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Family Resemblances (family + resemblance)
Selected AbstractsIf Wittgenstein and Lyotard could talk with Jack and Jill: towards postmodern family therapyJOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY, Issue 3 2001Lois Shawver This essay uses a literary device to create a transcript of an imagined conversation between postmodern philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-François Lyotard with two family therapy trainees, Jack and Jill, in order to explain key postmodern concepts as they might relate to family therapy. These include Lyotard's concepts of a differend, paralogy, metanarrative, and Wittgenstein's concepts of a language game, language game confusions and family resemblance. Other postmodern theorists and therapists make cameo appearances in the conversation, tying their own ideas to the topics under discussion. The essay also addresses the criticism of postmodernism raised by Barbara Held. [source] MAKING SENSE OF CONCEPTUAL CHANGEHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2008JOUNI-MATTI KUUKKANEN ABSTRACT Arthur Lovejoy's history of unit-ideas and the history of concepts are often criticized for being historically insensitive forms of history-writing. Critics claim that one cannot find invariable ideas or concepts in several contexts or times in history without resorting to some distortion. One popular reaction is to reject the history of ideas and concepts altogether, and take linguistic entities as the main theoretical units. Another reaction is to try to make ideas or concepts context-sensitive and to see their histories as dynamic processes of transformation. The main argument in this paper is that we cannot abandon ideas or concepts as theoretical notions if we want to write an intelligible history of thought. They are needed for the categorization and classification of thinking, and in communication with contemporaries. Further, the criterion needed to subsume historical concepts under a general concept cannot be determined merely on the basis of their family resemblances, which allows variation without an end, since talk of the same concepts implies that they share something in common. I suggest that a concept in history should be seen to be composed of two components: the core of a concept and the margin of a concept. On the basis of this, we can develop a vocabulary for talking about conceptual changes. The main idea is that conceptual continuity requires the stability of the core of the concept, but not necessarily that of the margin, which is something that enables a description of context-specific features. If the core changes, we ought to see it as a conceptual replacement. [source] The Imaginary Audience and Personal Fable: Factor Analyses and Concurrent Validity of the "New Look" MeasuresJOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, Issue 2 2002Luc Goossens This study examined key components of the "New Look" at the imaginary audience and personal fable constructs. Toward this end, data from four samples of Belgian high school students (N= 1,458) were analyzed. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses failed to confirm that the measures associated with the New Look theory, the New Imaginary Audience Scale, and the New Personal Fable Scale (NPFS), tapped a common underlying construct. Only the invulnerability and omnipotence subscales of the NPFS proved to be highly related. In line with the New Look theory, boys were found to believe more strongly in their own uniqueness, invulnerability, and omnipotence than were girls. Higher scores on the invulnerability and omnipotence subscales were associated with lower levels of depression and loneliness. Finally, each aspect of the personal fable seemed to have its own specific role in the process of separation , individuation. Implications of these findings for the New Look theory of the imaginary audience and the personal fable are discussed. Suggestions for future research are put forth, with particular emphasis on the role of the invulnerability/omnipotence complex in adolescent development and behavior and on the family resemblances among the various aspects of the personal fable. [source] Concepts and semantic relations in information scienceJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 10 2010Wolfgang G. Stock Concept-based information retrieval and knowledge representation are in need of a theory of concepts and semantic relations. Guidelines for the construction and maintenance of knowledge organization systems (KOS) (such as ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 in the U.S.A. or DIN 2331:1980 in Germany) do not consider results of concept theory and theory of relations to the full extent. They are not able to unify the currently different worlds of traditional controlled vocabularies, of the social web (tagging and folksonomies) and of the semantic web (ontologies). Concept definitions as well as semantic relations are based on epistemological theories (empiricism, rationalism, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and critical theory). A concept is determined via its intension and extension as well as by definition. We will meet the problem of vagueness by introducing prototypes. Some important definitions are concept explanations (after Aristotle) and the definition of family resemblances (in the sense of Wittgenstein). We will model concepts as frames (according to Barsalou). The most important paradigmatic relation in KOS is hierarchy, which must be arranged into different classes: Hyponymy consists of taxonomy and simple hyponymy, meronymy consists of many different part-whole-relations. For practical application purposes, the transitivity of the given relation is very important. Unspecific associative relations are of little help to our focused applications and should be replaced by generalizable and domain-specific relations. We will discuss the reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity of paradigmatic relations as well as the appearance of specific semantic relations in the different kinds of KOS (folksonomies, nomenclatures, classification systems, thesauri, and ontologies). Finally, we will pick out KOS as a central theme of the Semantic Web. [source] Complexity and the Culture of CurriculumEDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2008William E. Doll Abstract This paper has two main foci: (1) the history of curriculum design, and (2) implications from the new sciences of chaos and complexity for the development of new forms of curriculum design and teaching implementation. Regarding the first focus, the paper posits that there exist,to use Wittgenstein's phrase,,family resemblances' between Peter Ramus' 16th century curriculum design and that of Ralph Tyler in the 20th century. While this 400-year linkage is by no means linear, there are overlapping strands from Ramus to Comenius to the Puritans to colonial New England to Horace Mann to Ralph Tyler. What unites these strands, all belonging to the Protestant Methodization movement that swept across northern Europe into colonial America and the USA, is the concept of Method. Taylor's ,time and motion' studies set the stage for Tyler's Basic Principles of curriculum design,those starting with set goals and concluding with measured assessment. The second focus draws on the new sciences of chaos and complexity to develop a different sense of curriculum and instruction,open, dynamic, relational, creative, and systems oriented. The paper concludes with an integration of the rational/scientific with the aesthetic/spiritual into a view of education and curriculum informed by complexity. [source] | ||||||||||