A well-researched line showing equivalence performances in a wide variety of areas has been conducted in the field of Behavior Analysis (BA). One area demonstrates that relating relations is a behavioral account of analogical thinking. Relating relations may have implications for the development of analogical training given that analogical reasoning is seen as the foundation of intelligence yet research in this area is limited. A protocol by Stewart, Barnes-Holmes, and Weil (2009) was developed to train children in analogical reasoning using equivalence-equivalence relations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate an equivalence-equivalence training protocol based on Stewart et al. (2009) and test whether the protocol was effective in training equivalence-equivalence responding to 7 and 8-year-old children. A secondary purpose was to test whether training in equivalence-equivalence responding increased performances on analogical tests. All five participants were dismissed throughout the study. Participant 1 was dismissed during the pre-assessments and all other participants were dismissed during intervention. Because none of the participants passed the equivalence-equivalence training, increases in performance in analogical testes were not analyzed. Individual performance data from training are examined and analyzed to provide an account of the failures to pass the equivalence-equivalence protocol.

This study explores the application of the dialogue seminar method within a doctoral programme KTH Advanced Programme in Reflective Practice of the research area of Skill and technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. In order to understand distinctive features of the dialogue seminar method the study starts with a survey of how the method and its spirit were affected by the history of ideas related to the research area, of which many were generated within the intellectual milieu gathered around the Dialogue seminar of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and cultural journal Dialoger. The dialogue seminar method stands for a well thought out idea about what the link between skills, literature, philosophy, history of ideas, art and science is made up of. This idea is expressed in the way the dialogue is conducted; various topics are explored through associations, digressions and deviations form the subject. This indirect approach to reflection is called analogical thinking in contrast to the thinking based on deduction or induction. Analogical thinking prevails in judgement and action. It is also of great significance in e.g. development projects, in arts, all sorts of problem-solving, and those phases of research that call for inventiveness and imagination. The Dialogue Seminar’s Research Milieu brings up new questions about the possibilities of pursuing scientific or methodological reflection by means of analogical thinking and about the status of classical humanistic readings within the post graduate education. / QC 20100629

“There is no need to reinvent the wheel” – a cliché, often told when you want to come up with something new that in someway can be connected to something that already exist. This study shows the opposite – that inventions emanate from what is given. It can be a detail, a problem in a thing - a wheel - or a situation that catches the inventor’s attention. It is something that seeks a solution or something that generates an idea, a hint or a clue of something new and useful. The art of invention emerges from the ability and skill to broaden the seeing and put thinking, substance and tradition into motion. An old radio dial generates a new ergonomic steering wheel. The connection of memories between a chestnut, a cello and an early morning at a water pump creates three works of art. The epistemology of this study is based on a dialogue between voices from different times and traditions. Some voices are normative examples, drawn from a dialogue between Swedish inventors. The others are those of philosophers from the Age of Enlightenment, fetched from their original writings. Through that dialogue, perspectives and ideas of inventors and classical philosophers meet and are compared. A deeper understanding thus emerges that shows the essence of invention and in fact the essence of all creative work: i) Freedom – in thought and in action ii) Dialogue - to test and try new ideas and things in the ever changing circumstances. iii) Doubt - not taking established fact and assumptions for granted iv) Action – testing and breaking established praxis and rules. The study also illustrates the need for an alternative scientific form and expression concerning studies in the fields of invention, innovation and other practical work. Invention can not be captured or shaped by exact measurements, concepts, definitions or abstract models. It takes place in the borderland between fact and fiction, where technique, aesthetics and philosophy are one working entity. The strive for knowledge is endless and without limits and it is nurtured by wondering, searching and ambiguity. With inspiration from the dialogue seminar method used within KTH Advanced Programme in Reflective Practice – this study point out the actuality and vitality in using the classical philosophical writings, dialogue and analogical thinking as a scientific method within higher education.

Model integration that allows multiple models to work together for solving a sophisticated problem has been an important research issue in the management of decision models. The recent development of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) has provided an opportunity to apply this new technology to support model integration. This is particularly critical when more and more models are delivered as web services. A web-services-based approach to model management is useful in providing effective decision support. In the past, existing literature has adopted the approach that treated a model as a service. Model integration can be thought of as a composition of web services. In the composition process, proper components and their relationships must be properly identified. This requires accurate model definition and reasoning. In the research, we propose a semantic-based approach for developing such as system. The approach uses DAML-S to describe the capability of a service. Then the system can discover proper services for a particular requirement by using semantic matching on these DAML-S documents. When suitable web services are found, the system uses BPEL4WS to composite them together. The resulting composite web service can be applied to decision support. A prototype that demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach is implemented in Java.

“There is no need to reinvent the wheel” – a cliché, often told when you want to come up with something new that in someway can be connected to something that already exist. This study shows the opposite – that inventions emanate from what is given. It can be a detail, a problem in a thing - a wheel - or a situation that catches the inventor’s attention. It is something that seeks a solution or something that generates an idea, a hint or a clue of something new and useful. The art of invention emerges from the ability and skill to broaden the seeing and put thinking, substance and tradition into motion. An old radio dial generates a new ergonomic steering wheel. The connection of memories between a chestnut, a cello and an early morning at a water pump creates three works of art. The epistemology of this study is based on a dialogue between voices from different times and traditions. Some voices are normative examples, drawn from a dialogue between Swedish inventors. The others are those of philosophers from the Age of Enlightenment, fetched from their original writings. Through that dialogue, perspectives and ideas of inventors and classical philosophers meet and are compared. A deeper understanding thus emerges that shows the essence of invention and in fact the essence of all creative work: i) Freedom – in thought and in action ii) Dialogue - to test and try new ideas and things in the ever changing circumstances. iii) Doubt - not taking established fact and assumptions for granted iv) Action – testing and breaking established praxis and rules. The study also illustrates the need for an alternative scientific form and expression concerning studies in the fields of invention, innovation and other practical work. Invention can not be captured or shaped by exact measurements, concepts, definitions or abstract models. It takes place in the borderland between fact and fiction, where technique, aesthetics and philosophy are one working entity. The strive for knowledge is endless and without limits and it is nurtured by wondering, searching and ambiguity. With inspiration from the dialogue seminar method used within KTH Advanced Programme in Reflective Practice – this study point out the actuality and vitality in using the classical philosophical writings, dialogue and analogical thinking as a scientific method within higher education. / QC 20100826

This dissertation discusses the transfer of practical knowledge as seen in the practises of conservatory teachers at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. It is based on material from three series of dialogue seminars conducted with teachers and students. The aim of the dialogue seminar is to bring a practitioner’s personal style of relating to a profession into a form which makes it possible for the practitioner and others to reflect upon. Using the participants’ texts and the seminar protocols as a starting point the dissertation develops some of the themes which emerged. It is divided into three parts: The first discusses conservatory teachers’ relationship to language. Examples include the teachers’ use of indirect ways to »work around« a problem rather than addressing it directly, the use of metaphors and figures of speech, and the fields of disagreement that surround certain central concepts. These disagreements exist within a »thought-style« shared by practitioners of a profession. The second part develops some of the paradoxes inevitably encountered in practical music making and musical education. Examples include planning-spontaniety, simplicity-complexity, reflection-action, clarity-truth, breadth-depth. It is argued that the way in which practitioners’ handle and relate to such »paradoxical fields« constitute an essential part of mature professional skills. The third part discusses the nature of practical knowledge, especially its relationship to the rules that can be established to help transmit such knowledge. The wittgensteinian image of basic rules, which are followed in a way that can not be described in rules, is contrasted by an image in which the learner gains access to patterns of action which are handled on the basis of the percieved meaning of the actions. / QC 20100923

In two studies, the author attempts to develop a general symbol theoretical approach to knowledge representation. The first study, Modeling change - the frame problem, critically examines the - so far unsuccessful - attempts to solve the notorious frame problem. By discussing and analyzing a number of related problems - the prediction problem, the revision problem, the qualification problem, and the book-keeping problem - the frame problem is distinguished as the problem of finding a representational form permitting a changing, complex world to be efficiently and adequately represented. This form, it is argued, is dictated by the metaphysics of the problem world, the fundamental form of the symbol system we humans use in rightly characterizing the world. In the second study, Pictures and words, the symbol theoretical approach is made more explicit. The subject Is the distinction between pictorial (non-linguistic, non-propositional, analogical, "direct") representation and verbal (linguistic, propositional) representation, and the further implications of this distinction. The study focuses on pictorial representation, which has received little attention compared to verbal representation. Observations, ideas, and theories in AI, cognitive psychology, and philosophy are critically examined. The general conclusion is that there is as yet no cogent and mature theory of pictorial representation that gives good support to computer applications. The philosophical symbol theory of Nelson Goodman is found to be the most thoroughly developed and most congenial with the aims and methods of AI. Goodman's theory of pictorial representation, however, in effect excludes computers from the use of pictures. In the final chapter, an attempt is made to develop Goodman's analysis of pictures further turning it into a theory useful to AI. The theory outlined builds on Goodman's concept of exemplification. The key idea is that a picture is a model of a description that has the depicted object as its standard model. One consequence Is that pictorial and verbal forms of representation are seen less as competing alternatives than as complementary forms of representation mutually supporting and depending on each other. / digitalisering@umu

The acquisition of relational concepts plays an integral role and is assumed to be a prerequisite for analogical reasoning. Language and token-trained apes (e.g. Premack, 1976; Thompson, Oden, and Boysen, 1997) are the only nonhuman animals to succeed in solving and completing analogies, thus implicating language as the mechanism enabling the phenomenon. In the present study, I examine the role of meaning in the analogical reasoning abilities of three different primate species. Humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus monkeys completed relational match-to-sample (RMTS) tasks with either meaningful or nonmeaningful stimuli. For human participants, meaningfulness facilitated the acquisition of analogical rules. Individual differences were evident amongst the chimpanzees suggesting that meaning can either enable or hinder their ability to complete analogies. Rhesus monkeys did not succeed in either condition, suggesting that their ability to reason analogically, if present at all, may be dependent upon a dimension other than the representational value of stimuli.

In recent years, the field of design has met new grounds with the growing awareness among design researchers of the potential relationships between cognitive studies of creativity and computational modeling. The turn of the studies has given rise to the emergence of a new paradigm of modeling and understanding mental processes in creative design. This study tries to gain further insight into the creative occurrence by blending virtual experiences with designer actions in a model of creative thinking in concept generation phase based on the Geneplore Model by Finke et al. (1995) and supported by analogy construction incorporating the implementation of a computer based tool (Black Box) running on PC platform as a potential immanent part of the concept generation phase. Black Box is devised in such a way that the core of the constructive process of the analogy relies on the designer&amp / #8217 / s expressional, perceptual and conceptual actions which are presented in the traditional methods of sketching and writing, whereas the change and expansion of the design space is realized through the virtual worlds the tool offers via the computer screen. The research method is based on the development of Black Box tool and its subsequent implementation in a study with eight experienced design consultants, utilizing a procedure composed of preliminary interview, observational protocol analysis, questionnaire and retrospective interview. Through encoding actions of individual designers by means of their maps in the computational tool, the study yields significant results in revealing differing thinking maps of different designers which have been used to propose a general creative thinking map of concept generation in Black Box presented in a way to be adapted for further studies. Moreover, the study provided insight on the methods used to assist creativity in concept generation by different designers, on the selection of inspirational material and on the integration of analogies as knowledge transformers to evoke design concepts.

Ceramics can highly withstand the environments of high temperature and serious erosion, it completely substitutes for alloys which reach their specific limitations. Turbine rotor operates in the compressed stage with temperature over thousand Celsius degrees; it must rely on excellent properties of ceramics to elevate the durability and lifetime. To manufacture complex ceramic component before, industry usually uses near net shaping or rapid prototyping (RP) processes. A manufacturing process based on machining green ceramic turbine component is presented here. Initially, formulating a series of machining experiments for green ceramics to verify the idea of thesis, and analyzing the probability of Al2O3 ceramic as a turbine material. Firstly, it needs to check the machinability of green ceramic by face milling. Secondly, point milling the normal plate of green compact and the plate with analogical blade geometry to find a set of usable machining parameters (such as revolution speed, feed rate, step over and cutting depth); meanwhile, addressing machining amendment by observing the final conditions of specific geometric characteristics on workpiece. Finally, try to machining green ceramic turbine successfully applying the above parameters.