One of the main criteria for an adequate semantic theory is that it solve the problem of substitution into intensional contexts, otherwise known as Frege's Puzzle. Given common-sense assumptions about how natural language functions, a contradiction arises in explaining attitude reports. For example, Lisa might believe that Twain is tall, but not believe that Clemens is tall. Lisa is perhaps unaware that the names "Twain" and "Clemens" corefer. But Twain's being tall is just Clemens' being tall, so one and the (...) same state of affairs is either believed or not. The tasks are to specify what Lisa believes and to accurately and consistently describe the situation given certain foundational semantic principles. ;I argue that of three main semantic frameworks: Davidsonian Semantics, Model-Theoretic Semantics and Propositional Semantics , PS has the best chance to provide a complete, consistent and natural solution. On my view, dynamic propositions are complex states of affairs where things stand in the propositional relation of having expressions of a certain type which pick them out as semantic values and where those expressions stand in appropriate syntactic relations. The propositional relation crucially involves restricted quantification over expression types which are logical features of the language. The sentences "Twain is tall" and "Clemens is tall" express different DP's because even though their constituents are identical, they stand in distinct propositional relations in virtue of the different syntactic expressions. This explains how Lisa could believe one and not the other. These fine-grained propositions successfully serve as both the truth-conditions of sentences and the objects of propositional attitudes. The solution leads to the surprising result that the question of whether singular terms are Fregean or directly referential is actually irrelevant to Frege's Puzzle. ;While DP's are naturalistic and theoretically well-motivated, they face apparent difficulty accounting for translation and being the objects of mental content. The logical form of DP's limits their possible interpretation and thus sheds light on the conceptual framework of its user. I argue that DP's are not beliefs, but cognitive models that serve as interpretations of beliefs in communication. (shrink)

In recent years, countries have begun to establish ministries of transitional justice as part of political transitions from authoritarianism to democracy or from conflict to peace. This may reflect a broader historical trend in the administration of TJ, which has evolved from isolated offices within a particular ministry to ad hoc cross-ministry coordinating bodies to the establishment of dedicated ministries. The reasons for the establishment of specific ministries to pursue TJ, what we call ministerialization, have not attracted scholarly attention. This (...) article explores the causes and likely consequences of this development. In particular, it applies international relations, comparative politics, and public policy theories to explain the phenomenon. Contrary to some TJ literature that is concerned about hegemonic transnational discourse, international actors have played little to no role in shaping how TJ is bureaucratically managed. Rather, based upon fieldwork in Solomon Islands and Tunisia, the article concludes that ministerialization has been the result of domestic policy entrepreneurship. For TJ ministries to become a norm, however, more transnational actors will need to be convinced of the benefits of such an institutional arrangement. (shrink)

Balanced pools of deoxyribonucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs) are essential for DNA replication to occur with maximum fidelity. Conditions that create biased dNTP pools stimulate mutagenesis, as well as other phenomena, such as recombination or cell death. In this essay we consider the effective dNTP concentrations at replication sites under normal conditions, and we ask how maintenance of these levels contributes toward the natural fidelity of DNA replication. We focus upon two questions. (1) In prokaryotic systems, evidence suggests that replication is driven (...) by small, localized, rapidly replenished dNTP pools that do not equilibrate with the bulk dNTP pools in the cell. Since these pools cannot be analyzed directly, what indirect approaches can illuminate the nature of these replication‐active pools? (2) In eukaryotic cells, the normal dNTP pools are highly asymmetric, with dGTP being the least abundant nucleotide. Moreover, the composition of the dNTP pools changes as cells progress through the cell cycle. To what extent might these natural asymmetries contribute toward a recently described phenomenon, the differential rate of evolution of different genes in the same genome? (shrink)

Plastination is a relatively novel technique wherein human tissue is dehydrated and the water is replaced with a plastic-like substance. The process is valuable to educational institutions, because it preserves the body for a long period of time, allowing for prolonged anatomical study. However, a number of ethical issues have been raised regarding the process, particularly related to the procurement of human specimens and the act of displaying these bodies, even for educational purposes. This article explores both the process itself (...) and the associated ethical pitfalls, particularly from a Catholic perspective. (shrink)

The disclosure of prognosis to terminally ill patients has emerged as a recent concern given greater demands for patient involvement in medical decision‐making in the United States. As part of the informed consent process, American physicians are legally and ethically obligated to provide information to such patients about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of all available treatment options including the use of experimental therapies. Although not legally required, the disclosure of a terminal prognosis is ethically justified because it upholds the (...) principle of self‐determination and enables patients to make treatment decisions consistent with their life goals. To understand oncologists’ attitudes about disclosing prognostic information to cancer patients with advanced disease, we interviewed fourteen oncologists and conducted one focus group of medical fellows. Although oncologists reported to disclose prognosis in terms of cancer not being curable, they tend to avoid using percentages to convey prognosis. Oncologists’ reported reluctance to disclosing prognosis was conveyed through the use of metaphors depicting the perceived violent impact of such information on patients. Oncologists’ reluctance to disclose prognosis and preserve patient hope are held in check by their need to ensure that patients have ‘realistic expectations’ about therapy. We discuss these data in light of the cultural, ethical, and legal dimensions of prognosis disclosure, patient hope and the doctor–patient relationship, and recommend ways to enhance the communication process. (shrink)

(2013). Multiple paths to transfer and constraint relaxation in insight problem solving. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 96-136. doi: 10.1080/13546783.2012.742852.

This book presents the theory of capital utilization, a discussion of the econometrics of capital utilization, and econometric tests of the theory using international data. Capital utilization, defined as the proportion of time that capital is working productively, is mainly affected by shift-working. Capital utilization is an important economic variable that has received serious attention from economists only since the mid-1960s In the first part, the authors provide a synthesis of current knowledge, combining a consistent statement of existing theory with (...) some major extensions. In the second part, they turn to the econometrics, first discussing the appropriate methodology and then testing the theory on data from several countries. This empirical work is considerably more sophisticated than previous studies on this topic. Having established the theory and tested it, they move on to consider policy, the relationship between capital utilization and economic growth, and the place of shift-work in the dual economy. (shrink)

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism. CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, (...) the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection. (shrink)

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a preliminary assessment of (...) the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis. (shrink)

A vast literature has developed probing the law's aversion to statistical/probability evidence in general and its rejection of naked statistical evidence in particular. This literature rests on false premises. At least so far as US law is concerned, there is no general aversion to statistical forms of proof and even naked statistics are admissible and sufficient for a verdict when the evidentiary proffer meets the normal standards of admissibility, the most important of which is reliability. The belief to the contrary (...) rests upon a series of mistakes: most importantly, mismodeling of the structure of legal systems and the nature of common law decision making. Contributing to these mistakes is the common methodology in this literature of relying on weird hypotheticals that mismodel the underlying legal relations and contain impossible epistemological demands. Collectively, these phenomena have distracted attention from issues that actually affect real legal systems. (shrink)

Fictional terms are terms that have null extensions, and in this regard pejorative terms are a species of fictional terms: although there are Jews, there are no kikes. That pejoratives are fictions is the central consequence of the Moral and Semantic Innocence (MSI) view of Hom et al. (2013). There it is shown that for pejoratives, null extensionality is the semantic realization of the moral fact that no one ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation solely in virtue (...) of their group membership. In having null extensions, pejorative terms are much like mythological terms like ‘unicorn horn’ that express concepts with empty extensions, even though it was thought otherwise: people who falsely believed the mythology were mislead into thinking that ordinary objects (i.e. whale tusks) were magical objects, and pejoratives terms work likewise. For example, the term ‘kike’ is supported by the ideology of anti-Semitism, and speakers who fall prey to its influence (perniciously or not) are mislead into thinking that ordinary people (i.e. Jews) are inherently worthy of contempt. In this paper, we explore the consequences of this parallelism, with an eye to criticisms of MSI. In particular, we will re-visit identity expressivist views - those that hold that there are kikes and that they are Jews, and hence deny null extensionality - arguing that this embeds a mistake of fiction for fact. Among the issues to be discussed are the role of fictional truth in understanding pejorative sentences and the relation of the semantics of pejoratives to offensive use of language. We conclude with meta-semantic reflections on the origins of word meanings. (shrink)

The problem of the unity of the proposition asks what binds together the constituents of a proposition into a fully formed proposition that provides truth conditions for the assertoric sentence that expresses it, rather than merely a set of objects. Hanks’ solution is to reject the traditional distinction between content and force. If his theory is successful, then there is a plausible extension of it that readily solves the Frege–Geach problem for normative propositions. Unfortunately Hanks’ theory isn’t successful, but it (...) does point to significant connections between expressivism, unity, and embedding. (shrink)

Pejoratives are the class of expressions that are meant to insult or disparage. They include swear words and slurs. These words allow speakers to convey emotional states beyond the truth-conditional contents that they are normally taken to encode. The puzzle arises because, although pejoratives seem to be a semantically unified class, some of their occurrences are best accounted for truth-conditionally, while others are best accounted for non-truth-conditionally. Where current, non-truth-conditional, views in the literature fail to provide a unified solution for (...) the puzzle, this paper motivates a novel, semantic, analysis of pejorative language. The significance of the proposed solution is not only linguistic in nature, but also philosophical, as it both provides a new argument for, and sheds further light on, the nature of semantic externalism. (shrink)

In theorizing about racial pejoratives, an initially attractive view is that pejoratives have the same reference as their “neutral counterparts”. Call this the identity thesis. According to this thesis, the terms “kike” and “Jew”, for instance, pick out the same set of people. To be a Jew just is to be a kike, and so to make claims about Jews just is to make claims about kikes. In this way, the two words are synonymous, and so make the same contribution (...) to the truth-conditions of sentences containing them. While the fundamental claim for the identity thesis that Jews are kikes sounds anti-semitic, it need not be actually anti-semitic. The identity thesis is usually bolstered with the further claim that the pejorative aspect of “kike” and other such terms is located elsewhere than in truth-conditional content, so what makes “kike” a bad word is a non-truth-conditional association with anti-semitism that is not shared with the word “Jew”. The exact nature and location of the negative moral content of pejoratives is a matter of some dispute among identity theorists. But whatever the intuitive appeal of the identity theory for those persuaded by such views, it is nevertheless inconsistent. (shrink)

Efforts aimed at broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) require a holistic presentation of the state of racial and gender participation. Statistics currently used to describe participation often include raw counts of degrees and the percentages of demographic groups receiving STEM degrees. While these data provide insights into demographic trends, they do not present the complete picture because these “traditional” statistics do not capture how well a field of study reflects—or is proportionally similar to—a larger body, such (...) as the college population. If the goal of broadening participation in STEM education is to ensure that all racial and gender groups are proportionally represented, analysts require direct measures of representation. In this article, we present a novel metric that assesses the degree to which groups are overrepresented or underrepresented in a given field. This metric calculates field-specific representation by comparing the proportion of degrees awarded to members of a demographic group in a specific field of study with the proportion of all degrees awarded to that group. Using data from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, we demonstrate the efficacy of this representation metric and show that it provides new insights into STEM participation levels for women and other groups considered to be underrepresented. While traditional measurements show the increasing number of degrees awarded to and the increasing share of underrepresented minority students in STEM, our metric revealed that underrepresented minorities remain underrepresented in STEM fields, especially in engineering and the natural sciences. (shrink)

Participants in clinical research sometimes view participation as therapy or exaggerate potential benefits, especially in phase I or phase II trials. We conducted this study to discover what methods might improve cancer patients’ understanding of early-phase clinical trials. We randomly assigned 130 cancer patients from three U.S. medical centers who were considering enrollment in a phase I or phase II cancer trial to receive either a multimedia intervention or a National Cancer Institute pamphlet explaining the trial and its purpose. Intervention (...) participants were 32 times more likely to believe that the trial’s purpose was to examine safety and 60 % less likely to believe they would experience long-term benefit or cure. There was no difference in enrollment decision. However, while patients’ understanding of the trial’s purpose improved and expectations of long-term benefit diminished, half the respondents still believed they would experience long-term benefit or cure from participation. Therefore, we conclude that multimedia interventions such as this one may help oncologists to explain the risks and benefits of early-phase cancer trials in a way that patients can more easily understand, helping them to make more informed decisions about participation. But further research into other factors that influence patients’ beliefs about the outcome of enrollment is needed, both to modify the interventions and to determine how malleable patient beliefs are. (shrink)

Hanks develops a theory of propositions as speech-act types. Because speech acts play a role in the contents themselves, the view overturns Frege’s force/content distinction, and as such, faces the challenge of explaining how propositions embed under logical operators like negation. The attempt to solve this problem has lead Hanks and his recent commentators to adopt theoretically exotic resources, none of which, we argue, is ultimately successful. The problem is that although there are three different ways of negating the sentence (...) “Mary’s card is an ace”, current speech-act theories of propositions can only accommodate two of them. We distinguish between “It is false that Mary’s card is an ace”, “Mary’s card is a non-ace”, and “Mary’s card is not an ace” and show that Hanks and his commentators cannot explain content negation. We call this Hanks’ Negation Problem. The problem is significant because content negation is the negation required for logic. Fortunately, we think there is a natural way for Hanks to accommodate content negation as successive acts of predication. The view solves Hanks’ Negation Problem with only resources internal to Hanks’ own view. (shrink)

The Negation Problem states that expressivism has insufficient structure to account for the various ways in which a moral sentence can be negated. We argue that the Negation Problem does not arise for expressivist accounts of all normative language but arises only for the specific examples on which expressivists usually focus. In support of this claim, we argue for the following three theses: 1) a problem that is structurally identical to the Negation Problem arises in non-normative cases, and this problem (...) is solved once the hidden quantificational structure involved in such cases is uncovered; 2) the terms ‘required’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’ can also be analyzed in terms of hidden quantificational structure, and the Negation Problem disappears once this hidden structure is uncovered; 3) the Negation Problem does not arise for normative language that has no hidden quantificational structure. We conclude that the Negation Problem is not really a problem about expressivism at all but is rather a feature of the quantificational structure of the required, permitted, and forbidden. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact on firm value created by investor reaction to same day news of corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility activities. First, using trading volume, the authors establish that the perceived value of moral capital generated by news involving institutional stakeholders is less clear to investors than that of the news involving technical stakeholders. Subsequently, the authors analyze abnormal returns from 565 unique firm events—each comprising at least one positive and one negative stakeholder news item. Using (...) signaling theory, the authors demonstrate that news of the number of CSR activities involving institutional groups counteracts the effects of same day CSiR news in an inverted U-shaped fashion. In contrast, they find that news of the number of CSR activities involving technical groups mitigates the effects of same day CSiR news in a U-shaped fashion. (shrink)

Despite an increase in international business ethics research in recent years, the number of studies focused on Latin America and China has been deficient. As trade among Pacific Rim nations increases, an understanding of the ethical beliefs of the people in this region of the world will become increasingly important. In the current study 208 respondents from Peru and China are queried about their ethical ideologies, firm practices, and commitment to organizational performance. The empirical results reveal that Chinese workers are (...) more relativistic and less idealistic than their Peruvian counterparts. One explanation for the disparity between these two groups is likely the variation in collectivism that can be traced to different levels of importance across ingroups and outgroups. In addition to a summary of the results, future research directions and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, (...) where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)