Rambling Thoughts About Doing and Thinking Research

Eight LANGUAGE AND THINKING ABOUT THOUGHTS

Thinking about it: thoughts about health and valuing QALYs.

When valuing health states (e.g., for use in the assessment of health technologies), health economists often ask respondents how many years of life in poor health they would be willing to trade-off in order to live in full health. Problems with preferences of this kind have led to calls for the use of more direct measures of the utility associated with experiencing a health state. The fact rema...

Computational Thinking … and Doing

A t our most recent CiSE meeting, one of the board members approached me during a short break and asked: " Why do you do this? you seem to have better things to do. " seeking clarification , i came to understand that he Was Wondering Why a computer scientist such as myself would want to be on the editorial board of a publication that isn't necessarily focused on the " tradition " of computer sc...

Diagrams about Thoughts about Thoughts about Diagrams

The study of diagrammatic reasoning often focuses on computational models of diagram use rather than on studies of human performance. This paper considers diagrams as a notational system that can be used and studied in an experimental context. It presents a review of the experimental psychology literature rather than a complete theoretical framework, and is intended as an introduction to the fi...

Thinking by Doing and Doing by Thinking: A Taxonomy of Actions

Taking a lead from existing typologies of actions in the philosophical and cognitive science literatures, we present a novel taxonomy of actions. To promote a notion of epistemic agency we distinguish theoretical (mental state-directed) from practical (world-directed) actions. Our basic structural unit is that of a teleological frame, which spans one specific goal of an agent. Relative to a giv...