Theoretical Inclinations Research Articles

Analysis of the Model Used to Predict Continuous Deformations of the Land Surface in Areas Subject to Discontinuous Deformations—A Case Study

This article analyses and evaluates the model used by the Jastrzebie Coal Company in Poland to forecast the values of continuous deformations of land surfaces caused by underground mining. Particular attention is paid to the values of terrain inclinations, which cause significant deflections of buildings located in mining areas affected by exploitation. The inclination forecasts were made using Bialek’s model, with the values of its parameters determined in situ and after completion of the exploitation of a longwall. The obtained results were compared with the values of the terrain inclinations calculated from the results of geodetic measurements carried out at observation points located near the buildings and discontinuous linear deformations (i.e., the ground steps). The conducted research shows that the correlations between the absolute values of the practical inclinations and the values of the theoretical inclinations were rather weak, as the values of their correlation coefficients did not exceed 0.24. The tested model underestimated 45.5% of the values of the inclinations observed in situ by an average of −53.5%. The model values of the inclinations for the remaining observed inclinations (54.5%) were overestimated by an average of 461.9%. The largest anomalies were obtained in the case of inclination values from points located near the ground steps. The effectiveness of predicting inclination values with a commonly used model is strongly reduced when discontinuous linear deformations appear. Nonetheless, it reflects well the mining area categories.

Feasible and Ethical Dilemmas of Rehabilitation - Focusing on Community Sanction

Imprisonment and rehabilitation are two widely used approaches to crime control in countries around the world. In recent years, numerous scholars have engaged in theoretical reasoning and empirical research from various angles in an attempt to argue that rehabilitation is superior to imprisonment in both feasibility and ethical considerations for offenders. Community sanctions, as a primary form of rehabilitative punishment, indeed exhibit several advantages over traditional retributive incarceration. However, the feasibility and ethical dimensions of rehabilitative community sanctions face significant challenges in the absence of personalized needs assessments, resource constraints within the criminal justice system, a tendency towards conservatism, and a theoretical inclination towards explaining crime through social factors. It is imperative to recognize the complexity and limitations of rehabilitation and adopt a more nuanced approach in sentencing and correction, striving to find a balance between offenders' rights and the public interest.

Internal Audit Effectiveness and Financial Accountability in the Provincial Treasuries of South Africa

Provincial Treasuries are responsible for assisting the National Treasury in enforcing compliance with the measures established in the South African constitution, which stipulates public sector expenditure control and transparency. This study aims to examine the relationship between internal audit effectiveness and financial accountability in the Provincial Treasuries of South Africa. The theoretical inclination is on the stewardship theory. The research is based on a quantitative approach and draws secondary data on internal audit and financial performance from the nine provincial treasuries of South Africa. Analyses were done using the fixed effect regression after conduction the Hausman tests, Augmented Dickey-Fuller tests (ADF) and Philips Perron (PP). Findings indicate that internal audit can enhance financial accountability across all the expenditure programmes of provincial treasuries in South Africa. Government departments should embrace internal audit as a monitoring tool to evaluate financial accountability and service delivery performance, but not as a punitive initiative. In addition, educational training of internal audit staff can be very effective in achieving government financial control. The paper provides a veritable case study to higher institutions regarding educational qualification versus experience implications on public sector internal audit and accountability; it also offers an agenda for further research.

Teacher Cognition in Grammar Teaching: A Case Study in a Turkish EFL Context

This Language Teacher Cognition (LTC) study primarily explores language teachers’ beliefs and practices about a common Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) construct: Grammar Teaching (GT). This study also aims to investigate to what extent teacher beliefs and practices compromise with each other and cognitive and contextual factors behind their cognition. The data were collected through interviews, observations, and stimulated recall with the teachers. The findings after a cross-case analysis revealed that coursebook-based beliefs, experience-based beliefs, lack of theoretical knowledge and inclination for communicative activities influence what teachers believe about GT. There are both congruent and incongruent relationships between beliefs and practices varying from one teacher to another due to the effect of experiential knowledge, unconscious decisions, and some contextual factors. The findings can contribute to the integration of LTC into ISLA studies, and to LTC framework by exploring the effects of many variables on teachers’ decision making processes. Key words: Language Teacher Cognition (LTC), Grammar Teaching (GT), teacher beliefs, teacher practices

Measuring pre-service teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge—What are the results telling?

A pilot study was carried out in order to attempt capturing teachers' general pedagogical knowledge (GPK). The aim of the paper is to find out how pre-service teachers' GPK differs within internship experience, level of education and work experiences, and what can be concluded about the test instrument based on results. All together 135 pre-service teachers from Estonia filled in a knowledge test with 60 multiple choice questions. The results showed that those who had not done their internship performed better at the test, possibly indicating a theoretical nature of the test instrument. However, it also shows a shift in pre-service teachers' knowledge when entering practical field. Therefore, it can be discussed whether the experiences from practice schools differ from what has been learned at the university courses. For future test developments, the theoretical inclination of the test should be challenged by improving items targeting more of practical knowledge. Keywords: Teachers' knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, teacher education.

Processes in Psychotherapy and the MATRIX: The Case of Projective Identification

The MATRIX is a tool designed to analyze psychoanalytic sessions. It is composed of two axes: focus (patient, therapist, and dyad) and dimension (space, content, and order). The MATRIX was found to be a reliable tool, and valid for identifying the therapist's theoretical inclinations in psychoanalytic-oriented psychotherapy sessions. In the present study, we suggest that the MATRIX can identify different (Kleinian, Bionian, and relational) approaches to projective identification, thus providing therapists and supervisors an easy-to-use tool for monitoring, and better managing, projective identifications during psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.

The MATRIX, a novel tool exploring dynamic psychotherapy: Preliminary psychometric properties

Most measures in the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy are bound to a specific theory, and usually focus only on patient processes or therapist interventions. The MATRIX is a newly developed research tool that focuses on events within both the patient and the therapist individually, as well as on dyadic events, and provides the simple and meaningful coding of content for therapy session transcripts in psychotherapy. The present study describes the inter-rater reliability and construct validity of the MATRIX.Reliability of the MATRIX was assessed by applying it to 805 fragments of psychodynamic-oriented psychotherapy sessions. Three independent experts coded fragments, and the tool was examined for reliability. Validity in identifying the theoretical inclinations was assessed by applying the MATRIX to 30 segments (containing 1309 fragments) of sessions that reflect different theoretical orientations. Findings evinced high inter-rater reliability for all dimensions. The MATRIX was found to have high degree of validity for differentiating the theoretical inclinations of segments of sessions.The MATRIX is a reliable and valid measure that may enable moment-to-moment, quantitative, analysis of psychodynamic psychotherapy.

“The Delight and Torment of the World” — Aesthetics and its History

A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols, by Paul Guyer. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2014. xii, 578 pp.; vi, 478 pp.; x, 658 pp. $335.00 US (cloth). Beauty has been the Delight and Torment of the World ever since it began. The Philosophers have felt its Influence so sensibly, that almost every one of them has left us some Saying or other, which has intimated that he too well knew the Power of it.--Richard Steele remarked wisely in 1711 (The Spectator, No. 144). Though he did not have the faintest idea about a new discipline exploring the beautiful, the sublime, the novel and the like, he was one of the first authors who supported its emergence. In his Vorschule zur Asthetik of 1804, Jean Paul already complained that aesthetes were incredibly numerous. And, finally, when Nicolai Hartmann was writing the chapters--for example, about the menschliche Schonheit als Erscheinung--of his monumental Asthetik in a Berlin cellar during the carpet-bombing raids of the Allies, that could be regarded as a symbol of the agony of systematic philosophical (Two of these three authors are not even mentioned in the 1,714 pages which are being reviewed.) (1) The word was coined by Alexander von Baumgarten as late as 1735 (his Latin Aesthetica came to light only in 1750), still the first history of aesthetics was published as early as 1799 by Joseph Roller, though it is rather an annotated bibliography. Nevertheless it lists the major authors of this new discipline including Baumgarten, Lord Karnes, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller who have become inevitable figures of the subsequent series of the histories of aesthetics. (2) Robert Zimmermann, later professor of philosophy in Vienna, wrote the first elaborated history of aesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century (beginning with Socrates and presenting history as a historic-critical story that concludes into the author's own aesthetic theory published in a separate volume). (3) Since then several influential narratives have been published. It is worth mentioning at least the classical works of Max Schasler from 1872, Menendez y Pelayo from 1883-89, K. Heinrich von Stein from 1886, Benedetto Croce from 1902, Alfred Baeumler from 1921, and Ernst Cassirer from 1932. (4) Only some of the newer historical interpretations of modern aesthetics or philosophies of art are briefly discussed by Guyer in a single footnote. (5) Of course, a huge literature has simultaneously been written on the history of rhetoric and literary theory, of criticism, and of art theory, but aesthetics has somehow preserved its relative independence, probably by means of its intimate connection with philosophy; thus, for example, the poet Samuel T. Coleridge with his attitude and interest is almost an indispensable figure in the histories of aesthetics, while such significant critics with otherwise profound theoretical inclination as John Dryden, John Dennis, Samuel Johnson, or Matthew Arnold usually do not receive due attention (sometimes, they are not even mentioned). In the Anglo-American part of the academic world, the last comprehensive history of aesthetics was written by Beardsley in 1966, (6) and the previous one was first published in 1939. (7) Paul Guyer made his contribution to this tradition of historiography and signed up to this list of illustrious historians in 2014. First of all, I would like to emphasize that Paul Guyer's three-volume history is a respectable enterprise; only a few scholars are capable of completing such a gigantic work. It must have required heroic efforts and an extremely high endurance for years of writing and researching. No doubt, every future reader will learn, as I also did, a lot from these volumes. Generations will come to consult them with satisfaction; and personally, I would have been glad, as an undergraduate in Aesthetics at Pecs in the late 1980s, had I had a similar set of volumes to overview the history of modern aesthetics. …

The Future of Comparative Politics is its Past

Schmitter advocates that the future of comparative politics should be about addressing context, complexity, aggregate dynamics, limits to simplified cross-national generalizations, non-reductive assumptions about individual rationality, and an analytical method that is pragmatic and realistic in its assumptions. In this short essay, I argue that most of what Schmitter calls for as the future of comparative politics is already present. Schmitter has reengaged in a debate and discussion that goes back to the origins of comparative politics, and that is how to balance its theoretical inclination for broad cross-national generalization with its area (case) study empirical basis. In this respect, the future of comparative politics is its past!

Canadian scholarship on international relations: Unified, divided or diverse?

This article examines the Canadian data collected by the Teaching, Research and International Policy project to assess the state of Canadian international relations scholarship. The focus is on the divide, mentioned but not studied in previous work, between the higher profile PhD programs (UBC, McGill, Toronto) and other Canadian universities. The results indicate that the approaches, methods, and theoretical inclinations differ less than often averred, but that the two groups do value different scholars, journals, and presses. And there is more diversity within each side than often argued, which makes the divide itself less deep. The article concludes with some implications about the possibility of a distinctively Canadian international relations.

The Turkish Left and the Kurdish Question

This essay examines Marxist Turkish left’s engagement with the Kurdish question in Turkey. It aims to portray, on the basis of some first-hand material, the theoretical inclinations and political attitudes of the main legal and illegal Marxist parties and organizations concerning the Kurdish question. It basically argues that the Turkish Marxists’ stressful engagement with the Kurdish question can be viewed in four periods corresponding to four conditions: encounter, union, separation, and divorce.

Hot on the audit trail: How to assess methodological transparency of grounded theory in Management?

Iterative methods such as grounded theory rely on several cycles of comparing empirical phenomena with theoretical inclinations until saturation is reached. We propose a new method for assessing th...

Det endelig ordforråd

Text analysis and text comprehension are problems closely connected with the question of vocabulary. The vocabulary comprises the units which text analysis cannot ignore as one of its goals, and text comprehension - irrespective of theoretical inclination - will always interact with word comprehension. You may claim that texts presuppose words and word semantics in so far as the words are the bricks in the building of texts, or you may claim that the meaning of words is an abstract concept presupposing the sentence, or the text, and not having its empirical status; but to the best of my knowledge nobody will claim that there is no interrelation between the comprehension of words and that of texts. Thus it is relevant to study the words and the vocabularies of languages considering i.a., whether the vocabulary is finite or infinite. This paper will argue the first case, even for a language like Danish with its wide range of word formation potentials which might present the latter case as the attractive alternative. The arguments will be based on facts about the structure of the words and on some considerations on functional and semantic load. The paper is a slightly revised and extended version of a oral contribution given at a conference "Danish Text Analysis on Computers" in November 1991 at the University of Copenhagen under the auspices of the Danish Research Council for the Humanities.

WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT WHAT YOU BELIEVE: DISCUSSING SOCIAL THEORY IN SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Taken together, the papers published in this volume demonstrate that Southeastern archaeologists are theoretically eclectic, are borrowers and users of theory, are reflexive and collaborative, and are modest and unaggressive when discussing their theoretical inclinations. This paper clarifies the positive and negative outcomes of these characteristics and suggests ways to encourage the benefits while discouraging the drawbacks. I advocate being careful when combining theoretical paradigms, using technology to continue year-round informal communication, being more generous with stakeholder relationships and the methods used to build them, and giving ourselves more credit for the interesting theory building that we do.

State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible

This book is a significant and welcome addition to the literature on state formation. As is true of any ambitious collection of essays, it provides an opportunity to consider how scholarly treatment of a subject has evolved since the last landmark study in the field — in this case, since the publication of Everyday Forms of State Formation (1994), edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent. If that 20-year-old volume was notable for its argument that state formation could be studied from a cultural and popular perspective emphasizing the “negotiation of rule,” the book presently under review illustrates the multiplicity of approaches and perspectives employed by scholars today. The authors in Miguel Centeno and Agustin Ferraro's volume — an array of 19 historians and historically oriented social scientists — share inspiration from a range of theorists, including Michael Mann, James Scott, Charles Tilly, and Lawrence Whitehead, but they do not share an overarching interpretive paradigm.In their introduction, the editors delineate several forms of state power that provide the basis for dividing the volume into three main sections. The first group of essays focuses on the state's economic and territorial power, an approach that emphasizes issues of political economy well established in the literature on state formation. The second section examines the state's “infrastructural” capacity, which includes “the organizational and technical power to process information, build organizational structures, and maintain transportation and communication systems” (p. 11). The third section (perhaps the most diverse) features essays focused on state legitimacy and on elites' (including bureaucrats') efforts to project particular representations of the nation. Thus the nation making referred to in the volume's title is treated as one dimension of state formation — though a crucial one, as the editors note in their concluding essay. These three categories of state power, of course, are not mutually exclusive in practice; some of the most engaging essays could be placed in more than one category. The wide range of factors encompassed in these categories also serves as a useful reminder that it is overly simplistic to think of a particular state as merely weak or strong; rather, as a state changes over time, its capacity may grow in some areas but atrophy in others. One of the virtues of this collection is that the contributors consistently view the state as multifaceted and dynamic rather than monolithic or reified.Numerous provocative themes and connected ideas emerge from these essays. One example is the tension between systems of patronage and attempts to expand the state's bureaucratic and fiscal capacity. Ricardo Salvatore argues that Argentina's expansion of public education by an expert bureaucracy in the late nineteenth century led, ironically, to the school system becoming a source of patronage and rent-seeking behavior thereafter. Exploring similar themes, Claudia Herrera and Ferraro examine the opposition between a political culture of clientelism and efforts to create a modern “tax culture” in Argentina and Spain (p. 157). Iván Jaksić's study of Andrés Bello's contribution to the development of educational institutions and civil law in Chile highlights the ways that respect for bureaucratic expertise and the separation of powers contributed to political stability and legitimacy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Expanding this picture of state capacity and legitimacy in postindependence Chile, Sarah Chambers argues that the courts received and sympathetically resolved cases brought by a broad swath of society, though the judicial system appears to have become more exclusionary later in the nineteenth century. This issue of Latin American states' inclusionary and exclusionary practices arises throughout the volume. Alan Knight observes that in Mexico both the Porfirian state and its revolutionary successor went through inclusionary and exclusionary phases, while contributions by Hillel Soifer and Nancy Appelbaum explore the mostly exclusionary effects of Peruvian education and Colombian cartography, respectively.Readers' reaction to this volume will naturally reflect their own research interests and theoretical inclinations. Some might ask whether scholars' previous success in bringing bottom-up social history into discussions of state formation — as exemplified by Joseph and Nugent's volume — has been slighted in favor of an overly narrow focus on the state itself. Others might conclude that, given Centeno and Ferraro's choice to highlight issues of state capacity, more sustained attention should have been devoted to governments' inability to raise greater domestic revenues — a failure with negative implications for all other state powers. Despite such objections, this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary volume deserves a large audience. It has more than enough theoretical and empirical substance to make it required reading for anyone interested in the Latin American state.

Foolishness, Stupidity, and Cognitive Values

1. IntroductionWhat are the relations between ethical values and moral norms, on the one hand, and cognitive values and norms, on the other hand? Between ethical and intellectual virtues and vices? Between cognitive values and other types of value-aesthetic, hedonic, political, prudential and religious? Between kitsch, sham emotions or sentiments, and foolishness? Between foolishness and cognitive vices and forms of practical irrationality such as self-deception, ressentiment, blether, obscurantism, and obscurity? What are and should be our affective attitudes towards knowledge, truth, justification, precision, and clarity?In 1930 Jose Ortega y Gasset wondered why there is still no study of foolishness (tonteria) dealing with those aspects of the phenomenon not investigated by Erasmus.1 The first installments of The Man Without Qualities in 1931 and 1933 provide a remarkable panoply of fools, foolishness, silliness, and stupidity and a determined attempt to understand these phenomena. The passion of the book is, its author says, the passion for precision.2 Reason, he also says, plays a great role in his art.3 Many of the fools and follies in the novel are presented as examples of attempts to mind (Geist) to life. The Parallel Action is, through and through, a foolish enterprise.4 Amheim, Meingast, Feuermaul, Hans Sepp, Gerda, Diotima, Bonadea, Clarissa, and Professor Lindner display a variety of cognitive vices. Humanitarianism, intuition, mindless action or energy, and pharisaism are depicted as cognitive vices or evils.Ulrich and Agathe, on the other hand, are (imperfect) epistemic heroes. Agathe has unusually exact memory, which did not deform its contents by any sort of prejudice or wishful thinking.5 But, we are told by the (Weiningerian?) narrator, although intelligent women such as Agathe are unerring in their observation of the men they love, they have no theoretical inclinations.6 Unlike Ulrich, who is a prince of mind. listens to, analyses, evaluates, and indeed provokes an astonishing amount of nonsense and bullshit. Thus Ulrich converses with Hans Sepp and Gerda in the pidgin-language of the frontier district between the super-rational and the sub-rational. What Sepp has to say is mere nonsense, claptrap (Geschwatz), peppered with pretentious nouns.7One early striking appearance of foolishness in the novel is the account given by and the narrator of a peculiar phenomenon-the tendency of the cognitively virtuous to manifest virtue or habit only in severely restricted contexts. Ulrich's second career, as an engineer, fills him with enthusiasm because of its possibilities:Who still needed the Apollo Belvedere when he had the new forms of a turbodynamo ... before his eyes !... Looked at from a technical point of view, the world is simply ridiculous: impractical in all that concerns human relations, and extremely uneconomic and imprecise in its methods; anyone accustomed to solving his problems with a slide-rule cannot take seriously a good half of the assertions people make ... If you own a slide-rule and someone comes along with big statements or great emotions, you say: Just a moment, please-let's first work out the margin for error and the most probable values.8But this powerful view of what it meant to be an engineer is not shared by the engineers has known, who fail to adapt the daring and innovative soul of [their] technology to [their] private soul[s]:9It is hard to say why engineers don't quite live up to vision . . . [A]ny suggestion that they might apply their daring ideas to themselves instead of their machines would have taken them aback, much as if they had been asked to use a hammer for the unnatural purpose of killing a man.10Their cognitive virtues or habits, then, are manifested only selectively.The panoply of folly presented in the novel is contrasted in many ways with the first and third of the three individual utopias explored one after the other in the novel-the utopia of exactness and the utopia of inductive humility. …

Il ruolo della Sociologia della salute e della medicina nell'attuale dibattito sulla inter-disciplinarietÀ nelle scienze sociali

Since the earliest phases of its institutionalization, the sociology of health and medicine has played an increasingly central role within the more general context of sociological thinking. Its prospects are further heightened in the context of the current debate on the interactions between the social sciences and fields of knowledge like cognitive science, behavioral genetics, neurosciences, which are becoming more and more closely engaged with the study of Human Social Behavior. This mediation role, however, finds it difficult to manifest itself due to the various theoretical and epistemological inclinations that sociology has relied on to solidify its own identity and stand apart from the formal criteria used in other scholarly contexts.

The role of the Sociology of Health and Medicine in the current debate on interdisciplinarity in Social Sciences

Since the earliest phases of its institutionalization, the sociology of health and medicine has played an increasingly central role within the more general context of sociological thinking. Its prospects are further heightened in the context of the current debate on the interactions between the social sciences and fields of knowledge like cognitive science, behavioral genetics, neurosciences, which are becoming more and more closely engaged with the study of Human Social Behavior. This mediation role, however, finds it difficult to manifest itself due to the various theoretical and epistemological inclinations that sociology has relied on to solidify its own identity and stand apart from the formal criteria used in other scholarly contexts.

Dispute Settlement in the WTO and NAFTA: A Comparative Evaluation

Trade agreement frameworks are generally aimed at liberalising markets. Broadly, there are two approaches to constituting such agreements: the multilateral approach and the regional approach. The World Trade Organisation, whose rules are increasingly becoming framework rules for almost all trade activities (lex generalis) between countries, best exemplifies - or, indeed, is - the multilateral approach, while the North American Free Trade Agreement is an example of a strong Regional Trade Agreement. It is a particularly interesting one because it incorporates the perspective of developed economies on the one hand (U.S. and Canada) and a developing economy on the other (Mexico). This work compares the fulcrums of the dispute settlement contraptions in both frameworks, in addition to the theoretical and conceptual inclinations which constitute the foundation of their unique approaches.

Afterword to the Special Issue on Knowledge in Practice

I was very glad to say yes when Claudio Benzecry and Monika Krause asked if I would contribute an afterword to this special issue of Qualitative Sociology. I was not one of the discussants at the 2009 Junior Theorists Symposium (JTS) where the papers published here were originally presented. But I was in the audience, and was impressed then, just as I am now, by the range, intellectual vigor, and downright interestingness of the pieces. Young scholars selected to take part in the JTS are typically regarded by their mentors as having the potential to make major contributions to the discipline, and from the papers it is not hard to see why. Given space constraints I won’t be able to discuss most of the essays in any depth. Instead, I’ll confine myself to making a few observations, based in part on my reading of the papers, about the state of the theory field. In a piece for the ASATheory Section newsletter in 2004, Michele Lamont reported the results of an informal survey of theory teaching in the top ten American graduate departments of sociology. Most of those sociologist who taught theory didn’t think of themselves first and foremost as theorists. Rather, “the prime subfield-identity of the theory teachers tends to be that of cultural sociologist, comparative historical sociologist, political sociologist, and gender sociologist” (Lamont 2004, p. 14). The only exceptions were very senior scholars. Lamont found a similar pattern when she examined ASA section memberships. Among the sections, it was Culture, Comparative-Historical, Political Sociology, and Sex and Gender that had the largest number of members who were also members of the Theory Section. Lamont went on to reflect on the significance of these findings. Are they a function of the fact that there are few jobs these days for self-identified theorists, signaling the declining prestige of the subfield, such that those with theoretical inclinations are forced to reinvent themselves as empirical researchers? Do they mean, more narrowly, that top departments, for whatever reason, are reluctant to hire theorists, and offload their required theory courses onto scholars with other interests? Or do they signal a shift in the nature of the theoretical enterprise, with the most innovative and influential work now being done by Qual Sociol (2010) 33:563–567 DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9170-0