Whether philosophy can contribute decisively towards alleviating humanity’s pressing environmental predicament I here argue in the affirmative. There are many considerations that challenge my case. Specifically, I show that environmental ethics, the subdiscipline of moral philosophy which was founded on the presumption of this possibility, has faltered. The field threatens to divide between “impractical theoretical” discourses within the academy, and “pragmatic” and largely atheoretical “practical” engagements with environmental science, policy and management. To help environmental ethics advance beyond this dysfunctional division, I explore methodological comparisons with bioethics, the “most successful field of applied ethics”. My deliberations apply in novel ways Bartha’s model for evaluating the plausibility of scientific hypotheses that incorporate analogies. In an initial test application of Bartha’s model, I evaluate the relevance to environmental ethics of the failure of the “top-down” applied ethics approach in bioethics. I present good reasons to conclude that environmental ethics can indeed learn from this failure. I also conclude that my trial application of Bartha’s model is promising. I then evaluate two proposals for reforms towards the greater practical effectiveness of environmental ethics. First I evaluate the plausibility of the proposal of Minteer and Collins for a new field of “ecological ethics”. They argue for the adoption of the broadly pragmatic methodological commitments now prevailing in bioethics. Because they focus primarily on supporting individual rather than collaborative processes of ethical judgment, I argue they risk facilitating an ethically pernicious “ecological paternalism” on analogy with the widely condemned practice of medical paternalism. Second I evaluate Norton’s proposal to incorporate environmental ethics within the adaptive ecosystem management paradigm. By arguing that the tasks of seeking cultural and biophysical sustainability within spatiotemporally defined communities must be integrated, Norton offers a potentially vital interface for intelligent and just interaction between culture and wider nature. I also argue this interface may be of more general relevance to bioethics and moral and political philosophy. However, a significant theoretical challenge for Norton’s sustainability model is identified. I argue that his model provides a thought experiment which illustrates the conceptual and practical incoherence of the primary liberal mechanisms for managing ethical conflict once these are applied to the sustainability challenge. Those mechanisms are the separation of public and private spheres and the simultaneous pursuit within private spaces of mutually exclusive conceptions of the good (and biophysically sustainable) life. I argue that rectifying this failure defines a vital, albeit daunting, theoretical and practical challenge for environmental ethics. That is to reconceptualise ethical conflict and to help design and facilitate practical processes to achieve sufficient common ethical agreement. Addressing this challenge is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, some promising work and possibilities for further research are outlined. I conclude that I have successfully defended the value of analogical comparison with bioethics for enhancing the unity and effectiveness of theory and practice in environmental ethics. I therefore further conclude that I am correct to affirm that philosophy can, and I believe indeed should, contribute more effectively toward alleviating humanity’s pressing environmental predicament.

Analogiskt tänkande är en central kognitiv förmåga som vi använder i vardagslivet, såväl som i mer formella sammanhang, såsom i forskning och undervisning. Föreliggande avhandling behandlar hur analogier och analogiskt tänkande, uppmärksamhet på semantik och förståelse för vetenskaplig modellering kan användas för att hantera utmaningar i naturvetenskapsundervisningen, särskilt inom området termodynamik. Dessutom presenteras ett teoretiskt ramverk över hur analogiskt tänkande förhåller sig till semantik och vetenskaplig modellering, tre ämnesområden som alla utgår ifrån att finna motsvarigheter mellan två olika domäner. Mot denna bakgrund fokuserar avhandlingen på följande forskningsfrågor: I vilken utsträckning används analogier för att koppla olika representationer av ett fenomen till varandra och till det representerade fenomenet? Hur relaterar självgenerade analogier till vetenskaplig modellering? Avhandlingen består av fyra publicerade tidskriftsartiklar och en kappa. Den första artikeln är en semantisk utredning av ordet ’entropi’, den andra artikeln är en empirisk undersökning av synen på vetenskaplig modellering i olika kunskapstraditioner, och de tredje och fjärde artiklarna är empiriska undersökningar av fysiklärarstudenters respektive förstaklassares självgenererade analogier för termiska fenomen. Från ett metodperspektiv utfördes de empiriska studierna i en huvudsakligen kvalitativ tradition, där centrala resonemang exemplifieras genom analys av dialogutdrag. I de två studierna av självgenererade analogier fick deltagarna olika former av stöttning i form av social interaktion med varandra, gemensam erfarenhet av naturfenomen och diskussion kring deras representationer av fenomenen. I kappan utvecklas det teoretiska ramverket och mot den bakgrunden görs en omanalys av artiklarnas resultat. En central ståndpunkt i avhandlingen är att varje fenomen kan representeras på många olika sätt, som alla kan vara lämpliga och användbara i olika sammanhang med tyngdpunkt på olika aspekter av fenomenet. Rörande analogiskt tänkande anförs att elever och studenter kan skapa flera egna analogier för att få en rikare, kompletterande bild av ett fenomen, snarare än att undervisas utifrån en enda förment bästa analogi. Med utgångspunkt från vetenskaplig modellering kan olika representationer eller modeller lyfta fram olika aspekter av ett fenomen, med olika grad av idealisering och inom olika kunskapstraditioner. Slutligen, från ett semantiskt perspektiv kan ett ord svara mot flera, distinkta, men relaterade betydelser – fenomenet polysemi. Dessa tre perspektiv kan erbjuda konstruktivistiska ansatser till begreppsförståelse inom naturvetenskapsundervisningen, genom att elever och studenter uppmuntras att i dialog knyta till sin vardagsföreställning av de begrepp och fenomen de möts av, snarare än att byta ut den mot ett enda, förmodat korrekt vetenskapligt begrepp. Dessutom hävdas att den naturvetenskapsdidaktiska forskningen kan komma långt med ett strukturellt fokus på analogiskt tänkande och vetenskaplig modellering, där man försöker finna motsvarigheter mellan domäners beståndsdelar och deras relationer och helst isomorfism, en perfekt  överensstämmelse, men att beaktande av andra dimensioner, såsom en insikt i kognitionens förankring i kroppen och varseblivningen, de pragmatiska, kontextuella sammanhangen mot vilken bakgrund tänkande sker och språkets särskilda karaktär, krävs för en mer heltäckande bild. / Analogical reasoning is a central cognitive ability that is used in our everyday lives, as well as in formal settings, such as in research and teaching. This dissertation concerns how analogies and analogical reasoning, attention to semantics and insight into scientific modelling may be recruited in order to come to terms with challenges in science education, in particular within the field of thermodynamics. In addition, it provides a theoretical framework of how analogy relates to semantics and the practice of scientific modelling, three fields of study which all strive to map correspondences between two different domains. In particular, the dissertation addresses the following research questions: To what degree is analogy involved in connecting different representations of a phenomenon to each other and to the represented phenomenon? How do students’ selfgenerated analogies relate to the practice of scientific modelling? The dissertation comprises four published journal articles and a cover story. The first article is a semantic investigation of the word ‘entropy’, the second article is an empirical study of the view on scientific modelling in different traditions of knowledge, and the third and fourth articles are empirical studies of self-generated analogies for thermal phenomena among preservice physics teachers and first-graders, respectively. From a methodological point of view, the empirical studies were conducted in a primarily qualitative tradition, where central lines of reasoning are exemplified by analysis of dialogue excerpts. The two studies on self-generated analogies provided the participants with extensive scaffolding in the form of social interaction among peers, interaction with physical phenomena and discussion of their representations of the phenomena. The theoretical framework is developed in the cover story, which provides a background to the individual studies and reanalyses of the findings. A key claim of the dissertation is that any phenomenon can be represented in many different ways, all potentially adequate and useful in different contexts, emphasising different aspects of the phenomenon. Applied to the field of analogical reasoning, it is argued that students can generate several analogies themselves in order to get a richer, complementary view of a phenomenon, as opposed to be provided with a presumed best analogy. As for scientific models, many different representations or models may bring across different aspects of a phenomenon at varying degrees of idealisation and within different traditions of knowledge. Finally, in semantics, one word may correspond to several distinct, yet related, meanings: the phenomenon of polysemy. These three perspectives may provide constructivist approaches to conceptual development in science teaching, in which students are encouraged to connect to and enrich their everyday understanding of encountered concepts and phenomena in dialogue, rather than merely abandoning them for one single, supposedly correct, scientific concept. In addition, science education research can come quite far with structural approaches to analysing analogical reasoning and scientific modelling, establishing correspondences between entities in different domains, ultimately striving for isomorphism, perfect matches, but other dimensions, such as the perceptual, embodied nature of our cognition, the pragmatic, contextual circumstances in which any act of reasoning is performed, and the specificities of language, should also be taken into account for a fuller view.

Le raisonnement par analogie est un aspect fondamental de la cognition humaine souvent considéré comme propre à notre espèce. Des travaux récents utilisant des tâches d'appariement relationnel suggèrent que des chimpanzés, des babouins et des capucins sont également capables de comparer des relations exprimées par des paires d'objets. Cependant, des doutes persistent quant aux stratégies cognitives qu'ils emploient pour résoudre ces tâches, et notamment l'implication du raisonnement par analogie. Cette thèse a pour objectif (1) de déterminer ces stratégies chez le babouin, (2) d'appréhender les facteurs permettant leur émergence et (3) plus généralement de caractériser les continuités et discontinuités entre l'homme et les primates non humains dans leur capacité à raisonner par analogie. Nous avons conduit trois études chez le babouin de Guinée pour aborder ces questions. La première montre que le traitement relationnel chez le babouin implique, comme chez l'homme, à la fois une prise en compte des propriétés des objets et de leurs relations. La seconde étude montre que les babouins utilisent le raisonnement par analogie pour résoudre une tâche d'appariement relationnel puisqu'ils traitent trois niveaux d'informations ; à savoir (1) les objets, (2) les relations entre objets et (3) des relations entre ces relations. La troisième étude montre leur capacité à traiter des relations multidimensionnelles dans une version plus complexe de la tâche d'appariement relationnel. Dans une perspective évolutive, nous discutons des implications de ces travaux du point de vue des continuités et discontinuités entre l'homme et les primates non humains dans leurs capacités d'analogie. / Analogical reasoning is a cornerstone aspect of human cognition, often considered to be human specific. Recent experiments using relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks suggest that chimpanzees, baboons and capuchin monkeys can understand and compare the relations expressed between and within pairs of objects. However, the exact strategies used by these species to solve analogy problem remain unclear at this point. We conducted three studies exploring different aspects of analogical reasoning in the Guinea baboons (Papio papio). The first study showed that (1), as in human, relational processing in baboons involves the processing of both perceptive and relational information, and that (2) the relative contribution of these two types of processing depends on the number of items illustrating each relation during training. The second study showed that the cognitive strategy developed by baboons in a RMTS task involves analogical reasoning. The third study emphasized the ability of baboons to process multidimensional relations in a more complex version of the RMTS task. Altogether, these findings from suggest that (1) baboons are able to use analogical reasoning, to solve at least tasks involving perceptive relations; (2) relational processing and further analogical reasoning skills depend on their previous experience with the different relations. We shall discuss the potential implications of those findings, and the continuity and discontinuity of analogical reasoning skills found in human and nonhuman primates.

No description available.

Policy makers have long recognized the importance of considering past experience, history, and the use of Analogical reasoning when making policy decisions. When elite political actors face foreign policy crises, they often use their past experience, refer to history, and use Analogical reasoning to help them frame their decisions. In the case of the ill-fated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the use of Analogical reasoning revolving around past covert successes may have created an environment for faulty foreign policy decision-making. Former members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) filled the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and held key positions within the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. OSS success with guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and intelligence gathering during World War II, coupled with early CIA covert successes (specifically in Guatemala), may have led President Kennedy to make the wrong policy decisions with regard to dealing with Fidel Castro and Cuba. This research explores the use of Analogical reasoning during the decision-making process by way of process-tracing. Process-tracing attempts to identify the intervening processes between an independent variable (or variables) and the outcome of the dependent variable. We look at six critical junctures and compare how Groupthink, the Bureaucratic Politics Model, and Analogical reasoning approaches help explain any causal mechanisms. The findings suggest that Analogical reasoning may have played a more significant role in President Kennedy's final decision to invade Cuba than previously thought. The findings further suggest that by using the Analogical reasoning approach, our understanding of President Kennedy's foreign policy in Cuba is enhanced when compared to the Groupthink and Bureaucratic Politics Model approaches emphasized in past research.

No description available.

Ett fåtal tidigare studier har visat att barn med cochleaimplantat (CI) har sämre förmåga till såväl ordflöde som verbalt analogiskt resonerande jämfört med normalhörande barn. Det finns ett förhållande mellan språk och analogiskt resonerande, men förhållandet mellan ordflödesförmåga och förmågan till analogiskt resonerande har inte undersökts tidigare för varken barn med CI eller normalhörande barn, vilket motiverar föreliggande studie. Syftet var att undersöka huruvida det finns skillnader mellan barn med CI och normalhörande barn vad gäller ordflöde och analogiskt resonerande. Studien syftade även till att undersöka förhållandet mellan ordflöde och analogiskt resonerande hos barn med CI respektive normalhörande barn. Nio barn med CI i åldrarna 6;4–8;2 år och en kontrollgrupp av trettio normalhörande barn i åldrarna 6;1–7;1 år medverkade. Ordflödesförmågan undersöktes med det fonologiska ordflödestestet FAS och det semantiska ordflödestestet Djur. Visuellt analogiskt resonerande undersöktes med AnimaLogica och verbalt analogiskt resonerande undersöktes med deltestet Auditiv analogi från Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities-3 (ITPA-3). I föreliggande studie har barnen med CI sämre ordflödesförmåga och analogiskt resonerande än de normalhörande barnen. Det finns ett samband mellan semantiskt ordflöde och verbalt analogiskt resonerande hos normalhörande barn, med ett liknande mönster hos barn med CI. Förmågan till ordflöde och analogiskt resonerande samt sambandet mellan dessa förmågor har klinisk relevans för logopeden i och med att detta blir ännu en aspekt att ta hänsyn till vid språkliga utredningar och behandlingar hos såväl normalhörande som barn med CI. / Previous studies have shown that children with cochlear implant (CI) have worse word fluency abilities and analogical reasoning abilities compared to normal-hearing children. There is a relationship between language and analogical reasoning. However, a possible relationship between word fluency and analogical reasoning has not been studied before among children with CI or among normal-hearing children. This warrants the present study, which aimed to examine if there are differences between children with CI and normal-hearing children regarding word fluency and analogical reasoning. The study also aimed to examine the relationship between word fluency and analogical reasoning in children with CI and normal-hearing children. The present study involved nine children with CI aged 6;4–8;2 years and thirty normal-hearing children aged 6;1–7;1 years. Word fluency was examined using the phonological word fluency test FAS and the semantic word fluency test Animal. Visual analogical reasoning was examined using AnimaLogica and verbal analogical reasoning using Spoken Analogies from Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities-3 (ITPA-3). The results of the present study show that the children with CI had poorer word fluency ability and analogical reasoning compared to the normal-hearing children. A relationship between semantic word fluency and verbal analogical reasoning in normal-hearing children was found, with the children with CI showing the same trend. Word fluency ability and analogical reasoning and their relationship has a clinical relevance for speech-language pathologists since this must be considered when investigating and treating language difficulties in children with CI as well as normal-hearing children.

abstract: The main objective of this project was to create a framework for holistic ideation and investigate the technical issues involved in its implementation. In previous research, logical ideation methods were explored, ideation states were identified, and tentative set of ideation blocks with strategies were incorporated in an interactive software testbed. As a subsequent study, in this research, intuitive methods and their strategies were investigated and characterized, a framework to organize the components of ideation (both logical and intuitive) was devised, and different ideation methods were implemented based on the framework. One of the major contributions of this research is the method by which information passes between different ideation methods. Another important part of the research is that a framework to organize ideas found by different methods. The intuitive ideation strategies added to the holistic test bed are reframing, restructuring, random connection, force connection, and analogical reasoning. A computer tool facilitating holistic ideation was developed. This framework can also be used as a research tool to collect large amounts of data from designers about their choice of ideation strategies, and assessment of their effectiveness. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Mechanical Engineering 2012

No description available.

Les grammaires de construction postulent l’émergence progressive des structures du langage via l’utilisation de processus cognitifs généraux. Les hypothèses théoriques qui en émanent suggèrent que la complexité et la structure des formes morphosyntaxiques ne peuvent s’expliquer que dans une perspective constructiviste, où l’enfant développe ses nouvelles formes en complexifiant et en généralisant ses propres productions antérieures. Ces hypothèses ont été éprouvées auprès de populations présentant un développement typique du langage (DTL) mais ont peu fait l’objet d’une mise en application auprès d’enfants avec troubles spécifiques du langage (TSL). Or, ces théories offrent de nouvelles perspectives théoriques permettant de mieux appréhender leurs difficultés langagières. Ces enfants présentent un manque de productivité syntaxique ainsi qu’une plus grande dépendance à l’input linguistique, allant dans le sens d’un manque de généralisation des schémas de construction. Nous suggérons que, contrairement aux enfants avec DTL, l’abstraction des schémas de construction des enfants avec TSL serait entravée en raison d’un mécanisme de généralisation qui se mettrait en place plus lentement. Ce travail de thèse a pour objectif de tester cette hypothèse chez les enfants avec TSL, en s’intéressant plus particulièrement au rôle du mapping analogique. Les résultats obtenus sont prometteurs et compatibles avec cette hypothèse. Si l’étude du mapping analogique comme facteur à l’origine des difficultés des enfants avec TSL est particulièrement séduisante, de nombreuses pistes restent à explorer pour appuyer davantage notre hypothèse. / Construction grammars argue that language structures progressively emerge thanks to the use of general cognitive processes. Theoretical hypotheses suggest that complexity and structure of morphosyntactic forms can only be explained in a constructivist perspective in which children develop their new forms by making more complex and generalizing their own prior utterances. These hypotheses have been already tested with children with typical language development (TLD) but few studies were interested in children with specific language impairment (SLI). These hypotheses give new interesting theoretical perspectives for apprehending their language disorders better. Children with SLI present a lack of syntactic productivity and a more important input dependency. These observations are compatible with the hypothesis of a lack of generalization of construction schemas. Consequently, the children’s abstraction of construction schemas would be slowed down compared to children with TLD’s abstraction. The current doctoral thesis studies the hypothesis of a lack of generalization in children with SLI by analyzing more particularly the role of analogical mapping. The results obtained are promising and in agreement with our hypothesis. If studies about the role of analogical mapping as a factor explaining the disorders in children with SLI are attractive, other considerations have still to be explored for strengthening our hypotheses.