Minimalist View Research Articles

Consumers’ Views of Feng Shui: Antecedents and Behavioral Consequences

ABSTRACTConsumers have three views about Feng Shui: instrumental, spiritual, and minimalist. According to the instrumental view, Feng Shui arrangements can affect luck and fortune. The spiritual view treats Feng Shui as part of one's spiritual life and cultural identification. The minimalist view dismisses Feng Shui as superstition. We developed psychometric scales for measuring these three views and the intention to make Feng Shui–related purchase, and conducted two studies to establish the reliability and validity of these scales. The participants in Study 1 were 331 university students; 180 working adults were the participants in Study 2. These three views of Feng Shui have different antecedents. Their effects on the intention to make Feng Shui–related purchase are also different. The effect of the instrumental view is positive and the strongest, but that of the spiritual view and the minimalist view is weakly positive and negative, respectively. The marketing implications of these findings are discussed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Political Economy of Autocratic Constitutions

Austria adopted a new constitution in 1934, as did Portugal in 1933, Poland in 1935, Turkey in 1924, and Brazil in 1937 and again in 1967. Besides the fact that these are constitutions adopted in countries characterized by colorful political histories marked by periods of both drastic change and hard-fought stability, what do their constitutions share in common? They were adopted under dictatorship. Although all of these countries eventually transitioned to democracy, these constitutions were not designed to bring about democracy – although some of them served, decades after being adopted, as vehicles for introducing elections and checks on executive authority. Why do autocrats adopt constitutions? This chapter argues that the fundamental reason is that constitutions can help dictators consolidate power, increase investment, and boost economic development – all while generating a steady flow of rents for themselves and their cronies without empowering challengers that might undermine their authority. This claim may come as a surprise to most readers. It certainly challenges the status-quo, minimalist view that an autocratic constitution is merely window dressing that provides lip service to the rule of law and rights without the sincere intention to enforce them (see Posner and Young 2007, and Chapter 1 of this volume). It also challenges the view that in a dictatorship, a constitution is a formality and afterthought that merely announces that the dictator's authority is supreme and formally and publicly announces his political agenda (Brown 2002).

Priming Attitudes toward Feng Shui

Previous research has identified three fundamentally different attitudes toward Feng Shui: the instrumental view, the spiritual view, and the minimalist view. An experiment was conducted to test the prediction that each of these three attitudes can be activated in people by “priming” them with related concepts. As predicted, priming people with concepts to do with uncertainties and ups and downs in life led them to a higher level of agreement with the instrumental view of Feng Shui. Priming people with concepts of nature and cultural identity led to a higher level of agreement with the spiritual view of Feng Shui. Finally, priming people with concepts to do with school life led to a higher level of agreement with the minimalist view of Feng Shui. We discuss the implications of these findings for business practitioners.

Photon geodesics in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies

The Hubble radius is a particular manifestation of the Universe's gravitational horizon, R_h(t_0)=c/H_0, the distance beyond which physical processes remain unobservable to us at the present epoch. Based on recent observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with WMAP, and ground-based and HST searches for Type Ia supernovae, we now know that R_h(t_0)~13.5 Glyr. This coincides with the maximum distance (ct_0~13.7 Glyr) light could have traveled since the big bang. However, the physical meaning of R_h is still not universally understood or accepted, though the minimalist view holds that it is merely the proper distance at which the rate of cosmic recession reaches the speed of light c. Even so, it is sometimes argued that we can see light from sources beyond R_h, the claim being that R_h lies at a redshift of only ~2, whereas the CMB was produced at a much greater redshift (~1100). In this paper, we build on recent developments with the gravitational radius by actually calculating null geodesics for a broad range of FRW cosmologies, to show---at least in the specific cases we consider here, including LCDM---that no photon trajectories reaching us today could have ever crossed R_h(t_0). We therefore confirm that the current Hubble radius, contrary to a commonly held misconception, is indeed the limit to our observability. We find that the size of the visible universe in LCDM, measured as a proper distance, is approximately 0.45ct_0.

Public Meeting Facilitation

During the record 2009 flood, the city of Fargo, North Dakota, United States held daily televised public meetings. Unknown to many citizens, the city also held private premeetings to prepare for the public meetings. The present study examined city leaders’ naïve theories of meeting facilitation in light of a minimalist view of public meetings ( McComas, 2001 ). Interviews of city leaders during and after the flood, as well as meeting transcripts, were analyzed. Findings indicated that city leaders believed debate about controversial issues should be contained within private premeetings, where leaders planned how to be open with citizens during public meetings. City leaders also believed public meetings had to portray a calm yet urgent image for the public. City leaders used micro-level (e.g., humor, explicit vigilant messages, and metaphor) and macro-level (transparency) processes to communicatively accomplish their desires.

Perspectivas minimalistas en la investigación psicolingüística

A particular approach to the study of psycholinguistic processes is presented, which is based on a minimalist conception of language. A procedural model of language acquisition is sketched, which reconciles infants speech processing and the idea of innately guided learning with a minimalist view of the initial state of language acquisition in an account of the bootstrapping problem. Language acquisition is viewed as proceeding with the progressive specification of formal features of the functional categories of the lexicon. The possibility of a minimalist derivation to be incorporated in a sentence production and/or comprehension model is discussed. Possible sources of language impairment, as manifes ted in SLI (Specific Language Impairment) syndrome, are considered in the light of this integrative approach. Reference is made to experimental work carried out in Brazilian Portuguese, with some extension to European Portuguese and River-Plate Spanish.

Christianity, Private Power, and the Law from Decius to Constantine: The Minimalist View

This essay considers the development in the third and fourth centuries of the idea of a "universal church" and the transition from private power to corporate institutional polity as the basis of authority within the churches, in light of "minimalist revolution" in our understanding of Roman law and government over the last few decades.

Bound‐Variable Anaphora and Left Branch Condition

Abstract. Since the seminal work of Reinhart (1976, 1984), it has been recognized that the structural configuration for bound-variable anaphora is that of c-command. One way of deriving this variable-binding condition is to capitalize on the similarities between traces and bound pronouns and to analyze the latter as spelled-out traces (see Aoun 1982, also Hornstein 2001 for a somewhat different implementation of Aoun’s idea). Taking Hornstein’s (2001) analysis of bound pronouns in English as a starting point, I account for some puzzling differences between English and Serbo-Croatian in the domain of the intrasentential pronominal anaphora. By establishing the correlation between the way English and Serbo-Croatian behave with respect to the Pronoun Insertion strategy, on the one hand, and the Left Branch Condition (Ross 1967/1986), on the other, I argue that the differences under consideration boil down to the presence or absence of a DP-layer in a given language. The validity of this hypothesis is tested on a broader set of crosslinguistic data, including data from Dutch, Latin, Russian, and Spanish. The analysis I put forth supports the minimalist view of binding (Hornstein 2001, 2006; Grohmann 2003) as well as accounts of left branch extraction languages as D-less (Uriagereka 1988; Corver 1992; Bošković 2005, 2008).

Business Ethics and the ‘End of History’ in Corporate Law

Henry Hansmann has claimed we have reached the “end of history” in corporate law, organized around the “widespread normative consensus that corporate managers should act exclusively in the economic interests of shareholders.” In this paper, I examine Hansmann’s own argument in support of this view, in order to draw out its implications for some of the traditional concerns of business ethicists about corporate social responsibility. The centerpiece of Hansmann’s argument is the claim that ownership of the firm is most naturally exercised by the group able to achieve the lowest agency costs, and that homogeneity of interest within the ownership group is the most important factor in achieving lower costs. He defends this claim through a study of cooperatives, attempting to show that homogeneity is the source of the competitive advantage most often enjoyed by shareholders over other constituency groups, such as workers, suppliers and customers, when it comes to exercising control over the firm. Some business ethicists, impressed by this argument, have taken it to be a vindication of Milton Friedman’s claim that profit-maximization is the only “social responsibility” of management. I would like to suggest that this conclusion does not follow, and that the “Hansmann argument” lends itself to a less minimalist view, what I refer to as a “market failures” approach to business ethics.

On the Meaning of Connectives (Apropos of a Non-Necessitarianist Challenge)

According to logical non-necessitarianism, every inference may fail in some situation. In his defense of logical monism, Graham Priest has put forward an argument against non-necessitarianism based on the meaning of connectives. According to him, as long as the meanings of connectives are fixed, some inferences have to hold in all situations. Hence, in order to accept the non-necessitarianist thesis one would have to dispose arbitrarily of those meanings. I want to show here that non-necessitarianism can stand, without disposing arbitrarily of the meanings of connectives, based on a minimalist view on the meanings of connectives.

Why Should We Care About the Concept of Knowledge?

Can we learn something interesting about knowledge by examining our concept of knowledge? Quite a bit, many argue. My own view, however, is that the concept of knowledge is of little epistemological interest. In this paper, I critically examine one particularly interesting defense of the view that the concept of knowledge is of great epistemological interest: Edward Craig'sKnowledge and the State of Nature. A minimalist view about the value of examining our concept of knowledge is defended.

Ontological Minimalism about Phenomenology

I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense‐data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively indistinguishable perception are employed as a consequence of being related to external, mind‐independent objects or property‐instances. These concepts and nonconceptual structures are identified with modes of presentation types. Since a hallucinating subject is not related to any such objects or property‐instances, the concepts she employs remain empty. I argue that the phenomenology of hallucinations and perceptions can be identified with employing concepts and analogous nonconceptual structures. By doing so, I defend an ontologically minimalist view of the phenomenology of experience that (1) vindicates Aristotelianism about types and (2) amounts to a naturalized view of the phenomenology of experience.

Punctuated equilibrium and species selection: what does it mean for one theory to suggest another?

McMullin (In: Cohen et al. (eds.) Essays in memory of Imre Lakatos, 1976, In: Leplin (ed.) Scientific realism, 1984) argues that fertility is a theoretical virtue. He thinks of a fertile theory as one whose central metaphors suggest new directions for theoretical development, where those new developments help solve previous problems and anomalies. Nolan (Br J Philos Sci 50:265-282, 1999) argues that fertility in this sense is not a distinctive theoretical virtue in its own right. Rather, Nolan thinks that fertility is reducible to predictive novelty. This article explores the relationship between punctuated equilibrium (PE) and species selection in the light of this philosophical debate about the nature of theoretical fertility, or suggestiveness. I argue that (1) PE suggests, but does not imply, that species selection is a mechanism of evolution; (2) the suggestiveness in this case is not reducible to predictive novelty; (3) species selection is not a metaphorical extension of PE; and (4) getting clear about the way in which PE suggests species selection can help solve a puzzle about punctuated equilibrium. The puzzle is that Eldredge and Gould's initial presentation of PE seems to presuppose a minimalist or extrapolationist view of macroevolution, even though many scientists take PE to challenge that minimalist view.

The Law of Fair Use and the Illusion of Fair-Use Guidelines

The relative uncertainty about the meaning of fair use has led various interested parties to develop interpretative “guidelines,” notably for the application to teaching, learning, and librarianship. The best known of these guidelines are the Classroom Guidelines of 1976, which allow teachers to make single copies of short items, such as an article or book chapter, for research or class preparation. Multiple copies are subject to detailed limits, and the guidelines include sweeping prohibitions. The Classroom Guidelines break significantly from the statutory factors of fair use, as do other early guidelines applicable to the reproduction of music and the recording of television programs off-air.Subsequent efforts to develop fair use guidelines are comparably suspect. The National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established by Congress, and in 1979 it recommended standards for copying journal articles for sending to researchers through interlibrary loans. The Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), initiated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, issued a Green Paper report in 1994 that outlined and summarized a wide range of copyright and related issues affecting the expansion of digital commerce and communication. CONFU held meetings throughout the following three years, resulting in three proposals for guidelines on fair use. The Multimedia Guidelines allow uses of limited portions of different types of works for nonprofit educational uses. Distance Learning Guidelines attempt to overcome some of the problems with a specialized statutory exception in effect at that time. Finally, the Digital Images Guidelines allow faculty and others to make digital versions of analog images, but subject to numerous conditions that are not clearly articulated. All of these guidelines deviate from the law of copyright and fair use, and reflect instead a negotiated understanding of allowed uses.Congress and the courts have acted carefully and explicitly not to elevate any of the guidelines to a legally binding standard. The guidelines reflect a minimalistic view of fair use which proprietor groups were prepared to acquiesce as either unequivocally within fair use or beyond the scope of activity that is worth challenging. However, the guidelines do not displace the importance of applying the four factors from the statute, which remains the source of fair use law. Despite serious problems with the guidelines, they have been a compelling tool for educators who seek to create policies relating to fair use, and for courts that treat the guidelines as a crutch to bolster a ruling and to fend off criticism. Such reliance on guidelines has distorted perceptions of the law.In responding to the guidelines, educational institutions must remember that none of the fair use guidelines has the force of law, and following the guidelines does not ensure that a user is actually acting within the law. The law of fair use is flexible to meet changing needs and circumstances, while the guidelines are rigid. Staying within fair use law prevents infringement, but the guidelines do not offer even a “safe harbor.” Congress granted an important protection in recognition of lingering uneasiness and the importance of advancing knowledge through a reasonable, balanced, and good-faith understanding of rights and responsibilities. No set of guidelines can offer that same combination of promises. Because of the practical and political pressure to develop interpretations of fair use, this article offers recommendations for the process of their development in the future.

On second quantization on noncommutative spaces with twisted symmetries

By the application of the general twist-induced ⋆-deformation procedure we translate second quantization of a system of bosons/fermions on a symmetric spacetime into a noncommutative language. The procedure deforms, in a coordinated way, the spacetime algebra and its symmetries, the wave-mechanical description of a system of n bosons/fermions, the algebra of creation and annihilation operators and also the commutation relations of the latter with functions of spacetime; our key requirement is the mode-decomposition independence of the quantum field. In a minimalistic view, the use of noncommutative coordinates can be seen just as a way to better express non-local interactions of a special kind. In a non-conservative one, we obtain a closed, covariant framework for quantum field theory (QFT) on the corresponding noncommutative spacetime consistent with quantum mechanical axioms and Bose–Fermi statistics. One distinguishing feature is that the field commutation relations remain of the type ‘field (anti)commutator=a distribution’. We illustrate the results by choosing as examples interacting non-relativistic and free relativistic QFT on Moyal space(time)s.

Focus on Focus A Review Article of Aspects of the Grammar of Focus: A Minimalist View by Przemysław Tajsner

Focus on Focus A Review Article of Aspects of the Grammar of Focus: A Minimalist View by Przemysław Tajsner

State Capacity in Latin America

State Capacity in Latin America Mauricio Cárdenas (bio) The debate on the role of the state in the economic development of Latin America swings from the defense of state activism to the minimalist view emphasizing the advantages of market liberalization and privatization. Too often, this ideologically driven controversy between market mechanisms and state intervention assumes that the government is capable of delivering whatever society wants from it. Rather than asking whether the state should be in or out of the development strategy, this paper deals with the more basic question of what drives state capacity, defined as the ability of the state to provide public goods and support the economy with a sound legal framework. Despite the intense controversy on its role, the Latin American state has been extremely weak in terms of the most basic capacity measures. This is what is salient about the region, compared with other more successful development experiences. The term state capacity has been used in the social sciences with multiple interpretations and meanings. In the more recent economics literature, a distinction has been made between "legal" and "fiscal" state capacity. Legal capacity encompasses what is now known as "contracting institutions" (that is, institutions supporting private contracts) and "property rights institutions" (that is, institutions constraining government expropriation), to use Acemoglu and Johnson's terminology.1 In this paper, building on the recent work by Besley and Persson, the emphasis is placed on the "fiscal" dimension, which is the state's capacity to raise revenues from the population (including [End Page 1] the ability to tax incomes).2 Fiscal state capacity is essential for the state to be able to deliver public goods or to engage in redistribution between different groups in society. The paper's main claim is that fiscal state capacity is stunted in Latin America as a result of the high concentration of economic and political power. Although this argument is not new, the paper tries to innovate by formalizing the specific channels linking inequality and state capacity, while providing some empirical evidence that supports the model's predictions. To put the argument in its simplest form, investing in state capacity involves costs (sacrificing present consumption) and benefits (future provision of public goods or redistribution). The key insight is that when the group making the decision has much more income and political power than the rest of the population, there are fewer incentives to invest in state capacity. The fear of losing power in the future, and therefore the possibility that state capacity ends up in the hands of the opposition, is another deterrent. All these forces lead to under-investment in state capacity. The paper also explores other potential determinants of state capacity. For years, the bellicist approach to state development has emphasized the role of interstate threat and war, arguing that societies that engage in external conflict are more likely to build their state apparatus. With a few exceptions, major external confrontations have been rare in Latin America (in part as a result of the Monroe Doctrine, which has kept other global powers outside the region). In contrast, internal conflict and civil war—which have been more common in the region than external wars—destroy, by definition, state capacity. This explanation is particularly relevant in explaining weak state capacity in Latin America, as Centeno argues.3 The paper is structured in the following way. The next section introduces the appropriate definitions and measures of state capacity and provides the key stylized facts on the underdevelopment of state capacity in Latin America. The second section discusses the literature on the specific mechanisms through which political and economic inequality reproduce weak state capacity. The third section develops a model where the two forms of inequality (political and economic) and the two types of conflict (external and internal) determine the equilibrium investment in state capacity. The fourth section presents the econometric evidence supporting the predictions of the model. The main result is that political inequality is a major obstacle to the development [End Page 2] of state capacity. The incidence of external wars, while greatly important when long-run data are used (1900-75), loses relevance when the analysis focuses on the last...

To Exist and to Count: a Note on theMinimalist View

Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don't want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don't want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes full- fledged to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of parts and of wholes - all on a par, included in the domain of quantification - and this makes mereology look counterintuitive to various philosophers. In recent years, a proposal has been advanced to solve the tension between mereology and familiar ways of counting objects, under the label of Minimalist View. The Minimalist View may be summarized in the slogan: Count x as an object iff it does not overlap with any y you have already counted as an object. The motto seems prima facie very promising but, we shall argue, when one looks at it more closely, it is not. On the contrary, the Minimalist View involves an ambiguity that can be solved in quite different directions. We argue that one resolution of the ambiguity makes it incompatible with mereology. This way, the Minimalist View can lend no support to mereology at all. We suggest that the Minimalist View can become compatible with mereology once its ambi- guity is solved by interpreting it in what we call an epistemic or conceptual fashion: whereas mereology has full metaphysical import, the Minimalist View may account for our ways of selecting conceptually salient entities. But even once it is so disambiguated, it is doubtful that the Minimalist View can help to make mereology more palatable, for it cannot make it any more compatible with commonsensical ways of counting objects.

An independent, empirical route to nonconceptual content

The overall goal of this paper is to offer an independent, empirical route to characterize the content on nonconceptual content. I pursue a recent move by Pylyshyn, a leading cognitive scientist and philosopher of mental representation, who focuses on empirical considerations in favor of nonconceptual representations. Pylyshyn proposes a minimalist view of nonconceptual representations. I offer empirical reasons that force us to go beyond minimalist account and reinstate empirically defensible richer nonconceptual representations into a theory of content.

Persons in context: building a science of the individual

Part 1. Introduction. D. Cervone, Y. Shoda, G. Downey, Construing Persons in Context: On Building a Science of the Individual. Part 2. Conceptualizing the Person. G.H. Bower , The Trait versus Situation Debate: A Minimalist View. J. Kagan, The Power of Context. R.E. Nisbett, Eastern and Western Ways of Perceiving the World. R.A. Shweder , From Persons and Situations to Preferences and Constraints. Part 3. Self-Regulation: From Willpower to a System. O. Ayduk, Delay of Gratification in Children: Contributions to Social-Personality Psychology. E.T. Higgins, In Search of Generative Mechanisms: The Case of Value from Engagement Strength. A.M. Isen, Positive Affect, Cognitive Flexibility, and Self-Control. E.E. Smith, Expectancy and the Perception of Aversive Events. Part 4. Incorporating Situations into a Science of the Individual. S.M. Andersen, J.S. Thorpe, C.S. Kooij, Character in Context: The Relational Self and Transference. N. Bolger, R. Romero-Canyas, Integrating Personality Traits and Processes: Framework, Method, Analysis, Results. R. Mendoza-Denton, S.H. Park, A. O'Connor, Toward a Science of the Social Perceiver. P.S. Mischel, Toward a Science of the Individual: A Molecular View of Personalized Medicine. R.J. Sternberg, Intelligence as a Person-Situation Interaction. Part 5. Paradigm Change in Psychological Models of Human Nature (1950-2000-2050?). W. Mischel, Toward a Science of the Individual: Past, Present, Future? W. Mischel, Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality. Y. Shoda, From Homunculus to a System: Toward a Science of the Person.