The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning

Positive testing is characteristic of exploratory behavior, yet it seems to be at odds with the aim of information seeking. After all, repeated demonstrations of one’s current hypothesis often produce the same evidence and fail to distinguish it from potential alternatives. Research on the development of scientific reasoning and adult rule learning have both documented and attempted to explain this behavior. The current chapter reviews this prior work and introduces a novel theoretical account—the Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis—which suggests that producing multiple positive examples serves the goals of causal learning. This hypothesis draws on the interventionist framework of causal reasoning, which suggests that causal learners are concerned with the invariance of candidate hypotheses. In a probabilistic and interdependent causal world, our primary goal is to determine whether, and in what contexts, our causal hypotheses provide accurate foundations for inference and intervention—not to disconfirm their alternatives. By recognizing the central role of invariance in causal learning, the phenomenon of positive testing may be reinterpreted as a rational information-seeking strategy

Diversity of teachers’ conceptions related to environment and human rights. A survey in 24 countries

The environmental, social and economical dimensions of ESD include human rights as equality of all the human beings independently to their gender, ethnic group, religion or sexual orientation. To analyse teachers’ conceptions on environment and on human rights, and to identify eventual links between them and with controlled parameters, a large survey has been done in 24 countries (8 749 teachers). The data are submitted to multivariate analyses. In the less developed countries, the teachers’ conceptions are more anthropocentric, less awareness of the problem of the limit of resources in our planet, and less reticent to use GMO (genetically modified organisms). These teachers are more believing in God, more practicing religion, more for “a strong central power”, “against the separation between science and religion”. The priority of ESD in these countries is poverty and development, while it is to avoid wasting and excessive consumption in the most developed countries. The teachers with the most anthropocentric conceptions more agree with these propositions: “It is for biological reasons that women more often than men take care of housekeeping” and “Ethnic groups are genetically different and that is why some are superior to others”, and more disagree with: “Homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples”. These points illustrate that some socio-cultural traditions can differ from values of ESD (the universal human rights).CIEC – FCT Research Unit 317