To advance the task of designing robots capable of performing collective tasks with humans, studies in human–robot interaction often turn to psychology, philosophy of mind and neuroscience for inspiration. In the same vein, this chapter explores how the notion of recognition and commitment can help confront some of the current problems in addressing robot-human interaction in joint tasks. First, we argue that joint actions require mutual recognition, which cannot be established without the attribution and maintenance of commitments. Second, we argue (...) that commitments require affective states such as social motivations or shared emotions. Finally, we conclude by assessing three possible proposals for how social robotics could implement an architecture of commitments by taking such an affective components into consideration. (shrink)

Natural Justice is a bold attempt to lay the foundations for a genuine science of morals using the theory of games. Since human morality is no less a product of evolution than any other human characteristic, the book takes the view that we need to explore its origins in the food-sharing social contracts of our prehuman ancestors. It is argued that the deep structure of our current fairness norms continues to reflect the logic of these primeval social contracts, but the (...) particular fairness norm a society operates is largely a product of cultural evolution. In pursuing this point, the book proposes a naturalistic reinterpretation of John Rawls' original position that reconciles his egalitarian theory of justice with John Harsanyi's utilitarian theory by identifying the environment appropriate to each. (shrink)

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

Euteleology is a metaphysics according to which reality is inherently purposive and the contingent Universe exists ultimately because reality’s overall telos, the supreme good, is realized within it. This book provides an exposition of euteleology and a defence of its coherence. The main aim is to establish that euteleological metaphysics provides a religiously adequate alternative to the ‘personal-omniGod’ understanding of theism prevalent amongst analytic philosophers. The quest for an alternative to understanding the God of the Abrahamic traditions as an omnipotent, (...) omniscient, morally perfect personal being is motivated by criticizing the religious adequacy of this conception of God. This criticism deploys a ‘normatively relativized’ version of the ‘logical’ Argument from Evil: it is argued that an omnipotent personal agent would unavoidably be responsible for a morally flawed relationship with human beings caught up in horrendous evils. Reasons are given for preferring a ‘non-personalist’ account of theism, and the religious adequacy of a euteleological theism is then defended against two main objections—first, that it faces a problem of evil that threatens its coherence, and, second, that it cannot make good sense of the practices of prayer and worship that are essential to theist religion. An important theme is that, though God is not a personal being, nor any kind of ‘being amongst beings’ in basic euteleological ontology, God-talk may be understood as resting on a radical analogy that is apt for enabling right human responses to ultimate divine reality. (shrink)

An important question in the debate over embodied, enactive, and extended cognition has been what has been meant by “cognition”. What is this cognition that is supposed to be embodied, enactive, or extended? Rather than undertake a frontal assault on this question, however, this paper will take a different approach. In particular, we may ask how cognition is supposed to be related to behavior. First, we could ask whether cognition is supposed to be behavior. Second, we could ask whether we (...) should attempt to understand cognitive processes in terms of antecedently understood cognitive behaviors. This paper will survey some of the answers that have been given in the embodied, enactive, and extended cognition literature, then suggest reasons to believe that we should answer both questions in the negative. (shrink)

Tricycles are one of the most popular, most accessible, and least expensive forms of public transit in the Philippines. In addition to being common modes of transportation, motorcycles, and tricycles also contribute significantly to the livelihoods of millions of Filipinos who rely on them for a living. Hence, this study explores the lived experiences and challenges faced by female tricycle drivers. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: The participants strive to assist their husbands in providing (...) for their families. Their motivation comes primarily from their families. They each make every effort to provide a better life for their children. Thus, have faced challenges related to their ability to make ends meet, find time to balance job and family obligations, and encounter discrimination and stereotypes in others, and day-to-day life. Moreover, they evade and disregard the problem and discrimination as a coping mechanism. They feel that if they ignore their problem and focus on achieving their goal of providing for their family, it would eventually disappear. (shrink)

Do conventions need to be common knowledge in order to work? David Lewis builds this requirement into his definition of a convention. This paper explores the extent to which his approach finds support in the game theory literature. The knowledge formalism developed by Robert Aumann and others militates against Lewis’s approach, because it shows that it is almost impossible for something to become common knowledge in a large society. On the other hand, Ariel Rubinstein’s Email Game suggests that coordinated action (...) is no less hard for rational players without a common knowledge requirement. But an unnecessary simplifying assumption in the Email Game turns out to be doing all the work, and the current paper concludes that common knowledge is better excluded from a definition of the conventions that we use to regulate our daily lives. (shrink)

One trend in recent work on topic of the multiple realization of psychological properties has been an emphasis on greater sensitivity to actual science and greater clarity regarding the metaphysics of realization and multiple realization. One contribution to this trend is Bechtel and Mundale’s examination of the implications of brain mapping for multiple realization. Where Bechtel and Mundale argue that studies of brain mapping undermine claims about the multiple realization, this paper challenges that argument.

Elizabeth Barnes and J. Robert G. Williams claim to offer a new ontic theory of vagueness, the kind of theory which considers vagueness to exist not in language but in reality. This paper refutes their claim. The possible worlds they employ are ersatz possible worlds, i.e., sets of sentences. Unlike reality, they don’t contain concrete and often material objects. As a result, there is nothing in Barnes and Williams’s description of the theory that the semanticist cannot or does not accept. (...) Thus, they have failed to establish their theory as a genuine intelligible ontic alternative to semantic theories. (shrink)

This article criticises one of Stuart Rachels' and Larry Temkin's arguments against the transitivity of 'better than'. This argument invokes our intuitions about our preferences of different bundles of pleasurable or painful experiences of varying intensity and duration, which, it is argued, will typically be intransitive. This article defends the transitivity of 'better than' by showing that Rachels and Temkin are mistaken to suppose that preferences satisfying their assumptions must be intransitive. It makes cler where the argument goes wrong by (...) showing that it is a version of Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. (shrink)

Can people be relied upon to be nice to each other? Thomas Hobbes famously did not think so, but his view that rational cooperation does not require that people be nice has never been popular. The debate has continued to simmer since Joseph Butler took up the Hobbist gauntlet in 1725. This article defends the modern version of Hobbism derived largely from game theory against a new school of Butlerians who call themselves behavioral economists. It is agreed that the experimental (...) evidence supports the claim that most people will often make small sacrifices on behalf of others and that a few will sometimes make big sacrifices, but that the larger claims made by contemporary Butlerians lack genuine support. (shrink)

Mindreading capacity has been widely understood as the human ability to gain knowledge about the inner processes and states of others that bring about the behavior of these agents. This paper argues against this epistemic view of mindreading on the basis of different empirical studies in linguistics and social and developmental psychology: we are systematically biased in attributing mental states, and many everyday uses of mental ascription sentences do not reflect an epistemic function in our social interactions. We introduce an (...) alternative view of mental ascriptions, the social cover view, which is consistent with the evidence. The social cover view holds that the main function of mental ascriptions is to cover the social status and reputation of an agent rather than to gain knowledge about her inner processes and states. Finally, we discuss two possible objections to our proposal. (shrink)

Some behavioral economists argue that the honoring of social norms can be adequately modeled as the optimization of social utility functions in which the welfare of others appears as an explicit argument. This paper suggests that the large experimental claims made for social utility functions are premature at best, and that social norms are better studied as equilibrium selection devices that evolved for use in games that are seldom studied in economics laboratories.

’Tis vain to talk of adding quantities which after the addition will continue to be as distinct as they were before; one man’s happiness will never be another man’s happiness: a gain to one man is no gain to another: you might as well pretend to add 20 apples to 20 pears.

Games are played everywhere: from economics and online auctions to social interactions, and game theory is about how to play such games in a rational way, and how to maximize their outcomes. This VSI reveals, without mathematical equations, the insights the theory can bring to everything from how to play poker optimally to the sex ratio among bees.

ABSTRACT This essay argues that historians of science who seek to embody our oxymoronic self-description must confront both contradictory terms that define our common enterprise—that is, both “history” and “science.” On the history/methods side, it suggests that we embrace the heterogeneity of our institutional arrangements and repudiate the homogeneous disciplinary model sometimes advocated by Thomas Kuhn and followed by art history. This implies that rather than treating the history of science as an end in itself, we consider it a means (...) to a variety of historical ends, think of ourselves as a tool-making community, and jettison moralistic assertions of scientific exceptionalism. To do so, this essay argues—on the science/subject side—that we rebrand the subject of our historical inquiry as “episcience,” a neologism that stands in relation to “science” as the new field of epigenetics does to the old genetics. Episcience encompasses both the material activities of the relevant sciences and their “surround” (environment, milieu, Umgebung) to reframe knowledge making to include the material processes that put science “in play” and make its findings matter beyond science. The essay concludes that “the history of science” is an oxymoron that makes sense to the extent that its practitioners acknowledge that the history of science is important not just because science is important, but because its history is. (shrink)

Este artigo visa analisar indícios verbo-visuais de episódios de mal-estar enunciados por alunos que integram turmas da modalidade Educação de Jovens Adultos (EJA) em uma escola do interior baiano. Dedicamo-nos, especialmente, a compreender como os sujeitos semiotizam situações de embaraço social vivenciadas em salas de aula e(m) seus (d)efeitos. Como referencial teórico, partimos de pressupostos da Análise Dialógica do Discurso, da Clínica da Atividade e de outras categorias discursivas para lermos, a partir de uma dimensão axiológica, o corpus que é (...) composto por duas biograficzines. A análise dos dados registra que os (res)sentimentos dos discentes, que se deixam materializar em termos verbo-visuais, deflagram situações que ilustram a complexidade de dinâmicas que perfazem interações didáticas no ambiente escolar. Trabalhos como o nosso contribuem para tensionar a realidade escolar-profissional possibilitando a exploração de outros ângulos de nossas atividades como sujeitos sociais. (shrink)

On the one hand, philosophers have presented numerous apparent examples of indeterminate individuation, i.e., examples in which two things are neither determinately identical nor determinately distinct. On the other hand, some have argued against even the coherence of the very idea of indeterminate individuation. This paper defends the possibility of indeterminate individuation against Evans’s argument and some other arguments. The Determinacy of Identity—the thesis that identical things are determinately identical—is distinguished from the Determinacy of Distinctness—the thesis that distinct things are (...) determinately distinct. It is argued that while the first thesis holds universally and there is no case of indeterminate identity, there are reasons to think that the second thesis does not hold universally, and that there are cases of indeterminate distinctness. (shrink)

Este artigo visa analisar modos de axiologizar o bem-estar na escola em enunciados produzidos por alunos do 9º ano do ensino fundamental de uma escola municipal do interior baiano. Interessa-nos, especialmente, compreender como os sujeitos semiotizam, em seus enunciados, o que consideram o evento mais marcante de suas experiências ao longo dos anos finais do ensino fundamental e o que isso nos informa sobre os valores ali mobilizados relativos ao papel social e institucional da escola e(m) suas modalidades de convivência (...) intersubjetiva. As análises destacam que as memórias verbo-visualmente materializadas não se limitam a registros, abrigados na consciência, mas são repositórios de experiências afetivas de e em diversos cronotopos. O fato de as memórias apresentadas recobrirem diferentes eventos interacionais oferecem-nos uma visão crítica dos estudantes de como percebem e matizam complexidades das interações por eles rememoradas e enunciadas. Trabalhos, como o nosso, que se interessam pelos afetamentos de alunos, contribuem, localmente, para que o contexto escolar seja (re)(des)coberto, tensionando como percepções sociais são semiotizadas em horizontes apreciativos de experiências. (shrink)

This short paper begins with a summary of the views of a sympathetic game theorist on the current state of play in what is still called the New Institutional Economics. It continues with a much abbreviated summary of my own attempts to treat justice as a kind of institution in the hope that this will serve as a case study in how game theory can serve as a useful intellectual framework for the study of human institutions.

The Boolean many-valued approach to vagueness is similar to the infinite-valued approach embraced by fuzzy logic in the respect in which both approaches seek to solve the problems of vagueness by assigning to the relevant sentences many values between falsity and truth, but while the fuzzy-logic approach postulates linearly-ordered values between 0 and 1, the Boolean approach assigns to sentences values in a many-element complete Boolean algebra. On the modal-precisificational approach represented by Kit Fine, if a sentence is indeterminate in (...) truth value in some world, it is taken to be true in one precisified world accessible from that world and false in another. This paper points to a way to unify these two approaches to vagueness by showing that Fine’s version of the modal-precisificational approach can be combined with the Boolean many-valued approach instead of supervaluationism, one of the most popular approaches to vagueness. (shrink)

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão acerca do domínio da arte na perspectiva de Hannah Arendt. A partir da análise do pensamento da autora, de seus esforços em problematizar a relação dos homens com o âmbito da arte e das inúmeras vezes em que convoca produções artísticas para examinar a experiência humana no mundo, vislumbra-se identificar as especificidades atribuídas por ela às linguagens artísticas, bem como compreender a relevância da arte na constituição de um legado humano material, imaterial e simbólico, um (...) mundo de significados compartilhados.Palavras-chave: Domínio da arte. Linguagens artísticas. Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

Meu objetivo aqui é o de abordar os escritos iniciais de Wittgenstein com base na tradição do misticismo filosófico. O benefício de minha leitura se deve ao fato de permitir uma certa clarificação no que tange a determinadas passagens obscuras, além de trazer à tona perspectivas inexploradas concernentes ao período inicial do autor; fase esta que, em minha opinião, ainda requer um nível de escrutínio adicional.Entendo que especialmente no caso do Tractatus, Wittgenstein não incida no místico por conta de uma (...) limitação da perquirição lógico-linguística relacionada a determinadas regiões do conhecimento, pelo contrário. Irei sugerir que a aplicação da lógica ocorre com o propósito de estabelecer o escopo do místico. Portanto, o que proporei em seguida é a tentativa de desenvolvimento de uma “interpretação mística” emrelação aos escritos iniciais do autor.AbstractMy goal here is to approach Wittgenstein’s initial writings based on the tradition of philosophical mysticism. The benefit of my reading is that it will allow some clarification in regard to obscure passages and still unexplored perspectives concerning this initial period which, in my opinion, still require additional scrutiny. As I see it, especially when it comes to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein does not “arrive” at the mystical due to the failure of a logical-linguistic inquiry/analysis related to certain realms of knowledge, on the contrary. I will make a case for supposing that the application of logic occurs with the purpose of establishing the scope of the mystical. Therefore, what I propose here is an attempt to develop a “mystical interpretation” of the initial writings of the author. (shrink)

This unique anthology of new, contributed essays offers a range of perspectives on various aspects of ontic vagueness. It seeks to answer core questions pertaining to onticism, the view that vagueness exists in the world itself. The questions to be addressed include whether vague objects must have vague identity, and whether ontic vagueness has a distinctive logic, one that is not shared by semantic or epistemic vagueness. The essays in this volume explain the motivations behind onticism, such as the plausibility (...) of mereological vagueness and indeterminacy in quantum mechanics and they offer various arguments both for and against ontic vagueness; onticism is also compared with other, competing theories of vagueness such as semanticism, the view that vagueness exists only in our linguistic representation of the world. Gareth Evans’s influential paper of 1978, “Can There Be Vague Objects?” gave a simple but cogent argument against the coherence of ontic vagueness. Onticism was subsequently dismissed by many. However, in recent years, researchers have become aware of the logical gaps in Evans’s argument and this has triggered a new wave of interest in onticism. Onticism is now widely regarded as at least a coherent view. Reflecting this growing consensus, the present anthology for the first time puts together essays that are focused on onticism and its various facets and it fills in the lacuna in the literature on vagueness, a much-discussed subject in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

El presente artículo aplica una nueva caracterización del pensamiento conservador a la obra de Edmund Burke. Con este objetivo, se critica la asimilación entre los conservadores y el rechazo al cambio. Posteriormente, en una segunda parte, se propone el concepto de conservadorismo sustantivo para describir a la corriente conservadora. Finalmente, la tercera parte utiliza el aparato conceptual anterior para analizar la obra Reflexiones sobre la Revolución en Francia, de Edmund Burke, fundadora del conservadorismo. Se concluye que la definición es pertinente (...) para caracterizar al autor y que, por lo tanto, posee capacidad heurística para ser extrapolada a otros pensadores. (shrink)

BackgroundAdvance directives (ADs) were implemented in Portugal in 2012. Although more than a decade has passed since Law 25/2012 came into force, Portuguese people have very low levels of adherence. In this context, this study aimed to identify and analyse the attitudes of people aged 18 or older living in Portugal towards ADs and to determine the relationships between sociodemographic variables (gender/marital status/religion/level of education/residence/whether they were a health professional/whether they had already drawn up a living will) and people’s attitudes (...) towards ADs.MethodsAn online cross-sectional analytical study was conducted using a convenience sample. For this purpose, a request (email) that publicized the link to a –form—which included sociodemographic data and the General Public Attitudes Toward Advance Care Directives (GPATACD) scale—was sent to 28 higher education institutions and 30 senior universities, covering all of mainland Portugal and the islands (Azores and Madeira). The data were collected between January and February 2023.ResultsA total of 950 adults from completed the online form. The lower scores (mean 1 and 2) obtained in most responses by applying the GPATACD scale show that the sample of the Portuguese population has a very positive attitude towards ADs. The data showed that women, agnostics/atheists, health professionals and those who had already made a living will had more positive attitudes (p < 0.001) towards ADs. There were no statistically significant differences in the attitudes of the Portuguese population sample towards ADs in relation to marital status, education level, and residence.ConclusionThe results obtained enable us to confirm that this sample of the Portuguese population has a positive attitude towards ADs. We verify that there are certain fringes of this sample with certain sociodemographic characteristics (women, agnostics/atheists, health professionals and those who had already made a living will) that have a more positive attitude towards ADs. This data could facilitate the implementation and adjustment of relevant measures, particularly in the field of health education and aimed at groups with less favourable attitudes, to increase the effectiveness of voluntary exercise of citizens’ autonomy in end-of-life care planning. (shrink)

This article is extracted from a forthcoming book, ‘Natural Justice’. It is a nontechnical introduction to the part of game theory immediately relevant to social contract theory. The latter part of the article reviews how concepts such as trust, responsibility, and authority can be seen as emergent phenomena in models that take formal account only of equilibria in indefinitely repeated games. Key Words: game theory • equilibrium • evolutionary stability • reciprocity • folk theorem • trust • altruism • responsibility (...) • authority. (shrink)

In this contribution we suggest two simple contentions: i) that Saint Anselm’s ontological argument, as presented in the Proslogion, only makes sense if embedded in an ordered and bounded ontology; and ii) that an interpretation of the main premise of the argument, within such ontology, produces a dilemma that demands a new revision of the argument.

Readers of Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy will find a collection of authoritative papers from across the Neoplatonic and Eastern Christian traditions. It is only recently that scholars have started to take notice of the Eastern Christian engagement with late antique philosophical texts. This volume builds upon this new interest in order to show the dynamic nature of Neoplatonism and Eastern Christianity at a time when both faced a variety of challenges. The legacy of Greek philosophy in the Christian (...) East fills the gap between the schools of Alexandria and Baghdad and brings into focus the intellectual history of the period. The aim of the volume is to stimulate interest in late antique philosophy and its reception in the Christian East. (shrink)

RESUMO: Em grande medida, os estudos sobre a constituição do arcabouço teórico do lacanismo têm ocorrido ao largo do exame de sua historicidade. Essa negligência reforça o ocultamento do processo social que levou a produção lacaniana a uma profunda integração entre a formalização e a etificação da teoria. Esse processo não pode ser compreendido sem a contextualização crítica da conjuntura política que cercou a proposta e a existência da École Freudienne de Paris, fundada por Lacan, em 1964. A estreita convivência (...) com os jovens militantes dos grupos da esquerda extraparlamentar da época, notadamente os maoístas, e a assimilação de suas problematizações fizeram do pensamento lacaniano e da EFP o espaço de objetivação de um discurso movido pela paráfrase política e seus efeitos de engajamento. Este artigo pretende expor as linhas de estruturação político-social dos conceitos forjados por Lacan, em meio à instituição e à consolidação de sua Escola. ABSTRACT: To a great extent the studies of the constitution of the Lacanism theoretical framework have occurred off the examination of its historicity. This neglect strengthens the concealment of the social process that led the Lacanian production to a deep integration between the theory formalization and the theory ethification. This process can not be understood without grasping the context of the political environment that surrounded the proposal and the existence of École Freudienne de Paris, founded by Lacan in 1964. The close contact with the young militants of the extra-parliamentary left groups of the time, notably the Maoists, and the assimilation of the problems they rose made the Lacanian thought and EFP the place of objectification of a speech moved by the political paraphrase and their engagement effects. This article aims to expose the lines of political and social structure of concepts forged by Lacan through the establishment and consolidation of his School. (shrink)

This paper introduces Richard Montague's theory of determiner phrases to the philosophically oriented readers who are familiar with Russell's traditional treatment. Determiner phrases include not only quantifier phrases in the narrow sense, such as every man, some woman, and nothing, but also DP conjunctions such as Adam and Betty and Adam or Betty, and even proper names such as Adam and Betty. Montague treats all determiner phrases as belonging to type t, i.e., the type of functions from properties of individuals (...) to truth values. This paper also introduces the simply typed lambda-calculus for the explication of Montague's theory. Two major problems with Montague's theory, one more philosophical and the other more linguistic, are discussed. (shrink)

The target article by Henrich et al. describes some economic experiments carried out in fifteen small-scale societies. The results are broadly supportive of an approach to understanding social norms that is commonplace among game theorists. It is therefore perverse that the rhetorical part of the paper should be devoted largely to claiming that “economic man” is an experimental failure that needs to be replaced by an alternative paradigm. This brief commentary contests the paper's caricature of economic theory, and offers a (...) small sample of the enormous volume of experimental data that would need to be overturned before “economic man” could be junked. (shrink)

This paper argues that we need to look beyond Bayesian decision theory for an answer to the general problem of making rational decisions under uncertainty. The view that Bayesian decision theory is only genuinely valid in a small world was asserted very firmly by Leonard Savage [18] when laying down the principles of the theory in his path-breaking Foundations of Statistics. He makes the distinction between small and large worlds in a folksy way by quoting the proverbs ”Look before you (...) leap” and ”Cross that bridge when you come to it”. You are in a small world if it is feasible always to look before you leap. You are in a large world if there are some bridges that you cannot cross before you come to them. As Savage comments, when proverbs conflict, it is proverbially true that there is some truth in both—that they apply in different contexts. He then argues that some decision situations are best modeled in terms of a small world, but others are not. He explicitly rejects the idea that all worlds can be treated as small as both ”ridiculous” and ”preposterous”. The first half of his book is then devoted to a very successful development of the set of ideas now known as Bayesian decision theory for use in small worlds. The second half of the book is an attempt to develop a quite different set of ideas for use in large worlds, but this part of the book is usually said to be a failure by those who are aware of its existence.2 Frank Knight [15] draws a similar distinction between making decision under risk or uncertainty.3 The pioneering work of Gilboa and Schmeidler [7] on making.. (shrink)

This study tested the direct effects of Dark Tetrad traits on organizational and interpersonal counterproductive work behaviors. We also examined the moderating effects of the three dimensions of organizational justice – distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice – on the Dark Tetrad-CWBs relationships. Based on the data from 613 employees across different occupations, the results revealed that only psychopathy and sadism had significant effects on CWBs targeted at the organization. The results also supported the direct effect of sadism on (...) interpersonal CWBs. The findings confirmed the moderating role of interactional justice but differentially, depending on the dark trait and the target of workplace deviance. Whereas low and medium levels of interactional justice moderated the relationship between Machiavellianism and CWBs directed to the organization, it did not play any role in narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. Regarding CWBs aimed at other people, interactional justice emerged as a significant moderator in Machiavellianism and sadism. But, whereas sadistic employees performed more harmful behaviors toward other individuals whatever their level of interactional justice, if people high in Machiavellianism perceived a high fair interpersonal treatment, they did not show deviant behaviors directed at other employees. The paper concludes with some suggestions and recommendations about the relevance of organizational justice in the influence of dark personality traits on CWBs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Even now, now, very now"Mimesis's and Imitation's TemporalitiesJoão Cezar de Castro Rocha (bio)Had we but world enough and time.—Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"THE EMPIRE OF NOWNESSIn the contemporary world our lives seem to become ever more Girardian, and to such an extent that even everyday language speaks of this circumstance. I think especially of a tool that is omnipresent in our societies: One just has to listen (...) carefully to the concepts employed daily by billions of users of the digital universal, and more particularly pay attention to the naturalization of an extremely aggressive behavior by the users of social networks.Is it not true that we all want our posts and tweets and photos to go viral? Haven't we all have lost some precious time looking at an infinity of memes scrolling down mechanically screen after screen? In political science, there is even a new approach, memetic, specialized in the study of the production [End Page 47] of memes and above all in understanding the overwhelming impact of their reception—notably in the political arena. Among so many possible examples, the Italian movement Cinque Stelle, the election of both Donald Trump in the United States (2016) and Jair Messias Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018), and the outcome of the Brexit plebiscite (2016) are events intrinsically (although not exclusively) related to a sort of mass production of memes and other gadgets typical of social networks.And that is not all: The word contagion is commonly employed by users in almost a technical Girardian sense. The paroxysm of a world for which social relations are dominated by aggravated internal mediation also deepens the mimetic drive underlying the digital universe. What is one to say of a new "profession" that is flourishing nowadays? I am referring to the digital influencer, whose only possible parallel is given by the uncontrollable multiplication of coaches for every single aspect of life. The reader of René Girard's fundamental work cannot but close her eyes and anticipate the next step. Digital influencers and coaches are only successful if they present themselves as an authentic skandalon to billions of users around the globe, for their lifestyle, although seemingly inaccessible or precisely because of it, becomes the explicit object of desire of their followers. Girardian concepts come naturally to mind: Metaphysical desire defines the profile of such followers—they want to be exactly like the coaches and influencers they admire. The double-bind nature of this predicament is a perfect recipe for the escalation of symbolic violence and abusive language that permeates the digital universe. Influencers and coaches are, so to speak, active nonreaders of Gregory Bateson's work, urging their followers to adopt them as undisputable models, but at the same time, because they are the coaches and the influencers, they are making it clear that the followers will not be able to achieve what nonetheless they are led to covet because of the same influencers and coaches. Otherwise, if every follower became a coach, the "profession" would at once reach its apogee and its destruction!(You understand that redundancy imposes itself here because it is a powerful mimetic machine.)In Bateson's words, the double bind is "a situation in which no matter what a person does, he 'can't win.' It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms."1 This paradoxical structure evokes the classic situation of the fable, in which the character who desires everything [End Page 48] gains nothing; finding himself midway between two treasures, he is unable to settle on one for fear of losing the other. This is a conflictive situation provoked by the digital universe on a daily basis and on a planetary scale in an unprecedented manner.The "best" is yet to come: This troubling escalation of mimetic rivalry and therefore mimetic violence, although entangled in embarrassingly trite matters, has a shocking outcome: the obsessive repetition of the mimetic resolution offered by the so-called "virtual lynching," and the omnipresence of the "cancel or call-out culture," an obvious variation of the scapegoat mechanism, widely employed and rendered properly epidemic due to an... (shrink)