What Kind of Mind? Engaging Children and the Public with Research on Animal and Infant Minds from Philosophy and Psychology

婴儿是如何看待世界的？黑猩猩有语言吗？你的猫爱你吗？猴子如何看待他们环境中的物体，以及彼此之间的想法？真的可以说他们会思考吗？反思思维和意义项目是AHRC文化科学主题的一部分，重点是从科学和哲学的角度理解婴儿和动物的思维。这项后续建议旨在让监狱和当地社区的在校学生和服务不足的成年人参与这项研究，从而建立对科学的批判性理解，包括评估当前研究的能力，并建立适用于许多工作和生活领域的批判性思维技能。我们将与法夫和苏格兰高地和群岛的教师和学生密切合作，开发材料，使小学教师能够向他们的学生展示心理学方面的尖端实证研究，评估这项研究对关于心灵的传统哲学问题的影响，并开始思考回答关于婴儿和动物心灵的问题的新方法。对这些领域的活动有相当大的需求；特别是法夫的小学，最近采用了STEAM(科学、技术、工程、艺术和数学)教学方案，将艺术和文化融入科学教学。我们的跨学科研究，使用经验技术来研究关于心灵的传统哲学问题，是这些目标的完美匹配，我们将与FIFE STEAM课程的开发者合作，以确保我们的材料满足教师和学生的需求。更广泛地说，我们所有的活动都将与教师和学生合作创建，以确保它们在课堂上有用，并真正吸引年轻观众。结果将包括教师的背景信息，为不同年龄的学生量身定做的活动，以及多媒体链接(如实验视频)。我们将通过专门的社交媒体支持教师提供这些材料，他们可以在那里提问(或传递学生的问题)，并在苏格兰各地继续举办专业发展研讨会，特别是重点放在高地和岛屿学校，这些学校可能由于地理位置偏远而无法接触到大学研究人员。我们将通过我们的网站在线分发这些材料，并在有需求的地方以硬拷贝的形式向教师广泛提供这些材料。我们还将直接向成年观众授课，特别是包括珀斯和波尔蒙特监狱的囚犯，以及当地社区服务不足的观众。我们相信，通过教授前沿哲学和科学研究，我们可以培养对科学及其方法进行批判性思考的技能。科学如何回答关于心灵的直观哲学问题？什么是科学方法，它们如何在特定情况下应用？科学实验的结果到底说明了什么？这种批判性思维能力不仅对于思考当前的科学争议--例如，关于气候变化、转基因作物或替代医学--至关重要，而且在这个“假新闻”和“另类事实”的时代，对于全面参与政治和公共领域也是至关重要的。

How do babies see the world? Do chimpanzees have a language? Does your cat love you? How do monkeys think about objects in their environment, and about each other? Can they really be said to think at all? The Rethinking Mind and Meaning project, funded as a part of the AHRC's Science in Culture theme, focused on understanding the minds of infants and animals from a scientific and philosophical perspective. This follow-on proposal aims to engage school pupils and underserved adults in prisons and the local community with this research, and thereby to build a critical understanding of science, including the ability to evaluate current research, and to build critical thinking skills applicable to many areas of work and life. Working closely with teachers and pupils in Fife and in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, we will develop materials that will enable primary teachers to present cutting-edge empirical research in psychology to their pupils, to evaluate how this research bears on traditional philosophical questions about the mind, and to begin to think about new methodologies for answering questions about the minds of infants and animals. There is considerable demand for activities in these areas; primary schools in Fife, in particular, have recently adopted a programme of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) teaching that integrates arts and culture into science teaching. Our interdisciplinary research, which uses empirical techniques to investigate traditional philosophical questions about the mind, is a perfect fit for these aims, and we will collaborate with the developers of Fife's STEAM curriculum to ensure that our materials meet the needs of teachers and pupils.More generally, all of our activities will be collaboratively created with teachers and pupils, to ensure that they are useful in the classroom and genuinely engaging to a young audience. The result will include background information for teachers, activities tailored to pupils of different ages, and links to multimedia (such as videos of experiments). We will support teachers in the delivery of this material by a dedicated social media presence where they can ask questions (or pass on questions from their pupils), and by continuing professional development workshops throughout Scotland, focusing particularly on Highland and Island schools which may have limited access to University researchers due to their remote locations. And we will make the materials widely available to teachers by distributing them online through our website and in hard copy where there is demand.We will also deliver lessons directly to adult audiences, notably including prisoners in HMPs Perth and Polmont, and to underserved audiences in the local community. We believe that by teaching cutting-edge philosophical and scientific research, we can build skills in thinking critically about science and its methods. How can science answer intuitive philosophical questions about the mind? What are scientific methods, and how can they be applied in particular cases? What do the results of scientific experiments really show? Critical thinking skills of this kind are crucial not only for thinking through current scientific controversies - for example, about climate change, GMO crops, or alternative medicine - but also, in this age of "fake news" and "alternative facts", for full participation in politics and the public sphere.