Short description: One of the major works of the great German theologian Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative deals with one the many uncertainties in which we ...

We investigate peer influence on managerial honesty under varying levels of transparency. In a laboratory experiment, managers report their costs to a superior to request budget. We manipulate whether the managers learn each other’s report and cost or the report but not the cost. The results show, first, that managers are susceptible to peer influence, as they join peers in reporting honestly and dishonestly both under full and partial transparency. Second, however, the effect of peer influence is asymmetric. While managers’ (...) dishonesty increases much when peers’ reports are higher than they have expected, the opposite is not true. Third, partial transparency reinforces this asymmetry in peer influence. Unlike full transparency, it allows managers to substitute self-serving assumptions for missing information and to thus justify their own dishonesty more easily. The contribution of this study is twofold: It provides evidence for the interaction between transparency and peer influence and it highlights the role of expectations in fueling dishonesty. Our findings warn firms that especially partial transparency may spread dishonesty more than honesty. Transparency may also hurt firms that push honesty norms but fail to enforce compliance, thus raising and disappointing managers’ expectations. (shrink)

Education-migration, or the multi-step recruitment and retention of international students as immigrants, is an increasingly important component of both higher education and so-called highly-skilled migration. This is particularly true in Canada, a country portrayed as a model for highly-skilled migration and supportive of international student mobility. However, education-migration remains under-analyzed from a social justice perspective. Using a mobility justice framework, this paper considers COVID-19’s impact on Canada’s education-migration system at four scales: individuals, education institutions, state immigration regimes, and planetary geoecologies. (...) It identifies ethical tensions inherent to Canada’s education-migration from a systems-level and suggests that a multi-scalar approach to social justice can both usefully complexify discussions and introduce unsettling paradoxes. It also stresses that the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to reimagine rather than return. (shrink)

In the digital age, the use of advanced technology is becoming a new paradigm in police work, criminal justice, and the penal system. Algorithms promise to predict delinquent behaviour, identify potentially dangerous persons, and support crime investigation. Algorithm-based applications are often deployed in this context, laying the groundwork for a ‘smart criminal justice’. In this qualitative study based on 32 interviews with criminal justice and police officials, we explore the reasons why and extent to which such a smart criminal justice (...) system has already been established in Switzerland, and the benefits perceived by users. Drawing upon this research, we address the spread, application, technical background, institutional implementation, and psychological aspects of the use of algorithms in the criminal justice system. We find that the Swiss criminal justice system is already significantly shaped by algorithms, a change motivated by political expectations and demands for efficiency. Until now, algorithms have only been used at a low level of automation and technical complexity and the levels of benefit perceived vary. This study also identifies the need for critical evaluation and research-based optimization of the implementation of advanced technology. Societal implications, as well as the legal foundations of the use of algorithms, are often insufficiently taken into account. By discussing the main challenges to and issues with algorithm use in this field, this work lays the foundation for further research and debate regarding how to guarantee that ‘smart’ criminal justice is actually carried out smartly. (shrink)

Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis is a sympathetic critique of Freud's work, tracing its political content and context from his early writings on hysteria to his late essays on civilization and religion. Brunner's central claim is that politics is a pervasive and essential component of all of Freud's discourse, since Freud viewed both the psyche and society primarily as constellations of power and domination. Brunner shows that when read politically, Freud's discourse can be seen to unite mechanics and meaning (...) into a plausible, fruitful and internally consistent theory of the mind, therapy, family and society. Part one deals with the medical and political background of Freud's work. It explains how Freud postulated mental principles that were the same for all races and nations. The second part is concerned with the logic and language of Freud's theory of the mind. Brunner also details how Freud introduced dynamics of dominance and subjugation into the very core of the psyche. Part three addresses dynamics of power in the clinical setting, which Freud forged out of a curious blend of authoritarian and liberal elements. Brunner focuses on how this setting creates an arena for verbal politics. He also examines various social factors that influenced the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis, such as class, gender and education. Part four explores Freud's analysis of the family and large-scale social institutions. Though Brunner is critical of the authoritarian bias in Freud's social theory, he suggests that it provides a useful vocabulary to unmask hidden psychological aspects of domination and subjection. (shrink)

This study investigates the use of specific educative features for supporting the teaching of nature of science during read-alouds of elementary science trade books. Educative features are components of educative curriculum materials that aim to increase teachers’ content knowledge and support effective instructional practices. Understanding how teachers use specific educative features is important for the future design of curriculum materials that can be used to improve teachers’ views of NOS in tandem with changing their teaching practices. Qualitative data from teacher (...) interviews and observations of read-alouds were used to determine which educative features teachers used and how effective they were perceived as being. Results indicate that teachers varied in their use of educative features and tended to focus on the ones that addressed specific teaching moves as opposed to those that supported understanding why the curriculum was developed as it was. Based on these findings, recommendations for future research that highlights the importance of all educative features are provided. (shrink)

Languages are complex systems that allow speakers to produce novel grammatical utterances. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract they think the mental representation of speakers have to be to give rise to this grammatical creativity. In order to shed light on these questions, the present study looks at one specific construction type, English comparative correlatives, that turns out to be particularly interesting in this context: on the one hand it has been described in terms of one of (...) the most abstract and general syntactic rules, on the other hand it shows specific idiomatic structures that are often produced without any variation. While the syntax and semantics of the English Comparative Correlative construction have received considerable attention in the literature, so far only a small number of usage-based analyses have been published on the topic. These either only relied on small databases or focussed only on the productivity of one slot in the construction. In contrast to this, the present study analyses more than 1,400 CC tokens sampled from COCA. The results of the present study yield important results concerning English CC constructions, including the schematicity and generality of their mental representations. (shrink)

In this paper we study an alternative approach to the concept of abstract logic and to connectives in abstract logics. The notion of abstract logic was introduced by Brown and Suszko —nevertheless, similar concepts have been investigated by various authors. Considering abstract logics as intersection structures we extend several notions to their κ -versions, introduce a hierarchy of κ -prime theories, which is important for our treatment of infinite connectives, and study different concepts of κ -compactness. We are particularly interested (...) in non-topped intersection structures viewed as semi-lattices with a minimal meet-dense subset, i.e., with a minimal generator set. We study a chain condition which is sufficient for a minimal generator set, implies compactness of the logic, and in regular logics is equivalent to compactness of the consequence relation together with the existence of a inconsistent set, where κ is the cofinality of the cardinality of the logic. Some of these results are known in a similar form in the context of closure spaces, we give extensions to intersection structures and to big cardinals presenting new proofs based on set-theoretical tools. The existence of a minimal generator set is crucial for our way to define connectives. Although our method can be extended to further non-classical connectives we concentrate here on intuitionistic and infinite ones. Our approach leads us to the concept of the set of complete theories which is stable under all considered connectives and gives rise to the definition of the topological space of the logic. Topological representations of abstract logics by means of this space remain to be further investigated. (shrink)

A child’s age in comparison to the age of her or his classmates (relative age) has been found to be an influential factor on academic achievement, particularly but not exclusively at the beginning of formal schooling. However, few studies have focused on the generalizability of relative age effects. To close this gap, the present study analyzes the generalizability across students with and without immigrant backgrounds, across three student cohorts that entered school under a changing law of school enrollment, and across (...) classes. To this end, we capitalized on representative large-scale data sets from three student cohorts attending public schools in Berlin, the capital of Germany. We analyzed the data using a multilevel framework. Our results for the overall student sample indicate relative age effects for reading and mathematics in favor of the relatively older students in Grade 2 that become somewhat smaller in size in Grade 3. By Grade 8, relative age effects had vanished in reading and had even reversed in favor of the relatively young in mathematics. Furthermore, relative age effects were not found to be systematically different among students with and without immigrant backgrounds, student cohorts, or across classes. Taken together, these results empirically underscore the broad generalizability of the findings as found for the overall student population and replicate the pattern of findings on relative effects as identified by the majority of previous studies. (shrink)

Freud uses paradoxical and conflictual rhetoric to create an unstable and conflictual picture of the mind. Thus he diverges from both dominant traditions of thought in the West: the Judeo-Christian way of filling all gaps in meaning by putting a single omnipotent divinity in charge of them, and the Enlightenment quest for a final, causal language to describe reality. By both suggesting and displacing a plurality of perspectives on the unconscious, Freud’s text mirrors what it claims happens in our minds, (...) in which unconscious impulses undermine the pretense of total rational self-control. Though Freud suggests that a mechanistic description of the mind may bring us nearer to the reality of the unconscious, he also explains that this reality will remain dark. He not only develops an ostensibly mechanistic vocabulary for unconscious mental processes, but also clarifies that his terminology is most fictional precisely when it seems most scientific. Hence, Freud’s science of the unconscious cannot be assimilated to an empiricist position; its philosophical underpinnings are both Kantian and Nietzschean, with metaphors and analogies playing a crucial role. Two dramatic images, in which the mind appears as a domain of warring gods and a realm of political conflict, demonstrate that Freud did not regard the unconscious as some kind of true inner self. He depicts the mind in general and the unconscious in particular as a pagan, conflictual universe over which no god or goddess can gain exclusive control and where no rigid dictatorship is possible. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay examines Freud's construction of a mythical moment during early childhood, in which differences between male and female sexual identities are said to originate. It focuses on the way in which Freud divides fear and envy between the sexes, allocating the emotion of fear to men, and that of envy to women. On the one hand, the problems of this construction are pointed out, but on the other hand, it is shown that even a much-maligned myth may still (...) provide food for thought.Then, four critiques of Freud which have been articulated by prominent feminist psychoanalysts – Karen Horney, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Jessica Benjamin – are presented, as well as the alternative visions of sexual identities which these thinkers have developed. The basic metaphors or economies guiding these visions of sexual difference are appraised in terms of their breadth and depth, with particular reference to their ability to acknowledge and integrate the presence of fear and envy as passions which are evoked but also repressed in the face of sexual difference.From this angle, the contributions of Nancy Chodorow and Luce Irigaray are found to be more limited than those of Karen Horney and Jessica Benjamin, since the former two theorists allocate fear primarily or exclusively to men, as Freud has done, while they remain completely silent on envy. Differences in the scope or reach of the four feminist approaches are explained as a result of the theorists' differing perceptions of the social, political, and cultural position of women in patriarchal society. (shrink)

This article focuses on the dialectic of metapsychology and hermeneutics in psychoanalysis. By combining the causal language of the former with the intentional terminology of the latter, Freud's discourse continuously transgresses narrowly conceived boundaries of scientific disciplines and places its stakes both in the humanities and the natural sciences. The argument is made that attempts to reduce psychoanalytic theory to either causal explanation or interpretation of meaning, turn it into a closed thought-system and rob it of its vitality. Moreover, it (...) is argued that although Freud understood himself to be a scientist, by eschewing the dichotomous reductionism characteristic for both his orthodox followers and critics who try to turn psychoanalysis into either a natural-science-like discipline or a hermeneutics, Freud demonstrated that his self-understanding was far more sophisticated than either of these two groups admit to. This argument is supported by a detailed discussion of Freud's epistemological premises, his conception of science and reality, and, especially, the place which Freud allocated to metapsychology in his interdisciplinary science. It is claimed that metapsychology served Freud as a double-edged sword, both enabling creative and metaphorical thought about the mind's hidden reality, and revealing the necessary incompleteness of hermeneutics. The article concludes with the claim that psychoanalysis needs metapsychology in order to pursue this dual task. (shrink)

This Article shows how three modern English thinkers — Hobbes, Locke and Bentham — construe the law as an intersection of secular eternity on the one one hand and transience in modernity on the other, allowing for immovability and movement at the same time, combining stability with change. It details how these theorists, who undoubtedly have earned themselves places of honor in the canon of modern political thought, tried to solve the problem of self-grounding in three different and yet paradigmatically (...) modern ways, each of them intertwining law and time in a different fashion, and each of them connecting both law and temporality to happiness. Thus this Article shows not only that these three British thinkers claim in one way or another that while natural desires may provide pleasure, only the law can bring happiness, but also emphasizes that, in their view, the transformation of the former into the latter entails a transformation of temporal consciousness. Thereby this Article foregrounds two elements that are crucial to an understanding of how seventeenth and eighteenth century British thinkers envisaged the transformation of pleasure into happiness by means of the law: first, the notion that the law creates or reinforces duration in social life, and second, the idea that the law can harness the immediacy of desires by assuring the legal protection of enduring pleasures, which lead to happiness. (shrink)

This essay discusses various representations of Eichmann's mind that were fashioned on the occasion of his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Gideon Hausner the prosecutor presented the defendant as demonic. Hannah Arendt, the German-born American Jewish philosopher portrayed him as banal or thoughtless. Limiting themselves to the issue of mens rea in their judgment, the Israeli Supreme Court justices described Eichmann's mind as controlled by criminal intent. While these views have been widely discussed in the literature, much of this essay (...) focuses on a hitherto little noted perspective on Eichmann's mind that was formulated by the mental health experts who examined Eichmann for the prosecution. As compared to the inclusionist, confictual, and complex picture these experts presented of Eichmann's mind, Arendt's and Hausner's views appear similar in their reductionism, rather than diametrically opposed, while the approach of the Supreme Court justices to Eichmann's mind can be regarded as restrictive. Methodological problems involved in all these different perspectives are discussed, and it is argued that even though the psychological outlook declares itself to be non-judgmental, it does, in fact, entail a dimension of moral judgment. Finally, Eichmann 's recently declassified memoirs are adduced and interpreted as lending some support to the psychological, inclusionist perspective on Eichmann's mind. (shrink)

This paper discusses a dialectic whereby the law not only influenced medical thinking in late nineteenth-century Germany, but also underwent medicalization of its own initiative. At the end of the 1880s, social legislation was crucial in initiating the German discourse on traumatic nervous disorders. By employing doctors as medical experts in court, the law also created a new experiential realm for doctors, altering their behavior toward patients and shifting their focus from therapy to investigation. However, in the wake of their (...) experiences in court, doctors developed a dual etiology of traumatic symptoms, which included the law itself as a pathogenic element with the power to aggravate symptoms. Two medical views of law can be distinguished: some doctors claimed that it was the desire to receive the pensions offered under social legislation that induced workers to perpetuate and exaggerate their symptoms; others argued that since pension claims embroiled claimants in intimidating legal proceedings, the pathogenic effect of social legislation stemmed from fear rather than greed. (shrink)

Public perception of the magnitude of challenges associated with climate change is still lower than that of the majority of scientists. The societal relevance of climate change has raised the need for a more direct communication between scientists and the public. However, peer-reviewed scientific articles are not well-suited to engaging a wider audience. This begets a need to explore other avenues for communicating climate change. Social media is a vibrant source for information exchange among the masses. Blogs in particular are (...) a promising tool for disseminating complex findings on topics such as climate change, as they are easier to comprehend and are targeted at a broader audience compared to scientific publications. This chapter discusses the usefulness of blogs in communicating climate change, using our blog Climate Footnotes as a case study. Drawing from communication theory and our experiences with Climate Footnotes, we identify and describe elements such as message framing, translation of scientific data, role of language, and interactivity in aiding climate change communication. The insights outlined herein help understand the nature and impact of online climate change communication. The chapter may also serve as a useful blueprint for scientists interested in utilizing blogs to communicate climate change. [Open access]. (shrink)

Increasingly, clinical research is evaluated on the quality of its statistical analysis. Traditionally, statistical analyses in clinical research have been carried out from a ‘frequentist’ perspective. The presence of an alternative paradigm – the Bayesian paradigm – has been relatively unknown in clinical research until recently. There is currently a growing interest in the use of Bayesian statistics in health care research. This is due both to a growing realization of the limitations of frequentist methods and to the ability of (...) Bayesian methods explicitly to incorporate prior expert knowledge and belief into the analyses. This is in contrast to frequentist methods, where prior experience and beliefs tend to be incorporated into the analyses in an ad hoc fashion. This paper outlines the frequentist and Bayesian paradigms. Acute myocardial infarction mortality data are then analysed from both a Bayesian and a frequentist perspective. In some analyses, the two methods are seen to produce comparable results; in others, they produce different results. It is noted that in this example, there are clinically relevant questions that are more easily addressed from a Bayesian perspective. Finally, areas in clinical research where Bayesian ideas are increasingly common are highlighted. (shrink)

This essays argues that Freud’s vision of the rule of law may be worthwhile pondering by legal scholars. It can heighten awareness of its unconscious dimensions and point to a variety of ways in which the law functions as part of culture or civilization, rather than as a system with its own rules. The first two parts of the essay seek to reconstruct Freud’s notion of the rule of law as a dialectical or paradoxical civilizatory force, restraining the passions even (...) though they drive it. These two parts retrace Freud’s genealogy of the law’s prehistoric origins and unconscious dynamics, which can be found in Totem and Taboo and, in summary form, in Moses and Monotheism. Then, the third section critically assesses the problems and limitations of some of the uses legal scholars made of Freud’s genealogy. Finally, the essay returns to the intellectual context of Freud’s conception of the rule of law, concluding with the claim that a Freudian perspective implies, in fact, that legal studies should be conceived as cultural studies. (shrink)