Many writers have attempted to develop criteria to demarcate between competent science and pseudo?science. Such attempts can be aimed at sizeable, organized endeavours, such as mesmerism and astrology, or at the level of individual practice. The latter is seen by some, such as Lugg, as more likely to be feasible and useful. This paper argues that parapsychology, due to its complexity and diversity, illustrates some of the problems of attempting to develop demarcation criteria for extensive endeavours. It is also suggested (...) that parapsychology may offer a productive ground for testing whether demarcation criteria can be successfully applied to practices in respect of predicting which will succeed and which will not. The conclusion is that, for demarcation efforts to be useful, they should pass some of their own criteria, such as falsifiability. (shrink)

Despite much research on the relationship between awareness and dementia little can be concluded concerning their relationship and the role of other factors. It is likely that studies capture different phenomena of awareness. This study aimed at identifying and delineating such variation by analysing data from three questionnaires obtained during the longitudinal study of awareness in 101 people with early-stage dementia. The data concerned awareness in relation to memory, activities of daily living and socio-emotional function. Significant differences in patterns of (...) discrepancies were obtained. This suggests that the awareness phenomena involved were structurally different; and that, in turn, this may reflect variation in the intrinsic linking between awareness and its ‘object’ . The identification of such differences is necessary so that appropriate methodologies can be applied to the study of awareness in different contexts. (shrink)

A national survey of CEOs of manufacturing firms was conducted to identify factors explaining CEOs' intentions to engage in two questionable business practices: soliciting a competitor's technological secrets and making payments to foreign government officials to secure business. Drawing on research in corporate misconduct, ethical decision making, and strategic management, the authors analyzed ethical intentions by looking at hostile environmental conditions, opportunity-rich situations, and/or personal characteristics. Based on responses to scenarios, their findings suggest that the ethical intentions of CEOs may (...) be more affected by the decision maker's predisposition than by environmental pressures or organizational/situational characteristics. (shrink)

Ce texte s'adresse au problème de l'analyse sémiotique de la question de l'idéologie. Il montre la faiblesse des principaux développements traditionnels sur ce point. Dans la première partie, nous avons rejeté les théories des sémioticiens saussuriens , en raison de leur conception du langage et de la connotation. Dans cette seconde partie, nous analysons les théories sociosémiotiques de Kristeva, Morris et Eco. En conclusion, nous montrons la pertinence d'une approche peircienne de cette problématique.This paper deals with the problem of (...) analysing the question of ideology as a semiotic one. It shows the weakness of the main traditionnal developments on this issue. In the first part, I rejected the theories of saussurian semioticians , because of their conception of language and connotation. In this second part, I analyse the sociosemiotic theories of Kristeva, Morris and Eco. In conclusion, I show the relevance of a peircean approach of this problematic. (shrink)

This paper deals with the problem of analysing the question of ideology as a semiotic one. It shows the weakness of the main traditionnal developments on this issue. In the first part, I rejected the theories of saussurian semioticians (Hjelmslev, Barthes and Greimas), because of their conception of language and connotation. In this second part, I analyse the sociosemiotic theories of Kristeva, Morris and Eco. In conclusion, I show the relevance of a peircean approach of this problematic.

Stakeholder management is an important method for reducing business risk. Recent decades have seen the growth of a new type of stakeholder: social protest stakeholders, individuals engaging in protest action which is directed at other unrelated parties, often the government. However, the actions of social protest stakeholders may negatively affect companies located nearby. This stakeholder category has not received any formal attention in the literature, and this article addresses the knowledge gap by exploring the effects of community-driven protest action in (...) South Africa and the strategies that firms adopt to mitigate the negative consequences of such protests. A multiple case study analysis was used to describe this type of stakeholder group and the management of the consequences of social protest action. Eight manufacturing companies in the Gauteng province participated in the study, the companies varied in size and industry. Among the key findings are that companies need to be highly adaptable if they are to mitigate the impact of protest action. We make practical suggestions about how companies may manage these risks, including the recommendation that companies engage more directly with social protestors to manage risks. The study makes an important contribution to the literature by identifying an additional key category of stakeholder and proposing a risk management approach to avert or minimize loss and damage. (shrink)

Gregory S. Kavka was a prominent and influential figure in contemporary moral and political philosophy. The essays in this volume are concerned with fundamental issues of rational commitment and social justice to which Kavka devoted his work as a philosopher. The essays take Kavka's work as a point of departure and seek to advance the respective debates. The topics include: the relationship between intention and moral action as part of which Kavka's famous 'toxin puzzle' is a focus of discussion, the (...) nature of deterrence, the rationality of morals, contractarian ethics, and the contemporary relevance of Hobbes' political thought. Incorporating important philosophical statements of problems and fresh contributions to the ongoing debate about rational intention this volume will interest not just philosophers but also political scientists and economists. (shrink)

When word pairs having a familiar order are sequentially flashed on a computer in their non-familiar order, , observers have a strong phenomenology of seeing them in familiar order . Reversal errors remained frequent even when participants obtained perceptual experience of reverse-display items by beginning with a block of longer-duration trials. A forced-choice order-detection procedure reduced but did not eliminate reversal errors, showing that “fast pairs” is a robust perceptual illusion. Even adjective + noun pairs showed reversal errors, and reversal (...) errors increased with the log frequency of the word pair, consistent with a strong role for statistical processing at the level of multi-word units. (shrink)

The Structure of Emotions argues that emotion concepts should have a much more important role in the social and behavioural sciences than they now enjoy, and shows that certain influential psychological theories of emotions overlook the explanatory power of our emotion concepts. Professor Gordon also outlines a new account of the nature of commonsense (or ‘folk’) psychology in general.

What did C. S. Lewis think about truth, goodness and beauty? Fifteen essays explore three major philosophical themes from the writings of Lewis--Truth, Goodness and Beauty. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of Lewis's philosophical thinking on arguments for Christianity, the character of God, theodicy, moral goodness, heaven and hell, a theory of literature and the place of the imagination.

To speak of the nature of an image is to initiate a problematic second only to that raised by considerations of the nature of language. To inquire into the relations between image and language is to step into a very old philosophical problem. Nevertheless, I would hope at least to approach the edge of such an encounter in the attempt to see what relevance it might have for recent past art. Certainly the term “image” has had a long and embattled (...) history. A taxonomy and a genealogy of the term might be in order. Do we wish to speak of mental images or of optical ones? What about perceptual images or the verbal images of descriptions and metaphors? To consider the sense data and appearances of the perceptual, or the dreams, fantasies, memories, and ideas of the mental image is to review an entire Western philosophical discourse. We might consider the issue of what may or may not be in the mind as an image; or the relation of visual images to linguistic terms; or the relation between objects and visual images that stand for them. Certainly the ways of formulating such relations have decided the divisions of Western metaphysics. Representational theories of the mind revolve around such issues and imply the persistent division of mind from body, subject from object.Let me say right away that my interests here are not to review an entire philosophical discourse with the hope of establishing a clarity of distinctions between the imagistic and the linguistic. Rather the assumption here is that the two are inextricably entangled, and the interest is to see how certain art in this century has resisted or embraced this entanglement. Robert Morris is an artist and a professor at Hunter College. A collection of his writings is forthcoming. (shrink)

Subjective feelings of familiarity associated with a stimulus tend to be strongest when specific information about the previous encounter with the stimulus is difficult to retrieve . Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence. Psychological Review, 87, 252–271.]). When a stimulus has been encountered previously and the circumstances of the encounter cannot be recollected, additional cognitive resources may be directed toward recollection processes; this resource allocation is accompanied by autonomic arousal [Dawson, M. E., Filion, D. L., & Schell, A. M. . (...) Is elicitation of the autonomic orienting response associated with allocation of processing resources?. Psychophysiology, 26, 560–572]. One easily measurable index of autonomic arousal is the skin conductance response . In the present study, participants studied lists of words and then gave recognition ratings to briefly displayed and masked studied and nonstudied test words while their SCRs were monitored. Results revealed a relationship between recognition ratings and the temporal characteristics of the SCR, supporting the idea that feelings of familiarity are indeed “feelings” in that they stem from autonomic arousal associated with cognitive resource allocation. (shrink)

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such as C.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set.

According to one productive and influential approach to cognition, categorization, object recognition, and higher level cognitive processes operate on a set of fixed features, which are the output of lower level perceptual processes. In many situations, however, it is the higher level cognitive process being executed that influences the lower level features that are created. Rather than viewing the repertoire of features as being fixed by low-level processes, we present a theory in which people create features to subserve the representation (...) and categorization of objects. Two types of category learning should be distinguished. Fixed space category learning occurs when new categorizations are representable with the available feature set. Flexible space category learning occurs when new categorizations cannot be represented with the features available. Whether fixed or flexible, learning depends on the featural contrasts and similarities between the new category to be represented and the individual's existing concepts. Fixed feature approaches face one of two problems with tasks that call for new features: If the fixed features are fairly high level and directly useful for categorization, then they will not be flexible enough to represent all objects that might be relevant for a new task. If the fixed features are small, subsymbolic fragments (such as pixels), then regularities at the level of the functional features required to accomplish categorizations will not be captured by these primitives. We present evidence of flexible perceptual changes arising from category learning and theoretical arguments for the importance of this flexibility. We describe conditions that promote feature creation and argue against interpreting them in terms of fixed features. Finally, we discuss the implications of functional features for object categorization, conceptual development, chunking, constructive induction, and formal models of dimensionality reduction. Key Words: concept learning; conceptual development; features; perceptual learning; stimulus encoding. (shrink)

This Dictionary provides a wide range of coverage on a topic that has played a significant role in human society, from the early theoreticians and thinkers who proposed republican, democratic, and authoritarian innovations; to those who sought equality of classes, races, and genders; to those who insisted on hierarchy under a supreme leader, or god; and to those who had more practical economic, social, and ethical plans. This historical dictionary covers the most vital information on the persons, plans, and attempts (...) associated with utopianism that have been seen since ancient times. An introductory essay, chronology, 600 dictionary entries, an extensive bibliography, and an appendix listing the names and locations of utopian communities worldwide enable the reader to explore the Western mind's desire to improve the world and the lives of the people within it as utopianism has persisted over the centuries. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual learning is (...) beneficial, but that its benefits are tied to both a person's narrow interests and the training environment or domain, and so if there are changes to either of these, then benefits can turn into liabilities, though these are often temporary. (shrink)