Formative Autonomy: Lessons from Elio Petri

John Baldacchino's discussion of the concept of autonomy in this article runs on the dual track of the arts and education. His aim is to engage with the notion of autonomy in terms of what human beings invent (through art) and know (through education) by what they share as free and intelligent beings who live convivially. Following Luigi Pareyson's argument that by form one means a living organism endowed by its own legality (and thereby its own autonomy), Baldacchino offers an analysis of Elio Petri's film La classe operaia va in Paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven) as context for this discussion, which adds a third dimension to the notion of autonomy: that of the political. Here, autonomy is presented as a triangulation of sorts, where what we mean by the autonomous stands for our artistic, educational, and political dispositions (and abilities) to mediate and represent a number of immediate questions with yet-to-be-found answers.     

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false-belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false-belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false-belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true-belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true- and false-belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true-belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true-belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English-speakers. Children were recruited from university-sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. In Chapter III, minor alterations in task procedures produced wide variations in children's performance in 3-option false-belief tasks. In Chapter IV, we report findings which show that the developmental lag between children's understanding ignorance and understanding false belief is longer than the lag reported in previous studies. In Chapter V, children did not distinguish between agents who have false beliefs versus agents who have no beliefs. In Chapter VI, findings showed that children found it no easier to reason about true beliefs than to reason about false beliefs. In Chapter VII, when children were asked to justify their correct answers in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. Similarly, in Chapter VIII, when children were asked to explain agents’ actions in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. In Chapter IX, children who were identified as using PAR differed from children who understood beliefs along three dimensions—in levels of social development, inhibitory control, and kindergarten adjustment. Although the findings need replication and additional studies of alternative interpretations, the collection of results reported in this monograph challenges the prevailing view that representational ToM is in place by the end of the preschool years. Furthermore, the pattern of findings is consistent with the proposal that PAR is the developmental precursor of representational ToM. The current findings also raise questions about claims that infants and toddlers demonstrate ToM-related abilities, and that representational ToM is innate.     

Pedagogical constraints of physical literacy based on cognitive load theory

PROSPECTS - While numerous studies have highlighted the benefits of physical activity on cognitive health, learning, and executive function, maintaining physical activity throughout one’s...     

Curriculum and coronavirus: New approaches to curriculum in the age of uncertainty

The coronavirus crisis has appeared like some vast, cruel sociological experiment. It has confined people to their homes, radically disturbed their taken-for-granted knowledge and beliefs, and forced them to alter behaviors once casually, even unthinkingly, employed in their everyday personal, working, and social lives. What has been learned? How might this experience stimulate a reimagining of the curriculum? More fundamentally, how might it lead to the development of a knowledgeable, intelligent, effective public, able to engage freely and equally in decision-making at all levels of social, cultural, political, and economic life, as a condition for personal freedom? This article explores the implications of “lockdown” or “confinement” to homes, which has suspended freedom of movement, limited the freedom to associate with others, and established rituals of hygiene regarding surfaces. These experiences of physical confinement and limitation of ordinary freedoms raise the central question of how to return to “normal” and, indeed, what will count as normal. In exploring the issues posed by these questions, this article offers an approach to pedagogical and curriculum practice that seeks to embed democratic practice at all levels of organization and interaction between individuals.

     

The European molecular biology laboratory

The need for collaborative ventures in Europe has long been stressed in the editorial pages of this journal, and more than ten years ago (Endeavour, 28, 54, 1969) we gave strong support for a proposal to establish a European Laboratory of Molecular Biology. For this we then incurred some criticism, on the ground that such a laboratory would weaken national academic institutes striving to establish themselves in this rapidly developing field. Nevertheless, we continued to maintain (30, 2, '71) ‘the great political and scientific importance of this [concept]—and of other such collaborative enterprises—if Europe is to maintain the initiative in fields where the great institutions of the United States have established a dominant position.’ In the event, the Laboratory was established at Heidelberg in 1974, though not formally opened until 1978. The Director-General, Sir John Kendrew, here surveys the policy and achievements of this important new institute.     

Why There's No Cause to Randomize

The evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is widelyregarded as supplying the ‘gold standard’ in medicine—wemay sometimes have to settle for other forms of evidence, butthis is always epistemically second-best. But how well justifiedis the epistemic claim about the superiority of RCTs? This paperadds to my earlier (predominantly negative) analyses of theclaims produced in favour of the idea that randomization playsa uniquely privileged epistemic role, by closely inspectingthree related arguments from leading contributors to the burgeoningfield of probabilistic causality—Papineau, Cartwrightand Pearl. It concludes that none of these further argumentssupplies any practical reason for thinking of randomizationas having unique epistemic power.

1 Introduction

2 Why theissue is of great practical importance—the ECMOcase

3Papineau on the ‘virtues of randomization’

4 Cartwrighton causality and the ‘ideal’ randomizedexperiment

5 Pearl on randomization, nets and causes

6 Conclusion

     

Pseudo bond graphs of circulating Fluids with application to solar Heating design

Two different bond-graph schemes for the modeling of circulating fluids are discussed and compared. The first uses a heuristic approach wherein the flow path is broken into segments. Each segment has separate hydraulic and thermal submodels which are linked with active bonds. The model is general enough to handle natural convective flows, heat storage, conduction, forced convective heat transfer and heat energy sources. The second method, applicable to pumped flows, uses a modal analysis approach to derive state equations for the modal temperatures, the time varying coefficients of the spatially varying mode shapes in a separation of variables solution for the temperature partial differential equation. Two examples are worked to illustrate the models. Numerical simulation results are presented using the first method and a simple analytic solution given to illustrate the second.