In the Lambek calculus of order 2 we allow only sequents in which the depth of nesting of implications is limited to 2. We prove that the decision problem of provability in the calculus can be solved in time polynomial in the length of the sequent. A normal form for proofs of second order sequents is defined. It is shown that for every proof there is a normal form proof with the same axioms. With this normal form we can give (...) an algorithm that decides provability of sequents in polynomial time. (shrink)

We present a new axiomatization of the non-associative Lambek calculus. We prove that it takes polynomial time to reduce any non-associative Lambek categorial grammar to an equivalent context-free grammar. Since it is possible to recognize a sentence generated by a context-free grammar in polynomial time, this proves that a sentence generated by any non-associative Lambek categorial grammar can be recognized in polynomial time.

It is tempting to think that, if a person's beliefs are coherent, they are also likely to be true. This truth conduciveness claim is the cornerstone of the popular coherence theory of knowledge and justification. Erik Olsson's new book is the most extensive and detailed study of coherence and probable truth to date. Setting new standards of precision and clarity, Olsson argues that the value of coherence has been widely overestimated. Provocative and readable, Against Coherence will make stimulating reading (...) for epistemologists and anyone with a serious interest in truth. (shrink)

Environmental, social and ethical issues have become increasingly important for businesses due to changed customer expectations, more regulation and stakeholder pressure, amongst others. This led to the development of concepts such as sustainability management, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder management and business ethics. Though mostly developed in isolation, scholars have increasingly worked on their integration. This editorial sheds light on overlaps between these concepts. We find that sustainability management and CSR have become more integrated and are increasingly grounded in an “embedded (...) view“ in which business and society is part of the natural environment. In contrast, business ethics has not been integrated to the same extent, expect for the subfield of environmental ethics. After this general overview, we introduce the individual contributions to the special issue which are advancing the conceptual and empirical foundation of sustainability management, CSR, and business ethics. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that storing predictive relations between two events in memory as bi-directional associations does not require conscious awareness of this relation, whereas the formation of unidirectional associations that capture the direction of the relation does. This study reports a set of experiments demonstrating that unidirectional associations can be formed even when awareness of the relation is actively prevented, if attention is “tuned” to process predictive relations. When participants engaged in predicting targets based on cues in an unrelated (...) task before the actual acquisition phase, unidirectional associations were formed during this acquisition phase even though E1 was presented subliminally. This suggests that although processing the relation between events may often be accompanied by awareness of this relation, awareness is not a prerequisite for the formation of unidirectional associations. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that one can have the feeling of being the cause of an action’s outcome, even in the absence of a prior intention to act. That is, experienced self-agency over behavior increases when outcome representations are primed outside of awareness, prior to executing the action and observing the resulting outcome. Based on the notion that behavior can be represented at different levels, we propose that priming outcome representations is more likely to augment self-agency experiences when the primed representation (...) corresponds with a person’s behavior representation level. Three experiments, using different priming and self-agency tasks, both measuring and manipulating the level of behavior representation, confirmed this idea. Priming high level outcome representations enhanced experienced self-agency over behavior more strongly when behavior was represented at a higher level, rather than a lower level. Thus, priming effects on self-agency experiences critically depend on behavior representation level. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive account of what it means to try to quantify health in distributing resources for health care. It examines the concept of QALYs which supposedly makes it more accurate to talk about life in terms of both quality and quantity of years lived when referring to health care policy. It offers an elegant new approach to comparing the costs and benefits of medical interventions. Cost-Utility Analysis is a method designed by economists to aid decision makers distribute (...) scarce resources to areas of health care where they will yield the greatest benefits. Erik Nord questions the feasibility of measuring patients' quality of life meaningfully in numerical terms, as CUA presupposes. He presents an alternative approach called cost-value analysis in which representative samples of the general public express preferences between different health-care programs. In this approach, subjects are allowed to include concerns for fairness that go beyond concerns for efficiency of conventional health economics. (shrink)

Affect misattribution occurs when affective cues color subsequent unrelated evaluations. Research suggests that affect misattribution decreases when one is aware that affective cues are unrelated to the evaluation at hand. We propose that affect misattribution may even occur when one is aware that affective cues are irrelevant, as long as the source of these cues seems ambiguous. When source ambiguity exists, affective cues may freely influence upcoming unrelated evaluations. We examined this using an adapted affect misattribution procedure where pleasant and (...) unpleasant responses served as affective cues that could influence later evaluations of unrelated targets. These affective cues were either perceived as reflecting a single source , or as reflecting two sources suggesting source ambiguity. Results show that misattribution of affect decreased when participants perceived affective cues as representing one source rather than two. (shrink)

Using a new method, we examined whether incidental perception of need-rewarding (positive) objects unintentionally prepares motor action. Participants who varied in their level of need for water were presented with glasses of water (and control objects) that were accompanied by go and no-go cues that required a response (key-press) or withholding a response. Importantly, if need-rewarding objects unintentionally prepare action, presentation of no-go cues should lead to motor inhibition of these prepared motor impulses. Consistent with this hypothesis, results showed that (...) participants relatively high in need for water (and hence, who perceive water as a rewarding, positive object) were slower to react to a successive action probe after withholding a response during perception of water than during perception of the control object, suggesting motor inhibition of unintentionally prepared motor impulses. We propose that incidental perception of need-rewarding objects unintentionally potentiates preparation of motor action to these objects. (shrink)

This volume develops new conceptual and theoretical directions in the study of religion, conflict, and violence through a sharp focus on materiality, drawing upon two previously unrelated fields of scholarship: research on religion and conflict and the material turn within religious studies.

The results of an empirical study intoperceptions of the treatment of farm animals inthe Netherlands are presented. A qualitativeapproach, based on in-depth interviews withmeat livestock farmers and consumers was chosenin order to assess motivations behindperceptions and to gain insight into the waypeople deal with possible discrepancies betweentheir perceptions and their daily practices.Perceptions are analyzed with the help of aframe of reference, which consists ofvalues, norms, convictions, interests, andknowledge.

Background: Spasticity following a stroke occurs in about 30% of patients. The mechanisms underlying this disorder, however, are not well understood. Method: This review aims to define spasticity, describe hypotheses explaining its development after a stroke, give an overview of related neuroimaging studies as well as a description of the most common scales used to quantify the degree of spasticity and finally explore which treatments are currently being used to treat this disorder.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 327-368.

This chapter contains sections titled: Frankfurt's Meno Challenge Reliabilist Solutions Frankfurt's Puzzle about Bullshit A Social Epistemology Perspective References.

The Peter Principle states that employees tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. In a sophisticated simulation study, Pluchino et al confirmed a version of the principle. However, they also noted that their model has the counterintuitive consequence that “the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members”. We argue that what promotion rule is (...) used can in general influence employee productivity. Accommodating this psychological aspect of promotion is noted as an open problem by Pluchino et al. Using an amended simulation model we verify that if the incentive induced by promoting the best is strong enough, then that strategy will be optimal. In a final simulation experiment we consider the effect on the efficiency of an organization of using “double standard” promotion strategies, i.e., strategies that depend on the official promotion rule being different from the de facto promotion rule. We show that double standard promotion strategies can be highly efficient, although we also note that in using such strategies the employer may take an unacceptable medium to long term risk. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 51 Heft: 1 Seiten: 449-460.

The EU is often considered to be a unique entity. This assertion rests on assessments of its institutional character more than on assessments of its social constituency, i.e., the structure of demands and expectations that citizens and groups place on the EU. Establishing the character of the latter is important both to understand the EU as polity and to understand its democratic deficit. It is also of theoretical interest given the increased focus on recognition politics, not only within nation-states but (...) also within the transnational realm. This article develops a conceptual-methodological framework with a set of structured tests so as to permit us to establish the character of the EU’s social constituency. This framework combines a philosophical approach to recognition with a sociological approach to contentious politics. A central element is the notion of ‘recognition order’, and the article briefly examines whether the EU might be said to make up a unique recognition order. (shrink)

This is a remarkable book on an important theme, namely, knowing ourselves, which the author elaborates in three meditations. The first is devoted to the virtues and vices of the tongue, that is, the relationship between truth and deceit. It is in this chapter that irony, the central concept of the book, is most fully elaborated. The second has war as its central theme and deals first and foremost with the possibility of civilizing war. Is there any sanity in war? (...) In the last meditation, a bunch of related questions are treated that boil down to the role of security, prosperity, happiness, and pleasure in life. Each of the three meditations is a fine and erudite examination wherein the author tries to unravel an... (shrink)

Recent years (pre-Obama) of transatlantic rifts should not deceive us into ignoring the great attraction that the United States has exerted, and continues to exert, on Europeans. This article, first, seeks to uncover the normative assumptions that underpin the US as an exemplar or polity model for the EU, as seen from a European perspective. Second, it briefly considers whether the traits that Europeans find attractive about the US as a polity model have much real bearing on the EU, not (...) in terms of how Europeans would want the EU to be but in terms of how the EU presently is. The point is to get a sense of the empirical distance that Europeans would have to travel if they were to transpose what they find attractive about the US to the EU. Are the features Europeans hold up as attractive about the US also available in Europe? These two undertakings set the stage for the third and most original, endeavour, which is to consider whether there are entities that are more compatible with what we currently find in Europe. The case singled out here is another American state, namely Canada. A clarification and critical assessment of what is referred to here as ‘Europe’s American Dream’ are intended to serve as a kind of mirror for Europeans to consider whether the European project is: (a) one of emulating the US; (b) a unique experiment; or (c) an EU that is closer to Canada than the US. If the reality of Canada is more proximate to the reality of the EU, should then Canada instead serve as Europe’s American Dream? (shrink)

The author places Herzen's view of history in the context of the development of West European political philosophy—in particular, the concepts of "open history" and "historicism.".

"For at kunne leve og virke og for at kunne planlægge vort eget liv på længere sigt, må vi tage stilling til livets tre hovedproblemer: Hvad kan vi vide? Hvad tør vi håbe? Og hvad skal vi gøre? Det er netop disse problemer, de store filosoffer har tænkt igennem langt mere dybtgående og grundigt, end man sædvanligvis har mulighed for at gøre det." I en vis forstand er vi alle sammen filosoffer, for vi har alle et bestemt livssyn, om vi (...) er klar over det eller ej. Professor i filosofi Svend Erik Stybes bog beskriver ikke blot forskellige livssyn, som er opstået gennem filosofihistorien i løbet af de sidste mange århundreder. Han giver også en definition af begrebet livssyn, som de fleste vil kunne relatere til og få til at give mening i forhold til deres eget liv. Bogen "De store tænkere og vort livssyn" fra 1963 henvender sig til enhver, der har interesse for livets store og små spørgsmål og forskellige filosoffer og idéhistorikeres tilgang dertil. Svend Erik Stybe (1919-1995) var en dansk idéhistoriker og forfatter, der udgav et væld af bøger om både dansk og europæisk filosofi- og idéhistorie gennem de sidste mange hundrede år. Han skrev blandt andet bøger til brug i undervisning i idéhistorie på gymnasiet og universitetet, opslagsværker om filosofi og idéhistorie samt bøger om specifikke filosoffer som Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke og Baruch de Spinoza. Svend Erik Stybe blev udnævnt til professor i filosofi ved Københavns Universitet i 1970, hvor han forblev frem til sin pension i 1989. (shrink)