The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these (...) were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline. (shrink)

This essay looks at Norplant qua technology and uses analytic frameworks from the social construction of technology to explain the trajectory of its brief history. The author contend that there were multiple uses of Norplant, in terms of rhetorical strategies, symbolic representations, and contraceptive intentions, constructed by reproductive scientists, population control advocates, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, birth control clinic staffers, government regulators, legislators, judges, women’s health activists, potential users, and actual users. However, while relevant social groups shaped the discourse surrounding Norplant (...) in the 1990s, its ultimate fate was determined by choices made by potential users. At the ‘‘consumption junction’’ of the late twentieth-century contraceptive marketplace, American women ignored the meanings constructed for Norplant by developers, producers, providers, and policy makers and made their decisions based on what Norplant meant to them. Individuals’ decisions to choose other methods of preventing pregnancy coalesced into a collective rejection of this contraceptive technology. (shrink)

This collection contains fourteen critical essays on Hume's *A Treatise of Human Nature*, plus an Introduction: 1 The Association of Ideas in Hume’s Treatise (John P. Wright), 2 Methodizing Hume’s Metaphysics (Donald L. M. Baxter), 3 Hume on Belief (Jennifer Smalligan Marǔsić), 4 “All the Logic I think Proper to Employ”: Hume’s Rules by which to Judge of Causes and Effects (Hsueh Qu), 5 Imagining the Unseen: The External World of Hume’s Treatise (Angela Coventry), 6 The Updating Problem for Hume’s (...) Account of Belief in Personal Identity (Annemarie Butler), 7 Experimental Philosophy, Blind Submission, and Hume’s Other Sceptical Principles (Miren Boehm), 8 How to Read Book 2 of the Treatise (Katharina Paxman), 9 Hume on Curiosity: The Conclusion to Treatise Book 2? (Emilio Mazza), 10 Hume’s Geography of Feeling in A Treatise of Human Nature (Don Garrett), 11 Some Vexations about Character in Hume’s Treatise (Elizabeth S. Radcliffe), 12 Hume on Promising and Self-Obligation (Rachel Cohon), 13 No Men Are Created Equal: Rank, Passions, and Virtues in Hume’s Treatise (Margaret Watkins), 14 The Eighteenth-Century British Reception of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (Mark G. Spencer and Mikko Tolonen). -/- . (shrink)

Expressive accounts of practical reason, morality, and law are gaining increasing currency. At the most general level, expressive theories tell actors-whether individuals, associations, or the State-to act in ways that express appropriate attitudes toward various substantive values. In one well-known version, the State is required to express equal respect and concern toward citizens. Expressivists do not present this view as some radically new theory of morality and law. Instead, we claim that much of our existing practices of moral and legal (...) evaluation are best understood through expressivist perspectives-but that the more perspicaciously we can grasp the expressive structure of action, the more we can improve our evaluative practices. Expressivism is thus an internal account of existing normative practices, but one with sufficient critical capacity to exert leverage over those practices and to indicate where they ought to be reformed. This Article provides a more comprehensive account than has previously appeared of the aims and features of such theories. (shrink)

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena--including money, gender, urban life, and technology--that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book (...) restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten. (shrink)

The study of animal emotion can be the source of much confusion and lack of clarity. Researchers may talk past each other when discussing their work, and communication with stakeholders can result in misunderstandings about what is actually being studied and what has been found out. Here, we identify some key challenges in studying animal emotion and offer ways forward for tackling them. We begin by considering the uses of, and debates about, terminology and definitions, offering a prescriptive, reinforcement-based definition (...) that can facilitate empirical research. Highlighting difficulties encountered when transposing human constructs of “affect”, “emotion”, and “mood” to non-humans, we identify three pathways that may help in this endeavour – translation of: emotion concepts (theory-focused); emotion correlates (subject-focused), and emotion contexts (event-focused). For emotion concepts, we consider the arguments for discrete and dimensional views of animal affect, and the temporal distinction between short-term emotions and longer-term moods. We then discuss how translation of emotion correlates and contexts can be used to identify affective states in animals; an essential prerequisite for the validation of animal emotion indicators, including facial and vocal behaviours, which we use as examples. We conclude by considering the elusive, subjective component of animal emotion. (shrink)

The astute reviews by Hamlin and by Revencu and Csibra provide compelling arguments and evidence for the early emergence of moral evaluation, communication, and pedagogical learning. I accept these conclusions but not the reviewers' claims that infants' talents in these domains depend on core systems of moral evaluation or pedagogical communication. Instead, I suggest that core knowledge of people as agents and as social beings, together with infants' emerging understanding of their native language, support learning about people as moral agents, (...) moral patients, communicators, and teachers. These issues are open, however, and our competing views invite further testing. (shrink)

Astonishment that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. It is not the beginning of any insight, unless it is that the idea of history from which it comes is untenable.And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?In 1940 the exiled German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin warned that fidelity to a vision of history as (...) progress risked normalizing the remy-thologization of politics.1 Recent events have underlined the urgency, both for thought and for action, of rejecting the same unphilosophical astonishment in our own time. In the face of political... (shrink)

The importance of ethical listening -- The power of difference and values that unite -- Take off your armor and bring down the walls: adopting a listening posture -- Dolls and cages: listening as investment and care -- Deep listening: remembering and responding with intentional focus -- Hyenas and chickens: listening as invitation -- Hope for sustainable hospitality -- References -- About the author.

Twenty-five commentaries raise questions concerning the origins of knowledge, the interplay of iconic and propositional representations in mental life, the architecture of numerical and social cognition, the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, and the borders among core knowledge, perception, and thought. They also propose new methods, drawn from the vibrant, interdisciplinary cognitive sciences, for addressing these questions and deepening understanding of infant minds.

In order to strengthen civic education in elementary schools, research is needed to understand preservice teachers’ ideas about civic teaching. The current study examined the degree to which elementary preservice teachers’ civic competencies (i.e., civic awareness, dispositions, and interpersonal skills) and the grades they plan to teach are associated with expected future civic teaching. Survey data were collected from 235 undergraduate students majoring in early childhood or elementary education. Results from hierarchical multiple regression showed that greater civic awareness and lower (...) levels of trust in the American promise were associated with expected future teaching about politics, while greater civic awareness, stronger commitment to social issues, and better interpersonal skills were associated with expected future teaching about community engagement. Additionally, those who plan to teach the upper elementary grades (third–fifth) were more likely to report that they will teach about politics and community engagement in their future classrooms when compared to those who plan to teach younger grades (PreK–second). Practical implications for preservice teacher preparation are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Perpetuation of privileged norming in organizations threatens the fragile hope that the theory and practice of professionalism can evolve alongside commitments to equity and inclusion. Uncritical engagement with a normative professionalism can lead to the muting of differences and strengths that diverse standpoints offer to professional communities. We look to the field of Medicine as an example for other professional groups, in which experts have criticized its development of a normative professionalism shaped by, retaining, and sustaining privilege. Using a (...) triad of case studies and co-cultural theory, we suggest that non-dominant perspectives and behaviors ought to be better recognized and welcomed as part of professionalism discourse, and that professional education ought to include co-cultural awareness of communication behaviors and their function as identity performance. We suggest that recognizing and reinforcing accommodation behaviors will lead to a more robust inclusivity for an evolving normativity, and that the wisdom habits of curiosity, perspective, love of learning, judgment, and creativity must be brought to bear on improving co-cultural dialogue, dismantling systemic privilege, practicing attributional complexity, and building genuinely dialogic professional communities rather than depersonalized collectives. (shrink)

This is our initial issue as co-editors of Hume Studies. We thank our predecessors, Ann Levey, Karl Schafer, and Amy M. Schmitter, for their years of editorial oversight and for their assistance in the transition. Some of the papers they began shepherding through the editorial process will be appearing in our issues.Regular readers of the journal will notice that volume 46 is dated 2020, while this first issue of volume 47 is dated April 2022. The journal has been behind the (...) calendar for many years and catching up is essential. So, the Hume Society Executive Committee and the Hume Studies Editorial Board approved a proposal to advance the publication cover date to the current date. Subscribers will of course be... (shrink)

What happens when adjudication signals its own artifice? Or when jurisprudence is animated by what Maksymilian Del Mar calls ‘legal artifacts’ that invite us to suspend certain of our prevailing no...

This study analyzed 328 single- and group-authored stories composed by nine 4-year-olds in a mixed-age preschool class participating in a peer-oriented storytelling and story-acting practice. Group-authored stories (33 percent) were overwhelmingly told by same-gender groups. The frequencies, developmental trajectories, and functions of group-authored stories were different for girls and boys. Girls told mostly group-authored stories in the fall and single-authored stories in the spring. Group-authoring provided ‘brain-storming sessions’ for narrative experimentation; these stories were longer, with more dramatic problems and more (...) sophisticated character portrayals. By the spring, girls’ single-authored stories also included these features, suggesting internalized narrative gains. Boys consistently preferred single-authored stories, though in the spring the frequency and quality of their group-authored stories increased. These were longer, with more sophisticated character portrayals, than single-authored stories. Group-authored stories made a distinctive contribution to narrative development, partly by helping boys and girls overcome limitations of their preferred narrative genres. (shrink)

Six-month-old infants discriminate between large sets of objects on the basis of numerosity when other extraneous variables are controlled, provided that the sets to be discriminated differ by a large ratio (8 vs. 16 but not 8 vs. 12). The capacities to represent approximate numerosity found in adult animals and humans evidently develop in human infants prior to language and symbolic counting.

Experiments using a preferential looking method, a perceptual judgment method, and a predictive judgment method investigated the development, from 7 months to 6 years of age, of sensitivity to the effects of gravity and inertia on inanimate object motion. The experiments focused on a situation in which a ball rolled off a flat surface and either continued in linear motion (contrary to gravity), turned abruptly and moved downward (contrary to inertia), or underwent natural, parabolic motion. When children viewed the three (...) fully visible motions, both the preferential looking method and the perceptual judgment method provided evidence that sensitivity to inertia developed between 7 months and 2 years, and that sensitivity to gravity began to develop after 3 years. When children predicted the future location of the object without viewing the motions, the predictive judgment method provided evidence that sensitivity to gravity had developed by 2 years, whereas sensitivity to inertia began to develop only at 5±6 years. These findings suggest that knowledge of object motion develops slowly over childhood, in a piecemeal fashion. Moreover, the same system of knowledge appears to be tapped both in preferential looking tasks and in judgment tasks when children view fully visible events, but a different system may underlie children's inferences about unseen object motions. (shrink)

A letter replying to Bayne et al. "Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond", 2024, arguing that the search for consciousness "beyond" healthy adult humans should begin with other animals.

Five-year-old children categorized as skilled versus unskilled counters were given verbal estimation and number word comprehension tasks with numerosities 20 – 120. Skilled counters showed a linear relation between number words and nonsymbolic numerosities. Unskilled counters showed the same linear relation for smaller numbers to which they could count, but not for larger number words. Further tasks indicated that unskilled counters failed even to correctly order large number words differing by a 2 : 1 ratio, whereas they performed well on (...) this task with smaller numbers, and performed well on a nonsymbolic ordering task with the same numerosities. These findings provide evidence that large, approximate numerosity representations become linked to number words around the time that children learn to count to those words reliably. (shrink)

Four-month-old infants sometimes can perceive the unity of a partly hidden object. In each of a series of experiments, infants were habituated to one object whose top and bottom were visible but whose center was occluded by a nearer object. They were then tested with a fully visible continuous object and with two fully visible object pieces with a gap where the occluder had been. Pattems of dishabituation suggested that infants perceive the boundaries of a partly hidden object by analyzing (...) the movements of its surfaces: infants perceived a connected object when its ends moved in a common translation behind the occluder. Infants do not appear to perceive a connected object by analyzing the colors and forms of surfaces: they did not perceive a connected object when its visible parts were stationary, its color was homogeneous, its edges were aligned, and its shape was simple and regular. These findings do not support the thesis, from gestalt psychology, that object perception first arises as a consequence of a tendency to perceive the simplest, most regular configuration, or the Piagetian thesis that object perception depends on the prior coordination of action. Perception of objects may depend on an inherent conception of what an object is. (shrink)

Because human languages vary in sound and meaning, children must learn which distinctions their language uses. For speech perception, this learning is selective: initially infants are sensitive to most acoustic distinctions used in any language1–3, and this sensitivity reflects basic properties of the auditory system rather than mechanisms specific to language4–7; however, infants’ sensitivity to non-native sound distinctions declines over the course of the first year8. Here we ask whether a similar process governs learning of word meanings. We investigated the (...) sensitivity of 5-month-old infants in an English-speaking environment to a conceptual distinction that is marked in Korean but not English; that is, the distinction between ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ fit of one object to another9,10. Like adult Korean speakers but unlike adult English speakers, these infants detected this distinction and divided a continuum of motion-into-contact actions into tightand loose-fit categories. Infants’ sensitivity to this distinction is linked to representations of object mechanics11that are shared by non-human animals12–14. Language learning therefore seems to develop by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of sound and meaning. Our research focuses on the crosscutting conceptual distinctions between actions producing loose- and tight-fitting contact relationships (compare left and right columns in Fig. 1a) and actions producing containment versus support relationships (compare first and second rows in Fig. 1a). As early as Korean and English children begin to talk about such actions, they categorize them differently from one another and similarly to Korean- and Englishspeaking adults9,15. Moreover, English and Korean adults differ in their performance on non-linguistic categorization tasks involving heterogeneous examples of these actions, in accord with the differing semantics of their languages16,17, whereas the performance of young children on such tasks has been mixed9,10,18,19.. (shrink)

In learning mathematics, children must master fundamental logical relationships, including the inverse relationship between addition and subtraction. At the start of elementary school, children lack generalized understanding of this relationship in the context of exact arithmetic problems: they fail to judge, for example, that 12 + 9 - 9 yields 12. Here, we investigate whether preschool children’s approximate number knowledge nevertheless supports understanding of this relationship. Five-year-old children were more accurate on approximate large-number arithmetic problems that involved an inverse transformation (...) than those that did not, when problems were presented in either non-symbolic or symbolic form. In contrast they showed no advantage for problems involving an inverse transformation when exact arithmetic was involved. Prior to formal schooling, children therefore show generalized understanding of at least one logical principle of arithmetic. The teaching of mathematics may be enhanced by building on this understanding. (shrink)

& Behavioral and brain imaging research indicates that human infants, humans adults, and many nonhuman animals represent large nonsymbolic numbers approximately, discriminating between sets with a ratio limit on accuracy. Some behavioral evidence, especially with human infants, suggests that these representations differ from representations of small numbers of objects. To investigate neural signatures of this distinction, event-related potentials were recorded as adult humans passively viewed the sequential presentation of dot arrays in an adaptation paradigm. In two studies, subjects viewed successive (...) arrays of a single number of dots interspersed with test arrays presenting the same or a different number; numerical range (small numerical quantities 1–3 vs. large numerical.. (shrink)

David Hume (1711–1776), a prominent intellectual of the Scottish Enlightenment, is renowned as the modern thinker who most rigorously applied the experimental method to traditional problems in philosophy. His approach generated innovative theories of human understanding, knowledge, belief, emotion, moral and political practice, and other areas of human endeavor. This encyclopedia article discusses Hume's life and his philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of the passions, ethical theory, and philosophy of religion. It makes use of both primary and secondary sources (...) to point out interpretative disagreements in the discussions concerning these important areas of Hume's philosophy. (shrink)

Although disoriented young children reorient themselves in relation to the shape of the surrounding surface layout, cognitive accounts of this ability vary. The present paper tests three theories of reorientation: a snapshot theory based on visual image-matching computations, an adaptive combination theory proposing that diverse environmental cues to orientation are weighted according to their experienced reliability, and a modular theory centering on encapsulated computations of the shape of the extended surface layout. Seven experiments test these theories by manipulating four properties (...) of objects placed within a cylindrical space: their size, motion, dimensionality, and distance from the space’s borders. Their findings support the modular theory and suggest that disoriented search behavior centers on two processes: a reorientation process based on the geometry of the 3D surface layout, and a beacon-guidance process based on the local features of objects and surface markings. Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Disoriented animals from ants to humans reorient in accord with the shape of the surrounding surface layout: a behavioral pattern long taken as evidence for sensitivity to layout geometry. Recent computational models suggest, however, that the reorientation process may not depend on geometrical analyses but instead on the matching of brightness contours in 2D images of the environment. Here we test this suggestion by investigating young children's reorientation in enclosed environments. Children reoriented by extremely subtle geometric properties of the 3D (...) layout: bumps and ridges that protruded only slightly off the floor, producing edges with low contrast. Moreover, children failed to reorient by prominent brightness contours in continuous layouts with no distinctive 3D structure. The findings provide evidence that geometric layout representations support children's reorientation. (shrink)