The editors welcome letters from readers, although we cannot guarantee that all will be published. To ensure timeliness, correspondents must respond to an article within seven weeks and not exceed two double‐spaced pages. Letters become the property of the editors and may be edited and shortened at our discretion.

The editors welcome letters from readers, although we cannot guarantee that all will be published. To ensure timeliness, correspondents must respond to an article within seven weeks and not exceed two double‐spaced pages. Letters become the property of the editors and may be edited and shortened at our discretion.

In video games, identification with avatars—virtual entities or characters driven by human behavior—has been shown to serve many interpersonal and intraindividual functions but our understanding of the psychological variables that influence players' avatar choices remains incomplete. The study presented in this paper tested whether players' preferred style of avatar creation is linked to the magnitude of self-perceived discrepancies between who they are, who they aspire to be, and who they think they should be. One-hundred-and-twenty-five undergraduate gamers indicated their preferred avatar (...) creation style and completed a values measure from three different perspectives: their actual, ideal, and ought selves. The average actual/ideal values discrepancy was greater among those who preferred idealized avatars vs. those who preferred realistic avatars. The average actual/ought values discrepancy was greater among those who preferred completely different avatars vs. those who preferred realistic avatars. These results, therefore, offer additional evidence that self-discrepancy theory is a useful framework for understanding avatar preferences. (shrink)

_Zettel, _ an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

Decisions related to animal welfare standards depend on farmer’s multiple goals and values and are constrained by a wide range of external and internal forces. The aim of this paper is twofold, i.e., to develop a theoretical framework for farmers’ AW decisions that incorporates farmers’ goals, use and non-use values and to present an approach to empirically implement the theoretical framework. The farmer as a head of the farm household makes choices regarding production to maximize the utility of the household. (...) The overall utility of the farmer is determined by his multiple objectives. For the analysis of multi-objective problems, the multiple criteria decision - making paradigm provides an appropriate theoretical framework. However, theories from the field of social-psychology are needed to facilitate the identification of all relevant aspects in the decision making. The practical use of the conceptual framework is demonstrated using a simple numerical application of a multi-objective programming model. Two workshops were devoted to examining the scientific consistency and the practical usefulness of the approach. Implementing this approach will increase knowledge of the main factors and barriers that determine farmers’ decisions with regard to AW standards. This knowledge is relevant during the development of new AW concepts that aims to supply products that comply with above-legal AW standards for middle-market segments. (shrink)

Unlike the radical historicist and the radical logicist, the moderate historicist in the philosophy of science adopts the position that neither purely a priori (i.e., logical or philosophical) nor purely historical considerations alone determine the acceptability of a philosophical analysis of science. A dilemma arising from the nature of this position is first described and then it is argued that what is perhaps the most plausible way of avoiding this dilemma is doomed to failure. A particular example of this attempt (...) at escaping the dilemma is considered in some detail, and along the way evidence is amassed in support of the view that no non-trivial statement of moderate historicism will be coherent. (shrink)

Zettel is a collection of fragments which Wittgenstein cut from various of his typescripts and preserved for future use. More than half of the fragments were written in the years 1946-1948, after the completion of Part I and before the composition of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. This collection may therefore be regarded as a companion volume to the Investigations, adding to both the scope and the Unity of Wittgenstein′s chef d′oeuvre. The fragments were kept in a box and (...) were not strictly ordered. Many have marks showing changes and improvements made after they were cut from the typescripts; some have remarks added in handwriting. Editing the collection for publication was thus a task of considerable difficulty. Since Zettel was first published, further research has been carried out on the fragments and minute comparisons have been made with their typescript and manuscript sources, revealing certain inaccuracies and misinterpretations in the first editing of the work. The second edition corrects these shortcomings and includes new explanatory footnotes; a detailed index, compiled by Stephen Amdur, has also been added. (shrink)