This paper investigates how the credit incentive to engage in questionable research practices interacts with cumulative advantage, the process whereby high-status academics more easily increase their status than low-status academics. I use a mathematical model to highlight two dynamics that have not yet received much attention. First, due to cumulative advantage, questionable research practices may pay off over the course of an academic career even if they are not attractive at the level of individual publications. Second, (...) because of the role of bottleneck moments in academic careers, questionable research practices may be selected for even if they do not provide a benefit in expectation. I also observe that, within the model, the most successful academics are the most likely to have benefited from fraud. (shrink)

Despite a meritocratic discourse prevalent in higher education, academic careers appear to be deeply influenced by structural inequalities. In this study, we employed a systemic perspective that merged organizational theories of cumulative advantage and job crafting to explore the career development of highly productive researchers. Our focus was on the dynamic relationship between the researchers’ agency and the organizational structure of their workplaces, which facilitated their access to crucial job resources, enhancing their research productivity. Methodologically, we conducted a (...) large-scale qualitative study exploring how academics at public universities perceived their work environments in relation to their career development. The analysis showed that participants “crafted” their jobs to acquire career-related resources, leading to cumulative benefits in later career stages. We identified three main themes across career stages: "crafting dependence" in the early career stage, when participants navigated dependency; "crafting independence" in the mid-career stage, as they established autonomy in their research; and "crafting interdependence" in the advanced stages, where participants occupied central positions at their workplaces, leveraging access to resources that they invested in other people to accumulate further resources and maintain their high research productivity. We discuss these findings from the perspective of individual academic career development as conditions for developing research excellence as well as from an institutional perspective, with implications for the development of inequalities in academic workplaces. (shrink)

Imitation, the replication of observed behaviors, has been proposed as the crucial social learning mechanism for the generation of humanlike cultural complexity. To date, the single published experimental microsociety study that tested this hypothesis found no advantage for imitation. In contrast, the current paper reports data in support of the imitation hypothesis. Participants in “microsociety” groups built weight-bearing devices from reed and clay. Each group was assigned to one of four conditions: three social learning conditions and one asocial learning (...) control condition. Groups able to observe other participants building their devices, in contrast to groups that saw only completed devices, show evidence of successive improvement. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that imitation is required for cumulative cultural evolution. This study adds crucial data for understanding why imitation is needed for cultural accumulation, a central defining feature of our species. (shrink)

The lie detector test has long been treated with suspicion by the law. Recently, several authors have called this suspicion into question. They argue that the lie detector test may have considerable forensic benefits, particularly if we move past the classic, false-positive prone, autonomic nervous system-based (ANS-based) control question test, to the more reliable, brain-based, concealed information test. These authors typically rely on a “comparative advantage” argument to make their case. According to this argument, we should not be so (...) suspicious of lie detection evidence if it has comparative advantages over the epistemic methods currently utilised by the legal system. In this article, I add to this growing support by making a novel comparative advantage argument in favour of brain-based lie detection evidence. The argument focuses on the P300 concealed information test (P300 CIT), which has several unique properties, and on the effect it may have on pre-trial bargaining in criminal cases rather than in-court evidence. The thesis is that P300 CIT could allow for innocent defendants to credibly signal their innocence to investigators and prosecutors during pre-trial bargaining more effectively than current proposed methods for doing the same thing. I defend this argument from a number of objections, and suggest that it opens up an interesting avenue in the ongoing debate about the merits of this technology. Although the argument is presented with the criminal law in mind, it could form part of a more general cumulative case in favour of this technology. (shrink)

Current sociology of knowledge tends to take for granted Robert K. Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage: successful ideas bring recognition to their authors, successful authors have their ideas recognized more easily than unknown ones. This article argues that this theory should be revised via the introduction of the differential between the status of an idea and that of its creator: when an idea is more important than its creator, the latter becomes identified with the former, and this will (...) hinder recognition of the intellectual’s new ideas as they differ from old ones in their content or style. Robert N. Bellah’s performance during the “civil religion debate” of the 1970s is reconstructed as an example of how this mechanism may work. Implications for further research are considered in the concluding section. (shrink)

Social scientists are often interested in understanding how the dynamics of social systems are driven by the behavior of individuals that make up those systems. However, this process is hindered by the difficulty of experimentally studying how individual behavioral tendencies lead to collective social dynamics in large groups of people interacting over time. In this study, we investigate the role of social influence, a process well studied at the individual level, on the puzzling nature of success for cultural products such (...) as books, movies, and music. Using a “multiple‐worlds” experimental design, we are able to isolate the causal effect of an individual‐level mechanism on collective social outcomes. We employ this design in a Web‐based experiment in which 2,930 participants listened to, rated, and downloaded 48 songs by up‐and‐coming bands. Surprisingly, despite relatively large differences in the demographics, behavior, and preferences of participants, the experimental results at both the individual and collective levels were similar to those found in Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006). Further, by comparing results from two distinct pools of participants, we are able to gain new insights into the role of individual behavior on collective outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Web‐based experiments to address questions of collective social dynamics. (shrink)

This paper investigates how the credit incentive to engage in questionable research practices interacts with cumulative advantage, the process whereby high-status academics more easily increase their status than low-status academics. I use a mathematical model to highlight two dynamics that have not yet received much attention. First, due to cumulative advantage, questionable research practices may pay off over the course of an academic career even if they do not appear attractive at the level of individual publications. (...) Second, because of the role of bottleneck moments in academic careers, questionable research practices may be selected for even if they do not provide a benefit in expectation. I also observe that, within the model, the most successful academics are the most likely to have benefited from fraud. -/- This paper has been published under a different title. See PhilPapers record HEECAA or DOI 10.1086/716235. (shrink)

Intellectual leadership indicates the informal leadership of professors based on aspects such as knowledge production and dissemination, institutional services, and public engagement. Academic freedom is considered as the overarching condition for individual academics to develop intellectual leadership. Against the backdrop of internationalisation and globalisation of higher education, academics face enormous pressures to produce measurable research outputs, deliver high-quality teaching and meet all kinds of institutional requirements. In modern universities, women scholars, as the non-traditional participants in academia, must tackle with multiple (...) obstacles and bias brought by gender intertwined with academic discipline features, higher education institutions, and sociocultural characteristics. How do women professors protect, negotiate, or strive for academic freedom? Situated in higher education in Hong Kong, this article aims to explore how epistemological norms, institutional management, and gender influence women scholars’ academic freedom. The author has analysed how sixteen established women professors in humanities and social sciences (HSS) augmented freedom using the cumulative advantage theory. The study finds that women scholars in different sub-groups within HSS had mixed views about freedom and developed diverse patterns to seek freedom for intellectual leadership. (shrink)

Paul Thagard describes how his current work in neurophilosophy grew out of a long series of engagements with philosophy, philosophy of science, cognitive science, neural networks, and theoretical neuroscience. Each of these engagements had cumulative advantages over its predecessors. Neurophilosophy is prospering by applying insights about the workings of the brain to central problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics.

This article tries to shed light on the mystery of human culture. Human beings are the only extant species with cumulative, evolving cultures. Many animal species do have cultural traditions in the form of socially transmitted practices but they typically lack cumulative culture. Why is that? This discrepancy between humans and animals is even more puzzling if one realizes that culture seems highly advantageous. Thanks to their accumulated knowledge and techniques our early ancestors were able to leave their (...) cradle in Africa and swarm out across the planet, thereby adjusting themselves to a whole range of new environments. Without culture this would have been impossible. So we may ask once again: if cumulative culture is so useful, why don’t other animals have it? In order to explain this mystery I won’t appeal to the major transitions in human evolution—like walking upright, crafting stone tools and controlling fire, etc.—because that would be question begging. Instead I try to unearth the mechanisms that caused those evolutionary turning points to occur in the first place. It seems that unlike other animals, humans are predisposed to efficiently acquire, store and transmit cultural information in such ways that our cultures can genuinely evolve. (shrink)

In any academic discipline, published articles in respective journals represent "production units" of scientific knowledge, and bibliometric distributions reflect the patterns in such outputs across authors or "producers." Closely following the analysis approach used for similar studies in the economics and finance literature, we present the first study to examine whether there exists an empirical regularity in the bibliometric patterns of research productivity in the business ethics literature. Our results present strong evidence that there indeed exists a distinct empirical regularity. (...) It is the so-called Generalized Lotka's Law of scientific productivity pattern: the number of authors publishing ç papers is about Í /n c of those publishing one paper. We discuss the likely processes that underlie the productivity pattern postulated by the Generalized Lotka's Law. We find that the value of the exponent is equal to about 2.6 for the comprehensive bibliometric data across the two leading business ethics journals. The observed research productivity pattern in the business ethics area, a relatively young discipline, is interestingly very consistent with those found in much older, related business disciplines like economics, accounting, and finance. We discuss the general implications of our findings. (shrink)

In most cultures, extramarital sex is highly restricted for women. In most of those cultures, men transfer wealth to their own sons. In some cultures extramarital sex is not highly restricted for women, and in most of those cultures, men transfer wealth to their sisters' sons. Inheritance to sisters' sons ensures a man's biological relatedness to his heirs, and matrilineal inheritance has been posited as a male accommodation to cuckoldry—a paternity strategy—at least since the 15th century. However, longitudinal analysis of (...) the cumulative effect of female extramarital sex indicates that matrilineal inheritance is most advantageous for women and would be more accurately considered a grandmaternity strategy. That is, if the probability that men's putative children are their biological children is less than 1, the probabilistic degree of relatedness between a female and her matrilineal heirs is higher than her corresponding relatedness to her patrilineal heirs. The same holds true for men only if ρ is very low. The upshot is that for moderate levels of female extramarital sex, matrilineal inheritance, relative to patrilineal inheritance, is highly advantageous for women and disadvantageous for men. Consideration of female variance in reproductive success beyond the first generation, and of a man's network of obligation to the inclusive fitness of his relatives, suggests that although the establishment of matrilineal inheritance may require extremely high levels of female extramarital sex, once established, it is likely to be maintained at levels of ρ that reasonably characterize many societies in the ethnographic record. New analysis of previously published data shows a strong association between matrilineal inheritance and moderate to low probability of paternity, and an even stronger relationship between patrilineal inheritance and high probability of paternity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to focus on the specificities of the creative processes in taste industries: industries that have connected the artistic and industrial dimensions to supply goods and services—demand for which derives not from the logic of needs and necessity, but from the logic of pleasures, tastes, ethic preferences and hedonism. These taste industries belong to the creative industries but, unlike scientific and technological production, they work not on the basis of cumulative knowledge but through the (...) creation of ideas, drawings, recipes, goods and services which pass through time, and which constitute heritages. Thus, creativity works on the basis of heritages: that is, past and accumulated creativity. The paper considers how the different types of heritage contribute to creative process. It concludes on the double-edged effect of heritages, which while bestowing competitive advantages and favouring the development of creativity, do orient development along a given path, promoting a certain kind of creativity that may lead to lock-in effects, and build obstacles in the way of development. (shrink)

In the dissertation we study the complexity of generalized quantifiers in natural language. Our perspective is interdisciplinary: we combine philosophical insights with theoretical computer science, experimental cognitive science and linguistic theories. -/- In Chapter 1 we argue for identifying a part of meaning, the so-called referential meaning (model-checking), with algorithms. Moreover, we discuss the influence of computational complexity theory on cognitive tasks. We give some arguments to treat as cognitively tractable only those problems which can be computed in polynomial time. (...) Additionally, we suggest that plausible semantic theories of the everyday fragment of natural language can be formulated in the existential fragment of second-order logic. -/- In Chapter 2 we give an overview of the basic notions of generalized quantifier theory, computability theory, and descriptive complexity theory. -/- In Chapter 3 we prove that PTIME quantifiers are closed under iteration, cumulation and resumption. Next, we discuss the NP-completeness of branching quantifiers. Finally, we show that some Ramsey quantifiers define NP-complete classes of finite models while others stay in PTIME. We also give a sufficient condition for a Ramsey quantifier to be computable in polynomial time. -/- In Chapter 4 we investigate the computational complexity of polyadic lifts expressing various readings of reciprocal sentences with quantified antecedents. We show a dichotomy between these readings: the strong reciprocal reading can create NP-complete constructions, while the weak and the intermediate reciprocal readings do not. Additionally, we argue that this difference should be acknowledged in the Strong Meaning hypothesis. -/- In Chapter 5 we study the definability and complexity of the type-shifting approach to collective quantification in natural language. We show that under reasonable complexity assumptions it is not general enough to cover the semantics of all collective quantifiers in natural language. The type-shifting approach cannot lead outside second-order logic and arguably some collective quantifiers are not expressible in second-order logic. As a result, we argue that algebraic (many-sorted) formalisms dealing with collectivity are more plausible than the type-shifting approach. Moreover, we suggest that some collective quantifiers might not be realized in everyday language due to their high computational complexity. Additionally, we introduce the so-called second-order generalized quantifiers to the study of collective semantics. -/- In Chapter 6 we study the statement known as Hintikka's thesis: that the semantics of sentences like ``Most boys and most girls hate each other'' is not expressible by linear formulae and one needs to use branching quantification. We discuss possible readings of such sentences and come to the conclusion that they are expressible by linear formulae, as opposed to what Hintikka states. Next, we propose empirical evidence confirming our theoretical predictions that these sentences are sometimes interpreted by people as having the conjunctional reading. -/- In Chapter 7 we discuss a computational semantics for monadic quantifiers in natural language. We recall that it can be expressed in terms of finite-state and push-down automata. Then we present and criticize the neurological research building on this model. The discussion leads to a new experimental set-up which provides empirical evidence confirming the complexity predictions of the computational model. We show that the differences in reaction time needed for comprehension of sentences with monadic quantifiers are consistent with the complexity differences predicted by the model. -/- In Chapter 8 we discuss some general open questions and possible directions for future research, e.g., using different measures of complexity, involving game-theory and so on. -/- In general, our research explores, from different perspectives, the advantages of identifying meaning with algorithms and applying computational complexity analysis to semantic issues. It shows the fruitfulness of such an abstract computational approach for linguistics and cognitive science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reason m Seneca JOSIAH B. GOULD MAx POHLENZ,in his last great work on the Stoa,1 maintained that Logos is the central concept of Stoic philosophy (I, 34). Neither Mette2nor Edelstein,3each of whom reviewed Pohlenz's study, notes the author's frequent reminders that Stoicism is "eine Logosphilosophie" and his contention, set forth early in Volume I, that the concept of Logos has in Stoic philosophy "pushed wholly to one side the (...) Aristotelian J,o~sin doctrine as well as in terminology." One who is familiar with the fragments of the writings of the early Stoics hardly needs to be told that for Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, Logos is a fundamental notion. Help is needed when one tries to make clear to himself the content of this notion. An example is the moral philosophy of Chrysippus as we have reconstructed it from the fragments of his writings. For Chrysippus the basic expression in Stoic moral philosophy, "life in accordance with nature" (zb ~arh ~b~Lu~'~u) becomes "life in accordance with reason" (r~ KaTh~,bTou~'~). I have, however, found it difficult to render an account of what, for Chrysippus, it would be to live in accordance with Logos or reason. On one hand, it would appear that to live in conformity with reason is to be guided by cumulative experience or generalizations from past experience about what would or would not be advantageous. It seems, that is, to be assent to reason when it passes from experience of this benefit following on that action to judgments such as "that kind of action issues in this kind of advantage." On the other hand, reason or Logos, in a fully developed state, we are informed, is the knowledge of genuinely good and genuinely bad things; and such knowledge is obviously not the kind of thing to be induced from particular experiences. In the first place a judgment that a particular consequence of a particular deed is of value presupposes the knowledge which Chrysippus describes as the "knowledge of things really good or really advantageous." For example, given that one has a relatively clear notion as to what health is, he with some experience, can judge whether or not this food and that activity contribute to health. But, on Chrysippus' view, it would seem that reason or Logos in order to come to conclusions about the value of health-inducing foods or activities has to possess a relatively clear notion about the value of something else in whose acquisition health is instrumental. The assertion that actions leading to health or wealth have value could not follow from some special insight by Logos into the intrinsic worth of health or wealth, for it is explicitly denied that they are unqualifiedly good. The question then arises whether Logos has an insight into 1Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa. Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung. 2nd. ed. (GSttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupreeht, 1959). H. J. Mette, Max Pohlenz: Die Stoa. Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung. 2 Bde. (G6ttingen : Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht). Review, GnomonXXIII (1951),27-39. Ludwig Edelstein, Max Pohlenz. Die Stoa. Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung. (GSttingen : Yandenhoeck und Ruprecht, I [1948},490 pp.; II [1949],230 pp.). Review,American Journal of Philology, LXXII (Oct., 1951),426--432. [13] 14 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY something else which is genuinely good by reference to which judgments can be made about the value of health and wealth under certain conditions. The suspicion that this is so is heightened by the exalted status assigned to the wise man. The ideal of the wise man does not fit snuglywith Chrysippus' conception of Logos as a generalizing instrument for determining what things and activities are useful. The wise man is too contemptuous of or, at least, too indifferent toward the "goods" of the world. It is unthinkable that he should attend to them with a view to determining which of them is useful. He knows already; his wisdom comes from other parts. He is sure of what is really good because an unobfuscated reason or Logns has declared this to him in an immediate way; he has not had to wait for the verdict of reason's generalizations on experience. It is difficult to ignore either of... (shrink)

Next SectionThis paper proposes an extension of Dependency Tree Semantics (DTS), an underspecified formalism originally proposed in Robaldo (2007). The crucial advantage of DTS as compared to other contemporary proposals is its ability to represent Independent Set (IS) readings (a.k.a. scopeless readings), e.g. cumulative and collective readings. DTS achieves the expressivity needed to represent IS readings because it underspecifies Skolem-like functional dependencies. This paper extends DTS by introducing additional meta-constraints in First-Order Logic dedicated to disambiguating underspecified structures. However, (...) it is worth noting that the meta-constraints are independent from DTS, and could be easily re-implemented in any underspecified theory. The meta-constraints achieve flexible disambiguation, in the sense that they allow ambiguous structures to be specified independently of the linguistic (rather than logical) knowledge used. Secondly, DTS, equipped with the meta-constraints, becomes an expressively complete formalism in the sense of Ebert (2005). Expressive completeness is a desirable property for an underspecified formalism, because it allows a representation for each possible subset of available readings. (shrink)

It is often claimed that reducing population size would be advantageous for climate change mitigation, on the grounds that lower population would naturally correspond to lower emissions. This apparently obvious claim is in fact seriously misleading. Reducing population size would indeed, other suitable things being equal, reduce the emissions rate. But it is well recognised that the primary determinant of the eventual amount of climate change is not the emissions rate, but rather cumulative emissions. It is far less clear (...) whether reducing population size would reduce cumulative emissions, or would in any other way prove an advantage for reasons related to climate change. This paper identifies and briefly discusses the issues relevant to assessing that less clear question. (shrink)

In real life, multiple network public opinion emergencies may break out in a certain place at the same time. So, it is necessary to invite emergency decision experts in multiple fields for timely evaluating the comprehensive crisis of the online public opinion, and then limited emergency resources can be utilized to give priority to respond to the one with the highest crisis. Due to the complexity of network public opinion emergencies and the limited cognition of experts, most of the decision (...) problems for evaluating the network public opinion emergencies are highly uncertain. Also, prior to the selection of the highest crisis, it is preferable that experts reach a high degree of consensus among their assessments or opinions. To address such problems, this paper presents a novel adaptive consensus reaching model for multiattribute group decision making with probabilistic linguistic decision matrices. First, to quantify the difference between any two probabilistic linguistic term sets accurately and efficiently, we define a novel distance measure between PLTSs based on the Wasserstein metric. Then, by integrating the defined PLTSs-based Wasserstein distance measure into the classical CCSD method, we construct an optimization model for objectively determining attribute weights. Subsequently, we develop the individual cumulative consensus contribution measure and the group consensus measure, respectively, following which is to present an integrated consensus improving strategy that considers both weight-updating and assessment-adjusting. Finally, the feasibility and the applicability of the proposed approach are illustrated via a real evaluation of network public opinion emergencies. Through comparing with existing probabilistic linguistic MAGDM approaches, the proposed approach offers the advantages in terms of the accurate measurement of information difference and the integrated improvement of consensus efficiency. (shrink)

Objections to child labour range from its creating unfair trade advantage to its infringing children’s human rights. Analysis of the responsibilities of various parties implicated in the use of child labour can lead to identifying stages in a cumulative ethical approach which is not self‐defeating. The author is an economist who has recently completed his MBA at London Business School.

This paper presents the hypothesis that linguistic capacity evolved through the action of natural selection as an instrument which increased the efficiency of the cultural transmission system of early hominids. We suggest that during the early stages of hominization, hominid social learning, based on indirect social learning mechanisms and true imitation, came to constitute cumulative cultural transmission based on true imitation and the approval or disapproval of the learned behaviour of offspring. A key factor for this transformation was the (...) development of a conceptual capacity for categorizing learned behaviour in value terms - positive or negative, good or bad. We believe that some hominids developed this capacity for categorizing behaviour, and such an ability allowed them to approve or disapprove of their offsprings- learned behaviour. With such an ability, hominids were favoured, as they could transmit to their offspring all their behavioural experience about what can and cannot be done. This capacity triggered a cultural transmission system similar to the human one, though pre-linguistic. We suggest that the adaptive advantage provided by this new system of social learning generated a selection pressure in favour of the development of a linguistic capacity allowing children to better understand the new kind of evaluative information received from parents. (shrink)

"Ontology and the Foundations of Mathematics" consists of three papers concerned with ontological issues in the foundations of mathematics. Chapter 1, "Numbers and Persons," confronts the problem of the inscrutability of numerical reference and argues that, even if inscrutable, the reference of the numerals, as we ordinarily use them, is determined much more precisely than up to isomorphism. We argue that the truth conditions of a variety of numerical modal and counterfactual sentences place serious constraints on the sorts of items (...) to which numerals, as we ordinarily use them, can be taken to refer: Numerals cannot be taken to refer to objects that exist contingently such as people, mountains, or rivers, but rather must be taken to refer to objects that exist necessarily such as abstracta. ;Chapter 2, "Modern Set Theory and Replacement," takes up a challenge to explain the reasons one should accept the axiom of replacement of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, when its applications within ordinary mathematics and the rest of science are often described as rare and recondite. We argue that this is not a question one should be interested in; replacement is required to ensure that the element-set relation is well-founded as well as to ensure that the cumulation of sets described by set theory reaches and proceeds beyond the level o of the cumulative hierarchy. A more interesting question is whether we should accept instances of replacement on uncountable sets, for these are indeed rarely used outside higher set theory. We argue that the best case for replacement comes not from direct, intuitive considerations, but from the role replacement plays in the formulation of transfinite recursion and the theory of ordinals, and from the fact that it permits us to express and assert the content of the modern cumulative view of the set-theoretic universe as arrayed in a cumulative hierarchy of levels. ;Chapter 3, "A No-Class Theory of Classes," makes use of the apparatus of plural quantification to construe talk of classes as plural talk about sets, and thus provide an interpretation of both one- and two-sorted versions of first-order Morse-Kelley set theory, an impredicative theory of classes. We argue that the plural interpretation of impredicative theories of classes has a number of advantages over more traditional interpretations of the language of classes as involving singular reference to gigantic set-like entities, only too encompassing to be sets, the most important of these being perhaps that it makes the machinery of classes available for the formalization of much recent and very interesting work in set theory without threatening the universality of the theory as the most comprehensive theory of collections, when these are understood as objects. (shrink)

Information-theoretic approaches to formal logic analyse the "common intuitive" concept of propositional implication (or argumental validity) in terms of information content of propositions and sets of propositions: one given proposition implies a second if the former contains all of the information contained by the latter; an argument is valid if the conclusion contains no information beyond that of the premise-set. This paper locates information-theoretic approaches historically, philosophically and pragmatically. Advantages and disadvantages are identified by examining such approaches in themselves and (...) by contrasting them with standard transformation-theoretic approaches. Transformation-theoretic approaches analyse validity (and thus implication) in terms of transformations that map one argument onto another: a given argument is valid if no transformation carries it onto an argument with all true premises and false conclusion. Model-theoretic, set-theoretic, and substitution-theoretic approaches, which dominate current literature, can be construed as transformation-theoretic, as can the so-called possible-worlds approaches. Ontic and epistemic presuppositions of both types of approaches are considered. Attention is given to the question of whether our historically cumulative experience applying logic is better explained from a purely information-theoretic perspective or from a purely transformation-theoretic perspective or whether apparent conflicts between the two types of approaches need to be reconciled in order to forge a new type of approach that recognizes their basic complementarity. (shrink)

This paper selected Vanke as the case to study the governance problems of Vanke and the protection of the interests of small and medium shareholders under the situation of equity disputes. At the same time, the study further explored the advantages and disadvantages of the dispersed ownership structure, the long-term impact on the company’s development and the choice of the involved corporate governance methods under the current Chinese capital market conditions. This paper adopted the event research method and selected the (...) period from June 2015 to June 2017 as the observation period to analyze the market performance impact of Vanke in the equity disputes. At the same time, this paper also measured Vanke’s individual stock rate of return and market rate of return, and calculated Vanke’s normal rate of return [E], abnormal rate of return, and cumulative abnormal rate of return during different event windows. Vanke’s shareholding was too dispersed and the stock price had been sluggish for a long time, which had greatly reduced the acquisition difficulty and cost of Baoneng, thus triggering the “barbarian invasion” of Baoneng. In the struggle for control, whether it was Vanke’s anti-takeover measures or China Resources, Baoneng, and Evergrande’s competition for equity, their actions had harmed the interests of small and medium shareholders. The market supervision department was too lenient to supervise and punish the interests of small and medium shareholders, and opportunism made behaviors that infringe on the interests of others more reckless. However, small and medium shareholders cannot actively participate in the company’s management decision-making to safeguard their legitimate rights and interests, which intensifies the violations of all parties in the equity disputes, thus forming a vicious circle. Therefore, the protection of the interests of small and medium shareholders required the joint efforts and consciousness of regulators, small and medium shareholders, and acquirers. (shrink)

The network is moving towards a global informational equilibrium that is irrevocable – if inter‐individual communication persists as the only driving force behind the network's evolution. On the basis of an example, this chapter compares the respective changes in the values of the main characteristic variables at the level of the network as a whole, and that of each cluster considered separately. Any local informational equilibrium achieved by a cluster is therefore fundamentally unstable, as it is constantly threatened by such (...) a phenomenon. It follows that the cumulative formation of local clusters of actors corresponding to a progressive regionalization of the effective space of the network is then erased as at least one category shared by all actors allows each of them to escape from the cluster in which they would otherwise remain enclosed. Maintaining separations between regions dividing the network space before the homogenization process ends means that it does not only have advantages. (shrink)

The gray prediction model, based on the GM method, is an important branch of gray theory with the most active research and the most fruitful results, and it is the most widely used because of its small sample size, simple modeling process, and easy to use. Such advantages have been successfully applied in many fields such as transportation, agriculture, energy, medicine, and environment and have been gradually developed into a mainstream predictive modeling method. This study combines the Three-parameter Whitenization Grey (...) Model ), which fits the inhomogeneous exponential law sequence, and the Particle Swarm Algorithm to optimize the order and background value coefficients under the condition of the minimum sum of squares of simulation errors, and hence, to solve the problem that the cumulative order is fixed to “1” and the background value coefficient value is fixed to “0.5.” As a result, a parameter-optimized gray system model with flexibility, adaptability, and dynamic adjustment is designed to simulate and predict China’s higher education gross enrollment rate. The application shows that the model has better overall simulation and prediction performance than others. On the one hand, the parametric optimization model significantly improves its own performance, and on the other hand, its intelligent and adjustable adaptivity improves the accuracy and further extends its application. (shrink)

The network is moving towards a global informational equilibrium that is irrevocable – if inter‐individual communication persists as the only driving force behind the network's evolution. On the basis of an example, this chapter compares the respective changes in the values of the main characteristic variables at the level of the network as a whole, and that of each cluster considered separately. Any local informational equilibrium achieved by a cluster is therefore fundamentally unstable, as it is constantly threatened by such (...) a phenomenon. It follows that the cumulative formation of local clusters of actors corresponding to a progressive regionalization of the effective space of the network is then erased as at least one category shared by all actors allows each of them to escape from the cluster in which they would otherwise remain enclosed. Maintaining separations between regions dividing the network space before the homogenization process ends means that it does not only have advantages. (shrink)

This short paper focuses on Kripke's paper on truth from 1975. It is 1. a historiographical commentary, 2. an argument about the advantages of the theory, and 3. an interpretation of its philosophical meaning. 1. Kripke presents a diagnosis of semantic paradoxes based on their similarity with ungrounded sentences. Based on Kleene's three-value logic, he then shows that it is possible to find fixed points in which the assertion of an unsubstantiated (non-paradoxical) sentence can sustain a cumulative distance with (...) its anti-extension. 2. We argue that Kripke's paper has the advantage of explaining risk in truth assessments. It provides a framework to solve problems of languages that have their truth predicate. Although compatible with Tarski's, this solution more faithfully paints the speculative and revisionist representation of assignments of truth. It exhibits the conditions of stable risk assertions (whose fixed point accumulates semantic value in a single direction) and distinguishes it from irrational assertions, which, as dogmas, base their risk on arbitrary points and provide an unstable basis for truth assertions. (shrink)

Information-theoretic approaches to formal logic analyze the "common intuitive" concepts of implication, consequence, and validity in terms of information content of propositions and sets of propositions: one given proposition implies a second if the former contains all of the information contained by the latter; one given proposition is a consequence of a second if the latter contains all of the information contained by the former; an argument is valid if the conclusion contains no information beyond that of the premise-set. This (...) paper locates information-theoretic approaches historically, philosophically, and pragmatically. Advantages and disadvantages are identified by examining such approaches in themselves and by contrasting them with standard transformation-theoretic approaches. Transformation-theoretic approaches analyze validity (and thus implication) in terms of transformations that map one argument onto another: a given argument is valid if no transformation carries it onto an argument with all true premises and false conclusion. Model-theoretic, set-theoretic, and substitution-theoretic approaches, which dominate current literature, can be construed as transformation-theoretic, as can the so-called possible-worlds approaches. Ontic and epistemic presuppositions of both types of approaches are considered. Attention is given to the question of whether our historically cumulative experience applying logic is better explained from a purely information-theoretic perspective or from a purely transformation-theoretic perspective or whether apparent conflicts between the two types of approaches need to be reconciled in order to forge a new type of approach that recognizes their basic complementarity. (shrink)

H. sapiens stands out from other primates along many social dimensions; however, none seems as prominent and important as the capacity of our species for cumulative cultural evolution or, as Tomasello calls it, “the ratchet.” Although other primate species show evidence of cultural variation, there is little evidence of cumulative cultural evolution, i.e., the gradual accumulation, modification, and refinement of traditions and skills over historical time, in any primate species other than our own. This is clearly an extremely (...) significant component of the human phenotype, responsible for our unparalleled cultural, social, political, and technological achievements. However, it remains extremely controversial what sorts of cognitive capacities are necessary to trigger cumulative cultural evolution and whether any currently proposed candidates are really distinctive of humans. Furthermore, the ratchet raises a bootstrapping problem: before complex skills and technologies are present and necessary for biological success, there appear to be few advantages to high-fidelity social learning; however, without such high-fidelity social learning, it is unclear how traditions capable of generating complex skills and technologies could arise in the first place. In this chapter, we survey relevant empirical research in comparative and developmental psychology, integrating it with a novel theoretical analysis of the bootstrapping problem to defend a hypothesis about the minimal cognitive preconditions on the ratchet. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change (...) in understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

Motivated by the disproportionately high incidence of fraudulent financial reporting in the IT sector where technological capability is a major source of competitive advantage, this study investigates the possible relationship between technological capability and fraud probability in the IT sector. Technological capability is measured by a firm’s technical efficiency relative to peers in transforming cumulative R&D resources into innovative output, which is a source of competitive advantage, according to the resource-based view of the firm. Technical efficiency is (...) estimated via data envelopment analysis. A sample of fraud firms taken from Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases is matched with control samples of non-fraud firms. Consistent with the RBV, technological capability is found to have a negative and economically significant effect on fraud probability. Moreover, fraud probability is insignificantly associated with the scale efficiency of innovative activities, as investment in R&D resources per se is not a source of sustainable competitive advantage. (shrink)

Multiple pressures are today propelling the private sector towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) without detracting from the firm’s competitive advantage,profitability, and hence, its own sustainability. Achieving credible CSR is often a longterm process, taking years to fully develop, institute, and pay off financially, yet current research is limited by its ambiguity and methodological inconsistencies, and by the short time horizon of many studies. This paper responds to this gap by developing and testing a multifaceted, long-term model of firm sustainability (...) practices. The dataset we develop spans ten years, which to our knowledge is the first time such a cumulative long-term view has become possible in the study of CSR actions. Our findings reveal a number of significant relationships which together suggest the existence of a long-term “halo” effect in CSR-committed companies, whereby responsible behavior in the CSR arena is positively associated with other positive aspects of firm operations, including financial performance and a lack of evidence of “greenwashing.”. (shrink)

Operating universities under pandemic conditions is a complex undertaking. The Artificial University responds to this need. TAU is a configurable, open-source computer simulation of a university using a contact network based on publicly available information about university classes, residences, and activities. This study evaluates health outcomes for an array of interventions and testing protocols in an artificial university of 6,500 students, faculty, and staff. Findings suggest that physical distancing and centralized contact tracing are most effective at reducing infections, but there (...) is a tipping point for compliance below which physical distancing is less effective. If student compliance is anything short of high, it helps to have separate buildings for quarantining infected students, thereby gracefully increasing compliance. Hybrid in-person and online classes and closing fitness centers do not significantly change cumulative infections but do significantly decrease the number of the infected at any given time, indicating strategies for “flattening the curve” to protect limited resources. Supplementing physical distancing with centralized contact tracing decreases infected individuals by an additional 14%; boosting frequency of testing for student-facing staff yields a further 7% decrease. A trade-off exists between increasing the sheer number of infection tests and targeting testing for key nodes in the contact network. There are significant advantages to getting and acting on test results quickly. The costs and benefits to universities of these findings are discussed. Artificial universities can be an important decision support tool for universities, generating useful policy insights into the challenges of operating universities under pandemic conditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 741 pointedly, what he is asking for is " the ' planned dissolution ' of the Latin Church into a considerable number of distinct, autonomous ' patriarchates ' " (p. 132). These suggestions, although not original, are intriguing. They deserve, however, more than three pages. What is needed is a detailed presentation of these changes, indicating their historical context, their advantages and disadvantages, and their practical implementation. (...) Despite the criticisms given above, there is much good material to be found in this crisply written book. I agree in general with Hill's judgment that Church authority should embody a collegial rather than a monarchical ecclesiology. He shows that the MC ecclesiology has a solid foundation in scripture and tradition and its cornerstone is the theology of the local Church. Furthermore, he is correct in insisting that the doctrines of collegiality and the priesthood of the faithful are urgent questions in contemporary ecclesiology and that they have broad ecumenical ramifications. He speaks convincingly of greater lay participation, local autonomy, consultation, and accountability. At the same time, his partisanship leads him to caricature the MP view. He will not persuade many MP supporters by criticizing their "highhanded authoritarianism and paternalism " (p. 53) and " ecclesiastical dishonesty " (p. 127) or by claiming that the Roman Curia " is neuro· tically obsessed with the matter of papal authority" (p. 114). Hill makes many valid and important points, but, on occasion, he weakens them by exaggeration. At times his partisan style overcomes his theo· logical substance. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. pATRICK GRANFIELD Many Paths: A Catholic Approach to Religious Pluralism. By EUGENE HILLMAN. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1989. Pp. 95. A Christian theology of religions raises fundamental epistemological and methodological questions. Hillman comes to the debate from what Lindbeck has called an " experiential expressivist " background, that is, there is a tacit assumption that reality is experienced and then expressed, that reality precedes language rather than being disclosed and shaped through language. When such an outlook is applied to the theology of religions, the outcome is often the " discovery " of a common experience underlying all religions, despite their different expressions. The latter can be seen to vary according to climate, history, temperament, and so on. Such expressions are loose symbols for a 742 BOOK REVIEWS greater reality, which takes on an increasingly vague shape with the demise of the signifier. History can offer very little resistance to such a model, and the conflicts, differences, intractabilities, and real problems of religious plurality are slowly silenced, almost numbed into a drowsy calm. That history refuses to play this role, while theologies of religion are often demanding it, is indicative of the difficulties with such a model. Hillman's first book on this topic (The Wider Ecumenism, 1968) showed him to be a follower of Rahner. He stressed the universality of grace and its mediation through the historical and particular; he thereby argued for a wider ecumenism with regard to the world religions, in a model analogous to intra-Christian ecumenism. In this book, Hillman advances the same position, but now infused with a strong dose of Wilfred Cantwell Smith. He does not confront the theological criticisms made against either of his mentors. The book is divided into four lucid chapters. The first considers the meaning and role of religion, and much of Hillman's discussion is helpful. However, as the chapter proceeds, one finds that the definition of religion is not controlled by the particularities and intractable dif. ferences presented by the subject matter but rather by an experiential essentialism. Hillman uses Smith's distinction between "faith" and " belief " to two ends, one descriptive, the other evaluative. However he, like Cantwell Smith, conflates description with evaluation. Furthermore, he is untroubled that the subject matter under inspection does not easily yield to such distinctions. Descriptively, " belief " or the " cumulative tradition " involves the " myriad historico-cultural par· ticularizations " that go to make up a religion such as liturgies, doc· trines, ethical systems, practices, histories, and so on {20). Faith is basically an experience of " the tr,anscendent, which is presumably the same for every person," and can be distinguished from the "cumulative tradition, which is different for each people, nation or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 719 An Apology for Apologetics: A Study in the Logic of lnterreligious Dialogue. By PAUL J. GRIFFITHS. New York: Orbis, 1991. ISBN: 0 88344 761 4. pp. 113. Jesus Christ at the Encounter of World Religions. By J. DUPUIS. New York: Orbis, 1991 (ET: Robert R. Barr, from French, 1989). ISBN: 0 88344 723 1. pp. 301. Griffiths presents a rigorous argument for the possibility of con· (...) tradictory claims between different religious communities. His inspira· tion, as he acknowledges, is William Christian Snr. His basic argu· ment is: " If representative intellectuals belonging to some specific religious community come to judge at a particular time that some or all of their own doctrine-expressing sentences are incompatible with some alien religious claim(s), then they should feel obliged to engage in both positive and negative apologetics vis-a-vis these alien religious claim(s) and their promulgators" (3). He takes negative apologetics to be a critique of arguments made against one's own religious claims, showing that such arguments fail or are inconsistent or incoherent. Positive apologetics shows how a particular religious community's doctrines are cognitively superior, in some respect(s), to another religious community 's doctrines. It is essential for this enterprise that only methods of argumentation and criteria of knowledge acceptable to the adversary are employed. This requires the acceptance of natural theology. Griffiths is well aware of the lion's den he is entering, as his proposals run counter to much scholarship in the area of interreligious dialogue, so he spends three chapters apologetically tackling the lions. The objectors (who mainly remain in notes) include Derrida, Barthes, Winch, Lindbeck, Hick, Huxley, Nasr, Plantinga and others, although Mac· Intyre is curiously missing. This technique has the advantage of isolating and presenting arguments, without falling into problems of cor· rect exegesis of opponents. And this is also its weakness, as objectors will sometimes feel caricatured or misunderstood-as is surely the case with Plantinga and in one instance, Hick. First, he tackles objections that sentences from one tradition are either incomprehensible or incommensurable with those of another, convincingly showing that the strong versions of both claims are self· defeating and unsustainable. Weaker versions still allow for his proj· ect-or so he thinks. This is where Maclntyre's work should have been considered. Then he tackles various theories of religious language (following Lindbeck's typology). He argues against non-cognitive accounts that reduce beliefs to the credibility of causes for holding beliefs, a position incapable of asserting its truth over other views because of its 720 BOOK REVIEWS own presuppositions. He follows Lindbeck in criticizing experiental expressivism, and then turns upon Lindbeck's own form of rule theory (which is ambivalent regarding cognitive claims), arguing convincingly that to suggest that only sentences uttered confessionally and with performative function can possess ontological truth is confused (42). In a brief review it is not possible to rehearse Griffiths's careful argumentation. Griffiths then sets about tackling two types of universalists: Hick and Huxley. Of Hick, he argues that some criteria are required to discern true from false religions (e.g. Jim Jones) and in so doing such a position needs to support and develop such criteria, thereby effectively introducing apologetics. He neglects to deal with Hick's pragmatic criteria of beneficial ' fruits ' evident in adherents, but the logic of his argument can be applied to Hick's proposals. Using Katz and Zaehner, he argues against the esoteric universalism of the philosophia perennis. (The arguments of Robert Forman's recent book, The Problems of Pure Consciousness, are strangely neglected, despite Griffiths's being a contributor to that collection.) Finally, he tackles objections against positive apologetics-first, on the grounds that it has a negative effect on interreligious relations. Logically, this need not be the case, although Griffiths is well aware that the political context of apologetics can obscure its proper goal: deeper critical understanding, learning and problem solving. Then, in sustained dialogue with Plantinga, he argues against the objection that success is impossible. It is impossible only if " knockdown drag-out" (64) argumentative victory is expected. Griffiths suggests the cumulative -case argument and gives instances of such successful apologetics (medieval... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid by Louis E. LoebKevin MeekerLouis E. Loeb. Reflection and the Stability of Belief: Essays on Descartes, Hume, and Reid. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 369. ISBN: 978-0-19-536876-5, Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-536875-8, Paper, $45.00.This book is (almost entirely) a collection of previously published essays by Louis Loeb. The first three essays focus primarily (...) on advancing the general interpretive claim that Descartes’s main epistemological goal is achieving unshakable beliefs. While essays 5–10 address many topics in Humean interpretation, they all contribute in various ways to supporting Loeb’s claim that Hume’s primary epistemological goal is achieving stable beliefs. Essay 12 compares the naturalisms of Hume and Reid. All of the collected essays are excellent.Such excellence is not surprising, for Loeb is an influential interpreter of early modern philosophy, justly renowned for the ingenuity of his readings. Spanning the last three decades, these essays display many fine qualities that have helped make Loeb such a prominent historian. Here I will briefly mention three of these qualities. First, Loeb has remarkable command of the primary historical texts and the secondary literature. This mastery is perhaps best seen in his “What is Worth Preserving in the Kemp Smith Interpretation of Hume?” (essay 9). In addition to providing a detailed exposition of a wide range of texts from Hume and Norman Kemp Smith, Loeb also makes adroit comments about the literature discussing the secondary literature when he addresses the “Canonical Understanding” of Kemp Smith (246–47). Second, Loeb effortlessly integrates historical and contemporary concerns. His “Hume’s Agent-Centered Sentimentalism” (essay 8), for instance, has [End Page 257] an interesting discussion of how Hume’s moral theory might aid contemporary utilitarians (238–44). Moreover, essays 5 (“Integrating Hume’s Accounts of Belief and Justification”) and 10 (“Psychology, Epistemology, and Skepticism in Hume’s Argument about Induction”) fruitfully discuss Hume’s epistemology in light of issues important to the contemporary distinction between internalism and externalism. Third, Loeb’s intuitive knack for isolating important connections amongst various texts and figures allows him to tell a concise story about the evolution of certain philosophical ideas that panoramically covers large portions of the history of philosophy. His “Locke and British Empiricism” (essay 11), which connects epistemological themes in Locke with Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Malebranche, and Reid, among others, is one example. (Because this essay is, as of this writing, still forthcoming, it is the only essay that is not previously published.) Finally, all three of these qualities are prominently on display in “Sextus, Descartes, Hume, and Peirce” (essay 4), which interestingly uses contemporary views about belief (especially as developed by David Velleman) to understand Descartes and Hume “against the backdrop of Sextus and Peirce” (107). To my mind this essay is the best in the book.There are at least two main advantages of collecting these excellent essays into a book. First, the collection allows Loeb to systematically emphasize the similarities between different early modern thinkers in a way that typically strengthens the cumulative case he makes for his readings of these philosophers. Second, the volume permits us to catch a rare glimpse of how an interpreter’s views can change over time. Considering the cumulative effect of the arguments as well as the changes in Loeb’s views also provides us with a great opportunity to reflect critically on many important issues in a fruitful way. The rest of this review will focus on such critical reflections.Let us start with Descartes, as Loeb does. In his introduction to the essays, Loeb helpfully contextualizes his discussions of Descartes. He points out that his paper “Was Descartes Sincere in His Appeal to the Light of Nature?” (not included here) maintains that the arguments Descartes presents are so poor that they “suggest” that “Descartes was insincere in offering his proofs of the existence of God and in appealing to Divine veracity to validate clear and distinct perception” (9; cf. 35). Of course others have likewise contended that Descartes was a dissimulator. But in the first four chapters... (shrink)

Due to the confinement imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic situation, companies adopted remote work more than ever. The rapid rise of remote work also affected local life and many employers introduced or extended their telework activities because of the associated advantages. However, despite the evident positive benefits, some employees were pressured to work remotely while ill. This evidence brought new challenges to the presenteeism literature. This article investigates how individual, economic/societal, and organizational/sectorial/supervisory-related variables can moderate the role of a contagious (...) disease, such as the COVID-19, in explaining presenteeism behavior. Moreover, the current research presents a multi-level conceptual model to describe how a new construct of remote-work presenteeism behavior mediates the relationship between different post pandemic health conditions and future cumulative negative consequences. The authors suggested that the widespread pervasive adoption of remote work because of COVID-19 has important implications for the presenteeism literature and opens avenues for further research. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a major challenge to policy makers on how to encourage compliance to social distancing and personal protection rules. This paper compares the effectiveness of two policies that aim to increase the frequency of responsible health behavior using smartphone-tracking applications. The first involves enhanced alert capabilities, which remove social externalities and protect the users from others’ reckless behavior. The second adds a rule enforcement mechanism that reduces the users’ benefit from reckless behavior. Both strategies should be effective (...) if agents are expected-value maximizers, risk averse, and behave in accordance with cumulative prospect theory or in accordance with the Cognitive Hierarchy model. A multi-player trust-game experiment was designed to compare the effectiveness of the two policies. The results reveal a substantial advantage to the enforcement application, even one with occasional misses. The enhanced-alert strategy was completely ineffective. The findings align with the small samples hypothesis, suggesting that decision makers tend to select the options that lead to the best payoff in a small sample of similar past experiences. In the current context, the tendency to rely on a small sample appears to be more consequential than other deviations from rational choice. (shrink)

Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late-appearing technologies. Yet by taking these as paradigm cases, researchers unhelpfully lump together different ways that culture accumulates. This article has two aims: (a) to distinguish four types of cultural accumulation: adaptiveness, complexity, efficiency, and disparity and (b) to highlight the epistemic implications of taking complex hominin technologies as paradigmatic instances of cumulative culture. Addressing these (...) issues both clarifies the cumulative culture concept and demonstrates the importance of further cumulative culture research into non-human animals and ancestral hominins. (shrink)

The systems Kα of transfinite cumulative types up to α are extended to systems K∞α that include a natural infinitary inference rule, the so-called limit rule. For countable α a semantic completeness theorem for K∞α is proved by the method of reduction trees, and it is shown that every model of K∞α is equivalent to a cumulative hierarchy of sets. This is used to show that several axiomatic first-order set theories can be interpreted in K∞α, for suitable α.

Standard Type Theory, STT, tells us that b^n(a^m) is well-formed iff n=m+1. However, Linnebo and Rayo have advocated the use of Cumulative Type Theory, CTT, has more relaxed type-restrictions: according to CTT, b^β(a^α) is well-formed iff β > α. In this paper, we set ourselves against CTT. We begin our case by arguing against Linnebo and Rayo’s claim that CTT sheds new philosophical light on set theory. We then argue that, while CTT ’s type-restrictions are unjustifiable, the type-restrictions imposed (...) by STT are justified by a Fregean semantics. What is more, this Fregean semantics provides us with a principled way to resist Linnebo and Rayo’s Semantic Argument for CTT. We end by examining an alternative approach to cumulative types due to Florio and Jones; we argue that their theory is best seen as a misleadingly formulated version of STT. (shrink)

In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evolution of full human language, the transition from so-called “protolanguage” to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also defends (...) and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon—cumulative cultural evolution—and while we rarely have direct information about communication, we have more direct information about the cumulative cultural evolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary history during which we became lingual. (shrink)

I present a cumulative case for the thesis that we only know propositions that are certain for us. I argue that this thesis can easily explain the truth of eight plausible claims about knowledge: -/- (1) There is a qualitative difference between knowledge and non-knowledge. (2) Knowledge is valuable in a way that non-knowledge is not. (3) Subjects in Gettier cases do not have knowledge. (4) If S knows that P, P is part of S’s evidence. (5) If S (...) knows that P, ~P is epistemically impossible for S. (6) If S knows that P, S can rationally act as if P. (7) If S knows that P, S can rationally stop inquiring whether P. (8) If S knows each of {P1, P2, … Pn}, and competently deduces Q from these propositions, S knows that Q. -/- I then argue that the skeptical costs of this thesis are outweighed by its explanatory power. (shrink)

For nonmonotonic logics, Cumulativity is an important logical rule. We show here that Cumulativity fans out into an infinity of different conditions, if the domain is not closed under finite unions.

Family income is associated with gray matter morphometry in children, but little is known about the relationship between family income and white matter structure. In this paper, using Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS), a whole brain, voxel-wise approach, we examined the relationship between family income (assessed by income-to-needs ratio) and white matter organization in middle childhood (N = 27, M = 8.66 years). Results from a nonparametric, voxel-wise, multiple regression (threshold-free cluster enhancement, p < 0.05, FWE corrected) indicated that lower family (...) income was associated with lower white matter organization (assessed by fractional anisotropy) for several clusters in white matter tracts involved in cognitive and emotional functions including fronto-limbic circuitry (uncinate fasciculus and cingulum bundle), association fibers (inferior longitudinal fasciculus, superior longitudinal fasciculus), and corticospinal tracts. Further, we examined the possibility that cumulative risk exposure might function as one of the potential pathways by which family income influences neural outcomes. Using multiple regressions, we found lower fractional anisotropy in portions of these tracts, including those found in the left cingulum bundle and left superior longitudinal fasciculus, was significantly related to greater exposure to cumulative risk (β = -0.47, p < 0.05 and β = -0.45, p < 0.05). (shrink)

Capitalizing on a 15-year longitudinal dataset of 9–12 years old children in rural China, this study adopts a life course perspective and analyzes cumulative childhood adversity and its associations with mental health problems from childhood to adulthood. Four domains of childhood life are selected to construct cumulative childhood adversity: socioeconomic hardship, family disruption, physical issue, and academic setback. Overall, cumulative childhood adversity significantly associates with children’s internalizing and externalizing problems as well as adults’ depression and self-esteem. However, (...) cumulative childhood adversity has no significant relationship with internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescence. Furthermore, different domains of childhood adversity matter differently for mental health problems in different life stages. Physical issue and academic setback have the strongest association with internalizing and externalizing problems in childhood, while only socioeconomic hardship has a significant relationship with depression and self-esteem in adulthood. The relationship between cumulative childhood adversity and adult mental health problems is fully mediated by educational attainment. Finally, there is no gender difference in either the occurrence of cumulative childhood adversity or the association between cumulative childhood adversity and mental health problems. (shrink)

What explains the unique features of human culture? Culture is not uniquely human, but human culture is uniquely cumulative. Cumulative culture is a product of our collective intelligence and is supported by cognitive processes and learning strategies that enable people to acquire, transform, and transmit information and technologies within and across generations. Technological and social innovations are currently driving unprecedented changes in cultural complexity and diversity. Innovation is a cognitively and socially complex, multistep process that typically requires ( (...) class='Hi'>cumulative) cultural learning to achieve. I argue that the technological solutions that characterize twenty-first-century innovation can only be explained by understanding both the capacity to learn from and build upon the insights of others and the transmission systems that store the knowledge and technologies of previous generations. Human uniqueness is a product of cumulative cultural learning, transmission, and innovation. (shrink)

Cumulative cultural knowledge [CCK], the knowledge we acquire via social learning and has been refined by previous generations, is of central importance to our species’ flourishing. Considering its importance, we should expect that our best epistemological theories can account for how this happens. Perhaps surprisingly, CCK and how we acquire it via cultural learning has only received little attention from social epistemologists. Here, I focus on how we should epistemically evaluate how agents acquire CCK. After sampling some reasons why (...) extant theories cannot account for CCK, I suggest that things aren’t as bleak as they might look. I explain how agents deserve epistemic credit for how CCK is transmitted in cultural learning by promoting a central need of their social group: The efficient and safe transmission of CCK. A good initial fit exists between this observation and Greco’s knowledge-economy framework. Ultimately, however, Greco’s account doesn’t straightforwardly account for CCK because of its strict focus on testimony. I point out two issues in the framework due to this focus. The resulting view advocates giving epistemic credit to agents when they act to promote their communities’ epistemic needs in the right way and highlights the various ways in which agents come to do this. (shrink)