We investigate the performance and risk of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) equity funds in the Australian market and find no significant difference between the returns of SRI and conventional funds. In an extension to prior literature, we examine the impact of the number of positive, negative and total screens funds impose on performance and risk. We find little evidence of positive or negative screening impacting total return, but find weak evidence that funds with more screens overall provide better risk-adjusted performance. (...) Positive screening significantly reduces funds’ risk. However, negative screening significantly increases risk and reduces funds’ abilities to form diversified portfolios. (shrink)

The 2015 Paris Agreement set a global warming limit of 2°C above preindustrial levels. Corporations play an important role in achieving this objective, and methods have recently been developed to map global climate targets to specific industries, and individual corporations within those industries. In this article, we assess whether Sustainability ratings capture corporate performance in meeting the 2°C target. We analyze nine rating schemes used by investors and three commonly used in academic studies. Most rating schemes do consider corporate greenhouse (...) gas emissions in their analysis, whereas only a minority scale emissions by factors that have the potential to allow benchmarking against science-based targets. None take the final step of mapping climate indicators against the 2°C target. Furthermore, we find a lack of consistency in the climate change ratings of the databases used in academic studies. These results are concerning in the context of being able to meet global climate change goals. (shrink)

Category-specific impairments of object recognition and naming are among the most intriguing disorders in neuropsychology, affecting the retrieval of knowledge about either living or nonliving things. They can give us insight into the nature of our representations of objects: Have we evolved different neural systems for recognizing different categories of object? What kinds of knowledge are important for recognizing particular objects? How does visual similarity within a category influence object recognition and representation? What is the nature of our semantic knowledge (...) about different objects? We review the evidence on category-specific impairments, arguing that deficits even for one class of object cannot be accounted for in terms of a single information processing disorder across all patients; problems arise at contrasting loci in different patients. The same apparent pattern of impairment can be produced by damage to different loci. According to a new processing framework for object recognition and naming, the hierarchical interactive theory, we have a hierarchy of highly interactive stored representations. HIT explains the variety of patients in terms of lesions at different levels of processing and different forms of stored knowledge used both for particular tasks and for particular categories of object. Key Words: category-specific deficits; functional imaging; hierarchical models; interactive activation models; neuropsychology; object recognition; perceptual and functional knowledge. (shrink)

We provide a comprehensive analysis of differences between socially responsible investment and conventional funds in terms of manager characteristics, performance and fund styles. We use holdings-based analysis to evaluate fund performance and style, which allows us to perform a more in-depth analysis than the extant literature. We find that SRI managers have longer tenure and are more likely to be a female. However, these differences do not result in any significant difference in the performance of SRI and conventional funds. Further, (...) it is possible to find an SRI fund of any style, although these funds are under-represented in value styles. (shrink)

Prior literature on socially responsible investment has contended that excluding “sin stocks” from a portfolio will reduce performance and increase risk. Further, incorporating stocks of firms with positive social responsibility scores will improve performance and reduce risk. We simulate portfolios designed to mimic typical equity mutual funds’ holdings and investigate these propositions. We remove the potentially confounding influences of differences in manager skill, transaction costs and fees, and conduct a clean experiment on the effect of positive and negative portfolio screening. (...) We find no difference in the return or risk of screened and unscreened portfolios. We conclude that a typical socially responsible fund will neither gain nor lose from screening its portfolio. (shrink)

There is growing regulatory pressure on firms worldwide to address the under-representation of women in senior positions. Regulators have taken a variety of approaches to the issue. We investigate a jurisdiction that has issued recommendations and disclosure requirements, rather than implementing quotas. Much of the rhetoric surrounding gender diversity centres on whether diversity has a financial impact. In this paper we take an aggregate (market-level) approach and compare the performance of portfolios of firms with gender diverse boards to those without. (...) We also investigate whether having multiple women on the board is linked to performance, and if there is a within-industry effect. Overall, we do not find evidence of an association between diversity and performance. We find some weak evidence of a negative correlation between having multiple women on the board and performance, but that in some industries diversity is positively correlated with performance. (shrink)

We summarise and respond to the main points made by the commentators on our target article, which concern: whether structural similarity can play a causal role in normal object identification and in neuropsychological deficits for living things, the nature of our structural knowledge of the world, the relations between sensory and functional knowledge of objects, and the nature of our functional knowledge about living things, whether we need to posit a “core” semantic system, arguments that can be marshalled from evidence (...) on functional imaging, the causal mechanisms by which category differences can emerge in object representations, and the nature of our knowledge about categories other than living and nonliving things. We also highlight points raised in our article that seem to be accepted. (shrink)

To date, research into socially responsible investment (SRI), and in particular the socially responsible investment funds industry, has focused on whether investing in SRI assets has any differential impact on investor returns. Prior findings generally suggest that, on a risk-adjusted basis, there is no difference in performance between SRI and conventional funds. This result has led to questions about whether SRI funds are really any different from conventional funds. This paper examines whether the portfolio allocation across industry sectors and the (...) stock-picking ability of SRI managers are different when compared to conventional fund managers. The study finds that SRI funds exhibit different industry betas consistent with different portfolio positions, but that these differences vary from year to year. It is also found that there is little difference in stock-picking ability between the two groups of fund managers. (shrink)

_Private Language_ is that it almost universally sees KW as offering, in his sceptical solution, an account of meaning attributions (i.e., statements of the form, "X means such-and-so by 's'"; hereafter, MAs) which takes their legitimate attribution to be a function of something other than facts or truth conditions. KW is almost universally read as having rejected any account of meaning attributions which takes them to be stating facts or corresponding to facts. In a word, KW is understood as offering (...) a nonfactualist account of MAs. And given that KW's sceptical challenge to the possibility of meaning rests on his negative assertions that there are no meaning facts, and that KW offers a sceptical solution to the sceptic's claim that meaning is impossible, i.e., a solution that by definition "begins . . . by conceding that the sceptic's negative assertions are unanswerable" (K, p. 66), it seems impossible that there would be any doubts about the accuracy of the "almost universal" reading of KW as a nonfactualist. (shrink)

A twofold taxonomy for emergence is presented into which a variety of contemporary accounts of emergence fit. The first taxonomy consists of inferential, conceptual, and ontological emergence; the second of diachronic and synchronic emergence. The adequacy of weak emergence, a computational form of inferential emergence, is then examined and its relationship to conceptual emergence and ontological emergence is detailed. †To contact the author, please write to: Corcoran Department of Philosophy, 120 Cocke Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904‐4780; e‐mail: [email protected].

People used to think that the items referred to by one word, e.g. , should all have certain features in common, which would jointly constitute : and that this should enable us to decide whether any given item is a triangle or not.

The alleged paradox begins with a sceptical inquiry about my right to claim that my past usage of '+' (i.e., my past usage of the plus sign) was used to denote the function plus rather than the function quus. The definition of quus is: x quus y = x + y, if x, y < 57; otherwise, x quus y = 5. (Kripke uses an encircled plus sign to represent the quus sign. I can't reproduce that sign here so I'll (...) just use 'quus'). Basically, the problem is that on all of the problems that I have done so far, the plus and quus functions demand the same answers. So, whether I know it or not, my past responses to computations have been in accord with plus just as much as they have been in accord with quus. Thus, there seems to be no reason at all to prefer the claim that I've been plussing to the claim that I've been quussing, given my hypothetical past history. After all, the two functions are identical over the cases that I am allowed to appeal to so far. Given this setup, Kripke boldly asks: "Who is to say that [quus] is not the function I previously meant by '+'?" The sceptic claims that no one can legitimately claim that quus is not the function I previously meant by '+', given the hypothetical situation he proposes, because no one can find a fact that shows that I meant plus rather than quus. More specifically, the sceptic challenges those of us who disagree with him to produce a fact that shows that I meant plus rather than quus. Also, the sceptic requires that the fact in question "must, in some sense, show how I am justified in giving the answer '125' to '68 + 57'" (rather than '5'). (K, p. 11). (I have always seen the second form of the challenge, as Kripke calls it, viz., the requirement that the fact show how I am justified in answering '125' rather than '5', as simply a way of clarifying the task at hand. After all, challenging someone to produce a fact that I meant plus rather than quus is not the most obvious challenge in the world, for a variety of reasons. Since it's clear that if I such a fact could be produced, it would justify my saying '125' rather than '5', the second form of the challenge does not impose a new task on us.. (shrink)

Allison's interpretation and defense of Kant's idealism turn on his claim that a clear distinction between two senses of the appearance/reality distinction is crucial to and pervades Kant's thought. These are the empirical and transcendental senses, which distinguish respectively between the ordinary senses of subjective and objective, i.e., that which in my experience I believe belongs solely to my private awareness of things and that which I believe must pertain to everyone's awareness of things because it is an aspect of (...) their being, and the philosophical, or critically reflective, senses of those terms, i.e., that which we want to say about them as a function of the way in which we all experience them and that which sub specie aeternitatis we want to say belongs to things as they are in themselves. The fundamental thrust of Allison's argument is that for Kant the notion of objectivity in the ordinary sense does not imply or entail transcendental objectivity, which had been a supposition common to most of Kant's predecessors. Moreover, Allison's basic criticism of the dominant tradition of interpretation, beginning with Kant's rough contemporaries and extending into the present in the persons of Pritchard, Strawson and Walker, is that their reconstructions of Kantian doctrine and their criticisms of it turn on their inability to see or refusal to acknowledge the presence of this central distinction of Kant's thought. The deep irony pointed out by this study, then, is that just the set of distinctions on which Kant based his solutions to the metaphysical and epistemological problems which he inherited from the Cartesian tradition have been missed by most of his critics, who in turn criticized him for succumbing to all the illusions he thought he had exposed to the light. I believe Allison is correct in this claim, and his strategy of interpretation and defense is both right-minded and fruitful. The key to maintaining the distinction between the two senses of the appearance/reality distinction for Allison is the notion of an epistemic condition, which he defines as "one that is necessary for the representation of an object or an objective state of affairs", and which is to be distinguished from both psychological conditions of knowing and ontological conditions of being. The crux of Allison's argument, then, is to show that and how the notion of an epistemic condition underlies a proper understanding of idealism in the Kantian sense such that it avoids Cartesian metaphysical commitments. This is a formidable task, but one that Allison completes with much more than normal success. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 183 Moore goes on to provide an analysis, all of which goes to support the contentions (1) that, except in philosophy, there is no puzzle ("In the first place: Are you puzzled?...I am in a way, in spite of all the Critical Phil. I've done. But I'm not sure my puzzlement is all of the sort B. means: it seems such a queer question to ask: Why (...) should you ask it?"); (2) if there is a problem it exists within a philosophical theory, as in Russell's Analysis o] Matter, and that what "Critical Phil. really can do is to explain why R. is wrong when he says this"; and (3) "If you don't find that question interesting, I think you'd better not do Crit. Phil." (p. 170). Curious stuff for Part I Moral Science Tripes takers; one wonders how many of them decided they weren't that interested in the question as to whether the theories of Broad or Ru~ell were true or false, or just plain silly. Perhaps this suffices to show that the characteristic mood of Moore's public writings is to be found in the lectures as well. Somehow or other, students were exposed to this cold bath of scepticism as to the significance of the whole endeavor, and yet went on to caxry out, in his own sytle, those rather more dogmatic exercises in analysis for which he is famous. This curious combination of dogmatic claim and lingering doubt suffuses Moore's work, of course. Perhaps it is seen best here in his ready acceptance of a method in which problems will be resolved by showing what is entailed by what we say, yet admitting that in most cases how you decide that p entails q is not terribly clear. All in all this is a valuable extension of a portrait of a major figure in twentieth century philosophy; and Mr. Lewy is to be congratulated for his skillful editing, conveying the arguments while preserving the quality of Moore's mind. At the same time there is something a bit depressing about it all, something a little too arrogant about the insistence that the stuff he is doing has no significance apart from what other moral science lecturers are saying to other crowds of undergraduates and writing for other lecturers in moral science. A. R. LoucH Ctar~faont Graduate School ~ant et le Kantisme. By Jean Lacroix. (Paris: Presses Universitairesde France, 1966.Pp. 127. -~ "Que Sais-je?", 1213.) Lacroix' Kant et ~e Kantisme is a concise, well argued defense of two theses: 1) The main import of Kant's work is metaphysical. 2) Kant's Critical programme derived its impetus from the desire to insure human freedom, morality, and religion against the fatalism or scepticism to which Kant felt Leibniz' and Wolff's dogmatic metaphysics or Hume's naturalism condemned them. The approach is not altogether new, particularly in Europe, but it has been largely overlooked in the United States and Britain. There are exceptions, such as Lewis White Beck, but generally English speaking philosophers have contended that Kant's motives were mainly epistemological. Lacroix argues that the three Critiques are parts of a single philosophical conception of man's place in the universe. Although his book is short, directed at the general (French) reader, and therefore necessarily concerned with the broad flow of Kant's thought, he does an admirable job of marshalling evidence from all the main works in the Kantian corpus, including the Opus Postumum. In the last, according to Lacroix, "... Kant a voulu ]ui-m~me synthdtiser les diverses Critiques et donner une rue d'ensemble de sa pens~e" (p. 9). The reader will, however, feel frustrated with Lacroix' documentation, for all the citations are to French translations, making them difficult to follow up. Inasmuch as Lacroix has a penchant for citing particularly pregnant passages and has written a book worthy of consideration by serious students of Kant, correlate citations to the Akademie Ausgabe are warranted. The weight of Lacroix' thesis that Kant's intentions were primarily metaphysical rests on his contention that "... le noum~ne a aussi un rble positif" (p... (shrink)

One staple of living in our information society is having access to the web. Web-connected devices interpret our queries and retrieve information from the web in response. Today’s web devices even purport to answer our queries directly without requiring us to comb through search results in order to find the information we want. How do we know whether a web device is trustworthy? One way to know is to learn why the device is trustworthy by inspecting its inner workings, 156–170 (...) 1995; Humphreys 2004, Episteme, 6, 221–229 2009). But ordinary users of web devices cannot inspect their inner workings because of their scale, complexity, and the corporate secrecy which enshrouds both the procedures by which the devices operate and the companies that make them. Further piling on this predicament, authors have criticized web technology on the grounds that the invisibility of the web devices’ inner workings prevents users from critically assessing the procedures that produce a given output, in some cases, barring users from fulfilling their epistemic responsibilities, 343–355 2010; Miller and Record Episteme, 10, 117–134 2013). I consider four broad kinds of reasons which we can acquire without inspecting the inner workings of black-boxed technology: individual understanding, expert testimony, testing through experience, and social vetting; and show how each is a viable method of appraising black-boxed technology. By deploying these methods, we can remain responsible inquirers while nonetheless benefitting from today’s epistemic resources on the web. (shrink)