Standard Explanation Research Articles

Error and the Limits of Quasi-Realism

If ethical expressivism is true, then moral judgements are motivational desire-like states and do not robustly represent reality. This gives rise to the problem of how to understand moral error. How can we be mistaken if there is no moral reality to be mistaken about? The standard expressivist explanation of moral doubt is couched in terms of our fear that our judgements may not survive improvements to our epistemic situation. There is a debate between Egan (Australas J Philos 85(2):205–219, 2007), Blackburn (Australas J Philos 87(2):201–213, 2009), Köhler (Australas J Philos 93(1):161–165, 2015) and Ridge (J Ethics Soc Philos 9(3):1–21, 2015) on the adequacy of this explanation when it comes to the phenomenon of fundamental moral error. This paper is my contribution to the debate. I argue, contrary to Blackburn and Ridge, that expressivism is committed to some first-order anti-realist sounding claims, and thus quasi-realism fails. If expressivism is true, none of us can coherently believe we might be fundamentally mistaken. However, contrary to Egan and Köhler, I do not think this is bad. Expressivists can still do what motivated the project of quasi-realism in the first place: they can interpret, make sense of, and vindicate ordinary moral discourse. I end by showing it yields some positive results for moral philosophers too – it effectively amounts to a transcendental argument against unhealthy moral scepticism.

Doing, Allowing, Gains, and Losses

This paper examines Kahneman and Tversky’s standard explanation for preference reversal due to framing effects in the famous “Asian flu” case. It argues that, alongside with their “loss/no gain effect” account, an alternative interpretation, still consistent with the empirical data, amounts to a more reasonable psychological explanation for the preference reversal. Specifically, my hypothesis is that shifts in the baseline induce shifts in the agents’ classification of the same action as “doing harm” rather than “allowing harm to occur”, and that people are risk-seeking when it comes to avoid causing extra deaths–doing harm–and risk-averse when it comes to preventing more deaths–by the means of allowing other deaths to occur as a side effect. I then survey the two most influential concurrent accounts in the moral literature, with respect to the relation between the loss/no gain and the doing/allowing distinction: Horowitz’s reductionist conclusion, which argues that the latter collapses into the former, and Kamm’s rebuttal, which claims instead that the two distinctions can be pulled apart. I eventually explain why my interpretation differs from both these positions.

Inter-Generational Transmission and the 21st Century Rise in Skilled Mothers' Labor Supply

By most measures, gender progress in the U.S. labor market has stagnated since the 1990s. Yet, this paper reveals that skilled U.S. mothers' full-time employment rate rose by 12 percentage points between 1999 and 2016. After ruling out several standard explanations for such a change, I hypothesize that the surge of skilled mothers entering the full-time workforce in the previous generation has induced a recent shift in household gender norms. I develop a model in which a new mother's ex ante valuation of the disutility of pursuing a career is conditioned by her own mother's prior career behavior, and find empirical support for the model in two-generation datasets constructed from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. An accounting exercise attributes roughly 30 percent of the recent change to the model's inter-generational mechanism. Shifting norms appear to be promoting gender equality in household labor supply in the 21st century.

Immigrants against immigration: Competition, identity and immigrants’ vote on free movement in Switzerland

Standard explanations of anti-immigrant sentiments as well as explanations of the voting behavior of ethnic minorities would both predict voters with an immigrant background should be less inclined to support anti-immigration policies than comparable natives. We show this was not the case in the Swiss referendum “against mass immigration” held in 2014. In this referendum voters with an immigrant background showed surprisingly high levels of support to the initiative to restrict immigration, which were comparable to those expressed by natives. To explain this puzzling finding, we propose to look at two alternative (but not mutually exclusive) drivers of policy preferences previously overlooked in the voting literature: ethnic boundary making and labor market competition. We show that accounting for Secondo identity (a boundary-making identity specific to the Swiss ethnic hierarchy) and exposure to occupational and geographical labour market competition can explain the puzzle of immigrants’ support for immigration restrictions.

The relevance of personality traits for urban economic growth: making space for psychological factors

Economic growth differences across regions and cities can only be partly explained by standard explanations in economic geography. One reason for this might be the neglect of the psychological make-up of cities and its citizens. To assess the value added of incorporating psychological factors alongside the more standard explanations, this paper tests the relevance of personality traits for economic growth for a sample of UK cities. We argue that Neuroticism and Conscientiousness, and the traits that make up entrepreneurship culture help to explain urban growth differences. The personality scores of >400,000 UK residents are combined with economic data for 63 UK cities from 1981 to 2011. We find that both Neuroticism and entrepreneurship culture matter for economic growth. Our main contribution is that geographically clustered personality traits help to understand economic growth differences, and add explanatory power over and above standard determinants, also when the recursive relationship between personality traits and economic growth is taken into account.

Spontaneous gain of susceptibility suggests a novel mechanism of resistance to hybrid dysgenesis in Drosophila virilis.

Syndromes of hybrid dysgenesis (HD) have been critical for our understanding of the transgenerational maintenance of genome stability by piRNA. HD in D. virilis represents a special case of HD since it includes simultaneous mobilization of a set of TEs that belong to different classes. The standard explanation for HD is that eggs of the responder strains lack an abundant pool of piRNAs corresponding to the asymmetric TE families transmitted solely by sperm. However, there are several strains of D. virilis that lack asymmetric TEs, but exhibit a “neutral” cytotype that confers resistance to HD. To characterize the mechanism of resistance to HD, we performed a comparative analysis of the landscape of ovarian small RNAs in strains that vary in their resistance to HD mediated sterility. We demonstrate that resistance to HD cannot be solely explained by a maternal piRNA pool that matches the assemblage of TEs that likely cause HD. In support of this, we have witnessed a cytotype shift from neutral (N) to susceptible (M) in a strain devoid of all major TEs implicated in HD. This shift occurred in the absence of significant change in TE copy number and expression of piRNAs homologous to asymmetric TEs. Instead, this shift is associated with a change in the chromatin profile of repeat sequences unlikely to be causative of paternal induction. Overall, our data suggest that resistance to TE-mediated sterility during HD may be achieved by mechanisms that are distinct from the canonical syndromes of HD.

The rise and fall of the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse climate

Abstract A compilation of foraminiferal stable isotope measurements from southern high latitude (SHL) deep-sea sites provides a novel perspective important for understanding Earth's paleotemperature and paleoceanographic changes across the rise and fall of the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse climate and the subsequent Paleogene climatic optimum. Both new and previously published results are placed within an improved chronostratigraphic framework for southern South Atlantic and southern Indian Ocean sites. Sites studied were located between 58° and 65°S paleolatitude and were deposited at middle to upper bathyal paleodepths. Oxygen isotope records suggest similar trends in both bottom and surface water temperatures in the southern sectors of the South Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean basins. Warm conditions were present throughout the Albian, extreme warmth existed during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum (early-mid-Turonian) through late Santonian, and long-term cooling began in the Campanian and culminated in Cretaceous temperature minima during the Maastrichtian. Gradients between surface and seafloor δ18O and δ13C values were unusually high throughout the 11.5 m.y. of extreme warmth during the Turonian-early Campanian, but these vertical gradients nearly disappeared by the early Maastrichtian. In absolute terms, paleotemperature estimates that use standard assumptions for pre-glacial seawater suggest sub-Antarctic bottom waters were ≥21 °C and sub-Antarctic surface waters were ≥27 °C during the Turonian, values warmer than published climate models support. Alternatively, estimated temperatures can be reduced to the upper limits of model results through freshening of high latitude waters but only if there were enhanced precipitation of water with quite low δ18O values. Regardless, Turonian planktonic δ18O values are ~1.5‰ lower than minimum values reported for the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) from the same region, a difference which corresponds to Turonian surface temperatures ~6 °C warmer than peak PETM temperatures if Turonian and Paleocene temperatures are estimated using the same assumptions. It is likely that warm oceans surrounding and penetrating interior Antarctica (given higher relative sea level) prevented growth of Antarctic ice sheets at all but the highest elevations from the late Aptian through late Campanian; however, Maastrichtian temperatures may have been cool enough to allow growth of small, ephemeral ice sheets. The standard explanation for the sustained warmth during Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse climate invokes higher atmospheric CO2 levels from volcanic outgassing, but correlation among temperature estimates, proxy estimates of pCO2, and intervals of high fluxes of both mafic and silicic volcanism are mostly poor. This comparison demonstrates that the relative timing between events and their putative consequences need to be better constrained to test and more fully understand relationships among volcanism, pCO2, temperature ocean circulation, Earth's biota and the carbon cycle.

Meat consumption and capitalist development: The meatification of food provision and practice in Vietnam

The global consumption of meat and animal products has increased dramatically in recent decades, particularly due to rising consumption in so-called developing countries. This increase has popularly been explained as part of a “nutrition transition” driven by rising income, urbanisation and foreign culinary influences. From the supply side, the increase has been approached as part of a “livestock revolution”, or alternatively as the outcome of capitalist agricultural processes. This paper argues, however, that these explanations have given insufficient attention to how and why consumption of meat changes. The paper analyses the case of Vietnam, where meat consumption has increased very rapidly since the initiation of market reforms in 1986. In understanding how meat consumption and development have co-evolved, the paper argues that consumption should be approached at the intersection between systems of provision and everyday practices. With this backdrop – and partly combining, partly going beyond standard explanations – the paper locates four main contributing factors towards increasing meat consumption in Vietnam: (1) changes in systems of provision for meat, (2) the meat intensification of traditional meals and the import of meat-intensive eating practices from abroad, (3) the increasing prevalence of eating out; and (4) the positive social connotations attached to meat as a symbol of development and progress. The paper goes on to argue that the dramatic meatification of food provision and practice in Vietnam should be understood as the result of capitalist development processes and their associated economic and social changes, rather than the ‘natural’ and inevitable outcome of development.

Reckless ambition: Moscow’s policy toward the United States, 2016/17

Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election succeeded in introducing an element of chaos into US politics, but neither Russia nor its leader Vladimir Putin gained much from it. Instead, US sanctions against Russia increased, and Russia’s 2017 attempt to introduce a new “reset” policy to the administration of Donald Trump fell flat as conflict between the two countries escalated. This article describes what we know about Russian actions and delves into the Russian foreign policy decision-making process, proposing four alternative explanations for Russia’s 2016/17 policies toward the US: Putin’s psychological mindset; the limited rationality inherent in all similarly autocratic regimes; competing economic interests among Russia’s elite patron–client system; and the loss of centralized control over the actions of officers in Russia’s intelligence agencies. While there is insufficient evidence to choose among these explanations, the exercise is useful because it encourages analysts to think both beyond standard realist explanations and beyond the role of Putin as an individual.

Closing Down the Shop: Optimal Health and Wealth Dynamics Near the End of Life

Near the end of life, health declines, mortality risk increases and curative is replaced by uninsured long-term care, accelerating the fall in wealth. Whereas standard explanations emphasize inevitable aging processes, we propose a com- plementary closing down the shop justification where agents’ decisions affect their health and the timing of death. Despite preferring to live, individuals optimally deplete their health and wealth towards levels associated with high death risk and indifference between life and death. Reinstating exogenous aging processes reinforces the relevance of closing down. Using HRS data for elders, a structural estimation of the closed-form decisions identifies and tests conditions for these strategies to be optimal and confirm their economic relevance. We also discuss why policy intervention to reduce the incidence of closing down, although feasible, is not warranted.

Does ease mediate the ease-of-retrieval effect? A meta-analysis.

A wealth of literature suggests individuals use feelings in addition to facts as sources of information for judgment. This paper focuses on a manipulation in which participants list either a few or many examples of a given type, and then make a judgment. Instead of using the number of arguments or evidence strength, participants are hypothesized to use the subjective ease of generating examples as the primary input to judgment. This result is commonly called the ease-of-retrieval effect, and the feeling of ease is typically assumed to mediate the effect. We use meta-analytic methods across 142 papers, 263 studies, and 582 effect sizes to assess the robustness of the ease-of-retrieval effect, and whether or not the effect is mediated by subjective ease. On average, the standard few-versus-many manipulation exhibits a medium-sized effect. In experimental conditions designed to replicate the standard effect, about a third to half of the total effect is mediated by subjective ease. This supports the standard explanation, but suggests that other mediators are present. Further, we find evidence of publication bias that reduces the standard effect by up to 1 third. We also find that (a) moderator manipulations that differ from the standard manipulation lead to smaller, often reversed effects that are not as strongly mediated by ease, (b) several manipulations of theory-based moderators (e.g., polarized attitudes, misattribution) yield strong theory-consistent effects, (c) method-based moderators have little or no effects on the results, and (d) the mediation results are robust with respect to assumptions about error structure. (PsycINFO Database Record

Tiered teacher competency qualification standards as CPD guide VHS teachers

The purpose of research is to produce a tiered teacher qualification standards of competence and qualification assessment levels rise as a guide ongoing professional development of teachers of VHS.Type mix of research methods, approaches Research and Development of Richey and Klein (2009, p.8) are limited to 2 stages of development and product validation. Internal validation by expert judgment Delphi Technique 2 rounds and FGD. External validation of the test product on teachers vocational competency skills Techniques Audio Video in Yogyakarta. Retrieving data using questionnaires. Test the validity of the instrument using factor analysis with SPSS version 20, the validity of 77.781% in the high category. Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient of 0.896 in the category of very reliable. Data were analyzed using the Rank-Order of Difference Scores.Stakeholders assess differences in the demands of professional competence and work area clear hierarchy between the teacher. Standard assessment level rise is able to describe the complexity of teaching. Effectiveness qualification standards can be improved mainly through the standard explanation tiered competence and qualifications, assessment of real professional attributes inherent in the everyday lives of teachers.

The Pragmatics of Non-denoting Descriptions

One challenge that the proponent of the Fregean theory of definite descriptions has to meet is to account for those truth-value intuitions that do not match the predictions of her theory. What needs an explanation is why sentences such as ‘The king of France is sitting in that chair’ [pointing at an empty chair] are intuitively false, while semantically truth-valueless (on the Fregean account). The existence of such cases was pointed out by Strawson (Philos Rev 63(2):216–231, 1954) and Russell (Mind 66(263):385–389, 1957), and much discussed in the subsequent literature. The standard pragmatic explanation that Fregeans have proposed (Lasersohn, J Semant 10(2):113–122, 1993; von Fintel, Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; Elbourne, Definite descriptions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013) invokes an epistemic strategy of verification of the utterance of the sentence. I raise three objections to this strategy, two concerning its descriptive adequacy, and one concerning the motivation offered for the approach. Finally, I propose an alternative account that relies on an inferential pattern that leads to the relevant truth-value judgements in certain contextually specified conditions.

A Note on the Balto-Slavic and Indo-European Background of the Proto-Slavic Adjective *svętъ ‘Holy’

The standard etymological explanation of the Proto-Slavic adjective *svętъ ‘holy, saint’ – a word of extreme literary, cultural and religious importance in the Slavic world – concentrates on the formal match with Lithuanian šventas ‘id.’ and Avestan spəṇta‑ ‘life-giving, holy’ (PIE *ḱwen‑to‑, from the root *ḱwen‑). This article highlights the verbal formation seen in Latvian svinêtsvin svinẽjo ‘celebrate, venerate’, generally recognized as another reflex of the root *ḱwen‑ in Balto-Slavic, but without due attention to the formal implications. It is argued that both in Av. and in BSl. the adjective spəṇta‑/*svętъ behaves as an item participating in the so-called ‘Caland System’ (a set of arbitrary morphological alternations reconstructible for Proto-Indo-European).

Simulating the effect of the quadrupole moment on the adsorption of nitrogen in siliceous zeolites

Physical adsorption of an inert gas such as nitrogen or argon is commonly used to characterize zeolites and other porous materials. In high-resolution adsorption (adsorption in micropores), it has long been known that nitrogen begins to adsorb at a substantially lower relative pressure than argon, despite the similar sizes of the two absorbates. The standard explanation for this difference in relative pressure is that nitrogen has a quadrupole moment, which strengthens its interactions with the zeolite framework atoms, whereas argon does not. In this study, we investigate this standard explanation by simulating the adsorption of nitrogen at 77 K and argon at 87 K in siliceous zeolites of framework types LTA, FAU, and MFI using grand canonical Monte Carlo. For nitrogen, we tested models with a quadrupole formed by three collinear point charges, as well as models in which the effect of the quadrupole moment was removed by setting the point charges to zero. We find that the influence of the quadrupole moment is heavily dependent on the magnitude of the zeolite framework charges in the model. For a model with relatively weak framework charges, the quadrupole moment makes very little difference, but with stronger framework charges, nitrogen with its quadrupole moment begins to adsorb at much lower pressures than nitrogen without its quadrupole moment, accounting for most of the spread between nitrogen and argon. Since the larger-magnitude charges we studied are more in line with theoretically-derived values, we conclude that the standard explanation is largely correct. We recommend that zeolite models use partial charges with reasonable theoretical justification and that are checked against the accuracy of simulations of adsorption of quadrupolar gases.

Teaching and Learning Methodologies for Improving Students’ Performance in Academics

To intellectualize undergraduate education as a process of improving students along the path from novice towards proficient understanding within a given discipline, a study has been done by the authors. To achieve this target, it is important to begin by identifying what students know, how their ideas align with standard engineering explanations and practices. With these factors in observance, the further step for an educator is to search for instructions and other resources that make it easier to differentiate the curriculum and make learning more vital and relevant. By considering this concept authors have designed a pattern and followed the same, thereby they achieve the improvement in the performance and result of students.

Modified Newtonian Gravity as an Alternative to the Dark Matter Hypothesis

[-5]The applications of Newtonian dynamics in galactic scales have shown that the inverse square law is incompatible with the amount of visible mass in the form of stars and molecular clouds. This manifests as the rotational curves of galaxies being asymptotically flat instead of decaying with the distance to the center of the galaxy. In the context of Newtonian gravity, the standard explanation requires a huge amount of dark mass in the form of hypothetical particles that still remain undetected. A different theory was provided as a modification of Newtonian dynamics (MOND) at low accelerations . This MOND theory still has many supporters and it can easily explain some features of the rotation curves, such as the Tully–Fisher (TF) phenomenological relation between luminosity and velocity. In this paper, we revisit the third approach of a non-Newtonian force, that has resurfaced from time to time, in order to reconcile it with a finite apparent dark mass and the TF relation.

Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile?

Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals while similar islands slightly farther away did not. Leveraging a targeted survey of 2,070 islands residents and distance to Turkey as an instrument, we find that direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizeable and lasting increases in natives' hostility toward refugee, immigrant and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies. Since refugees only passed through these islands, our findings challenge both standard economic and cultural explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment, and show that mere exposure suffices in generating lasting increases in hostility.

“Potsdam Revisited: Prelude to a Divided Korea”

Scholarly debate about the reasons for Korea’s division at the 38th parallel in August 1945 has not been particularly intense. Early historical accounts accepted the u.s. government’s claim that the United States and the Soviet Union made a hasty decision to partition the country as a matter of military convenience to coordinate the acceptance of the surrender of Japanese forces at the end of World War ii. By the early 1980s, however, new research had established that President Harry S. Truman planned to occupy all of Korea after using the atomic bomb, which was designed to force Japan’s surrender before the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War. But when Premier Joseph Stalin sent the Red Army into Korea, Truman proposed dividing Korea to prevent the Soviets from imposing Communist rule on the entire nation. Recently, some South Korean scholars have challenged this interpretation. Relying on new research, they contend that during the Potsdam Conference, u.s. and Soviet officials negotiated a secret agreement to divide Korea at the 38th parallel. This research note examines Won Bom Lee’s article making this argument, showing how it lacks evidentiary support to overturn the standard explanation for Korea’s division.

Comparative economics and European integration

Transformation processes in Central and Eastern Europe and deep economic reforms in China and other emerging countries did not end the variety of economic systems. Various brands of comparative economics have shown this variety in both theory and different countries. An increasingly important form of this variety concerns the process of European integration. Systemic differences within the European Union are the source of difficulties and tensions, of a European conundrum that appears in different forms and ways and that make the sustainability and progress of integration difficult. This article looks at the logic of and proposals by the “New Comparative Economics” and the “Variety of Capitalisms” literature to find an explanation to the problems and difficulties that the European integration is meeting, going beyond the standard technical explanations based on European convergence criteria. It finds that both theories, although important and useful for contributing to solving the European conundrum, do not account sufficiently for the novelty and the complexity of European integration.