As corporate scandals proliferate, organizational researchers and practitioners have made calls for research providing guidance for those wishing to influence positive moral decision-making and behavior in the workplace. This study incorporates social cognitive theory and a vignette-based cognitive measure for moral imagination to examine (a) moral attentiveness and employee creativity as important antecedents of moral imagination and (b) creativity as a moderator of the positive relationship between moral attentiveness and moral imagination. Based on the results from supervisor–subordinate dyadic data (N (...) = 162) obtained from employed students, hypotheses were largely supported as expected. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

NG van Kampen is a well-known theoretical physicist who has had a long and distinguished career. His research covers scattering theory, plasma physics, statistical mechanics, and various mathematical aspects of physics. In addition to his scientific work, he has written a number of papers about more general aspects of science. An indefatigable fighter for intellectual honesty and clarity, he has pointed out repeatedly that the fundamental ideas of physics have been needlessly obscured. As those papers appeared in various journals, partly (...) in Dutch, it was felt that it would be worthwhile to collect them and make them available to a larger audience. This is a book of major importance to scientists and university teachers. (shrink)

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about supernatural agents’ socially strategic knowledge more quickly than non-strategic knowledge. Furthermore, agents’ knowledge of immoral and uncooperative social behaviors should be especially accessible to people. To examine these hypotheses, we measured response-times (...) to questions about the knowledge attributed to four different agents—God, Santa Claus, a fictional surveillance government, and omniscient but non-interfering aliens—that vary in their omniscience, moral concern, ability to punish, and how supernatural they are. As anticipated, participants respond more quickly to questions about agents’ socially strategic knowledge than non-strategic knowledge, but only when agents are able to punish. (shrink)

In his book on Karl Barth Professor T. F. Torrance spoke at one point of ‘the great watershed of modern theology’. ‘There are,’ he wrote, 1 ‘two basic issues here. On the one hand, it is the very substance of the Christian faith that is at stake, and on the other hand, it is the fundamental nature of scientific method, in its critical and methodological renunciation of prior understanding, that is at stake. This is the great watershed of modern theology: (...) either we take the one way or the other – there is no third alter native… one must go either in the direction taken by Barth or in the direction taken by Bultmann.’. (shrink)

In recent years the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have received much attention from philosophers in general and especially from philosophers interested in religion; and there is no doubt that Wittgenstein's legacy of thought is both highly suggestive and highly problematical. It seems likely, however, that the vogue which Wittgenstein now enjoys owes not a little to his peculiar place in the development of modern philosophy and, in particular, of that empiricist tradition in philosophy which stems from what has been called (...) the revolution in philosophy in the early decades of the present century. (shrink)

Under the sway of the postulate of determinism, sociologists (with some exceptions) have given little direct attention to sheerly fortuitous events. Such events are analytically distinguishable from those which are considered the results of chance only because we currently lack knowledge of their causation. Exemplifications of pure chance abound in the various arts and sciences, including sociology (especially in work by symbolic interactionists). Direct, explicit consideration of random, accidental, or chance phenomena requires approaches that emphasize both the processes of behavior (...) and interaction and the case-study method of investigation. (shrink)

Background: computer software is widely used to support literacy learning. There are few randomised trials to support its effectiveness. Therefore, there is an urgent need to rigorously evaluate computer software that supports literacy learning.Methods: we undertook a pragmatic randomised controlled trial among pupils aged 11–12 within a single state comprehensive school in the North of England. The pupils were randomised to receive 10 hours of literacy learning delivered via laptop computers or to act as controls. Both groups received normal literacy (...) learning. A pre‐test and two post‐tests were given in spelling and literacy. The main pre‐defined outcome was improvements in spelling scores.Results: 155 pupils were randomly allocated, 77 to the ICT group and 78 to control. Four pupils left the school before post‐testing and 25 pupils did not have both pre‐ and post‐test data. Therefore, 63 and 67 pupils were included in the main analysis for the ICT and control groups respectively. After adjusting for pre‐test scores there was a slight increase in spelling scores, associated with the ICT intervention, but this was not statistically significant – 1.83 to 3.74, p = 0.50). For reading scores there was a statistically significant decrease associated with the ICT intervention .Conclusions: we found no evidence of a statistically significant benefit on spelling outcomes using a computer program for literacy learning. For reading there seemed to be a reduction in reading scores associated with the use of the program. All new literacy software needs to be tested in a rigorous trial before it is used routinely in schools. (shrink)

It is a curious fact that the much maligned ontological argument to prove the existence of God has in recent times enjoyed a revival of interest to which even Karl Barth, the arch-enemy of natural theology has contributed; but since the revival of interest has appared in a wide diversity of intellectual contexts, both philosophical and theological, the revival is itself almost as problematic as the argument itself.

In his article ‘Professor Bartley's Theory of Rationality and Religious Belief’ Mr W. D. Hudson has brought considerable clarification to the rather confused situation occasioned by Professor W. W. Bartley's book The Retreat to Commitment and its subsequent discussion; but the process can, I think, be carried still further.

This paper describes the escape/intervention concept as it is used in the agent growing environment framework. The Escape and Intervention is used in many multi-disciplinary areas, including agent research, artificial intelligence, groupware and workflow, process support, software engineering, and social sciences. Based on an ontological perspective, this paper explains how an interaction-oriented agent architecture and language (used for modelling, simulation, and development) makes use of an interaction pattern that is inspired from social contexts seen as multi-agent systems.

A recent study using a crossmodal matching task showed that the identity of a talker could be recognized even when the auditory and visual stimuli that were being matched were different sentences spoken by the talker. This finding implies that general temporal features of a person's speech are shared across the auditory and visual modalities.

In this paper we study generic complexity of undecidable problems. It turns out that some classical undecidable problems are, in fact, strongly undecidable, i.e., they are undecidable on every strongly generic subset of inputs. For instance, the classical Halting Problem is strongly undecidable. Moreover, we prove and analog of the Rice theorem for strongly undecidable problems, which provides plenty of examples of strongly undecidable problems. Then we show that there are natural super-undecidable problems. i.e., problem which are undecidable on every (...) generic (not only strongly generic) subset of inputs. In particular, there are finitely presented semigroups with super-undecidable word problem. To construct strongly- and super-undecidable problems we introducea method of generic amplification (an analog of the amplification in complexity theory). Finally, we construct absolutely undecidable problems, which stay undecidable on every non-negligible set of inputs. Their construction rests on generic immune sets. (shrink)