Fundamental theological and ethical themes of Luther’s thought and tradition provide a basis for appreciating both the role of business in God’s providential design and the importance of occupation for living out one’s Christian vocation. These same insights establish the ethical basis for a critical appraisal of the current practice of downsizing and its negative impact on the quality of individual lives and whole communities. While Lutheran ethics is realistic about the ambiguities of life, it is also an ethic of (...) compassionate love seeking justice in the world of business as in all of life. (shrink)

It is natural to say that when we acquire a new concept or concepts, or grasp a new theory, or master a new practice, we come to see things in a new way: we perceive phenomena that we were not previously aware of; we come to see patterns or connections that we did not previously see. That natural idea has been applied in many areas, including the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of language. And, (...) in reflecting on the character of philosophy itself, Wittgenstein himself associates the introduction of a new concept in philosophy with the discovery of a new way of looking at things (PI §401), and says that the point of presenting us with an imagined example may be to change our way of looking at things (PI §144). The paper considers four interrelated questions about this association between seeing-as and change, novelty, or innovation. 1. Is there an important difference between the case where the change in someone’s way of seeing things involves the invention or discovery of a completely new concept, a completely new theory etc., and the case where it involves the person’s coming to understand an existing concept or theory? 2. Is there a special connection between seeing-as and conceptual or theoretical change or creativity: a connection that does not obtain between seeing-as and using or applying a familiar theory or system of concepts? 3. In cases where seeing-as is associated with novelty or creativity, is there any sense in which the fact that someone sees things in a new way can help to explain their conceptual or theoretical creativity? 4. To the extent that there is some association between seeing-as and novelty or creativity, why if at all does it matter that one experiences things in a certain way? Would someone who was aspect-blind be any worse off with respect to creativity or innovation than the rest of us? And if so, why? (shrink)

The nature of the connection between theory and observation has been a major source of difficulty for philosophers of science. It is most vexing for those who would reduce the terms of a theory to those of an observation language, e.g. Carnap, Braithwaite, and Nagel. Carnap's work, particularly his treatment of physical theories as partially interpreted formalisms, forms the point of focus of this paper. Carnap attempted to make the connection between theory and observation through correspondence postulates. It is (...) pointed out that such postulates depend in critical ways upon theoretical truths. This particular type of theoretical dependence produces serious trouble for Carnap's approach. For reasons given it may make it untenable. Furthermore, this problem when generalized creates difficulty for any similar reductionist program. Not only is this kind of theoretical dependence pointed out, but more important, the logical conditions which produce it are revealed. In this way light is shed upon the formal characteristics of the notion of theory dependence, especially upon the way in which observation terms depend upon theories for their meaning. (shrink)

The paper considers three questions. First, what is the connection between economics and agency? It is argued that causation and explanation in economics fundamentally depend on agency. So a philosophical understanding of economic explanation must be sensitive to an understanding of agency. Second, what is the connection between agency and causation? A causal view of agency-involving explanation is defended against a number of arguments from the resurgent noncausalist tradition in the literature on agency and action-explanation. If agency is fundamental to (...) economic explanation, it is argued, then so is causation. Third, what is the connection between causal explanation and the natural sciences? It is argued that, though the explanations given in economics and other social sciences are causal explanations, they are different in kind from the causal explanations of the natural sciences. On the one hand, then, the causal explanations of the social sciences are irreducible to those found in the natural sciences. On the other hand, the causal relations described by the social sciences are not completely autonomous; they do not float free of, or operate independently from, the causal relations charted by the natural sciences. (shrink)

This article charts the history of mental testing in the context of the rise and fall of Russian child science between the 1890s and the 1930s. Tracing the genealogy of testing in scientific experimentation, scholastic assessment, medical diagnostics and bureaucratic accounting, it follows the displacements of this technology along and across the boundaries of the child science movement. The article focuses on three domains of expertise – psychology, pedagogy and psychiatry, examining the key guises that mental (...) testing assumed in them – namely, the experiment, the exam and the diagnosis. It then analyses the failed state-bureaucratic harnessing of mental testing in early Soviet attempts to manage mass education, discussing the peculiar dynamics of the (de)legitimation of testing, as it swung between black-boxing and instrumentalization, on the one hand, and scandal and controversy, on the other. The article argues that mental testing thrived in Russia as a strategically ambiguous and flexibly interpreted ‘boundary object’, which interconnected a highly heterogeneous field, enabling the coexistence and cooperation of diverse occupational agendas and normative regimes. (shrink)

Child's play? Certainly Alison Gopnik is in good company in pointing to connections between science and child development. To mention just a few luminaries: in psychology, Freud looked at the developmental connection between children's play and adult work; in philosophy, Thomas Reid may have been the first to ground the faculty of reasoning in developmental stages that “unfold themselves by degrees; so that it [the child] is inspired with the various principles of common sense”. As for (...) connecting commonsense reasoning and science, according to Einstein, “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking”. Quod erat demonstrandum. (shrink)

Upshot: Adam Toon’s book is a development in the fictionalist view of scientific modelling. Although his fictionalist account is realistic and representational, Toon’s input to the theory can contribute to the constructivist discourse. The introduction of a direct view on models’ fictions brings this theory close to non-dualism and living practice views.

When Carl Jung and Carl Kerenyi got together to collaborate on this book, their aim was to elevate the study of mythology to a science. Kerenyi wrote on two of the most ubiquitous myths, the Divine Child and The Maiden, supporting the core 'stories' with both an introduction and a conclusion. Jung then provided a psychological analysis of both myths. He defined myth as a story about heroes interacting with the gods. Having long studied dreams and the subconscious, (...) Jung identified certain dream patterns common to everyone. These 'archetypes' have developed through the centuries, and enable modern people to react to situations in much the same way as our ancestors. From nuclear annihilation to AIDS and Ebola, we continue to engage the gods in battle. _Science of Mythology_ provides an account of the meaning and the purpose of mythic themes that is linked to modern life: the heroic battles between good and evil of yore are still played out, reflected in contemporary fears. (shrink)

Essays on a Science of Mythology is a cooperative work between C. Kerényi, who has been called "the most psychological of mythologists," and C. G. Jung, who has been called "the most mythological of psychologists." Kerényi contributes an essay on the Divine Child and one on the Kore, together with a substantial introduction and conclusion. Jung contributes a psychological commentary on each essay. Both men hoped, through their collaboration, to elevate the study of mythology to the status of (...) a science.In "The Primordial Child in Primordial Times" Kerényi treats the child-God as an enduring and significant figure in Greek, Norse, Finnish, Etruscan, and Judeo-Christian mythology. He discusses the Kore as Athena, Artemis, Hecate, and Demeter-Persephone, the mother-daughter of the Eleusinian mysteries. Jung speaks of the Divine Child and the Maiden as living psychological realities that provide continuing meaning in people's lives.The investigations of C. Kerényi are continued in a later study, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. (shrink)

Understanding Child and Adolescent Behaviour in the Classroom is a vital guide for pre-service and in-service teachers, providing the tools to respond effectively and ethically to child and adolescent behaviour that is of concern. In this innovative book, expert authors offer 'positive rules' that will assist educators in their classroom practice. Key practical issues that are addressed include: • Building a purposeful and emotionally and psychologically positive classroom culture • Recognising and responding to children who present with social, (...) emotional and behavioural difficulties • Using research to inform and enrich classroom practice around student conduct • Working collegially to respond to the social, emotional and/or behavioural needs of individual students, including those needs associated with poor mental health and/or child protection Cutting-edge research from psychology, behavioural science and education is accessibly presented to help develop professional expertise and knowledge in the area of child and adolescent behaviour. (shrink)

Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human minds are designed to operate within a social environment. This leads (...) to a neglect of _norms_ and the processes of _social_ _transmission_ which have an important effect on scientific cognition and cognition more generally. (shrink)

Disputes regarding the ethics of work by children have intensified in recent years, with little resolution. The impasses stem from failure to recognize the diverse forms of child work and a lack of empirical research regarding its causes and consequences. We report on data gathered in Brazil’s export-oriented shoe industry, which is notorious for the employment of children. Central findings are: 1) the causes of child work have less to do with backwardness and more to do with how (...) shoe workers are integrated into the global order; 2) local employers and children regard this work as benign, but the U.S. government sees it as hazardous to children and unfair to U.S. producers; 3) efforts to remove children from the shoe industry have been frustrated by local resistance and raise ethical questions; and 4) in certain circumstances, efforts to eliminate hazards from the workplace are morally superior to campaigns to remove childworkers from employment. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that William Stern was a forerunner of human science thinking in child psychology. Stern’s view of development, though widely neglected even among humanists, is consonant with human science thought on the whole as well as human science child developmental theory. Certain core characteristics of human science psychology are noted with special emphasis on how they relate to the study of child development. Stern’s views are then shown to (...) be illustrative of these characteristics. In addition, various aspects of Stern’s highly humanistic approach to child development are shown to be relevant today. (shrink)

El presente texto se inscribe dentro de la temática dirigida a la investigación sobre la violencia intrafamiliar. Tiene como objetivo sistematizar aspectos históricos y teóricos inherentes al estudio del maltrato infantil y sus consecuencias en el ámbito social y familiar para su detección y tratamiento en el nivel de atención primaria de los servicios de salud en Cuba. Mediante una revisión bibliográfica se logró concretar un análisis documental de materiales y textos en soporte digital e impreso que condujo a los (...) acercamientos teórico e histórico del fenómeno en el ámbito internacional y nacional, para su conceptualización, la determinación de su tipología y el establecimiento de sus consecuencias; elementos imprescindibles del saber profesional del futuro egresado de las ciencias médicas, en función de su desempeño en los diferentes niveles de atención de salud, en especial, la atención primaria. The text falls within the research on intrafamiliar violence subject matter. Its objective is to systematize historical and theoretical aspects inherent to the study of child abuse and its consequences within the social and domestic scopes for its detection and treatment in the Cuban primary health care services. By means of a bibliographic review, a documentary analysis of electronic and printed form materials and texts was summarized. It led to theoretical and historical approaches to the phenomenon within the national and international scopes for its conceptualization, the establishment of its typology and consequences. They are essential elements of the professional knowledge of future medical sciences graduates towards their performance in different health care levels, especially in primary health care. (shrink)

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this question using a recent longitudinal dataset collected from a single child, consisting of egocentric visual data paired with text transcripts. We train both language-only and vision-and-language neural networks and (...) analyze the linguistic knowledge they acquire. In parallel with findings from Jeffrey Elman's seminal work, the neural networks form emergent clusters of words corresponding to syntactic (nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs) and semantic categories (e.g., animals and clothing), based solely on one child's linguistic input. The networks also acquire sensitivity to acceptability contrasts from linguistic phenomena, such as determiner-noun agreement and argument structure. We find that incorporating visual information produces an incremental gain in predicting words in context, especially for syntactic categories that are comparatively more easily grounded, such as nouns and verbs, but the underlying linguistic representations are not fundamentally altered. Our findings demonstrate which kinds of linguistic knowledge are learnable from a snapshot of a single child's real developmental experience. (shrink)

An evolutionary theory of socialization suggests that children from father-absent families will mature earlier, and form less-stable pair bonds, compared with those from father-present families. Using a sample of about 1,000 persons the recent study focuses on elements of father-absent children’s behavior that could be better explained by a Darwinian approach than by rival social science theories. As a result of their enhanced interest in male competition, father-absent boys were found to engage in rule-breaking behavior more intensively than father-present (...) boys. Compared with father-present children, adolescents from widowed households (both boys and girls) showed a higher intensity of various kinds of noncompliant behavior, which can be linked to their earlier maturation. School attendance, age at marriage, and marital success proved to be influenced by the children’s early family experiences, governed by adapted evolutionary strategies. Father-absent daughters conceived more children than those whose fathers were present during their childhood. As evolutionary theory predicts, reproductive behavior of individuals from divorced households differed from that of individuals who grew up in widowed households. Finally, the strong correlation found between spontaneous abortion/stillbirths and family arrangement indicates that father absence has certain direct impacts on the neurohormonal processes of child development. (shrink)

Depictions of children in British science fiction and horror films in the early 1960s introduced a new but dominant trope: the ‘extraordinary’ child. Extraordinary children, I suggest, are disturbing because they violate expected developmental norms, drawing on discourses from both the ‘psy’ sciences and early neuroscience. This post-war trope has been considered by film and literature scholars in the past five years, but this existing work tends to present the extraordinary child as an American phenomenon, and links (...) these depictions to adults’ psychoanalytical anxieties about parenthood and the family. This article, considering Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1963), The Damned (1963), and Lord of the Flies (1963), will contend that the extraordinary child was British before it was American, and tapped as much into nuclear anxieties generated by the early Cold War as fears about the ‘permissive society’, especially given that many of these films preceded the peak of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and were based on British science fiction of the 1950s. The ‘psy science’ that was dominant in these films was developmental psychology, not psychoanalysis. Moreover, adolescents as well as adults were key audiences for these films. Drawing on self-narrative essays written by English adolescents aged 14 to 16 between 1962 and 1966, I will demonstrate that this age group employed their own fears of nuclear war and their knowledge of psychological language to challenge adult authority, presenting a counter-narrative to adult conceptions of the abnormal and irresponsible ‘rising generation’. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is one of the few major phenomenologists to engage extensively with empirical research in the sciences, and the only one to examine child psychology with rigor and in such depth.

Our encounters with the physical world are filled with miraculous puzzles-wind appears from somewhere, heavy objects float on oceans, yet smaller objects go to the bottom of our water-filled buckets. As adults, instead of confronting a whole world, we are reduced to driving from one parking garage to another. The Child's Conception of Physical Causality, part of the very beginning of the ground-breaking work of the Swiss naturalist Jean Piaget, is filled with creative experimental ideas for probing the most (...) sophisticated ways of thinking in children. The strength of Piaget's research is evident in this collection of empirical data, systematically organized by tasks that illuminate how things work. Piaget's data are remarkably rich. In his new introduction, Jaan Valsiner observes that Piaget had no grand theoretical aims, yet the book's simple power cannot be ignored. Piaget's great contribution to developmental psychology was his "clinical method"-a tactic that integrated relevant aspects of naturalistic experiment, interview, and observation. Through this systematic inquiry, we gain insight into children's thinking. Reading Piaget will encourage the contemporary reader to think about the unity of psychological phenomena and their theoretical underpinnings. His wealth of creative experimental ideas probes into the most sophisticated ways of thinking in children. Technologies change, yet the creative curiosity of children remains basically unhindered by the consumer society. Piaget's data preserve the reality of the original phenomena. As such, this work will provide a wealth of information for developmental psychologists and those involved in the field of experimental science. Jean Piaget is known for investigations of thought processes. He was professor at Geneva University and director of the International Center for Epistemology. He is the author of The Language and Thought of the Child, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, The Origin of Intelligence in Children, and The Early Growth of Logic in the Child. Jaan Valsiner is professor of psychology at Clark University, and a recognized authority on the life and work of Piaget. (shrink)

This article takes Viviana Zelizer’s (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child to the new millennium. Zelizer documented the transformation between the 19th and 20th century from an “economically useful” to an “emotionally priceless” child. She observed that by the 1930s, American children were practically economically worthless but invested with significant emotional value. What has happened to this emotionally priceless child at the dawn of the new millennium? Has there been a new transformation in the social value of children, (...) and, if so, what might have such a transformation entailed? To address these questions, we examine overtime trends that point to increasing devotion of resources and time to children’s education, a key input in the exceedingly influential human capital theory, which connects investment into children’s human capital with their future market value. Therefore, we argue that the priceless child 2.0 is a useful-to-be human capital investment child. We use four empirical examples of overtime growth in children’s human capital investment: (a) enrollments in early childhood education, (b) federal spending on early education, (c) federal spending on K-12 programs, and (d) parental spending on child care, education and extracurricular activities. In the conclusion, we discuss some potential consequences and concerns about raising children as human capital investment. (shrink)

Child Law starts with the question "Who is the Child?" In direct contrast to the CRC, which calls for putting the interests of the child first in all policies dealing with children, it appears that the interests of others are the major consideration de facto. In law, children's right to protection is severely limited by the presence of a maximum age limit, with no consideration of the starting point: current and ongoing scientific research has demonstrated the effects (...) of this non-consideration in a number of abnormalities and diseases, not only in children, but in adults and the elderly. The WHO has published a number of studies to that effect, and the 2012 Report on Endocrine Disruptors more than confirms this claim. This and other scientific insights that have largely been ignored show the flaws and inadequacies of the legal regimes intended to protect children, in a number of areas, from the basic public health to the right to normal development; child labor law conventions; in conflict situations; as a result of climate and other events; children as illegal migrants; and as inmates in prison camps. (shrink)

Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human minds are designed to operate within a social environment. This leads (...) to a neglect of _norms_ and the processes of _social_ _transmission_ which have an important effect on scientific cognition and cognition more generally. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is one of the few major phenomenologists to engage extensively with empirical research in the sciences, and the only one to examine child psychology with rigor and in such depth. His writings have recently become increasingly influential, as the findings of psychology and cognitive science inform and are informed by phenomenological inquiry. Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne lectures of 1949 to 1952 are a broad investigation into child psychology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, phenomenology, sociology, and anthropology. They argue that the (...) subject of child psychology is critical for any philosophical attempt to understand individual and intersubjective existence. Talia Welsh’s new translation provides Merleau-Ponty’s complete lectures on the seminal engagement of phenomenology and psychology. (shrink)