Numerous questions remain unanswered concerning the functional determinants of symbolic behavior and perspective-taking, particularly regarding the capabilities of children with autism. An alternative approach that considers these behaviors to be forms of derived relational responding allows for the design of functional intervention programs to establish such repertoires in individuals for whom they are absent.

Research in archaeology and anthropology on the evolution of modern patterns of human behavior often makes use of general theories of signs, usually derived from semiotics. Recent work generalizing David Lewis’ 1969 model of signaling provides a better theory of signs than those currently in use. This approach is based on the coevolution of behaviors of sign production and sign interpretation. I discuss these models and then look at applications to human prehistoric behavior, focusing on body ornamentation, tools, and other (...) artifacts. (shrink)

This article describes a multilevel theoretical framework that examines the multiple causes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in the social environment of business. We argue that substantive and/or symbolic reporting flows from individual‐, aggregate‐, organizational‐, and institution‐level phenomena, and is thus a complex outcome of CSR and corporate social performance (CSP). Theoretical lenses range from reinforcement theory at the microlevel to legitimacy and stakeholder theories at the macrolevel, and include a discussion of the emergence of lower‐level CSR‐relevant characteristics (...) to higher level constructs. Our goal is to clarify how this behavior develops from microlevel, mesolevel, and macrolevel processes with a view toward assisting corporations to better enact CSR reporting, and their stakeholders to effectively promote substantive reporting behavior. (shrink)

In July, 1939, a celebration was held at Leland Stanford University to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the discovery that the cell is the basic unit of all living tissue. Today we are beginning to realize and to appreciate the fact that the symbol is the basic unit of all human behavior and civilization.

With the spread of cross-cultural communication and the expansion of multinational brands the semantic boundaries of signs is being transcended in various ways. The contemporary global and transnational construction of signs has a different impact on consumer behaviour across the world. Easter consumers have some unique national psychology and purchasing behaviour to Western consumers. This study explores different the characteristics and motivations behind the cross-cultural exchange of signs, their reception, the specific symbolic value, and consumer behaviour (...) in China. (shrink)

The proposed theory is broad enough to accommodate the reduction or elimination of prior influences by a variety of acts symbolizing separation. However, it does not account for stability in psychological variables, and is contradicted by widely documented stability in people's actual attitudes and behavior over time, in multiple domains, despite people's pervasive everyday acts of symbolic separation.

ABSTRACTChristopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s Democracy for Realists makes a persuasive case that standard theories of democracy rest on shaky empirical ground, and that optimistically interpreted empirical findings about public competence do not save the day. However, I argue that the solution does not lie with theories of elite competition or accountability to other institutions. Instead, I turn to theories of symbolic politics. These theories capture the empirical reality of how voters engage with politics and make decisions. While they (...) tend to emphasize human irrationality, they also contain the potential for a symbolic kind of rationality that could provide a solid foundation for democratic politics. (shrink)

Aesthetics is thought of as not only a theory of art or beauty, but also includes sensibility, experience, judgment, and relationships. This paper is a study of Bernard Stiegler’s notion of Aesthetic War (stasis) and symbolic misery. Symbolic violence is ensued through a loss of individuation and participation in the creation of symbols. As a struggle between market values against spirit values human life and consciousness within neoliberal hyperindustrial society has become calculable, which prevents people from creating affective (...) and meaningful attachments to symbols in relation to our retentional apparatuses, technology and memory. Such tension can be thought of as a dissonance between overlapping domains of social life, private and public. New Media is a reflection of aesthetic dissonance, an experience such as being bored and entertained at the same time, between antagonistic experiences, values, and behavior. Moreover, new media is at once a medium of customizing aesthetic experience individually as well as the threat and practice of prioritizing calculability and modeling of consumer behavior in favor of capitalistic effectiveness, which results in the simultaneous categorization of an individual as a data point, putting those who do not fit an algorithm’s premises at a disadvantage. (shrink)

According to Bickerton, the behavioral sciences have failed to give an adequate account of human nature at least partly because of the conjunction and mutual reinforcement of two widespread beliefs: that language is simply a means of communication and that human intelligence is the result of the rapid growth and unusual size of human brains. Bickerton argues that each of the properties distinguishing human intelligence and consciousness from that of other animals can be shown to derive straightforwardly from properties of (...) language. In essence, language arose as a representational system, not a means of communication or a skill, and not a product of culture but an evolutionary adaptation. The author stresses the necessity of viewing intelligence in evolutionary terms, seeing it not as problem solving but as a way of maintaining homeostasis - the preservation of those conditions most favorable to an organism, the optimal achievable conditions for survival and well-being. The term protolanguage is used to describe the stringing together of symbols that prehuman hominids employed. "It did not allow them to turn today's imagination into tomorrow's fact. But it is just this power to transform imagination into fact that distinguishes human behavior from that of our ancestral species, and indeed from that of all other species. It is exactly what enables us to change our behavior, or invent vast ranges of new behavior, practically overnight, with no concomitant genetic changes." Language and Human Behavior should be of interest to anyone in the behavioral and evolutionary sciences and to all those concerned with the role of language in human behavior. (shrink)

Aspects of human symbolic evolution are studied by scholars active in a variety of fields and disciplines in the life and the behavioral sciences as well as the scientific-philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and linguistic sciences. These fields and disciplines all take on an evolutionary approach to the study of human symbolism, but scholars disagree in their theoretical and methodological attitudes. Theoretically, symbolism is defined differentially as knowledge, behavior, cognition, culture, language, or social group living. Methodologically, the diverse symbolic evolution (...) sciences establish their teachings upon diverging evolutionary biological schools and paradigms. This chapter reviews past and current research fields in human symbolic evolution for how they differentially implement tenets of the major evolution schools that were discussed in the previous chapter. Traditional evolutionary epistemology and biosemiotics bring in a mesoevolutionary outlook by drawing on early Darwinism and evolutionary developmental biology movements that emphasize the role of the organism in evolution. Communication studies instead originally take on a microevolutionary perspective by investigating how units of information are transmitted across generations through time. Only later do they integrate studies on meaning-making at the organismal level. Sociobiology complements a microevolutionary with a macroevolutionary outlook by implementing population genetic approaches, typical of the Modern Synthesis, into studies on individual and group behavior. The new symbolic evolutionary sciences build upon these traditions and include disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary archaeology, evolutionary sociology, and evolutionary economics. Originally centered on implementing Darwinian selection theory, these fields are now including ecological and evolutionary developmental biology as well as reticulate evolutionary paradigms. As diverse in outlook and scope as they are, no discipline holds a privileged position over the other and all have made valuable contributions to our understanding of human symbolic evolution. (shrink)

Human cognition and behavior are dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual-level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter-individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a referential communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of recurring meanings to a partner by drawing, but without using their conventional language. Individual-level learning, via observation and cognitive bias, was (...) sufficient to produce signs that became increasingly effective, efficient, and shared over games. However, breaking a referential precedent eliminated these benefits. The most effective, most efficient, and most shared signs arose when participants could directly interact with their partner, indicating that social coordinative learning is important to the creation of shared symbols. Experiment 2 investigated the contribution of two distinct aspects of social interaction: behavior alignment and concurrent partner feedback. Each played a complementary role in the creation of shared symbols: Behavior alignment primarily drove communication effectiveness, and partner feedback primarily drove the efficiency of the evolved signs. In conclusion, inter-individual social coordinative learning is important to the evolution of effective, efficient, and shared symbols. (shrink)

The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological (...) accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence. (shrink)

The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological (...) accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence. (shrink)

This paper proposes how various disciplinary theories of cognition may be combined into a unifying, sub-symbolic, computational theory of cognition. The following theories are considered for integration: psychological theories, including the theory of event coding, event segmentation theory, the theory of anticipatory behavioral control, and concept development; artificial intelligence and machine learning theories, including reinforcement learning and generative artificial neural networks; and theories from theoretical and computational neuroscience, including predictive coding and free energy-based inference. In the light of such (...) a potential unification, it is discussed how abstract cognitive, conceptualized knowledge and understanding may be learned from actively gathered sensorimotor experiences. The unification rests on the free energy-based inference principle, which essentially implies that the brain builds a predictive, generative model of its environment. Neural activity-oriented inference causes the continuous adaptation of the currently active predictive encodings. Neural structure-oriented inference causes the longer term adaptation of the developing generative model as a whole. Finally, active inference strives for maintaining internal homeostasis, causing goal-directed motor behavior. To learn abstract, hierarchical encodings, however, it is proposed that free energy-based inference needs to be enhanced with structural priors, which bias cognitive development towards the formation of particular, behaviorally suitable encoding structures. As a result, it is hypothesized how abstract concepts can develop from, and thus how they are structured by and grounded in, sensorimotor experiences. Moreover, it is sketched-out how symbol-like thought can be generated by a temporarily active set of predictive encodings, which constitute a distributed neural attractor in the form of an interactive free-energy minimum. The activated, interactive network attractor essentially characterizes the semantics of a concept or a concept composition, such as an actual or imagined situation in our environment. Temporal successions of attractors then encode unfolding semantics, which may be generated by a behavioral or mental interaction with an actual or imagined situation in our environment. Implications, further predictions, possible verification and falsifications, as well as potential enhancements into a fully spelled-out unified theory of cognition are discussed at the end of the paper. (shrink)

The fasting and Eid al-Fitr celebration has a strong public dimension for their traditional characteristics in Islamic communal celebrations. This study used field research from interviews with the two largest mass organisations in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, and the statements of mass media. This research shows that contestation of religious symbols is not something that needs to be debated but it should broaden the understanding of the differences that must be respected in order to build brotherhood not, division. Contestation (...) of religious symbols between the hisab [astronomical calculations] and the ru'yat [sighting a new crescent moon] is a competition between religious organisations, to strengthen their position, social legitimacy and religious authority in the public sphere. The government has to take the initiative to compromise the policy between the two Islamic organisations to reach a methodological agreement in order to minimise social tensions.CONTRIBUTION: This article proposed that understanding the ru'yat and hisab as a symbol of contestation becomes an attribute of religious organisations and part of organisational behaviour and culture. (shrink)

The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To address these issues, a connectionist model of sentence production was developed. The model had variables (role‐concept bindings) that were inspired by spatial representations (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). In order to take advantage of these variables, a (...) novel dual‐pathway architecture with event semantics is proposed and shown to be better at symbolic generalization than several variants. This architecture has one pathway for mapping message content to words and a separate pathway that enforces sequencing constraints. Analysis of the model's hidden units demonstrated that the model learned different types of information in each pathway, and that the model's compositional behavior arose from the combination of these two pathways. The model's ability to balance symbolic and statistical behavior in syntax acquisition and to model aphasic double dissociations provided independent support for the dual‐pathway architecture. (shrink)

This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 ‘Business Profiles’, written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition in 2005. Included in each of these narratives were claims relating to the firms’ contributions to wider society, relationships with customers, employees and stakeholders. These narratives were coded and classified in a framework (...) drawn from Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998, Academy of Management Review 23(2), 242–266) categorisation of social capital. The analysis revealed a range of strategic orientations towards the development of social and symbolic capital, along a conceptual continuum ranging from being responsible for oneself to being responsible for others. Overall, the evidence demonstrates the significance of the power inherent in the social relations of SMEs as a force for ethical behaviour, and suggests that normative theories of the development of social capital may provide ‘competitive advantage’ through responsible behaviour for small business in the global economy. (shrink)

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that (...) it was successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2. (shrink)

Jablonka & Lamb's (J&L's) book is refreshing in that it debunks the exclusively gene-centered approach used these days to explain almost anything about life and human behavior. The book is very accessible and most convincing when the authors discuss biological theories of genetic and epigenetic inheritance, but it does not shy away from the more slippery terrain of behavioral and symbolic inheritance, and specifically the origins of language. But is the analogy appropriate?

Apart from these reservations, however, the child sacrifices certain immediate ends of satisfaction for ends which by their very transcendence elude him. The consequence of his new attitude on his interpretation of the actions of other individuals will he striking; for, inasmuch as their acts and gestures no longer signify as means to his immediate and tangible ends within his life-space, their behavior will be problematic, and the child will attempt to interrogate its meaning. Under the old dispensation he could (...) grasp the meaning of a bodily movement by following its direction towards an object in his proximate environment, and the end of the movement was simply the object viewed as terminus ad quem or as positively charged with respect to action. Under the new dispensation, based no longer on Pleasure and Pain but on Good and Bad, the signification of the gestures and speech of those around the child is transcendent in the sense that it does not aim at material objects or at combinations of the same in his proximate milieu, but at possible or ideal objects separated from the child not by an interval of space but by an interval of time. Thus the transcendent terminus of a gesture is not a materially given object but an object to be constructed and as yet existing only in the projects of the parents. Moral and intellectual formation is a process of self-alienation, of auto-suggestive submission to the Transcendent, interrupted periodically on the part of the child by acts of defiance, systematic contradiction and obstinacy, and regression to earlier modes of adjustment with considerable nuisance-value. If under the regime of indulgence the child becomes what he is by acquiring his immanent meaning in his activities of self-gratification, under the regime of discipline he becomes other than he is by a sacrifice of his determinate individuality. (shrink)

In this way, his diffuse if not altogether random behavior is already action in the world, directed towards ends which he did not lay down and yet which satisfy his needs. The neonate is integrated in a system of immediate utility, and his body is surrounded by a complex of instruments, utensils, and commodities, never made or put there by him but nonetheless constituting the meaning of his objectivity. Hence his objectivity, or his body as a significant object, is constituted (...) by the activity of others. Although he has not himself made or given himself this meaning, it is what he is, for his needs are silenced and this is decided according to an empirical test of satisfaction as drive reduction. At the stage of immediate utility it cannot be maintained that the child's objectivity or the systematic interpretation of his behavior is forced upon him, since the system works and his needs are satisfied. We conclude, then, that his body is his being-for-others and that he is this body although he cannot pose it for himself; that is to say, he cannot manipulate and control the complex of instruments that surround him and thus give to his gestures the meaning they have for others. (shrink)

This edited volume covers new ground by bringing together perspectives from symbolic legislation theory on the one hand, and from biolaw and bioethics on the other hand. Symbolic legislation has a bad name. It usually refers to instances of legislation which are ineffective and that serve other political and social goals than the goals officially stated. Recently, a more positive notion of symbolic legislation has emerged in legislative theory. From this perspective, symbolic legislation is regarded as (...) a positive alternative to the more traditional, top-down legislative approach. The legislature no longer merely issues commands backed up with severe sanctions, as in instrumental legislation. Instead, lawmakers provide open and aspirational norms that are meant to change behavior not by means of threat, but indirectly, through debate and social interaction. Since the 1990s, biomedical developments have revived discussions on symbolic legislation. One of the reasons is that biomedical legislation touches on deep-rooted, symbolic-cultural representations of the biological aspects of human life. Moreover, as it is often impossible to reach consensus on these controversial questions, legislators have sought alternative ways to develop legal frameworks. Consequently, communicative and interactive approaches to legislation are prominent within the governance of medical biotechnology. The symbolic dimensions of biolaw are often overlooked. Yet, it is clear that the symbolic is at the heart of many legal-political debates on bioethical questions. Since the rise of biomedical technologies, human body materials have acquired a scientific, medical and even commercial value. These new approaches, which radically question existing legal symbolizations of the human body, raise the question whether and how the law should continue to reflect symbolic values and meanings. Moreover, how can we decide what these symbolic values are, given the fact that we live in a pluralistic society? (shrink)

Behaviour is often described as the computation of a response to a stimulus. This description is incomplete in an important way because it only examines what occurs between the reception of stimulus information and the generation of an action. Behaviour is more correctly described as a control process where actions are performed in order to affect perceptions. This closed-loop nature of behaviour is de-emphasized in modern discussions of brain function, leading to a number of artificial mysteries. A (...) notable example is the ‘symbol grounding problem'. When behaviour is viewed as a control process, it is natural to explain how internal representations, even symbols, can have meaning for an organism, and how actions can be motivated by organic needs. (shrink)

Boehm's model conceptualizes a common ancestor to humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos at several million years B.P., followed by a model of prehistoric foragers at 25,000-50,000 B.P. based on ethnographic data from twentieth-century hunters and gatherers. By putting processes of complex communication into the picture, we can refine Boehm's model considerably by filling in significant scenarios for humans beginning at perhaps 2 million years ago. These include a suite of features that include constraints on sexual behaviour, a rudimentary division of (...) labour, the gendering of morality, socialized control over junior males, increased group size, increased home range size, the reduction of bullying behaviour, and a reverse dominance hierarchy that promotes egalitarianism among fully adult males. Boehm's model emphasizes the last two of these, but it is consistent with the others as well. Cultural or proto-cultural elaboration of beliefs and associated practices is the symbolic dimension of morality and is an important component of human evolution. Boehm's model is extremely important for outlining socio-political mechanisms and concomitants in the formation of adult male egalitarian groups, and, in the process, identifying a key element in the evolution of human morality. (shrink)

This article investigates whether different religious (mythological) worldviews can be described as alternative and altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Differences between conscious and unconscious motivations for behaviour are discussed before looking at ASCs, Weltanschauung and symbolic universes. Mythology can be described both as Weltanschauung and symbolic universe, functioning on all levels of consciousness. Different Weltanschauungen constitute alternative states of consciousness. Compared to secular worldviews, religious worldviews may be described as ASCs. Thanks to our globalised modern societies, the (...) issue is even more complex, as alternate modernities lead to a symbolic multiverse, with individuals living in a social multiverse.Keyowrds: mythology; Weltanschauung; worldview; symbolic universe; states of consciousness; altered states of consciousness; alternative states of consciousness; symbolic multiverse; social multiverse. (shrink)

This paper adopts a social representations approach to examine the ‘9/11’ symbol which is argued to be a centrally organising, communication oriented, symbolic resource within contemporary representations of terrorism. Within the context of the events of September 11 2001 as a point of shared history which has come to be understood as a significant world event, the ‘9/11’ symbol is argued to fulfil a triple function in contemporary representations of terrorism. Firstly, the ‘9/11’ symbol provides a central anchor for (...) the events of September 11 2001. Secondly the ‘9/11’ symbol acts as a powerful rhetorical resource for objectifying the abstract concept of terrorism. Lastly, alongside the capacity to objectify the abstract, the ‘9/11’ symbol also enables a counter process of transcendentalisation whereby it transforms the object into the abstract. As a result the ‘9/11’ symbol is highly suited to widespread mobilisation of easily apprehended notions defining what terrorism is, which do not readily provoke contest and are widely constructed as mundane forms of ‘truth’ amongst a community of users. (shrink)

This paper adopts a social representations approach to examine the ‘9/11’ symbol which is argued to be a centrally organising, communication oriented, symbolic resource within contemporary representations of terrorism. Within the context of the events of September 11 2001 as a point of shared history which has come to be understood as a significant world event, the ‘9/11’ symbol is argued to fulfil a triple function in contemporary representations of terrorism. Firstly, the ‘9/11’ symbol provides a central anchor for (...) the events of September 11 2001. Secondly the ‘9/11’ symbol acts as a powerful rhetorical resource for objectifying the abstract concept of terrorism. Lastly, alongside the capacity to objectify the abstract, the ‘9/11’ symbol also enables a counter process of transcendentalisation whereby it transforms the object into the abstract. As a result the ‘9/11’ symbol is highly suited to widespread mobilisation of easily apprehended notions defining what terrorism is, which do not readily provoke contest and are widely constructed as mundane forms of ‘truth’ amongst a community of users. (shrink)

The traditional view of symbol grounding seeks to connect an a priori internal representation or ‘form’ to its external referent. But such a ‘form’ is usually itself systematically composed out of more primitive parts, so this view ignores its grounding in the physics of the world. Some previous work simulating multiple talking/listening agents has effectively taken this stance, and shown how a shared discrete speech code can emerge. Taking the earlier work of Oudeyer, we have extended his model to include (...) a dispersive force intended to account broadly for a speaker’s motivation to increase auditory distinctiveness. New simulations show that vowel systems result that are more representative of the range seen in human languages. These simulations make many profound abstractions and assumptions. Relaxing these by including more physically and physiologically realistic mechanisms for talking and listening is seen as the key to replicating more complex and dynamic aspects of speech, such as consonant-vowel patterning. (shrink)

A “sender–receiver” framework based on models developed in several fields can provide a general treatment of communicative and symbolic phenomena, replacing traditional semiotic theories that have failed to live up to the hopes of their advocates. Sender–receiver models have mostly been applied to linguistic behavior, gestures, and other ephemeral interactions between individuals. I look at the application of this framework to enduring artifacts, including pictures, using indigenous rock art in Australia as a case study.

This paper illustrates how external symbol grounding can be studied in simulations with large populations. We discuss how we can simulate language evolution in a relatively complex environment which has been developed in the context of the New Ties project. This project has the objective of evolving a cultural society and, in doing so, the agents have to evolve a communication system that is grounded in their interactions with their virtual environment and with other individuals. A preliminary experiment is presented (...) in which we investigate the effect of a number of learning mechanisms. The results show that the social symbol grounding problem is a particularly hard one; however, we provide an ideal platform to study this problem. (shrink)

A symbol is defined as a species of sign. The concept of a sign coincides with Skinner's (1938) concept of a discriminative stimulus. Symbols differ from other signs in five respects: (1) They are stimuli which the organism can both respond to and produce, either as a self-directed stimulus (as in thinking) or as a stimulus for another individual with a predictably similar response from the recipient in each case. (2) they act as discriminative stimuli for the same kind of (...) object for all members of the verbal community within which they function as a symbols; (3) they acquire their properties by virtue of arbitrary social convention rather than any natural and intrinsic connection between the sign and what it is a sign of; (4) competent members of the verbal community can both produce the appropriate symbol in response to a naturally occurring sign of the presence of the object or a sample of the kind of object which the symbol stands for and select the appropriate object when presented with the symbol; (5) they form stimulus equivalence classes of the kind demonstrated in the matching-to-sample task (Sidman, 1971; Sidman and Tailby, 1982) both with other symbols having the same meaning and, more important, with the naturally-occurring non-symbolic signs of the presence of the object or kind of object which the symbol stands for. (shrink)

The extent of confusion between symbols and that which is symbolised is examined across five institutional spheres. Religion is the institution most marked by confusion of this type; indeed in some respects the symbolic mes- sage of religion may be the extent of the substantive reality. On the other hand, the very existence of the nation state may be judged to depend upon the exercise of the human imagination; hence providing a source of instability which may lead to the (...) excesses of nationalism. In regard to social status, the main problematical element is a certain circularity: it is necessary to get peo- ple to exhibit differences in behaviour which are then used to justify or con- stitute the status differences themselves. In politics, the symbolism of left and right threatens to strangle creative thinking, while in education the tendency on all sides to orient towards public systems of measurement and grading undermines the claim that what is really important is pupil and student learn- ing. A social cost is being paid for the failure to recognise and, where possible, address the issues identified. (shrink)

Well-known concepts in Organization Behavior are viewed in this paper through a Taoist lens, in particular through the perspective enshrined in the famous yin–yang symbol. Since Tao purports to be a fundamental Law of Nature, it should be possible to find Taoist principles operating within, or at least behind, concepts and theories presented in the field of Organization Behavior as having some degree of truth value. Concepts from personality theory, learning, motivation, leadership, and organization culture are found indeed to accord (...) with the Tao. The review reveals aspects of OB concepts not usually discussed, and suggests a fresh approach for theory evaluation and development. A general principle of yin–yang balance as an essential dynamic for performance and harmony in a wide variety of contexts is suggested. Implications for further research are indicated. (shrink)

The article starts by offering a definition of fake kindness focused on the dissociation between the behavioural components of kindness and the intent to sincerely pay some heed to the needs of others. Using the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, this definition is then used to articulate how fake kindness can be conceptualized as a specific form of symbolic violence. Such a view allows explanations as to how and why the prevalence and effectiveness of fake kindness vary according to (...) microsociological norms and values. The generic definition and conceptualization of fake kindness as a form of symbolic violence are then used to discuss how nursing’s enthrallment with the concept of caring and its operationalization as a moral compass likely fosters the growth of fake kindness within the profession. In this view, the institutional enforcement of propriety and well-behaved professionalism is more likely to lead to toxic environments than to healthy workplaces. We hope that being able to understand how professional norms and institutional rules are sometimes turned into social tools to enforce obedience and existing hierarchies can empower victims of those phenomena to resist them more effectively. It might also contribute to increasing the awareness of well-meaning nurses or people in position of authority who have been socialized in environments where fake kindness is normalized. (shrink)

In an era of generalized communication, democratic societies cannot escape the radical changes that the development of different types of communication claims. Political communication determines new types of political practice and adhesion. As in the case of postmodern communication in general, in political communication, expressions of symbolic communication characteristic for traditional societies are still being used, even if those expressions are presented as contemporary symbolic constructs, as for example the construct of “postmodern tribes”. This text focuses on how (...) these elements are highlighted in the socio-analysis of Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, one of the most renowned experts in the Romanian political culture. The public space, shaped in the past by the intellectual elite, bearer of values and symbolic conscience, is being seized by television stars, by the online communication specialists. This leads to new fragmentations in and coagulation of political space, and to a prevalence of sentimentalities, mythical stories, and mystical experiences at the expense of rationality, civic involvement and ideologies. The new configuration of political groups of interest and the new ways of adhesion typical for “political followers” belonging to the Facebook generation are regarded from a mythic– symbolic mentality which links them to a behavior and a kind of solidarity characterizing tribal groups which are acting on a postmodern political scene. (shrink)

We analyse the Mitchell ordering in a model where κ is P 2 κ-hypermeasurable and $2^{2^\kappa} > (2^\kappa)^+$.

This paper invokes the conceptual framework of Bourdieu to analyse the mechanisms, which help to maintain inappropriate authorship practices and the functions these practices may serve. Bourdieu’s social theory with its emphasis on mechanisms of domination can be applied to the academic field, too, where competition is omnipresent, control mechanisms of authorship are loose, and the result of performance assessment can be a matter of symbolic life and death for the researchers. This results in a problem of game-theoretic nature, (...) where researchers’ behaviour will be determined more by the logic of competition, than by individual character or motives. From this follows that changing this practice requires institutionalized mechanisms, and change cannot be expected from simply appealing to researchers’ individual conscience. The article aims at showing that academic capital is translated into honorary authorship. With little control, undetected honorary authorship gives the appearance of possessing intellectual capital. In this way a dominant position is made to be seen as natural result of intellectual ability or scientific merit, which makes it more acceptable to those in dominated positions. The final conclusion of this paper is that undemocratic authorship decisions and authorship based performance assessment together are a form of symbolic violence. (shrink)

Concepts such as “symbolism” and “symbolic cognition” often remain unspecified in discussions the symbolic capacities of earlier hominins. In this paper, I use conceptual tools from phenomenology to reflect on the origins of early symbolic cognition. In particular, I discuss the possible early use of pointing gestures around the time of the earliest known stone tool industries. I argue that unlike more basic social acts such as expression, gaze following, and attention-getters, which are used by extant non-human (...) great apes, communicative pointing involves key elements that are characteristic of symbolic cognition. In particular, it involves “third order intentionality” as well as “shared practice horizons”: shared frameworks of understanding which are required for the interpretation of communicative acts whose meaning is not codified indexically or iconically in the signaling behavior. In the final part, I briefly review some indications for the use of pointing gestures around the time of the Lomekwian and Oldowan industries, as a way to sustain cooperation and possibly learning by instruction. It is suggested that pointing is more complex than is standardly acknowledged, and that it may have been an important communicative act for Early Stone Age hominins in transitioning to more fully symbolic speech capacities. (shrink)

If S, T are stationary subsets of a regular uncountable cardinal κ, we say that S reflects fully in $T, S , if for almost all α ∈ T (except a nonstationary set) S ∩ α is stationary in α. This relation is known to be a well-founded partial ordering. We say that a given poset P is realized by the reflection ordering if there is a maximal antichain $\langle X_p; p \in P\rangle$ of stationary subsets of $\operatorname{Reg}(\kappa)$ so that (...) $\forall p, q \in P \forall S \subseteq X_p, T \subseteq X_q \text{stationary}: (S We prove that if $V = L\lbrack\overset{\rightarrow\mathscr{U}}\rbrack, o^\mathscr{U} (\kappa) = \kappa^{++}$ , and P is an arbitrary well-founded poset of cardinality ≤ κ + then there is a generic extension where P is realized by the reflection ordering on κ. (shrink)

On the Cave of the Nymphs, an allegorical exegesis of Homer’s description of the cave of the nymphs at Odyssey 13.102-112, a passage quoted in full at the beginning of the treatise after the briefest possible indication of the project on which Porphyry is embarking, has been generally given little attention in discussions of Neoplatonic philosophy, as it is deemed to be of little importance for establishing Porphyrian doctrine. However, the treatise contains significant philosophical thoughts on the relationship between the (...) soul and body, embodiment, demonology, and the concept of the salvation of the soul, which are compatible with his other works, especially _On Abstinence from Killing Animals_ and _Pathways to the Intelligible_. The concept of the salvation of the soul is found in Porphyry’s identification of the goddess Athena with _phronesis_, along with the olive tree, while Odysseus represents the soul descending into genesis, but will return back to his fatherland. In this context, this paper will explore the role and meaning of _phronesis_, namely the goddess Athena, in the process of the soul’s journey towards the intelligible realm and show the relevance of the Neoplatonic doctrine of virtues, particularly the cathartic virtues, in _Sententia_ 32 to Porphyry’s reading of Homer’s image of Odysseus under guidance of the goddess Athena. _Phronesis_ inspires the soul to incline towards the level of Intellect that is, away from damaging influences of the body to which the soul is enslaved and which confuses it with desires, passions, fears and illusory impressions, and prevents it from attaining the intelligible realm, whereas the body and its desires lead us to conflict and unjust behaviour in order to gain wealth, status, power, and pleasure. (shrink)

This paper compares the nascent theory of the ‘semiotic symbol’ in cognitive science with its computational relative. It finds that the semiotic symbol as it is understood in recent practical and theoretical work does not have the resources to explain the role of symbols in cognition. In light of this argument, an alternative model of symbol internalisation, based on Vygotsky, is put forward which goes further in showing how symbols can go from playing intersubjective communicative roles to intrasubjective cognitive ones. (...) Such a formalisation restores the symbol’s cognitive and communicative dimensions to their proper roles. (shrink)