We propose that leaders play a more important role in voters’ party sympathy in proportional representation systems than previous research has suggested. Voters, from the 2018 Swedish General Election, were in an experiment asked to describe leaders and parties with three indicative keywords. Statistical models were conducted on these text data to predict their vote choice. The results show that despite that the voters vote for a party, the descriptions of leaders predicted vote choice to a similar extent (...) as descriptions of parties. However, the order of the questions mattered, so that the first questions were more predictive than the second question. These analyses indicate that voters tend to conflate characteristics of leaders with their parties during election campaigns, and that leaders are a more important aspect of voting under PR than previous literature has suggested. Overall, this suggests that statistical analysis of words sheds new light of underlying sympathies related to voting. (shrink)

In The Emotional Sphere of Politics, Justin MacCarthy explores the premise that there are four sets of conflicting emotions (Security versus Freedom, Property versus Communality, Equality versus Status and Order versus Nature) which are an integral part of the human condition. Having these four pairs of contradictory needs makes it extremely difficult for party politicians to meet our expectations, as each party has a particular focus on just one single need. These party politicians promise us that increased adherence to their (...) particular dogma will lead us to Nirvana, but in fact it usually leads to excess and hubris. The most notorious example of excess is fascism, which is an ultra form of nationalism. But there are two sides to every coin, and all of the ideological excesses can be matched by political virtues. For example, the capitalist vice of greed can be offset by the virtue of philanthropy. MacCarthy sets out to show how these political forces neatly fit together into what is quite literally The Emotional Sphere of Politics, in three-dimensional form. The interrelationship of eight major political movements of the 20th century with our basic human emotions are each examined individually, from how 'Authoritarianism promises us Security', to how 'The Communists claim to be the Organisers of our resources for the benefit of all'. Similar to The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, it examines why people feel so differently about political issues, making this book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in politics. (shrink)

Many organizations, companies, and so on are committed to certain representational aims as regards the composition of their workforce. One motivation for such aims is the assumption that numerical underrepresentation of groups manifests discrimination against them. In this article, I articulate representational aims in a way that best captures this rationale. My main claim is that the achievement of such representational aims is reducible to the elimination of the effects of wrongful discrimination on individuals and that this very important concern (...) is, in principle, compatible with the representation of various groups diverging widely from their share of the overall population. The discussion also shows that we should ensure that a preoccupation with groups' numbers in relation to the population as a whole does not lead us away from our real aim, for example because we are blinded to the effects of discrimination against numerically overrepresented groups, or overlook the innocently different ambitions of some numerically underrepresented groups. In relation to the latter point, I appeal to the fact that many luck egalitarians think justice should be ambition sensitive. Also, the time-relative account of representational aims expounded shows that, and how, representational aims should accommodate the changing composition of populations over time. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give one kind of internal proportional systems with general representation and without closure and finiteness assumptions. First, we introduce the notions of internal proportional system and of general representation. Second, we briefly review the existing results which motivate our generalization. Third, we present the new systems, characterized by the fact that the linear order induced by the comparison weak order ≥ at the level of equivalence classes is also a (...) weIl order. We prove the corresponding representation theorem and make some comments on strong limitations of uniqueness; we present in an informal way a positive result, restricted uniqueness for what we call connected objects. We conclude with some final remarks on the property that characterizes these systems and on three possible empirical applications. (shrink)

L’article discute les conceptions respectives que le philosophe Ernst Cassirer et l’historien de l’art Erwin Panofsky se font de l’espace artistique. L’occasion en est donnée par une discussion lors du Kongress für Ästhetitk und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Congrès d’esthétique et de science de l’art) organisé à Hambourg en 1933 sur la question de l’espace et du temps artistiques. La perspective, considérée par Panofsky comme une forme symbolique, constitue un bon cas pour saisir les proximités et différences entre l’historien de l’art et (...) le philosophe des formes symboliques. L’espace de la perspective correspond-il à cet espace de l’art que le philosophe définit comme espace de la représentation (Darstellung)? À cet exemple de la perspective, exemple classique quoique souvent évoqué sans grande précision pour comparer les deux théoriciens, l’article en ajoute un autre, inédit, à savoir celui de la théorie des proportions. Peut-on dire que la théorie des proportions qui structure elle aussi la surface de l’image est, comme la perspective, une forme symbolique? La réponse permet de préciser la façon dont Cassirer et Panofsky construisent un lien entre art, représentation et subjectivité. À travers cette recherche des affinités et différences dans la conception de l’art, ce qui se joue en toile de fond, c’est, d’une part, la possibilité et les limites de l’interdisciplinarité et du dialogue fécond entre philosophie et histoire de l’art et, d’autre part, la question de savoir si une commune théorie de l’art était partagée à Hambourg dans ces années, autour de l’Institut Warburg. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give one kind of internal proportional systems with general representation and without closure and finiteness assumptions. First, we introduce the notions of internal proportional system and of general representation. Second, we briefly review the existing results which motivate our generalization. Third, we present the new systems, characterized by the fact that the linear order induced by the comparison weak order ≥ at the level of equivalence classes is also a (...) weIl order. We prove the corresponding representation theorem and make some comments on strong limitations of uniqueness; we present in an informal way a positive result, restricted uniqueness for what we call connected objects. We conclude with some final remarks on the property that characterizes these systems and on three possible empirical applications. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the paradoxes of the largest remainders methods has been studied by numerous authors. Nevertheless, the examples presented in their studies do not deal with the case where a party’s possible additional votes can directly lead to a loss in the party’s number of representatives. This paradox, which can be called the no-show apportionment paradox, has not previously been mentioned in the literature. It is based on the assumption that a voter’s favourite party may lose a seat if (...) the voter votes honestly but get more seats if he or she abstains. The article gives simple examples illustrating the no-show paradox in a party-list proportional representation electoral system using the quota method of apportionment. In these situations it would be better for the party if some of their voters abstained, otherwise it would lose one or more seats. (shrink)

In multiethnic and multi-religious democracies, the chronic danger is that candidates will engage in “identity politics,” appealing to one locally preponderant ethnic group against other groups. The usual formulas for composing multiethnic democracies—ethnic federalism and/or proportional representation—often exacerbate the problem, ethnicizing political campaigns and carving up the national legislature into ethnic blocs, each beholden only to its own group. An alternative approach—what I call “dispersed constituency democracy”—is to match each legislative seat with a constituency that reflects the overall (...) ethnic composition of the society in question, so as to encourage candidates to reach across ethnic divisions rather than play to locally preponderant ones. I propose a simple way to do this, and explore the likely consequences for national electoral campaigns and legislative dynamics over a range of demographic circumstances. I also consider supplemental devices for protecting minority rights that would be made possible by the proposed constituency system. (shrink)

This study examines the representation of male and female musicians in world-class symphony orchestras. Personnel of 40 orchestras of three regions, UK, Europe and the USA and distributions of men and women across the four orchestral departments: strings, woodwind, brass and percussion are compared. Significant differences in representation between orchestras of the three regions are reported. Practices adopted by orchestras when appointing musicians to vacant positions are reviewed and numbers of males and females appointed to rank-and-file and Section (...) Principals are compared. Career patterns of male and female musicians are also compared. Increases in numbers of women appointed to orchestral posts in the last three decades are compared with increases in the proportion of women in the general workforce. The data of orchestral membership are then compared with the numbers of young people receiving tuition on orchestral instruments retrieved from a large national database (n = 391,000 students). Implications for the future of male and female representation in orchestral personnel are then considered. (shrink)

BackgroundIt is widely acknowledged that there is a global divide on health care and health research known as the 10/90 divide.MethodsA retrospective survey of articles published in the BMJ, Lancet, NEJM, Annals of Internal Medicine & JAMA in a calendar year to examine the contribution of the developing world to medical literature. We categorized countries into four regions: UK, USA, Other Euro-American countries (OEAC) and (RoW). OEAC were European countries other than the UK but including Australia, New Zealand and Canada. (...) RoW comprised all other countries.ResultsThe average contribution of the RoW to the research literature in the five journals was 6.5%. In the two British journals 7.6% of the articles were from the RoW; in the three American journals 4.8% of articles were from RoW. The highest proportion of papers from the RoW was in the Lancet (12%). An analysis of the authorship of 151 articles from RoW showed that 104 (68.9%) involved authorship with developed countries in Europe or North America. There were 15 original papers in these journals with data from RoW but without any authors from RoW.ConclusionsThere is a marked under-representation of countries in high-impact general medical journals. The ethical implications of this inequity and ways of reducing it are discussed. (shrink)

This research investigates the representations of gendered social actors within the subversionary discourse of equal educational opportunities for males and females in Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) books. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the theoretical framework, the authors blend van Leeuwen’s (Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis, Routledge, London, 2003) ‘Social Actor Network Model’ and Sunderland’s (Gendered discourses, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2004) ‘Gendered Discourses Model’ in order to examine the depictions of male and female social (...) actors within this gendered discourse. The gendered discourse of equal opportunities was buttressed by such representations within a tight perspective in proportion to gender ideologies prevailing in Iran. Resorting to CDA, we can claim that resistance against such gendered discourse in Iranian EFL textbooks militates against such gender norms. These representations of male and female social actors in school books are indicative of an all-encompassing education, reinforcing that the discourse of equal opportunities is yet to be realized in the education system of Iran. (shrink)

Although more women continue to enter the medical profession, disparities between the sexes in academic medicine persist. This “gender gap” has implications for academic advancement. In 2006, Jagsi and colleagues reported that, although the proportion of women among first and last authors in the United States had significantly increased since 1970, women still represented a minority of the authors of original research and guest editorials in six prominent medical journals.1 In a related 2008 study, Jagsi and colleagues found a substantial (...) increase in women’s representation on editorial boards and as editors-in-chief of several prominent journals.2 We collected more recent data about the gender distribution of authors, members of editorial boards, and peer reviewers for prominent medical journals. Using data from 2010-2011, we determined the proportion of women who were authors of original research or guest editorials, members of editorial boards, or reviewers at six major general medical journals: the Annals of Internal Medicine (Ann Intern Med), the British Medical Journal (BMJ), JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). (shrink)

Consider the following two seemingly unrelated questions. First, why does Rousseau (1993 [1762]) believe that the formation of factions or partial associations is not conducive to the general will in Du Contrat Social, II, 3? Second, why do federal assemblies typically strive for some form of degressive proportionality, i.e. a balance between equal and proportional representation, for the countries in the federation? We will show that there is a surprising connection between these questions. We turn to our first (...) question. It is often thought that Rousseau’s opposition to factions can be interpreted in reference to the Condorcet Jury Theorem. The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that if voters are more likely to be right on some issue than not and cast their votes independently, then the chance that the majority is correct converges to one as the number of voters goes to infinity. This interpretation is tempting, but it is inconsistent with some crucial textual evidence. We turn to our second question. Consider a federation of countries with a decision-making assembly in which each country casts a block vote. On equal representation, the vote of each country has the same weight. On proportional representation, the weights of the votes are proportional to the countries’ population sizes. In between these extremes, we can let the weights increase as a function of population sizes, but smaller countries receive greater weights and larger countries receive lesser weights than proportionality would warrant. Such weightings are called degressively proportional weightings. How can degressive proportionality be justified? And does this justification provide us any guidance as to how these weights should be set? A correct understanding of Rousseau’s misgivings about the formation of factions will hold the key to these questions. (shrink)

Evidence suggests a limited contribution to the total research output in leading obstetrics and gynaecology journals by researchers from the developing world. Editorial bias, quality of scientific research produced and language barriers have been attributed as possible causes for this phenomenon. The aim of this study was to understand the prevalence of editorial board members based out of low and lower-middle income countries in leading journals in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology. The top 21 journals in the field of (...) obstetrics and gynaecology were selected based on their impact factor, SCImago ranking and literature search. The composition of the editorial boards of these journals was studied based on World Bank Income Criteria to understand the representation status of researchers from low and lower-middle income countries. A total of 1315 board members make up the editorial composition of leading obstetrics and gynaecology journals. The majority of these editors belong to high-income countries (n = 1148; 87.3%). Low (n = 6; 0.45%) and lower-middle income (n = 55; 4.18%) countries make up for a very minuscule proportion of editorial board members. Only a meagre 9 out of 21 journals have editorial board members from these countries (42.85%). Low and low-middle countries have poor representation in the editorial boards of leading obstetrics and gynaecology journals. Poor representation in research from these countries has grave consequences for a large proportion of the global population and multidisciplinary collaborative efforts must be taken to rapidly change this statistic with immediate effect. (shrink)

This paper is organized around the theme of political representation in India. Its first section deals with the changing politics of representation in India in the past two decades, the growing demands for proportional representation, and for political inclusion of two influential groups: the scheduled castes and tribes and Other Backward Classes. In the second section, representation is briefly explored in relation to women and minorities. The third section deals with some reflections on the challenges (...) of political representation in India’s diverse democracy. The author aims to account for the varied trajectories of caste, community and gender in Indian politics through an analysis of the politics of representation. The main argument developed here is that the politics of presence does not offer a resolution to the problems of under-representation nor to the more fundamental issue of the representation of the interests of constituents, especially the needs of the most vulnerable. (shrink)

Given the under-representation of women in the elected assemblies, women politicians argue in favor of a higher representation of their gender in the political realm. Their claim is based on different kinds of arguments. We present and discuss the four following arguments: proportional representation and parity, interest representation, ressource utilisation and the argument of a different women 's voice.

Every pregroup grammar is shown to be strongly equivalent to one which uses basic types and left and right adjoints of basic types only. Therefore, a semantical interpretation is independent of the order of the associated logic. Lexical entries are read as expressions in a two sorted predicate logic with ∈ and functional symbols. The parsing of a sentence defines a substitution that combines the expressions associated to the individual words. The resulting variable free formula is the translation of the (...) sentence. It can be computed in time proportional to the parsing structure. Non-logical axioms are associated to certain words (relative pronouns, indefinite article, comparative determiners). Sample sentences are used to derive the characterizing formula of the DRS corresponding to the translation. (shrink)

Although the connectionist approach has lead to elegant solutions to a number of problems in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, its suitability for dealing with problems in knowledge representation and inference has often been questioned. This paper partly answers this criticism by demonstrating that effective solutions to certain problems in knowledge representation and limited inference can be found by adopting a connectionist approach. The paper presents a connectionist realization of semantic networks, that is, it describes how knowledge about (...) concepts, their properties, and the hierarchical relationship between them may be encoded as an interpreter‐free massively parallel network of simple processing elements that can solve an interesting class of inheritance and recognition problems extremely fast—in time proportional to the depth of the conceptual hierarchy. The connectionist realization is based on an evidential formulation that leads to principled solutions to the problems of exceptions and conflicting multiple inheritance situations during inheritance, and the best‐match or partial‐match computation during recognition. The paper also identifies constraints that must be satisfied by the conceptual structure in order to arrive at an efficient parallel realization. (shrink)

The neural vehicles of mental representation play an explanatory role in cognitive psychology that their realizers do not. In this paper, I argue that the individuation of realizers as vehicles of representation restricts the sorts of explanations in which they can participate. I illustrate this with reference to Rupert’s (2011) claim that representational vehicles can play an explanatory role in psychology in virtue of their quantity or proportion. I propose that such quantity-based explanatory claims can apply only to (...) realizers and not to vehicles, in virtue of the particular causal role that vehicles play in psychological explanations. (shrink)

It is important for members of marginalized groups to express political views relevant to how members of their respective groups should be treated. Recently, however, it has been argued that there are some contexts––that is, contexts in which members of marginalized groups are tokenized and have considerable power to influence political outcomes that would affect their other group members––in which certain marginalized group members ought not express certain political views relevant to how members of their respective groups should be treated. (...) In this essay, I examine two arguments defending this conclusion (the proportional representation and unjust enrichment arguments) and conclude that both fail. Then, I argue that recognizing that members of marginalized groups are permitted to speak their minds, even in these contexts, favorably affirms their broad political speech rights. (shrink)

According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague concepts. For a case study, we selected two natural language quantifiers most and more than half. We conducted two online experiments, each with 90 native English speakers. In the first (...) experiment, we tested between-subjects variability in meaning representations. In the second experiment, we tested the stability of meaning representations over time by testing the same group of participants in two experimental sessions. In both experiments, participants performed the verification task. They verified a sentence with a quantifier (e.g., “Most of the gleerbs are feezda.”) based on the numerical information provided in the second sentence, (e.g., “60% of the gleerbs are feezda”). To investigate between-subject and within-subject differences in meaning representations, we proposed an extended version of the Diffusion Decision Model with two parameters capturing truth conditions and vagueness. We fit the model to responses and reaction times data. In the first experiment, we found substantial between-subject differences in representations of most as reflected by the variability in the truth conditions. Moreover, we found that the verification of most is proportion-dependent as reflected in the reaction time effect and model parameter. In the second experiment, we showed that quantifier representations are stable over time as reflected in stable model parameters across two experimental sessions. These findings challenge semantic theories that assume the truth-conditional equivalence of most and more than half and contribute to the representational theory of vague concepts. The current study presents a promising approach to study semantic representations, which can have a wide application in experimental linguistics. (shrink)

During the sixteenth century in England the logocentrism of the Middle Ages was confronted by a materialism that heralded the modern world. With remarkable tenacity in music, poetry, and painting, the orthodox aesthetic persisted as formal features which served as nonverbal signs and provided a subtext of form. In opposition, however, a radical aesthetic emerged to accommodate the new attention to physical nature. The growing force of materialism occasioned a fundamental rethinking of what an artifact might represent and how that (...) representation might be achieved. This book explores the ontological and epistemological issues that poststructuralist thought raises about that shift in our cultural history. In doing so, it charts a course for Renaissance studies, now in disarray, that avoids the old positivism while not succumbing to the new nihilism. (shrink)

Efforts aimed at broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) require a holistic presentation of the state of racial and gender participation. Statistics currently used to describe participation often include raw counts of degrees and the percentages of demographic groups receiving STEM degrees. While these data provide insights into demographic trends, they do not present the complete picture because these “traditional” statistics do not capture how well a field of study reflects—or is proportionally similar to—a larger body, such (...) as the college population. If the goal of broadening participation in STEM education is to ensure that all racial and gender groups are proportionally represented, analysts require direct measures of representation. In this article, we present a novel metric that assesses the degree to which groups are overrepresented or underrepresented in a given field. This metric calculates field-specific representation by comparing the proportion of degrees awarded to members of a demographic group in a specific field of study with the proportion of all degrees awarded to that group. Using data from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, we demonstrate the efficacy of this representation metric and show that it provides new insights into STEM participation levels for women and other groups considered to be underrepresented. While traditional measurements show the increasing number of degrees awarded to and the increasing share of underrepresented minority students in STEM, our metric revealed that underrepresented minorities remain underrepresented in STEM fields, especially in engineering and the natural sciences. (shrink)

Using bibliographic metadata from 177 Philosophy Journals between 1950 and 2020, this article presents new data on the under- representation of women authors in philosophy journals across decades and across four different compounding factors. First, we examine how philosophy fits in comparison to other academic disciplines. Second, we consider how the regional academic context in which Philosophy Journals operate impacts on author gender proportions. Third, we consider how the regional specialization of a journal impacts on author gender proportions. Fourth, (...) and perhaps most interestingly, we consider the impact of author ethnicity on gender representation, and we examine the breakdown of author ethnicity across Philosophy Journals between 1950 and 2020. To our knowledge, this is the first work to offer an estimate for author ethnicity and gender in philosophy publications using a large- scale data set. We find that women authors are underrepresented in Philosophy Journals across time, across disciplines, across the globe, and regardless of ethnicity. (shrink)

Pointe extrême de la métaphore, l'oxymore postule, dans le théâtre claudélien, une altérité essentielle entre l'Amant et l'Amante, entre Dieu et sa créature, altérité que ne contredirait pas cependant l'identité existentielle: l'Incarnation. Prouhèze déploie sous nos yeux la bannière divine dont le signe est, comme dans les versets de Raymond Lulle, “un homme mort”. Si la corde de l'amour est tissée à coups de languissements de soupirs et de pleurs par le poète-dramaturge, la Croix est symétriquement désignée dans ses drames (...) comme l'Arbre de Vie.Un personnage aussi étrange — car bien peu théâtral — que l'Ombre Double duSoulier de Satin résume ce paradoxe dans la mesure où la représentation qu'elle offre de la tension amoureuse crée un lien insécable entre la Terre et l'Ailleurs; l'Ombre Double témoigne de ce que l'Amant et l'Amante comme Dieu et sa créature peuvent concorder dans la béatitude sans pour autant fusionner. Autrement dit, selon Claudel, que l'homme soit à l'image de Dieu ne suffit pas à sa foi, encore faut-il qu'il ne cesse de manifester sa ressemblance à Dieu. Seule, la “métaphore vive”, c'est-à-dire la métaphore ayant gardé en mémoire les paradoxes et les tensions de l'oxymore, respecterait le mystère d'une relation où la présence croît a proportion de l'absence et fonderait cette parole sacrée et compensatoire d'une resseblance mille fois déjouée. (shrink)

This study examined the effect of an interference task on the consolidation of duration in long-term memory. In a temporal generalization task, the participants performed a learning phase with a reference duration that either was, or was not, followed 30 minutes later by a 15-min interference task. They were then given a memory test, 24h later. Using different participant groups, several reference durations were examined, from several hundred milliseconds (600ms) to several seconds (2.5, 4 and 8s). The results showed that (...) the scalar timing property (i.e. precision proportional to judged duration) was preserved despite the interference task given during the memory consolidation process. However, the interference task increased the variability of time judgment and tended to produce a lengthening effect in all reference duration conditions. The modeling of individual data with parameters derived from scalar expectancy theory suggests that disrupting the memory consolidation of learned reference durations introduces noise in their representation in memory, with time being specifically distorted towards a lengthened duration. (shrink)

In previous work we have developed Property Theory with Curry Typing (PTCT), an intensional first-order logic for natural language semantics. PTCT permits fine-grained specifications of meaning. It also supports polymorphic types and separation types. We develop an intensional number theory within PTCT in order to represent proportional generalized quantifiers like "most", and we suggest a dynamic type-theoretic approach to anaphora and ellipsis resolution. Here we extend the type system to include product types, and use these to define a permutation (...) function that generates underspecified scope representations within PTCT. We indicate how filters can be added to encode constraints on possible scope readings. Our account offers several important advantages over other current theories of underspecification. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that processing of irrelevant information can be modulated in a rapid online fashion by contextual information in the task environment depending on the usefulness of that information in different contexts. Congruency effects evoked by irrelevant stimulus attributes are smaller in contexts with high proportions of incongruent trials and larger in contexts with high proportions of congruent trials . The present study investigates these context-adaptation effects in a masked-priming paradigm. Context-specific adaptation effects transfer to stimulus identities that are (...) equiprobale in all contexts – an observation that renders explanations in terms of event-learning processes unlikely. Yet, context-specific effects vanished when the irrelevant information remained unconscious. The results suggest that context-specific adaptation of congruency effects reflect cognitive control operations that alter the processing of irrelevant information depending on the experienced utility of that information for action control. (shrink)

This essay is a contribution to the historical phenomenology of science, taking as its point of departure Husserl’s later philosophy of science and Jacob Klein’s seminal work on the emergence of the symbolic conception of number in European mathematics during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sinceneither Husserl nor Klein applied their ideas to actual theories of modern mathematical physics, this essay attempts to do so through a case study of the conceptof “spacetime.” In §1, I sketch Klein’s account of (...) the emergence of the symbolic conception of number, beginning with Vieta in the late sixteenth century. In §2,through a series of historical illustrations, I show how the principal impediment to assimilating the new symbolic algebra to mathematical physics, namely, thedimensionless character of symbolic number, is overcome via the translation of the traditional language of ratio and proportion into the symbolic language of equations. In §§3–4, I critically examine the concept of “Minkowski spacetime,” specifically, the purported analogy between the Pythagorean distance formula and the Minkowski “spacetime interval.” Finally, in §5, I address the question of whether the concept of Minkowski spacetime is, as generally assumed, indispensable to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (shrink)

Five experiments investigated the role of spatial connectedness between a pair of objects presented in the change detection task for the actual capacity of visual working memory (VWM) in healthy young adults (total N = 405). Three experiments yielded a surprising nonlinear relationship between the proportion of pair-wise connected objects and capacity, with the highest capacity observed for homogenous displays, when either all objects were connected or disjointed. A drop in capacity, ranging from an average of a quarter of an (...) object out of three objects maintained in VWM, was noted when only some objects were connected while others were disjointed. As indicated by another two experiments, this effect was specific to double-feature encoding, but disappeared when single visual features had to be memorized. No existing theoretical model of VWM can directly explain this novel effect. Overall, the nonlinear effect of spatial connectedness implies that representations in VWM possess hierarchical structure defined by wholes, parts, features, and their relations, and the heterogeneity of such a structure hinders VWM performance, while homogeneity facilitates it. (shrink)

The verification of a sentence against a visual display in experimental conditions reveals a procedure that is driven solely by the properties of the linguistic input and not by the properties of the context (the set-up of the visual display) or extra-linguistic cognition (operations executed to obtain the truth value). This procedure, according to the Interface Transparency Thesis (ITT) (Lidz et al. in Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011), represents the meaning of an expression at the interface with the ‘conceptual-intentional’ system (...) (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995). My experiments provide support for the ITT by replicating in Polish and in Bulgarian the findings of Lidz et al. (Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011) for the English quantifier most. We also obtain new evidence that participants are prompted to switch between verification procedures by a change in the linguistic input (a different superlative quantifier entailed by most), but not by a change in the visual input. Thus, the motivation for the subconscious switch in procedures is not to maximize efficiency. Participants use the procedure associated with each quantifier, and in effect, the same display is verified differently depending on which information the visual system is instructed to use by the semantic representation of the sentence. (shrink)

This Paper is divided into three sections. In the first section I provide a brief historical overview of Hindu-Muslim relations in India and of the condition of Indian Muslims today. I conclude by claiming that Indian Muslims are a marginalized minority who have been persistently underrepresented in political institutions, particularly in the Indian Parliament. This section is important for those who are less informed about these issues—and I assume that most readers fall in this category. In the second section, I (...) examine the case for political representation for Muslims. This was a much debated issue in pre-independent India. It was debated with subtlety and in considerable detail in the Constituent Assembly debates on the Indian constitution. However, with the partition of the country and the formation of the separate state of Pakistan, all debate on the political representation of Muslims ceased. I examine the merits and demerits of the case for the political representation of Indian Muslims. I also attempt a brief explanation of why this issue has virtually disappeared from the public arena in India. I conclude in the section that although political representation of Muslims qua Muslims is desirable, it is still unfeasible in the prevailing situation in India. In other words, I would support the recommendation to the Indian State that political rights not to be granted to any religious community. If political theory was to remain a handmaiden of state policy, then the matter ends right here. However, since I believe that political theory must think for the long run and design just institutions and policies for the future, and since, there is, I claim, no principled objection to the political representation of Muslims, in the third and final section I briefly outline which of the several electoral mechanisms are best suited to ensure fair political representation for Muslims in the future. In my view, the principle of fair political representation for Indian Muslims is best fulfilled by a complex mechanism consisting of preferential voting in multi-member constituencies with intra-party quotas in proportion to the overall population of Muslims in the country. (shrink)

The chemist Jeremias Benjamin Richter (1762–1807) coined the term “stoichiometry” and proposed the “law of definite proportions.” He is also commonly acknowledged as having been a student of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). This paper demonstrates how Kant’s philosophy positively shaped Richter’s approach to chemistry in the _Anfangsgründe der Stöchiometrie_ (1792–1794) and outlines two ways in which Richter attempted to represent the chemical force in “pure intuition”: (1) “reductionistic forces,” in which qualitative features scale with the quantity of matter; and (2) generalized (...) “abstracted forces,” in which a plurality of dissolution- and bonding-properties are latent within the chemical in the manifold of space-time. (shrink)

Union security has long been an industrial relations controversy. While compulsory unionism supporters say it benefits the working class, right-to-work advocates denounce it as an unethical infringement of individual rights and freedom. Unfortunately, neither side has adequately addressed the shortcomings of their viewpoint, nor the broader worker concerns about effective representation beyond just "unionism". In this paper, we examine the ethical and practical problems of compulsory and voluntary unionism and propose a new resolution, compulsory proportional representation, that (...) has the advantages of: ensuring workers' freedom to associate or not associate, promoting freedom to contract, allowing free competition in representation in line with anti-trust principles, improving industrial peace and efficiency, enhancing fairness and social justice, and addressing the employer-employee power imbalance. It is superior to either voluntary unionism, which often lead to management unilateralism, or compulsory unionism, where workers are compelled to join unions against their will. (shrink)

Equal and proportional representation are two poles of a continuum of models of representation for the assembly of a federation of states. The choice of a model has repercussions on the welfare distribution in the federation. We determine, first by means of Monte Carlo simulations, what welfare distributions result after assemblies that were constituted on the basis of different models of representation have considered a large number of motions. We assess what model of representation is (...) favored by a Rawlsian maximin measure and by the utilitarian measure and present matching analytical results for the utilitarian measure for a slightly idealized case. Our results show that degressive proportionality can be justified as a compromise between maximin and utilitarian considerations. There is little surprise in this result. What is more surprising, however, is that, within certain contexts of evaluation, degressive proportionality can also be justified on strictly utilitarian grounds. (shrink)