Meaningful climate science

Within the climate science community, useable climate science has been understood as quantitative, usually as a best estimate together with a quantified uncertainty. Physical scientists are trained to produce numbers and to draw general, abstract conclusions. In general, however, people relate much better to stories and to events they have experienced, which are inevitably contingent and particular. Sheila Jasanoff has argued elsewhere that the process of abstraction in climate science “detaches knowledge from meaning”. Perhaps useable climate science is, then, meaningful climate science. We argue here that the development of meaningful climate science can be achieved by adopting a storyline approach to climate variability and change. By ‘storyline’ we mean a physically self-consistent unfolding of past events or of plausible future events or pathways. Storylines represent a combination of qualitative and quantitative information, where the qualitative element represents a packaging or contextualization of the quantitative aspects, which ensures that data can be meaningfully interpreted. Viewed from this perspective, we show that physical climate storylines can be aligned with several well-established vehicles for translation of knowledge between diverse communities: narratives, boundary objects, and data journeys. They can therefore be used as a ‘pidgin language’ to enrich the set of tools available to climate scientists to bring meaning to climate knowledge. “And what is the use of a book”, thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

Trigger poverty and reduplicative identity in Lakota

This paper offers a phonological account of various ways in which reduplication interacts with independent processes in Lakota: transparent application in the case of cluster simplification, overapplication in the case of palatalization, and underapplication in the case of vowel mutation. I argue that all three patterns follow from phonological optimization rather than morpheme-specific constraints on the reduplicant or on other morphemes, and that the co-existence of divergent patterns is compatible with such a phonological analysis. Local application is the default pattern, while overapplication receives a cyclic explanation. For underapplication, which is the most recalcitrant pattern in Lakota, I offer an account in terms of Trigger Poverty, a concept which denotes an imbalance between the number of triggers and the number of potential targets created by copying. Trigger Poverty is likely to be a more general abstract source of underapplication beyond Lakota. This paper thus contributes to the discussion of modularity in phonology by presenting evidence that identity effects in reduplication can be epiphenomenal.

Introduction

The Introduction establishes the argument of the book (see general abstract) and lays out its structure. It explains the current volume’s origin in the author’s earlier books on dragons in the ancient world, Drakōn and Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers, and in the desirability of tracing the story of how the modern western dragon evolved out of the ancient one described there. The book is divided into three parts, bearing upon (I) classical antiquity, (II) the world of hagiography (saints’ lives), and (III) the Germanic world, principally the Norse one. It is stipulated that the book confines itself to documenting the development of a particular tradition, albeit a vast one, and that it is not an attempt to explain the dragon, or man’s obsession with it, at any universal level, psychological or other.

A stochastic control problem with regime switching

This paper studies a stochastic control problem with regime switching in a fairly general abstract setting. Such problems may arise from production planning management. We perform a full mathematical analysis of this stochastic control problem via the HJB equation and verification. The connection of the optimal controls and subgame perfect controls is discussed, and it is shown that the optimal controls solve the generalized HJB equation as well. In a special case we provide a closed form solution.

The Skilful Origins of Human Normative Cognition

I briefly present and motivate a ‘skill hypothesis’ regarding the evolution of human normative cognition. On this hypothesis, the capacity to internally represent action-guiding norms evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of standardizing, learning and teaching complex motor skills and craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking. We have an evolved cognitive architecture for internalizing norms of technique, which was then co-opted for a rich array of social functions. There was a gradual expansion of the normative domain, with ritual playing an important role in bridging the gap between concrete, enacted norms and general, abstract norms, such as kinship norms. I conclude by stating nine predictions arising from the skill hypothesis.

DEVELOPMENT OF EXPECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES IN BIOLOGY MAJOR COURSE AT HIGH SCHOOL

The modern educational process reform considers a competence approach as a way to achieve the expected learning outcomes. Following the approach in 2017 the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine updated the curricula for general secondary education institutions. The main change is as follows: the focus was shifted from content to learning outcomes. The point of expected learning outcomes as part of the competence approach is widely discussed in the educational environment. At the same time, the issue of achieving the expected learning outcomes while studying the specific chapters of the “Biology and Ecology” curriculum for secondary schools, in our opinion, has not been closely studied. The purpose of the article is to provide evidence that the development of expected learning outcomes by tenth-graders (with Biology as major) while studying the topic “Exchange of Matter and Energy” is quite achievable. The difference between the concepts of “competence” and “expected learning outcomes”, corresponding to secondary education Biology curriculum (standard and profound variants) is emphasized. The approach to teaching this issue is offered. It allows students to develop such expected learning outcomes defined by school curriculum as the ability to qualify, explain, and give examples of basic Biology and Ecology laws. It has been stressed that while learning and mentation the following knowledge component of expected learning outcomes is realized: students use the terms “metabolism”, “homeostasis”, “epigenesis”. The attitude component is realized by getting aware of the fact that body parts need to be constantly renewed. The offered logic of educational material communication makes students effective in getting knowledge about certain biological facts and phenomena. In certain case, it is the ability to explain wildlife phenomena with the help of the scientific method of inquiry elements. The task examples given are to develop students’ ability to predict changes in cell and body metabolism under the influence of external factors, and the ability to seek independently for new information about the bio- and ecosystems functioning features. The justified teaching educational material includes a general abstract thesis, which on being stated at the beginning of a chapter, gets new substantiations with students acquiring knowledge of biological phenomena. The author believes that for expected learning outcomes, it is meaningful to study everything related to enzyme catalysis, in conjunction with milieu interior and body balance control. The possible variant to explain and develop the concept of “metabolic pathway”, necessary for students to predict metabolism dynamics, is described.

Berkeley and Locke’s Substance–Person Distinction

Especially in his post-1720 works, Berkeley focuses his comments about Locke on general abstract ideas. He warns against using metaphysical principles to explain observed regularities, and he extends his account to include spiritual substances (including God). Indeed, by calling a substance a spirit, he emphasizes how a person is simply the will that ideas be differentiated and associated in a certain way, not some thing that engages in differentiation. In this sense, a substance cannot be conceived apart from its activity.

Claiming Martin Luther King, Jr. for the right: The Martin Luther King Day holiday in the Reagan era

The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. We focus on a key moment in that process, when Republicans in the early 1980s battled other Republicans to establish King’s birthday as a federal holiday and thereby distinguish a conservative position on racial inequality from that associated with southern opposition to civil rights. The victory was consequential, aiding the New Right’s efforts to roll back gains on affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. We use the case to explore the conditions in which political actors are able to lay claim to venerated historical figures who actually had very different beliefs and commitments. The prior popularization of the figure makes it politically advantageous to identify with his or her legacy but also makes it possible to do so credibly. As they are popularized, the figure’s beliefs are made general, abstract, and often vague in a way that lends them to appropriation by those on the other side of partisan lines. Such appropriation is further aided by access to a communicative infrastructure of foundations, think tanks, and media outlets that allows political actors to secure an audience for their reinterpretation of the past.

Transient Neural Activation of Abstract Relations on an Incidental Analogy Task

Although a large proportion of the lexicon consists of abstract concepts, little is known about how they are represented by the brain. Here, we investigated how the mind represents relations shared between sets of mental representations that are superficially unrelated, such as car–engine and dog–tongue, but that nonetheless share a more general, abstract relation, such as whole–part. Participants saw a pair of words on each trial and were asked to indicate whether they could think of a relation between them. Importantly, they were not explicitly asked whether different word pairs shared the same relation, as in analogical reasoning tasks. We observed representational similarity for abstract relations in regions in the “conceptual hub” network, even when controlling for semantic relatedness between word pairs. By contrast, we did not observe representational similarity in regions previously implicated in explicit analogical reasoning. A given relation was sometimes repeated across sequential word pairs, allowing us to test for behavioral and neural priming of abstract relations. Indeed, we observed faster RTs and greater representational similarity for primed than unprimed trials, suggesting that mental representations of abstract relations are transiently activated on this incidental analogy task. Finally, we found a significant correlation between behavioral and neural priming across participants. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate relational priming using functional neuroimaging and to show that neural representations are strengthened by relational priming. This research shows how abstract concepts can be brought to mind momentarily, even when not required for task performance.