Criteria Of Necessity Research Articles

Causal relatedness and importance of story events

The question of what makes a statement “important” in a story was studied. Causal relations were identified between all pairs of events in six folktales, using context-dependent, logical criteria of necessity, and counterfactual tests of the form: If event A had not occurred, then, in the circumstances of the story, event B would not have occurred. Causal networks were derived from these identifications for each story and two properties of them were found to predict judgments of importance: (1) the number of direct causal connections and (2) whether or not an event was in a causal chain from the opening to the closing of the story. The judged importance of a statement increased with the number of causal connections and causal chain membership. Regression analyses showed that substantial proportions of variance were accounted for jointly by both properties and uniquely by causal connections. The importance of a statement, whether identified by structural analysis or judged by naive subjects, seems to be determined by analogous assessments of the statement's causal and logical relations to other statements in the text.

Involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill as a moral issue.

Conflict exists between medical model and civil liberties approaches to involuntary hospitalization for mental illness. The amassing and analysis of data will not resolve this conflict because the two sides view the problem from differing moral vantage points. Medical model adherents are influenced chiefly by utilitarian or consequentialist considerations, while the civil libertarians take more of a deontological or absolutist position. Opinions about such issues as hospitalization criteria of dangerousness versus medical necessity and the relative role of rights versus obligations and of autonomy versus paternalism can be seen largely to depend on such underlying value judgments. Neither side has a monopoly on truth or right in the question of involuntary hospitalization.

Food aid to developing countries: A survey

Food aid currently constitutes nearly 15% of official development assistance and hence has considerable potential as a stimulant to growth in LDCs. This paper reviews the evidence on the impact of food aid on growth and its associated factors. While recognizing that the use of food aid is influenced by a constellation of interests in recipient and donor countries, it identifies a set of guiding principles for maximizing the effectiveness of food aid. These include the need for food (relative to other development needs), its level of substitutability with commercial imports, its incorporation in a poverty-oriented development plan, its guaranteed availability and its complementarity with financial aid. Current food aid programmes recognize the relevance of some of these principles - e.g. the criteria of necessity - but ignore others — notably the need to situate food aid in a comprehensive plan for improving patterns of income distribution in LDCs.