En los estudios sobre participación política se observan diferencias tanto conceptuales como metodológicas relativas a su evaluación que afectan la producción del conocimiento en este campo. Tales diferencias configuran un nivel de complejidad mayor cuando refieren a estudios hechos sobre una misma población. Con el fin de evaluar la participación política de la población cordobesa se desarrollaron 7 estudios en un período de 14 años utilizando diferentes innovaciones metodológicas tendientes a mejorar la calidad de los datos y con el propósito (...) de contribuir a la discusión en torno a la evaluación de este constructo de marcada relevancia social y complejidad. Los resultados reportados son consistentes con la tendencia observada en el campo de estudios que sugiere la complejización de la evaluación de este constructo abarcando su intensidad, amplitud y orientación para conocer de modo más preciso su multidimensionalidad. (shrink)

This collection of essays examines the ways in which disputes and controversies about the application of scientific knowledge are resolved. Four concrete examples of public controversy are considered in detail: the efficacy of Laetrile, the classification of homosexuality as a disease, the setting of safety standards in the workplace, and the utility of nuclear energy as a source of power. The essays in this volume show that debates about these cases are not confined to matters of empirical fact. Rather, as (...) is seen with most scientific and technical controversies, they focus on and are structured by complex ethical, economic, and political interests. Drs. Engelhardt and Caplan have brought together a distinguished group of scholars from the sciences and humanities, who sketch a theory of scientific controversy and attempt to provide recommendations about the ways in which both scientists and the public ought to seek more informed resolutions of highly contentious issues in science and technology. Scientific Controversies is offered as a contribution to the better understanding of the roles of both science and nonscientific interests in disputes and controversies pertaining to science and technology. (shrink)

This is an interpretative, critical, and selective review of scholarly contributions that explore Latin America’s religious landscape. We present data, both qualitative and quantitative, from Latin America and analyze the explanations given to make sense of it. After assessing the literature that uses either secularization theory or the “religious economy” approach, we study explanations that highlight a Latin American style of “popular religiosity.” These three models, in different ways, put the emphasis on religious institutions—their vitality, commands, competition, and authority. We (...) propose, instead, a focus on the religious practices of regular believers. We speculate that embarking from that focus, the idea of an “enchanted modernity” will help make sense of Latin America’s religious landscape. Nuanced elucidation of Latin America’s religious particularities will situate them in dialogue with other regions of the world, like western Europe and the United States, while also acknowledging the fact that Latin America is experiencing a modernization process distinct from the North Atlantic one. (shrink)

This is the first book to examine individual rights from an economic perspective, collecting together leading articles in this emerging area of interest and showing the vibrant and expanding scholarship that relates them. Areas covered include The implications of constitutional protections of individual rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech and of the press, The right to bear arms, The right against unreasonable searches, The right against self-incrimination, The right to trial by jury, The right against cruel and unusual punishment, (...) including capital punishment. The focus of these papers is both theoretical and empirical, examining how economics can illuminate the entire sequence of crime and punishment, from the decision to commit a crime, to police methods for apprehending and arresting criminals, to the rules used in trials to the scope of punishment for the convicted. (shrink)

The human blood coagulation system comprises a series of linked glycoproteins that upon activation induce the generation of downstream enzymes ultimately forming fibrin. This process is primarily important to arrest bleeding (hemostasis). Hemostasis is a typical example of a molecular machine, where the assembly of substrates, enzymes, protein cofactors and calcium ions on a phospholipid surface markedly accelerates the rate of coagulation. Excess, pathological, coagulation activity occurs in “thrombosis”, the formation of an intravascular clot, which in the most dramatic form (...) precipitates in the microvasculature as disseminated intravascular coagulation. Thrombosis occurs according to a biochemical machine model in the case of atherothrombosis on a ruptured atherosclerotic plaque, but may develop at a slower rate in venous thrombosis, illustrating that the coagulation machinery can act at different velocities. The separate coagulation enzymes are also important in other biological processes, including inflammation for which the rapid conversion of one coagulation factor by the other is not a prerequisite. The latter role of coagulation enzymes may be related to the old and probably maintained function of the coagulation machine in innate immunity. BioEssays 25:1220–1228, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Perioicals, Inc. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda las relaciones entre el pensamiento estructuralista, especialmente la variante antropológica de éste en Lévi-Strauss y la teoría de sistemas sociales de Luhmann. El análisis se hace a través de dos hipótesis que guían el desarrollo del texto. Se revisan los antecedentes h..

The article investigates to what extent metaphysics may shape literary criticism and in how far a discursive mode of thought may mould critical concepts. these issues are discussed in the context of t s eliot's early criticism. the first part of the article shows how eliot envisaged the assembling of speculative ideas inside literary criticism. the second part offers an analysis of the parallelism between the key terms of eliot's criticism and the philosophical concepts gathered from his dissertation of f (...) h bradley. this leads to an assessment of the precise nature of eliot's criticism as the cognitive elucidation of the transition from artistic sensibility to artistic expression. (shrink)

The role of reasoning in our moral lives has been increasingly called into question by moral psychology. Not only are intuitions guiding many of our moral judgments and decisions, with reasoning only finding post-hoc rationalizations, but reasoning can sometimes play a negative role, by finding excuses for our moral violations. The observations fit well with the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier H, Sperber D, Behav Brain Sci, in press-b), which claims that reasoning evolved to find and evaluate arguments in dialogic (...) contexts. This theory explains the strong confirmation bias that reasoning displays when it produces arguments, which in turn explains its tendency to rationalize our decisions. But this theory also predicts that people should be able to evaluate arguments felicitously and that, as a result, people should reason better in groups, when they are confronted with other people’s arguments. Groups are able to converge on better moral judgments. It is argued that reasoning and argumentation play an important role in our everyday moral lives, and a defense of the value of reasoning for moral change is offered. (shrink)