Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

This paper is a critical review of Mitchell Green’s Self-Expression . The principal focus is on Green’s contention that all expression is at route, a form of signalling by an agent or by some mechanism of the organism which has been evolutionary selected for signalling. Starting from the idea that in some but not all expression an agent seeks to express his or her self, I question the centrality of communication to the idea of expression.

When we dream, it is often assumed, we are isolated from the external environment. It is also commonly believed that dreams can be, at times, accurate, convincing replicas of waking experience. Here I analyse some of the implications of this view for an enactive theory of conscious experience. If dreams are, as described by the received view, “inactive”, or “cranially envatted” whilst replicating the experience of being awake, this would be problematic for certain extended conscious mind theories. Focusing specifically on (...) Alva Noë’s enactive view, according to which the vehicles of perceptual experience extend beyond the brain, I argue that dreams are a quandary. Noë’s view is that dreaming is consistent with enactivism because even if dreams are inactive and shut off from the external environment, they are not “full-blown” perceptual consciousness, and also, there is some reason to reject the inactive claim. However, this view rests on an unjustified and reductive account of dreams which is not supported... (shrink)

The world is not on track to achieve Agenda 2030—the approach chosen in 2015 by all UN member states to engage multiple stakeholders for the common goal of sustainable development. The creation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) arguably offered a new take on sustainable development by adopting hybrid and principle-based governance approaches, where public, private, not for profit and knowledge-institutions were invited to engage around achieving common medium-term targets. Cross-sector partnerships and multi-stakeholder engagement for sustainability have consequently taken (...) shape. But the call for collaboration has also come with fundamental challenges to meaningful engagement strategies—when private enterprises try to establish elaborate multi-stakeholder configurations. How can the purpose of businesses be mitigated through multi-stakeholder principle-based partnerships to effectively serve the purpose of a common sustainability agenda? In selecting nine scholarly contributions, this special issue aims at advancing this discourse. To stimulate further progress in business studies, this introductory essay, furthermore, identifies three pathways for research on multi-stakeholder engagement processes in support of the Decade of Action along three coupling lines: multi-sector alignment (relational coupling), operational perception alignment (cognitive coupling) and goal and strategic alignment (material coupling). (shrink)

Christian universalism, or the theory of universal salvation, is increasingly popular among religious thinkers. A small group of scholars has put forward the contentious claim that Kierkegaard was a universalist, despite that he refers in places to the idea of eternal damnation as essential to Christianity. This paper examines the evidence both for and against the view that Kierkegaard was a universalist and concludes that despite Kierkegaard’s occasional references to the importance of the idea of eternal damnation to Christianity, there (...) is reason to believe that Kierkegaard may have been a universalist, both in terms of the substance of his thought, including two unequivocal statements in his journals that he believed everyone would eventually be saved and in terms of his rhetorical style which prioritizes the effect his writings would have on the reader over the literal truth of the views they present. (shrink)

Negotiation is a complex and dynamic decision process during which parties perceptions, preferences, and roles may change. Modelling such a process requires flexible and powerful tools. The use of rule-based formalism is therefore expanded from its traditional expert system type technique, to structuring and restructuring non-trivial processes like negotiation. Using rules we build a model of a negotiation problem. Some rules are used to infer positions and reactions of the parties, other rules are used to modify problem representation when such (...) a modification is necessary. We illustrate the approach with a contract negotiation case between two large companies. We also show how this approach could help one party to realize that negotiations are being carried on against their assumptions and expectations. (shrink)

The debate about constructivism in physics has led to different kinds of questions that can be conventionally framed in two classes. One concerns the mathematics that is considered for the theoretical development of physics. The other is concerned with the experimental parts of physical theories. It is unnecessary to observe that the intersection between our two classes of problems is far from being empty. In this paper we will mainly deal with topics belonging to the second class. However, let us (...) briefly mention some important problems that have been debated in the framework of our first class. For instance, the following: to what extent do the undecidability and incompleteness results of classical mathematics affect fragments of physical theories, in such way as to have a “real physical meaning”? are the mathematical arguments that seem to be essential for physics justifiable in the framework of traditional mathematical constructivism?The first question has recently been investigated by Pitowski, Penrose, da Costa, Doria, Mundici, Svozil and others. As expected by most logicians, one can construct undecidable sentences whose physical meaning seems to be hardly questionable. This happens both in classical and in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Trust among current and future patients is essential for the success of biobank research. The submission of an informed consent is an act of trust by a patient or a research subject, but a strict application of the rule of informed consent may not be sensitive to the multiplicity of patient interests at stake, and could thus be detrimental to trust. According to a recently proposed law on “genetic integrity” in Sweden, third parties will be prohibited from requesting or seeking (...) genetic information about an individual. Cumbersome restrictions on research may be lifted, thus creating a more favourable climate for medical research. (shrink)

Radzikowska and Kerre developed L-fuzzy rough set as a fuzzy generalisation of the notion of rough sets. Specifically, they have taken a residuated lattice L as the underlying set of truth degrees. However, in real life, we may encounter situations where truth degrees are not always linear, or where the existence of the least upper bound of two elements is no longer required. Instead, there may be the possibility of having minimal upper bounds, and dually, maximal lower bounds, multilattices have (...) become a suitable algebraic structure for addressing such cases. Our aim is to extend Radzikowska and Kerre's work by replacing a residuated lattice with a multilattice M, thereby obtaining a more flexible structure. We define M-fuzzy rough sets using operators derived from adjoint pairs within the multilattice M. For a tolerance and an equivalence M-fuzzy relation, we define an appropriate M-fuzzy rough set and investigate its properties. (shrink)

L.S. Vygotskii was an outstanding generator of problems. This is what makes his texts more than vestigial curiosities.

It is usual to read nomina, with which three interpretations are possible. The stronger arrogates to himself the titles of moderation and justice. So in the excellent Rumanian translation of 1871 by Gavrilu J. Munteanu: ‘Cându are sâ decida pumnulu, celu mai tare si atribue titlu de moderatu şi de onestu.’.

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Science of Interdisciplinary Research: A Polyocular Framework for Wicked Problems” by Hugo F. Alrøe & Egon Noe. Upshot: Alrøe and Noe are right in addressing Rittel and Webber’s notion of “wicked problems” as crucial for interdisciplinary research. However, I can see neither that they are providing a sufficiently clear understanding of “science” in their concept of a “second-order science of interdisciplinary research,” nor that their “polyocular framework” can contribute anything useful to addressing the (...) practical challenges posed by wicked problems. (shrink)