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3.5 Emotions as passions I have already suggested that in stressing the connection between emotions and bodily changes, James might be seen as endorsing the intuitive picture of emotion that I set out earlier on. James's thesis could also be taken to sanction the view that emotions are passive, involuntary responses. Perceptual states are often regarded as passive, involuntary states. To say this is to say that we cannot exercise direct control over our perceptual states. If my mouth is full of pickled herring,
3.3 Emotion, motivation and action Perhaps one of the most striking features of James's theory is his account of the relationship between emotions and actions. As James points out, this is one aspect of his theory that runs directly counter to our ordinary conception of emotion. Ordinarily, we assume that emotions motivate actions: for example, if someone asked why Larry kicked Bella's bin, we might say that he was motivated by anger – that he did it because he was angry. On James's account, the order of explanation is rever
3.1 William James In 1890, the philosopher and psychologist William James published his influential work The Principles of Psychology. The book included a chapter on the emotions, in which James advanced a bold new thesis about the nature of the emotions. James's thesis has had an enormous influence on subsequent debate. Reading 1 is a short extract from James's chapter on the emotions. In the passage that precedes this extract, James castigates earlier psychologists who have written on the subjec
2.2 Identifying emotions The question ‘What is an emotion?’ is a question about emotions in general. But it is impossible to address this question without being aware that there appear to be many different types of emotion. One way to start is to consider a range of states and to identify which states we would naturally classify as emotions, and which we would naturally classify as states of some other kind. This will put us in a better position to see whether there are any common features that link different typ
2.2.2 Model 2: African + Roman= African traits continue to dominate and Roman traits fail to become This model is more or less the opposite of the first, and the political domination of Rome has little or no effect upon the African people and their culture. Here we might expect to find evidence for politico-military control but little or no evidence for Roman culture or the acceptance of a Roman identity. This is perhaps the model we might expect to encounter in frontier zones at the limits of the Roman empire. It might also prevail in a scenario where a traditional society chose to reinfor
1.10 Religion and the individual How formal or informal, how personal or impersonal, how loose or how tight, how casual or demanding the religious community is will depend on the form of religion, the extent to which it is enforced and the level of the individual's commitment to it. It is worth remembering that just as people have certain expectations of religion, religions tend to have certain expectations of adherents. The sociologists Rodney Stark and Charles Glock (1968) have argued that although religious organizations
1.8 Religion and spirituality A good example of polysemy can be found in the different ways in which people regard the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’, and this is the subject of the first exercise below. Give some thought for a moment to 1.2 Continuity and change Religions generally go to a great deal of trouble to stress how consistent, how changeless, how solid they are, but change is, in fact, an observable and constant factor in religion. At a personal level, for example, older Catholics who grew up having to eat fish on Friday and ‘knowing’ that cremation was forbidden to them are aware of that. Such ‘unchanging certainties’ have changed a great deal over the years. It is therefore useful to look both at how a religion develops over time Introduction There is a widespread perception in the West that we live in a secular age, an age in which religion is at best an optional extra, if not a false delusion completely out of place. However, religion still arouses passion and causes controversy; it controls and transforms lives. An informed understanding of the contemporary world thus requires an appreciation of the role of religion in shaping ideas, world-views and actions that have an impact on the social as well as on the personal life of th 3.3 The musicians at work 4.18.2 Information visualisation We read increasingly of the problem of information overload. Earlier, we emphasised the importance of designing appropriate information representations to assist human interpretation in order to create actionable knowledge. Information visualisation is concerned explicitly with designing representations using intuitive visual metaphors and graphics to highlight the most important aspects of information structures and processes. Information visualisation is a rapidly emerg 4.18.1 Data mining Data mining refers to techniques for analysing databases or information systems to try to identify hidden but significant patterns that are not possible to detect by standard querying of the database. Moxon defines data mining as follows: Data mining is a set of techniques used in an automated approach to exhaustively explore and bring to the surface complex relationships in very large datasets … most likely im 4.14.1 Metadata
Metadata is descriptive data about data. This has also come to refer to a way of tagging documents (on the Web or any other repository) with structured, descriptive information. For example, to describe a unit in B823, we would expect to have concepts such as title and author, but perhaps also prerequisite or core concepts. Translated into a metadata scheme, this might appear as follows (typically metadata fields use 4.13.2 Example: an ‘intelligent’ email system Let us work through an email example of making a system ‘smarter’. We are all familiar with the standardised fields in an email system: From, To, Subject. The computer needs the To/From information, expressed in a standard format, to direct the message to its addressees and allow them to reply. It has no concept of who the sender and recipient are, or what the Subject field means. We can imagine simple knowledge-level email categories which add status information to t 4.12.1 Communities of practice and technology Communities of practice are technical and social networks which set the context in which new knowledge arises in daily work, and determine how it is shared and interpreted, what counts as important knowledge and how people become recognised as members of that community: A good deal of new technology attends primarily to individuals and the explicit information that passes between them. To support the flow of knowledge, 4.11.1 Debating and negotiating meaning The two briefings in Boxes 4.10 and 4.11 illustrate other technological approaches to supporting socially based forms of knowledge generation, with the common theme of facilitating negotiation and debate among stakeholders. These are examples of tools which can assist communication between communities of practice as they seek to understand each other's perspectives. 4.4.2 Mapping across multiple communities of practice In introducing the core concepts, we highlighted the perspective that ‘what counts’ as valuable knowledge is unavoidably shaped by the communities of practice to which the ‘publisher’ and ‘consumer’ belong. One makes situated judgements regarding the relevance of a new piece of information for oneself and others, and how to store or share it appropriately. One geographical metaphor conjured up by this perspective is that of ‘islands’ of local coherence, with narrow ‘c 3.2 Organisational memory systems Without a memory, humans are paralysed in the present moment, unable to reflect on lessons learned or to anticipate the future. You will notice that the heading given to the framework in Figure 3 is corporate memory. The whole dynamic system of people and technologies is conceived as constituting an organisation-wide resource that will enable it to become a more intelligent, learning organism, to pursue the anthropomorphic metaphor. The organisational memory challenge goes beyond tradi 3.1 A knowledge management technology framework In the introduction to a book on knowledge management technologies, Borghoff and Pareschi (1998) described a framework for organisational memory that has been developed within Xerox to promote understanding of the roles and interplay between different technologies (Figure 4).
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