Corporate environmental performance (CEP) has been of fundamental interest in scholarly research during the last few decades. However, there is a great deal of disagreement pertaining to the definition, conceptualization, and adequate measurement of CEP. Our study addresses these issues and provides a methodologically rigorous and comprehensive examination of content validity and construct validity. By integrating the available literature on CEP, we derive a parsimonious definition and theoretically sound framework of the focal construct. Drawing on non-aggregated and publicly available data (...) for a sample of 706 firm-years, we test the construct validity of this framework by means of factor analysis. Our results provide evidence for the multidimensional nature of the focal construct. By contrasting our findings with existing measurement approaches in empirical research, we emphasize several deficiencies with regard to the inferences and conclusions yielded in prior research. Future empirical and practically oriented studies can build on our findings and thus provide more stringent results. (shrink)

Peirce promised but never delivered a theoretical system called "speculative rhetoric," therefore explication is synthesized from throughout his writings. bypassing nearly everything akin to standard rhetorical theory, he thinks of it as the "power of appealing to a mind" defined strictly in terms of logical processes. these "formal conditions of symbolic force" fall into two operations: "methodeutic" is an alternating inductive/deductive process beginning with imagined ideational relationships and ending with a specific claim or idea; "assertiveness" is a conjoining of images (...) ("icons") which, when directed upon the attention ("indexed"), provides compulsiveness to the idea. (shrink)

This article discusses the famous Popperian terms of 'empirical content' and 'falsifiability' or 'refutability'. They are all synonymous with another and are all fundamental principles, not for Popper's philosophy exclusively, but for Lakatos's and for Sneed's rational reconstruction of the ideas of Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In dem vorliegenden Artikel wird die auf falschen Voraussetzungen beruhende Ausbeutung der Sozialphilosophie des Kritischen Rationalismus für die Zwecke der Sozialdemokratie zurückgewiesen. Diese Sozialphilosophie kann keinesfalls für eine bestimmte parteipolitische Richtung und nur für jene in Anspruch genommen werden, ist sie doch von ihrem Selbstverständnis her auf allgemeingültigere Aussagen angelegt, als sie in der Programmatik der SPD zu finden sind. Daneben wird eine neue Strukturierung der kritizistischen Sozialphilosophie vorgeschlagen, die sich die Unterteilung in Meta- und Objektsprache zunutze macht. Die Sozialphilosophie (...) thematisiert dabei das politische Handeln selbst, während sich die Sozialphilosophie das Reden über das politische Handeln zum Gegenstand setzt. Geht es beim ersten Ansatz um politische Normen, so beim zweiten darum, welchen methodologischen Kriterien solche Normen zu genügen haben. (shrink)

Summary Hans Albert's famous principle ‘Sollen impliziert Können’, which should bridge the two disparate domains of normative decisions and empirical informations is a constitutive one of the Popperian metaethical philosophy of social relations.

In an era of confessional conflict, the conscience served as a powerful mediator between God and man, directing and judging moral actions. This work aims to convey the breadth of the conscience's jurisdiction, analyzing its impact upon a variety of important aspects of early modern society: political allegiance the genre of "advice to princes" religious conformity slavery the regulation of sexual behavior gender roles and the intellectual methods of scientists.

In Book II of the Republic, Socrates briefly depicts a city where each inhabitant contributes to the welfare of all by performing the role for which he or she is naturally suited. Socrates calls this city the `true city ' and the `healthy one'. Nearly all commentators have argued that Socrates' praise of the city cannot be taken at face value, claiming that it does not represent Socrates' preferred community. The point of this paper is to argue otherwise. The claim (...) is that Socrates genuinely believes the city is a healthy and desirable city, and that he believes that the First City is in fact superior to the Kallipolis. (shrink)

First, I offer a short overview on the classical occidental philosophy as propounded by the ancient Greeks and the natural philosophies of the last 2000 years until the dawn of the empiricist logic of science in the twentieth century, which wanted to delimitate classical metaphysics from empirical sciences. In contrast to metaphysical concepts which didn’t reflect on the language with which they tried to explain the whole realm of entities empiricist logic of science initiated the end of metaphysical theories by (...) reflecting on the preconditions for foundation and justification of sentences about objects of investigation, i.e. a coherent definition of language in general, which was not the aim of classical metaphysics. Unexpectedly empiricist logic of science in the linguistic turn failed in the physical and mathematical reductionism of language and its use in communication, as will be discussed below in further detail. Nevertheless, such reflection on language and communication also introduced this vocabulary into biology. Manfred Eigen and bioinformatics, later on biolinguistics, used ‘language’ applied linguistic turn thinking to biology coherent to the logic of science and its formalisable aims. This changed significantly with the birth of biosemiotics and biohermeneutics. At the end of this introduction it will be outlined why and how all these approaches reproduced the deficiencies of the logic of science and why the biocommunicative approach avoids their abstractive fallacies. (shrink)

All the conserved detailed results of evolution stored in DNA must be read, transcribed, and translated via an RNAmediated process. This is required for the development and growth of each individual cell. Thus, all known living organisms fundamentally depend on these RNA-mediated processes. In most cases, they are interconnected with other RNAs and their associated protein complexes and function in a strictly coordinated hierarchy of temporal and spatial steps (i.e., an RNA network). Clearly, all cellular life as we know it (...) could not function without these key agents of DNA replication, namely rRNA, tRNA, and mRNA. Thus, any definition of life that lacks RNA functions and their networks misses an essential requirement for RNA agents that inherently regulate and coordinate (communicate to) cells, tissues, organs, and organisms. The precellular evolution of RNAs occurred at the core of the emergence of cellular life and the question remained of how both precellular and cellular levels are interconnected historically and functionally. RNA-networks andRNA-communication can interconnect these levels.With the reemergence of virology in evolution, it became clear that communicating viruses and subviral infectious genetic parasites are bridging these two levels by invading, integrating, coadapting, exapting, and recombining constituent parts in host genomes for cellular requirements in gene regulation and coordination aims. Therefore, a 21st century understanding of life is of an inherently social process based on communicating RNA networks, in which viruses and cells continuously interact. (shrink)

Investigation into the sequence structure of the genetic code by means of an informatic approach is a real success story. The features of human language are also the object of investigation within the realm of formal language theories. They focus on the common rules of a universal grammar that lies behind all languages and determine generation of syntactic structures. This universal grammar is a depiction of material reality, i.e., the hidden logical order of things and its relations determined by natural (...) laws. Therefore mathematics is viewed not only as an appropriate tool to investigate human language and genetic code structures through computer sciencebased formal language theory but is itself a depiction of material reality. This confusion between language as a scientific tool to describe observations/experiences within cognitive constructed models and formal language as a direct depiction of material reality occurs not only in current approaches but was the central focus of the philosophy of science debate in the twentieth century, with rather unexpected results. This article recalls these results and their implications for more recent mathematical approaches that also attempt to explain the evolution of human language. (shrink)

Natural genome editing from a biocommunicative perspective is the competent agent-driven generation and integration of meaningful nucleotide sequences into pre-existing genomic content arrangements, and the ability to (re-)combine and (re-)regulate them according to context-dependent (i.e. adaptational) purposes of the host organism. Natural genome editing integrates both natural editing of genetic code and epigenetic marking that determines genetic reading patterns. As agents that edit genetic code and epigenetically mark genomic structures, viral and subviral agents have been suggested because they may be (...) evolutionarily older than cellular life. This hypothesis that viruses and viral-like agents edit genetic code is developed according to three well investigated examples that represent key evolutionary inventions in which non-lytic viral swarms act symbiotically in a persistent lifestyle within cellular host genomes: origin of eukaryotic nucleus, adaptive immunity, placental mammals. Additionally an abundance of various RNA elements cooperate in a variety of steps and substeps as regulatory and catalytic units with multiple competencies to act on the genetic code. Most of these RNA agents such as transposons, retroposons and small non-coding RNAs act consortially and are remnants of persistent viral infections that now act as co-opted adaptations in cellular key processes. (shrink)

Boards of directors affect corporate strategy and decision-making through monitoring of management and resource provision. Recently, an increasing number of studies have examined the relationships between board characteristics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). These studies have yielded inconsistent findings. This article therefore reports the results of a study applying meta-analytical techniques to a sample of 82 empirical studies to help clarify the relationships between board characteristics and CSR. Although prior research has tended to apply relatively simplistic models investigating the impact (...) of individual board characteristics independently and only directly, we adopt a more complex perspective to shed new light on the board characteristics–CSR nexus. Specifically, we use a meta-analytic path model that accounts for the potential interplay between board characteristics in determining CSR and tests whether the presence of a CSR committee plays a meditating role. Our findings suggest that board size, board independence, and female board representation are partially interrelated with each other and jointly influence CSR directly as well as indirectly via the presence of a CSR committee. In addition, we find that country-level institutional factors act as moderators and that the relationships differ with regard to the specific dimension of CSR (i.e., social, environmental, or aggregate). (shrink)

In two pre-registered online studies during the COVID-19 pandemic and the early 2020 lockdown (one of which with a UK representative sample) we elicit risk-tolerance for 1,254 UK residents using four of the most widely applied risk-taking tasks in behavioral economics and psychology. Specifically, participants completed the incentive-compatible Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) and the Binswanger-Eckel-Grossman (BEG) multiple lotteries task, as well as the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking Task (DOSPERT) and the self-reported questions for risk-taking used in the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) (...) study. In addition, participants in the UK representative sample answered a range of questions about COVID-19-related risky behaviors selected from the UCL COVID-19 Social Survey and the ICL-YouGov survey on COVID-19 behaviors. Consistently with pre-COVID-19 times, we find that risk tolerance during the UK lockdown (i) was higher in men than in women and (ii) decreased with age. Undocumented in pre-COVID-19 times, we find some evidence for healthier participants displaying significantly higher risk-tolerance for self-reported risk measures. We find no systematic nor robust patterns of association between the COVID-19 risky behaviors and the four risk-taking tasks in our study. Moreover, we find no evidence in support of the so-called “risk compensation” hypothesis. If anything, it appears that participants who took greater risk in real-life COVID-19-relevant risky behaviors (e.g., isolating or taking precautions) also exhibited higher risk-tolerance in our experimental and self-reported risk-taking measures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Rights and the Ethics of Globalization by Daniel E. Lee and Elizabeth J. LeeGuenther "Gene" HaasHuman Rights and the Ethics of Globalization Daniel E. Lee and Elizabeth J. Lee Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 264 pp. $27.99While there have been numerous books written on the nature of rights in a world of globalization, this book fills a gap by presenting a thoughtful and balanced discussion that is (...) firmly grounded in ethical theory yet takes into account the concerns of both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the realities of the business world. The authors acknowledge that there can be naive troublemakers in NGOs and greedy people in business as well as socially concerned people in both groups.The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with the philosophical foundations for addressing ethical issues in business within the context of globalization. Here the authors advocate for a limited, carefully defined notion of rights, properly noting that not everything of ethical significance falls under the notion of rights. The important distinction they make is between negative rights (the rights to life and freedom), which oblige us never to harm others, and positive rights (rights of entitlement, such as education, medical care, housing), which depend upon the various types of relationships, voluntary or involuntary, in which people find themselves. The former apply universally to neighbors near and far; the latter, because they are defined by relationships, apply primarily to neighbors near to us. With globalization distant neighbors often become near neighbors—for example, when a company builds a production facility in another country. In view of this, the authors argue that the Enlightenment’s individualistic understanding of rights is incomplete. A fuller version of rights (rooted in Aristotle) situates all humans in social communities where mutual charitable treatment is better suited to promoting human flourishing. With this in mind, the authors use the second form of Kant’s categorical imperative (“Always treat others as ends”) to map out some helpful practical guidelines for multinational corporations that are conducive to human well-being. Such guidelines seek to take into consideration all the constituencies that these organizations are called to serve—including shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, and communities of location.In part 2 the authors draw on these philosophical foundations and practical guidelines to discuss ethical issues related to business practices in four different [End Page 198] countries: respect for human rights in China given the widespread practice of outsourcing; the condition of workers in Liberia where Firestone is the largest employer; free trade and fair trade issues related to coffee growers in Ethiopia; and the question of whether low-wage factories (maquiladoras) in Mexico exploit workers or provide economic opportunity for them. The authors provide a fair evaluation of each situation rooting their discussion in the nature of each respective business and the conditions over which it has direct control.Part 3 deals with the possibilities and challenges of dealing with multinational corporations that do not respect human rights. Although many argue for sanctions and treaty provisions, the authors argue that these approaches have their limitations. As an alternative, they recommend the Alien Tort Claims Act as the most promising means of enforcing human rights standards among American multinational corporations with overseas operations.This is an insightful and balanced book on human rights and social ethics precisely because it has a positive view of markets and is optimistic about achieving greater social responsibility in the business world. It will be helpful to all committed to promoting ethical business practices in a growing global economy—not only in the church and academy but also in the legal community and business world and in NGOs.Guenther HaasRedeemer University CollegeCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Excerpt from Ideen zur Kulturphilosophie Jaerber philofophifche %eanlagung weicht ftarl bon Dem ab, wa man fich gewohnlich Darunter borftellt: er iit weber fpftematifch noch fritifch ftarf begabt. och befa er eben, wa Die auptbebingung fur alle sj)hilofophieren aumacht Da intuitioe efuhl fur Da ictp@ntfprechenbe in Den ingen. %ei feiner gefchichtphilofophifdyen 2lufgabe brachte Der 932angel an %egrifffpftematit auch einen wefentlichen %orteil mit fich: jebe %eftlegung auf ein 9ftem bedeutet eine Flaerengung De %erftanbniffe, einen ogmatimu. 82iemanb warnt einbringlicher al oethe bor Diefem (...) voreiligen 2lbe fchlieen, Dem %einbe Der lebenbigen @rfenntni. 93zit freier 55eweglichteit De eifte Durchforfcht Jaerber Die abelt; er geht Den ingen mit empfanglicher ecle nach, ohne fie herrifch unter eine Sbee 3u beugen. och entfpricht Dem %or teil auch mancher 92achteil. $die eigenen, prin5ipiellen e bauten, Die Doch Da tragende eruft Der 2lufuhrungen finb, entftehen bei ihm nicht in logifcher, fonfequenter @ntwialung, fonbern ergeben fich oft mehr gelegentlich bei Der arftellung eingelner fontreter $atfachen. 933enn fie Daher oft nicht gu einanber ftimmen wollen ober nicht fcharf oerfolgt werben, fo haben fie Doch wieber Den?bor5ug, gang unmittelbar und urfprunglid, au Der wirtlichen %elt hervorguwarhfm und nicht Durch Die Steflegion getrubt 5u fein. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Current research on the origin of DNA and RNA, viruses, and mobile genetic elements prompts a re-evaluation of the origin and nature of genetic material as the driving force behind evolutionary novelty. While scholars used to think that novel features resulted from random genetic mutations of an individual’s specific genome, today we recognize the important role that acquired viruses and mobile genetic elements have played in introducing evolutionary novelty within the genomes of species. Viral infections and subviral RNAs can enter (...) the host genome and persist as genetic regulatory networks. Persistent viral infections are also important to understand the split between great apes and humans. Nearly all mammals and nonhuman primates rely on olfaction, i.e., chemoreception as the basis of the sense of smell for social recognition, group membership, and the coordination of organized social life. Humans, however, evolved other means to establish social bonding, because several infection waves by endogenous retroviruses caused a loss of odor receptors in human ancestors. The human independence from olfaction for social recognition was in turn one driver of the rather abrupt human transition to dependence on visual information, gesture production, and facial recognition that are at the roots of language-based communication. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the coping resources of hope and sense of coherence, which are rooted in positive-psychology theory, as potential resilience factors that might reduce the emotional distress experienced by adults from three cultural groups in Israel during the chronic-stress situation of a pandemic. The three cultural groups examined were secular Jews, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Arabs. We compared these cultural groups during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, just before the Jewish New Year (mid-September (...) 2020) as a second lockdown was announced. Data were gathered from 248 secular Jews, 243 Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and 203 Arabs, who were 18–70 years old (M= 37.14,SD= 12.62). The participants filled out self-reported questionnaires including the Brief Symptom Inventory as a measure of emotional/psychological distress (i.e., somatization, depression, and anxiety) and questionnaires about sense of coherence and different types of hope (i.e., intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal) as measures of coping resources and resiliency. Differences were found between the three groups in terms of several variables. The Arab participants reported the highest levels of emotional distress and the lowest levels of interpersonal and transpersonal hope; whereas the Ultra-Orthodox participants revealed the highest levels of sense of coherence and other resilience factors. A structural equation model revealed that, in addition to the sociodemographic factors, only sense of coherence and intrapersonal hope played significant roles in explaining emotional distress, explaining 60% of the reported distress among secular Jews, 41% among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and 48% among Arabs. We discuss our findings in light of the salutogenic and hope theories. We will also discuss their relevancy to meaning-seeking and self-transcendence theory in the three cultural groups. (shrink)

Russellianism (also called `neo-Russellianism, `Millianism, and `thenaive theory') entails that substitution of co-referring names inattitude ascriptions preserves truth value and proposition expressed.Thus, on this view, if Lucy wants Twain to autograph her book, thenshe also wants Clemens to autograph her book, even if she says ``I donot want Clemens to autograph my book''. Some philosophers (includingMichael Devitt and Mark Richard) claim that attitude ascriptions canbe used to predict behavior, but argue that if Russellianism weretrue, then this would not be so. (...) They conclude that Russellianism isfalse. I defend Russellianism from this objection. I present severalanalyses of ``sentence S can be used to predict event E''. I arguethat, on each of these analyses, attitude ascriptions can be used topredict behavior, even if Russellianism is true. Furthermore, if myarguments are incorrect, and attitude ascriptions cannot be used topredict behavior under Russellianism, then Russellians can explainaway the intuition that they can be so used. (shrink)

Every coordination within or between animals depends on communication processes. Although the signaling molecules, vocal and tactile signs, gestures and its combinations differ throughout all species according their evolutionary origins and variety of adaptation processes, certain levels of biocommunication can be found in all animal species: Abiotic environmental indices such as temperature, light, water, etc. that affect the local ecosphere of an organism and are sensed, interpreted. Trans-specific communication with non-related organisms. Species-specific communication between same or related species. Intraorganismic communication, (...) i.e., sign-mediated coordination within the body of the organism. This book gives an overview of the manifold levels of animal communication exemplified by a variety of species and thereby broadens the understanding of these organisms. (shrink)

The community college movement has been eager to embrace the accelerating changes brought about by global capital and facilitated by information technology. Leadership for the community college role in globalization has been cultivated by the American Association of Community Colleges and the League for Innovation in the Community College. As the administrators of publicly funded community colleges view themselves as managers and CEOs in a competitive market for education, the colleges look to private industry for funding. Meanwhile, the voice of (...) the community college is nearly silent with regard to environmental destruction and human rights abuses e xacerbated by globalization. This article will focuse on the role of community colleges in facilitating and cheerleading the corporate global economy while attenuating dissenting world views that would promote a more just and sustainable future. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis opened up discussions on using online tools and platforms for academic work, e.g. for research (management) events that were originally designed as face-to-face interactions. As social scientists working in the domain of responsible research and innovation (RRI), we draft this paper to open up a dialogue on Responsible online Research and Innovation (RoRI), and deliberate particular socioethical opportunities and challenges of the onlineification in collaborative theoretical and empirical research. An RRI-inspired ‘going online’ approach would mean, we suggest, (...) trying to make academic events and research activities more inclusive, researchers’ attitude to their work more reflective and suggest processes that are more responsive to societal needs and ethical concerns. For such systematic reflection, we suggest using the RRI-heuristic provided by Owen et al., and applying the dimensions of ‘Anticipation, Inclusion, Reflection and Responsiveness’ (AIRR) in order to identify and reflect on the dilemmas involved in ‘going online’ in one’s research. (shrink)

Marketers use autobiographical advertising as a means to create nostalgia for their products. This research explores whether such referencing can cause people to believe that they had experiences as children that are mentioned in the ads. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with Mickey Mouse as a child. Relative to controls, the ad increased their confidence that they personally had shaken hands with Mickey as a child at a Disney resort. The (...) increased confidence could be due to a revival of a true memory or the creation of a new, false one. In Experiment 2, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with an impossible character (e.g., Bugs Bunny). Again, relative to controls, the ad increased confidence that they personally had shaken hands with the impossible character as a child at a Disney resort. The increased confidence is consistent with the notion that autobiographical referencing can lead to the creation of false or distorted memory. ᭧ 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Simone Weil's ideas proved fundamental for Iris Murdoch, opening up a difficult path of thought for one rooted in the British philosophical tradition in the 1950s (Sim 1985, Bok 2005, Lovibond 2011a, Panizza 2022a, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022). Grasping the Weilian-inspired moral theory of attention sketched by Iris Murdoch is a prerequisite for comprehending the development of her moral ideas (Panizza 2015, Broackes 2012) and the form they may take in her literary writings (Griffin 1993, Morgan 2006). This paper (...) argues that we can read an expression of Simone Weil in Iris Murdoch's novels which articulate her notions of grace and gravity, but also convey the Weilian insights that shape Murdoch's moral perfectionism. It investigates three of Murdoch's well-known male protagonists, i.e., Bradley Pearson, Charles Arrowby and Hilary Burde, so as to comprehend how their moral failures relate to a defective implementation of the concepts of love and attention as theorised by Simone Weil as leading to goodness. Hence, it offers a new examination of the way in which the Murdochian literary staging of inattention as a cause of moral deficiency reveals its Weilian-based ethics of attention. (shrink)

When making substituted judgments for incapacitated patients, surrogates often struggle to guess what the patient would want if they had capacity. Surrogates may also agonize over having the (sole) responsibility of making such a determination. To address such concerns, a Patient Preference Predictor (PPP) has been proposed that would use an algorithm to infer the treatment preferences of individual patients from population-level data about the known preferences of people with similar demographic characteristics. However, critics have suggested that even if such (...) a PPP were more accurate, on average, than human surrogates in identifying patient preferences, the proposed algorithm would nevertheless fail to respect the patient’s (former) autonomy since it draws on the ‘wrong’ kind of data: namely, data that are not specific to the individual patient and which therefore may not reflect their actual values, or their reasons for having the preferences they do. Taking such criticisms on board, we here propose a new approach: the Personalized Patient Preference Predictor (P4). The P4 is based on recent advances in machine learning, which allow technologies including large language models to be more cheaply and efficiently ‘fine-tuned’ on person-specific data. The P4, unlike the PPP, would be able to infer an individual patient’s preferences from material (e.g., prior treatment decisions) that is in fact specific to them. Thus, we argue, in addition to being potentially more accurate at the individual level than the previously proposed PPP, the predictions of a P4 would also more directly reflect each patient’s own reasons and values. In this article, we review recent discoveries in artificial intelligence research that suggest a P4 is technically feasible, and argue that, if it is developed and appropriately deployed, it should assuage some of the main autonomy-based concerns of critics of the original PPP. We then consider various objections to our proposal and offer some tentative replies. (shrink)

Libertarians famously contend that the minimal state is the most just social arrangement because it secures individual freedoms and basic political rights. They also oppose wealth transfer taxation, i.e. taxation of inheritances, bequests, and inter vivos gifts, arguing that it violates people's right to use their wealth freely. However, as I argue, libertarian opposition to wealth transfer taxation causes practical problems for their commitment to a minimal state, as there is strong empirical evidence demonstrating that wealth transfer taxation is required (...) to secure the political rights necessary for a free and stable society. In other words, I contend that without an effective wealth transfer tax, it will be difficult to ensure political rights and basic freedoms, thus leaving the libertarian minimal state in peril of collapse. (shrink)

Previous processing studies have shown that constituents that are prosodically marked as focus lead to an activation of alternatives. We investigate the processing of constituents that are prosodically marked as contrastive topics. In German, contrastive topics are prosodically realized by prenuclear L*+H accents. Our study tests a) whether prenuclear accents (as opposed to nuclear accents) are able to activate contrastive alternatives, b) whether they do this in the same way as constituents prosodically marked as focus with nuclear accents do, which (...) is important for semantic modeling and c) whether the activation of alternatives is caused by pitch accent type (prenuclear L*+H as contrastive accent vs. prenuclear L+H* as non-contrastive accent) or by differences in F0-excursion (related to prominence). We conducted two visual-world eye-tracking studies, in which German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flappers) and watched displays that depicted four printed words: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver), one that was non-contrastively related to it (e.g., sports), the object (e.g., flappers), which had to be clicked, and an unrelated distractor. Experiment 1 presented participants with two naturally produced intonation conditions, a broad focus control condition with a prenuclear L+H* accent on the subject and a contrastive topic condition with a prenuclear L*+H accent. The results showed that participants fixated more on the contrastive alternative when the subject was produced with an L*+H accent, with the same effect size and timing as reported for focus constituents. Experiment 2 resynthesized the stimuli so that peak height and F0-excursion were the same across intonation conditions. The effect was the same, but the time course was slightly later. Our results suggest that prenuclear L*+H immediately leads to the activation of alternatives during online processing, and that the F0-excursion of the accent lends little. The results are discussed with regard to the processing of contrastive focus accents and theories of contrastive topic. (shrink)

Expondré a continuación algunas notas sobre el pensamiento económico en América Latina a finales del siglo XVIII y comienzos del XIX. Me referiré al pensamiento ilustrado y al mercantilismo, y haré entrar a una filosofía que ejerció bastante influencia entonces -con particular relevancia desde finales de la década de 1810- en España e Iberoamérica, en un episodio poco estudiado en la historia de las ideas: el utilitarismo.

Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems – especially in terms of their gender asymmetries – have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender on the mental representations of women and men. Our (...) index is based on five main language groups (i.e., grammatical gender languages, languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender, natural gender languages, genderless languages with few traces of grammatical gender and genderless languages) and three sets of specific features (morphology, masculine-male generics and asymmetries). Our index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify languages according to grammatical gender. (shrink)

Despite the practical knowledge throughout the nineteenth century that citrus fruit cured scurvy, and that rickets and beriberi were diseases caused by poor diet, it was not until 1901 that animal feeding experiments led one investigator to propose the existence of 'accessory food factors,' a lack of which was determined to be the cause of some illnesses (Hopkins, 1949. In Joseph Needham and E. Baldwin (eds.), Hopkins and Biochemistry, 1861-1947: Papers Concerning Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, O.M., P.R.S., with a Selection (...) of His Addresses and a Bibliography of His Publications. Cambridge: W. Heifer and Sons Ltd). The discovery of vitamins has long been considered as a delayed discovery. This delay has been attributed to the power of the germ theory in physiology at the time. While the germ theory and theories of autointoxication certainly played a role in delaying the discovery of vitamins, I argue further that it is important to consider the difference made to physiology by understanding the vitamins’ catalytic function. The profound difference made to physiology by the vitamins’ catalytic function suggests that a vitamin concept had previously been systematically inaccessible to researchers working within the conceptual framework of Bernardian physiology. (shrink)