Subjectivist Approach Research Articles

A Subjectivist Approach to Advertising: The Case of Vitasoy in Hong Kong

Contemporary neoclassical economics ignores the subjective evaluation of information and therefore fails to explain the persuasive role of advertising. This article explains the roles of advertising and promotion strategies from a subjectivist lens. In particular, it attempts to use a phenomenological approach to explain the persuasive power of advertising. It will argue that when consumers watch a piece of advertising, they will interpret the message conveyed in the content by their stock of knowledge, which is cumulated from everyday life experience. If consumers fail to interpret the advertising content, we cannot expect them to accept and buy the product. In other words, the content of advertising has to make sense to consumers. Sense making implies subjective understanding. When consumers find the advertising content makes sense, then consumers and the advertising agent (on behalf of the product) share ‘common sense’, or share the same definition of the situation, which can be made possible only through intersubjective communication. Since knowledge is obtained from everyday life experience and has history, in order to share the same biography with consumers, a successful piece of advertising requires the firm to know consumers’ personal growth history, racial identity, culture and social and economic backgrounds. The phenomenological approach to explain the persuasive power of advertising is applied to understand the successful advertising campaign made by Vitasoy, a well-known soybean drink in Hong Kong.

Jane Jacobs on Henry George: Progress or Poverty?

AbstractHenry George and Jane Jacobs each have devoted followers today who remain mainly outside the intellectual mainstream, both are iconic American intellectuals largely sympathetic to and quite knowledgeable about how markets work, and they each challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxies of their day. Much has been written, pro and con, on George's single tax and on Jacobs's battles with urban planners, and while I don't directly address either here, what I say does have implications for those controversies. In particular, I show how and why their views on the nature of economic progress, and of cities in that progress, fundamentally differ. I trace the difference to George's essentially classical approach to economics in contrast to Jacobs's subjectivist approach, which more radically transcends the economics of her time.

Statistical Data and Mathematical Propositions

AbstractStatistical tests of the primality of some numbers look similar to statistical tests of many nonmathematical, clearly empirical propositions. Yet interpretations of probability prima facie appear to preclude the possibility of statistical tests of mathematical propositions. For example, it is hard to understand how the statement that n is prime could have a frequentist probability other than 0 or 1. On the other hand, subjectivist approaches appear to be saddled with ‘coherence’ constraints on rational probabilities that require rational agents to assign extremal probabilities to logical and mathematical propositions. In the light of these problems, many philosophers have come to think that there must be some way to generalize a Bayesian statistical account. In this article I propose that a classical frequentist approach should be reconsidered. I conclude that we can give a conditional justification of statistical testing of at least some mathematical hypotheses: if statistical tests provide us with reasons to believe or bet on empirical hypotheses in the standard situations, then they also provide us with reasons to believe or bet on mathematical hypotheses in the structurally similar mathematical cases.

Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations, and the 'Invisible Hand': A Metaphor for Ambiguity-Uncertainty Aversion by Decision Makers

Smith’s use of the “Invisible Hand,” as pointed out by Gavin Kennedy, is a metaphor provided for the great percentage of readers of the Wealth of Nations whom Smith realized would not be able to grasp the nature of his argument, which was about the ambiguity-uncertainty aversion of the majority of 18th century English business men. Gavin Kennedy has pointed out that the term, “Invisible Hand,” had nothing to do with Laissez Faire, free markets, free trade, Natural liberty, etc., for Adam Smith. Smith’s argument is an application of his very advanced decision theory that regarded the standard mathematical laws of the probability calculus as a special case that had only limited applicability in the real world. In general, applications of the mathematical laws of the probability calculus required a complete information set that was rarely satisfied. Smith realized that probability, nevertheless, had to be taken into account. Smith advocated an interval valued approach to the use of probability under conditions of uncertainty/ambiguity. Smith made great use of the concept of uncertainty. Uncertainty for Smith dealt with the quality of the information base upon which the probabilities were being calculated. Smith generally defined risk in the Wealth of Nations as an inexact and/or indeterminate estimate not based on the mathematical laws of the probability calculus. Risk could be calculated exactly only in conditions where there was a very high quality of evidence over which there were no conflicts and/or disputes of assessment regarding the relevancy of the data. Smith’s major conclusion in Part IV of the Wealth of Nations is that businessmen are ambiguity and/or uncertainty averse. The quality of the information, data, or knowledge upon which the probabilities, which would be interval estimates, is a second factor that is completely independent of the probability estimates themselves. Only in a limiting case, where the evidence is great, stable, and invariant over time, as in the case of deciding to become a shoemaker, would the probability estimates be point estimates. Smith completely rejects the ethics and decision theory of Jeremy Bentham, as well as all approaches built on it, such as the Subjectivist (SEU-Subjective Expected Utility) approaches of Frank Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, L J Savage , Milton Friedman .and modern Bayesians, such as Patrick Suppes.

Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum by Gillian B. Pierce

Reviews 221 Amour and Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane to examine the primal encounter in disability studies—the stare—and the protagonists’ recuperation of their narratives through surreptitious observation; Condé’s Heremakhonon and Bugul’s Le baobab fou to study the quest for a cure and the failed promise of integrative healing as emblems of uneasy testimony and attempts at postcolonial reconciliation; Diagne Sène’s Le chant des ténèbres and Bugul’s La folie et la mort to consider how marked bodies are cast as impediments to the smooth circulation of capital in the era of globalization; and finally, Bessora’s 53 cm and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique to explore the lives of African immigrant women living in France, whose bodies contaminate urban spaces and trouble phantasmatic notions of nation and belonging. Calling for‘contact,’these analyses engage a methodology that intentionally juxtaposes disparate texts and allies lenses of analysis. They overturn traditional readings of the sick and disabled female body as an easy metaphor for postcolonial alienation in favor of nuanced readings of lived and shifting subjectivities. They negotiate rifts within disability studies between the ‘social model’ of disablement and the subjective, embodied experience of impairment , trauma and pain while at the same time revealing spaces for rewriting and self-determination. Postcolonial and disability studies have come of age together and yet seem to have met fairly recently.With few notable exceptions, the field of disability studies has yet to engage with literatures in languages other than English. Nack Ngue points out how foundational Michel Foucault and Henri-Jacques Stiker have been to disability studies to wonder why this encounter is so long in coming. The methodology and structure of Critical Conditions reckon with deeply ingrained hierarchies and patterns of exclusion—historical, linguistic, and theoretical—in order to imagine solidarity between apparently disparate subjects and to reach for a transnational feminist disability politics. University of Minnesota, Morris Tammy Berberi Pierce, Gillian B. Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum.Amsterdam: Rodopi,2012.ISBN 978-90-420-3594-2.Pp.240. $70. Pierce analyzes French art criticism penned by creative authors, starting with Diderot’s Salons followed by Baudelaire, Breton, and Lyotard (spending the major part of her analysis on Diderot’s 1767 Salon and Lyotard’s 1995 Beaubourg exhibition, Les immatériaux). What ties these four writers together is their insistence on a purely subjectivist approach, on viewing art as an experience resulting in an inner moment and space of personal creativity and an outwardly aesthetic attitude toward existence. The term Scapeland is taken from Lyotard who uses it to describe the veritable ‘estrangement’ or displacement of the beholder and object viewed, transporting both viewer and subject matter into another-worldly or imaginative landscape of the beholder’s imagination. Unlike the scholarly gaze of the art historian whose interests are primarily attached to technique,materials,and subject matter—all for the purposes of describing and explaining the work of art—that of the subjectivist art critic sees the work of art as a point of departure for his own private creation; art (viewing) becomes a collaboration producing another work of art, be it a story, poem or even a self-engineered exhibit or event. For Lyotard, Diderot’s famous “Promenade Vernet” (Salon de 1767—the philosopher’s imaginative stroll through the sites visited in the paintings) expertly exemplifies this strange collaboration which Pierce also identifies as art’s ‘immateriality’; the physical canvas disappears into the beholder’s newly imagined ‘scape.’ In Baudelaire, this experience is taken to another level resulting not only in a prose poem but also in transforming the aesthetic experience of the flâneur into that of creator of (verbal) cityscapes. For Breton, the surrealist gaze is that “receptiveness or openness to the marvelous” (149): apprehending what lies beyond mere representation. Landscape paintings in particular serve as rich highways “to journey beyond the limits of mere representation into a world of dream and imagination inside its frame” (157). The subjective gaze of the author/critic reveals the essential immateriality of art, leading to an increasingly decentered attitude toward the work itself or what Lyotard identifies...

Fenomenologie jako základ ekonomické metody

In recent years, economic approach to human behavior has been challenged by contributions of cognitive science under the name of behavioral economics. As a result, two methodological strands in economics discord with each other: objectivistic (naturalistic) approach refuses the role of motivations in human behavior, adopting methods of natural science; subjectivistic (interpretative) approach, on the other hand, takes the teleological structure of human action as its corner stone. It is argued that position of the latter (esp. rational choice theory) has been undermined because it builds upon primitive version of human teleological structure. The paper shows that phenomenology offers a promising solution. Phenomenology identifies typical, invariant structures of human action and social world, with various degrees of their anonymity. If economic approach is founded on those structures adequately, then both rational choice theory and bounded rationality theories become compatible, as they differ in their degrees of anonymity only; they both belong to the body of (subjectivistic) economic approach to human behavior.

Are passive houses economically viable? A reality-based, subjectivist approach to cost-benefit analyses

Abstract The ‘passive house’ (PH) is a specific, pan-nationally recognised building standard designed to consume 15 kilowatt-hours of space heating energy per square metre of living area per year (kWh/m2a), significantly less than most countries’ current standard for a conventional house (CH). Most PHs cost some 5–15% more to build than a CH of equivalent size and layout. Investor-households therefore often enquire as to whether building a PH is economically viable: will the extra cost pay back in the long-run through fuel savings? A number of studies have offered cost-benefit analyses to address this, usually based on modelled heating consumption figures and prescriptive approaches to setting values for unknowable variables such as future fuel price rises and the investor's discount rate. This study offers a novel ‘reality-based, subjectivist’ approach. It uses empirically derived (i.e. real rather than modelled) consumption figures for PHs and CHs, and allows flexibility in setting fuel price increase and discount rates according to investor-households’ subjective judgments. Drawing on a wide range of data from peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed studies, it presents sample results in terms of years to amortisation against PH–CH consumption differences, and offers an 11-point decision-making process for would-be investor-households.

Reasons for action: Wittgensteinian and Davidsonian perspectives in historical and meta-philosophical context

My paper reflects on the debate about reasons for action and action explanations between Wittgensteinian teleological approaches and causalist theories inspired by Davidson. After a brief discussion of similarities and differences in the philosophy of language, I sketch the prehistory and history of the controversy. I show that the conflict between Wittgenstein and Davidson revolves neither around revisionism nor around naturalism. Even in the philosophy of mind and action, Davidson is not as remote from Wittgenstein and his followers as is commonly assumed: there are numerous points of contact of both a biographical and a substantive kind. The real conflict concerns the difference between Davidson’s official subjectivist approach to reasons for action, according to which they are mental states of believing and desiring (or their onsets) on the one hand, and an objectivist approach, according to which reasons for action are what is believed or desired, non-mental facts or states of affairs.

Objective Mens Rea and Attenuated Subjectivism: Guidance from Justice Louise Charron in R v. Beatty

In R v. Beatty, Charron J addressed a notoriously thorny issue in Canadian criminal law: when is one criminally liable for harm one neither intends nor foresees? Objective mens rea offences, which punish acts that fall below objective standards of conduct without regard to the defendant’s subjective mental state, are controversial. Among criminal law scholars, the controversy is reflected in the ongoing debate between subjectivists and contextualists. Subjectivists maintain that criminal punishment should be reserved for blameworthy conduct and that conduct is not blameworthy unless it is consciously chosen. They criticize objective mens rea offences for punishing inadvertent acts and omissions. Contextualists believe it may be appropriate to punish harmful conduct that falls below community standards, even if the harm was neither intended nor foreseen. They therefore accept many objective mens rea offences. This article reads Charron J’s majority reasons in Beatty as illustrating an alternative theory, called the subjectivist approach.According to the attenuated subjectivist approach, conduct is blameworthy if it reflects the defendant’s moral agency; that is, if it is fair to say the defendant could and should have done otherwise. The approach is admittedly of limited help in evaluating the fault requirements for particular offences since the claim that a defendant should have done otherwise begs the key normative question. The approach can, however, be readily applied to objective mens rea offences in the context of licensed activities because it is fair to presume that people engaged in those activities can and should meet the requisite standard of care. Justice Charron’s Beatty reasons both explain and exemplify this concrete application of the attenuated subjectivist approach.

De Finetti on uncertainty

The well-known Knightian distinction between quantifiable risk and unquantifiable uncertainty is at odds with the dominant subjectivist conception of probability associated with de Finetti, Ramsey and Savage. Risk and uncertainty are rendered indistinguishable on the subjectivist approach insofar as an individual’s subjective estimate of the probability of any event can be elicited from the odds at which she would be prepared to bet for or against that event. The risk/uncertainty distinction has however never quite gone away and is currently under renewed theoretical scrutiny. The purpose of this article is to show that de Finetti’s understanding of the distinction is more nuanced than is usually admitted. Relying on usually overlooked excerpts of de Finetti’s works commenting on Keynes, Knight and interval valued probabilities, we argue that de Finetti suggested a relevant theoretical case for uncertainty to hold even when individuals are endowed with subjective probabilities. Indeed, de Finetti admitted that the distinction between risk and uncertainty is relevant when different individuals sensibly disagree about the probability of the occurrence of an event. We conclude that the received interpretation of de Finetti’s understanding of subjective probability needs to be qualified on this front.

Phenomenology as a Foundation of Economic Method

In recent years, the economic approach to human behavior has been challenged by contributions of cognitive science. Thus two methodological strands in economics disagree with each other: the objectivistic approach favors the methods of natural science; the subjectivistic approach takes the teleological structure of human action as its cornerstone. It is argued that the position of the latter has been undermined because it builds upon the primitive version of the teleological structure. Its deeper analysis is needed, which is the task for economic phenomenology: it identifies invariant pragmatic structures of human action, with various degrees of their anonymity. If the economic approach is founded on those structures adequately, then both rational choice theory and bounded rationality theories become compatible, as they differ in their degrees of anonymity only; they both belong to the body of the (subjectivistic) economic approach to human behavior.

A subjectivist’s solution to the limits of public choice

In light of Wittman (1995) and Caplan (2007) this paper contends that the rational-choice approach to political science (“Public Choice theory”) has reached a dead end. By critiquing their treatment of rationality, knowledge assumptions, and views of the democratic process, an alternative is presented based on the core insight of the “Epistemic Primacy Thesis”. This subjectivist approach to political economy is introduced in light of an existing debate between the compatibility (or otherwise) of Austrian economics and Public Choice theory.

V-Aesthetics in Science: A Kantian Proposal

Can aesthetic judgements legitimately be linked to the success of scientific theories? I suggest that a satisfactory answer to this question should account for the persistent attraction that aesthetic considerations seem to have for scientists, while also explaining the apparent instability of the link between the beauty of a theory and its truth. I argue that two widespread tendencies in the literature, Pythagorean and subjectivist approaches, have difficulties meeting this twofold challenge. I propose a Kantian conception of aesthetic judgements as second-order considerations, related to our own intellectual capacities for making sense of the world, and argue that it fares better.

Context granulation and subjective-information quantification

In the course of comprehension, the human brain makes astounding inferences despite insufficient and ambiguous data—the data mostly being ‘words’ that frame sentences. Can this neural process of “abstraction of the relevant” be sufficiently modeled such that the computer may be induced to perform the same? This article is our response to this very question; a treatise on our attempt at engineering the basis of such a model, or rather, a methodology of ‘relevance cognition’. Drawing inspiration from the way children learn languages, we propose here a corpus and entropy-based methodology that follows a subjectivist approach to granulate and identify statements of consequence in a natural language sample, all within the periphery of a particular context. Besides promoting language grasping abilities of a machine–through simulation of the intuitive process of relevant-information segregation–the methodology aims at reducing overall text-processing costs. The suggested scheme considers ‘conceptual keywords’ to be the basis of sentential understanding and utilizes the principles of Bayes’ conditional probability and Shannon’s entropy theorem. Experimental results have been provided to substantiate our logic. Though this article has been formulated over the backdrop of the Z-number approach to computing with words (CWW), it nevertheless applies to research areas in natural language processing (NLP) like text summarization, semantic disambiguation and concept graph generation.

Avoiding Strict Liability in Mixed Conflicts: A Subjectivist Approach to the Contextual Element of War Crimes

As long as distinct legal regimes apply to international and non-international armed conflicts, the determination of the nature of the conflict by a court of law directly impacts on the criminal responsibility of the accused for war crimes. As this article shows, the approach traditionally used in international criminal law to characterise mixed conflicts is not sufficiently reliable for the addressees of penal norms. Low-ranking perpetrators have generally little chance of being aware of the international character of the conflict. This article argues that the principle of individual guilt requires establishing the mens rea regarding the nature of the conflict. Accordingly, a mistake of fact, or alternatively, a mistake of legal element should be admissible defences. Furthermore, it is submitted that both the method of conflict characterisation and the definition of the corresponding mental element are not compatible with the requirements of the principle of legality.

Ethical expertise and Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs)

In setting national standards for the ethical review of human research in Australia, the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research(NS) (2007) does not aim to be exhaustively prescriptive, and so requires a degree of ethical reflection when applying the principles of research merit and integrity, justice, beneficence and respect. There are two broad ways in which this need for ethical reflection can be understood. On an objectivist interpretation, an adequate levelof ethical expertise is required to ensure the informed application and implementation of these principles. From a subjectivist perspective, recourse to the 'community view' or common-sense morality provides an adequate basis for ethical reflection. The primary purpose of this article is to argue that the NSis itself an exercise in objectivist research ethics, but that what weknow of the current practices ofHRECs is more consistent with a subjectivist approach to ethical reflection, and that this mismatch is best addressed by improving the level of ethical expertise brought to bear in the ethical review of human research. The secondary purpose of this article is to briefly suggest ways of achieving this improvement within the parameters of a de-centralised system of review such as we have in Australia, yet also to hopefully stimulate debate as to whether this need to improve the level of expertise, ethical and otherwise, might best be served by moving towards a more centralised and professionalised system of ethical review.

De Finetti on the Insurance of Risks and Uncertainties

In the insurance literature, it is often argued that private markets can provide insurance against ‘risks’ but not against ‘uncertainties’ in the sense of Knight ([1921]) or Keynes ([1921]). This claim is at odds with the standard economic model of risk exchange which, in assuming that decision-makers are always guided by point-valued subjective probabilities, predicts that all uncertainties can, in theory, be insured. Supporters of the standard model argue that the insuring of highly idiosyncratic risks by Lloyd's of London proves that this is so even in practice. The purpose of this article is to show that Bruno de Finetti, famous as one of the three founding fathers of the subjective approach to probability assumed by the standard model, actually made a theoretical case for uncertainty within the subjectivist approach. We draw on empirical evidence from the practice of underwriters to show how this case may help explain the reluctance of insurers to cover highly uncertain contingencies. 1 Introduction 2 Knight and Keynes on the Philosophy of Unknown Probabilities and Lloyd's of London 2.1 Knight 2.2 Keynes 3 Insuring Unique Events: The Subjectivist Viewpoint as Represented by de Finetti 4 The ‘Philosophy’ of Practitioners 5 De Finetti on Uncertainty in Knight and Keynes and on Insurability 5.1 De Finetti on Knight 5.2 De Finetti on Keynes 6 Empirical Evidence on Insurance Under Ambiguity 7 Conclusion

Credit scoring analysis using a fuzzy probabilistic rough set model

Credit scoring analysis is an important activity, especially nowadays after a huge number of defaults has been one of the main causes of the financial crisis. Among the many different tools used to model credit risk, the recent development of rough set models has proved effective. The original development of rough set theory has been widely generalized and combined with other approaches to uncertain reasoning, especially probability and fuzzy set theories. Since coherent conditional probability assessments cope well with the problem of unifying these different approaches, a merging of fuzzy rough set theory with this subjectivist approach is proposed. Specifically, expert partial probabilistic evaluations are encompassed inside a gradual decision rule structure, with coherence of the conclusion as a guideline. In line with Bayesian rough set models, credibility degrees of multiple premises are introduced through conditional probability assessments. Nonetheless, discernibility with this method remains too fine. Therefore, the basic partition is coarsened by equivalence classes based on the arity of positively, negatively and neutrally related criteria. A membership function, which grades the likelihood of default, is introduced by a peculiar choice of t-norms and t-conorms. To build and test the model, real data related to a sample of firms are used.

STRONG SUBJECTIVISM IN THE MARXIAN THEORY OF EXPLOITATION: A CRITIQUE

This paper critically analyses the strongly subjectivist approach to exploitation theory proposed by Matsuo on this journal, in general convex economies with heterogeneous agents. It is proved that the Fundamental Marxian Theorem is not preserved and that no meaningful subjectivist exploitation index can be constructed. A minimal objectivism is necessary in exploitation theory, whereby subjective preferences do not play a direct, definitional role. An objectivist approach related to the ‘New Interpretation’ is proposed which captures the core intuitions of exploitation theory, provides appropriate indices of individual and aggregate exploitation, and preserves the Fundamental Marxian Theorem in general economies.

A new look at the Austrian School of Economics: review and prospects

This paper looks at the Austrian School of Economics from the subjectivist perspective. It begins by reviewing the major architects in the Austrian School, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig M. Lachmann and Isaac M. Kirzner. The paper then elucidates the major tenets of the Austrian School of Economics, namely methodological subjectivism and interpretative economics; entrepreneurship, knowledge and coordination problems in the market process; central planning and Austrian business cycle. It highlights the agreements with public choice school, new institutional economics, evolutionary economics, feminist economics and disagreements with the Marxist economics, Neo-Ricardian School and orthodox neoclassical paradigm. It also clarifies similarities and differences between the Chicago School and Austrian School of Economics. The paper ends with further suggestions on the Austrian subjectivist approach to economic problems by using two illustrations of recent international events, Financial Crisis in 2007 and nuclear meltdown in Japan.