In this paper we extend an argument originally developed in Hülsmann to analyze changes to the structure of production that occur when the demand for money changes. In particular, we show that Hülsmann’s argument, which contrasted such changes under commodity and fiat systems, applies as well to the case of 100% reserve systems contrasted with fractional reserve free banking systems . Specifically, we argue that under a 100% reserve system, the structure of production will change in (...) response to a change in demand for money, and that it will not under FR/FB. In fact, such changes are beneficial. Since one of the central arguments in defense of FR/FB is precisely the fact that it avoids such changes to the structure of production , we conclude that this argument amounts to comparing different mechanisms for attaining different equilibrium states, and hence is invalid as a defense of that mechanism as such. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of argumentation in direct-to-consumer health product ads in Newsweek that brings out special features of the arguments used in the ads, including practical reasoning, chained arguments, enthymemes, and prolepsis. A way to help overcome deficiencies in techniques of tailored health communication in consumer health informatics is shown by using argumentation schemes, argument visualisation tools, and dialogue models to frame these persuasive communication messages. The evidence collected is shown to be useful to allow the health informatics (...) communicator and the person to whom message was directed to interact in a dialogue format where arguments can be put forward by both parties in a way that responds to the previous arguments and questions of the other party. (shrink)

From the arguments I have presented, I hope it is clear that the distinction between basic and applied research is tenuous. Certain areas of research and methods may be favoured over others because of intrinsic biases, which are predictive of the type of application possible. Believing in the neutrality of pure knowledge is like wearing blinders: scientists need not be too concerned about the way in which the knowledge they generate is used. In my own case, this belief led to (...) my participation in a system of agriculture to which I do not subscribe. Scientists should be willing to take responsibility for how they function in the system as a whole. Given the social structure of science, it is difficult for basic researchers to see their connections with the larger issues, much less to control them. Perhaps new ways of constructing knowledge-generating societies will be necessary in order to encourage individual responsibility. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is to reflect on the intellectual origin of the close relationship between Austrian economics and libertarian philosophy. It suggests that the relationship in question is grounded in the fact that personal liberty and individual initiative, in addition to being significant moral values, are also crucial reservoirs of organizational efficiency and developmental drive. This implies that libertarian values can be disseminated, promoted, and implemented particularly effectively as a result of utilizing theoretical insights of the Austrian (...) school, which is singularly committed to explaining the efficiency-enhancing features of the unhampered market process and entrepreneurial rivalry. In this connection, special attention is devoted to the liberty-promoting potential of Austrian contributions to the fields of capital, entrepreneurship, and the firm. (shrink)

One Road One Belt has made a drastic change not only to the lives of people but also to their minds and future prospective. This initiative has connected not only countries but has consolidated trading patterns. It has not only impacted physical trade but has also boosted the e-commerce of China. Therefore, this study has tried to find the major patterns of trading across the globe and digital commerce considering the factors of production. China, being the cheapest country for (...) manufacturing, has excelled in the e-commerce as well. The targeted population for this study was contractors, marketers, logistic service providers, and engineers. The sample size in this study was 329. Data collection was done through a survey developed on the Likert scale. The software used for the data analysis was Smart-PLS for structural equation modeling. Findings of the study show that factors of production and international trade have an impact on e-commerce. Moreover, the foreign policy and international relations have also been found to have a significant role in e-commerce. (shrink)

In the first part of my paper, we will journey through the general structure of the first volume of Ideas, from which we will be able to deduce the position of Volume II. After carrying out a general analysis of the noesis/noema correlation structure in Section III and having provided, in Section IV, the basics of a phenomenology of reason, the second volume of Ideas should study the general fields in which the objects of transcendental experience appear: the (...) world, the animal being, and the spiritual or cultural being. The third, unwritten volume should have been devoted to the study of the superior products of culture, and science. Thus, the second part of this paper will show the place of Ideas’ second volume. The third part, the decisive one, will inquire into the position of the world and the place of the body and culture. Specifically, it will ask whether the experience of the body is understood to be an objective genitive or whether it is also understood, necessarily, as a subjective genitive. The same question will be asked about culture. An understanding of one as objective or subjective genitive radically alters the meaning of the pure ego. (shrink)

History educators find themselves in the peculiar situation of wishing to introduce students to the history discipline while lacking a clear conception of the features intrinsic to historical inquiry across its various specialisations and subject matters. In affirming that no one methodological charter hangs in the corridors of academic history departments, we fail to provide an adequate justification for an education in history. The doctrine that history is an exercise in disciplined knowledge, a specific way of knowing, is weakened by (...) disciplinary disquietude and dissimilitude. Three features impress themselves upon all who inquire into the past. In the learning and teaching of history, these three features assume a distinct structural shape. First, colligation consists in grouping the events and concepts to be studied according to their shared purposes. Second, historical distance, intimately tied up with tradition and collective memory, provides the means for identifying a past separate from the present to be studied in its own right. Third, reconstruction describes the process of supplying individual content to the general categories illuminated by the earlier stages. To work knowingly in this structure of historical inquiry offers no solutions to the problems of historical thinking, it is to work productively within these problems. (shrink)

The paper uses the example of the failure of bankers and financial managers to understand the risks of dealing in structured financial products, before the financial collapse, to investigate how people respond to crises. It focuses on whether crises cause people to challenge their habitual frames by the application of moral imagination. It is proposed that the structure of financial products and their markets triggered the use of heuristics that contributed to the underestimation of risks. It is further proposed (...) that such framing heuristics are highly specialised to specific contexts and are part of a wider set of heuristics that people carry in their cognitive ‘adaptive toolboxes’. Consequently, it is argued, when a crisis occurs, the heuristics are not challenged, but are simply put away, and other more appropriate heuristics are put to use until a sense of normality returns, and the use of the old heuristics is resumed. (shrink)

The paper uses the example of the failure of bankers and financial managers to understand the risks of dealing in structured financial products, before the financial collapse, to investigate how people respond to crises. It focuses on whether crises cause people to challenge their habitual frames by the application of moral imagination. It is proposed that the structure of financial products and their markets triggered the use of heuristics that contributed to the underestimation of risks. It is further proposed (...) that such framing heuristics are highly specialised to specific contexts and are part of a wider set of heuristics that people carry in their cognitive ‘adaptive toolboxes’. Consequently, it is argued, when a crisis occurs, the heuristics are not challenged, but are simply put away, and other more appropriate heuristics are put to use until a sense of normality returns, and the use of the old heuristics is resumed. (shrink)

: This paper seeks to contribute to the development of a sociological understanding of scientific change. It first presents a conceptual framework for defining and understanding the conditions that give rise to episodes of cumulative change (both as the selective reconstruction of events and as the patterned structuring of innovations over time and across different settings). It argues that one of the most powerful structuring mechanisms is the existence of standardized research technologies. Then, the development of electroencephalography (EEG) is presented (...) as an illustrative case study. The EEG supported a dramatic episode of development in brain science, and did so primarily through technological standardization and reliability. The case shows how standard and manipulable technologies provide a framework for orderly change both in retrospective accounts and in specific historical periods of scientific practice. (shrink)

This paper studies the structure of semisimple rings using techniques of reverse mathematics, where a ring is left semisimple if the left regular module is a finite direct sum of simple submodules. The structure theorem of left semisimple rings, also called Wedderburn-Artin Theorem, is a famous theorem in noncommutative algebra, says that a ring is left semisimple if and only if it is isomorphic to a finite direct product of matrix rings over division rings. We provide a proof (...) for the theorem in $$\mathrm RCA_{0}$$, showing the structure theorem for computable semisimple rings. The decomposition of semisimple rings as finite direct products of matrix rings over division rings is unique. Based on an effective proof of the Jordan-Hölder Theorem for modules with composition series, we also provide an effective proof for the uniqueness of the matrix decomposition of semisimple rings in $$\mathrm RCA_{0}$$. (shrink)

Theories of language production propose that utterances are constructed by a mechanism that separates linguistic content from linguistic structure, Linguistic content is retrieved from the mental lexicon, and is then inserted into slots in linguistic structures or frames. Support for this kind of model at the phonological level comes from patterns of phonological speech errors. W present an alternative account of these patterns using a connectionist or parallel distributed proceesing (PDP) model that learns to produce sequences of phonological (...) features. The model's errors exhibit some of the properties of human speech errors, specifically, properties that have been attributed to the action of phonological rules, frames, or other structural generalizations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how systematic Charles Taylor’s philosophy is. It rejects two opposite readings: one claiming that Taylor’s thought is too diverse to have real unity; the other, that it is the product of a “monomaniac” (Taylor’s own word). I claim that his thought has a very distinct structure, comprising two levels. On the first, “meta-hermeneutic” level, Taylor defends a thesis about hermeneutics (namely, that it cannot be dispensed with): this unifies his anthropology, epistemology, (...) moral philosophy, philosophy of language and political philosophy. On the second, “hermeneutic” level, Taylor builds an impressive historic construal of modern identity and its dilemmas. More importantly, while these two levels are irreducibly distinct, they relate to each other in interesting ways, giving Taylor’s philosophy its systematicity. I finally confront this view with other readings, and argue that it is the best way to understand Taylor’s work. (shrink)

This article seeks to develop the Marxist conception of social structure by incorporating developments within critical realist philosophy. It rejects forms of economic determinism such as the base-superstructure model and those reconstructions—like Cohen’s—that attribute primacy to productive forces in explaining history and society. It argues instead that society is the product of complex, often contradictory combinations of many different structures and mechanisms. They form a structural ensemble, hierarchically arranged, but where each element has its own dynamics and emergent powers. (...) It concludes that society is best understood through critical realist conceptions of stratification, emergence, transformation, and overdetermination. (shrink)

We show that—unlike products of ‘transitive’ modal logics which are usually undecidable—their ‘expanding domain’ relativisations can be decidable, though not in primitive recursive time. In particular, we prove the decidability and the finite expanding product model property of bimodal logics interpreted in two-dimensional structures where one component—call it the ‘flow of time’—is • a finite linear order or a finite transitive tree and the other is composed of structures like • transitive trees/partial orders/quasi-orders/linear orders or only finite such structures expanding (...) over time. The decidability proof is based on Kruskal’s tree theorem, and the proof of non-primitive recursiveness is by reduction of the reachability problem for lossy channel systems. The result is used to show that the dynamic topological logic interpreted in topological spaces with continuous functions is decidable if the number of function iterations is assumed to be finite. (shrink)

This book employs a new eco-cognitive model of abduction to underline the distributed and embodied nature of scientific cognition. Its main focus is on the knowledge-enhancing virtues of abduction and on the productive role of scientific models. What are the distinctive features that define the kind of knowledge produced by science? To provide an answer to this question, the book first addresses the ideas of Aristotle, who stressed the essential inferential and distributed role of external cognitive tools and epistemic mediators (...) in abductive cognition. This is analyzed in depth from both a naturalized logic and an ecology of cognition perspective. It is shown how the maximization of cognition, and of abducibility – two typical goals of science – are related to a number of fundamental aspects: the optimization of the eco-cognitive situatedness; the maximization of changeability for both the input and the output of the inferences involved; a high degree of information-sensitiveness; and the need to record the “past life” of abductive inferential practices. Lastly, the book explains how some impoverished epistemological niches – the result of a growing epistemic irresponsibility associated with the commodification and commercialization of science – are now seriously jeopardizing the flourishing development of human creative abduction. (shrink)

An econometric study of the demand for energy in industrialized and underdeveloped countries, examining the role that energy plays as a consumption good and as a factor in industrial production.

Data from various settings suggest that there is an upper limit of about four on the number of individuals who can interact in spontaneous conversation. This limit appears to be a consequence of the mechanisms of speech production and detection. There appear to be no differences between men and women in this respect, other than those introduced by women’s lighter voices.

Schelling has been exploited for a variety of psychoanalytical projects, from Marquard’s revision of Freud, to various readings of Jung, to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. What we have not seen is an elaboration of the psycho-therapeutical implications of Schelling’s metaphysics on its own terms. What we find when we read Schelling as metapsychologist is a nonpathologizing theory of dissociation. Like anything that lives, the psyche dissociates for the sake of growth. The law of productive dissociation is the source of psyche’s (...) adaptive power and an explanation of the structure of its illnesses. (shrink)

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, etc. (...) And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

We describe a unified framework for the understanding of structure representation in primate vision. A model derived from this framework is shown to be effectively systematic in that it has the ability to interpret and associate together objects that are related through a rearrangement of common “middle-scale” parts, represented as image fragments. The model addresses the same concerns as previous work on compositional representation through the use of what+where receptive fields and attentional gain modulation. It does not require prior (...) exposure to the individual parts, and avoids the need for abstract symbolic binding. (shrink)

This study in the philosophy of science analyzes "the logic of scientific inquiry and the logical structure of its intellectual products." The author distinguishes four patterns of scientific explanation: the deductive model, probabilistic explanation, functional and teleological explanation, and genetic explanation. The structure and application of each is explored with respect to some of the more specialized areas of science. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy of science are discussed, and there are excellent treatments of the methodology (...) of the social sciences and historical explanation. A large and important book, presenting a vast amount of material handled in an incisive manner.--B. J. H. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of written argumentative texts produced by pupils in grades 3, 5, 7 and 11 in relation to three different tasks: Group A — subjects are assigned a topic question consisting of a single statement ; Group B — subjects are given a topic question consisting of both a statement and its opposite ; Group C — subjects are given an initial and a final sentence of a text, which they (...) have to complete, and which refers to opposite opinions . Six different types of text organization were evidenced on the basis of the argumentative moves presented in the texts, the linguistic indexes used to express the relationships between the moves, the presence or absence of counter-arguments and the type of argumentation or reasoning used. The organization of the texts range from a simple affirmation of a position to a use of data or reasons to support a position, to others still in which two positions are presented in the body of a unitary structure, developed ‘in parallel’ and interconnected regularly. Our analysis found a well-defined tendency corresponding to the age levels in the types of texts produced by the subjects. The texts produced by the younger group, the pupils in elementary school, contained a fairly simple structural organization, characterized by very few argumentations or a lack of explicitness of the essential moves and a juxtaposing of arguments. The older subjects, in particular those attending secondary school, were able to produce texts which were more complex with regard to the presence and the organization of the argumentative moves, and more coherent and cohesive with respect to their articulation of opinions and use of adequate linguistic indices to analyze t topic. As regards the different types of tasks, when the subjects were presented explicitly with two opposite opinions , they developed both positions in their responses, contrary to the situation in which they produced one position when only one of two opinions was presented. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of written argumentative texts produced by pupils in grades 3, 5, 7 and 11 in relation to three different tasks: Group A — subjects are assigned a topic question consisting of a single statement (open question); Group B — subjects are given a topic question consisting of both a statement and its opposite (opposite opinions); Group C — subjects are given an initial and a final sentence of a text, (...) which they have to complete, and which refers to opposite opinions (oriented task). Six different types of text organization were evidenced on the basis of the argumentative moves presented in the texts, the linguistic indexes used to express the relationships between the moves, the presence or absence of counter-arguments and the type of argumentation or reasoning used. The organization of the texts range from a simple affirmation of a position (repitition of the proposition or its opposition without any support) to a use of data or reasons to support a position, to others still in which two positions are presented in the body of a unitary structure, developed ‘in parallel’ and interconnected regularly. Our analysis found a well-defined tendency corresponding to the age levels in the types of texts produced by the subjects. The texts produced by the younger group, the pupils in elementary school, contained a fairly simple structural organization, characterized by very few argumentations or a lack of explicitness of the essential moves and a juxtaposing of arguments. The older subjects, in particular those attending secondary school, were able to produce texts which were more complex with regard to the presence and the organization of the argumentative moves, and more coherent and cohesive with respect to their articulation of opinions and use of adequate linguistic indices to analyze t topic. As regards the different types of tasks, when the subjects were presented explicitly with two opposite opinions (though in different terms), they developed both positions in their responses, contrary to the situation in which they produced one position when only one of two opinions was presented. (shrink)

Calhoun is interviewed regarding the relationship of his work on the university to his other research interests. Calhoun elaborates on his hope for a debate over transformations in the structure of the university that is much more sensitive to the public role universities play and the importance of the collective goods they create. In the process he articulates the possibilities for an institutional analysis of the university that meets scholarly standards of knowledge production while remaining engaged with central (...) issues that arise out of institutional transformation. By situating universities in relationship with the public sphere, Calhoun provides a basis for debates about the transformation of the university to overcome the structured and structuring dispositions of the participants, while remaining grounded in social and historical analysis-an approach that can be considered an alternative public sociology. (shrink)

Changes of theories are major events in science. Two main types of questions may be asked about them: i) how do scientists choose new theories?, and ii) how is consensus formed? Generally, philosophers do not distinguish these two questions. Kuhn, on the contrary, offers very different answers to each of these questions. Theory-choice, on the one hand, is explained through the application of epistemic criteria, such as accuracy and consistency; nonetheless, because these values do not prescribe a single choice, consensus (...) formation, on the other hand, is explained through a series of socio-epistemic mechanisms, namely: scientific pedagogy, diffusion and production of knowledge within the community, and restructuring of the scientific field. These mechanisms are the basis of Kuhn’s social epistemology, in that they are not restricted to sociology nor epistemology, encompassing both social interactions and epistemic evaluations of theories. Keywords: Thomas Kuhn, consensus formation, social epistemology. (shrink)

Novel forms of matter, such as states made of gluons (glueballs), multiquark mesons or baryons and hybrid mesons are predicted by low energy QCD, for which several candidates have recently been identified. Searching for such exotic states of matter and studying their production and decay properties in detail has become a flourishing field at the experimental facilities now available or being built - e.g. BESIII in Beijing, BELLE II at SuperKEKB, GlueX at Jefferson Lab, PANDA at FAIR, J-PARC and (...) in the upgraded LHC experiments, in particular LHCb. A modern primer in the field is required so as to both revive and update the teaching of a new generation of researchers in the field of QCD. These lectures on hadron spectroscopy are intended for Master and PhD students and have been originally developed for a course delivered at the Stefan Meyer Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. They are phenomenologically oriented and intended as complementary material for basic courses in particle and nuclear physics. The book describes the spectra of light and heavy mesons and baryons, and introduces the fundamental properties based on symmetries. Further, it derives multiplet structures, mixing angle, decay coupling constants, magnetic moments of baryons, and predictions for multiquark states and compares these with suitable experimental data. Basic methods of calculating decay angular distributions and determining masses and widths of resonances are also presented. The appendices provide students and newcomers to the field with the necessary background information, and include a set of problems and solutions. (shrink)

This study will focus on a systematic exemplification of the notion of art and artwork based on Hegels aesthetics. It opposes two forms of skepticism which (1) question the possibility and value of a definition of art and (2) reject the category of the artwork for art is regarded as a process rather than a material thing. As such it is no longer something that can be conceived by seeing, hearing or touching the end product of that process. The criticism (...) of these postions results in an understanding of works of art as objects or processes with a specific structure of meaning. The study developes ideas which are related to Hegel's thought, insofar as Hegel regards the artwork as an expression of the ‘idea’, and the term ‘idea’ designates a complex semantic structure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We can best understand Marx’s economic thought by seeing it as implicitly relying upon and reworking a Hegelian philosophy of history, which was deeply salvific and soteriological in its basic structure. Hegel’s philosophy of history reworked the Christian narrative of man’s fall, his redemption through Christ’s atonement, and his return to a state of reconciliation with God in the life of the Christian church. Thus, the loss of the organic form of community found in the Greek polis was (...) a fall that was atoned for in the religious alienation found in both Judaism and Christianity, where man is treated as separated from a transcendent God. The reconciliation between man and God is found, finally, in the reconciliation of the modern, rational state. Early on Marx adopted Hegel’s philosophy of history, but its basic structure remains even in his mature economic work. There he envisions the loss of the organic unity of primitive communism, and the alienation of individuals from the larger social totality of feudalism and capitalism. Under communism, however, individuals are reconciled with the larger social whole through the collective mastery of the products of labor. (shrink)

Let equation image denote the inverse limit of all finite cyclic groups. Let F, G and H be abelian groups with H ≤ G. Let FβH denote the abelian group , where +βis defined by +β = + β — β) for a certain β : F → G linear mod H meaning that β = 0 and β + β — β ∈ H for all a, b in F. In this paper we show that the following hold: The (...) additive group of any nonstandard model ℤ* of the ring ℤ is isomorphic to βH for a certain β : ℤ*+/H → equation image linear mod H. equation image is isomorphic to βH for some β : equation image/H →ℚ linear mod H, though equation image is not the additive group of any model of Th and the exact sequence H → equation image → equation image/H is not splitting. (shrink)

In the course of a study of elementary particles, an analysis is given of a fundamental presupposition of many research programs, namely the belief in the ultimate unity of physics. It is argued tht this unity-idea is incorrect. By classical physics, relativity theory and quantum theory three distinct structures of nature are revealed. Next, the essential aspect of measurement, that a measurement always results in a record, is analysed. Recording implies irreversibility and entropy production. In modern elementary particle physics (...) the record itself is all important, and therefore the entropy production due to measurement is essential. It is argued that this aspect of measurement will play a central role in a distinct theory concerning fundamental characteristics of elementary particles, revealing a fourth structure of physical reality. Some basic notions of this new theory are proposed. Finally the meaning of irreversibility on the micro-level of elementary particles is discussed, in connection with the concept of time. (shrink)