Ernest Sosa has long defended bi-level virtue epistemology on the grounds that it offers the best overall treatment of epistemology’s central issues. A surprising number of problems “yield to” the approach (Sosa 1991: 9). Sosa applies bi-level virtue epistemology to diagnose and bypass ongoing disputes in contemporary epistemology, including the disputes between foundationalists and coherentist...

The question of whether reasoning can, or should, be described by a single normative model is an important one. In the following, I combine epistemological considerations taken from Piaget's notion of genetic epistemology, a hypothesis about the role of reasoning in communication and developmental data to argue that some basic logical principles are in fact highly normative. I argue here that e...

Constructivist and conceptual change perspectives on learning have given rise to a number of models of constructivist classroom teaching. Motivation has been recognized as an important factor in the construction of knowledge and the process of conceptual change, so one could expect that motivation strategies would be integral components of constructivist-informed teaching. The purpose of this p...

The roots of cognitive science go as far back as those of philosophy. One way of defining cognitive science is to say that it is just naturalised philosophy. Much of contemporary thinking about the mind derives from René Descartes' distinction between the body and the soul. They were constituted of two different substances and it was only humans that had a soul and were capable of thinking. Acc...

In the past, few mainstream epistemologists have endorsed Bayesian epistemology, feeling that it fails to capture the complex structure of epistemic cognition. The defenders of Bayesian epistemology have tended to be probability theorists rather than epistemologists, and I have always suspected they were more attracted by its mathematical elegance than its epistemological realism. But recently ...

The purpose of the current study was to compare the use of virtual discussion boards in various educational settings in the United States and Costa Rica. Participants included professors of education, in-service and pre-service teachers in the United States and Costa Rica where a survey was used that included demographic, knowledge, attitude, and behavioral questions regarding the use of virtua...

This article is written in response to a recent report on a review of teacher education in Scotland undertaken by Graham Donaldson (2011). In particular it questions the recommendation that engaging teachers in professional enquiry and research-informed teaching is the way forward for developing the professional capabilities required of “21 Century teachers”. The report reflects an increasing e...

Gunver S. Kienle, MD, Institute for Applied Epistemology and Medical Methodology, Freiburg/Bad Krozingen, Germany. Harald J. Hamre, MD, Clinical Research Department, Institute for Applied Epistemology and Medical Methodology, Freiburg/Bad Krozingen, Germany. Emanuela Portalupi, MD, Medico Oncologo, ARESMA, Milano, Italy. Helmut Kiene, MD, Institute for Applied Epistemology and Medical Methodolo...