The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to determine if there is a relationship between middle school students’ epistemological beliefs and Piagetian stages of cognitive development and (b) if there is a relationship between epistemological beliefs and academic performance. Epistemological beliefs were defined as how individuals come to know and the beliefs they hold about this knowledge. A ...

This study investigated the role of knowledge building in fostering conceptual and epistemological changes in the context of Grade 10 chemistry students collaborating on Knowledge Forum in a Hong Kong classroom. Participants were 40 experimental and 39 comparison students experiencing knowledge building and traditional instruction respectively. Students engaging in knowledge building posed ques...

This paper provides an overview of the issues involved in recent debates about the epistemological relevance of emotions. We first survey some key issues in epistemology and the theory of emotions that inform various assessments of emotions’ potential significance in epistemology. We then distinguish five epistemic functions that have been claimed for emotions: motivational force, salience and ...

If school diffusion of innovation is viewed as complex adaptive process, how shall we prepare school leaders to be effective diffusion decision makers? Coming from the epistemological belief that knowledge is subjective and embodied, this paper proposes to use Agent Based Modeling (ABM) for learning by focus on learning to “do” diffusion of innovation rather than learning about diffusion of inn...

Based on an analysis of some 4.000 pages of manuscript notes on ordinary medical practice which the little-known Bohemian physician Georg Handsch (1529–1578?) wrote from the late 1540s, this article traces the central place which empiricist attitudes and approaches held in mid-sixteenth-century learned medical practice. While explicit epistemological statements are rare, the very effort which H...

Abduction was first introduced in the epistemological context of scientific discovery. It was more recently analyzed in Artificial Intelligence, especially with respect to diagnosis analysis or ordinary reasoning. These two fields share a common view of abduction as a general process of hypotheses formation. More precisely, abduction is conceived as a kind of reverse explanation where a hypothe...

This paper discusses the possibility of modelling inductive inference (Gold 1967) in dynamic epistemic logic (see e.g. van Ditmarsch et al. 2007). The general purpose is to propose a semantic basis for designing a modal logic for learning in the limit. First, we analyze a variety of epistemological notions involved in identification in the limit and match it with traditional epistemic and doxas...

Capgras delusion is the belief that significant others have been replaced by impostors, robots or aliens. Although it usually occurs within a psychiatric illness, it can also be the result of brain injury or other obviously organic disorder. In contrast to patients with prosopagnosia, who cannot consciously recognize previously familiar faces but display autonomic or covert recognition (measure...

This article combines findings from cognitive psychology on the role of processing fluency in truth judgments with epistemological theory on justification of belief. We first review evidence that repeated exposure to a statement increases the subjective ease with which that statement is processed. This increased processing fluency, in turn, increases the probability that the statement is judged...

The relation between games and simulations can be profitably investigated by combining ontological tools and recent neurological findings. Neurology shows that simulations are connected to fiction or to reality by a suspension of disbelief or alternatively a suspension of belief, and ontological categories of Mimesis (simulation of an event or an object) and Catharsis (simulation of the experie...