Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper reflects on how Philippe Aries’s work, Centuries of Childhood (1962[1960]), and its (in)famous conclusion, “[i]n medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist,” can inform a cognitive approach to childhood. Drawing upon recent research in cognitive sociology, I elucidate a conception of childhood as cognition, childhood as one of the many mental frames or cognitive “schemes” that individuals evoke as they respond to culture. From this perspective, I argue Aries’s contentious conclusion can be taken to suggest that the “childhood scheme,” the cognitive frame by which modern westerners “think” people within a certain chronological age range, was not available to individuals in medieval society, nor were the cultural cues – personal and structural – that would sustain such a conception of childhood. I reread Aries’s text in this new light and find he presents evidence that key cultural tools required to enact modern childhood – specifically the notions that age, like time, is linear, limited and quantifiable; that development is tantamount to the “counting down” of chronological age from birth to death; and that childhood is the most significant, developmentally-speaking, stage of the life course – were unavailable to medieval society. I conclude that taking Aries “at his word” – in other words, accepting that medieval society did not hold the idea of childhood – can help advance a conception of childhood as cognition, an approach that holds some interesting possibilities for childhood studies more generally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".