In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 405-414 [Access article in PDF] Nihilism in Seamus Heaney Irene Gilsenan Nordin I WISH TO BEGIN WITH THE WORDS of Nietzsche's madman as he makes his famous appearance, running into the crowded marketplace in the bright morning with his lit lantern in his hand, crying out his proclamation of the death of God: "'Where has God gone?' he [cries]. 'I shall (...) tell you. We have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers.'" He calls out in despair to the bemused and indifferent crowd his rhetorical questions: How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? 1These words of the madman express the abyss of despair experienced on the realization that God is dead, the state of desolation which articulates what Nietzsche himself understood to be the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment. But these words of despair sum up more than that; they sum up the underlying problems of Nietzsche's age, and indeed our age: the basic mistrust of all previously held systems of value; the collapse of all ordering principle; and the erosion of the authority of tradition. In other words, reason has revealed the inadequacy of tradition, and has itself lost the ability to provide us with [End Page 405] any reliable means of evaluation—since any such evaluation must be based on the very principles which are themselves under attack.This stark realization of the absence of all sense of meaning in values previously held to be true leads to the condition that Nietzsche calls "nihilism," (Latin nihil, "nothing"), the condition that he considered to be the central problem of Modernity. This condition, Nietzsche believed, is brought about by the realization of three factors: first, the loss of faith in what he calls a "'meaning' in all events," a loss which contributes to an experience of aimlessness; second, the realization that there is no inherent pattern to the world or to history that can lend universal coherence; and third, the loss of faith in the existence of a stable world of being which can be evaluated according to steadfast, enduring principles. The rejection of these three categories, which Nietzsche terms "aim," "unity," and "being," leads to an experience of a world that appears "valueless," in other words, the experience of nihilism. 2Nietzsche, whose thought was considered by Heidegger to be the "final thought of Western metaphysics," 3 is seen as a heralding voice of postmodernism. 4 In this respect, Nietzsche's "death of God" can be seen to be about the death of modernist philosophical presuppositions, the death of the logocentric metaphysics of presence. But, parallel with the notion of crisis that Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God expresses and the ensuing critique of "metanarratives" which his thought has helped to give rise to, 5 Nietzsche's declaration of crisis can also be seen as a statement of faith. His interpretation of the problems of our age, while on the one hand "negatively" proclaiming the death of God and denying the possibility of shared meaning—or in Lyotard's terms "the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable" (p. 81), can, on the other hand, be viewed in a more "positive" light. The term "nihilism" itself, as Nietzsche has shown us, is ambiguous, comprising both the concepts of what he termed "active nihilism" and "passive nihilism," which involves a complex interplay between the dual forces of affirmation and negation (WP, p. 22).As the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, points out, the most general distinction between these forces can be seen in terms of "strength of spirit," where nihilism is considered as both "a sign (Zeichen) of the strengthened power... (shrink)

Social media is a prominent communication platform. Its active usage permeates all generations and it is imperative that the platform be fully optimized for knowledge transfer and innovation diffusion. However, there are several considerations regarding platform usage, including media affordances. Social media affordances enable users to interact with the world around them through features of modality, agency, interactivity, and navigation. Previous studies have indicated that social media affordances significantly influence user behavior and usage. However, research exploring the effect of social (...) media affordances on knowledge acquisition and the reduction of decision-making complexities is limited. Therefore, focusing on 179 paddy farmers in Malaysia, this study examined the effect of social media affordances on information quality, knowledge acquisition, and complexity reduction regarding innovation adoption decisions using a quantitative approach. This study’s findings reveal that social media affordances have a significant effect on perceived information quality, knowledge acquisition, and complexity reduction. (shrink)

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

One problematic aspect of the rationality of medical practice concerns the relation between expert knowledge and non-expert knowledge. In medical practice it is important to match medical knowledge with the self-knowledge of the individual patient. This paper tries to study the problem of such matching by describing a model for technological paradigms and comparing it with an ideal of technological rationality. The professionalised experts tend to base their decisions and actions mostly on medical knowledge while the rationality of medicine also (...) involves just as important elements of the personal evaluation and knowledge of the patients. Since both types of knowledge are necessary for rational decisions, the gap between the expert and the non-expert has to be bridged in some way. A solution to the problem is suggested in terms of pluralism, with the patient as ultimate decision-maker. (shrink)

The received view of Martin Heidegger’s work is that he leaves little room for reason in the practice of philosophy or the conduct of life. Citing his much-scorned remark that reason is the “stiff-necked adversary of thought”, critics argue that Heidegger’s philosophy effectively severs the tie between reason and normativity, leaving anyone who adheres to his position without recourse to justifying reasons for their beliefs and actions. Transcending Reason is a collection of essays by leading Heidegger scholars that challenges this (...) view by exploring new ways to understand Heidegger’s approach to the relationship between reason, normativity, and the philosophical methodology that gives us access to these issues. The volume points to Heidegger’s novel approach to reason understood in terms of what he calls Dasein’s ‘transcendence’—the ability to occupy the world as a space of normatively structured meanings in which we navigate our striving to be. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of this new and innovative take on Heidegger’s philosophy, this collection considers the possibility that he does not sever but rather reconceives the relation between reason and normativity. -/- . (shrink)

The commentaries on the Ethica nova and the Ethica vetus written by some masters of the arts – presumably operating in the Paris faculty – in the first half of the thirteenth century expound in an original way the doctrine of the virtutes consuetudinales which Aristotle, at the end of the first book of his Ethica (I 13), distinguishes into the two main classes of the “moral virtues” and the “intellectual virtues”. The present paper aims at highlighting the particularly important (...) task which is assigned to the intellectual virtues in these early commentaries: joining man to God directly, through a contemplation which becomes love. The masters of the arts maintain that the moral virtues, in spite of the definition given by Aristotle (habitus a quo quis bonus est et opus eius bene reddit), are not sufficient alone to bring man to perfection, but that other more perfect virtues, namely the intellectual ones, are needed in order to make him know and love the supreme good. Having no knowledge of the sixth book of the Ethica, in which Aristotle deals in particular with the intellectual virtues, our masters know only their general description and are concerned with clarifying their relationships with the moral virtues, compared to which they appear to be sometimes really distinct and sometimes united to them in sharing the recta ratio, so much that they may constitute a double virtue. Although the masters of the arts seem to be well-informed about the teaching of the theologians – which they often cite without opposing to it, albeit stressing their own philosophical point of view –, it is significant that no reference whatsoever is made by them to the theological virtues and that they have recourse to the themes of Avicennian mysticism such as the doctrine of the two faces of the soul. Besides presenting the commentaries on the Ethica vetus from a general point of view, I will focus on the Paris commentary in Ethicam veterem (Paris BN lat. 3804A, ff. 152ra-159vb, 241ra-247vb; Paris BN lat. 3572, ff. 226ra-235ra), of which I am preparing a critical edition. The Paris commentary contains in fact a special and original discussion of the doctrine of the virtutes intellectuales. (shrink)

This paper aims to produce a defense of the ethical significance of Confucian ritual. An adequate defense must explain how these conventions are based in a culturally-neutral, objective ground. After a brief account of how Confucians view the relationship between rituals and moral goodness, I consider three sorts of justification. Mencian naturalism appeals to a conception of flourishing that is grounded in human nature. Xunzian consequentialism looks to how ritual brings about social order. I argue that both of these approaches (...) fail because they are unable to account for the normative fineness of rituals, which refers to the precision and detail of ritual propriety. Instead, I look to Xunzi for a justification of rituals in terms of their role in beautifying human nature. I argue that this view provides a sort of objective ground for ritual, while also preserving their normative fineness. I conclude with remarks on how Xunzian aestheticism may be useful for understanding other areas of moral life. (shrink)

For the first time, the reader can have a synoptic view of the reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, East and West, in a multicultural perspective. All the major themes of Pythagoreanism are addressed, from mathematics, number philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and religious thought.

El artículo se centra en el filósofo argentino Eugenio Pucciarelli (1907-1995) y su recepción de la fenomenología, a la que confiere un sesgo humanista. Se procederá a una introducción a su contribución a la fenomenología en América Latina y se abordarán los siguientes temas: 1) la misión de la filosofía, las diversas vías de acceso a su esencia, en particular aquellas de Scheler, Dilthey y Husserl, 2) su recepción de Husserl en cuanto concierne a los ideales de ciencia y de (...) razón, 3) la crisis de la razón y de la evidencia, 4) su concepción pluralista de la razón, del tiempo y de la cultura, 5) humanismo y libertad. La tesis sostiene que su concepción de la filosofía, que enfatiza la dimensión personal y el compromiso social de la práctica filosófica, revela un profundo humanismo pluralista que no descuida su función militante y crítica, evidenciado así la actualidad de su mensaje. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) -- Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) -- Martin Buber (1878-1965) -- Leo Strauss (1899-1973) -- Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995).

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to (...) think through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)

Summary During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental (...) training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbu ü rgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions. (shrink)

Fodor argues that speech perception is accomplished by a module. Typically, modular processing is taken to be bottom-up processing. Yet there is ubiquitous empirical evidence that speech perception is influenced by top-down processing. Fodor attempts to resolve this conflict by denying that modular processing must be exclusively bottom-up. It is argued, however, that Fodor's attempt to reconcile top-down and modular processing fails, because: (i) it undermines Fodor's own conception of modular processing; and (ii) it cannot account for the contextually varying (...) top-down influences that characterize speech perception. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

In this collection of original essays, leading scholars of East Asian studies seek to define the deeply religious dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought and practice in order to demonstrate its intellectual connections with other traditions of thought--such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Shintoism--at specific junctures in history.

The initiative to ensure oil-palm smallholders around the world participate in sustainable certification is increasing. Different efforts were strategised including increasing awareness and providing financial support. Despite that, the number of smallholders’ participation in sustainable certification is relatively low. This study embarked on the objective to identify the role of social structure, namely social interaction ties in affecting smallholders’ participative behaviours. Moreover, this study is also looking on the mediating impact of deliberative communication and responsible leadership in explaining the relationship (...) between the two previously stated constructs. Using a quantitative research design, this study collected data from 440 smallholders as its respondents. Samples were randomly selected, and questionnaires were distributed to obtain their responses. Data collected were then analysed using PLS-SEM to test the developed hypothesis. Accordingly, the findings indicate that social interaction ties have a significant impact on smallholders’ decisions to participate in sustainable certification. Furthermore, both deliberative communication and responsible leadership were proven to be significant mediators. This study provides insights on how smallholders’ participation in sustainable certification can be improved by tapping on the social structure elements as well as adopting deliberative communication and responsible leadership as a method to communicate and lead with the smallholders. This shall expand literature related to organisation psychology in rural areas and sustainability. (shrink)

This article uses a conversation analytic framework to describe a type of wh-question used to challenge a prior utterance, specifically to challenge the basis for or right to do an action done by the prior utterance. These wh-questions are able to do challenging because, rather than asking for new information, they are used to convey a strong epistemic stance of the questioner, a negative assertion. The utterances are designed as requests for an account for a prior claim or action, but (...) by conveying a negative assertion, they suggest that there is no adequate account available and, thus, that there are no grounds for the prior claim or action. The use of these questions in institutional settings can display participants' orientation to institutional goals, norms and roles, showing that institutional roles can thus be enacted, and goals accomplished, by means of practices of talk which are not, themselves, institutionally specific. (shrink)

Known throughout East Asia as Mengzi, or "Master Meng," Mencius was a Chinese philosopher of the late Zhou dynasty, an instrumental figure in the spread of the Confucian tradition, and a brilliant illuminator of its ideas. Mencius was active during the Warring States Period, in which competing powers sought to control the declining Zhou empire. Like Confucius, Mencius journeyed to one feudal court after another, searching for a proper lord who could put his teachings into practice. Only a leader who (...) possessed the moral qualities of a true king could unify China, Mencius believed, and in his defense of Zhou rule and Confucian philosophy, he developed an innovative and highly nuanced approach to understanding politics, self-cultivation, and human nature, profoundly influencing the course of Confucian thought and East Asian culture. _Mencius_ is a record of the philosopher's conversations with warring lords, disciples, and adversaries of the Way, as well as a collection of pronouncements on government, human nature, and a variety of other philosophical and political subjects. Mencius is largely concerned with the motivations of human actors and their capacity for mutual respect. He builds on the Confucian idea of _ren_, or humaneness, and places it alongside the complementary principle of _yi_, or rightness, advancing a complex notion of what is right for certain individuals as they perform distinct roles in specific situations. Consequently, Mencius's impact was felt not only in the thought of the intellectual and social elite but also in the value and belief systems of all Chinese people. (shrink)

Durante los años 1880, Nietzsche propone una idea original de individuo en tanto pluralidad como un modo de superación del difundido nihilismo con respecto a la unidad. Sus escritos, tanto editados como inéditos, presentan una crítica aguda de la concepción heredada de unidad anímica y cultural acorde con la crisis de identidad que vive Europa en la segunda mitad del siglo xix. Nuestro objetivo es mostrar un hilo que va desde la biología celular hasta la filosofía de Nietzsche. Consideramos cómo (...) la biología celular, especialmente con Rudolph Virchow, inauguró la crítica de la noción de Individuum desde el plano orgánico. Eso constituyó un motivo fuerte en la psicología de los franceses Hippolyte Taine y Theódule Ribot, quienes transpusieron el problema al ámbito anímico y de la psicopatología. Ambos concluyeron con un fuerte cuestionamiento sobre la unidad y simplicidad del yo. Eso generó un profundo interés en la filosofía de Nietzsche que en repetidas ocasiones se refiere al Individuum como una multiplicidad de células. Finalmente, profundizaremos en el registro nietzscheano acerca del Individuum, ya que constituye uno de los costados del pensamiento sobre el Übermensch, que Nietzsche imagina inspirado en los grandes hombres del Renacimiento, como posible superación del nihilismo. Among possible ways that Nietzsche can take to deal with Nihilism and its challenges, he proposes an original idea of plural individual. His papers both published and unpublished, present a sharp critique of the inherited view of psychic and cultural unit. It was in line with the identity's crisis faced by Europe along the second half of the nineteenth century. Our goal is to show a thread that goes from cell biology to Nietzsche's philosophy. We see how cell biology, precisely through Rudolph Virchow, inaugurated the critique of the notion of organic Individuum from the organic field. It became a strong subject in the psychology of Hippolyte Taine and Theódule Ribot. They transposed the issue to the field of mind and psychopathology. Both concluded in a strong challenge on the self's unity and simplicity. This generated a deep concern in Nietzsche's philosophy. He repeatedly refers to Individuum as a multiplicity of cells. Finally, we will go in deep into the Nietzschean consideration about Individuum because this topic means one important aspect of the concept of Übermensch that Nietzsche imagines inspired by the great men of the Renaissance as a promising way out of Nihilism. (shrink)

L’article analyse la représentation et la perception des Grandes invasions à la fin du xixe siècle et au début du xxe siècle : des mouvements de groupes ethniques cohérents, conduits par des héros masculins. Ce modèle a été suggéré à partir d’un type spécifique de sagas mythiques du haut Moyen Âge, les Origines gentium qui, s’appuyant sur différentes sources anciennes, présentaient l’échiquier complexe des déplacements, des guerres et des alliances entre les barbares et l’Empire comme des exodes linéaires de tribus (...) cohérentes vers une terre promise. Les archéologues et les ostéologues ont appliqué littéralement ce modèle : les biens funéraires et les types de squelettes permettaient à leurs yeux d’identifier les membres des différentes tribus et de suivre leurs routes migratoires. Ils ont privilégié les tombes avec des armes et les squelettes masculins et souligné ainsi l’agentivité des hommes. Cependant, les découvertes archéologiques examinées de plus près nous racontent une histoire complètement différente : dans les cimetières du haut Moyen Âge, les femmes avaient une plus grande visibilité que les hommes. (shrink)

How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different stages of the process. We test our hypotheses with a proprietary database of 169 environmental, social, and governance engagements with US public companies over 2007–12. We find that while (...) deliberative interaction does not help advance the engagement process, it positively moderates the effect of disagreement in the solution development stage. By contrast, in the solution implementation stage, deliberative interaction amplifies the negative effect of disagreement, thus hindering progress in the engagement. Our article contributes to shareholder engagement, deliberation theory, and interactionist organization theory by establishing that engagement effectiveness is an interactional achievement shaped by both deliberation and disagreement. (shrink)

The concept of sustainability was developed in response to stakeholder demands. One of the key mechanisms for engaging stakeholders is sustainability disclosure, often in the form of a report. Yet, how reporting is used to engage stakeholders is understudied. Using resource dependence and stakeholder theories, we investigate how companies within the same industry address different dependencies on stakeholders for economic, natural environment, and social resources and thus engage stakeholders accordingly. To achieve this objective, we conducted our research using qualitative research (...) methods. Our findings suggest that the resource dependencies on different stakeholders lead to development of different stakeholder relationships and thus appropriate resources within the company to execute engagement strategies that are informing, responding, or involving. Our research explains why diversity exists in sustainability disclosure by studying how it is used to engage stakeholders. We find that five sustainability reporting characteristics are associated with the company’s stakeholder engagement strategy: directness of communication, clarity of stakeholder identity, deliberateness of collecting feedback, broadness of stakeholder inclusiveness, and utilization of stakeholder engagement for learning. Our study develops the literature by providing insight into companies’ choices of stakeholder engagement strategy thus explaining diversity in sustainability reporting based on the characteristics and relationships with specific stakeholders. (shrink)

This study concerned validating academic integrity survey, a measure developed in 2010 to investigate academic integrity practices in a Malaysian university. It also examined the usefulness of the measure across gender and nationality of the participants. The sample size comprised 450 students selected via quota sampling technique. The findings supported the multidimensionality of academic dishonesty. Also, strong evidence of convergent and discriminant validity, and construct reliability were generated for the revised AIS. The testing of moderating effects yielded two outcomes. While (...) the gender invariant analysis produced evidence that the three-dimensional model was not moderated by gender; the nationality effect was inconclusive, probably due to a noticeable imbalance in respondent distribution for the nationality group. The significance of this study lies not only in the rigorous statistical methods deployed to validate the dimension and psychometric properties of the AIS; but establishing the gender invariance of the model. It is understood from the findings that although male and female students may vary in their academic misconducts, the underlying factors for these conducts are the same and can be addressed effectively using a non-discriminating approach. (shrink)

Known throughout East Asia as Mengzi, or "Master Meng," Mencius was a Chinese philosopher of the late Zhou dynasty, an instrumental figure in the spread of the Confucian tradition, and a brilliant illuminator of its ideas. Mencius was active during the Warring States Period, in which competing powers sought to control the declining Zhou empire. Like Confucius, Mencius journeyed to one feudal court after another, searching for a proper lord who could put his teachings into practice. Only a leader who (...) possessed the moral qualities of a true king could unify China, Mencius believed, and in his defense of Zhou rule and Confucian philosophy, he developed an innovative and highly nuanced approach to understanding politics, self-cultivation, and human nature, profoundly influencing the course of Confucian thought and East Asian culture. _Mencius_ is a record of the philosopher's conversations with warring lords, disciples, and adversaries of the Way, as well as a collection of pronouncements on government, human nature, and a variety of other philosophical and political subjects. Mencius is largely concerned with the motivations of human actors and their capacity for mutual respect. He builds on the Confucian idea of _ren_, or humaneness, and places it alongside the complementary principle of _yi_, or rightness, advancing a complex notion of what is right for certain individuals as they perform distinct roles in specific situations. Consequently, Mencius's impact was felt not only in the thought of the intellectual and social elite but also in the value and belief systems of all Chinese people. (shrink)

Controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) studies involve the deliberate infection of healthy volunteers with malaria parasites under controlled conditions to study immune responses and/or test drug or vaccine efficacy. An empirical ethics study was embedded in a CHMI study at a Kenyan research programme to explore stakeholders’ perceptions and experiences of deliberate infection and moral implications of these. Data for this qualitative study were collected through focus group discussions, in‐depth interviews and non‐participant observation. Sixty‐nine participants were involved, including CHMI study (...) volunteers, community representatives and research staff. Data were managed using QSR Nvivo 10 and analysed using an inductive‐deductive approach, guided by ethics literature. CHMI volunteers had reasonable understanding of the study procedures. Decisions to join were influenced by study incentives, trust in the research institution, their assessment of associated burdens and motivation to support malaria vaccine development. However, deliberate malaria infection was a highly unusual research strategy for volunteers, community representatives and some study staff. Volunteers’ experiences of physical, emotional and social burdens or harms were often greater than anticipated initially, and fluctuated over time, related to specific procedures and events. Although unlikely to deter volunteers' participation in similar studies in furture, we argue that the dissonance between level of understanding of the burdens involved and actual experiences are morally relevant in relation to community engagement, informed consent processes, and ongoing support for volunteers and research staff. We further argue that ethics oversight of CHMI studies should take account of these issues in deciding whether consent, engagement and the balance of benefits and harms are reasonable in a given context. (shrink)

Research has shown that the construction of visual representations may have a positive effect on cognitive skills, including argumentation. In this paper we present a study on learning argumentation through computer-supported argument diagramming. We specifically focus on whether students, when provided with an argument-diagramming tool, create better diagrams, are more motivated, and learn more when working with other students or on their own. We use learning analytics to evaluate a variety of student activities: pre and post questionnaires to explore motivational (...) changes; the argument diagrams created by students to evaluate richness, complexity and completion; and pre and post knowledge tests to evaluate learning gains. (shrink)

Research from behavioural sciences shows that people reach decisions in a much less rational and well-considered way than was often assumed. The doctrine of informed consent, which is an important ethical principle and legal requirement in medical practice, is being challenged by these insights into decision-making and real-world choice behaviour. This article discusses the implications of recent insights of research on decision-making behaviour for the informed consent doctrine. It concludes that there is a significant tension between the often non-rational choice (...) behaviour and the traditional theory of informed consent. Responsible ways of dealing with or solving these problems are considered. To this end, patient decisions aids are discussed as suitable interventions to support autonomous decision-making. However, current PDAs demand certain improvements in order to protect and promote autonomous decision-making. Based on a conception of autonomy, we will argue which type of improvements are needed. (shrink)

TThis paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing visuo-kinetic signs as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts of (...) metonymy (e.g., experiential domains, frame metonymy, contiguity, and pragmatic inferencing). The guiding assumption is that gestures metonymically profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of familiar scenes, that is, the motivating context of frames. The discussion shows how gestures may evoke frame structures exhibiting varying degrees of groundedness, complexity, and schematicity: basic physical action and object frames; more complex frames; and highly abstract, complex frame structures. It thereby provides gestural evidence for the idea that metonymy is more basic and more directly experientially grounded than metaphor and thus often feeds into correlated metaphoric processes. Furthermore, the paper offers some initial insights into how metonymy also seems to induce the emergence of schematic patterns in gesture which may result from action-based and discourse-driven processes of habituation and conventionalization. It exemplifies how these forces may engender grammaticalization of a basic physical action into a gestural marker that shows strong metonymic form reduction, decreased transitivity, and interacting pragmatic functions. Finally, addressing basic metonymic operations in signed lexemes elucidates certain similarities regarding sign constitution in gesture and sign. English and German multimodal discourse data as well as German Sign Language (DGS) are drawn upon to illustrate the theoretical points of the paper. Overall, this paper presents a unified account of metonymy’s role in underpinning forms, functions, and patterns in visuo-kinetic signs. (shrink)

‘‘Post-normal science’’ has received much attention in recent years, but like many iconic concepts, it has attracted differing conceptualizations, applications, and implications, ranging from being a ‘‘cure-all’’ for democratic deficit to the key to achieving more sustainable futures. This editorial article introduces a Special Issue that takes stock of research on PNS and critically explores how such research may develop. Through reviewing the history and evolution of PNS, the authors seek to clarify the extant definitions, conceptualizations, and uses of PNS. (...) The authors identify five broad areas of research on, or using, PNS which have developed over four decades. Their analysis suggests that the 1990s represent a symbolic watershed in the use of PNS terminology, when the concept was further developed and applied to highly complicated issues such as climate change. The authors particularly distinguish between uses of PNS as a normative prescription and as a practical method. Through this classification, they set out gaps and research questions arising. They then briefly summarize the Special Issue articles and consider their relationship to each other and the research questions raised by their analysis. They conclude by considering what the articles in this issue suggest for future theory building in PNS and related scholarship. (shrink)

Introduction: Time and the shared world -- The "subject" of inquiry -- Mineness and the practical first-person -- Being and otherness: Sartre's critique -- Heideggerian aprioricity and the categories of being -- The temporality of care -- Fursorge: acknowledging the other Dasein -- Authenticity, inauthenticity, and the extremes of Fursorge -- Conclusion.

This study examines the relationships between a company''s emphasis on discretionary social responsibility, environment, and firm performance. It tests the proposition that environmental munificence and dynamism moderate the relationship between discretionary social responsibility and financial performance. Social responsibility was measured with a three-item scale in a sample of 62 firms using a questionnaire. Environmental munificence and dynamism were measured using archival sources as was financial performance (return on assets and return on sales). The results of moderated regression analyses and subgroup (...) analyses found a significant moderating effect of environment on the social responsibility-firm performance relationship. Discretionary social responsibility contributes to firm performance in environments that are dynamic and munificent. (shrink)

The methodological underpinnings of studies into early specialization have recently been critiqued. Previous researchers have commented on the variety of, and over-simplified, methods used to capture early specialization. This exploratory study, therefore, suggests a new direction for how early specialization can be conceptualised and measured. We aim to create an index approach whereby early specialization is measured as a continuous variable, in line with commonly used definitions. The continuous variable for degrees of early specialization is calculated from a questionnaire which (...) captures the four key components of early specialization; 1) intensity, 2) year-round training, 3) single sport, and 4) commencing age 12 or younger. The proposed index approach is illustrated in a sample of 290 Swedish aesthetic performers aged 12-20 years (M = 15.88), whose descriptive statistics are used to discuss the suitability and usability of the measure. The proposed index approach functions as a guideline to future researchers. We hope that introducing a new index approach we will encourage further discussion around the measurement of early specialization. Additionally, we hope to pave the way for future research to explore more complex research questions. (shrink)

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the use of heavily restricted randomization designs which enforce balance on observed covariates in randomized controlled trials. However, when restrictions are strict, there is a risk that the treatment effect estimator will have a very high mean squared error. In this article, we formalize this risk and propose a novel combinatoric-based approach to describe and address this issue. First, we validate our new approach by re-proving some known properties of complete randomization and restricted (...) randomization. Second, we propose a novel diagnostic measure for restricted designs that only use the information embedded in the combinatorics of the design. Third, we show that the variance of the MSE of the difference-in-means estimator in a randomized experiment is a linear function of this diagnostic measure. Finally, we identify situations in which restricted designs can lead to an increased risk of getting a high MSE and discuss how our diagnostic measure can be used to detect such designs. Our results have implications for any restricted randomization design and can be used to evaluate the trade-off between enforcing balance on observed covariates and avoiding too restrictive designs. (shrink)

The automatic prediction of court case judgments using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing is challenged by the variety of norms and regulations, the inherent complexity of the forensic language, and the length of legal judgments. Although state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on large-scale datasets, the underlying model reasoning is not transparent to the legal expert. This paper jointly addresses court judgment prediction and explanation by not only predicting the judgment but also providing legal experts (...) with sentence-based explanations. To boost the performance of both tasks we leverage a legal named entity recognition step, which automatically annotates documents with meaningful domain-specific entity tags and masks the corresponding fine-grained descriptions. In such a way, transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models can attend to in-domain entity-related information in the inference process while neglecting irrelevant details. Furthermore, the explainer can boost the relevance of entity-enriched sentences while limiting the diffusion of potentially sensitive information. We also explore the use of in-context learning and lightweight fine-tuning to tailor LLMs to the legal language style and the downstream prediction and explanation tasks. The results obtained on a benchmark dataset from the Indian judicial system show the superior performance of entity-aware approaches to both judgment prediction and explanation. (shrink)

SCHOFIELD I, TOLSON D and FLEMING V. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 165–176 [Epub ahead of print]How nurses understand and care for older people with delirium in the acute hospital: a Critical Discourse AnalysisDelirium is a common presentation of deteriorating health in older people. It is potentially deleterious in terms of patient experience and clinical outcomes. Much of what is known about delirium is through positivist research, which forms the evidence base for disease‐based classification systems and clinical guidelines. There is little (...) systematic study of nurses’ day‐to‐day practice of nursing patients with delirium. The aim was to uncover the kinds of knowledge that informs nurses’ care and to explicate the basis of that knowledge. Critical Discourse Analysis is underpinned by the premise that powerful interests within society mediate how social practices are constructed. Links were made between the grammatical and lexical features of nurses’ language about care in interviews and naturalistic settings, and the healthcare context. Care focused on the continuous surveillance of patients with delirium by nurses themselves or vicariously through other patients, and containment. Nurses influenced by major discourses of risk reduction and safety, constructed patients with delirium as risk objects. The philosophy of person‐centred and dignified care advocated in nursing literature and government policy is an emerging discourse, though little evident in the data. The current dominant discourses on safety must give space to discourses of dignity and compassion. (shrink)