Am I ‘Chinese’ or ‘Scottish’? children’s perceptions of the adaptive nature of Chinese Scottish children’s dual identities

Chinese Scottish children (children who are born and live in Scotland with Chinese parents) face challenges in establishing their identity. However, there is lack of research that investigates ethnic minority Chinese children’s identity and associated feelings about the dual social context in which they live. The study introduced a social identity vignettes task to examine Chinese Scottish and White Scottish children’s perceptions of Chinese ethnic identity and Scottish national identity of a Scottish born Chinese character within two contrasting socio-cultural contexts (Scottish vs. Chinese). This study examines whether children’s ethnic and national identity and feelings of positivity are adaptive and sensitive to social context. In addition it explored age-related changes in perceptions of ethnic and national identification in the vignettes. The sample comprised of 161 children (8, 11, and 14 years). The results found Chinese Scottish children and White Scottish children’s judgments of the characters’ ethnic identity changed with the cultural context. Both groups of children had a similar perception of vignette characters’ feeling of positivity. Both Chinese and White Scottish children judged that the character would feel more positive about him/herself in the Chinese context. There was no main effect of age.     

The privileging of ‘Support-From-Below’ in early spatial language acquisition

Spatial terms that encode support (e.g., “on”, in English) are among the first to be understood by children across languages (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Johnston & Slobin, 1979). Such terms apply to a wide variety of support configurations, including Support-From-Below (SFB; cup on table) and Mechanical Support, such as stamps on envelopes, coats on hooks, etc. Research has yet to delineate infants’ semantic space for the term “on” when considering its full range of usage. Do infants initially map “on” to a very broad, highly abstract category – one including cups on tables, stamps on envelopes, etc.? Or do infants begin with a much more restricted interpretation - mapping “on” to certain configurations over others? Much infant cognition research suggests that SFB is an event category that infants learn about early - by five months of age (Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017) - raising the possibility that they may also begin by interpreting the word “on” as referring to configurations like cups on tables, rather than stamps on envelopes. Further, studies examining language production suggests that children and adults map the basic locative expression (BE on, in English) to SFB over Mechanical Support (Landau et al., 2016). We tested the hypothesis that this ‘privileging’ of SFB in early infant cognition and child and adult language also characterizes infants’ language comprehension. Using the Intermodal-Preferential-Looking-Paradigm in combination with infant eye-tracking, 20-month-olds were presented with two support configurations: SFB and Mechanical, Support-Via-Adhesion (henceforth, SVA). Infants preferentially mapped “is on” to SFB (rather than SVA) suggesting that infants differentiate between two quite different kinds of support configurations when mapping spatial language to these two configurations and more so, that SFB is privileged in early language understanding of the English spatial term “on”.     

‘Inhliziyo ekhombisa uthando’: Exploring children’s conceptions of spirituality

In this study we explored young isiZulu children’s conceptions of spirituality. The children (n = 8; females = 5; male = 3) were nine to eleven years old and attended a primary school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. They drew pictures depicting their sense of spirituality and answered questions on vignettes or scenarios that contained a moral dilemma. The children also engaged in conversations with a picture, and wrote a letter to God. Thematic analysis of the data yielded three themes that characterised the children’s emerging conceptions of their spirituality: conceptions of a transcendental being; spirituality as a search for personal meanings; and influences on emerging conceptions of spirituality. For the young children, being spiritual was about connecting with a transcendental being and with significant others in their lives through expressions of love, respect, hope, faith, compassion, closeness, fairness, and empathy. Children appear to acquire a sense of spirituality mainly by internalising experiential interactions within their social and material environment.     

‘A higher degree of scholarship’: Pagans and the language of scholarly authority

Through an exploration of the intellectual history and contemporary writings of the Pagan movement, this study will examine the lineage of ‘knowledge-based’ authority in contemporary Paganism. In particular, it will illuminate how the intellectual lineage of Pagan writings helped contemporary writers respond to a moment of crisis in Paganism, and it will provide an explanation for the traditionalised use of the rhetorical modes of scholarly authority among Pagan writers.     

From ‘Intersex’ to ‘DSD’: a case of epistemic injustice

Synthese - The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new...     

Behaviour of ‘impulsive’ and ‘non-impulsive’ humans in a temporal differentiation schedule of reinforcement

The operant behaviour of psychometrically defined ‘impulsive’ and ‘non-impulsive’ subjects, under a temporal differentiation schedule of reinforcement, was examined. Four impulsive and four non-impulsive females were selected on the basis of their scores on the Matching Familiar Figures Test. The subjects participated in fifteen 45-min sessions in which they were exposed to an inter-response-time-greater-than-10-sec schedule of monetary reinforcement. During Phase I (sessions 1–5) no information was provided about the reinforcement contingency. During Phase II (sessions 6–10) a light on the response panel was illuminated whenever a reinforcer became available. At the start of Phase III (session 11) the subjects were given explicit information about the reinforcement contingency. At the start of Phase IV (sessions 12–15) the subjects were told that the light would no longer be operative although the contingency would remain unaltered. During Phase I the impulsive subjects earned fewer reinforcers, and emitted a greater proportion of non-reinforced responses (inter-response times less than 10 sec) than the non-impulsive subjects. During Phase II both groups increased their earnings, although the performance of the non-impulsive group remained superior to that of the impulsive group. In Phase III both groups performed equally well. In Phase IV the performance of both groups deteriorated, the impulsive group performing more poorly than the non-impulsive group. The results demonstrate the sensitivity of operant performance maintained under temporal differentiation schedules to personality dimensions such as ‘impulsiveness/non-impulsiveness’.     

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a ‘Ritual’

‘Ritual’ has long been a key concept in anthropology and many ‘rituals’ have been identified, described, and interpreted. In most cases, those interpretations have been generated and presented by anthropologists. Occasionally, however, the interpretations of participants themselves are presented and can be equally multifarious. These sets of ways of looking at ‘ritual’ may or may not overlap. In this paper, I present thirteen ways of looking at one particular ‘ritual’—the (British) Quaker meeting for worship—and suggest that ways of looking are sometimes shared by academics and adepts. I conclude from this, firstly, that we are likely to produce an impoverished understanding of social phenomena when we ignore the interpretations of protagonists and, secondly, that to eschew a multivocal appreciation of ‘ritual’ will result in an unnecessarily crude representation of social life.     

Taking a children’s rights perspective on children’s spirituality

Abstract

The right to spiritual development has had little attention in public educational policy. This is more challenging, considering the fact of increasing religious diversity and the focus on spirituality and religion in that context, as well as the way the spiritual is mentioned in documents on children’s rights. This article traces the development from the first documents on the rights of the child and responses to these documents. It is argued that educational policy and practice should pay more attention to the way children’s spirituality is included in the documents. This is an issue of general education as well as of moral philosophy. The article concludes with a claim: spiritual development is a matter of survival and flourishing as human beings, and considering this in the framework of children’s rights could mean exploring spiritual sources in one’s own faith as well as in other faiths.     

‘Tied together feelings’ Group psychotherapy with latency children: the process of forming a cohesive group

In this paper we describe our experience of running a psychoanalytic psychotherapy group for six children, ranging in age from 4-8 years old. The group ran for a year, with sessions held weekly for an hour. The rationale for group work, selection criteria and the treatment setting are discussed. The paper charts the evolution within the children of the concept of an internal 'work group' (Bion, 1961), as opposed to a 'gang', as their self-awareness and capacity to relate to each other improved. This reflected a corresponding shift in their relationship to the two group leaders, moving from their initial perception of us as neglectful and in conflict with each other, towards recognizing us as a therapist couple who could work together thoughtfully for their benefit. The children's relationship to the group leaders, representing a 'parental couple' in the transference, was the focus of much of the work group. The positive outcomes for most of the children, resulting from this treatment, are reported.     

‘Interfaith dialogue’ as a form of opposition of ‘minority religions’ to governmental pressure in Russia

Russian governmental policy toward non-traditional religious groups, especially so-called New Religious Movements (NRMs), is discriminatory. Despite Russia’s formal secularity, the government strongly supports the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), a position which results in various limitations on many other religious groups. As a result, legal actions have been initiated against new religious groups, for example the Bhagavad Gita trial in Tomsk, Siberia, and the designation of the literature of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as ‘extremist’. However, pressure by the government can sometimes lead to the development of spontaneous interreligious oppositional associations. One important example is the ‘interfaith dialogue’ in Tomsk, where local leaders or representatives of religious groups, such as the Episcopal, Jewish, and Latter-day Saints (Mormon) churches as well as the Hare Krishna movement, unorthodox Buddhist groups, and local pagan movements, united to oppose governmental and ROC efforts to disband a Hare Krishna group in the Tomsk area. This research note presents results of a case study, which involved participant observation, of the phenomenon of oppositional interfaith dialogue in Tomsk in the period 2011–2014. I discuss factors that influenced its appearance, its relationship with the local government, and the methods of cooperation between the different religious groups within this association and offer some theoretical interpretations of these developments. The results of this case study illustrate new and important modern relationships between minority religions and the government in Russia.     

Mathematical modeling of the effects of ‘capability’ and ‘intent’ on the stability of a competitive international system

In international relations theory, there is a long history of Richardson-like modeling of the evolution of military capability. Usually, such models are deterministic and predictive and do not allow for the representation of the transition from competitive peace to shooting war. More recently, models have been developed which attempt to represent the evolution of relationship between nations. The relationship between nations, varying from friendship to hostility, is taken to be synonymous with the intent of nations towards each other, varying from good will to malice. Generally, these relationship models do not include capability though common sense would indicate that capability and mutual intent should profoundly influence each other. A model is presented here which combines these two fundamental attributes of international relations and attempts to represent the outbreak of war in the world system by the onset of deterministic chaos in the extended model.On leave 1994–95 at U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Washington, D.C. 20451, U.S.A.     

Hay’s Buddhist philosophy of gestural language

The central role of gestural language in Buddhism is widely acknowledged, as in the story of the Buddha pointing at the moon, the point being the student’s seeing beyond the finger (as object) to its gesture (as act). Gesture’s role in dance is similarly central, as noted by scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dance studies. Unsurprisingly, then, the intersection of these two fields is well-populated, including the formal gestures (called “mudras”) Buddhism inherited from classical Indian dance, and the masked dance of the Mani Rimdu Festival. In this investigation, I will articulate a new Buddhist philosophy of gestural language, based on a new conception of emptiness that I locate in the work of contemporary U.S. choreographer Deborah Hay, as influenced by Nāgārjuna and Zen. And this, finally, suggests that contemporary Western philosophy should incorporate this compassion as a normative dimension to its own theorizing and practice.     

Avner Baz on the ‘Point’ of a Question

Abstract

Avner Baz claims that questions philosophers ask about hypothetical cases lack the kind of ‘point’ possessed by ‘everyday’ questions. He concludes from this that there is something wrong with the philosophical practice of asking questions about hypothetical cases. This paper defends the practice from Baz’s criticism.     

In defence of a perspectival semantics for ‘know’

Relativism offers an ingenious way of accommodating most of our intuitions about ‘know’: the truth-value of sentences containing ‘know’ is a function of parameters determined by a context of use and a context of assessment. This sort of double-indexing provides a more adequate account of the linguistic data involving ‘know’ than does standard contextualism. However, relativism has come under recent attack: it supposedly cannot account for the factivity of ‘know’, and it entails, counterintuitively, that circumstances of evaluation have features that cannot be shifted by any intensional operator. I offer replies to these objections on behalf of the relativist. I then argue that a version of contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizing sentence truth to contexts of assessment. This version of contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds.