An investigation into the underlying logic of human languages which looks at how children acquire English and Mandarin.

This book grew out of a five-year collaboration between groups of American and German mathematics educators. The central issue addressed accounting for the messiness and complexity of mathematics learning and teaching as it occurs in classroom situations. The individual chapters are based on the view that psychological and sociological perspectives each tell half of a good story. To unify these concepts requires a combined approach that takes individual students' mathematical activity seriously while simultaneously seeing their activity as necessarily socially situated. Throughout their collaboration, the chapter authors shared a single set of video recordings and transcripts made in an American elementary classroom where instruction was generally compatible with recent reform recommendations. As a consequence, the book is much more than a compendium of loosely related papers. The combined approach taken by the authors draws on interactionism and ethnomethodology. Thus, it constitutes an alternative to Vygotskian and Soviet activity theory approaches. The specific topics discussed in individual chapters include small group collaboration and learning, the teacher's practice and growth, and language, discourse, and argumentation in the mathematics classroom. This collaborative effort is valuable to educators and psychologists interested in situated cognition and the relation between sociocultural processes and individual psychological processes.

Given the evolutionary and developmental processes that form a human being, can we plausibly believe that people can make rational and autonomous choices about their lives? How can such choices be non-arbitrary and compelling if there are no norms outside the historical process against which they can be judged? And if that historical process is simply an accidental episode in an indifferent universe, what sorts of meanings can individual lives and choices have?

The aim of this study is a comparative analysis of the role of semantics in the linguistic theory of four grammatical traditions, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic. If one compares the organization of linguistic theory in various grammatical traditions, it soon turns out that there are marked differences in the way they define the place of ‘semantics’ within the theory. In some traditions, semantics is formally excluded from linguistic theory, and linguists do not express any opinion as to the relationship between syntactic and semantic analysis. In other traditions, the whole basis of linguistic theory is semantically orientated, and syntactic features are always analysed as correlates of a semantic structure. However, even in those traditions, in which semantics falls explicitly or implicitly outside the scope of linguistics, there may be factors forcing linguists to occupy themselves with the semantic dimension of language. One important factor seems to be the presence of a corpus of revealed/sacred texts: the necessity to formulate hermeneutic rules for the interpretation of this corpus brings semantics in through the back door.

Over the last several decades, the theories of emergence and downward causation have become arguably the most popular conceptual tools in scientific and philosophical attempts to explain the nature and character of global organization observed in various biological phenomena, from individual cell organization to ecological systems. The theory of emergence acknowledges the reality of layered strata or levels of systems, which are consequences of the appearance of an interacting range of novel qualities. A closer analysis of emergentism, however, reveals a number of philosophical problems facing this theory. In Emergence, Mariusz Tabaczek offers a thorough analysis of these problems and a constructive proposal of a new metaphysical foundation for both the classic downward causation-based and the new dynamical depth accounts of emergence theory, developed by Terrence Deacon. Tabaczek suggests ways in which both theoretical models of emergentism can be grounded in the classical and the new (dispositionalist) versions of Aristotelianism. This book will have an eager audience in metaphysicians working both in the analytic and the Thomistic traditions, as well as philosophers of science and biology interested in emergence theory and causation.

Two problems continually arise in the sciences and humanities, according to Mario Bunge: parts and wholes and the origin of novelty. In Emergence and Convergence, he works to address these problems, as well as that of systems and their emergent properties, as exemplified by the synthesis of molecules, the creation of ideas, and social inventions. Along the way, Bunge examines further topical problems, such as the search for the mechanisms underlying observable facts, the limitations of both individualism and holism, the reach of reduction, the abuses of Darwinism, the rational choice-hermeneutics feud, the modularity of the brain vs. the unity of the mind, the cluster of concepts around 'maybe,' the uselessness of many-worlds metaphysics and semantics, the hazards posed by Bayesianism, the nature of partial truth, the obstacles to correct medical diagnosis, and the formal conditions for the emergence of a cross-discipline. Bunge is not interested in idle fantasies, but about many of the problems that occur in any discipline that studies reality or ways to control it. His work is about the merger of initially independent lines of inquiry, such as developmental evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and socio-economics. Bunge proposes a clear definition of the concept of emergence to replace that of supervenience and clarifies the notions of system, real possibility, inverse problem, interdiscipline, and partial truth that occur in all fields.

This Open Access Brief analyzes the dynamics in which children's selves emerge through their everyday activities of meaning construction, both in their relationships with family and within school education. It begins with a discussion of new psychological inquiries into children's selves and builds upon the innovative theoretical notion of the Presentational Self, developed by the author over the last decade. The book illustrates how the observation of children's meaning construction in their everyday lives becomes a starting point for theoretical and empirical inquiries into child development and gives a framework that promotes new inquiries in this area. The book describes the Presentational Self Theory as a sense of how the notion of the Self is being worked upon in everyday life encounters. Chapters feature in-depth analyses of exchanges between adults and children in the Japanese cultural context. Meaning-Making for Living will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in the fields of cognitive, social, developmental, educational, and cultural psychology. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.