Which are objective and which are natural? Contrasting conceptions of social institutions, animals, and artifacts

We investigate whether beliefs about category boundaries as objective and category boundaries as natural are fused in intuitive conceptions or whether people distinguish between objectivity and naturalness. We conducted four studies with children (N = 270, ages 4-9, American) and adults (N = 360, American). In particular, we explored their judgments about animal (e.g., lions), artifact (e.g., hammers), and social-institution (e.g., police officers) categories. In every study, children and adults judged that social-institution categories were more constituted by social processes (and less by natural processes) than artifact categories. In contrast, they judged that social-institution categories were more objective (and less subjective) than artifact categories (this was significant in 3 of the 4 studies). Thus, children and adults distinguished which category boundaries were natural from which categories were objective. Our results additionally supported the conclusion that social-institution categories comprise a distinct conceptual domain from artifact categories.

Living on the Edge

Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school’s teachings, one that provokes ethical reflection at the limits of the self’s intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the by-product of a complex set of experiences in the face of nature and society and across any number of flashpoints, from one’s own or others’ beliefs, actions, values, and relationships to the difficulty of sizing up one’s place in the universe. The pressures of natural and ethical reflection put intuitive conceptions of the self at considerable risk. The Roman Stoic self proves to be vulnerable, contingent, unbounded, relational, and opaque—in short, a rich matrix of problems that point beyond the individual self and anticipate contemporary critiques of the self.

Early Childhood Pre-Service Teachers’ Conception of Living and Non-Living Things in a Ghanaian College of Education

The study examined pre-service teachers’ conception of living and non-living things and their classification using a case study design. The mixed method approach was employed for this study. Census sampling technique was initially used to collect data from 70 participants who complete a questionnaire. Afterwards, purposive sampling technique was used to collect data from 12 of the initially sampled participants using a semi-structured interview guide. The quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the qualitative data was analyzed thematically. The findings revealed that 72% and 93% of the participants had appropriate scientific conception of living and non-living things respectively, as they were able to correctly classify and justify their classifications of items provided. The findings further revealed that at least 28% and 7% of the participants still had intuitive conception of living and non-living things respectively as demonstrated in their inability to classify seven living things and eight non-living things correctly. The educational implication is that Science Educators need to be aware of the intuitive conceptions that pre-service teachers’ have about living and non-living things in order to employ appropriate teaching techniques to address the underlying misconceptions during instruction. This will enable pre-service teachers to form sound conceptual understanding of living and non-living things as conventionally known in the scientific community.

The Polluter-Pays Principle in Climate Change Law: an Economic Appraisal

There is a lively debate among scholars and policymakers on whether either consumers or producers should be seen as responsible for pollution caused in the production and consumption of traded goods. In this article, we argue that, in conformity with intuitive conceptions of causation, the economic incidence of a Pigouvian tax can be seen as a measure of the relative contribution to pollution of consumers and producers. Taking this perspective on the polluter-pays principle can help increase ambition in climate change action because it reduces the relevance of the question “Who is the polluter?” in climate change negotiations and enables a focus instead on the issue of “What can be done?” to reduce carbon emissions.

Qualia

The terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’ (plural) are most commonly understood to mean the qualitative, phenomenal or ‘felt’ properties of our mental states, such as the throbbing pain of my current headache, or the peculiar blue of the afterimage I am experiencing now. Though it seems undeniable that at least some of our mental states have qualia, their existence raises a number of philosophical problems. The first problem regards their nature or constitution. Many theorists have noted great differences between our intuitive conceptions of qualia and those of typical physical properties such as mass or length, and have asked whether qualia could nonetheless be identical with physical properties. Another problem regards our knowledge of qualia, in particular, whether our beliefs about them can be taken to be infallible, or at least to have some kind of special authority.

Are People Born to be Believers, or are Gods Born to be Believed?

Proposals that god-belief is an innate capacity of all humanity have not been confirmed by empirical studies. Scientific disciplines presently lean against god-belief’s innateness. Perhaps religion should be relieved that belief in gods is not innate. Intuitive cognitive functions supporting god-belief offer little convergence upon any god. Religious pluralism back to the Stone Age displays no consensus either. Any cognition for god-belief can only be deemed as mostly or entirely misleading. Theology has tried to forestall that skeptical judgment, by dictating what counts as authentic religiosity and who enjoys a valid idea of god. Justin Barrett exemplifies this theological interference with scientific inquiry. Contorting the anthropology and cognitive science of religion too far, his quest for a primal natural religion won’t match up with his search for intuitive conceptions of god. His quest for god-belief’s innateness devolves into theological dogmatism, deepening doubts that scientific theories of religion will validate god-belief.

Complex Dynamic Systems View on Conceptual Change: How a Picture of Students’ Intuitive Conceptions Accrue From Dynamically Robust Task Dependent Learning Outcomes

We discuss here conceptual change and the formation of robust learning outcomes from the viewpoint of complex dynamic systems (CDS). The CDS view considers students’ conceptions as context dependent and multifaceted structures which depend on the context of their application. In the CDS view the conceptual patterns (i.e. intuitive conceptions here) may be robust in a certain situation but are not formed, at least not as robust ones, in another situation. The stability is then thought to arise dynamically in a variety of ways and not so much to mirror rigid ontological categories or static intuitive conceptions. We use computational modelling to understand the generic dynamic and emergent features of that phenomenon. The model is highly simplified and idealized, but it shows how context dependence, described here by an epistemic landscape structure, leads to the formation of context dependent robust states that can be viewed as attractors in learning, and how owing to the sharply defined nature of these states, learning appears as a progression of switches from one state to another, giving thus the appearance of conceptual change as switches from one robust state to another. Finally, we discuss the implications of the results in directing attention to the design of learning tasks and their structure, and how empirically accessible learning outcomes might be related to these underlying factors.