Broad Tendency Research Articles

Shame, Guilt and Morality

AbstractThe connection between shame, guilt and morality is the topic of many recent debates. A broad tendency consists in attributing a higher moral status and a greater moral relevance to guilt, a claim motivated by arguments that tap into various areas of morality and moral psychology. The Pro-social Argument has it that guilt is, contrary to shame, morally good since it promotes pro-social behaviour. Three other arguments claim that only guilt has the requisite connection to central moral concepts: the Responsibility Argument appeals to the ties between guilt and responsibility, the Autonomy Argument to the heteronomy of shame and the Social Argument to shame's link with reputation. In this paper, we scrutinize these arguments and argue that they cannot support the conclusion that they try to establish. We conclude that a narrow focus on particular criteria and a misconception of shame and guilt have obscured the important roles shame plays in our moral lives.

Islam, Human Rights and Interfaith Relations: Some Contemporary Egyptian Perspectives

This paper explores current discussions and debates on Islam, human rights and interfaith relations in Egypt through an analysis of the public statements and writings of various religious scholars and spiritual teachers and the textbooks used to teach Islam in public secondary schools. It is well known that Islamist perspectives have become mainstream in Egypt, a largely devout and socially conservative country that is also the source of most of the major Islamic trends and political ideologies that have impacted the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, there is a broad tendency in government-issued textbooks on Islam and in the population at large to equate Islam with democracy and human rights, despite the authoritarianism of the state and the contradictions between traditional interpretations of Islam and international human rights norms. The rhetoric of democracy and human rights is linked to the threat of terrorism, which is labeled un-Islamic. Among ordinary Egyptian Muslims, even those who support Islamist politics, there seems to be a new concern to eradicate Islamic extremism and more openness to unconventional Muslim approaches. The most liberal example of this is an association that teaches the unity of all religions from a somewhat Sufi perspective, promotes interfaith dialogue, and advocates reinterpreting the Shari'a to promote gender equality and equal human rights for all Egyptians.

A New Type of Folk-inspired Definition in English Monolingual Learners' Dictionaries and its Usefulness for Conveying Syntactic Information

A new type of definition of abstract noun headwords, the single-clause when-definition, has recently found its way into major English monolingual learners’ dictionaries. In line with a current broad tendency in pedagogical lexicography, the new definition format seems to be modeled after (English) folk defining, although in fact the latter has so far received little systematic study. The present contribution focuses on the usefulness of the new definition format for conveying syntactic class information to the foreign learner, who may be unfamiliar with the English folk defining tradition. The new definition is tested empirically against the traditional analytical definition. 1. Background Definition, out of all the types of information given in dictionaries, seems to enjoy a privileged status. Even though there are dictionaries that do not have definitions (such as, for example, pronouncing dictionaries, spelling dictionaries, or most bilingual dictionaries), writing definitions is seen as the prototypical task of the professional lexicographer. Of course, there are usually other elements of entry microstructure in a typical monolingual dictionary, and, by lexicographers’ design, each of these elements has its specific purpose: phonetic transcription gives information on the pronunciation of the headword; grammar codes convey syntactic information; examples afford models of usage; etc. The primary purpose of including a definition is to explain the word’s meaning to the dictionary user. However, studies of actual dictionary

Intuitions About Origins: Purpose and Intelligent Design in Children's Reasoning About Nature

Two separate bodies of research suggest that young children have (a) a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena in terms of a purpose (e.g., Kelemen, 1999c) and (b) an orientation toward "creationist" accounts of natural entity origins whether or not they come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds (e.g., Evans, 2001). This study extends this prior work to examine whether children's purpose-based reasoning about nature is actively related to their intelligent design reasoning in any systematic fashion. British elementary school children responded to 3 tasks probing their intuitions about purpose and intelligent design in context of their reasoning about the origins of natural phenomena. Results indicated that young children are prone to generating artifact-like teleo-functional explanations of living and nonliving natural entities and endorsing intelligent design as the source of animals and artifacts. They also reveal that children's teleo-functional and intelligent design intuitions about natural phenomena are interconnected.

Are children "intuitive theists"? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature.

Separate bodies of research suggest that young children have a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena in terms of purpose and an orientation toward intention-based accounts of the origins of natural entities. This article explores these results further by drawing together recent findings from various areas of cognitive developmental research to address the following question: Rather than being "artificialists" in Piagetian terms, are children "intuitive theists"-disposed to view natural phenomena as resulting from nonhuman design? A review of research on children's concepts of agency, imaginary companions, and understanding of artifacts suggests that by the time children are around 5 years of age, this description of them may have explanatory value and practical relevance.

What Is Liberal Islam?

On 25 September 2002, the International Forum for Democratic Studies cosponsored with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars a conference in Washington, D.C., on "Liberal Islam." We asked a group of distinguished Muslim speakers and commentators drawn from a variety of countries to address some basic questions regarding the broad tendency within current Islamic thought that is often described as "liberal" or "reformist" or "modernizing." It is in this camp that many observers place their hopes for some kind of Islamic "reformation" or "renewal," which they believe would greatly enhance the prospects for successful democratization in the Muslim world.

The Politics of Multiple Identities: Lineage and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan

IN POST-COLONIAL SITUATIONS1 dual efforts to create an effective state apparatus (state building) and foster broad-based popular allegiance to that apparatus (nation building) run up against the institutional, material and discursive legacies of the previous political order.2 These two-fold imperatives are thus fraught with pitfalls that, in the extreme, can result in civil conflict, as in Tajikistan, or even near-total state collapse, as in Somalia.3 Given its implications for political stability, the difficult process of nation building leads students of identity politics to focus on a central question: 'Why do some nation building efforts succeed, while others fail?' The question is critical, but, as posed, it has an unintended consequence: it limits theoretical discussion to a single dimension. Following the broad tendency to theorise identities as single and isolatable,4 analysts routinely ignore the possibility that nation building efforts have implications that are not neatly captured on an analytical spectrum from success to failure. This article5 highlights the central linkages between forms and levels of identity politics by suggesting that elite efforts at ethnic nation building in Kazakhstan served, willy-nilly, to place sub-ethnic identities at the centre of political life. The argument is that the weak post-Soviet Kazakhstani state, bent on strategies of ethnicity-based compensation, lacked the resources to implement its programmes to promote ethnic Kazakhs. Instead, it created a broad discourse of ethnic redress that was left to individual actors in individual locales to translate into political practice. In doing so, many such actors used knowledge of genealogical lineage, which undergirded sub-ethnic identities, as a marker of Kazakhness. A virtual bidding war among locales ensued over these ethnic markers that served to construct lineage identities as politically salient. The context was a society popularly perceived as bi-ethnic. Political competition centred on two groups-Russians and Kazakhs-and much of the Kazakh political elite was culturally and linguistically russified. The actual cultural composition revealed greater diversity. When the USSR collapsed, Kazakhstan was the only successor state whose titular group was an ethnic minority (39.7%). A significant Russian population (33%), Germans and Ukrainians (4% each), Belarusans, Uzbeks and Crimean Tatars (2% each) rounded out this population of under 17 million. As for sub-ethnic lineage identities, the nomadic society of the pre-Soviet Kazakh steppe was segmentary. Kazakhs generally divided themselves into three zhuz (tribal

Governance and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Real income per head in much of sub-Saharan Africa grew rapidly in the 1960s, but faltered following the first OPEC oil price shock in 1973-74, and then stagnated or fell from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Africa also saw a broad wave of authoritarian rule sweep the continent in the 1960s and early 1970s. Since 1990, however, the African political landscape has experienced significant changes, many in the direction of greater pluralism and democracy. Moreover, where civil strife has been avoided, Africa has seen a broad tendency towards rapid growth for several years after 1995. This sequence of events suggests that political economy may offer useful perspectives on Africa's growth record over the last several decades. We begin with a summary of Africa's growth patterns and the evolution of African political regimes. We then examine models of authoritarian rule for insights into the conditions under which elites may sacrifice the general interest to extract rents and retain power, or in which leaders may find ways of making growth-enhancing policy politically acceptable. It would be premature to conclude that Africa's political reforms of the 1990s have helped to generate economic progress. However, we do believe that the increase in political pluralism, in combination with greater unity among African aid donors, bodes well for a continuation of Africa's growth recovery.

A Case for Comparing Apples with Oranges Intemational Differences in Values

The Nature of Across Nations Comparisons are odorous (Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, III, v, 18) Popular wisdom deems that one cannot compare apples with oranges. But what do we mean by 'compare'? Both Oxford and Webster Dictionaries(1) give two meanings to word: (1) liken, regard as similar; and (2) examine in order to observe similarities or differences. It is obvious that general interpretation of word refers to first meaning, and that scientific inquiry involves second. Scientifically speaking, apples and oranges come under general category of 'fruits' and can be compared on many criteria such as availability, price, color, vitamin content or keeping quality. Comparing apples with oranges, cross-cultural psychologist Harry Triandis once said, is okay as long as we possess fruitology, theory of fruits. Any comparison of values and attitudes across nations is in some way comparison of apples to oranges, and without its fruitology it risks being fruitless effort. Three basic questions have to be resolved: (1) nature of criteria for comparison; (2) to what extent nations are proper unit for such comparison, and (3) functional equivalence of nations concerned with respect to criteria considered. 1. The criteria for our comparison are values and attitudes, known as constructs. A construct is directly accessible to observation but inferable from verbal statements and other behaviors and useful in predicting still other observable and measurable verbal and nonverbal behavior (Levitin, 1973: 492). Constructs do not 'exist' in an absolute sense: we define them into existence. Metaphorically I called them mental programs; like computer programs, we cannot observe them directly; we can only observe what they do. In case of people we can observe their behavior, their words and deeds - including way they respond to survey questions - from which we infer presence of stable mental programs (Hofstede, 1980: 14). Inspired by Kluckhohn (1951: 395) and Rokeach (1972:159ff) I defined value as a broad tendency to prefer certain states of affairs over others. The term values is generally reserved for mental programs that are relatively unspecific; attitudes and beliefs refer to more specific mental programs (Hofstede, 1980: 15). I treated values as part of culture, latter defined as the collective programming of mind which distinguishes members of one group or category of people from another. This is not complete definition of culture, which as construct has been notoriously difficult to define, but it covers what I was able to measure in my research (Op. cit.: 25). At level of nations, values that distinguish between nations are component of 'national cultures.' National culture is more or less synonymous to what generation ago used to be called national character, term that infers psychologizing. Culture allows more emphasis on environment in which people function.(2) 2. The use of nations as units for comparing mental programs is debatable. Most anthropologists shy away from nations as units for studying culture. They are basically right, as nations can host many cultures in anthropological sense, and cultures can bridge more than one nation. If data are collected by field observation as anthropologists tend to do, student of culture can choose more relevant units. If data are partly collected from secondary sources, as in most comparative research, one can hardly escape from using nation level. Many potentially culturally relevant data are only available at that level, so nation becomes surrogate for more suitable units. Fortunately, quite few nations are culturally reasonably homogeneous. Older nations have in 20th century been subject to process of homogenization through national media (such as TV) and national institutions (e.g., army and soccer league). …

Gender and Income Inequality in the UK 1968–90: The Feminization of Earnings or of Poverty?

Summary This paper uses data from the Family Expenditure Survey for five selected years between 1968 and 1990 to examine trends in the income distribution in the UK, highlighting the role of women’s labour force participation and earnings. The increased labour force participation of married women (especially mothers of young children in the 1980s) made a greater contribution to the decline of the ‘traditional’ male breadwinner family than the increased number of lone parents. The lower half of the distribution of weekly earnings became increasingly dominated by women. Though women’s weekly earnings remained low relative to men’s, the increase in their participation meant that, over the period, an increased share of family income came from women’s labour market income: in 1990 nearly a quarter of the income of families with children came from women’s earnings. Women’s earnings were an important factor in keeping families out of poverty. There was no trend towards increasing feminization of poverty over the sample period. Adult women were somewhat more likely to be poor than adult men were, but female-headed families were very much more likely to be in poverty, and much more dependent on state benefits, than male-headed families were. Women’s increased role in the labour market affected those in male-headed families more than those in female-headed families. Alongside a broad tendency for women’s earnings to reduce poverty and inequality, there is evidence that the female population has become more economically polarized.

Generality in the errors of estimation of body image.

An aspect of the considerable research on the association between eating disorders and discrepancies in body image estimation is the extent, if at all, that such discrepancies could be due to a more general tendency to show a positive or negative bias in estimation of the size of objects. One hundred female subjects, without known eating disorder, estimated the width of their own bodies (head, shoulders, waist, and hips), of another person's body (waist and hips), of four commercial packages, and of a cylinder. Errors in estimation, computed as algebraic differences from the true value, were computed, and all error means were found to be positive. Correlations between the error scores were all positive. Factor analysis of the correlations between the 11 error scores indicated a substantial general factor plus a bipolar factor, or alternatively two positively correlated factors referring to human body or physical measures. Results were interpreted as supporting the notion of a broad general tendency to enhance or diminish estimations of the width of familiar objects including estimations of the width of own body parts. The relevance of this finding to eating disorders was discussed.

A ‘Pause-Break’ Task For Eliciting Syllable Boundary Judgments from Literate and Illiterate Speakers: Preliminary Results for Five Diverse Languages

A new oral ‘pause-break’ task is described for eliciting judgments about syllable boundaries from speakers of languages of diverse types who have potentially limited educational and/or literacy levels. Results are presented from five different languages, including English. The English results replicate the findings from previous studies using other techniques, while the following generalizations follow from the application of the technique to Arabic, Blackfoot, Korean, and Swiss German: There is (1) a widespread tendency to treat single intervocalic consonants as syllable onsets and (2) an equally broad tendency to break between the two members of intervocalic CC clusters. The treatment of intervocalic geminates or long consonants (as in Arabic and Blackfoot) seems to vary as a function of educational level: In general, the better educated, literate speakers interpret them as disegments and treat them as in (2) above, while the semiliterate subjects often interpret them as single segments and treat them as in (1). The technique itself seems to have proved itself as suitable for use with speakers of a wide range of educational levels and languages.

Compartmentalization within the nucleus: discovery of a novel subnuclear region.

Antibodies to a set of structurally related autoantigens (p23-25) bind to a previously uncharacterized, large structural domain in the nucleus of a variety of human cell types. This subnuclear domain is visible by phase contrast alone as a region of decreased density after several different fixation protocols. The morphology of this region changes dramatically during the cell cycle and we have given it the name PIKA (for polymorphic interphase karyosomal association) based on preliminary evidence that the PIKA proteins may be associated with chromatin. The function of the PIKA is not yet known, but our immunolocalization data indicate that it is unlikely to be associated with regions of ongoing DNA replication, heterogeneous nuclear RNA storage, or mRNA processing. The discovery of the PIKA provides evidence supporting an emerging model of nuclear structure. It now appears that the nucleus is organized into distinct domains which include not only the nucleolus, but also previously unidentified regions such as the PIKAs. Furthermore, structural rearrangements undergone by the nucleolus and the PIKAs may be indicative of a broad tendency for nuclear organization to change in a cell cycle-specific fashion.

GEOGRAPHIC VARIATION AND CLIMATIC ADAPTATION IN A FIELD CRICKET (ORTHOPTERA: GRYLLIDAE).

This article describes a geographic trend of size variation and its adaptive background. The Emma field cricket, Teleogryllus emma (Ohmachi et Matsuura) is one of the most conspicuous and widely distributed insects between 30 and 440 north latitude in the Japanese islands. This species produces only one generation a year. The nymph hatches in late spring or early summer and matures in autumn. The adult lays diapause eggs in the soil. This pattern of the life cycle is stable throughout the islands, posing a question about geographic adaptation. A conspicuous climatic gradient exists within the range of this species. The annual mean temperature is about 7 C in the northernmost habitat of Hokkaido, while it reaches as high as 19 C in the island of Tanegasima near the southern limit of distribution. Under such circumstances, local adjustments of development are required for stabilizing the univoltine cycle. Otherwise, the life cycle would tend to depart from the established pattern in different climates. A physiological cline has been found in the intensity of egg diapause of this cricket, which is closely correlated with the local climatic conditions (Masaki, 1965). The nymphs of a northern strain give rise to smaller adults after a shorter period of development than do the nymphs of a southern strain, and intercrossing between them produces hybrids of intermediate size (Masaki, 1963). Body size is one of the most variable and easily discernible external characters among the local populations of this field cricket, and yet the broad tendency of this geographic variation has remained to be investigated. Variation in size frequently occurs in many other insects and has been the concern of entomologists in the past. Previously, geographic regularities of such variations have been reported for several species (for example, Dobzhansky, 1951; Huxley, 1963). Nevertheless, the difficulty in determining their adaptive significance is particularly acute (Mayr, 1963), and no principle comparable to Bergmann's rule for warm-blooded animals has been established for insects. This is probably due to the difficulty in distinguishing between environmental and genetic variations of field material. Without this distinction, the real adaptive significance of size trends cannot be recognized and factors of natural selection cannot be inferred with certainty. The close examination of field specimens and the experimental study of local populations in the laboratory seem, in most cases, indispensable for elucidating the genetic and adaptive background of size trends. In the following account such an analysis is attempted.

Frequency distribution of geomagnetic disturbance commencements at Alibag for the period 1921-1960

Frequency distribution of times of commencement of geomagnetic disturbances at Alibag is studied. Hourly distribution of SSC (Storm Sudden Commencement) occurrences does not show any significant diurnal variation, however, a broad tendency for the frequency to be slightly higher during the day than the night is noticed. Hourly distribution of GC's (Gradual Commencements) show 8, definite preference for the hours 6 to 12 local time, with 50 per cent occurring during that interval. Monthly distribution of both SSC and GO occurrences show a slightly higher frequency for the equinoxial months.

Democratic Realities and Democratic Dogma

Not long ago, a distinguished political scientist called attention to “the law of the pendulum” in politics. No sooner, he argued, does a broad political tendency establish itself than tendencies of opposite direction set in and gather force until the original tendency is reversed. As applied to relatively short periods of time and to movements which reflect temporary trends, a plausible case can be made out for the law of the pendulum. It seems doubtful, however, whether it can be proved with like plausibility for tendencies which are truly secular. Take as an example the steady trend toward enlarging the size of the independent political unit, or state. Since the feudal age, the tendency has run in the same direction, sometimes more slowly and sometimes more rapidly, but with seldom a check, and never a retreat, from the feudal state to the national state, from the national state to the colonial empire, and in recent years from the colonial empire toward some larger goal of world organization. Barring accidental destruction of modern machine civilization, a recurrence to a world of petty states seems unthinkable.Whether or not the law of the pendulum applies in the world of political events, there can be no doubt of its sway over political thought. No sooner does a doctrine embody itself in an institution than it exposes its nakedness in a pillory and challenges competing dogmas to do their worst. In consequence, the history of political ideas has been a story of oscillations, of attack and repulse and counter-attack.