Recent research suggests that individuals from East Asian and Western cultures differ in the degree to which they hold a folk world view known as naïve dialecticism, which is characterized by tolerance for contradiction, expectation of change, and cognitive holism. The current research utilizes the Mouse Paradigm to investigate the dynamic nature of naïve dialecticism in real time by measuring individuals’ fluctuations in judgment during the process of contemplation. The results showed cultural differences in dynamic measures of evaluation process: Japanese (...) participants took more time to stabilize their thought and showed more fluctuations in their judgment than American participants. These cultural differences were fully mediated by individual differences in levels of naïve dialecticism as measured by the level of dialectical self-views. Implications for cultural psychology and the psychology of dialectical thinking are discussed. (shrink)

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

Studies suggest that emotional complexity—the experience of positive and negative emotion in response to the same event—is unusual in Western samples. However, recent research finds that the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotion during unstructured situations is more common among East Asians than Westerners, consistent with theories emphasising the prevalence of dialectical folk epistemology in East-Asian culture. The present study builds upon previous research by examining Asian- and European-Americans' experience of a particular positive emotion—love—and a situationally appropriate negative emotion during (...) four structured laboratory conversations with their romantic partner. Among Asian Americans, love and the experience of negative emotion were typically less negatively correlated during these conversations than was true for European Americans. (shrink)

Our current work seeks to provide direct empirical evidence on whether Chinese international students’ experiences studying abroad promote dialectical thinking. We collected behavioral data from 258 Chinese international students studying in multiple regions. We found that there was a main effect among the four conditions. More specifically, when primed with studying abroad or typical day, participants were more likely to show tolerance for contradiction by deeming both sides of contradictory scientific statements as convincing and rating them more favorably. Therefore, it (...) is plausible that Chinese international students’ experiences studying abroad promote their dialectical thinking. More work is needed to further this line of research by extending these effects with other measures of dialectical thinking such as perception of interconnectedness and prediction of change, adopting differing paradigms to provide more robust findings, and probing the underlying processes as to why experiences studying abroad promote dialectical thinking. (shrink)

Who can feel both happy and sad at the same time, but not discomfort? This study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in mixed emotional experiences induced by conflict stimuli among American and Chinese undergraduate students. In total, 160 Americans and 158 Chinese watched two different valence advertisements (one predominantly positive and the other predominantly negative) that elicited mixed emotions; their feelings were assessed through self-reported measures. Findings indicated the impact that cultural differences have in people’s mixed emotional experiences depends (...) on the emotional components of the mixed emotional situations. The Americans and Chinese both experience a comparably intense mixture of emotions in different valence situations, but their discomfort toward conflicting stimuli is different. Further, dialectical thinking may be a mechanism behind the influence of cultural differences in people’s mixed emotional experiences. Implications for emotion theory and research are discussed. (shrink)

Recent psychological research on the connection between culture and thought could have dire consequences for the idea that there are objective standards of reasoning and that meaningful cross-cultural discussion is possible. The problems are particularly acute if research shows that the Law of Noncontradiction (LNC) is not a universal of folk epistemology. It is extremely difficult to provide a non-circular justification for the LNC, and yet the LNC seems to act as a basic standard for reasoning in the West. If (...) non-Western cultures do not believe the LNC holds, then meaningful cross-cultural discussion and debate will be very difficult, to say the least. In this paper it is argued that the distinction between belief and acceptance is important in analyzing cross-cultural studies on the way people reason. Studies conducted by Richard Nisbett and Kaiping Peng concerning differences between East Asians and Westerners are analyzed. The distinction between belief and acceptance is used to demonstrate that the empirical data currently available fail to show that the LNC is not a universal of folk epistemology. A brief proposal for further research is presented. (shrink)

Gene editing in the environment must consider uncertainty about potential benefits and risks for different populations and under different conditions. There are disagreements about the weight and balance of harms and benefits. Deliberative and community‐led approaches offer the opportunity to engage and empower diverse publics to co‐create responses and solutions to controversial policy choices in a manner that is inclusive of diverse perspectives. Stories, understood as situated accounts that reflect a person's life experiences, can enable the articulation of nuanced perspectives, (...) diversify how perspectives are communicated, encourage wider participation, open dominant perspectives to challenge, and invite participants to assess appropriate empathy and precaution in collective positions. An emphasis on storytelling in deliberations on gene editing of organisms emphasizes carefully designed recruitment and facilitation to support hearing from a range of perspectives, including those that present a different set of assumptions than those that may be held by experts or other stakeholders, among these, consideration of how to understand our relationships to nature. (shrink)

The Party school has always been an important bastion through which our Party trains and educates its cadres in Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The Party Central Committee headed by Chairman Hua has laid great emphasis on the Party school since the smashing of the "gang of four" and has made special decisions on how successfully to run the Party schools on different levels. Chairman Hua and Vice Chairman Ye personally made important speeches at the opening ceremony of the Central (...) Party School and indicated the direction in which the Party school should be run during the new stage of historical development. Pursuant to the Central Committee's decision, the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee has restored its Party school which had been closed down for some ten years by the "gang of four." Since its reopening, the Municipal Party School has already run a one-term study class for the cadres and has achieved fairly good results. In the future, we will run the study class every term and strive to run the Party school better and better. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze people's confidence in political institutions in the so-called BRICS countries, that is, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. I argue that the quality of macroeconomic indicators cannot explain the variation in political confidence between the five most dynamic new emerging economies, and that there is no substantial difference among the young, middle-aged, and senior-aged groups. By combing data from the Asia Barometer Survey and the World Value Survey, I provide (...) two complementary approaches, one sociocultural and the other micropolitical, to reveal the factors that influence people's confidence in four major political institutions. The explanatory effects of these two approaches are mixed. Political identity and values, in most cases, have a significant impact on political confidence. On the other hand, high levels of interpersonal social trust, individual happiness, and satisfaction with living standards also show positive influences. (shrink)

A geometric lattice is the lattice of closed subsets of a closure operator on a set which is zero-closure, algebraic, atomistic and which has the so-called exchange property. There are many profound results about this type of lattices, the most recent one of which, due to Czédli and Schimdt, says that a lattice L of finite length is semimodular if and only if L has a cover-preserving embedding into a geometric lattice G of the same length. The goal of our (...) paper is to offer the following result: a lattice of finite length is semimodular if and only if every cell in L is a 4-element Boolean lattice and the 7-element non-distributive atomistic lattice having 3 atoms is not a cover-preserving sublattice of L. (shrink)

Dujiangyan irrigation system of more than 2000 years history is a symbol of originality of Chinese ancestors both in its conception and project mode. It is still working well and benefit Chengdu Plain nowadays while other comparable water conservancy projects of the same or later age have vanished and been forgotten. More than just a world-famous cultural heritage, it shows the harmonious relationship between man and nature. And it also reveals us how to solve problems in the era of economic (...) globalization, such as the constantly silt up of the dams, the exhaustion of the energy and the crisis of the deterioration of ecosystem. The inspirations it gives us range from technology to humanities, from economy to various aspects in social life. In a word, Dujiangyan irrigation system demonstrates the wisdom and creativity of Chinese people and has a universal significance despite the change of time and space. (shrink)

In this paper, the fixed-time practical bipartite tracking problem for the networked robotic systems with parametric uncertainties, input disturbances, and directed signed graphs is investigated. A new fixed-time estimator-based control algorithm for the NRSs is presented to address the abovementioned problem. By applying a sliding surface and the time base generator approach, a new stability analysis method is proposed to achieve the fixed-time practical bipartite tracking for the NRSs. We also derive the upper bound of the convergence time for employing (...) the presented control algorithm to solve the practical bipartite tracking problem and further demonstrate that the convergence time is independent of the initial value. Finally, the simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the presented algorithms. (shrink)

This paper explores the often-overlooked role of teaching assistants (TAs) in engineering ethics courses, and a particular challenge that TAs face in these roles. TAs not only undertake tasks like instructors, which include teaching, guiding, and evaluating courses, but they also assume the roles of “intermediaries between instructors and students” and “learners becoming teachers.” These distinct roles present TAs with unique challenges, one of which we call the neutrality problem. This problem pertains to whether TAs can and should maintain a (...) neutral stance in the classroom, particularly when students articulate ideas that deviate from the values promoted in the course or held by the TAs. Using a real-life teaching experience as illustrative, we claim that it is challenging and, at times, undesirable for TAs to achieve pedagogical neutrality, primarily due to their pre-existing understanding of ethics and the actual situation of the students. Nevertheless, we posit that TAs should strive to foster an environment where students are encouraged to improve their ethical awareness. Through the underrepresented lens of TAs, we aim to initiate a multi-faceted dialogue on the teaching philosophy and goal of engineering ethics. (shrink)

The relationships between age and the life-supporting treatments use, and between gender and the life-supporting treatments use are still controversial. Using extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as an example of life-supporting treatments, the objectives of this study were: to examine the relationship between age and the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use; to examine the relationship between age and the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use; and to deliberate the ethical and societal implications of age and gender disparities in the initiation of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. This (...) is a population-based, retrospective cohort study. Taiwan’s extracorporeal membrane oxygenation cases from 2000 to 2010 were collected. The annual incidence rate of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use adjusting for both age and gender distribution for each year from 2000 to 2010 was derived using the population of 2000 as the reference population. The trend of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use was examined using time-series linear regression analysis. We conducted joinpoint regression for estimating the trend change of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use. The trends of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use both for different gender groups, and for different age groups have been significantly increasing over time. Men were more likely to be supported by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation than women. Women’s perspectives toward life and death, and women’s perception of well-being may be associated with the phenomenon. In addition, the patients at the age of 65 or older were more likely to be supported by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation than those younger than 65. Family autonomy/family-determination, and the Confucian tradition of filial piety and respecting elders may account for this phenomenon. This study showed gender and age disparities in the initiation of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use in Taiwan, which may be accounted for by the cultural and societal values in Taiwan. For a healthcare professional who deals with patients’/family members’ medical decision-making to initiate life-supporting treatments, he/she should be sensitive not only to the legality, but also the societal and ethical issues involved. (shrink)

This article explores the moral permissibility of sweatshop boycotts. We build explicitly on Tomhave and Vopat’s (2018) framework for evaluating the moral permissibility of boycotts in general for the specific case of sweatshop labor. We argue that sweatshop boycotts are more likely to be morally justified when targeting forced labor compared to free labor and we explore the relevant moral tradeoffs associated with boycotts of free labor sweatshops. We analyze the morality of three cases of sweatshop boycotts—Indonesia in the 1990s, (...) Bangladesh following the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, and the Uyghur region in China—and then discuss how insights from these cases might provide a model to guide activists and business ethicists in analyzing the morality of other sweatshop boycotts. (shrink)

Under the influence of the linguistic turn in philosophy, contemporary Western philosophers typically limit their thinking on pluralism to the realm of language. This sort of pluralism can be named as pluralism of significance. I propose another version of pluralism in light of Confucianism, which extends the concerns from the realm of language to the realm of experience – I call it pluralism of presence. In this article, I first expound the aforementioned two versions of pluralism on the basis of (...) Hans-Georg Moeller’s semiotic trichotomy. I then argue that the conflict between multiculturalism and cultural identity in today’s globalized world and the failure of pluralism of significance in resolving this conflict can be overcome by pluralism of presence. Finally, I show a possibility of reconciliation between pluralism of significance and pluralism of presence. (shrink)

全书以灾异思想为切入点，以西汉经学灾异思想与思潮为中心，结合先秦至西汉间的时代背景与思想氛围，在细致考察与解读相关文本的基础上，对西汉经学灾异思想的观念来源与理论先导、创立过程与时代特色、理论形态与建 构方法，以及灾异思潮与现实政治的互动等问题，进行了全面深入的研究和探讨；对于经学灾异思想何以会在西汉建立、经学灾异思潮缘何会在西汉爆发、经学灾异论造成了怎样的历史影响，以及如何评价灾异论氛围中的西汉儒 学与儒生群体等问题，本书也进行了系统的反思，并提出了一系列见解。.

Strong Turing Determinacy, or ${\mathrm {sTD}}$, is the statement that for every set A of reals, if $\forall x\exists y\geq _T x (y\in A)$, then there is a pointed set $P\subseteq A$. We prove the following consequences of Turing Determinacy ( ${\mathrm {TD}}$ ) and ${\mathrm {sTD}}$ over ${\mathrm {ZF}}$ —the Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic set theory without the Axiom of Choice: (1) ${\mathrm {ZF}}+{\mathrm {TD}}$ implies $\mathrm {wDC}_{\mathbb {R}}$ —a weaker version of $\mathrm {DC}_{\mathbb {R}}$.(2) ${\mathrm {ZF}}+{\mathrm {sTD}}$ implies that every (...) set of reals is measurable and has Baire property.(3) ${\mathrm {ZF}}+{\mathrm {sTD}}$ implies that every uncountable set of reals has a perfect subset.(4) ${\mathrm {ZF}}+{\mathrm {sTD}}$ implies that for every set of reals A and every $\epsilon>0$ :(a)There is a closed set $F\subseteq A$ such that $\mathrm {Dim_H}(F)\geq \mathrm {Dim_H}(A)-\epsilon $, where $\mathrm {Dim_H}$ is the Hausdorff dimension.(b)There is a closed set $F\subseteq A$ such that $\mathrm {Dim_P}(F)\geq \mathrm {Dim_P}(A)-\epsilon $, where $\mathrm {Dim_P}$ is the packing dimension. (shrink)

Abstract:The most important themes of Wang Lü's painting theory are the "true self" and the "true thing." One reason this topic has not received sufficient attention is that the original text was altered. This article aims to correct and reinterpret the text. After textual research and interpretation, Wang Lü's paintings and painting theory have been reevaluated. This article also responds to some difficult topics such as the relationship between "form" (ᔶ) and "meaning" (ᛣ) and between "following" (ᕲ) and "not following" (...) (䘩) the rules in Chinese painting theory. (shrink)

A result from a standard linear model course is that the variance of the ordinary least squares (OLS) coefficient of a variable will never decrease when including additional covariates into the regression. The variance inflation factor (VIF) measures the increase of the variance. Another result from a standard linear model or experimental design course is that including additional covariates in a linear model of the outcome on the treatment indicator will never increase the variance of the OLS coefficient of the (...) treatment at least asymptotically. This technique is called the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), which is often used to improve the efficiency of treatment effect estimation. So we have two paradoxical results: adding covariates never decreases the variance in the first result but never increases the variance in the second result. In fact, these two results are derived under different assumptions. More precisely, the VIF result conditions on the treatment indicators but the ANCOVA result averages over them. Comparing the estimators with and without adjusting for additional covariates in a completely randomized experiment, I show that the former has smaller variance averaging over the treatment indicators, and the latter has smaller variance at the cost of a larger bias conditioning on the treatment indicators. Therefore, there is no real paradox. (shrink)