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Summary: Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Her award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological revolution, and interconnected commerce, our decisions have far-reaching consequences. Use this book as your companion and guide for the many challenges ahead.

We propose a general type notation, formal semantics and a sound, compositional, and decidable type system to characterise some liveness properties of distributed systems. In the context of mobile processes, we define two concepts, activeness (ability to send/receive on a channel) and responsiveness (ability to reliably conduct a conversation on a channel), that make the above properties precise. The type system respects the semantic definitions of the concepts, in the sense that the logical statements it outputs are, according to the semantics, correct descriptions of the analysed process. Our work is novel in two aspects. First, since mobile processes can make and communicate choices, a fundamental component of data representation (where a piece of data matches one of a set of patterns) or conversations (where the protocol may permit more than one message at each point), our types and type system use branching and selection to capture activeness and responsiveness in process constructs necessary for such usage patterns. Secondly, conditional properties offer compositionality features that permit analysing components of a system individually, and indicate, when applicable, what should be provided to the given process before the properties hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of occasionalism ascribes all causal power to God. Occasionalists ranging from the Ash`arites to Malebranche also ascribed freedom to human beings to account for moral responsibility. However, human freedom within occasionalistic metaphysics seems to be problematic at the first glance. This paper aims to open a door for the plausibility of human will within occasionalistic metaphysics. For this aim, I mainly rely on Sadr us-Sharia΄s view, a theologian in the Sunni School of Islamic thought, on free will and compare his account of free will with that of Malebranche and draw similar conclusions from both on the nature of human will. The main elements of Sadr΄s analysis, especially the categorical distinction between creation and choice, are similar to some elements in contemporary philosophy. Sadr΄s ontological assumptions and his application of them to the free will debate seem to be shared in a certain degree by John Searle and Gilbert Ryle in a different philosophical context. By focusing on Sadr us-Sharia΄s solution to the problem free will, I show how some elements of his metaphysics illuminate the free will debate as it is understood across many different traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies within neuroscience and cognitive psychology have explored the place of conscious willing in the generation of purposive action. Some have argued that certain findings indicate that the commonsensical view that we con trol many of our actions through conscious willing is largely or wholly illusory. I rebut such arguments, contending that they typically rest on a conflation of distinct phenomena. Nevertheless, I also suggest that traditional philosophical accounts of the will need to be revised: a raft of studies indicate that control over one΄s own will among human beings is limited, fragile, and – insofar as control depends to an extent on conscious knowledge – admitting of degrees. I briefly sketch several dimensions along which freedom of the will may vary over time and across agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multicriteria choice problems deal with a selection of a small subset of best actions from a larger set and multicriteria ranking problems aim to obtain an ordering of actions from a set from the best to the worst. In order to construct a comprehensive decision-rule preference model for choice and ranking, we propose the concepts of decision matrices and decision functions to generate the minimal decision rules from a pairwise comparison table. Decision rules derived can be used to obtain a recommendation in multicriteria choice and ranking problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an Expert System for Special Education (ESSE) based on scenario in Malaysia. This system is developed through the process of knowledge-gaining which is gathered from various expertise in chosen domain. Realizing the limitation of traditional classification system that teachers adopted, we developed ESSE to automate a centralized decision making system. ESSE is also able to provide consistent answers for repetitive decisions, processes and tasks. Besides, teachers using this system hold and maintain significant level of information pertaining both learning disabilities, thus reduce amount of human errors. ESSE knowledge-based resulted from the knowledge engineering called Qualifiers and Choice. Both are gathered from the analysis of symptoms that are experienced by Autism and Dyslexia patients. Every type of disability is divided to several categories and sub-category to facilitate question΄s arrangement. This paper presents a review of Expert System for Special Education (ESSE), problems arises and the knowledge-based classification systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These two scholars were more than a little acquainted: Vygotsky was Shpet's student at the Shanyavsky People's University, and he attended Shpet's seminar for two years. At the beginning of the 1920s, Vygotsky started to work at the psychological institute where, as Aleksei N. Leont'ev has noted, Shpet was the most famous professor. At the end of the 1920s, Shpet and Vygotsky both taught at the Pedology Department of the Second Moscow University. Despite all these connections, there is only one reference to Shpet in Vygotsky's works (in The Psychology of Art), and even this is only in passing. And Shpet's books Phenomenon and Meaning (1914), Aesthetic Fragments (1922), and The Inner Form of Word (1927), in which he discussed thinking and language, thought and word, meaning and sense, and external and inner forms of a word were all published significantly earlier than Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech (1934). Today, it is hard to guess why Vygotsky and his whole scientific school (Aleksandr R. Luria, A. N. Leont'ev, Aleksandr V. Zaporozhets, and others) ignored Shpet's works. It could have been fear or caution born out of Shpet's style of behavior and writing. This style was characterized by freedom and dignity and the independence of his thought from Marxist-Leninist ideology,which at the time was growing stronger and stronger. The Bolsheviks felt this independence, dismissed Shpet several times from his academic positions, and, in the end, arrested and shot him in 1937. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, I will discuss the pedagogic implications of some aspects of Vygotsky's writing. I will draw heavily on his own words and seek to develop two major strands in the range of possible interpretations of his work. The central tension that I wish to explore is between those accounts that emphasize the analysis of the content of instruction as against those which are more concerned with forms of pedagogic interaction and participation. Arguably, many of the differences in emphasis and priority that have arisen reflect differences in what are, ultimately, political preferences. Vygotsky was well aware of the extent to which pedagogic practice is subject to social, cultural, and political influence. “ Pedagogics is never and was never politically indifferent, since, willingly or unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche, it has always adopted a particular social pattern, political line, in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its interests.” (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 348) / Vygotsky was suggesting a process of social formation in the formation of educational ideas. He distances himself from the naturalistic or common sense pedagogic positions that pervade so much political debate, particularly when the term back to basics is invoked. For him pedagogies arise and are shaped in particular social circumstances. Ironically, the text Pedagogical Psychology from which the above quote is drawn, was considered to be so politically unacceptable to the rulers of the Soviet state that one had to have a special pass from the KGB that would admit one to the restricted reading room in the Lenin Library where the book could be read (Davydov, 1993). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two of Vygotsky's (1997) central theoretical points are that cultural- historically developed tools mediate the child's relation to the world and that the competence to handle such tools is acquired in social settings through guidance from others. His theory of concept formation for preschoolers, schoolchildren, and adolescents explains how the practice of institutional activities influences children's concept formation (Vygotsky, 1987, 1998a). Small children participate in the everyday activities at home; schoolchildren meet the academic world in school, which he points out as a necessity for schoolchildren's development of scientific concepts; and adolescents get acquainted with the activities in work life, a necessity for their development of dialectical concepts. Vygotsky describes how very young children appropriate concepts of tools and objects through interaction with their caregivers and, as an example, he exemplifies this with how a child learns to use a spoon in interaction with his caregivers (Kravtsov & Berezlizhkaya, 1999). In his theory, Vygotsky characterizes small children's and preschool children's concepts as everyday concepts developed spontaneously in collaboration with others through everyday activities. He contrasts these concepts to schoolchildren's concepts, which he characterizes as scientifically developed through systematic school instruction. Although Vygotsky describes the concept learning of preschool children as inscribed in the social practice of everyday activities, what he primarily draws on when describing preschool children's concept formation is an experiment with the double-stimulation method (Vygotsky, 1987 p. 130ff). In this experiment, children's task is to sort blocks that vary in form, size, and color, gradually finding the sorting principle because a meaningless label is attached to the bottom of each block that is turned over each time the child has chosen one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many reasons why it is difficult for readers to analyze and to understand Vygotsky's terminology. He developed his psychology in a direct and indirect dialogue with many other authors. In doing so, he absorbed and processed all the ideas and terms that he believed could be useful. These ideas ranged from the philosophy of Spinoza and Marx to the American behaviorism of Watson and the linguistics of Sapir. However, when one meets a seemingly familiar term borrowed from some predecessor in Vygotsky's writings, one should keep in mind that he was likely to have modified the term's meaning. Another motivation for a logico-semantic analysis of Vygotsky's writings is the quantity, variety, and nature of his scientific heritage. A 1960 bibliography of Vygotsky's works includes 274 titles (Vygotsky, 1960). Excluding nonscientific articles and notes devoted for the most part to the events of literary and theatrical life (1916-1923), there remain around 190 works in psychology, written from 1924 until Vygotsky's death (June 11, 1934): a period of only ten years. Many items from this decade were written very quickly, in almost telegraphic style. Some works remain unfinished. It is certainly possible that some of the works that were published posthumously were not yet intended for publication (unfortunately, the editors of contemporary editions do not always warn the reader about the state and nature of the original texts). Therefore, when reading Vygotsky's works one needs to remember his own words (from a letter to A. N. Leontiev dated July 31, 1930), “our writings are imperfect but there is great truth in them. This is my symbol of faith. . . . ” (Vygotsky, 1960, p. 169). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter examines the philosophical dimensions of Vygotsky's legacy. Vygotsky was a profoundly original thinker, but he was not one whose independence of thought caused him to neglect the ideas of others. On the contrary, Vygotsky was exceptionally well-read. He had an impressive command of the European psychological literature and considerable knowledge of adjacent fields, such as anthropology and educational theory. His appreciation of literature and literary theory is well-known and justly celebrated. Less often remarked upon, however, is his debt to philosophy. In this field, too, he was well-versed, having majored in philosophy and history at the Shanyavsky People's University. Vygotsky was much influenced by the philosophical vision of Marx and Engels: Almost all of the many references to their writings in Vygotsky's Collected Works are to philosophical themes. He was also inspired by a number of philosophers who had influenced Marx and Engels, notably Hegel (whom Vygotsky had read in high school), Spinoza, and Feuerbach. Marxism and its antecedents, however, by no means exhaust Vygotsky's philosophical interests. He cites numerous other philosophers, including Aristotle, Bergson, Brentano, Descartes, Dewey, Dilthey, Fichte, Hobbes, Husserl, James, Kant, Lichtenberg, Malebranche, Nietzsche, Neurath, Plato, and Scheler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity is a key concept in many different fields including psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and cultural studies. At the intersection of these fields, sociocultural research - a recent name for the interdisciplinary approach inspired by the cultural historical work of L. S. Vygotsky and others - is developing its own integrated perspective on identity. In his brief life, Vygotsky wrote down only rudimentary ideas about personality or self. Still, those he did offer, when combined with his general notions of semiotic mediation and higher-order psychological functions, formulate an important nascent understanding of identity formation and its significance for processes of social and cultural change. This chapter examines developments in relevant research and theory that have appeared, for the most part, since William Penuel and James Wertsch's key 1995 article. By adopting an expanded definition of identity, we include a wide range of research, from case studies of individual identity development to analyses of the centrality of identities in mediating response to state projects and to social movements. Concepts of identity are often (although not in Penuel and Wertsch) promiscuously mingled, producing a good bit of confusion and ambiguity. Because we concentrate on the approach to identity associated with George Herbert Mead, rather than following Penuel and Wertsch's focus on Erik Erikson's better-known concept, our first task is to clarify the differences between these two major conceptualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vygotsky's most popular book in the English-speaking world, Thought and Language, was first published in English in 1962. (It was originally published in Russian in 1934.) When retitled Thinking and Speech in 1987, it captured a more active notion of these interrelated processes. They are seen as activities rather than entities and the book explores the developmentally changing relationship between intellectual and verbal processes. Vygotsky viewed speaking and thinking as dynamically related and approached their connection as “The complex movement from the first vague emergence of the thought to its completion in a verbal formulation. . . . Thought is not expressed but completed in the word. . . . Any thought has movement. It unfolds. . . . This flow of thought is realized as an internal movement through several planes. As a transition from thought to word and from word to thought.” (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 249-250) Thinking and Speech presents important distinctions between communicative language and language used for conceptual representation. By addressing such broad themes, Vygotsky's work was grounded in philosophical, psychological, and linguistic traditions that have influenced Western students of language. Within these disciplines, the relationship between thinking and speech was forged, and it is still of great concern to contemporary thinkers. Part of what is so interesting about revisiting this relationship is that it emerges repeatedly across disciplines and informs every aspect of the human sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the epilogue to the first Blair Effect, I described the Blair government of 1997–2001 as a ‘foundation’ and as ‘a surprisingly restrained’ government, and observed that ‘no Labour government in history had come to power with so many initial advantages, not even the Attlee government in 1945’. Yet in many spheres the first Blair government's achievements, and especially those which bore the Prime Minister's personal imprint, were modest. The major successes – over the economy, welfare reform and the constitution – were primarily due to others. The epilogue concluded by saying that Number 10, as the first term was ending, had come to recognise that it would not see the groundbreaking changes and reforms Blair had foreshadowed. Instead, a new narrative emerged: the first term should be seen merely as an introduction or a prelude, in which the ‘foundations’ for real change were laid. The radicalism would come in the second term. The chapter was sceptical, however, as to whether Blair would be able to achieve the great things that he promised for his second term. It observed that, where British governments in history had been radical, the progress had come early on in the life of a prime minister rather than in the middle, and still less in the twilight years. William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, Stanley Baldwin, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath and Harold Wilson thus were prime ministers who saw their best work achieved in their early years in Downing Street. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The society Labour inherited when it took power in 1997 looked dramatically different from the one it had left behind in 1979. During the Thatcher years economic growth had disproportionately benefited the better off, leading to a widening gulf between rich and poor. The dramatic nature of the change can be seen in historical context in Figure 14.1. Poverty more than doubled between 1979 and 1991, and families with children were most affected: between one in three and one in four children lived in relative poverty in 1997. Inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient show a similar pattern. Some of these changes can be put down to global forces beyond the reach of government policy. Falling demand for unskilled labour had placed an increasing premium on skills, affecting countries across the industrialised world. The impact on the UK was particularly great because of the high proportion of the population with low qualifications. Demographic factors also played a role, with increasing numbers of children growing up in one-parent households. But policy under Margaret Thatcher was also crucial. Curbs on trade union power and an end to the minimum wages councils had removed a floor on wages, while the move to linking benefits to price levels rather than incomes had left those without work, from pensioners to the unemployed, increasingly far behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Tony Blair took up residence in Number 10 few could have predicted that he would seek to rest an important part of his legacy on profound changes to the National Health Service. In fact, it has become something of a personal crusade. True, Labour had come to power saying it would ‘save the NHS’. But in the context of the accompanying slogans in 1997 this was a conservative claim. It implied that Labour would return to the principles and organisational assumptions on which the NHS had been founded in 1946, assumptions that derived from the apparent success of a centralised state in the Second World War. There was no admission that the service was massively underfunded compared with health systems in similar economies. New Labour accepted the Conservative spending plans for its first two years as a way of convincing voters that there would be no increases in rates of income tax. Many economists were proud of the NHS's low spending, including my mentor at the LSE, Brian Abel-Smith. Yet Blair ended his second period in office: with health care spending well on its way to matching the high health spenders in Europe; with the government implementing a significant change to the way in which health service providers were rewarded – the aim was to give patients more power; money would follow the patients who would make choices about which hospital or service provider they preferred, again a model more familiar in Europe; with adult care services for elderly and disabled […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Blair government came fresh to power in May 1997 it had primary education as it main aim and a close-knit team ready for both Number 10 and the newly merged Department for Education and Employment. David Blunkett, the secretary of state, had been the only member of the shadow cabinet besides Gordon Brown to have been publicly promised his post prior to the election. Estelle Morris, a member of the education team since 1995, became under-secretary for schools and then school standards minister from 1998 when Stephen Byers was promoted to the Cabinet. Professor Michael Barber, Tony Blair's chief speechwriter on schools in opposition, became Blunkett's main adviser and head of the newly created Standards and Effectiveness Unit (SEU) in the department, charged with changing the culture to accept responsibility for delivery as well as legislation. In Number 10, Tony Blair's chief of staff since 1994, David Miliband, an education expert, became head of the newly formed Policy Unit. Andrew Adonis, don and education journalist, who in an article in the run-up to the 1997 election had urged Blair to become his own education minister, was recruited to be Blair's education adviser. From the outset the new DfEE was a whirl of activity. It restructured and rewrote the mission statement and embarked on an ambitious programme of legislation and monitoring. Within days it was setting targets in literacy and numeracy for primary education. Tony Blair was personally involved, regularly meeting the education team at the DfEE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A guiding principle of this study is that the issue of luxury – its meaning and definition – is deeply implicated in the broadly political question of the nature of social order and the definition of a good society. In Parts ii and iii we examined how, at various periods in Western history, this implication manifested itself. In this concluding Part, I return to more ostensibly conceptual concerns and, in so doing, pick up a number of the points adumbrated in Part i. These concerns deal, again, with the relationship between needs and desires and the location/definition of luxury in those terms. The object of this Part is to bring the political aspect more directly to the front of the discussion. More precisely, I wish to discuss the ways in which the operant definitions of luxury and need indicate a society's conception of itself, that is, what it values or thinks important, what it regards as ‘good and politic order’. The discussion in this chapter will focus on two topics – taxation and poverty – as two sides of the same coin. Taxation of consumption goods is a case where the definition of luxury is made socially explicit, when some goods are either exempted from or, conversely, specially selected for such a tax. Poverty is a case where it is the definition of need that is made socially explicit. It is necessary, however, to situate these topics within the more general conceptual picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth century was the period when the debate as to the meaning and value-laden status of luxury came into prominence. The ‘de-moralisation’ undertaken by Barbon as part of his limited and polemical aims was pursued more directly by others and the increasing publicity for this view (especially following Mandeville's contribution) produced, in reaction, a re-vindication of the traditional, moralist – whether humanist or Christian – view. It is important testimony to the salience and implicit seriousness of this debate that it was taken up and pursued throughout the world of letters from St Petersburg to Boston, from Naples to Aberdeen. The sheer size of the literature makes a comprehensive survey impossible but since any such survey would reveal enormous duplication, it would of itself serve little purpose. Accordingly my strategy in this chapter is to concentrate on Hume and, especially, Smith. It would, however, be untrue to the debate to ignore its breadth of expression and reiterative quality. Additionally, of course, the comprehension of Hume (section iii) and Smith's (section iv) own contribution is bound up with an appreciation of the general debate. To that end, therefore, the first section of the chapter will examine briefly Mandeville's historically key presentation. This will be followed (section ii) by noting, again cursorily, the diffusion of ‘his’ ideas, especially in France, and a concluding section (v) will acknowledge the ‘popular’ dimension of the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the disagreement between Cohen and Rawls on the question of whether individuals should be held responsible for their tastes and preferences. It notes the difference in principle, since the primary goods measure of Rawls holds individuals responsible for their choices as to how to deploy these goods, whereas Cohen’s aim is to equalize access to advantage, and thereby the satisfaction of persons, however costly. It is argued that since Cohen concedes that practical matters of application might compromise egalitarian principle, the two thinkers might be, in practice, not that dissimilar., Philosophy