Resumen: El presente artículo propone una visión estructural de la e-justicia por contraposición al reduccionismo metodológico e instrumental actual que la concibe como la simple incorporación de los dispositivos tecnológicos de la información y de la comunicación a la función pública judicial de impartir justicia, cuando más, a una transformación cultural del órgano judicial. El análisis plantea que la justicia es un concepto medular de la estabilidad social, que no se agota en la funcionalidad judicial, que depende de las asignaciones (...) estimativas acerca de aquello que para cada sociedad significa la armonía o la armonización social en relación con la interferencia de las conductas entre los individuos que la conforman. Con la introducción de la teoría de la impetración de la justicia se propone que la sociedad sea un componente activo de la gestión conflictiva a partir de la idea de justicia que se construye de igual forma, sin permitir que se le conciba como un simple receptor de la demanda de justicia que de forma vertical entrega la organización pública al margen de la realidad social, que ha adquirido una nueva configuración con la eclosión de la tecnología en todos los ámbitos de la vida humana.: This paper proposes a structural vision of e-justice as opposed to the current methodological and instrumental reductionism that conceives it as the simple incorporation of information and communication technology devices to the judicial public function of imparting justice, or at most, to a cultural transformation of the judicial body. The analysis suggests that justice is a core concept of social stability, which is not exhausted in the judicial functionality, which depends on the estimative allocations about what for each society means harmony or social harmonization in relation to the interference of behaviors between the individuals that comprise it. With the introduction of the theory of the impetration of justice, it is proposed that society be an active component of conflict management based on the idea of justice that is constructed in the same way, without allowing it to be conceived as a simple receiver of the demand for justice that is delivered vertically by the public organization at the margin of social reality, which has acquired a new configuration with the emergence of technology in all areas of human life. (shrink)

New Caledonian crow populations have developed complex tools that show suggestive evidence of cumulative change. These tool designs, therefore, appear to be the product of cumulative technological culture. We suggest that tool-using NC crows offer highly useful data for current debates over the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of CTC.

We agree with Vaesen that there is evidence for cognitive differences between humans and other primates. However, it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the uniqueness of the cognitive mechanisms underlying human tool use. Tests of causal understanding are in their infancy, as is the study of animals more distantly related to humans.

Gödel’s incompleteness applies to any system with recursively enumerable axioms and rules of inference. Chaitin’s approach to Gödel’s incompleteness relates the incompleteness to the amount of information contained in the axioms. Zurek’s quantum Darwinism attempts the physical description of the universe using information as one of its major components. The capacity of quantum Darwinism to describe quantum measurement in great detail without requiring ad-hoc non-unitary evolution makes it a good candidate for describing the transition from quantum to classical. A baby-universe (...) diffusion model of cosmic inflation is analyzed using quantum Darwinism. In this model cosmic inflation can be approximated as Brownian motion of a quantum field, and quantum Darwinism implies that molecular interaction during Brownian motion will make the quantum field decohere. The quantum Darwinism approach to decoherence in the baby-universe cosmic-inflation model yields the decoherence times of the baby-universes. The result is the equation relating the baby-universe’s decoherence time with the Hubble parameter, and that the decoherence time is considerably shorter than the cosmic inflation period. (shrink)

Academic misconduct is widespread in schools, colleges, and universities and it appears to be an international phenomenon that also spills over into the workplace. To this end, while a great deal of research has investigated various individual components such as, demographic, personality and situational factors that contribute to cheating, research has yet to examine why students help others cheat and which students are being asked to help others cheat. In this study, we investigated if the closeness of the relationship to (...) the individual requesting help in cheating to the individual being asked to help cheat, influenced the decision to help cheat. We also investigated if past cheating behavior predicted how an individual would respond to requests to cheat. Additionally, we sought to answer the following questions; whether minor cheating is more prevalent than serious cheating, what personality factors predict helping others cheat, who is helped, and how people rationalize helping others cheat. Results indicate minor cheating to be more prevalent, prudent personalities are less likely to have cheated or to help others cheat, individuals are more likely to help friends cheat than to help strangers, and past cheating behaviors is indicative of helping others to cheat. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The economic globalization process has integrated different competitive markets and pushes firms in different countries to improve their managerial and operational efficiencies. Given the recent empirical evidence for the benefits to firms and stakeholders of good corporate governance (CG) practice, it is expected that good CG practice would be a common strategy for firms in different countries to meet the increasingly intense competition; however, this is not the case. This study examines the differences in CG practices in firms across different (...) countries using the concept of ethical sensitivity. Through the regression analysis of 271 firms in 12 countries and regions, it is found that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions can explain the differences in CG practices. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the influence of culture on ethical sensitivity, which eventually determines the CG practices in different regions. (shrink)

What role does non-genetic inheritance play in evolution? In recent work we have independently and collectively argued that the existence and scope of non-genetic inheritance systems, including epigenetic inheritance, niche construction/ecological inheritance, and cultural inheritance—alongside certain other theory revisions—necessitates an extension to the neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis (MS) in the form of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). However, this argument has been challenged on the grounds that non-genetic inheritance systems are exclusively proximate mechanisms that serve the ultimate function of calibrating organisms (...) to stochastic environments. In this paper we defend our claims, pointing out that critics of the EES (1) conflate non-genetic inheritance with early 20th-century notions of soft inheritance; (2) misunderstand the nature of the EES in relation to the MS; (3) confuse individual phenotypic plasticity with trans-generational non-genetic inheritance; (4) fail to address the extensive theoretical and empirical literature which shows that non-genetic inheritance can generate novel targets for selection, create new genetic equilibria that would not exist in the absence of non-genetic inheritance, and generate phenotypic variation that is independent of genetic variation; (5) artificially limit ultimate explanations for traits to gene-based selection, which is unsatisfactory for phenotypic traits that originate and spread via non-genetic inheritance systems; and (6) fail to provide an explanation for biological organization. We conclude by noting ways in which we feel that an overly gene-centric theory of evolution is hindering progress in biology and other sciences. (shrink)

In the Chinese stock market, special treatment (ST) firms are the firms listed as facing imminent danger of delisting, unless they return to profitability after reporting two consecutive annual losses. Some ST firms voluntarily pay substantial fees to their external auditors to conduct interim audits, which are not required by regulations. In this study, we investigate and find that ST firms that pay for voluntary interim audits report greater discretionary accrued earnings, higher non-operating earnings, and higher returns on assets in (...) ensuing annual reports. As a result, these firms are more likely to return to profitability and reduce their delisting risk. Our results, which contribute to the current debate on auditor independence, appear to be consistent with the possibility that ST firms “buy” external auditors’ cooperation to manipulate earnings when faced with the threat of delisting. (shrink)

The study has two objectives: to introduce grip force recording as a new technique for studying embodied numerical processing; and to demonstrate how three competing accounts of numerical magnitude representation can be tested by using this new technique: the Mental Number Line, A Theory of Magnitude and Embodied Cognition account. While 26 healthy adults processed visually presented single digits in a go/no-go n-back paradigm, their passive holding forces for two small sensors were recorded in both hands. Spontaneous and unconscious grip (...) force changes related to number magnitude occurred in the left hand already 100–140 ms after stimulus presentation and continued systematically. Our results support a two-step model of number processing where an initial stage is related to the automatic activation of all stimulus properties whereas a later stage consists of deeper conscious processing of the stimulus. This interpretation generalizes previous work with linguistic stimuli and elaborates the timeline of embodied cognition. We hope that the use of grip force recording will advance the field of numerical cognition research. (shrink)

Das Handbuch Kritische Theorie beleuchtet aus ganz unterschiedlicher Perspektive, was Kritische Theorie heute bedeuten kann. Das Handbuch reklamiert, trotz seines Umfangs, keine eindeutige oder definitorische Antwort auf die Frage, was Kritische Theorie heute ist oder zu sein hat. Die Programmatiken Kritischer Theorie sind in den letzten 85 Jahren weder konstant geblieben noch lässt sich Kritische Theorie auf die Interpretation eines Kanons von Texten festlegen. Gleichwohl sind Kritische Theorie und die Bezugnahmen auf sie nicht beliebig, sondern, so die Überzeugung der Herausgeber*in, (...) bei allen Auseinandersetzungen um die richtige Interpretation und institutionelle Praxis, mehr als eine „bloße Metapher“. Im Zentrum steht nach wie vor die Diskrepanz zwischen dem Ausmaß an real vorhandenen und in gesellschaftliche Institutionen gegossenen Herrschaftsverhältnissen einerseits und den Möglichkeiten der Verringerung von Herrschaft von Menschen über sich, über andere und über Natur andererseits. In diesem Grundverständnis sind sich – bei aller Heterogenität – die im Handbuch versammelten Beiträge und Beitragenden einig. (shrink)

Since the millennium, first person accounts of experience have been accepted as philosophically valid, potentially useful sources of information about the nature of mind and self. Several Vedic sciences rely on such first person accounts to discuss experience and consciousness. This paper shows that their insights define the information structure of experience in agreement with a scientific theory of mind fulfilling all presently known philosophical and scientific conditions. Experience has two separate components, its information content, and a separate ‘witness aspect’, (...) which can reflect on all forms of experience, and with training be strengthened until its power of reflection identifies it as the innermost aspect of ‘self’. The Vedic sciences, Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta develop these themes. Sankhya identifies the different aspects of experience, outer and inner; Yoga practices lead the mind to inner states without information content (samadhi) in which the experience of the witness (sakshi) is strengthened and deepened. Vedanta states the nature of the ‘self’ is to know itself directly without intermediary. All this requires the witness to have a singular loop structure. The information structure of experience therefore has two aspects, information content plus a singular loop endowing it with a subjective sense of ‘Self’. (shrink)

Recent work indicates that there are distinct response habituation mechanisms that can be recruited by different stimulation rates and that can underlie different components (e.g., the duration or speed) of a single behavioral response. These findings raise the question: why is “the simplest form of learning” so complicated mechanistically? Beyond evolutionary selection for robustness of plasticity in learning to ignore, it is proposed in this article that multiple mechanisms of habituation have evolved to streamline shifts in ongoing behavioral strategy. Then, (...) speculations are offered regarding the implications of this reconceptualization of habituation for approaching the analysis of mechanisms of more complex forms of learning and memory. (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

This comment mainly examines Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne’s preferred framework for examining whether narrow content is viable, arguing that their framework is not well-suited to the task; once a more traditional framework is adopted, Y&H’s case against internalism is strengthened.

There have been many readings of Mead's work, and this paper proposes yet another: Mead, theorist of the social act. It is argued that Mead's core theory of the social act has been neglected, and that without this theory, the concept of taking the attitude of the other is inexplicable and the contemporary relevance of the concept of the significant symbol is obfuscated. The paper traces the development of the social act out of Dewey's theory of the act. According to (...) Mead, Dewey's theory does not sufficiently account for consciousness. Grappling with this problematic leads Mead to several key ideas, which culminate in his theory of the social act. The social act and taking the attitude of the other are then illustrated by the analysis of a game of football. The interpretation presented has two novel aspects: first, symbolisation arises not simply through self taking the attitude of the other, but through the pairing of this attitude with the complementary attitude in self; second, self is able to take the attitude of the other to the extent that self has in actuality or in imagination previously been in the social position of the other. From this standpoint the key issue is how the attitude of self and other become integrated. New directions for empirical research, aimed at advancing this question are outlined. Finally, the paper shows how the social act can contribute to our contemporary concerns about the nature of the symbolic. (shrink)

Dispositional theories of colour have been attacked by McGinn and others on the ground that ‘Colours do not look like dispositions’. Langsam has argued that on the contrary they do, in ‘Why Colours Do Look Like Dispositions’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 , pp. 68–75. I make three claims. First, neither side has made its case. Secondly, it is true, at least on one interpretation, that colours do not look like dispositions. Thirdly, this does not show that dispositionalism about colours is (...) false. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to describe the implementation and outcomes of an Eye Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing treatment-program for women with posttraumatic stress disorder after childbirth.MethodsA prospective cohort-study with pre- and post-measurements was carried out in the setting of an academic hospital in the Netherland. Included were women who gave birth to a living child at least 4 weeks ago, with a diagnosis of PTSD, or severe symptoms of PTSD combined with another psychiatric diagnosis. All received up to (...) 8 sessions of EMDR-therapy. The posttraumatic stress disorder Checklist for DSM-5 was administered before and after treatment. Trauma history was assessed before treatment with the Life Events Checklist for the DSM-5, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the Childbirth Perception Scale. Descriptive statistics were used.ResultsForty-four women were referred, 26 met the inclusion criteria. After treatment, none of the women met the criteria for diagnosis of PTSD after on average 5 weekly sessions of EMDR- therapy. These outcomes are promising, as they were achieved in women with relatively high levels of psychiatric comorbidity and high rates of previous mental health treatment.ConclusionImplementing an EMDR-treatment program for women with PTSD after childbirth in the setting of an academic hospital is feasible and effective. Key factors for success include a close collaboration between the relevant hospital departments and a thorough case conceptualization addressing the etiology of the PTSD. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cartography: The Ideal and Its History by Matthew H. EdneyAlex ZukasCartography: The Ideal and Its History BY MATTHEW H. EDNEY Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019As Matthew Edney notes in the introduction, “This book is the product of my entire career as a map historian (so far);” it does, indeed, represent the culmination of more than thirty years of his research in the history of maps and mapping (...) that began in graduate school (ix). From the outset of his career, Edney has followed and advocated a postmodern or poststructural approach to map studies. This book follows that theoretical approach, which is both a strength and a weakness. Adopting another theoretical approach would have enabled his desired critique of cartography without being self-refuting, as his poststructuralism turns out to be when he makes a positive case for studying mapping processes rather than cartography and “maps.”1Edney is a major and respected figure in the history of mapping. Along with Brian Harley, Denis Wood, Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, Chris Perkins, and John Pickles, he has helped reshape the field over the past thirty-plus years in the direction of “critical cartography” or “critical map studies.” He has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2005, and co-edited the fourth volume in that series, Cartography in the European Enlightenment (2019). He notes that co-editing that volume tested and tempered many of his ideas (ix). Since 2007 he has held the Osher Chair in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine. [End Page 111]A provocative and complex polemic, the beautifully illustrated book is, as indicated by its title, divided into two main thematic sections: a philosophical deconstruction of the cartographic ideal and a retelling of the ideal’s historical development. It contains four content chapters with a brief introduction and conclusion. While the second historical half has much to recommend it (chapters 4 and 5), the first poststructurally-informed philosophical part (chapters 2 and 3) critiques propositions that he deploys to make his historical narrative work. Edney’s central argument in the book is that “cartography” is a prescriptive model that “exists only as an idealization produced by modern culture and that it cannot provide a valid conception of mapping in the past, present, or future. Cartography is not an endeavor common to all societies and cultures. Rather, it is very much a creation of the modern West and is permeated by many of the myths that Westerners tell themselves about their rationality and superiority” in which “the ideal of cartography is the entire belief system, while cartography is the fiction generated by the ideal” (8, 1). We will see that, in less sweeping form, there is value to these claims historically. However, key aspects of Edney’s philosophical position undermine his historical argument by undercutting its foundations. In fact, the polemics come mainly in the philosophical section whose tone is prescriptive, reproving, insistent, and absolute, which is ironic given his arguments against universality. His tone detracts from the value of the first section of the book and makes it a challenging read. Edney divides his book into philosophical and historical halves because he believes that “A true critique of cartography requires, first and foremost, the delineation of the ideal’s multiple tenets and all of their flaws” (26). However, he makes no specific argument on behalf of this sweeping, absolute, and universal premise, especially regarding its claims that it is a “true critique” and other critiques are “misguided and misleading” (26). If the book is supposed to provide the evidence for his premise and these claims, then the argument is circular.The introduction (chapter 1) lays out the ideal and the book’s structure. Chapter 2 examines sociocultural critiques of the ideal that emerged over the past thirty-five years and Edney’s recommended “processual approach” to mapping, which he claims “provides an intellectual framework to pursue map studies without running into the ideal’s flaws [End Page 112] and preconceptions” because “it encourages scholars to address issues about why and how maps are produced and consumed... in an explicit and empirically founded manner... (shrink)

The theme of the paper is that what is true cannot be false and conversely. This position was anticipated by Aristotle in De Interpretatione and by G. H. von Wright. The latter calls it “a truth of the logic of relative modalities.”Aristotle has been taken to task by Susan Haack and others for arguing fallaciously from the Principle of Bivalence, that every statement is either true or false, to fatalism. The implication holds, but we show that it is unreasonable to (...) assume that Aristotle grounded his argument on this implication rather than on what we call the force of truth. (shrink)

The theme of the paper is that what is true cannot be false and conversely. This position was anticipated by Aristotle in De Interpretatione and by G. H. von Wright. The latter calls it “a truth of the logic of relative modalities.”Aristotle has been taken to task by Susan Haack and others for arguing fallaciously from the Principle of Bivalence, that every statement is either true or false, to fatalism. The implication holds, but we show that it is unreasonable to (...) assume that Aristotle grounded his argument on this implication rather than on what we call the force of truth. (shrink)

We introduce a dynamic model for evolutionary games played on a network where strategy changes are correlated according to degree of influence between players. Unlike the notion of stochastic stability, which assumes mutations are stochastically independent and identically distributed, our framework allows for the possibility that agents correlate their strategies with the strategies of those they trust, or those who have influence over them. We show that the dynamical properties of evolutionary games, where such influence neighborhoods appear, differ dramatically from (...) those where all mutations are stochastically independent, and establish some elementary convergence results relevant for the evolution of social institutions. (shrink)

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Contents: H.G. CALLAWAY: Open Transcendentalism and the Normative Character of Methodology. Roger F. GIBSON: Two Conceptions of Philosophy. Jürg FREUDIGER: Quine und die Unterdeterminiertheit empirischer Theorien. David PEARS: The Ego and the Eye: Wittgenstein's Use of an Analogy. Guido KÜNG: Welterkennen und Textinterpretation bei Roman Ingarden und Nelson Goodman. Barry SMITH: Putting the World Back into Semantics. Herbert STACHOWIAK: Offen für Ophelia? Paul GOCHET & Michel KEFER: Henri Lauener's Open Transcendentalism. Rudolf HALLER: Zum Problem des Relativismus in der Philosophie. Andreas (...) GRAESER: Analytic Philosophy and Hermeneutic Philosophy. Toward Reunion in Philosophy? Avrum STROLL: That Puzzle We Call the Mind. Wolfgang RÖD: Humes Skeptizismus als Entwurf eines neuen philosophischen Paradigmas. Henry E. ALLISON: Apperception and Analyticity in the B-Deduction. Peter SIMONS: Who's Afraid of Higher-Order Logic? Wilhelm K. ESSLER: Gorgias hat Recht! Alex BURRI: Relativismus, Realismus, Mathematik. (shrink)

1 In 1954 Karl Popper published an article attempting to show that the identification of the quantitative concept degree of confirmation with the quantitative concept degree of probability is a serious error. The error was presumably committed by J. M. Keynes, H. Reichen bach and R. Carnap. 2 It was Popper's intention then, to expose the error and to introduce an explicatum for the prescientific concept of degree of confirmation. A few months later Y. Bar-Hillel published an article attempting to (...) show that no serious error had been committed (particularly by Carnap) and that the problem introduced by Popper was simply a "verbal one. "3 Popper replied immediately that "Dr. Bar-Hillel forces me [Popper] now to criticize Carnap's theory further," and he [Popper] introduced further objections which, if accepted, destroy Carnap's theory. 4 About eight years after this exchange took place I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago in search of a topic for a doctoral dissertation. An investigation of the issues involved in this exchange seemed to be ideal for me because I had (and still have) a great ad miration for the work of both Carnap and Popper. A thoroughly revised and I hope improved account of that investigation appears in the first five chapters of this book. Put very briefly, what I found were four main points of contention. (shrink)

InThe Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon offers a distinctive revisionary account of American poetry written in the wake of the ideological retreats of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden around the time of the Second World War. Nealon argues that American verse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was profoundly influenced by an unfolding context of capitalist development and crisis, in ways that have not been fully accounted for in orthodox accounts of recent literary history. Ruth Jennison’sThe Zukofsky Era: (...) Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Gardeseeks similarly to highlight the centrality of leftist critiques of capitalism in modern American poetry. Her focus is the Objectivist group of poets, in particular Louis Zukofsky, a Jewish-American Marxist often regarded as the major successor to Pound in the interwar years. Jennison applies the theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the 1930s work of Zukofsky and his circle. (shrink)

The publication of the first Report of the International Panel on Social Progress is a significant intellectual event, both because of its hugely ambitious aim – of uniting the world's leading researchers from social sciences and the humanities to develop research-based, multi-disciplinary, non-partisan, action-guiding solutions to the central challenges of our time – and because it represents the completion of a mammoth effort in the service of this aim by a diverse set of 269 authors. In its attempt to synthesize (...) and render accessible to social actors a broad range of the latest social scientific knowledge, as well as in its confidence that knowledge can empower those actors to make progress, it recalls D'Alembert and Diderot's famous Encyclopédie. Indeed, one can say that the Report is a quintessential Enlightenment project. For example, in his famous Outlines of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, Condorcet asserts the possibility of an accumulation of empirical and theoretical knowledge and the concomitant expansion in our capacities to alleviate social and natural evils. And Condorcet and many of his contemporaries were motivated to propose political institutions that would enable such an indefinite increase in knowledge so as to bring about the attendant improvement to people's lives. (shrink)

Books reviewed in this essay:Fred d'Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the Essential Tension (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)Edwin H.-C. Hung, Beyond Kuhn: Scientific Explanation, Theory Structure, Incommensurability and Physical Necessity (Hants: Ashgate, 2006)Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen, The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Forty-eight years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, fourteen since the death of its author, Thomas S. Kuhn, and ten since the publication of the posthumous Road Since Structure (...) (2000), the Kuhn cottage industry continues to produce. In preparing this essay review I .. (shrink)

People judge positive information to be more alike than negative information. This good-bad asymmetry in similarity was argued to constitute a true property of the information ecology (Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017). Why good is more alike than bad: Processing implications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 69–79). Alternatively, the asymmetry may constitute a processing outcome itself, namely an influence of phasic affect on information processing. Because no research has yet tested whether phasic affect influences perceived similarity among (...) stimuli, we conducted 5 Experiments that also tested whether phasic affect can account for the higher judged similarity among positive compared to negative stimuli. In three experiments, we affectively charged pictures of different Pokemon by pairing them with monetary gains and losses (Exp. 1a, 1b) as well as positive and negative trait words (Exp. 2); yet, the evaluative charge did not differentially influence perceived similarity among the Pokemon. Experiment 3 replicated the basic similarity asymmetry among positive and negative words, and found that it was unaffected by externally induced phasic affect. Experiment 4 showed that phasic affect had no influence on perceived similarity of non-evaluative words either. We conclude that albeit a weak influence of phasic affect on perceived similarity of stimuli cannot be ruled out entirely, it can most likely not account for the typically medium to large sized asymmetry in similarity among positive and negative stimuli. (shrink)