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

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.