Leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for ethical climate in organizations. In recent years, there has been an increased skepticism about the role played by corporate executives in developing and implementing ethics in business practices. Sales and marketing practices of businesses, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, have come under increased scrutiny. This study identifies a type of leadership style that can help firms develop an ethical climate. Responses from 333 salespeople working for a North American subsidiary of (...) an international pharmaceutical company were used to analyze the impact of instrumental leadership on ethical climate. We also examined the effect of ethical climate on effort, satisfaction with the supervisor, and job satisfaction. Managerial implications are provided. (shrink)
Customer orientation (CO) and the development of long-term relationships with customers are known conditions for growth and profit sustainability. Businesses use special treatments, inducements, and personal gestures to show their appreciation to customers. However, there are concerns about whether these inducements really create the right perceptions in customer’s mind. This study suggests that when customers believe that the firm is ethical, the inducements and special treatments received are seen in a positive light and can help develop loyalty. The hypotheses were (...) tested with responses from 299 customers of financial institutions in Chile. Results support the hypotheses that firm’s ethical reputation helps in retaining customers. Managerial implications are provided. (shrink)
We review and discuss A. H. Louie’s book “More than Life Itself: A Reflexion on Formal Systems and Biology” from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, involving both biology and mathematics, taking into account new developments and related theories.
Attitudinal- and stress theory are used to investigate the effect of ethical climate on job outcomes. Responses from 208 service employees who work for a country health department were used to test a structural model that examines the process through which ethical climate (EC) affects turnover intention (TI). This study shows that the EC-TI relationship is fully mediated by role stress (RC), interpersonal conflict (IC), emotional exhaustion (EE), trust in supervisor (TS), and job satisfaction (JS). Results show that EC reduces (...) (RS) and increases TS. Lower stress levels result in lower EE, higher JS, and lower TI. Also, supervisor trust (TS) reduces IC and EE. The structural model predicts 53.9% of the variance of TI. (shrink)
A distinction is drawn between situations as indices required for semantically evaluating sentences and situations as denotations resulting from such evaluation. For atomic sentences, possible worlds may serve as indices, and events as denotations. The distinction is extended beyond atomic sentences according to formulae-as-types and applied to implicit quantifier domain restrictions, intensionality and conditionals.
In [HKL00] (henceforth HKL), Hamm, Kamp and van Lambalgen declare ‘‘there is no opposition between formal and cognitive semantics,’’ notwithstanding the realist/mentalist divide. That divide separates two sides Jackendo¤ has (in [Jac96], following Chomsky) labeled E(xternalized)-semantics, relating language to a reality independent of speakers, and I(nternalized)-semantics, revolving around mental representations and thought. Although formal semanticists have (following David Lewis) traditionally leaned towards E-semantics, it is reasonable to apply formal methods also to I-semantics. This point is made clear in HKL via (...) two computational approaches to natural language semantics, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, [KR93]) and the Event Calculus (EC) presented in [LH05]. In this short note, I wish to raise certain questions about EC that can be traced to the applicability of formal methods to E-semantics and I-semantics alike. These opposing orientations suggest di¤erent notions of time, event and representation. (shrink)
This course aims to assess the principle of compositionality (CP) and how it fits with recent developments in natural language interpretation, especially those that stress the role of context. We first try to lay down a suitable formal framework for CP, reviewing proposals by Montague, Janssen, Hendriks, Kracht and Hodges. Versions of CP of varying strength are formulated, and some recent results on the existence of compositional semantics and the (much debated) issue of the empirical import of CP discussed. Complementing (...) CP is the notion of context which, under modern (e.g. "dynamic") conceptions, not only conditions interpretation but also is transformed during interpretation. The tension between CP and context is examined relative to problems of anaphora, presupposition, idioms and ambiguity. A somewhat un-orthodox computational application of CP is suggested, emphasizing co-inductive aspects of interpretation that cut across the divide between model-theoretic and proof-theoretic approaches, and between procedural and declarative styles. (shrink)
The idea that temporal propositions are vague predicates is examined with attention to the nature of the objects over which the predicates range. These objects should not, it is argued, be identified once and for all with points or intervals in the real line (or any fixed linear order). Context has an important role to play not only in sidestepping the Sorites paradox (Gaifman 2002) but also in shaping temporal moments/extent (Landman 1991). The Russell-Wiener construction of time from events (Kamp (...) 1979) is related to a notion of context given by a string of observations, the vagueness in which is brought out by grounding the observations in the real line. With this notion of context, the context dependency functions in Gaifman 2002 are adapted to interpret temporal propositions. (shrink)
Situations serving as partial worlds as well as events in natural language semantics are constructed from a type-theoretic interpretation of firstorder formulae and (after a type reduction) temporal formulae. Limitations of the Russell-Wiener-Kamp derivation of time from events are discussed and overcome to give a more widely applicable account of temporal granularity. Finite situations are formulated as strings of observations, conceptualized to persist inertially (in the absence of forces).
Events and situations are represented by strings of temporally ordered observations, on the basis of which the events and situations are recognized. Allen’s basic interval relations are derived from superposing strings that mark interval boundaries, and Kamp’s event structures are constructed as projective limits of strings. Observations are generalized to temporal propositions, leading to event-types that classify event-instances. Working with sets of strings built from temporal propositions, we obtain natural notions of bounded entailment from set inclusions. These inclusions are decidable (...) if the sets are accepted by finite automata. (shrink)
To address complications involving ambiguity, presupposition and implicature, three processes underlying natural language interpretation are isolated: translation, entailment and attunement. A meta-language integrating these processes is outlined, elaborating on a proof-theoretic approach to presupposition.
Conservativity in generalized quantifiers is linked to presupposition filtering, under a propositions-as-types analysis extended with dependent quantifiers. That analysis is underpinned by modeltheoretically interpretable proofs which inhabit propositions they prove, thereby providing objects for quantification and hooks for anaphora.
Forsyth’s (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire and Hunt et al.’s (1989) Corporate Ethical Value Questionnaire are used to examine the ethical ideologies of senior managers from organizations listed in the Australian Stock Exchange. The results indicate how corporate ethical values, religion, gender, and age are related to the idealism and relativism of senior Australian managers. After discussing the results, limitations of the study are offered. Finally, managerial implications are provided and recommendations for future research are given.
String representations of events are applied to Robin Cooper’s proposal that propositions in natural language semantics are types of situations. Links with the higher types of prooftheoretic semantics are forged, deepening type-theoretic interpretations of Discourse Representation Structures to encompass event structures.
The “surge in use of finite-state methods” ([10]) in computational linguistics has largely, if not completely, left semantics untouched. The present paper is directed towards correcting this situation. Techniques explained in [1] are applied to a fragment of temporal semantics through an approach we call finite-state temporality. This proceeds from the intuition of an event as “a series of snapshots” ([15]; see also [12]), equating snapshots with symbols that collectively form our alphabet. A sequence of snapshots then becomes a string (...) over that alphabet, evoking comic/film strips. Jackendoff has, among others, objected to conceptualizing events in terms of snapshots ([8]). To counter these objections, we step up from events-as-strings to event-typesas-regular languages ([5, 6]), recognizing the need for variable granularity. Beyond the introduction of disjunction implicit in the step from a single string up to a set of strings, we obtain a useful logic from the regular operations and a careful choice of the snapshots (constituting our alphabet). (shrink)
The relationship between spiritual well-being and ethical orientations in decision making is examined through a survey of executives in organizations listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The four domains of spiritual well-being, personal, communal, environmental and transcendental (Fisher, Spiritual health: its nature and place in the school curriculum, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1998 ; Gomez and Fisher, Pers Individ Differ 35:1975–1991, 2003 ) are examined in relation to idealism and relativism (Forsyth, J Pers Soc Psychol 39(1):175–184, 1980 ). Results (...) reveal that spiritual well-being, in particular the communal domain of spiritual well-being, is correlated with and predictive of idealism. However, the relationship between spiritual well-being and relativism is weak. Implications of the study are discussed in terms of developing managerial programs that enhance communal well-being which should lead to greater idealism in decision making. Limitations of the study and future research opportunities are outlined. (shrink)
Intervals and the events that occur in them are encoded as strings, elaborating on a conception of events as “intervals cum description.” Notions of satisfaction in interval temporal logics are formulated in terms of strings, and the possibility of computing these via finite-state machines/transducers is investigated. This opens up temporal semantics to finite-state methods, with entailments that are decidable insofar as these can be reduced to inclusions between regular languages.
‘The proper treatment of events’ is the title of a recent book [LH04] by M. van Lambalgen and F. Hamm, applying the event calculus from [Sha97] to natural language semantics. Some basic ideas behind that treatment are presented in a technically different form below, shaped by a concrete formulation of events as strings of sets of fluents ([Fer04]). These strings can be read as comic strips that are (I think) easy to grasp and work with, providing a friendly (if not (...) altogether proper) approach to events. (shrink)
Notions of disambiguation supporting a compositional interpretation ofvambiguous expressions and reflecting intuitions about how sentences combinevin discourse are investigated. Expressions are analyzed both inductively byvbreaking them apart, and co-inductively by embedding them within larger contexts.
Inertia is enshrined in Newton’s first law of motion, a body at rest or in uniform motion remains in that state unless a force is applied to it. Now, consider (1). (1) Pat stopped the car before it hit the tree. Can we conclude from (1) that the car struck the tree? Not without further information such as that supplied in (2). (2) But the bus behind kept going. A post-condition for Pat stopping the car is that the car be (...) at rest. To satisfy a pre-condition for the car hitting the tree (namely, that the car not be at rest), inertia requires that some intervening force act on the car (as hinted, for example, by (2)). In the absence of such a force, (1) would appear to suggest that Pat prevented a collision between car and tree. Exactly what bit of physics are we importing into natural language interpretation here? Oversimplified, Newton’s first law of motion says: no change without force. Identifying force with cause, we come to the slogan no temporality without cause, capturing in a phrase the proposal from Steedman 2000 that.. (shrink)
Anankastic conditionals are analyzed in terms of events conceived as sequences of snapshots – roughly, comics. Quantification is applied not to worlds (sets of which are customarily identified with propositions) but to strings that record observations of actions. The account generalizes to other types of conditionals, sidestepping certain well-known problems that beset possible worlds treatments, such as logical omniscience and irrelevance. A refinement for anankastic conditionals is considered, incorporating action relations.
Finite-state methods are applied to the Russell-Wiener-Kamp notion of time (based on events) and developed into an account of interval relations and semi-intervals. Strings are formed and collected in regular languages and regular relations that are argued to embody temporal relations in their various underspecified guises. The regular relations include retractions that reduce computations by projecting strings down to an appropriate level of granularity, and notions of containment for partiality within and across such levels.
Relations computed by finite-state transducers are applied to interpret temporal propositions in terms of strings representing finite contexts or situations. Carnap–Montague intensions mapping indices to extensions are reformulated as relations between strings that can serve as indices and extensions alike. Strings are related according to information content, temporal span and granularity, the bounds on which reflect the partiality of natural language statements. That partiality shapes not only strings-as-extensions (indicating what statements are about) but also strings-as-indices (underlying truth conditions).
The processing of sequences of (English) sentences is analyzedcompositionally through transitions that merge sentences, rather thandecomposing them. Transitions that are in a precise senseinertial are related to disjunctive and non-deterministic approaches toambiguity. Modal interpretations are investigated, inducing variousequivalences on sequences.
are considered with a view toward analyzing operational semantics from the perspective of predicate logic. The notion of a bisimulation is employed in two distinct ways: (i) as an extensional notion of equivalence on programs (or processes) generalizing input/output equivalence (at a cost exceeding II' ,over certain transition predicates computable in log space). and (ii) as a tool for analyzing the dependence of transitions on data (which can be shown to be elementary or nonelementary. depending on the formulation of the (...) transitions). (shrink)
with the meaning function [[·]] appearing on both sides. (1) is commonly construed as a prescription for computing the meaning of a based on the parts of a and their mode of combination. As equality is symmetric, however, we can also read (1) from right to left, as a constraint on the meaning [[b]] of a term b that brings in the wider context where b may occur, in accordance with what Dag Westerst˚ahl has recently described as “one version of (...) Frege’s famous Context Principle”. (shrink)
Finite-state methods are applied to the Russell-Wiener notion of time (based on events) and developed into an account of interval relations and temporal propositions. Strings are formed and collected in regular languages and regular relations that are argued to embody temporal relations in their various underspecified guises. The regular relations include retractions that reduce computations by projecting strings down to an appropriate level of granularity, and non-deterministic relations defining notions of partiality within and across such levels.
Reichenbach's event, reference and speech times are interpreted semantically by stringing and superposing sets of temporal formulae, structured within regular languages. Notions of continuation branches and of inertia, bound (in a precise sense) by reference time, are developed and applied to the progressive and the perfect.
This groundbreaking collection, the most thorough treatment of the philosophy of linguistics ever published, brings together philosophers, scientists and historians to map out both the foundational assumptions set during the second half of ...
A modal logic for translating a sequence of English sentences to a sequence of logical forms is presented, characterized by Kripke models with points formed from input/output sequences, and valuations determined by entailment relations. Previous approaches based (to one degree or another) on Quantified Dynamic Logic are embeddable within it. Applications to presupposition and ambiguity are described, and decision procedures and axiomatizations supplied.
Finite-state methods are applied to determine the consequences of events, represented as strings of sets of fluents. Developed to flesh out events used in natural language semantics, the approach supports reasoning about action in AI, including the frame problem and inertia. Representational and inferential aspects of the approach are explored, centering on conciseness of language, context update and constraint application with bias.
Eventualities and worlds are analysed uniformly as schedules of certain descriptions of eventuality-types (reversing the reduction of eventuality-types to eventualities). The temporal interpretation of modals in Condoravdi 2002 is reformulated to bring out what it is about eventualities and worlds that is essential to the account. What is essential, it is claimed, can be recovered from schedules that may or may not include worlds.
The processing of sequences of (English) sentences is analyzed compositionally through transitions that merge sentences, rather than decomposing them. Transitions that are in a precise sense inertial are related to disjunctive and non-deterministic approaches to ambiguity. Modal interpretations are investigated, inducing various equivalences on sequences.
This article analyses the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility in relation to Human Resources (HR) management. Five potential tools are defined and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Finally, the implementation of the most advanced and powerful tool in this area is studied: the SA8000 standard.
June 1985 B.S. in Mathematics, California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, California) Senior thesis: Elementary induction on finite abelian groups Supervisor: Alexander S. Kechris..
Finite-state descriptions for temporal semantics are outlined through which to distinguish soft inferences reflecting manners of conceptualization from more robust semantic entailments defined over models. Just what descriptions are built (before being interpreted model-theoretically) and how they are grounded in models of reality explain (upon examination) why some inferences are soft.
Notions of context for natural language interpretation are factored in terms of three processes: translation, entailment and attunement. The processes are linked by accessibility relations of the kind studied in many-dimensional modal logic, modulo complications from constraints between translation and entailment (violations in which may trigger re-attunement) and from refinement and underspecification.
Temporal propositions are mapped to sets of strings that witness (in a precise sense) the propositions over discrete linear Kripke frames. The strings are collected into regular languages to ensure the decidability of entailments given by inclusions between languages. (Various notions of bounded entailment are shown to be expressible as language inclusions.) The languages unwind computations implicit in the logical (and temporal) connectives via a system of finite-state constraints adapted from finite-state morphology. Applications to Hybrid Logic and non-monotonic inertial reasoning (...) are briefly considered. (shrink)
A survey was conducted to investigate the relationship of Australian consumers’ lived (experienced) spiritual well-being and materialism with the various dimensions of consumer ethics. Spiritual well-being is composed of four domains—personal, communal, transcendental and environmental well-being. All four domains were examined in relation to the various dimensions of consumers’ ethical beliefs (active/illegal dimension, passive dimension, active/legal dimension, ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension and ‘doing good’/recycling dimension). The results indicated that lived communal well-being was negatively related to perceptions of the active/illegal (...) dimension and the passive dimension and was positively related to perceptions of the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension and the ‘doing good’/recycling dimension. Lived personal well-being was negatively related to perceptions of the active/illegal dimension and was positively related to perceptions of the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension and the ‘doing good’/recycling dimension. Lived transcendental well-being was negatively related to perceptions of the passive dimension, the active/legal dimension and the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension. Lived environmental well-being was negatively related to perceptions of the active/legal dimension and the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension. The findings also indicated that materialism was positively associated with perceptions of actively benefiting from illegal actions, passively benefiting at the expense of the seller, actively benefiting from questionable but legal actions and benefiting from ‘no harm, no foul’ actions. Public policy implications of the findings and opportunities for future research are discussed. (shrink)
Dynamic and proof-conditional approaches to discourse (exemplified by Discourse Representation Theory and Type-Theoretical Grammar, respectively) are related through translations and transitions labeled by first-order formulas with anaphoric twists. Type-theoretic contexts are defined relative to a signature and instantiated model-theoretically, subject to change.
The Yale Shooting Problem introduced by Steve Hanks & Drew McDermott (1987) is a well-known test case of non-monotonic temporal reasoning. There is a sequence of situations. In the initial situation a gun is not loaded and the target is alive. In the next situation the gun is loaded. Eventually, a shot is fired, perhaps with fatal consequences. In this scenario there are two "fluents", alive and loaded, and two actions, load and shoot. Being loaded and being alive are inert (...) propositions in the sense that if they are true at a given moment, they will be true at the next moment unless some action such as.. (shrink)
El Estado es un concepto clave en la filosofía jurídico-política de José Ortega y Gasset (Madrid, 1883-1955). Sin embargo, resulta sorprendente que, pese a la importancia que para este autor tenía dicha noción, no haya sido estudiada con la misma profundidad e interés que otras vertientes de su pensamiento. A este respecto, basta repasar las monografías y los artículos publicados hasta la fecha sobre la figura y la obra de Ortega para constatar que, en términos cuantitativos, las investigaciones dedicadas a (...) la idea orteguiana del Estado han sido apenas testimoniales, y desde luego no son tan significativas como las que se han podido dedicar a otros temas o tópicos más conocidos de su pensamiento. Así pues, el presente libro pretende abordar el estudio de la realidad problemática del Estado en su triple dimensión histórica, sociológica y política. De acuerdo con tal propósito, esta monografía se divide en tres partes: en la primera de ellas, se estudian las instituciones políticas de Roma entendidas por Ortega como precedentes ineludibles para la formación histórica del Estado. La segunda parte de la obra versa sobre el Estado concebido como culminación de lo social, es decir, como órgano diferenciado para el ejercicio del poder público, lo cual conduce indefectiblemente hasta la Teoría de los usos sociales. Por último, la tercera parte se centra en el concepto orteguiano de Estado como forma de organización política, explica la relación que mantienen el Estado y nación en su obra, y expone las líneas principales del programa político pensado por Ortega para modernizar, regenerar y europeizar a España. (shrink)
Events employed in natural language semantics are characterized in terms of regular languages, each string in which can be regarded as a motion picture. The relevant finite automata then amount to movie cameras/projectors, or more formally, to finite Kripke structures with par- tial valuations. The usual regular constructs (concatena- tion, choice, etc) are supplemented with superposition of strings/automata/languages, realized model-theoretically as conjunction.
Schubert’s proposal ([Sch00]) that sentences not only describe but also characterize situations is worked out in the context of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), a well-known propositional logic with linear future operators (e.g. [HR04]). The resulting formalism LTL∗∗ illustrates an approach that diverges from Schubert’s FOL∗∗ in technical details but shares many (if not all) its motivations.
judgments of acceptability A basic choice point is whether the conjunction of two propositions each separately acceptable must be deemed acceptable Concepts of acceptability closed under conjunction are analyzed within Keisler s weak logic for generalized quanti ers or more speci cally lter quanti ers In a di erent direction the notion of a lter is generalized so as to allow sets with probability non in nitesimally below to be acceptable..
Since its original 1996 publication,Jorge Garcia''s ``The Heart of Racism'''' has beenwidely reprinted, a testimony to its importanceas a distinctive and original analysis ofracism. Garcia shifts the standard framework ofdiscussion from the socio-political to theethical, and analyzes racism as essentially avice. He represents his account asnon-revisionist (capturing everyday usage),non-doxastic (not relying on belief),volitional (requiring ill-will), and moralized(racism is always wrong). In this paper, Icritique Garcia''s analysis, arguing that hedoes in fact revise everyday usage, that hisaccount does tacitly rely on (...) belief, thatill-will is not necessary for racism, and thata moralized account gets both the scope and thedynamic of racism wrong. While I do not offeran alternative positive account myself, Isuggest that traditional left-wing structuralanalyses are indeed superior. (shrink)
The year of the centennial of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges is probably the right time to exhume one of the links that this universal writer had with William James. In 1945, Emece, a publisher from Buenos Aires, printed a Spanish translation of William James’s book Pragmatism, with a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges.
Why should philosophy, or even thinking, get in the way of seeing? In attempting to address this question, this paper identifies post-Romanticism as a phenomenologically inflected response to the failure of both pre-Romantic Reflexionsphilosophie and Hegelian speculative overcoming, one that seeks to express our relation to the world in a way that does not rely on a reflection model of consciousness and gives no support to the notion of a cognitively inaccessible absolute. It will be suggested that the poetry of (...)Fernando Pessoa offers lessons in such a post-Romanticism, showing how a phenomenological attentiveness to the world-disclosive power of poetry and to the everyday mereness of things constitutes a more coherent way of relating to the world. With reference to Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, it will be argued that Pessoa’s poetry shows us that it is by reining in the reflection model of consciousness that we achieve a greater sense of the world and our position in it. (shrink)
In this article, we argue that it can be fruitful for philosophers interested in the nature and moral significance of racism to pay more attention to psychology. We do this by showing that psychology provides new arguments against Garcia's views about the nature and moral significance of racism. We contend that some scientific studies of racial cognition undermine Garcia's moral and psychological monism about racism: Garcia disregards (1) the rich affective texture of racism and (2) the diversity of what makes (...) racial ills morally wrong. Key Words: racism • emotions • implicit bias • psychology • racial ills • pluralism. (shrink)
“Given the history of ideas about race and the present knowledge that race does not have the biological foundation that the lay public continues to think it does, philosophers addressing race at this time would seem to have a professional obligation to think through the implications for related topics of the biological non-existence of race. For instance, […].
Valadez' book is an excellent investigation of the question of group rights. Nonetheless, there are some serious objections to group rights that he does not investigate. Groups contain hierarchies of power: thus giving legal privileges to a group is usually tantamount to giving more power to those already in power within the group. Groups have unclear and changing boundaries of membership; group rights often reify the current definition of a group and militate against change. Finally, there are 'dispersed groups' that (...) may be very important in people's identity, but that do not figure in the usual discussions of group ethno-cultural rights; the group of women, groups defined by sexual orientation, profession or the love of something. Such groups are unlikely to win legal privileges but then, giving legal privileges to the ethno-cultural groups makes them more salient by contrast with the 'dispersed groups'. I investigate these points, using a variety of examples. Key Words: group rights • identity • race • Valadez • women. (shrink)
Transpersonal psychology first emerged as an academic discipline in the 1960s and has subsequently broadened into a range of transpersonal studies. Jorge Ferrer (2002) has called for a 'revisioning' of transpersonal theory, dethroning inner experience from its dominant role in defining and validating spiritual reality. In the current paradigm he detects a lingering Cartesianism, which subtly entrenches the very subject-object divide that transpersonalists seek to overcome. This paper outlines the development and current shape of the transpersonal movement, compares Ferrer's (...) epistemology with the heterophenomenology of Daniel Dennett, and speculates on the integration of the latter into transpersonal theory. (shrink)
Following a lengthy period in which they were glorified and worshiped, several illustrious personages led a seemingly miserable and almost forgotten existence for two thousand years until they appeared sporadically in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and poetry. Apart from a brief moment during the Renaissance, the ancient Greek gods only managed to emerge from their existential shadows at the time of Romanticism, when few poets failed to provide these gods with a fleeting haven in some of their verse, even (...) if this favor was often nothing more than a form of tautological self-identification as their being poets (Calasso 11-12). Subsequently, the gods generally played a merely more or less .. (shrink)
It is an honor and also a pleasure to respond to the three philosophers who have devoted so much time and careful attention to reading and critiquing my paper "Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?" As an interdisciplinary scholar who interacts more often with specialists in the social sciences, history, and Italian studies than with philosophers, I was unsure what to expect from the Coss Dialogue. Would it be possible to find words common enough to all that we could begin (...) to address the complex issues raised by national mythology about the United States as a nation of immigrants? I believe that our panel discussions revealed the common ground we rather quickly found. But they also uncovered a few gaping chasms .. (shrink)
