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A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms—alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and (...) stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment. (shrink)

A half-billion years ago, a few species of single-celled protozoa stumbled irreversibly from loose social interaction into a tight, specialized interdependence. They became multi-celled metazoa, and human beings are one sort. Metazoa greatly transcend their constituent cells in lifetime, abilities, experiences and even materials (like bone). New kind of beings emerged out of the interactions of the old.

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

The mass extinction visited upon us by capitalism involves many kinds of devastation. Here I clarify the grounds for assessing the most obvious of these harms, i.e., decimation of species diversity. The thesis that variety among species has intrinsic value motivates, and in turn follows from, the “variable value view” (VVV) of abundance within any given species. In contrast, standard axiologies have no place for the intrinsic value of species diversity. I show that the VVV provides a better justification than (...) the latter do, of the way in which a widely-used empirical indicator summarizes the overall state of life on Earth. These considerations favor ecocentric value theory – which ascribes intrinsic value to properties of ecological wholes, like species diversity, that do not supervene on the well-being of their constituent organisms – over its main competitors. I conclude by widening the focus from wild nature alone to the biosphere comprising both wilderness and the domesticated realm. This broadened perspective helps to link the science and ethics of biodiversity with the political struggle to extract ourselves from the moral abyss of mass extinction. (shrink)

This volume examines the diversity of new scientific theories of religion, by outlining the logical and causal relationships between these enterprises.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper develops a semantic account of morphological number marking, specifically in the presence of numerals. In addition to accounting for number marking on basic nouns like _book_ in English, the account handles variation in patterns of number marking along two dimensions: cross-linguistically, between languages that either necessitate or prohibit singular morphology in the presence of numerals greater than ‘one’; and within one and the same language on the various nominal elements in English. Building off the presuppositional approach to morphological (...) number from Sauerland (Proc SALT 13:258–275, 2003), the proposed semantics accounts for both sorts of variation by assuming flexibility in the selection of the measure relevant to the one-ness presupposition of the morphological singular form. (shrink)

We discuss mathematical and physical arguments against continuity and in favor of discreteness, with particular emphasis on the ideas of Émile Borel.

This paper presents a case study of the English noun amount, a word that ostensibly relies on measurement in its semantics, yet stands apart from other quantizing nouns on the basis of its existential interpretation. John ate the amount of apples that Bill ate does not mean John and Bill ate the same apples, but rather that they each ate apples in the same quantity. Amount makes reference to abstract representations of measurement, that is, to degrees. Its existential interpretation evidences (...) the fact that degrees contain information about the objects that instantiate them. Outside the domain of nominal measurement, the noun kind exhibits behavior strikingly similar to that of amount; both yield an existential interpretation. This observation motivates re-conceiving of degrees as nominalized quantity-uniform properties—the same sort of entity as kinds. Thus, the semantic machinery handling kinds also handles degrees: as nominalized properties, degrees are instantiated by objects that hold the corresponding property; when instantiated by real-world objects, degrees deliver the existential interpretation. (shrink)

Many supporters of ‘moral bioenhancement’ (MBE), the use of biomedical interventions for moral improvement, have been criticised for having unrealistic proposals. The interventions they suggest have often been called infeasible and their implementation plans vague or unethical. I dispute these criticisms by showing that various interventions to implement MBE are practically and ethically feasible enough to warrant serious consideration. Such interventions include transcranial direct current stimulation over the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, as well as supplementation with lithium and omega-3. (...) Considering their efficacy and feasibility, it is strange that these interventions have rarely been proposed or discussed as MBE. I review evidence that each of those interventions can reduce antisocial behaviour, reduce racial bias, increase executive function or increase prosocial traits like fairness and altruism. I then specify and defend realistic, ethically permissible ways to implement these interventions, especially for violent offenders and public servants—the former as rehabilitation and the latter to meet the high standards of their occupations. These interventions could be given to violent offenders in exchange for a reduced sentence or compulsorily in some cases. Potential intervention methods for non-prisoners include increasing the USDA-recommended dose of omega-3, encouraging food companies to supplement their products with omega-3 or trace lithium, requiring MBE for employment as a police officer or political leader, and insurance companies providing discounts for undergoing MBE. In some reasonably limited form, using these interventions may be a good first step to implement the project of MBE. (shrink)

Seeking to reassess Plato's views on how we might investigate and explain the natural world, this book argues that many of the common charges against Plato (disinterest, ignorance, dismissal of observation) are unfounded, and that Plato had a series of important and cogent criticisms of the early atomists and other physiologoi. His views on science, and on astronomy and cosmology in particular, develop in interesting ways. It also argues that Plato can best be seen as someone who is struggling with (...) the foundations of scientific realism, and that he has interesting epistemological, cosmological and nomological reasons for his teleological approach. (shrink)

This article examines a questioning strategy in trial crossexamination designed to control an evasive witness, and how that control functions through the interactive contours of verbal and visual conduct to index identity, construct multidimensional forms of participation and project intertextual relations. In the process of nailing down an answer, attorney and witness manipulate linguistic ideologies and project participations of power to calibrate the epistemological criteria for determining the legitimacy of legal realities. I demonstrate how indexical iconicities of trial dialogic form (...) emerge as a contested ritual of truth in the situated details of multimodal discursive practices. (shrink)

Looks at Plato's theory of the cosmos, as well as what earlier Greeks thought of the makeup of the universe. Original.

While euthanasia and assisted suicide have been the subject of continuing public debate, few studies have examined the attitudes of relevant patient groups. This study systematically reviews the research literature on patients’ attitudes from 1989 to 2003, to i) identify the number of studies, ii) evaluate study methods and measures, and iii) examine prevalence of favourable attitudes. A systematic search was undertaken across five databases. Methods of the 21 studies identified varied considerably. General support for euthanasia and assisted suicide was (...) substantial across patient groups, with lower support for these as a personal option. The cancer / terminally ill / palliative care patient group had the lowest median general support for euthanasia (60% [IQ1=47, IQ3=65]) and assisted suicide (50% [IQ1=38, IQ3=71]), while the general/older/younger patient group had the lowest median personal preference for these (18% [IQ1=14, IQ3=27]). The effect of question context on level of support was unclear, due to the variety and number of contexts used across questions. There is still work that needs to be done in this controversial area before any robust conclusions can be made concerning the attitudes of patients to euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the adoption of a minimum set of standard questions would enhance this work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WORKS OF FICTION AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS by Gregory Currie ii O peech act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what ficOtion is." So says Kendall Walton.1 My purpose here is to showjust how wrong diis judgment is. Not that I want to endorse all die attempts there have been to connect fiction with the notion of a speech act. Elsewhere I have argued diat the most prominent attempt (...) at such a theory, the one due to John Searle, fails.2 But my complaint is not mat Searle employs the idea of a speech act; rather it is that he employs it in too half-hearted a fashion. The idea of Searle and odiers is diat to write fiction is not to perform a speech act, but rather to pretend to do so. I, on the odier hand, take the view that the writer of fiction engages in an act of speech diat is distinctively fictional, and distinctively different from speech acts such as asserting, requesting, questioning, and so forth. What follows is a much simplified account of this idea.3 Following die program of Strawson and Grice, I believe diat the different kinds of speech acts are to be individuated in terms of the utterer's intentions.4 The intention of the one who asserts is to get a certain kind of response; perhaps to get the audience to believe the proposition asserted.5 The one who commands wants the audience to obey, die requester wants the audience to answer, etc. And in all these cases the utterer intends to get the response partly as a result of the audience's recognition of diat very intention. (This is the familiar Gricean mechanism.) The utterer of fiction, on the odier hand, wants to get the audience to make-believe die proposition uttered.6 Thus we have an act structurally similar to 304 Gregory Currie305 paradigmatic speech acts like asserting, commanding, and requesting (die structural similarity being given by the use in all cases of the Gricean intention ), but differing from diese odiers with respect to die content of the utterer's intention. Let us call such an act a.fictive illocutionary act. Pursuing this line in more detail leads to an intuitively satisfactory taxonomy of speech acts which places the uttering (usually writing) of fiction fully widiin die purview of the theory, rather dian shutting it off to one side as a pseudo-performance, as widi Searle. Is such a theory susceptible to the objections diat Walton brings? Walton is quite right to say (and here I suppose he has Searle in mind) that fiction is not simply the absence ofillocutionary force: "it is something positive, something special" (p. 79). As already indicated, my theory gives a positive account of fiction as a special kind of speech act. But Walton presses the issue further by suggesting that the essence of fiction has nodiing to do with die absence of assertive force. It is possible, he says, "to make an assertion by writing fiction." His point is not merely that fictional stories are sometimes told in order to get across some serious but not explicit point — everyone can agree to that. It is rather diat fictional works contain explicit assertions — e.g., some of Tolstoy's sentences about Napoleon in War and Peace — and that a fiction might contain nothing but assertions. He imagines a genre of historical fiction in which "authors are allowed no liberties with the facts, and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write" (p. 80). Let us grant that this is a possibility. What, dien, would distinguish a piece of fiction belonging to this genre from, say, a work of historical scholarship? The answer comes when we see that the same utterance can be used to perform more than one illocutionary act. Thus if I say to someone "I have no money" it may be that I want him both to believe that I have no money and to give me the goods on credit. And in both cases I intend to get die desired responses via his recognition of my intentions. The same utterance can count both as an assertion... (shrink)

Introduction "reading a mute history": Ernst Cassirer, the Marburg School and the crises of modern Germany -- The Marburg School and the politics of science in Germany -- The twentieth-century conflict of the faculties: the Marburg School and the reform of the sciences -- Cassirer and the Marburg School in the administrative and political context of the Kaiserreich -- "The supreme principles of knowledge": Cassirer's transformation of the tenets of Cohen's infinitesimal method (1882) and system of philosophy (1902-1912) -- Critical (...) science and modernity -- Leibniz and the foundation of critical science: Leibniz's system in its scientific foundations -- Science and history in Cassirer"s substance and function -- Liberal democracy and law -- Liberalism and the conflict of forms: the knowledge problem (1906-1940) and freedom and form -- Law as science and the "coming-into-being" of natural right in Cohen, Cassirer and Kelsen -- Conclusion critical science, the future of humanity and the riddle of an essay on man. (shrink)

Classical or Patañjala Yoga diagnoses die human conditon as state of suffering caused by ignorance whose specific form is misidentification of self with psychophysical nature. This paper argues that liberation in Yoga is healing in an ultimate sense, i.e., attainment of well-being with respect to the person's fundamental nature and soteriological potential. Vyāsa's Yogabhasya presents the yogic remedy in terms of a medical model, and this paper excavates the therapeutic paradigm of the Yogasūtras using concept of health distilled from the (...) Āyurvedic medical text Caraka-saṁhitā. Determinants of health according to Āyurveda include wholeness, self-identit), and freedom, and these concepts are utilized to ground the claim that in classical Yoga, liberation is healing: curing the dysfunction and consequent suffering of one's psychophysical self, which is coextensive with realization of one's true Self as consciousness. (shrink)

In this article, I expand upon Slavoj Zižek’s “anamorphic” reading of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. In this reading, Zižek distinguishes between the film’s ostensible narrative structure, the “foreground,” as he calls it, and the “background,” wherein the social and spiritual dissolution endemic to Cuaron’s dystopian England draws the viewer into a recognition of the dire conditions plaguing the post-9/11, post-Iraq invasion, neoliberal world. The foreground plots the conventional trajectory of the main character Theo from ordinary, disaffected man to self-sacrificing (...) hero, one whose martyrdom might pave the way for a new era of regeneration. According to Zižek, in this context the foreground merely entertains, while propagating some well-worn clichés about heroic individualism as demonstrated through Hollywood’s generic conventions of an action-adventure/political thriller/science-fiction film. Zižek contends that these conventions are essential to the revelation of the film’s progressive politics, as “the fate of the individual hero is the prism through which … [one] see[s] the background even more sharply.” Zižek’s framing of Theo merely as a “prism” limits our understanding of the film by not taking into account its status as an adaptation of P.D. James’ The Children of Men. This article offers such an account by interpreting the differences between the film and its literary source as one informed by the transition from Cold War to post-9/11 neoliberal conceptions of identity and politics. To articulate the terms of this argument and its implications, I turn to another narrative depicting the identity and politics at the end of history, Francis Fukuyama’s infamous The End of History and the Last Man, published the same year as James’ novel, both offering meditations on the Cold War and speculations on its aftermath. Incorporating these two texts into Zižek’s anamorphic paradigm contributes to our understanding of the film’s message regarding the “state of things” during the post-9/11 era, as well as the Cold War era that preceded it, as perceived through the eyes of Theo adapted to suit the respective dystopian conditions of the novel and film. (shrink)

This essay on Richard Miller’s Friends and Other Strangers (2016) locates its arguments in the context of how the practice of religious ethics bears upon debates about normativity in the study of religion and the cultural turn in the humanities. After reviewing its main claims about identity and otherness, I focus on three areas. First, while commending Miller’s effort to analogize virtuous empathy with Augustine’s ethics of rightly ordered love, I raise questions about his use of Augustine and his distinctive (...) formulation of Augustinian “iconic realism.” Second, I suggest his discussion of public reason is at odds with the dialogical spirit of the book and may distract from the democratic solidarity required by our political moment. Third, more briefly, I highlight the practical implications of Miller’s vision for higher education at both the graduate and undergraduate level. (shrink)