Bakhtin, Socrates and the carnivalesque in education

In this article, we critically review the application of Bakhtin's literary work to education with the aim of exploring the notion of carnival. We argue that Bakhtin's highly original interpretation of Socrates as a carnivalesque figure has been neglected in the literature. While Bakhtin's references to Socrates are scattered through different texts, he develops an interpretation that extends our modern view of the Socratic ‘method’ of teaching. From his Socratic reading, we argue that Bakhtin develops an epistemology that links authority, carnival and knowledge. As such, we will argue that carnival helps to bridge the gap between ‘authoritative’ and ‘internally persuasive’ discourse in Bakhtin's wider thought and, specifically, application of his ideas to education. In this Bakhtinian interpretation, a Socratic dialogue involves: (1) the subversion of authoritative discourse; (2) the discovery of knowledge through social cross-examination of ideas and (3) educating by personal example. Drawing on empirical educational examples already available in the literature, we will look at the difficulties and benefits involved in applying these aspects of the Socratic dialogue to formal education. Overall, however, we will argue both authority and internally persuasive discourse and carnival gives us an insight into the development of conceptual understanding and enables us to reflect on their application for classroom practice.     

Why I Hit Him: Women's Reasons for Intimate Partner Violence

This study examines motives for intimate partner violence (IPV) among a community sample of 412 women who used IPV against male partners. A "Motives and Reasons for IPV scale" is proposed, and exploratory factor analyses identified five factors: expression of negative emotions, self-defense, control, jealousy, and tough guise. To our knowledge, the study is the first to investigate the relationship between women's motives for IPV and their perpetration of physical, psychological, and sexual aggression, as well as coercive control, toward partners. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed participants' aggression was driven by complex, multiple motives. All five motives were related to a greater frequency of perpetrating IPV. Treatment programs focusing on women's IPV perpetration should address both defensive and proactive motives.     

‘The Echo of a Thought in Sight’: Property Perception,Universals and Wittgenstein

Contemporary philosophers of perception, even those with otherwise widely differing beliefs, often hold that universals enter into the content of perceptual experience. This doctrine can even be seen as a trivial inference from the observation that we observe properties – ways that things are – as well as things. I argue that the inference is not trivial but can and should be resisted. Ordinary property perception does not involve awareness of universals. But there are visual (and aural) experiences which do involve determinate universals: following Wittgenstein, I call these ‘aspect experiences’. The common view of perceptual content effectively conflates aspect experiences with mere property perceptions. Wittgenstein’s later writings on the philosophy of psychology provide an alternative way to think about both aspects and properties. It also forms a contrast with Wittgenstein’s own early treatment of perception in the Tractatus, the doctrine of which is much closer to the contemporary norm among philosophers of perception. In seeing how Wittgenstein moved away from his early view, we can see how we might move away from that norm.     

Understanding Variations in Judgments of Infidelity: An Application of Attribution Theory

The current program of research examined how the four dimensions of the attribution (locus of causality, controllability, stability, intentionality) influenced judgments of a partner’s hypothetical infidelity and actor-observer discrepancies associated with judgments of real-life infidelity. The results from Study 1 (N?=?396) revealed that the dimensions of the attribution affected the extent to which adults’ judged a partner’s hypothetical behavior as indicative of infidelity differently depending on the type of behavior. When reporting on real-life behavior (Study 2, N?=?802), adults attributed the cause of their partner’s infidelity as being a result of internal, controllable, stable, and intentional causes to a greater extent than when judging their own infidelity.     

Treating destructive behavior reinforced by increased caregiver compliance with the participant's mands

Functional analyses sometimes do not identify momentary fluctuations in the function of destructive behavior (Bowman, Fisher, Thompson, & Piazza, 1997). In such cases, individuals may mand for the reinforcer that is currently most preferred and display destructive behavior if that mand goes unreinforced. In this study, we conducted a mand analysis to test whether destructive behavior functioned as a precurrent response that increased reinforcement for the participant's mands. We then evaluated a treatment that matched this function of destructive behavior by providing differential or time-based reinforcement of participant mands in accordance with multiple or chained schedules with reinforcement-schedule thinning. Decreases in destructive behavior averaged 97.4% across cases. We discuss these results relative to the importance of matching treatments for destructive behavior to operant functions for both traditional and idiosyncratic functions of destructive behavior.     

Measurement of nontargeted problem behavior during investigations of resurgence

Resurgence occurs when a previously extinguished behavior reemerges once a more recently reinforced behavior is placed on extinction. Previous research has suggested that nontargeted responses within the same response class recur alongside target-response resurgence (e.g., da Silva, Maxwell, & Lattal, 2008; Lieving, Hagopian, Long, & O'Connor, 2004). The purpose of this two-experiment investigation was to examine target response resurgence while simultaneously measuring the occurrence of nontargeted responses. Three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder who displayed multiple topographies of problem behavior participated. In Experiment 1, a three-phase resurgence procedure was conducted and all three participants displayed target-response resurgence accompanied by the emergence of nontargeted forms of problem behavior. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 using a 30-min assessment procedure. The implications of these findings as they pertain to the treatment of severe problem behavior and utility of a brief relapse assessment are discussed.     

Counting to Infinity: Does Learning the Syntax of the Count List Predict Knowledge That Numbers Are Infinite?

By around the age of 5½, many children in the United States judge that numbers never end, and that it is always possible to add 1 to a set. These same children also generally perform well when asked to label the quantity of a set after one object is added (e.g., judging that a set labeled “five” should now be “six”). These findings suggest that children have implicit knowledge of the “successor function”: Every natural number, n, has a successor, n + 1. Here, we explored how children discover this recursive function, and whether it might be related to discovering productive morphological rules that govern language-specific counting routines (e.g., the rules in English that represent base-10 structure). We tested 4- and 5-year-old children’s knowledge of counting with three tasks, which we then related to (a) children’s belief that 1 can always be added to any number (the successor function) and (b) their belief that numbers never end (infinity). Children who exhibited knowledge of a productive counting rule were significantly more likely to believe that numbers are infinite (i.e., there is no largest number), though such counting knowledge was not directly linked to knowledge of the successor function, per se. Also, our findings suggest that children as young as 4 years of age are able to implement rules defined over their verbal count list to generate number words beyond their spontaneous counting range, an insight which may support reasoning over their acquired verbal count sequence to infer that numbers never end.