Macroeconomic events often require individuals and policy-makers to make decisions that they are not accustomed to making. For example, a sovereign debt crisis makes it necessary to either default on government debt, increase taxes, cut public spending or to impose a mixture of these measures. I argue that decisions on such matters are not derived from deep preferences; they require reflections and judgement under uncertainty. Past experiences and the interaction with other individuals are likely to influence the salience of preferences (...) in the situations of decision making. Using a simple model, I illustrate how the salience of preferences changes with different degrees of individuality and conformity. Individuality is associated with the importance of private habits, while conformity is related to the perceived dissonance between initial intuitions and social opinions. The results obtained from simple simulation exercises stress that a high degree of conformity or a low degree of individuality may lead to overreactions when social opinion makers err for a short period of time. At the same time, a low degree of conformity or a high degree of individuality or leads to delayed adjustments to new circumstances. (shrink)

Sarah Hutton - Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita, and: The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 261-263 Book Review Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650 Marialuisa Baldi and Guido Canziani. Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita. Milan: Francoangeli, 1999. Pp. 589. L. 68,000. William J. Bouwsma. The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650. (...) New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 288. Cloth, $29.95. The two books under review represent very different approaches to Renaissance philosophy. The collection edited by Marialuisa Baldi and Guido Canziani brings together an international team of twenty-two scholars to scrutinize in close detail a single figure from among the constellation of inventive Italians whose intellectual energies fuelled the Renaissance. The Waning of the Renaissance is a single-viewpoint survey of a European-wide canvas that covers England and France as well as Italy. The subject of Girolamo Cardano is a forgotten philosopher normally only remembered, if at all, by oxymoronic recognition of his brilliance as a mathematician and fame as an astrologer. William J. Bouwsma's book is a broad overview of the mainstream Renaissance. The names that fill his pages are, in the main, the.. (shrink)

A key role in inference is played by randomization, which has been extensively used in clinical trials designs. Randomization is primarily intended to prevent the source of bias in treatment allocation by producing comparable groups. In the frequentist framework of inference, randomization allows also for the use of probability theory to express the likelihood of chance as a source for the difference of end outcome. In the Bayesian framework, its role is more nuanced. The Bayesian analysis of clinical trials can (...) afford a valid rationale for selective controls, pointing out a more limited role for randomization than it is generally accorded. This paper is aimed to offer a view of randomization from the perspective of both frequentist and Bayesian statistics and discussing the role of randomization also in theoretical decision models. (shrink)

The communication process between the political elites and the general public, crucial as it is in a democratie system, is suffering increasingly from an information overlaad. The best way to tackle this problem seems to be the improvement of the communication medium, i.e. ofthe political language. Ideology is the most «rational» political language available : it can carry more information about elite decision-making to a relatively modest cost.This problem-definition suggest a sequence of three critical questions. Do the decisionmakers have a (...) political ideology? If so, is it instrumental in the actual decision-making process? If so, why does this ideological factor rarely reach the general public? The article deals with the two last questions from a format point of view. It can be shown, after the necessary conceptual clarifications and contrary to current opinion, that ideology can hold its own in the private forum of political decision-making and fades away when the elites address the public in the public forum.The private forum is dominated by the need for policy output and by the necessity of coalition-formation. The adaptation of ideology to this situation depends on its degree of articulation and on the type of coalition-formation. In general the «salience» aspect of ideology is likelyto suffer less than its «position» aspect.The public forum is dominated by the needs of recruiting support and legitimizing proposals. Generally ideology is too costly a device to be used for these purposes. (shrink)

Following the distinctions proposed by Gamson and Easton the complex phenomenon of political alienation among the young was empirically subdivided in several dimensions. Within the 'input'dimension of political alienation we distinguished between the ability to process information and the ability to participate. Within the 'output'dimension we distinguished between two referents of distrust, political actors and authorities on the one hand, and the political system on the other. We succeeded in constructing reliable scales for each of these dimensions which were then (...) used as dependent variables in regression models. When turning to the explanation of the phenomenon our attention was focused first and foremost on the cultural factors. This was amply rewarded. Some of the normative aspects of culture, namely 'presenteism' and 'dionysianism', have a significant influence on various dimensions of political alienation. The impact of cognitive aspects appears to be even more significant. This means that an effective policy to counter the rise of political alienation wilt have to cope with a phenomenon solidly embedded in contemporary culture. (shrink)

This contribution should be seen as an attempt to retrieve information from restcategories, such as «does not know» and «no answer». From these, and from other data as well, we constructed 10, mostly summating, indexes of political ignorance. Among them is an index of objective ignorance, that is about political events, persons and situations. The others aim at more subjective dimensions. Does the respondent feel informed about the political process : about government and party performance, partisan congeniality, modalities of voting, (...) local politics social problems, political issues?There seems to be some evidence in favor of the following hypotheses.1. The indexes tend to compensate each other: respondents who score low on one index, do not necessarily score low on the next one.2. I t is difficult to ascertain the validity of an index of objective ignorance. Moreover it does by no means express all the dimensions of political information.3. A mong indexes of subjective ignorance one should distinguish between «policy» and «political» information ; the latter seems to refer to a situation where strictly political rules of the game, a.o. those of political conflict, prevail.4. Of all indexes the «political issues» index showed the most discriminating power, as well as the most expected associations. (shrink)

This essay questions the self-sufficiency of abstract, non-consequentialist, principles as a defence of a libertarian regime. The argument focuses on the difficulties involved in attempts to defend the priority of negative rights if an attractive conception of freedom and an agent-relative view about our reasons to respect rights are to be upheld. The paper closes by suggesting how libertarianism could gain support from various, and perhaps mutually irreducible and even conflicting, considerations in a wide consequentialist system.

Pincione argues that procedural constitutional guarantees of market freedoms best protect individuals from domination. If he is right, Philip Pettit's claim that various forms of state interference with private markets are needed to forestall domination will prove to be unwarranted. Pincione further contends that market freedoms are best protected by procedural rules for political decision-making, as opposed to constitutional guarantees of private property and other substantive rules.Central to his position are claims that the dispersion of economic power precludes domination, and (...) that free entry into markets furthers such dispersion. As against the idea that the state is in a better position to disperse economic power, Pincione argues that the constitutional provisions needed to implement that idea are contestable, and to that extent require interpretive powers that themselves involve domination. Only a constitution that, as a side effect of its procedures for political decision making, generates full private property rights holds out hope of shielding citizens from domination. This is so, because a plurality of suppliers of goods and services is a structural feature of the free market, in a sense of “structural” that matters for measurements of domination based on fairly uncontroversial claims about persons and resources. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est de présenter quelques considérations sur les relations temporelles, stratigraphiques et épistémologiques entre la surface archéologique (et les matériels céramiques collectés pendant les prospections) et les niveaux souterrains (avec leur potentiel informatif). Il ne s’agit pas donc d’une étude archéologique spécifique ou de la discussion d’un problème méthodologique. Mais plutôt d’une réflexion sur les contradictions implicites à certaines approches archéologiques : la lecture linéaire du temps et des évolutions, l’application de notions typiquement occidentales (bien qu’utiles) (...) à des contextes non-occidentaux, ainsi que l’absence d’intérêt archéologique pour la culture matérielle actuelle (sur la surface). La temporalité traditionnelle et linéaire (fondée sur la notion d’une Grande Fracture entre passé et présent, antiquité et « modernité »), est strictement liée aux postulats d’un évolutionnisme linéaire d’empreinte coloniale et crée des apories archéologiques qui peuvent être dépassées par l’adoption d’une temporalité non-linéaire et « aplatie ». Des exemples archéologiques sont brièvement présentés pour montrer le caractère souvent non linéaire des transformations techniques et culturelles et comment la culture matérielle du présent peut être approchée par des méthodes strictement archéologiques. (shrink)

The essay has the aim to analyze the genetic relationship between aesthetic faculties and symbolic performances. The field chosen by the author for his remark is the work of Walter Benjamin, in which the centrality of the subject is detectable both in its first and in its last part. Following the theory of Fabrizio Desideri’s last book La percezione riflessa and trying to apply its results to this specific field, the essay sheds light on the mimetic link between symbol and (...) perception, therefore it results perspicuous the role of aesthetic faculties in the genesis of human symbolism. (shrink)