This empirical paper examines individual-level cognitive factors associated with developing an orientation to sustainable development issues among a population of business practitioners from France. Across two studies, we survey 180 financial managers and 83 finance students, as well as 144 managers from other business disciplines and 117 non-finance business students. We consider ability and motivation variables integrated and adapted into a cognitive elaboration model for sustainable decision making. Specifically, we examine the degree of influence of two factors on the ethical (...) sensitivity to sustainability: the moral maturity of the individual, and the perceived moral intensity of a sustainability issue. Our investigation offers insights into how financial managers perceive the importance of sustainability for corporate strategy. (shrink)

[1] Das Werten.--[2] Das Erkennen.--[3] Das Handeln.

Sex reversal, a mismatch between phenotypic and genetic sex, can be induced by chemical and thermal insults in ectotherms. Therefore, climate change and environmental pollution may increase sex‐reversal frequency in wild populations, with wide‐ranging implications for sex ratios, population dynamics, and the evolution of sex determination. We propose that reconsidering the half‐century old theory “Witschi's rule” should facilitate understanding the differences between species in sex‐reversal propensity and thereby predicting their vulnerability to anthropogenic environmental change. The idea is that sex reversal (...) should be asymmetrical: more likely to occur in the homogametic sex, assuming that sex‐reversed heterogametic individuals would produce new genotypes with reduced fitness. A review of the existing evidence shows that while sex reversal can be induced in both homogametic and heterogametic individuals, the latter seem to require stronger stimuli in several cases. We provide guidelines for future studies on sex reversal to facilitate data comparability and reliability. (shrink)

. This paper explores the relationship between gift giving, guanxi and corruption through a study of the relationships between UK manufacturing companies in China and their local component suppliers. The analysis is based on interviews in the China-based operations of 49 UK companies. Interviews were carried out both with senior (often expatriate) staff and with local line managers who were responsible for everyday purchasing decisions and for managing relationships with suppliers. The results suggest that gift giving is perceived to be (...) a significant problem in UK-owned companies in China. However the relationship between these payments and established understanding of gift giving within guanxi-networks appears to be weak. Gift giving appears to be associated with illicit payments, corruption and the pursuit of self-interest. Firms seek to reduce the incidence of illicit transactions by changing staff roles, instituting joint responsibilities, which include the separation of different aspects of sourcing/purchasing, ineasing the involvement of senior staff in the process and through the education of employee and suppliers. (shrink)

Through a detailed account of the history of online chat devices, this article shows the emergence, over time, of two distinct interactional formats underlying these social media. They may be captured by two generic metaphors of synchrony: conference (a gathering in a virtual place where unfocused interactions and group sociability occur) and copresence (where practices are centered on the sustainment of contact between individuals who know each other). Internet Relay Chat (IRC) appears as the archetype of the conference format. This (...) notion of chat involves the existence of a relatively persistent shared space—conjured up by various specific metaphors: room, channel, and so on—inside which users get together and through which they are able to find other users, with whom they may weave electronic social ties that may possibly lead to offline relationships. The other format is associated with instant messaging (IM) devices, on the model of “ICQ” software. Although there seems to be a decline in interest for devices based on the former format, those based on the latter benefit from a growing popularity, possibly indicating deeper sociological implications. (shrink)

We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) “neuron” and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial system state since state changes are relevant, but (...) most current accounts ignore state changes through time; (5) more generally, there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about these sorts of cases are normative; but (6) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptive. Our skepticism is not directed towards the possibility of a correct account of actual causation; rather, we argue that standard methods will not lead to such an account. A different approach is required. Once upon a time a hungry wanderer came into a village. He filled an iron cauldron with water, built a fire under it, and dropped a stone into the water. “I do like a tasty stone soup” he announced. Soon a villager added a cabbage to the pot, another added some salt and others added potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was a meal for all. (shrink)

The literature on causal discovery has focused on interventions that involve randomly assigning values to a single variable. But such a randomized intervention is not the only possibility, nor is it always optimal. In some cases it is impossible or it would be unethical to perform such an intervention. We provide an account of ‘hard' and ‘soft' interventions and discuss what they can contribute to causal discovery. We also describe how the choice of the optimal intervention(s) depends heavily on the (...) particular experimental setup and the assumptions that can be made. ‡The first author is funded by the Causal Learning Collaborative Initiative supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Many aspects of this paper were inspired by discussions with members of the collaborative. †To contact the authors, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; e-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]. (shrink)

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are (...) connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life. Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health. (shrink)

A number of recent articles have invoked the republican ideal of non-domination to justify either open borders, and/or the reduction of states’ discretionary powers to unilaterally determine immigration policy. In this paper, I show that such arguments are one-sided, as they fail to fully account for the deep ambiguity of the very ideal which they invoke. In fact, non-domination lends just as powerful support to maintaining state border controls as it does to dismantling them. There are only two exceptions to (...) the rule. It is well established that promoting non-domination demands, one the one hand, that refugees be admitted, and second, that all migrants have a right to contest decisions concerning their own admission. But aside from these things, the policy implications of the ideal are unclear. In itself, therefore, it is insufficient to justify either open borders, or the reduction of states said discretionary powers. Such arguments will have to rely on other, additional moral criteria. -/- . (shrink)

An interventionist account of causation characterizes causal relations in terms of changes resulting from particular interventions. I provide a new example of a causal relation for which there does not exist an intervention satisfying the common interventionist standard. I consider adaptations that would save this standard and describe their implications for an interventionist account of causation. No adaptation preserves all the aspects that make the interventionist account appealing. Part of the fallout is a clearer account of the difficulties in characterizing (...) so-called “soft” interventions. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to provide an example that illustrates Hans Reichenbach’s concept of coordination. Throughout Reichenbach’s career the concept of coordination played an important role in his understanding of the connection between reality and how it is scientifically described. Reichenbach never fully specified what coordination is and how exactly it works. Instead, we are left with a variety of hints and gestures, many not entirely consistent with each other and several that are subject to change over the course (...) of his career. Using the example of how to discover and construct causal variables, I will show that most of the features of coordination that Reichenbach described can be instantiated together and formulated precisely. (shrink)

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are (...) connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life. Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach is well known for his limiting frequency view of probability, with his most thorough account given in The Theory of Probability in 1935/1949. Perhaps less known are Reichenbach's early views on probability and its epistemology. In his doctoral thesis from 1915, Reichenbach espouses a Kantian view of probability, where the convergence limit of an empirical frequency distribution is guaranteed to exist thanks to the synthetic a priori principle of lawful distribution. Reichenbach claims to have given a purely objective (...) account of probability, while integrating the concept into a more general philosophical and epistemological framework. A brief synopsis of Reichenbach's thesis and a critical analysis of the problematic steps of his argument will show that the roots of many of his most influential insights on probability and causality can be found in this early work. (shrink)

A symposium on Michael Strevens' book "Tychomancy", concerning the psychological roots and historical significance of physical intuition about probability in physics, biology, and elsewhere.

The causal Bayes net framework specifies a set of axioms for causal discovery. This article explores the set of causal variables that function as relata in these axioms. Spirtes showed how a causal system can be equivalently described by two different sets of variables that stand in a non-trivial translation-relation to each other, suggesting that there is no “correct” set of causal variables. I extend Spirtes’ result to the general framework of linear structural equation models and then explore to what (...) extent the possibility to intervene or a preference for simpler causal systems may help in selecting among sets of causal variables. (shrink)

BackgroundPrevious studies suggested a circadian variation of migraine attack onset, although, with contradictory results – possibly because of the existence of migraine subgroups with different circadian attack onset peaks. Migraine is primarily a brain disorder, and if the diversity in daily distribution of migraine attack onset reflects an important aspect of migraine, it may also associate with interictal brain activity. Our goal was to assess brain activity differences in episodic migraine subgroups who were classified according to their typical circadian peak (...) of attack onset.MethodsTwo fMRI studies were conducted with migraine without aura patients (n= 31 in Study 1,n= 48 in Study 2). Among them, three subgroups emerged with typical Morning, Evening, and Varying start of attack onset. Whole brain activity was compared between the groups in an implicit emotional processing fMRI task, comparing fearful, sad, and happy facial stimuli to neutral ones.ResultsIn both studies, significantly increased neural activation was detected to fearful (but not sad or happy) faces. In Study 1, the Evening start group showed increased activation compared to the Morning start group in regions involved in emotional, self-referential (left posterior cingulate gyrus, right precuneus), pain (including left middle cingulate, left postcentral, left supramarginal gyri, right Rolandic operculum) and sensory (including bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right Heschl’s gyrus) processing. While in Study 2, the Morning start group showed increased activation compared to the Varying start group at a nominally significant level in regions with pain (right precentral gyrus, right supplementary motor area) and sensory processing (bilateral paracentral lobule) functions.ConclusionOur fMRI studies suggest that different circadian attack onset peaks are associated with interictal brain activity differences indicating heterogeneity within migraine patients and alterations in sensitivity to threatening fearful stimuli. Circadian variation of migraine attack onset may be an important characteristic to address in future studies and migraine prophylaxis. (shrink)

This survey presents some of the main principles involved in discovering causal relations. They belong to a large array of possible assumptions and conditions about causal relations, whose various combinations limit the possibilities of acquiring causal knowledge in different ways. How much and in what detail the causal structure can be discovered from what kinds of data depends on the particular set of assumptions one is able to make. The assumptions considered here provide a starting point to explore further the (...) foundations of causal discovery procedures, and how they can be improved. (shrink)

It is said that all philosophy is nothing other than a commentary on Plato.Maybe.But was not Plato himself a commentary on Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans, and the Sophists, not to mention Socrates?And conversely, too, the Commentary on Aristotle composed by St Thomas was not the personal philosophy of Thomas Aquinas? Or then again, do Proclus’ Commentarii in primum Euclidis Elementorum librum not embody a new and original neoplatonic philosophy of mathematics?

In his collection of anecdotes, Lives, Opinions, and Remarkable Sayings of the Most Famous Ancient Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius devotes a chapter to the life of Zeno of Elea. Zeno's reputation is based on his celebrated paradoxes, amply discussed by Aristotle: a moving body will never reach its (pre-defined) telos, since it first has to cover half (or more than half) the remaining distance; the faster will never catch up with the slower, since it first has to get to the point (...) from which the slower has just left. Zeno's style is laconic, like that of an Aesop fable. Maxima e minimis: there is no superfluous word. Everything needed to arrive at the conclusion is explicitly stated. (shrink)

Using the flexibility of recently developed methods for causal discovery based on Boolean satisfiability solvers, we encode a variety of assumptions that weaken the Faithfulness assumption. The encoding results in a number of SAT-based algorithms whose asymptotic correctness relies on weaker conditions than are standardly assumed. This implementation of a whole set of assumptions in the same platform enables us to systematically explore the effect of weakening the Faithfulness assumption on causal discovery. An important effect, suggested by simulation results, is (...) that adopting weaker assumptions greatly alleviates the problem of conflicting constraints and substantially shortens solving time. As a result, SAT-based causal discovery is potentially more scalable under weaker assumptions. (shrink)

We present an algorithm to infer causal relations between a set of measured variables on the basis of experiments on these variables. The algorithm assumes that the causal relations are linear, but is otherwise completely general: It provides consistent estimates when the true causal structure contains feedback loops and latent variables, while the experiments can involve surgical or `soft' interventions on one or multiple variables at a time. The algorithm is `online' in the sense that it combines the results from (...) any set of available experiments, can incorporate background knowledge and resolves conflicts that arise from combining results from different experiments. In addition we provide a necessary and sufficient condition that determines when the algorithm can uniquely return the true graph, and can be used to select the next best experiment until this condition is satisfied. We demonstrate the method by applying it to simulated data and the flow cytometry data of Sachs et al. (shrink)

Using a variety of different results from the literature, I show how causal discovery with experiments is limited unless substantive assumptions about the underlying causal structure are made. These results undermine the view that experiments, such as randomized controlled trials, can independently provide a gold standard for causal discovery. Moreover, I present a concrete example in which causal underdetermination persists despite exhaustive experimentation and argue that such cases undermine the appeal of an interventionist account of causation as its dependence on (...) other assumptions is not spelled out. (shrink)

Although the existence of implicit motor learning is now widely accepted, the findings concerning perceptual implicit learning are ambiguous. Some researchers have observed perceptual learning whereas other authors have not. The review of the literature provides different reasons to explain this ambiguous picture, such as differences in the underlying learning processes, selective attention, or differences in the difficulty to express this knowledge. In three experiments, we investigated implicit visual learning within the original serial reaction time task. We used different response (...) devices in order to manipulate selective attention towards response dimensions. Results showed that visual and motor sequence learning differed in terms of RT-benefits, but not in terms of the amount of knowledge assessed after training. Furthermore, visual sequence learning was modulated by selective attention. However, the findings of all three experiments suggest that selective attention did not alter implicit but rather explicit learning processes. (shrink)

This essay explores the nexus between Buddhist discourse, moral reasoning, and aspects of indigenous ethnopsychology in a Shan community in northern Thailand. I suggest that these three strands of thought are routinely braided together in intricate ways and, furthermore, that some version of this conceptual arrangement is necessary in order for any moral thinking to take place. That is, all moral thought entails some conception of the way the world is structured (a conception that may or may not be based (...) on religion) and some ethnotheory of human nature, both of which are culturally mediated. Finally, I discuss the implications of this view for our understanding of human agency and autonomy. (shrink)

By combining experimental interventions with search procedures for graphical causal models we show that under familiar assumptions, with perfect data, N - 1 experiments suffice to determine the causal relations among N > 2 variables when each experiment randomizes at most one variable. We show the same bound holds for adaptive learners, but does not hold for N > 4 when each experiment can simultaneously randomize more than one variable. This bound provides a type of ideal for the measure of (...) success of heuristic approached in active learning methods of casual discovery, which currently use less informative measures. (shrink)

An interventionist account of causation characterizes causal relations in terms of changes resulting from particular interventions. We provide an example of a causal relation for which there does not exist an intervention satisfying the common interventionist standard. We consider adaptations that would save this standard and describe their implications for an interventionist account of causation. No adaptation preserves all the aspects that make the interventionist account appealing.

We provide a critical assessment of the account of causal emergence presented in Erik Hoel’s 2017 article “When the map is better than the territory”. The account integrates causal and information theoretic concepts to explain under what circumstances there can be causal descriptions of a system at multiple scales of analysis. We show that the causal macro variables implied by this account result in interventions with significant ambiguity, and that the operations of marginalization and abstraction do not commute. Both of (...) these are desiderata that, we argue, any account of multi-scale causal analysis should be sensitive to. The problems we highlight in Hoel’s definition of causal emergence derive from the use of various averaging steps and the introduction of a maximum entropy distribution that is extraneous to the system under investigation. (shrink)

We consider the problems arising from using sequences of experiments to discover the causal structure among a set of variables, none of whom are known ahead of time to be an “outcome”. In particular, we present various approaches to resolve conflicts in the experimental results arising from sampling variability in the experiments. We provide a sufficient condition that allows for pooling of data from experiments with different joint distributions over the variables. Satisfaction of the condition allows for an independence test (...) with greater sample size that may resolve some of the conflicts in the experimental results. The pooling condition has its own problems, but should—due to its generality—be informative to techniques for meta-analysis. (shrink)