This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants (...) were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing. (shrink)

This paper posits that differences in corporate governance structure partly result from differences in institutional arrangements linked to business systems. We developed a new international triad of business systems: the Anglo-American, the Communitarian and the Emerging system, building on the frameworks of Choi et al. (British Academy of Management (Kynoch Birmingham) 1996, Management International Review 39, 257–279, 1999). A common factor determining the success of a corporate governance structure is the extent to which it is transparent to market forces. Such (...) transparency is more than pure financial transparency; as it can also be based on factors such as governmental, banking and other types of institutional transparency mechanism. There may also be a choice for firms to adopt voluntary corporate disclosure in situations where mandatory disclosure is not established. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1999 and the more recent corporate governance scandals such as Enron, Andersen and Worldcom in the United States and Ahold and Parmalat in Europe show that corporate governance and business ethics issues exist throughout the world. As an illustration we focus on Asia’s emerging1 markets, as, both in view of the pressure of globalization and taking into account the institutional arrangements peculiar to the emerging business system, these issues are important there. Particularly for those who have to find an accommodation between the corporate governance structures and disclosure standards of the Emerging system and those of the Anglo-American and Communitarian systems. (shrink)

: We offer a response to four themes that result from the commentators’ inquiries and critiques: the psychodynamic perspective in contemplative research; the limitations of self-….

Context: Research in the contemplative field has focused on trainable capacities that foster self-regulation and integration. From a psychological perspective, mindfulness and personality research ….

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

Research on children’s ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4 years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the object will similarly experience a false perception. We tested 33 (...) preschool children with a task in which distorting lenses caused a small object to appear large and a large object to appear small. To succeed, children needed to recognize that a naive agent would falsely perceive the relative size of the objects and to correctly anticipate the agent’s actions on that basis. Children performed significantly better than chance in our false perception test, and there was a developmental progression in performance from 4 to 5 years of age similar to that seen in standard false belief tests. Our findings demonstrate that preschool children are capable of understanding that other individuals will be perceptually misled by illusory objects and that these false perceptions will influence their actions in predictable ways. (shrink)

Nuestro objetivo es analizar críticamente el enfoque de la noción de modelo de Alfred Tarski que Patrick Suppes integra en su concepción semanticista de las teorías científicas. En efecto, mostraremos cómo esta noción se configura en Suppes (1969; 1970) desde una revisión formal de la noción de modelo en Tarski (1936), focalizando nuestro análisis en tres ejes principales: i) una crítica a la perspectiva estática del semanticismo; ii) un análisis de las condiciones restrictivas y el lenguaje para la axiomatización de (...) teorías; y iii) la revisión de las nociones de ‘sistema axiomático’, ‘sistema formal’ y ‘método axiomático’. (shrink)

According to Iris Murdoch, the chief experience in morality is the recognition of others, and this is the experience of loving attention. Love is an independent source of moral authority, distinct from the authority of reason. It is independent because it can be attained through moral experiences that are not certified by reason and cannot be achieved by rational deliberation. This view of love calls into question a cluster of concepts, such as rational agency and principled action, which figure prominently (...) in the Kantian characterization of the moral experience and resound through Kant’s account of virtue as an endured but never-ending struggle. But it would be a mistake to conclude that Murdoch’s philosophical project opposes Kant’s without further qualifications. In this chapter, I illustrate some convergence between Kant and Murdoch at the methodological level, in their polemic against reductivism. They both oppose reductivist empiricism on epistemological and moral grounds, because they define the standard of proof in relation to the experience of morality. In Murdoch’s words, the philosophical proof, if there is one, is the same as the moral proof (Murdoch 1997: 361). This is where Kant and Murdoch part ways. While Kant argues that the moral experience is the experience of the impact of reason, which provides self-discipline by constraint, Murdoch holds that the moral standard of proof is love. The transformative power of love allows us to engage with reality and recognize others for what they are, that in which consists the primal moral experience. Murdoch’s argument against Kant’s appeal to principles brings to the fore a crucial issue, which concerns the source of moral authority and the possibility of practical reason. Some of her most popular arguments against Kant are based on an oversimplified view of the impact of reason in moral life, and perhaps they owe part of their fortune to this oversimplification. I shall argue that such arguments miss their intended target, but I also hope to show that Murdoch sketches a distinctive model of the moral proof, which establishes a genuine alternative both to theories of practical reason and to reductivist accounts of the mind and its activities. (shrink)

While foregrounding the historiography of HIV and AIDS in the South African context, this article analyses AIDS as simultaneously existing in three spheres: first, virtually – as the subject matter of electronically measurable research; second, academically – as a topic of research in the discipline of History; and third, actually – as a complex health concern and signifier that, via the field of Medical and Health Humanities, could allow for new collaborations between historians and others interested in understanding AIDS. Throughout, (...) the central focus is the discipline of History and the global trends that become evident when examining metrics about AIDS research, particularly those that show the hierarchies of knowledge ‘production’, the reinforcement of disciplinary boundaries, and the discrepancy between the amount of research ‘produced’ by scientific and humanities disciplines. Overall, the article suggests that ‘post-AIDS’ is not currently helpful to health historians working on South African and other majority world contexts. More specifically, the article reflects on what AIDS histories still need to be written, and I argue that Medical and Health Humanities could provide a space for historians to work within and across disciplinary boundaries given the ever evolving remit of AIDS histories, temporalities, and narratives. (shrink)

According to a widely accepted philosophical model, agent-regret is practically significant and appropriate when the agent committed a mistake, or she faced a conflict of obligations. I argue that this account misunderstands moral phenomenology because it does not adequately characterize the object of agent-regret. I suggest that the object of agent-regret should be defined in terms of valuable unchosen alternatives supported by reasons. This model captures the phenomenological varieties of regret and explains its practical significance for the agent. My contention (...) is that agent-regret is a mode of valuing: a way in which the agent expresses and confers value. (shrink)

According to Iris Murdoch, the chief experience in morality is loving attention. Her view calls into question the Kantian account of the standard of moral authority, and ultimately denies that reason might provide moral discernment, validate moral experience or drive us toward moral progress. Like Kant, Murdoch defines the moral experience as the subjective experience of freedom, which resists any reductivist approach. Unlike Kant, she thinks that this free agency is unprincipled. Some of her arguments are based on an oversimplified (...) account of Kant’s theory of reflective agency and discount the discipline of reason, thereby nullifying its practical import. However, Murdoch’s work offers a distinctive view of the standard of proof as a ‘moral proof’, which rehabilitates the transformative power of love and represents a genuine alternative to theories of practical reason as well as to reductivist empiricist views of the mind. (shrink)

In this paper, I characterize a new kind of testimonial injustice, a phenomenon I call ‘testimonial void’, which involves a substantial extension of the limits of the original concept put...

This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and economist (...) Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy. (shrink)

I investigate the reciprocal relationship between social accounts of knowledge production and efforts to increase the representation of women and some minorities in the academy. In particular, I consider the extent to which feminist social epistemologies such as Helen Longino’s critical contextual empiricism can be employed to argue that it is in researchers’ epistemic interests to take active steps to increase gender diversity. As it stands, critical contextual empiricism does not provide enough resources to succeed at this task. However, considering (...) this view through an employment equity lens highlights areas where such theories need to be further developed. I argue that views such as Longino’s ought to attend to nuances of community structure and cultural features that inhibit critical social interactions, if we are to maximize the epistemic as well as the ethical improvements associated with a social approach to knowing. These developments advance these epistemic theories for their own sake. They also help develop these theories into a tool that can be used by those calling for increased diversity in the academy. (shrink)

Wildlife conservation aims to protect the natural world, plant and animal species, and the habitats they form part of and rely on for survival. More particularly, it focuses on species that are considered important, be it from economic, ecological and other perspectives, and preventing harm to these species. While conservation activities, based on common conservation values such as species fitness and biodiversity, are no doubt beneficial to animals in general, there seems to be a fundamental disjoint between this approach and (...) the mainstay of current ethical theories regarding animals, which focus on the treatment and welfare of individual entities. I will argue that the conflict between wildlife conservation and animal ethics arises both in the aims, as well as the application of conservation. In its aims, the focus on species as a whole often comes at a cost to individual animals, and in its application individual animals are often harmed as well. To demonstrate these two points, I will use the case study of the cloning and reintroduction of the currently extinct northern white rhino. I will then conclude that wildlife conservation, while aiming to benefit animals, is fundamentally at odds with any animal ethic that considers individual wellbeing as central. (shrink)

This paper provides evidence for a radically enactive, embodied account of remembering. By looking closely at highly context-dependent instances of memorizing and recalling dance material, I aim at shedding light on the workings of memory. Challenging the view that cognition fundamentally entails contentful mental representation, the examples I discuss attest the existence of non-representational instances of memory, accommodating episodic memory. That being so, this paper also makes room for content-involving forms of remembering. As a result, it supports the duplex vision (...) of mentality advanced by the REC framework. Building on research on the enactive imagination, I suggest that contentless forms of remembering act below content-involving forms. In addition, contentless and contentful forms of remembering a movement are revealed as the product of culturally scaffolded engagements with others and the environment, in which direct perception and mirroring play a fundamental role. It is argued that many of the practices of remembering a movement are best explained as enactments or re-enactments of such direct ecological perceptions. In the process, the dance studio proves to be a paradigm of the extensive mind. This paper is also intended as an invitation to the REC framework to extend the family and explicitly embrace research on sociocultural practices as an equal partner, including dance studies. Given the fundamental role that sociocultural practices play in REC’s understanding of cognition, it is only natural that further radicalization goes along those lines. (shrink)

This article describes a contrastive study of rhetorical differences between Italian and English ‘For Your Information’ letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written business communication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how information is presented in business correspondence and what rhetorical strategies are used to elicit compliance by a given readership in a given culture. To answer these questions of an essentially pragmatic and (...) ethnolinguistic nature, our research focused on analysing contrastively a corpus of authentic Italian and English business letters. At the macro-textual level, the analysis focused on rhetorical structure, mainly drawing on the notion of move. At the micro-textual level, the analysis concentrated on the pragmatic use of mood, modality, reference system and metadiscourse. This article focuses on the cultural preferences that Italian and English writers show - both at the macro- and micro-textual level - when engaged in ‘For Your Information’ letter writing. It will be shown that in both languages there are differences in the way in which discourse patterns are organized as well as in the use of politeness. (shrink)

It is largely agreed that if constructivism contributes anything to meta-ethics it is by proposing that we understand ethical objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept” (Rawls 1980/1999: 307). Constructivists defend this “practical” conception of objectivity in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists place their theory “somewhere in the space between (...) realist and relativist accounts of ethics” (O’Neill 1988: 1). Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of certain features of morality, such as its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency, which escape rival theories (Korsgaard 1996b, Korsgaard 2003b). To this extent, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. The legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including some constructivists — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Some critics object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and thus must be combined with a fully-fledged meta-ethics (Hussain and Shah 2006); others argue that it tacitly relies on realism (Timmons 2003; Shafer-Landau 2003; Larmore 2008). Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In this chapter, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories, reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics. Even though the term is ambiguous, I retain the qualification “Kantian” for the constructivist theory I outline, and for two reasons. First, while the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist variants, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they bind us in the first person. Practical cognitions are common knowledge because they are such that all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning and find them authoritative. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. This is the second reason for keeping the qualification “Kantian”. On this formulation, constructivism is antagonistic to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known; but it is also a rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical in itself. How constructivism differs over the realist theories of practical reason is the least understood aspect of this debate. This essay aims to make the case that practical reason is both discursive and emotional. In contrast to foundational and anti-realist accounts of practical reasoning, it attempts to show that the moral feeling of respect plays a cognitive but non-evidential role in the account of the cognitive and practical powers of reason. The argument proceeds as follows. In section 1, I consider some prominent constructivist arguments against the model of applied knowledge and show that they are driven by non-cognitivist assumptions about the practicality of ethics and the legitimacy of epistemological claims. In section 2, I argue that these arguments do not succeed in disposing of the idea of practical knowledge as incoherent, because they trade on an ambiguity regarding the proper object of practical knowledge. To solve this ambiguity, I turn to Anscombe’s contrast between “practical” and “speculative” knowledge as models for understanding action. I thus suggest that Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge as knowledge of oneself as an agent is an important resource for Kantian constructivism. This finding prompts us to reset the current dispute about the ontological and epistemological commitments of Kantian constructivism, as illustrated in section 3. While constructivism does not postulate any moral ontology prior to reasoning, it attributes to reasoning the cognitive powers to establish a distinctive relation between the agent and her action. The task of sections 4-7 is to account for the distinctive features of Kantian constructivism understood as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. In section 4, I argue that in order for reasoning to accomplish its normative tasks, it should be conceived as a self-legislating activity. I respond to some objections to the idea of self-legislation as the form of rational willing by offering a dialogical view of practical reason. In section 5, I propose a non-standard interpretation of Kant’s argument of “the fact of reason” to show that the constructivist account of self-legislation does not build on realism about value, as its detractors claim. The “basis of construction” is the subjective experience of respect for the self-legislative capacity itself. This moral feeling conveys our awareness of rational agency and shows our responsiveness to the demands of practical reason. It is an emotional mode of practical knowledge of oneself as an agent (in the sense specified in section 2), but not as a mode of moral discernment. In section 6, I show how practical knowledge of oneself as an agent relates to practical knowledge about what one ought to do. I thus account for the relation between respect as emotional moral consciousness and respect as a deliberative constraint. Finally, in section 7, I reply to the objection of subjectivism. I explain how the complex sort of objectivity that Kantian constructivism affords is at the same time more ambitious and more modest than is generally assumed. (shrink)

The reform of the health care system will include a mandate: Individuals are required to purchase health insurance provided that affordable options are available. But what is affordable health insurance? Three accounts of affordability of health coverage have been advanced. The first two accounts are empirical. The third account is needs-based. All three accounts are inadequate. I propose a fourth, the reasonable tradeoff account, according to which individuals should only be required to make reasonable tradeoffs in order to pay for (...) their health coverage. That is, health insurance is affordable if in order to pay for it one does not to have to sacrifice other benefit(s) that are comparable in importance to the benefits of health coverage. (shrink)

In ‘Parental Virtues: A New Way of Thinking about the Morality of Reproductive Actions’ Rosalind McDougall proposes a virtue-based framework to assess the morality of child selection. Applying the virtue-based account to the selection of children with impairments does not lead, according to McDougall, to an unequivocal answer to the morality of selecting impaired children. In ‘Impairment, Flourishing, and the Moral Nature of Parenthood,’ she also applies the virtue-based account to the discussion of child selection, and claims that couples with (...) an impairment are morally justified in selecting a child with the same impairment. This claim, she maintains, reveals that the flourishing of a child should be understood as requiring environment-specific characteristics. I argue that McDougall's argument begs the question. More importantly, it does not do justice to virtue ethics. I also question to what extent a virtue ethics framework can be successfully applied to discussions about the moral permissibility of reproductive actions. (shrink)

In his original essay, The Form of Practical Knowledge, Stephen Engstrom argues for placing Kant’s ethics in the tradition of practical cognitivism. My remarks are intended to highlight the merits of his interpretation in contrast to intuitionism and constructivism, understood as ways of appropriating Kant’s legacy. In particular, I will focus on two issues: first, the special character of practical knowledge—as opposed to theoretical knowledge and craft expertise; and second, the apparent tension between the demands of morality and the requirements (...) of instrumental reason, when this is understood as driven by concerns for happiness, prudence, and personal integrity. (shrink)

parte i: modernidade, subjetividade, Hegel e o Western Resumo: Trata-se de apresentar aspectos da teoria de Josef Früchtl sobre a subjetividade moderna, com base em uma associação do “Eu” filosófico e a figura do herói encontrada em alguns gêneros cinematográficos. Neste artigo, o foco será a relação entre a filosofia de Hegel e o gênero do Western, além da introdução aos princípios gerais sobre o fenômeno da modernidade e seus três estratos: o clássico, o agonal e o híbrido.

In this paper, I ask feminist philosophers and science studies scholars to consider the goals of developing critical analyses of evolutionary psychology. These goals can include development of scholarship in feminist philosophy and science studies, mediation of the uptake of evolutionary psychology by other academic and lay communities, and improvement of the practices and products of evolutionary psychology itself. I evaluate ways that some practices of feminist philosophy and science studies facilitate or hinder meeting these goals, and consider the merits (...) of critical engagement with some of the scientists themselves. Finally, I describe a community of feminist evolutionary psychologists with whom it might be both fruitful and interesting to engage, and identify ways that these interactions may benefit the science and the study of the science. (shrink)

There is a widespread assumption in Construction Grammar that the meanings of verbs correlate with or even determine their complementation forms and patterns. There is much less research on noun complementation, however, although this category is even more interesting for a number of reasons such as the potential for valency reduction, nominal topicalization constructions, and additional complementation options, e.g.of-PPs and existential constructions.In this paper we focus on the class of nouns reporting commissive illocutionary acts, and address the question of whether (...) there is a correlation between the meaning of these nouns and their preferred complementation patterns, and between their semantic similarity and their similarity in the distribution of complementation patterns.We report the results of a study of a set of 17 commissive nouns chosen from a wider collection of illocutionary nouns. Two types of analysis were carried out in order to compare the semantic and grammatical characteristics of these nouns. The semantic analysis was based on insights from speech act theory and the philosophy of language. We developed a framework for a systematic comparative description of the nouns in our word field. The results were tallied with a corpus-based grammatical analysis. Two hundred tokens of each noun type were randomly sampled from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Using these data, the 17 nouns were subjected to an analysis of the relative frequencies of their complementation patterns.Results indicate a general match between noun meanings and complementation patterns. More specifically, however, they indicate that the closeness of this match depends on the prototypicality of nouns as members of the class of commissives.The study, then, contributes to our understanding of the relation between lexis and syntax. At the same time, it confirms the need for a close semantic analysis to account for the great extent to which item-specific information, i.e. properties of individual nouns, have to be taken into consideration at the expense of large-scale generalizations. (shrink)

A constructivist account of moral dilemmas and integrity.

This paper examines Moran’s argument for the special authority of the first-person, which revolves around the Self/Other asymmetry and grounds dichotomies such as the practical vs. theoretical, activity vs. passivity, and justificatory vs. explanatory reasons. These dichotomies qualify the self-reflective person as an agent, interested in justifying her actions from a deliberative stance. The Other is pictured as a spectator interested in explaining action from a theoretical stance. The self-reflective knower has authority over her own mental states, while the Spectator (...) does not. I highlight the implications of this construal for a theory of action, and call attention onto some other interesting normative relations between the self-reflective agent and the Other that escape both the first-person and the third-person approach. My contention is that the authority of self-reflection (and of reason) is best understood as a relation of mutual recognition between self and others, hence from a second-person stance. (shrink)

Are the emotions relevant for the theory of value and normativity? Is there a set of morally correct arrangements of emotions? Current debates are often structured as though there were only two theoretical options to approach these questions, a sentimentalist theory of some sort, which emphasizes the role of emotions in forming ethical behaviour and practical thought, and intellectualist rationalism, which denies that emotions can help at all in generating normativity and contributing to moral value, hence also denying that they (...) may have any role to play in moral agency and moral thinking. In what follows, I will offer a Kantian account of ‘practical reason’ as the seat of moral agency, which recognizes a diversified and complex relation between reason and sensibility. (shrink)

In this study I focus on the complementation patterns of commissive shell nouns in Ghanaian English (GhE). Commissive shell nouns are a type of illocutionary shell noun, i.e. a noun that encapsulates a content that is usually expressed in a complement or even separate clause or sentence thereby ascribing it an illocutionary force. I use the usage-based approach to the study of language and investigate the behavioral profile of these nouns in GhE. I apply descriptive statistics to data that have (...) been collected from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). The study provides evidence for the characterization of GhE usage norms, and thus contributes to the scholarly knowledge on this variety of English. It also sheds light on the contribution that the meaning-related and ultimately cognitive perspective can offer in describing the complementation patterns of illocutionary nouns in Postcolonial Englishes (PCEs). (shrink)

This paper deals with some of the issues raisedabout the use of context in language, that is,the pragmatic side of the problem; morespecifically it aims to stress the significanceand complexity of context. In real life context is exploited both in production and in comprehension.I will deal here mainly with comprehension:after briefly referring to cognitive contextsand their interaction with knowledge andcomprehension, and touching on the relationbetween language and context, I will analyzethe uses of an indexical pronoun, we,which may both include and (...) exclude speaker/sand/or interlocutor/s, and cannot beinterpreted without referring to an`integrated' view of context. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to apply theEntrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model(EC-Model hereafter; seeSchmid 2014,2015,2016,2017,2018;Schmid & Mantlik 2015) of language knowledge to genre, with the aim of showing how a unified theory of the relation between usage and linguistic knowledge and convention can shed light on the way genre knowledge becomes entrenched in the individual and shared conventional behavior in communities. The EC-Model is a usage-based and emergentist model of language knowledge and convention rooted in cognitive linguistics and usage-based approaches. It sees (...) knowledge as emerging from language usage, and explains the processes underlying the intertwining of social practice and cognition. However, so far, no suggestion has been advanced on how to extend the model to account for entrenchment and conventionalization at the supra-sentential level. In the area of genre studies various attempts have been made by scholars to develop or apply theories belonging to different scientific domains to understand the nature of genre. However, so far, there has been no research that applies a unified model in the attempt to link entrenchment of genres in individuals to their conventionalization at the societal level. I largely focus on the long tradition of rhetorical studies of genre, one among the different approaches that, over time, have regarded genre as their main topic of investigation. I concentrate on this tradition as it opens up the entire field of enquiry that defines contemporary genre research. To these I add by showing how the explanations provided so far can be cognitively clarified and unified under the EC-Model. The paper, then, argues that the EC-Model is theoretically apt to address questions about the nature of genre, capturing in an elegant way the interplay between cognition and social interaction in genre emergence, evolution, stabilization and variation. (shrink)

On the Pragmatics of Hortatory Subjunctive in Italian Business Letter Discourse This paper is a pragmatic account of the use of the Italian hortatory subjunctive in business letter discourse. According to traditional descriptions of the Italian subjunctive mood which mostly focus on the use of this mood in dependent clauses, the hortatory subjunctive is one of the few remaining examples of subjunctive use in independent clauses. In business letter discourse it is used in independent clauses, always as a formulaic modal (...) expression with the modal verb of volition volere. In this paper it is argued that the rare examples of its use seem to confirm that in the Italian language the hortatory subjunctive survives only in very formal types of writing, business letter discourse being a case in point; and that in this type of genre the dynamic modality expressed by the subjunctive mood is used only in specific moves within the text for negative politeness reasons. The findings also suggest the need to take a "discourse-approach" to politeness, i.e. to rethink and analyze politeness as a holistic phenomenon which is the result of a number of acts intricately wound together in the text, both at the micro and macro level. (shrink)

The present article analyzes ethics in Karl Marx perspectives, going through information ethics and information literacy that permeate individuation and class struggle in capitalist society. The objective is to approach critical reflection about dominated and dominant class’s ethics values proclaimed by author. In order to provide the desired research, I did literature review and digital documents consultation about the themes. Through this work, it is possible to identify that the author’s description of reality through historical materialism sought the dissemination of (...) ethics through the ascertainment that individuals generate their stories, but these are not linked to their wills but directly linked to class formation and struggle as factors determining the circumstances under which the reality of society is constituted. It implies the search for mastery of language codes and information literacy to know, seize and disseminate information ethics aiming at the effective strategies elaboration to combat the ruling class hegemony. (shrink)

Gaslighting is a form of domination which builds upon multiple and mutually reinforcing strategies that induce rational acquiescence. Such abusive strategies progressively insulate the victims and inflict a loss in self-respect, with powerful alienating effects. In arguing for these claims, I reject the views that gaslighting is an epistemic or structural wrong, or a moral wrong of instrumentalization. In contrast, I refocus on personal addresses that use, affect, and distort the very practice of rational justification. Further, I argue that the (...) social dimension of gaslighting cannot be fully explained by reference to bare social structures because this compound wrong succeeds via emotional person-to-person addresses. Rational justification becomes, then, the locus where the struggle for power takes place. This struggle involves and is operated by not only victims and wrongdoers but also third parties. They are crucial actors in wrongdoing as well as in rescuing the victims and restoring their normative status. Ultimately, this study shows that the deontic structure of wrong is multifocal, and its relationality points to modes of epistemic and moral rehabilitation that are also modes of social empowerment. (shrink)

The most distinctive feature of Murdoch's philosophical project is her attempt to reclaim the exploration of moral life as a legitimate topic of philosophical investigation. In contrast to the predominant focus on action and decision, she argues that “what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being” (AD 293).1 I shall argue that to (...) fully appreciate the novelty of this proposal we need to recognize some elements of continuity with analytic methods of philosophical inquiry and themes that belong to continental traditions. On Murdoch's view, the most important question facing moral philosophy is that of whether and how we can become better. In order to describe moral progress and failure, struggle and ascent, we need ethical concepts capable of capturing mental events such as change in mind, self-examination, and redescription. These concepts are presently unavailable, and this lack seriously undermines our attempts to understand the phenomena of morality. Because of this conceptual loss, we succumb to the mistaken idea that moral life coincides with its scattered outer manifestations, i.e. public acts. Instead, Murdoch urges us “the moral life […] is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices” (SG 37).2 Murdoch's point is that we need to conceive the locus of agency more broadly if we want to understand the complicated machinery of action. But perhaps more importantly, she points out that we may be morally active while entertaining a contemplative attitude, which does not issue in action. The grain of moral life, she argues, is constituted by the.. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that the “attestation of evil and testimony of hope” are characterized by the genitive that accompanies them. This places them both, each no less than the other, in two different horizons: while the horizon of attestation is Heideggerian, the horizon of testimony is a legacy of Jean Nabert. Both of these horizons are present in the thought of Ricoeur, and characterize the entire spectrum of his work. However, we are not dealing here (...) with a syncretism resulting from the co-presence of a hermeneutic source and of the philosophy of reflection. On the contrary, I attempt to show that the copresence of attestation and testimony results from the fact that Ricoeur never stopped “walking on two legs,” given what he writes in a conversation published in the Critique and Conviction, and that this presence is rooted in Ricoeur’s formation, which is at the same time philosophical, literary and biblical, as he never renounced either the former one, or the latter ones. (shrink)

The perspective of deliberative choice is constitutively from here. This simple truth carries significant implications for our agency and integrity, some of which are the focus of Wallace's thought-provoking essay. Wallace is concerned with the discrepancy between our present attachments and the rational justification of past decisions, which threatens our personal and moral integrity. In what follows, I raise some questions about Wallace's claim that attachments make us immune to regret and, ultimately, about his account of the impact of contingency (...) in our practical thought. My argument revolves around two cases of immunity to regret, due to the agent's attachment to a ground project. Contrary to Wallace, I argue that in these cases the agent's inability to regret that things had not gone otherwise is neither unreasonable nor morally objectionable. (shrink)

This book explores the role of time in rational agency and practical reasoning. Agents are finite and often operate under severe time constraints. Action takes time and unfolds in time. While time is an ineliminable constituent of our experience of agency, it is both a theoretical and practical problem to explain whether and how time shapes rational agency and practical thought. The essays in this book are divided in three parts. Part I is devoted to the temporal structure of action (...) and agency, from metaphysical and metaethical perspectives. Part II features essays about the temporal structure of rational deliberation, from the perspective of action theory and theories of practical reasoning. Finally, Part III includes essays about to the temporal aspects of failures of rationality. Taken together, the essays in this book sheds new light on our understanding of the temporality of agency that coheres with our subjective sense of finitude and explains rational agency both in time and over time. Time in Action will be of interest to advanced students and researchers working on the philosophy of time, metaphysics of action, action, theory, practical reasoning, ethical theory, moral psychology, and rational justification. (shrink)

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a striking case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that one needs to refer to more than one explanation in order to adequately account for it. I develop the concept a domain of phenomena in order to analysis this pluralism. Pluralism exists when a phenomenon can be included in more that one homogeneous domain or in a heterogeneous domain. I argue that in some cases domain partitioning can be used to decrease pluralism, but that in the (...) case of sex domains are overlapping and interconnecting, or in other words bear an orthogonal relationship to one another, and hence cannot be partitioned in such a way as to eliminate pluralism. (shrink)

During the scientific revolution reductionism and mechanism were introduced together. These concepts remained intertwined through much of the ensuing history of philosophy and science, resulting in the privileging of approaches to research that focus on the smallest bits of nature. This combination of concepts has been the object of intense feminist criticism, as it encourages biological determinism, narrows researchers’ choices of problems and methods, and allows researchers to ignore the contextual features of the phenomena they investigate. I argue that the (...) historical link between mechanism and reductionism is not a necessary one, that this link should be severed, and in many cases has already been severed. Teasing reductionism away from mechanism allows us to hold onto the mechanistic view that science should explain how things work, without mandating methods and approaches that reduce the objects of scientific investigation to their smallest parts. Mechanism without reductionism decenters reductive methods, and so creates intellectual space for a plurality of methods that may engage the world at a variety of levels of organization. This ensuing pluralism opens the door for a wide variety of approaches to research, including feminist and gender-sensitive science. (shrink)

The evolutionary maintenance of sexual reproduction is a case of explanatory pluralism of central importance to evolutionary biology. I analyze this pluralism from an epistemological perspective. My thesis is that the various explanations of sex are explanatory by virtue of local factors and hence are importantly distinct from one another and cannot be subsumed under a single unifying framework. A critic may argue that philosophical accounts of mechanism can provide just such a framework. I show that this attempt at unification (...) fails because the accounts of sex are not explanatory simply in light of being their being mechanistic; rather they are explanatory because they are particular kinds of mechanisms. The explanatory power of a mechanism is dependent on its epistemological context and the contexts of these mechanisms differ. (shrink)

Philip Pettit is the most important contemporany advocate of the republican tradition in political philosophy. He advances a concept of freedom as non-domination, and constrasts it with the liberal conception of freedom as non-interference. He claims that two features distinguish domination from interference: The capacity of interference , and the fact that the interference is arbitrary. I shall argue that Pettit´s republicanism is not sufficiently differente from liberalism, certainly not from John Rawls´s liberalism. The only relevant difference between republicanism and (...) liberalism is related to : the notion of arbitrariness. Yet this difference makes republicanism an unattractive version of liberalism, insofar as it, paradoxically, allows for republicanism to legitimize a grave form of domination, paternalism, and, in general, domination coming from the state. This problem gets exacerbated by Pettit´s consequentialist framework. (shrink)

Philip Pettit is the most important contemporany advocate of the republican tradition in political philosophy. He advances a concept of freedom as non-domination, and constrasts it with the liberal conception of freedom as non-interference. He claims that two features distinguish domination from interference: (1) The capacity of interference ( as opposed to actual interference), and (2) the fact that the interference is arbitrary. I shall argue that Pettit´s republicanism is not sufficiently differente from liberalism, certainly not from John Rawls´s liberalism. (...) The only relevant difference between republicanism and liberalism is related to (2): the notion of arbitrariness. Yet this difference makes republicanism an unattractive version of liberalism, insofar as it, paradoxically, allows for republicanism to legitimize a grave form of domination, paternalism, and, in general, domination coming from the state. This problem gets exacerbated by Pettit´s consequentialist framework. (shrink)

Capitolo I Il rispetto e l'ideale morale 1.1. Angeli, bruti e agenti 1.2. Il rispetto dell'altro 1.3. Il rispetto di sé 1.4. Auto−riflessione e auto−legislazione 1.5. Autonomia e individualità 1.6. Il rispetto e l'attenzione 1.7. Il rispetto e l'amore.

Several studies conducted in the 1970's by western analysts concluded that Buddhism is the main obstacle to economic development in Thailand. This view typifies the reasoning of mainstream modernization and development practices in Third World countries. Yet in recent years, Post World War II policies based upon the goal of modernization have been under attack for the environmental disasters they have generated, for their failure to improve human conditions where they have been implemented, and for their assumption that the western (...) world's high levels of production and consumption are superior to all other socio-economic possibilities. This dissertation focuses on Buddhist community and environmental action as a response to the hardships generated by modernization, and the ethical and spiritual system on which this action is based, especially as demonstrated by Thailand's forest monks. ;Chapter 1 examines traditionally accepted views of Buddhist ethics, the background against which new environmental interpretations emerge. Chapter 2 surveys the present trend of Buddhist social action, the application of Buddhist philosophy to contemporary social issues. Socially-engaged Buddhism is also considered with a view to its scriptural justification. Chapter 3 explores both the ethics and social action of Buddhism with specific reference to the conservation of nature. ;At this point in the modernization of Thailand, poverty is growing in rural areas, compounded by increasing drought and environmental adversity. At the same time, expanded corporate and governmental control over arable land and forests assumes command of the nation's remaining natural resources. Chapter 4 discusses this recent history. Chapter 5 concentrates on Thailand's conservationist forest monks, their ethical philosophy, the social and natural environments they are endeavoring to preserve or recover, and their work with villagers whose well-being is at stake. ;The concluding chapter investigates the western model of economic development, criticizing its universalizability, its underlying values, and its outcomes. I argue that the challenge to contemporary economic practices and lifestyles represented by the conservationist forest monks' revitalization of Buddhist tradition offers Thailand's rural poor the potential for a more satisfying and beneficial way of life. (shrink)