Applying the sensemaking perspective in the field of corporate social responsibility is a recent but promising development. Using an in-depth exploratory case study, we analyze and discuss the CSR character of British American Tobacco Switzerland. Our findings indicate that BAT Switzerland does not follow traditional patters of building CSR. BAT Switzerland can be classified as a “legitimacy seeker,” characterized mainly by a relational identity orientation and legitimation strategies that might provide pragmatic and/or cognitive legitimacy. We conclude that understanding the cognitive (...) processes underlying the CSR decision-making process is of fundamental value when analyzing and changing the CSR approach of a firm. We discuss boundary conditions of the CSR character framework and expand it by differentiating between process and product legitimacy, as both perspectives have important but possibly different implications for the firm. (shrink)

This study aims to enrich our understanding of the relationship between political connections and the adoption of environmental corporate socially responsible investments. In addition to the individual-level political connections, i.e., entrepreneurs’ personal ties to government officials, we propose in China the creation of Communist Party of China branches in privately owned firms serve as organizational and institutionalized dimensions of political connection building. Drawing on the social exchange theory, this paper details how CPC branches function in privately owned firms and how (...) entrepreneurs are motivated by the reciprocal logic to engage in ECSR. We also supplement this main effect by examining the boundary conditions of it at the firm and regional level. Using a dataset with 17,690 firm observations in China, we find that the existence of CPC branches gives rise to the ECSR investments and the firm-level contingencies such as centralized governance and financial constraints, and the regional-level contingencies such as the development of the market system, are important moderators that shape the association of political links and ECSR investments. These findings have ample implications to understand the ECSR activities and extend social exchange theory beyond the individual level on which it is typically applied. (shrink)

Court rulings are among the most important documents in all legal systems. This article describes a study in which natural language processing is used for the automatic characterization of Spanish judgments that deal with the physical custody (joint or individual) of minors. The model was trained to identify a set of elements: the type of custody requested by the plaintiff, the type of custody decided on by the court, and eight of the most commonly used arguments in this type of (...) judgment. Two jurists independently annotated more than 3000 judgments, which were used to train a model based on transformers. The main difficulties encountered in this task were the complexity of the judicial language and the need to work with appellate court rulings that have a more complicated structure than decisions at first instance. For the complete court rulings, the F1 score of the inter-annotator agreement ranged from 0.60 to 0.86 and the Kappa index from 0.33 to 0.73. The F1 score of the agreement between the model and the annotators ranged from 0.66 to 0.93 and the Kappa index from 0.57 to 0.80. These results in which the model performance exceeds even the inter-annotator agreement show the high ability of transformers to identify abstract entities in legal texts. (shrink)

Aesthetic chills occur in artistic, scientific and religious context. We introduce a theoretical framework relating them to humans’ vital need for cognition. We discuss the implications of such a framework and the plausibility of our hypothesis. Numerous references to chills are introduced.

It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of “the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as “sound symbolism”. After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. How can there, for example, be (perceived) similarity between expressionsand contents across different sensory modalities? We offer an answer, based on the (...) Peircian notion of iconic ground, and G. Sonesson’s distinction betweenprimary and secondary iconicity. Furthermore, we describe an experimental study, in a paradigm first pioneered by W. Kohler, and recently popularized by V.Ramachandran, in which we varied vowels and consonants in fictive word-forms, and conclude that both types of sounds play a role in perceiving an iconic ground between the word-forms and visual figures. The combination of historical conceptual analysis, semiotic explication and psychological experimentationpresented in this article is characteristic of the emerging paradigm of cognitive semiotics. (shrink)

It is question in this text of analyzing the intention to mean something to somebody in the light of the husserlian concept of intentionality. The communication is described there as aiming at the cooperation between the persons by means of ostensive appearance of some of their intentions, on the foundation of the desire of recognition. The constituent role of the communication for any Community is put in it in evidence.

This study synthesizes research on evolutionary psychology, emotional appeals, and viral advertising in order to develop a novel perspective on how sustainable luxury brands can be effectively promoted on social media. The results of two experiments show that the emotional appeals of pride and gratitude increase consumer intentions to spread electronic word-of-mouth about sustainable luxury brands via two discrete mechanisms. Study 1 establishes that featuring the pride appeal increases eWOM intentions by heightening the luxury dimension of sustainable luxury brands, whereas (...) featuring the gratitude appeal increases eWOM intentions by heightening the sustainability dimension of sustainable luxury brands. Study 2 shows that these discrete effects of emotional appeals influence consumers to adopt different types of eWOM behaviors toward sustainable luxury brands. Specifically, the pride appeal increases consumer intentions to broadcast eWOM via status attainment motives. In contrast, the gratitude appeal increases consumer intentions to narrowcast eWOM via affiliation seeking motives. The findings offer novel theoretical insights and provide managers with tools to promote sustainable luxury brands in a digital environment. (shrink)

What is political about political refugeehood? Theorists have assumed that refugees are special because their specific predicament as those who are persecuted sets them aside from other “necessitous strangers.” Persecution is a special form of wrongful harm that marks the repudiation of a person's political membership and that cannot—contrary to certain other harms—be remedied where they are. It makes asylum necessary as a specific remedial institution. In this article, I argue that this is correct. Yet, the connection between political membership, (...) its repudiation, and persecution is far from clear. Drawing on normative political thought and research on autocracies, repression, and migration studies, I show that it is political oppression that marks the repudiation of political membership and leads to various forms of repression that can equally not be remedied at home. A truly political account moves away from persecution and endorses political oppression as the normative pillar of refugeehood and asylum. (shrink)

Who should be recognized as a refugee? This article seeks to uncover the normative arguments at the core of legal and philosophical conceptions of refugeehood. It identifies three analytically dist...

Who should be recognized as a refugee? This article seeks to uncover the normative arguments at the core of legal and philosophical conceptions of refugeehood. It identifies three analytically distinct approaches grounding the right to refugee status and argues that all three are normatively inadequate. Refugee status should neither be grounded in individual persecution for specific reasons (classical approach) nor in individual persecution for any discriminatory reasons (human rights approach). It should also not be based solely on harm (humanitarian approach). (...) Rather, this article argues, it should be based on political oppression – on persons lacking public autonomy, formally expressed as a lack of legal–political status. The normative foundation for a claim to refugee status lies in the inability of a person to control, amend and seek recourse to the specific situation she faces. It lies in the lack of public autonomy expressed as a lack of legal–political rights. What matters for a claim to refugee status is thus the legal–political disenfranchisement of a person, ultimately leaving her with no recourse to the particular situation she faces other than flight. Refugees, then, are not only those who fear harm or persecution, but those who are politically oppressed. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of the war in the Ukraine, realism has made a comeback in public discourses but it is not clear what realism actually means as it seems to stand for everything: from supporting the Ukraine against Russian aggression to the war is the West’s fault. This is the result of decades of not distinguishing between neorealism and classical realism and implicitly acknowledging neorealist storytelling of having systematized classical realist thought. The present paper is a further intervention to carefully (...) distinguish between both theoretical perspectives to uncover what they can add to current world political problems. It finishes by asking if neorealist scholars like John Mearsheimer have a point that it is the West’s fault and a diplomatic solution needs to be found. They often refer to Hans Morgenthau not least because he was one of the most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War. (shrink)

Should refugees govern refugee camps? This paper argues that they should. It draws on normative political thought in consulting the all-subjected principle and an instrumental defense of democratic rule. The former holds that all those subjected to rule in a political unit should have a say in such rule. Through analyzing the conditions that pertain in refugee camps, the paper demonstrates that the all-subjected principle applies there, too. Refugee camps have developed as near distinct entities from their host states. They (...) have formed their own economic, legal and even political systems within which refugees are subjected to political rule. The paper then demonstrates that democratic rule should be preferred over any other decision-making procedure. No amount of experts can replace the institutions that would lead to the accountability of decision-makers and to the incorporation of refugees as situated and epistemically diverse knowers of the problems they face and the solutions that would work best. (shrink)

Should refugees receive political rights in liberal democracies? I argue that they should. Refugees are special – at least when it comes to claims towards democratic inclusion. They lack exit options and are significantly impacted by decisions made in liberal democracies. Enfranchisement is a matter of urgency to them and should occur on a national level. But what justifies the democratic inclusion of refugees? I draw on the all-subjected principle in arguing that all those subjected to rule in a political (...) unit should have a say in such rule. I show that refugees cannot be denied democratic inclusion based on the argument that transients should be excluded from participation. Refugees are not transients. Finally, I show that naturalization is not a prerequisite for enfranchisement. Political rights and citizenship can be had independently of each other. Refugees, then, should be nationally enfranchised as soon as they receive refugee status. (shrink)

Computational models have shown how polarisation can rise among deliberating agents as they approximate epistemic rationality. This paper provides further support for the thesis that polarisation can rise under condition of epistemic rationality, but it does not depend on limitations that extant models rely on, such as memory restrictions or biased evaluation of other agents’ testimony. Instead, deliberation is modelled through agents’ purposeful introduction of arguments and their rational reactions to introductions of others. This process induces polarisation dynamics on its (...) own. A second result is that the effect size of polarisation dynamics correlates with particular types of argumentative behaviour. Polarisation effects can be soothed when agents take into account the opinions of others as premises, and they are amplified as agents fortify their own beliefs. These results underpin the relevance of argumentation as a factor in social-epistemic processes and indicate that rising issue polarisation is not a reliable indicator of epistemic shortcomings. (shrink)

This paper looks at the way in which scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conceptualized the relationship between sacred history and pagan mythology through the lens of their approach to the ancient Greek writer Euhemerus. It argues that the popular contemporary tendency to equate Euhemerism with the historical interpretation of pagan mythology is the product of early eighteenth century French mythography, during which time scholars divested the study of pagan myth from the study of biblical history and thereby sought (...) for new, non-Christian, hermeneutical traditions through which to analyze the origins of pagan mythology more generally. (shrink)

We explore the interaction between oculomotor control and language comprehension on the sentence level using two well-tested computational accounts of parsing difficulty. Previous work (Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011) has shown that surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and cue-based memory retrieval (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are significant and complementary predictors of reading time in an eyetracking corpus. It remains an open question how the sentence processor interacts with oculomotor control. Using a simple linking hypothesis proposed in Reichle, Warren, and (...) McConnell (2009), we integrated both measures with the eye movement model EMMA (Salvucci, 2001) inside the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson et al., 2004). We built a reading model that could initiate short “Time Out regressions” (Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) that compensate for slow postlexical processing. This simple interaction enabled the model to predict the re-reading of words based on parsing difficulty. The model was evaluated in different configurations on the prediction of frequency effects on the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. The extension of EMMA with postlexical processing improved its predictions and reproduced re-reading rates and durations with a reasonable fit to the data. This demonstration, based on simple and independently motivated assumptions, serves as a foundational step toward a precise investigation of the interaction between high-level language processing and eye movement control. (shrink)

The mounting pressures of the climate -and ecological crisis organising politics under a “new climatic regime” (Latour 2017, 3). The epistemic and affective interference of Holocene collapse (author 2022) mobilises Minority-world liberal and far-right resistance, driving feedbacks that undercut democratic capacities for mitigation and adaptation (IPCC 2022). This paper proposes approaching such resistance through an “ecology of practices” (Stengers 2005, 2010), thereby delineating a shared modern timespace linked to affordances of whiteness. In response, the paper proposes a ‘politics of life’ (...) that displaces humanistic agency as the bearer of historical progress and territorial integrity. (shrink)

It is easier to work out the age of the world than to work out how old Flavius Josephus thought it was. Since the nineteenth century, the former has been the concern of scientists and is now estima...

In the second half of the 19th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based explanations via five (...) historical cases of immoral persons. In addition, the article analyses the associated controversies in the context of the period’s psychiatric thinking. The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning. (shrink)

In the era of consumer distrust of corporations, transparency is becoming a must rather than an option. While prior research has explored why businesses should disclose their costs and how consumers may react to such cost transparency, it is still unclear how marketers can best communicate cost transparency. The present research offers a practical examination of how and when cost transparency is effective, specifically, by examining the moderating role of authentic and hubristic pride on the effectiveness of cost transparency. Across (...) two experimental studies, the effectiveness of cost transparency is leveraged using authentic pride, whereas hubristic pride decreases it. Further, we empirically demonstrate the mediating role of moral elevation. Overall, the results demonstrate that marketing messages that elicit authentic pride can increase the effectiveness of cost transparency. Hence, the current research highlights how marketers and brands can effectively combine specific emotional appeals with cost transparency to obtain favorable consumer evaluations. (shrink)

Can arguments and their properties influence the development of issue polarisation in debates among artificial agents? This paper presents an agent-based model of debates with logical constraints based on the theory of dialectical structures. Simulations on this model reveal that the exchange of arguments can drive polarisation even without social influence, and that the usage of different argumentation strategies can influence the obtained levels of polarisation.

ABSTRACT Avner de Shalit argues that philosophers should listen to what the public thinks. He argues that by engaging with people in the streets, political philosophy will improve. Yet, what makes the public special in this regard? This response will do three things. First, it asks whether discussing with the public differs in any meaningful way from discussing with other people such as colleagues or students. Second, it questions the methodological approach, asking whether de Shalit's approach provides a legitimate answer (...) to his question. Third, it raises the worry that this approach is prone to doing politics rather than philosophy. (shrink)

What exactly do we need to do in order to make a promise, or to exercise some other normative power? On a view relied on by many philosophers writing on promising, consent, and related phenomena, the answer is that we must communicate a suitable kind of intention. On this view, power-conferring principles assert that specific normative consequences, determined in part by the content of the communicated intention, attach to such communicative acts, and these principles need not be socially practised or (...) accepted to be true. The paper offers a defense of this convention-independent view against the forceful challenge developed by Jed Lewinsohn in ‘The “Natural Unintelligibility” of Normative Powers’. Lewinsohn appeals to action-theoretic considerations to show that the relevant type of communicative act could not be performed under conditions of rationality and full information, and that therefore promissory power and other normative powers require the existence of social rules conferring such powers. The defense of the view targeted by Lewinsohn turns partly on the exact content of plausible constraints on the intelligibility of actions done with a particular aim, and partly on the question just how the social acceptance of power-conferring rules should be thought to matter. (shrink)