KOOKY OBJECTS REVISITED: ARISTOTLE'S ONTOLOGY

Abstract: This is an investigation of Aristotle's conception of accidental compounds (or “kooky objects,” as Gareth Matthews has called them)—entities such as the pale man and the musical man. I begin with Matthews's pioneering work into kooky objects, and argue that they are not so far removed from our ordinary thinking as is commonly supposed. I go on to assess their utility in solving some familiar puzzles involving substitutivity in epistemic contexts, and compare the kooky object approach to more modern approaches involving the notion of referential opacity. I conclude by proposing that Aristotle provides an implicit role for kooky objects in such metaphysical contexts as the Categories and Metaphysics.     

Extending Psychotherapeutic Strategies to People With Disabilities

In the last decade mind-body strategies have evolved to extend possible counseling approaches to persons with disabilities. Using Beatrice A. Wright's principles of attention to individual needs, respect for situational complexities, and flexibility, the authors reflect on the work of Milton H. Erickson, from which modern mind-body counseling interventions can be traced. Included are strategies to develop rapport, the therapeutic use of imagery, reframing and other paradoxical techniques, and the use of metaphor in counseling with people with disabilities.     

EXPERIENCED HIRING VERSUS COLLEGE RECRUITING: PRACTICES AND EMERGING TRENDS

Although much professional and managerial hiring involves experienced workers, previous recruitment research has focused almost exclusively on new college graduates. To remedy this imbalance, 251 staffing professionals were surveyed concerning experienced-versus-college hiring practices in their organizations. Results suggest that a majority of positions requiring a college degree are filled with experienced workers. Experienced hires are evaluated more highly than new graduates on most characteristics (understanding business, knowledge of competition, realistic expectations, technical skills, interpersonal skills, writing skills, work ethic, likelihood of success, personal ethics), although new graduates are evaluated more highly on open-mindedness and willingness and ability to learn new things. Higher proportions of experienced hiring are associated with organizational growth, short-term staffing strategies, older workforces, and less dynamic business environments. Perceived success of experienced hiring is associated with greater use of effective recruitment sources, older workforces, and more competitive salary offers.     

Artistic and Scientific Creative Behavior: Openness and the Mediating Role of Interests

The arts and sciences have been identified as two specific domains that are dependent upon the creative process. A total of 369 undergraduate students served as research participants in two separate studies. In the first study, participants (N = 238) completed a measure of Openness to Experience (NEO‐PI; McCrae & Costa, 1999) and a questionnaire assessing artistic and scientific creativity (ASAS; Guastello & Shissler, 1994). Results from study 1 indicated that the Aesthetics and Actions personality traits were significantly related to artistic creativity, while the Ideas trait was the only lower level personality trait to significantly correlate with scientific creativity. In the second study, participants (N = 131) completed a measure of Openness to Experience (NEO‐PI), Vocational Interests (Holland, 1985), and an artistic and scientific creativity questionnaire (Guastello & Shissler, 1994). Findings from study 1 were largely replicated in study 2. Namely, Aesthetics and Ideas were significantly related with artistic and scientific creativity, respectively. Results from partial correlation computations were used to identify specific personality traits that were used in a series of regression models testing the second goal of the second study. Specifically, vocational interests were observed to mediate the relationship between personality dispositions and creativity. Results suggest the ability of lower level personality traits of Openness to differentiate between artistic and scientific creativity. In addition, results lend support for the motivational aspect of vocational interests.     

Stroud's Camap

In "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" Camap drew his famous distinction between 'internal' and 'external' questions of existence, pronouncing the former meaningful and the latter meaningless. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism , Barry Stroud understands Carnap to be applying the verification criterion of meaningfulness in order to refute Cartesian skepticism. I suggest that Stroud misrepresents both Carnap's aim and method. Camap was responding to critics who suggested that his willingness to quantify over abstract entities in his work in semantics violated his commitment to empiricism. He rejected that criticism as presupposing a super-scientific standpoint from which constraints on the admissible domain of entities of science could be delivered. Carnap wanted to insulate science from the imposition of first-philosophical metaphysical prejudice, not to defuse scepticism by appeal to verificationism.     

Parametrized preference structures and some geometrical interpretation

Order structures such as linear orders, semiorders and interval orders are often used to model preferences in decision-making problems. In this paper we introduce a family of preference structures where the mutual indifference threshold belongs to a specific family parametrized by extended reals α. This family includes interval orders (α=1), tangent circle orders (α=0) and a new preference structure called ‘diamond order’ (α=−∞). All these preference relations present an asymmetric part which is shown to be always quasi-transitive and to be transitive for α > 1. Diamond orders present ‘forbidden configurations’ which can occur in the case of tangent circle orders. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.