The purpose of this article is to present and discuss some of the best practices of financial industry, in three emerging economies: Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The main thesis is that, notwithstanding the importance of certain specific deficiencies, such as an inadequate regulatory context or the lack of financial education among the population, the main factor that explains the low banking levels in emerging and developing economies, affecting mostly lower-income segments, is the use of inefficient financial service distribution models. (...) In connection with this thesis, we will try to show that traditional financial institutions, both in developing countries and in the advanced economies have a special social responsibility to help create an efficient financial system that makes saving and borrowing instruments available to the greatest possible number of citizens. (shrink)

The development of educational technologies is enhancing a distinctive feature of learning environments: the learner’s personalized environment. However, the current literature in e-learning seems to neglect an important discussion: will individuals and organizations face an enhancement concerning ethical dilemmas due to this evolution? To promote this discussion, this paper builds on a consideration of e-learning definition and its ethical dilemmas, and human-centred learning concept and its dimensions, to examine the implications of integrating social and cultural contexts. By examining the evolution (...) of e-learning management systems the argument progresses to a discussion of the relationships between pedagogy and ethics. By framing evidence at different scales, the authors critically reflect on the ethical dilemmas embedded in e-learning systems. The discussion concludes with advocating the adoption of an extension of “three P” mode of pedagogy to become the “P3E” model: personalization, participation, productivity, lecturer’s ethics, learner’s ethics, and organizational ethics. (shrink)

People cannot make independent judgements of stimulus attributes and so (Lockhead 1992, p. 551) rather than in terms of stimulus features. The new commentaries here further this statement and also support the observations in the target article that psychophysical scaling methods allow us to measure (1) how context determines judgments and (2) what people remember about prior stimuli.

Recent research suggests that processing of irrelevant information can be modulated in a rapid online fashion by contextual information in the task environment depending on the usefulness of that information in different contexts. Congruency effects evoked by irrelevant stimulus attributes are smaller in contexts with high proportions of incongruent trials and larger in contexts with high proportions of congruent trials . The present study investigates these context-adaptation effects in a masked-priming paradigm. Context-specific adaptation effects transfer to (...) class='Hi'>stimulus identities that are equiprobale in all contexts – an observation that renders explanations in terms of event-learning processes unlikely. Yet, context-specific effects vanished when the irrelevant information remained unconscious. The results suggest that context-specific adaptation of congruency effects reflect cognitive control operations that alter the processing of irrelevant information depending on the experienced utility of that information for action control. (shrink)

Innes’s “control signals” provides a semiotic perspective for explaining how acts of social control send “signals” about the effectiveness of security mechanisms. A cross-cutting theme infers that “culture and situation matter” in the reception of signals. However, the control signals concept does not explicitly consider the influence that prior experiences may have on present interpretations. Drawing on qualitative research into how members of a residential community perceived control measures within their everyday environment for Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games, this article (...) outlines the importance of the “pre-signalling” context in influencing how control signals are received. Goffman’s “frame analysis” is used as part of a semiotic framing approach to demonstrate that control signals are framed (or pre-signalled) by the history of relations between sender and receiver of the signal (for example, police and residents). (shrink)

The study aims to investigate how prior experience of interlocutors interacts with actual situational context in intercultural interactions when the latter is represented by a well-known frame: getting acquainted with others. It attempts to demonstrate how the cultural frame of the target language is broken up and substituted with an emergent frame that is co-constructed from elements from prior experience with the target language, the first language and the actual situational experience. Getting acquainted with others is a (...) closed social situation, a cultural frame in which interlocutors usually have to follow a behavior pattern dictated by the requirements of the socio-cultural background in a given speech community. There is a ‘skeleton’ of these ‘getting to know you’ procedures that can be considered universal but is substantiated differently in every language. In each conversation in any language, ‘flesh’ is added to the ‘skeleton’ in a dynamic and co-constructed manner. However, there is a difference between how this happens in L1 and in intercultural interactions. While in L1 the ‘flesh’ on the skeleton is predetermined to a significant extent by requirements of core common ground in the given language, in intercultural encounters this ‘flesh building’ process in the target language is not set but is co-constructed by the interlocutors as emergent common ground relying on their prior experience with their own L1 culture, limited experience with the target culture and the assessment of the actual situational context. In this study the co-construction process, i.e. emergent common ground will be analyzed by examining the use of formulaic language and freely generated language in several discourse segments. (shrink)

The distinction between receptive field and conceptual field is appealing and heuristically useful. Conceptually, it is more satisfactory to distinguish between information from the environment and from the brain. We emphasize here a selectionist view that considers information transmission within the brain as modulated by a stimulus, rather than information transmission from a stimulus as modulated by the context.

Under the hit of the epidemic, an increasing number of young people exchange and purchase goods by watching and resorting to mobile short video advertisements. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the influence mechanism of mobile short video advertising on the consumption behavior of young people. This study develops a theoretical framework including fashion, socialization, entertainment, personalization, brand, psychological needs, satisfaction, and consumption behavior using a stimulus–organism–response (SOR) theory. The data from 332 young people using mobile short (...) video advertising revealed that psychological needs exerted significant impacts on satisfaction, mediating the advertisements, and consumer satisfaction. The attributes of advertising, including fashion, socialization, entertainment, personalization, and branding, significantly promote young people’s psychological needs and satisfaction. In addition, satisfaction affects consumer behavior, and in the same manner, fashion and brand attribute directly impact consumer satisfaction. (shrink)

Social media marketing has become one of the most significant growth paths for many businesses in today’s world. However, many companies are still unclear about using social media marketing to get their advantages, particularly in an e-commerce environment. In this background, this study is proposed to examine the effects of social media marketing activities on relationship quality, such as commitment, trust, and satisfaction in order to predict consumers’ online repurchase intentions in China’s e-commerce environment. This study proposed a theoretical model (...) by using the stimulus-organism-response theory. Using a structured questionnaire and purposive sampling, this study examined the responses of 403 consumers through partial least square-structural equation modeling. The findings discovered that SMMAs significantly strengthen the relationship quality factors, such as commitment, trust, and satisfaction, which in turn positively increase consumer online repurchase intentions in China’s e-commerce industry. This is novel research that contributes to the S-O-R theory and provides several managerial guidelines that assist managers in improving their business performance in the e-commerce industry. This research also highlighted some limitations. (shrink)

The law of prior entry was one of E.B. Titchener’s seven fundamental laws of attention. According to Titchener : “the object of attention comes to consciousness more quickly than the objects which we are not attending to.” Although researchers have been studying prior entry for more than a century now, progress in understanding the effect has been hindered by the many methodological confounds present in early research. As a consequence, it is unclear whether the behavioral effects reported in (...) the majority of published studies in this area should be attributed to attention, decisional response biases, and/or, in the case of exogenous spatial cuing studies of the prior-entry effect, to sensory facilitation effects instead. In this article, the literature on the prior-entry effect is reviewed, the confounds present in previous research highlighted, current consensus summarized, and some of the key questions for future research outlined. In particular, recent research has now provided compelling psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence to support the claim that attending to a sensory modality, spatial location, or stimulus feature/attribute can all give rise to a relative speeding-up of the time of arrival of attended, as compared to relatively less attended stimuli. Prior-entry effects have now been demonstrated following both the endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention, though prior-entry effects tend to be smaller in magnitude when assessed by means of participants’ performance on SJ tasks than when assessed by means of their performance on TOJ tasks. (shrink)

We discuss prior publication and redundancy in contemporary science in the context of changing perceptions of originality in the communication of research results. These perceptions have been changing in the publication realm, particularly in the last 15 years. Presenting a brief overview of the literature, we address some of the conflicts that are likely to arise between authors and editors. We illustrate our approach with conference presentations that are later published as journal articles and focus on a recent (...) retraction of an article that had been previously published as a conference proceedings. Although we do not make definitive pronouncements on the matter—as many concepts are evolving—we do argue that conference papers that contain sufficient details for others to attempt a replication and are indexed in scientific databases such as PubMed, challenge some currently held assumptions of prior publication and originality in the sciences. Our view is that these important issues are in need of further clarification and harmonization within the science publishing community. This need is more evident when we consider current notions of research integrity when it comes to communication to peers. Revisiting long-standing views about what constitutes prior publication and developing a clearer set of guidelines for authors and editors to follow should reduce conflicts in the research environment, which already exerts considerable pressure, especially on newcomers in academia. However, while clearer guidelines are timely, developing them is only part of the challenge. The present times seem to call for deeper changes in the research and publication systems. (shrink)

Swear words are highly colloquial expressions that have the capacity to signal the speaker's affective states, i.e., to display the speaker's feelings with respect to a certain stimulus. For this reason, swear words are often called 'expressives'. Which linguistic mechanisms allow swear words display affective states, and, more importantly, how can such 'affective content' be characterized in a theory of meaning? Even though research on expressive meaning has produced models that integrate the affective aspects of swear words in a (...) compositional framework, there is extensive evidence that swear words cannot be assigned a single or stable affective interpretation across contexts. For example, even though expletive adjectives (e.g., 'damn'), particularistic insults (e.g., 'bastard') and slurs (e.g., 'wop') typically express (and elicit) negatively valenced affective states, they can also be interpreted positively in some contexts. Thus, inspired in recent developments in formal sociolinguistics, I propose an 'indexical' approach to affective meaning. Under this approach, an affective expression is associated with a set of affective qualities, anyone of which may emerge at a given context depending on the interpreter's prior assumptions about the speaker's affective states and/or relation with the target of the swear word. To define this set, also called 'indexical field', I will use the dimensions pleasure, arousal and dominance, standardly employed in cognitive psychology to characterize and measure affective episodes. In this dissertation, thus, the affective meaning of an expression is given by the set of affective states it typically conveys within a linguistic community, but its interpretation at a given context is established by taking into account the interpreter's prior assumptions about the speaker's affective states and/or attitudes with respect to the target of the affective expression. (shrink)

A Linguistic Analysis of Prior, Quine, and Searle on Propositional Attitudes, Martinich on Fictional Reference, Taglicht on the Active/Passive Mood Distinction in English, etc.

This commentary focuses on the stimulus-reinforcer hypothesis of resistance to change. The overall context of reinforcement can account for resistance to extinction. There are ways to systematically test the hypothesis that Pavlovian contingencies account for the behavioral “mass” of discriminated operant behavior.

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary (‘folk’) concept (...) of pain is more complex than previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic (or ‘many ideas’) analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment. (shrink)

This paper attempts to account for the contrastive discourse connective (tam) tersine (‘on the contrary’) in Turkish discourse. We suggest that this connective evokes a discourse structure which has at least three parts: the material in the prior linguistic context, its refutation, and then rectification in the clause where the connective is hosted. Since negation is obligatory in the discourse context for refutation, we include a discussion of negation and we conclude that the obligatory negative clauses are (...) instances of descriptive negation rather than metalinguistic negation. We show that linguistic and cognitive contexts interact in producing and interpreting the discourse adverbial connective under discussion and the discourse structure in which it is used. It is claimed that (tam) tersine serves to bring closer the cognitive context of the intended audience to that of the writer’s while minimizing any potential discrepancies in the audience’s and the writer’s cognitive context. We argue that this discourse connective and the discourse it evokes are used in the argumentative mode. (shrink)

Bayesian methods have become among the most popular methods in phylogenetics, but theoretical opposition to this methodology remains. After providing an introduction to Bayesian theory in this context, I attempt to tackle the problem mentioned most often in the literature: the “problem of the priors”—how to assign prior probabilities to tree hypotheses. I first argue that a recent objection—that an appropriate assignment of priors is impossible—is based on a misunderstanding of what ignorance and bias are. I then consider (...) different methods of assigning prior probabilities to trees. I argue that priors need to be derived from an understanding of how distinct taxa have evolved and that the appropriate evolutionary model is captured by the Yule birth–death process. This process leads to a well-known statistical distribution over trees. Though further modifications may be necessary to model more complex aspects of the branching process, they must be modifications to parameters in an underlying Yule model. Ignoring these Yule priors commits a fallacy leading to mistaken inferences both about the trees themselves and about macroevolutionary processes more generally. (shrink)

The idea that perceptual and cognitive systems must incorporate knowledge about the structure of the environment has become a central dogma of cognitive theory. In a Bayesian context, this idea is often realized in terms of “tuning the prior”—widely assumed to mean adjusting prior probabilities so that they match the frequencies of events in the world. This kind of “ecological” tuning has often been held up as an ideal of inference, in fact defining an “ideal observer.” But (...) widespread as this viewpoint is, it directly contradicts Bayesian philosophy of probability, which views probabilities as degrees of belief rather than relative frequencies, and explicitly denies that they are objective characteristics of the world. Moreover, tuning the prior to observed environmental frequencies is subject to overfitting, meaning in this context overtuning to the environment, which leads (ironically) to poor performance in future encounters with the same environment. Whenever there is uncertainty about the environment—which there almost always is—an agent's prior should be biased away from ecological relative frequencies and toward simpler and more entropic priors. (shrink)

I will show how a metaphysical problem of Arthur Prior’s can be solved by a logical tool he developed himself, but did not put to any foundational use: metric logic. The broader context is given by the key question about the metaphysics of time: Is time tenseless, i.e., is time just a structure of instants; or is time tensed, because some facts are irreducibly tensed? I take sides with Prior and the tensed theory. Like him, I therefore (...) I have to deal with a more specific metaphysical question: How can the instants of tenseless time be reduced to tensed facts? This is the point where, on the technical level, hybrid logic and metric logic come in. For present purposes, both can be seen as species of tense logic; and both are creations of Prior. In his argument for the tensed theory of time, Prior used hybrid tense logic to reduce instants. But, as he himself pointed out, this reduction runs into deep problems, because it immediately generalizes to other categories, for example and most importantly to persons. My main aim is to show that metric logic does not run into similar difficulties: It will help the tensed theory reduce instants, but it leaves persons untouched. I will also give reasons for preferring a metric to a hybrid logic of time that are independent of the metaphysical issue of reduction, but concern temporal reasoning, natural language semantics, and the epistemic side of time-keeping. (shrink)

It has often been claimed that (i) Aristotle's expression 'protasis' means 'premiss' in syllogistic contexts and (ii) cannot refer to the conclusion of a syllogism in the Prior Analytics. In this essay we produce and defend a counter-example to these two claims. We argue that (i) the basic meaning of the expression is 'proposition' and (ii) while it is often used to refer to the premisses of a syllogism, in Prior Analytics 1.29, 45b4-8 it is used to refer (...) to the conclusion of a syllogism. In our view, the best explanation of Aristotle's use of the expression 'protasis' is that it means proposition throughout but is frequently used without change of meaning (in certain specific contexts) to refer to the premisses from which a conclusion follows. In Prior Analytics 1.29, 45b4-8 he uses 'protasis' to refer to the conclusion when he needs a single expression to refer to both the conclusion and one of the premisses of the syllogism that constitutes the core of a syllogism through the impossible. If we are correct, we have shown that the view that the expression 'the final protasis' in EN 7.3, 1147b9ff must mean 'the final premiss' and so cannot refer to the conclusion of the relevant syllogism is mistaken. (shrink)

Camp (2009) distinguishes two varieties of conceptual recombination. One of them is full-blown or (as I prefer to call it) spontaneous recombination. The other is causal-counterfactual recombination. She suggests that while human animals recombine their concepts in a full-blown way, many non-human animals are capable of conceptual recombinability but only of the causal-counterfactual kind. In this paper, I argue that there is conceptual space to draw further sub-distinctions on how different animals may recombine their concepts. More specifically, I propose to (...) differentiate between a) narrow causal-counterfactual recombination; b) broad causal-counterfactual recombination; c) lean spontaneous recombination; d) robust spontaneous recombination. Afterwards, I focus on how these distinctions relate to several previous philosophical ideas on the representational capacities of non-human animals. I also provide several empirical examples suggesting that some animals display one or another of these four ways of recombining concepts, at least in some contexts. (shrink)

This paper examines the striking absence of women philosophers from German historiography of philosophy during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While the general topic has been considered before, additional documents and considerations are presented that will help us better understand the omission of women philosophers in the German context. Firstly, material is presented showing that women philosophers were widely discussed in Germany prior to 1800. These discussions stand sharply in contrast with the silence about women in subsequent (...) general histories of philosophy. Secondly, it is shown that the absence of women philosophers in German historiography of philosophy during the nineteenth century is not entirely new but has to be seen as a continuation of tendencies characteristic for the historiography of philosophy already during the eighteenth century. Thirdly, it is argued that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a new stimulus for thinking about women in the history of philosophy, namely women’s emancipation and, more specifically, the right to a university education. Seen in this light, the renewed and intensified effort to diminish women philosophers can be understood as a symptomatic attempt to keep women out of academia in general, and out of philosophy in particular. (shrink)