Reading as a source of knowledge

Synthese - This paper argues that reading is a source of knowledge. Epistemologists have virtually ignored reading as a source of knowledge. This paper argues, first, that reading is not to be...     

Public Entrepreneurship as Social Creativity

The article begins with an overview of the innovation process and the entrepreneurial process, each treated as separate but interrelated phenomena. The innovation process tracks the evolution of a new idea through time, whereas the entrepreneurial process tracks the activities that entrepreneurs develop to promote and defend the idea against its detractors. The model of innovation and entrepreneurship introduced distinguishes between individual and collective entrepreneurship and identifies two types of collective entrepreneurship: team entrepreneurship and functional entrepreneurship. A Minnesota case study demonstrates the power of both team and functional entrepreneurship. It also illustrates how important the linkages are between the entrepreneurs and their larger community. An innovative idea's development and survival depends on an “ecology of organizations” that provide “venture” capital for analysis and experimentation. The vast networks of contacts and associations represent a form of social capital just as important as the community's economic capital. In this case, both aspects of social creativity—the community resources and the network of social relations—were found to be instrumental in passing and implementing the first public school choice program in the country.     

Interactional expertise as a third kind of knowledge

Between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skill lies ‘interactional expertise’—the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners. Interactional expertise is exhibited by sociologists of scientific knowledge, by scientists themselves and by a large range of other actors. Attention is drawn to the distinction between the social and the individual embodiment theses: a language does depend on the form of the bodies of its members but an individual within that community can learn the language without the body. The idea has significance for our understanding of colour-blindness, deafness and other abilities and disabilities. They say that love's a word, a word we've only heard the meaning of.     

Early understanding of perception as a source of knowledge

Two studies investigated preschool children's ability to infer another person's knowledge or ignorance on the basis of that person's recent perceptual experience. In Experiment 1 children were questioned about their own and a puppet's knowledge of a hidden object's color and about their own and the puppet's ability to see the hidden object. Three- and 4-year-olds attributed knowledge and perceptual experience to the person (either themselves or the puppet) who had viewed the hidden object, but not to the person who did not view it. Experiment 2 further investigated 3-year-olds understanding of perception as a source of knowledge. Children were asked to indicate which of two puppets, one who had viewed a hidden object and one who had not, would be able to tell them the object's color. Children chose the correct puppet more often than would be predicted by chance. The results of these experiments suggest that understanding of perception as a source of knowledge is present by the age of 3 years.     

Unconscious phantasy as an obstacle and as a stimulus to knowledge

This paper underlines and explores the connections between emotional and cognitive development at a very early stage, starting from the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a 4-year-old boy with autistic features. Development of the personality and development of the mind are shown to proceed together and to be interwoven when the therapist starts to help the child to modulate the terror and the rage related to separation. The development of the idea of a good nipple and the Introjection of it as a mental structure is considered an important step on the way towards separation between mother and baby and towards the formation within the baby self of a space where symbols of the external world can be placed. Autistic features are considered as an extreme form of denial of both internal and external reality.     

A reconstruction of contemporary Confucianism as a form of knowledge

Traditional Confucianism might be likened to a great tree, with various branches and trends of thought emerging from common roots. Continuing with this metaphor, Confucianism as a form of knowledge might be regarded as a main branch, and the resulting form of Confucianism constitutes the main body of Chinese learning. Due to modern society’s transformation, Confucianism as a form of knowledge has begun to disappear and the form of Confucianism which has its own discourse system and problem consciousness has become a disconnected tradition and an object of study of all the branches of learning in modern times. It is important for the present-day development of Confucianism that we break the rigescent modern academic system, propagate Confucianism as a form of knowledge, and rebuild the Confucian form of knowledge. __________ Translated from Hebei Xuekan 河北学刊 (Hebei Academic Journal), 2005(4) by Yan Xin     

Subtyping as a knowledge preservation strategy in category learning

Subtyping occurs when atypical examples are excluded from consideration in judging a category. In three experiments, we investigated whether subtyping can influence category learning. In each experiment, participants learned about a category where most, but not all, of the exemplars corresponded to a theme. The category structure included a subtyping dimension, which had one value for theme-congruent exemplars and another for exception exemplars. On the basis of work by Hayes, Foster, and Gadd (2003) and studies on social stereotyping, we hypothesized that this subtyping dimension would enable the participants to discount the exception exemplars, thereby facilitating category learning. Contrary to expectations, we did not find a subtyping effect with traditional category-learning procedures. By introducing the theme prior to learning, however, we observed increased effects on typicality ratings (Experiment 1) and facilitated learning of the category (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 provided direct evidence that introducing the theme prior to learning enhanced the subtyping effect and provided support for a knowledge-gating explanation of subtyping. We conclude that subtyping effects are strongest on already-learned concepts and that subtyping is unlikely to aid in the learning of new concepts, except in particular circumstances.     

Knowability as potential knowledge

The thesis that every truth is knowable is usually glossed by decomposing knowability into possibility and knowledge. Under elementary assumptions about possibility and knowledge, considered as modal operators, the thesis collapses the distinction between truth and knowledge (as shown by the so-called Fitch-argument). We show that there is a more plausible interpretation of knowability—one that does not decompose the notion in the usual way—to which the Fitch-argument does not apply. We call this the potential knowledge-interpretation of knowability. We compare our interpretation with the rephrasal of knowability proposed by Edgington and Rabinowicz and Segerberg, inserting an actuality-operator. This proposal shares some key features with ours but suffers from requiring specific transworld-knowledge. We observe that potential knowledge involves no transworld-knowledge. We describe the logic of potential knowledge by providing models for interpreting the new operator. Finally we show that the knowability thesis can be added to elementary conditions on potential knowledge without collapsing modal distinctions.     

Semantic knowledge as a determinant of developmental differences in recall

Two experiments examined the possible role of children's semantic knowledge and their ability to encode it in a cued-recall test. Performance of children aged 7, 10, and 13 was observed in encoding specificity tasks, which used homographs as the to-be-remembered words (TBRs).In Experiment I, children of all ages performed better when the output cue words prompted similar meanings to the input cues, than when output and input meanings were incompatible. In Experiment II, all children were required to recall identical items, but younger children, owing to lack of knowledge, were unable to encode pairs comprising input and TBR words incompatibly with output cues. In such circumstances, younger subjects outperformed older subjects. When input and output cues were incompatible for all ages, recall increased with age, possibly due to older childrens' using more effective retrieval strategies.The findings indicate that semantic encoding influenced recall performance at each age. This suggests that age differences in memory are due to differences in the amount of semantic knowledge a child possesses for encoding and cuing and not to capacity differences.     

Inadequacy of recall as a basis for frequency knowledge.

Subjects studied a word list comprising varying numbers of words from distinct semantic categories. The category names (trees, colors, etc.) were then re-presented, and for each name subjects either recalled as many exemplars as they could or estimated how many had been included in the list (Experiments 1 and 2). Recall was not sufficiently informative about actual category sizes to account for performance in the frequency estimation task. Moreover, it remained insufficiently informative when efforts were made to induce a recall-estimate strategy by requiring overt recall prior to estimation (Experiments 3-5), by using very small categories (Experiment 4), and by not showing the category name at study (Experiment 5), even though it did allow a partial account of estimation when the category exemplars were individually cued (Experiment 6). It is concluded that the role of recall in frequency estimation is much exaggerated.     

Counterfactuals versus conceivability as a guide to modal knowledge

Philosophical Studies - I compare two prominent approaches to knowledge of metaphysical modality, the more traditional approach via conceiving viz. imagining a scenario and a more recent approach...     

Being perceived as a knowledge sender or knowledge receiver: A multistudy investigation of the effect of age on knowledge transfer

As a result of demographic changes, workforces are becoming older and more age diverse. While interactions between workers from different age groups can provide opportunities for mutual learning through bidirectional knowledge transfer, research has yet to investigate how age influences knowledge transfer between age‐diverse colleagues. Building on the organizational theory of age effects, we conducted two studies to examine how age influenced the roles assigned to individuals in knowledge transfer processes, that is, whether they were perceived as knowledge senders or knowledge recipients. In Study 1, we used an experimental vignette design with 450 employees to assess how age affected perceived ability and motivation to share and receive knowledge. Further, we tested the extent to which trustworthiness moderated these relationships. In Study 2, we extended these findings using a dyadic research design with data from 53 age‐diverse knowledge transfer dyads. We examined through which mechanisms the age of one's colleague affected one's knowledge transfer behaviour. We found that the age of one's colleague had a positive effect on one's knowledge receiving behaviour and a negative effect on one's knowledge sharing behaviour. Further, perceived ability to receive knowledge and perceived motivation to share knowledge mediated these effects.     

Visual field dependence as a navigational strategy

Visual perception is an important component of environmental navigation. Previous research has revealed large individual differences in navigational strategies (i.e., the body’s kinesthetic and embodied approach to movement) and the perception of environmental surfaces (via distance estimations), but little research has investigated the potential relationship between these sources of individual variation. An important navigational strategy is the interaction between reliance on visual cues and vestibular or proprioceptive cues. We investigated the role of this navigational strategy in the perception of environmental surfaces. The results supported three embodied evolutionary predictions: Individuals who were most reliant on visual context (1) overestimated vertical surfaces significantly more, and (2) feared falling significantly more, than did those who were least reliant on visual context; and (3) all individuals had roughly accurate horizontal distance estimates, regardless of their navigational strategy. These are among the first data to suggest that individual differences in perception are closely related to the individual differences in navigation that derive from navigational risks. Variable navigational strategies may reflect variable capacities to perceive and navigate the environment.