Esse artigo discute a intensa imbricação entre mídia, cultura e consumo, tomando esta articulação como um aspecto central no contexto contemporâneo. Será analisado o papel do entretenimento e das paisagens audiovisuais como principais produtos da cultura midiática, sendo a espetacularização e a estetização do cotidiano entendidos como eixos organizadores dos padrões econômicos e socioculturais do mundo atual. Discutiremos a centralidade da visualidade na pós-modernidade, sem descurar da forte pregnância da sonoridade e da escuta nas nossas práticas culturais. Sendo assim, propomos (...) entender os processos audiovisuais ancorados nas produções midiáticas como estruturadores das subjetividades e discursos pós-modernos. (shrink)

As more and more firms operate globally, an understanding of the effects of cultural differences on ethical decision making becomes increasingly important for avoiding potential business pitfalls and for designing effective international marketing management programs. Although several articles have addressed this area in general, differences along specific, cultural dimensions have not been directly examined. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine differences in ethical decision making within Hofstede's cultural framework. The results confirm the utility of Hofstede's cultural dimensions (...) and place ethical decision making within an overall theoretical framework. Sales agents from a high power distance, uncertainty avoidant, Confucian, collectivist culture (i.e., Taiwan) placed more value on company and fellow employee interests (vis-à-vis self interests) than did managers from a masculine, individualistic culture (i.e., the United States). American and Taiwanese managers did not differ in their deontological norms or on the importance that they placed on customer interests. The theoretical and managerial importance of these findings are also discussed. (shrink)

This book is about how we can deepen our understanding of subjectivity through the use of the concept of triangulation. Fundamentally, this book seeks to address the question of how we can be objective about subjectivity. If psychology, as a scientific discipline, is concerned with the study of human experience, which is essentially subjective; then we are faced with the problem of how apply the scientific method, as it is commonly understood. If experience is essentially unique to the experiencer, then (...) there seems to be a basic incompatibility with the scientific method. As currently practised, this method searches for psychic phenomena, which can be validly measured e.g. intelligence; showing a range of individual differences. But this does not enable us to examine individual experience. An individual's experience seems to become impenetrable because generalisation across different individuals' experience entails the loss of individuality in the generalisation. (shrink)

It is often assumed that engaging in a one‐on‐one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested the interaction hypothesis under the constraint that (a) all students covered the same content during instruction, (b) the task domain was qualitative physics, (c) (...) the instruction was in natural language as opposed to mathematical or other formal languages, and (d) the instruction conformed with a widely observed pattern in human tutoring: Graesser, Person, and Magliano's 5‐step frame. In the experiments, we compared 2 kinds of human tutoring (spoken and computer mediated) with 2 kinds of natural‐language‐based computer tutoring (Why2‐Atlas and Why2‐AutoTutor) and 3 control conditions that involved studying texts. The results depended on whether the students' preparation matched the content of the instruction. When novices (students who had not taken college physics) studied content that was written for intermediates (students who had taken college physics), then tutorial dialogue was reliably more beneficial than less interactive instruction, with large effect sizes. When novices studied material written for novices or intermediates studied material written for intermediates, then tutorial dialogue was not reliably more effective than the text‐based control conditions. (shrink)

It is often assumed that engaging in a one‐on‐one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested the interaction hypothesis under the constraint that (a) all students covered the same content during instruction, (b) the task domain was qualitative physics, (c) (...) the instruction was in natural language as opposed to mathematical or other formal languages, and (d) the instruction conformed with a widely observed pattern in human tutoring: Graesser, Person, and Magliano's 5‐step frame. In the experiments, we compared 2 kinds of human tutoring (spoken and computer mediated) with 2 kinds of natural‐language‐based computer tutoring (Why2‐Atlas and Why2‐AutoTutor) and 3 control conditions that involved studying texts. The results depended on whether the students' preparation matched the content of the instruction. When novices (students who had not taken college physics) studied content that was written for intermediates (students who had taken college physics), then tutorial dialogue was reliably more beneficial than less interactive instruction, with large effect sizes. When novices studied material written for novices or intermediates studied material written for intermediates, then tutorial dialogue was not reliably more effective than the text‐based control conditions. (shrink)

Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member (...) of a different natural kind (e.g., a spider) and these effects were similar in magnitude to altering the surface-features of a natural kind. Our results suggest that we might view teleological properties as partially constitutive of the essence of natural kinds. (shrink)

Languages around the world use a recurring strategy to discuss abstract concepts: describe them metaphorically, borrowing language from more concrete domains. We “plan ahead” to the future, “count up” to higher numbers, and “warm” to new friends. Past work has found that these ways of talking have implications for how we think, so that shared systems of linguistic metaphors can produce shared conceptualizations. On the other hand, these systematic linguistic metaphors might not just be the cause but also the effect (...) of shared, non‐linguistic ways of thinking. Here, we present a case study of a variety of American English in which a shared, non‐linguistic conceptualization of time has become crystallized as a new system of linguistic metaphors. Speakers of various languages, including English, conceptualize time as a lateral timeline, with the past leftward and the future rightward. Until now, this conceptualization has not been documented in the speech of any language. In two studies, we document how members of the U.S. military, but not U.S. civilians, talk about time using conventionalized lateral metaphors (e.g., “move the meeting right” to mean “move the meeting later”). We argue that, under the right cultural circumstances, implicit mental representations become conventionalized metaphors in language. (shrink)

Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior on the fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task together and other times dividing it up into sub‐tasks to work on in parallel. Underlying the human ability to collaborate is theory‐of‐mind (ToM), the ability to infer the hidden mental states that drive others to act. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decentralized multi‐agent learning mechanism with these abilities. Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hidden intentions of others by inverse planning. (...) We test Bayesian Delegation in a suite of multi‐agent Markov decision processes inspired by cooking problems. On these tasks, agents with Bayesian Delegation coordinate both their high‐level plans (e.g., what sub‐task they should work on) and their low‐level actions (e.g., avoiding getting in each other's way). When matched with partners that act using the same algorithm, Bayesian Delegation outperforms alternatives. Bayesian Delegation is also a capable ad hoc collaborator and successfully coordinates with other agent types even in the absence of prior experience. Finally, in a behavioral experiment, we show that Bayesian Delegation makes inferences similar to human observers about the intent of others. Together, these results argue for the centrality of ToM for successful decentralized multi‐agent collaboration. (shrink)

Before there was the digital divide there was the analog divide– and universal service was the attempt to close that analogdivide. Universal service is becoming ever more complex in terms ofregulatory design as it becomes the digital divide. In order to evaluatethe promise of the next generation Internet with respect to the digitaldivide this work looks backwards as well as forwards in time. Byevaluating why previous universal service mechanisms failed andsucceeded this work identifies specific characteristics ofcommunications systems – in particular (...) in billing and managinguncertainty – and argues that these characteristics underliesuccess or failure in terms of technological ubiquity. Developing a setof characteristics of services rather than a set of services is afundamental break with the tradition of universal service. In fact, theimplications of our proposal is that basic characteristics in theoffering of the service rather than the absolute price are critical toclose the digital divide: certainty of total charge, ability to avoiddeposits or disconnection via best effort service, and payer-basedcontrol of all charges. While all of these principles sound obvious infact none of these hold in the telephony network. Universal service hasevolved from common carriage (serve all with no discrimination) to aright to basic services (100% penetration). Universal service isnow discussed as the digital divide, as the access to information asopposed to services becomes increasingly critical. However, we arediscussing in this paper access to the bits and the network rather thanaccess to the information (or intellectual property) once connected. Theprovision of universal service is seen as a technical problem only in thatthe technology costs money – universal service debates have longbeen the domain of economists. Yet the design of protocols has been thedomain of engineers, the building of systems the corporate domain, andthe discussion of equity the interest of ethicists. The design ofprotocols can define the parameters of the corporate decision-makers,the variables of the economist, and the questions for the ethicist. Thedesign decisions made at the fundamental levels can make communicationsequity more or less likely. In this work I focus on the design ofprotocols for the next generation Internet, protocols which willfundamentally change the best-effort nature of Internet services.Building on the economic and ethnographic work of others I argue thatthe effects of protocols adoption on universal service can be predictedto some degree. By examination of past and current technologies Iexamine a set of technical mechanisms to determine how such mechanismsmight harm or enhance universal service. I define each mechanism (e.g.denial of entry) and offer observations about each particularmechanism''s implicit pricing assumptions. I close with a discussion ofinterest to ethicists and regulators on evaluating communicationsprotocols with respect to universal access. Protocols for developingmultiple qualities of service for packet-switched networks have focusedon economic efficiency (e.g. Mackie-Mason, 1995; Choi, Stahl &Winston, 1997; Shapiro & Varian, 1998), billing to encouragewidespread adoption of network innovations (e.g. Xie & Sirbu, 1985)and billing in a manner consistent with the underlying network (e.g.Clark, 1996). Here we examine a set of protocols which include varyingquality of service mechanisms with respect to the compatibility of theprotocols with universal access. (shrink)

The global economic crisis, the popular discontent against traditional parties and post-democratic forms of governance, as well as the sharp increase in migrant and refugee arrivals have led to the resurgence of populist parties around the world. Left-wing parties usually express an inclusionary populist discourse with patriotic features, while right-wing parties utilize an exclusionary populism with strong nationalist and xenophobic characteristics. In Greece in recent years, the radical left party of SYRIZA rose to power through a left-wing populist and (...) anti-imperialist discourse. Alexis Tsipras formed a paradox coalition government with the radical right party of ANEL to reach an agreement that would lessen the effects of austerity policies. However, once in office, SYRIZA transformed some features of its political style and began to follow a type of "pragmatic populism". This paper examines the relationship between populism and anti-imperialism, while analyzing SYRIZA's discourse in opposition and in power. The questions that it attempts to answer are: does Tsipras express an anti-imperialist discourse both in opposition and in power? What forces are considered imperialist by SYRIZA? Can the notion of "crypto-colonialism" explain the rise of left-wing populism in Greece? (shrink)

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people (...) are morally responsible in that universe. Although this suggests that people are intuitive incompatibilists, Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray, in a recent series of important papers, have developed an important challenge to this interpretation. They argue that people confuse determinism with bypassing, the idea that one’s mental states lack causal efficacy. Murray and Nahmias present new experiments that seem to confirm the bypassing hypothesis. In this paper, we use structural equation modeling to re-examine the issue. We find support instead for an incompatibilist explanation of the bypassing results, i.e., incompatibilist judgments seem to cause bypassing judgments. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs because people think of decisions as essentially indeterministic; thus, when confronted with a description of determinism they tend to think that decisions do not even occur. We provide evidence for this in three subsequent studies which show that many participants deny that people make decisions in a deterministic universe; by contrast, most participants tend to allow that people add numbers in a deterministic universe. Together, these studies suggest that bypassing results don’t reflect a confusion, but rather the depth of the incompatibilist intuition. (shrink)

This book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides.

In a series of pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering a stranger), and (d) the difference (...) between people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility in response to first-person scenarios and third-person scenarios. We predicted that once we focused participants’ attention on the two different abilities to do otherwise available to agents in indeterministic and deterministic scenarios, their intuitions would support natural incompatibilism—the view that laypersons judge that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. This prediction was borne out by our findings. (shrink)

This paper examines socrates' method for determining whether virtue is taught, And discusses some of the opposing interpretations that have been offered (e.G., By robinson and hackforth). Some major conclusions are: that hypotheses that have been deduced from other hypotheses can still be called hypotheses; that it is false that there can be only one hypothesis per argument; and that the several hypotheses in a given argument need not all be hypothesized with the same degree of confidence.

Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, p. 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about perception that Fodor also shared. The problem is that these ideas (...) have turned out to be false. Both Danto and Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non-perceptual processing (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn 1984). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this modularist assumption. There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various point in a top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encountered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical literature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see also the references in the last section of this paper). What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and bear repeating. Even more importantly, Danto’s aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles. (shrink)

By around the age of 5½, many children in the United States judge that numbers never end, and that it is always possible to add 1 to a set. These same children also generally perform well when asked to label the quantity of a set after one object is added (e.g., judging that a set labeled “five” should now be “six”). These findings suggest that children have implicit knowledge of the “successor function”: Every natural number, n, has a successor, n (...) + 1. Here, we explored how children discover this recursive function, and whether it might be related to discovering productive morphological rules that govern language‐specific counting routines (e.g., the rules in English that represent base‐10 structure). We tested 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children’s knowledge of counting with three tasks, which we then related to (a) children’s belief that 1 can always be added to any number (the successor function) and (b) their belief that numbers never end (infinity). Children who exhibited knowledge of a productive counting rule were significantly more likely to believe that numbers are infinite (i.e., there is no largest number), though such counting knowledge was not directly linked to knowledge of the successor function, per se. Also, our findings suggest that children as young as 4 years of age are able to implement rules defined over their verbal count list to generate number words beyond their spontaneous counting range, an insight which may support reasoning over their acquired verbal count sequence to infer that numbers never end. (shrink)

This study examines the public's and physicians' willingness to support deception of insurance companies in order to obtain necessary healthcare services and how this support varies based on perceptions of physicians' time pressures. Based on surveys of 700 prospective jurors and 1617 physicians, the public was more than twice as likely as physicians to sanction deception (26% versus 11%) and half as likely to believe that physicians have adequate time to appeal coverage decisions (22% versus 59%). The odds of public (...) support for deception compared to that of physicians rose from 2.48 to 4.64 after controlling for differences in time perception. These findings highlight the ethical challenge facing physicians and patients in balancing patient advocacy with honesty in the setting of limited societal resources. (shrink)

By means of a Clebsch representation which differs from that previously applied to electromagnetic field theory it is shown that Maxwell's equations are derivable from a variational principle. In contrast to the standard approach, the Hamiltonian complex associated with this principle is identical with the generally accepted energy-momentum tensor of the fields. In addition, the Clebsch representation of a contravariant vector field makes it possible to consistently construct a field theory based upon a direction-dependent Lagrangian density (it is this kind (...) of Lagrangian density that may arise when developing the Finslerian extension of general relativity). The corresponding field equations are proved to be independent of any gauge of Clebsch potentials. The law of energy-momentum conservation of the field appears to be covariant and integrable in a rather wide class of direction-dependent Lagrangian densities. (shrink)

A Finslerian extension of general relativity is examined with particular emphasis on the Finslerian generalization of the equation of motion in a gravitational field. The construction of a gravitational Lagrangian density by substituting the osculating Riemannian metric tensor in the Einstein density is studied. Attention is drawn to an interesting possibility for developing the theory of test bodies against the Finslerian background.

The analysis of a previous paper (see Ref. 1), in which the possibility of a Finslerian generalization of the equations of motion of gravitational field sources was demonstrated, is extended by developing the Finslerian generalization of the gravitational field equations on the basis of the complete contractionK = K lj lj of the Finslerian curvature tensorK l j hk (x, y). The relevant Lagrangian is constructed by the replacement of the directional variabley i inK by a vector fieldy i (x), (...) so that the notion of osculation may be regarded as the key concept on which the approach is based. The introduction of the auxiliary vector fieldy i (x) is shown to be of physical significance, for the field equations refer not only to the proper field variables but also to a special coordinate system associated withy i (x) through the Clebsch representation of the latter. The status of the conservation laws proves to be similar to that in the theory of the Yang-Mills field. By choosing a special Finslerian metric function we elucidate in detail the structure of the field equations in the static case. (shrink)

Both inside and outside philosophy of science, the past 25 years has seen a remarkable increase in the epistemic importance attached to the role of background beliefs and values of agents engaged in cognitive inquiry. Emphasis on the role of background commitments has been beneficial in bringing philosophy of science back into closer relation with the varied forms of science. But at present there cannot be said to be any clear consensus among philosophers on issues of the theoretical status of (...) such commitments, or of their import upon conceptions of scientific meta-methodology.The situation worsens when one considers widespread suspicion today among many historicists and sociologists of science of the viability of philosophy of science as a normative enterprise. This marks the ground between normative epistemology and its critics. But to understand the skeptical attitude towards normative theory, one must attend to the background assumptions about normative discourse imbedded in logical empiricism, and in particular to the state of logical empiricist metascience just prior to the revolution of sorts that occurred in the 1960’s. (shrink)

This book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides.

The faults of logical empiricist accounts of metascientific discourse are examined through a study of the modifications Carnap makes to his version of the program over four decades. As empiricists acquiesced on the distinction between theory and observation, Carnap attempted to retain and insulate an equally suspect sharp distinction between the theoretic and the pragmatic. Carnap's later philosophy was understood as a modification of the program in the direction of pragmatism. But neither the key notion of "external questions" nor an (...) instrumentalist understanding of "pragmatic utility" are genuinely compatible with pragmatism. This underlines the need to clarify what is unique to pragmatic views of cognitive evaluation and normative discourse as they affect scientific reasoning. I conclude by suggesting how pragmatic conceptions of metascientific discourse can work to correct misconceptions about norm generation and governance that are shared in logicist and historicist accounts. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropologist Mircea Eliade once said that "the union of opposites" is a basic category of archaic ontology and comparative world religions. In this paper I develop the theory of contrariety or opposition as a prime focus for East/West comparative philosophy. The paper considers especially Nishida Kitaro's later works and the complex phrase "zettai mujuntekijikodbitsu," variously translated by Schinzinger as "absolute contradictory self-identity," "the self-identity of absolute contradictories," or more simply as "oneness" or "unity" of opposites.

This book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides.