Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) (...) that “emotion or ideology” explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principles—neither “rational” nor “irrational,” but simply mistaken—is a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public‐opinion research. (shrink)

Examination of a comprehensive database of political knowledge, constructed from pooled 1988 and 1992 National Election Studies, refutes criticisms that haue sometimes been lodged against standard tests that seem to reveal profound levels of public ignorance. Although most people know something about politics, the typical citizen is poorly informed, and only a small group is very knowledgeable about politics. Differentiating people according to their perceptions of the most important national problem does not reveal pockets of well‐informed “issue publics” among the (...) electorate. The NES data also show that knowledge makes a difference in how people feel about government spending for social‐welfare programs, and in how well citizens were able to connect their partisanship and ideological proclivities to their votes in the 2000 presidential election. (shrink)

The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse's picture of a tiny stratum of well‐informed ideological elites whose passionate political debates find little (...) echo, or even awareness, in the mass public. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to “saving” democratic legitimacy from such findings, the Converse‐inspired work of John Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse's basic ideas can be not only in analyzing real‐world political events, but in pulling together and stimulating new lines of research into what moves the “creative synthesizers” of belief systems; into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems and attempt to transmit them to the public; and into the long‐term psychological or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass public confront the resulting political messages. (shrink)

Over the course of his career, Murray Edelman made one of the few sustained attempts by a theoretically inclined political scientist to explore the effects of the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics. In his early work, he focused on political elites? manipulation of an ignorant public through the deployment of symbolism. In his later work, however, he suggested that even elites are the puppets of their ideologies. His early work has been well received; his later work has gone largely unremarked. (...) The reason may have to do with the very thing that Edelman was, in his later work, addressing: the ideological biases of his politically elite audience. (shrink)

Between 1998 and 2006, a new style of television news consumption was born: “news grazing.” With remote control devices in hand, “grazers” flip through TV news channels in order to find interesting news stories. Approximately three‐fifths of the public graze, and this group tends to be younger than non‐grazers. Grazers are less likely than the rest of the public to follow “hard” news about politics and economics, and, not surprisingly, they are even less knowledgeable about public affairs than most people (...) are. (shrink)

An increasing amount of data is now available from public and private sources. Furthermore, the types, formats, and number of sources of data are also increasing. Techniques for extracting, storing, processing, and analyzing such data have been developed in the last few years for managing this bewildering variety based on a structure called a knowledge graph. Industry has devoted a great deal of effort to the development of knowledge graphs, and knowledge graphs are now critical to the functions of intelligent (...) virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The goal of the Ontology Summit 2020 was to understand not only what knowledge graphs are but also where they originated, why they are so popular, the current issues, and their future prospects. The summit sessions examined many examples of knowledge graphs and surveyed the relevant standards that exist and are in development for knowledge graphs. The purpose of this Communiqué is to summarize our understanding from the Summit in order to foster research and development of knowledge graphs. (shrink)

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” (...) The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability. (shrink)

Although a number of articles have addressed ethical perceptions and behaviors, few studies have examined ethics across cultures. This research focuses on measuring the job satisfaction, customer orientation, ethics, and ethical training of automotive salespersons in the U.S. and Taiwan. The relationships of these variables to salesperson performance were also investigated. Ethics training was found to be negatively related to perceived levels of ethicalness and performance. High performance U.S. salespeople reported high ethical behavior, while the opposite was true in Taiwan. (...) Customer orientation in both countries was influenced by ethics training. Managers should evaluate current ethics training programs to insure correct ethical behavior is taught and rewarded. (shrink)

This “experimental” essay both investigates maps and functions as a map. Taking its cue from the Deleuzean rhizome, this essay proposes a new method of inquiry based upon the Scientific Method. This essay works as a series of displacements. Each piece of new evidence will take the paper in a different direction. After each piece of evidence is introduced, it will be my job to draw conclusions about the displacement. This inquiry works like a Deleuzean map.

Despite the importance of research on repression to the study of social movements, few researchers have focused on developing a refined and powerful conceptualization of repression. To address the difficulties such theoretical inattention produces, three key dimensions of repression are outlined and crossed to produce a repression typology. The merit of this typology for researchers is shown by using the typology to: reorganize major research findings on repression; diagnose theoretical and empirical oversights and missteps in the study of repression; and (...) develop new hypotheses about explanatory factors related to repression and relationships between different forms of repression. Such a typology represents an important step toward creating richer theoretical explanations of repression. (shrink)

Democratic deliberation is credited with a variety of virtues, including its possible usefulness in resolving, or at least ameliorating, inter‐cultural conflicts. This paper questions this claim. First, it overlooks that the facts and principles involved in these conflicts generally prove contestable and that such contestation is likely to be greater the less homogenous societies are. Second, it neglects that many, if not most, citizens have neither the time nor the inclination to acquire the conceptual and factual knowledge needed to try (...) and overcome these differences. As a result, the more inclusive and popular deliberation becomes, the less suitable it may be for overcoming cross cultural disagreements. Indeed, it has the potential to exacerbate rather than narrow the differences between majorities and minorities. These conclusions are drawn from an empirical review of a Canadian debate about aboriginal rights that followed a controversial Supreme Court of Canada decision and comparing the character of deliberation in three contexts: the legal community, the print media and legislative bodies. (shrink)

It has been argued that naturalizing the mind will result in the elimination of the ontology of folk psychology (e.g. beliefs and desires). This paper draws from a wide range of empirical literature, including from developmental and cross-cultural psychology, in building an argument for a position dubbed restrictive materialism . The position holds that while the ontology of folk psychology is overextended, there is a restricted domain in which the application of the folk ontology remains secure. From the evidence (...) of developmental uniformity and cross-cultural ubiquity of beliefs and desires, it is argued that the ontology (but not the principles) of folk psychology may be incorrigible. Thus, even if radically false as a description of first-order brain processes, beliefs and desires might be an unavoidable second-order brain process. Given that the domain of psychology is how humans think, if the above argument is correct, then beliefs and desires will continue to earn their rightful place in the ontology of any future psychology, in just the same way as any other scientific entity. (shrink)

Notes on stratification, education, and mobility in industrial societies, by E. Hopper.--Social selection in the welfare state, by T. H. Marshall.--Domination and assertion in educational systems, by M. Scotford-Archer and M. Vaughan.--Sponsored and contest mobility and the school system, by R. H. Turner.--A typology for the classification of educational systems, by E. Hopper.--The management of knowledge: a critique of the use of typologies in educational sociology, by I. Davies.--Selection and knowledge management in education systems, by D. Smith.--Systems of education and (...) systems of thought, by P. Bourdieu.--On the classification and framing of educational knowledge, by B. Bernstein.--The political functions of the educational system, by H. Zeigler.--Power, ideology, and the transmission of knowledge: an exploratory essay, by D. Smith.--Theoretical advance and empirical challenge, by A. H. Halsey.--A cross-cultural outline of education, by J. Henry.--Educational systems and selected consequences of patterns of mobility and non-mobility in industrial societies: a theoretical discussion, by E. Hopper. (shrink)

All football teams that compete within the F. A. Premier League possess an academy, whose objective is to produce more and better home-grown players that are capable of playing professionally. These young players spend a large amount of time with their coach, but little is known about player’s perception of the coach-athlete relationship within F.A. Premier League Academies. The objectives of this study were to examine whether perceptions of the coach-athlete relationship changed over six months and if the coach-athlete relationship (...) predicted self-reported goal achievement among F. A. Premier League academy players. This study included cross-sectional (n = 104) and longitudinal (n = 52) assessments, in which academy soccer players completed a measure of the coach-athlete relationship and goal achievement across either one or two time periods. The cross-sectional data were subjected to bivariate correlations, whereas the longitudinal data were analyzed using multiple regressions. Perceptions of the coach-athlete relationship remained stable over time. The coach-athlete relationship predicted the achievement of mastery goals six months later. Enhancing the quality of the coach-athlete relationship among elite adolescent athletes appears to be a suitable way of maximizing mastery achievement goals, particularly among developmental athletes who participate in team sports. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea in small boats has become a common sight in the media, particularly since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. The number of boats crossing the English Channel between the French and UK coasts has been increasing as other migration routes have been closed down. This article reports the findings of a discourse analysis of 96 UK newspaper articles published in December 2018 when the daily crossings were referred to as a ‘major crisis’. Adopting a (...) broadly critical discursive psychology perspective, we identify the use of three main interpretative repertoires used within the media reporting. Firstly, a ‘secure the borders’ repertoire which positions the UK’s borders as porous and easily breached, secondly, a ‘smuggling is immoral’ repertoire which works to position smugglers as to blame for the current ‘crisis’ and removes responsibility for the crisis from the Government, and finally, a ‘desperate people’ repertoire which worked to position the refugees themselves as vulnerable and in need of protection, but also as people who will engage in risky behaviours. We suggest that the use of these repertoires ultimately functions to obscure the need for safe and legal migration routes to the UK. (shrink)

The Ontology Summit 2012 explored the current and potential uses of ontology, its methods and paradigms, in big systems and big data: How ontology can be used to design, develop, and operate such systems. The systems addressed were not just software systems, although software systems are typically core and necessary components, but more complex systems that include multiple kinds and levels of human and community interaction with physical-software systems, systems of systems, and the socio-technical environments for those systems which can (...) include cultural, legal, and economic components. The focus themes used for this exploration were Big Systems Engineering, Big Data Challenge, Large Scale Domain Applications, and cross-cutting aspects Ontology Quality, and Federation and Integration of Systems. The Ontology Summit 2012 consisted of over three months of intensive virtual collaborative elaboration of these issues in presentations, panels, and group email. The culmination of these activities was a face-to-face Symposium at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA, 12–13 April 2012. The primary product of this Ontology Summit is the communiqué reported here. But there are other products, some continuing as collaborative, more specifically focused analysis and modeling efforts aligned with various open standards activities. Behind all of these particular products, of course, is the real overriding purpose of the Ontology Summit 2012, which was: the joint collaboration of three distinct communities, the ontology, systems engineering and big systems stakeholder communities, who came together to address common problems, create common understanding and propose common solutions. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about (...) the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world. (shrink)

Aim To examine the contribution of programme year and demographic factors to medical students’ perceptions of evidence-based classification categories of professional misconduct. Methods Students at an Irish medical school were administered a cross-sectional survey comprising 31 vignettes of professional misconduct, which mapped onto a 12-category classification system. Students scored each item using a 5-point Likert scale, where 1 represents the least severe form of misconduct and 5 the most severe. Results Of the 1012 eligible respondents, 561 students completed the (...) survey, providing a response rate of 55%. Items pertaining to disclosure of conflict of interest were ranked as the least severe examples of professional misconduct, and this perception was highest among finalyear students. While ratings of severity declined for items related to ‘inappropriate conduct not in relation to patient’ and ‘inappropriate use of social media’ between years 1 and 3, ratings for both categories increased again among clinical cycle students. Conclusions Increased clinical exposure during years 4 and 5 of the undergraduate programme was associated with better recognition of the importance of selected professional domains. Disclosure of conflict of interest is identified as an area of medical professionalism that requires greater emphasis for students who are at the point of transition from student to doctor. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history. -/- By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The ethical and existential character (...) of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics. -/- These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field. (shrink)

I show that given Jonathan Bennett's theory of 'even if,' the following statement is logically true iff the principle of conditional excluded is valid: (SE) If Q and if P wouldn't rule out Q, then Q even if P. Hence whatever intuitions support the validity of (SE) support the validity of Conditional Excluded Middle, too. Finally I show that Bennett's objection to John Bigelow's theory of the conditional can be turned into a (perhaps) more telling one, viz. that (...) on Bigelow's theory 'if P then Q' and 'if P and Q then R' do not jointly entail 'if P then R'. (shrink)

This is an abridgement of the complete translation of the New Essays, first published in 1981, designed for use as a study text. The material extraneous to philosophy - more than a third of the original - and the glossary of notes have been cut and a philosophical introduction and bibliography of work on Leibniz have been provided by the translators. The marginal pagination has been retained for ease of cross-reference to the full edition. The work itself is an (...) acknowledged philosophical classic, in which Leibniz argues point by point with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The result is the single most important confrontation between the philosophical traditions of rationalism and empiricism. It makes an extremely suitable focus for the study of Leibniz's thought and of those two traditions in relation to one another. (shrink)

Issues of academic integrity, specifically knowledge of, perceptions and attitudes toward plagiarism, are well documented in post-secondary settings using case studies for specific courses, recording discourse with focus groups, analyzing cross-cultural education philosophies, and reviewing the current literature. In this paper, the authors examine the perceptions of graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines at the University of Florida regarding misconduct and integrity issues. Results revealed students’ perceptions of the definition and seriousness of potential academic misconduct, knowledge (...) of institutional procedures, and views on faculty actions, all with a focus on divergences between US and internationally-educated students. The open-ended questions provide anecdotal evidence to highlight personal experiences, positive and negative, aimed at the faculty, international students and undergraduates. Combined, these findings outline an important part of the campus academic integrity culture at a major American university. Recommendations for local actions also are discussed. (shrink)

This study compares Australian marketers with those in the United States along lines that are particular to the study of ethics. The test measured two different moral philosophies, idealism and relativism, and compared perceptions of ethical problems, ethical intentions, and corporate ethical values. According to Hofstede's cultural typologies, there should be little difference between American and Australian marketers, but the study did find significant differences. Australians tended to be more idealistic and more relativistic than Americans and the other results were (...) mixed, making it difficult to generalize about the effects of moral philosophies on the components of ethical decision-making measured here. This is an important finding; as firms become increasingly more globalized, marketers will more often be involved in cross-cultural ethical dilemmas and it seems natural to assume that similar cultures will have similar ethical orientations. That assumption may well prove erroneous. (shrink)

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is primarily a display of conceptual interrelationships of the same logical kind as might occur in an academic work of analytic philosophy. Its pyrotechnic show of jokes, puns and cross-purposes consists mainly in sparks thrown off by the underlying conceptual exploration. That philosophical insights are closely connected with jokes is a fact which Carroll exploited in Through the Looking Glass, a work which is brim-full of small-scale philosophy. Stoppard, unlike Carroll, works intensively (...) at a small cluster of intimately connected concepts. The central one is the concept of reality, and grouped around it are identity, memory, activity and death. One source of the play’s power - to move and disturb, as well as to amuse - is that these concepts are so important in our thinking about ourselves; but the power derives also from the sheer pertinacity and complexity and depth of the conceptual exploration. Although this can be felt by someone who does not fully realize what is going on, one’s experience of the play can be heightened, and the play made more illuminating and memorable, if one becomes consciously aware of its underlying structures. My aim here will be to make such an awareness available - both as a service (I hope) to readers who will subsequently encounter the play, and also as a defence of my judgment about what kind of play it is and how good it is of its kind. I shall write as though for readers who are ignorant of Stoppard’s play but not of Shakespeare’s. All quotations are from the Faber editions of the play. There will be no omissions within anything I quote, so any rows of ellipses in my quotations are Stoppard’s own. The chief personages are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and “the Player” - the leader of the band of tragedians who perform for Hamlet the play within the play.. (shrink)

In response to a 2023 article by Jay Lampert in Deleuze and Guattari Studies, this paper develops the question of what Deleuze and Guattari might make of AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence developed by Google which defeated one of the top human Go players in 2016. It approaches the question in a way that supplements and complements Lampert’s analysis, by noting the well-worn analogy between computer programming and evolutionary biology and then cross-referencing it with Deleuze and Guattari’s attitude towards the (...) latter in A Thousand Plateaus. The results reinforce Lampert’s conclusion that AlphaGo is not ‘nomadic’, but they show that this is precisely because AlphaGo’s algorithms are reminiscent of Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection. (shrink)

This “experimental” essay both investigates maps and functions as a map. Taking its cue from the Deleuzean rhizome, this essay proposes a new method of inquiry based upon the Scientific Method. This essay works as a series of displacements. Each piece of new evidence will take the paper in a different direction. After each piece of evidence is introduced, it will be my job to draw conclusions about the displacement. This inquiry works like a Deleuzean map.