There are different narratives on mathematics as part of our world, some of which are more appropriate than others. Such narratives might be of the form ‘Mathematics is useful’, ‘Mathematics is beautiful’, or ‘Mathematicians aim at theorem-credit’. These narratives play a crucial role in mathematics education and in society as they are influencing people’s willingness to engage with the subject or the way they interpret mathematical results in relation to real-world questions; the latter yielding important normative considerations. Our strategy is (...) to frame current narratives of mathematics from a virtue-theoretic perspective. We identify the practice of mathematizing, put forward by Freudenthal’s ‘Realistic mathematics education’, as virtuous and use it to evaluate different narratives. We show that this can help to render the narratives more adequately, and to provide implications for societal organization. (shrink)

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigers have stripes and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripes was acquired in Spanish-speaking children of two different age groups (4/5-year-olds and 8/9-year-olds), and then compare these results with those of adults. The starting point of this research was the semantic distinction between (...) GS and UQS in that the former admit exceptions, unlike the latter. On the other hand, several authors have observed a Generic overgeneralization effect (GOG) consisting in allowing for UQS to be felicitous in the face of exceptions, thus proposing that this “error” stems from GS being defaults (simpler, more easily learned and processed). In the current paper we aimed to test the “Generics as Default” (GaD) hypothesis by comparing GS and UQS in three different age ranges. Our data show that, overall, the accuracy of GS is greater than the accuracy of UQS. Moreover, we also confirm a hypothesized interaction between age and NP type (GS vs UQS). Further, we present several data points that are not predicted by the GaD, including an observed decline in the accuracy of GS in the older group of children as well as in adults, and that children fail at rejecting statements that are not considered to be true generalizations. (shrink)

Since time immemorial, poverty reduction interventions in Sub‐Saharan Africa like everywhere in the South, have focused on the individual as the basic ingredient of a moral society (ethical individualism). According to this perspective, in order to lift human persons out of poverty, it is imperative to integrate poor persons into poverty eradication interventions irrespective of sex, social status and gender. Scholars and institutions that subscribed to this conception of poverty thought that individuals were poor because of personal weaknesses (case poverty).This (...) perspective has been greatly challenged due to the upsurge of gender and human rights scholarship in the 20th century. Gender scholars have painstakingly argued that in order to understand poverty, we need to look at society (ethical collectivism). They have rejected the Women in Development(WID) discourse that aims at integrating women into the development process in favour of the Gender and Development(GAD) approach to development and poverty reduction that aims at confronting power relations between men and women (empowerment).This GAD perspective looks at poverty in terms of the powerlessness speared head by prevailing structures in society (structural poverty) and hence the need to empower vulnerable persons such as women to challenge structures and strictures of oppression. The International Monetary fund (IMF) and World Bank as vehement promoters of economism in Sub‐Saharan Africa for decades have urged governments to include the perspectives of the poor in poverty polices through what they call participatory poverty assessments (PPAs). Despite its deceptive appearance, this PPAs stance of the IMF and World Bank tacitly looks at poverty as a case and not structural issue and that is why Uganda’s ambitious poverty reduction policy though greatly informed by Participatory Poverty Assessments greatly ignores structures and strictures that render women vulnerable to poverty. This paper critically assesses the obliviousness of Uganda’s Agricultural poverty policy to structures and how this has militated on the gender poverty production in Uganda. The paper contends that in order to realise engendered poverty eradication in Uganda, it is pertinent for the agricultural policy to ultimately make paradigm shift from focusing on the individual as the basic ingredient of a moral society (ethical individualism) to confronting structures and strictures that disempower and vulnerablelise individual moral agents (ethical collectivism). (shrink)

First, the book does not have an original thesis. The thesisthe author wants to argue is that Smith is different from his current caricature, a legacy of his nineteenth-century image, according to which he would argue that: i) man is a maximizer of utility; ii) man is ordinarily moved by a narrow selfish interest, or at least is indifferent to the interests of others; iii) human beings are social atoms; iv) a perfectly competitive market is morally a free zone (pp. (...) 4-5). The author recognizes that these interpretations "are being questioned by many scholars". contemporary", however, reiterates his conviction that these interpretations are still prevalent, and cites in this regard the abuse of the name of Smith by the Chicago school (p.6). If the author's aim is to challenge a caricature, still common among non-experts but no longer shared by Smith's scholars, one may wonder whether this justifies a new book. Secondly, the author does not demonstrate mastery of the state of the art. She wants to demonstrate the non-existence of Adam Smith Problem, not only without any direct knowledge of German literature but ignoring an important article by Heilbroner from 1981 and a fundamental essay by Dickey from 1986 that explicitly advocate an exhumation of the "Adam Smith problem" in a new form. Thirdly, the author lacks the ability to understand concepts and problems in contextual terms: where she mentions Adam Smith's 'Newtonianism' she does not prove to be familiar with the literature on the subject, citing Lindgren as the only authority and ignoring, among others, Moscovici, Skinner, Hetherington and Freudenthal, but also seems to understand by Newtonianism an equivalent of deterministic and materialistic mechanicism (pp. 48-51). Besides, every time she uses the term utilitarianism he confuses it with the terms hedonism, economicism, selfishness (p. 155). (shrink)