Publication date: 21 March 2019 Source: Author: Ali Jamshidi The present research was done to analyze the relationship between organizational trust and organizational innovation at Payam Nour University in Tehran Province. To collect data related to organizational trust, Payne questionnaire was used. Organizational innovation data were collected by a researcher-developed questionnaire. The reliability of both of which based on Alfa Cronbach coefficient was 91% and 86% respectively. To analyze data, Pearson correlation test and step-by step regression were applied. The (...) result of correlation test showed that there is positive and significant relationship between organizational trust and all its dimensions with organizational innovation. The results of structural equation modeling were collected by 231 questionnaires and suggest that innovative leadership and organizational trust have relation with organizational innovation. In conclusion, the result is analyzed and some suggestions are made to improve innovation capability in the organization of the target population. (shrink)

The influence of popular management gurus derives from two factors: the willingness of their management audience to outsource or subcontract thinking and the ability of gurus to deliver apparently relatively simple messages to an audience that probably does not want or need to think deeply, while retaining their leadership status. As managers look to management gurus to provide them only with reasons to be, to behave or act as opposed to reasons to think, per se, the nature of a popular (...) guru’s output can never address the unseen innovating process which true leadership demands. As a result, popular management gurus are not in a position to promote insights, awakening or higher consciousness in others and cannot fulfil the traditional raison d’être of a guru as an enlightened being. The output of popular management gurus probably communicates more about their audience than it usefully communicates about the guru’s thinking. (shrink)

Phenomenal Conservatism is an approach to epistemological justification that, based on "appearances" and "seemings" and in line with the theory of common sense epistemology, attempt to set up an internal and non-inferential justification, at least for some kind of beliefs. According to this view, justification and non-justification have a direct relationship with the mental state of the agent. Based on this assumption that “Things are as they seem”, phenomenal conservatism offers its central idea that if, for an agent, something seems (...) to be true -and there is no defeater for that until doubting in - that agent thereby has at least some justification for believing that. In this article, we will interpret this new approach with an empathetic attitude and, in addition to explaining its main components, we will effort to answer the most important objections of phenomenal conservatism and show that this view is a significant approach to the justification and rationality of human beliefs. (shrink)

Publication date: 24 January 2019 Source: Author: Ali Jamshidi, Omid Grey Present research’s goal is to study the relationship between knowledge management of Parsian Bank and its financial performance. The statistical population consists of 220 executives, assistants and postgraduate staff in banking and financial management. The statistical sample consists of 144 of them who were determined according to the Morgan Table. This research uses quantitative and survey method and it has a practical purpose. The results show that there is (...) a meaningful relationship between the research variables and that the relationship between them includes strength and weakness. (shrink)

The influence of popular management gurus derives from two factors: the willingness of their management audience to outsource or subcontract thinking and the ability of gurus to deliver apparently relatively simple messages to an audience that probably does not want or need to think deeply, while retaining their leadership status. As managers look to management gurus to provide them only with reasons to be, to behave or act as opposed to reasons to think, per se, the nature of a popular (...) guru’s output can never address the unseen innovating process which true leadership demands. As a result, popular management gurus are not in a position to promote insights, awakening or higher consciousness in others and cannot fulfil the traditional raison d’être of a guru as an enlightened being. The output of popular management gurus probably communicates more about their audience than it usefully communicates about the guru’s thinking. (shrink)

This study examines the contestability of “relevance” as an abstract construction with no fixed meaning when applied, and questions its usage in the research quality debate. It finds that different research agendas and approaches have their own idiosyncratic logic and that any logic has its own criteria for assessing quality which cannot be applied to assess the quality of others. This is illustrated by delineating practitioner-led research from academic-led research and by comparing and contrasting research perspectives as examples. The research (...) quality debate becomes meaningless when it is limited to a singular research agenda or approach as in practice these are invariably combined. Having said this, however, every agenda and approach can be argued to be legitimate as potentially each can find what otherwise cannot be noticed. As a result, this study challenges the conventional unitarist wisdom that conceptualises knowledge as commodity, and suggests instead that heterogeneity, linked to tolerance and relative independence of means and mind, free from the control or influence of others to enable critical distance from context and status quo and facilitate judgement, is the key to those seeking a meaningful research quality debate that acknowledges tolerance of the diversity of knowledge, difference, contestation and struggle. Although such heterogeneity may at first appear to add confusion rather than clarity, without first looking at this heterogeneity it is not possible to develop a dialogue, in the context of the present neo-liberal post-political drift that emphasises consensus, the annulment of dissensus and diverts attention from relationships of power, through which a positive contribution can be made to the research quality debate. (shrink)

Organisations are socially constructed in that their members are socialised in a world of language that enables them to understand, communicate and share. They use language to create patterns that help them make choices and relate their actions to the patterns they create and the choices they make. The world of organisations and their management is, therefore, a matter of language. In this world, rationality plays a fundamental role in legitimising choices together with the actions that express them. This study (...) suggests that the limited expressive resources of a dominant version of rationality limit the world of management in a way that undermines its legitimacy and that it is possible for management to break free from this limited world by learning to think in other languages that express contrasting versions of rationality. (shrink)

Metaphor theory claims that there is no any construct of reality outside of domination of a picture orimage. At the bottom of any philosophical system lays an image or a picture. Analysis of thinking relatesto the analysis of metaphorical aspects of that thinking. Every concept that pretends to be abstract becomes a consequence of a concrete image. The canon of philosophy no longer lays at depth but isaroused from surface. Hana Arendt is one of the most interesting and most complicated (...) politicalphilosopher in the 20th century. This study is going to examine the role of theater metaphor in her politicalphilosophy. Arendt’s political philosophy is influenced by theater metaphor. This study aimed to examinethis by using the works of Flydenberg and Blumenberg. (shrink)

Religiosity has been linked with prosocial behavior and a preference for religious ingroups over outgroups. Yet, there are important differences in religious people’s beliefs, values, and practices. Fundamental and quest orientation toward religion may differentially predict intergroup bias in prosociality. Also, individualizing and binding moral foundations may have diverse effects on ingroup and outgroup bias in helping, as moral foundations theory suggests that individualizing and binding foundations differ in how much they focus on ingroup and outgroup moral considerations. In this (...) study, we examined the relationship between religious dimensions, moral foundations, prosocial behavior, and intergroup bias in helping. We found evidence for the effect of individualizing foundations, religious fundamentalism, and quest religion above and beyond demographics and other religious dimensions on intergroup bias in helping. Furthermore, there were independent positive effects of individualizing foundations, religious activity, and age, and independent negative effects of female gender and religious fundamentalism on prosocial behavior. This study provides a more nuanced understanding of the relations between religion, prosociality, and moral intuitions in a Muslim context. (shrink)

Medical practice is practiced morality, and clinical research belongs to normative ethics. The present book elucidates and advances this thesis by: 1. analyzing the structure of medical language, knowledge, and theories; 2. inquiring into the foundations of the clinical encounter; 3. introducing the logic and methodology of clinical decision-making, including artificial intelligence in medicine; 4. suggesting comprehensive theories of organism, life, and psyche; of health, illness, and disease; of etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and therapy; and 5. investigating the moral and (...) metaphysical issues central to medical practice and research. Many systems of (classical, modal, non-classical, probability, and fuzzy) logic are introduced and applied. Fuzzy medical deontics, fuzzy medical ontology, fuzzy medical concept formation, fuzzy medical decision-making and biomedicine and many other techniques of fuzzification in medicine are introduced for the first time. -/- . (shrink)

ZusammenfassungWas ist praktisches Wissen?Die Diskussion über diese Frage hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten darauf konzentriert, das praktische Wissen als ein Wissen- wie aufzufassen. Im Folgenden wird eine weitere Differenzierung dieser Ansicht vorgenommen, indem durch eine Analyse der Syntax des klinischpraktischen Wissens dafür geworben wird, dieses Wissen als eine Kategorie von bedingten Geboten für das ärztliche Handeln in der klinischen Entscheidungsfindung zu betrachten. Syntaktisch gesehen, sind diese Gebote deontische Normen („conditional obligations“). Da sie durch die diagnostisch-therapeutische Forschung (= klinische Forschung) (...) aufgestellt und erforscht werden, muss die klinische Forschung als eine deontische Disziplin angesehen werden. Sie ist deshalb dem Bereich der normativen Ethik zuzuordnen. Im direkten Zusammenhang damit ist die klinische Praxis – als eine überzeitliche Institution, nicht als das Handeln von Einzelpersonen – als praktizierte Moral im Dienste der Menschen („Karitas“) einzustufen, weil sie aus dem Versuch besteht, jene Gebote umzusetzen. (shrink)

According to the principles of transcendent philosophy, the human soul as a contingent existence after being created in this world has a continuous motion from an actuality to another one until becoming immaterial. This means that he leaves his body and continues to his evolution immaterially. According to the principle of “Impossibility of Return” it seems impossible for human being to return to the mundane life after his death. This belief is apparently inconsistent with the Islamic doctrine of “dead human (...) beings’ return to the life”. So, since transcendent philosophers reject the doctrine of reincarnation on the basis of the principle of “Impossibility of Return”, they should explain the doctrine of Raj’ah in a consistent way. Sayyed Abolhasan Rafī’ee-Qazvīnī is one of the few transcendent philosophers who have taken this issue into account. Although he validates the principle of Impossibility of Return, he asserts that it does not include the doctrine of Raj’ah. He tries to defend the doctrine of Raj’ah and differentiate it from the doctrine of reincarnation through a couple of philosophical principles. For example he accepts that Coercion does not last and every existent has its exclusive existential influence which is necessarily emergent. (shrink)

At least as important as a particular item of medical knowledge itself is to know something about the relationships of that knowledge to the experiential world it is talking about. The reason is that the patients the physician is concerned with are parts of that experiential world. So, when using any knowledge in her practice, e.g., some knowledge on infectious diseases, a morally conscientious doctor will be interested in whether, and in what way, this knowledge relates to the ‘world out (...) there’. Does the medical knowledge she employs bear any relevance to the bodies and souls of her patients? Does it enable her to understand the patient’s suffering, illness experience, and illness narrative? Will it help her find useful diagnoses and treatments? Are there in fact any indicators of such qualities of medical knowledge? Why not use astrology, Ayurveda, or exorcism instead of the theory of infectious diseases? A prerequisite for dealing with such questions is the awareness of the relationships between medical knowledge and its referent, i.e., of the semantics of medical knowledge, on the one hand; and of the pragmatic factors beyond this semantics, which influence the role medical knowledge plays in health care, on the other, e.g., social and economic processes. In the present chapter, we shall look at these issues with an eye toward understanding why some particular information is allowed to enter the medical world as knowledge, whereas other information is considered unacceptable or quackery. Is there a clear line of demarcation between medical knowledge and self-deception? To begin with, we will discuss the issues of truth and justification because, as pointed out in Section 10.1 on page 402, knowledge is traditionally defined as justified true belief . These two defining features of knowledge, truth and justifiedness, are due to the classical conception of knowledge as the representation of some ‘reality’. This ancient, representational postulate brings with it that the predominant view on the semantics of medical knowledge is realism, i.e., the view that medical knowledge is concerned with and represents ‘the real world out there’. We shall therefore need to inquire into the philosophy and medical relevance of this doctrine before we proceed to alternative views. Our discussion thus divides into the following five parts: 12.1 Justified True Belief; 12.2 Realism; 12.3 Anti-Realism; 12.4 Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism in Medicine; 12.5 Social Epistemology. (shrink)

The notions of health, illness, and disease are fuzzy-theoretically analyzed. They present themselves as non-Aristotelian concepts violating basic principles of classical logic. A recursive scheme for defining the controversial notion of disease is proposed that also supports a concept of fuzzy disease. A sketch is given of the prototype resemblance theory of disease.

What follows is a brief comment on Ludwik Fleck's paper on the foundations of medical knowledge translated by Thaddeus J. Trenn in this issue. Since the original is much older than I am, I have some scruples in presenting the critical thoughts which occurred to me when I read it a few years ago. Despite the criticism, I am very sympathetic to most of what Fleck has told us in his tragically neglected work. Two facts make Fleck's tragedy even more (...) disturbing: (i) others have given rise to post-Fleck revolutions in epistemology by exploiting his ideas while omitting proper references to him, and (ii) sociology of science, precisely what Fleck wanted to promote, has emerged without his work being operative in any sense. In my commentary, I shall examine his concept of social conditioning of knowledge. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Patrick Suppes' set-theoretical approach to the analysis of theories, and Joseph D. Sneed's metatheory are briefly outlined. The notions of observation, illusion and hallucination are reconstructed according to these approaches. It is argued that the terms ‘perception’ and ‘truth’ are theoretical with respect to observation but nontheoretical with respect to illusion and hallucination. Hallucination is construed as a special kind of illusion.

Since the advent of the natural sciences, natural scientists have spread the idea that the pursuit of truth about the facts of the world is the main drive of scientific research. The aim, they say, is to acquire knowledge and to provide explanations and predictions of phenomena and events. Surprisingly, even in our contemporary world in which scientific research is strongly involved in seeking solutions to practical problems pertaining to the pursuit of food, water, energy, health, labor, peace, war, nuclear (...) weapons, money, and the like, the pursuit-of-truth postulate nevertheless enjoys vigorous advocacy, especially in philosophy. In this chapter, the role that truth actually plays in medicine will be examined. Our discussion of this issue divides into the following four sections: 24.1 Truth in Medical Sciences; 24.2 Truth in Clinical Practice; 24.3 Misdiagnoses; 24.4 Truth Made in Medicine. In summary, it is shown that medical knowledge does not contain much truth because it mainly consists of hypotheses, theories, and deontic rules. The truth values of the former are unknown, while theories and deontic rules do not assume truth values. Likewise, in clinical practice true diagnoses and prognoses are not always attainable because (i) medical knowledge is inevitably vague, uncertain, and unreliable and is therefore scarcely truth-conducive; (ii) this also applies to most parts of patient data; (iii) physicians are not trained in viable and efficient methodology of clinical reasoning; and (iv) neither clinical decision support systems nor the automation of clinical decision-making will be able to compensate for the first two shortcomings. So, misdiagnoses will remain inevitable forever, although their frequency may be reduced by improving the techniques of clinical judgment. Since medical theories are artifactual structures and medical languages are artifactual systems, the truth of diagnoses and prognoses, and of any other judgment based thereon is made in medicine. (shrink)

Research ethics training during post-graduate education is necessary to improve ethical standards in the design and conduct of biomedical research. We studied quality and quantity of research ethics training in the curricula of post-graduate programs in the medical science in I.R. Iran. We evaluated curricula of 125 post-graduate programs in medical sciences in I.R. Iran. We qualitatively studied the curricula by education level, including the Master and PhD degrees and analyzed the contents and the amount of teaching allocated for ethics (...) training in each curriculum. We found no research ethics training in 72 of the programs. Among the 53 programs that considered research ethics training, only 17 programs had specific courses for research ethics and eight of them had detailed topics on their courses. The research ethics training was optional in 25% and mandatory in 76% of the programs. Post-graduate studies that were approved in the more recent years had more attention to the research ethics training. Research ethics training was neglected in most of the medical post-graduate programs. We suggest including sufficient amount of mandatory research ethics training in Master and PhD programs in I.R. Iran. Further research about quality of research ethics training and implementation of curricula in the biomedical institutions is warranted. (shrink)

On the basis of a ten-place comparative value relation, artificially reduced to a binary relation, some human value structures are studied and a concept of value kinematics is proposed. A miniature value logic is outlined, making it possible with precision to handle several explicated value notions and to analyze interrelations between them. Finally, the question is discussed whether health can be said to be an absolute and an intrinsic value.

The question is raised whether it would be beneficial to establish a clinical praxiology for the sake of a multi-focused inquiry into the foundations of clinical pratice. Beginning with the concept of medical diagnosis, a framework is presented which makes it possible to view diagnosis as an element of a complex structure whose adequate analysis requires at least comparative diagnostic methodology and epistemology.

Patrick Suppes'' set-theoretical approach to the analysis of theories, and Joseph D. Sneed''s metatheory are briefly outlined. The notions of observation, illusion and hallucination are reconstructed according to these approaches. It is argued that the terms perception and truth are theoretical with respect to observation but nontheoretical with respect to illusion and hallucination. Hallucination is construed as a special kind of illusion.

Corruption involves greed, money, and risky decision-making. We explore the love of money, pay satisfaction, probability of risk, and dishonesty across cultures. Avaricious monetary aspiration breeds unethicality. Prospect theory frames decisions in the gains-losses domain and high-low probability. Pay dissatisfaction (in the losses domain) incites dishonesty in the name of justice at the individual level. The Corruption Perceptions Index, CPI, signals a high-low probability of getting caught for dishonesty at the country level. We theorize that decision-makers adopt avaricious love-of-money aspiration (...) as a lens and frame dishonesty in the gains-losses domain (pay satisfaction-dissatisfaction, Level 1) and high-low probability (CPI, Level 2) to maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity. We challenge the myth: Pay satisfaction mitigates dishonesty across nations consistently. Based on 6500 managers in 32 countries, our cross-level three-dimensional visualization offers the following discoveries. Under high aspiration conditions, pay dissatisfaction excites the highest- (third-highest) avaricious justice-seeking dishonesty in high (medium) CPI nations, supporting the certainty effect. However, pay satisfaction provokes the second-highest avaricious opportunity-seizing dishonesty in low CPI entities, sustaining the possibility effect—maximizing expected utility. Under low aspiration conditions, high pay satisfaction consistently leads to low dishonesty, demonstrating risk aversion—achieving ultimate serenity. We expand prospect theory from a micro and individual-level theory to a cross-level theory of monetary wisdom across 32 nations. We enhance the S-shaped Curve to three 3-D corruption surfaces across three levels of the global economic pyramid, providing novel insights into behavioral economics, business ethics, the environment, and responsibility. (shrink)