This introductory chapter previews the major themes of the book. The chapter discusses how brain development has become incorporated into parents’ thinking about early child development, educators’ concerns with early childhood education, legislators’ initiatives supporting young children and their families, businesses’ marketing of commercial products for young children, and other features of the climate of early child development for the past twenty years. It discusses how ideas from philosophy and later psychological science have historically created images and metaphors to convey new understanding of the developing child, and how brain development has become the most recent and influential of these scientific accounts because of its novelty, its technological sophistication, and a concerted public engagement campaign in 1997 to promote public understanding of the developing brain. The view that “science does not speak for itself” highlights that scientists are trusted sources but not trusted communicators. This raises the problem of how best to convey this scientific account to an interested public, and alternative ways of translating developmental research findings into “usable knowledge” for parents and practitioners are considered. The chapter concludes with an outline of the chapters and the issues they discuss.

The knowledge commons framework, deployed here in a review of the early network of scientific communication known as the Republic of Letters, combines a historical sensibility regarding the character of scientific research and communications with a modern approach to analyzing institutions for knowledge governance. Distinctions and intersections between public purposes and privacy interests are highlighted. Lessons from revisiting the Republic of Letters as knowledge commons may be useful in advancing contemporary discussions of Open Science.

Ontology (i.e. thinking about what’s out there) is intimately connected to epistemology (i.e. questions such as, “how can we know what’s out there?”). Both are also connected to ideology (i.e. whose interests do those perspectives on ontology and epistemology serve?). The once dominant cognitivist and structuralist orientations on language and communication are increasingly challenged by new thinking about what is out there. This new thinking is in turn changing the way we engage in inquiry about language and communication. Among the many philosophical paradigms challenging cognitivism and structuralism, I present the set of theories espousing a flat ontology as facilitating a more inclusive and dynamic understanding of language in communication. Flat ontology questions binaries such as mind/body, cognition/matter, human/nonhuman, and verbal/nonverbal, with the former in each pair treated as agentive and more significant. It considers all resources as working together in the construction of meaning and activity. Flat ontology is adopted by philosophical schools such as posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), new materialism (Barad, 2007), actor network theory (Latour, 2005), and spatiality (Massey, 2005). In this chapter, I will articulate how such schools provide a different orientation to the ontology of English, with new implications for meaning and communication, and for changes in the way we conduct language analysis and teaching in the future.