The aim of this paper is to introduce Robert Brandom’s Inferentialism (Inferential theory of meaning) and Fodor and Lepore’ compositionality objection, and to protect Inferentialism from the objection based on compositionality. According to Inferentialism, To grasp or understand a concept is to have practical mastery over the inferences in which it is involved. However, Fodor and Lepore oppose Inferentialism by offering the compositionality objection. They argue that compositionality is needed to explain productivity, systematicity and learnability of language, meaning is compositional. (...) Since inferential role is not compositional, however, meaning is not an inferential role. Against Fodor and Lepore’s objection, I present Brandom’s responses and develop my own views. (shrink)

Ideological indoctrination is explicit and pervasive in China, with the school curriculum used to mould the spirit and character of adolescents, fulfilling ideological and political purposes. But the exact content varies over time. Comparing two versions of textbooks published in 1997 and 2005, this paper depicts the continuities and change in the curricular discourses centred on the notion of ?good citizen?. While keeping the official status of socialism and the Party leadership untouched, the new textbooks soften the presentation and packaging (...) of the ideological content, very much in tandem with the soft authoritarianism practised since the post?Deng era when China has been deeply involved in the processes of marketisation, liberalisation and globalisation. The new textbooks also adopt a stance of greater reconciliation with human rights and global citizenship. While being granted more autonomy and rights, young citizens are still expected to shoulder the mission of national revival and socialist modernisation?very much derived from official policies. (shrink)

In order to keep matters brief, I shall assume knowledge of my Mind paper and Sungho Choi’s paper printed before this brief response (Noordhof 1999; Choi 2002). Sungho Choi claims that the example I gave to motivate my formulation of the ‘actual events’ clause fails to motivate it and that the formulation, in fact, contains a redundant element, namely my appeal to supersets. I think he is right that my example doesn’t work. However, I think he is (...) wrong that the actual events clause contains a redundant element. The second case he discusses provides the motivation we need. (shrink)

Despite the general expectation that ethical leadership fosters employees’ ethical behaviors, surprisingly little empirical effort has been made to verify this expected effect of ethical leadership. To address this research gap, we examine the role of ethical leadership in relation to a direct ethical outcome of employees: moral voice. Focusing on how and when ethical leadership motivates employees to speak up about ethical issues, we propose that moral efficacy serves as a psychological mechanism underlying the relationship, and that leader–follower value (...) congruence serves as a boundary condition for the effect of ethical leadership on moral efficacy. We tested the proposed relationships with matched reports from 154 Korean white-collar employees and their immediate supervisors, collected at two different points in time. The results revealed that ethical leadership was positively related to moral voice, and moral efficacy mediated the relationship. Importantly, as the relationship between ethical leadership and moral efficacy depended on leader–follower value congruence, the mediated relationship was effective only under high leader–follower value congruence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Incremental implicit theories are associated with a belief regarding it is possible to improve one’s intelligence or ability through efforts. Previous studies have demonstrated that incremental implicit theories contributed to better academic achievement and positive youth development. Our study aimed to examine whether incremental implicit theories of morality significantly influenced change in students’ engagement in voluntary service activities. In our study, 54 Korean college students for Study 1 and 180 Korean 8th graders for Study 2 were recruited to conduct two (...) two-wave studies. We surveyed participants’ implicit theories of morality and participation in voluntary service activities. The effect of implicit theories of morality on change in service engagement was analyzed through regression analysis. In Study 1, the moral growth mindset significantly moderated longitudinal change in service engagement. In Study 2, the moral growth mindset significantly influenced engagement in art-related activities, while it significantly moderated change in engagement in youth-related activities. (shrink)

Ezra Pound's Canto 18 begins with Kublai Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, who undertook and indeed had the power to complete the coining of money, that is, the establishment of a new currency system.1 Despite the use of the word "coin," the reason that Pound pays attention to such a historical figure as Kublai is that he was among the first to issue "paper" money; "They take bast of the mulberry-tree, / That is a skin between the (...) wood and the bark, / And of this they make paper". Apart from the physical production and printing of paper, however, the basic and more essential prerequisite for the issue of paper money—and for its successful circulation and distribution—is to make paper money... (shrink)

"The chief characteristic of poets," writes I. A. Richards in his well-known essay, "Science and Poetry," "is their amazing command of words".1 By this Richards does not mean that poetry can be written "by cunning and study, by craft and contrivance," that is, by "the technique of poetry added to a desire to write some"; his point is rather that "the ordering of the words" must spring from "an actual supreme ordering of experience." The true vocation of "genuine poetry" consists (...) in its attempt to give the reader "a response which is as passionate, noble and serene as the experience of the poet." It is, in other words, only by being "the master of experience" that a poet can be "the master of... (shrink)

What are the effects of word-by-word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large-scale cumulative cloze task to collect word-by-word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal (...) and entropy reduction values in a theory-neutral manner. A separate group of participants read the same texts while their eye movements were recorded. Results showed that increases in surprisal and entropy reduction were both associated with increases in reading times. Furthermore, these effects did not depend on the global difficulty of the text. The findings suggest that surprisal and entropy reduction independently contribute to variation in reading times, as these metrics seem to capture different aspects of lexical predictability. (shrink)

When Western Christianity came to Asia, it merged with Eastern religions and histories and developed very differently in different places. Today Asian women in each country build up very unique images of God. They practice Eastern forms of worship and liturgical rites, and do indigenized theologies. They simultaneously try to find their own ways of naming, imaging, believing in and communicating with their own God. Korean Christianity has inherited many images of God from Western Christian doctrines and theologies. However, when (...) it meets and merges with Koreanized Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shamanism, some of the images of God in Christianity are transformed and re-imagined in Korean women's social cultural and religious contexts. As an Asian woman, especially a Korean woman, I would like to introduce one of the many Asian women's theologies, Korean women's images of God. It cannot represent all Asian women's ways of doing theologies, but it will give some clues to show how Asian women do theologies in their own context. In particular, I will examine three images of God that demonstrate how Western Christianity and Eastern religions meet and are transformed in Korean Christian women's living contexts. (shrink)

This is a perfect overview article that serves as a general introduction to the topic of dispositions. It is composed of six sections that review the main philosophical approaches to the most important questions: Analysis of disposition ascription, the dispositional/categorical distinction, dispositions and categorical bases, the intrinsicness of dispositions and the causal efficacy of dispositions.

For the last several decades, dispositional properties have been one of the main topics in metaphysics. Still, however, there is little agreement among contemporary metaphysicians on the nature of dispositional properties. Apparently, though, the majority of them have reached the consensus that dispositional ascriptions cannot be analysed in terms of simple counterfactual conditionals. In this paper it will be brought to light that this consensus is wrong. Specifically, I will argue that the simple conditional analysis of dispositions, which is generally (...) thought to be dead, is in fact an adequate analysis of dispositions. I will go on to discuss Mumford’s view of dispositions from the perspective of the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. (shrink)

The gulf between multinational enterprises’ focus on high income countries and the reality of 80% of the world living in developing, bottom of pyramid (Hahn, J Bus Ethics 84:313–324, 2009 ) economies could magnify the anti-globalisation movement and political backlashes in the twenty-first century. The global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 has increased such social tensions throughout the world and creates greater challenges for, responsible leadership. In this conceptual article, the authors analyse the value and identity of local managers, (...) and the liability of foreignness caused by over-reliance on expatriate managers and under-reliance on local managers in bottom of pyramid countries (Hahn, 2009 ). It is argued that multinational enterprises need to assess local managers’ knowledge and contributions as having not only operational and market value, but also institutional value, such as access to local knowledge and local social capital; such a holistic approach will ensure fairer, equal treatment of all managers in the multinational enterprise. Responsible leadership in the twenty-first century requires a greater appreciation of local managers’ institutional value and the overcoming of any psychological distance towards local managers of bottom of pyramid countries. (shrink)

This study explores how and when ethical leadership predicts three forms of team-level creativity, namely team creativity, average of member creativity, and dispersion of member creativity. The results, based on 230 members of 44 knowledge work teams from Chinese organizations, showed that ethical leadership was positively related to team creativity and average of member creativity but was negatively related to dispersion of member creativity. Consistent with the predictions of uncertainty reduction theory, psychological safety climate mediated the relationship between ethical leadership (...) and the three forms of team-level creativity. Furthermore, supervisor support for creativity positively moderated the effect of ethical leadership on psychological safety climate and the indirect effects of ethical leadership on the three forms of team-level creativity through psychological safety climate. The analysis offers significant theoretical and practical implications on ethical leadership and creativity in organizations. (shrink)

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

Lewis claims that Martin’s cases indeed refute the simple conditional analysis of dispositions and proposes the reformed conditional analysis that is purported to overcome them. In this paper I will first argue that Lewis’s defense of the reformed analysis can be understood to invoke the concepts of disposition-specific stimulus and manifestation. I will go on to argue that advocates of the simple analysis, just like Lewis, can also defend their analysis from alleged counterexamples including Martin’s cases by invoking the concepts (...) of disposition-specific stimulus and manifestation. This means that Lewis’s own necessary defense of the reformed analysis invalidates his motivation of it. Finally, I will argue that we have a good reason to favor the simple analysis over Lewis’s analysis. (shrink)

Extant studies on private regulation have not reached a sufficient understanding about the interplay between private and public regulations, due to underdeveloped theoretical framework and the lack of large-sample empirical investigations. Leveraging ISO 14001 adoption among Chinese firms as the research context, the current research draws on the institutional theory to examine how firm’s adoption of ISO 14001 standard, as a specific form of private regulation, affects the incidence of public environmental inspections. To test our arguments, we conduct two empirical (...) studies. Study 1 uses the first-hand data of a corporate social responsibility survey on Chinese manufacturing firms, whereas Study 2 deploys the second-hand longitudinal archival data of the government environmental inspections on Chinese listed firms. Both of the two studies reveal consistent findings that ISO 14001 adoption decreases the incidence of government environmental inspections, and that the effect of ISO 14001 adoption becomes stronger in state-owned enterprises and firms with top management team’s political ties. Our findings are suggestive of a complementary relationship between private and public regulations, in a sense that private regulations can compensate for the weaknesses of public regulations by offering faster, more flexible and cost-efficient means of enforcement, which allows the public authorities to economize on the deployment of public resources to monitor the rest non-compliant firms. (shrink)

The central theme of this paper is the dispositional/categorical distinction that has been one of the top agendas in contemporary metaphysics. I will first develop from my semantic account of dispositions what I think the correct formulation of the dispositional/categorical distinction in terms of counterfactual conditionals. It will be argued that my formulation does not have the shortcomings that have plagued previously proposed ones. Then I will turn my attention to one of its consequences, the thesis that dispositional properties are (...) not susceptible to intrinsic finks. This thesis was first advanced by me and has ever since stirred up a big controversy, endorsed by some philosophers like Handfield, Bird, and Cohen but rejected by others like Clarke and Fara. Against this background, I will remedy my defense of the impossibility of intrinsically finkable dispositions and then refute some of apparently powerful criticisms of it. And so the upshot is that it is much more reasonable to hold on to the thesis that dispositions are intrinsically unfinkable. This will have the effect of putting the dispositional/categorical distinction on firmer and more secure ground. (shrink)

Stephen Mumford, in his book on dispositions, argues that we can distinguish between dispositional and categorical properties in terms of entailing his 'conditional conditionals', which involve the concept of ideal conditions. I aim at defending Mumford's criterion for distinguishing between dispositional and categorical properties. To be specific, no categorical ascriptions entail Mumford's 'conditional conditionals'.

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and the use of (...) explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes. (shrink)

The idea that dispositions are an intrinsic matter has been popular among contemporary philosophers of dispositions. In this paper I will first state this idea as exactly as possible. I will then examine whether it poses any threat to the two current versions of the conditional analysis of dispositions, namely, the simple and reformed conditional analysis of dispositions. The upshot is that the intrinsic nature of dispositions, when properly understood, doesn't spell trouble for either of the two versions of the (...) conditional analysis of dispositions. Along the way, I will propose an extensionally correct and practically useful criterion for identifying nomically intrinsic dispositions and criticize one objection raised by Lewis against the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. (shrink)

The transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) seeks to reestablish food sovereignty authority within national borders by removing agriculture from the WTO system. The WTO is a membership organization of participating nation-states that have agreed to abide by the rules of the WTO governance regime. Nominally, at least, changes in these governance rules must be approved by the nation-state members. This paper examines the extent to which South Korean affiliate organizations of LVC, the Korean Peasant League and the Korean (...) Women Peasants Association, have been successful in placing food sovereignty issues on the national agri-food policy agenda in South Korea that challenge the WTO’s neoliberal global governance regime for agriculture. In effect, the success of transnational movements like LVC in challenging global institutions may rest on how well their member affiliates are able to play domestic agri-food politics. (shrink)

A variety of stakeholders have long been interested in the factors that are related to firm valuation. This article investigates why companies with more comprehensive corporate governance (CG) have a value premium over companies with less comprehensive CG. We posit and find that the cost of equity capital (COC) decreases with the strength of CG, suggesting that the value premium stems from the lower COC for more comprehensive CG. We also find that the COC is lower for companies with strong (...) commitment to business ethics (BE) than for those with weak commitment to BE and that the beneficial effect of CG on the COC is more pronounced for companies with weak commitment to BE than for those with strong commitment to BE. Companies with more comprehensive CG tend to exhibit strong commitment to BE, but the beneficial effect of corporate ethical commitment is not completely subsumed by CG. Our results suggest that companies could lower their cost of equity capital and increase firm value by adopting more comprehensive CG practices and committing to higher standards of BE. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has grown on the corporate agenda and is at the heart of today’s corporate culture. While much research has examined CSR strategies and effects, the effects of post-crisis CSR communication have received relatively little academic attention. Therefore, this paper uses two experimental studies to examine several key contingency factors that influence consumers’ responses to post-crisis CSR initiatives. Results suggest that consumers demonstrate more favorable responses when a company launches a CSR initiative congruent with the crisis issue, or (...) when the crisis is the result of an accident rather than a transgression. Further, the congruence between the crisis issue and the pre-crisis CSR initiative moderates the consistency effects between pre- and post-crisis initiatives. Such findings should be understood by considering the mediating role of corporate CSR motives’ consumer attributions, which was evidenced in this study. This study theoretically contributes to an improved understanding of the underlying mechanism of the post-crisis CSR information process and managerially contributes to the strategic development of effective post-crisis CSR initiatives given a particular situation. (shrink)

Attempting to determine solutions for unethical practices in the field, this research was designed to assess the effectiveness of public relations firms’ ethics statements in decreasing the incidence of malpractice. This study revealed an encouraging finding that practitioners working in firms with ethical parameters were significantly more likely to engage in ethical practices. Moreover, educating public relations practitioners about the content of ethics statement could positively influence their ethical practices. At the same time, this study’s findings suggest further questions for (...) consideration in future scholarship and in the application of ethics statements to practice within the field. (shrink)