Theory Claims Research Articles

Competitively-Issued Convertible Bank Notes in a Theory of Finance: Earl Thompson Meets Fischer Black

In this paper, I show the validity of and the relationship between two previously unrelated claims in monetary theory. The first claim, made by Earl Thompson, is that privately-issued bank notes pay a positive rate of return in a competitive equilibrium. The second claim, made by Fischer Black, is that it is possible to have a gold standard in which the gold reserves of the central bank are near zero. I first show the validity of Thompson's claim. I then show that a corollary of my result is that Black's claim is correct in a competitive market. The link between these claims is the Black-Scholes equation applied to bank notes. In commodity-based monetary systems, bank notes are perpetual American options. I extend the model to consider the implications of a lack of commitment on the part of the bank and incomplete markets. I show that both arguments break down when banks lack commitment or markets are incomplete. I conclude with implications for macroeconomic theory.

Is knowledge capital theory degenerate? PIAAC, PISA, and economic growth

ABSTRACT Extending recent analyses using PISA data, the current study utilises the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to test the central claims of knowledge capital theory. PIAAC has a distinct advantage over PISA in that it more directly tests levels of purported ‘knowledge capital’ across an entire national workforce, rather than offering approximations based on the performance of 15-year-old students. Findings from our two original studies reported herein further refute the tight linkage between cognitive levels and GDP growth per capita envisaged by proponents of knowledge capital, most notably the OECD and World Bank. These results suggest that knowledge capital theory is now degenerate. If scholars are willing to extend this reporting of results refuting knowledge capital theory, this will likely accelerate the theory’s loss of momentum in the coming years.

Fractured modernization: cultural and structural predictors of attitudes on gender equality

ABSTRACTAs modernization has become globally valued, the topic of gender equality as a human right has been taken up across the world. In a simultaneously individual and national-level analysis, we sought links between citizens’ views on gender equality and their social and economic conditions, as well as relationships with factors concerning religion. With data generated from the World Values Survey-Wave 6, and from the UIS database maintained by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, we analyzed a sample of 68,633 respondents from 53 countries. Results supported our hypothesis that positive views of gender equality are associated with modernized, non-Islamic civilizations whose upper social classes endorse gender equality, and which feature strong income, higher levels of employment, and less religiosity at the individual level. Our study also showed moderating roles being played by modernization and Islamic civilization in the relationship between religiosity and gender-equality attitudes. Our results call into question modernization theory's claim for a linear path between modernization and widespread gender equality over time. The results further indicate a need to analyze how nonuniformly modernized countries, divergent with regard to their citizens’ religiosity, might achieve gender equality.

Culture and the development of views of agency: Perspectives from storybooks, parents, and children.

The present three-study investigation examined cultural influences on the internalization of social expectations. Testing the claim of self-determination theory that lesser internalization of social expectations is linked to socialization practices that portray social expectations as in conflict with autonomy, in Study 1 we undertook a content analysis of the views of social expectations portrayed in American and Indian storybooks. Results indicated that only American and not Indian storybooks more frequently portrayed characters as displaying negative emotions when behaviors were socially expected as compared with spontaneous. In Study 2 (n = 120), we undertook a vignette-based experiment, which showed that American parents viewed social expectations as incompatible with agency whereas Indian parents viewed them as compatible with agency. In Study 3 (n = 224), we undertook a related vignette based experiment among 7- and 10-year-old children in the United States and India. Results indicated that younger children shared a view of social expectations as compatible with agency, with qualitative developmental change occurring among American children who come to view social expectations as in conflict with autonomy with age, and quantitative developmental change occurring among Indian children who deepen their earlier understandings of social expectations with age. Our results point to the presence of early relational outlooks that young children use in assimilating cultural variable messages communicated in socialization practices. Challenging simple "fax" models of cultural learning, our results indicate that children do not passively absorb cultural messages but actively interpret them in integrating them with their emerging sense of self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Linguistic Meaning, Rigid Designators, and Legal Philosophy

This essay is intended to engage some of the controversies that have emerged in legal philosophy concerning the theory of linguistic meaning we should adopt with reference to the law. In particular, I will focus on two theories of linguistic meaning that have opposing positions both on the nature of meaning, and the consequences this might have for law and legal objectivity. The first can be called plain meaning view. The plain meaning theory claims that the meaning of legal terms is a settled thing, and it is the duty of legal officials, especially judges, to simply apply that meaning to a given case in hand. In modern American jurisprudence, the plain meaning theory is often associated with various originalist figures, most notably the late Antonin Scalia who called his iteration of the plain meaning theory “textualism.” For this reason, I will largely be focusing on Justice Scalia’s account. The second theory of linguistic meaning I will be examining can be called the indeterminate theory. The indeterminate theory holds that there is no set or foundational meaning to any semantic term in the law which can be objectively applied by legal practitioners.

Nonadmirable moral exemplars and virtue development

ABSTRACTLinda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory claims that admiration for a person is a necessary condition for her to be a moral exemplar. I argue that this claim is empirically unsupported. I provide two counterexamples, astronauts and brain data. I demonstrate that they play the role of exemplars well but receive no admiration and, accordingly, are entitled to be called nonadmirable moral exemplars. I conclude that my argument suggests why Aristotle, distinct from Zagzebski, does not emphasise the role of the praiseworthiness of virtue in his theory of virtue development in the Nicomachean Ethics.

Reconhecimento ou Redistribuição: O que o debate entre Honneth e Fraser diz das lutas sociais e vice-versa

Neste texto, buscamos revisitar o debate entre Honneth e Fraser acerca dos conceitos de reconhecimento e redistribuição sob duas óticas diferentes. Por um lado, faremos isso tentando verificar os ecos e as conseqüências dessa discussão nas obras desses dois autores posteriores ao livro-debate de 2003. Assim, se é verdade que as divergências centrais entre eles se mantiveram, também é fato que houve uma aproximação entre seus modos de conceberem as fontes de injustiças nas sociedades contemporâneas. Por outro lado, no espírito da teoria crítica, que tanto Honneth quanto Fraser reivindicam a herança, tentaremos discutir como esse debate dialoga com as tendências recentes do movimento negro, mostrando assim que esse debate é tanto teórico quanto político.

Taking Action or Thinking About It? State Orientation and Rumination Are Correlated in Athletes.

Athletic performance in competitive sports relies heavily on the ability to cope effectively with stressful situations. In contrast, some athletes report that their thoughts revolve around the future or past and not around the actual demands during competitions. In those specific stressful situations, the lack of focus like an unintended fixation on repetitive cognitions can have fatal consequences with regard to the performance. Especially when competitors are close in their athletic capabilities, differences in effectively coping with stress and mental stability may decide about winning and losing. One established factor of performing effectively under pressure is the individual tendency to either focus on taking action (i.e., action orientation) or on focusing on the own emotions (i.e., state orientation). It is widely acknowledged that state-oriented athletes have disadvantages in performing under stress. Moreover, the action control theory claims that state orientation is related to ruminative cognitions, which itself is assumed to impair performance in the long term. We tested this hypothesis in 157 competitive athletes from different sports (including individual and team sports). Regression analysis demonstrates a substantial correlation of failure-related action orientation (i.e., state orientation) with different measures of rumination (including general, clinically relevant, and competition-related rumination). In addition, general (i.e., content independent) rumination also correlated substantially with a rumination scale adapted specifically to sports-related competition. These results suggest (1) that a sports and competition-related ruminative mechanism exists and (2) that ruminative cognitions are related to the cognitive basis of state orientation. While our study does not allow for a causal interpretation, it provides an additional approach to investigate mental factors underlying inter-individual differences in athletic performance under stress and pressure.

Representing Types as Neural Events

One of the claims of Type Theory with Records is that it can be used to model types learned by agents in order to classify objects and events in the world, including speech events. That is, the types can be represented by patterns of neural activation in the brain. This claim would be empty if it turns out that the types are in principle impossible to represent on a finite network of neurons. We will discuss how to represent types in terms of neural events on a network and present a preliminary computational implementation that maps types to events on a network. The kind of networks we will use are closely related to the transparent neural networks discussed by Strannegård.

A Novel Test of Pure Irrelevance-Induced Blindness

Load theory claims that bottom-up attention is possible under conditions of low perceptual load but not high perceptual load. At variance with this claim, a recent one-trial study showed that under low load, with only two colors in the display – a ring and a disk –, an instruction to process only one of the two stimuli led to better memory performance for the color of the relevant than of the irrelevant stimulus. Control experiments showed that if instructed to pay attention to both objects, participants were able to memorize both colors. Thus, stimulus irrelevance diminished the likelihood of memory for a color stimulus under low perceptual-load conditions. Yet, we noted less than optimal design features in that prior study: a lack of more implicit priming measures of memory or attention and an interval between color stimulus presentation and memory test that probably exceeded 500 ms. We took care of these problems in the current one-trial study by improving the retrieval displays while leaving the encoding displays as in the original study and found that the results only partly replicated prior findings. In particular, there was no evidence of irrelevance-induced blindness under conditions in which a ring was designated as relevant, surrounding an irrelevant disk. However, a continuously cumulative meta-analysis across past and present experiments showed that our results do not refute the irrelevance-induced effects entirely. We conclude with recommendations for future tests of load theory.

Fostering first-year pre-service teachers’ proof competencies

In the study presented, as we report in this paper, we describe our theoretical and practical consideration to engage first-year pre-service teachers in proving activities in the context of a transition-to-proof course. We investigated how students argued to verify a claim of elementary number theory on entering university and compared the results to their performance in the final examination of the course. Subsequently, we elaborate on the following results: On entering university, students do not seem to be capable of using algebraic variables as a heuristic to engage in reasoning. However, after learning about different kinds of proofs and the symbolic language of mathematics, students give evidence of starting to value mathematical language and of enhancing their proof competencies.

The antecedents of corporate social and environmental responsibility discourse in Pakistan: Multiple theoretical perspectives

The primary purpose of the study is to explore the antecedents of corporate social and environmental responsibilities discourse practices in Pakistan. The industry sensitivity, government shareholding, block holder ownership, print media coverage, environmental monitoring programs, and strategic posture are examined as antecedents of corporate social and environmental responsibility practices. A multidimensional theoretical perspective namely stakeholder theory (ST), institutional theory (IT), agency theory (PAT), and legitimacy theory (LT) is used to conceptualize the phenomena. All the four of perspective theories (positive accounting theory, legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory, and institutional theory) claim that there are ‘pressures’ that impact the organization. How much ‘pressures’ are recognized, managed or satisfied differs from one perspective of theory to the other. To estimate the data, this study uses three sets of panel data models, i.e., the pooled ordinary least squares model (POLS) or constant coefficients model, fixed effects (FEM or least squares dummy variable/LSDV model) and random-effects models. The final sample is comprising of 173 firms over eight years from 2011 to 2017. The firms listed in PSX are included in the sample. Overall the findings of the study have shown agreement with the proposed results. However, the study has provided more support to the institutional theory and stakeholder theory. Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, Stakeholders Theory, Agency Theory, Pakistan

Prospect theory and presidential elections: Two cases from Yugoslavia and Serbia

Why do presidents in semi-presidential regimes sometimes call early elections? Is the behavior of incumbent presidents different from the behavior of presidential contenders when the former do not need to run for office but face the loss of parliamentary majority in a semi-presidential system? Prospect theory claims that agents make risky choices when facing a loss. Consequently, if incumbent presidents face a loss of majority in the parliament, they will call for early election to try to shore up or salvage the majority. To provide empirical evidence supporting this claim, prospect theory has been applied to the two presidential elections in Yugoslavia and Serbia in which two incumbent presidents, Slobodan Milošević (2000) and Boris Tadić (2012), had lost early presidential elections. The expected contribution of the paper is to deepen our understanding of how semi-presidential regimes resolve the problem of temporal rigidity and offer novel empirical data in support of the application of prospect theory in political science.

The Emergence of Intersectional Disadvantage

ABSTRACTIntersectionality theory explores the peculiar disadvantages that arise as the result of occupying multiple disadvantaged demographic categories. Addressing intersectionality theory through quantitative methods has proven difficult. Concerns have been raised about the sample size one would need in order to responsibly tease out evidence for the claims of intersectionality theorists. What is more, theorists have expressed concern about our ability to formulate novel intersectional hypotheses in a non-ad-hoc manner. We argue that simulation methods can help address these, and other, methodological problems, because they can generate novel hypotheses about causal dependencies in a relatively cheap way, and can thus guide future empirical work. We illustrate this point using models which show that intersectional oppression can arise under conditions where social groups are disadvantaged in the emergence of bargaining norms. As we show, intersectional disadvantage can arise even when actors from all social categories are completely identical in terms of preferences and abilities. And when actors behave in ways that reflect stronger intersectional identities, the potential for disadvantage increases. As we note, this exploration illustrates the usefulness of idealized models to real-world inquiry.

Imaginary onomastics

ABSTRACTThe arguments concerning proper names are divided between the no-sense and the sense theories. The no-sense theory claims that proper names simply stand for particular objects, with a referent but no meaning, while the sense theory argues that names are essentially sorts of disguised descriptions, which have a sense, but only coincidentally a referent. Names supposedly translate the identity of an individual being into language, but if we forego an irrational insistence on their determinate meaningfulness, we realize that they actually reflect the spirit of an individual language. Therefore names are so intimately wedded to a language they cannot be effectively translated; rather, it is necessary to recreate the conditions of the possibility of acts of onomastic denomination. This study – ranging from Valère Novarina's linguistic inventions to the Manhattan phone directory to my culinary memoirs – will attempt to show how the designation of names works, and does not work, across languages.

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade

Reviewed by: The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade Edward L. Farmer The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 432. $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book. The academic historical profession came of age in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the first industrialized powers exercised an economic and military hegemony on a global scale. It was quite natural, perhaps inevitable, that historical discourses adopted Eurocentric perspectives that valorized what has been called the rise of the West at the expense of other regions.1 This paradigm is a particular burden for Chinese studies. Following the Second World War and the subsequent dismantling of colonial empires, many historians felt the need to adopt less parochial perspectives. Teachers working in the field of world history attempt to frame more balanced views of the past, but they are often handicapped by the limited availability of articles and monographs. Most graduate students are still trained to work in a single region of the world. Due to the demands of language study and the time required to carry out research, the number of scholars willing to undertake inquiries on a comparative or global scale remains regrettably small; for this reason, their contributions are especially valuable. One fruitful strategy is the study of a commodity in the world system—for example, S. A. M. Adshead's study of salt, Sucheta Mazumdar's book about sugar, and most recently Sven Beckert's masterful treatment of cotton.2 Another approach entails cross-regional [End Page 265] comparison as a check on claims of European superiority or uniqueness—examples of this genre include the economic studies by Mark Elvin, Kenneth Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong—although the questions these authors raise similarly grew out of claims for the unique character of European economic modernization.3 Tonio Andrade's bold and imaginative study of the gunpowder age, which shares elements of both strategies, promises to make a major contribution to rebalancing our understanding of China vis-à-vis the West. Gunpowder is neither a consumer product nor an economic system; "gunpowder age" stands for a period in the evolution of warfare. Andrade frames his topic in a world-history context, but the bulk of the book compares historical materials on Europe and China with only incidental references to other areas such as Korea, Japan, and the Islamic empires. He offers us a binary framework that transcends a narrowly Eurocentric view and takes a big step toward understanding military history on a global scale. In two earlier books about Taiwan, Andrade signals his interest in bringing balanced perspectives to European–East Asian interactions in the early modern period. The first book, How Taiwan Became Chinese (2007), puts Dutch, Spanish, and Han Chinese colonization on an even footing.4 In Lost Colony (2011), an account of the Sino-Dutch War (1661–1668), Andrade briefly reviews the respective claims of military revolution theory, its revisionists, and counterrevisionists before settling on a formulation that acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of each position.5 He remarks in passing that when the conflicting claims of theory threaten this balance of voices, his solution is to plunge back into the sources.6 In The Gunpowder Age, Andrade brings this mindset to a comparative examination of military achievements on a truly heroic scale. Andrade's gunpowder age extends for a millennium, from the invention of gunpowder in China to the development [End Page 266] of smokeless powder in the nineteenth century. His argument is a complex one: it combines carefully reasoned assessments of gunpowder's developments at both ends of the Eurasian landmass with particular attention to a number of common misunderstandings. By structuring a long historical narrative, Andrade makes a sequence of Europe-China comparisons without making one side superior to the other. The comparisons are facilitated by a nuanced historical chronology. Andrade reasons that military innovation, in this case the adoption and improvement of gunpowder weaponry, was the greatest during periods of prolonged conflict and was less likely to occur during periods of peace. This...

Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recali-brations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping ed. by Nele Noesselt

Reviewed by: Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recali-brations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping ed. by Nele Noesselt Jason Young (bio) Nele Noesselt, editor. Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recalibrations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xvi, 209 pp. Hardcover, isbn 978-1-4985-8024-3. Since Xi Jinping took his position as general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and chairman of the Central Military Commission in 2012, scholars have debated how Chinese politics are changing under his rule. This 2018 edited volume by Nele Noesselt presents a collection of chapters that attempt to answer this question. The organizing concept for the volume is "governance innovation" and the general approach institutionalism, though the three major parts, each with three chapters, in reality present an eclectic set of theoretical paradigms and approaches to the question. [End Page 95] The first part of the volume is a reflection on the field of Chinese political studies and is made up of two single-authored chapters by Suijian Guo and Jon Taylor, and coauthored chapter by Elizaveta Priupolina and Fan Yang. Guo's chapter outlines key themes and challenges in China's political science presenting some insights and raises important questions about the universality claims of political science theory in light of the China case and the response to this from the field of Chinese political science. This is a short but interesting contribution that concludes by asking where Chinese political science is heading. The next chapter argues that the rest of the world should pay more attention to the insights of China's political science in order to dehegemonize the discipline, and the following puts forward a discourse analysis methodology. The second part of the volume has three chapters on "values, norms and political culture in contemporary China" with single-authored chapters by Kent Freeze and Baogang Guo, and one coauthored by Xuedong Yang and Yan Jian. The first chapter uses public opinion data to explore pathways (inequality and cultural modernization) between economic modernization and support for political liberalization, concluding that "trends over time indicate that support for the status quo (measured by support for the current direction of the country) appears to be increasing in the past fifteen years" (p. 69). The next chapter argues that it "revealed cognitive differences between the Chinese and Western people" where "the group (family), ethical rule, and political hierarchy is to some extent inconsistent with individualism, rule of law, liberty, and equality advocated by Western liberalism" (p. 91). This is then followed by a chapter that presents interpretation of the trajectory of reform since the eighteenth CPC Party Congress and that argues China's reform process has shifted from "crossing the river by feeling the stones" to "top-level design." The chapter discusses this from the perspective of the institutionalization of central decision making and local autonomy. The third part of the volume is on "local governance reform and rule of law" with three chapters by Wei-chin Lee, Zhiyuan Zhang, and Nele Noesselt. The first chapter explores a series of judicial reforms arguing that "each reform attempt has required careful deliberation and crafty design to fulfill public aspiration for justice without seriously undercutting the party's supremacy and legitimacy in political governance" (p. 128). This chapter presents a realistic appraisal of the challenges China's judiciary faces in light of the reinvigoration of party control. This is followed by an analysis of government approaches to the implementation of environmental policy that identifies both top-down mandatory approaches as would be expected from the environmental authoritarianism literature but other approaches also, thereby questioning this literature. Zhang concludes that "the environmental performance evaluation system introduced by the central government creates powerful incentives for provincial bureaucratics and urges them to expand their policy instrument boxes by adopting more voluntary and [End Page 96] market-based instruments" (p. 168). The final chapter, "Reinventing the Chinese Leviathan," presents a very useful discussion of the debates and positions taken on the question of constitutionalism in China and illustrates the shift toward greater party control and management, thereby showing the limits of this movement. Taken together, this volume presents a good collection of...

Physiognomy of the war in the postmodern: A case study of the Syrian armed conflict

The transformation of war, as a result of the overall social changes in the postmodern, reflects significant changes in its physiognomy. These changes could be observed by getting answers to fundamental and eternal questions about war - between whom it is fought, why it is waged and, lastly, how it is waged. In the case of the armed conflict in Syria, the answers to these questions indicate that the nature of the war has remained the same and that only its character has changed, especially with regard to a conceptual approach based on reducing the effectiveness of a military instrument of power and increasing others in achieving the ultimate strategic goals of the war. This disproves the claims of theorists and strategists, representatives of the theoretical direction of the ?new wars?, who believe that the characteristics of the postmodern wars are fundamentally different from those of the modern era which are considered as ?old? wars. The aim of the paper is to illustrate, in the example of the Syrian conflict, that the definitions of war in the form of armed violence and political nature remain firmly embedded in that part of the physiognomy of war that Klauzevic explains as objective or immutable.

Is God in the Clouds?

A discussion of the cloud-astrophysical theory of the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon. I argue that the theory, systematically articulated for the first time by A.P.D. Mourelatos in a series of essays over the last decade, suggests how clusters of Xenophanes’s surviving texts, which have up to now been given isolated scholarly treatments, may be understood as forming a more comprehensive theory of how divine agency is manifested in observable events of the natural world. The cloud-astrophysical theory claims that all meteorological change and heavenly objects (the sun, moon, stars, comets, shooting stars, rainbows, St. Elmo’s fire, etc.) are caused and constituted by the fiery compression and inflammation of water vapor, the underlying mechanism of which is a kind of movement or agitation of cloudlets. From this theory, I argue that Xenophanes further conjectured that the kind of agitation he famously attributed to god (who “completely without toil, shakes all things with the thought of his mind”) either is identical to or supervenes on the agitation of the cloud-astrophysics, thus radically revising the account of divine agency in traditional Greek religion.

CONSTRUCTIVISM: NEO-PIAGETIAN PERSPECTIVE

Ponte Academic JournalSep 2019, Volume 75, Issue 9 CONSTRUCTIVISM: NEO-PIAGETIAN PERSPECTIVEAuthor(s): Prof Tuntufye S MwamwendaJ. Ponte - Sep 2019 - Volume 75 - Issue 9 doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2019.9.12 Abstract:Piaget’s theory of cognitive development has been in existence for many years, as the best description of how people develop cognitively; irrespective of where they are born, or whatever race they claim to be. While the theory claims to be universal; research has shown that, this is not the case for any given group of people, when it comes to formal operations, which is the highest level of cognitive development. Based on the title of this Paper; Neo-Piagetian Perspective came into operation, following the passing on of Piaget. However, one is tempted to question what is new? The terminology used “Constructivism” meaning being actively involved in what a person is experiencing for him/her to develop cognitively. The answer is positive. That is fine. But is not the same thing that is inherent in his theory? Therefore this Paper argues that, it is the emphasis placed on constructivism more than before that makes the difference. Given such emphasis, this Paper aims at exploring and assessing: Constructivism: Neo-Piagetian Perspective, as understood today. Download full text:Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Username Password