Principle Of Judgment Research Articles

An evolution-based approach with modularized evaluations to forecast financial distress

Due to the radical changing of the global economy, a more precise forecasting of corporate financial distress helps provide important judgment principles to decision-makers. Although financial statements reflect a firm's business activities, it is very challenging to discover critical information from these statements. Applying machine learning algorithms can be demonstrated to improve forecasting accuracy in predicting corporate bankruptcy. In this paper, we introduce an evolutionary approach with modularized evaluation functions to forecast financial distress, which allows using any evolutionary algorithm to extract the set of critical financial ratios and integrates more evaluation function modules to achieve a better forecasting accuracy by assigning distinct weights. To achieve a more precise predicting accuracy, the undesirable forecasting results from some modules are weeded out, if their predicting accuracies are out of the allowable tolerance range as learned from our mechanism.

The Value of Personal Contact in Marketing Insurance: Client Judgments of Representativeness and Mental Availability

AbstractMuch previous research in decision analyses has focused on the processes of simplification that the decision maker applies in order to obtain a reduced set of alternatives. In the present work, we show how the principles of judgment by representativeness and mental availability can be applied to insurance decisions. We extend this view by considering interaction between these two heuristics and by analyzing the effect of the longer time horizon typical for insurance problems. The results of such simplification are shown to be inherently unstable. Nevertheless, it is possible to explain on the basis of our analysis why certain marketing practices dominate insurance markets.

Approaching and Avoiding Linda: Motor Signals Influence the Conjunction Fallacy

In two experiments, using two different conjunction problems, participants who engaged in avoidance motor actions were significantly more likely to commit conjunction errors than participants who engaged either in approach or no motor actions. Because previous studies (e.g., Friedman & Förster, 2000) have demonstrated that avoidance motor signals enhance analytic processing, whereas approach motor signals enhance heuristic processing, these findings suggest that enhanced heuristic processing does not necessarily lead to an increase in conjunction error. Instead, detail-oriented processing can lead participants to pay too much attention to irrelevant details in a given narrative, which can undermine consistency with normative principles of judgment.

Law, Aesthetic Symbolism and Utopia: A Kantian Reading

This paper presents aphilosophical approach to the semiotics of lawin terms of an exercise in symbolictransposition whereby aesthetic categories arebrought to bear on jurisprudence, and inparticular on two of its foundationalquestions. These questions, the backdropagainst which the analysis unfolds, ask (1)whether law is static or dynamic; and (2)whether law `constitutes' human beings, in somespecific sense, or whether the reverse holds. The notions of universality and necessity andthat of utopia are employed together with twoopposite art symbols and a model of theirantitheses is constructed revealing diverseanswers as to how to conceive law in relationto the two questions. One answer is singled outby adopting the principles of Kantian aesthetic(reflective) judgement: to elicit an aestheticclaim, law must be seen as a utopian socialorder exhibiting purposiveness without,however, presupposing any predeterminedsubstantive normative end. This is effected bya special reading permitting the combination ofnecessitation (obligation) with free play – thisbeing the common ground shared by both law andaesthetics but only in this limiting utopianmoment. This is a unique sense in which legaldiscourse is formally assimilated to aestheticnon-purposive judgements yet withoutrelinquishing law's distinctive feature aspurposive order prescribing, however,prescription alone as a formal end.

Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure (review)

Reviewed by: Heidegger, language, and world-disclosure by Christina Lafont Natalie Sciarini-Gourianova Heidegger, language, and world-disclosure. By Christina Lafont; translated by Graham Harman. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 298. Cloth $59.95. Interpreting Martin Heidegger’s ideas has been a credo for linguists and philosophers more than once, providing a plot and background for both individual studies and schools with long-lasting research traditions. This new volume by Christina Lafont is a valuable contribution to the field. It continues the series of work in modern philosophy on schools of thought prominent in the Kantian and post-Kantian European tradition. The discussion focuses on the most interesting philosophical problem which gained a dramatic importance in the last quarter of the twentieth century: the idea of language as world disclosure. This basic concept is characteristic of the German tradition of the philosophy of language which evolved during the course of engagement with Kant by authors such as Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt and which had been further developed by Heidegger. In her attempt to bridge the gap between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy, the author tries to find her way among the diversity of commentaries and possible interpretations of Heidegger’s work. L analyzes the philosophically relevant features of linguistic paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language in the Hamann-Herder-Humboldt tradition. In Part 1 (11–178) L explores the Heideggerian conception of language in depth and points out that Heidegger, indeed, had developed one of Hamann and Humboldt’s core concepts: overcoming the philosophy of consciousness by taking into account the symbolically structured character of the world. Looking into Heidegger’s understanding of language as world disclosure, L found out that Heidegger was unable to determine what kind of being corresponds to language in general, saying that the necessary holistic character of the system of meaning makes it impossible to differentiate between factual knowledge and linguistic knowledge. L gives a brief characterization of Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn in his ‘Being and time’ and finds it possible to extract the basic elements responsible for both the continuity and the break between this new hermeneutic approach and transcendental philosophy. In Part 2 (179–289), L draws our attention to recent work of direct reference (Hilary Putnam, Keith Donnellan, Saul Kripke, et al.) to reveal the limitation of Heidegger’s views and to show how language shapes our understanding of the world without making learning impossible. Part 2 mainly considers Heidegger’s thesis that world disclosure as a ‘happening of being’ determines all intra-worldly truth. On the one hand, with his interpretation of the ontological difference, Heidegger is taking for granted the constructivism expressed in Kant’s highest principles of synthetic judgments. On the other hand, his interpretation leads to understanding the essence of the objects of experience as only the plurality of linguistic world disclosures resulting from the historical process of projecting meaning for interpreting the world. L examines the foundations of these theses in Heidegger’s conception and draws the conclusion that it might lead to an explicit linguistic relativism completely foreign to Kant’s philosophy. More than that, in L’s opinion it leads to an obvious reification of language. Regardless, the conclusion sounds optimistic as L states that the danger of linguistic idealism and relativism that arises with the linguistic turn is not a consequence of this paradigm shift as such. Rather it results only from an absolutization of the world-disclosure function of language and a corresponding misinterpretation of its designative function. L’s approach is an interesting consideration of many possible variations in understanding one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century; that is why it should be heartily welcome. The book is really well-done, the amount of research truly amazing, and the language as clear as philosophical discourse can allow. The book will certainly appeal to a broad range of students and professionals in philosophy and in other humanities as well. Natalie Sciarini-Gourianova Guilford, CT Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

A philosophical discussion of end-of-life decision-making methods for incompetent patients.

This article provides an analysis of decision-making methods that can be used with incompetent patients (patients who are unable to make decisions for themselves). It is intended as a general discussion of the relevant issues rather than an examination of legal or policy concerns. The advance directive principle (whereby a person leaves instructions for what to do if they become unable to make their own decisions) is discussed with reference to practical and philosophical issues. Substituted judgement (where surrogate decision makers make decisions that the patient who is incompetent would make if competent) is then discussed followed by the principle of best interests, which requires consideration beyond purely medical interests. The need to make patient-centred quality-of-life judgements as a component of best interests decisions is argued. Conclusions reached include the notion that the advance directive principle and the substituted judgement principle facilitate the concept of self-determination. The best interests principle helps to ensure that patients ending up in this vulnerable position are protected.

Somatoform Pain Disorder and Fibromyalgia--difficulties and problems of their judgement in German consultant praxis

In the last 20 years the fibromyalgia syndrome and the somatoform pain disorder became more and more important in clinical medicine and in legal affairs. The consultant meets progressive more specific questions, which are not sufficient mentioned in the medico-legal recommendations and at least national "guide-lines" of medical societies. By an casuistic approach we try to show the implications of the often seen comorbidity of these two common disorders (i.e. the fibromyalgia syndrome and the somatoform pain disorder) both in legal and in medical perspectives. At the moment the medico-legal recommendations and the national "guide-lines" of medical societies are often not sufficient to decide many of the the legal implications and consultant questions that result from the comorbidity ot these often seen "modern disorders". Therefore we try to develop in an single case the solution principles of appropriate judgement for the functional effects of comorbidity with fibromyalgia syndrome and the somatoform pain disorder. Because of the wide spectrum of comorbid symptoms between these both disorders one must analyse any specific case very exactly and prove the individual functional implications of the comorbidity in correlation to the degree of impairement. We try to show in an casuistic presentation the possibilities of judgement according the appointments of german law.

The Divisions of Yeats Studies

The Divisions of Yeats Studies Daniel T. O’Hara (bio) Pierce, David. W.B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. 4 Vols. Helm Information, 2000. xxx + 678 pp.; viii + 587 pp.; viii + 554 pp.; viii + 856 pp. With Index to Writers and Assessments. $495.00. The Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English, under the general editorship of Graham Clarke, is an invaluable aid to scholarship. For writers such as Henry James and George Eliot, the Bronte Sisters and D.H. Lawrence (just four of the eighteen sets already published, with nine more announced as forthcoming), this series generously makes available truly representative samples of contemporaneous reviews of a writer’s major works, as well as a wide range of general assessments and critical views up to the present moment. Today’s [End Page 511] scholars can discover in these finely edited, exquisitely handsome volumes, not only the histories of critical debates for their chosen writers, but they can also recognize the recurrent features of the writers’ oeuvres that have characteristically defined the object of study. I myself—selection entry number “305” in Volume 4—have found that what I think of as the divisions of Yeats studies have appeared and re-appeared insistently from the earliest reviews and commentaries right up to the latest studies. Such remarkable continuity makes one think that, despite their differences, all the generations of critics are addressing the same realities. The primary division concerns the scholarly conflict about the state of the corpus. Next, there is the division in the field occasioned by the critical discussions about the status of Yeats’s occult system of belief. These divisions between matters of textual analysis (and construal) and critical judgments on the nature and value of Yeats’s religious worldview lead rather naturally to yet another divisive issue, the more speculative or theoretical question of Yeats’s identity—as a person, as a writer, and as a citizen influential in the formation of modern Ireland. Yeats, as we know, was a constant reviser of his texts throughout his career. When he collected work in book-form not only did he usually revise the individual texts therein many times over, but also he would create ever-new arrangements for them that would vary from the first sometimes to all later editions. The first appearance of a poem, and the volume in which it was initially collected, would equally become material for subsequent acts of imaginative creation of increasingly powerful and also chronologically distorting symbolic and mythic patterns. For textual scholars and literary biographers or historians, the question of the “best” version of a poem or a volume is not necessarily answered by determining, when possible, Yeats’s so-called “final intention.” The question is, quite simply: “best” for what and whose purposes? Richard J. Finnegan (see entry 334) and Warwick Gould (see entry 342) are the most recent scholars to debate the comparative merits of symbolic pattern and simple chronology as the principle of judgment for arranging Yeats’s corpus. What complicates their debate, however, is that before his death in January 1939, Yeats expressed a double intention for his collected works. On the one hand, the so-called edition deluxe or “Dublin” edition from Scribner’s, which was never published as such, was to be chronological with respect to the sequence of his published volumes, even as the internal pattern of the volumes was largely to be maintained. Narrative and dramatic poems were to be interspersed among the lyric volumes throughout the projected “Collected Poems” in this edition. On the other hand, the familiar Collected Poems from Macmillan (reprinted many times since 1933, with the addition of the final poems in 1954), divides the lyric from the dramatic and narrative poetry, consigning the latter to the back of the book. Gould argues for the former, chronological arrangement, Finneran for the latter. Finneran, as the general editor of the new Collected Works of W.B. Yeats from Scribner’s, has won the debate, for now, and has published, not without some controversy over his re-arrangements of the final poems, what is billed as the definitive editon of The Poems, with many uncollected poems supplementing, also at the back...

Normatively demanding creatures:Hobbes, the Fall & individual responsibility

This paper explores an internal relation between wrong-doing and the ability to think in moral terms, through Hobbes’ thought. I use his neglected retelling of our ‘original sin’ as a springboard, seeing how we then discover a need to vindicate our own projects in terms shared by others. We become normatively demanding creatures: greedy for normative vindication, eager to judge others amid the difficulties of our world. However there is, of course, no choice for us but to choose our own principles of judgment, or at least some authority to provide these. Unconvinced by Hobbes’ remedies, I conclude with one implication for moral philosophy@ a need to look rather differently at agency and responsibility.

Interpreting Surrogate Consent using Counterfactuals

Philosophers such as Dan Brock believe that surrogates who make health care decisions on behalf of previously competent patients, in the absence of an advance directive, should make these decisions based upon a substituted judgment principle. Brock favours substituted judgment over a best interests standard. However, Edward Wierenga claims that the substituted judgment principle ought to be abandoned in favour of a best interests standard, because of an inherent problem with the substituted judgment principle. Wierenga's version of the substituted judgment principle and his counterexample to the principle's successful interpretation of valid surrogate consent is presented. A new version of what is meant by the substituted judgment principle is advanced. The new version is not beset with the problems Wierenga initially ascribed to the substituted judgment principle.

Public health implications of environmental exposures.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a public health agency with responsibility for assessing the public health implications associated with uncontrolled releases of hazardous substances into the environment. The biological effects of low-level exposures are a primary concern in these assessments. One of the tools used by the agency for this purpose is the risk assessment paradigm originally outlined and described by the National Academy of Science in 1983. Because of its design and inherent concepts, risk assessment has been variously employed by a number of environmental and public health agencies and programs as a means to organize information, as a decision support tool, and as a working hypothesis for biologically based inference and extrapolation. Risk assessment has also been the subject of significant critical review. The ATSDR recognizes the utility of both the qualitative and quantitative conclusions provided by traditional risk assessment, but the agency uses such estimates only in the broader context of professional judgment, internal and external peer review, and extensive public review and comment. This multifaceted approach is consistent with the Council on Environmental Quality's description and use of risk analysis as an organizing construct based on sound biomedical and other scientific judgment in concert with risk assessment to define plausible exposure ranges of concern rather than a single numerical estimate that may convey an artificial sense of precision. In this approach biomedical opinion, host factors, mechanistic interpretation, molecular epidemiology, and actual exposure conditions are all critically important in evaluating the significance of environmental exposure to hazardous substances. As such, the ATSDR risk analysis approach is a multidimensional endeavor encompassing not only the components of risk assessment but also the principles of biomedical judgment, risk management, and risk communication. Within this framework of risk analysis, the ATSDR may rely on one or more of a number of interrelated principles and approaches to screen, organize information, set priorities, make decisions, and define future research needs and directions.

Causal judgment and explanation

This article reviews the antecedents and consequents of causal judgments and explanations. We consider the situations in which causal explanations are produced, and the principles that underly the formation of causal impressions (contiguity, similarity and covariation). We also examine how causal explanations change as a function of the conversational context of the explanation. We show how these principles of judgment can lead to bias in causal judgment, and suggest some ways in which these tendencies can be debiased. The consequences of causal attributions for emotional reactions and motivation are also reviewed, as are the effects of accountability on judgment and choice.

Research report: A preliminary analysis of medical futility decisionmaking: law and professional attitudes

The debate in medical futility decisionmaking centers on the conflict between a patient insisting treatment and a doctor refusing to furnish it. Courts have taken two disparate approaches to the legal status of medical futility. Believing that such legal ambiguity may reflect ambiguity in the medical profession itself, this research report sought to identify any emerging consensus among professionals handling medical futility issues. The report explains the results of the Life Sustaining Treatment Survey, a nationwide survey of health care professionals at hospitals. Presented with a list of criteria, respondents assigned important ratings to the factors used in recent futility decisions at their institutions. The resulting data suggests that there is no consensus among professionals in medical futility decisionmaking. The data supports at least three distinct approaches for making futility decisions: emphasis on the patients’ preferences; providing for the patient and family; and adhering to objective medical and social norms. It is unlikely that the law will realize its full potential to regulate futility judgments until explicitly articulated professional standards emerge. This article advocates continued empirical research to document and test professional judgment principles. Such research may ultimately help identify factors that will form the basis for a consensus in medical futility decisionmaking.

Symmetry and Asymmetry of Human Spatial Memory

Six experiments investigated the limiting conditions on and the causes of asymmetries in estimates of euclidean distance. Participants estimated distances between locations on recently learned maps or between buildings on their college campus. Estimates between landmarks and neighboring nonlandmarks were often asymmetric, but estimates between other pairs of locations were typically symmetric. These and other results were inconsistent with the predictions of models that attribute asymmetries to stimulus or to retrieval bias. A contextual scaling model of asymmetry is proposed. According to this model, asymmetries in proximity judgments are caused by general principles of human memory and judgment: (a) Stimuli differ in the contexts they establish in working memory, and (b) magnitude estimates are scaled by the context in which they are made.

Explanatory Versatility and Exclusivity as Principles of Causal Judgment

This research is concerned with the role in causal judgment of information pertaining to prior causal beliefs. Evidence is reported that the judged likelihood that a given cause was responsible for a given effect increases as the number of other effects attributable to that cause and present on that occasion increases. It was also found that the judged likelihood that a cause was responsible for a given effect decreased as the number of effects attributable to an alternative cause increases. These judgmental tendencies are termed the principles of explanatory versatility and explanatory exclusivity, respectively. It is argued that these principles, which are independent of explanatory coherence, are most likely to be used when cues to causal mechanisms are not available and when people possess relevant prior beliefs about possible effects of the candidate causes.

Modern Canadian Plays, 3rd ed., 2 vols; You’re Making a Scene: Scenes from Canadian Plays; Eureka! Seven One-Act Plays for Secondary Schools

In our review article, Rob Nunn considers the disparate goals of three anthologies: canonizing Canadian drama (Wasserman), collecting dramatic scenes (Hamill), and promoting regional drama (Johnston Lewis and Warren). From the Greek words anthos, meaning “flower” and legein, “to gather”, “anthology” describes a collection of the “flowers” of Greek verse, the gathering up of small choice poems. Of course, gathering implies judging, selecting, and rejecting. And in the age of post-modern drama, Canadian and otherwise, these activities are permeated with ideological agendas. “Choice” becomes exceedingly problematic when we recognize that principles of judgement and selection are no longer “natural”, no longer unscrutinized. What do anthologists reject, exclude, make standard? What is “standard”? CTR considers three anthologies here because the impulse to anthologize, it seems, is as old as the Greeks. But, given the increasing difficulty to justify “judgement”, does the anthology have a future? JTG

Gathering rose buds as ye may

In our review article, Rob Nunn considers the disparate goals of three anthologies: canonizing Canadian drama (Wasserman), collecting dramatic scenes (Hamill), and promoting regional drama (Johnston Lewis and Warren). From the Greek words anthos, meaning “flower” and legein, “to gather”, “anthology” describes a collection of the “flowers” of Greek verse, the gathering up of small choice poems. Of course, gathering implies judging, selecting, and rejecting. And in the age of post-modern drama, Canadian and otherwise, these activities are permeated with ideological agendas. “Choice” becomes exceedingly problematic when we recognize that principles of judgement and selection are no longer “natural”, no longer unscrutinized. What do anthologists reject, exclude, make standard? What is “standard”? CTR considers three anthologies here because the impulse to anthologize, it seems, is as old as the Greeks. But, given the increasing difficulty to justify “judgement”, does the anthology have a future? JTG

Question wording and mass policy preferences: The comparative impact of substantive information and peripheral cues

Understanding the dynamics of mass political behavior requires attention to the mechanisms and processes citizens use in evaluating political affairs. At its structural core, a political appraisal has much in common with most of the other decisions individuals must make each day. Consequently, insight can be gained by examining political judgments from the perspective of those psychological theories concerned with information processing and decision making. More specifically, because the American citizen typically must maximize cognitive efficiency when evaluating political phenomena, those psychological mechanisms that facilitate expedience and simplicity in decision making are likely to operate on a great diversity of political judgments. Hence theoretical perspectives concerning the role of heuristic principles of judgment may be of considerable utility for the study of mass political behavior. One such perspective, the heuristic‐systematic model, is discussed. The tenets of the heuristic‐systematic mo...

The rational treatment of multiple personality disorder.

The complex symptomatology of patients who have survived profound childhood abuse, particularly the severe dissociative and post-traumatic symptoms of patients with multiple personality disorder (MPD), may predispose therapists to engage in poorly considered psychotherapeutic practices. Therapists should be careful to keep a rational clinical perspective, and not to be distracted by patients' unusual and dramatic clinical presentation. This article discusses the particular problematic areas often encountered in the treatment of MPD patients, including the necessity for pacing the therapy, keeping the focus on the patient as a whole, and avoiding preoccupation with individual personalities or with MPD phenomenology. Good clinical judgment and sound therapeutic principles should be the core of the psychotherapy ofMPD.

Public opinion and heuristic processing of source cues

If the American citizen is capable of constructing reliable political judgments without engaging in extensive cognitive deliberation, then criticism that public opinion is largely vacuous in character may overstate the implications of a politically inattentive citizenry. Heuristic processing, reliance on simple rules of judgment, provides a cognitive mechanism that may enable citizens to advance informed yet efficient issue appraisals. More specifically, application of heuristic processing to source cues—references to prominent political leaders—can allow individuals to extend evaluations of those leaders to the policies and issues with which they are associated. In this paper, discussion of heuristic principles of judgment facilitates specification of the expected relationship between source cues and two component processes of individual-level public opinion: opinion holding and opinion direction. Separate quasi-experimental analyses yield evidence consistently supportive of the heuristic perspective.