The concept of social capital helps to explain relations within and between companies but has not crystallized yet. As such, the nature, development, and effects of such relations remain elusive. How is social capital created, how is it put to use, and how is it maintained? Can it decline, and if so, how? We argue that the concept of social capital remains a black box as the mechanisms that constitute it remain underdeveloped and that it is a black hole as (...) many empirical phenomena are attributed to its presence. We use and develop the literature on gift exchange to provide a firmer theoretical basis for the concept of social capital. (shrink)

Theory and Practice of Knowledge Transfer: Studies in School Education in the Ancient Near East and Beyond. Edited by W. S. van Egmond and W. H. van Soldt. Publications de l’Institut histo- rique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul, vol. 121. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het NabiJe Oosten, 2012. Pp. 111 + 152. €36.04.

The Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards will not of course stop humanitarian crises from happening, nor can they prevent human suffering. What they offer, however, is an opportunity for the enhancement of assistance with the aim of making a difference to the lives of people affected by disaster” Ton van Zutphen, Sphere Board Chair and John Damerell, Sphere Project Manager in the Foreword to the new edition of the Handbook. The Sphere Project is an initiative to determine and promote standards (...) by which the global community responds to the plight of people affected by disasters. What’s new in the 2011 edition of the Sphere Handbook The new edition of the Sphere Project’s Handbook updates the qualitative and quantitative indicators and guidance notes and improves the overall structure and consistency of the text The new version has: * a rewritten Humanitarian Charter * updated common standards * a stronger focus on protection * revised technical chapters. (shrink)

Do adherents of different religious traditions communicate and, if so, how? What enables them to do so? What is interreligious “communication”? These issues are ad dressed with reference to Wilfred Cantwell Smith's hermeneutical rule, and to inter alia Paul Knitter, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, David Tracy, and John Dunne. Four responses to the question as to what permits interreligious communication are criticised. According to a fifth response, on which the author elaborates, interreligious communication is not – as the objectivist (...) claims – possible because members of different religious traditions speak the very same language, or – as the relativist claims – impossible because they speak radically different languages. Adherents of different religions communicate, if at all, by means of an analogical language. This language is the product of persistent efforts to understand the religion/faith of the other as he or she understands it. Paradoxically, the language that permits inter religious communication is thus the product of such communication. Without thereby reverting to objectivism or an essentialist view of religion, the author identifies five “less unstable” similarities between religions. These and other “less un stable” similarities might assist believers in their efforts to under stand the religious other. (shrink)

"This is an important book, and no one interested in issues which touch on the free will will want to ignore it."--Ethics. In this stimulating and thought-provoking book, the author defends the thesis that free will is incompatible with determinism. He disputes the view that determinism is necessary for moral responsbility. Finding no good reason for accepting determinism, but believing moral responsiblity to be indubitable, he concludes that determinism should be rejected.

The first comprehensive presentation of the dynamical approach to cognition. It contains a representative sampling of original, current research on topics such as perception, motor control, speech and language, decision making, and development.

This paper has two parts. In the first part, I concede an error in an argument I have given for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. I go on to show how to modify my argument so as to avoid this error, and conclude that the thesis that free will and determinism are compatible continues to be—to say the least—implausible. But if free will is incompatible with determinism, we are faced with a mystery, for free will undeniably exists, and (...) it also seems to be incompatible with indeterminism. In the second part of this paper, I will defend the conclusion that the concept of agent causation is of no use to the philosopher who wants to maintain that free will and indeterminism are compatible. I conclude that free will remains a mystery---that is, that free will undeniably exists and that there is a strong and unanswered prima facie case for its impossibility. (shrink)

Though most contemporary philosophers and scientists accept a physicalist view of mind, the recent surge of interest in the problem of consciousness has put the mind /body problem back into play. The physicalists' lack of success in dispelling the air of residual mystery that surrounds the question of how consciousness might be physically explained has led to a proliferation of options. Some offer alternative formulations of physicalism, but others forgo physicalism in favour of views that are more dualistic or that (...) bring in mentalistic features at the ground- floor level of reality as in pan-proto-psychism. My aim here is to give an overview of the recent philosophic discussion to serve as a map in locating issues and options. I will not offer a comprehensive survey of the debate or mark every important variant to be found in the recent literature. I will mark the principal features of the philosophic landscape that one might use as general orientation points in navigating the terrain. I will focus in particular on three central and interrelated ideas: those of emergence, reduction, and nonreductive physicalism. The third of these, which has emerged as more or less the majority view among current philosophers of mind, combines a pluralist view about the diversity of what needs to be explained by science with an underlying metaphysical commitment to the physical as the ultimate basis of all that is real. The view has been challenged from both left and right, on one side from dualists and on the other from hard core reductive materialists. Despite their differences, those critics agree in finding nonreductive physicalism an unacceptable and perhaps even incoherent position. They agree as well in treating reducibility as the essential criterion for physicality; they differ only about whether the criterion can be met. Reductive physicalists argue that it can, and dualists deny it. (shrink)

_This is an account of his present thinking by an excellent philosopher who has been_ _among the two or three foremost defenders of the doctrine that determinism and_ _freedom are incompatible -- that logically we cannot have both. In his 1983 book,_ _An Essay on Free Will_ _, he laid out with unique clarity and force a fundamental_ _argument for this conclusion. What the argument comes to is that if determinism is_ _true, we are not free, since our actions are (...) effects of causal circumstances in the_ _remote past, and those circumstances are certainly not up to us. To that line of_ _thought, in the article below, by way of the supposition of a world of angels, he adds_ _something new. This is a fundamental difficulty with the freedom that we cannot_ _have if determinism is true. The difficulty, indeed a mystery, is one having to do with_ _the opposite of determinism -- indeterminism._. (shrink)

I raise the question of what cognitive attitude self-deception brings about. That is: what is the product of self-deception? Robert Audi and Georges Rey have argued that self-deception does not bring about belief in the usual sense, but rather “avowal” or “avowed belief.” That means a tendency to affirm verbally (both privately and publicly) that lacks normal belief-like connections to non-verbal actions. I contest their view by discussing cases in which the product of self-deception is implicated in action in a (...) way that exemplifies the motivational role of belief. Furthermore, by applying independent criteria of what it is for a mental state to be a belief, I defend the more intuitive view that being self-deceived that p entails believing that p. Beliefs (i) are the default for action relative to other cognitive attitudes (such as imagining and hypothesis) and (ii) have cognitive governance over the other cognitive attitudes. I explicate these two relations and argue that they obtain for the product of self-deception. (shrink)

The conclusions drawn by Benjamin Libet from his work with collegues on the timing of somatosensorial conscious experiences has met with a lot of praise and criticism. In this issue we find three examples of the latter. Here I attempt to place the divide between the two opponent camps in a broader perspective by analyzing the question of the relation between physical timing, neural timing, and experiential timing. The nervous system does a sophisticated job of recombining and recoding messages from (...) the sensorial surfaces and if these processes are slighted in a theory, it might become necessary to postulate weird operations, including subjective back-referral. Neuroscientifically inspired theories are of necessity still based on guesses, extrapolations, and philosophically dubious manners of speech. They often assume some neural correlate of consciousness as a part of the nervous system that transforms neural activity in reportable experiences. The majority of neuroscientists appear to assume that the NCC can compare and bind activity patterns only if they arrive simultaneously at the NCC. This leads to a search for synchrony or to theories in terms of the compensation of differences in neural delays . This is the main dimension of the Libet discussion. Examples from vision research, such as “temporal-binding-by-synchrony” and the “flash-lag” effect, are then used to illustrate these reasoning patterns in more detail. Alternatively one could assume symbolic representations of time and space that are not coded in their own dimension . Unless such tags are multiplexed with the quality message , one gets a binding problem for tags. One of the hidden aspects of the discussion between Libet and opponents appears to be the following. Is the NCC smarter than the rest of the nervous system, so that it can solve the problems of local sign and timing on its own, or are these pieces of information coded symbolically early on in the system? A supersmart NCC appears to be the assumption of Libet's camp . The wish to distribute the smartness evenly across all stages of processing in the nervous system appears to motivate the opponents. I argue that there are reasons to side with the latter group. (shrink)

Despite its uniform appearance, the cerebellar cortex is highly heterogeneous in terms of structure, genetics and physiology. Purkinje cells (PCs), the principal and sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex, can be categorized into multiple populations that differentially express molecular markers and display distinctive physiological features. Such features include action potential rate, but also their propensity for synaptic and intrinsic plasticity. However, the precise molecular and genetic factors that correlate with the differential physiological properties of PCs remain elusive. In this (...) article, we provide a detailed overview of the cellular mechanisms that regulate PC activity and plasticity. We further perform a pathway analysis to highlight how molecular characteristics of specific PC populations may influence their physiology and plasticity mechanisms. (shrink)

I raise three puzzles concerning self-deception: (i) a conceptual paradox, (ii) a dilemma about how to understand human cognitive evolution, and (iii) a tension between the fact of self-deception and Davidson’s interpretive view. I advance solutions to the first two and lay a groundwork for addressing the third. The capacity for self-deception, I argue, is a spandrel, in Gould’s and Lewontin’s sense, of other mental traits, i.e., a structural byproduct. The irony is that the mental traits of which self-deception is (...) a spandrel/byproduct are themselves rational. (shrink)

systematicity is. Until systematicity is adequately systematicity. Most contributors to these debates have clarified, we cannot know whether classical paid little or no attention to the alleged empirical.

Perceptual experience can be explained by contextualized brain dynamics. An inner loop of ongoing activity within the brain produces dynamic patterns of synchronization and de- synchronization that are necessary, but not sufficient, for visual experience. This inner loop is controlled by evolution, development, socialization, learning, task and perception- action contingencies, which constitute an outer loop. This outer loop is sufficient, but not necessary, for visual experience. Jointly, the inner and outer loop may offer sufficient and necessary conditions for the emergence (...) of visual experience. This hypothesis has methodological, empirical, theoretical, and philosophical implications. (shrink)

When the various disciplines participating in cognitive science are listed, philosophy almost always gets a guernsey. Yet, a couple of years ago at the conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Boulder (USA), there was no philosophy or philosopher with any prominence on the program. When queried on this point, the organizer (one of the "superstars" of the field) claimed it was partly an accident, but partly also due to an impression among members of the committee that philosophy is basically (...) a waste of time. Philosophy, they thought, is mostly obscure bullshit that does little to help, and much to hinder, real progress in cognitive science. (shrink)

Owing to technological advances, genomic medicine is moving from specific to broader genetic analyses and from specialised to mainstream services. Sahan et al 1 point to complex ethical cases encountered by clinical laboratory scientists in the context of genomic medicine’s expansion. The authors discuss debates on interpreting and reporting genetic results, offering extended genetic testing and differences in the perceived responsibility of clinical laboratory scientists in different settings. As demonstrated by the case examples in the article, while genomic medicine holds (...) the promise of providing clinical answers, its mainstreaming can introduce a new type of ‘odyssey’ for patients and/or relatives, such as when there are uncertain findings. The integration of genomics in healthcare at large can also impact communication decisions and perceptions of responsibility for clinical laboratory scientists. Clinical laboratory scientists might report less to non-specialists than to genetic/genomic specialists, as they feel responsible for minimising the potential of non-specialists misunderstanding, misinterpreting or miscommunicating the genetic findings to patients.1 In this way, the perceived responsibility affects patients and the type and amount of genetic information they receive. We agree with the authors that current limitations in knowledge and capabilities among non-specialist clinicians necessitate identifying effective ways to communicate outcomes and …. (shrink)

Considering Pragma-Dialectics honors the monumental contributions of one of the foremost international figures in current argumentation scholarship: Frans van Eemeren. The volume presents the research efforts of his colleagues and addresses how their work relates to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation with which van Eemeren’s name is so intimately connected. This tribute serves to highlight the varied approaches to the study of argumentation and is destined to inspire researchers to advance scholarship in the field far into the future. Replete with (...) contributions from highly-esteemed academics in argumentation study, chapters in this volume address such topics as: *Pragma-dialectic versus epistemic theories of arguing and arguments; *Pragma-dialectics and self-advocacy in physician-patient interactions; *The pragma-dialectical analysis of the ad hominem family; *Rhetoric, dialectic, and the functions of argument; and *The semantics of reasonableness. As an exceptional volume and a fitting tribute, this work will be of interest to all argumentation scholars considering the astute insights and scholarly legacy of Frans van Eemeren. (shrink)

Considering Pragma-Dialectics honors the monumental contributions of one of the foremost international figures in current argumentation scholarship: Frans van Eemeren. The volume presents the research efforts of his colleagues and addresses how their work relates to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation with which van Eemeren’s name is so intimately connected. This tribute serves to highlight the varied approaches to the study of argumentation and is destined to inspire researchers to advance scholarship in the field far into the future. Replete with (...) contributions from highly-esteemed academics in argumentation study, chapters in this volume address such topics as: *Pragma-dialectic versus epistemic theories of arguing and arguments; *Pragma-dialectics and self-advocacy in physician-patient interactions; *The pragma-dialectical analysis of the ad hominem family; *Rhetoric, dialectic, and the functions of argument; and *The semantics of reasonableness. As an exceptional volume and a fitting tribute, this work will be of interest to all argumentation scholars considering the astute insights and scholarly legacy of Frans van Eemeren. (shrink)

‘Vandaag ga je toch niet hardlopen, met zo'n rotweer?’ Vraag van een collega aan een andere collega. ‘Natuurlijk wel,’ klonk het antwoord. ‘Net met dit regenweer vind ik het heerlijk om er eens tegenaan te gaan.’ Dat antwoord beviel me wel. Vorige winter heb ik het nog zo vaak mogen meemaken tijdens het fietsen. Een geselende wind, ijskoude regendruppels, opspattende modder: bij het begin van een trainingsrit roept dat vraagtekens op naar de zin van dit gedoe. Dat duurt hooguit een (...) uur. Dan worden je twijfels overstemd door wat je lichaam je zeer nadrukkelijk influistert: dit is genieten. Van binnen in je lijf lijken allerlei explosieve stofjes naar buiten te willen. Lijden als springstof. Een klein beetje doodgaan om je springlevend te voelen. Duursporters kennen die wijsheid van het lichaam. (shrink)

Verhack's book De mens en zijn onrust. Over het raadsel van de beweging seeks to develop a metaphysics after the 'end of metaphysics'. Such a metaphysics not only has to take into account Nietzsche's and Heidegger's radical critiques of metaphysics. It also has to avoid the soteriological strategies of traditional metaphysics by searching for a transcendent meaning, to which our finite and resdess human existence is pointing from the inside. Yet in which direction does our human existence transcend itself? By (...) comparing Verhack's answer to this question with Thomas Aquinas' discussion of the desiderium naturale Dei, it is argued that Verhack's post-metaphysical metaphysics is based on a spiritualistic outlook on life. From this line of argument it is shown that this metaphysics threatens to perpetrate the verysame soteriological strategies it tried to avoid, and to pass over the meaning and bearing of 'the end of metaphysics'. (shrink)

(1996). Korte Notities Over Het Godsbegrip Bij Grieken En Romeinen En De Vergoddelijking Van Jezus in Het Nieuwe Testament. Bijdragen: Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 149-157.

It has been reported by some studies that the desire to be involved in decisions concerning one’s healthcare especially with regard to obtaining informed consent is related to educational status. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to assess the influence of educational status on attitude towards informed consent practice in three south-eastern Nigerian communities.

The purpose of the current study was to apply and evaluate a procedure to elicit expert judgments about correlations, and to update this information with empirical data. The result is a face-to-face group elicitation procedure with as its central element a trial roulette question that elicits experts' judgments expressed as distributions. During the elicitation procedure, a concordance probability question was used to provide feedback to the experts on their judgments. We evaluated the elicitation procedure in terms of validity and reliability (...) by means of an application with a small sample of experts. Validity means that the elicited distributions accurately represent the experts' judgments. Reliability concerns the consistency of the elicited judgments over time. Four behavioral scientists provided their judgments with respect to the correlation between cognitive potential and academic performance for two separate populations enrolled at a specific school in the Netherlands that provides special education to youth with severe behavioral problems: youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and youth with diagnoses other than ASD. Measures of face-validity, feasibility, convergent validity, coherence, and intra-rater reliability showed promising results. Furthermore, the current study illustrates the use of the elicitation procedure and elicited distributions in a social science application. The elicited distributions were used as a prior for the correlation, and updated with data for both populations collected at the school of interest. The current study shows that the newly developed elicitation procedure combining the trial roulette method with the elicitation of correlations is a promising tool, and that the results of the procedure are useful as prior information in a Bayesian analysis. (shrink)

Most foundationalists allow that relations of coherence among antecedently justified beliefs can enhance their overall level of justification or warrant. In light of this, some coherentists ask the following question: if coherence can elevate the epistemic status of a set of beliefs, what prevents it from generating warrant entirely on its own? Why do we need the foundationalist's basic beliefs? I address that question here, drawing lessons from an instructive series of attempts to reconstruct within the probability calculus the classical (...) problem of independent witnesses who corroborate each other's testimony. Starred section headings indicate sections omitted here, but available on the author's USC website. (shrink)

In this honorific volume, his protigi F. LeRon Shults has gathered a chorus of excellent voices in van Huyssteen's main areas of philosophy, science, and ...