Advance Praise: "A distillation of the wisdom accumulated over a lifetime by one of our leading thinkers in psychiatry. . . .It should interest. . .anyone who has thought seriously about the brain, the mind and the meaning of illness." --Albert J. Stunkard, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania.

The debate between the “Transcendental” and “Neo-” Thomists is an ongoing concern. Specifically, Jeremy Wilkins and John F.X. Knasas differ sharply over the correct interpretation of St. Thomas, Bernard Lonergan, and the very nature of cognition itself (ACPQ 78 [2004]). This debate is clouded, however, due to a lack of appreciation for key terms, specifically, “sensation” and Lonergan’s own phrase “the notion of being.” Using the distinction between precisive and non-precisive abstraction, the author clarifies the relevant sense of “sensation” and (...) its related concepts. The clarification reveals that Wilkins and Knasas use such terms in markedly different, though compatible ways. Second, the notion of being as it is presented in various texts of Lonergan is examined. Contrary to what is supposed by Knasas, the notion of being, for Lonergan, contributes no formal or constitutive element to human knowing, and is in fact a pure potency with respect to intelligibility. Accordingly, any concerns or charges of crypto-Kantianism with respect to Lonergan are unfounded. (shrink)

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

The debate between the “Transcendental” and “Neo-” Thomists is an ongoing concern. Specifically, Jeremy Wilkins and John F.X. Knasas differ sharply over the correct interpretation of St. Thomas, Bernard Lonergan, and the very nature of cognition itself (ACPQ 78 [2004]). This debate is clouded, however, due to a lack of appreciation for key terms, specifically, “sensation” and Lonergan’s own phrase “the notion of being.” Using the distinction between precisive and non-precisive abstraction, the author clarifies the relevant sense of “sensation” and (...) its related concepts. The clarification reveals that Wilkins and Knasas use such terms in markedly different, though compatible ways. Second, the notion of being as it is presented in various texts of Lonergan is examined. Contrary to what is supposed by Knasas, the notion of being, for Lonergan, contributes no formal or constitutive element to human knowing, and is in fact a pure potency with respect to intelligibility. Accordingly, any concerns or charges of crypto-Kantianism with respect to Lonergan are unfounded. (shrink)

This article presents an integrative conceptual framework for linking corporate social performance, stakeholders, and quality of management, then tests this framework empirically. Results provide strong support for the hypothesis that perceived quality of management can be explained by the quality of performance with respect to specific primary stakeholders: owners, employees, customers, and (marginally) communities, but treatment of ecological environmental considera- tions is not a significant factor.

What place should formal or computational methods occupy in social psychology? We consider this question in historical perspective, survey the current state of the field, introduce the several new contributions to this special issue, and reflect on the future.

This article presents a study of corporate-stakeholder relationships using an empirical technique called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to assess company "best practices" with respect to five primary stakeholders at an industry level of analysis. Five key stakeholder domains are considered: community relations, employee relations, environment, customer (product category), and stockholders (financial performance). These data reflect the relationships between companies and these five primary stakeholders; these relationships are considered to be important elements of corporate social performance. About 15% of companies, on (...) average, are found to be operating at the multidimensional "best practices frontier" that DEA establishes. Differences in treatment of stakeholders within industries and between industries are observed. (shrink)

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same causal chain. To distinguish these possibilities, we tested whether people make transitive judgments about causal chains by inferring, given A causes B and B causes C, (...) that A causes C. Specifically, causal chains schematized as one chunk or mechanism in semantic memory led to transitive causal judgments. On the other hand, chains schematized as multiple chunks led to intransitive judgments despite strong intermediate links. Normative accounts of causal intransitivity could not explain these intransitive judgments. (shrink)

We consider various curious features of general relativity, and relativistic field theory, in two spacetime dimensions. In particular, we discuss: the vanishing of the Einstein tensor; the failure of an initial-value formulation for vacuum spacetimes; the status of singularity theorems; the non-existence of a Newtonian limit; the status of the cosmological constant; and the character of matter fields, including perfect fluids and electromagnetic fields. We conclude with a discussion of what constrains our understanding of physics in different dimensions.

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current ethical guidance (...) and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice underradical uncertainty– situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people usenarratives– structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships – rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According to CNT, (...) narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels “right” to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences. (shrink)

The rate‐limiting step in the uptake and metabolism of Dglucose by insulin target cells is thought to be glucose transport mediated by glucose transporters (primarily the GLUT4 isoform) localized to the plasma membrane. However, subcellular fractionation, photolabelling and immunocytochemical studies have shown that the pool of GLUT4 present in the plasma membrane is only one of many subcellular pools of this protein. GLUT4 has been found in occluded vesicles at the plasma membrane, clathrin‐coated pits and vesicles, early endosomes, and tubulo‐vesicular (...) structures; the latter are analogous to known specialized secretory compartments. Tracking the movement of GLUT4 through these compartments, and defining the mechanism and site of action of insulin in stimulating this subcellular trafficking, are major topics of current investigation. Recent evidence focuses attention on the exocytosis of GLUT4 as the major site of insulin action. Increased exocytosis may be due to decreased retention of glucose transporters in an intracellular pool, or possibly to increased assembly of a vesicle docking and fusion complex. Although details are unknown, the presence in GLUT4 vesicles of a synaptobrevin homologue leads us to propose that a process analogous to that occurring in synaptic vesicle trafficking is involved in the assembly of GLUT4 vesicles into a form suitable for fusion with the plasma membrane. Evidence that the pathways of signalling from the insulin receptor and of GLUT4 vesicle exocytosis may converge at the level of the key signalling enzyme, phosphatidylinositol 3‐kinase, is discussed. (shrink)

Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of action were found to rely principally on the mental states of an agent, while judgments of blame and punishment are found to rely jointly on mental states and the causal connection (...) of an agent to a harmful consequence. Also, selectively for judgments of punishment and blame, people who attempt but fail to cause harm more are judged more leniently if the harm occurs by independent means than if the harm does not occur at all. An account of these phenomena is proposed that distinguishes two processes of moral judgment: one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent, and the other which begins with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Chater & Loewenstein have done a service to the field by raising the fundamental issue of how the political process distorts well-intentioned efforts at behavioral public policy. We connect this argument to broader research on government failure, particularly public choice theory in economics. We further suggest ways that behavioral research can help identify and mitigate such failures.

Whereas most commentators agree about the centrality of narratives in decision-making, the commentaries revealed little consensus about the nature of radical uncertainty. Here we consider thirteen objections to our views, including our characterization of the uncertain decision environment and associated cognitive, affective, and social processes. We conclude that under radical uncertainty, narratives rather than probabilities are the currency of thought.

India, the world's largest democracy of 1 billion people, went to the polls in September 1999. In this article the director of the Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief and Development offers a critical reading of India's journey in building a nation state, and the challenge this represents to evangelicals to present a public face for the Christian faith in such a context. The article is a prelude to a larger and longer study he is undertaking, which the editors (...) hope to include a future issue of Transformation. (shrink)