The innovation systems approach has swiftly spread out worldwide in the last three decades and stood as an important framework for policy-making in the fields of science, technology, and innovation. At the same time, there have been serious and untreated concerns in the literature about the theoretical soundness of this approach. Our discussion in this paper is based on the belief that a detailed analysis on epistemological foundations of the approach could shed a judgmental light on the aforementioned concerns. To (...) provide that analysis, we reconstructed and studied the nature and evolution of innovation systems approach as a case of conceptual revolution against the more established traditions in economics of innovation. Our analyses show that the rise of the systemic view of innovation include radical changes in conceptual structures pertaining to orthodox view of innovation. These developments also go so far as to include significant shifts in epistemological foundations of the old paradigm. These later shifts provide us with an epistemological base from which we can shelter the innovation systems approach from the hard criticisms rooted in a quasi-positivist point of view. That epistemological base also shows the path for the future development of the approach towards more robustness and precision. (shrink)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that participants in conversation can sometimes act as a coalition. This implies a level of conversational organization in which groups of individuals form a coherent unit. This paper investigates the implications of this phenomenon for psycholinguistic and semantic models of shared context in dialog. We present a corpus study of multiparty dialog which shows that, in certain circumstances, people with different levels of overt involvement in a conversation, that is, one responding and one not, can nonetheless access (...) the same shared context. We argue that contemporary models of shared context need to be adapted to capture this situation. To address this, we propose “grounding by proxy,” in which one person can respond on behalf of another, as a simple mechanism by which shared context can accumulate for a coalition as a whole. We explore this hypothesis experimentally by investigating how people in a task-oriented coalition respond when their shared context appears to be weakened. The results provide evidence that, by default, coalition members act on each other's behalf, and when this fails they work to compensate. We conclude that this points to the need for a new concept of collective grounding acts and a corresponding concept of collective contexts in psycholinguistic and semantic models of dialog. (shrink)

Arash Arjomandi, discípulo cercano de Eugenio Trías, junto a quien se nutrió de los principios fundamentales de la inteligencia fronteriza, intenta descubrir aquí, en compañía del lector, las prescripciones o reglas para tener una vida buena (según expresión de muchos filósofos), es decir, aquellas prácticas cotidianas que sincronicen, de un modo sostenible, la satisfacción con la vida, por un lado, y el placer o deleite, por otro. Si bien este texto es resultado de un pensamiento filosófico profundo, tiene la (...) pretensión de serle útil al gran público. Ello responde al principal móvil que le guía siempre en sus trabajos: contribuir, desde la meditación filosófica, al bien común promoviendo cambios creativos en los hábitos de pensamiento y, por tanto, en los hábitos de actuación. En medio de la ingente cantidad de ensayos que se publican cada año sobre la felicidad, la gran innovación de este libro es que no adopta una perspectiva psicológica del asunto, sino que apuesta por una visión filosófica, aunque práctica; en ningún caso, abstracta. De ahí que sea un texto orientado, de parte a parte, a la provisión de instrumentos reflexivos pero útiles para cualquier tipo de lector, aunque no tenga el menor interés por la filosofía. Arjomandi continua en este libro el estilo de escritura que inauguró en su anterior ensayo, "La alquimia filosofal", un subgénero que, en la prensa, Pablo d’Ors denominó halagüeñamente intriga filosófica, es decir, un género ensayístico que persigue, mediante pistas racionales, la demostración de una intuición a la manera de una pesquisa detectivesca. (shrink)

This article reevaluates the Iranian polymath Ali Shariati’s most controversial lectures. Scholarly consensus reads 1969’s Ummat va Imāmat as derivative, comprising an imitation of Sukarno’s guided democracy and hence an apology for postcolonial authoritarian rule. Shariati’s rhetorical performance suggests otherwise. The lectures address a postcolonial iteration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s paradox of founding—a call for self-determination alongside the external intervention needed to prepare for it in the wake of moral dispositions accrued during colonization. Shariati proposes to resolve the problem of enduring (...) colonial domination by citing a fabricated French professor, a foreigner, as an authoritative source. He practices a noble lie, believable because it draws from colonized sensibilities but laden with hints encouraging audiences to see past it. If audiences develop the requisite ability to decipher the lie, Shariati wagers, they at once develop the autonomy implied by self-determination. On these grounds, Shariati theorizes the paradox of politics as decolonization. (shrink)

The question of whether or not a closed border entry policy under the unilateral control of a democratic state is legitimate cannot be settled until we first know to whom the justification of a regime of control is owed. According to the state sovereignty view, the control of entry policy, including of movement, immigration, and naturalization, ought to be under the unilateral discretion of the state itself: justification for entry policy is owed solely to members. This position, however, is inconsistent (...) with the democratic theory of popular sovereignty. Anyone accepting the democratic theory of political legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral domestic right to control state boundaries. Because the demos of democratic theory is in principle unbounded, the regime of boundary control must be democratically justified to foreigners as well as to citizens, in political institutions in which both foreigners and citizens can participate. (shrink)

This paper discusses the possibility of wealth adjustment through a credit network. The discussed credit network in this paper is a kind of loaning with no interest rate (its value is zero). It explains the influence of existence or inexistence of a cooperation originated from the credit network on wealth distribution and adjustment in an artificial society. To show how the wealth may distribute, environment agents in terms of their obtained wealth have been classified into ten wealth categories; thus, the (...) share of each category in terms of population has been determined. In addition, the survival of population in the environment has been studied. Findings and results show more balanced distribution of agents among the categories of wealth and higher survival of the population in the existence of the credit network. More over, the curve of population has fewer fluctuations. In other words, the population is more stable due to the ability of credit network in making more survival and stability in the population of environment in periods of time by providing the possibility of cooperation and wealth better distribution. (shrink)

Wealth distribution based on classic sugarscape model leads to a population increase and the Gini coefficient decrease when cooperation and communication parameters are taken into account. In another study, this model was developed by implying a receipt of one-fifth of the assets of the population and derived utilization for poor people. The results showed a relation between mortality decrease, population increase, and Gini coefficient decrease (equality increase). In a synergic process, the wealth adjustment based on sugarscape model underwent some experiments (...) by implying communication and cooperation, and the mechanism of receiving and utilizing the assets. The results show that the population increase and the Gini coefficient decrease play an important role in wealth adjustment. (shrink)

The, classical realist writings of E.H. Carr and constructivist publications of Alexander Wendt are extraordinarily influential. While they have provoked a great number of reactions within the discipline of International Relations, the ethical dimensions of their works have rarely been studied at length. This article seeks to remedy this lack of examination by engaging in an in-depth scrutiny of the moral concerns of these two mainstream International Relations scholars. On investigation, it is revealed that Carr demonstrates a strong commitment to (...) the ethical principle of fairness and Wendt a moral concern for the prevention of the use of organized violence. These concerns are shared by Rawlsians and cosmopolitans in International Relations, and these findings may thereby encourage closer engagement between these diverse communities that rarely speak to one another and strengthen disciplinary research on morals. (shrink)

Known as a revolutionary ideologue and a religious reformer, Ali Shariati’s activities as a translator have not garnered substantial scholarly attention. We reconstruct a history of Shariati’s translations, situating these endeavors at the center of his intellectual project. Shariati’s thought itself, we show, is a form of translation in the service of decolonization. This history reveals a nascent theory of decolonization as open-ended and indeterminate. We advance this claim by staging a conversation between Shariati’s reflections on decolonization and Morad Farhadpour’s (...) evolving concept of thought/translation, a dissident theory of translation influential in contemporary Iran that bears resemblance to Shariati’s performative works. More than an abstruse debate in Iranian intellectual history, these continuities raise questions of pressing concern for postcolonial states, in particular the specificity of local situations as they relate to ongoing global hierarchies. (shrink)

Readers of Hobbes usually take his account of practical deliberation to be a passive process that does not respond to agents’ judgements about what normative reasons they have. This is ostensibly because deliberation is purely conative and/or excludes reasoning, or because Hobbesian reasoning is itself a process in which reasoners merely experience a succession of mental states (e.g. according to purely associative mental structures). I argue to the contrary that for Hobbes deliberation (and hence the basis for voluntary action) is (...) not purely conative and amongst humans it involves reasoning. Furthermore, while non-linguistic reasoning is passive, specifically linguistic reasoning is for Hobbes an active process in which reasoners affirm propositions from which they reason. The historical significance of Hobbes’s new account of agency lies in his attempt, in deploying the tool of language, to weld a materialist determinism to a cognitive account of practical deliberation that can involve reasoning and be reason-responsive. (shrink)

The gods were bored; therefore, they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore, Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.We hate boredom. We create; (...) we play in order to postpone boredom. We search for any possible capacity to play. We created language first and went further then, for literature, metaphor, symbol, and other possibilities in language to defer boredom. Interpretability of language... (shrink)

Humanitarian social enterprises (HSEs) are facing mounting pressure to incorporate social innovation into their practice. This study thus identifies how HSEs leverage organizational capabilities toward developing social innovation. Specifically, it considers how resource scarcity and operating circumstances affect the capabilities used by HSEs for developing social innovation, using a longitudinal case study approach with qualitative data from 12 hunger-relief HSEs operating in the United States. Based on 59 interviews with 31 managers and directors and related documents, several propositions are posited. (...) The findings suggest that resource availability (i.e., scarcity vs. abundance) leads some HSEs to focus on developing social innovation using their collaborative capabilities, while others leverage their absorptive capacity. Further, HSEs adjust their approach to developing social innovation based on whether they are operating in ordinary circumstances (i.e., before the COVID pandemic) or extraordinary ones (i.e., during the COVID pandemic). Interestingly, the findings suggest that the organizational capabilities used by HSEs are adjusted as these enterprises become more familiar with extraordinary operating circumstances. For example, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, resource-scarce HSEs focused on parallel bricolage to develop social innovation. Subsequently, they focused on selective bricolage. The findings offer novel insights by relating the social innovation of social enterprises to crisis management. (shrink)

Many anticosmopolitan Rawlsians argue that since the primary subject of justice is society's basic structure, and since there is no global basic structure, the scope of justice is domestic. This paper challenges the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument by distinguishing three interpretations of what Rawls meant by the basic structure and its relation to justice, corresponding to the cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion theories of distributive justice. On the cooperation theory, it is true that there is no global basic structure, but (...) the basic structure turns out to be only an instrumental condition for realizing justice, and not an existence condition that must be met before demands of justice arise. On the pervasive impact and coercion theories, the basic structure is indeed an existence condition, but there exists a global basic structure. The upshot is that on any plausible interpretation of Rawls's account of the basic structure, Rawlsian justice is global in scope. (shrink)

There are two rival conceptions of power in modern sociopolitical thought. According to one, all social power reduces to power-over-others. According to another, the core notion is power-to-effect-outcomes, to which even power-over reduces. This article defends seven theses. First, agential social power consists in a relation between agent and outcomes (power-to). Second, not all social power reduces to power-over and, third, the contrary view stems from conflating power-over with a distinct notion: power-despite-resistance. Fourth, the widespread assumption that social power presupposes (...) the capacity to overcome resistance is false: social power includes the capacity to effect outcomes with others’ assistance. Fifth, power-with can be exercised via joint intentional action, strategic coordination and non-strategic coordination. Sixth, agential social power is best analysed as a capacity to effect outcomes, with the assistance of others, despite the resistance of yet others. Seventh, power-over and power-with are not mutually exclusive: each can ground the other. (shrink)

According to the special-obligations challenge to the justice argument for more open borders, immigration restrictions to wealthier polities are justified because of special obligations owed to disadvantaged compatriots negatively impacted by the immigration of low-skilled foreign workers. We refute the special-obligations challenge by refuting its empirical premise and draw out the normative implications of the empirical evidence for border policies. We show that immigration to wealthier polities has negligible impact on domestic wages and that only previous cohorts of immigrants are (...) adversely affected. The special-obligations challenge therefore succeeds only if special obligations owed to previous immigrants justify closing borders to further immigration; we argue that they do not. (shrink)

Cultural-nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a pre-political, in-principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nation’s (...) pre-political culture, but it cannot fix cultural-national boundaries pre-politically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is legitimized pre-politically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a pre-political ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory. (shrink)

Feedback such as backchannels and clarification requests often occurs subsententially, demonstrating the incremental nature of grounding in dialogue. However, although such feedback can occur at any point within an utterance, it typically does not do so, tending to occur at Feedback Relevance Spaces. We present a corpus study of acknowledgements and clarification requests in British English, and describe how our low-level, semantic processing model in Dynamic Syntax accounts for this feedback. The model trivially accounts for the 85% of cases where (...) feedback occurs at FRSs, but we also describe how it can be integrated or interpreted at non-FRSs using the predictive, incremental and interactive nature of the formalism. This model shows how feedback serves to continually realign processing contexts and thus manage the characteristic divergence and convergence that is key to moving dialogue forward. (shrink)

Overview of "Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics" to kick off online colloquium on book, with responses by Sandra Field, Michael LeBuffe, and Daniel Eggers, ending with reply from Arash Abizadeh.

According to the democratic borders argument, the democratic legitimacy of a state's regime of border control requires granting foreigners a right to participate in the procedures determining it. This argument appeals to the All-Subjected Principle, which implies that democratic legitimacy requires that all those subject to political power have a right to participate in determining the laws governing its exercise. The scope objection claims that this argument presupposes an implausible account of subjection and hence of the All-Subjected Principle, which absurdly (...) implies that all domestic laws subject foreigners to their requirements. I argue that this objection misconstrues the logical structure of the legal requirements enshrined in domestic laws: domestic laws typically enshrine narrow-scope, not wide-scope, legal requirements. To be sure, some state laws do subject foreigners to their requirements, and the All-Subjected Principle conditions democratic legitimacy on granting foreigners some say in determining them. But the best reading of the Principle does not have such general expansionary implications. (shrink)

We propose a novel framework that formalizes awareness within Relational Quantum Dynamics (RQD) by integrating Integrated Information Theory (IIT) with quantum measurement processes. In our approach, quantum interactions are not merely stochastic events, but are interpreted as intrinsic awareness updates that occur via Bayesian conditioning. Specifically, we define an awareness metric A(A : B) that combines the quantum mutual information generated during an interaction and Φ as a measure of integrated information. By modeling quantum measurements as stochastic processes and determinizing (...) these via outcome indexing, we construct a composite functor that maps probabilistic quantum instruments to deterministic awareness updates in a separate category of awareness states. We show that this functor preserves identities and composition, ensuring that multi-observer scenarios such as nested Wigner’s Friend or Frauchiger-Renner experiments produce a coherent alignment of facts once interactions occur, even though no single truth value exists prior to interaction. We outline experimental proposals, including nested observer experiments, gravitational entanglement tests, and the engineering of artificial observers with tunable integrated information, to test the predictions of our model. Our framework does not alter standard quantum mechanics but enriches its interpretation by positing that every quantum interaction is accompanied by an awareness update whose significance depends on both the amount of exchanged information and the integration capacity of the systems involved. This work provides a mathematically robust bridge between quantum foundations and cognitive science, suggesting that conscious experience may emerge naturally from the dynamics of quantum information. (shrink)

Reading Hobbes in light of both the history of ethics and the conceptual apparatus developed in recent work on normativity, this book challenges received interpretations of Hobbes and his historical significance. Arash Abizadeh uncovers the fundamental distinction underwriting Hobbes's ethics: between prudential reasons of the good, articulated via natural laws prescribing the means of self-preservation, and reasons of the right or justice, comprising contractual obligations for which we are accountable to others. He shows how Hobbes's distinction marks a watershed (...) in the transition from the ancient Greek to the modern conception of ethics, and demonstrates the relevance of Hobbes's thought to current debates about normativity, reasons, and responsibility. His book will interest Hobbes scholars, historians of ethics, moral philosophers, and political theorists. (shrink)

This introduction frames the special issue titled “Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Act of Translation.” Drawing from insights across the collection’s essays, it foregrounds a notion of translation as a transformative act, anchored in Shariati’s mystical ontology, that fosters and sustains anticolonial solidarities. To illustrate, we explore differences and affinities between Shariati and Frantz Fanon with regard to truth-telling, translation, alienation, and subjectivity. The comparison reveals a generative distinction in Shariati’s thought between cultural and existential alienation, “translated intellectuals” and (...) the act of translation. The distinction creates grounds for a vision of anticolonial solidarity responsive to circumstances in postrevolutionary Iran, a vision that reaches beyond the postcolonial state. (shrink)

One way to evaluate electoral rules is instrumental: we ask what effects they tend to produce. A second way is constitutive: we ask what kinds of values they embody, or whether the procedures they effect respect people's rights or moral status. A third way is genetic: we ask by what procedure the electoral rules were adopted. I shall argue that in judging the value or the legitimacy of electoral rules, we must consider not only (1) the values they serve instrumentally (...) and (2) the values, rights, or statuses they embody or respect, but also (3) the procedure by which they were chosen. I argue, moreover, that the best way to choose electoral rules in representative governments is on an ongoing basis via a randomly selected citizen assembly whose decisions are binding independently of any appeal to referenda. (shrink)

RésuméDe nombreux philosophes ont soutenu que l'existence du mal gratuit est la plus sérieuse objection contre l'existence d'un Dieu absolument parfait. Je soutiens que l'idée d'un dilemme moral (ou, plus précisément, d'un dilemmetragique) peut (1) fournir une justification morale pour que Dieu permette l'existence du mal gratuit, ou (2) offrir une théodicée de la tragédie divine pour expliquer pourquoi les maux de ce monde ne sont pas nécessairement gratuits ou, s'ils le sont, pourquoi ils ne peuvent pas fournir une preuve (...) décisive permettant de rejeter l'existence d'un Dieu absolument parfait. (shrink)

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient (...) for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly. (shrink)

It is widely thought that if one cannot effect outcomes without others’ assistance, then one has agential power to effect those outcomes only if one has power over those whose assistance one requires. The corollary is that someone who just happens to find herself amongst people who share her preferences and would be disposed to help effect her preferred outcomes, but over whom she has no power, is lucky, but not thereby more powerful. This view is false. It ignores the (...) independent force of the power of numbers: the agential social power enjoyed by someone who finds herself amongst others disposed to act in concert with her, even if she has no power over them. The power of numbers is the power one may have in virtue of one’s position in social structures that shape preferences. It is the power enjoyed by members of persistent majorities. It is the power of whites in European and European-settler societies in virtue of their position in these societies’ racial structures. Sure, those with numbers on their side are lucky; but that’s just to say they are lucky to be powerful. (shrink)

Our public debate over secularism has suffered from a kind of amnesia about the historical genesis of the modern, secular, and tolerant state. The transition away from the highly intolerant and persecutory regimes of late-medieval and early-modern Europe was greatly facilitated by four important developments. First, Europeans learned that social order and cohesion are threatened less by diversity than by intolerance of diversity. Second, the traditionally paternalist vision of the state’s role was called into question by a new valuation of (...) the individual conscience and consequently of individual liberties. Third, the assumption that the meaning of symbols is objectively determined was replaced by the idea that symbols are intersubjectively determined by convention. Fourth, Europeans began to distinguish two senses of publicity: visibility and representativeness. The proposed Charter of Quebec values harked back to a medieval mindset on all four counts. (shrink)

By the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he was a theist, but not in the sense presumed by either side of the present-day debate concerning the sincerity of his professed theism. On the one hand, Hobbes’s expressed theology was neither merely deistic, nor confined to natural theology: the Hobbesian God is not merely a first mover, but a person who counsels, commands, and threatens. On the other hand, the Hobbesian God’s existence depends on being constructed artificially by human convention. The Hobbesian (...) God is not a natural person; he exists as a person only insofar as he is by fiction represented. Like the state and pagan gods, he is an artificial person by fiction. The upshot is that Hobbes was a sincere theist and that his seventeenth-century critics were right to think that, in their sense, he was an atheist: he did not steadfastly believe in an independently existing deity who precedes human convention. Hobbes was agnostic on this question. He nevertheless believed that God is brought into being as an artificial person. This ‘personal theology’ not only involved a heretical interpretation of the Trinity, it also came to play a significant role in his moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

This article proposes a synthesis of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems—landmark results in mathematical logic—with Relational Quantum Dynamics, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that emphasizes relational properties over absolute states. Gödel’s theorems establish that any sufficiently complex formal system cannot prove all true statements within itself (incompleteness) nor its own consistency. In parallel, quantum mechanics reveals limits through phenomena like contextuality (where measurement outcomes depend on the measurement context) and Bell’s theorem (which rules out local hidden variables). The article uses category theory—a (...) mathematical framework for abstract structures—to formalize these parallels, suggesting that both logic and quantum physics reflect inherent limitations in achieving a single, absolute description of reality. It further incorporates consciousness as a fundamental aspect of RQD, linking it to quantum interactions via information theory. (shrink)