Jaron J. Cheung

Research in STEM education is rapidly growing. Many terms in use have no shared meanings, making knowledge dissemination and accumulation difficult, if not impossible. With new terms constantly added to the literature, and often inconsistently used, there is a need for a common framework of STEM education terms. There is also a need to “take stock” of what has been accomplished in the field. To that end, we propose the adoption of standards and techniques from the field of ontology engineering to construct a shared vocabulary system that defines a universe of terms and formal relations among them, to address this challenge. We created a reference ontology, STEM Identity Ontology (STEMIO), and a domain ontology, Science Teacher Identity Ontology (STIO), to demonstrate how ontologies can be leveraged to improve existing STEM identity data and future research in the area. Ontology engineering has been successfully deployed across research in medicine, engineering, social science, and education; it has potential to facilitate research in STEM education.

This paper introduces three new criteria that a theory of personal identity ought to satisfy: (1) material holism, (2) narrative unity, and (3) narrative integrity. Material holism guards against the undesirable consequence of positing the person as part and existentially distinct from the organismal whole, of which it is dependent and interconnected. Narrative unity ensures that continuity between the beginning, middle, and end of a human life is sufficiently accounted for. Narrative integrity secures fidelity and congruence between each part and the whole, the whole to each part. Jeff McMahan’s Embodied Mind Account (EM) fails to satisfy each of these. On McMahan’s account, human persons and human organisms are distinct entities, human persons come into existence after its human organism, and human persons may go out of existence before their human organism. Moreover, fetuses, infants, the congenitally severely cognitively impaired, those with severe dementia, and the comatose are non-persons. A theory of personal identity that incorporates holism and narrative can provide a better explanation of human existence, life and death, and the identity paradox of dicephalic twins. If accepted, EM must either be rejected or ameliorated, and the new criteria ought to be incorporated in contemporary research of personal identity.