The quality of doctoral-level chemistry (N=145), computer science (N=58), geoscience (N=91), mathematics (N=115), physics (N=123), and statistics/biostatistics (N=64) programs at United States universities was assessed, using 16 measures. These measures focused on variables related to: program size; characteristics of graduates; reputational factors (scholarly quality of faculty, effectiveness of programs in educating research scholars/scientists, improvement in program quality during the last 5 years); university library size; research support; and publication records. Chapter I discusses prior attempts to assess quality in graduate education, (...) development of the study plans, and the selection of disciplines and programs to be evaluated. Chapter II discusses the methodology used, focusing on each of the assessment measures. Chapters III to VIII present, respectively, findings from the analyses of the chemistry, computer science, geoscience, mathematics, physics, and statistics/biostatistics programs. Chapter IX includes a summary of results, correlations among measures, several additional analyses, and suggestions for future studies. Among the findings reported are those indicating that mathematics programs had, on the average, the largest number of faculty (N=33) in December 1980 followed closely by physics (N=28) and chemistry (N=23), and that 80 percent of computer science students had job commitments by graduation. (Survey instruments and supporting documentation are included in appendices.) (JN). (shrink)

The quality of doctoral-level biochemistry (N=139), botany (N=83), cellular/molecular biology (N=89), microbiology (N=134), physiology (N=101), and zoology (N=70) programs at United States universities was assessed, using 16 measures. These measures focused on variables related to: (1) program size; (2) characteristics of graduates; (3) reputational factors (scholarly quality of faculty, effectiveness of programs in educating research scholars/scientists, improvement in program quality during the last 5 years); (4) university library size; (5) research support; and (6) publication records. Chapter I discusses prior attempts (...) to assess quality in graduate education, development of the study plans, and the selection of disciplines and programs to be evaluated. Chapter II discusses the methodology used, focusing on each of the assessment measures. Chapters III to VIII present, respectively, findings from the analyses of the biochemistry, botany, cellular/molecular biology, microbiology, physiology, and zoology programs. Chapter IX includes a summary of results, correlations among measures, several additional analyses, and suggestions for future studies. Among the findings reported are those indicating that cellular/molecular biology programs had, on the average, the largest number of faculty and that students in cellular/molecular biology, biology, biochemistry, microbiology, and physiology received a relatively high fraction of financial support. (Survey instruments and supporting documentation are included in appendices.) (JN). (shrink)

The essays in this book explore the different ways the body has been experienced and interpreted in history, from the medieval to the modern period. Challenging the negative perceptions that the term {u2019}disability{u2019} suggests, the essays together present a mosaic of literary representations of bodies and accounts of real lives lived in their particularity and peculiarity. The book does not attempt to be exhaustive, but rather it celebrates the fact that it is not. By presenting a group of individual cases (...) from different periods in history, the collection demonstrates that any overarching way of describing bodies, or unifying description of the experience of the myriad ways of being in a body, is reductive and unhelpful. The variability of each body in its context is our subject. (shrink)

Bodies of Information initiates the Routledge Advances in the History of Bioethics series by encompassing interdisciplinary Bioethical discussions on a wide range of descriptions of bodies in relation to their contexts from varying perspectives: including literary analysis, sociology, criminology, anthropology, osteology and cultural studies, to read a variety of types of artefacts, from the Romano-British period to Hip Hop. Van Renslaer Potter coined the phrase Global Bioethics to define human relationships with their contexts. This and subsequent volumes return to Potter's (...) founding vision from historical perspectives, and asks, how did we get here from then? (shrink)

Kit Fine has reawakened a puzzle about variables with a long history in analytic philosophy, labeling it “the antinomy of the variable”. Fine suggests that the antinomy demands a reconceptualization of the role of variables in mathematics, natural language semantics, and first-order logic. The difficulty arises because: (i) the variables ‘x’ and ‘y’ cannot be synonymous, since they make different contributions when they jointly occur within a sentence, but (ii) there is a strong temptation to say that distinct variables (...) ‘x’ and ‘y’ are synonymous, since sentences differing by the total, proper substitution of ‘x’ for ‘y’ always agree in meaning. We offer a precise interpretation of the challenge posed by (i) and (ii). We then develop some neglected passages of Tarski to show that his semantics for variables has the resources to resolve the antinomy without abandoning standard compositional semantics. (shrink)

As is well known, the variable-sharing property (vsp) is, according to Anderson and Belnap, a necessary property of any relevant logic. In this paper, we shall consider two versions of the vsp, what we label the "weak vsp" (wvsp) and the "strong vsp" (svsp). In addition, the "no loose pieces property," a property related to the wvsp and the svsp, will be defined. Each one of these properties shall generally be characterized by means of a class of logical matrices. (...) In this way, any logic verified by an actual matrix in one of these classes has the property the class generally represents. Particular matrices (and so, logics) in each class are provided. (shrink)

Parity games are combinatorial representations of closed Boolean μ-terms. By adding to them draw positions, they have been organized by Arnold and Santocanale [3] and [27] into a μ-calculus whose standard interpretation is over the class of all complete lattices. As done by Berwanger et al. [8] and [9] for the propositional modal μ-calculus, it is possible to classify parity games into levels of a hierarchy according to the number of fixed-point variables. We ask whether this hierarchy collapses w.r.t. the (...) standard interpretation. We answer this question negatively by providing, for each n≥1, a parity game Gn with these properties: it unravels to a μ-term built up with n fixed-point variables, it is not semantically equivalent to any game with strictly less than n−2 fixed-point variables. (shrink)

This paper argues that research on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) must account for the path dependent nature of firm-stakeholderrelations, and develops the construct of stakeholder influence capacity (SIC) to fill this void. SIC helps to explain why the effects of CSR on corporate financial performance (CFP) vary across firms and across time, therein providing a missing link in the study of the business case. This paper distinguishes CSR from related and confounded corporate resource allocations and from (...) corporate social performance (CSP), then incorporates SIC into a model that explains how acts of CSR are transformed into CFP through stakeholder relationships. This paper also develops a set of propositions to aid future research on the contingencies that produce variable financial returns to investments in CSR. (shrink)

Children are those whose lives are most affected by political conflict. Efforts to establish global peace, equality, justice, and security should, therefore, consider best approaches for aiding and...

Moral capacity is an important feature of what it means to be human. In this volume, the contributors have taken on the daunting task of trying to distinguish between legal and moral capacity. This distinction is difficult at times for clinicians, philosophers and legal scholars alike. Part of the challenge of defining moral capacity lies in the difficulty of adequately categorizing it. For this reason, the editors have chosen to divide the book into three parts. The first looks at the (...) concepts involved in the discussion of moral capacity; the second considers the role of moral capacity in the lives of professionals; and the final part reflects on case studies of moral capacity or incapacity illustrating the challenge that moral capacity presents - its definition lying between two seemingly incommensurable models, those of the threshold and continuum. This volume takes a multidisciplinary approach to the subject, and ties the disciplines of medicine, philosophy and law into the health context. It will be of interest to medical health professionals as well as researchers working in the areas of philosophy and law. (shrink)

It is common in attempts to extend the theory of evolution to culture to generalize from the causal basis of biological evolution, so that evolutionary theory becomes the theory of copying processes. Generalizing from the formal dynamics of evolution allows greater leeway in what kinds of things cultural entities can be, if they are to evolve. By understanding the phenomenon of cultural transmission in terms of coordinated phenotypic variability, we can have a theory of cultural evolution which allows us to (...) avoid the various difficulties with the elaboration of informational entities such as the cultural replicator, or meme. Such an account is a boon to the project of evolutionary epistemology since it confirms the presumption in favor of the general adaptiveness of culture, illuminating rather than obscuring the inherent intimacy of our relationship to (e.g.) our ideas. (shrink)

There is a solution to the antinomy of the variable that does not call for semantic relationism. I argue that if we carefully distinguish between variable types and variable tokens or occurrences, and if we take the number of variable types involved properly into account, then coordination among variable tokens or occurrences is reducible to an intrinsic semantic feature of those tokens or occurrences. The fact that two tokens or occurrences of the same variable (...) type contained in the same sentence or context assume the same value at a time derives from an intrinsic semantic feature of a token or occurrence, namely from being a token or occurrence of a type whose tokens or occurrences must assume the same value at a time if contained in the same sentence or context. (shrink)

Sex differences in behavior are most interesting when they are the result of inherent differences in the operational rules motivating behavior and not merely a reflection of differing life history experiences. American men and women exhibit a few differences in testamentary patterns of property allocation that appear to be due to inherently different rules of allocation. Even when analyses control for resources and surviving kin configurations, women distribute their property among a greater number of individual beneficiaries than do men. The (...) most striking differences in property allocation between men and women occur within the nuclear family and reflect differences in reproductive life span and the resulting reproductive conflicts between spouses that can endure beyond death. (shrink)

This paper argues that research on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) must account for the path dependent nature of firm-stakeholderrelations, and develops the construct of stakeholder influence capacity (SIC) to fill this void. SIC helps to explain why the effects of CSR on corporate financial performance (CFP) vary across firms and across time, therein providing a missing link in the study of the business case. This paper distinguishes CSR from related and confounded corporate resource allocations and from (...) corporate social performance (CSP), then incorporates SIC into a model that explains how acts of CSR are transformed into CFP through stakeholder relationships. This paper also develops a set of propositions to aid future research on the contingencies that produce variable financial returns to investments in CSR. (shrink)

Many relevant logics are conservatively extended by Boolean negation. Not all, however. This paper shows an acute form of non-conservativeness, namely that the Boolean-free fragment of the Boolean extension of a relevant logic need not always satisfy the variable-sharing property. In fact, it is shown that such an extension can in fact yield classical logic. For a vast range of relevant logic, however, it is shown that the variable-sharing property, restricted to the Boolean-free fragment, still holds for the (...) Boolean extended logic. (shrink)

In our paper “A general characterization of the variable-sharing property by means of logical matrices”, a general class of so-called “Relevant logical matrices”, RMLs, is defined. The aim of this paper is to define a class of simpler Relevant logical matrices RMLs′serving the same purpose that RMLs, to wit: any logic verified by an RML′has the variable-sharing property and related properties predicable of the logic of entailment E and of the logic of relevance R.

The logic TM is the result of adding the mingle axiom, M to Ticket Entailment logic, T. In the present study, it is proved that TM has the variable-sharing property . Ternary relational semantics for TM is provided. Finally, an interesting extension of TM with the vsp is briefly discussed.

A restriction of R-Mingle with the variable-sharing property and the Ackermann properties is defined. From an intuitive semantical point of view, this restriction is an alternative to Anderson and Belnap’s logic of entailment E.

We examine the set of formula-to-formula valid inferences of Classical Logic, where the premise and the conclusion share at least a propositional variable in common. We review the fact, already proved in the literature, that such a system is identical to the first-degree entailment fragment of R. Epstein's Relatedness Logic, and that it is a non-transitive logic of the sort investigated by S. Frankowski and others. Furthermore, we provide a semantics and a calculus for this logic. The semantics is (...) defined in terms of a \-matrix built on top of a 5-valued extension of the 3-element weak Kleene algebra, whereas the calculus is defined in terms of a Gentzen-style sequent system where the left and right negation rules are subject to linguistic constraints. (shrink)

As it is well known, Relevance Logic R plus the axiom mingle (R-Mingle) does not have the variable-sharing property (vsp). The aim of this paper is to improve this result by defining a weak logic with the axiom mingle and not included in minimal logic BM lacking the vsp.

The paper reviews the leading attempts in the literature—contextualist, relativist, and interest-relative invariantist—to provide a satisfactory semantic theory of the ways in which the correctness conditions of ascriptions of knowledge seem to vary in tandem with variation in pragmatic factors—interests, stakes, and sentences—afflicting the parties concerned. It is argued that none of these attempts provides a satisfactory account of all the variability phenomena save at the cost of mis-predicting other aspects of what we count as acceptable uses of “knows” and (...) its cognates. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the correct reaction to this finding is not a reversion to the traditional kind of invariantism about knowledge, but rather a move to a kind of deflationism about “knows” broadly comparable to the familiar deflationist account of “true”. (shrink)

Research in the fields of pragmatics has highlighted important differences in speech act realisation strategies and the perception of contextual variables across lingua-cultures. This particularly applies for requests, which are potentially face-threating acts and important expressions of cultural behaviour, as their performance is influenced by culturally-embedded perspectives on rights and obligations. Although some languages have been widely investigated in terms of request realisation, such as English, little research has been done on Italian. This study examines request realisation strategies in Italian, (...) in terms of Head Acts and request perspective, and the impact of the sociopragmatic factors of social distance and weight of imposition of the request on strategy choice amongst eight Italian speakers, by means of open-ended roleplays. The data was analysed by using a coding scheme based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain and revealed that the Italian speakers where more influenced by social distance, which in turn impacted on the choice of request perspective. They were shown to prefer using hearer-orientation, which reflected in the verb conjugation of the Head Acts, since this perspective allows them to do relational work with the hearer, by either addressing the recipient with the familiar tu or with the formal lei. (shrink)

In this paper we first briefly review Bell's (1964, 1966) Theorem to see how it invalidates any deterministic "hidden variable" account of the apparent indeterminacy of quantum mechanics (QM). Then we show that quantum uncertainty, at the level of DNA mutations, can "percolate" up to have major populational effects. Interesting as this point may be it does not show any autonomous indeterminism of the evolutionary process. In the next two sections we investigate drift and natural selection as the locus (...) of autonomous biological indeterminacy. Here we conclude that the population-level indeterminacy of natural selection and drift are ultimately based on the assumption of a fundamental indeterminacy at the level of the lives and deaths of individual organisms. The following section examines this assumption and defends it from the determinists' attack. Then we show that, even if one rejects the assumption, there is still an important reason why one might think evolutionary theory (ET) is autonomously indeterministic. In the concluding section we contrast the arguments we have mounted against a deterministic hidden variable account of ET with the proof of the impossibility of such an account of QM. (shrink)

As children gradually master grammatical rules, they often go through a period of producing form‐meaning associations that were not observed in the input. For example, 2‐ to 3‐year‐old English‐learning children use the bare form of verbs in settings that require obligatory past tense meaning while already starting to produce the grammatical –ed inflection. While many studies have focused on overgeneralization errors, fewer studies have attempted to explain the root of this earlier stage of rule acquisition. In this work, we use (...) computational modeling to replicate children's production behavior prior to the generalization of past tense production in English. We illustrate how seemingly erroneous productions emerge in a model, without being licensed in the grammar and despite the model aiming at conforming to grammatical forms. Our results show that bare form productions stem from a tension between two factors: (1) trying to produce a less frequent meaning (the past tense) and (2) being unable to restrict the production of frequent forms (the bare form) as learning progresses. Like children, our model goes through a stage of bare form production and then converges on adult‐like production of the regular past tense, showing that these different stages can be accounted for through a single learning mechanism. (shrink)