If distributed cognition is to become a general analytic frame, it needs to handle more aspects of cognition than just highly efficient problem solving. It should also handle learning. We identify four classes of distributed learning: induction, repurposing, symbiotic tuning, and mutual adaptation. The four classes of distributed learning fit into a two-dimensional space defined by the stability and adaptability of individuals and their environments. In all four classes of learning, people and their environments are highly interdependent during initial learning. (...) At the same time, we present evidence indicating that certain types of interdependence in early learning, most notably mutual adaptation, can help prepare people to be less dependent on their immediate environment and more adaptive when they confront new environments. We also describe and test examples of learning technologies that implement mutual adaptation. (shrink)

As a result of globalization, the number of people living outside of their countries of origin is on the rise. Among them are children of primary and secondary school age of varying socio-economic backgrounds. This article addresses the education-related challenges that children in such circumstances face. I first identify two principles – an educational adequacy principle and a presumption of responsibility on the part of a host country for meeting children’s educationalneeds – which are widely employed to guide national policy (...) decisions on educational content and the distribution of educational resources. I then discuss a number of problems that students living abroad face which, I argue, policies devised on the basis of these principles either systematically overlook or, in some cases, exacerbate. Finally, I offer two alternative principles – a cosmopolitan revision of the first and a replacement for the second with a focus on collective responsibility – designed to promote education policies better suited to a globalized world which might help to alleviate the barriers to success commonly encountered by children learning abroad. (shrink)

Five studies examined how interacting with the physical environment can support the development of fraction concepts. Nine‐ and 10‐year‐old children worked on fraction problems they could not complete mentally. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that manipulating physical pieces facilitated children's ability to develop an interpretation of fractions. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when children understood a content area well, they used their interpretations to repurpose many environments to support problem solving, whereas when they needed to learn, they were prone to the (...) structure of the environment. Experiments 4 and 5 examined transfer after children had learned by manipulating physical pieces. Children who learned by adapting relatively unstructured environments transferred to new materials better than children who learned with “well‐structured” environments that did not require equivalent adaptation. Together, the findings reveal that during physically distributed learning, the opportunity to adapt an environment permits the development of new interpretations that can advance learning. (shrink)

Accounts of the concepts of function and dysfunction have not adequately explained what factors determine the line between low‐normal function and dysfunction. I call the challenge of doing so the line‐drawing problem. Previous approaches emphasize facts involving the action of natural selection (Wakefield 1992a, 1999a, 1999b) or the statistical distribution of levels of functioning in the current population (Boorse 1977, 1997). I point out limitations of these two approaches and present a solution to the line‐drawing problem that builds on the (...) second one. (shrink)

Why have radical political theorists, whose thinking inspired mass movements for democracy, been so suspicious of political plurality? According to Joseph Schwartz, their doubts were involved with an effort to transcend politics. Mistakenly equating all social difference with the harmful way in which particular interests dominated marketplace societies, radical thinkers sought a comprehensive set of "true human interests" that would completely abolish political strife. In extensive analyses of Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and Arendt, Schwartz seeks to mediate the (...) radical critique of democratic capitalist societies with the concern for pluralism evidenced in both liberal and postmodern thought. He thus escapes the authoritarian potential of the radical position, while appropriating its more democratic implications. In Schwartz's view, a reconstructed radical democratic theory of politics must sustain liberalism's defense of individual rights and social pluralism, while redressing the liberal failure to question structural inequalities. In proposing such a theory, he criticizes communitarianism for its premodern longing for a monolithic, virtuous society, and challenges the "politics of difference" for its failure to question the undemocratic terrain of power on which "difference" is constructed. In conclusion, he maintains that an equitable distribution of power and resources among social groups necessitates not the transcendence of politics but its democratic expansion. (shrink)

The study examines employee, managerial, and ethics officer perceptions regarding their companies codes of ethics. The study moves beyond examining the mere existence of a code of ethics to consider the role that code content and code process (i.e. creation, implementation, and administration) might play with respect to the effectiveness of codes in influencing behavior. Fifty-seven in-depth, semi-structured interviews of employees, managers, and ethics officers were conducted at four large Canadian companies. The factors viewed by respondents to be important with (...) respect to code effectiveness include: provisions of examples; readability; tone; relevance; realism; senior management support; training; reinforcement; living up to standards; reporting requirement; anonymous phone line; communicating violations; and enforcement. The factors found to be potentially important include: justification for provisions; employee involvement; and sign-off requirements. Factors found not to be important include: objectives for the code; prior distribution; testing; and relating ones performance review to compliance with the code. (shrink)

Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare asks why love is regarded as the highest human value in some cultural sectorsDLreligion, literature and the artsDL and is not even on the map in othersDLphilosophy, law, and political thought. In the biblical vision, 'love the neighbor' is both the law and the just way to live. And yet, while religious thinkers cannot conceive of justice without love, for political philosophers, justice and love belong in completely different spheres, rational and public vs. emotional and private. (...) This book engages our dominant ideas of justice, including theories of contract, retribution and distribution, showing how they fall short if love is not included. Shakespeare emerges as its hero: part of his endurance is due to the many ways his plays stage how justice must be driven by loveDL no mere private passion, but a vital understanding of care for one another, care that a just world cannot do without. (shrink)

Abstract: The natural lottery is a metaphor about the way luck affects the allocation of personal attributes, talents, skills, and defects. Susan Hurley has argued that it is incoherent to regard individual essential properties (IEPs) as a matter of lottery luck. The reason is that a lottery of identity-affecting properties generates the ‘non-identity problem’. For this reason among others she suggests substituting lottery luck with ‘thin luck’, i.e. luck as non-responsibility, which would allow us to coherently regard IEPs as a (...) matter of luck.I argue that we are not not-responsible for our IEPs. Therefore, the coherent range of ‘thin luck’ is not broader than that of lottery luck. Moreover, justice theorists need to be worried about the non-identity problem only to the extent that IEPs affect life prospects and it is far from evident that they do. After addressing some connected aspects of Hurley's analysis, I discuss the type of reasons that justify seeking to expand domain of justice and the ways of doing this, for instance by abandoning lottery luck. I close by suggesting, however, that if Parfit's view of ‘what matters about identity’ is correct, its application to the case of identity-affecting lotteries may prove the expansion of the domain of justice superfluous, as IEPs belong to it as it is. (shrink)

Discussions of both personal responsibility and the importance of trust in health-care settings are increasingly prominent in the bioethics literature. In this paper I link the two discussions and argue that health policies that include personal responsibility ought to address climates of social trust. Trust is a social good that is not always fairly distributed. Disadvantaged social groups often face default distrust. I suggest that agent-centered models in which responsibilities are negotiated do a better job of repairing social distrust than (...) authoritative models in which responsibilities are assigned. Attending to climates of trust, distrust, or antitrust is essential for addressing health inequalities. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the two-system framework, examine its strengths, point out a fundamental weakness concerning the unity of conscious experience, and then propose a new hypothesis that avoids that weakness and other related concerns. According to our strong emergence hypothesis, what emerges are not merely mental properties in specialized, distributed neural areas, but also a new, irreducibly singular entity that functions in a recurrent manner to integrate its mental properties and to rewire its brain. We argue that the (...) former function is suggested, in part, by the effects of anesthetics on sensory integration, and that the latter function is suggested by evidence garnered from the neuroscience of mindfulness, constraint-induced movement therapy for stroke, and neuroimaging data surrounding mental illness. We then discuss how our strong emergence hypothesis relates to the description and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Finally, potential objections are addressed. (shrink)

Pointillistic based super‐resolution techniques, such as photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), involve multiple cycles of sequential activation, imaging, and precise localization of single fluorescent molecules. A super‐resolution image, having nanoscopic structural information, is then constructed by compiling all the image sequences. Because the final image resolution is determined by the localization precision of detected single molecules and their density, accurate image reconstruction requires imaging of biological structures labeled with fluorescent molecules at high density. In such image datasets, stochastic variations in photon (...) emission and intervening dark states lead to uncertainties in identification of single molecules. This, in turn, prevents the proper utilization of the wealth of information on molecular distribution and quantity. A recent strategy for overcoming this problem is pair‐correlation analysis applied to PALM. Using rigorous statistical algorithms to estimate the number of detected proteins, this approach allows the spatial organization of molecules to be quantitatively described. (shrink)

When is it justifiable to exclude a person who wishes to enter a country? What are the acceptable moral bases for immigration policy? These questions lie at the heart of this book, the first interdisciplinary study of the fundamental normative issues underpinning immigration policy. A distinguished group of economists, political scientists, and philosophers offer a provocative discussion of this complex topic. Among the issues addressed are the proper role of the state in supporting a particular culture, the possible destabilization of (...) the political and social life of a country through immigration, the size and distribution of economic losses and gains, and the legitimacy of discriminating against potential immigrants in favor of members of the resident population. The need for serious consideration of this subject is beyond question. This volume should advance discussion in an area of great practical as well as philosophical importance. (shrink)

Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings from rapid eye movement sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from studies of REM sleep. Neuroimaging results show that REM sleep is characterized by a specific pattern of regional brain activity. We demonstrate that this heterogeneous distribution of brain (...) activity during sleep explains many typical features in dreams. Reciprocally, specific dream characteristics suggest the activation of selective brain regions during sleep. Such an integration of neuroimaging data of human sleep, mental imagery, and the content of dreams is critical for current models of dreaming; it also provides neurobiological support for an implication of sleep and dreaming in some important functions such as emotional regulation. (shrink)

Speech is a perceptuo-motor system. A natural computational modeling framework is provided by cognitive robotics, or more precisely speech robotics, which is also based on embodiment, multimodality, development, and interaction. This paper describes the bases of a virtual baby robot which consists in an articulatory model that integrates the non-uniform growth of the vocal tract, a set of sensors, and a learning model. The articulatory model delivers sagittal contour, lip shape and acoustic formants from seven input parameters that characterize the (...) configurations of the jaw, the tongue, the lips and the larynx. To simulate the growth of the vocal tract from birth to adulthood, a process modifies the longitudinal dimension of the vocal tract shape as a function of age. The auditory system of the robot comprises a “phasic” system for event detection over time, and a “tonic” system to track formants. The model of visual perception specifies the basic lips characteristics: height, width, area and protrusion. The orosensorial channel, which provides the tactile sensation on the lips, the tongue and the palate, is elaborated as a model for the prediction of tongue-palatal contacts from articulatory commands. Learning involves Bayesian programming, in which there are two phases: specification of the variables, decomposition of the joint distribution and identification of the free parameters through exploration of a learning set, and utilization which relies on questions about the joint distribution. Two studies were performed with this system. Each of them focused on one of the two basic mechanisms, which ought to be at work in the initial periods of speech acquisition, namely vocal exploration and vocal imitation. The first study attempted to assess infants’ motor skills before and at the beginning of canonical babbling. It used the model to infer the acoustic regions, the articulatory degrees of freedom and the vocal tract shapes that are the likeliest explored by actual infants according to their vocalizations. Subsequently, the aim was to simulate data reported in the literature on early vocal imitation, in order to test whether and how the robot was able to reproduce them and to gain some insights into the actual cognitive representations that might be involved in this behavior. Speech modeling in a robotics framework should contribute to a computational approach of sensori-motor interactions in speech communication, which seems crucial for future progress in the study of speech and language ontogeny and phylogeny. (shrink)

Empirical tests of Schwartz’s theory of culture-level value priorities have predominantly been performed using an averaging approach–as values of the average individual in a culture. However, from a theory of measurement standpoint such an approach seems inadequate. We argue that the averaging approach is an insufficiently accurate methodology in capturing the compatibilities-incompatibilities between values of individuals within cultures. We propose an approach based on the distribution of values of individuals in a given culture–the distribution approach. Using data from two (...) rounds of the European Social Survey, we show how frequencies of specific individual value priorities in a culture can be used towards the description of culture-level value preferences. We recommend a re-conceptualization of Schwartz’s culture-level value theory to an orthogonal two-dimensional structure, namely as Preservation vs. Alteration and Dominance vs. Amenability, which we explain based on heterogeneity in socioecological indicators across countries. We conclude that societal challenges may influence the cultural value climate across countries. (shrink)

We construct an algebra of generalized functions endowed with a canonical embedding of the space of Schwartz distributions.We offer a solution to the problem of multiplication of Schwartz distributions similar to but different from Colombeau’s solution.We show that the set of scalars of our algebra is an algebraically closed field unlike its counterpart in Colombeau theory, which is a ring with zero divisors. We prove a Hahn–Banach extension principle which does not hold in Colombeau theory. We (...) establish a connection between our theory with non-standard analysis and thus answer, although indirectly, a question raised by Colombeau. This article provides a bridge between Colombeau theory of generalized functions and non-standard analysis. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 22-25. The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Ensino Superior), Brazil. From the multifarious subdivisions of semiotics, be they naturalistic or culturalistic, the realm of semiotics of value is a ?eld that is getting more and more attention these days. Our entire political and economic systems are based upon structures of symbolic representation that many times seem not only to embody monetary value but also to determine it. The connection between monetary (...) and linguistic exchanges is self-evident: the former requires the latter and develops in direct relation to it. Creative experimentation and design of digital systems of value exchange are blossoming on the web. Dr. Gilson Schwartz, an economist turned media theorist and professor at the University of São Paulo, adopted the concept of Iconomics, originally created by Michael Kaplan, an author concerned with the linguistics of economic value. Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of value creation and representation via digital technologies are the main goals of Dr. Schwartz’s projects, aiming at the re-designing of our relationship to the economic value of imagination and the social control of property. Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, a former Chief Economist at BankBoston, Brazil and Advisor to the President of the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). FURTHER READING: Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture . 15.3 (2003): 477-493. Renata Lemos-Morais: You have recently produced and directed a short documentary about Creative Currencies in Latin America. Could you tell us a bit about its process and its findings? Gilson Schwartz: The “Creative Currencies” project is a work-in-progress platform which unfolds as an action research agenda connected both to the production of audiovisual content and the development of social currency software. The initiative dates back to 2003 when I led an experimental project supported by the Presidency of Brazil. At that time, we issued paper currency in a small, touristic village in the Northeast Region which stimulated local cultural projects. But it was only in 2009 that the Central Bank of Brazil acknowledged “social currencies” as a legitimate economic agenda, calling for more debate at the I Financial Inclusion Forum. This year, the monetary authorities organized a second forum that also opened the room to discussions on mobile payment systems and new perspectives on poverty alleviation via State subsidies. The Ministry of Culture funded the “Creative Currencies” project in 2009-2010 and our next stage in this discovery process is to be supported by the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). In short, there is genuine interest among public officials in different areas and public funding for social currencies is on the rise in Brazil. However, after all these years we are still at a very early stage of research and practice. Some of the most successful initiatives (such as Banco Palmas) actually evolved out of local monetary creation to become correspondent banking operations for commercial banks and other financial groups. After eight years of price stability and social inclusion, Brazil stands out as a major opportunity for social experimentation, even the Grameen Bank is now entering the Brazilian market and many NGOs are geared towards different forms of entrepreneurialism in the base of the pyramid, riding solidarity economic models, microfinance and microcredit for local development. It is yet to be seen, however, whether these developments are just one more stage of “bankarization”, that is to say, an extension of regular banking services or actually a new form of social and symbolic self-determination at the local level. So far, the Central Bank of Brazil is open to new forms of credit and local finance as long as they are strictly territorial and very close to barter among the poor. In other words, whether the process of monetary creation could be made to fit an open source paradigm is yet to be seen. Community banking and social currencies might as well end up as just another channel for access to and use of banking services. The “Creative Currencies” project aims at promoting the discussion of more fundamental issues, such as the limits of central banking, the prospects for local financial development and the possibility of creating and managing financial icons as cultural assets. The purpose of this project is to produce short documentaries that will bear testimony to this evolving regulatory framework while inducing more discussion about the fundamental iconomic issues concealed in the process of money and wealth creation. RLM: What new potential is there in applying digital technologies to currency creation? GS: Globalization is a result of the virtualization of money, that is, the overcoming of illusions such as the “gold standard”. Money is an icon created by institutions, not on supposedly natural or material foundations but out of political and financial interests. The “dollar standard” is an outstanding evidence of this phenomenon and Kaplan´s paper, the first to use the expression “iconomics”, insists on the rhetoric and semiotic effects associated to a supposedly scientific model of money creation and management. This is a fundamental change that was perceived and discussed much before the digitalization of the world by unorthodox economists such as John Maynard Keynes since the early 20th century. The digitalization of global financial flows accelerated this immateriality and the creation of the Euro was yet another evidence of the political foundations of currencies. The banking establishment, however, is keen on the idea that scientific formulae hold the key to sound money creation. Keynesianism has been repeatedly associated to “inflationism” while the supposedly sound monetary policies of the Orthodoxy serve well the political and financial interests of a technocratic elite. Corporate media also serve this fictitious depiction of the monetary process despite the cyclical bust of monetary rules and financial regulations. The internet, however, has created numerous opportunities for the disintermediation in industries such as film, music and commodities. There is no reason to doubt that the financial industry can also be transformed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Money is media as well. Credit is but confidence. Once people realize that the distributed computing power of networks can also be the platform to weave new monetary and credit operations, there is room for grassroots emancipation out of the established owners of monetary institutions. So far, however, there has been a privatization of monetary management and there is not a clear path or model for the emergent (P2P) property democratization that is inherent to the internet. Digital assets, however, clearly have an inherent potential to escape central control and proprietary regulatory frameworks. RLM: How are social networks transforming the ways in which we exchange value? Do you believe that online influence and reputation might be translated into a new kind of currency? GS: The foundation for social currencies as envisaged by solidarity economics is the territory. Authorities are willing to concede local monetary creation as long as it is restricted to poor neighborhoods, as a proxy to barter. In this relevant but limited context, reputation, personal knowledge and informal ties form the matrix of local or “proximity” finance which are expected to keep credit and leverage to a sustainable level. Anything beyond that should and would lead to an integration of local finance into the established banking system. However, inasmuch as the internet promotes virtual territories and reputation is now subject to all sorts of digital manipulation and stardom becomes an everyday cultural process among teenagers and elders alike, the territorial “foundation” is substituted for more complex patterns of solidarity, cooperation and exchange that reach beyond the physical territory and even the “human.” Digital assets embody knowledge, technology, cultural and educational values that are exchanged at a global scale beyond the control of democratic States (Chinese-like intervention is the exception, not the rule). Hacktivism is unstoppable and so is monetary hacktivism. Especially in the Third World, mobile communications fast became conveyors of money transfers and other appropriation strategies. Banking and telecom sectors already battle for the control of these emerging markets and, as a matter of fact, have so far contributed to the containment of these processes. Governments serve these moguls and have usually adopted a wait-and-see attitude. If open source hardware and grassroots social movements combine to challenge these proprietary battles, then social networks may evolve into new forms of social capital and thus form the ground on which to design and implement social currencies. The global financial crisis, as well as the dollar demise, are an event of such a proportion that social networks may open the path for emancipator subjects to seize the opportunity. RLM: What are some of the social experiments that you think are revolutionizing the way in which value is exchanged? GS: There is a broad evolution of economic systems towards the valuation of intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and sustainability. There are many examples of local as well as global events that call the traditional systems of exchange into question, from carbon credits to educational bonuses, digital barter frameworks and locally based solidarity and fair trade networks. These emerging examples, no matter how different in nature or scale, represent a challenge to the traditional value creation schemes and theories which are based on use and exchange value, supply and demand. This is not to say that utility and labour or scarcity are to be totally dismissed, but there is now an emerging perception that value is also a function of behavioral codes, symbolic patterns and the energy of institutional frameworks. The plasticity of digital platforms is relevant insofar as intellectual property becomes the central source of value creation. But when you discuss the property rights of public goods such as the environment or basic social rights (of minorities or localities), then a new paradigm seems to emerge. RLM: Are gaming and online storytelling digital practices that might have an impact on the way new currencies are created and developed? GS: “Play money” has been one of the early and most intriguing phenomena associated to the diffusion of virtual worlds. These virtual currencies have also been prone to “boom and bust” dynamics, speculation and pure theft (Second Life scams were common and led to “intervention” by the owners of the game). Storytelling is a major source of value, that is, the value of attention and the markets for audience. There are plenty of private monies created and managed by corporate entertainment groups, telecom operators (via mobile virtual network operators) and marketing frameworks. The casino economy, as already depicted by Keynes and other unorthodox economists, is always storytelling about future states of the world, confidence building and leverage of animal spirits. The novelty of current events is not the fictitious nature of any form of capital, but the potential for digital democratization of controls over the imaginary nature of value creation. But this is just a potential, a possibility, a figment that more often than not is appropriated by centralized and opaque private powers. The game industry is a testbed for new connections between storytelling and money creation. RLM: Monetary value was originally connected to the scarcity of precious metals, such as gold. Our entire monetary system seems therefore to function according to a logic of scarcity. Do you believe it is possible to reverse this logic into a logic of abundance? GS: The gold standard was a fiction itself, the “scarcity” is always produced by institutions that regulate confidence and access to credit. The key issue is not to fabricate abundance, but to question the institutions which produce scarcity out of any standard, gold or whatever. Central banks are at the service of private banks in the creation and management of scarcity. RLM: The promise that nanotechnology holds for our future is one of radical abundance (or so say transhumanists). The possibility of creating any kind of material substance through nanoengineering seems each day more feasible. What would this possibility entail in terms of systems of value exchange? GS: Nanotechnology, environmental concerns and grassroots appropriation of distributed knowledge are the frontiers of a new horizon of energy creation and management. Social groups in charge of managing scarcity for the sake of wealth and power concentration must be held accountable for the destruction of our future. Once this key political conundrum is accounted for, new systems of value exchange and even a non-mercantile society will come into existence. Revolutionary theorists such as Marx envisaged transformation via the extreme clash of contradictions between capital and labour. This approach has never led to a change in the systemic logic of scarcity for the sake of social control. We are once again facing the threshold of large scale societal change, but the outcome of the current crisis should come from our imagination, not from yet another paradox of abundance and scarcity. As long as we remain attached to the materiality of value, the illusion of freedom will but reinforce the massive manipulation of necessity. RLM: What do you think is the role of crowdfunding in this context? GS: Crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding are examples of the peer to peer opportunities that come along with distributed computer power. However, the power structure behind wealth and scarcity creation may or may not be changed by crowd management. But it should not be taken at face value, so to speak. The stock market of course is an early form of crowdfunding without calling into question the proprietary framework of the companies offering their investment projects to the market. Any market is a form of crowdsourcing, that is to say, of distributed forms of supply and demand matchmaking. The wealth of networks, however, depends on the contractual ecosystem, the institutional framework, the channeling of social imagination, not on the purely quantitative distribution of bids and offers. I see economics as supply, demand and code. Once you have access to the code, once openness becomes part of the game, then there is a chance of crowd behavior becoming collective intelligence and sustainable imagination. RLM: Is the development of digital currencies headed towards a pluralistic ecology in which many micro currency systems co-exist, or is it penetrating the mainstream monetary system? If it is affecting the mainstream financial system, what would be its effect in the long-term? GS: The same issue is at stake both at local and global levels. The global system is, as a matter of fact, an unstable ecosystem of “micro currencies” whereas the dollar has so far exerted an overwhelming influence. Local currencies and private monies coexist with national currencies only to the extent that the Central Bank admits, for instance, that grassroots monetary emissions remain territorial and strictly connected to poverty. However, the question of how new developments in digital technologies and nanotechnologies might alter not only our current monetary systems but also our understanding of value in itself, is still an open question. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th century Oliver Heaviside developed a formal calculus of differential operators in order to solve various physical problems. The pure mathematicians of his time would not deal with this unrigorous theory, but in the 20th century several attempts were made to rigorise Heaviside's operational calculus. These attempts can be grouped in two classes. The one leading to an explanation of the operational calculus in terms of integral transformations (Bromwich, Carson, Vander Pol, Doetsch) and the other (...) leading to an abstract algebraic formulation (Lévy, Mikusiński). Also Schwartz's creation of the theory of distributions was very much inspired by problems in the operational calculus. (shrink)

Business codes are a widely used management instrument. Research into the effectiveness of business codes has, however, produced conflicting results. The main reasons for the divergent findings are: varying definitions of key terms; deficiencies in the empirical data and methodologies used; and a lack of theory. In this paper, we propose an integrated research model and suggest directions for future research.

. Recent corporate scandals have focused the attention of a broad set of constituencies on reforming corporate governance. Boards of directors play a leading role in corporate governance and any significant reforms must encompass their role. To date, most reform proposals have targeted the legal, rather than the ethical obligations of directors. Legal reforms without proper attention to ethical obligations will likely prove ineffectual. The ethical role of directors is critical. Directors have overall responsibility for the ethics and compliance programs (...) of the corporation. The tone at the top that they set by example and action is central to the overall ethical environment of their firms. This role is reinforced by their legal responsibilities to provide oversight of the financial performance of the firm. Underlying this analysis is the critical assumption that ethical behavior, especially on the part of corporate leaders, leads to the best long-term interests of the corporation. We describe key components of a framework for a code of ethics for corporate boards and individual directors. The proposed code framework is based on six universal core ethical values: (1) honesty; (2) integrity; (3) loyalty; (4) responsibility; (5) fairness; and (6) citizenship. The paper concludes by suggesting critical issues that need to be dealt with in firm-based codes of ethics for directors. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of Canadian-trained health professionals working in humanitarian and development organizations who considered not treating a patient or group of patients because of resource limitations. In the narratives, not treating the patient(s) was sometimes understood as the right thing to do, and sometimes as wrong. In analyzing participants’ narratives we draw attention to how medications and equipment are represented. In one type of narrative, medications and equipment are represented primarily as scarce resources; in another, they are (...) represented as patient care. In the contexts respondents were working, medications and equipment were often both patient care interventions and scarce resources. The analytic point is that health professionals tend to emphasize one conceptualization over the other in coming to assert that not treating is right, or wrong. Rendering tacit ethical frameworks more explicit makes them available for reflection and debate. (shrink)

_A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls_ presents a comprehensive overview of the historical development of all major aspects of analytic philosophy, the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition in the twentieth century. Features coverage of all the major subject areas and figures in analytic philosophy - including Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Putnam, and many others Contains explanatory background material to help make clear technical philosophical concepts Includes listings of suggested further readings (...) Written in a clear, direct style that presupposes little previous knowledge of philosophy. (shrink)

'Modern History' views claim that in order for a trait X to have the proper function F, X must have been recently favored by natural selection for doing F (Griffiths 1992, 1993; Godfrey-Smith 1994). For many traits with prototypical proper functions, however, such recent selection may not have occurred, since traits may have been maintained owing to lack of variation or selection for other effects. I explore this flaw in Modern History accounts and offer an alternative etiological theory, which I (...) call the 'Continuing Usefulness' account. According to my view, a trait has the proper function F if and only if, first, the trait was favored by selection for doing F at some point (perhaps far in the past), and, secondly, the trait has recently contributed to survival and reproduction by doing F. This separates the requirement involving natural selection from the one involving the recent past, two issues that the Modern History account conflates. The clear separation allows a detailed analysis of the causal judgments and form of adaptationism that ground the etiological approach to function. (shrink)

Prior research has shown a pronounced self-orientation in students of business and economics. This article examines if self-orientation can be alleviated by a focus on prosocial values in business education. In a cross-sectional design, we test the prosocial behavior and values of bachelor students at the beginning and the end of a traditional 3-year business administration program. We compare their behavior with the behavior of two different groups: students from an ethically-oriented international management school and students from a social work (...) program of equal length. The results showed that students of business administration show less prosocial behavior in a dictator game than students in the other two groups. This difference is larger between final-year students than between first-year students. According to the results of the Schwartz Value Survey, the Inglehart Index, and a scale for preferences for distributive justice, students in the three disciplines differ substantially in prosocial values, but there is no significant difference between first and last semester students of the same discipline. We conclude that there is no transmission of self-oriented behavior through self-oriented values emended in traditional business education curricula. Instead, students seem to select academic programs according to their personal and preexisting social orientations. (shrink)

In this exploratory study, we look at the professed values that people have, and their performance in a negotiation. We found relations between Schwartz values and conflict handling behaviors, and distributive, integrative, and compatible negotiation outcomes in a controlled environment using Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) analysis.

V. 1. Structures and processes -- v. 2. Domains and categories.

This paper investigates the development of Hobbes’s theory of imagination and its unique intervention in the scientific debates of the seventeenth century. I argue that this intervention is designed to solve a tension between Hobbes’s scientific and political commitments. His scientific commitments led him to take the imagination seriously. While unorthodox in many ways, Hobbes was working within the predominant scientific framework of his time, which can be traced back to Aristotle and Galen. The same framework, however, was used for (...) naturalistic explanations for prophecy. This posed a problem for Hobbes, who was equally committed to the advances of science and to guarding against the political threat posed by prophets. I argue that Hobbes’s theory of imagination solves this tension by constructing a scientific account of imagination that is loyal to the leading scientific ideas while ruling out any potential use of imagination in the natural explanation of prophecy. (shrink)

Hanks develops a theory of propositions as speech-act types. Because speech acts play a role in the contents themselves, the view overturns Frege’s force/content distinction, and as such, faces the challenge of explaining how propositions embed under logical operators like negation. The attempt to solve this problem has lead Hanks and his recent commentators to adopt theoretically exotic resources, none of which, we argue, is ultimately successful. The problem is that although there are three different ways of negating the sentence (...) “Mary’s card is an ace”, current speech-act theories of propositions can only accommodate two of them. We distinguish between “It is false that Mary’s card is an ace”, “Mary’s card is a non-ace”, and “Mary’s card is not an ace” and show that Hanks and his commentators cannot explain content negation. We call this Hanks’ Negation Problem. The problem is significant because content negation is the negation required for logic. Fortunately, we think there is a natural way for Hanks to accommodate content negation as successive acts of predication. The view solves Hanks’ Negation Problem with only resources internal to Hanks’ own view. (shrink)

Most of us find the surgeon's surprise at this patient' request understandable, and it is hard to imagine any surgeon acceding to this patient's demand. On the other hand, the patient is right—the surgeon is denying his technical skill because his values are different from those of the patient, whose values the surgeon does not respect. The autonomy of the patient is being limited by the values of the doctor whose own interests, other than his interest in practicing medicine according (...) to his own ethical values, would remain unaffected by his decision to provide the service. (shrink)

A standard problem with the objectivity of social scientific theory in particular is that it is either self-referential, in which case it seems to undermine itself as ideology, or self-excepting, which seem pragmatically self-refuting. Using the example of Marx and his theory of ideology, I show how self-referential theories that include themselves in their scope of explanation can be objective. Ideology may be roughly defined as belief distorted by class interest. I show how Marx thought that natural science was informed (...) by class interest but not therefore necessarily ideology. Capitalists have an interest in understanding the natural world (to a point) so that they can manipulate it for profit. Their survival in the marketplace often depends on their competitive success in doing so. The fact that their interventions into nature, driven by class interest, often succeed, is evidence of the reliability and truth of their natural scientific theories. -/- With social science, capitalists have a partial interest in understanding the world, so that they may maintain their class power, ideological hegemony, and a reasonably stable and self-reproducing economy. Some bourgeois social science, Marx thinks, is therefore vindicated the same way that natural science is, because of, not despite, its success in promoting the class interests that cause it. But the capitalist class, Marx thinks, also has an interest in obfuscating the truth about the social world. It would undermine the stability of capitalism, for example, for the bourgeoisie to adopt what Marx thinks to be the correct social theory, Marxism, and proclaim to the world that capitalism is exploitative and unstable. Capitalism creates a a need for ideological social theories that, driven by class interest, represent capitalism as just, natural, inevitable, and unalterable. If Marxism is correct, while these theories may further capitalist interests, they will not withstand the test of time as capitalist exploitation and instability engenders countersystemic political action. -/- How, then can we know, according to Marx, that Marxism is correct, as applied to itself? In part it is whether it succeeds in further the class interests that cause it. If workers adopt bourgeois theories and Marxism is right, they will find themselves frustrated in pursuit of goals that they have, such as improving their well-being, and if Marxism is wrong, then those theories will help them further their own goals. Similarly with Marxism: if it is right, then workers who adopt it should in the long run have more success in furthering their own goals, and if not, then not. But it is question begging to say that our confidence in the reliability of Marxism is enhanced by its successful promotion of goals that capitalists do not have but (according to Marxism) workers do. To avoid this problem it is necessary to compare the relative success of each sort of theory in promoting the interests and needs that the respective classes have independently of the theory, as well as by the usual criteria of scientific theory choice. -/- Thus the Soviet variant of Marxism was fairly decisively refuted by its failure to generate the support of its own designated constituency necessary to grow and survive. Whether the same is true of other varieties of Marxism or of capitalist social theory, it is, as Zhou En Lai said when asked whether the French Revolution had succeeded, too soon to tell, at least in any definitive way. However, and this is the point of the paper, an objective test of Marxism is possible even though Marxism says that all theory is informed by class interest. The question is whether the interests are in discovering or obfuscating the truth. The point is not limited to Marx, but applies to any self-referential social scientific theory that includes itself in its scope. -/- Keywords: ideology, self-referential theory, self-reference, reliabilism, objectivity, Marx, Marxism, sociology of science, class interest, classes, capitalism, bourgeoisie, workers, working class, social theory of knowledge, confirmation of scientific theory. (shrink)

A research instrument is developed and preliminarily validated to formally measure the level of national business ethics activity for any country in the world. The seven dimensions measured include (a) academia, (b) business, (c) social or ethical investment, (d) business ethics organizations, (e) government activity, (f) social activist groups, and (g) media coverage. Results from the validation survey and examples are provided for each of the dimensions. The article concludes with future research directions for the instrument.

Comparing my historical account of the early years of Laurent Schwartz’s theory of distributions with number theorist Michael Harris’s narrative of the early years of Peter Scholze’s perfectoid theory, I develop a perspective on change and temporality in mathematics that emphasizes the relationships between concepts, expectations, and communities of practice. Contemporary mathematics, understood as mathematics imbued with temporality, reflects the dynamic relationship between the people, ideas, pasts, and prospects of mathematical knowledge. Studying these historically may offer critical perspectives (...) on the social and political conditions and implications of mathematical research and the communities that practice it. (shrink)

A broad consensus affirms the concept that all human beings have equal moral worth (Beauchamp and Childress 1994; Rawls 1971). Translating this ethical norm into practice requires careful attention...

a Mathematicians, like Proust and everyone else, are at their best when writing about their first lovea (TM) a ] They are among the very best we have; and their best is very good indeed. a ] One approaches this book with high hopes. Happily, one is not disappointed. a ]In paperback it might well have become a best seller. a ]read it. From The Mathematical Intelligencer Mathematics is shaped by the consistent concerns and styles of powerful minds a three (...) of which are represented here. Kaca (TM)s work is marked by deep commitment and breadth of inquiry. Rota is the easiest of these authors to reada ]a delight: witty and urbane, with a clear and interesting agenda and an astonishing intellectual range. To read him is to be a part of a pleasant and rewarding conversation. Jacob T. Schwartz attacks problems ina ]computer science, mathematical economics, computer and instructional a ] No matter how slippery the problem, Schwartz manages to capture a substantial chunk of it in his mathematical net. a Mathematics Magazine This is a volume of essays and reviews that delightfully explore mathematics in all its moods a from the light and the witty, and humorous to serious, rational, and cerebral. Topics include: logic, combinatorics, statistics, economics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and applications of mathematics broadly. You will also find history and philosophy covered, including discussion of the work of Ulam, Kant, Heidegger among others. (shrink)

This article offers a new interpretation of the second ‘theological’ pattern in Plato’s Republic. Situating Plato within his religious context, it argues that this pattern calls into question the traditional ancient model of divine epiphany. Divine epiphany was a central element in Greek religion. Yet, in the absence of a centralized religious organization, this model threatened the philosophers’ authoritative position. Plato’s second pattern seeks not only to undermine this potential threat but also to pave the way towards a new, philosophicalmodel (...) of divine epiphany, thus further establishing the philosophers’ authority and legitimacy within and outside his ideal city. (shrink)