Modes Of Thinking Research Articles

Color as a Vital Force: A Posthumanist Approach to the Color Narrative in John Hawkes’ Second Skin

This paper examines the color in Hawkes’ Second Skin as a subjectivity of zoe that possesses vitality and interacts dynamically with its environment and other entities through the lenses of posthumanism, especially a famous Neterland posthumanities theorist Braidotti’s zoe theory. Color is not a lifeless tool used by authors to embellish the text but an active force that interacts with the characters, predicting or influencing their actions. It guides readers in understanding the plot and themes while fostering an anti-anthropocentric worldview that challenges traditional distinctions between life and non-life. Thus, color in Second Skin embodies Rosi Braidotti’s concept of zoe. This new thinking mode expands human understanding of non-human things and facilitates the construction of non-anthropocentric standpoints.

Reconsidering Divergent and Convergent Thinking in Creativity – a Neurophysiological Index for the Convergence-Divergence Continuum

ABSTRACT Creative problem-solving has been described as an iterative process of divergent and convergent modes of thinking. With this opinion paper, we illustrate how some tasks, commonly used for the neuroscientific investigation of creativity might provide a condensed representation of divergent and convergent thinking, respectively. We have identified the following reasons for this: The specific presentation of stimuli and response alternatives within these tasks (“immediate problem space accessibility”), the restricted time on task for participants in well-established creativity tasks, as well as the challenges to identify specific temporal dynamics of divergent-convergent cycles using standard EEG procedures. Based on two recent studies, we propose that upper alpha band (10–12 hz) modulations in particular may serve a) as a neuro-physiological index to disentangle divergent-convergent cycles within these creativity tasks and b) as a data-driven marker for the task demands related to immediate problem space accessibility. Finally, we argue for a view on divergent and convergent thinking that is less of a dichotomy and more of a continuum.

Author, Narrative and the Impact of Internet Literature Upon Print Literature in China

Abstract Internet literature gains tremendous popularity in China with the coming of the digital era. In response to the emergence of the large body of Internet literature, this article examines the Internet literary tendencies observable in China by systematically analysing four issues concerning Internet literature. Based on retrospecting of the history of Chinese Internet Literature (CIL), the study first describes the uniqueness of CIL during its evolution. Then, this study categorizes CIL from three perspectives, namely, the author groups, the genre of the text, and the fiction narrative style. In the third part, this study explores the positive impact of CIL in terms of its interactivity, how it changes the creators’ mode of thinking, how it expands literary genres, the convergence and fusion of print literary genres in CIL, and the shifts in dissemination. The negative impact of Chinese internet literature is also discussed including how vulgar and shallow works impact the depth of print literature, how figurative language limit the readers’ imagination, and how CIL challenges the traditional publishing market. In the end, the far-reaching changes and possible future trends of CIL are discussed.

Digitally Driven Urban Governance: Framework and Evaluation in China

With the rapid development of digital technology, the role of digitalisation in urban governance continues to emerge. Building a theoretical analysis framework and evaluation system of digitally driven urban governance has important theoretical and practical significance for stimulating the efficiency of digital technology tools and improving the energy level of urban digital governance. This paper aims to explore the mechanism of urban governance enabled by digital technology, innovatively change the previous thinking mode that only attaches importance to facility construction and e-government platforms, adopt ecological thinking, and comprehensively consider the role of “soft elements” such as strategic support, industrial support, the security environment, talent support, and the market environment. Then, the extreme value variance method and the coefficient of variation method are used to calculate the overall capacity and secondary index scores of each city, and the standard deviation of secondary index scores is used to represent the sub-environmental balance of the cross-sectional data of China’s provinces. In order to further explore which indicators restrict the improvement of China’s urban digital governance capacity, this study also constructs an obstacle degree model. The results show the following: (1) The overall capability of China’s digitally driven urban governance is low, with a total score of 27.25, indicating that China’s digitally driven urban governance is in its infancy. (2) There is a significant development imbalance among Chinese provinces, with Beijing ranking first with a score of 81.16, and Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, and Ningxia scoring less than 13.30 points, ranking as the bottom 5 among the 31 provinces. (3) The shortcomings of talent support, industrial support, and the security environment restrict the improvement of the entire digital ecological governance ability.

The Pedagogical Power of Paper

AbstractIn this research, I explore the potential of a material‐led, embodied pedagogical approach to cultivate diverse modes of thinking, knowing and becoming within a pre‐GCSE curriculum. Drawing from my experiences as both an artist and educator, I acknowledge the transformative power inherent in recognising the agency of all forms of matter, whether human or non‐human. Through the implementation of a project titled ‘To Play,’ which utilises paper as a primary pedagogical tool, I engaged Year 9 Art and Design students. Qualitative data collected over a six‐week period underpins the analysis, with a particular emphasis on understanding students' experiences with material‐led processes. The findings highlight the potential of material‐led pedagogies to empower students and challenge anthropocentric perspectives, offering valuable insights for enhancing pre‐GCSE art education and harnessing the educational potential of materials. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse in art education by emphasising the importance of embodied, experiential learning approaches that prioritise creativity, exploration and critical engagement with the world around us.

Fang Dongmei's View on the Universality of "Consistency" in Chinese Philosophy

In Chinese philosophy, although the ultimate pursuit of human beings by Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism is different, as Fang Dongmei said, "Confucianism lies in promoting the sage's atmosphere, Taoism is intoxicated with poetry and art, while Buddhism seeks the spiritual illumination of human spirit with painstaking wisdom", but the starting point of all three is to show that the universe and life are a coherent whole by-pass. Confucianism tends to regard human affairs and heaven as a whole, Taoism tends to regard human beings and nature as a whole, Buddhism tends to regard human beings and the universe as a whole, and Neo-Confucianism tends to regard Confucianism as the basis. Tuning, taking into account the other two, linking man and nature is another form. The consistency and complementarity of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism affect the existence of Chinese philosophy and the thinking mode of Chinese people.

From men's violence to an ethic of care: Ecofeminist contributions to green criminology

Green criminology has made important contributions to criminological inquiry by highlighting the destructive impact of humans on the more-than-human world. However, it often adopts a gender-neutral lens that overlooks the disproportionate role of men and masculinities in perpetrating green harms. This paper places green criminology into critical dialogue with ecofeminism, arguing that harms against the environment and nonhuman animals are inextricably gendered and should be understood as interconnected forms of men's violence. Ecofeminist insights reveal that violence against the more-than-human world is rooted in hierarchical dualisms, whereby humans are placed separate from and above nature, and the masculine is defined as superior to the feminine. This hierarchical logic enables men to view others in detached, instrumental ways and serves to legitimise acts of men's violence. But just as ecofeminism provides green criminologists with a productive framework for understanding men's violence against the environment and nonhuman animals, it also provides a means of moving beyond this violence. It does this by advocating for an ethic of care that unravels hierarchical modes of thinking and promotes more harmonious relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. By building caring, egalitarian relationships with other living beings (and with their own emotional selves), it is harder for men to act in violent, dominating ways towards others, providing the foundation for more sustainable, interdependent ways of being.

Competition during verbal creative processes influences on ERS/ERD

ABSTRACT Humans are social creatures, and many tasks in our daily lives are solved together. The two main forms of social interaction in problem solving could be defined as competition and cooperation. In our study, we compared the ERS/ERD when performing a creative task (Alternative Uses Test, AUT) and a control task (“naming the objects from the presented category”) under competitive conditions in dyads (22 dyads, m-m, f-f, 18–23 years old) compared to the performance of tasks individually. The number of answers given by subjects under competitive conditions was significantly lower than during the execution of the tasks individually. The solving of the creative task in competition versus individual performance was accompanied by EEG synchronization (9–30 hz) clusters: 140–1220 ms and 900–1780 ms after stimulus presentation; 13.5–30 hz (1800–1980 ms), reflecting the creative thinking mode, and expected cognitive, emotional answers’ assessment. The control task under competitive conditions was accompanied by pronounced synchronization of low frequencies in the frontal areas (2–7 hz, 0–1980 ms), due to a greater working memory load; synchronization clusters in broadband (10–30 hz, 100–320 ms, 400–860 ms) and in the beta EEG band (17–30 hz, 1140–1980 ms). The competitive conditions significantly modulated the brain activity underlying creative and non-creative cognitive task performance, and resulted in greater induced EEG synchronization.

Answering, Fast and Slow: Strategy enhancement of visual understanding guided by causality

In his classic book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel, 2017), Kahneman points out that human thinking can be categorized into two main modes of thinking: a system that displays intuition and emotion (i.e., System 1), and a system that is more planned and relies more on logic, defined as System 2. This idea explains both rational and irrational motivations. In this paper, we revisit visual comprehension tasks based on this idea. At the theoretical level, we focus on the relationship between intuitive thinking, prior knowledge, and environmental information, and build a causal graph between the three. Further, inspired by the constructed causal graph, an intuitive optimization strategy with clear interpretability is proposed. In the validation session, we provide conclusions consistent with the theoretical analyses through extensive experiments on public datasets based on a visual quizzing task. Excitingly, our scheme demonstrates strong competitiveness in terms of generalizability without adding new technologies.

An Interdisciplinary Survey on Origin-destination Flows Modeling: Theory and Techniques

Origin-destination (OD) flow modeling is an extensively researched subject across multiple disciplines, such as the investigation of travel demand in transportation and spatial interaction modeling in geography. However, researchers from different fields tend to employ their own unique research paradigms and lack interdisciplinary communication, preventing the cross-fertilization of knowledge and the development of novel solutions to challenges. This article presents a systematic interdisciplinary survey that comprehensively and holistically scrutinizes OD flows from utilizing fundamental theory to studying the mechanism of population mobility and solving practical problems with engineering techniques, such as computational models. Specifically, regional economics, urban geography, and sociophysics are adept at employing theoretical research methods to explore the underlying mechanisms of OD flows. They have developed three influential theoretical models: the gravity model, the intervening opportunities model, and the radiation model. These models specifically focus on examining the fundamental influences of distance, opportunities, and population on OD flows, respectively. In the meantime, fields such as transportation, urban planning, and computer science primarily focus on addressing four practical problems: OD prediction, OD construction, OD estimation, and OD forecasting. Advanced computational models, such as deep learning models, have gradually been introduced to address these problems more effectively. We have constructed the benchmarks for these four problems at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/OD_benckmark. Finally, based on the existing research, this survey summarizes current challenges and outlines future directions for this topic. Through this survey, we aim to break down the barriers between disciplines in OD flow related research, fostering interdisciplinary perspectives and modes of thinking.

The importance of humanities in a career-focused educational environment

This article addresses the role of the humanities in the context of professional degree programs that focus on technology, and shows how the humanities has enhanced career-oriented degree programs. As part of a larger college-wide initiative to develop interdisciplinary curricula, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded a grant to ***** College to both explore the relationship between the humanities and career-focused degree programs in STEM departments. This article describes the design and implementation of coursework that bridges the curricular gaps between humanities disciplines and technical or career-focused disciplines by bringing the humanities to bear on science and technology-oriented courses. If humanities appear as a body of knowledge, then they appear distinct from other disciplines. If humanities are viewed as conceptual frameworks that develop different modes of thinking, then the importance of the humanities to workforce development becomes clear.

The Research and Analysis of the Application of Artistic Design Thinking in Design

The purpose is to study the application thinking of art design, with the unified expansion of conscious initiative as the core. Start with the essence and connotation of artistic design thinking. This paper discusses the nature, function, and application of artistic design thinking and the value of design. First of all, this paper analyzes “art design thinking”, which is divided into objective content and subjective mind fusion. It is a thinking mode applicable to the field of art, with a certain content of artistic thought and a consistent way of thinking, and emphasizes the principle of people-oriented, focusing on emotional experience and unique aesthetics. The paper explains that the characteristics of art design thinking are to understand things, to change things, and to associate things, and emphasizes that design should return to things eventually. Art design thinking is analyzed from the nature, function, and application of design thinking. Practical value, innovative value. In the design, the effective use of the thinking of art design can optimize the design. Then, it analyzes the original function and play of artistic design thinking in design. This involves the cognition, understanding, and comprehensive thinking of the original thing to combine image and rational thinking to extend and optimize creative ideas. Imagination and artistic thinking are transformed into new practical creativity, and art design thinking is used to optimize the design, so that the design has practical aesthetic value, to meet the needs of consumers. In terms of application analysis, it emphasizes the integration of cultural elements into artistic design thinking. This integration reflects that the designer and the spirit of creation cannot be separated, and the spirit of creation is fully reflected.

Painting matters: new materialism and new knowledge

ABSTRACT This article discusses the contributions of two individual research-creation projects focussed on the practice of painting and the matter of paint, emergent trans-disciplinary discussions regarding critical posthumanities, and new materialism. As an epistemological field, artistic research pursues knowledge in subjective, constructive and affective dimensions. It searches for new forms of understanding the world that do not reproduce existing modes of thinking, seeking to disrupt established research conventions regulating how the world is explored. Through reflections on the process of painting from a new materialist perspective, we define acts of painting as assemblages of human and non-human entities formed through complex intra-actions within a dynamic of becoming. Painting as practice is an embodied process of non-verbal material thinking, capable of enabling practitioners and viewers of artworks to experience, actualise and re-enact traces of affective registers. The article concludes with the proposal that painting practices within a new materialist framework enable modifications of personal affective registers contributing to transformations of the self and subjectivities.

The civic importance of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934)

In the Harvard lectures that became Art as Experience (1934) Dewey developed a democratic account of art that not only expanded the range of creative experience (watching a huge digger, the architectonics of a mutually satisfactory conversation, are included in the reach of art) but developed an account of art that was vitally reciprocal, participatory and social. Maker and perceiver are equally interactive creators as they mutually develop new modes of feeling and thinking. For Dewey this relationship necessarily re-makes the experience of community and, just as important, creates a civic space for interrogation and critique. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)

"Simply" talking about the Anthropocene?

The Anthropocene seems to be on everyone’s lips these days. Whether as a turning point in Earth’s history, a geological epoch, or as a cultural narrative and metaphor, the Anthropocene is currently being debated not only in the scientific disciplines, but also as a fashionable buzzword in the media, popular culture, and the arts. Conversely, some scholars have argued that the term perpetuates anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism, and global inequalities rather than “demystifying” them. Use of the term itself would seemingly encourage ongoing processes of depoliticization. In what follows, I will trace this supposed depoliticization of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, I argue that a critical look at notions of temporality and timescale could not only reveal the politics of the Anthropocene and initiate new modes of historical thinking, but also shake the foundations of history education.

A painting you can eat: A dialogue between Dōgen and postmodern thinkers on nature and ecology

ABSTRACT Ecology is a major international issue of the present moment because the earth is threatened by forces beyond our control that have potential devastating consequences. This essay looks at the problem through the eyes of the Zen master Dðgen and selected postmodern philosophers. The difference between them is evident by Dðgen’s planful statement about eating a painting of a rice cake. Postmodernists perceives nature as a social construct connected to a representational mode of thinking that conflicts with the postmodern emphasis on difference, simulation, planes without depth and lack of unity. These postmodern tendencies of thinking are contrary to the philosophy of Dðgen, whose image of a painting of a rice cake can satisfy intellectual hunger and serves as a serious way to save the ecological system and overcome the representational mode of thinking.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Philosophy and Organization Studies: How Does Philosophy Illuminate the Study of Organizations?

Although not always apparent, generating theories about organizational phenomena inevitably involves philosophical questions. The latter are concerned with the meaning of the concepts researchers use to describe, interpret, explain, and, in general, understand organizational phenomena. A philosophical approach to organization studies aims to scrutinize, critique, and clarify key concepts, modes of thinking, research practices, as well as assumptions about reality and ways of justifying knowledge claims. Similar to other institutionalized practices, organizational research legitimates and takes for granted certain ways of engaging with, and talking about, the world, leading inevitably to some closure of meaning. Philosophical inquiry can counteract such closure by questioning commonly accepted meanings and fostering an inquisitive mindset that allows us to perceive the world anew. The aim of this Special Issue is to further develop and critically enhance the existing endeavours that explicitly incorporate philosophical approaches in organization studies. Specifically, the objective is to promote a more philosophically oriented approach in the field, focusing on both critical analysis and the development of innovative conceptual advancements. In this Introduction, we not only introduce the featured papers but, also, reflect on the broader purpose of philosophy, its relationship to organization studies, and how it can inform and enrich the field.

Measuring the Success of Grandpa Aki’s Short Video Series in Cross-cultural Transmission of Traditional Chinese Culture

With the development of digitization and online platforms, short videos have become one of the ways to spread traditional Chinese culture. The success of Grandpa Aki’s short videos is a model of cross-cultural transmission of traditional Chinese culture, especially craftsmanship, via short videos. However, few scholars have talked about the implications of cross-cultural transmission of Chinese excellent traditional culture brought by Grandpa Aki’s short video series. The paper collected the title of the video, the view of the video and the proportion of positive comments and negative comments from the top 5 popular videos by using Python. The paper aims to identify (1) the characteristics of Grandpa Aki’s short video series; (2) the reasons for the success of Grandpa Aki’s short video series; (3) the implication of cross-cultural transmission of traditional Chinese culture from the success of Grandpa Aki’s short video series. The results show that 1) these videos are characterized by an immersive experience and spread traditional Chinese culture in detail. 2) The reasons for the success of these videos are the strong curiosity about traditional Chinese culture from overseas citizens, the value of traditional Chinese culture, the entertainment value of these videos and the resonance from people. The paper provides a thinking mode for scholars to solve the dilemma of overseas dissemination of traditional Chinese culture.

Teaching abductive reasoning for use as a problem-solving tool in organic chemistry and beyond

The second-year undergraduate Organic Chemistry course sequence is often cited as one of the most, if not the most, challenging for students in the US. Thus, a persistent question remains: What is it about Organic Chemistry that makes the course so difficult for students? Herein, we put forward the hypothesis that a new mode of thinking and problem solving is expected of the students; these skills have not yet been developed in their prior scientific coursework and are often not deliberately taught in Organic Chemistry. This form of reasoning and problem solving, known as abductive reasoning, is highlighted for its connection to medical diagnosis and scientific thinking. We provide examples to showcase how instructors could explicitly foreground the reasoning process in their classroom. Ultimately, we argue that teaching how to reason using abduction may benefit students in both the short term (in the course) and the long term (in their careers as scientists and medical practitioners).

Assessing inoculation's effectiveness in motivating resistance to conspiracy propaganda in Finnish and United States samples.

This study tested the motivational power of inoculation to foster resistance to conspiracy propaganda (9/11 Truth Movement), comparing inoculation effects across United States and Finnish study participants. We used a 2 inoculation (treatment vs. control) × 2 national culture (American vs. Finnish) independent groups design (N = 319), while examining the effects of motivational threat and thinking modes-analytic vs. intuitive-on the inoculation process. To test the effectiveness of the inoculation strategy, we used an excerpt from a conspiracy film Loose Change as a counterattitudinal attack message. Our results indicated that inoculation was effective at motivating resistance regardless of national culture. Inoculation effects emerged mostly as a direct effect on resistance and two indirect effects wherein motivational threat mediated the relationship between inoculation and resistance as well as inoculation and analytic mode of message processing. Although we found that an increase in analytic mode of processing facilitated resistance and intuitive processing increased conspiracy-theory endorsement, the indirect effects between inoculation and resistance via message processing modes were not significant. Finally, the data revealed national culture differences in analytic mode and cultural-context differences mostly pertaining to the relationships between thinking styles, media literacy, and modes of thinking. These results offer important theoretical implications for inoculation scholarship and suggest viable practical solutions for efforts to mitigate misinformation and conspiratorial beliefs.