Implicit Commitment Research Articles

Implicit commitment in theory choice

The proper evaluation of a theory’s virtues seems to require taking into account what the theory is indirectly or implicitly committed to, in addition to what it explicitly says. Most extant proposals for criteria of theory choice in the literature spell out the relevant notion of implicit commitment via some notion of entailment. I show that such criteria behave implausibly in application to theories that differ over matters of entailment. A recent defence by Howard Peacock of such a criterion against this objection is examined and rejected. I go on to a develop a better proposal on which, roughly speaking, a theory is counted committed to a claim if and only if its best fully explicit extension is explicitly committed to the claim. Such extensions in turn are evaluated by ordinary standards of theory choice adapted to the case of theories assumed to articulate their intended content in a fully explicit fashion.

Do customers respond to the disclosure of internal control weakness?

In this study, we investigate the effects of firms' internal control weakness (ICW) disclosures on their customers. We hypothesize that ICW disclosure adversely affects customers' perceptions of firms' ability and incentive to honor implicit commitments to customers, and as such, customers are less willing to buy from such firms. We thus expect a decline in firms' sales growth after ICW disclosure. We find a significant decline in sales growth subsequent to Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) Section 404 ICW disclosure after controlling for firms' past sales growth and other factors affecting sales performance and internal control. This result is robust to the consideration of selection bias in ICW disclosure. We also find that the decline is more pronounced for firms with company-level ICW disclosure, with industrial customers, in the durable goods industries, with high research and development (R&D) intensity, or without subsequent remediation of ICW. Taken together, these results are consistent with the argument that ICW concerns customers more when the implicit contracts between the firms and their customers are more intensive.

Embodied Cognition, Representationalism, and Mechanism: A Review and Analysis

AbstractEmbodied cognition has attracted significant attention within cognitive science and related fields in recent years. It is most noteworthy for its emphasis on the inextricable connection between mental functioning and embodied activity and thus for its departure from standard cognitive science's implicit commitment to the unembodied mind. This article offers a review of embodied cognition's recent empirical and theoretical contributions and suggests how this movement has moved beyond standard cognitive science. The article then clarifies important respects in which embodied cognition has not departed fundamentally from the standard view. A shared commitment to representationalism, and ultimately, mechanism, suggest that the standard and embodied cognition movements are more closely related than is commonly acknowledged. Arguments against representationalism and mechanism are reviewed and an alternative position that does not entail these conceptual undergirdings is offered.

Hamlet and the Ghost: A Joint Sense of Time

A deconstruction of Hamlet's ontological metaphor—"the time is out of joint"—indicates Shakespeare has made an implicit commitment to a conception of time that is explicitly and systematically developed by Kant's transcendental philosophy. Consequently, a retro reading explains how Hamlet temporarily identifies with the Ghost's temporal-categorical mind-set, and how Hamlet, who has been acutely aware of the passage of time, loses track of time during the prayer/closet scene sequence. More specifically, I assert that Hamlet's identification with the Ghost's categorical sense of what is possible and impossible in accordance with the passage of outer time is what causes his inaction.

The Neuroscience of Learning: Beyond the Hebbian Synapse

From the traditional perspective of associative learning theory, the hypothesis linking modifications of synaptic transmission to learning and memory is plausible. It is less so from an information-processing perspective, in which learning is mediated by computations that make implicit commitments to physical and mathematical principles governing the domains where domain-specific cognitive mechanisms operate. We compare the properties of associative learning and memory to the properties of long-term potentiation, concluding that the properties of the latter do not explain the fundamental properties of the former. We briefly review the neuroscience of reinforcement learning, emphasizing the representational implications of the neuroscientific findings. We then review more extensively findings that confirm the existence of complex computations in three information-processing domains: probabilistic inference, the representation of uncertainty, and the representation of space. We argue for a change in the conceptual framework within which neuroscientists approach the study of learning mechanisms in the brain.

Distributing Epistemic Authority: Refining Norton’s Pragmatist Approach to Environmental Decision-Making

Environmental pragmatists are committed to analyzing questions of environmental policy. Bryan Norton's pragmatic critique of environmental decision-making shows how an implicit commitment to the fact/value distinction has hindered productive environmental action. Nonetheless, Norton, as well as the majority of environmental ethicists, have devoted more attention to theorizing value disagreements as a primary cause of controversy than to examining epistemic structures. A case study demonstrates why and how Norton's procedural account may be supplemented with sensitive attention to the construction of epistemic authority in environmental disputes. I recommend supporting the development of local knowledges and just distributions of epistemic authority.1. Pragmatism and Environmental Policy-MakingPragmatist environmental philosophers have made noteworthy contributions to persistent philosophical problems in environmental ethics, such as the source of value in nature, the nature of our moral obligations to the environment and to living creatures, and the objectivity of environmental value. But pragmatists have an additional interest beyond these ethical and ontological questions - they believe that philosophers can help make ideas clear in order to improve policy and action. To this end, pragmatists have contributed to debates in agricultural biotechnology (Thompson 2003), ecological restoration (Light 2000), water policy (Thompson 1996), and livestock production (McKenna 2004).In doing so, pragmatist environmental philosophers are following the lead of earlier pragmatists such as John Dewey who recognized that pragmatism can and ought to have real-life practical consequences and should not be limited to debates of a merely academic or scholastic nature. From this standpoint, contemporary pragmatists can contribute to the resolution of environmental problems by examining the process of inquiry and by evaluating procedures for political participation. Thus, pragmatists are well positioned to expand environmental philosophy beyond its current focus on ethics. A broader scope for environmental philosophy ought to include both an epistemological examination of what is known about natural environments and the application of social and political theory to evaluate and improve environmental decisionmaking. Such pragmatist contributions will:a. avoid, disintegrate, demystify, and disarm confusing metaphysical disputes,b. investigate how epistemic practices operate to resolve or, on the other hand, to amplify environmental problems,c. search for practical solutions to environmental controversies that are acceptable to all parties, andd. encourage participants in inquiry to be open to social learning and change.2. Bryan Norton's Pragmatic ProceduralismA good example of this is Bryan Norton wide-ranging account of public environmental decision-making in his recent book Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management (2005). Drawing on Deweyan pragmatism, he develops a procedural framework for reaching democratic resolutions to environmental problems. Norton believes that one of the largest obstacles to resolving environmental controversies and to implementing solutions to environmental problems is that people fail to communicate. The role of the philosopher here is twofold: first, to outline and justify general procedures for inquiry and action; and second, to help the parties to disputes make their goals clear as they work toward mutually acceptable (in the ideal case, win-win) solutions.Both of these philosophical goals have Deweyan roots - in other words, Norton has contextualized Deweyan inquiry for the environmental policy arena. To this end, Norton proposes that participants in environmental problem solving pick what he calls indicators. An indicator is a measurable quantity that is tied to an environmental goal. Importantly, Norton holds that the ideological basis for the goal is not directly relevant. …

What are centered worlds?

David Lewis argues that centered worlds give us a way to capture de se, or self‐locating, contents in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In recent years, centered worlds have also gained other uses in areas ranging widely from metaphysics to ethics. This paper raises a problem for centered worlds and discusses the costs and benefits of different solutions. The present investigation into the nature of centered worlds helps to explicate potentially problematic implicit commitments of the theories that employ them. In addition, this investigation reveals that the conception of centered worlds widely attributed to David Lewis is not only problematic, but in fact not his.

Representation and the Straightjacketing of Curriculum's Complicated Conversation: The pedagogy of Pontypool's minor language

Reconceptualist and post‐reconceptualist curriculum scholars have drawn upon the notion of a complicated curriculum conversation as a means to describe the imbricated, pluralist, and eclectic character of curriculum theorizing. Insofar as this curriculum conversation is accomplished via language however, it remains wed to a particular representational logic restricting what might be thought. This essay explores the question of what it means to theorize curriculum when the very idea of a complicated curriculum conversation begins to fall into cliché. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, this essay analyzes three representational commitments of contemporary curriculum theorizing, addressing how each are inadequate for the theorization of difference or the instantiation of the radically new. Against the implicit commitment to conformity alive in the curriculum field, this essay posits an ethics of disidentification exemplified via Bruce McDonald's horror film Pontypool. It is via such a tactic of productive disidentification, this essay claims, that thought might be unfettered from the orthodoxies of common sense, becoming in this way more adequate for opening spaces unanticipated by contemporary representational regimes.

Ex ante Fairness in Criminal Law and Procedure

In Furman v. Georgia, the United States Supreme Court announced that it would not tolerate a capital sentencing regime that imposed death sentences in a seriously arbitrary fashion. The question I ask in this paper is whether we should in fact object to arbitrariness in punishment. The answer I propose is that under plausibly adverse conditions, we might not object to arbitrary penal outcomes, because under those conditions a fair distribution of punishment would be one that equalizes chances across a class of similarly situated criminals. In particular, fairness may require no more than a rough equalization of ex ante chances under conditions of resource scarcity, an inability to rank claims reliably by comparative desert, and a pressing need for punishment to be imposed. I call this an ex ante theory of fairness. The central virtue of ex ante fairness is that it is capable of reconciling parsimony in punishment with equity in its distribution, even when claims about who deserves what are deeply contested. Adopting an ex ante standard of fairness means that a concern for fair treatment of the guilty need not blind us to the realities of the severe resource constraints faced by American criminal justice, and vice versa. After laying out the argument for ex ante fairness in general terms, I proceed to show how several prominent features of American criminal law and procedure—the Supreme Court’s capital jurisprudence, prosecutorial discretion, judicial sentencing discretion, and “strict” criminal liability—all exhibit an implicit commitment to an equalization of chances rather than of outcomes.

A design for securing data delivery in mesh-based peer-to-peer streaming

While mesh-based approaches have emerged as the dominant architecture for P2P streaming, the performance of these approaches under malicious participants has received little attention. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of the implicit commitments made by nodes when peering with others. We show that when these commitments are not enforced explicitly, they can be exploited by malicious nodes to conduct attacks that degrade the data delivery service. We consider mesh-based specific P2P attacks where malicious nodes deliberately become neighbors of a large number of nodes and do not upload data to them, or malicious nodes deliberately delay packets till they are not useful anymore for the application. We focus on these attacks given the limited attention paid to them, and the significant impact they can have on overall data delivery. We present mechanisms that can enhance the resilience of mesh-based streaming against such attacks. A key part of our solution is a novel reputation scheme that combines feedback from both the control and data planes of the overlay. We evaluate our design with real-world experiments on the PlanetLab testbed and show that our design is effective. Even when there are 30% attackers, nodes receive 92% of the data with our schemes, however without our schemes they only receive 10% of the data.

Emergent properties in the work of Friedrich Hayek

The term ‘emergence’ features only infrequently on the work of Friedrich Hayek, and then almost always merely as a synonym for ‘spontaneous order’. The argument of this paper is that Hayek's accounts both of the working of the human mind, and also of the spontaneous order of the market, rely heavily – if almost always implicitly – on the philosophical notion of emergence, that is on the idea that when certain elements or parts stand in particular relations to one another, the whole that is formed has properties that are not possessed by those elements or parts taken in isolation. The implications of Hayek's implicit commitment to the notion of emergence for the possibility of downward causation in social life are considered. The differences between ‘emergence’ and ‘spontaneous order’ are also highlighted.

Is epistemic expressivism incompatible with inquiry?

Expressivist views of an area of discourse encourage us to ask not about the nature of the relevant kinds of values but rather about the nature of the relevant kind of evaluations. Their answer to the latter question typically claims some interesting disanalogy between those kinds of evaluations and descriptions of the world. It does so in hope of providing traction against naturalism-inspired ontological and epistemological worries threatening more ‘realist’ positions. This is a familiar position regarding ethical discourse; however, some authors (e.g. Field 1996, 1998, 2009; Heller 1999; Gibbard 2003; Blackburn 1996; Chrisman 2007) have recently defended a similar view regarding epistemic discourse. Others (especially Kvanvig 2003; Cuneo 2007; Lynch 2009) have argued that epistemic expressivism faces special problems, not necessarily attaching to expressivism about other areas. Their arguments differ in interesting ways, but the common strategy is an attempt to show that the very sort of meta-epistemological theorizing needed to articulate and establish epistemic expressivism involves the epistemic expressivist in some sort of internal incoherence or self-defeat. That is, they think that articulating or defending the position requires implicit commitment to the negation of one of the positions’ core tenets. This paper responds to those arguments on behalf of epistemic expressivism, suggesting that they each misunderstand what is crucial to epistemic expressivism. By responding to these arguments, we hope to achieve more clarity about what epistemic expressivism is and why one might want to endorse it in a meta-epistemology.

TWO KINDS OF ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT

There are two different ways of understanding the notion of ‘ontological commitment’. A question about ‘what is said to be’ by a theory or ‘what a theory says there is’ deals with ‘explicit’ commitment; a question about the ontological costs or preconditions of the truth of a theory concerns ‘implicit’ commitment. I defend a conception of ontological commitment as implicit commitment, and argue that existentially quantified idioms in natural language are implicitly, but not explicitly, committing. I use the distinction between the two kinds of ontological commitment to diagnose a flaw in a widely used argument to the effect that existential quantification is not ontologically committing.

Wrenching from Context: The Manipulation of Commitments

This article analyses the fallacy of wrenching from context, using the dialectical notions of commitment and implicature as tools. The data, a set of key examples, is used to sharpen the conceptual borderlines around the related fallacies of straw man, accent, misquotation, and neglect of qualifications. According to the analysis, the main characteristics of wrenching from context are the manipulation of the meaning of the other’s statement through devices such as the use of misquotations, selective quotations, and quoting out of context. The theoretical tools employed in the analysis are pragmatic theories of meaning and a dialectical model of commitment, used to explain how and why a standpoint is distorted. The analysis is based on a conception of fallacies as deceptive strategic moves in a game of dialogue. As a consequence, our focus is not only on misquotations as distortions of meaning, but on how they are used as dialectical tools to attack an opponent or win a dispute. Wrenching from context is described as a fallacy of unfairly attributing a commitment to another party that he never held. Its power as a deceptive argumentation tactic is based on complex mechanisms of implicit commitments and on their misemployment to improperly suggest an attribution of commitment.

Towards a Philosophy of the History of Thought?

AbstractThere are a large number of disciplines that are interested in the theoretical aspects of the history of thought. Their perspectives and subjects may vary, but fundamentally they have a common research interest: the history of human thinking and its products. Despite this, they are studied in relative isolation. I argue that having different subjects as specific objects of research, such as political or scientific thinking, is not a valid justification for the separation. I propose the formation of a new integrated field of study, the philosophy of the history of thought. Its most fundamental questions can be taken to be: 1) What is the basic theoretical unit in the history of thought? 2) How does change take place and how can it be described? 3) What kind of reasons are there for change? Why is there a change in a particular case? The existing confusions around the commitments and basic vocabulary used in contemporary historiography makes the establishment of this field important. Recognizing that there is such a discipline is necessary in order to enable concentration on the fundamental theoretical issues. It is likely that progress on theoretical questions and better awareness of the implicit commitments would have a positive impact on historical practice.

Intertemporal Dynamics of Corporate Voluntary Disclosures

ABSTRACTWhile empirical evidence alludes to the intertemporal nature of corporate voluntary disclosures, most of the existing theory analyzes firms' voluntary disclosure decisions within single‐period settings. Introducing a repeated, multiperiod, disclosure setting, we study the extent to which firms' strategic disclosure behavior in the past affects their prosperity to provide voluntary disclosures in the future. Our analysis demonstrates that by voluntarily disclosing private information firms make an implicit commitment to provide similar disclosures in the future, and therefore are less willing to voluntarily disclose information in the first place. This effect is expected to be of larger magnitude for firms (1) with a long history of absence of voluntary disclosures and an impressive past operating performance, or (2) that operate in a relatively stable and predictable business and information environment, or (3) whose managers have a long time horizon and a high degree of risk aversion.

Ontology and Epistemology in Political Marketing

Ontological and epistemological concerns, considerations about what is real and the status of the claims to knowledge that flow in relation to that reality, necessarily underpin all areas of political analysis. As such it is important to be clear about these positions in order that (1) rigorous analysis can be developed and (2) the extent to which models and frameworks that are used can be regarded as scientific or heuristic. While scientific models function to facilitate predictions and generalisations, heuristic frameworks have the capacity to describe and provide understanding. The mainstream political marketing literature is dominated by an implicit commitment to science and positivism. This entails the use of theories, models, and frameworks to generate predictions and a truth about the nature of political reality. However, these assumptions remain largely implicit and in places, this makes for inconsistency and contradictory claims within the literature. This article highlights the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of the mainstream political marketing literature, and argues that while this literature provides a comprehensive description of political reality, thereby performing an important heuristic function, this should not be conflated with prescription for, or prediction of, political behaviour.

Balance of payments crises under inflation targeting

This paper analyzes a small open economy model under inflation targeting. It shows why such a monetary regime is vulnerable to speculative attacks that take place over a short period rather than instantaneously. The speed at which the regime collapses, and the extent of reserve losses, are increasing in the central bank's explicit or implicit commitment to intervene in the foreign exchange market. Attacks are therefore ranked, from most to least severe, as follows: Exchange rate targeting, CPI inflation targeting, domestic nontradables inflation targeting, and money targeting. Under inflation targeting the size of the attack is increasing in the tradables consumption share.

Balance of Payments Crises Under Inflation Targeting

This paper analyzes a small open economy model under inflation targeting. It shows why such a monetary regime is vulnerable to speculative attacks that take place over a short period rather than instantaneously. The speed at which the regime collapses, and the extent of reserve losses, are increasing in the central bank's explicit or implicit commitment to intervene in the foreign exchange market. Attacks are therefore ranked, from most to least severe, as follows: Exchange rate targeting, CPI inflation targeting, domestic nontradables inflation targeting, and money targeting. Under inflation targeting the size of the attack is increasing in the tradables consumption share.

Balance of Payments Crises Under Inflation Targeting

This paper analyzes a small open economy model under inflation targeting. It shows why such a monetary regime is vulnerable to speculative attacks that take place over a short period rather than instantaneously. The speed at which the regime collapses, and the extent of reserve losses, are increasing in the central bank's explicit or implicit commitment to intervene in the foreign exchange market. Attacks are therefore ranked, from most to least severe, as follows: Exchange rate targeting, CPI inflation targeting, domestic nontradables inflation targeting, and money targeting. Under inflation targeting the size of the attack is increasing in the tradables consumption share.