Formulating Emergence

Emergence is intuitively characterized as dependent novelty. Yet, besides this intuition, several formulations of it were elaborated in the last decades. In this article, after having distinguished between two different varieties of emergence (a weak and a strong one), I aim at providing two formulation schemes for emergence. This could help to explain what emergence is and to clarify and unify the suggested formulations. The general idea behind my schemes is that emergence is partial and qualified dependence of the emergent entities on their emergence bases. After having examined several formulations of emergences and presented my schemes, I shall analyse two interesting consequences of the acceptance of the latter: the in principle compatibility between weak and strong emergence and the idea that micro‐physicalism, i.e., the main competitor of emergentism, may actually come in different degrees of strength, more or less in contrast with emergentism. Eventually, I shall briefly compare my formulation schemes with some other relevantly similar proposals.     

THE MEDIATING ROLE OF PROCEDURAL JUSTICE IN RESPONSES TO PROMOTION DECISIONS

This study used structural equations modeling to examine the mediating role of procedural justice in the relationships between promotion decisions and organizational commitment and between promotion decisions and intent to leave the organization. 156 managers and executives in Italian subsidiaries of two large multinational organizations in the chemical industry were surveyed about their career history within the organization and their reactions to promotion decisions over an 8-year period. The results showed that promotion decisions influenced feelings of organizational commitment through perceptions of procedural justice in promotion decision-making processes. The theoretical and practical implications of the study’s findings are discussed.This research was supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research (MURST). A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2000 Academy of Management meetings in Toronto and published in the Best Paper Proceedings. We would like to thank Paula Caliguiri, Jason Shaw, M. Susan Taylor, and two anonymous Academy reviewers for their helpful suggestions on prior drafts of this article.     

Ethics and the Social Dimension of Research Activities

This study identifies some of the ethical issues that arise in the everyday practice of researching in collecting interactional data. A form of conceptualizing ethics in research is proposed as awareness of the social dimension of research practices and their transformative nature. The collection of ethnographic data—including interviewing, observing, audiovisual recording, and other methods—is achieved by means of social interactions that necessarily imply issues of face, relevance, appropriateness, politeness, and identity, to name a few. Research activities have an impact on both the setting and the participants in the study, in fact, they become part of the setting studied. At times, participants may be using the research activity for their own ends. It is important for researchers to be aware of and responsible for the impact they have on the setting under study. Some ethical problems encountered conducting actual research activities are discussed as an illustration: issues related to negotiation of consent in semipublic settings and to the protection of informants’ anonymity. The actual resolution of these problems is presented as research findings from the everyday practice of doing research. Systematic reflection on the social and interactional dimension of how ethical decisions are taken during actual research activities could make legislation on the protection of research participants and ethical guidelines more realistic and useful.     

Attentional capture by items that match episodic long-term memory representations

A remarkable ability of the human visual system is the implementation of attentional control settings (ACSs) that govern what stimuli capture or hold attention. We provide evidence that ACSs can be specified by episodic long-term memory representations. In all experiments, participants memorized 30 images of objects that they then monitored for in an attention task, inducing an episodic-based ACS. In Experiments 1a and 1b, only studied cues in a cueing task captured attention. We confirmed these cueing effects reflect capture by testing for inhibition of return in Experiment 2a, and controlled for perceptual masking by cues in Experiment 2b. In Experiment 3 we determined that ACSs are specifically supported by episodic retrieval, by dividing studied images into two sets and designating one as the targets in a rapid serial visual presentation task: Only target-set matching distractors produced a spatial blink (captured attention). These results extend our understanding of the representations specifying ACSs.     

Theory of Mind,Anxiety, and Interpretive Bias During Middle Childhood

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The developmental trajectory of the anxiety-related interpretive bias (a tendency to inappropriately interpret ambiguous stimuli as threatening) and its...     

Powers,Probabilities, and Tendencies

Philosophia - In this article, I aim at showing how powers may ground different types of probability in the universe. In Section 1 I single out several dimensions along which the probability of...     

‘SUERTE’ (Luck): Spirituality and Well-Being in El Alto, Bolivia

This paper addresses the importance of faith and the consequent resort to supernatural forces to acquire a sense of well-being in a poor neighbourhood in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. Religious beliefs and practices have provided an important idiom for the expression of aspirations and the pursuit of ideals. The social role of emotions and its effect on well-being have been widely investigated in anthropology, especially in relation to issues of solidarity, feelings of confidence, and a sense of full personhood and empowerment (Barbalet 2001; Turner 2002; Bendelow and Williams 1997). The importance of faith is emphasised in my ethnography, showing how people’s loyalty to their notions of self-worth and the cosmological order is essential for their sense of fulfilment and empowerment. Thus, faith principles are fundamental to shed light on ideas of what people identify as well-being and fulfilment. My informants believe that luck can be controlled and changed by treating the spirits better. It can be bought and acquired by asking for protection from the spiritual forces living in the Bolivian plateau. Luck is inextricably connected with ideas of protection, destiny control and future aspirations. Bad luck is a moment of passage that leads to good luck. However, this is not a simple process. It requires a complex involvement of people, who carefully have to invest their time and money in changing their situation through various cultural practices of divination and control of destiny. Unless you are a breech baby, you are not born lucky, but you become so if you invest your resources in nourishing the forces that support the world. In exchange, these forces will assure and control an individual’s luck, freeing him/her from evil eye and envy-major sources of ill-being. This can be achieved through a ritual performed by a yatiri—local shaman, or other means, such as participating and dancing in a religious celebration in honour of a patron saint or engaging in regular acts of faith. The paper is based on ethnographic research carried out in Senkata, a poor neighbourhood in the city of El Alto, between November 2003 and November 2004. I spent 12 months in Bolivia in order to collect data for my Phd thesis. My methodology was mainly based on participant observation, informal conversations and a few formal interviews.     

How Powers Emerge from Relations

I shall explore in this article the metaphysical possibility of powers’ strongly emerging from relations. After having provided a definition of emergent powers that is also based on the distinction between the possession and the activation of a power, I shall introduce different sorts of Relations that Ground Emergence, both external and internal. Later on, I shall discuss some examples of powers that are grounded on their instantiation. Finally, I shall examine the consequences of accepting such relations within a physicalistic ontology and I shall defend them against two objections based on the notion of bruteness.     

Emergent Powers

Topoi - I shall introduce at the beginning of the paper a characterization of strong ontological emergence. According to it, roughly, something strongly emerges from some other thing(s) iff the...     

Asymmetric haptic function and manual motor efficiency in blind children aged 6 to 14

Forty-eight congenitally blind children aged 6 to 14 were asked to discriminate and recognize Braille characters unimanually and to perform unimanual motor tasks which tested tapping ability and grip-strength. Haptic and motor efficiency scores increased with age, but no specific relationships were found between ipsilateral haptic and motor scores. Exploring Braille characters was faster in bimanual than unimanual conditions, but right-hand scores did not differ from left-hand scores. The role of blindness in manual functional asymmetry is discussed.