درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Moral realism is the doctrine that some propositions asserting that some action is ‘morally’ good (obligatory, bad, or wrong) are true. This paper examines three different definitions of what it is for an action to be ‘morally’ good (with corresponding definitions for ‘morally’ obligatory, bad, or wrong) which would make moral realism a clear and plausible view. The first defines ‘morally good as ‘overall important to do’; and the second defines it as ‘overall important to do for universalizable reasons’. The paper argues that neither of these definitions is adequate; and it develops the view of Cuneo and Shafer-Landau that we need a definition which is partly in terms of paradigm examples of morally good actions, which they call ‘moral fixed points’. Hence the third and final definition is that an action is morally good if it is ‘overall important to do because this follows from a fundamental universalizable principle, belonging to a system of such principles which includes almost all the moral fixed points; when a suggested fundamental principle is one which would be shown to be very probably true by the exercise of reflective equilibrium over many centuries’.

As science focuses exclusively on the physical, it seems to assume that the brain has a key role in the origin if not also the constitution of our consciousness; and thus the destruction of the brain, the nervous system, and the body makes it pointless or even absurd to think of any personal consciousness after death. But one need not be convinced by this. However, any effort to investigate a possible post-mortem life depends on forming a coherent conception of what such a life could be. Can we speak, without incoherence or contradiction, of a person continuing to exist after death in a disembodied state? Our concern in this study lies here. Based on Lund's view, we will present and defend an argument that one can conceive of a self who is fully embedded in the natural world and deeply embodied in a physical organism, and yet could have a rich variety of experiences in an afterworld encountered after death. In this theory, the close association of the mental and the physical is due to a causal connection - a connection that fails to establish that the physical brings the mental into existence and is compatible with theories that the source of consciousness is not in the brain (e.g., the transceiver or filter theory).

John McDowell and Richard Rorty draw on Kant’s influential account of experience. For Rorty, Kant is the antagonist who succumbs to foundationalism or what Sellars calls the Myth of the Given and Wittgenstein is the hero who helps in overcoming the siren call of the Myth. McDowell, however, is ambivalent toward Kant. With Sellars, he applauds Kant as the hero who helped us vanquish the Myth of the Given. But he argues that Kant failed to recognize the full strength of his account of experience and capitulated to a subjective idealism. Wittgenstein, for McDowell, is the hero who helps us achieve an account of experience that gets to the things themselves. I adjudicate the philosophical and the exegetical tensions between Rorty and McDowell and support the latter’s approach to experience and to the reading of Kant and Wittgenstein.

Conducting qualitative research in applied linguistics seems to have some challenges. Hence, this study aimed to investigate the challenges of applied linguists across different research abilities to conduct qualitative studies. To that end, the biographical narratives, authored by 13 applied linguists, were collected. Then, the narratives were analyzed through qualitative data analysis principles, including organizing and familiarizing, coding and reducing, and interpreting and presenting (Ary et al., 2014). The findings showed that applied linguists face four challenges: methodological issues, technical issues, ethical issues, and qualitative research dissemination while doing qualitative research. The findings also indicated similarities and differences among applied linguists' challenges across different research abilities. It can be concluded that teaching qualitative research is more than mere lecturing about qualitative concepts. Thus, there should be practice-based instruction on qualitative research for applied linguistics students. Moreover, there should be a community for addressing pedagogical dialogs among applied linguists about doing qualitative research.

The present study aimed to review the instruction of the L2 speech acts in English pragmatics in the Iranian context during the last two decades from 2000 to 2020. To this end, upon the completion of the study search, the retrieved articles were selected and analyzed based on the research domain.  The results of our synthesis from 54 studies carried out on the instruction of the speech act not only reveal that pragmatics is amenable to instruction but also unfold that the most frequently instructed speech act is the speech act of request which has been conducted in 29 studies, while the least instructed speech act is  invitation, used in only one study. Moreover, analyzing the data collection methods documented that Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) is the most predominant method utilized in 36 papers during the last decades in English pragmatic instruction. With respect to the treatment types, it is illuminated that the most recurrent treatment type is explicit, implicit vs. control, followed by explicit vs. implicit, although other treatment types have been embarked on. As a final point, it is worth noting that 53 of the conducted studies utilized the quantitative method in their data analyses, whereas only one study implemented the qualitative method. The paper concludes with some avenues for further research.

This study investigated the comparative effects of audio-visually prompted collaborative dialogue on the listening comprehension development of symmetrical, asymmetrical, and asymmetrical teacher-fronted EFL learner groups. Besides, it explored the attitude of the participants of the groups concerning the effectiveness of collaborative dialogue for their listening comprehension improvement. The participants of the study were 120 Iranian female EFL learners who were conveniently chosen from several English language institutes and put into three experimental and one control groups, each with 30 learners. In the first experimental group, coequal learners engaged in collaborative dialogue. In the second experimental group, the expert peer(s) and less knowledgeable peers applied collaborative dialogue, and in the third experimental group, in addition to the peers, the teacher was involved in collaborative dialogue with the group members. As for the control group, the collaborative dialogue was abandoned and the participants worked individually. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that collaborative dialogue in asymmetrical teacher-fronted, asymmetrical peer and symmetrical peer groups were respectively the most effective procedures for listening comprehension development of the EFL learners. Also, it was found that the participants of the asymmetrical teacher fronted group had a more positive attitude towards the efficacy of audio-visually prompted collaborative dialogue compared with asymmetrical and symmetrical peer groups. The findings underscore the cognitive and affective efficiency of a more knowledgeable source, either a teacher or a peer, in asymmetrical dyadic interactions for the less knowledgeable partners' ZPD sensitive development.   

Designing appropriate materials and activities to enhance vocabulary learning is one of the primary goals of language courses. Among the claims about efficient pedagogical tasks is the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) according to which vocabulary development is contingent on the amount of cognitive process a task involves. Building on the previous research on this hypothesis, this study seeks to explore the extent to which three post-listening tasks of different involvement loads along with single-versus dual-mode glosses affect receptive and productive vocabulary learning of advanced English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The participants (n = 204) listened to an expository text while twenty lexical items were presented through text-only or text-plus-picture glosses. Subsequently, they were assigned to one of the task type groups (sentence writing, gap-fill, and paragraph writing). Paribakht and Wesche’s (1997) Vocabulary Knowledge Scale was employed as the pre and post-tests. The results pointed to the efficacy of dual-mode over single-mode glosses concerning both receptive and productive vocabulary learning. The sentence writing task produced the highest scores in the vocabulary tests, whereas the gap-fill and paragraph writing tasks did not significantly differ. Hence, the results only partially confirmed the Involvement Load Hypothesis. The current study corroborates other studies verifying the modality effect on vocabulary learning and suggests that task type is a significant factor in EFL vocabulary learning.