The role of beliefs in expected unchangeability of life stress (EU) was studied in a sample of 194 elderly persons with economic and/or health problems and a control group. The research model integrated different approaches to cognitive theories of adjustment to aging. (Author/CM)

Uses John Searle's concept of "Background" to explore the acquisition of scholarly know-how, particularly as it relates to graduate students whose previous education impedes their epistemological access to scholarly practices. (EV)

This paper debates the usefulness and plausibility of the notion of cognitive structures. The cornerstone of the theory of cognitive philosophy is the claim that the epistemic process is mediated by mental representations that constitute both the knowledge base and interpretations of sensory experience of individuals. Cognitive theorists typically…

Jean Piaget is credited with such topics as the synthesis of philosophy and the life sciences through a description of progressive stage by stage development, and a genetic epistemology founded on the principle of knowledge through processes of cognitive assimilation and accommodation. In actuality, these themes were originally postulated by James…

Western philosophy has not had much to say about listening or receptive communication until fairly recently, and listening research has tended either to follow the trends of the speech communication field or to be directed by speech science or the pragmatics of the working world. A study examines the process of understanding and interpretation…

The central thesis of this paper is that the philosophical systems survey provided by Morris and Pai (1976) in their text entitled "Philosophy and the American School" misrepresents the school of Thomism on several significant points. Though the authors' treatment of Thomistic metaphysics is judged to be adequate, their presentation of…

Arguing that the concept of causality in human experience is archaic, unnecessary, and misleading, particularly in the social/behavioral sciences, a new plausibility approach is proposed for understanding relationships among entities. The epistemological history of causality includes positivist, deductive-nomological, essentialist, activity or…

In focusing on the epistemology of journalism, this paper seeks to determine how reporters, particularly investigative reporters, know what they know. It begins by distinguishing between the validity of knowledge claims and their everyday justification, assuming the latter to be the proper focus for a phenomenological study of what passes as…

The terms "rigor" and "relevance" most often surface in discussions of methodological adequacy. Assessing epistemological relevance is equivalent to answering the question, "Is this particular research question worth asking at all?" Epistemological rigor refers to the properties of a "researchable" problem.…

Clinical report writing involves two interlinking processes--creation and communication. There are six stages of clinical inference that find parallels in generative writing stages: possessing a postulate system, constructing the major premise, observing for occurrences, instantiating (classifying) the occurrences, reaching a referential product,…

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development and David Ausubel's assimilation theory of learning are explicated and selected research involving both theories is reviewed in this paper. The two theories are compared on selected dimensions to demonstrate that they are compatible and that, in conjunction with one another, they form a strong…

Argues that a weak form of schema theory (a schema being an abstract set of expectations) gives the best account of the knowledge most people have about ordinary matters. Emphasizes that a person's culture is a principal determiner of what is already known and what can come to be known. (KH)

At the heart of the debate over validity in qualitative research are ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological questions that are themselves blurred in a postmodern/poststructuralist matrix. This paper explores some of the foundations and criteria for establishing, representing, and evaluating the truth, rigor, and accuracy of…

This paper explores the representation of taxonomy, systematics and other aspects of science on selected natural history museum Web sites, using two different but related approaches. One uses a series of categories relating to the nature of science (derived from an evaluation of exhibitions) and applies these to each Web site. In essence, this…

Uses Karl Popper's theory that knowledge is produced through continual trial conjectures and error elimination to argue that students are fallible creators of knowledge and that the primary role of the teacher is as a critic. (EV)