Evolutionary and Genetic Perspectives on Educational Attainment
At first glance, it may seem unusual to find a chapter on evolutionary psychology and genetics in a handbook of educational psychology, let alone open it. However, we hope to demonstrate why educators can benefit from being aware of work in these areas. Human biology may seem far removed from the day-to-day concerns of teachers and policy makers, but in one way or another evolutionary and genetic perspectives on education raise questions about many of these daily concerns and also suggest answers to at least some of them. For example: • Why is motivating students to listen to their teachers more of a problem than persuading them to believe their teachers? • Why might students of physics be more adept at reasoning about the motion of particles than solid bodies? • In a crowded school curriculum, what subjects should be given priority? • Why do children find it easier to learn to talk than to read, when the rules of grammar are seemingly so complex and the rules relating print to speech seemingly so straightforward? • Because reading difficulties are known to run in families, shouldn't parents foster literacy in the home earlier and more intensively? • Why are some children high (or low) achievers across a broad range of subjects, such as reading and mathematics, when the subject contents are so diverse? We begin by considering evolutionary perspectives on educational attainment before turning to the contribution of genetics to this area. In doing so, we draw on two branches of modern psychological science, evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics.
Mental states: Evolution, function, nature
This volume presents a rich diversity of views from researchers in cognitive science and associated disciplines - archaeology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology - on the nature, function and evolution of "mental" or "cognitive" states. A quick glance at the titles of the contributions and/or the disciplinary backgrounds of the contributors might lead one to suspect little commonality in theoretical interests. However, this would be a mistake. Although the contributions differ markedly in approach and methodology, common questions about mind and cognition unite them.
The Logic Instinct
We present a series of arguments for logical nativism, focusing mainly on the meaning of disjunction in human languages. We propose that all human languages are logical in the sense that the meaning of linguistic expressions corresponding to disjunction (e.g. English 'or', Chinese 'huozhe', Japanese 'ka') conform to the meaning of the logical operator in classical logic, inclusive-'or'. It is highly implausible, we argue, that children acquire the (logical) meaning of disjunction by observing how adults use disjunction. Findings from studies of child language acquisition and from cross- linguistic research invite the conclusion that children do not learn to be logical—it comes naturally to them.
The case of the missing generalizations
This review discusses several kinds of linguistic generalizations that pose a challenge for the constructionist approach to linguistic generalizations advocated by Adele Goldberg. It is difficult to see, for example, how such an account can explain the wide-ranging linguistic phenomena governed by structural properties, such as c-command, or semantic properties, such as downward entailment. We also argue against Goldberg's rejection of formal semantics in favour of an account of meaning based primarily on information structure and discourse function.
In Defence of Nativism
There is considerable evidence for innate knowledge furnished by psychology & linguistics, yet widespread disbelief amongst philosophers in particular that there is any such thing. Empirical and conceptual arguments given in support of this scepticism are considered here and rejected.
Mental States - Volume 2: Language and cognitive structure
This volume is the second of a two-volume collection on mental states. The contributions to this volume focus on the question what language and language use reveals about cognitive structure and underlying cognitive categories, whereas the first volume is concerned with evolutionary and functional aspects of certain mental states in an effort to understand their nature. The contributions to this volume address the question what insights conceptual categorisation can give us into the organisation and structure of the mind and thus of mental states. Topics and linguistic phenomena investigated under this view include narratives and story telling, language development, figurative language, questions of linguistic categorisation, linguistic relativity, and more generally the linguistic coding of mental states (such as perceptions and attitudes). The volume comprises contributions from psychologists and linguists who explore the interaction between language and cognition. This reflects the provenance of the chapters, versions of which were presented at the 'International Language and Cognition Conference', held in September 2004 at Pacific Bay Resort in Coffs Harbour, Australia.
Semantic Challenges to Realism
According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independently of how humans take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world's nature and these objects exist independently of our ability to discover they do. Unless this is so, realists argue, none of our beliefs about our world could be objectively true since true beliefs tell us how things are and beliefs are objective when true or false independently of what anyone might think. The issue of objectivity affects all of us deeply - when we think the State has an obligation to provide adequate health care to all its citizens we mean to be describing what the State's obligations really are, independently of what anyone might think about the matter. If someone disagrees with us over this matter, we think they've got it wrong - are mistaken about how things are as regards the State and its obligations. If there can be no objectivity without a mind-independent world, as realists claim, then there had better be a mind-independent world.Henceforth, by 'realism' I shall mean metaphysical realism unless otherwise stated. Many philosophers believe realism is just plain common sense. Others believe it to be a direct implication of modern science which paints humans as fallible creatures adrift in an inhospitable world not of their making. Nonetheless, realism is controversial. There are epistemological problems connected with it - how can we obtain knowledge of a mind-independent world? There are also prior semantic problems - how are the links between our beliefs and the mind-independent states of affairs they allegedly represent set up? This is the Representation Problem.
Semantic Entanglement
A natural picture of how meaning and truth are determined seems to be undermined by a rather strange semantic phenomenon structurally similar to quantum entanglement. This paper describes the phenomenon of semantic entanglement, compares the semantic with the quantum mechanical case and explores the prospects for disentanglement.
Review of Barry Stroud, 'Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value', Oxford University Press, 2011, 163pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780199764969.
Barry Stroud argues that puzzles about the metaphysical status of values, modality and causation are of a particularly recalcitrant kind: on the one hand, we cannot make sense of the world without believing these properties exist and thus can know that attempts to unmask them as illusory or as mental constructions must fail. On the other hand, we have no satisfying positive reason to believe in their mind-independent reality. He writes: "A positive metaphysical verdict could at least seem to offer what a negative verdict promised but could not deliver: a detached, impartial and consistently acceptable account of the relation between the beliefs in question and the independent reality they are about." (p. 158). The failure of negative evaluations does not by itself support any such positive verdict. Indeed, "if modal and evaluative notions are felt to be metaphysically problematic ... then even a positive verdict would seem to offer no prospect of increasing our understanding." (p. 158) Stroud presents a carefully argued, lucid and scholarly defence of his thesis, applying it first to causation, then to necessity and finally to value. Kantian themes and problems pervade this book, so it is no surprise to find Hume and his latter-day followers as the chosen protagonists for the deflationary accounts of modality and value Stroud sets out to oppose.