Number games, magnitude representation, and basic number skills in preschoolers

The effect of 3 intervention board games (linear number, linear color, and nonlinear number) on young children's (mean age = 3.8 years) counting abilities, number naming, magnitude comprehension, accuracy in number-to-position estimation tasks, and best-fit numerical magnitude representations was examined. Pre- and posttest performance was compared following four 25-min intervention sessions. The linear number board game significantly improved children's performance in all posttest measures and facilitated a shift from a logarithmic to a linear representation of numerical magnitude, emphasizing the importance of spatial cues in estimation. Exposure to the number card games involving nonsymbolic magnitude judgments and association of symbolic and nonsymbolic quantities, but without any linear spatial cues, improved some aspects of children's basic number skills but not numerical estimation precision.     

An Experiential, Game-Theoretic Pedagogy for Sustainability Ethics

The wicked problems that constitute sustainability require students to learn a different set of ethical skills than is ordinarily required by professional ethics. The focus for sustainability ethics must be redirected towards: (1) reasoning rather than rules, and (2) groups rather than individuals. This need for a different skill set presents several pedagogical challenges to traditional programs of ethics education that emphasize abstraction and reflection at the expense of experimentation and experience. This paper describes a novel pedagogy of sustainability ethics that is based on noncooperative, game-theoretic problems that cause students to confront two salient questions: “What are my obligations to others?” and “What am I willing to risk in my own well-being to meet those obligations?” In comparison to traditional professional ethics education, the game-based pedagogy moves the learning experience from: passive to active, apathetic to emotionally invested, narratively closed to experimentally open, and from predictable to surprising. In the context of game play, where players must make decisions that can adversely impact classmates, students typically discover a significant gap between their moral aspirations and their moral actions. When the games are delivered sequentially as part of a full course in Sustainability Ethics, students may experience a moral identity crisis as they reflect upon the incongruity of their self-understanding and their behavior. Repeated play allows students to reconcile this discrepancy through group deliberation that coordinates individual decisions to achieve collective outcomes. It is our experience that students gradually progress through increased levels of group tacit knowledge as they encounter increasingly complex game situations.     

Trust,expertise, and the philosophy of science

Trust is a central concept in the philosophy of science. We highlight how trust is important in the wide variety of interactions between science and society. We claim that examining and clarifying the nature and role of trust (and distrust) in relations between science and society is one principal way in which the philosophy of science is socially relevant. We argue that philosophers of science should extend their efforts to develop normative conceptions of trust that can serve to facilitate trust between scientific experts and ordinary citizens. The first project is the development of a rich normative theory of expertise and experience that can explain why the various epistemic insights of diverse actors should be trusted in certain contexts and how credibility deficits can be bridged. The second project is the development of concepts that explain why, in certain cases, ordinary citizens may distrust science, which should inform how philosophers of science conceive of the formulation of science policy when conditions of distrust prevail. The third project is the analysis of cases of successful relations of trust between scientists and non-scientists that leads to understanding better how ‘postnormal’ science interactions are possible using trust.     

Advancing Shūrā: A Social Agent for Democratization

ABSTRACT

This study is an analytical comparison between Islamic articulations of shūrā (consultation) and notions of representative democracy. It emphasizes various epistemic understandings of shūrā in light of qur’anic exegesis and historical precedents of consultative rule in Islam. In particular, it identifies shūrā as an agent for democratization in contrast to its more familiar manifestation as a top-down consultative system. This is examined together with the works of influential Muslim scholars from modernist, Islamist and pro-democratic backgrounds to elucidate what aspects of democracy they accept and/or reject. The article does not exhaustively analyze each scholar’s interpretation of democracy. Rather, it selects scholars from different historical epochs with distinctive theoretical positions on shūrā. Overall, the study finds shūrā remains largely under-utilized as a result of post-colonial discourses on Islam and authoritarian political systems in Muslim-majority countries. The article finally examines how shūrā can be better facilitated as a social agent to renew civil society and combat authoritarian rule.