Empiricism,Capacities and Experiments

Recent developments in Nancy Cartwright's philosophy are examined, against the background of her earlier ideas. The examination is structured around two related problems for the interpretation of Cartwright; how to understand Cartwright's claim that we can see capacities in experiments, and the question of whether Cartwright is entitled to call herself an empiricist. It is argued that we should understand Cartwright as allowing that the seeing of capacities in experiments can incorporate an interpretive aspect. It is further argued that, although Cartwright is a long way from contemporary Humean empiricists, her views can be understood as falling within the broad empiricist tradition. In the process of addressing these issues the role of idealization in Cartwright's thought is explained.     

Freedom as Non‐Domination,Standards and the Negotiated Curriculum

This article investigates the application of Philip Pettit's concept of freedom as non‐domination to the issues of educational standards and the negotiated curriculum. The article will argue that freedom as non‐domination (and the connected concept of debating contestations as part of a legitimate democratic state) shines a critical light on governmental practice in England over the past two decades. Joshua Cohen's proposal of an ideal deliberative procedure is offered as a potential mechanism for the facilitation of debating contestations between stakeholders over the curriculum. Cohen places particular importance on the participants being ‘formally and substantively equal’ in the proceedings and being able to ‘recognize one another as having deliberative capacities’. It will be argued that formal and substantive equality between children and responsible adults is highly problematic due to the ‘considerable interference’ (Pettit) teachers and adults have to make in children's lives. However, the article does offer examples of children's deliberative capacities on the issue of the curriculum (in response to Cohen).     

Children''s and Adults'' Models for Predicting Teleological Action: The Development of a Biology-Based Model

Understanding that only living things must act to gain self-beneficial goals is important for developing a theory-like understanding of the living world. This research studied the models that preschoolers, fifth graders, and adults use to guide their predictions of self-beneficial, goal-directed (i.e., teleological) action. Four possible models have been suggested: finalist, complexity based, biology based, and animal based. In Study 1, participants (N = 104) were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in whether a beneficial or neutral object was pictured; they were asked to predict whether animals, plants, machines, and simple artifacts would modify their movement in the direction of that object. Preschoolers' predictions were consistent with an animal-based model, fifth graders' predictions were consistent with biology-based and complexity-based models, and adults' predictions were consistent with a biology-based model. Analysis of both individual response patterns and explanations supported these findings, but also showed that a significant number of preschoolers and fifth graders were finalist, and that very few individual fifth graders followed a complexity-based teleology. In Study 2, participants (N = 84) reported whether the animals, plants, machines, and simple artifacts in Study 1 had psychological capacities. All age groups attributed psychological capacities to animals at levels higher than other domains and at above-chance levels. The evidence from these two studies suggests that preschoolers, unlike fifth graders and adults, predict teleological action for plants and animals on the basis of these entities' inferred psychological capacities.     

Creativity,Art and Learning: A Psycho‐Social Exploration of Uncertainty

What makes it possible for artists to stay with the anxieties and uncertainties of the creative process? This aspect of an artist's development is rarely theorised or addressed despite it being an essential aspect of creative practice. It is a capacity, similar to tacit knowing, that is gradually acquired and learnt, and cultivated over time as part of the process of practising art and being an artist. The role of tacit knowledge as a key aspect of fine art education is well documented and is a learning experience that artists are familiar with. However, what tends to get focused on in discussions about tacit knowing are the practical, usually physical and technical, aspects of learning from experience to the exclusion of a range of mental or psychological capacities that are also a fundamental part of the tacit knowing process and vital to the learning necessary to be an artist. These mental capacities, which include being able to tolerate high levels of excitability, periods of nothingness, chaos, uncertainty and not‐knowing, are also, I suggest, passed between tutor and student as a form of tacit knowledge. This article draws on the experience of one artist, both as a learner and as an emergent practising artist, in developing this ability. The role played by art tutors in supporting student artists to develop a capacity to stay with the anxieties of the creative process is also explored.     

Multigenerational Forces and Regenerative Capacities: Matter,Weather, Flesh,and the Sociogenic

To what extent are multigenerational forces associated with the becoming of measured academic skills? This study argues that by considering inhuman(e) ontologies such as a system of racialized structural relations, a new materialist and radical black feminist lens opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing and understanding how shifting structures of sociopolitical relations have had temporally enfolding (re)configured and (re)produced differences over multiple generations. By fitting multilevel growth models to the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study empirically demonstrates (1) the importance of the grandparent’s wealth and permanent income on the grandchild’s embodied reading development in relation with the parent’s material resources; (2) the importance of historically shifting sociopolitical relations and their materialization in the becoming assemblages of reading skills; and (3) that multigenerational processes are an assemblage of historical, sociopolitical, and biopolitical forces. The author argues that systems of sociopolitical relations outlive individuals and their shifting ontologies do materialize in constrained, enabled, or debilitated bodily capacities across multiple generations. It is suggested that scholars, policymakers, and practitioners must take seriously the multigenerational forces of regenerative capacities.     

“I Know You Don't Know I Know…” Children Use Second‐Order False‐Belief Reasoning for Peer Coordination

Numerous studies have investigated children's abilities to attribute mental states, but few have examined their ability to recruit these abilities in social interactions. Here, 6‐year‐olds (N = 104) were tested on whether they can use first‐ and second‐order false‐belief understanding to coordinate with peers. Children adjusted their decisions in a coordination game in response to either their partner's erroneous belief or their partner's erroneous belief about their own belief—a result that contrasts with previous findings on the use of higher order “theory of mind” (TOM) reasoning at this age. Six‐year‐olds are thus able to use their higher order TOM capacities for peer coordination, which marks an important achievement in becoming competent social collaborators.     

Liberal feminism,cultural diversity and comparative education

For multiculturalists who favour a relativist approach, globalization and the increasing interconnectedness of societies pose a threat to cultural diversity. In this paper we show, through an exploration of the work of Martha Nussbaum, that a viable universalist feminism can accommodate a thin and so defensible version of multiculturalism. Nussbaum's treatment of culture in relation to women's education and the cultivation of capacities for world citizenship fosters inclusion of norms and traditions from different ways of life, while leaving room for a critical perspective on them. On these grounds, there is considerable scope for cooperation between comparative education and feminist philosophy's liberal theorists.     

Animate affects: censorship,reckless pedagogies,and beautiful feelings

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that affect bears a potent teaching capacity. To do so, it explores the intensities that built around a student-teacher's dismissal from a US school placement. In this incident, the topic of homophobia in a poetry lesson elicited a buzz among students that enacted a pedagogy that exceeded the speaking subject. It was these animating capacities of affect, the author argues, that were deemed particularly threatening by the school. Affect as pedagogy puts pressure on legacies that position the human, usually the teacher, as the sole locus of pedagogy in the classroom and that privilege telos-driven notions of curricular ‘progress’. The paper concludes by drawing connections between the animating capacities of affect and larger debates around trigger warnings on curricular materials. The author suggests that, rather than seeking to foreclose intensities in classrooms, educators might pay more attention to how affect offers richly generative, but often overlooked, sites of pedagogical force.     

Testing social learning in a wild mountain parrot,the kea (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Nestor notabilis</Emphasis>)

Huber, Taborsky, and Rechberger (2001) reported an experiment in which the efficiency with which captive keas opened a complex food container was increased by observation of a skilled conspecific. However, only testing social learning in free-ranging animals can demonstrate social learning in natural conditions. For that purpose, a tube-lifting paradigm was developed and tested on keas both in captivity and in Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand. The task was to remove a tube from an upright pole in order to gain access to a reward inside the tube. The top of the pole was higher than a standing kea, so that, to remove the tube, an individual had to simultaneously climb onto the pole and manipulate the tube up the pole with its bill. Because only 1 naive bird managed to remove a tube twice in 25 halfhour sessions and disappeared after success, another bird was trained to solve the task and to provide demonstrations for others. Even under such conditions, only 2 of at least 15 birds learned to remove the tube in 28 sessions. There was no indication that observer birds’ use of bill and feet when exploring the tube changed as the number of observations of tube removal increased in a way that would, in principle, increase the likelihood of tube removal. The results suggest a dissociation of social learning potential as assessed in laboratory animals, and social transmission of foraging techniques in natural populations.     

Education,knowledge and the network society

The ‘development of individual capacities’, in addition to the ‘education of responsible citizens’ and the ‘preparation for work’, constitutes one of the most important objectives to be achieved by education systems and, in this sense, makes up one of the main planks of that which Dale terms ‘mandates for the education system’, i.e. projects for education based on ‘conceptions of what it is desirable and legitimate for the education system to bring about’. In a previous work we tried to map out, on the basis of the objectives ‘preparation for work’ and ‘education of responsible citizens’, the outlines of a new mandate for European education policy that appears to be in the making in accord with recent socio‐economic, political and educational developments. In this article, we centre our attention on the ‘development of individual capacities’ in an attempt to map out the effects of the simultaneous pressure, top‐down and bottom‐up, that has been increasingly brought to bear on the nation state and on the education system. With regard to the first, it is argued that what is at stake is the transformation of knowledge itself into money (i.e. pure performance), while with regard to the second, there appears to be taking place a movement of knowledge from the school (national level) to the local community in which this latter is interpreted as the ‘educative city’ (where a ‘transparent’ communicational pedagogy holds sway). This work aims at challenging the dichotomy constructed by way of an analysis of the implications, for both pedagogy and the development of individual capacities, of the development and consolidation of a network state and society.     

我国四大区域城乡统筹发展能力评价和比较分析

根据城乡统筹发展能力的内涵和动力机制构建城乡统筹发展能力评价指标体系．采用2005-2009年的面板数据,运用全局主成分分析法对我国四大区域的城乡统筹发展能力进行动态的综合评价,并从统筹城乡政策与决策支撑能力、经济协调发展能力和社会协调发展能力三个层面来对四大区域的城乡统筹发展能力进行具体的比较,分析四大区域城乡统筹发展能力各方面的差距以及变动趋势。     

Making Room for Children's Autonomy: Maria Montessori's Case for Seeing Children's Incapacity for Autonomy as an External Failing

This article draws on Martha Nussbaum's distinction between basic, internal, and external (or combined) capacities to better specify possible locations for children's ‘incapacity’ for autonomy. I then examine Maria Montessori's work on what she calls ‘normalization’, which involves a release of children's capacities for autonomy and self‐governance made possible by being provided with the right kind of environment. Using Montessori, I argue that, in contrast to many ordinary and philosophical assumptions, children's incapacities for autonomy are best understood as consequences of an absence of external conditions necessary for children to exercise capacities they already have internally, rather than intrinsic limitations based on their stage of life. In a closing section, I show how Montessori proposes a model wherein both children and adults have autonomy, power, and responsibility, but over different spheres, and suggest implications of these differences for who has responsibility for establishing the conditions under which children can flourish.     

Race and the Educated Imagination: Outlining a Pedagogy of Belonging

Abstract

A teaching life can be a powerful intervention into the structures of racial antagonism that shape the West, but only if we can find a way to overturn our colonial legacies and draw the dominant trajectories of Western educational institutions toward more life giving ends. A life that teaches in this racially agonistic moment must be angled in a new direction beyond simply building intellectual capacities, toward presenting an embodied desire to learn from and join others. To be teachers who live by faith at this moment is to be those who speak a word of belonging not simply by their words but by their lives.     

一种高压条件下测定吸附剂静态吸附容量的装置

采用静态容量法研制开发了适于高压条件下的静态吸附仪,阐述了仪器的工作原理和功能结构,并采用该仪器测定了活性炭对CO2、CH4和N2的吸附量,获得了吸附剂在不同高压条件下对各气体的吸附容量数据。该吸附仪能直观地分析吸附剂对气体的吸附特性,对吸附剂的工程应用有着重要的指导作用。此外,该仪器能够与上位计算机通过串口进行通讯,实现测量数据的实时显示与存储。     

陕西省科技创新体系创新能力评价研究

在构建区域科技创新体系创新能力评价指标体系的基础上,应用模糊综合评价模型,对陕西省科技创新体系创新能力与全国其他省份进行横向比较,与2011年陕西省科技创新体系创新能力进行纵向比较,分析总结陕西省科技创新体系建设存在的不足,并针对发展过程中存在的不足提出了相应的对策建议。     

“三农”“三步走”的农村城镇化瓶颈、对策与发展模式

新农村建设与农村城镇化是紧密相关的两个层面,前者能够有力地促进后者。在"旧三农"必须变成"新三农"并且经历"三步走"的过程中会遇到诸多障碍因素,包括分散的自然村落与城镇集中发展之间的矛盾、不同的行政村之间进行合并的困扰、有些新农村建设只做表面文章、农村经济市场化程度较低等。变"旧三农"为"新三农"过程中需要农业工业化、农民知识化、农村现代化,在新农村建设与农村城镇化互动中改变农村面貌。结合不同农村的具体特点,可以通过发展工业企业、依托城镇职能以及政府行政造城等方式突出城镇作用推进农村城镇化,也可以通过完善农业产业、开发旅游服务和重用能人贤士等方式突出农村作用推进农村城镇化。     

Historicizing the Future: Educational Reform, Systems of Reason, and the Making of Children Who are the Future Citizens

Educational reform and reformist research are not merely about school improvement. They embody a field of cultural practices that constitutes the objects of schooling – the teacher who administers the reforms to the child and the distinctions and differentiations about who the child is and should be. Our interest is in the rules and standards of reason assembled through the cultural practices of school reform. Reason is a cultural practice functioning to enact a change in the conditions of people but also invests people with particular capacities and capabilities. This investiture of capacities and capabilities produces particular human kinds or categories of the determinant qualities of the individuals schools administer. Using studies of educational governance and social inclusion/exclusion in Europe and on US educational reform, the discussion focuses on the overlapping practices of system management and curriculum reforms that map different human kinds. One human kind is the child as a lifelong learner, an individual whose qualities entail actively and flexibly participating in communities through problem-solving strategies. The characteristics and qualities of the lifelong learner are differentiated from those who do not embody the norms of participation –the child left behind. The study of the systems of reason that govern the objects of reflection and rectification in school reforms is a strategy to consider the politics of reform, change, and social inclusion and exclusion.     

Kindergarten Self‐Regulation As a Predictor of Body Mass Index and Sports Participation in Fourth Grade Students

Identifying early precursors of body mass index (BMI) and sports participation represents an important concern from a public health perspective and can inform the development of preventive interventions. This article examines whether kindergarten child self‐regulation, as measured by classroom engagement and behavioral regulation, predicts healthy dispositions in fourth grade. To address this objective, secondary analyses were conducted using prospective‐longitudinal data from 966 children followed by the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development. Self‐regulatory skills, including classroom engagement and behavioral regulation, were measured by kindergarten teachers. Greater self‐regulatory skills predicted lower BMI and greater parent‐reported child sports participation, after controlling for a number of potentially confounding child and family characteristics. This article suggests that assessing kindergarten self‐regulatory capacities may help identify children at risk of developing unhealthy dispositions and behaviors in middle childhood.     

The multidimensionality of multicultural service learning: The variable effects of social identity, context and pedagogy on pre-service teachers’ learning

Multicultural service learning (MSL) seeks to develop pre-service teachers’ capacities and commitment to teach diverse student populations. We use multiple regression analyses of survey data collected from 212 pre-service teachers engaged in 22 MSL sites to assess the effects of pre-service teachers’ social identities, MSL contexts, and university pedagogy on pre-service teachers’ awareness of cultural bias, understanding of social inequality, and commitment to teaching diverse students. We find that pedagogical engagement positively contributes to all three outcomes. Pre-service teacher’s social identities and MSL contextual factors, however, have variable effects. We explore the pedagogical and research implications of this multidimensionality.     

经济政策、法律与经济波动

法律与政策都是国家干预经济的重要措施。法律面对经济波动缺乏应变能力和调控能力,制定和实施经济政策已成为政府应对经济波动的主要举措。运用货币与财政政策可以稳定经济,但也可能事与愿违,甚至政策会成为经济波动的起因或加剧经济波动。为了维护市场秩序、防范新的经济波动,需要通过立法和完善相关制度来弥补导致经济波动的制度性缺陷。通过执法和司法活动可以在一定程度上解决经济波动的并发症,发挥法律的保障作用。