An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

Corporate reputation is decisive for stakeholders’ supporting or repelling behavior and, therefore, one of firms’ most valuable intangible resources. Drawing on signaling theory, this paper focuses on the usefulness of voluntarily provided corporate reputation disclosures (CRDs) and examines their impact on stakeholders’ attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Our experimental vignette studies reveal that CRDs reduce stakeholders’ information asymmetries, which positively affects perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation as well as stakeholders’ purchase, investment, and employment intentions. The relationships between CRDs and stakeholders’ (...) behavioral intentions are sequentially mediated by changes in the perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation. This implies that stakeholders use the signals transmitted by CRDs to adjust their perceptions of a firm’s organizational performance and corporate reputation, which ultimately induces their behavioral outcomes. Overall, our empirical results show the usefulness of CRDs for firms in effectively developing stakeholder relationships and, thereby, contributing to assure their going concern. For stakeholders, CRDs improve efficiency in evaluating a firm’s future development. (shrink)

We examine significant parallels between Surrealist art theory and Vico’s understanding of primitive metaphor, centering on a 1933 article on Vico by the Czech Surrealist Zdenko Reich, who recognized that Vico’s understanding of primitive thought shared notable similarities with the Surrealists’ intent to effect an epistemological revolution by re-establishing poetic thought as the central mode of human understanding. The Surrealists sought to undermine the rationalist assumptions of Western philosophy and revive the “poetic ideas of the first men” through the use (...) of disjunctive juxtaposition, a technique Reich identified with Vichian primitive metaphor. Also like Vico, Reich and the Surrealists stressed the concrete and sensory foundations of thought as revealed in language, and saw the human body as the primary mediating vehicle of poetic thought. In this regard the Surrealists can be seen as effecting a complete embrace of Vico’s concept of metaphor in their attempt to re-organize reality on poetic terms. (shrink)