We explored the home learning environments of 173 Mexican preschool children in relation to their numeracy performance. Parents indicated the frequency of their formal home numeracy and literacy activities, and their academic expectations for children’s numeracy and literacy performance. Children completed measures of early numeracy skills. Mexican parent–child dyads from families with either high- or low-socioeconomic status participated. Low-SES parents reported higher numeracy expectations than high-SES parents, but similar frequency of home numeracy activities. In contrast, high-SES parents reported higher frequency (...) of literacy activities. Path analyses showed that operational numeracy activities were positively related to children’s numeracy skills in the high- but not in the low-SES group. These findings improve the understanding of the role of the home environment in different contexts and provide some insights into the sources of the variable patterns of relations between home learning activities and children’s numeracy outcomes. They also suggest that SES is a critical factor to consider in research on children’s home numeracy experiences. (shrink)

Tarski's theory of truth brings out the question of whether he intended his theory to be a correspondence theory of truth and whether, whatever his intentions, his theory is, in fact, a correspondence theory. The aim of this paper is to answer both questions. The answer to the first question depends on Tarski's relevant assertions on semantics and his conception of truth. In order to answer the second question Popper's and Davidson's interpretations of Tarski's truth theory are examined; to this (...) end both Tarski's definition of truth in terms of satisfaction and the T-sentences are taken into account. (shrink)

This textbook for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Evolutionary Game Theory covers recent developments in the field, with an emphasis on economic contexts and applications. It begins with the basic ideas as they originated within the field of theoretical biology and then proceeds to the formulation of a theoretical framework that is suitable for the study of social and economic phenomena from an evolutionary perspective. Core topics include the Evolutionary Stable Strategy and Replicator Dynamics, deterministic dynamic models, and stochastic (...) perturbations. A set of short appendices presents some of the technical material referred to in the main text. Evolutionary theory is widely viewed as one of the most promising appraoches to understanding bounded rationality, learning, and change in complex social environments. New avenues of research are suggested by Vega-Redondo, and plentiful exmples illustrate the theory's potential applications. The recent boom experienced by this dscipline makes the book's systematic presentation of its essential contributions vital reading for newcomer to the field. (shrink)

Modern society is characterised by rapid technological development that is often socially controversial and plagued by extensive scientific uncertainty concerning its socio-ecological impacts. Within this context, the concept of ‘responsible research and innovation’ is currently rising to prominence in international discourse concerning science and technology governance. As this emerging concept of RRI begins to be enacted through instruments, approaches, and initiatives, it is valuable to explore what it is coming to mean for and in practice. In this paper we draw (...) attention to a realm that is often backgrounded in the current discussions of RRI but which has a highly significant impact on scientific research, innovation and policy—namely, the interstitial space of international standardization. Drawing on the case of nanoscale sciences and technologies to make our argument, we present examples of how international standards are already entangled in the development of RRI and yet, how the process of international standardization itself largely fails to embody the norms proposed as characterizing RRI. We suggest that although current models for RRI provide a promising attempt to make research and innovation more responsive to societal needs, ethical values and environmental challenges, such approaches will need to encompass and address a greater diversity of innovation system agents and spaces if they are to prove successful in their aims. (shrink)

Presents an interview with the creator of "Star Trek," detailing his memories of the television show and their characters, and revealing his philosophical views.

Fern Logan’s collection of photographic portraits documents the emergence of the African American artist into mainstream American art. The Artist Portrait Series captures sixty significant artists from the late twentieth century.

Ramon Llull y el secreto de la vida descubre el enigmático mundo de este filósofo, místico y visionario que escribió unos 300 libros en catalán, latín y árabe recorriendo las principales capitales europeas, el Mediterráneo oriental y el norte de África con el claro propósito de comunicar y predicar un modelo místico de contemplación. El descubrimiento del «ars combinatoria», un nuevo lenguaje que tenía sus paralelismos en las técnicas de cabalistas y sufíes, encontraría numerosos admiradores en Europa, desde los filósofos (...) del Renacimiento ;que lo entendieron como un arte de la memoria; hasta los más recientes estudios, que lo ven como un precedente del lenguaje de la informática. Este libro quiere ofrecer una interpretación del pensamiento filosófico y religioso de Llull. La primera parte se vincula a la necesidad de comprensión de su propia experiencia extraordinaria. La segunda desarrolla la teoría de la contemplación mística.;En la tercera se estudian los diversos usos del lenguaje empleados por Llull. Y la cuarta incluye una selección de sus textos más representativos. (shrink)

This book updates and adds to the classic Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, showing how social movement theory has grown and changed.

This second volume in the Counterpoints Series focuses on alternative models of visual-spatial processing in human cognition. The editors provide a historical and theoretical introduction and offer ideas about directions and new research designs.

This article aims to review the standard objections to dualism and to argue that will either fail to convince someone committed to dualism or are flawed on independent grounds. I begin by presenting the taxonomy of metaphysical positions on concrete particulars as they relate to the dispute between materialists and dualists, and in particular substance dualism is defined. In the first section, several kinds of substance dualism are distinguished and the relevant varieties of this kind of dualism are selected. The (...) remaining sections are analyses of the standard objections to substance dualism : It is uninformative, has troubles accounting for soul individuation, causal pairing and interaction, violates laws of physics, is made implausible by the development of neuroscience and it postulates entities beyond necessity. I conclude that none of these objections is successful. (shrink)

This paper presents a pedagogical framework for teaching cross-cultural clinical ethics. The approach, offered at the intersection of anthropology and bioethics, is innovative in that it takes on the “social sciences versus bioethics” debate that has been ongoing in North America for three decades. The argument is made that this debate is flawed on both sides and, moreover, that the application of cross-cultural thinking to clinical ethics requires using the tools of the social sciences within a principles-based framework for clinical (...) ethics. This paper introduces the curriculum and provides guidelines for how to teach cross-cultural clinical ethics. The learning points that are introduced emphasize culture in its relation to power and underscore the importance of viewing both biomedicine and bioethics as culturally constructed. (shrink)

Although emissions trading is embraced as a means to curb carbon emissions and to incentivize the use of renewable energy, it is also heavily contested on ethical grounds. We will assess the main fundamental objections and possible counterarguments. Although we sympathize with some of these arguments, we argue that they are unpersuasive when an emissions trading system is well designed: emissions should be accounted ‘upstream,’ on the production rather than the consumer level. Moreover, allowances should be auctioned, and regulatory measures (...) could instigate the right kind of behavior towards the environment. (shrink)

The desire to guide research and innovation in more ‘responsible’ directions is increasingly emphasised in national and international policies, the funding of inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborations and academic scholarship on science policy and technology governance. Much of this growth has occurred simultaneously with the development of nanoscale sciences and technologies, where emphasis on the need for responsible research and innovation has been particularly widespread. This paper describes an empirical study exploring the potential for RRI within nanosafety research in Norway and (...) Denmark. It identifies three different ways nanosafety scientists relate to core RRI criteria, demonstrating areas of both convergence and divergence between their views and those of academics and policymakers currently defining and working to promote RRI. The paper identifies a range of practical barriers and cultural differences that are creating such divergences and inhibiting the enactment of RRI within the particular site of research laboratories. It concludes that the identified differences and challenges demand critical reflection on both the appropriateness and applicability of RRI characteristics for enactment at the level of individual research scientists. Significant changes are therefore advocated as required if RRI, as currently imagined and promoted, is to become an integral mode of scientific culture. (shrink)

In the business ethics literature, the growing interest in social entrepreneurship has remained limited to the assumption that pursuing a social mission will clash against the pursuit of associated economic achievements. This ignores recent developments in the social entrepreneurship literature which show that social missions and economic achievement can also have a mutually constitutive relation. We address this gap adopting the notion of shared value for an ethical inquiry of social entrepreneurship. Using a sensemaking framework, we assume that the emergence (...) of SV propositions can be captured through the analysis of how social entrepreneurs make sense of events of change, selecting the journey of three exemplar cases for an inductive empirical inquiry. From our findings, we propose three themes for further examination. First, the ethical groundings of entrepreneurial SV are mostly shaped by idiosyncratic imperatives that inform both social mission and economic gain from the onset. Second, the ethical groundings of entrepreneurial SV will be likely operationalised as a filtering device, which allows for resilience as well as potentially detrimental blind spots. And third, the ethical groundings of entrepreneurial SV are expressed through ongoing transparency. Whilst there are agendas, these are not necessarily hidden but instead are likely put on show for the scrutiny of markets and communities. We hope that this evidence can add more light to our still modest understanding of the ethical groundings of social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

En su libro The Tapestry of Reason: An Inquiry into the Nature of Coherence and its Role in Legal Argument,1 Amalia Amaya argumenta las ventajas de adoptar una postura coherentista en el derecho. Concretamente, su tesis principal es la siguiente...

Roughly speaking, classical statistical physics is the branch of theoretical physics that aims to account for the thermal behaviour of macroscopic bodies in terms of a classical mechanical model of their microscopic constituents, with the help of probabilistic assumptions. In the last century and a half, a fair number of approaches have been developed to meet this aim. This study of their foundations assesses their coherence and analyzes the motivations for their basic assumptions, and the interpretations of their central concepts. (...) The most outstanding foundational problems are the explanation of time-asymmetry in thermal behaviour, the relative autonomy of thermal phenomena from their microscopic underpinning, and the meaning of probability. A more or less historic survey is given of the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs in statistical physics, and the problems and objections to which their work gave rise. Next, we review some modern approaches to (i) equilibrium statistical mechanics, such as ergodic theory and the theory of the thermodynamic limit; and to (ii) non-equilibrium statistical mechanics as provided by Lanford's work on the Boltzmann equation, the so-called Bogolyubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon approach, and stochastic approaches such as `coarse-graining' and the `open systems' approach. In all cases, we focus on the subtle interplay between probabilistic assumptions, dynamical assumptions, initial conditions and other ingredients used in these approaches. (shrink)

In this book, Honi Haber offers a much-needed analysis of postmodern politics. While continuing to work towards the voicing of the "other," she argues that we must go beyond the insights of postmodernism to arrive at a viable political theory. Postmodernism's political agenda allows the marginalized other to have a voice and to constitute a politics of difference based upon heterogeneity. But Haber argues that postmodern politics denies us the possibility of selves and community--essential elements to any viable political theory. (...) Haber calls into question the postmodern dichotomy of totality or difference. She argues that the self--which need not be coherent or unchanging--is always already a social entity. The "subject" must be understood as a subject-in-community, but any subject is constructed by many different communities. The subject whose death has been dictated by postmodern deconstruction is the very subject whose life is necessary for a politics of difference. Haber develops this theory through a detailed examination of postmodern politics as formulated in the work of Lyotard, Rorty, and Foucault. Beyond Postmodern Politics suggests that we must use the concept of subjects-in-community in order to move beyond postmodern politics and arrive at a genuine politics of difference. (shrink)

In research and teaching on ethical aspects of emerging sciences and technologies, the structure of working environments, spaces and relationships play a significant role. Many of the routines and standard practices of academic life, however, do little to actively explore and experiment with these elements. They do even less to address the importance of contextual and embodied dimensions of thinking. To engage these dimensions, we have benefitted significantly from practices that take us out of seminar rooms, offices and laboratories as (...) well as beyond traditional ways of working and interacting. We have called one such practice the ‘walkshop’. Through walkshops, we have spent several days walking together with our colleagues and students in open outdoor spaces, keeping a sustained intellectual discussion on ethical aspects of science, technology and innovation while moving through these landscapes. For us, this has generated useful opportunities to escape established hierarchies, roles and patterns of thought and to rethink conceptual and philosophical issues from new perspectives, under new attitudes and with renewed energy. In this paper we wish to highlight the potential benefits of the walkshop approach by sharing some of our experiences and describing how we have prepared for and carried out these events. We share this information in the hope that we may encourage others to both experiment with the walkshop approach and exchange information on their own innovative processes for research and teaching in science and engineering ethics. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse the relation between the second law of thermodynamics and the so-called arrow of time. For this purpose, a number of different aspects in this arrow of time are distinguished, in particular those of time-reversal (non-)invariance and of (ir)reversibility. Next I review versions of the second law in the work of Carnot, Clausius, Kelvin, Planck, Gibbs, Caratheodory and Lieb and Yngvason, and investigate their connection with these aspects of the arrow of time. It (...) is shown that this connection varies a great deal along with these formulations of the second law. According to the famous formulation by Planck, the second law expresses the irreversibility of natural processes. But in many other formulations irreversibility or even time-reversal non-invariance plays no role. I therefore argue for the view that the second law has nothing to do with the arrow of time. (shrink)

The target article by Locke & Bogin (L&B) focuses on the evolution of language as a communicative tool. They neglect, however, that from infancy onwards humans have the ability to go beyond successful behaviour and to reflect upon language (and other domains of knowledge) as a problem space in its own right. This ability is not found in other species and may well be what makes humans unique.

This study investigates the effects of internal and external corporate governance and monitoring mechanisms on the choice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement and the value of firms engaging in CSR activities. The study finds the CSR choice is positively associated with the internal and external corporate governance and monitoring mechanisms, including board leadership, board independence, institutional ownership, analyst following, and anti- takeover provisions, after controlling for various firm characteristics. After correcting for endogeneity and simultaneity issues, the results show that (...) CSR engagement positively influences firm value measured by industry-adjusted Tobin’s q. We find that the impact of analyst following for firms that engage in CSR on firm value is strongly positive, while the board leadership, board independence, blockholders’ ownership, and institutional ownership play a relatively weaker role in enhancing firm value. Furthermore, we find that CSR activities that address internal social enhancement within the firm, such as employees diversity, firm relationship with its employees, and product quality, enhance the value of firm more than other CSR subcategories for broader external social enhancement such as community relation and environmental concerns. (shrink)

Nature, God and Humanity clarifies the task of forming an ethics of nature, thereby empowering readers to develop their own critical, faith-based ethics. Calling on original, thought-provoking analyses and arguments, Richard L. Fern frames a philosophical ethics of nature, assesses it scientifically, finds support for it in traditional biblical theism, and situates it culturally. Though defending the moral value of beliefs affirming the radical Otherness of God and human uniqueness, this book aims not to compel the adoption of any particular (...) ethic but rather illumine the contribution diverse forms of inquiry make to an ethics of nature. How does philosophy clarify moral conviction? What does science tell us about nature? Why does religious faith matter? Rejecting the illusion of a single, rationally-compelling ethics, Fern answers these questions in a way that fosters both agreement and disagreement, allowing those holding conflicting ethics of nature to work together for the common good. (shrink)

We developed this study to examine the issue of parental refusal of treatment, looking at the issue through a cultural competence lens. Recent cases in Canada where courts have declined applications by clinicians for court orders to overrule parental refusal of treatment highlight the dispute in this area. This study analyses the 16 cases of a larger group of 24 cases that were selected by a literature review where cultural or religious beliefs or ethnic identity was described as important reasons (...) behind the refusal. The most significant finding was that nearly all of the cases cited unacceptable side effects as the main reason for declining treatment. We then analysed the detail of the cases and concluded that in the first instance a skilled clinical approach to develop an agreed management plan is by far the best approach. In the event that agreement cannot be reached we recommend engaging a mediator to help the clinician and parents/child to find an agreeable way forward. We argue that the option of se... (shrink)

This paper outlines a framework of the temporal interpretation in Chinese with a special focus on complement and relative clauses. It argues that not only does Chinese have no morphological tenses but there is no need to resort to covert semantic features under a tense node in order to interpret time in Chinese. Instead, it utilises various factors such as the information provided by default aspect, the tense-aspect particles, and pragmatic reasoning to determine the temporal interpretation of sentences. It is (...) shown that aspectual markers in Chinese play the same role that tense plays in a tense language. This result implies that the Chinese phrase structure has AspP above VP but no TP is above AspP. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the empirical association between corporate governance (CG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement by investigating their causal effects. Employing a large and extensive US sample, we first find that while the lag of CSR does not affect CG variables, the lag of CG variables positively affects firms’ CSR engagement, after controlling for various firm characteristics. In addition, to examine the relative importance of stakeholder theory and agency theory regarding the associations among CSR, CG, and corporate (...) financial performance (CFP), we also examine the relation between CSR and CFP. After correcting for endogeneity bias, our results show that CSR engagement positively influences CFP, supporting the conflict-resolution hypothesis based on stakeholder theory, but not the CSR overinvestment argument based on agency theory. Furthermore, firms’ CSR engagement with the community, environment, diversity, and employees plays a significantly positive role in enhancing CFP. (shrink)

There is a growing demand to incorporate social, economic and ethical considerations into biotechnology governance. However, there is currently little guidance available for understanding what this means or how it should be done. A framework of care-based ethics and politics can capture many of the concerns maintaining a persistent socio-political conflict over biotechnologies and provide a novel way to incorporate such considerations into regulatory assessments. A care-based approach to ethics and politics has six key defining features. These include: 1) a (...) relational worldview, 2) an emphasis on the importance of context, 3) a recognition of the significance of dependence, 4) an analysis of power, including a particular concern for those most vulnerable, 5) a granting of weight to the significance of affect, and 6) an acknowledgment of an important role for narrative. This policy brief provides an overview of these defining features, illustrates how they can appear in a real world example and provides a list of guiding questions for assessing these features and advancing a politics of care in the governance of biotechnology. (shrink)

This yearbook on education for 2001 brings together leading international voices on values in education and presents a window on current debates. These include such fundamental issues as who should decide upon the values we adopt.

Purpose: There is a widespread recognition that biomedical explanations offer benefits to those diagnosed with a mental disorder. Recent research points out that such explanations may nevertheless have stigmatizing effects. In this study, this ‘mixed blessing’ account of biomedical explanations is investigated in a case of philosophical interest: Tourette Syndrome. Method: We conducted a vignette survey with 221 participants in which we first assessed quantitative attributions of blame as well as the desire for social distance for behavior associated with Tourette (...) Syndrome. Results: In our study, it is confirmed that in the case of biomedical explanations, less blame is attributed than in the case of psychosocial explanations. When presented with a mixed explanation stressing an entanglement of biological and psychosocial factors this did not increase blame attribution. The desire for social distance is unaffected by the type of explanation but the participants’ free text feedback indicates this might obfuscate an underlying dilemma between stigma and blame revealed in recent research. Conclusion: There seems to be potential for blame reduction in explanations where biological and psychosocial factors are entangled. However, dynamic, ‘epigenetic’, explanations require further qualitative research to be performed as well as a philosophical framework to account for the ‘mixed blessings’ account. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have a variety of approaches to studying cognition: experimental psychology, computer science, robotics, neuroscience, educational psychology, philosophy of mind, and psycholinguistics, to name but a few. In addition, they also differ in their approaches to cognition - some of them consider that the mind works basically like a computer, involving programs composed of abstract, amodal, and arbitrary symbols. Others claim that cognition is embodied - that is, symbols must be grounded on perceptual, motoric, and emotional experience. The existence (...) of such different approaches has consequences when dealing with practical issues such as understanding brain disorders, designing artificial intelligence programs and robots, improving psychotherapy, or designing instructional programs. The symbolist and embodiment camps seldom engage in any kind of debate to clarify their differences. This book is the first attempt to do so. It brings together a team of outstanding scientists, adopting symbolist and embodied viewpoints, in an attempt to understand how the mind works and the nature of linguistic meaning. As well as being interdisciplinary, all authors have made an attempt to find solutions to substantial issues beyond specific vocabularies and techniques. (shrink)

Although argumentation plays an essential role in our lives, there is no integrated area of research on the psychology of argumentation. Instead research on argumentation is conducted in a number of separate research communities that are spread across disciplines and have only limited interaction. With a view to bridging these different strands, we first distinguish between three meanings of the word ?argument?: argument as a reason, argument as a structured sequence of reasons and claims, and argument as a social exchange. (...) All three meanings are integral to a complete understanding of human reasoning and cognition. Cognitive psychological research on argumentation has focused mostly on the first and second of these meanings, so we present perspectives on argumentation from outside of cognitive psychology, which focus on the second and third. Specifically, we give anoverview of the methods, goals, and disciplinary backgrounds of research on the production, the analysis, and the evaluation of arguments. Finally, inintroducing the experimental studies included in this special issue, which were conducted by researchers from a range of theoretical backgrounds, weunderline the breadth of argumentation research as well as stress opportunities for mutual awareness and integration. (shrink)

Psychiatric diagnoses such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are primarily attributed on the basis of behavioral criteria. The aim of most of the biomedical research on ASD is to uncover the underlying mechanisms that lead to or even cause pathological behavior. However, in the philosophical and sociological literature, it has been suggested that autism is also to some extent a ‘social construct’ that cannot merely be reduced to its biological explanation. We show that a one-sided adherence to either a biological (...) or a social explanation leads to a moral dilemma, a Catch-22, for autistics and for those living with them. Such explanations close the space for self-identifying as autistic and at the same time being considered to be in good mental health. They foreclose the possibility of making sense of the lived experience of (and with) autistics. In this paper we argue that such lack of space for moral imagination inherently leads to scientific stalemate. We propose that one can only go beyond this stalemate by taking an ethical stance in theorizing, one that enables better intersubjective understanding. Only on such a view can behavior and biology be linked without either disconnecting them or reducing the one to the other. (shrink)

There is a rapidly expanding field of research on social and ethical interactions with nano-scaled sciences and technologies. An important question is: What does social and ethical research actually mean when it is focussed on technological applications that are largely hypothetical, and a field of science spread out across multiple disciplines and lacking unification? This paper maps early literature in the field of research as a way of answering this question. Our aim is to describe how this field is developing (...) in response to its difficult task, and particularly, to comment on the topics of focus and where there is potential for future development. We present four topical categories, labelled Governance, Perception, Science and Philosophy, and use these as a tool to both map the field and to analyse its development. We find a majority of literature currently focused on issues of governance and perception, and offer suggestions for why this might be so. We then discuss cross-category themes of definition, novelty and interdisciplinarity, highlighting diverse positions and a problematic lack of direct debate. Our conclusion is that the field would benefit from more interaction, cross-referencing and creative research across traditional fields of inquiry. (shrink)

This study explores how paradoxical tensions between economic growth and environmental protection are avoided through organizational mythmaking. By examining the European oil and gas supermajors’ “CEO-speak” about climate change, we show how mythmaking facilitates the disregarding, diverting, and/or displacing of sustainability tensions. In doing so, our findings further illustrate how certain defensive responses are employed: regression, or retreating to the comforts of past familiarities, fantasy, or escaping the harsh reality that fossil fuels and climate change are indeed irreconcilable, and projecting, (...) or shifting blame to external actors for failing to address climate change. By highlighting the discursive effects of enacting these responses, we illustrate how the European oil and gas supermajors self-determine their inability to substantively address the complexities of climate change. We thus argue that defensive responses are not merely a form of mismanagement as the paradox and corporate sustainability literature commonly suggests, but a strategic resource that poses serious ethical concerns given the imminent danger of issues such as climate change. (shrink)

This research explores the field dynamics that facilitated the emergence of a dominant understanding of business’ role in sustainable development. Based on a study of the U.N. Earth Summits, we examine how actors meet every decade to battle for definitional control of what SD means for business, and what business means for SD. Through a discourse analysis of texts from business, policy, and civil society actors during each Summit, we illustrate how an ensuing discursive struggle shifts the role of business (...) in SD from being largely undefined in 1992, to being considered an SD partner in 2002, and finally to becoming a driver of SD by 2012. We contend that these shifts occurred largely due to two field dynamics: rearranging of field boundaries and forming of a discourse coalition. Accordingly, our study highlights how disparate actors coalesce around a shared-meaning system and collectively shape the role of business role in SD. However, we argue that despite the allure of a unified meaning-making process between once antagonistic actors, business–SD relations are underpinned by politicized interaction where certain actors come to dominate, and, in doing so, marginalize others. (shrink)