A Philosophy of Problem Solving: Using the Idea of Developing a List Interpreter

Appreciate the Complexities Involved in Decision-Making & Problem Solving. Develop evidence to support views. Analyze situations carefully. Discuss subjects.
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The Bloom Taxonomy 25 is a hierarchy of thinking skills that ranges from simple skills, such as knowledge, to complex thinking, such as evaluation. Depending on the initial words used in the question, students can be challenged at different levels of cognition. Examples of Questions Another type of questioning technique is Socratic questioning. Socratic questioning is defined as a type of questioning that deeply probes or explores the meaning, justification, or logical strength of a claim, position, or line of reasoning. Questioning methods, such as calling on students who do not have their hands up, can enhance learning by engaging students to think.

The Socratic method focuses on clarification. A student's answer to a question can be followed by asking a fellow student to summarize the previous answer. Summarizing the information allows the student to demonstrate whether he or she was listening, had digested the information, and understood it enough to put it into his or her own words. Avoiding questions with one set answer allows for different viewpoints and encourages students to compare problems and approaches. Asking students to explain how the high school and the collegiate or university field experiences are similar and different is an example.

There is no right or wrong answer because the answers depend upon the individual student's experiences. In addition to using these questioning techniques, it is equally important to orient the students to this type of classroom interaction. Mills 22 suggested that provocative questions should be brief and contain only one or two issues at a time for class reflection. Elliot 18 argued that waiting even as long as 10 seconds allows the students time to think about possibilities.

If a thought question is asked, time must be given for the students to think about the answer. Classroom discussion and debates can promote critical thinking. Various techniques are available. Bernstein 28 developed a negotiation model in which students were confronted with credible but antagonistic arguments. Students were challenged to deal with the tension between the two arguments.

This tension is believed to be one component driving critical thought. Controversial issues in psychology, such as animal rights and pornography, were presented and discussed. Students responded favorably and, as the class progressed over time, they reported being more comfortable arguing both sides of an issue. In athletic training education, a negotiation model could be employed to discuss certain topics, such as the use of heat versus ice or the use of ultrasound versus electric stimulation in the treatment of an injury. Students could be assigned to defend the use of a certain treatment.

Another strategy to promote students to seek both sides of an issue is pro and con grids. Debate was used to promote CT in second-year medical students. Regardless of the teaching methods used, students should be exposed to analyzing the costs and benefits of issues, problems, and treatments to help prepare them for real-life decision making. Observing the reasoning skills of another person was used by Galotti 31 to promote CT.

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Students were paired, and 4 reasoning tasks were administered. As the tasks were administered, students were told to talk aloud through the reasoning process of their decisions. Students who were observing were to write down key phrases and statements. This same process can be used in an injury-evaluation class. One student performs an evaluation while the others in the class observe.

Classroom discussion can then follow. Another alternative is to divide students into pairs. One student performs an evaluation while the other observes. Another option is to have athletic training students observe a student peer or ATC during a field evaluation of an athlete. While observing, the student can write down any questions or topics to discuss after the evaluation, providing the student an opportunity to ask why certain evaluation methods were and were not used.

Daily newspaper clippings directly related to current classroom content also allow an instructor to incorporate discussion into the classroom. Such news also affords the instructor an opportunity to discuss the affective components involved. Students could be asked to step into the role of the ATC and think about the reported implications of this death from different perspectives.

They could also list any assumptions made by the article or follow-up questions they would ask if they could interview the persons involved. This provides a forum to enlighten students to think for themselves and realize that not each person in the room perceives the article the same way.

Whatever the approach taken, investigators and educators agree that assignments and arguments are useful to promote thought among students. In-class and out-of-class assignments can also serve as powerful vehicles to allow students to expand their thinking processes. Emig 33 believed that involving students in writing serves their learning uniquely because writing, as process and product, possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies. As a general rule, assignments for the purpose of promoting thought should be short not long term papers and focus on the aspect of thinking.

Allegretti and Frederick 34 used a variety of cases from a book to promote CT regarding different ethical issues. Countless case-study situations can be created to allow students to practice managing situations and assess clinical decision making. For example, after reading the National Athletic Trainers' Association position statement on lightning, a student can be asked to address the following scenario: What information would you use from this statement to explain your concerns?

Explain why you picked the specific concerns. The students will pick different concerns based on their thinking. This variety in answers is not only one way to show that no answer is right or wrong but also allows students to defend their answers to peers. Questions posed on listservs are excellent avenues to enrich a student's education. Using these real-life questions, students read about real issues and concerns of ATCs. These topics present excellent opportunities to pose questions to senior-level athletic training students to examine how they would handle the situation.

This provides the students a safe place to analyze the problem and form a decision. Once the students make a decision, additional factors, assumptions, and inferences can be discussed by having all students share the solution they chose. Lantz and Meyers 35 used personification and assigned students to assume the character of a drug.

Students were to relate themselves to the drug, in the belief that drugs exhibit many unique characteristics, such as belonging to a family, interaction problems, adverse reactions, and so forth. The development of analogies comes from experience and comparing one theory or scenario to another with strong similarities.

Many incorporate a personal reaction from the student and allow the student to link that learning to his or her feelings. This personal reaction of feelings to cognitive information is important to show the relevance of material. His idea was that a word was not isolated in the text, but that it had friends, that are linked between themselves, or, as the German philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it: Nowadays, we can extend this idea of common minimal units to a more general resemblance, and speak, for instance, of an isotopy of irony in a text, that is based on an assembly words conveying this meaning.

With the isotopy theory, the meaning of a word has to be considered in relationship to the other words which are part of the same isotopy. And the meaning of the text emerges from the network of isotopies which structure the text. This is the meaning that the translator has to translate, a meaning that is not linked to special representative words in the text as for instance Gerzymisch claims:.

In order to grasp this meaning, which is between the isotopies of the text, we have to interpret the tokens which are likely to bear meaning. Hermeneutics can be defined as the science or art of interpreting. Translational hermeneutics is intimately linked to philosophical hermeneutics in so far as translation can be seen as actualized hermeneutics and vice-versa. So the history of hermeneutics can be seen as a fight for recognition as a science or as rejecting these efforts, and seeing it rather as an art. But things are not clear at all. From domain-specific isolated aggregates of interpretation rules to methodological universality.

The status as a science is linked to the development of a methodology that might be universally applicable. The first to fight for universality was Johann Conrad Dannhauer. Before Dannhauer, text interpreting existed, closely linked to the translation of ancient texts from Latin and Greek which alimented medieval thinking. But these interpretations were strictly domain specific, concerning religion, philosophy, history, law, medecine, etc. His initiative was pursued in the 18th century, when the discussion on universal hermeneutics went into details like discussing the origins of obscurity in difficult passages Johann Martin Chladenius, or extending the idea of hermeneutic universality to general semiotics Georg Friedrich Meyer, considering everything in this world as being a sign which pointed towards something behind it that was part of a coherent whole designed as such by the Divine Creator.

In the 19th century, hermeneutics were dominated by a philosopher and theologian who is generally considered as the founder of modern hermeneutics: Before him the interpretation was limited to the obscure passages of the text. This meaning is always beyond the words with which we try to express it. As a consequence, no expression of this meaning by words can be seen as the ultimate representation of it.

This is one of the fundamentals in hermeneutic thinking. For the translator, this means that there is not such a thing as the perfect translation of the source text. This mental representation of the meaning is the verbum interius of the translator which struggles to be expressed in words of the target language.

Hans-Georg Gadamer , however, completely dispelled the idea of such a methodology. For him, the task of hermeneutics was not to find a methodology, but to discover the truth, be it through language or through works of art.

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The main obstacle to this discovery are our prejudices. The rationalist philosophies have condemned prejudices, conceiving them as something negative. For Gadamer, however, prejudices are part of the process of understanding as something unavoidable that has to be integrated into the theoretical approach.

Prejudices hinder our quest for truth when they are ignored.

For Gadamer, understanding is a permanent dynamic progress in a dialectic confrontation with the other. The translator has to enter into a dialogue with the text. To get at it we have to develop empathy though Gadamer himself never used this term himself. Meaning is not anything static to be seized by mere intellectual analysis. All these ideas are made fruitful for translation by Fritz Paepcke, whose conception of translation, taken over from Gadamer, materializes itself in a dynamization of the terminology of translation studies speaking for instance of Kommmunikations geschehen [the happening or process of communication], Wahrheits geschehen [the happening or process of truth], etc, to draw attention to the dynamic character of meaning.

Paepcke introduces terms like the Leibhaftigkeit [corporeality, sensuous physicality] of the translator in his understanding, insisting on the physical implication of the translator with all his senses, an aspect which Douglas Robinson will sum up under the term somatics. With Paepcke, the translator as a human being was brought into the focus of attention, which, in the context of all-dominating linguistic structuralism, was indeed a little revolution in translation studies.

However, the impossibility of handling intuition and creativity from a systematic point of view gave rise to concerns about the danger of subjectivity in translation and the lack of scientificity which was suspected to go with it. Instead of trying to deny the subjectivity of the translator, the hermeneutic approach deliberately integrated it in its theoretical thinking.

But handling intuition and creativity compelled the hermeneuts to look for new scientific criteria in the quality assessment of translation. In her different books about hermeneutics and translation, she highlightens several concepts of philosophical mainly Gadamerian hermeneutics, and explains their relevance for the translator. But the handling of intuition and creativity, which is the core issue in translational hermeneutics, exacted a view beyond the borders of linguistics into the new fields of cognitivistic research.

The introduction of subjectivity, intuition and creativity as fundamentals in hermeneutic translation studies gave rise to concern regarding the scientific character of the hermeneutic approach. Indeed Popper , pp. This is what recent research in translational hermeneutics is striving to do by appealing not only to linguistic analysis, but also to recent research in cognitive studies.

The methodology for this new aproach was provided by American researchers in social sciences in the s as described by Garfinkel Stefanink introduced this methodology into translation studies under the French name of ethnotraductologie [ethnotranslatology]. This methodology provides not only a possibility for studying the process of translating but also exposes the naive representations the implicated translators have in their minds regarding the process of translation, language and the relationship between culture and language, etc.

It is moreover very efficient from a didactical point of view. After having transcribed their dialogue the participants analyze it with the help of their supervisor, an analysis in the course of which they are confronted with their naive ideas about about the process of translation, about language, about the relationship between culture and language, etc.

These new elements in translation theory require new criteria for quality assessment. German students had to translate from English into German in a context describing the problems of young couples having children and being both working in a job:. In the English context of child education, the word potty-chair triggers a very common element, which is lexicalized in idiomatics like potty-chair training. In England the prototypical emblematic element in this scene is the potty-chair, in Germany it is changing the diaper.

The memory of the bi-cultural translator had registered the scene excrement management , this scene contains both the elements of potty-chair and diaper changing. The translation by Kind establishes the equivalence on a higher level. Indeed, Kind can be seen as a short cut for the scenario Kindererziehung [education of children]. The potty-chair is one of the elements in this scenario of Kindererziehung , so it sounds plausible, according to the Thematic Organization Packets [TOP] theory of Roger Schank, that the translator associates this element of the scene with the scenario of Kindererziehung , which includes this scenic element potty-chair , which belongs to the scene excrement management.

As one can see, the relations between the different scenes are of associative nature, and as Fillmore , p. I want to say that people, when learning a language, come to associate certain scenes with certain linguistic frames. I intend to use the word scene — a word that I am not quite happy with — in a maximally general sense, to include not only visual scenes, but familiar kinds of interpersonal transactions, standard scenarios, familiar layouts, institutional structures, enactive experiences, body image; and, in general, any kind of coherent segment, large or mall, of human beliefs, actions, experiences, or imaginings.

I intend to use the word frame for referring to any system of linguistic choices the easiest cases being collection of words, but also including choices of grammatical rules or grammatical categories that can get associated with prototypical instances of scenes. I would like to say that scenes and frames, in the minds of people who have learned the associations between them, activate each other; and that, furthermore, frames are associated with other frames by virtue of shared linguistic material, and that scenes are associated with other scenes by virtue of sameness or similarity of the entities or relations or substances that are in them or their contexts of occurence.

All these explanations given by cognitive science legitimate the creativity that helps the hermeneutic translator to overcome the cultural barriers. Linguistic analysis allows you to see what triggered your creative solution from the bottom up elements of the text, cognitive science helps you to understand and make understood to others what associative chaining processes induced this problem solving.

Critical Thinking

Perspectives for the future: Schleiermacher drew philosophical hermeneutics from his discussion with Schlegel about his translation of Plato. Contemporary translatologists — as for instance, Paepcke — have been feeding on philosophers like Gadamer, but the interest of hermeneutic philosophers in translation is very limited as we could notice at the last symposion of philosophers in Florianopolis, Hermeneia But until now this has not been very much materialized.

At the end sof her summa , Cercel , p. We completely share her criticism, when she writes: We think that the challenge of making translation hermeneutics more convincing could be met, on the one hand, at the empirical level, by multiplying individual examples of studies concerning the translation process especially creative problem-solving with the help of ethnomethodological conversation analysis, which would offer a solid basis to discussions about the contentiously discussed comprehension process — actio vs.

On the other hand, an interdisciplinary contact with cognitive sciences would be helpful, since cognitive sciences are confirming the heuristic function of hermeneutics. Words in the Mind. An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Albiana — Bu — Ccu — Iitm. Radegundis Stolze zu ihrem Other theories exist to discuss non-linguistic meaning i.

Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called theories of reference. Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory. Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: The sense of a sentence is the thought that it expresses.

Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The sense of any sub-sentential expression consists in its contribution to the thought that its embedding sentence expresses. Senses determine reference and are also the modes of presentation of the objects to which expressions refer. Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while their referents are truth values true or false. The referents of sentences embedded in propositional attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses. Bertrand Russell , in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology , held that the only directly referential expressions are, what he called, "logically proper names".

Logically proper names are such terms as I , now , here and other indexicals. Trump may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and husband of Melania Trump. Such phrases denote in the sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, such objects are not to be considered meaningful on their own, but have meaning only in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which they are a part.

Hence, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for Russell. On Frege's account, any referring expression has a sense as well as a referent. Such a "mediated reference" view has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names, such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain , cause problems for a directly referential view because it is possible for someone to hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised — thus, their cognitive content seems different.

Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism was criticized in Saul Kripke 's Naming and Necessity. Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" or "argument from rigidity". Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions "the greatest student of Plato", "the founder of logic" and "the teacher of Alexander".

Aristotle obviously satisfies all of the descriptions and many of the others we commonly associate with him , but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then Aristotle was any one, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing any single one of the things for which he is known to posterity.

He may have existed and not have become known to posterity at all or he may have died in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated by Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and the actual Aristotle died in infancy. But this is deeply counterintuitive. Hence, names are rigid designators , according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists.

In the same work, Kripke articulated several other arguments against " Frege—Russell " descriptivism. It is worth noting that the whole philosophical enterprise of studying reference has been critiqued by linguist Noam Chomsky in various works. Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in modern psycholinguistics.

Some important questions are How much of language is innate? Is language acquisition a special faculty in the mind? What is the connection between thought and language? There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning. The second is the hypothesis testing perspective , which understands the child's learning of syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the general faculty of intelligence.

The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind. There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language. Connectionist models emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative network. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity of the brain.

An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind is to what extent language influences thought and vice versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions. Linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic community" can think about certain subjects a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell 's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Philosopher Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint.

The stark opposite to the Sapir—Whorf position is the notion that thought or, more broadly, mental content has priority over language. The "knowledge-first" position can be found, for instance, in the work of Paul Grice. According to his argument, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in the mind. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite regress.

Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive — that there is no way of explaining one without the other. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction.

Daniel Dennett holds a similar interpretationist view of propositional attitudes. Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias , have questioned whether or not language was capable of capturing thought at all. There are studies that prove that languages shape how people understand causality. Some of them were performed by Lera Boroditsky. For example, English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself.

Later everyone was asked whether they could remember who did what. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blue in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha , a tribe in Brazil , whose language has only terms like few and many instead of numerals, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.

In one study German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key"—a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish—the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny.

In a series of studies conducted by Gary Lupyan, people were asked to look at a series of images of imaginary aliens. They had to guess whether each alien was friendly or hostile, and after each response they were told if they were correct or not, helping them learn the subtle cues that distinguished friend from foe. A quarter of the participants were told in advance that the friendly aliens were called "leebish" and the hostile ones "grecious", while another quarter were told the opposite.

For the rest, the aliens remained nameless. It was found that participants who were given names for the aliens learned to categorize the aliens far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told the names could correctly categorize 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest. It was concluded that naming objects helps us categorize and memorize them. In another series of experiments [39] a group of people was asked to view furniture from an IKEA catalog.

Half the time they were asked to label the object — whether it was a chair or lamp, for example — while the rest of the time they had to say whether or not they liked it. It was found that when asked to label items, people were later less likely to recall the specific details of products, such as whether a chair had arms or not. It was concluded that labeling objects helps our minds build a prototype of the typical object in the group at the expense of individual features. A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics.

One question is, "What exactly is a convention, and how do we study it? However, this view seems to compete to some extent with the Gricean view of speaker's meaning, requiring either one or both to be weakened if both are to be taken as true. Some have questioned whether or not conventions are relevant to the study of meaning at all. Noam Chomsky proposed that the study of language could be done in terms of the I-Language, or internal language of persons.

If this is so, then it undermines the pursuit of explanations in terms of conventions, and relegates such explanations to the domain of "meta-semantics". Metasemantics is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise. Etymology the study of the origins of words and stylistics philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language are two other examples of fields that are taken to be meta-semantic.

Not surprisingly, many separate but related fields have investigated the topic of linguistic convention within their own research paradigms. The presumptions that prop up each theoretical view are of interest to the philosopher of language. For instance, one of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism , is based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings. Rhetoric is the study of the particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach.

Some relevant applications of the field include the examination of propaganda and didacticism , the examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives especially how it influences the behavior of others, and defines relationships , or the effects of gendered language. It can also be used to study linguistic transparency or speaking in an accessible manner , as well as performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform called "speech acts". It also has applications to the study and interpretation of law, and helps give insight to the logical concept of the domain of discourse.

Literary theory is a discipline that some literary theorists claim overlaps with the philosophy of language. It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text.


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This field, an outgrowth of the study of how to properly interpret messages, is unsurprisingly closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics. In Continental philosophy , language is not studied as a separate discipline, as it is in analytic philosophy. Rather, it is an inextricable part of many other areas of thought, such as phenomenology , semiotics , hermeneutics , Heideggerean ontology , existentialism , structuralism , deconstruction and critical theory.

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The idea of language is often related to that of logic in its Greek sense as " logos ", meaning discourse or dialectic. Language and concepts are also seen as having been formed by history and politics, or even by historical philosophy itself.

Objective:

The field of hermeneutics, and the theory of interpretation in general, has played a significant role in 20th century Continental philosophy of language and ontology beginning with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger combines phenomenology with the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey.

Heidegger believed language was one of the most important concepts for Dasein. Heidegger believed that language today is worn out because of overuse of important words, and would be inadequate for in-depth study of Being Sein.