This study aims to identify the ethical challenges in the process of product marketing. It conducted a bibliometric study to evaluate the major ethical concerns in the area of product marketing. The data for the current study was extracted using the Scopus database. The study uses VOSviewer and Biblioshiny-bibliometrix to analyze the data. The results revealed that in the twenty-first century, ethical concerns and research related to pharmaceutical marketing, consumption behavior, and sustainability have significantly grown and are emerging as important (...) issues. The study is novel in its approach and develops a theoretical model to know ethical issues related to product marketing with multidimensional process (i.e., identification, search strategy, and analysis) for a long-term sustainable business success. By this study, the academicians and researchers will focus greater attention on the rapidly developing human-techno-centric world to fulfill the organizations’ service promises. The study contributes to the marketing ethics literature, particularly to the literature related to ethical issues in product marketing. (shrink)

Bangladesh continues to experience stubbornly high levels of rural malnutrition amid steady economic growth and poverty reduction. The policy response to tackling malnutrition shows an overwhelmingly technocratic bias, which depoliticizes the broader question of how the agro-food regime is structured. Taking an agrarian and human rights-based approach, this paper argues that rural malnutrition must be analyzed as symptomatic of a deepening agrarian crisis in which the obsession with productivity increases and commercialization overrides people’s democratic right to culturally appropriate, good, nutritious (...) food. Using qualitative insights from a case study of three villages, this research illustrates how agricultural modernization and commercialization reproduce rural malnutrition by degrading local biodiversity and the rural poor’s access to nutrient-rich diets. In so doing, it undermines the official discourse’s simplistic and literal reading of malnutrition as a pathological health condition resulting from the mere absence of certain micronutrients in the human body, and thus questions the adequacy of the proposed solutions. Instead, this research suggests that solving malnutrition in large part involves facilitating the rural poor’s access to nutritious diets through democratizing and reorganizing the agriculture sector in a manner that is eco-friendly and unconstrained by market imperatives. It cautiously advances agroecology and food sovereignty as possible alternatives, while recognizing that overcoming the challenges agrarian class conflict, gender disparity and urban–rural divide pose would not be easy. (shrink)

Post-modernism and its influence in Sri Lanka.

In contemporary philosophy, various attempts have been made in relation to placing our minds or mental states in the natural world or nature. In this context, there is a clear divide between naturalism and anti-naturalism, materialism and immaterialism, etc. Driven by the influence of naturalistic turn in philosophy and scientism, many philosophers have tried to put forth various naturalistic accounts of the relationship between mind and natural world. However, many of these accounts are naturalistic based on the modern scientific conception (...) of nature which has been hailed as the dominating conception of nature. John McDowell in his magnum opus Mind and World, while criticizing modern scientific account of the relationship between mind and world, has not resorted back to anti-naturalism. Instead, he has tried to give us certain clues to develop an account of an alternative form of naturalism which is at the same time radically different from both scientific naturalism and mysterious anti-naturalism. In this paper, I will try to search for an alternative naturalism following McDowell and examine to what extent this account is tenable. In this context, we shall discuss various approaches to understand the relation between reason/normativity (which is one of the significant constituting elements of our mind) and natural world. (shrink)

Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which took place in 2019 and 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic. The writers hail from India, England...

Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT‐2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story. For three stories, we used the probability distributions generated by GPT‐2 to compute the time series of (...) prediction error. We also asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to relate the GPT‐2 measures to the human segmentation data. We found that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in Bayesian surprise but not with a simpler measure of prediction error (surprisal) that tracks, for each word in the story, how strongly that word was predicted at the previous time point. These results support the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation and point to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 1, Page 7-10, January 2022.

The study is an attempt to understand the prevailing discourse in India on education as a right by closely reading the parliamentary debates on The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Educatio...

This article empirically examines how the performance of Indian manufacturing corporations is affected by corporate governance practices. The study has used panel data comprising of 76 manufacturing companies listed in BSE, for a consecutive six-year period, from 2015-2016 to 2020-2021. The study has applied panel data regression model to enquire the impact of ownership structure variables; and also board composition variables on firm performance using Tobin's Q and ROA. The findings reveal that ownership structure variables, board size and multiplicity of (...) the board positively affect both ROA and Tobin's Q. While independent board and women director show positive effect on Tobin's Q, the CEO-duality is negatively associated with Tobin's Q. The study suggests policymakers to enhance the multiplicity of directors and gender diversity, to maintain the right proportion of board independency, and to increase the size of board. Policymakers may also restrict the CEO to play dual role.Keywordsboard composition, ownership structure, CEO-duality, Tobin's Q. (shrink)

This book by an internationally reputed Indian scientist traces the developments of Science, Religion and Philosophy in human civilization through the ages. The common underlying bond-more specifically, a linkage of philosophy with both science and religion-has been examined incisively. All the three sub-areas of human culture have been presented from a holistic point of view, and at the same time, stressing some of their irreconcilable basic differences in scope and outlook. Meant primarily for general readers, the book achieves a fine (...) balance between basic comcepts, historical evolution and a critical unbiased analysis of rituals, dogmas, unresolved queries and it leads to an enlightened view of 'humanism', 'Nature', 'Unity of man', need for a new paradigm of social and political order transcending globalization and control of resources of weaker nations by supremacy in global power equation. The book reviews the wisdom of the ancient Hindus, Buddhism, Jainism and of the three semitic religions-Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It presents a concise account of the Indian Vedas, Vedangan, Saddarsana, the two epics and the Bhagavadgita, of the philosophy and science of the Greeks, science and technology of ancient Egypt, Babylonia and China. A valuable special feature is a summary of the status of present-day science, starting with the classical phase, and ending with the developments in the last century comprising the Theory of Relativity, quantum physics, genetics, various aspects of human consciousness, modern astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. Last but not least, the author critically reviews some of the presentday fashionable discourses on 'science as the best way to reach God' and leads the readers to an appraisal of the on-going researches on the unification of the four fundamental interactions of physical sciences. He ends with the inexorable conclusion that this unification, when fully achieved, would still not strictly identify the unique force as 'God as concieved in different religions. (shrink)

We propose a novel edge detector in the presence of Gaussian noise with the use of proximal support vector machine (PSVM). The edges of a noisy image are detected using a two-stage architecture: smoothing of image is first performed using regularized anisotropic diffusion, followed by the classification using PSVM, termed as regularized anisotropic diffusion-based PSVM (RAD-PSVM) method. In this process, a feature vector is formed for a pixel using the denoised coefficient’s class and the local orientations to detect edges in (...) all possible directions in images. From the experiments, conducted on both synthetic and benchmark images, it is observed that our RAD-PSVM approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art edge detection approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively. (shrink)

Incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity are non‐Mendelian phenomena resulting in the lack of correlation between genotype and phenotype. Not withstanding the diversity in mechanisms, differential expression of homologous alleles within cells manifests as variations in penetrance and expressivity of mutations between individuals of the same genotype. These phenomena are seen most often in dominantly inherited diseases, implying that they are sensitive to concentration of the gene product. In this framework and the advances in understanding the role of microRNA (miRNA) in (...) fine‐tuning gene expression at translational level, we propose miRNA‐mediated regulation as a mechanism for incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity. The presence of miRNA binding sites at 3′ UTR, co‐expression of target gene–miRNA pairs for genes showing incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity derived from available data lend support to our hypothesis. Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the miRNA target site facilitate the implied differential targeting of the transcripts from homologous alleles. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt at exploring the possibility of reconciling the two interpretations of biolinguistics which have been recently projected by Koster(Biolinguistics 3(1):61–92, 2009). The two interpretations—trivial and nontrivial—can be roughly construed as non-internalist and internalist conceptions of biolinguistics respectively. The internalist approach boils down to a conception of language where language as a mental grammar in the form of I-language grows and functions like a biological organ. On the other hand, under such a construal consistent with Koster’s (Biolinguistics (...) 3(1):61-92, 2009), the non-internalist version does not necessarily have to be externalist in nature; rather it is a matter of mutual reinforcement of biology and culture under the rubric of a co-evolutionary dynamics. Here it will be argued that the apparent dichotomy between these two conceptions of biolinguistics can perhaps be resolved if we have a richer synthesis that accounts for both internalism and non-internalism. (shrink)

This paper revisits the conception of intelligence and understanding as embodied in the Turing Test. It argues that a simple system of meaning relations drawn from words/lexical items in a natural language and framed in terms of syntax-free relations in linguistic texts can help ground linguistic inferences in a manner that can be taken to be 'understanding' in a mechanized system. Understanding in this case is a matter of running through the relevant inferences meaning relations allow for, and some of (...) these inferences are plain deductions and some can serve to act as abductions. Understanding in terms of meaning relations also supervenes on linguistic syntax because such understanding cannot be simply reduced to syntactic relations. The current approach to meaning and understanding thus shows that this is one way, if not the only way, of framing Alan Turing's original insight into the nature of thinking in computing systems. (shrink)

_Natural Language and Possible Minds: How Language Uncovers the Cognitive Landscape of Nature_ examines the intrinsic connection between natural language and the nature of mentality, offering to show how language can shed light on the forms of other types of mentality in non-humans.

In this work, our aim is to investigate the impact of a non-Kolmogorov predator-prey-subsidy model incorporating nonlinear prey refuge and the effect of fear with Holling type II functional response. The model arises from the study of a biological system involving arctic foxes, lemmings, and seal carcasses. The positivity and asymptotically uniform boundedness of the solutions of the system have been derived. Analytically, we have studied the criteria for the feasibility and stability of different equilibrium points. In addition, we have (...) derived sufficient conditions for the existence of local bifurcations of codimension 1. It is also observed that there is some time lag between the time of perceiving predator signals through vocal cues and the reduction of prey’s birth rate. So, we have analyzed the dynamical behaviour of the delayed predator-prey-subsidy model. Numerical computations have been performed using MATLAB to validate all the analytical findings. Numerically, it has been observed that the predator, prey, and subsidy can always exist at a nonzero subsidy input rate. But, at a high subsidy input rate, the prey population cannot persist and the predator population has a huge growth due to the availability of food sources. (shrink)

This paper approaches the question of how to describe the higher-level internal structures and representations of cognitive systems across various kinds of nonhuman (neuro)cognitive systems. While much research in cognitive (neuro)science and comparative cognition is dedicated to the exploration of the (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes with a focus on brain-behavior relations across different non-human species, not much has been done to connect (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes and the associated behaviors to plausible higher-level structures and representations of distinct kinds of cognitive (...) systems in non-humans. Although the study of (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes can certainly be revealing, (neuro)cognitive mechanisms and processes are underspecified with respect to internal structures and representations of non-human cognitive systems because multiple such mechanisms can target, or be mapped onto, the same internal structure or vice versa. This paper outlines a biosemiotic approach to this linking problem in order to bridge the gap between functions of (neuro)cognitive systems in different species and the higher-level cognitive structures and representations. It is contended that the higher-level internal structures and representations of various cognitive systems are biosemiotic constraints on the (biological) functions of (neuro)cognitive systems that serve to restrict the range of functions (neuro)cognitive systems have or are selected for. This turns out to have implications for issues on the convergent evolution of cognitive traits. (shrink)

We present an inventory of business ethics-related content to supplement and reinforce classroom education. The 23 films and documentaries introduced here allow the instructor to illustrate ethical issues in a manner which resonates with students. While sixteen of these selections involve fictitious plots, three selections (The Corporation, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Inside Job) are documentaries, and four selections (Barbarians at the Gate, Rogue Trader, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Too Big to Fail) are based on a (...) dramatization of actual events. For each selection, we present a contextual synopsis and leading questions to help instructors demonstrate the existence of ethical issues so that students may gain a better understanding of the need for ethical behavior and practices in business. We also categorize various ethical breaches by functional business areas. (shrink)

This article will provide a unifying perspective on perception and cognition via the route of linguistic representations of emotion. Linguistic representations of emotions provide a fertile ground for explorations into the nature and form of integration of perception and cognition because emotion has facets of both perceptual and cognitive processes. In particular, this article shows that certain types of linguistic representations of emotion allow for the integration of perception and cognition through a series of steps and operations in cognitive systems, (...) whereas certain other linguistic representations of emotion are not so representationally structured as to permit the unity of perception and cognition. It turns out that the types of linguistic representations of emotion that readily permit the desired unity of perception and cognition are exactly those that are linguistically encoded emotive representations of everyday objects, events, and things around us. It is these ordinary objects, events and things that provide the scaffolding for task-dependent or goal-oriented activities of cognitive systems including autonomous systems. In this way, cognitive systems can be saliently tuned to the outer world by being motivated and also subtly governed by emotion-driven representations. This helps not only tie together perceptual and cognitive processes via the interface between language and emotive representations, but also reveal the limits of emotive representations in amalgamating perceptual and cognitive processes in cognitive systems. (shrink)

The study aims to unravel the impact of green performance and green initiatives on corporate financial performance, and also to explore and establish the relationship between specific components of green performance and financial performance. This study considers a panel dataset comprising 224 nonfinancial companies listed on NSE 500 index for the period of eight consecutive years, i.e., from 2014–2015 to 2021–2022. This study adopts both the static and dynamic panel estimations to explore the link between these variables. The estimation shows (...) green initiatives have a positive impact on financial performance. In addition, this estimation also documents a positive impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) productivity and energy productivity (specific measure of green performance) on corporate performance. This finding provides several important suggestions for Indian companies and policymakers towards adopting more green initiatives along with improving green performance to enhance higher financial performance. This study may also help to implement green policies, which will help to minimize pollutions, and is ultimately beneficial for the whole of society as well as the environment. The novelty of the study is to provide deep understanding and bridge the knowledge gap about the relationship by considering key functional dimensions of Indian firms. In addition, specially by incorporating dynamic panel estimation, this study has controlled for potential endogeneity bias and also the dynamic effects, which are scarce in earlier literature. (shrink)

We study the different solution strategy for solving epidemic model in different imprecise environment, that is, a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model in imprecise environment. The imprecise parameter is also taken as fuzzy and interval environment. Three different solution procedures for solving governing fuzzy differential equation, that is, fuzzy differential inclusion method, extension principle method, and fuzzy derivative approaches, are considered. The interval differential equation is also solved. The numerical results are discussed for all approaches in different imprecise environment.

This book examines linguistic expressions of emotion in intensional contexts and offers a formally elegant account of the relationship between language and emotion. The author presents a compelling case for the view that there exist, contrary to popular belief, logical universals at the intersection of language and emotive content. This book shows that emotive structures in the mind that are widely assumed to be not only subjectively or socio-culturally variable but also irrelevant to a general theory of cognition offer an (...) unusually suitable ground for a formal theory of emotive representations, allowing for surprising logical and cognitive consequences for a theory of cognition. Challenging mainstream assumptions in cognitive science and in linguistics, this book will appeal to linguists, philosophers of the mind, linguistic anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists of all persuasions. Prakash Mondal is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. He is the author of Language, Mind and Computation (2014), Natural Language and Possible Minds (2016) and Language, Biology and Cognition (completed). (shrink)

In this paper a connection between intentionality, intensionality, language and emotion will be drawn up through a demonstration of an intimate relationship between the intentionality of emotion and intensionality in language. What will be shown is that the intentionality of emotion can ultimately be traced to the intensionality of emotional contexts. For this purpose, emotive predicates will be categorized in terms of their intensional behavior and regularities. They will then be brought forward for an explication of why and how far (...) the intentionality of emotion is unique. The insights derived from the relevant analyses will then be employed for the implications and ramifications that might be thrown upon the fabric of emotion and language within the space of cognition. (shrink)

In this paper we propose and analyze a prey-predator type dynamical system for pest control where prey population is treated as the pest. We consider two classes for the pest namely susceptible pest and infected pest and the predator population is the natural enemy of the pest. We also consider average delay for both the predation rate i.e. predation to the susceptible pest and infected pest. Considering a subsystem of original system in the absence of infection, we analyze the existence (...) of all possible non-negative equilibria and their stability criteria for both the subsystem as well as the original system. We present the conditions for transcritical bifurcation and Hopf bifurcation in the disease free system. The theoretical evaluations are demonstrated through numerical simulations. (shrink)

This paper seeks to understand machine cognition. The nature of machine cognition has been shrouded in incomprehensibility. We have often encountered familiar arguments in cognitive science that human cognition is still faintly understood. This paper will argue that machine cognition is far less understood than even human cognition despite the fact that a lot about computer architecture and computational operations is known. Even if there have been putative claims about the transparency of the notion of machine computations, these claims do (...) not hold out in unraveling machine cognition, let alone machine consciousness (if there is any such thing). The nature and form of machine cognition remains further confused also because of attempts to explain human cognition in terms of computation and to model/simulate (aspects of) human cognitive processing in machines. Given that these problems in characterizing machine cognition persist, a view of machine cognition that aims to avoid these problems is outlined. The argument that is advanced is that something becomes a computation in machines only when a human interprets it, which is a kind of semiotic causation. From this it follows that a computing machine is not engaged in a computation unless a human interprets what it is doing; instead, it is engaged in machine cognition, which is defined as a member or subset of the set of all possible mappings of inputs to outputs. The human interpretation, which is a semiotic process, gives meaning to what a machine does, and then what it does becomes a computation. (shrink)

This paper explores the link between rules of grammar, grammar formalisms and the architecture of the language faculty. In doing so, it provides a flexible meta-level theory of the language faculty through the postulation of general axioms that govern the interaction of different components of grammar. The idea is simply that such an abstract formulation allows us to view the structure of the language faculty independently of specific theoretical frameworks/formalisms. It turns out that the system of rules, axioms and constraints (...) of grammar cannot beexplicitlyrepresented in a general architecture of the language faculty — which circumvents the ontological mismatch of mental representations and formal/axiomatic properties of language. Rather, the system of rules, axioms, constraints of grammar isintentionallyprojected by humans, and this projection realizes/instantiates what Dascal (1992) calls ‘psychopragmatics’. Relevant implications for linguistic theory, learnability and (computational) models of language processing are also explored. (shrink)

This paper aims to characterize the relationship between information as defined in the information-theoretic approach and linguistic meaning by way of formulation of computations over the lexicon of a natural language. Information in its information theoretic sense is supposed not to be equivalent to linguistic meaning, whereas linguistic meaning has an intrinsic connection to information as far as the form and structure of the lexicon of a language (in a non-lexicological sense) is concerned. We argue that these two apparently conflicting (...) aspects of the relationship between information and linguistic meaning can be unified by showing that information conserves linguistic meaning, only insofar as computations of a certain kind are defined on the symbolic elements of a lexicon. This has consequences not merely for the nature of lexical learning – natural or artificial or otherwise – but also for the conservation of information in axiomatic systems. (shrink)

Bankimchandra was a stalwart in terms of his writings in the nineteenth-century Bengal. He was one of the pioneers of nationalism in India and a Hindu revivalist. Prior to the publication of his prose writings in the forms of novels, articles and essays, nationalism was not an Indian phenomenon. It had been imported from the West through English education. Such English education gave the Indians an exposure of utilitarianism and the ideologies of French Revolution. Bankimchandra’s political thought accords with the (...) characteristic of utilitarianism and the ideologies of French revolution. He thought that like Europe the rise of India would be possible only with the help of nationalism. He was well aware that the rational element of English education, which is the basis of nationalism, independence and political liberty, could not solely revive Hindu society. There are certain differences between the European concept of nationalism and the Indian concept of nationalism. Bankim’s idea of nationalism or patriotism is based on the ideal of love for the well-being of all. His concept of nationalism took its shape in his revolutionary novel Anandamath. Both the novel and the song vandemātaram used in that novel played a crucial role in the nationalist movement in India. In this article, an attempt has been made to understand the concept of nationalism as found in Bankimchandra’s writings. (shrink)

"This paper aims to impugn the magnified role of specific natural languages in structuring and shaping cognition in the context of language-thought relations. Since language-thought interactions are being increasingly explored in different kinds of empirical studies showing or attempting to show context-specific or general influences of language over thought and thinking, there is reason to tame the excesses of language-specific influences over thought, thinking and cognition. In this regard, any context-specific influences of languages over thought and thinking in being grounded (...) in certain modes/modalities of cognition must be governed by the constraints of body-world interactions that operate on modes/modalities of cognition. Thus, this paper will argue that language-specific influences over thought, thinking and cognition are possible to the extent that they are permitted by the constraints of embodiment. Keywords: language; thought; thinking; embodiment; cognition ". (shrink)

This book explores the cognitive constraints and principles of variation in structures of linguistic meaning across languages. It unifies cognitive-semantic representations with formal-semantic representations to make a unique contribution to the study of typological generalizations and universals in natural language semantics. This unified approach not only helps reveal why semantic structures have the observed variation they have, but also sheds light on the compelling cognitive and formal regularities and patterns in the variation of linguistic semantics. The book also advances the (...) general principles of a cognitively-oriented semantic typology. Lucid and topical, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of language typology, linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and semantics. It will also be of interest to theoretical linguists of both cognitivist and formalist schools. (shrink)

This is the first of a series of reports on the research groups of the institute: Death and Dying, Behavior Control, Genetic Engineering/Genetic Counseling, the Teaching of Medical Ethics, and the subject of this report, Population Control.

Natural language meaning has properties of both (embodied) cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures. But it is not clear how they actually relate to one another. This article argues that how properties of cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning can be united remains one of the puzzles in cognitive science. That is primarily because formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning are abstract, logical, and truth‐conditional properties, whereas cognitive/conceptual representations are embodied and grounded in sensory‐motor systems. After reviewing the (...) current progress, this work offers, in outline, the general formulations that show how these two different kinds of representations for semantic structures can (potentially) be unified and also proposes three desiderata for testing, in brain dynamics, the mathematical equivalence between formal symbolic representations (and their transitions), and neuronal population codes (and their transitions). (shrink)

Akshaya Mukul, Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, The New India Foundation, 2015. 540 pp., ₹799. ISBN: 139789351772309; 109351772306.

Examples are worked out using a new equation proposed in the previous paper to show that it has new physical predictions for mesoscopic systems.

Euthanasia has been a subject of debate worldwide. It has brought up multiple controversies in different countries and among different societies. Over the years, euthanasia has been an active topic of research in the field of bioethics, owing to its numerous ethical and legal implications. In this article, we take a brief look into the laws and legislation surrounding euthanasia in different parts of the world.