Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber were giant thinkers of the twentieth century who made significant contributions to the understanding of religious consciousness and of Judaism. They wrote on various subjects, such as the Bible, the commandments, Hasidism, Zionism and Christianity, and had much in common, though they also differed on substantial points. Of special note is the intense and fruitful interaction that took place between them. Until now, scholars have not undertaken a comparative analysis of Buber and Heschel as (...) eminent contemporary interpreters of the Jewish tradition. In this volume, Meir and Even-Chen have taken upon themselves the challenge of monitoring their agreements and disputes. (shrink)

Why is education in the open society not open? Why is this option not even considered in the debate over which education is most suited for the open society? Many consider such an option irresponsible. What, then, are the minimal responsibilities of education? The present volume raises these questions and many more. It is a book we have been waiting for. It offers a rare combination of two seemingly opposite, unyielding attitudes: critical and friendly. Dr. Yehezkely applies a rigorous (...) fallibilist-critical approach to issues regarding contemporary education. His diagnosis is that the source of our trouble is the closed undemocratic character of education, which causes education to become, in effect, a fifth column in the open democratic society. Following Popper, he concedes that democracy is every bit as flawed and as problematic as its enemies accuse it of being, particularly in education; still it is our only hope, since open responsible debate of vital problems cannot do without it. Democracy is risky: yet its absence guarantees failure, especially in closed undemocratic education, even when inspired by the most progressive ideas extant, charged with tremendous good will, and executed with selfless love and devotion. Kibbutz education is a case in point. (shrink)

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to measure population levels of conceptual alignment among two polar sensory metaphors and clusters of concepts to which they are commonly applied. A total of 873 participants were tested online, to compare within- and between-cluster alignments of concepts associated with two different polar sensory metaphors (up/down and black/white). IAT results were sensitive to semantic alignments that were also picked up by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) using a large-scale corpus of English. However, even (...) with these semantic alignments taken into account, the dual categorization results demonstrated strong metaphor-cluster alignments over and above the predictions of LSA. It is proposed that, rather than ontogenetic development of metaphoric concepts based on sensorimotor experience, conventionalized sensorimotor metaphors in language may be cognitive tools that provide language learners with insights supported by conceptual properties of a phylogenetically evolved perceptual interface. (shrink)

Leonid Levin showed that every algorithm computing a function has an optimal inverter. Recently, we applied his result in various contexts: existence of optimal acceptors, existence of hard sequences for algorithms and proof systems, proofs of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, analysis of the complexity of the clique problem assuming the nonuniform Exponential Time Hypothesis. We present all these applications here. Even though a simple diagonalization yields Levin’s result, we believe that it is worthwhile to be aware of the explicit result. (...) The purpose of this survey is to convince the reader of our view. (shrink)

Let $\mathscr {C}$ be a class of finite and infinite graphs that is closed under induced subgraphs. The well-known Łoś–Tarski Theorem from classical model theory implies that $\mathscr {C}$ is definable in first-order logic by a sentence $\varphi $ if and only if $\mathscr {C}$ has a finite set of forbidden induced finite subgraphs. This result provides a powerful tool to show nontrivial characterizations of graphs of small vertex cover, of bounded tree-depth, of bounded shrub-depth, etc. in terms of forbidden (...) induced finite subgraphs. Furthermore, by the Completeness Theorem, we can compute from $\varphi $ the corresponding forbidden induced subgraphs. This machinery fails on finite graphs as shown by our results: –There is a class $\mathscr {C}$ of finite graphs that is definable in first-order logic and closed under induced subgraphs but has no finite set of forbidden induced subgraphs.–Even if we only consider classes $\mathscr {C}$ of finite graphs that can be characterized by a finite set of forbidden induced subgraphs, such a characterization cannot be computed from a first-order sentence $\varphi $ that defines $\mathscr {C}$ and the size of the characterization cannot be bounded by $f(|\varphi |)$ for any computable function f.Besides their importance in graph theory, the above results also significantly strengthen similar known theorems for arbitrary structures. (shrink)

At one time, modern historians had come to be accustomed to using the paradigm of "Western challenge-Chinese response" to describe the development of modern China since the Opium War. However, in the past few decades, some scholars have begun to offer a very different opinion and argument. This is not only because Arnold J. Toynbee's "challenge and response" theory has continued to be repeatedly criticized and examined in a more unfavorable light, but also because people have come to believe that (...) the lessons of Chinese history over the past century and a half cannot simply be summarized as an outward response to the modern civilization, or the civilization of modernity, represented by the West, and that the conflict between the two—[i.e., between China and the West] must be resolved only through China's own modernization. Nonetheless, from a macrocultural perspective, the question of how a premodernistic Chinese culture may produce a creative response to the modernized culture of the West has remained and to a certain extent remains today a major topic for the study of the culture of modern and contemporary China. In a fundamental sense, the ebb and flow and the interweaving between the stubborn cultural identity of a cultural conservatism that was, and is, deeply rooted in a powerful spiritual-cultural tradition on the one hand and the antitraditional consciousness which is produced out of an urgent, even desperate concern for modernization on the other hand has formed the basic framework of the culture of modern China. (shrink)

Jin Yuelin’s logical and philosophical thought was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. The same influence existed also in the case of his view on truth, which was considerably close to the views maintained by Russell in his phase of logical atomism. In their investigations, Russell and Jin not only focused on similar topics, but also occupied similar philosophical positions, such as realism in the domain of ontology, empiricism in epistemology, and the correspondence theory in the domain of (...) the theory of truth. Nevertheless, Jin Yuelin’s view on truth was not only a mere imitation or recapitulation or even plagiarized copy of Russell’s, but also contained innovations and characteristics of its own. Jin, for example, emphasized certain general characteristics of truth, including the notion of truth as a relational quality, that truth is not a matter of degree, and that it is relative neither to time and space nor to the different types of knowledge. By so doing, Jin underlined the objectiveness, reliability, and transcendence of true propositions. By arguing that the correspondence theory of truth possessed strong foundations in common sense, Jin set out to defend the role of common sense in philosophy and science, maintaining that the former cannot be completely eliminated and arguing against the notion that any modification of a part of common sense would ultimately be founded on yet another segment of common sense. Moreover, Jin delivered his own response against the theory of the gap between “subject and object/the internal and the external,” which had been used to question the correspondence theory of truth, proposing a variety of cognitivist theory, which defined facts as “the given” (datum) that has been received and arranged. Most importantly, facts are cognitive constructs created on the basis of “the given” and encapsulate both subjectiveness and objectiveness. Jin Yuelin was a modern Chinese philosopher who had achieved profound erudition in both Chinese and Western thought, and, above all, an independent an profoundly original thinker. (shrink)

This paper argues for a hybrid and alternative theory of names—Socio-historical Causal Descriptivism, which consists of six claims: (1) the referring relation between a name and an object originates from a generalized “initial baptism” of that object. (2) The causal chain of the name N firstly and mainly transmits informative descriptions of N’s bearer. (3) The meaning of N consists of an open-ended collection of informative descriptions of N’s bearer acknowledged by a linguistic community. (4) With respect to practical needs (...) of agents there is s weighted order in the collection of descriptions of N’s bearer. (5) The meaning or even partial meaning of N, together with the background of a discourse, the network of knowledge, speaker’s intention, etc., determines the referent of N. (6) All names have their own referents, including physical individuals, and parasitic, fictional, or intensional objects; there are few names absolutely without reference. (shrink)

This paper divides the sophisms and paradoxes put forth by Chinese thinkers of the pre-Qin period of China into six groups: paradoxes of motion and infinity, paradoxes of class membership, semantic paradoxes, epistemic paradoxes, paradoxes of relativization, other logical contradictions. It focuses on the comparison between the Chinese items and the counterparts of ancient Greek and even of contemporary Western philosophy, and concludes that there turn out to be many similar elements of philosophy and logic at the beginnings of (...) Chinese and Greek civilizations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBy means of critical reflection on the current situation of Chinese philosophy, this article aims to clarify two different approaches to philosophy. One is for scholars to focus on original texts and thought tradition, concerned with interpretation and inheritance; even in this way, scholars can achieve theoretical innovation through creative interpretation. The other is for researchers to face up questions from academics and from reality, and mainly to do theoretical creation in philosophy on a profound theoretical background, strictly following (...) academic norms and standards. For contemporary Chinese philosophy, the two approaches are indispensable, but the serious problem is that the first approach absolutely is dominant, but the second is too weak. The correct choice of Chinese philosophy should be to let hundreds of flower bloom, to let different approaches compete with each other, and to cooperatively establish the prosperity of contemporary Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

Individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 (C19) experienced prejudice and blame for the pandemic. Because people vastly overestimate C19 risks, we examined whether these negative judgements could be partially understood as a form of scapegoating (ie, blaming a group unfairly for an undesirable outcome) and whether political ideology (previously shown to shape risk perceptions in the USA) moderates scapegoating of the unvaccinated. We grounded our analyses in scapegoating literature and risk perception during C19. We obtained support for our speculations through two vignette-based (...) studies conducted in the USA in early 2022. We varied the risk profiles (age, prior infection, comorbidities) and vaccination statuses of vignette characters (eg, vaccinated, vaccinated without recent boosters, unvaccinated, unvaccinated-recovered), while keeping all other information constant. We observed that people hold the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated) more responsible for negative pandemic outcomes and that political ideology moderated these effects: liberals (vs conservatives) were more likely to scapegoat the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated), even when presented with information challenging the culpability of the unvaccinated known at the time of data collection (eg, natural immunity, availability of vaccines, time since last vaccination). These findings support a scapegoating explanation for a specific group-based prejudice that emerged during the C19 pandemic. We encourage medical ethicists to examine the negative consequences of significant C19 risk overestimation among the public. The public needs accurate information about health issues. That may involve combating misinformation that overestimates and underestimates disease risk with similar vigilance to error. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including (...) the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

BackgroundSocial support plays an important role for health outcomes. Support for those living with chronic conditions may be particularly important for their health, and even for their survival. The role of support for the survival of cancer patients after receiving an allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplant is understudied. To better understand the link between survival and support, as well as different sources and functions of support, we conducted two studies in alloHCT patients. First, we examined whether social support is related (...) to survival. Second, we examined who provides which support and which specific support-related functions and tasks are fulfilled by lay caregivers and healthcare professionals.MethodsIn Study 1, we conducted a retrospective chart review of alloHCT patients and registered availability of a dedicated lay caregiver and survival. In Study 2, we prospectively followed patients after alloHCT from the same hospital, partly overlapping from Study 1, who shared their experiences of support from lay caregivers and healthcare providers in semi-structured in-depth interviews 3 to 6 months after their first hospital discharge.ResultsPatients with a dedicated caregiver had a higher probability of surviving to 100 days than patients without a caregiver, OR = 2.84, p = 0.042. Study 2 demonstrated the importance of post-transplant support due to patients’ emotional needs and complex self-care regimen. The role of lay caregivers extended to many areas of patients’ daily lives, including support for attending doctor’s appointments, managing medications and financial tasks, physical distancing, and maintaining strict dietary requirements. Healthcare providers mainly fulfilled medical needs and provided informational support, while lay caregivers were the main source of emotional and practical support.ConclusionThe findings highlight the importance of studying support from lay caregivers as well as healthcare providers, to better understand how they work together to support patients’ adherence to recommended self-care and survival. (shrink)

We introduce a construct called “humanness sensitivity,” which we define as the ability to recognize uniquely human characteristics. To evaluate the construct, we used a “concurrent study design” to conduct an internet-based study with a convenience sample of 42,063 people from 88 countries.We sought to determine to what extent people could identify subtle characteristics of human behavior, thinking, emotions, and social relationships which currently distinguish humans from non-human entities such as bots. Many people were surprisingly poor at this task, (...) class='Hi'>even when asked simple questions about human relationships or anatomy. Participants were best at identifying subtle aspects of human cognition and worst at identifying subtle aspects of human communication. Test scores were good predictors of whether someone was employed and modest predictors of other self-reported criterion measures. We also found that people identifying themselves in marginal societal categories identified themselves as less human and also scored lower on our test. As computers continue to become more human-like, our study suggests that the vast majority of humankind will likely have great difficulty distinguishing them from people. Can methods be devised for improving this ability? Might humanness sensitivity help people to make such distinctions? Will people who excel at differentiating humans and non-human entities—like the “blade runners” in the 1982 and 2017 feature films—someday hold a special place in society? (shrink)

Many ecological and environmental economists take a microeconomic approach to envi­ronmental valuation and view the macroeconomy as an amalgam of firms whose primary task is to efficiently allocate scarce resources. In this framework, replacing freely provided ecosystem services with costly human-provided substitutes is by definition inefficient. Although destroying and replacing the free gifts of nature can sometimes be an economic benefit, in the case of apple-tree pollination in Maoxian County, China, the positive economic benefits do not justify eliminating the natural (...) processes. To the contrary, the Maoxian case illustrates the danger of allowing the logic of the market and its apologetic models to drive conservation policy. The conflict between the market economy and the natural world must be recognized and addressed in a more substantial way. The bees of Maoxian County are a parable for the relationship between humans and the natural world and show clearly the danger of leaving the fate of nature to the whims of the markets even if prices are “corrected.”. (shrink)

Recently implemented Chinese health insurance schemes have failed to achieve a Chinese health care system that is family-oriented, family-based, family-friendly, or even financially sustainable. With this diagnosis in hand, the authors argue that a financially and morally sustainable Chinese health care system should have as its core family health savings accounts supplemented by appropriate health insurance plans. This essay’s arguments are set in the context of Confucian moral commitments that still shape the background culture of contemporary China.

Much has happened in the field of contemporary epistemology since Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” was published in 1969. Even before Ronald Giere published his article “Philosophy of Science Naturalized,” naturalized philosophy of science had been influenced by the so-called historical approach. Kuhm, Lakatos, Feyerabend and Laudan all contributed importantly to this trend. In this light it has emerged, without a doubt, that philosophy of science is closely related to epistemology. This volume explores some of the relevant relations and will be (...) of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Previous research shows that people can use the co-occurrence of words and objects in ambiguous situations (i.e., containing multiple words and objects) to learn word meanings during a brief passive training period (Yu & Smith, 2007). However, learners in the world are not completely passive but can affect how their environment is structured by moving their heads, eyes, and even objects. These actions can indicate attention to a language teacher, who may then be more likely to name the attended (...) objects. Using a novel active learning paradigm in which learners choose which four objects they would like to see named on each successive trial, this study asks whether active learning is superior to passive learning in a cross-situational word learning context. Finding that learners perform better in active learning, we investigate the strategies and discover that most learners use immediate repetition to disambiguate pairings. Unexpectedly, we find that learners who repeat only one pair per trial—an easy way to infer this pair—perform worse than those who repeat multiple pairs per trial. Using a working memory extension to an associative model of word learning with uncertainty and familiarity biases, we investigate individual differences that correlate with these assorted strategies. (shrink)

One famous debate in contemporary epistemology considers whether there is always one unique, epistemically rational way to respond to a given body of evidence. Generally speaking, answering “yes” to this question makes one a proponent of the Uniqueness thesis, while those who answer “no” are called “permissivists”. Another influential recent debate concerns whether non-truth-related factors can be the basis of epistemic justification, knowledge, or rational belief. Traditional theories answer “no”, and are therefore considered “purists”. However, more recently many theorists have (...) argued to the contrary, claiming that impurist factors, such as practical stakes, can sometimes encroach or even override truth-related considerations. This paper bridges the two debates by presenting and defending what I call “Impurist Permissivism”. I support Impurist Permissivism by showing how it can resist Roger White’s famous Argument from Arbitrariness (2005). (shrink)

This paper investigates some delicate tradeoffs between the generality of an algorithmic learning device and the quality of the programs it learns successfully. There are results to the effect that, thanks to small increases in generality of a learning device, the computational complexity of some successfully learned programs is provably unalterably suboptimal. There are also results in which the complexity of successfully learned programs is asymptotically optimal and the learning device is general, but, still thanks to the generality, some of (...) those optimal, learned programs are provably unalterably information deficient—in some cases, deficient as to safe, algorithmic extractability/provability of the fact that they are even approximately optimal. For these results, the safe, algorithmic methods of information extraction will be by proofs in arbitrary, true, computably axiomatizable extensions of Peano Arithmetic. (shrink)

This is Palmer 2004 years come to Taiwan, Lo Fu Jen Catholic University in light of the second lecture series lecture, described as vulgar different flow history of Western hermeneutics. This means a comprehensive history of hermeneutics unifying different from the contemporary general domain of hermeneutics for individual study. This ancient Egypt, Rome hope臘nervous, then interpretation of the Bible, the Protestant development, the liberation of neural science, until the liberation of Latin America contemporary neural science, etc., all kinds of important (...) interpretation of the provision of interpretation of the form of sperm Jie. Tirelessly road ahead, not only the context of the history of hermeneutics with management and to clarify the effect of comb, more understanding of how hermeneutics itself with the meaning of integration, resulting in program like dragon eye-dotting enlightening. This article is the second lecture made by Richard Palmer in Taiwan in 2004, entitled as "An Unconventional History of Hermeneutics in the West," indicating that such a general history of hermeneutics is different from the various hermeneutic studies on individual fields. This paper makes outstanding explications on those important hermeneutic forms of ancient Egypt mythology, Greek and Roman mythology, Biblical interpretation, the development of the Protestant, liberation theology and even the contemporary liberation theology of Latin America, not only sorting out and clarifying the historical contexts of hermeneutics but also inspiring us on how to understand and unify the meanings of hermeneutics itself. (shrink)

Taiwanese enterprises generally display a tacit acceptance and practice of globally-recognized business ethics such as the respect of human rights. Yet some Taiwanese business supervisors subscribe instead to a philosophy of leadership, dubbed "pseudo-harmony", which actively seeks to evade responsibility and any conflict of interest with profitability. Meanwhile other Taiwanese entrepreneurs are even less enlightened, dictatorially upholding self-serving regimes which operate on a philosophy which is euphemistically referred to as "householder management".These attitudes result in the sub-optimal development of "organizational (...) democratization" within Taiwanese enterprises and hi-light the fragility of "ethical leadership" in Taiwan. There is a strong argument, therefore, that Taiwanese business needs to become both its own analyst and therapist if it is to enhance its "governance ethics". Only this way can the nation's enterprises evolve their ethical responsibilities to stakeholders and sustain their competitiveness in a global market that increasingly demands an adherence to ethical standards. (shrink)

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated the influence of Mandarin numeral classifiers – a grammatical category in the language – on online overt attention. Mandarin speakers were presented with simple sentences through headphones while their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer screen were monitored. The crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier categories influence Mandarin speakers' general conceptual processing, then on hearing the target noun they should look at objects that (...) are members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not explicitly present. The data show that when participants heard a classifier they shifted overt attention significantly more to classifiermatch objects than to distractor objects, but when the classifier was not explicitly presented in speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects and distractor objects did not differ. This suggests that although classifier distinctions do influence eye-gaze behavior, they do so only during linguistic processing of that distinction and not in moment-to-moment general conceptual processing. (shrink)

Abstract Chinese culture has remained steady, stretching through time as long and unbroken as the Great Wall. In thousands of years, Chinese culture has exhibited a remarkable ability to assimilate foreign intrusions. Even though several times throughout Chinese history minority nationalities have been in military and political control of China, they were gradually assimilated by Chinese culture. Christianity has spent more than a thousand years attempting to convert the Chinese with only negligible success. However, why was Marxism able to (...) become the dominant ideology in only 30 years? This article discusses the critical cultural roots of the different destinies of Marxism and Christianity within the Great Wall. (shrink)

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

With the rapidly expanding catalogue of scientific publications, especially within the Biomedical Sciences field, it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to search for, read or even interpret emerging scientific findings. PubMed, just one of the current biomedical data repositories, comprises over 33 million citations for biomedical research, and over 2500 publications are added each day. To further strengthen the impact biomedical research, we suggest that there should be more synergy between publications and machines. By bringing machines into the (...) realm of research and publication, we can greatly augment the assessment, investigation and cataloging of the biomedical literary corpus. The effective application of machine-based manuscript assessment and interpretation is now crucial, and potentially stands as the most effective way for researchers to comprehend and process the tsunami of biomedical data and literature. Many biomedical manuscripts are currently published online in poorly searchable document types, with figures and data presented in formats that are partially inaccessible to machine-based approaches. The structure and format of biomedical manuscripts should be adapted to facilitate machine-assisted interrogation of this important literary corpus. In this context, it is important to embrace the concept that biomedical scientists should also write manuscripts that can be read by machines. It is likely that an enhanced human–machine synergy in reading biomedical publications will greatly enhance biomedical data retrieval and reveal novel insights into complex datasets. (shrink)

To oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic, in (...) which teleology is introduced to solve a problem in the individuation of entities. It will turn out that the fullest actualization of the end is in the durable means, which is also thereby individuated. And it will turn out that the paradigmatic historical means—the state—is tensed, as it were, between the end and its realization that makes it synchronically historical. This synchronic historicity is missing in the usual progressive and thus diachronic accounts of the teleological process of history. But first we step back even farther (at least historically). We begin by taking up the two most important philosophical accounts of teleology for Hegel, namely those of Aristotle and Kant. Then we go to Hegel's Logic for his reconstruction of teleological processes against the background of the explanatory need for individuation. We focus on four aspects of Hegel's account: that teleology is a structure of reciprocal interaction, that the purpose is an immanent governing principle, that change is the price of immanence, and that the durable means is the teleological object par excellence. Finally, we trace these features through Hegel's account of world history and conclude with some brief remarks on the historicity of the state described in the Philosophy of Right. (shrink)

Although expected utility theory has proven a fruitful and elegant theory in the finite realm, attempts to generalize it to infinite values have resulted in many paradoxes. In this paper, we argue that the use of John Conway's surreal numbers shall provide a firm mathematical foundation for transfinite decision theory. To that end, we prove a surreal representation theorem and show that our surreal decision theory respects dominance reasoning even in the case of infinite values. We then bring our (...) theory to bear on one of the more venerable decision problems in the literature: Pascal's Wager. Analyzing the wager showcases our theory's virtues and advantages. To that end, we analyze two objections against the wager: Mixed Strategies and Many Gods. After formulating the two objections in the framework of surreal utilities and probabilities, our theory correctly predicts that (1) the pure Pascalian strategy beats all mixed strategies, and (2) what one should do in a Pascalian decision problem depends on what one's credence function is like. Our analysis therefore suggests that although Pascal's Wager is mathematically coherent, it does not deliver what it purports to, a rationally compelling argument that people should lead a religious life regardless of how confident they are in theism and its alternatives. (shrink)

Kirchhoff’s 1882 theory of optical diffraction forms the centerpiece in the long-term development of wave optics, one that commenced in the 1820s when Fresnel produced an empirically successful theory based on a reinterpretation of Huygens’ principle, but without working from a wave equation. Then, in 1856, Stokes demonstrated that the principle was derivable from such an equation albeit without consideration of boundary conditions. Kirchhoff’s work a quarter century later marked a crucial, and widely influential, point for he produced Fresnel’s results (...) by means of Green’s theorem and function under specific boundary conditions. In the late 1880s, Poincaré uncovered an inconsistency between Kirchhoff’s conditions and his solution, one that seemed to imply that waves should not exist at all. Researchers nevertheless continued to use Kirchhoff’s theory—even though Rayleigh, and much later Sommerfeld, developed a different and mathematically consistent formulation that, however, did not match experimental data better than Kirchhoff’s theory. After all, Kirchhoff’s formula worked quite well in a specific approximation regime. Finally, in 1964, Marchand and Wolf employed the transformation of Kirchhoff’s surface integral that had been developed by Maggi and Rubinowicz for other purposes. The result yielded a consistent boundary condition that, while introducing a species of discontinuity, nevertheless rescued the essential structure of Kirchhoff’s original formulation from Poincaré’s paradox. (shrink)

In an effort at ethical reform, Taiwan recently revised the Hospice Palliative Care Law authorising family members or physicians to make surrogate decisions to discontinue life-sustaining treatment if an incompetent terminally ill patient did not express their wishes while still competent. In particular, Article 7 of the new law authorises the palliative care team, namely the physicians, to act as sole decision-makers on behalf of the incompetent terminally ill patient's best interests if no family member is available. However, the law (...) fails to provide guidance as to what constitutes the patient's best interests or what specific procedures the treating physicians should follow, and so has raised constitutional concerns. It may be difficult to translate ethical reform into law but it is not impossible if essential requirements are carefully followed. First, there must be substantial nexus between the purpose of the statute and the measures provided under the statute. Second, advocates need to convince the public that futility or waste has amounted to a public health emergency so as to justify lower procedural requirements. Third, a remedy or compensation should be available if the surrogate decisions have not been appropriately made. Fourth, minimum procedural safeguards are necessary even though the statute is intended to reduce the procedural burdens of making surrogate decisions on behalf of incompetent patients who lack family members and did not express their wishes while still competent. (shrink)

Revealing the general status quo of teacher curriculum leadership has great theoretical, policy, and practical significance. However, large-scale empirical investigations in this area are rare, and there is even less attention to the current situation of rural teacher curriculum leadership. Based on the survey of 2,966 rural teachers in 20 provinces of China, this paper presented the status quo of rural teacher curriculum leadership and examined influencing factors through multiple linear regression analysis. It was found that curriculum leadership of (...) rural teachers was at a low level with backward leadership views, lack of practical ability, and low sense of identity. Regression analysis demonstrated that individual field factors had a significant impact on teachers’ curriculum leadership. Specifically, the higher the teachers’ leadership willingness, trust in others, and self-efficacy, the higher the curriculum leadership. The school field was also an important influential aspect. In particular, the formation of a common vision and teacher community by the school and the appropriate empowerment of the principal had a significant positive impact on the curriculum leadership of rural teachers. Based on these key findings, several improvement suggestions are put forward at the end, which can be used as references for other countries to develop improvement plans on rural teacher curriculum leadership. (shrink)

The dark side of entrepreneurship, especially the dark side of student entrepreneurship, has received little attention from academia. This study tries to examine the dark side of entrepreneurship among students in Chinese universities. Employing qualitative method by conducting semi-structured interview with students at the universities. Our study identifies the unproductive and destructive factors that drive the dark side of student entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship costs that accompany students in the process of entrepreneurship are usually time pressure, academic conflict, and even health (...) damage. There is a huge discrepancy between the knowledge given to students by universities and the knowledge required for entrepreneurship, and college students frequently lack entrepreneurial knowledge and business logic. In China, the use of inappropriate policy tools has decoupled the student entrepreneurship policies it pursues from the purpose the policies are supposed to serve. In so doing, this study contributes to the micro-level of the notion of the dark side of student entrepreneurship. (shrink)

A central question in many debates on paternalism is whether a decision analyst can ever go against the stated preference of a client, even if merely intending to improve the decisions for the client. Using four gedanken-experiments, this paper shows that this central question, so cleverly and aptly avoided by libertarian paternalism (nudge), cannot always be avoided. The four thought experiments, while purely hypothetical, serve to raise and specify the critical arguments in a maximally clear and pure manner. The (...) first purpose of the paper is, accordingly, to provide a litmus test on the readers’ stance on paternalism. We thus also survey and organize the various stances in the literature. The secondary purpose of this paper is to argue that paternalism cannot always be avoided and consumer sovereignty cannot always be respected. However, this argument will remain controversial. (shrink)

Research into innovative behavior is not new, but its importance for organizational effectiveness has become even more evident in recent years. However, the psychological processes and underlying mechanism concerning how and why innovative behavior occurs within an organization still invite more investigation. The present study considers ambidextrous organizational culture as a pro-innovation culture and proposes that it can be perceived by employees, which leads to their innovative behavior. This study adds clarity by exploring the impact of perceived ambidextrous organizational (...) culture on employees’ reactions related to innovation via the intermediate mechanism of psychological empowerment and the moderating condition of transformational leadership. Hypotheses are derived from a motivational perspective based on self-determination theory. Results are based on data collected from 647 Chinese employee-supervisor dyads. This study finds that employees’ perceptions of ambidextrous organizational culture have an indirect effect on innovative behavior through psychological empowerment. Specifically, the positive indirect relationship is amplified when transformational leadership is at a higher level. Our findings show how the mediating mechanism of psychological empowerment and the moderating condition of transformational leadership work together to improve innovation by individuals. The findings reveal several ways in which organizations can strategically focus on their cultural and supervisory training, such as applying this model to improve employees’ outcome related to innovation. (shrink)

What exists at the fundamental level of reality? On the standard picture, the fundamental reality contains (among other things) fundamental matter, such as particles, fields, or even the quantum state. Non-fundamental facts are explained by facts about fundamental matter, at least in part. In this paper, I introduce a non-standard picture called the "cosmic void” in which the universe is devoid of any fundamental material ontology. Facts about tables and chairs are recovered from a special kind of laws that (...) satisfy strong determinism. All non-fundamental facts are completely explained by nomic facts. I discuss a concrete example of this picture in a strongly deterministic version of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics. I discuss some philosophical and scientific challenges to this view, as well as some connections to ontological nihilism. (shrink)

Interpersonal responsibility is an indigenous Chinese personality construct, which is regarded to have positive social functions. Two studies were designed to explore the relationship among interpersonal responsibility, proposal allocation ratio, and responders’ hostile decisions in an ultimatum game. Study 1 was a scenario study using a hypothetical ultimatum game with a valid sample of 551 high school students. Study 2 was an experimental study which recruited 54 undergraduate students to play the incentivized ultimatum game online. The results of the two (...) studies showed a significantly negative correlation between interpersonal responsibility and responders’ rejection responses only when the proposal allocation ratio was 3:7. In addition, in study 2, interpersonal responsibility had negative effects on responders’ rejection responses under the offer of 3:7, even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits. Taken together, proposal allocation ratio might moderate the effects of interpersonal responsibility on hostile decision-making in the ultimatum game. The social function of interpersonal responsibility might be beyond the Big Five. Keywords: interpersonal responsibility, proposal allocation ratio, hostile decision-making, moderator, ultimatum game, Big Five personality. (shrink)

In a previous article we have shown that Kuhn's theory of concepts is independently supported by recent research in cognitive psychology. In this paper we propose a cognitive re-reading of Kuhn's cyclical model of scientific revolutions: all of the important features of the model may now be seen as consequences of a more fundamental account of the nature of concepts and their dynamics. We begin by examining incommensurability, the central theme of Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, according to two different (...) cognitive models of concept representation. We provide new support for Kuhn 's mature views that incommensurability can be caused by changes in only a few concepts, that even incommensurable conceptual systems can be rationally compared, and that scientific change of the most radical sort—the type labeled revolutionary in earlier studies—does not have to occur holistically and abruptly, but can be achieved by a historically more plausible accumulation of smaller changes. We go on to suggest that the parallel accounts of concepts found in Kuhn and in cognitive science lead to a new understanding of the nature of normal science, of the transition from normal science to crisis, and of scientific revolutions. The same account enables us to understand how scientific communities split to create groups supporting new paradigms, and to resolve various outstanding problems. In particular, we can identify the kind of change needed to create a revolution rather precisely. This new analysis also suggests reasons for the unidirectionality of scientific change. (shrink)

Policies promoted and adopted for allocating ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic have often prioritised healthcare workers or other essential workers. While the need for such policies has so far been largely averted, renewed stress on health systems from continuing surges, as well as the experience of allocating another scarce resource—vaccination—counsel revisiting the justifications for such prioritisation. Prioritising healthcare workers may have intuitive appeal, but the ethical justifications for doing so and the potential harms that could follow require careful analysis. Ethical (...) justifications commonly offered for healthcare worker prioritisation for ventilators rest on two social value criteria: instrumental value, also known as the ‘multiplier effect’, which may preserve the ability of healthcare workers to help others, and reciprocity, which rewards past usefulness or sacrifice. We argue that these justifications are insufficient to over-ride the common moral commitment to value each person’s life equally. Institutional policies prioritising healthcare workers over other patients also violate other ethical norms of the healthcare professions, including the commitment to put patients first. Furthermore, policy decisions to prioritise healthcare workers for ventilators could engender or deepen existing distrust of the clinicians, hospitals and health systems where those policies exist, even if they are never invoked. (shrink)

The research presented in this paper focuses on business ethical values inChina, a country in which the process of institutional transformation has left cultural values in a state of flux. A survey was conducted in China and the U.S. by using five business scenarios. Survey results show similarities between the Chinese and American decision choices for three out of five scenarios. However, the results reveal significant differences in rationales, even forsimilar decisions. The implications of similarities and differences between the (...) U.S. and Chinese samples are discussed. (shrink)

Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expres- sions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write (...) down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while o thers contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that mastering languages with distinct rather than similar rhythmic properties enhances musical rhythmic perception. This study investigates whether learning a second language (L2) enhances the perception of musical rhythmic variation in general, regardless of first and second languages’ rhythmic properties. Additionally, we investigated whether this perceptual enhancement could be alternatively explained by exposure to musical rhythmic complexity, such as the use of compound meter in Turkish music. Finally, it investigates if an enhancement of musical rhythmic perception could (...) be observed among L2 learners whose first language relies heavily on pitch information, as is the case with tonal languages. Therefore, we tested Turkish, Dutch and Mandarin L2 learners of English and Turkish monolinguals on their ability to perceive musical rhythmic variation. Participants’ phonological and working memory capacities, melodic aptitude, years of formal musical training and daily exposure to music were assessed to account for cultural and individual differences which could impact their rhythmic ability. Our results suggest that mastering a second language rather than exposure to musical rhythmic complexity could explain individuals’ enhanced perception of musical rhythmic variation. An even stronger enhancement of musical rhythmic perception was observed for L2 learners whose first and second languages differ regarding their rhythmic properties, as enhanced performance of Mandarin and Turkish in comparison with Dutch L2 learners of English seem to suggest. Our findings provide further support for a cognitive transfer between the language and music domain, which may find its grounds on a common evolutionary basis. (shrink)

We examined how the cultural dimension of universalism–particularism influences managers’ attitudes toward relational favoritism. Paradoxically, we found in a survey study that Brazilian and Chinese managers perceived more negative consequences of relational favoritism than did American managers—even though the Brazilians and the Chinese perceived stronger particularistic cultural norms in their countries than Americans did in the United States. We attribute this pattern of results to “cultural reflexivity”—the ability of people from transforming economies to be culturally self-critical during a period (...) of dramatic societal change. This pattern of results also emerged in a scenario study in which we asked these same Brazilian, Chinese, and American participants to assess managerial succession decisions made by a General Manager. We varied the scenarios so that the promoted manager was either a colleague with no pre-existing relation with the GM or a colleague who was a relative, a close friend, from the same town, or from the same school. Consistent with the results of the survey study, we found that perceived cultural norms of particularism were negatively related to perceptions of fairness. In other words, Brazilians and Chinese, even while living in more particularistic cultures, were more harsh in judging relational favoritism. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of these paradoxical relationships. (shrink)

Research into second language teacher identity has experienced a shift in recent years from a cognitive perspective to social constructionist orientation. The existing research in Chinese language literature in relation to Foreign Language teachers’ identity shift is principally in relation to the change of social, cultural, and institutional contexts. Built on the current literature, this research asks: “How might teachers’ self-images or self-conceptualizations be renegotiated when they are located within their own mainstream cultural and educational system, yet comprised of students (...) from various cultural backgrounds?” The data were collected from a group of CFL teachers in a South China university. The research found that students’ backgrounds largely impacted on, and led to, the teachers’ dichotomous relational identities, but did not dramatically change the teachers’ perception on what or how much subject knowledge to be possessed to make an ideal CFL teacher. This attribute of their identity was sustained even though the teaching content was modified at a practical level in response to groups’ differences. Further, the CFL teachers’ pedagogical identity remained stable with only minor modifications when teaching “ingroups” and “outgroups” of students. (shrink)