empati. Studien visade också att individer som gråter ofta har bra avläsningsförmåga. Tjejer med bra betyg och nära till gråt verkar ha de bästa intellektuella och emotionella verktygen för empatisk avläsning.</p>