Given State Of Affairs Research Articles

The Right to Vote in the Light of an Individual’s End of Life

This paper has the following research thesis: An individual’s end of life has far-reaching legal effects, also in the sphere of the person’s subjective rights. The research problem consists in reflecting on the right to vote, understood as a human right, in the light of a set of legal norms that undergo changes quite frequently. The aim of this paper is to examine what concepts the legislator uses to describe the death of a person and what effects it brings in the sphere of substantive law? Does the current legal state require amendments? If so, what kind of changes? To determine this, I will examine two fundamental normative acts in the Polish system of sources of law: the Constitution and the Electoral Code. In the research conducted, I will apply the formal-dogmatic method. Apart from legal regulations, I will examine the opinions of legal scientists and some relevant judicial decisions. The Constitution does not link the consequences in the sphere of the electoral law to the end of individual’s life. Electoral Code uses the terms “death” and “died” directly providing for the end of life in special situations confirming the natural consequence of a given state of affairs and requiring various procedural steps. The author expresses the hope that his findings will become the basis for further profound research on the issues of electoral procedures related to the death of a person as: a voter, candidate or member of electoral bodies.

Legal Authority and the Dead Hand of the Past. Dworkin's Law's Empire and Plato's Laws on Legal Normativity

According to Ronald Dworkin's mature views on jurisprudence, legal normativity depends on judges’ views about political morality. Plato's own mature views on this subject seem to take the contrary position as he claims that the law is expected to be authoritative in order to preserve a given state of affairs. Therefore, in Plato's view judges are not expected to interpret the law ubiquitously according to their own standards of political morality. In what follows, the discussion starts off by offering a brief account of Dworkin's interpretivism and some of its shortcomings. We shall then move on to Plato's account of legal normativity, especially his views on the authority of law, law as preservation, and finally the politics of law in the light of the debate between conservatism and progressivism.

After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival

After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival

양태접속부사 ‘하기는’의 의미

This paper aims to investigate the meaning of a modal-conjunctive adverb ‘Hagineun’ in detail considering its preceding and following contexts. The meaning of ‘Hagineun’ is closely related to the logic of expectation, a semantic category concerning whether a given state of affairs accords with the speaker’s original expectation or prediction or not. It is required for characterizing semantics of the adverb to take account of different aspects such as the semantic relation of the preceding and following sentences, ontology and epistemology of the sentence meaning, and the discourse type. When the S1 denotes a state of affairs, it represents a situation which does not accord with the speaker’s expectation and the S2 expresses his/her acception of the situation. In the case of the S1 denoting the speaker’s opinion, his/her own original claim is expressed in the S1 and then his/her admission of the opposing one is conveyed in the S2. In an integrated viewpoint, the speaker can be seen to express his/her original thoughts in the S1 and then change his/her mind to accept the opposite thoughts in the S2. The relevant meaning for the interpretation of ‘Hagineun’ may be conveyed either in a direct or indirect way. Besides, the speaker’s thoughts should be changed in the flow of the discourse, and the grounds for the acception showed in the S2 should be a part of the speaker’s internalized knowledge at the moment of utterance.

Epistemic modality in the speech of Russian young children and adolescents

This paper considers the early and later stages of the acquisition of epistemic modality, focusing on certainty and uncertainty, and such basic forms of their expression as parenthetical modal words (e.g. navernoe ‘probably’, možet byt’ ‘maybe’, konecno ‘of course’, dejstvitel’no ‘really’), along with sentential complement constructions (e.g. I dumaju/scitaju, (cto) p ‘I think/believe (that) p’), which are closely connected in semantics and functions. Epistemic and – more broadly – subjective (modus) markers are interpreted as linguistic tools, conveying the propositional attitudes and feelings of the speaker/writer to a given state of affairs. Sequences in the development of epistemic repertoire, the epistemic density of spoken speech and the written texts of Russian children and adolescents, as well as the functions performed by epistemic markers, both at utterance level and text level, are discussed. Keywords: (Un)certainty, propositional attitudes, epistemic markers, early and late language development, oral and written language, Russian

The Events of the Past Find Meaning in the Reality of the Present

Because democracy, by definition, implies choice, the dilemma, option, and choice, should occupy the centre stage: how a given state of affairs posed an alternative of way of dealing with it, that is, the manner of proceeding rather than the outcome should be the centre of interest. This can be done only if the subject matter of history is presented in terms of conflict: a plurality of conflicting opinions, conflicting values, and conflicting interests. The knowledge about the conflict within the elite is potentially democratic because people who know the nature of it can involve themselves in politics or communication, even when they are not politicians themselves. The aim of knowing what is really on the national agenda is not to train future leaders but rather to enable the future generation to be spirited citizens, narrowing the gap between rulers and subjects. This article presents the following thesis regarding the teaching of history as the politics of the past.

Gender mainstreaming in legal education in Serbia: A pilot analysis of curricula and textbooks

The general aim of this paper is to initiate a long-lasting systemic process of reviewing higher education in Serbia from a gender-sensitive point of view, and to offer initial input for building action plans and policies oriented towards this goal. The main focus is on analyzing legal studies from a gender-sensitive point of view and on initiating gender mainstreaming within law schools. However, this paper can aspire only to modest achievements, dealing solely with preliminary research of legal studies, with a limited but a representative sample. Namely, only two accredited study programs at two public university faculties of law in Serbia - at the Faculty of Law in Belgrade and the Faculty of Law in Nis - were taken into consideration. This pilot analysis is based on an established methodology for gender-sensitive analysis of curricula as well as of syllabi and textbooks for certain legal courses. The mentioned methodology introduces specific gender-sensitive indicators as well as three categories for assessing learning outcomes of study programs, syllabi and textbooks: gender-negative, gender-neutral, and gender-sensitive. The focus of the investigation was on of the following courses: Sociology of Law, Constitutional Law, Family Law, Labor Law, and Criminal Law. The meaning and importance of gender mainstreaming in law schools is explained in the Introduction. The normative and strategic framework for gender mainstreaming in higher education in Serbia is presented in the second chapter. The main focus of analysis - the reconsideration of curricula and textbooks from a gender perspective - is elaborated through the following three chapters: the third chapter explores the main indicators of the gender-sensitive analysis of legal education; the fourth is devoted to the analytical framework and methodology of investigation; chapter five presents the research results and their interpretation. The concluding notes clarify discrepancies between the normative and strategic international and national framework for gender mainstreaming of higher education, on the one hand, and the given state of affairs in Serbian legal education, on the other. The text includes recommendations for gender action plans, which could contribute to the improvement of legal and higher education in general.

Argument structure and implicational constructions at the crossroads

On the basis of corpus data and in consonance with cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches to language, mainly the work by Goldberg (1995, 2006) and the developments in Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2008, 2011), we offer a fine-grained analysis of some specific instantiations of the resultative pattern based on the prepositional phrase to death. The analysis starts off from the classification of verb classes made by Levin (1993). The verbs in some of these classes are readily available for fusion into the resultative configuration. Others call for reconstrual in terms of high-level metaphor and/or metonymy before they can conform to the requirements of the pattern mentioned above. Thus, we focus on the way in which the resultative pattern overwrites the properties of some lexical groups of verbs through the licensing activity of such cognitive mechanisms as high-level metaphor and metonymy. Additionally, the prepositional phrase to death is shown to perform two key communicative functions from among those put forward by Boas (2003): placing emphasis on an end point or rendering a vague point clear. Finally, the paper examines the hyperbolic load of the PP to death in some contexts where this PP is seen as converting an argument-structure construction into an implicational one conveying the speaker’s (usually negative) reaction to a given state of affairs.

A coherence maximisation process for solving normative inconsistencies

Norms can be used in multi-agent systems for defining patterns of behaviour in terms of permissions, prohibitions and obligations that are addressed to agents playing a specific role. Agents may play different roles during their execution and they may even play different roles simultaneously. As a consequence, agents may be affected by inconsistent norms; e.g., an agent may be simultaneously obliged and forbidden to reach a given state of affairs. Dealing with this type of inconsistency is one of the main challenges of normative reasoning. Existing approaches tackle this problem by using a static and predefined order that determines which norm should prevail in the case where two norms are inconsistent. One main drawback of these proposals is that they allow only pairwise comparison of norms; it is not clear how agents may use the predefined order to select a subset of norms to abide by from a set of norms containing multiple inconsistencies. Furthermore, in dynamic and non-deterministic environments it can be difficult or even impossible to specify an order that resolves inconsistencies satisfactorily in all potential situations. In response to these two problems, we propose a mechanism with which an agent can dynamically compute a preference order over subsets of its competing norms by considering the coherence of its cognitive and normative elements. Our approach allows flexible resolution of normative inconsistencies, tailored to the current circumstances of the agent. Moreover, our solution can be used to determine norm prevalence among a set of norms containing multiple inconsistencies.

Knowledge, perception, and the art of camouflage

I present a novel argument against the epistemic conception of perception (ECP) according to which perception either is a form of knowledge or puts the subject in a position to gain knowledge about what is perceived. ECP closes the gap between a perceptual experience that veridically presents a given state of affairs and an experience capable of yielding the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains. Against ECP, I describe a particular case of perceptual experience in which the following triad of claims is true: (i) The experience presents a given state of affairs (it has propositional content); (ii) The experience is veridical; (iii) The experience cannot yield the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains (even in the absence of relevant defeaters). This case involves an empirically well-studied phenomenon, namely perceptual hysteresis, which involves the maintenance of a perceptual experience with a relatively stable content over progressively degrading sensory stimulations.

Tracing Associations in Global Finance

Four decades ago, when financial globalization was attracting widespread attention, the few theoretical frameworks that were available to analyze it were relatively simplistic. Often, it was seen as an unstoppable quasi-natural expression of the expansion of market forces, operating independently of state power, which it was undermining. Today there is a rich variety of frameworks which help us understand the immensely complex entanglements of power, states, markets, and international institutions that constitute and govern global finance, including some insightful uses of actor-network theory (ANT) (for instance, Langley ⇓; Best forthcoming ⇓). In this contribution I highlight a number of unique contributions that ANT makes to our understanding of global finance. Actor-network theory focuses on the importance of micro-level connections among humans and “non-humans” such as other life-forms, technical artifacts, or physical objects. Latour (⇓:5) has advocated studying these types of associations rather than the social: to redefine sociology “not as the ‘science of the social’, but as the tracing of associations .” He argues that the social is too often used as a shorthand that obscures the painstaking and often fragile ways that collectivities are constructed and assembled. The social then can become “invisible, untraceable, ubiquitous, and total … It's only if forces are made of smaller ties, whose resistance can be tested one by one, that you might have a chance to modify a given state of affairs. To put it bluntly: if there is a society, then no politics is possible ” (Latour ⇓:250). ANT's insistence on tracing out associations is a valuable corrective to the common tendency to see global finance as involving large, powerful, unstoppable forces operating independently of humans. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that global finance is heavily dependent on careful, detailed coordination of particular humans and objects, and this …

Interpreting the Divyadhvani : On Why the Digambara Sect Is Right about the Nature of the Kevalin

One of the issues dividing the Digambara and Śvetāmbara sects of Jainism centers on the nature of the kevalin —where a kevalin is a being that has achieved kevalajñāna or omniscience. According to the Śvetāmbara sect the kevalin continues to act much like a normal human being (eating, preaching, walking, etc.) after his enlightenment. But the Digambara sect denies this. They claim that the kevalin ceases to act at the moment of his enlightenment. Reason is given here for thinking that the Digambara sect is right about the nature of the kevalin . It is argued that the kevalin is a trivialist, that is, someone who believes that everything is the case. According to Graham Priest, precisely because a trivialist believes everything, he is unable to act. Because he believes that a given state of affairs already obtains, the trivialist cannot form the intention to bring about that state of affairs. Why is the kevalin a trivialist? An answer is attempted by raising a paradox in Jain epistemology. According to various doctrinal sources, the kevalin is infallible and omniscient. But the mode of this knowledge is a priori, because the kevalin is causally isolated from the rest of reality. How is it possible for the kevalin to know everything infallibly without there being any connection between himself and the objects of his knowledge? The only solution to this paradox is to postulate that everything is true and that the kevalin believes everything to be true. It is then shown that this trivialist account of Jain epistemology coheres nicely with Jain logic and metaphysics. Given that the kevalin is a trivialist and given the conclusion that the trivialist cannot act, the kevalin cannot act. Therefore, the Digambara sect is right about the nature of the kevalin .

Principles of information organization in L2 use: Complex patterns of conceptual transfer

IRAL 51 (2013), 229–242 0019042X/2013/051-229 DOI 10.1515/iral-2013-0010 c ©Walter de Gruyter We will start the discussion of this special issue by placing the present domains of investigation within the broader context of the debate on languagespecificity in conceptualization processes. The debate has gained momentum in recent years, but central issues are still theoretically controversial and empirically inconsistent. The exact nature of the interrelation between language (in the sense of a specific language and specific linguistic structures) and the conceptual processes involved in language use is not clear. We can assume, on the basis of studies in this field and the focus on patterns of actual language usage, that the nature of this interrelation is highly dynamic in that it can differ across tasks, contexts, conditions and levels of complexity. The specific contribution of L2 studies to this debate is that it allows the comparison of processes of conceptualization which relate to the use of a specific language, to those of a different language, within an individual speaker. If cognitive processes during language tasks are somehow shaped by the categories of the respective mother tongue, speakers of a second language should – depending on the level of proficiency and the specific typological profile of the L1 (source language) and L2 (target language) – show divergent patterns from target standards with respect to the selection and organization of content for expression. Cook (1981) has already put the investigation of L2 users forward as a possible window on the language – cognition interrelation: “It would be highly useful if we could, so to speak, disengage the two processes of language and cognitive development and look at people whose level of thinking is out of step with their level of language (i.d second language learners)” (Cook 1981: 255; see also Bassetti and Cook 2011). When focusing on the dynamics of the interrelation between language and cognitive processing, it is useful to draw on a language productionmodel which spells out the different components and phases in the generation of a verbal representation of a given state of affairs. Levelt (1989) distinguishes three mod-

The primacy of thinking about possibilities in the development of reasoning.

One of the main tenets of the mental model theory is that when individuals reason, they think about possibilities. According to this theory, reasoning on what is possible from the truth of a sentence would be psychologically basic, whereas reasoning the other way round, on the truth or falsity of a sentence from a given state of affairs, would require some meta-ability. The present study tested the developmental corollary of this theory, which is that reasoning about possibilities should develop first, whereas the development of reasoning about truth-value should be delayed. For this purpose, 3rd, 6th, and 9th graders as well as adults were presented with tasks requiring them to evaluate either the possibilities compatible with conditional sentences or the truth-value of these sentences from these same possibilities. The results revealed 2 phenomena. First, the same developmental trend was observed in both tasks with 3 successive interpretational levels: conjunctive, biconditional, and then conditional. Second, there was a developmental lag between the 2 forms of reasoning--with developmental transitions from one level to the next occurring about 3 years later when reasoning about truth-value. The implications of these results for theories of cognitive development and of reasoning are discussed.

Bradley's Regress, Russell's States of Affairs, and Some General Remarks on the Problem

In this paper, I will give a presentation of Bradley's two main arguments against the reality of relations. Whereas one of his arguments is highly specific to Bradley's metaphysical background, his famous regress argument seems to pose a serious threat not only for ontological pluralism, but especially for states of affairs as an ontological category. Amongst the proponents of states-of-affairs ontologies two groups can be distinguished: One group holds states of affairs to be complexes consisting of their particular and universal constituents alone, the other holds that there has to be a "unifying relation" of some sort to establish the unity of a given state of affairs. Bradley's regress is often conceived to be a compelling argument against the first and for the latter. I will argue that the latter approaches have no real advantage over the simpler theories—neither in the light of Bradley's regress nor in other respects.

The Development of System Justification in the Developing World

System justification theorists have proposed that under some circumstances ‘‘people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it’’ Jost et al. (2003). These claims are contrary to theories that suggest that group members seek to enhance their self-interest or group-interest (e.g., realistic group conflict theory, rational choice models). The present study, conducted in one of the poorest countries in the world, Bolivia, tested if even the most impoverished people of the world will endorse beliefs justifying the status quo. A survey of 356 Bolivian school children found that low-status children endorse beliefs in the effectiveness of government in meeting the people’s needs more than their high-status counterparts. The results suggest that system-justifying beliefs are endorsed by low-status group members in even the most extreme cases of poverty, and even among the youngest politically aware members of society, and they raise questions about the capacity for true social change in those parts of the world that may need it the most.

Indirect anaphora in English and French: A cross-linguistic study of pronoun resolution

There is disagreement within both linguistics and psycholinguistics concerning the use of unaccented third person pronouns to refer to implicit referents. Some researchers (e.g., Erkü & Gundel, 1987) argue that it is impossible or highly marked, while others (e.g., Yule, 1982) maintain that it is not only acceptable but commonly used in normal discourse. However, both sides in the debate may be correct: while peripheral implicit referents (which evoke the means or the instrument by which a given state of affairs is established) are not easily referred to using pronouns, central or ‘nuclear’ implicit referents are. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments, involving different languages (English and French). The results of both experiments show that pronominal reference to implicit referents caused slower reading times compared to explicit referents for peripheral referents only. We discuss these results with respect to Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski’s (1993, 2000) Givenness Hierarchy.

A model for self‐organizing systems

Considers a conceptual model that leads to the notions of a “distance function” g(t) and that of a “controlled‐disturbance function” δ(t)=h(g(t)). Using these notions we begin a mathematical theory of a system that is self‐organizing to achieve a given state of affairs in a given environment. Obtains, in terms of the functions δ(t) and g(t), a condition under which the system always progresses towards the goal. We also establish the form of expression for the distance function g(t). This comes as a major tool in the proofs of the so‐called goal‐state‐description theorems. These theorems have results that facilitate the determination of the “working functions” of the self‐organizing system (SOS). When they exist, the “working functions” specify a goal‐path for the SOS to learn to adopt.

Social inequality and the reduction of ideological dissonance on behalf of the system: evidence of enhanced system justification among the disadvantaged

AbstractAccording to system justification theory, people are motivated to preserve the belief that existing social arrangements are fair, legitimate, justifiable, and necessary. The strongest form of this hypothesis, which draws on the logic of cognitive dissonance theory, holds that people who are most disadvantaged by the status quo would have the greatest psychological need to reduce ideological dissonance and would therefore be most likely to support, defend, and justify existing social systems, authorities, and outcomes. Variations on this hypothesis were tested in five US national survey studies. We found that (a) low‐income respondents and African Americans were more likely than others to support limitations on the rights of citizens and media representatives to criticize the government; (b) low‐income Latinos were more likely to trust in US government officials and to believe that ‘the government is run for the benefit of all’ than were high‐income Latinos; (c) low‐income respondents were more likely than high‐income respondents to believe that large differences in pay are necessary to foster motivation and effort; (d) Southerners in the USA were more likely to endorse meritocratic belief systems than were Northerners and poor and Southern African Americans were more likely to subscribe to meritocratic ideologies than were African Americans who were more affluent and from the North; (e) low‐income respondents and African Americans were more likely than others to believe that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary; and (f) stronger endorsement of meritocratic ideology was associated with greater satisfaction with one's own economic situation. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the dissonance‐based argument that people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it. Implications for theories of system justification, cognitive dissonance, and social change are also discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Topics, assertions, and additive words: how L2 learners get from information structure to target-language syntax

The article compares the integration of topic-related additive words at different stages of untutored L2 acquisition. Data stem from an additive-elicitation task that was designed in order to capture topic-related additive words in a context that is at the same time controlled for the underlying information structure and nondeviant from other kinds of narrative discourse. We relate the distinction between stressed and nonstressed forms of the German scope particles and adverbials auch 'also', noch 'another', wieder 'again', and immer noch 'still' to a uniform, information-structure-based principle: the stressed variants have scope over the topic information of the relevant utterances. It is then the common function of these additive words to express the additive link between the topic of the present utterance and some previous topic for which the same state of affairs is claimed to hold. This phenomenon has often been referred to as contrastive topic, but contrary to what this term suggests, these topic elements are by no means deviant from the default in coherent discourse. In the underlying information structure, the validity of some given state of affairs for the present topic must be under discussion. Topic-related additive words then express that the state of affairs indeed applies to this topic, their function therefore coming close to the function of assertion marking. While this functional correspondence goes along with the formal organization of the basic stages of untutored second-language acquisition, its expression brings linguistic constraints into conflict when the acquisition of finiteness pushes learners to reorganize their utterances according to target-language syntax.