Commonsense Meaning Research Articles

Współzamieszkiwanie. O wykorzystaniu wielostronnego studium przypadku w metodologii badań migracyjnych

The primary objective of this paper is to address the methodology employed in qualitative migration research. It involves a theoretical analysis of the methodological challenges associated with a case study design, necessitating the collection of accounts from multiple individuals participating in the studied process or event. The second aim is to empirically illustrate these considerations through a study focusing on the relationship between Polish hosts and Ukrainian guests (2022–23). The gathered empirical material indicates the effectiveness of applying the technique of cross stories (récits croisés) derived from biographical research, along with the ontological-epistemological difficulties encountered. The paper does not aim to offer a comprehensive analysis of the cohabitation phenomenon. Instead, it contributes to the field by explicitly citing significant portions of raw material and elucidating their context. Its impact on migration studies lies in demonstrating, from a methodological perspective, that the simultaneous examination of various viewpoints and definitions of situations allows researchers to leverage the full potential of qualitative research. Through cross stories, a more profound understanding of interviewees’ perspectives on the world emerges, enabling researchers, when necessary, to question common-sense meanings of certain categories and highlight gaps in biographical accounts.

The Evolution of Symbolic Thought: At the Intersection of Schizophrenia Psychopathology, Ethnoarchaeology, and Neuroscience.

The human capacity for symbolic representation arises, evolutionarily and developmentally, from the exploitation of a widespread sensorimotor network, along a fundamental continuity between embodied and symbolic modes of experience. In this regard, the fine balancing between constrained sensorimotor connections (responsible for self-embodiment processing) and more untethered neural associations (responsible for abstract and symbolic processing) is context dependent and plastically neuromodulated, thus intersubjectively constructed within a specific socio-cultural milieu. Instead, in the schizophrenia spectrum this system falls off catastrophically, due to an unbalance toward too unconstrained sensorimotor connectivity, leading to a profound distortion of self/world relation with a symbolic activity detached from its embodied ground. For this very reason, however, schizophrenia psychopathology may contribute to unveil, in a distorted or magnified way, ubiquitous structural features of human symbolic activity, beneath the various, historically determined cultural systems. In this respect, a comparative approach, linking psychopathology and ethnoarchaeology, allows highlight the following invariant formal characteristics of symbolic processing: (1) Emergence of salient perceptive fragments, which stand out from the perceptual field. (2) Spreading of a multiplicity of new significances with suspension of common-sense meaning. (3) Dynamic and passive character through which meaning proliferation is experienced. This study emphasizes the importance of fine-grained psychopathology to elucidate, within a cross-disciplinary framework, the evolutionarily and developmental pathways that shape the basic structures of human symbolization.

Technology Focus: Completions (April 2024)

To start a text for high-level readers with a cliché is always a risk, but I will take it: “Data is the new oil.” When British mathematician Clive Humby coined this clever sentence in 2006, the thought-provoking idea behind it was that both oil and data need to be refined and processed to have value. Time and repetition eventually shaped the new, more common-sense meaning that data is as valuable as oil. And when the data refers to oil exploration and production, Humby’s statement becomes resounding, especially in its original meaning. The oil and gas industry, notably the completion activity, with its distributed sensors, optical fibers, permanent downhole gauges, sealed-wellbore pressure monitoring (SWPM), and microseismic, has generated a fantastic amount of data, which has increasingly been properly refined and processed, producing more information—and more oil. A quick search of OnePetro shows the number of papers that deal with the use of artificial intelligence with massive amounts of data that are being made available in the cloud to solve everything from the most prosaic completion decisions to the automatic design of stimulations in naturally fractured reservoirs. A good example of the use of data is shown in paper SPE 212922, which provides an in-depth analysis of interventions in the UK sector of the North Sea. Most of the conclusions, although mostly based on the UK Stewardship Survey, can be easily extrapolated to other regions of the world. And one of them puts its finger on the wound: the fear of asset managers of conducting interventions, even though they appear to be highly effective and economically viable. Paper SPE 212367 discusses the automation of SWPM data analysis for automatic volume-to-first-response matching, a great evolution in the design of refractures in the legendary Eagle Ford shales. And, if the evolution of completing unconventionals led the US to its historic production record in 2023, with more than 16 million BOE/D, in Argentina, shale gas has been a driver of development. The evolution of completions in the most famous unconventional prospect, Vaca Muerta, can be followed in paper SPE 212574. All of these great readings prove the cliché that “data is the new oil.” To complement the reading, a paper that will bring a discreet smile to a generation that breathlessly watched spaceships and even planets being destroyed by lasers, paper SPE 215016, details the industrial use of lasers in perforation. The future has finally arrived. To close the selections, two papers present current and important topics: completion options for carbon capture, use, and storage (SPE 216187) and innovations in autonomous inflow control devices, with the ingenious activation of the apparatus with chemical devices (SPE 216041). Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. SPE 215016 First Industrial High-Power Laser Perforation Deployment by Sameeh I. Batarseh, Saudi Aramco, et al. SPE 216187 Improving Injection Efficiency in CCUS Wells: A Comparative Analysis of Different Completion Designs by Prakasa Bona, Halliburton, et al. SPE 216041Configurable Adaptive Chemical Inflow Control Device Eliminates Intervention by P. Asthana, Saudi Aramco, et al.

Semantics-Aware Context-Based Learner Modelling Using Normalized PSO for Personalized E-learning

E-learning proves its importance in the diverse educational levels over traditional education. An adaptive e-learning system needs to deduce the learner model for adding personalization to instructional websites. The learner model is the perception repository about the e-content user, which can be inferred implicitly by employing meaningful semantic analysis of the text. In this research, a novel methodology is proposed to conceptually deduce the semantic learner model for personalized e-learning recommendations. Firstly, Conceptual Learner Model (CLM) is developed based on the learner’s behavior and context-based text semantic representation by exploiting concepts from the ConceptNet knowledge base, with a significant association of patterns and rules. Then, Expanded Contextual Learner Model (ECLM) is developed by exploring the latent semantics in graphs to add concepts with the common-sense meanings that exceeded the named entities. The learner’s knowledge graph is defined based on contextually associated concepts. Semantic relations in ConceptNet are exploited to extend learner models. The Normalized Particle Swarm Optimization (NPSO) algorithm is used to learn the importance of the relation types between the concepts. Thus, CLM and ECLM each are represented as a vector of weighted concepts in which updating is obtained automatically. The proposed recommendation system incorporates dynamic learner models to predict an appropriate e-content with the highest ranking, matching the true needs of a particular learner. Our simulation results show that the performance of ECLM is better Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) value 0.780 than other existing methods.

─ “Matemática”? O que quer dizer isso? ─ Não se faça de bobo; todo mundo sabe.

Abstract We criticize the polysemy of the signifier “mathematics”. Its commonsense meaning should not be considered enough to ground mathematics education. We describe a form of speech emerging in Ancient Greece, originated from the social necessity to avoid intra-family clashes by means of precise agreements, written laws, and democratic dialog in a singular historical situation. This form of speech emerged together with coinage, was made numerically precise with the Pythagorean movement, and logically precise after the crisis unleashed by Russell’s paradox in the beginning of the last century. We show how this form of speech has developed in history together with communities that came to be known as “exact sciences”, among which is Mathematics, a distinguished community of speech. We end the paper suggesting a political agenda for mathematics education.

Knowledge-driven Natural Language Understanding of English Text and its Applications

Understanding the meaning of a text is a fundamental challenge of natural language understanding (NLU) research. An ideal NLU system should process a language in a way that is not exclusive to a single task or a dataset. Keeping this in mind, we have introduced a novel knowledge driven semantic representation approach for English text. By leveraging the VerbNet lexicon, we are able to map syntax tree of the text to its commonsense meaning represented using basic knowledge primitives. The general purpose knowledge represented from our approach can be used to build any reasoning based NLU system that can also provide justification. We applied this approach to construct two NLU applications that we present here: SQuARE (Semantic-based Question Answering and Reasoning Engine) and StaCACK (Stateful Conversational Agent using Commonsense Knowledge). Both these systems work by ``truly understanding'' the natural language text they process and both provide natural language explanations for their responses while maintaining high accuracy.

SQuARE: Semantics-based Question Answering and Reasoning Engine

Understanding the meaning of a text is a fundamental challenge of natural language understanding (NLU) and from its early days, it has received significant attention through question answering (QA) tasks. We introduce a general semantics-based framework for natural language QA and also describe the SQuARE system, an application of this framework. The framework is based on the denotational semantics approach widely used in programming language research. In our framework, valuation function maps syntax tree of the text to its commonsense meaning represented using basic knowledge primitives (the semantic algebra) coded using answer set programming (ASP). We illustrate an application of this framework by using VerbNet primitives as our semantic algebra and a novel algorithm based on partial tree matching that generates an answer set program that represents the knowledge in the text. A question posed against that text is converted into an ASP query using the same framework and executed using the s(CASP) goal-directed ASP system. Our approach is based purely on (commonsense) reasoning. SQuARE achieves 100% accuracy on all the five datasets of bAbI QA tasks that we have tested. The significance of our work is that, unlike other machine learning based approaches, ours is based on "understanding" the text and does not require any training. SQuARE can also generate an explanation for an answer while maintaining high accuracy.

Augmented Context-Based Conceptual User Modeling for Personalized Recommendation System in Online Social Networks

As the data on the online social networks is getting larger, it is important to build personalized recommendation systems that recommend suitable content to users, there has been much research in this field that uses conceptual representations of text to match user models with best content. This article presents a novel method to build a user model that depends on conceptual representation of text by using ConceptNet concepts that exceed the named entities to include the common-sense meaning of words and phrases. The model includes the contextual information of concepts as well, the authors also show a novel method to exploit the semantic relations of the knowledge base to extend user models, the experiment shows that the proposed model and associated recommendation algorithms outperform all previous methods as a detailed comparison shows in this article.

Considering Finite Provinces of Meaning

This essay considers social science as a finite province of meaning. It is argued that teasing out common-sense meanings from social scientific conceptions is difficult because the meanings of scientific concepts are often veiled in life-worldly taken-for-grantedness. If social scientists have successfully created a scientific province of meaning, attempts to communicate findings outside of this reduced sphere of science should be somewhat problematic.

Challenges to Groups as Epistemic Communities: Liminality of Common Sense and Increasing Variability of Word Meanings

The ‘epistemic calculus of groups’ posits functions to group-generated knowledge. In this article, those same epistemic group functions are now re-evaluated as means by which group members may tackle two contemporary and increasing challenges, or even obstructions, to knowledge. These obstructions, namely the liminality, the increasingly transitional nature of both ‘common sense’ and ‘common word meanings,’ occur, as our mass and social media practices change. Can groups still remain as ‘epistemic communities’ and regenerate common sense or common word meanings? As a response to media developments and to counterarguments by the analytic social epistemologists, I reconceptualize the functions of the ´epistemic calculus of groups´ as skills, and present a synthetic approach toward thinking in small groups to enable the regeneration of common meanings. As a basis in the analysis of the notions of common sense and common word meanings, I use the theory of psychologic: a theory built on formal logic. Finally, group functions that help to tackle the challenges related to common sense and word meanings are summarized.

Common Sense, Language, and Semantic Primes: Liminal or Constant Concepts of Psychology?

Common sense, language, and semantic primes are linguistic and psychological elements that enable people to speak and to understand each other with ease. Ease and fluidity of interaction do not, however, arise on their own. On the contrary, if we lose common sense, commonly shared language and even some primitive basic components of language, such as semantic primes, we face disorderliness, chaos, and misunderstandings in small and large group interactions. Such a dystopian scenario sounds extreme, but this article presents an argument that we now witness increasing decay of both “common sense” and “common word meanings,” as our mass and social media practices change. Without the cultural psychological key notions of common sense and common word meanings, the necessary psychic unity decreases, as Jan Smedslund’s (1988) psychologic posits. I propose as an antidote to the observable disorderliness and the loss of “common meaning” a critical analysis of these core concepts and an increased effort to regenerate common meanings. While the media “narrow-cast” meanings to small groups of like-minded individuals, such like-mindedness is also at the heart of the process of making something “common,” in any sense. Thus, if we become good at reflecting and understanding fundamental semantic primes and basic psychological axioms of our language, we are also better equipped to consider unfamiliar word meanings with flexibility. This would enable new meanings in the social regulation of common language and interaction between people who otherwise “talk past one another.”

‘Should I stay or should I go?’: unpacking teacher attrition/retention as an educational issue

The paper starts from the observation that teacher attrition/retention seems to be a wicked issue: it seems to have strong face validity and a commonsense meaning, but the literature doesn’t provide a clear and distinctive definition. In the first section, the author analyzes the different ways in which the issue of teacher attrition and retention is problematized—in general and educationally—as the basis for a definition: as an educational issue, teacher attrition and retention refers to the need to prevent good teachers from leaving the job for the wrong reasons. Arguing that teacher attrition/retention constitutes both a problem and a challenge, he continues in the second part of the article foregrounding several lessons learned from the research on teacher attrition. A first lesson is related to the central role of social relationships and teachers’ need for social recognition as well as sense of belonging. Secondly, the impact of performativity policies on teacher attrition is discussed. A final lesson looks at teacher attrition and retention from the perspective of career and teachers’ work lives. The conclusion section outlines an agenda for teacher education, teacher induction, and school development to positively deal with the challenge to keep the good teachers in teaching.

Playful Texts and the Emergent Reader: Developing Metalinguistic Awareness by Anne Plummer

Reviewed by: Playful Texts and the Emergent Reader: Developing Metalinguistic Awareness by Anne Plummer Jennifer Farrar (bio) Playful Texts and the Emergent Reader: Developing Metalinguistic Awareness, by Anne Plummer. Bristol: Equinox, 2016. We are ushered into this book about the potential of playful texts with a warm welcome that comes straight from the opening pages of Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s famous picture book, The Jolly Pocket Postman. “Dear Reader!” it begins, “Enclosed you’ll find a useful lens. It’s in here—take a look!” (1). Indeed, Anne Plummer’s informative text does offer its readers a “useful lens,” in that it provides us with a helpful perspective from which to regard, or reconsider, the multifaceted and often underappreciated relationship between play—and playful texts—and the development of young children as readers and thinkers. Aimed primarily at teachers, students and scholars who may be relatively new to the field of children’s literature and literacies, Anne Plummer’s text is underpinned by a drive to celebrate and share the benefits of reading playful texts. According to her quite specific definition, a playful text is one that “plays on words and/or images in the same way that children play in games of make believe, transforming the everyday world of common sense meaning into a self-reflexive play world which works to disclose, and subvert, the rules which sustain it” (2). As Plummer notes in the introduction, such texts tend to delight in the chaotic pursuit of multiple, sometimes contradictory plot lines; are often narrated by disruptive and unreliable storytellers; and frequently invite readers to toy with their linguistic and literary assumptions about how books—and language—ought to work. Consequently, Plummer makes an explicit connection between the texts she has labeled as textually playful and the concept of metafiction, an approach or set of devices that is said to interrupt or undermine readers’ expectations by deliberately drawing attention to the “artifice of fiction” or the constructedness of a text (Pantaleo 212). In fact, the extent of this connection [End Page 255] is such that Plummer uses the terms “playful” and “metafictive” interchangeably, describing playful texts as “essentially metafictive” in nature (2), a conflation that I return to in the later stages of this review. As Margaret Mackey has noted, an effect of metafiction can be to create readers who are able to approach the act of reading with a more “reflective and detached awareness of how the processes of fiction are operating … they are simultaneously caught up in the story and standing back from it, watching it work” (179). Although Mackey is not cited, it is this heightened awareness of meaning-making as a process that Plummer is also interested in, and a central premise of this book is that young readers’ engagement with “playful metafiction” (69), a conjoined phrase that emerges in the latter stages of the argument, can create opportunities for crucial developments of a metalinguistic and/or metacognitive nature. In Plummer’s own words, these can be equated with “the ability to identify and talk about the properties of language” (1). The positive stance that Plummer has adopted toward metafiction builds on significant work in this field by picture book and children’s literature scholars such as Mackey, but also that of Lawrence R. Sipe, Sylvia Pantaleo, David Lewis, and Frank Serafini, whose work with younger readers is acknowledged and signposted via a series of vignettes, or case studies, which appear in the final chapter. While these critics have often used metafiction or postmodernism as the prism through which to scrutinize children’s texts, Plummer’s contribution has been to approach the texts from a perspective that puts the concept of play, rather than metafiction, first. Given her background as a Montessori-trained teacher, Plummer’s interest in the productive power of play is not surprising, and it is this influence that provides the book with much of its overarching structure. Having briefly outlined her perspective in the introductory pages, in chapter 2 Plummer starts to assemble a theoretical “pro-play” argument that begins with a discussion of the developmental origins of pretend play—or make believe—and makes reference to the theories of Jerome...

Ambivalence--a key concept in gerontology? Elements of heuristics exemplified by identity formation in old age

Ambivalence is a widely used concept in gerontology, mostly used in the common sense meaning. We propose that an elaborated notion based on the historical and systematic analysis, reveals important theoretical, methodological and practical potentials of the idea of ambivalence for the study of aging. We exemplify this view by proposing a heuristic perspective for the analysis of processes to constitute and reconstitute identities in old age using a model based on a multidimensional understanding of ambivalence. Ambivalence is defined as referring to the experiences of vacillating between polar contradictions of feeling, thinking, wanting and social structures in the search for the sense and meaning of social relationships, facts and texts, which are important for unfolding and altering facets of the self and agency.

Political participation and commons

Purpose– The crisis of confidence in political institutions has become a phenomenon with uniform trends across Europe. Nevertheless, citizens still express interest in politics and are engaged in political and social activities. What are the issues that still motivate them to go to the polls and/or engage in non-institutional forms of political participation? The case study of the Italian referendum in favour of the “Water Common Good” (June 2011) is particularly appropriate to explore these issues and motivations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– The paper proposes a multidisciplinary common good’s framework focusing on its social and political challenges. As the referendum succeeded also thanks to the rhetorical effectiveness of the “common good” epithet, a survey on 120 Roman citizens who voted in favour of the “Water Common Good” was conducted. The hypothesis was that the referendum success could be associated with social needs to defend strategic resources (“commons”) by actively participating in the deliberations on them. A quantitative non-probabilistic research was carried out face-to-face, through a standardized and semi-structured questionnaire.Findings– The main findings refer to the leading role that distrust in political institutions, civil society activism and common good rhetorical effectiveness played.Originality/value– The most original contribution of this paper is the explanatory and stipulative definition of common good, which reduces the semantic uncertainty of the concept including common sense meanings. This novel conceptualization has practical implications in policy terms, as it explicates the social need to change the way of conceiving the relationship with strategic resources and decision-making processes concerning them.

Mapping the meaning of ‘difference’ in Europe: A social topography of prejudice

This paper draws on original empirical research to investigate popular understandings of prejudice in two national contexts: Poland and the United Kingdom. The paper demonstrates how common-sense meanings of prejudice are inflected by the specific histories and geographies of each place: framed in terms of ‘distance’ (Poland) and ‘proximity’ (United Kingdom), respectively. Yet, by treating these national contexts as nodes and linking them analytically the paper also exposes a connectedness in these definitions which brings into relief the common processes that produce prejudice. The paper then explores how inter-linkages between the United Kingdom and Poland within the wider context of the European Union are producing – and circulating through the emerging international currency of ‘political correctness’ – a common critique of equality legislation and a belief that popular concerns about the way national contexts are perceived to be changing as a consequence of super mobility and super diversity are being silenced. This raises a real risk that in the context of European austerity and associated levels of socioeconomic insecurity, negative attitudes and conservative values may begin to be represented as popular normative standards which transcend national contexts to justify harsher political responses towards minorities. As such, the paper concludes by making a case for prejudice reduction strategies to receive much greater priority in both national and European contexts.

Assisted Learning Systems in e-Education

Human society, analyzed as a learning environment, presumes different languages in order to know, to understand or to develop it. This statement results as a default application of cognitive domain in educational scientific research, and it highlights a key feature: each essential discovery was available for entire language compatible society. E-Society is constructed as an application of E-Science in social services, and it is going to reveal a learning system for each application of information technology developed for a compatible society. This article is proposed as a conceptual one focused on scientific research and interrelationship between building blocks of research, defined as an engine for any designed learning system applied in cognitive domain. In this approach, educational research become a learning system in e-Education. The purpose of this analysis is to configure teacher assisted learning system and to expose its main principles which could be integrated in standard assisted instruction applications, available in e-Classroom, supporting design of specific didactic activities.Keywords: Research Methodologies, Educational Research, E-Science, E-Education Infra- structure, E-ClassroomIntroductionT he analysis of this study is built on paradigm of triangle lexical, terminologi- cal and conceptual approach, presented as a three layers research methodology for an ed- ucational environment. A case study is start- ed for word 'society', which lexically, has a multiple common-sense meanings. The most abstract sense of it is concentrated in expressions such as the information socie- ty, the knowledge society or the learning society; in this case, perspective is cognitive domain and no limitations are in- cluded. These are different representations of same global community, and as another lexical exercise, globalization is used to de- scribe international community by us- ers of global information system and to explain international community by designers of same society. The three senses are reflecting first three stages of Bloom taxonomy: knowledge, compre- hension, and application. We use these three concepts as a building block for a learning system, and as a scaffold of pyramid of specific terms. Passing lexical level, we develop a terminological analyze, in a socio- logical approach, where [1] concludes that common-sensical meaning of 'society' have three features in common: first, each re- fers to networks of people relating to each other in some meaningful way, even if indi- rectly; second, there are criteria of member- ship, and therefore there is some sense of in- clusive - and therefore necessarily exclusive - boundedness; and third, each conveys a sense of ways of doing things in common, of characteristic patterns of behavior, of organi- zation. For an educational approach, this rep- resents two next stages of Bloom tax- onomy: analysis and synthetizing using network's terms of domain. These mean- ings of 'society' also suggest that there is widespread recognition that there is some- thing more for everyday life than embod- ied obviousness of individuals. The same au- thor considers that talking about how we can perceive collective more-than-the-sum- of-the-parts move discussion on epis- temology: how are we to know and under- stand human-made world? In educa- tional approach, at this level, we identify sixth stage of Bloom taxonomy: evalua- tion, in order to intend a scientific methodol- ogy for an educational research. Before an- swering that question, [1] considers that it is necessary to clarify relationship between ontology and epistemology.According to [2], there are several reasons for wanting to have a clear and transparent knowledge of ontological and epistemo- logical assumptions that underpin research: first, to understand interrelationship of key components of research, including methodology and methods; second, to avoid confusion when discussing theoretical de- bates and approaches to social phenomena; and third, to be able to recognize others', and defend our own, positions. …

Double meanings will not save the principle of double effect.

In an article somewhat ironically entitled "Disambiguating Clinical Intentions," Lynn Jansen promotes an idea that should be bewildering to anyone familiar with the literature on the intention/foresight distinction. According to Jansen, "intention" has two commonsense meanings, one of which is equivalent to "foresight." Consequently, questions about intention are "infected" with ambiguity-people cannot tell what they mean and do not know how to answer them. This hypothesis is unsupported by evidence, but Jansen states it as if it were accepted fact. In this reply, we make explicit the multiple misrepresentations she has employed to make her hypothesis seem plausible. We also point out the ways in which it defies common sense. In particular, Jansen applies her thesis only to recent empirical research on the intentions of doctors, totally ignoring the widespread confusion that her assertion would imply in everyday life, in law, and indeed in religious and philosophical writings concerning the intention/foresight distinction and the Principle of Double Effect.

A technologist visits sustainability

There was a time, not in too distant past, when Microsoft Word would not recognize the word ‘‘sustainability’’ in a text. Since then authors from all walks of life have written numerous narratives on sustainability or sustainable development. The United Nations and most governments on the planet have come together to promote sustainable development globally and nationally. Industry, especially large multinational corporations, have created their own organizations to promote sustainability. Local governments in every corner of the world are proponents of sustainability with programs titled ‘‘sustainable this’’ or ‘‘green that’’ to implement it. A responsible citizen dutifully separates recyclables from household wastes. Another drives a hybrid or an electric car. Yet another citizen volunteers for a citizen action group to promote solar or wind power. Are these behaviors contributing to sustainability? There can be two short answers, of which the first is: Perhaps. The second answer: We really would not be able to tell without knowing what the other interacting agents in society naturally do. The economy and society are vastly more complex than the simple causal relationship that we use such as ‘‘if we do this, that happens.’’ Profound confusions remain at every level of society about what one is supposed to do about sustainability. From the point of view of the science and engineering research, here is an attempt to make some sense on how this research community might look at sustainability. The word ‘‘sustainability’’ nowadays is as frequently used to connote its common sense meaning as to reflect the sense that came from the global environmental movement, generally accepted to have been popularized by the Bruntland commission report, our common future, of the UN-sponsored world commission on environment and development (WCED). No science dictionary has a useful scientific definition of the term. This is not surprising. Even though sustainability has penetrated many fields of science and engineering, the understanding varies from person to person, discipline to discipline. In truth, this is a sociopolitical idea, not a scientific one. Prof. J. Pop-Jordanov of Macedonia has compiled the distinctive ideas that are central to different professions in this context. For instance, for an economist, quantifying the environmental ‘‘externalities’’ is central to assessing human welfare. An ecologist is focused on studying the ways the carrying and regenerative capacities of natural resources are impaired by human enterprise. To a physicist, sustainability is ‘‘the ability of biological systems to fight against degradation of energy and resources (entropy) by creating new forms of order (negentropy) using the various inputs of solar energy.’’ To a chemist or an engineer, however, it is ‘‘the challenge to complete material and energy life cycles created by human activities, through new techniques for material design, re-use, recycling and waste management.’’ Though these disciplinary foci can be highly technical, none of them captures the sociopolitical definition given by the Bruntland commission report: ‘‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’’ This report is human centric, and its emphasis of intraand inter-generational equity is clear. It cried out for an unspecified plan of action to reverse widespread environmental damage to our planet by human activities, depleting finite natural resources in the process, and creating a huge gulf between ‘‘Haves’’ and ‘‘Have Nots’’. Our common future did not define sustainability per S. Sikdar (&) National Risk Management Research Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, OH, USA e-mail: sikdar.subhas@epa.gov

Reflections on culture, heritage and preservation

Since culture is the subject of this seminarI would like to begin with a discussion of the commonsense notion of culture. As CONDEPHAAT is charged with formulating cultural policy, it is important to understand commonsense meanings of the term in order to be better able to reach the most diverse public possible. This is relatively easy to do because commonsense notions of culture are part of our own understandings of the concept. Could one of you please give me a commonsense definition of cul...