Recent data breaches underscore the importance of organizational cybersecurity. However, the high costs of such security can force chief financial officers (CFOs) to make difficult financial and ethical trade-offs that have both business and societal implications. We employ a 2 × 2 randomized experiment that varies both an observed scenario CFO’s investment decision (invest/not invest in security) and organizational outcomes (positive/negative) to investigate these trade-offs. Participant managers assess the observed CFO’s investment behavior and indicate their own intentions to invest. Results (...) indicate that when the observed scenario CFO invests in security, managers primarily follow their peers when making investment decisions. However, when the observed CFO does not invest in security, managers make their own decisions by engaging in more in-depth reasoning that includes assessment of the seriousness of consequences, as well as the ethical and societal considerations. Moderated mediation findings further deconstruct and corroborate these relationships. (shrink)

This article is a comparative study between predictive processing (PP, or predictive coding) and cognitive dissonance (CD) theory. The theory of CD, one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology, is shown to be highly compatible with recent developments in PP. This is particularly evident in the notion that both theories deal with strategies to reduce perceived error signals. However, reasons exist to update the theory of CD to one of “predictive dissonance.” First, the hierarchical PP (...) framework can be helpful in understanding varying nested levels of CD. If dissonance arises from a cascade of downstream and lateral predictions and consequent prediction errors, dissonance can exist at a multitude of scales, all the way up from sensory perception to higher order cognitions. This helps understand the previously problematic dichotomy between “dissonant cognitive relations” and “dissonant psychological states,” which are part of the same perception-action process while still hierarchically distinct. Second, since PP is action-oriented, it can be read to support recent action-based models of CD. Third, PP can potentially help us understand the recently speculated evolutionary origins of CD. Here, the argument is that responses to CD can instill meta-learning which serves to prevent the overfitting of generative models to ephemeral local conditions. This can increase action-oriented ecological rationality and enhanced capabilities to interact with a rich landscape of affordances. The downside is that in today’s world where social institutions such as science a priori separate noise from signal, some reactions to predictive dissonance might propagate ecologically unsound (underfitted, confirmation-biased) mental models such as climate denialism. (shrink)

To combat the ecological crisis, fundamental change is required in how humans perceive nature. This paper proposes that the human-nature bifurcation, a metaphysical mental model that is deeply entrenched and may be environmentally unsound, stems from embodied and tacitly-held substance-biased belief systems. Process philosophy can aid us, among other things, in providing an alternative framework for reinterpreting this bifurcation by drawing an ontological bridge between humans and nature, thus providing a coherent philosophical basis for sustainable dwelling and policy-making. Michael Polanyi's (...) epistemology can further help us understand these environmentally-oriented tacit processes of knowing, and also provide a basis for the political and educational implementation of process-philosophical insights, particularly via the nudging of mental models. (shrink)

The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today’s dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for “the people.” To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered in (...) a world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy. Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today’s tempests. (shrink)

This comprehensive analysis dives deep into the intricate interplay between artificial intelligence (AI) and human agency, examining the remarkable capabilities and inherent limitations of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT. The paper traces the complex trajectory of AI's evolution, highlighting its operation based on statistical pattern recognition, devoid of self-consciousness or innate comprehension. As AI permeates multiple spheres of human life, it raises substantial ethical, legal, and societal concerns that demand immediate attention and deliberation. The metaphorical illustration (...) of humans as “shepherds” of AI, coupled with a thought-provoking examination of “agency without intelligence,” engenders deep reflections on the future of human-AI interplay and the associated philosophical, ethical, and practical ramifications. The paper further elucidates critical challenges associated with AI, such as ethical dilemmas, “agency without intelligence,” the role of human oversight, and the environmental impact of AI technologies. In the pursuit of solutions, the paper maps prospective directions, emphasizing the need for robust AI policies, improved AI literacy, sustainable AI practices, and a continued dialogue on the multifaceted issues surrounding AI. Through a holistic exploration of AI, this paper underlines the necessity for a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to chart an ethical, beneficial, and sustainable AI future, enabling society to harness the potential of AI responsibly while mitigating the associated risks. (shrink)

Social thinkers frequently remind us that people differ in their views on what constitutes personal well-being, but that even when they don't differ, they disagree over the extent to which one person's well-being can be permitted to be traded off against another's. In this paper I show, by offering an account of the development of development economics, that in professional debates on social policy, economists speak or write as though they agree on values but differ on their reading of facts. (...) A number of ethicists have concluded from this near-exclusive interest in facts that modern economics must be an ethical desert. It is shown here that the reason research economists analyze facts rather than values is that modern economics is built on broad ethical foundations, capable of being reduced as special cases to the various ethical theories that are currently on offer. Ethics has taken a back seat in modern economics not because contemporary economists are wedded to a “value-free” enterprise, but because the ethical foundations of the subject were constructed over five decades ago and are now regarded to be a settled matter. (shrink)

Social thinkers frequently remind us that people differ on what constitutes personal well-being, but that even when they don't differ, they disagree over the extent to which one person's well-being can be permitted to be traded off against another's. They tell us that political differences are to be traced to differences in people's conceptions of personal and social well-being. We are given to understand, in other words, that people's ethics differ.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 128-134 [Access article in PDF] Anderson's Utopia Partha Chatterjee Imagined Communities was, without doubt, one of the most influential books of the late twentieth century. In the years since it was published, as nationalism unexpectedly came to be regarded as an increasingly unresolvable and often dangerous "problem" in world affairs, Benedict Anderson has continued to analyze and reflect on the subject, adding two brilliant chapters (...) to his highly acclaimed book and writing several new essays and lectures. Some of these have been brought together, along with a series of essays on the history and politics of Southeast Asia, in The Spectre of Comparisons. The publication of this volume provides an opportunity for other scholars in the field to reassess the work of, and pay tribute to, a major intellectual of our time. 1 Theoretically, the most significant addition that Anderson has made to his analysis in Imagined Communities is his attempt to distinguish between nationalism and the politics of ethnicity. He does this by identifying two kinds of seriality that are produced by the modern imaginings of community. One is the unbound seriality of the everyday universals of modern social thought: nations, citizens, revolutionaries, bureaucrats, workers, intellectuals, and so on. The other is the bound seriality of governmentality: the finite totals of enumerable classes of population produced by the modern census and the modern electoral systems. Unbound serialities are typically imagined and narrated by means of the classic instruments of print-capitalism, namely, the newspaper and the novel. They afford the opportunity for individuals to imagine themselves as members of larger than face-to-face solidarities, of choosing to act on behalf of those solidarities, of transcending by an act of political imagination the limits imposed by traditional practices. Unbound serialities are potentially liberating. As Anderson quotes from Pramodeya Ananta Toer's novel Dia Jang Menjerah, which describes such a moment of emancipation experienced by one of its characters:By now, Is knew the society she was entering. She had found a circle of acquaintances far wider than the circle of her brothers, sisters and parents. She now occupied a defined position in that society: as a woman, as a typist in a government office, as a free individual. She had become a new human being, with new understanding, new tales to tell, new perspectives, new attitudes, new interests--newnesses that she managed to pluck and assemble from her acquaintances. [qtd. in Spectre 41] Bound serialities, by contrast, can operate only with integers. This implies that for each category of classification, an individual can count only as one or zero, never as a fraction, which in turn means that all partial or mixed affiliations to a category are ruled out. One can only be black or not black, Muslim or not Muslim, tribal or not tribal, never only partially or contextually so. Bound serialities, Anderson suggests, are constricting and perhaps inherently conflictual. They produce the tools of ethnic politics. [End Page 128]I am not sure that the distinction between bound and unbound seriality, despite its appearance of mathematical precision, is the appropriate way to describe the differences in political modalities that Anderson wants to demarcate. It is not clear why the "unbound" serialities of the nationalist imagination cannot, under specific conditions, produce finite and countable classes. Explaining unbound seriality, Anderson says it is that which "makes the United Nations a normal, wholly unparadoxical institution" [29]. But surely, at any given time, the United Nations can have only a finite number of members. And that is because, with its explicitly laid-down procedures and criteria of membership, the imagining of nationhood has been reduced to the institutional grid of governmentality. Again, if by revolutionaries we mean those who are members of revolutionary political parties, then the number of revolutionaries in a country, or even in the whole world, will also be finite and countable, in the same way that the census claims to provide a figure for, let us say, the number of Hindus in India. It is also not clear in what sense the serialities of governmentality are "bound." The series for Christians or English... (shrink)

Peter Thomas’s criticism of arguments advanced recently of an era of “post-hegemony” in Western democracies may be extended by considering the experience of post-colonial Asia and Africa. Reviewing the use of the Gramscian concepts of consent and passive revolution in the study of modern South Asian history, this paper argues that both of Gramsci’s objectives –a general theory of power and the analysis of historically contingent and strategic politics– can be retained to yield valuable analytical insights. The paper concludes that (...) rather than focusing on whether the analysis of hegemony can remain true to Gramsci’s text, one can put the concept to analytical use in explaining political change in different parts of the world today. (shrink)

We review the present status of wave-particle duality of single-photon states in the context of some recent experiments. In particular, Bohr's complementarity principle is critically reexamined. It is explained in detail how this principle is confronted in these experiments and how a contradiction with the notion of “mutual exclusiveness” of classical wave and particle pictures emerges.

There is a long-standing myth that the history of modern India was foretold at the beginning of the nineteenth century by British liberals who predicted that the enlightened despotic rule of India's new conquerors would, by its beneficial effects, improve the native character and institutions sufficiently to prepare the people of that country one day to govern themselves. Lord William Bentinck, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, while presenting as governor-general his case for the opening up of India to European settlers, (...) speculated on the possibility of “a vast change to have occurred in the frame of society . . . which would imply that the time had arrived when it would be wise for England to leave India to govern itself”, but added that such change “can scarcely be looked for in centuries to come”. The doctrinal basis within liberal theory for justifying a democratic country like Britain exercising despotic power in colonies such as Ireland and India was securely laid out by mid-century liberals such as John Stuart Mill. The project of “improvement” was revived at the end of the nineteenth century by Gladstonian liberals who inducted elite Indians into new representative institutions based on a very narrow franchise in preparation for some form of self-government. When power was ultimately transferred to the rulers of a partitioned subcontinent in 1947, the history of liberal progress in India was complete. The storyline was laid out, for instance, in Thompson and Garratt's Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India or in Percival Spear's revised edition of the hugely successful textbook by Vincent Smith. Even nationalist Indian scholars adopted at least a part of this story, nowhere more so than in the histories of constitutional law which traced the foundations of the postcolonial Indian republic to the progressive expansion of liberal state institutions under British rule. (shrink)

In order to identify usable indices, measures of well‐being are classified according to whether they are based on well‐being's constituents or their commodity determinants. For practical purposes, it is often simpler to construct measures based on well‐being's commodity determinants.

Illustrates how the concept of current well‐being can be put to work on the contemporary world. I draw upon evidence from the contemporary world's poorest countries to suggest that, interestingly, the three constituent spheres of citizenship may well be synergistically related to one another. The findings indicate that democracy and civil liberties are not only intrinsically valuable, but may even be instruments for bringing about material progress in poor countries. The fact remains though that, within democratic countries, there are enormous (...) differences in people's life chances. Democracies in poor regions harbour malnourished people. It is argued that the malnourished are caught in poverty traps. In order to explain the findings, we are led to study institutions and the role they play in determining the allocation of resources. (shrink)

In developing the basis on which climate change should be priced, I do five things. First, I review the ethical foundations for valuing future consumption relative to present consumption (i.e. social discount rates). Second, I report that the criterion for both assessing and prescribing economic policies should not be an economy's GDP, but an inclusive measure of an economy's wealth adjusted for the distribution of wealth. Third, I apply the resulting analysis to the problem of pricing carbon concentration in the (...) atmosphere. I give prominence to future uncertainties. Fourth, I show that the existing models of human behaviour on the basis of which these questions have been analysed by economists have serious deficiencies, in as much as the idea of personhood embodied in them has been built on the psychology of confirmed egotists. Fifth, I sketch the motivations of a social being and show how the altered specification of the human person affects the social price of climate change. (shrink)

It is shown that the correct way to evaluate a public project is to compare reductions in consumption arising from the investment outlay with the increase in wealth that the investment helps to create. Putting it in other words, projects should be accepted if they add to wealth, but not otherwise. It is also shown that for public projects this amounts to estimating the present discounted value of the flow of the project's social profits. A project whose PDV is positive (...) should be accepted; one whose PDV is negative should be rejected. The correct measure of social well‐being, even for purposes of project evaluation, is wealth. The finding unifies valuation and evaluation. (shrink)

Develops the concept of sustainable development and shows how it is related to the maintenance of social well‐being through time. It is shown that wealth, estimated in terms of accounting prices, serves admirably as an index of well‐being over time and across generations. A country's wealth measures the social worth of its capital assets. The notion of wealth developed here is a comprehensive one, including in it the social worth of manufactured and human capital, public knowledge, and natural capital. Given (...) that movements in wealth over time measure movements in social well‐being, the object of study is then shown to be genuine investment, the social worth of net changes in an economy's capital assets. Thus, ensuring that social well‐being is sustainable involves taking care that the economy's assets are managed well. The theory is also put to work on contemporary data from the poorest countries in the world. Movements in the wealth of nations present a vastly different picture from the one gleaned from the two most popular measures of social well‐being. A substantial reassessment of the post‐war development experience among poor countries is now needed if sustainable development is to be anything more than a slogan at national and international conferences. (shrink)

A number of papers on wave-particle duality has appeared since the two-prism experiment was performed by Mizobuchi and Ohtake, based on a suggestion by Ghose, Home, and Agarwal. Against this backdrop, the present paper provides further clarification of the key issues involved in the analysis of the two-prism experiment. In the process, we present an overview of wave-particle duality vis-a vis Bohr's complementarity principle.

[opening paragraph]: Dr. Ramachandran is a distinguished researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience whose work is grounded in impressive clinical data. As a scientific materialist, he has provided powerful arguments against the metaphysical notion of the ‘self', suggesting that our consciousness is really a biological function of the brain. He and his collaborator, William Hirstein, have now turned to human artistic activity, putting forward the argument that it is essentially a product of neural mechanism. They employ the experimental ‘peak (...) shift effect’ to sustain this hypothesis. The experiment demonstrates that a rat's cognitive achievements are related to the reward it receives for discriminating different shapes. Applying this principle to human responses to the visual image, they argue that certain simplified and exaggerated images, as for instance, caricature, appeal to our emotions and have the innate ability to give us pleasure. Furthermore, the binding of correlated features creates unitary objects that provide further grounds for aesthetic appeal. This is because, given our limited ability to concentrate, the most appealing art is one that produces heightened activity within a single dimension. (shrink)

Extractive summaries of legal judgments are invaluable due to their ability to preserve the original text, facilitating direct reference when required. Existing research on extractive summarization of Indian legal judgments predominantly employs supervised methodologies, which rely on extensive and often difficult-to-obtaining expert annotations. State-of-the-art methods that use role labels or rhetorical role labels are largely limited to supervised learning paradigms (Bhattacharya et al. in Identification of rhetorical roles of sentences in indian legal judgments, 2019). In this study, we propose an (...) unsupervised approach, Unsupervised Role-Labelled Knapsack Summarizer (_URL KnapSum_), which eliminates the need for expert annotations while effectively scaling to larger datasets. Our methodology begins by clustering sentences to group them into thematic categories. An optimized selection of sentences is performed using a knapsack algorithm using the similarity scores and length constraints, ensuring cluster-level diversity and global coherence. We evaluate the URL KnapSum using ROUGE (Lin in ROUGE: a package for automatic evaluation of summaries. In: Text summarization branches out, Barcelona, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 74–81, 2004) scores for supervised evaluation and Kendall’s tau (Puka in Kendall’s Tau. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 713–715, 2011) and Spearman’s correlation (Sedgwick in BMJ: Br Med J 349:g7327, 2014) for unsupervised evaluation. Additionally, we introduce a novel, reference-free evaluation metric, the _Top-K Analysis Metric_, which benchmarks the algorithm by measuring consistency between document and summary similarities. The results demonstrate the superiority of URL KnapSum over existing supervised methods, highlighting its effectiveness and scalability. (shrink)

Human behavior is an underlying cause for many of the ecological crises faced in the 21st century, and there is no escaping from the fact that widespread behavior change is necessary for socio-ecological systems to take a sustainable turn. Whilst making people and communities behave sustainably is a fundamental objective for environmental policy, behavior change interventions and policies are often implemented from a very limited non-systemic perspective. Environmental policy-makers and psychologists alike often reduce cognition ‘to the brain,’ focusing only to (...) a minor extent on how everyday environments systemically afford pro-environmental behavior. Symptomatic of this are the widely prevalent attitude–action, value–action or knowledge–action gaps, understood in this paper as the gulfs lying between sustainable thinking and behavior due to lack of affordances. I suggest that by adopting a theory of affordances as a guiding heuristic, environmental policy-makers are better equipped to promote policies that translate sustainable thinking into sustainable behavior, often self-reinforcingly, and have better conceptual tools to nudge our socio–ecological system toward a sustainable turn. Affordance theory, which studies the relations between abilities to perceive and act and environmental features, is shown to provide a systemic framework for analyzing environmental policies and the ecology of human behavior. This facilitates the location and activation of leverage points for systemic policy interventions, which can help socio–ecological systems to learn to adapt to more sustainable habits. Affordance theory is presented to be applicable and pertinent to technically all nested levels of socio–ecological systems from the studies of sustainable objects and households to sustainable urban environments, making it an immensely versatile conceptual policy tool. Finally, affordance theory is also discussed from a participatory perspective. Increasing the fit between local thinking and external behavior possibilities entails a deep understanding of tacit and explicit attitudes, values, knowledge as well as physical and social environments, best gained via inclusive and polycentric policy approaches. (shrink)

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a seamless manner. Professor Dasgupta puts the theory that he develops to use in extended commentaries on the economics of population, poverty traps, global warming, structural adjustment programmes, and free trade, particularly in relation to poor countries. The result (...) is a treatise that goes beyond quality-of-life measures and offers a comprehensive account of the newly emergent subject of ecological economics. (shrink)

This manuscript documents a systematic ethnomycological analysis of ethnographic archives. Focusing on texts describing human–fungi interactions, I conduct a global, cross-cultural review of mushroom use, covering 193 societies worldwide. The study reveals diverse mushroom-related cultural practices, emphasizing the significance of fungi beyond culinary value to include domains such as rituals, medicine, folklore, and fire-making. Special attention is given to exploring how mushrooms and their foraging involve human cognition. The findings also expose a lack of detail in descriptions of human–mushroom relations. (...) Ethnomycology continues to receive limited attention, largely due to Western mycophobic biases. This highlights the need for expanded ethnomycological research to enrich our understanding of past and present human encounters with the fungal kingdom. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of measurement as a cognitive technology across human history, emphasizing the coexistence of formal and informal measurement systems. While standardized systems dominate contemporary culture and are well documented across large-scale societies of the past, this manuscript highlights the less explored domain of informal measurement practices that have been integral to daily life from the past to the present. Through the examination of body-based measurement systems and proportional heuristics, we demonstrate how these informal strategies were not (...) merely precursors to formal standards but essential adaptive tools for solving everyday problems. Often, these informal solutions come with practical advantages. This manuscript calls for a broader recognition of their significance in cultural and technological evolution. (shrink)

Philosophers, novelists, and intercultural comparisons : Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens /​ Richard Rorty Lifeworlds, modernity, and philosophical praxis : race, ethnicity, and critical social theory /​ Lucius Outlaw Modern China and the postmodern West /​ David L. Hall From Marxism to post-Marxism /​ Svetozar Stojanović Incommensurability and otherness revisited /​ Richard J. Bernstein Incommensurability, truth, and the conversation between Confucians and Aritotelians about the virtues /​ Alasdair MacIntyre The commensurability of Indian epistemological theories /​ Karl H. Potter Pluralism, relativism, and (...) interaction between cultures /​ Bimal K. Matilal The problem of relativism /​ Jiang Tianji. Between relativism and fundamentalism : hermeneutics as Europe’s mainstream political and moral tradition /​ Ferenc Feher Conceptual schemes and linguistic relativism in relation to Chinese /​ A.C. Graham The origins of the question : four traditional Japanese philosophies of language /​ Thomas P. Kasulis Meaning as imaging : Prolegomena to a Confucian epistemelogy /​ Roger T. Ames On the dual nature of traditional Chinese thought and its modernization /​ Li Zhilin A planetary macroethics for humankind : the need, the apparent difficulty, and the eventual possibility /​ Karl-Otto Apel Reasonable challenges and preconditions of adjudication /​ Antonio S. Cua The French Revolution and the Holocaust : can ethics be ahistorical? /​ Hilary Putnam Tradition and moral progress /​ Joel J. Kupperman The shape of artistic pasts, East and West /​ Arthur C. Danto. Surrealistic distortion of landscape and the reason of the milieu /​ Megumi Sakabe Why art changes /​ Richard Wollheim The transcendental in a comparative context /​ Frederick J. Streng Reflections on religious pluralism in the Indian context /​ Margaret Chatterjee Three enduring achievements of Islamic philosophy /​ Lenn E. Goodman Two dimensions of religion : reflections based on Indian spiritual experience and philosophical traditions /​ G.C. Pande Between nationalism and nomadism : wondering about the languages of philosophy /​ Graham Parkes The discourse of cultural authenticity : Islamist revivalism and enlightenment universalism /​ Aziz Al-Azmeh Traditional political values and ideas : an examination of their relevance to developments in contemporary African political order /​ Kwame Gyekye On the interpretation of traditional cultures /​ Maria L. Herrera. The concept of progress and cultural identity /​ Roop Rekha Verma Moses, Hsüan-tsang, and history /​ Agnes Heller Secularism : sacred and profane /​ Daya Krishna Scientific progress and content loss /​ Larry Laudan A dialectical view of scientific rationality and progress /​ Marcello Pera Scientific progress reconsidered /​ Ilkka Niiniluoto Does progress in science lead to truth? /​ Lorenz Krüger. (shrink)

Public “upstream engagement” and other approaches to the social control of technology are currently receiving international attention in policy discourses around emerging technologies such as nanotechnology. To the extent that such approaches hold implications for research and development (R&D) activities, the distinct participation of scientists and engineers is required. The capacity of technoscientists to broaden the influences on R&D activities, however, implies that they conduct R&D differently. This article discusses the possibility for more reflexive participation by scientists and engineers in (...) the internal governance of technology development. It reviews various historical attempts to govern technoscience and introduces the concept of midstream modulation, through which scientists and engineers, ideally in concert with others, bring societal considerations to bear on their work. (shrink)

We argue that the Aharonov-Anandan-Vaidman model, by using the notion of so-called “protective measurements,” cannot claim to have dispensed with the ldcollapse of the wave function,” because it does not succeed in avoiding the quantum measurement problem. Its claim to be able to distinguish between two nonorthogonal states is also critically examined.

Linguists intuitions about language change can be captured by adynamical systems model derived from the dynamics of language acquisition.Rather than having to posit a separate model for diachronic change, as hassometimes been done by drawing on assumptions from population biology (cf.Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1973; 1981; Kroch, 1990), this new modeldispenses with these independent assumptions by showing how the behavior ofindividual language learners leads to emergent, global populationcharacteristics of linguistic communities over several generations. As thesimplest case, we formalize the example of (...) two grammars and show that eventhis situation leads directly to a nonlinear (quadratic) dynamical system.We study this one parameter model in a variety of situations for differentkinds of acquisition algorithms and maturational times, showing howdifferent learning theories can have very different evolutionaryconsequences. This allows us to formulate an evolutionary criterion for theadequacy of grammatical and learning theories. An application of thecomputational model to the historical loss of Verb Second from Old French toModern French is described showing how otherwise adequate grammaticaltheories might fail the evolutionary criterion. (shrink)

Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different parts of the world: in the Mid-West USA and in Ethiopia. He compares the obstacles facing them, and the processes that shape their lives, their families, and their futures. He shows how economics uncovers these processes, finds explanations for them, and how it forms policies and solutions. Along the way, Dasgupta provides an intelligent and accessible (...) introduction to key economic factors and concepts such as individual choices, national policies, efficiency, equity, development, sustainability, dynamic equilibrium, property rights, markets, and public goods. (shrink)

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a seamless manner. Professor Dasgupta puts the theory that he develops to use in extended commentaries on the economics of population, poverty traps, global warming, structural adjustment programmes, and free trade, particularly in relation to poor countries. The result (...) is a treatise that goes beyond quality-of-life measures and offers a comprehensive account of the newly emergent subject of ecological economics.With the publication of this new paperback edition, Professor Dasgupta has taken the opportunity to update and revise his text in a number of ways, including developments to facilitate its current use on a number of gradate courses in environmental and resource economics. The treatment of the welfare economics of imperfect economies has been developed using new findings, and the Appendix has been expanded to include applications of the theory to a number of institutions, and to develop approximate formulae for estimating the value of environmental natural resources. (shrink)

As part of an article symposium on their “Narrow Identities”, Partha Dasgupta and Sanjeev Goyal respond to commentaries by Jean-Paul Carvalho, John B. Davis, Peter Finke, and Miriam Teschl.

The paper traces the continuities between empires and successor nation-states and examines how imperial prerogatives continue to operate in the global system. The author also looks at the failure of postcolonial states to deliver on their promises after achieving national sovereignty. In all this, the focus is on conceptualizing the category of ‘the people’, which is supposedly the source of legitimate power in the contemporary world. In particular the paper zooms in on the historical continuity that characterized traditional empires and (...) is just as present in the context of contemporary world powers – the right to invoke imperial prerogatives to declare colonial exceptions. (shrink)