The outcomes of educational assessments undoubtedly have real implications for students, teachers, schools and education in the widest sense. Assessment results are, for example, used to award qualifications that determine future educational or vocational pathways of students. The results obtained by students in assessments are also used to gauge individual teacher quality, to hold schools to account for the standards achieved by their students, and to compare international education systems. Given the current high-stakes nature of educational assessment, it is imperative (...) that the measurement practices involved have stable philosophical foundations. However, this article casts doubt on the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary educational measurement models. Aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and Bohr’s philosophy of quantum theory are used to argue that a quantum theoretical rather than a Newtonian model is appropriate for educational measurement, and the associated implications for the concept of validity are elucidated. Whilst it is acknowledged that the transition to a quantum theoretical framework would not lead to the demise of educational assessment, it is argued that, where practical, current high-stakes assessments should be reformed to become as ‘low-stakes’ as possible. This article also undermines some of the pro high-stakes testing rhetoric that has a tendency to afflict education. (shrink)

In this article, I try to make sense conventional notions of ‘premodernism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ as ways of relating to reality, and apply them to education. I argue for the additional notion of ‘neo-premodernism’ to make sense of recent attempts to engineer social reality. Each of these four approaches coexists and constitutes the four ages: the age of prayer, the age of reason, the age of social engineering and the age of responsibility. I try to trace these ages in modern (...) schooling and critically analyze their consequences and the power relations between teachers and students. (shrink)

Foundational attitudes towards quantum theory have recently thrown off much of the old philosophical baggage largely associated with Niels Bohr to which Einstein famously objected, including the central ‘collapse of the wavefunction’ concept. A ‘neo-Copenhagen’ interpretation, it is suggested, has arisen. This development is placed in its historical context and contrasted to philosophical allegations of anti-realism. The neo-Copenhagen interpretation remains wedded to Heisenberg's uncertainty and observer-dependent values of particles. However a discussion of Nick Herbert's ‘rainbow analogy’ suggests that subatomic particles (...) are emergent from a ‘nonlocal’ level of reality outside the domain of space and time. Critical realism recognizes that emergent systems have an irreducibly ontologically character, and in its combination of epistemological relativism and ontological realism, provides a basis for the proposition that realists who support Einstein's objections must now recognize that their realism must be redefined. (shrink)

The philosophical argument between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus can be summarised in their conflicting accounts of skiing and swimming. For Sartre skiing exemplifies the struggle of existence and the angst of the alienated ego. For Camus, swimming represents some glimmering of collective harmony, the possibility of transcendence. Sartre's thinking is inflected by quantum theory and the 'steady state', whereas Camus is more of a wave theorist, with a lingering nostalgia for the 'primeval atom' and a fondness for peak experiences. (...) Put together their separate ways of analysing consciousness suggest a two-phase account of cognition. (shrink)

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings (...) are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book consists of a collection of essays which dramatically develop Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a conception of science that I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a conception of rationality I call aim-oriented rationalism. This has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. (shrink)

We have two main aims: to construct mathematical models for analysing determinism, causality and supervenience; and then to use these to demonstrate the possibility of constructing an ontic construal of the operation of free will - one requiring both the presentation of genuine alternatives to an agent and their selecting between them in a manner that permits the attribution of responsibility. Determinism is modelled using trans-temporal ontic links between discrete juxtaposed universe states and shown to be distinct from predictability. Causality (...) is defined on a temporal sequence of δ-algebras and quantified using a measure. The measure leads to definitions of causal overdetermination and epiphenomena. Proofs are constructed to demonstrate deterministic universes must carry their properties essentially but not necessarily locally. We argue determinism and causality are separate doctrines. These models and results are marshalled to put the case that a counterfactual construal of ontic choice cannot work. In response we propose ‘immanence’ - a modified form of indeterminism whereby a universe can present choices to its denizens. We prove that beings subsumed within a universe cannot pilot their own actions. We then argue these beings can exercise free will only when selecting between choices inhering within immanent relata. A being is responsible for its selections if and only if it is constituted of a temporally evolving deterministic substructure. Our proposal is novel: it avoids injecting indeterminism into the decision process. Topological models for property supervenience are developed and used to reconstruct standard definitions from the literature. These are then used to demonstrate considerations of supervenience do not affect our arguments. We have demonstrated that a model of the exercise of free will involving both genuine choices and responsibility is possible but can only operate within a non-deterministic universe possessing specific traits. (shrink)

A decade after the financial crisis, there is a growing consensus that the neoclassical approach to economics has failed, and that new approaches are needed. This paper argues that economics has been trying to solve the wrong problem. Economics sees itself as the science of scarcity, but instead it should be the science of money. Just as physicists' ideas about quantum matter were formed by studying the exchange of particles at the subatomic level, so economics should begin by analysing the (...) properties of money-based transactions, which like quantum entities have a fundamentally dualistic nature. By building on ideas from quantum money, quantum finance and quantum social science, this paper shows that the economy is an archetypal example of a quantum social system, complete with its own versions of measurement uncertainty, entanglement, and so on. This leads to a proposal for a quantum economics, which is to neoclassical economics what quantum physics is to classical physics. (shrink)