These are the basis of lectures to philosophy students in universities, colleges and seminaries. The text has been revised repeatedly in use with students in different years of philosophical studies.

How does a social enterprise pursue its ethical mandate of social impact growth while navigating the perils of the most vulnerable stage in a venture’s life—scaling up? We observe a small inclusivity social enterprise attempting to scale up rapidly to create equality for people with disabilities throughout the world. Our embedded, ethnographic study is terminated with the venture’s unfortunate demise after their dramatic effort to scale up failed. By examining scaling decision-making and conflicts around creation reasoning longitudinally, our study identifies (...) over-use of effectual logic—a creation reasoning type considered more ethical and more appropriate for high-innovativeness contexts than causal logic—as a major factor in the venture’s failure. From this insight, we extend the parameters of effectuation theory to scaling up and dimensionalize its ethical implications. Guidance for social entrepreneurs to scale up successfully while maintaining ethical integrity is also provided. (shrink)

Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that underlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations employed by the (...) interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local dialogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implications of the account. Key Words: common ground; dialogue; dialogue routines; language comprehension; language production; monitoring; perception-behavior link. (shrink)

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...) that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation. We show how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal. (shrink)

Linguistic interaction between two people is the fundamental form of communication, yet almost all research in language use focuses on isolated speakers and listeners. In this innovative work, Garrod and Pickering extend the scope of psycholinguistics beyond individuals by introducing communication as a social activity. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, philosophical and sociological research, they expand their theory that alignment across individuals is the basis of communication, through the model of a 'shared workspace account'. In this workspace, interlocutors are actors who (...) jointly manipulate and control the interaction and develop similar representations of both language and social context, in order to achieve communicative success. The book also explores dialogue within groups, technologies, as well as the role of culture more generally. Providing a new understanding of cognitive representation, this trailblazing work will be highly influential in the fields of linguistics, psychology and cognitive linguistics. (shrink)

This study investigates the relation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud in China. We document a significantly negative correlation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud using data on publicly traded firms between 2005 and 2010. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that firms penalize CEOs for fraud by lowering their pay. We also find that CEO compensation is lower in firms that commit more severe frauds. Panel data fixed effects and propensity score methods are used to demonstrate these effects. (...) Our results also indicate that corporate governance mechanisms influence the magnitude of punishment. We find that CEOs of privately controlled firms, firms that split the posts of CEO and chairman, and CEOs of firms located in developed regions suffer larger compensation penalties for committing financial fraud. Finally, we show that CEOs at firms that commit fraud are more likely to be replaced compared to those at non-fraud firms. (shrink)

Game-theoretic reasoning pervades economic theory and is used widely in other social and behavioural sciences. An Introduction to Game Theory International Edition, by Martin J. Osborne, presents the main principles of game theory and shows how they can be used to understand economics, social, political, and biological phenomena. The book introduces in an accessible manner the main ideas behind the theory rather than their mathematical expression. All concepts are defined precisely, and logical reasoning is used throughout. The book requires (...) an understanding of basic mathematics but assumes no specific knowledge of economics, political science, or other social or behavioural sciences. Coverage includes the fundamental concepts of strategic games, extensive games with perfect information, and coalitional games; the more advanced subjects of Bayesian games and extensive games with imperfect information; and the topics of repeated games, bargaining theory, evolutionary equilibrium, rationalizability, and maxminimization. The book offers a wide variety of illustrations from the social and behavioural sciences. Each topic features examples that highlight theoretical points and illustrations that demonstrate how the theory may be used. (shrink)

Q: If necessity is the mother of invention, whence necessity? A. : The matrix of necessity in God-talk is religious experience, philosophically interpreted. The interpreters, theists and non-thesists, have indeed been inventive.

In 1983, Harvard University Press published Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead And Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Many anthropologists judged the book to be an unwarranted attack on the late Margaret Mead for the field work she did in 1925-26 for Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928. The implications from this now famous book served as evidence for a general liberal view of culture in America, resonated with the work of John Dewey as it became (...) popular in the 1920's, and established Mead as an intellectual icon until her death in 1978. Freeman's first critique…. (shrink)

Our target article proposed that language production and comprehension are interwoven, with speakers making predictions of their own utterances and comprehenders making predictions of other people's utterances at different linguistic levels. Here, we respond to comments about such issues as cognitive architecture and its neural basis, learning and development, monitoring, the nature of forward models, communicative intentions, and dialogue.

Following Schleiermacher, who was unable to account for several oddities in the dialogue, some scholars consider the Hipparchus a spurious Platonic work. This essay, by means of a dramatic re-enactment of the dialogue, accounts for those oddities. It demonstrates that the comrade is a recent immigrant to Athens who, having been deceived by a moneychanger in the agora, accuses ‘lovers of gain’ of being ‘profiteers’. Socrates exposes the comrade as fearful of risk-taking and then defends the reputation of Hipparchus, the (...) Athenian King who encouraged commercial development. By further correcting the democratic account of his assassination, Socrates exposes the comrade’s envy, which hides his own profiteering ambitions. The discussion points to a series of dualities regarding commerce and philosophy, including both the generating and non-generating qualities of the philosophic life. It also reveals the rural origins of Socrates’ ‘new’ accusers, and the notion of justice held by them. (shrink)

Advocates a new existential and political coalition among critical and postmodern social theorists and among critical gender, race, and class theorists, in dissent from the New World Order, to raise specters of liberation and empower radical democratic change.

For children, the collateral damage of the COVID-19 pandemic response has been considerable. In this paper, we use the framework of evidence-based medicine to argue that child abuse is another negative side effect of COVID-19 lockdowns. While it was certain that school closures would have profound social and economic costs, it remains uncertain whether they have any effect on COVID-19 transmission. There is emerging evidence that lockdowns significantly worsened child abuse on a global scale. Low-income and middle-income countries are particularly (...) vulnerable to increases in child abuse. The best available external evidence from systematic research during the pandemic demonstrates an increase in the risk of child maltreatment, an increase in child maltreatment hospitalisations and a concerning decrease in official child maltreatment referrals. The paradoxical phenomenon of increased hospitalisations and decreased reports is unlikely to be explained by a genuine decrease in child abuse. We conclude that lockdowns have an unacceptably high risk of negative side effects for children, as evidenced by child abuse, the true extent of which appears to be masked by lockdown-related disruptions to schools and other surveillance systems. The desire for a sense of security may be a tempting bias towards emphasising the resilience of children, but it is ethically problematic to push children towards abuse in the name of public health. It is our view that the collateral damage of prolonged school closures for society’s most vulnerable members is a powerful ethical consideration against any pandemic response which involves their use. (shrink)

Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction (...) and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes). (shrink)

This book offers ways to overcome problems that arise when voters, politicians, and bureaucrats pursue selfish interests rather than the general interest in their political behavior. It combines previously published ideas about charging people the costs of their political actions and selling insurance against unfavorable political outcomes, with new ideas about competing legislatures and incentives for generating efficient political outcomes. The book includes new are discussed, as well as a proposed constitution and its rationale.

Self-executing treaties like the Salvage Convention 1989 automatically become "the supreme law of the land" in the United States under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.They require no legislation to make them operative but they have the same force and effect as an Article I legislative enactment.The fact that no implementing legislation is needed often leads to the paradoxical result that a self-executing treaty is more easily forgotten, perhaps for the simple reason that such treaties do not always appear (...) in the U.S. Code and so are not always easy to find. Perhaps that is the explanation of the curious fate of the Salvage Convention 1989, which does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Code. There can be no doubt, however, that when the provisions of a treaty prescribe a rule by which private rights may be determined, as the Salvage Convention 1989 does, a court must resort to the treaty for rules of decision, just as it would to a statute. A court may only refer to the law that would govern in the absence of the treaty - in the present context, general maritime law - when the treaty leaves an issue unresolved. In short, it is not acceptable for courts to continue to apply the general maritime law of salvage simply because it is broadly equivalent to the Salvage Convention 1989. Even when the general maritime law and the Salvage Convention 1989 would produce identical results, courts should apply the Salvage Convention 1989 and not the general maritime law. When the general maritime law and the Salvage Convention 1989 would (or even might) produce different results, which may occur quite often, there is no justification for applying the general maritime law. (shrink)

_Reading Science_ looks at the distinctive language of science and technology and the role it plays in building up scientific understandings of the world. It brings together discourse analysis and critical theory for the first time in a single volume. This edited collection examines science discourse from a number of perspectives, drawing on new rhetoric, functional linguistics and critical theory. It explores this language in research and industrial contexts as well as in educational settings and in popular science writing and (...) science fiction. The papers also include consideration of the role of images in science writing and the importance of reading science discourse as multi-modal text. The internationally renowned contributors include M. A. K. Halliday, Charles Bazerman and Jay Lemke. (shrink)

We describe seven challenges that confront the kind of cross-cultural research currently practiced in experimental philosophy, illustrating them in an example in which intuitions about moral responsibility were studied in participants in four different countries. The seven challenge are (1) defining culture, (2) finding representative samples, (3) defining cognition, (4) task variation, (5) ecological validity, (6) interpreting the results, and (7) conducting ethical research. We suggest that these challenges can be overcome or avoided by attending to the ways cognition arises (...) in everyday life, and briefly describe an approach which regards culture not as an independent variable but as the medium of human action and human life, and which regards cognition as situated in time and place. (shrink)

In this article I consider a two-page autobiographical recount which appears at the end of Nelson Mandela's book Long Walk to Freedom as a summary of his life and what he has learned from it. My aim is to illustrate the role of a detailed analysis of single texts in the field of discourse analysis, as opposed to studies of selected variables across a corpus of texts. The analysis is conducted within the general theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, with (...) special attention to transitivity, mood, theme, grammatical metaphor, lexical relations, conjunction, tense, phase, process type, hierarchy of periodicity, polarity, continuity, elaboration, extension and the analysis of images in multimodal text. Through these procedures I show the way in which Mandela reconciles the linear unfolding of his life history with the deepening understanding of freedom that gives meaning to his life - by means of a spiral texture which returns again and again to the meaning of freedom at different levels of abstraction. The effect, I think, is inspirational - with no tinge of bitterness or betrayal; rather a message of hope and wisdom - grace personified. The approach exemplifies a positive style of discourse analysis that focuses on hope and change, by way of complementing the deconstructive exposé associated with critical discourse analysis. (shrink)

The interactive-alignment model of dialogue provides an account of dialogue at the level of explanation normally associated with cognitive psychology. We develop our claim that interlocutors align their mental models via priming at many levels of linguistic representation, explicate our notion of automaticity, defend the minimal role of “other modeling,” and discuss the relationship between monologue and dialogue. The account can be applied to social and developmental psychology, and would benefit from computational modeling.

Western dualism is an illusion. All of reality is a dialectical unity of incarnate love understood through the condition of the possibilities of divine and human, spirit and matter, Self and Other. Incarnation offers an understanding of the Self with ethical and cultural applications.