Inconsistent Arguments Research Articles

Fiscal policy when monetary policy is tied to the mast

This paper analyses the time inconsistency problem of both exchange rate and fiscal policy in a small open economy. The equilibrium under discretion is characterised by inflation and a deficit. Commitment of the exchange-rate instrument only, e.g. through membership in a European monetary union with low inflation, contributes to price stability but may increase the deficit. Whether the government will prefer this outcome to the discretionary one will depend on the structure of the economy. We conclude that the time inconsistency argument strengthens the case for simultaneous commitment of monetary and fiscal policy for inflation-prone countries joining a monetary union.

The Sex Right: A Legal History of the Marital Rape Exemption

How did the American legal elite come to reject the husband's privilege to rape his wife. What is the significance of that rejection. This essay traces theories justifying the marital rape exemption from the 17th century, focusing on the period following World War II. The history illustrates how the postwar legal elite's limited progressivism created inconsistent arguments that left the exemption open for attack, an attack that came from within the 1970s feminist movement. Radical feminist rhetoric about sexuality, rape, and marriage pulled away the last layer of theoretical support for the exemption and denounced the sex right it left exposed underneath. Connections in the 1970s, both literal and conceptual, between radical feminists and the legal elite allowed the feminist movement to discredit the exemption within that elite. To interpret the significance of that rejection, I consider how legal language affects people's senses of self. I argue that legal words like “rape,” “marriage,” and “husband” validate and inform people's, specifically husbands', identities in marriage. By changing the meanings of those legal words, legal reform can eventually change human behavior.

Rational Rhetoric in Politics

During the debate over ratifying the U.S. Constitution, both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists offered inconsistent arguments. They violated principles of transitivity (e.g., statements such as “A furthers B” and “B furthers C” coexist with the statement “A hinders C”). Using cognitive mapping to extract the network of causal assertions offered during the debate, and transaction resource theory to identify game-theoretic structures in these maps, including coordination, bargaining, and social dilemma games, we find that violations of transitivity have only two sources. They arise in bargaining games, where concessions not only entail costs but also reduce the prospect for a costly conflict, and social dilemmas, where cooperation not only entails individual costs but also increases the amount of public good produced. Thus conflicting valuations of concessions and cooperation generate an ambivalence that is reflected in transitivity violations. Hence these violations serve as markers within the maps that indicate the presence of either bargaining games or social dilemmas. These games also reflect situations in which debaters have incentives to engage in strategic manipulation of information.

Liturgiese koorsang as wyse van kerklike verkondiging: ’n Prinsipiële besinning vanuit hermeneutieshomiletiese perspektief

Liturgical choral song as a form of ecclesiastical proclamation: A fundamental reflection from a hermeneutical-homiletical perspective Certain reformed churches have, traditionally, disapproved of choral singing. This has been due either to one-sided or inconsistent theological arguments, or to overreaction to bad choral singing. This article strives to show that, in principle, there is no difference between the kerugma of preaching and that of a choral work, and that liturgical choral singing can be regarded as a form of church proclamatioru Proclamation is examined from a hermeneutical-homiletical point of view, in order to show that there are no fundamental differences between the ‘hearing’ of a choral work and listening to an ‘ordinary’ spoken sermon.

Interpretive Sociology and Management Accounting Research — A Critical Review

Management accounting researchers have borrowed eclectically from interpretive sociology. Such borrowing has been associated with ethnographic studies of accounting in action in particular organisational contexts. However, the eclectic nature of the borrowing has also resulted in little theory development and inconsistent arguments. Deeper theoretical and empirical analysis is required in order that testable, “universal” relationships about management accounting processes may be developed and investigated in the future.

Status Inconsistency and Moral Issues

The emergence of the New Christian Right (NCR) as a force in the contemporary American political arena has raised once again the question of how to explain the origin of moral reform movements, and the role that religion plays in underwriting and sustaining them. The dean of American political sociologists, Seymour Martin Lipset, in keeping with his established views on right-wing politics, has argued that the Moral Majority phenomenon is a manifestation attributable to the threat that modernity poses for the values and folkways of sectarian Protestants. Attendant resentments, the theory goes, are transmuted into a politics of moral outrage (Lipset & Raab, 1981; see also Gannon, 1981, and Shupe & Stacey, 1982; cf. Harper & Leicht, 1984). As Wood and Hughes (1984) point out, Lipset's perspective traces the urge for moral reform to the status discontent accruing to groups that are in transit from the center to the periphery of a society. That view, however, is not unrelated to status inconsistency arguments which predict various individual reactive behaviors (including political activism) from status discrepancy. Using data from seven General Social Surveys, Wood and Hughes (1984) find evidence to sustain a status inconsistency interpretation of attitudes in the general population toward the distribution of pornography. They conclude that no special theories concerned with status frustration or status deprivation are required to account for the social base of moral-reform movements (96).1 Regarding the general reform movement exemplified by the Moral Majority phenomenon, it has been argued that by 1980 the Fundamentalists spearheading the movement were not experiencing a rapid loss of respect, prestige, or deference to their ways. On the contrary, they comprise a culturally disvalued group that was pushed to the edge of the American public arena over fifty years ago and is now taking advantage of fissures in the liberal establishment to regain some of the ground lost in the twenties and thirties. Thus, a sense of cultural and political empowerment and not resentment

The informational basis of social judgements: Under what conditions are inconsistent trait descriptions processed as easily as consistent ones?

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the conditions under which an effort k made to reconcile inconsistent arguments in a message. It assumes, first, that reconciliation requires additional processing; and second, that it does not occur automatically but only when the set of inconsistent arguments are informative and must be integrated in the representation of the judgment. Subjects were given trait descriptions that varied in consistency as well as in informativeness. Their task was to use these descriptions in forming a judgement about a hypothetical person. It was found that the impact of consistency on the ease with which the judgement was made, as indicated by its latency, was more pronounced when the descriptions were highly informative than when they were relatively uninformative: It took much longer for an inconsistent set of trait descriptions to give rise to a judgement than a consistent set if the set was informative; if the descriptions were uninformative, the difference in the latency of judgement diminished considerably. These effects support the hypothesis that the amount of processing invested in reconciling inconsistencies among arguments is determined by the informativeness of these arguments. After making their judgement, subjects were given a surprise recognition memory test. The results provided further support for the notion that highly informative arguments are elaborated to a larger extent than uninformative arguments, namely, recognition memory for the former was superior to that for the latter.

Product Differentiation and the Consistency of Monopolistic Competition: A Spatial Perspective

IN RECENT years researchers have increasingly recognized the similarities between problems in spatial economics and problems of product differentiation in monopolistic competition. Authors working from the spatial side have tried to outline some of the implications of spatial economics for traditional microtheory. At the same time, other writers such as Lancaster [17] have developed models of product differentiation which have a spatial flavor. It has become apparent that spatial economics can provide considerable insight into monopolistic competition. In this paper we address a long smoldering debate in the theory of the firm concerning whether or not monopolistic competition is a distinctly different case from perfect competition and monopoly. The issue was ignited by Demsetz [8], [9], [10] who questioned both the capacity theorem of monopolistic competition and the consistency of the underlying assumptions. Later Barzel [1] and Schmalensee [22] presented analyses that appeared to have successfully doused Demsetz' criticism of the excess capacity theorem. Recently, however, the debate has been rekindled by Greenhut [14], Ohta [21] and Murphy [20]. Most of the disagreement has been encamped around the excess capacity/efficiency question. A separate but related series of papers in the spatial competition literature (e.g. Eaton and Lipsey [11], [12], [13], and Capozza and Van Order [7]) has challenged the consistency of the free entry and zero profits assumptions. The link between the Demsetz inconsistency arguments and similar reasoning in the spatial competition literature is most apparent if one views product differentiation, a basis of monopolistic competition, as a locational concept (see for example Lovell [18], Eaton and Lipsey [13]). Indeed product differentiation in many large firms is a marketing problem where modern methods call for positioning products in the consumers' n-dimensional characteristics space. We try to demonstrate that monopolistic competition is indeed a distinct structure. We use a spatial model where monopolistic competition is the typical intermediate case while monopoly and perfect competition are extreme cases. We then argue that product differentiation, which has been the usual rationale for monopolistic competition, can be modelled in a manner analogous to the spatial model, implying a large degree of generality than our model.

Differentiation of arguments in relation to attitude, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

77 male and 81 female undergraduates wrote arguments favouring American intervention in South Vietnam and arguments opposing American intervention. They had 5 minutes to write each set. Half the Ss wrote pro arguments fust, then con arguments. The other half did the reverse. Ss then completed an attitude scale concerned with American intervention, Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale, and Budner's test of intolerance of ambiguity. As predicted, Ss reported a greater number of arguments consistent with their attitude than arguments not consistent with their attitude. Contrary to prediction, Ss who were high in dogmatism or high in intolerance of ambiguity did not report relatively more consistent than inconsistent arguments when compared to Ss low in dogmatism or low in intolerance of ambiguity. Nor did they report a relatively low number of arguments inconsistent with attitude. Results were related to those of a previous study and discussed in terms of information reception and processing.

British Magazines and the Oregon Question

7HE FIRST IMPRESSION, we believe, of any rational and tolerably impartial man, after wading through the protracted discussions and voluminous publications on what is called the Oregon Question, must be that of wonder at the wild chaos of contradictory facts and the tedious labyrinth of inconsistent arguments in which the claims of the United States have been enveloped, and of regret as well as surprise at finding so many statesmen of eminent ability and of the most respectable character exercising their misapplied ingenuity in support of so unreasonable a case.'