Everyday Concepts Research Articles

Vygotsky and Piaget: Scientific concepts

Introduction: Basic distinctionsJean Piaget's perspective is often compared with Lev Vygotsky's because both authors acknowledged the active role of humans in the construction of knowledge. However, they differ in that, unlike Piaget, Vygotsky thought that the assimilation of new information does not have to wait for an appropriate level of development but must, on the contrary, produce that development: organization of scientific concepts in children constitutes an important practical problem for schools (Vygotsky, 1934/2007, p. 222).Piaget framed his cognitive theory in biological context, repeatedly referring to his intellectual roots in Immanuel Kant's, C. H. Waddington's, and Henri Bergson's thoughts, as well as focusing on evolutionism and structuralism. He based his orientation and his psychogenetic theory on five principles: reason is rooted in action; it stands on two a priori mechanisms, adaptation and organization; reason is pure and non-temporal; structuralism is an independent concept.Piaget seems to have been mostly interested in spontaneous concepts. In his research, he stated that the development of formal reasoning and scientific concepts depends on the experience of cognitive conflict, which promotes imbalance, thus forcing the emergence of successive new assimilations. The reorganization of thought then takes place naturally. This description of the development of higher mental functions has been designated nonhistorical in opposition to Vygotsky's historical, or cultural, understanding.Vygotsky's work was strongly influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, by Charles Darwin's evolutionism, and by Spinoza's dynamic insights on universal development. Based on the ideas of these philosophers he defined the five distinctive principles that should orient epistemological research: psychology is the science of historical human being; higher psychological processes originate in social action; there exist three distinct classes of mediators: signs/instruments, individual acts, and interpersonal relationships; specific functions as well as social reality emerge from transformational acts or work; there exists fundamental unity between body and mind--that is, people global beings.According to Vygotsky, spontaneous and scientific conceptual structures both develop through continuous interaction between individual partners in an historical context and don't result from cognitive conflicts between two thought processes. In his view, spontaneous and scientific concepts belong to dialectical unity and become organized together along opposite paths: spontaneous concepts proceed from the concrete to the abstract; scientific concepts, from the abstract to the concrete.Spontaneous concepts primarily inductive, nonsystematic, and based on perceptual attributes; they embody elementary aspects of experienced reality and imbued with life and dynamics. In turn, scientific concepts, culturally formulated and transmitted, provide structure; they elevate the horizon of consciousness and its ponderings. Scientific concepts grow downward through the involvement of spontaneous concepts; spontaneous concepts grow upward through the use of scientific concepts. In Vygotsky's words:By forcing its slow upward trajectory, an everyday concept paves the way for scientific concept and its descendant development. It creates series of structures necessary for the evolution of the most primitive and elementary aspects of concept, giving it body and vitality. Scientific concepts, in turn, provide structures for the upward development of spontaneous concepts in relation to consciousness and deliberate use by the child. (1934/2003, pp. 93-94)Thus, everyday concepts emerge from dealings with concrete situations: these concepts are ontological, intuitive categories developed by each individual not counting on formal schooling. Consequently, they nonsystematic, qualified by contextual situations, their associations being affected by concrete analogies or related to isolated generalizations (Damazio, 2000, p. …

Framing Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Conceptions of Dissolving as a Ladder of Explanations

The paper details an exploratory qualitative study that investigated 61 prospective teachers’ conceptual understanding of dissolving salt and sugar in water respectively. The study was set within a 15-week elementary science methods course that included a 5E learning cycle lesson on dissolving, the instructional context. Oversby’s (Prim Sci Rev 63:6–19, 2002, Aspects of teaching secondary science, Routledge Falmer, London, 2002) ladder of explanations for the context of dissolving, current scientific explanations for dissolving and perspectives on conceptions and misconceptions provided the unified framework for the study. Concept maps, interview transcripts, written artifacts, and drawings and narratives were used as data to investigate these prospective teachers’ conceptual understanding of dissolving throughout the 15-weeks of the methods course. Analysis revealed that participants’ explanations of dissolving were predominantly descriptive explanations (39 %) and interpretative explanations (38 %), with lower percentage occurrences of intentional (14 %) and cause and effect (9 %) level explanations. Most of these explanations were also constructed by a set of loosely connected and reinforcing everyday concepts abstracted from common everyday experiences making them misconceptions. Implications include: (1) the need for science teacher educators to use multiple platforms to derive their prospective elementary teachers’ conceptual understandings of science content; and (2) to identify and help them identify their own scientific conceptions and misconceptions and how they influence the construction of scientific/nonscientific explanations. Science teacher educators also need to emphasize the role of meaningful frameworks associated with the concept that is being introduced during the Engage phase of the 5E learning cycle. This is important because, relevant prior knowledge is associated with the knowledge of the particle theory of matter and both are part of larger knowledge system comprised of interrelated scientific concepts.

Re-working everyday concepts of civic virtue and ethnic belonging among indigenous youth in Chile

This article discusses Mapuche adolescents' everyday articulations of civic virtue and ethnic belonging by juxtaposing their participation in their communities, schooling and civil society at large. It situates the youth within the exclusionary practices of education and broader society, and in the context of Chile's recent history of expanding youth civic participation. Chile is a highly racialised country and indigenous pupils experience altogether different modalities of inclusion and belonging compared to non-indigenous peers. Focus groups and interviews conducted during 2007–2008 are drawn on to explore how ideals of civic belonging are negotiated by those on the margins of society as a result of their schooling experiences and exposure to worldwide youth cultures. The article questions the ability of national schooling to produce a consistent discourse regarding a culturally diverse citizenry given that its practices are on the whole exclusionary towards Mapuche pupils. I argue instead that Mapuche youth construct a notion of the ‘good citizen’ from their home communities which respond to, and discursively resist, society's exclusionary values.

Everyday life and health concepts among blue-collar female workers in Denmark: implications for health promotion aiming at reducing health inequalities

This article introduces a perspective on the health of women with low levels of education in terms of organisation of their everyday life. The aim is to demonstrate the ways in which the women's concept of health is contingent on the conditions encountered in everyday life. A qualitative study based on interviews with the women forms the basis for the discussion. The analysis shows that the women find it difficult to adopt the official discourse on health and its foundation in a biomedical tradition. The article argues that it is necessary to move away from the educational approach focusing on risk and lifestyle with the goal of regulating individual behaviour. Instead, an approach is suggested which can provide the women with the opportunity to gain control of the everyday health determinants which are normally beyond their immediate reach. This is based on the argument that it is necessary to work with a health promotion and education strategy capable of operating within the various interactive patterns between 'environment' and 'individual' which form the foundation for health.

Understanding and communicating climate change in metaphors

An analysis of students’ conceptions on climate change shows a great confusion on key aspects of global warming. Even after instruction students often hold conceptions that differ from scientists’ conceptions. Student’s conceptions on global warming were collected in a reanalysis of 24 studies on everyday concepts of global warming as well as in an own interview study with 35 18-year-old students from German grammar schools. Climate-scientists conceptions were analysed from textbooks and research reports in a literature study. All data were analysed by systematic metaphor analysis and qualitative content analysis. Experientialism as a theory of metaphor provided insight in the process of understanding. The analysis of conceptions by experientialism shows that students and scientists have different metaphorical conceptions of global warming – but both refer to the same schemata. These schemata in mind we categorised the conceptions of global warming. Hereby we identified different thinking patterns in students’ and scientists’ conceptions. Following the model of educational reconstruction we took the metaphorical conceptions as a starting point for the development of learning environments. By uncovering the – mostly unconsciously – employed schemata, we gave students access to their metaphorical conceptions and let them reflect on their mental models.

Applying the Causal Theory of Reference to Intentional Concepts

We argue that many recent philosophical discussions about the reference of everyday concepts of intentional states have implicitly been predicated on descriptive theories of reference. To rectify this, we attempt to demonstrate how a causal theory can be applied to intentional concepts. Specifically, we argue that some phenomena in early social development (e.g., mimicry, gaze following, and emotional contagion) can serve as reference fixers that enable children to track others’ intentional states and, thus, to refer to those states. This allows intentional concepts to be anchored to their referents, even if folk psychological descriptions turn out to be false.

Thinking Intuitively

Intuitive knowledge of the world involves knowing what kinds of things have which properties. We express this knowledge in generalities, such as “Ducks lay eggs.” Intuitive knowledge contrasts with extensional knowledge about actual entities in the world, which we express in quantified statements, such as “All U.S. presidents are male.” Reasoning based on this intuitive knowledge, while highly fluent and plausible, may in fact lead us into logical fallacy. Several lines of research have pointed to conceptual memory as the source of such logical failure. We represent concepts with prototypical properties, rather than with logical definitions, and we judge likelihood and argument strength on the basis of similarity between these prototypes instead of using correct notions of probability or logical inference. Evidence that our minds represent the world in this intuitive way can be seen in a range of phenomena, including people’s interpretations of logical connectives applied to everyday concepts, the effects of creativity and emergent features in conceptual combination, and the logically inconsistent beliefs that people express in their everyday language.

The Archeology of Emotion Concepts

Changes in dictionary definitions over time reflect the way in which the degree of centrality of the features of the everyday concepts shame and vergüenza has changed, hence presenting different degrees of overlap between the categories at different times. We present a lexicographic analysis of the concepts shame and vergüenza in English and Spanish synchronic and diachronic dictionaries. Our results support Hurtado de Mendoza, Fernández-Dols, Parrott, and Carrera’s findings of differences between the contemporary everyday concepts of shame and vergüenza and they contradict the widespread idea that emotion concepts are classical, universal, and static notions. We warn about important inaccuracies of one-to-one translations in cross-cultural research.

Contrast Effects in Typicality Judgements: A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach

We examine the influence of contrast categories on the internal graded membership structure of everyday concepts using computational models proposed in the artificial category learning tradition. In particular, the generalized context model (Nosofsky, 1986), which assumes that only members of a given category contribute to the typicality of a category member, is contrasted to the similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model (SD-GCM; Stewart & Brown, 2005), which assumes that members of other categories are also influential in determining typicality. The models are compared in a hierarchical Bayesian framework in their account of the typicality gradient of five animal categories and six artefact categories. For each target category, we consider all possible relevant contrast categories. Three separate issue are examined: (a) whether contrast effects can be found, (b) which categories are responsible for these effects, and (c) whether more than one category influences the typicality. Results indicate that the internal category structure is codetermined by dissimilarity towards potential contrast categories. In most cases, only a single contrast category contributed to the typicality. The present findings suggest that contrast effects might be more widespread than has previously been assumed. Further, they stress the importance of characteristics particular of everyday concepts, which require careful consideration when applying computational models of representation of the artificial category learning tradition to everyday concepts.

Vygotsky's phases of everyday concept development and the notion of children's “working theories”

Abstract The impact of Vygotsky's theorising about culture, development, learning and education continues into the 21st century. This paper focuses on teachers' understandings of elements of young children's thinking. Young children have been described as “life theorizers”, keenly motivated to make meaning about their worlds during interactions with others. This paper discusses working theories, one of two indicative learning outcomes of the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki. Working theories occur in children's thinking and sense-making as they attempt to make connections between prior and new experiences and understandings. Specifically, the paper explores the Vygotskian notion of the development of everyday concepts as one theoretical underpinning for the notion of working theories. The concept of working theories is argued as a mediating mechanism that young children employ to progress through Vygotsky's three phases of everyday concept formation. It may also be a strategy that children utilise as they begin to develop and connect everyday and scientific knowledge. Working theories therefore provide a way teachers might recognise and build on children's everyday and early conceptual knowledge. To substantiate this argument, examples of children's working theories and associated pedagogical issues from a qualitative study in two early childhood education settings are provided. Some implications for teachers' knowledge and practice and future research are described.

Semantics-based selection of everyday concepts in visual lifelogging

Concept-based indexing, based on identifying various semantic concepts appearing in multimedia, is an attractive option for multimedia retrieval and much research tries to bridge the semantic gap between the media’s low-level features and high-level semantics. Research into concept-based multimedia retrieval has generally focussed on detecting concepts from high-quality media such as broadcast TV or movies, but it is not well addressed in other domains like lifelogging where the original data is captured with poorer quality. We argue that in noisy domains such as lifelogging, the management of data needs to include semantic reasoning in order to deduce a set of concepts to represent lifelog content for applications like searching, browsing or summarization. Using semantic concepts to manage lifelog data relies on the fusion of automatically detected concepts to provide a better understanding of the lifelog data. In this paper, we investigate the selection of semantic concepts for lifelogging which includes reasoning on semantic networks using a density-based approach. In a series of experiments we compare different semantic reasoning approaches and the experimental evaluations we report on lifelog data show the efficacy of our approach.

Neuroökonomie und Neurokapitalismus. Am Beispiel des Vertrauens

Abstract The relatively young discipline of neuroeconomics has taken an interest in forms of interpersonal trust from its very inception in an attempt to correct one-dimensional overrationalistic pictures of homo economicus. This article analyzes the notion of trust as present in these studies, but also takes a look at typical philosophical ways of criticizing neuroscientific uses of everyday concepts such as trust that insist on their irreducible semantic complexity. It is suggested that these critical approaches are justified, but often underrate the extent to which everyday concepts change or modify their meaning under various social, economic and political pressures. If this is granted, it becomes possible to take a deepened look at the neuroeconomic concept of trust. While it is true that this concept is under the influence of an every_day concept of trust it can be shown that this everyday concept of trust gradually takes on a reduced economic twist. If this fact remains unrecognized neuroeconomics in particular and neuroscience in general can take on ideological functions in reflecting back to society a seemingly natural understanding of trust that is, in truth, highly shaped by economic forces.

A INTERVENIÊNCIA DOS CONCEITOS COTIDIANOS NA ESCOLA: UMA ANÁLISE DAS DIFICULDADES DE APRENDIZAGEM

We propose here a reflection upon Vygotsky’s theorizations on everyday concepts with the aim of establishing relations between them and learning difficulties. The perspective we used approaches everyday concepts, like the ones developed from the experience, observation of the world that builds them from its perceptive properties - functional or contextual concepts of a referent. Before entering school, children share a lot of such knowledge. However, this is an everyday knowledge and it is not usually valued by school. Thus, understanding that in the chock between school (what it expects, requests) and students (with their personal history and socio-cultural references) there may happen what one started to call learning difficulties.

Methodological challenges in the implementation and evaluation of social welfare policies

As social reality is quite elusive, even regarding seemingly well-recognized everyday concepts and objects, there are always methodological challenges underlying assessments and evaluations of implementation policies. The present article addresses this area of concern by presenting the results of a rereading of an empirical study of elderly home care services. Our results reveal the emergence of a dissolution of common and professional key concepts and objects in these welfare services to a degree that challenges both the implementation policy and the evaluation of policy. We claim that this has methodological implications for evaluation of implementation policies in general.

Concepts and Perceptions of Democracy and Governance beyond the Nation State: Qualitative Research in Education for European Citizenship

The empirical research presented in this paper focuses on concepts and perceptions of European politics and citizenship which are expressed by students and teachers in secondary schools. The qualitative study is based on semi-standardized interviews, written surveys, and classroom research (video transcripts, observation records). The results suggest that many young people are amenable towards transnational patterns of identity and they tend to combine pragmatic-optimistic expectations with European Union citizenship. Many of the students interviewed seem willing to adapt themselves to a larger European environment. However, many of the teachers voiced ambivalent notions while expressing veiled scepticism, although they rarely expressed open criticism based on their own fears towards political developments in a unified Europe. The classroom research shows that in the examined civic education lessons, the everyday concepts of students are seldom questioned and sparsely developed towards social-science-based explanatory models. Sometimes even misleading concepts are enforced in classroom interaction instead of being clarified by the development of adequate categories and models.

Editorial: Knowledge and the curriculum

Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Michael F. D. Young, whose book Knowledge and Power (1971) was very influential on my early thinking about curriculum. Michael Young is an emeritus professor at the University of London and was in New Zealand to give the prestigious Hood lecture at University of Auckland. He began his talk, titled for a knowledge society: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge, with this challenge: Much is written in current educational policies about preparing students for a knowledge society and the important role education has to play. However, these policies say very little about the question of knowledge itself. What is it we want young people to know? More worrying than this, many of these policies almost systematically neglect or marginalise the question of knowledge ... (1) Professor Young went on to distinguish between a traditional view of a subject-based curriculum and his view of a reconceptualised curriculum. former, he claimed, is something that students comply with, and the latter is something that students acquire by engagement. His argument against the current curriculum reforms in the United Kingdom is based on his concern about the notion of viewing curriculum as an instrument for students. He contends that this (a) misunderstands what curriculum can do and (b) confuses curriculum with pedagogy. Curriculum he defines as the knowledge that a country agrees is important for all students to have access to, and pedagogy as the activities that teachers use to motivate students and enable them to engage with concepts stipulated by the curriculum. While I didn't always agree with aspects of Professor Young's argument as it developed in his lecture, he did put up challenges that were worthy of consideration. It made me reflect on the body of knowledge that we in New Zealand consider is essential for our learners to engage with. What and whose knowledge is important? Who chooses this knowledge and with what authority? Professor Young went on to argue that the curriculum needs to be seen as an end in itself, that is, for the intellectual development of students, not as a means, for example, of motivating disaffected students or solving social problems. This intellectual development is concept-based rather than content-based, but there must be content on which to build this conceptual understanding. conceptual knowledge base, he claims, comes from specialist fields developed by scholars and communities of researchers over time. claim he made that I found most challenging was this: The curriculum should exclude the everyday knowledge of students, whereas it is a resource for the pedagogic work of teachers. He continued, Students do not come to school to learn what they already know. Professor Young was very clear in his mind where the boundary lay between curriculum and pedagogy, between an agreed intellectual knowledge base and the links that teachers make to students' own knowledge and experiences. To paraphrase his words, curriculum is the agreed intellectual knowledge base and pedagogy is the work teachers undertake to draw on students' everyday knowledge to enable them to engage with and understand the relevance of the concepts in this knowledge base. Following on from this premise, the world and the concepts within it need to be viewed as an object of thought not as a place of experience. Let me quote his example: If pupils cannot grasp the difference between thinking about Auckland as an example of the geographical concept of a city and their experience of living in Auckland, when they draw on their everyday concepts they will have problems learning geography, and by analogy, any school subject that seeks to take them beyond their experience [his emphasis]. He continued to explain that teachers, therefore, had two fundamental tasks: 1. …

Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243-315 (review)

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243-315 Marie McGinn Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243–315, by Stephen Mulhall; 160 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, $23.95 paper. The primary concern of Stephen Mulhall's book is to investigate an interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, associated paradigmatically with Norman Malcolm. On this reading, the grammar of our ordinary concepts of language, reference, meaning, rule, etc. is held to prohibit or exclude the idea of a private language. The attempt to give expression to the idea is held to result in a violation of the grammar of these concepts, which connects them essentially with the idea of public criteria that are accepted as establishing that a [End Page 265] word has been correctly used. Something that philosophers have been inclined to regard as a possibility is shown to be excluded: the attempt to describe it results in philosophers' using words in ways that are essentially nonsensical. Mulhall calls this reading of Wittgenstein's remarks a "substantial reading." He questions whether its advocates have missed the fundamental point of Wittgenstein's remarks, even while they remain fundamentally convinced that they have grasped it. He opposes to this style of reading a "resolute reading," as outlined by Diamond and Conant in relation to the Tractatus, which holds that Wittgenstein's central philosophical purpose is to overcome our attraction to the idea that there is something that we cannot do, that the grammar of our language is a limitation on the thoughts we can express. Thus, the suggestion is that one should not see the grammar of our concepts as a limitation, or as a pre-established restriction, on the projection of words into new contexts. Rather, Wittgenstein's aim is to exploit our everyday mastery of language in the investigation, in particular cases, of what we might mean by our words. In the case of the idea of a private language, the aim of the investigation is to show that attempts to give meaning to words which, in a philosophical context, we feel compelled to utter cannot give them a content that succeeds in expressing what the philosopher had it in mind to describe. This description of Mulhall's aims does not, however, do justice to the singular nature of his text. Many interpreters would dissociate themselves from Malcolm's reading of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language. Many would also see the idea that the grammar of our everyday concepts can be used to prohibit the philosopher's use of words as committed to a view of language that is completely rejected in the Investigations. Yet a concern to find a reading of Wittgenstein's remarks on privacy and private language that avoids the suggestion of constraint, and which does better justice to his rejection of philosophical theorizing, would not on its own guarantee sympathy with Mulhall's treatment of them. The fundamental principle of Mulhall's approach is the need to be attentive to Wittgenstein's voice, and to resist substituting assertion for something that is essentially more interrogative and exploratory in tone. The principle is clearly undeniable, and much of what Mulhall says in this book does clear and careful justice to it. However, there are also points in his discussion where his account of Wittgenstein's dialectic is unconvincing or unclear, and, more significantly, places where his discussion imports concerns that seem remote from the remarks he has focused on. For example, Mulhall presents the dialectic of §§243–270 as one in which the idea of a language in which the expressions refer to the immediate private sensations of the person speaking, so that another person cannot understand it, is put forward by Wittgenstein's interlocutor, as something to which he—the interlocutor—is committed. Wittgenstein is held to respond to the interlocutor's idea by exploring how the notions of " refer," "immediate," and "private" might be used to give sense to the interlocutor's words. This, it seems to me, [End Page 266] makes matters more straightforward than they are and preserves—in this respect if in no other...

The part of cognitive science that is philosophy.

There is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitive science if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science, work toward testable hypotheses, and take on the task of clarifying the relationship between the scientific concepts and the everyday concepts with which we conduct our moral lives.

Formação continuada do professor de matemática: produções pessoais

The stimulating aspect of this study is grounded in the literature in saying that the teacher has his formation in two interrelated levels: initial and continuous. The focus is the continuing education that occurs as per the teacher’s own decision in classroom solitary situations. The assumption is that the teacher creates educational actions by the everyday existing needs in the school, especially in face of students’ difficulties and his pedagogical practice. The goal was mapped out: to analyze the production of teachers with the intention of bringing students to learning. Mathematics primary teachers of schools (5th to 8th grades) belonging to the regional education management established in Criciúma, Santa Catarina, from 1950 to 2000 were surveyed. Interviews were used as a tool for data collection. Analyses showed two categories of teaching productions: the imaginary of pedagogical practice and practical actions that illustrate classes. Another characteristic of these creations is the effort to articulate the mathematical content and its applications in everyday context, so that the conceptual relations are set in the background, making it clear that there is a disconnection between the everyday concepts and scientific concepts. Even embedded in good intentions, teachers’ creations, sometimes, do not lead students to appropriate the concepts as they desire. Teachers’ creations have a mechanistic characteristic, since their function is to provide tips for the students just to memorize and reproduce the content to be learned, without meaning and sense.

Understanding the Dialectical Relations Between Everyday Concepts and Scientific Concepts Within Play-Based Programs

In recent times there has been an enormous interest in Vygotsky’s writing on conceptual development, particularly his insights on the differences between everyday and scientific thinking. In drawing upon cultural–historical theory, this paper seeks to examine the relations between everyday concepts and scientific concepts within playful contexts, such as preschools, with a view to better understanding how very young children develop conceptual understandings in science. This paper presents an overview of a study which sought to map the transformation and appropriation of scientific concepts within two early childhood settings. Approximately ten weeks of data gathering took place, with video recordings, field notes, photographic documentation, and child and teacher interviews for recording child concept formation within these naturalistic settings. The findings indicate that when teacher programs are more oriented towards concepts rather than materials, children’s play is focused on conceptual connections. Importantly, the study showed that: It was possible to map the multiple and dynamic levels or stratas of thinking that a child or group of children may exhibit within play-based contexts; An analysis of ‘unorganised heaps’ and ‘complexive thinking’ evident in conceptually or materially oriented play-based programs can be determined; the dialectical relations between everyday concepts and scientific concepts in play-based programs can be understood; and greater understanding about the nature of concept formation in situated playful contexts have been possible.