This study takes an interest in instructions and instructed actions in the context of manual skills. The analysis focuses on a video recorded episode where a teacher demonstrates how to crochet chain stitches, requests a group of students to reproduce her actions, and then repeatedly corrects the attempts of one of the students. The initial request, and the students’ responses to it, could be seen as preliminary to the series of corrective sequences that come next: the request and the (...) following attempts make it possible for the teacher to launch instructional sequences specifically designed and addressed to the students who need further guidance. In the interaction between the teacher and the novice student, the reasoned character of the instructed actions is not explained so much as installed and tuned. The materiality of the project makes it possible for the two parties to methodically and meticulously adjust their actions in accordance with each other, and towards the gradual realization of the aimed-for results. In connection to this, a number of issues pertaining to the reproducibility and recognizability of manual skills are raised: how instructions-in-interaction orient towards the progression of the skill rather than the interaction itself; how attempts by and mistakes of the instructed party provide grounds for further instruction; and, consequently, how instructions in the form of corrections build on the instructor’s continuous assessments of the instructed actions. (shrink)

This paper aims to assess the credibility of the legitimation thesis; the claim that the development of experimental science involved a legitimation of certain aspects of artisanal practice or craft knowledge. My goal will be to provide a critique of this idea by examining Francis Bacon’s notion of ‘mechanical history’ and the influence it exerted on attempts by later generations of scholars to appropriate the knowledge of craft traditions. Specifically, I aim to show how such projects were often premised upon (...) socio-epistemological ideals that served to reinforce, rather than relinquish boundaries between artisans and natural philosophers. It will be my claim that a closer examination of the presuppositions underlying attempts by early modern natural philosophers to appropriate craft knowledge reveals, not a desire to legitimize aspects of artisanal practice, but rather strategies aimed at demonstrating the inferiority of the local ways of knowing upon which it was based. (shrink)

In pre-modern Korea, paper was renowned for its white glossy surface and cloth-like strength, becoming an important item in both tributary exchanges and private trade. The unique material of the tak tree and related technical innovations, including toch’im, the repeated beating of just-produced paper that provides sizing and fulling effects, were crucial to this fame. However, the scholar-officials who integrated papermaking into the state production system in order to meet administrative and tributary needs initially made toch’im corvée and then penal (...) labor, thereby dismissing it as simple toil. They were not alone, though, in denigrating a form of manual labor. Historiographies of modern science and technology are generally silent about such work, focusing instead on how we invented the human out of drudgery. However, papermakers in late Chosŏn Korea (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) chose to identify their artisanship with toch’im and eventually succeeded in securing recognition for that technique as a highly paid specialty. By examining this skilling of toch’im, this paper seeks to change the historiographical silence about toil. It overcomes the archival silence that accompanies manual skills by tracing toch’im’s contours through its changing locations and associations in society’s changing social and material networks, revealing paper artisans’ social techniques, or everyday politics that eventually dignified their laborious technique. Paper artisans’ changing relationships with tak barks, tools and facilities, central and local authorities, farmers, merchants, and scholar-officials reveal how such social skilling was made in late Chosŏn Korea, where papermaking became a most successful industry. This tracing of toch’im re-situates creative toil and everyday politics of artisanal hands in the interconnected transformation of social relations, craft, and knowledge practices. (shrink)

Craft food and beverage makers regularly emphasize transparency about the ethical, sustainable sourcing of their ingredients and the human labour underpinning their production, all of which helps elevate the status of their products and occupational communities. Yet, as with other niche ethical consumption markets, craft industries continue to rely on employment conditions for agricultural workers that reproduce inequalities of race, class, and citizenship in the dominant food system. This paper interrogates the contradiction between the exaltation of craft cidermakers’ labour and (...) the devaluation of farmworker labour by assessing how craft beverage actors make sense of inequalities facing manually skilled agricultural workers. Through a focus on the emerging craft cider industry, this paper draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data with a range of urban and rural cider actors in the Pacific Northwest (British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington State). I find that actors in the craft cider industry engage with inequalities affecting farmworkers through three main patterns: (1) Justifications of the status quo; (2) Supply chain fog; and (3) Misgiving/critique. By using an analytical framework that integrates critical agrarianism and the politics of sight, this study provides insights into both barriers and opportunities to redistribute social recognition and material rewards across food supply chains. (shrink)

Recording of neural activity during grasping actions in macaques showed that grasp-related sensorimotor transformations are accomplished in a circuit constituted by the anterior part of the intraparietal sulcus (AIP), the ventral (F5) and the dorsal (F2) region of the premotor area. In humans, neuroimaging studies have revealed the existence of a similar circuit, involving the putative homolog of macaque areas AIP, F5, and F2. These studies have mainly considered grasping movements performed with the right dominant hand and only a few (...) studies have measured brain activity associated with a movement performed with the left non-dominant hand. As a consequence of this gap, how the brain controls for grasping movement performed with the dominant and the non-dominant hand still represents an open question. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment has been conducted, and effective connectivity (dynamic causal modeling, DCM) was used to assess how connectivity among grasping-related areas is modulated by hand (i.e., left and right) during the execution of grasping movements toward a small object requiring precision grasping. Results underlined boosted inter-hemispheric couplings between dorsal premotor cortices during the execution of movements performed with the left rather than the right dominant hand. More specifically, they suggest that the dorsal premotor cortices may play a fundamental role in monitoring the configuration of fingers when grasping movements are performed by either the right and the left hand. This role becomes particularly evident when the hand less-skilled (i.e., the left hand) to perform such action is utilized. The results are discussed in light of recent theories put forward to explain how parieto-frontal connectivity is modulated by the execution of prehensile movements. (shrink)

Ethics, communication skills, and the law ('practice skills') are important in all aspects of modern health care. Doctors and nurses must be sensitive to the ethical aspects of their work and understand the legal framework within which clinical decisions are made. Well developed skills of communication, with patients, their relatives and other members of the clinical team, are a key feature of good clinical practice Until recently, the important of practice skills has been relatively neglected in health care education. This (...) situation is changing. The UK General Medical Council, for example, has recently identified three aspects as part of the core of the medical course, and the move to degree courses in nursing has led to an increasing focus of practice skills in nurse education. The Oxford Practice Skills Project (OPSP) team have developed a course, within the University of Oxford Clinical School, which covers the teaching of practice skills in an integrated manner. This course is widely recognized as one of the most systematic developments of education in these areas. This manual describes the OPSP course in detail and provides teaching materials. Although developed initially for medical students, it should be helpful to all those involved in teaching ethics, communication skills, and law in health care. Each Seminar is described in detail Tutors' guides are provided Student handouts are included Contains guidelines for introducing 'practice skills' into a busy clinical curriculum Includes over forty case histories for teaching and examination Gives details of many useful sources and resources Details a variety of teaching methods together with their advantages and disadvantages Provides an ethics teaching toolkit for clinical teachers new to this area Readers are welcome to photocopy any part of this manual for their own teaching. (shrink)

The categories and contours of a normative social theory are prefigured by its ‘anthropological’ presuppositions. The discourse/communicative-theoretic basis of Habermasian theory was prefigured by a strong anthropological demarcation between an instrumentally structured realm of science, technology and labor versus a normatively structured realm of social interaction. An alternative anthropology, bolstered by current work in the empirical sciences, finds fundamental normative needs for orientation and ‘compensation’ also to be embedded in embodied material practices. An emerging anthropologically informed concept of skill (...) that goes beyond old manual versus intellectual dichotomies and brings forth internal criteria of autonomy and authenticity can serve as a new bridge between categories of social justice, such as Sen and Nussbaum’s basic human ‘capabilities’, and new cutting-edge work in the empirical human sciences and thereby provide Critical Theory with a renewed point of departure that is both normatively and descriptively rich, for advancing its dialectical, historical mission. (shrink)

Migrant farmworkers dominate the horticultural workforce in many parts of the Minority (developed) World. The ‘manual’ work that they do—picking and packing fruits and vegetables, and pruning vines and trees—is widely designated unskilled. In policy, media, academic, activist and everyday discourses, hired farm work is framed as something anybody can do. We interrogate this notion with empirical evidence from the Sunraysia horticultural region of Australia. The region’s grape and almond farms depend heavily on migrant workers. By-and-large, the farmers and (...) farmworkers we spoke to pushed back against the unskilled tag. They asserted that farmworkers acquire knowledge and skills over time and that experienced farmworkers are valuable—their value being brought into sharp relief against accounts of inexperienced farmworkers’ errors. Our interviewees provided rich insights into farmworkers’ engagements with crops and the intricacies of picking and pruning well. Far from being bereft of knowledge and skills, they recognised that experienced farmworkers bring benefits. They improve productivity, product quality and ultimately profits. This is especially so when open communication channels exist across the farm hierarchy, when experienced farmworkers’ insights are taken seriously by their employers. Our research is informed by organisational studies literature and scholarship on craft/making. Like factory floor workers and artisans, experienced farmworkers bring accumulated knowledge and skills to their work, gained through repeat performance. They reflect on and adjust their activities in dialogue with their materials and the environment. Experienced farmworkers demonstrate care, dexterity and judgement. They are not unskilled, and they are more than labouring bodies. (shrink)

Excellent performance in sport involves specialized and refined skills within very narrow applications. Choking throws a wrench in the works of finely tuned performances. Functionally, and reduced to its simplest expression, choking is severe underperformance when engaging already mastered skills. Choking is a complex phenomenon with many intersecting facets: its dysfunctions result from the multifaceted interaction of cognitive and psychological processes, neurophysiological mechanisms, and phenomenological dynamics. This article develops a phenomenological model that, complementing empirical and theoretical research, helps understand and (...) redress choking. It aims at describing the experience of choking as experience, and to discuss strategies to palliate or prevent its onset at the pragmatic level at which athletes engage the phenomenon experientially. An overview of current empirical research and theoretical models highlights key ideas and points out contentious issues. The model describes the common structure of the choking experience. It identifies four core constitutive elements: A) disruptive proprioceptive and kinesthetic dynamics, B) a malfunctioning background or Jamesian fringe of consciousness, C) dislocated time dynamics, and D) emotional disturbances. The novelty of the remedy is that it is designed to cross disciplinary boundaries between phenomenology, historiography, and hermeneutics, and moreover connects theory to praxis as it looks at Japanese dō, practices of self-cultivation. It focuses on actual do-or-die situations, not putative ones such as important business deals or competing for a medal. To this effect, it examines medieval Japanese swordsmanship and training manuals and also engages risk sports, where death is indeed a real possibility. The manuals, which arise in the context of choke-inducing life or death duels, and risk sports, afford keen phenomenological observations and practical advice that prove invaluable for today’s sports world and beyond. (shrink)

BackgroundSocial cognition and competence are a key part of daily interactions and essential for satisfying relationships and well-being. Pediatric neurological and psychological conditions can affect social cognition and require assessment and remediation of social skills. To adequately approximate the complex and dynamic nature of real-world social interactions, innovative tools are needed. The aim of this study was to document the performance of adolescents on two versions of a serious video game presenting realistic, everyday, socio-moral conflicts, and to explore whether their (...) performance is associated with empathy or sense of presence, factors known to influence social cognition.MethodsParticipants first completed a pre-test measure of socio-moral reasoning based on three dilemmas from a previously validated computer task. Then, they either played an evaluative version or an adaptive version of a video game presenting nine social situations in which they made socio-moral decisions and provided justifications. In the evaluative version, participants’ audio justifications were recorded verbatim and coded manually to obtain a socio-moral reasoning maturity score. In the adaptive version, tailored feedback and social reinforcements were provided based on participant responses. An automatic coding algorithm developed using artificial intelligence was used to determine socio-moral maturity level in real-time and to provide a basis for the feedback and reinforcements in the game. All participants then completed a three-dilemma post-test assessment.ResultsThose who played the adaptive version showed improved SMR across the pre-test, in-game and post-test moral maturity scores, F = 9.81, pHF < 0.001, ϵ2 = 0.21, but those who played the Evaluative version did not. Socio-moral reasoning scores from both versions combined did not correlate with empathy or sense of presence during the game, though results neared significance. The study findings support preliminary validation of the game as a promising method for assessing and remediating social skills during adolescence. (shrink)

Includes a foreword by Kevin M. Gilmartin, PhD, author of the bestselling Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement: A Guide for Officers and Their Families. This book offers practical, research-based strategies to help police officers improve wellness, strengthen ethical commitments, and boost resilience both on and off-duty. Your power as a police officer does not come from your badge, gear, or tactical skills. It comes from your POWER: police officer wellness, ethics, and resilience. This book offers a research-based approach to dealing (...) with the daily challenges you face in your law enforcement job. It describes personal and professional steps you can take, on-duty and off-duty, to optimize your health and maintain your performance. When you proactively practice the skills, tips, and exercises outlined in this book, you will be better prepared to defuse crisis situations before they happen, and more capable of coping with them when they do. As a law enforcement officer, you deal with enormous challenges on a daily basis. Policing involves daily risks and stressors that can compromise your health, shorten your career, and make life harder on your loved ones. Even if you have a gym or access to counseling at work, you need a personal plan to maintain your overall wellness-physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual. (shrink)

Master basic skills of philosophical writing The Philosophy Student Writer's Manual, 3/e provides readers with the tools needed to write successful philosophy papers. The manual includes general background information on philosophy, helpful writing strategies, research tips, format instructions, and more. This user-friendly guide includes samples of excellent student writing that serve as concrete models for quality philosophical writing.

Humans are uncontroversially better than other species at learning from their peers. A key example of this is imitation, the ability to reproduce both the means and ends of others’ behaviours. Imitation is critical to the acquisition of a number of uniquely human cultural and cognitive traits. However, while authors largely agree on the importance of imitation, they disagree about the origins of imitation in humans. Some argue that imitation is an adaptation, connected to the ‘Mirror Neuron System’ that evolved (...) to facilitate action understanding and the learning of social behaviours. Others argue that imitation is a cultural practice learned in childhood, and that there is no evidence that it evolved genetically. We offer a third alternative that is consistent with both data that the human brain is optimised for imitation, and consistent with its being substantially learned. We hypothesise that at some point in human history humans underwent natural selection for two imitation-relevant abilities – specifically, (i) the tendency to be more attentive to our peers, and (ii) fine motor skill in the manual and oro-facial domains. These changes enabled us to excel at both learning to imitate, and learning by imitating. (shrink)

Developing Instinctive Analytical Skills in Students Becoming a Critical Thinker: A User Friendly Manual trains students to distinguish high-quality, well-supported arguments from those with little or no evidence to support them. It develops the skills required to effectively evaluate the many claims facing them as citizens, learners, consumers, and human beings, and also to be effective advocates for their beliefs. Teaching and Learning Experience Personalize Learning - MyThinkingLabdelivers proven results in helping students succeed, provides engaging experiences that personalize learning, (...) and comes from a trusted partner with educational expertise and a deep commitment to helping students and instructors achieve their goals. Improve Critical Thinking - Coverage of persuasive speaking, decision-making, the Toulmin model of argumentation, and chapter-end writing and speaking exercisesall teach students to construct and present arguments so that they can gain skill and confidence. Engage Students - Becoming a Critical Thinker: A User Friendly Manual exposes students to a variety of contemporary and multicultural issues, engaging their understanding of analytical skills through the use of articles and varied examples. Support Instructors - Teaching your course just got easier! You can create a Customized Text or use our Instructor's Manual, Electronic “MyTest” Test Bank or PowerPoint Presentation Slides. PLUS, our new Instructor's Manual has been updated and expanded with revised tests and answer keys, a discussion of chapter exercises, and suggestions for teaching critical thinking concepts. Note: MyThinkingLab does no come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MyThinkingLab, please visit www.MyThinkingLab.com or you can purchase a valuepack of the text + MyThinkingLab (VP ISBN-10: 0205176038, VO ISBN-13: 9780205176038). (shrink)

Excellent performance in sport involves specialized and refined skills within very narrow applications. Choking throws a wrench in the works of finely tuned performances. Functionally, and reduced to its simplest expression, choking is severe underperformance when engaging already mastered skills. Choking is a complex phenomenon with many intersecting facets: its dysfunctions result from the multifaceted interaction of cognitive and psychological processes, neurophysiological mechanisms, and phenomenological dynamics. This article develops a phenomenological model that, complementing empirical and theoretical research, helps understand and (...) redress choking. It aims at describing the experience of choking as experience, and to discuss strategies to palliate or prevent its onset at the pragmatic level at which athletes engage the phenomenon experientially. An overview of current empirical research and theoretical models highlights key ideas and points out contentious issues. The model describes the common structure of the choking experience. It identifies four core constitutive elements: A) disruptive proprioceptive and kinesthetic dynamics, B) a malfunctioning background or Jamesian fringe of consciousness, C) dislocated time dynamics, and D) emotional disturbances. The novelty of the remedy is that it is designed to cross disciplinary boundaries between phenomenology, historiography, and hermeneutics, and moreover connects theory to praxis as it looks at Japanese dō, practices of self-cultivation. It focuses on actual do-or-die situations, not putative ones such as important business deals or competing for a medal. To this effect, it examines medieval Japanese swordsmanship and training manuals and also engages risk sports, where death is indeed a real possibility. The manuals, which arise in the context of choke-inducing life or death duels, and risk sports, afford keen phenomenological observations and practical advice that prove invaluable for today’s sports world and beyond. (shrink)

CRITICAL THINKING: A USER’S MANUAL offers an innovative skill-based approach to critical thinking that provides step-by-step tools for learning to evaluate arguments. Students build a complete skill set by recognizing, analyzing, diagramming, and evaluating arguments; later chapters encourage application of the basic skills to categorical, truth-functional, analogical, generalization, and causal arguments as well as fallacies. The exercises throughout the text engage readers in active learning, integrate writing as part of the critical thinking process, and emphasize skill (...) transference. A special feature, called Your Turn! encourages students to not just skim through the book’s explanations, but stop, think, and apply what they are learning. CRITICAL THINKING: A USER’S MANUAL offers multiple opportunities for different kinds of practice and options for appealing to different learning styles. The quantity and variety of exercises allow for group work, reflection and application, and writing practice as well as traditional homework exercises. Aplia, an online homework solution that increases student effort and engagement, is available as an option with this text to provide additional critical thinking practice with immediate feedback to reinforce the skills students are building in class. (shrink)

In the recruitment process, manually selecting suitable candidates from curriculum vitae (CVs) for a job description (JD) is both time-consuming and expensive. Traditional keyword-based methods struggle to capture skill semantics, prompting the development of more advanced JD-CV matching systems. This paper aims to investigate and construct an ontology-based skills recommendation system, with objectives including creating a skills ontology and developing skills matching methods for JD-CV pairs. The objective of our approach is to enhance the accuracy and contextual relevance of (...) recommendations by utilizing the proposed score. The proposed skills ontology and skills matching strategies are applied to a real dataset in Vietnam. The results of our study can automatically recommend a list of CVs for a given JD. Furthermore, the findings indicate that our proposed model surpasses comparative approaches by a margin of at least 1% to 5%. Overall, the study demonstrates the potential of utilizing ontology-based approaches to offer a practical solution for enhancing hiring practices. (shrink)

This article chronicles the process used to transform a content-driven chemistry lab course into a course focused on developing critical-thinking skills. In general, the process described includes the following: 1) determining the needs of the students, 2) understanding the history of the course, 3) identifying some specific critical thinking skills that could be developed in the course, 4) considering how the skills can be taught developmentally, 5) defining criteria for the skills at different levels; 6) revising the lab manual (...) to include explicit critical-thinking definitions, directions and criteria for students, and 7) designing assessments of the students’ critical thinking abilities as defined and practiced in the lab. Six critical thinking skills (testing hypotheses, distinguishing between observationsand inferences, identifying assumptions, drawing conclusions supported by data, evaluating conclusions, and considering alternative explanations of data) were incorporated into the course. The lab manual displaying the results of this transformation is available by request from either the author or the journal editor. (shrink)

ArgumentStandards of botanical practice in Sweden between 1850 and 1950 were set, not only in schools and universities, but also in naturalist societies and botanical exchange clubs, and were articulated in handbooks and manuals produced for schoolboys. These standards were maintained among volunteer naturalists in the environmental movement in the 1970s, long after the decline and disappearance of collecting from the curriculum. School science provides a link between the laboratory, the classroom, and the norms and practices of everyday life: between (...) the various “insides” and “outsides” of educational and research settings. (shrink)

Humans are strongly lateralized for manual gestures at both individual and population levels. In contrast, the laterality bias in primates is less strong, leading some to suggest that lateralization evolved after the Pan and Homo lineages diverged. However, laterality in humans is also context-dependent, suggesting that observed differences in lateralization between primates and humans may be related to external factors such as the complexity of the social environment. Here we address this question in wild chimpanzees and examine the extent (...) to which the laterality of manual gestures is associated with social complexity. Right-handed gestures were more strongly associated with goal-directed communication such as repair through elaboration in response to communication failure than left-handed gestures. Right-handed gestures occurred in evolutionarily urgent contexts such as in interactions with central individuals in the network, including grooming reciprocity and mating, whereas left-handed gestures occurred in less-urgent contexts, such as travel and play. Right-handed gestures occurred in smaller parties and in the absence of social competition relative to left-handed gestures. Right-handed gestures increased the rate of activities indicating high physiological arousal in the recipient, whereas left-handed gestures reduced it. This shows that right- and left-handed gestures differ in cognitive and social complexity, with right-handed gestures facilitating more complex interactions in simpler social settings, whereas left-handed gestures facilitate more rewarding interactions in complex social settings. Differences in laterality between other primates and humans are likely to be driven by differences in the complexity of both the cognitive skills underpinning social interactions and the social environment. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to understand the functional role of mental representations and intentionality in skilled actions from a systems related perspective. Therefore, we will evaluate the function of representation and then discuss the cognitive architecture of skilled actions in more depth. We are going to describe the building blocks and levels of the action system that enable us to control movements such as striking the tennis ball at the right time, or grasping tools in manual action. (...) Based on this theoretical understanding the measurement of mental representations and related research results concerning mental representation in skilled action are presented in an overview. This leads to the question how mental representations develop and change during learning. Finally, to consolidate the functional understanding of mental representation in skilled action and interaction, we provide examples how to use the measurement of mental representation in humans to inform technical systems. (shrink)

This is a textbook in philosophy aimed at school kids doing the International Baccalaureate. One important aim of Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate is to teach students how to think for themselves. The student is encouraged to reflect on what they are learning and to reflect on themselves as learners. Theory of Knowledge is different from other areas in the International Baccalaureate because there are few hard facts to be learned. The Theory of Knowledge program aims to develop (...) a certain attitude of questioning and the skills needed to ask these questions and find answers to them. Another aim of Theory of Knowledge is to ask students to look at the whole of what they are learning and relate their knowledge to themselves as individuals and to life as they know it outside of the classroom. This book is an attempt to achieve both of these aims. (shrink)

This article explores the organization of instructional corrections in pre-clinical dental education. The students are practising manual skills using a simulator and tutors are inspecting and evaluating their progress. Simulators and simulation are critical to the organization of contemporary healthcare training, and the academic literature that explores forms of simulation in healthcare tends to consider the ‘fidelity’ of systems and the extent to which they match the clinical situations that they are designed to mimic. In contrast, this article considers (...) how tutors and students explicitly attend to matters of realism in the course of instructional sequences. We highlight the ways in which tutors routinely invoke ‘real life’ in instructional corrections and we discuss how these sequences reveal the work that tutors undertake to compensate for the ‘chronic insufficiency’ of the simulator. We show how tutors emphasize the reasoned character of manual bodily skills, reasons linked to the complexities and contingencies of clinical practice. To explore these issues and concerns, the article draws on the analysis of audio-visual data of everyday instruction. (shrink)

Historians of natural history have shown that the study of plants, animals, and minerals was a form of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century. Historians of early modern experiments have linked scientific knowledge to the manual skills of artisans. I combine these two insights, arguing that connoisseurship in the sciences meant learning to touch, not just learning to look. The focus is on gems and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France. I show, firstly, that the study of gems was linked to the (...) connoisseurship (“connoissance”) of paintings. Next, books on gems were closely related to the new mineralogical treatises that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century. These treatises formalized a distinction between “Oriental” and “Occidental” gems that was also a distinction between hard and soft gems. The best judges of hardness were gem cutters, a group that participated in mineralogy through the culture of collecting. Finally, the knowledge of cutters contributed to the quantification of hardness in the form of the hardness scale and the scratch sclerometer. (shrink)

Glover suggests that representational systems for planning versus control are mapped exclusively to the inferior (IPL) versus superior (SPL) parietal lobules respectively. Yet, there is ample evidence that the IPL and SPL both contribute to action planning and control. Alternatively, I distinguish between the parietal-frontal systems involved in the representation of acquired manual skills versus nonskilled actions.

Tacit premises of science constitute researcher’s cognitive scheme, i.e. a set of a priori conditions of knowledge acquisition and application. Couple of assumptions make Polanyi’s idea considerably different than Kantian or behavioural or structural interpretations of cognitive scheme. He sees it more in hermeneutical or habitual terms — as system of (a) skills (dispositions to act), which (b) defines the level of competence; (c) cannot be verbally articulated; (d) is embodied (and hence unaware); (e) innate or acquired through practice — (...) in master-pupil relations; (f) undergoes constant modifications when applied; (g) conditions both theoretical actions (eg. categorisation, acts of assertion), as well as practical (manual skills, acts of perception). (shrink)

This article stages a dialogue between Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett by characterizing and comparing their tendencies to indulge in doodles and drawings, both of which have been the subject of increased critical interest (and even public exhibition) in recent years. Surveying such recent criticism, the article begins by connecting Barthes’s and Beckett’s respective ways of drawing to theoretical and aesthetic concerns of their writing. Then, developing the complementary manual metaphors of legerdemain (sleight of hand, manual skill) (...) and gaucherie (left-handedness, awkwardness), the article draws from currents in genetic criticism, New Materialism and ‘weak theory’ to suggest ways in which reading doodles might inform ways of reading texts. (shrink)

Analysis of grip force signals tailored to hand and finger movement evolution and changes in grip force control during task execution provide unprecedented functional insight into somatosensory cognition. Somatosensory cognition is a basis of our ability to manipulate, move, and transform objects of the physical world around us, to recognize them on the basis of touch alone, and to grasp them with the right amount of force for lifting and manipulating them. Recent technology has permitted the wireless monitoring of grip (...) force signals recorded from biosensors in the palm of the human hand to track and trace human grip forces deployed in cognitive tasks executed under conditions of variable sensory (visual, auditory) input. Non-invasive multi-finger grip force sensor technology can be exploited to explore functional interactions between somatosensory brain mechanisms and motor control, in particular during learning a cognitive task where the planning and strategic execution of hand movements is essential. Sensorial and cognitive processes underlying manual skills and/or hand-specific (dominant versus non-dominant hand) behaviors can be studied in a variety of contexts by probing selected measurement loci in the fingers and palm of the human hand. Thousands of sensor data recorded from multiple spatial locations can be approached statistically to breathe functional sense into the forces measured under specific task constraints. Grip force patterns in individual performance profiling may reveal the evolution of grip force control as a direct result of cognitive changes during task learning. Grip forces can be functionally mapped to from-global-to-local coding principles in brain networks governing somatosensory processes for motor control in cognitive tasks leading to a specific task expertise or skill. Under the light of a comprehensive overview of recent discoveries into the functional significance of human grip force variations, perspectives for future studies in cognition, in particular the cognitive control of strategic and task relevant hand movements in complex real-world precision task, are pointed out. (shrink)

What happens to artist and to viewer when painting or sculpture emancipates itself from all physical mediums? What happens to art-world experts and to museum goers and amateurs when the piece of art turns immaterial, becoming indiscernible within its surrounding empty space and within the parergonal apparatus of the exposition site? What type of verbal depiction, of critical understanding and specific knowledge is attempted under these programmed and fabricated conditions? What kind of aesthetic experience–namely embodied and sensitive–is expected when a (...) performative utterance of the artist about his art takes the place of a real piece of artwork seen or perceived, or that may be seen or perceived? For Andy Warhol, «wasted space is any space that has art in it.» In the spring of 1958, in Paris, an artist already well-known among the neo-avantgardes and accredited by the international art-world, shows up empty-handed and presents himself as a painter without paintings in a empty space. In a singular never-wasted space, Yves Klein displays himself as a snob, with an extraordinary showbiz glamour and literally sine-nobilitate, without the traditional marks of artistic manual skills. Against the modernist issues, he writes: «Credit was given to me. The gesture alone was enough. The public had accepted the abstract intention.» What’s the matter with this powerful prestige and its influence on the critic and public? How to understand the public trust in the artist as a producer of an institutional “make-believe” without any objecthood, devoid of any individual artwork presented to the sight or to any other sense? For Modernism and Minimalism, the work of art seems to have an internal coherence, whether formal or expressive, and is thus autonomous from the surrounding world, existing with only the clear opposition to the living space and set as a specialized and situated objection to the enclosing field. Instead, now the object melts into the air and becomes undetectable, confused with the atmosphere of the theory of art and with the stylish and snobbish life of the artist. What type of interpretation is put on regarding this unclassifiable and ambiguous field, simultaneously an-aesthetic and existential, theoretical and sensitive, charismatic and motionless, at same time without a specialized position in the world made by the artist himself? And what kind of embodied experience is performed by the spectatorship? What type of phenomenology and pragmatics of aesthetic relationship is necessary to describe how the body of the beholder absorbs this vacated and boring space via a direct and immediate perception-assimilation? What kind of artistic rhetoric, what kind ontology of art? Until this day, after more than 50 years, Yves Klein’s The Void has not ceased asking these and other questions on aesthetics, philosophy and the history of art. (shrink)

Developing novices’ proficiency in skilful activities is central to the reproduction of human societies. The interactional practices through which instruction is accomplished have provided a rich focus for ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies examining classroom settings, and, more recently, non-classroom environments of instruction in practical and manual skills. This paper examines the work of instruction in basketball training and in particular the correction of player performances, which are a ubiquitous and central feature of instruction in basketball training sessions. A (...) central part of this instructional action relies on the coach observing training activities to determine players’ competencies and to extract relevant correctables from the players’ embodied displays, which are in turn embedded within complex arrangements of rapidly moving bodies situated in material environments. In this paper we examine the visual-analytic work involved in both organizing and observing a basketball training activity, demonstrating the sequential layering of multiple membership categorization devices drawn upon in producing and recognizing actions in this setting. We argue that the coach deploys spatial orientations which function analogously to membership categorization devices, with players’ bodily positions relative to one another and the material structure of the surround generating category-like sets of rights, responsibilities, and sequential relevancies. As we demonstrate, these orientations provide crucial resources for the identification of players’ errors and thereby for the organization of instruction in interaction in this setting. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the impact of Robert Owen’s educational ideas in France. It traces how his ideas attracted the attention of French liberals, particularly Charles de Lasteyrie, Alexandre de Laborde and Joseph-Marie de Gérando, and republicans associated with Marc-Antoine Jullien’s Revue Encyclopédique. The article focuses in particular on the work of one of Owen’s early French followers, the leading radical egalitarian political and social theorist Joseph Rey (1779–1855). The article examines how Owen’s reflections on education served as the foundation (...) for Rey’s own theoretical and practical contributions to educational philosophy and pedagogical reform. Drawing extensively from unpublished archive material, the article describes and analyses Rey’s detailed egalitarian critique of the work of educational theorist Joseph Jacotot, and explores how Rey advanced a far more ambitious philosophy of education that, when translated into practice, eliminated the traditional divide between manual skills and intellectual ability, resulting in a genuinely inclusive and comprehensive educational system. (shrink)

In the current climate of dramatic advances in the neurosciences, it has been widely assumed that the diagnosis of mental disorder is a matter exclusively for value-free science. Starting from a detailed case history, this paper describes how, to the contrary, values come into the diagnosis of mental disorders, directly through the criteria at the heart of psychiatry's most scientifically grounded classification, the American Psychiatric Association's DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Various possible interpretations of the prominence of values in (...) psychiatric diagnosis are outlined. Drawing on work in the Oxford analytic tradition of philosophy, it is shown that, properly understood, the prominence of psychiatric diagnostic values reflects the necessary engagement of psychiatry with the diversity of individual human values. This interpretation opens up psychiatric diagnostic assessment to the resources of a new skills-based approach to working with complex and conflicting values (also derived from analytic philosophy) called 'values-based practice.' Developments in values-based practice in training, policy and research in mental health are briefly outlined. The paper concludes with an indication of how the integration of values-based with evidence-based approaches provides the basis for psychiatric practice in the twenty-first century that is both science-based and person-centred. (shrink)

New technologies can upset scientific workplaces’ established practices and social order. Scientists may therefore prefer preserving skilled manual work and the social status quo to revolutionary technological change. For example, digital imaging of rock-encased fossils is a valuable way for scientists to “see” a specimen without traditional rock removal. However, interviews in vertebrate paleontology laboratories reveal workers’ skepticism toward computed tomography imaging. Scientists criticize replacing physical fossils with digital images because, they say, images are more subjective than the “real (...) thing.” I argue that these scientists are also implicitly supporting rock-removal technicians, who are skilled and trusted experts whose work would be made obsolete by widespread implementation of CT scanning. Scientists’ view of CT as a sometimes useful tool rather than a universal new approach to accessing fossils preserves the laboratory community’s social structure. Specifically, by privileging “real” specimens and trusted specimen-processing technicians over images and imaging experts, scientists preserve the lab community’s division of labor and skill, hierarchy between scientists and technicians, and these groups’ identity and mutual trust. (shrink)

THE TITLE OF THIS PAPER calls for clarification. Not only are there several senses in which something may be said to "be," there are also many nuances to the terms "categorial" and "intuition." Taking Aristotle as a guide, let us focus upon the primary sense of "being," that is, substance considered both as first substance and second substance. We may then take "categorial" as referring to what Aristotle calls the "figures of predication," the ways in which predicates characterize subjects, indicating (...) "what" the subject is, its quality, quantity, relation, its "where," its "when," and so forth. The term "intuition" expresses something too primitive to be defined, but Edmund Husserl's metaphorical contrast between the "emptiness" of thought and speech and the "fullness" of intuition successfully highlights its essential characteristic. A couple of examples should suffice to grasp the import of Husserl's distinction. Consider the difference, for instance, between first entertaining vague plans of visiting a foreign city and then experiencing the fulfillment of actually strolling through its streets, or the difference between first reading a manual of instructions for performing some task and then actually executing the task skillfully. Taking Husserl as a guide, let us therefore characterize intuition broadly as the presentation of something in its fullness, as opposed to thinking or talking about it in an empty way. Finally, combining Husserlian and Aristotelian terminologies, we may describe categorial intuition as the presentation of figures of predication. Rather than presenting some particular thing, say a red chair, categorial intuition presents the chair's being red, the red quality's belonging to the chair. In short, categorial intuition makes present the modes of presentation of things. (shrink)

Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory-motor behaviors that may underlie the establishment of joint attention between parents and toddlers. In an experimental task, parents and toddlers played together with multiple toys. We objectively measured joint attention—and the sensory-motor behaviors that (...) underlie it—using a dual head-mounted eye-tracking system and frame-by-frame coding of manual actions. By tracking the momentary visual fixations and hand actions of each participant, we precisely determined just how often they fixated on the same object at the same time, the visual behaviors that preceded joint attention and manual behaviors that preceded and co-occurred with joint attention. We found that multiple sequential sensory-motor patterns lead to joint attention. In addition, there are developmental changes in this multi-pathway system evidenced as variations in strength among multiple routes. We propose that coordinated visual attention between parents and toddlers is primarily a sensory-motor behavior. Skill in achieving coordinated visual attention in social settings—like skills in other sensory-motor domains—emerges from multiple pathways to the same functional end. (shrink)

During the school year of 1980-1981, I worked as an IAPC teacher trainer in the state of New Jersey. Within the workshops, the standard IAPC curriculum materials and method were used to train approximately 40 teachers, including a number of administrators as well as a district superintendent. I also worked directly with children in classes ranging from the fourth to the eighth grade. Lipman's novels were the basis for classroom discussion. After reading the novels aloud, students were encouraged to generate (...) topics for further analysis and elaboration. Next, exercises were selected from the teacher's manuals, guiding the examination of problems at greater depth. The goal of the workshops was, primarily, to develop a sense of the value of reflective discussion and to generate a community of inquiry. More specifically, I worked toward the improvement of discussion skills, sensitivity to philosophical issues as they arose in dialogue, and the identification of thinking skills. (shrink)

Learning from Chinese Philosophies explores early Confucianism and Daoism in order to engage today’s problems. By bringing into thoughtful play Confucian ideas of self and society and Daoist understanding of situated self, the author uses the debate between the two philosophies to argue for her understanding of Confucian moral thinking and Daoist metaethics. According to Lai, Daoist metaethics question dichotomous frameworks and discuss the unity of opposites enabling dynamic interplay of nonantagonistic polarities. Lai not only rejects comparisons of Confucianism to (...) consequentialist and deontological moral theories, but also the view that Confucian ethics is a form of virtue ethics. Instead, she argues that the Analects is a manual for moral decision making that requires skills “to unravel and analyse the complex features of particular situations and to pick out those which are morally relevant.” Together, Confucianism and Daoism offer views of interdependent relationality that help to reconceptualize contemporary problems and criticize existing thinking and practices. Lai applies what she has learned from these two Chinese philosophies in a critique of feminist care ethics. Despite a few flaws, this is a clearly written work with stimulating interesting ideas and it lives up to the promise of demonstrating the continued relevance of Chinese philosophies. (shrink)

Robot programming by demonstration covers methods by which a robot learns new skills through human guidance. We present an interactive, multimodal RPD framework using active teaching methods that places the human teacher in the robot’s learning loop. Two experiments are presented in which observational learning is first used to demonstrate a manipulation skill to a HOAP–3 humanoid robot by using motion sensors attached to the teacher’s body. Then, putting the robot through the motion, the teacher incrementally refines the robot’s (...) skill by moving its arms manually, providing the appropriate scaffolds to reproduce the action. An incremental teaching scenario is proposed based on insights from various fields addressing developmental, psychological, and social issues related to teaching mechanisms in humans. Based on this analysis, different benchmarks are suggested to evaluate the setup further. (shrink)

Different disciplines converge to trace language evolution from motor skills. The human ability to use tools has been advocated as a fundamental step toward the emergence of linguistic processes in the brain. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging research has established that linguistic functions and tool-use are mediated by partially overlapping brain networks. Yet, scholars still theoretically debate whether the relationship between tool-use and language is contingent or functionally relevant, since empirical evidence is critically missing. Here, we measured both linguistic production and tool-use (...) abilities in the same participants, as well as manual and linguistic motor skills. A path analysis ruling out unspecific contributions from manual or linguistic motor skills, showed that motor proficiency using a tool lawfully predicts differences in individual linguistic production. In addition, more complex tool-use reveals stronger association between linguistic production and tool mastery. These findings establish the existence of shared cognitive processes between tool-use and language. (shrink)

This essay review connects Joe L. Kincheloe's Critical Constructivism on epistemological analysis to the conceptual and sociopolitical challenges of new media in educational contexts. New media is a domain of educational research that has taken ubiquitous directions in recent scholarship. From cyber-bullying to digital rights management to the development of new literacies and the Orwellian nature of plagiarism watchdog sites like Turnitin.com, teachers are wary of tapping new media resources or ?vehicles? to enhance their more traditional instructional strategies and have (...) little impetus to develop what may be called critical digital literacy skills for themselves or their students. In 12 efficacious points, Joe L. Kincheloe's Critical Constructivism: A Primer ushers readers through complex processes of teaching and learning, knowledge construction, and cognition, as well as necessary examinations of the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which the knower and known are situated. The key understandings of critical constructivism are further explored in this review by evaluating its pedagogical applications and possibilities for teachers and learners confronting the challenges of navigating the vehicles (Web sites, online gaming, any form of online community/social environment ad, use of personal digital communication devices, ad infinitum) of new media in and beyond the classroom for the purposes of gaining what may be termed as critical digital literacy. Kincheloe's primer offers teachers, students and researchers an accessible epistemological manual equipped with definitions of concepts and terms emboldened and spotlighted throughout the text, in addition to its convenient glossary compiled in the back of the text. At face value, teachers, preservice teachers, and teacher educators are provided with a practical heuristic for crossing the great divide from the abstract domains of pedagogical theory to the inviting shores of teacher and learner cognition and practice. (shrink)

Developmental coordination disorder is a heterogeneous condition. Besides motor impairments, children with DCD often exhibit poor visual perceptual skills and executive functions. This study aimed to characterize the motor, perceptual, and cognitive profiles of children with DCD at the group level and in terms of subtypes. A total of 50 children with DCD and 31 typically developing peers underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological and motor assessment. The percentage of children with DCD showing impairments in each measurement was first described. Hierarchical agglomerative (...) and K-means iterative partitioning clustering analyses were then performed to distinguish the subtypes present among the complete sample of children in a data-driven way. Moderate to large percentages of children with DCD showed impaired executive functions and praxis, as well as attentional, visual perceptual, and visuomotor skills. Clustering analyses identified five subtypes, four of them mainly consisting of children with DCD and one of TD children. These subtypes were characterized by: generalized impairments, impaired manual dexterity, poor balance, planning, and alertness, impaired manual dexterity, cognitive inhibition, and poor visual perception, impaired manual dexterity and cognitive inhibition, and no impairment. Besides subtle differences, the motor and praxis measures did not enable to discriminate between the four subtypes of children with DCD. The subtypes were, however, characterized by distinct perceptual or cognitive impairments. These results highlight the importance of assessing exhaustively the perceptual and cognitive skills of children with DCD. (shrink)