This article examines the role of social context in corporate social responsibility research. The authors direct attention to three major perspectives in organization studies—institutional, cultural, and cognitive—that bear on the social context and explore how these perspectives are used in CSR research. These perspectives are framed as representative of the levels at which CSR may be analyzed, and each perspective is associated with a certain level of social context: the institutional perspective relates to the external social context, the cultural perspective (...) relates to the organizational level, and the cognitive perspective relates to the individual level. The authors demonstrate how the CSR field can benefit by combining or integrating multiple perspectives that bear on the social context, and by engaging in more explicit multilevel analysis of the social context within which CSR practicesunfold. Three promising avenues for future CSR research are outlined: social ecology, cross-sector social partnerships, and strategy-as-practice. The authors argue that these avenues transcend levels and perspectives and offer the prospect of more context-sensitive CSR research. (shrink)

Stewart Shapiro's ambition in Vagueness in Context is to develop a comprehensive account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary according to their context: a person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall (even short) with respect to professional basketball players. The key feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions of vague terms (...) also vary in the course of conversations and that, in some cases, a competent speaker can go either way without sinning against the meaning of the words or the non-linguistic facts. As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak; but vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other. (shrink)

This chapter, which is concerned with the phenomenology of perception, especially the role of content and context in the intentionality of perception, tries to provide an account of the structure of perceptual experience and its intentional relation to its objects. In particular, it presents an analysis of consciousness and intentionality in perception. Perceptual experience is sensuous and paradigmatically intentional. The intentional character of a visual experience of an object is different to the successful intentional relation between the experience and the (...) object. The twin-tomatoes experiment reveals that content alone does not settle which tomato is the correct object of perception. Perception gives a direct awareness of an object in the sense that the external object is itself the object of perception, and the object is actually present to the subject and experienced as actually present in the context of perception. (shrink)

The genetic code is a set of instructions that determine how the information in our genetic material is translated into amino acids. In general, it is universal for all organisms, from viruses and bacteria to humans. However, in the last few decades, exceptions to this rule have been identified both in pro‐ and eukaryotes. In this review, we discuss the 16 described alternative eukaryotic nuclear genetic codes and observe theories of their appearance in evolution. We consider possible molecular mechanisms that (...) allow codon reassignment. Most reassignments in nuclear genetic codes are observed for stop codons. Moreover, in several organisms, stop codons can simultaneously encode amino acids and serve as termination signals. In this case, the meaning of the codon is determined by the additional factors besides the triplets. A comprehensive review of various non‐standard coding events in the nuclear genomes provides a new insight into the translation mechanism in eukaryotes. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of a number of research studies conducted within the field of parenthood and reproduction in a variety of Western cultures, including Slovakia and the countries of Eastern Europe. The main aim of this overview is to analyse two key indicators on Second Demographic Transition: delaying marriage and parenthood until later on in life and the growth in cohabitation as an alternative living arrangement and childbearing as part of that. The author points out that the majority (...) of parents opt to have a first child and this brings normative and emotional fulfilment. Most young people do not reject this, but simply postpone it until later on in life. The hypothesis is postulated that the decision on whether to have further children is to a larger extent rationally based and is more dependent on weighing up the incentives available from the state. The article emphasises, on the basis of a comparison of the results of various empirical studies, that the same patterns of reproductive behaviour can produce markedly different consequences and outcomes within various subgroups of the population. It is recommended that current research into parenthood and reproduction should be extended so that studies are conducted into similar groups within subpopulations across different countries—in contrast to the current prevailing research that is focused on single countries or in comparing different countries as a whole. It is also recommended that the scope of the research be extended to compare a number of different subpopulations with similar value and life-style configurations as opposed to the majority of the current narrowly-focused approaches that concentrate on examining the differences in reproductive behaviour patterns of a section of the population selected on the basis of education. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

Cultural Context of Multilevel Collective Social Actions: Framing, Reflection, Resonance and the Impact of Global and Local Anti-Poverty Movements In political science as well as in other social sciences much attention has been paid during recent years to the rapid growth of national and transnational activist networks and their increasing impact on domestic and world politics. Together with the proliferation of literature on the topic, concepts of collective action frames, framing processes, mobilizing ideas and meanings and their cultural resonance have (...) gained considerable currency. However, less has been written about the possibilities of and the constraints on the circulation of collective action frames or about the connection between the cultural adaptation of frames and the results of actual collective struggles. The paper explores this understudied issue both theoretically and empirically. After identifying possible links between collective action framing processes and the representational practices of particular cultures based on a review of existing theoretical approaches, the functional consequences are demonstrated by the example of the Global Call for Action against Poverty international campaign and the Czech national variant. (shrink)

During a clinical ethics fellow’s first week of independent supervised service, two unhoused patients on the same floor were resisting the medical team’s recommendations to discharge. In the team’s view, both were medically stable and no longer required hospitalization in an acute setting. The medical team suspected malingering for both. The social worker and case manager had employed their usual means of gentle persuasion and eliminating psychosocial barriers to no avail. Rather than call the police, the attending physician, social worker, (...) and case manager decided to call ethics. These cases lead the fledgling fellow to consider the appropriate role for ethicists in difficult discharge cases. The article analyzes each case, evaluates their similarities and differences in the context of suspected malingering, and comments on ethical issues surrounding cases of suspected malingering. Finally, I reflect on the value and importance of developing and maintaining epistemic and professional independence. (shrink)

For the purposes of this enquiry—an account of what Equiano’sa modernity was, and which particular historical ‘demarcations’ of modernity provided for an enslaved man to achieve freedom through great fortune and great cunning, I will assume a definition of ‘modernity’ as defined by Kathleen Wilson: “. . . not one moment or age, but a set of relations that are constantly being made and unmade, contested and reconfigured, that nonetheless produce among their contemporaneous witnesses the conviction of historical difference.” By (...) adopting this definition, modernity in the times of Equiano refers to, “the cultural practices and representations that produced certain kinds of subjects and objects of knowledge, upheld widely-shared notions of space and time, or facilitated the formation of cultural identities that resulted in pluralities and contradictions as well as unities and coherences,” which provided for a slave to acquire freedom amidst eighteenth-century imperialism, slave-trade, and emerging abolitionist sentiments within bourgeois culture. (shrink)

In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over mental representation, (...) which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought--the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world--and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines--cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory--join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines. (shrink)

In this paper I want to hold that contextualism – the position according to which wide context, i.e., the concrete situation of discourse, may well have the semantic role of assigning truth-conditions to sentences – may well accommodate (along with some nowadays established theses about the semantics of proper names) three data about fiction, namely, the facts that as far as discourse involving fiction is concerned, i) sentences about nothing are meaningful ii) they may be true in fiction iii) yet (...) they may also be true in reality. Moreover, I also want to hold that such a contextualist accommodation does not depend on endorsing a realist stance about fictional entities, although such a stance gives the best truth-conditional explanation for such data, in particular iii). (shrink)

According to a view widely held by epistemic contextualists, the truth conditions of a knowledge claim depend on features of the context such as the presuppositions, interests and purposes of the conversational participants. Against this view, I defend an intentionalist account, according to which the truth conditions of a knowledge attribution are determined by the speaker’s intention. I show that an intentionalist version of contextualism has several advantages over its more widely accepted rival account.

It is widely agreed that because animals feel pain we should not make them suffer gratuitously. Some ethical theories go even further: because of the capacities that they possess, animals have the right not to be harmed or killed. These views concern what not to do to animals, but we also face questions about when we should, and should not, assist animals that are hungry or distressed. Should we feed a starving stray kitten? And if so, does this commit us, (...) if we are to be consistent, to feeding wild animals during a hard winter? In this controversial book, Clare Palmer advances a theory that claims, with respect to assisting animals, that what is owed to one is not necessarily owed to all, even if animals share similar psychological capacities. Context, history, and relation can be critical ethical factors. If animals live independently in the wild, their fate is not any of our moral business. Yet if humans create dependent animals, or destroy their habitats, we may have a responsibility to assist them. Such arguments are familiar in human cases-we think that parents have special obligations to their children, for example, or that some groups owe reparations to others. Palmer develops such relational concerns in the context of wild animals, domesticated animals, and urban scavengers, arguing that different contexts can create different moral relationships. (shrink)

Does context influence our appreciation of beauty? To answer this question, two experiments were conducted to determine the effect of contextual aesthetics on the recognition of moral behavior. Experiment 1 demonstrated that individuals in a high-aesthetic context had a quicker recognition time for moral behavior than those in a low-aesthetic context. In a low-aesthetic context, individuals recognize immoral behavior more quickly than in a high aesthetic context. Individuals showed greater recognition rates for moral behavior in a high aesthetic context and (...) higher recognition for immoral behaviors in a low aesthetic context for behavior with unclear information. Experiment 2 revealed that individual fixation counts were smaller under the conditions of high aesthetic context and moral behavior than under the conditions of low aesthetic context and moral behavior, indicating a correlation between low aesthetic context and immoral behavior. This study shows that high aesthetic context facilitates the recognition of moral behavior, which has implications for moral education. (shrink)

This paper examines distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative 'yes/no' questions (NPQs), such as 'Isn’t Jane coming too?'. Unlike with other 'yes/no' questions, using an NPQ '∼p?' invariably conveys a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using the negative question '∼p?' invariably expresses that the speaker previously expected the positive answer p to be correct. A prominent approach—what I call the context-management approach, developed most extensively by Romero (...) and Han (2004)—attempts to capture speaker expectation biases by treating NPQs fundamentally as epistemic questions about the proper discourse status of a proposition. I raise challenges for existing context-managing accounts to provide more adequate formalizations of the posited context-managing content, its implementation in the compositional semantics and discourse dynamics, and its role in generating the observed biases. New data regarding discourse differences between NPQs and associated epistemic modal questions are introduced. I argue that we can capture the roles of NPQs in expressing speakers’ states of mind and managing the discourse common ground without positing special context-managing operators or treating NPQs as questions directly about the context. I suggest that we treat the operator introduced with preposed negation as having an ordinary semantics of epistemic necessity, though lexically associated with a general kind of endorsing use observed with modal expressions. The expressive and context-managing roles of NPQs are explained in terms of a general kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. The distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties observed with NPQs are derived from the proposed semantics and a general principle of Discourse Relevance. (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker explores the contexts in which speech takes place, the ways we represent them, and the roles they play in explaining the interpretation and dynamics of speech. His central thesis is the autonomy of pragmatics: the independence of theory about structure and function of discourse from theory about mechanisms serving those functions.

The issue of context arises in assorted areas of Artificial Intelligence. Although its importance is realized by various researchers, there is not much work towards a useful formalization. In this paper, we will present a preliminary model (based on Situation Theory) and give examples to show the use of context in various fields, and the advantages gained by the acceptance of our proposal.

In the semantic literature, there is a class of examples involving anaphora in intensional contexts, i.e. under the scope of modal operators or propositional attitude predicates, which display anaphoric relations that appear at first glance to violate otherwise well-supported generalizations about operator scope and anaphoric potential. In Section 1,I will illustrate this phenomenon, which, for reasons that should become clear below, I call modal subordination; I will develop a general schema for its identification, and show how it poses problems for (...) most theories of scope and anaphoric relations. In Section 2, I will review the main approaches which have been considered in attempting to account for modal subordination and argue that only an approach involving accommodation can account for the full range of examples. The notion of accommodation is due to Lewis, who defines it as follows: If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then - ceteris paribus and within certain limits - presupposition P comes into existence at t.(Lewis 1979: 340) The interesting question, of course, is what the limits on accommodation might be. I believe that the proper account of modal subordination has something to say about this. I will argue this briefly in section 3, where I draw some conclusions and also sketch some ... (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that the extensions of evaluative terms and concepts aren’t unified under non-evaluative similarity relations and that this “shapelessness thesis” (ST) has significant metaethical implications regarding non-cognitivism, ethical naturalism, moral particularism, thick concepts and more. ST is typically offered as an explanation of why evaluative classifications appear to “outrun” classifications specifiable in independently intelligible non-evaluative terms. This paper argues that both ST and the outrunning point used to motivate it can be explained on the basis of more general (...) factors that have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. If so, there is no reason to expect ST to carry the sorts of metaethical implications that get attributed to it. I also show that my main argument is robust across certain complications that are raised by the context-sensitivity of many evaluative terms but have so far been ignored in discussions of ST and related matters. (shrink)

Stefano Predelli comes to the defense of the traditional "formal" approach to natural-language semantics, arguing that it has been misrepresented not only by its critics, but also by its foremost defenders. In Contexts he offers a fundamental reappraisal, with particular attention to the treatment of indexicality and other forms of contextual dependence which have been the focus of much recent controversy. In the process, he presents original approaches to a number of important semantic issues, including the relationship between validity and (...) indexicality, the limits of token-reflexive systems, the significance of contextualist arguments, and the interpretation of attitude reports. Contexts will make invigorating reading for all philosophers of language and many linguists. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

We argue that prediction success maximization is a basic objective of cognition and cortex, that it is compatible with but distinct from prediction error minimization, that neither objective requires subtractive coding, that there is clear neurobiological evidence for the amplification of predicted signals, and that we are unconvinced by evidence proposed in support of subtractive coding. We outline recent discoveries showing that pyramidal cells on which our cognitive capabilities depend usually transmit information about input to their basal dendrites and amplify (...) that transmission when input to their distal apical dendrites provides a context that agrees with the feedforward basal input in that both are depolarizing, i.e., both are excitatory rather than inhibitory. Though these intracellular discoveries require a level of technical expertise that is beyond the current abilities of most neuroscience labs, they are not controversial and acclaimed as groundbreaking. We note that this cellular cooperative context-sensitivity greatly enhances the cognitive capabilities of the mammalian neocortex, and that much remains to be discovered concerning its evolution, development, and pathology. (shrink)

In this paper, we are interested in the effects of institutional context on public attitudes towards climate policies, where institutions are defined as the conventions, norms and formally sanctioned rules of any given society. Building on a 2014 survey experiment, we conducted thirty qualitative interviews with car-owners in Oslo, Norway, to investigate the ways in which institutional context and political-value orientation affect public attitudes towards emissions policies. One context (presented as a text treatment) highlighted individual rationality, emphasising the ways in (...) which local pollution impacts the individual citizen; the other highlighted social rationality, emphasising the wider significance of carbon emissions and global responsibility for climate change. We analysed the effects of these contexts on attitudes, finding that institutional context influenced individuals' perspectives as well as their attitudes towards climate policies. Groups with different value orientations differed in terms of their evaluations but not their interpretations of these contexts. (shrink)

“Contextual” vocabulary acquisition is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from textual clues and prior knowledge, including language knowledge and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. But what is “context”? Is it just the surrounding text? Does it include the reader’s background knowledge? I argue that the appropriate context for contextual vocabulary acquisition is the reader’s “internalization” of the (...) text “integrated” into the reader’s “prior” knowledge via belief revision. (shrink)

In the last two decades, commercial crop production has boomed to meet global food and biofuel demands as well as produce industrial commodities, while also being promoted as an effective approach for poverty alleviation in the Global South. Despite possible new economic opportunities, scholars are concerned that crop booms could exacerbate vulnerability in farmer livelihoods. However, it is little known how local resilience can be built in the context of crop booms. Through mixed methods of combination of quantitative and qualitative (...) approaches, this research conducted a multidimensional assessment of livelihood resilience by focusing on absorptive, adaptive and anticipatory capacities of local people in Southwest China. Unlike existing literature, this research found that farmers who adopted a hybrid livelihood strategy that was partially involved in crop booms under agriculture modernization while simultaneously maintaining some degree of traditional agricultural practices had a higher level of livelihood resilience. In contrast, those who were fully involved and put all of their capital into cash crop planting as well as those who did not participate in cash crop production and completely avoided crop booms both showed a relatively low level of livelihood resilience. The paper argues that crop booms might provide more possibilities for farmers to diversify their agricultural systems and livelihood strategies to strengthen livelihood resilience when they have better access to land and markets. (shrink)

In this chapter I hope to persuade you that defective contexts are more ubiquitous than we typically assume. In doing, so I will draw attention to a number of pressing social and theoretical issues which arise once we start to consider defective contexts. I will proceed by pointing to a number of ways in which defective contexts can emerge without self-correcting in the manner envisioned by Stalnaker. First I will consider situations in which some, but not all interlocutors recognise that (...) the context is defective. I will then consider cases of opaquely defective contexts, and the question of what it is for a context to be “close enough” to being non-defective. (shrink)

In this work I intend to explore the textual and conceptual roots of the moral view in the Early Modern Rationalism of Cartesian spectrum as detected by Elisabeth of Bohemia. To this intent, I will drive my analysis, first, to the remark Descartes adds to his own provisional morality of the Discourse in the Letter of August 4th, 1645 to Elisabeth. Second, I will approach the two aspects of her reply to Descartes, both in her Letter of September 13th 1645, (...) which I call a) the contextual aspect – with which she excludes the hypotheses of an infinite science at the service of assessing the good and b) the self-related aspect, with which the philosopher of Bohemia address the moral objectiveness as an intrinsic practical value, obtained by the passions that may lead to reasonable actions. The upshot is a practical and affective moral view, in which the normative trait of some passions of the soul can be taken as the explanation of an intentional infrastructure of the mind, without, however, a theory of ideas as such playing an explicit role. Instead of a representational endeavor, Elisabeth of Bohemia claims a kind of self-awareness from the discovery of a passionate function as an expression of the adequate measure between happiness and morality of actions. That kind of awareness, I shall demonstrate, is what objectiveness consists in. (shrink)

Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express many different meanings on occasion of use, and yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. How do we do so? What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover the meaning so effortlessly? -/- This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine the interpretation (...) of context-sensitive items. Contrary to the dominant tradition, which maintains that the meaning of context-sensitive language is underspecified by grammar and that interpretation relies on non-linguistic cues and speakers' intentions, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, rules of language that have largely been missed and the effects of which have been mistaken for extra-linguistic effects of an utterance situation on meaning. The linguistic account of context developed here sheds new light on the nature of linguistic content and the interaction between content and context. At the same time, it provides a novel model of context that should constrain and help evaluate debates across many subfields of philosophy where appeal to context has been common, often leading to surprising conclusions such as epistemology, ethics, value theory, metaphysics, metaethics, and logic. (shrink)

Las trayectorias del arte caribeño, luego de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, experimentan profundas transforaciones en sus prácticas creativas y modos de com-prensión cultural. Las complejas realidades sociales y políticas en las islas del Caribe hispano condujeron a un punto de giro en los procesos regionales, una transformación del campo del arte y replanteamientos de los discursos periféricos desde las manifestaciones, los temas de interés y el rol del artista en la sociedad. La fotografía, y especialmente aquella procedente de espacios periféricos (...) en las lógicas internacionales del arte, aportaron los iconos más contestatarios del momento. Los símbolos culturales de una nueva voz, que responde a un pensamiento emancipatorio y descolonizador, se expresan en la construcción de un discurso visual de paradigmas éticos y libertarios. Los lenguajes más renovadores de la época apelan a una base fotográfica de trasfondo por la relación entre la inmediatez y la pregnancia de la imagen, o la inherente reproductibilidad que propicia una función comunicativa más efectiva. (shrink)

Purpose. The main purpose of the article is the analysis of the phenomenon and manifestations of the somatic transformations in the context of anthropo-technological evolution at the beginning of the XXI century. Theoretical basis. The author determines the understanding of the concept "somatic transformations" in the frames of anthropotechnogynesis is possible only on the base of integrative approach and combination of post-non-classical scientific paradigm methodology, theory of the technological development, ideas of trans-humanism, informative society concepts, and net technologies influence on (...) the identity of the human being with robots in the sphere of bioethics and nanoethics, the ethics of new technologies and legal documents which are regulating the processes of technotransformation of the human being. Originality. The author has proved on the example of analysis of the somatic transformations own psychosomatics as he solves some important global in the context of anthropotechnogynesis that a person with help of technological enlargement of and branch problems, so he is trapped of alienation in the very crucial stage, loses the identity and crashes the corporeality in his self. Conclusions. As evidenced by the given analysis, at the modern stage the anthropotechnogynesis is followed by the large-scale quantitative and qualitative somatic transformations based on NBIC-convergence, as a result, a new anthropological subspecies – Homo technologicus appears. All these transformations are a regular stage of evolution, which confirms the thesis of the essential and functional connection of technology with the human body, which are in a relationship of "mutual provocation". In the base of the paradigmatic ontological and anthropological shift which has been on the modern stage, lies the idea of continuity of anthropotechnological co-evolution of the human body and its environment which projects itself in psychosomatic human structure, making a transformation program for better adaptation in technonanobeing. The convergence of human life and techno-existence is a platform for somatic transformations. They are divided into two main groups: intra-structural, substantial, related to techno-modification of the human body directly through biotechnology and genetic engineering, cyborgization, xenotransplantation, Hi-Hume connection with Hi-Tech and others, and external-contextual, when under the influence of pancommunication and hybridization the environment is increasingly mentalized and somatized, and modern technologies are gradually transformed into the social body of man. (shrink)

With mention of Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning, and drawing on Mailinowski, for an opening example, Dewey argues for the importance of the relationship of interpretation and meaning, to context and and situation of usage or utterance. In this article, Dewey expounds, among other themes, on the the prospect of interpretation of a radically alien language and what this prospect tells us about linguistic meaning.

In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of what (...) John Perry has called`unarticulated constituents''. I conclude by drawingsome consequences of my arguments for appeals tocontext-dependence in the resolution of problems inepistemology and philosophical logic. (shrink)

In answering normative questions, researchers sometimes appeal to the concept of basic needs. Their guiding idea is that our first priority should be to ensure that everybody is able to meet these needs—to have enough in terms of food, water, shelter, and so on. This article provides an opinionated overview of basic needs in normative contexts. Any basic needs theory must answer three questions: (1) What are basic needs? (2) To what extent do basic needs generate reasons for action and (...) how are these reasons to be understood? (3) How are basic needs and their satisfaction to be measured? I address these questions in turn. Then I also briefly discuss the theoretical potential of appealing to basic needs in normative contexts. It turns out that future research in this area could benefit from a higher degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological reflection, and that, generally speaking, basic needs theories are more promising than they have often been claimed to be. (shrink)

Drawing on case studies from around the world - including Iran, Guatemala, USA and Mexico - this collection documents how transnational human rights discourses and legal institutions are materialised, imposed, resisted and transformed in a variety of contexts.