Unethical research practices are prevalent in China, but little research has focused on the causes of these practices. Drawing on the criminology literature on organisational deviance, as well as the concept of cengceng jiama, which illustrates the increase of pressure in the process of policy implementation within a top-down bureaucratic hierarchy, this article develops an institutional analysis of research misconduct in Chinese universities. It examines both universities and the policy environment of Chinese universities as contexts for research misconduct. Specifically, this (...) article focuses on China’s Double First-Class University Initiative and its impact on elite universities that respond to the policy by generating new incentive structures to promote research quality and productivity as well as granting faculties and departments greater flexibility in terms of setting high promotion criteria concerning research productivity. This generates enormous institutional tensions and strains, encouraging and sometimes even compelling individual researchers who wish to survive to decouple their daily research activities from ethical research norms. This article is written based on empirical data collected from three elite universities as well as a review of policy documents, universities’ internal documents, and news articles. (shrink)

This study investigated the impact of transformational leadership on affective organizational commitment and job performance with the mediating role of employee engagement. This study gathered data from 845 hotel employees in China and the structural equation modeling technique was used to verify the results. The findings indicated that transformational leadership has a positive effect on affective organizational commitment and job performance. Meanwhile, results showed that employee engagement partially mediates in the relationship between transformational leadership, affective organizational commitment, and job performance. (...) This study contributes to the research on transformational leadership in the Chinese hospitality sector and analyzes its effects on work performance metrics. Furthermore, theoretical and practical implications were also discussed in this article. (shrink)

Compared to constraint-based causal discovery, causal discovery based on functional causal models is able to identify the whole causal model under appropriate assumptions [Shimizu et al. 2006; Hoyer et al. 2009; Zhang and Hyvärinen 2009b]. Functional causal models represent the effect as a function of the direct causes together with an independent noise term. Examples include the linear non-Gaussian acyclic model, nonlinear additive noise model, and post-nonlinear model. Currently, there are two ways to estimate the parameters in the models: dependence (...) minimization and maximum likelihood. In this article, we show that for any acyclic functional causal model, minimizing the mutual information between the hypothetical cause and the noise term is equivalent to maximizing the data likelihood with a flexible model for the distribution of the noise term. We then focus on estimation of the PNL causal model and propose to estimate it with the warped Gaussian process with the noise modeled by the mixture of Gaussians. As a Bayesian nonparametric approach, it outperforms the previous one based on mutual information minimization with nonlinear functions represented by multilayer perceptrons; we also show that unlike the ordinary regression, estimation results of the PNL causal model are sensitive to the assumption on the noise distribution. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data support our theoretical claims. (shrink)

Asia is now home to some 800 million multilingual speakers of English, more than the total number of native English speakers, and how they use English is continuously evolving and changing to reflect their cultural backgrounds and everyday experiences. Can English, therefore, be considered an Asian language? Drawing upon the Asian Corpus of English, this book will be the first comprehensive account of the roles, uses and features of English in Asia, encompassing several different varieties of Asian English. Chapters cover (...) the distinctive linguistic features of English in different settings, such as in law, religion and popular culture, as well as the use of local rhetorical, pragmatic and cultural styles and its use as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals. It will also examine the role of English in education - from primary through to higher education - and consider the implications of this for other languages of Asia. (shrink)

Epistemic protocols are communication protocols aiming at transfer of knowledge in a controlled way. Typically, the preconditions or goals for protocol actions depend on the knowledge of agents, often in nested form. Informal epistemic protocol descriptions for muddy children, coordinated attack, dining cryptographers, Russian cards, secret key exchange are well known. The contribution of this paper is a formal study of a natural requirement on epistemic protocols, that the contents of the protocol can be assumed to be common knowledge. By (...) formalizing this requirement we can prove that there can be no unbiased deterministic protocol for the Russian cards problem. For purposes of our formal analysis we introduce an epistemic protocol language, and we show that its model checking problem is decidable. (shrink)

Ben shu nei rong bao kuo:zhong hua min zu dao de sheng huo zong lun,Yuan gu zhi zhan guo dao de sheng huo de ji ben zhuang kuang,Dao de guan xi ji wu zhong ji ben lun chang de que li,Li yi gui fan he li wen hua de xing qi yu hong yang,De hua tian xia yu dao de jiao yu zhi kai zhan deng.

本志编纂以辩证唯物主义和历史唯物主义为指导, 力求客观、科学地记述孟子及其思想学说, 以及与孟子有密切关系的人、事、物.

Pragmatic Scientific Realism (PSR) urges us to take up the realist aim or the goal of truth although we have good reason to think that the goal can neither be attained nor approximated. While Newton-Smith thinks that pursuing what we know we cannot achieve is clearly irrational, Rescher disagrees and contends that pursuing an unreachable goal can be rational on pragmatic grounds—if in pursuing the unreachable goal one can get indirect benefits. I have blocked this attempt at providing a pragmatic (...) justification for the realist aim of PSR on precisely the same pragmatic grounds—since there is a competing alternative to PSR, and the alternative can provide whatever indirect benefits PSR can offer while being less risky than it is, prudential reasoning favours the alternative to PSR. This undermines the pragmatic case for the realist aim of science since the instrumentalist alternative does not aim at the truth. (shrink)

In past decades, the subject atmosphere and mood has gone beyond the physio-meteorological and psychological scopes and become a new direction of aesthetics which concerns two sides of the same phenomenon. As the primary sensuous reality constructed by both the perceiving subject and the perceived object, atmosphere and mood are neither a purely subjective state nor an objective thing. Atmosphere is essentially a quasi-object pervaded by a specific affective quality and a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our outer life (...) experiences, while mood is a quasi-subject pervaded by specific objective quality and thus a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our inner life experiences. A practical dimension is thereby, from the outset, embedded in the consideration of both concepts. This is mainly characterized by actions and, correspondingly, ethical aspects, which concern the design and creation of atmosphere and thus the triggering of mood through works of art. Here, on the one hand, the process of artistic formation, long neglected in the European tradition, is given prominence as an aesthetic practice, and on the other hand, an interactive dialogue is effectively established between the artist, the work and the viewer. Due to the fact that atmosphere and mood, both as in-between, emphasize the interaction of the perceiver and the perceived from two sides, here the decisive question is: in what kind of environment do we live or participate and in what way do we experience it? The focus of aesthetics is now not on the conventional issue whether the environment is beautiful or gives us a sense of beauty, but on how the environment influences our feeling of being there (Befinden) through our own sensuality. Such an approach would contribute to a critical transformation in aesthetic methodology, namely from the ontological and/or epistemological what to the phenomenological and anthropological how. -/- The tension between atmosphere and mood, as revealed here, opens up a large space for exploring a new understanding of aesthetics. On this basis the special issue pursued to diversify this discussion on an international level. (shrink)

In addition to the classical mode of classroom philosophy education that focuses on the history of philosophical thinking, methods of “doing” and “using” philosophy, including philosophical practice and philosophical drama can also form part of philosophy education. Such thinking and language exercises are introduced into activities of the academic philosophy cafe, Inner Mongolia University’s 1957 Coffee. Based on core activities of the philosophy cafe as well as the concept of “language game”, an additional language training project is being designed for (...) bilingual participants and language learners, especially for students in secondary education. A two-pronged approach of linguistic and philosophical foci encourages learners to sharpen their minds to the use of languages in the academic world. (shrink)

Pragmatic theological realism (PTR) urges us to take up the realist aim of theology or the goal of truth although we have good reason to think that the goal can neither be attained nor approximated. Rescher contends that pursuing an unreachable goal can be rational on pragmatic grounds so long as pursuing the unreachable goal yields indirect benefits. I have blocked this attempt at providing a pragmatic justification for the realist aim of PTR on precisely the same pragmatic grounds: since (...) there is a competing alternative to PTR and the alternative can provide whatever indirect benefits PTR can offer while being less risky than it is, prudential reasoning favours the alternative to PTR. This undermines the pragmatic case for the realist aim of theology since the instrumentalist alternative does not aim at the truth. (shrink)

According to Hitchcock and Sober’s argument from overfitting for weak predictivism, the fact that a theory accurately predicts a portion of its data is evidence that it has been formulated by balancing simplicity and goodness-of-fit rather than overfitting data. The core argument consists of two likelihood inequalities. In this paper I show that there is a surprising accommodation-friendly implication in their argument, and contend that it is beset by a substantial difficulty, namely, there is no good reason to think that (...) their second likelihood inequality is true. (shrink)

Lipton contends that the no-miracle argument is illegitimate, because it fails to adduce new evidence beyond that cited by scientists for their theories. The debate on this issue between Lipton and Psillos has focussed on whether there is a construal of the no-miracle argument in relation to first-order scientific inferences that can yield new evidence. I move away from this focus without taking sides, and argue that the no-miracle argument, on its two popular interpretations, is as legitimate, cogent, and useful (...) an inductive argument for scientific realism as first-order scientific inferences to the best explanation even if it does not add to scientific evidence. (shrink)

In Practical Philosophy Education, besides the learning of conceptual knowledge and working with an introspective method, students are actively engaged whereby they are played in a new form as a language game. The negative attitudes and the pretending performances were revised from the exercise of answering questions to asking question, and then to continue asking. 1957 Coffee proposes the “cross-questioning” model of using knowledge to play the “game” of philosophy. This playing experience is passed down intellectually in the form of (...) language game, which is to be replayed sentimentally in a theater game. As a pedagogic, the previous philosophical activities are exemplified in the younger generation’s way of learning and “replaying”. As a lifestyle, the historical classical thinking is continued, while the old games of philosophers are played with new and refreshing rules. (shrink)

This paper shows that the semantics of shenme ‘what’ in Chinese bare conditionals may exhibit a phenomenon of double quantification. I argue that such double quantification can be nicely accounted for if one adopts Carlson's (1977a, b) semantics of bare plurals and verb meanings as well as the following two assumptions: (i) shenme ‘what’ can be a proform of bare NPs and hence has the same kind of denotation as bare NPs, and (ii) Chinese bare NPs are names of kinds (...) of things. This analysis of Chinese bare conditionals lends support to Carlson's approach to bare plurals despite Wilkinson's (1991) criticisms. I also show that an extension of Heim's (1987) analysis of what as ‘something of kind x’ to Chinese shenme ‘what’ encounters problems when shenme ‘what’ is a shared constituent of a predicate which applies to kinds and another predicate which applies to objects. (shrink)