Inclusion and Exclusion in Natural Language

We present a formal system for reasoning about inclusion and exclusion in natural language, following work by MacCartney and Manning. In particular, we show that an extension of the Monotonicity Calculus, augmented by six new type markings, is sufficient to derive novel inferences beyond monotonicity reasoning, and moreover gives rise to an interesting logic of its own. We prove soundness of the resulting calculus and discuss further logical and linguistic issues, including a new connection to the classes of weak, strong, and superstrong negative polarity items.     

Exclusion and Emphasis Reframed as a Matter of Ethics

With the shift from a society dominated mass media toward a media landscape of targeted messages, mediated social relations are also transformed. This article addresses a civil society increasingly mediated by advanced marketing communication technologies, analyzing the democratic consequences of information flows constituting new forms of social interaction. It is suggestive to think of advanced marketing technologies not as discreet components and legal codes, but as representational technologies that allow the coordination of a variety of sophisticated knowledge specialties, and as laboratories that structure the relationships, possibilities, and options for managers, technicians, viewers, and distributors. By conceptualizing issues of privacy with the focus on the creation and impact of social categories, we have a chance to make the marketing representations and laboratories constructed by concentrated powers less opaque and more open to joint creation.     

The Faith of the Outsider: Exclusion and Inclusion in the Biblical Story – Frank Anthony Spina

Book reviewed:
The Faith of the Outsider: Exclusion and Inclusion in the Biblical Story , Frank Anthony Spina, Eerdmans Publishing Company 2005 (0-8028-2864-7), x + 206 pp., pb £9.99/$16.00     

社会排斥对消费选择偏向的影响：怀旧的调节作用及社会联结的中介作用

社会排斥会导致许多消极影响,人们会尝试通过各种策略对此进行缓解,而消费是其中重要的一种应对方式。本文通过3个实验考察了社会排斥和消费选择偏向（体验性消费vs.实物性消费）的关系,同时探讨了怀旧的调节作用和社会联结的中介作用。结果发现,社会排斥可以提高消费者对体验性消费的偏好,怀旧调节了社会排斥与体验性消费偏向的关系,并通过社会联结的中介作用进一步缓冲了社会排斥对消费选择偏向的影响。     

A Generalized Syllogistic Inference System based on Inclusion and Exclusion Relations

We introduce a simple inference system based on two primitive relations between terms, namely, inclusion and exclusion relations. We present a normalization theorem, and then provide a characterization of the structure of normal proofs. Based on this, inferences in a syllogistic fragment of natural language are reconstructed within our system. We also show that our system can be embedded into a fragment of propositional minimal logic.     

The Consequences of Individual Consumption: A Defence of Threshold Arguments for Vegetarianism and Consumer Ethics

As a moral foundation for vegetarianism and other consumer choices, act consequentialism can be appealing. When we justify our consumer and dietary choices this way, however, we face the problem that our individual actions rarely actually precipitate more just agricultural and economic practices. This threshold or individual impotence problem engaged by consequentialist vegetarians and their critics extends to morally motivated consumer decision‐making more generally, anywhere a lag persists between individual moral actions taken and systemic moral progress made. Regan and others press just this point against Singer's utilitarian basis for vegetarianism; recently Chartier criticizes act‐consequentialist vegetarianism by identifying many factors weakening the connection between individual meat purchases and changes in animal production. While such factors are relevant to act‐consequentialist moral reasoning, I argue, they need not defeat the act‐consequentialist case for vegetarianism and consumer ethics. This is shown by offering a probabilistic account of the threshold issue and discussing the positive and negative role‐modelling effects of our morally motivated dietary and consumer choices.     

伦理学视阈下的绿色信贷

全球性的金融危机凸显绿色信贷的现实意义。绿色信贷是当代国际社会发展的潮流和趋势,是对不符合产业政策和环境要求的企业(项目)进行信贷控制,旨在强调银行贷款或资助之企业(项目)的环境责任和社会责任。绿色信贷的实施是实现环境内生型绿色经济的重要保证,是环境伦理和环境金融的有机结合,将加快推进我国环境保护的历史性转变,使环境保护逐步融入各项社会管理体系,是一份神圣的社会责任。     

Effects of Self-Recording and Contingent Credit on Balancing Participation Across Students

This study compared the effects of students’ (a) receiving participation credit with and without self-recording their participation and (b) self-recording participation with and without receiving credit for participation on the percentage of students functioning at four participation levels: non-participation, credit-level participation, frequent participation (slightly above credit-level), and dominant participation (2.5+ times above credit-level). Participants came from three sections of a relatively large discussion course (initially 55 students per section). Credit (with and without self-recording participation) decreased the percentage of both non-participants and dominant participants and increased the percentage of credit-level participants, thus creating greater balance in participation across students in each class. In contrast, self-recording versus non-self-recording (with and without credit) did not significantly differentiate the percentages of either non-participants or frequent participants but did differentiate the percentages of credit-level and dominant participants under the recording conditions.     

Attention,People of Earth! Aristotelian Ethics and the Problem of Exclusion

Abstract

Growth in human happiness seems to do in part with insights gained through attentive emotional engagement with fictional characters and their identities. For this reason it is important to pay attention to the critique that founding ethics on what we cannot but affirm of ourselves, our identity (rationality and sociability, in Nussbaum’s reading of Aristotle), amounts to a moral elitism, excluding those who fail to meet these marks of human identity. This objection throws light on the importance of the shift towards thematizing ‘subjectivity’ in modern and contemporary philosophy. Ethics takes place at the level of the deliberating subject, intending the good. The foundational element is grasped through moral commitment and not at all ‘neutrally’, in a disengaged attitude alien to human aspirations – something disturbingly overlooked in much normative ethics today. The criteria picked out as essential to our humanity are clarifications of this commitment, and involve an attitude of inclusivity. In our own non-classical philosophical framework this needs spelling out, in a manner not made clear in Nussbaum’s ‘self-validating’ arguments, in terms of the exigencies of self-enactment and personal identity. This also answers critics who would disallow the conflation of identity and judgments of value.     

The Unconscious Consumer: Effects of Environment on Consumer Behavior

In this article, we argue that consumer behavior is often strongly influenced by subtle environmental cues. Using grocery shopping as an example (or a “leitmotif,” if you wish), we first argue that the traditional perspective on consumer choice based on conscious information processing leaves much variance to be explained. Instead, we propose that many choices are made unconsciously and are strongly affected by the environment. Our argument is based on research on the perception–behavior link and on automatic goal pursuit.     

The Politics of Exclusion

Starting as a movement based on the discoveries of a genius, psychoanalysis aspired to be a science. A deeply subjective method of data gathering, it had to transform new findings into its founder's objectively coherent theory or revise it and challenge the founder. Exclusion from the group emerged as scientific judgment and punishment. From early on, when Freud barely distinguished between disagreement and enmity, assessment of new ideas was entwined with narcissistic conflicts. Exclusion not only maintained the relative coherence of the theory—a reasonable, laudable goal—but led to an enhanced in-group motivated to maintain the theory and a devalued out-group that would need to turn the tables. The way was paved for fortification of established ideas and overidealization of new ideas. But the decision by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) to accept only physicians for psychoanalytic training extended exclusion to group membership. The result was the establishment of training outside the official APA/International Psycho-analytical Association umbrella. Formation of nonestablishment psychoanalytic institutes not only allowed more heterogeneity of ideas during the rule of orthodoxy but introduced seemingly less hierarchical organizational structures. Ideas embodied in these structures are now advocated by those who find hierarchy too oppressive. The paper ends with an examination of some of these ideas.     

The Ethics of Self: Another Version of Confucian Ethics

My basic contention in this essay is that the proper characterization of Confucian ethics is not role-based ethics, rule-based ethics, or virtue ethics, but an ethics of the self or a self-based ethics. In essence, Confucian ethics is about how to realize a self in line with inner sagehood and outer kinghood (内圣外王); it is about how to realize a self as fully self-conscious being-for-itself of definite character, substance, and personality. Confucian ethics does not start with the assumption that there is a given self that should be made virtuous, rule-abiding, or dutiful, but starts from the assumption that a self needs to be created, developed, and realized in the ethical life while the potentiality of building a self is given.     

The Balancing Act: Concurrent Parent-Child Work

This article examines some of the challenges of parent work and the historical roots for why parent work has assumed a more marginal role in the treatment of children. The author contends that parent work is critical in the overall structure of a child’s treatment. The article describes concurrent parent psychotherapy, a psychoanalytically informed approach developed by Jack and Kerry Novick that emphasizes dual goals, two systems of self-regulation, and a framework for building and maintaining multiple therapeutic alliances. These principles are illustrated with a discussion of concurrent work with parents and their young son, who was prone to explosive behavior in school. Addressing parenthood as a developmental phase, the article covers typical anxieties parents bring to treatment and shows how the ongoing involvement of the boy’s parents helped him develop and consolidate inner controls and a more benign superego.     

Exclusion and Essentialism in Feminist Theory: The Problem of Mothering

Accounts of mothering have both contributed to feminist theory's development and depended on certain of its central concepts. Some of its critics, however, argue that feminist theory is undermined by the problems of exclusion and essentialism. Here I distinguish between these two problems and consider their implications for questions about mothering. I conclude that exclusion and essentialism do not present insurmountable obstacles to theorizing motherhood, but do suggest new directions for such theorizing.     

Smuggled into Existence: Nonconsequentialism, Procreation, and Wrongful Disability

The wrongful disability problem arises whenever a disability-causing, and therefore (presumptively) wrongful, procreative act is a necessary condition for the existence of a person whose life is otherwise worth living. It is a problem because it seems to involve no harm, and therefore no wrongful treatment, vis-à-vis that person. This essay defends the nonconsequentialist, rights-based, account of the wrong-making features of wrongful disability. It distinguishes between the person-affecting restriction, roughly the idea that wrongdoing is always the wronging of some person, and the harm principle, the idea that all wrongings are harmings. It argues, first, that the harm principle should be rejected, in light of offending intuitions in salient examples. Rejection of the harm principle is not only independently plausible, but also paves the way for a nonconsequentialist diagnosis of wrongful disability. This diagnosis conceives of wrongdoing as a failure to express adequate respect for the humanity or personhood inherent in the person created. The paper defends a theory of humanity-respecting rights that accommodates plausible intuitions about satisficing and fairness, without resorting to consequentialist premises that lead to well-known impossibility results and paradoxes.