Innate Knowledge Research Articles

Some Methodological Insights from a Reflexive “Insider” Ethnography of Shiatsu Practice

Presented as a collaborative reflexive account, this article has evolved through a series of discussions between the first author—who carried out an “insider” ethnography of Shiatsu practice—and her two supervisors. We highlight the challenges that she faced as an ethnographer in a field already familiar to the researcher and demonstrate how it was possible to use this tension to advantage in crafting an enhanced methodological approach. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s (1996, 24) notion of “forgetfulness of self,” we explore how the first author was able to harness and hone her key abilities, disposition, and innate knowledge as an experienced Shiatsu practitioner in order to forge a blended approach. Finally, the article suggests that this approach, based on sensitive skills involving “listening,” intuition, and touch—the essence of Shiatsu—can enhance ethnographic practice in general.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Openness to the World, and the Sensus Divinitatis

One of the foundational concepts for Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theological anthropology is his notion of ‘openness to the world.’ Openness to the world, according to Pannenberg, is essential to human identity in that one’s identity is established in their openness to the world, to the other, and, ultimately, to God. I aim to bring Pannenberg’s openness to the world into dialogue with the concept of the sensus divinitatis as articulated by John Calvin and further developed by Alvin Plantinga. The question driving this paper is whether or not Pannenberg’s openness to the world can rightly be understood as the sensus divinitatis, and, if so, what might be some benefits of it. I conclude that Pannenberg’s understanding of openness to the world is a fruitful way of understanding the sensus divinitatis and a fruitful way of arguing for and explaining humanity’s innate knowledge of God.

Hilma af Klint and the Need for Historical Revision

Hilma af Klint and the Need for Historical Revision

Intelligence Is beyond Learning: A Context-Aware Artificial Intelligent System for Video Understanding.

Understanding video files is a challenging task. While the current video understanding techniques rely on deep learning, the obtained results suffer from a lack of real trustful meaning. Deep learning recognizes patterns from big data, leading to deep feature abstraction, not deep understanding. Deep learning tries to understand multimedia production by analyzing its content. We cannot understand the semantics of a multimedia file by analyzing its content only. Events occurring in a scene earn their meanings from the context containing them. A screaming kid could be scared of a threat or surprised by a lovely gift or just playing in the backyard. Artificial intelligence is a heterogeneous process that goes beyond learning. In this article, we discuss the heterogeneity of AI as a process that includes innate knowledge, approximations, and context awareness. We present a context-aware video understanding technique that makes the machine intelligent enough to understand the message behind the video stream. The main purpose is to understand the video stream by extracting real meaningful concepts, emotions, temporal data, and spatial data from the video context. The diffusion of heterogeneous data patterns from the video context leads to accurate decision-making about the video message and outperforms systems that rely on deep learning. Objective and subjective comparisons prove the accuracy of the concepts extracted by the proposed context-aware technique in comparison with the current deep learning video understanding techniques. Both systems are compared in terms of retrieval time, computing time, data size consumption, and complexity analysis. Comparisons show a significant efficient resource usage of the proposed context-aware system, which makes it a suitable solution for real-time scenarios. Moreover, we discuss the pros and cons of deep learning architectures.

Moral Intuitions and Moral Nativism

Moral nativism is a theory of moral cognition which holds that significant elements of human moral psychology are innate. In this invited chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, I first summarize the intuitive turn in recent moral psychology and explain its significance for moral nativism. Drawing on an analogy to language, I then outline two principal arguments for moral nativism: the argument for moral grammar and the argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. After making some terminological clarifications and correcting some popular misconceptions, I then review some of the most significant research supporting moral nativism, including empirical studies of compassion, empathy, and altruistic motivation in humans and other primates; the intuitive jurisprudence of young children; the emergence of moral cognition in human infants and toddlers; the neurocognitive foundations of moral judgment; and human moral universals. The chapter concludes by locating moral nativism within a broader historical and scientific context, including ancient philosophy (e.g., Plato’s Meno), Enlightenment rationalism (e.g., Descartes’ Treatise on Man), evolutionary theory (e.g., Darwin’s Descent of Man), and the modern cognitive science of innate knowledge.

De verwerving van woordklemtoon in perspectief

Abstract The acquisition of word stress in perspective This paper reflects on the acquisition of Dutch word stress reported in Nederlandse Taalkunde 1 (1996), where I argued that children systematically build up a grammar for word stress that fits a parameter framework without assuming innate knowledge. In the past 25 years this work has been praised and criticized because (a) the theoretical framework changed to Optimality Theory, (b) the proposed stages did not always adequately fit the data, and (c) new evidence from infant speech perception suggested that children know the word stress system before they start speaking. To fully understand how children acquire word stress, the next 25 year requires researchers from various disciplines to join forces to study representations and perception-production processes in tandem, the mechanisms that cause learning, and the interaction of word stress with other linguistic subdomains.

The Origins of Social Knowledge in Altricial Species.

Human infants are altricial, born relatively helpless and dependent on parental care for an extended period of time. This protracted time to maturity is typically regarded as a necessary epiphenomenon of evolving and developing large brains. We argue that extended altriciality is itself adaptive, as a prolonged necessity for parental care allows extensive social learning to take place. Human adults possess a suite of complex social skills, such as language, empathy, morality, and theory of mind. Rather than requiring hardwired, innate knowledge of social abilities, evolution has outsourced the necessary information to parents. Critical information for species-typical development, such as species recognition, may originate from adults rather than from genes, aided by underlying perceptual biases for attending to social stimuli and capacities for statistical learning of social actions. We draw on extensive comparative findings to illustrate that, across species, altriciality functions as an adaptation for social learning from caregivers.

Aqua Yoga Asanas

Yoga is universally believed ancient structure of philosophical understood and perpetual source of innate knowledge terminating in the direct practice of self-amidst ostensible plurality. Yoga essentially works at three parts that include mental, physical and spiritual health. It is safe and simple enthusiastic method. Regular practice of Yoga boosts, refreshes and rediscovers one’s true self. As per the present-day setup physical exercise is given priority to continue fitness; mental health is given next priority and minimum priority to spiritual health. Continuing harmony of physical, mental and spiritual health's are to be measured. Practicing yoga asanas help in corporeal fitness by increasing basic metabolic rate and achieves purification of body and mind. With this development body and mind are thrilled with spiritual absorption. Modified asanas make committed them simple and apt to all. Practicing asanas helps in mobility of joints and continue the suppleness of muscles to help physical mobility. Practicing aqua yoga asanas, a unique working out technique, can be implemented by all swimmers for upgraded lung capacity, balance, flexibility andstamina.

Towards an Evolutionary Account of Human Kinship Systems

Kinship plays a foundational role in organizing human social behavior on both local and more global scales. Hence, any adequate account of the evolution of human sociality must include an account of the evolution of human kinship. This article aims to make progress on the latter task by providing a few key pieces of an evolutionary model of kinship systems. The article is especially focused on the connection between primate social cognition and the origins of kinship systems. I argue that early conceptions of kinship in our line were very likely scaffolded by preexisting forms of primate social cognition. It was only later, as linguistic resources increased in our line, and as human social life grew more complex, that these conceptions came to resemble kin categories as we now know them. I conclude by situating “kin cognition” within a broader cognitive science framework for studying capacities that reflect both innate knowledge and human cultural learning.

Need for innovative course module for teaching tooth morphology in India.

In India, the subject of Dental Anatomy and Dental Histology (DADH) has traditionally been taught and evaluated by oral pathologists. Earlier, it was taught in the 2nd year, and then, from 2008, it is part of the 1st BDS course. The goal of this composite subject is to understand the basic concepts of tooth morphology and histology of the soft and hard oral tissues, to establish the connection between these basic sciences and the clinical practice of dentistry. Dentistry, as defined by the WHO, is the “science and art of preventing, diagnosing and treating diseases, injuries and malformations of the teeth jaws and mouth.” The practice of dentistry requires instinctive innate knowledge of tooth morphology and the ability to reproduce the same with dexterity. Carving of natural teeth, out of wax blocks, has been the traditional method for teaching and learning tooth morphology. The development of this skill requires practice and the process itself ensures that the concepts of tooth morphology are deeply imbibed.[1] Thus, the very process of tooth carving ensures that students acquire psychomotor skills along with knowledge of tooth morphology. Several dentists in private practice acknowledge that knowledge and skills acquired through tooth carving are of great use to them in the management of patients.[2] Various opinions have been expressed in recent times about the undue importance given to tooth carving in the BDS course[34] and the difficulty faced by students in acquiring the required competency.[2] It has been proposed that knowledge of morphology may be acquired through virtual 3D models[5] similar to those used for teaching Human Anatomy. However, medical practitioners rarely have to recreate organs, as part of patient management, while restoration of tooth form is an integral part of dental practice. To revitalize the subject of DADH, there is a need to adopt innovative teaching methodologies. The use of videos, computerized 3D models and mobile applications like 3D Tooth Anatomy (Universal Hospital LP) by both teachers and students should be encouraged to facilitate the teaching and learning process and reduce the stress currently associated with the subject.[2] Given the COVID-19 situation, education institutions involved in health-care teaching and research are forced to adopt noncontact mode.[6] Blended teaching will likely be the “new normal” and hence the absolute need to develop methods to teach tooth carving on the digital platform in an asynchronous mode. The importance of acquiring the required level of psychomotor skills and manual dexterity involved in tooth carving for the successful practice of dentistry must be emphasized. It is the responsibility of those involved in teaching DADH to emphasize the clinical, functional and applied aspects of the theoretical and practical aspects of the subject. However, as oral pathologists, it is also our responsibility to ensure that students of 1st BDS successfully attain the required level of competency in tooth carving, while comprehending the clinical importance of the skill being taught and learned. We propose that teaching modules, incorporating various innovative methodologies, should be developed at the level of the individual, institution, national association and regulatory body to ensure a competency-based training in DADH. Financial support and sponsorship Nil. Conflicts of interest There are no conflicts of interest.

Comfort in Labor: "Like Being Able to Exhale".

Comfort is a fundamental human need to seek relief, ease, and transcendence. Comfort is relevant to women in labor who experience intense pain and mixed emotions. The subjective meaning of comfort in labor for women is not fully understood. This work was part of a phenomenological study of the experience of childbirth, in which the dynamic of keeping-it-together-falling-apart was identified as an essential quality of women's perceptions of childbirth. Comfort was a salient element of keeping-it-together-falling-apart. In this report, the concept of comfort is explored in greater depth, using qualitative descriptive analysis. Eight participants, aged 23 to 38 years, with spontaneous vaginal births, were each interviewed twice about the childbirth experience. Comfort was a holistic experience of relaxation and relief, where the needs of the body and the person were being met. Comfort and pain coexisted with each other, and relief of pain did not always provide comfort. Women had an innate knowledge of comfort, but their capacity for choice was at times restricted by caregivers in the hospital. There are aspects of labor care that do not support comfort, particularly as it relates to mobility and choice. Prioritizing comfort as well as pain relief may contribute to a more holistic, satisfying birth experience for women.

Avicenna's Notion of Fiṭrīyāt: A Comment on Dimitri Gutas' Interpretation

Avicenna's Notion of Fiṭrīyāt:A Comment on Dimitri Gutas' Interpretation Mohammad Saleh Zarepour (bio) I. Introduction In an illuminating article, Dimitri Gutas has tried to show that Avicenna's theory of knowledge should be understood within a full-blown empiricist framework very similar to that of John Locke.1 Gutas' argument is based on an analysis of Avicennian 'principles of syllogism'2 (mabādī al-qiyās). The principles of syllogism are those judgments and propositions that form the irreducible and axiomatic foundations of syllogisms and definitions.3 Avicenna categorizes these principles based on how we accept and acknowledge the truth (taṣdīq) of them. This categorization appears, with some slight modifications, in many places in Avicenna's oeuvre, for example in the Kitāb al-Burhān of al-Šifā',4 and the logic parts of al-Nağāt5 and al-Išārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt.6 According to al-Nağāt, the principles of syllogism are divided into sixteen types based on the cognitive mechanisms through which we grasp them.7 Gutas' argument for his main claim has two steps: (a) he considers these different types of principles, one by one, quoting the most important texts in which Avicenna discusses each of these principles; and (b) he shows, based on his analysis of the selected quotations, that the acknowledgment of the truth of these principles is finally grounded on what we grasp from our sensory experiences (mušāhadāt). More precisely, Gutas wants to show, based on the textual evidence, that we cannot acknowledge the truth of the principles of syllogism merely by the operation of our theoretical intellect and without appealing to what we obtain non–a priori, in the Kantian sense.8 The conclusion is that, according to Avicenna, all sorts of human propositional knowledge have an empiricist bedrock. No one can deny that Gutas' article, like all his other works, includes many valuable and insightful ideas. Despite this fact, I am not completely convinced by his analysis about at least some of the aforementioned principles. Specifically, what he says about the nature of the data with builtin syllogisms (qaḍāyā qiyāsātuhā ma'ahā or muqaddamāt fiṭrīyāt al-qiyās—henceforth fiṭrīyāt) seems implausible to me. Gutas believes that Avicennian [End Page 819] fiṭrīyāt are non–a priori and analytic propositions. However, in the present article I argue that a deeper look at Avicenna's writings on fiṭrīyāt reveals a plausible view that is very different from Gutas' position. I try to show that, contrary to what he proposes, Avicennian fiṭrīyāt are synthetic a priori. My article is organized as follows. The next section below presents the details of Gutas' views about fiṭrīyāt. I show that there is an equivocation in the term 'fiṭrīyāt' and that it can be understood in at least three different ways (when it is employed as a property for judgments). In section III, I show that at least some fiṭrīyāt are a priori judgments. In section IV, I show, based on Kant's principal criterion for analyticity, that fiṭrīyāt are, contrary to what Gutas explicitly claims, synthetic. Section V concludes. II. Gutas' Interpretation of Avicennian Fiṭrīyāt Gutas argues that primary data and fiṭrīyāt are two groups of principles of syllogism "whose necessity is internal to the soul and is imposed by the intellect."9 The difference between them is that the truth of the former group is directly imposed by the intellect, while the truth of the latter group is only indirectly imposed by the intellect, that is, "through an operation natural" to it.10 This natural operation is the fiṭra of the intellect. In fact, each of our cognitive faculties, Gutas argues, has a natural mode of operation that is its fiṭra. Criticizing the common understanding of fiṭra according to which fiṭra is the main source of innate knowledge, Gutas tries to show that Avicennian fiṭra is not an independent...

An ethical foundation for global citizenship education: a neo-Confucian perspective

ABSTRACT Offering an ethical foundation for global citizenship education, this paper draws upon the ideas of neo-Confucian thinker Wang Yangming. Focussing on UNESCO’s goal to help learners acquire a sense of belonging to a broader community and humanity, this paper elucidates Wang’s concept of innate knowledge (liangzhi). The article explains how Wang posits a shared humanity that is premised on moral knowledge inherent in all human beings. He further argues for the extension of innate knowledge by eliminating our selfish tendencies and manifestations that alienate us from other people. Two major implications for global citizenship arising from Wang’s ideas are highlighted. First, Wang’s notion of innate knowledge, by affirming human dignity, equality and potential, underpins and constitutes the vision of shared humanity in global citizenship. Secondly, Wang’s recommended pedagogical approaches promote global citizenship by foregrounding the moral cultivation of learners.

Contemporary Concept Nativism: Some Methodological Remarks

The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our knowledge about the world is a product of the universal learning mechanisms whose functioning is based on perception. The question about the presence of innate ideas in the human mind still remains relevant. New findings in cognitive science and neurosciences and also some recent arguments from philosophers contribute to the contemporary discussion between the spokesmen of the rival approaches to this problem. The paper presents the investigation of one of the approaches to solving the problem of innate concepts, which is called a “concept nativism.” It highlights the outstanding characteristics of the concept nativism: (a) domain specificity position, (b) belief that domain-specific mechanisms of learning are innate and (c) belief that at least some concepts are innate. The article also proposes an analysis of notions “innateness” and “idea” which is important for understanding nativists’ approach to innate ideas theory. And finally, it describes the most popular nativists’ arguments: (a) references to empirical studies using the preferential looking technique, (b) the poverty of the stimulus argument and (c) the argument from animals.

People's Intuitions About Innateness.

Few questions in science are as controversial as the origins of knowledge. Whether knowledge (e.g., “objects are cohesive”) is partly innate has been debated for centuries. Here, we ask whether our difficulties with innate knowledge could be grounded in human cognition itself. In eight experiments, we compared reasoning about the innateness of traits that capture knowledge (cognitive traits) with noncognitive (sensorimotor and emotive) traits. Experiments 1–4 examined adult and infant traits; Experiment 5 presented detailed descriptions of published infant experiments. Results showed that people viewed cognitive traits as less likely to be innate in humans—the stronger the association with “thinking,” the lower the rating for “innateness.” Experiments 6–8 explored human, bird, and alien traits that were presented as innate. Participants, however, still considered cognitive traits as less likely to emerge spontaneously (i.e., be innate). These results show that people are selectively biased in reasoning about the origins of knowledge.

Innate colour preferences of a hawkmoth depend on visual context.

Solitary insects that feed on floral nectar must use innate knowledge to find their first flower. While innate preferences for flower colours are often described as fixed, species-specific traits, the nature and persistence of these preferences have been debated, particularly in relation to ontogenetic processes such as learning. Here we present evidence for a strong context-dependence of innate colour preferences in the crepuscular hawkmoth Manduca sexta. Contrary to expectations, our results show that innate colour biases shift with changes in the visual environment, namely illuminance and background. This finding reveals that innate responses might emerge from a contextual integration of sensory inputs involved in object class recognition rather than from the deterministic matching of such inputs with a fixed internal representation.

Mit – umysł – rzeczywistość. Kognitywne uwarunkowania archaicznych form narracyjnych na przykładzie mitu

The article discusses the cognitive conditions of mythical narratives, especially their relationship with the architecture of the human mind and the processes of its evolutionary formation. The analyzed features are: a) a permanent arrangement of events (monomyth); b) a semiosis based on bricolage, and c) a counter-intuitive supernaturalism. The stability of the system of mythical events is related to the subjective significance of the elements of the chain of basic biological activities. The proposed explanation for bricolage is the embodied nature of the human mind. In combination with the archaic character of the myth, it translates tendency to code abstraction in specific objects. The presence of counter-intuitiveness in the myth is explained by the interaction between innate knowledge about ontological categories and cognitive fluidity, which allows to deformed them and the influence of what is counter-intuitiveness on the effectiveness of the cultural transmission of narrative containing it.

Showcasing the interaction of generative and emergent linguistic knowledge with case marker omission in spoken Japanese

Linguists debate the nature of grammatical knowledge. Many argue it is innate knowledge of syntactic structure that we use when generating utterances; others argue it emerges from linguistic experience, and forms exemplars for modeling novel utterances. Yet, still others argue that grammatical forms are processed in parallel by both types of knowledge (innate or otherwise), and crucially, that these two processing routes compete with each other.Our objective is to support the dual route argument with a corpus study illustrating the interaction of these two types of knowledge. We interpret two proxies as indicators of these two types of knowledge: syntactic complexity for generative knowledge and dispersion for emergent knowledge. Previous psycholinguistic work has shown that increased syntactic complexity correlates with increased judgment reaction times. Conversely, increased dispersion correlates with decreased judgment reaction times. If these two processing mechanisms compete, then we predict an interaction: specifically, we hypothesize that the more dispersed a linguistic form is, the less influence syntactic complexity has.We conducted a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis on case marker omissions in Japanese. Our results show that a casual speech style, a dispersed object–verb pair, and a syntactically simple noun phrase for the object correlate with increased case marker omission. More importantly, syntactic complexity and dispersion interact: as dispersion decreases, the estimated coefficient for syntactic complexity increases. These results support the claim that generative knowledge and emergent knowledge compete during language processing.

Theodore Roosevelt and the Education of Women

Theodore Roosevelt's prescriptions for the education of women reflected the growing anxiety entertained by middle class Protestant men early in the twentieth century over the proper place of women and the appropriate relationship between the sexes. Women must be taught, in schools and homes. through art and literature, that the perpetuation of America's moral character was largely their responsibility. They could act out their innate knowledge of order al home and in the nation. militating against chaos and anarchic aggression; they would restore America to the strong moral nation he imagined it had been in a simpler past.

A task completion framework to support single-interaction IR research

PurposeA conceptual model describes important factors within a system and how they relate to one another. They are important because they help to identify system changes that can yield the greatest improvement. Within information retrieval (IR), most research is directed towards multi-document retrieval and a multi-interaction IR user scenario. There are few, if any, IR conceptual models supporting minimal or single-interaction IR (siIR) user scenarios, however the need for siIR systems is growing rapidly. The purpose of this paper is to take the first step towards constructing a task-oriented conceptual model and experimental framework to support siIR research.Design/methodology/approachA first principles approach is employed to develop a task-oriented conceptual model, called bridging information retrieval (BIR). This model is contrasted with the concept of relevance, a central factor within IR research.FindingsBIR introduces the central concept of bridging information (BI) as the objective of IR systems. BI is the additional information a user requires to complete a task, beyond their innate knowledge. The relationship between BI and relevance is determined.Research limitations/implicationsThe theoretical basis of BIR is derived axiomatically; however the resulting system evaluation model is speculative.Practical implicationsThe proposed operational framework offers researchers a systematic approach to designing and evaluating siIR systems.Originality/valueThis work contributes a novel task-oriented IR conceptual model and evaluation framework, both centred around the concept of BI for siIR. It also contributes a novel search task classification method.