Suppose you’re certain that a claim—say, ‘Frida is tall’—does not have a determinate truth value. What attitude should you take towards it? This is the question of the cognitive role of indeterminacy. This paper presents a puzzle for theories of cognitive role. Many of these theories vindicate a seemingly plausible principle: if you are fully certain that A, you are rationally required to be fully certain that A is determinate. Call this principle ‘Certainty’. We show that Certainty, in combination with (...) some minimal side premises, entails a very implausible claim: whenever you’re certain that it’s indeterminate whether A, it is rationally required that you reject A. This is a surprising result, which requires abandoning at least some intuitive views about indeterminacy and cognitive role. (shrink)

Current research has documented how cases of irresponsible corporate behavior generate negative reactions from consumers and other stakeholders. Existing research, however, has not examined empirically whether the characteristics of the victims of corporate malfeasance contribute to shaping individual reactions. This study examines, through four experimental surveys, the role played by the national identity of the people affected on consumers’ intentions to spread negative word of mouth. It is shown that national identity influences individual reactions indirectly; mediated by perceived similarity and (...) sympathy. Consumers perceive foreign victims as different from the self and this reduces the sympathy experienced towards them. Sympathy is an emotion that shapes consumer reactions and regulates WOM. The study identifies two moderating processes of this effect. Individuals who score high on collective narcissism are most likely to be strongly biased against foreign victims. In-group bias is also moderated by the perceived severity of the crisis. When a case is perceived as very serious, perceived similarity plays a less important role in generating sympathy because consumers focus on the perceived suffering of the victims. Hence, in-group bias is stronger in cases perceived as having minor consequences. The paper contributes to the literature on corporate social irresponsibility and offers implications for both scholars and managers. (shrink)

The evidence of the phenomenon for which, in galaxies, the gravitating mass is distributed differently than the luminous mass, increases as new data become available. Furthermore, this discrepancy is well structured and it depends on the magnitude and the compactness of the galaxy and on the radius, in units of its luminous size \, where the measure is performed. For the disk systems with \ all this leads to an amazing scenario, revealed by the investigation of individual and coadded rotation (...) curves, according to which, the circular velocity follows, from their centers out to their virial radii, an universal profile \\) function only of the properties of the luminous mass component. Moreover, from the Universal Rotation Curve, so as from many individual high quality RCs, we discover that, in the innermost regions of galaxies, the DM halo density profiles are very shallow. Finally, the disk mass, the central halo density and its core radius, come out all related to each other and to two properties of the distribution of light in galaxies: the luminosity and the compactness. This phenomenology, being absent in the simplest \ Cosmology scenario, poses serious challenges to the latter or, alternatively, it requires a substantial and tuned involvement of baryons in the formation of the galactic halos. On the other side, the URC helps to explain the two-accelerations relationship found by McGaugh et al., in terms of only well known astrophysical processes, acting in a standard DM halos + luminous disks scenario. (shrink)

In this article I suggest that in the Soviet period Central Asians cultivated and conceptualized Islam as an episteme. They did this by reaching beyond alienating categories offered to them by the state. I argue that the constitution of an Islamic culture was made possible, among other things, by Central Asians’ encounters with the past, most notably with what they perceived as an Islamic past. We observe the curious phenomenon of Central Asians’ continuous interaction with the Islamic historical sites that (...) escaped the bulldozers of the Soviet campaigns of religious repression. For some, encounters with the past might be accidental. For many others, the exploration of the past represented a purposive, self-conscious, and reiterated emotional act. I show that Central Asians in the Soviet period—even if at school they were taught little about, and were usually offered a distorted vision of, the Islamic history of their region—were still able to access their past through the surviving architectural presence of Islam. Monumental sites, however, were not enough for Muslims to understand the past and use it to construct their own identity. Such artifacts acquired meaning through an interpretive framework provided by Sufi narratives about saints and their miracles. Therefore, shrines represented for Central Asia a collective memory space, i.e., a place in which the past was preserved for mobilization in the present through narrative. (shrink)

Ridare vita alle ombre esangui del passato”, che torna a vivere nel presente facendosinuovamente “carne e sangue”. Le citazioni di Dilthey e von Wartenburg delimitano ilcampo in cui, per l’Heidegger di Sein und Zeit, si gioca la partita decisiva della storicità delDasein. Per affondare il colpo, egli trova la stoccata vincente nelle frecciate che Nietzschescaglia contro lo storicismo nella seconda delle Considerazioni inattuali – Vom Nutzen undNachtheil der Historie für das Leben –. In lui, Heidegger intravede un autorevole alleato perinstaurare (...) un rapporto autentico con la storia. Essa non dovrà più essere confinata in unpassato museale, tanto grazioso quanto improduttivo per la vita: uscire dalla paralisi dellatradizione vuol dire scrollarsi di dosso il peso del passato e sbloccare il presente e ilfuturo. Solo così l’uomo sarà libero e la storicità recupererà il suo senso più elevato, alservizio della vita. Al di là delle differenze d’intento e di registro ermeneutico-stilistico, laricostruzione di un dialogo a distanza tra i passi di Sein und Zeit e le considerazioninietzscheane offrirà spunti interessanti per pensare alla storia e al suo rapporto, semprein bilico tra il vitale e il patologico, con l’esistenza umana. (shrink)