The paper analyzes the factors that brand engagement produces in the growth of a brand, studying the values of creating emotional bonds to retain customers and develop consumer cultures. The PACARI brand is taken as a reference, which has international recognition, managing to position Ecuador as the country where the best chocolate in the world originates. The objective is to analyze the impact of PACARI and its connection in ethical consumption, where the brand has generated impact from the word of (...) mouth marketing that it creates from influencers, and the commitment with its interest groups. (shrink)

En este artículo nos proponemos analizar la demostración de la existencia de Dios dada por Kant en dos de sus obras precríticas, en las cuales se postula la necesidad funcional del _fundamento_ material como enlace entre la realidad propositiva (determinaciones de realidad) y la _posibilidad_ de los particulares. Este fundamento material aparece como condición necesaria para el contenido del pensamiento, o la determinación de los conceptos. Como foco de análisis tenemos las siguientes dos obras: la _Nueva dilucidación sobre los primeros (...) principios del conocimiento metafísico_ de 1755, y _El único argumento posible para una demostración de la existencia de Dios_, de 1763. Nos proponemos señalar la continuidad conceptual y argumentativa entre estas obras en lo que respecta a las determinaciones de realidad. A su vez, nos interesa detenernos en dos conceptos que refieren a Dios, que son centrales en el argumento ontológico kantiano, y que serán retomados por el propio Kant en la _Crítica de la razón pura_; estos conceptos son _omnitudo realitatis_ (totalidad de la realidad) y _die höchste Realität_ (la suma realidad). (shrink)

We study statements about countable and well-ordered unions and their relation to each other and to countable and well-ordered forms of the axiom of choice. Using WO as an abbreviation for “well-orderable”, here are two typical results: The assertion that every WO family of countable sets has a WO union does not imply that every countable family of WO sets has a WO union; the axiom of choice for WO families of WO sets does not imply that the countable union (...) of countable sets is WO. (shrink)

Durante su desarrollo el niño se enfrenta a eventos que plantean demandas difíciles de satisfacer como la enfermedad y la hospitalización. La Organización Mundial de Salud define la salud como un estado de completo bienestar físico, mental y social, pero no existe consenso en la literatura sobre el término bienestar. El objetivo del artículo es realizar una revisión bibliográfica acerca del concepto bienestar en niños, asociado al proceso salud - enfermedad y a la hospitalización. Los niños experimentan bienestar cuando predominan (...) sus emociones positivas, estas favorecen la salud, las negativas, pueden provocar estados patológicos y son frecuentes en la hospitalización. Esa realidad amerita ser transformada. El bienestar en niños hospitalizados constituye un reto para las ciencias médicas para penetrar las bases del nivel secundario de atención. Throughout their development, children face events that pose hard-to-satisfy demands for them such as illness and hospitalization. The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, or social well-being; however, there is no consensus in literature about the term "well-being". The objective of the article is to do a bibliographic review on the concept of children well-being associated to the health-illness process and to hospitalization. Children experience the state of well-being when positive emotions, which favor health, prevail. Negative feelings, on the other hand, can cause pathological states and they are common in hospitalization. That reality merits transformation. Hospitalized children's well-being presents a challenge for medical sciences in order to get inside the basis of secondary health care attention. (shrink)

We investigate, within the framework of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory ZF, the interrelations between weak forms of the Axiom of Choice AC restricted to sets of reals.

We study conditions for a topological space to be metrizable, properties of metrizable spaces, and the role the axiom of choice plays in these matters.

This is a continuation of [2]. We study the Tychonoff Compactness Theorem for various definitions of compactness and for various types of spaces . We also study well ordered Tychonoff products and the effect that the multiple choice axiom has on such products.

We study the relationships between definitions of compactness in topological spaces and the roll the axiom of choice plays in these relationships.

RESUMEN Largamente desatendida o malinterpretada, la noción de caos en la filosofía de Nietzsche es una pieza constitutiva de la particular concepción del ser que este autor habría dejado apenas esbozada. El artículo se propone elaborar este concepto en la obra nietzscheana, siguiendo algunas de las metáforas que lo iluminan. Desde allí se busca plantear los rasgos centrales de una ontologia del caos, de sesgo no metafísico, que, al afirmar el carácter acontecimental de la realidad, puede verse como precursora de (...) la ontología hermenéutica contemporánea. ABSTRACT The notion of chaos, which has long been neglected or misinterpreted, is a constitutive element of a peculiar conception of being that the philosopher only had time to outline. The objective of this article is to elaborate on this concept in Nietzschean philosophy, guided by some of the metaphors that shed light on it. This serves as the basis to set forth the main characteristics of a non-metaphysical ontology of chaos that asserts the eventful nature of reality and can thus be seen as a precursor of contemporary hermeneutic ontology. (shrink)

To analyze which ethically relevant biases have been identified by academic literature in artificial intelligence algorithms developed either for patient risk prediction and triage, or for contact tracing to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, to specifically investigate whether the role of social determinants of health have been considered in these AI developments or not. We conducted a scoping review of the literature, which covered publications from March 2020 to April 2021. ​Studies mentioning biases on AI algorithms developed for contact (...) tracing and medical triage or risk prediction regarding COVID-19 were included. From 1054 identified articles, 20 studies were finally included. We propose a typology of biases identified in the literature based on bias, limitations and other ethical issues in both areas of analysis. Results on health disparities and SDOH were classified into five categories: racial disparities, biased data, socio-economic disparities, unequal accessibility and workforce, and information communication. SDOH needs to be considered in the clinical context, where they still seem underestimated. Epidemiological conditions depend on geographic location, so the use of local data in studies to develop international solutions may increase some biases. Gender bias was not specifically addressed in the articles included. The main biases are related to data collection and management. Ethical problems related to privacy, consent, and lack of regulation have been identified in contact tracing while some bias-related health inequalities have been highlighted. There is a need for further research focusing on SDOH and these specific AI apps. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to reflect on the impact of biases related to artificial intelligence (AI) systems developed to tackle issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, with special focus on those developed for triage and risk prediction. A secondary aim is to review assessment tools that have been developed to prevent biases in AI systems. In addition, we provide a conceptual clarification for some terms related to biases in this particular context. We focus mainly on nonracial biases (...) that may be less considered when addressing biases in AI systems in the existing literature. In the manuscript, we found that the existence of bias in AI systems used for COVID-19 can result in algorithmic justice and that the legal frameworks and strategies developed to prevent the apparition of bias have failed to adequately consider social determinants of health. Finally, we make some recommendations on how to include more diverse professional profiles in order to develop AI systems that increase the epistemic diversity needed to tackle AI biases during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets. Applied to the special case (...) of differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the (...) kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism. (shrink)

Introduction Introducing Accessibility theory 0.1 On the role of context Utterances cannot be processed and interpreted on their own. ...

Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of individuals satisfy a certain (...) property—in the example above, it says that sufficiently many birds fly. This view faces the complicated problem of spelling out exactly how many is “sufficiently many” in a way that correctly captures the intuitive truth conditions of generics. -/- An alternative, the rules and regulations view, despairs from this project and proposes instead that generics directly express rules in the world. Rules are taken to be abstract objects, which are not related to the properties of specific individuals. This view faces the difficult problem of explaining how people come to know of such rules when judging the truth of falsity of generics, and accounting for the strong intuition that a sentence such as Birds fly talks about birds, not abstract objects. -/- What seems to be beyond dispute is that generics, even if they do not express rules, are lawlike: they state non-accidental generalizations. Many scholars have taken this fact to indicate that generics are parametric on possible worlds: they refer to worlds other than the actual world. This, again, raises the problem of how people come to know about what happens in these other worlds. However, a rigorous application of standard tests for intensionality shows that generics are not, in fact, parametric on possible worlds, but only on time. This unusual property may explain much of the mystery surrounding generics. -/- Another mysterious property of generics is that although there is no language without them, there is no linguistic construction that is devoted to the expression of genericity. Rather, generics can be expressed in a variety of ways, each of which can also express nongenerics. Yet, each manifestation of generics differs subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) in its meaning from the others. -/- Even when these and other puzzles of genericity are solved, one mystery would remain: Why are generics, which are so easy to produce and understand in conversation, so difficult to analyze? (shrink)

Both traditional accounts of hope and some of their recent critics analyze hope exclusively in terms of attitudes that a hoper bears towards a hoped-for prospect, such as desire and probability assignment. I argue that all of these accounts misidentify cases of despair as cases of hope, and so misconstrue the nature of hope. I show that a more satisfactory view is arrived at by noticing that in addition to the aforementioned attitudes, hope involves a characteristic attitude towards an external (...) factor, on whose operation the hoper takes the prospect's realization to depend causally. (shrink)

On one classical conception of God, God has no parts, not even metaphysical parts. God is not composed of form and matter, act and potency, and he is not composed of existence and essence. God is absolutely simple. This is the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity. It is claimed that ADS implies a modal collapse, i.e. that God’s creation is absolutely necessary. I argue that a proper way of understanding the modal collapse argument naturally leads the proponent of ADS to (...) reject a particular premise of the argument: namely, “the same identical cause brings about the same effect.” However, I argue that the rejection of that premise leads to a deeper problem for ADS. It leads to an explanatory gap: how can we explain the relevant type of indeterminism in an absolutely simple God? (shrink)

I offer a feminist critique of deep ecology as presented in the seminal papers of Naess and Devall. I outline the fundamental premises involved and analyze their internal coherence. Not only are there problems on logical grounds, but the tacit methodological approach of the two papers are inconsistent with the deep ecologists’ own substantive comments. I discuss these shortcomings in terms of a broader feminist critique of patriarchal culture and point out some practical and theoretical contributions which eco-feminism can make (...) to a genuinely deep ecology problematic. (shrink)

Using data from 1,352 middle-school Israeli adolescents, the current study examines the interface of spirituality and character strengths and its longitudinal contribution to subjective well-being and prosociality. Participants were approached three times over a 14-months period and completed measures of character strengths, spirituality, subjective well-being (positive emotions, life satisfaction), and prosociality. Findings revealed a fourth-factor structure of character strengths that included the typical tripartite classification of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intellectual strengths together with spirituality emerging as a statistically autonomous factor. Spirituality (...) was stable over time and contributed to higher subjective well-being and prosociality both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Discussion focuses on spirituality as a fundamental character strength and an important aspect of positive development. (shrink)

Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized bullying, indicative of commodification of labour and disembeddedness. In contrast, children working in their home villages were not under debt bondage and underwent less exploitation and occasional and mild depersonalized bullying, indicative of how civil society organizations, (...) along with the state, attempt to re-embed economic activities in the social context. Polanyi’s double movement was evident. ‘Place’ emerged as the pivotal factor determining children’s experiences. A ‘protective alliance’ of community controls and social power, associated with in-group affiliations and cohesive ties, stemming from a common village and tribal identity, aided children working at home for Bhil farmers. ‘Asymmetric intergroup inequality’ due to pronounced social identity and class differences, coupled with locational constraints and developmental disadvantage, made migrant children vulnerable targets. Social embeddedness influences how child workers are treated because it forces employers to be ethical and not engage in bullying. However, by shifting production to children’s home villages, there is an attempt to obscure the difference between child labour and child work. Thus, the seeds of disembeddedness are sown through the very act of re-embeddeding, potentially hampering future interventions. (shrink)

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of (...) the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. (shrink)

While previous literature provides evidence of the positive relationship between ethical climate and job satisfaction, the possible mechanisms of this relationship are still underexplored. This study aims to enhance scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the ethical climate–job satisfaction relationship by identifying and testing two of the possible mechanisms. More specifically, this study fills an existing research gap by examining social and interpersonal mechanisms, referred to in this study as workplace isolation of colleagues and salesperson’s teamwork, of the ethical climate–job satisfaction (...) relationship. This is vital for the selling profession because job satisfaction is known to drive higher levels of salespeople’s performance. The arguments for such mechanisms are built on the foundations of social/psychological contract theory and ethical climate literature. Empirical testing using a large sample of salespeople shows higher levels of ethical climate to decrease workplace isolation and increase teamwork. Findings support hypothesized model where ethical climate positively relates to job satisfaction as partially mediated by workplace isolation and teamwork. Ethical climate is negatively related to workplace isolation and positively to teamwork. Further, findings indicate negative effect of workplace isolation on teamwork and sales performance. Job satisfaction is found to be key factor in driving performance of salespeople. (shrink)

What ends should designers pursue? To what extent should they care about the societal and environmental impact of their work? And why should they care at all? Given the key influence design has on the way people live their lives, designing is fraught with ethical issues. Yet, unlike education or nursing, it lacks widespread professional principles for addressing these issues. -/- Rooted in a communitarian view of design practice, this lively and accessible book examines design through the lens of professions, (...) offering a critical vision that enables practitioners, academics and students of design in all disciplines to reflect on the practice’s overarching purposes. Considering how these are connected to others' flourishing and moulded by community interactions, "The Goods of Design" argues for a practice-based approach to cultivate professional ethics; it provides a normative direction that can meaningfully guide professional design activity, both individually and collectively. The volume also looks into the implications work has for the designer's self-growth as a person, offering ways to discover and navigate the complex tensions between personal and professional life. (shrink)

This paper defends a rigorous reading of Hume’s critiques of arguments for the existence of God and of the belief in God against interpretations that endorse Humean theism, deism, and fideism. The latter include Donald Livingston’s theist reading, J. C. A. Gaskin’s “attenuated deism” reading, and Edward Kanterian’s “humble fideism” reading. I also examine whether Hume’s rejections of a positive theology commit him to agnosticism or atheism. My innovative challenge to such conclusions maintains that, while elements of both agnosticism and (...) atheism are found in Hume, these denote, respectively, a methodology and an incidental implication of his philosophy. But neither sufficiently captures his constructive vision for a society, individual psychology, and system of knowledge guided by naturalist principles and aims. For this, an alternate conception is needed that describes Hume’s philosophy of religion beyond mere atheism. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Solarpunk Conference by From Imagination to ActionAriel Kroon and Kees SchullerFrom Imagination to Action, The Solarpunk Conference, June 24, 2023, VirtualThe Solarpunk Conference was born out of the desire to see an accessible space dedicated to discussions of solarpunk. With solarpunk growing in popularity in both popular and academic circles, the need for such a space seemed obvious to the organizers. The organizers also felt the need (...) to bridge academic and popular conversations in a way that was productive and opened further discussion, as the disconnect between the academic and popular spheres is often damaging to social movements. [End Page 634]This was especially important for solarpunk because of its nature as being built from below. Solarpunk is crowdsourced, having evolved over the years from social media aesthetic to literature to social movement, with few canonical critical texts. Taking into consideration the distributed democratic nature at the heart of solarpunk, the conference aimed to be accessible to the widest array of people possible: in this regard, the conference was incredibly successful. As a remote conference, the event was already more financially and practically accessible than an in-person event. Tickets were available to those across the financial spectrum, with a large percentage of our tickets being pay-what-you-can, or free to those in need; live captioning was provided on the day of, volunteers were available throughout the day to address accessibility concerns, and the ability for attendees to request live translations or other accessibility options was also provided. Further, while still retaining academic integrity and value, the majority of the presentations were legible to the largely non-expert, non-academic audience.The other key goal for the conference was to create a space for conversation and networking between otherwise disconnected members of the solarpunk community. To this end, alongside the Zoom webinars used for presentations, a Discord server was created for attendees that saw consistent engagement, networking, and project sharing, further allowing presenters to engage with attendees after their talks, enabling extended Q+A sessions that otherwise would have not been possible within schedule constraints. This hybrid model between Zoom and Discord proved incredibly effective, allowing for a wide range of interactions, and encouraging the community building and idea sharing that were key to this conference.Throughout the conference, themes of climate grief and the disaffection and despair of late-stage neoliberal capitalism returned to the fore, with speakers positioning solarpunk as a way to combat these negative affects. Mirroring these themes, most speakers emphasized the necessity of direct (solarpunk) action to escape the dystopian long-present of contemporary corpo-capitalism. Perhaps because of these same themes appearing in the movement as a whole, solarpunk is often reduced to an aesthetic of green utopia, which is an unfair stereotype given that many strands of solarpunk thought could be labeled as anti-utopian or in the vein of critical utopian theory. Solarpunk’s explicit aim to imagine sociopolitical and economic realities beyond late-stage capitalist neoliberalism requires it to divest from what Lauren Berlant calls “stupid optimism”—“the faith that adjustment to certain forms or practices [End Page 635] of living and thinking... will secure one’s happiness” (2011, 126). Solarpunk rejects classical utopian picturing of a future world that operates according to the logics of the present, which in turn have been shaped by the (often racist, sexist, and classist) logics of the past (cf. Williams 2018; Kroon 2021). It is also important to note that solarpunk does not adhere to a singular vision of the future but instead acknowledges the biodiversity of nonhuman nature and the diversity of the human experience, and so encourages multiple futures that serve the peoples and lands on which they rest.The conference began with opening remarks by one of the organizers, Lindsay Jane, followed by a land acknowledgment by Cheryle Chagnon-Greyeyes, traditional knowledge-keeper and Indigenous activist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Treaty Six. Chagnon-Greyeyes welcomed participants in nehiyaw (Cree), acknowledging her location in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta) and the Indigenous nations there, and reminding attendees to think about their connection to the land that they were on. She shared a teaching... (shrink)

This study examines how multinational corporations (MNCs) from the retail sector deal with four challenges they face when adopting Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies: the challenge of developing well-performing CSR projects and programs, building competitive advantages based on CSR, responding to local stakeholder issues in the host countries and learning from different CSR experiences on a worldwide basis. Based on in-depth case studies of two globally leading retail MNCs (with strong operations in Latin America), the concept of Transverse CSR Management (...) emerged. Transverse CSR Management is defined as a distinctive form of organizational configuration that crosses different functional areas, country operations, and the boundaries of the firm. In particular, this article makes three main contributions: (1) we identify four central challenges faced by MNC managers when developing their CSR strategies; (2) we propose the concept of Transverse CSR Management to face these central challenges (together, at the same time) and identify its key elements (top management, external stakeholders, functional areas, and country subsidiaries); and (3) we propose four mechanisms (hierarchical, relational, cultural, and collaborative) through which the concept of Transverse CSR Management can be implemented by practicing managers. This study provides valuable insights for MNC managers in headquarters and subsidiaries on the issues they need to address in order to successfully deal with the four CSRrelated challenges. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine Stephen Turner's critique of practice theory in light of recent neurophysiological discoveries regarding the “mirror neuron system” in the pre-frontal mo-tor cortex of humans and other primates. I argue that two of Turner's strongest objections against the sociological version of the practice-theoretical account, the problem of transmission and the problem of sameness, are substantially undermined when examined from the perspective of re-cently systematized accounts of embodied learning and intersubjective action understanding in-spired by these developments. (...) In addition, I show that the practice-theoretical framework out-lined by Pierre Bourdieu in the Logic of Practice and other works is, in contrast to Turner's por-trayal of a confused hodgepodge of logical errors and empirical impossibilities, largely consistent with the latest neurophysiological evidence and as such fundamentally foreshadowed more recent understandings of the neurocognitive foundations of the perception, understanding and structure of the motor schemes productive of action in the world. Also in line with these newer neurosci-entific developments, the practice-theoretical focus on the body as the central matrix generative of tacit understandings and analogical operations responsible for “higher order” systems of classi-fication emerges as the key to solving some of the thorniest problems in the theory of action: eliminating to need to resort to unwarranted “collective object” explanations for the origins of shared presuppositional frameworks. (shrink)

Addressing one of the most difficult conceptual topics in the study of classical Hinduism, Ariel Glucklich presents a rigorous phenomenology of dharma, or order. The work moves away from the usual emphasis on symbols and theoretical formulations of dharma as a religious and moral norm. Instead, it focuses on images that emerge from the basic experiential interaction of the body in its spatial and temporal contexts, such as the sensation of water on the skin during the morning purification, or (...) the physical manipulation of the bride during the marriage ritual. Images of dharma are examined in myths, rituals, art, and even the physical landscape of the Hindu world. The varied and contingent experiences of dharma infuse it with a meaning that transcends a false analytical distinction from adharma, or chaos. Glucklich shows that when dharma is experienced by means of living images, it becomes inescapably temporal, and therefore inseparable from adharma. (shrink)

Cognitive penetration of perception, broadly understood, is the influence that the cognitive system has on a perceptual system. The paper shows a form of cognitive penetration in the visual system which I call ‘architectural’. Architectural cognitive penetration is the process whereby the behaviour or the structure of the perceptual system is influenced by the cognitive system, which consequently may have an impact on the content of the perceptual experience. I scrutinize a study in perceptual learning that provides empirical evidence that (...) cognitive influences in the visual system produce neural reorganization in the primary visual cortex. The type of cognitive penetration can be synchronic and diachronic. (shrink)

Cuba faces a dilemma between continuing its current portfolio of biotechnology drugs and vaccines with lower profitability or renewing its product portfolio with the associated costs and risks.

Generics and frequency statements are puzzling phenomena: they are lawlike, yet contingent. They may be true even in the absence of any supporting instances, and extending the size of their domain does not change their truth conditions. Generics and frequency statements are parametric on time, but not on possible worlds; they cannot be applied to temporary generalizations, and yet are contingent. These constructions require a regular distribution of events along the time axis. Truth judgments of generics vary considerably across speakers, (...) whereas truth judgments of frequency statements are much more uniform. A generic may be false even if the vast majority of individuals in its domain satisfy the predicated property, whereas a frequency statement using, e.g., usually would be true. This paper argues that all these seemingly unrelated puzzles have a single underlying cause: generics and frequency statements express probability judgments, and these, in turn, are interpreted as statements of hypothetical relative frequency. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to examine the notion of salesperson moral identity as a prosocial individual trait and its associated effects on customer and coworker relationships. In addition, this study examines the underlying processes in which these effects occur as well as the moderating role of internal competitive climate. Our empirical investigation of business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals reveals that moral identity has both direct and indirect effects on a salesperson’s customer- and team-directed outcomes. Specifically, our results demonstrate that (...) salesperson moral identity positively affects both salesperson-customer identification and organizational identification, which, in turn, impact customer service provision and teamwork. Our findings also indicate that internal competitive climate exacerbates the positive effects of salesperson moral identity on customer service provision and teamwork. (shrink)

There is a large gap between the specialized knowledge of scientists and laypeople’s understanding of the sciences. The novice-expert problem arises when non-experts are confronted with (real or apparent) scientific disagreement, and when they don’t know whom to trust. Because they are not able to gauge the content of expert testimony, they rely on imperfect heuristics to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientists. This paper investigates why some bodies of scientific knowledge become polarized along political fault lines. Laypeople navigate conflicting epistemic (...) and social demands in their acceptance of scientific testimony; this might explain their deference to scientific fringe theories, which often goes together with denying established scientific theories. I evaluate three approaches to mitigate denialism: improving the message, improving the messenger, and improving the environment in which the message is conveyed. (shrink)

The Assyrian presence in Palestine from the ninth through the seventh century B.C.E. represents a case of intercultural contact against the background of an expansionist imperial process. The “Assyrianization” of Israel and Judah, as well as that of the whole Levant, has often been posited. This term, which evokes “Romanization,” would indicate enforced cultural adaptation to Assyrian values and customs within the framework of a process of assimilation. An alleged “Assyrianization” of Ancient Israel would be congruent with that interpretation of (...) Assyrian imperialism postulating programmatic measures to impose the Assyrian way of life upon the whole empire. However, a study of the cuneiform and archaeological sources leads to an alternative interpretation of Assyrian imperial policy in the West. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus’s recently systematized “functionalist” approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus’s brand of “functionalism” and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter’s original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus’s functionalism ultimately falls short of providing a coherent alternative to the Durkhemian position or (...) serving as a useful starting point from which to understand the origins of abstract categories in concrete experience. (shrink)

Ernst Mach’s and Bertrand Russell’s philosophical outlooks contributed to shaping the philosophy of science of the 20th century. Mach is a philosophical interpreter of science, a positivist, and a historian, considering the general principles of science as condensed economic descriptions of observed facts. Russell held a view of the nature and relation of philosophy to science and to logic that can be described as essentially consistent. In this article, the aim is to explore how both Mach and Russell defended the (...) classical version of “Neutral Monism”. Since it was developed as a reaction to the mechanical philosophy of nature, Neural Monism also emerged along with scientific psychology in the late 19th century. The attempt in this article is to examine their versions of neutral monism and emphasize their differences and convergences. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.