Stuart G. Shanker

York University · Department of Philosophy

Shanker Self-Reg® always begins with reframing. The concept of reframing is grounded in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Reframing constitutes an “aspect-shift” in how we see and categorize the world around us. Perceptual, experiential and creative components are all involved. The current paper explores each of these strands and how they are woven...

Background: Public health nurses use parent education programmes to support individuals' transition to parenthood. A wide array of these programmes exists; however, the approach must be accommodated by resources available in a publicly funded system. For example, some new-parent education approaches use 1:1 home visiting (with a nurse or trained l...

Self-regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is unclear. To define it precisely, two studies examined the American Psychological Association's system of controlled vocabulary-specifically, the 447 associated terms it presents-and used techniques from the Digital Humanities to identify 88 closely rela...

In a report of the effectiveness of MEHRIT, a social-interaction-based intervention for autism, Casenhiser et al. (Autism 17(2):220-241, 2013) failed to find a significant advantage for language development in the treatment group using standardized language assessments. We present the results from a re-analysis of their results to illustrate the im...

Cognition arises from the transient integration and segregation of activity across functionally distinct brain areas. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which encompass a wide range of developmental disabilities, have been presumed to be associated with a problem in cortical and sub-cortical dynamics of coordinated activity, often involving enhanced...

In the fourth Book of The Republic, Socrates tells the following story: I once heard something that I believe, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Piraeus under the north wall from outside and observed corpses beside the public executioner. At the same time he had an appetite to look and again felt disquiet and turned himself...

The study evaluates a social-communication-based approach to autism intervention aimed at improving the social interaction skills of children with autism spectrum disorder. We report preliminary results from an ongoing randomized controlled trial of 51 children aged 2 years 0 months to 4 years 11 months. Participants were assigned to either a targe...

Background: Behaviorist methods of treating autism which often focus on manipulating the contingencies of behaviors using so-called artificial reinforcers have lead some researchers and parents to criticize their inflexibility and one-size-fits-all approach to intervention (e.g., Fay, W.H. 1980, Prizant, Barry 1982). Objectives: We present a ra...

Background: There is a substantial body of evidence from both electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies showing face processing impairments in adults and children with autism. Most of this research has focused on high functioning subjects with very few studies carried out on low functioning samples and still fewer studies assessing preschoole...

The first person I met when I arrived in Oxford in 1975 to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics was Isaiah Berlin. Isaiah was a personal friend of one of my professors at the University of Toronto, who had asked Isaiah if, as a personal favour, he would serve as my ‘moral tutor’. This rather quaint Oxford version of an ‘academic advisor’ turned...

This chapter challenges the hypothesis that the type of social impairment observed in children with autism is evidence of a specific underlying malfunction in a ‘theory of mind mechanism’, resulting in ‘mindblindness’. To establish this point, the chapter takes up two interesting ideas in the ‘Theory of Mind’ literature, but purged of their Cartesi...

How do human beings develop and function in relation to the human and natural world? The science of dynamic systems focuses on connections and relationships between people rather than on individual actions alone. This collection of engaging, non-technical essays, written by dynamic systems scientists in psychology, biology, anthropology, education,...

The dynamic systems approach is an emerging interdisciplinary set of principles used by a diverse collection of scientists to help understand the complex world in which we live. The main insight that unites these scientists, despite wide differences in methods and concepts, is a focus on connections and relationships. A relationship between a parti...

Each of the chapters in this book points to expanding our understanding of the multiple and complex relationships that surround development through the lifespan. In this chapter, we as the organizing committee of the Council for Human Development give a brief description and overview of the science of dynamic systems that is exemplified in the othe...

The dynamic systems approach is an emerging interdisciplinary set of principles used by a diverse collection of scientists to help understand the complex world in which we live. The main insight that unites these scientists, despite wide differences in methods and concepts, is a focus on connections and relationships. A relationship between a parti...

When Aristotle argued that ‘Man is by nature a political animal’, or Seneca that ‘Man is a reasoning animal’, the emphasis was very much on the idea that man is a part of the natural order - an animal, but an animal which is political and which reasons. These moral and cognitive capacities allow man to rise above the other animals. But given his in...

According to the functional/emotional hypothesis, the core capacities necessary for cognitive and language development, such as pattern recognition, joint attention, and intention reading, are downstream effects of more basic processes having to do with early patterns of affect signalling. In this paper, we present preliminary research that tests t...

This paper presents the Functional/Emotional approach to language development, which explains the process leading up to the core capacities necessary for language (e.g., pattern-recognition, joint attention); shows how this process leads to the formation of internal symbols; and how it shapes and is shaped by the child’s development of language. Th...

This paper challenges the hypothesis that the type of social impairment observed in children with autism is evidence of an underlying malfunction in their ‘Theory of Mind’, resulting in ‘mindblindness’. To establish this point, the paper takes up two interesting ideas in the Theory of Mind literature, purged of their Cartesianism: first, that the s...

Our starting point for the origins of language goes beyond prosody or infant-directed speech to highlight the affective, multimodal, and co-constructed nature of meaning-making that was likely present before the split between African great apes and hominins. Analysis of vocal and gestural caregiving practices in hominins, and of meaning-making via...

The present paper argues that what the phenomenon of autism may really represent is not, as has been argued by some, a window into the hidden mechanisms involved in a theory of mind, but rather a window into the conceptual problems involved in Cartesianism that lead one to postulate the need for a theory of mind. Far from constituting an anomaly fo...

We argue that dynamic-systems theory (DST) offers researchers a promising alternative to the information-processing framework that has dominated the study of primate social communication. DST rejects a linear view of communication in which a sender transmits a signal to a receiver, who then decodes that signal for its information content. Instead,...

A group of 8-year-old children with autism was compared to a group of typically-developing 4-year-olds (approximately matched for verbal mental age) and to a group of typically- developing 8-year-olds (matched for chronological age) on a computerized version of the dimensional change card sort task. This task requires children to classify a set of...

In recent years we have seen a dramatic shift, in several different areas of communication studies, from an information-theoretic to a dynamic systems paradigm. In an information processing system, communication, whether between cells, mammals, apes, or humans, is said to occur when one organism encodes information into a signal that is transmitted...

We group the issues raised in the commentaries into five major sections. In the first, section R1, we consider some of the antecedents to dynamic systems (DS) in psychology, biology, anthropology, and primatology and note the key changes that have occurred in DS over the past ten years. Next, in section R2, we explain the ways in which co-regulatio...

Certain defining problems in psychology force us to clarify both the origins and the limits of a paradigm that has long governed our thinking in a particular area of research. The current debate over the nature and causes of specific language impairment is proving to be just such an issue. In particular, the existence of the KE family, 15 of whose...

RESUMEN: El presente artículo cuestiona la visión mecánica del lenguaje y la comunicación para adop- tar un enfoque dinámico y complejo. A la vez, este enfoque descarta la idea de la existencia de un módulo aislado del lenguaje, demostrando las ligas profundas que en todos los niveles, vinculan el lenguaje con la emoción, en la conformación de nues...

Nativist theories of language insist that an infant must possess some abstract concepts about the structure of language or, at the very least, some word-learning biases to be able to acquire the sorts of skills and knowledge displayed by competent language-speakers. A direct consequence of Cartesian epistemology, nativism limits the role of linguis...

Nativist theories of language insist that an infant must possess some abstract concepts about the structure of language or, at the very least, some wordlearning biases to be able to acquire the sorts of skills and knowledge displayed by competent languagespeakers. A direct consequence of Cartesian epistemology, nativism limits the role of linguisti...

In addition, I See a Voice raises an intriguing question: To what extent have we transcended these Enlightenment metaphysical notions about the voice? I am not referring here to the fact that deafness is still widely viewed as a tragic impairment—an attitude that not only imposes untold stresses on families with deaf children but indeed can do much...

Green (1993/2000) draws attention to the importance of the following questions for those who are interested in reassessing and reorienting the cognitive revolution: How could two such dissimilar movements as AI and cognitive psychology ever have joined together? How could the concerns of the cognitive revolution have been so quickly usurped by thos...

Ape language research has been marked by constantly shifting demands made by those who feel that only human beings can acquire language. Kako (1999) continues in this tradition, but his paper marks a significant shift. For Kako concedes that Kanzi possesses rudimentary syntactic skills; but he questions whether Kanzi possesses morphosyntax. Rather...

This book describes S. Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi, a laboratory-reared bonobo, which has led to Kanzi's acquisition of linguistic and cognitive skills similar to those of a two and a half yr old human child. The book combines a narrative of the Kanzi research with incisive critical analysis of the research's broader linguistic, psychological...

When the classical philosophers argued that 'Man is by nature a political animal', or that 'Man is a reasoning animal', the emphasis in their assertions was very much on the idea that humans are a part of the natural order. That is, humans are animals, but a kind of animal which is political and which reasons. These moral and cognitive capacities w...

The Greeks had a ready answer for what happens when the mind suddenly finds the answer to a question for which it had been searching: insight was regarded as a gift of the Muses, its origins were divine. It served to highlight the Greeks'' belief that there are some things which are not meant to be scientifically explained. The essence of insight i...

Reading through Mechanica1 Intelligence, volume III of Alan Turing's Collected Works, one begins to appreciate just how propitious Turing's timing was. If Turing's major accomplishment in 'On Computable Numbers' was to expose the epistemological premises built into formalism, his main achievement in the 1940s was to recognize the extent to which th...

A layman's guide to the mechanics of GÖdel's proof together with a lucid discussion of the issues which it raises. Includes an essay discussing the significance of GÖdel's work in the light of Wittgenstein's criticisms.

Argues that Jerome Bruner's "Acts of Meaning" (1990), which calls for a "renewed cognitive revolution" for the direction of cognitive psychology research and study, does not sufficiently identify the direction of that journey or the obstacles that need to be removed for a successful journey. (31 references) (CB)

Discussion des raisons du scepticisme wittgensteinnien vis-a-vis de l'importance de la these de Church, et des machines de Turing pour les fondements des mathematiques et de la psychologie. L'A. commence par reconstituer la doctrine de Wittgenstein, a partir de textes disperses, puis en discute la pertinence

Those of us who, like Bruner, were at Oxford in the late 1970s, can understand why the scaffolding metaphor appealed to Bruner when he was writing Child's Talk. The ravages of time, the deathwatch beetle, and the motor car, had transformed many of Oxford's 'dreaming spires' into a nightmare of boards and trestles. Typical, and in many ways symbolic...