Search Results

This work argues for a liberal account of multiculturalism, which draws on a liberalism of fear, like that articulated by Judith Shklar and inspired by Montesquieu. Liberalism should not be centrally concerned either with preserving or with transcending cultural communities, practices, and identities. Rather, it should focus on mitigating evils such as interethnic civil wars, cruel practices internal to cultural communities, and state violence against ethnic minorities. This ‘multiculturalism of fear’ must be grounded in the realities of ethnic politics and ethnic conflict. It must therefore take seriously the importance, which persons feel their ethnic identities and cultural practices to have, without falling into a celebration of cultural belonging. Levy argues against nationalist and multicultural theories that accord significant moral weight to cultural communities as such. Yet he also insists that the challenges of life in a multicultural world cannot be met with appeals to cosmopolitanism, with attempts to deny the importance that particularist identities and practices have to individual persons and to social life. The book applies the multiculturalism of fear to a variety of policy problems confronting multi‐ethnic states. These include the regulation of sexist practices internal to cultural communities, secession and national self‐determination, land rights, customary law, and the symbols and words used by the state, including official apologies. It draws on cases from diverse states such as Australia, Canada, Israel, India, South Africa, and the US.

Needs assessments are a vital part of an organization's planning, service provision, and evaluation process. Social and human service agencies contemplating starting a new program, expanding an existing one, or reviewing existing services ought to conduct a needs assessment. This book is designed to help social workers assess macro problems within their communities and agencies. It provides the essentials needed to understand various ways to conceptualize need and offers practical advice about selecting an appropriate data collection design that incorporates considerations of purpose, stakeholders, and expertise. Two “applied” chapters illustrate how needs assessments can be employed within an agency to identify areas for new staff training, and across a state to obtain an accurate picture of the extent of substance abuse prevention and treatment needs.

This book reviews a productive period of research aimed at connecting brain and mind through the use of scalp-recorded brain potentials to chart the temporal course of information processing in the human brain. The book serves as both as a summary of where we have been and as a pointer of the way ahead. Event-related potential (ERP) methodology has long been used in neuroscience to measure electrical activity in the brain. It has become clear, however, that it can be a powerful tool in studying and illuminating central psychological issues relating to attention, information, processing, dynamics, memory, and language. Linking this technology to newer imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), it becomes possible to build up a spatial and temporal picture of the brain during the performance of high-level skills. This book provides strong evidence that cognitive psychology can benefit from the use of brain electrical activity.

This book follows the flow of economic thinking from ancient times by observing how moral issues impacted economic ideas and social organization. Over the centuries, thinkers such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas emphasized what was right and good more than the pursuit of social efficiency. That changed when scientific methods no longer required moral considerations and economics adopted a values-free scientific methodology. A positive-normative dichotomy has served the profession well in many ways, but there have been voices arguing for a more values-oriented approach to the discipline. Now microeconomics is facing many new challenges as the complications of interdependence increase and behavioral, neurobiological, and other interdisciplinary perspectives need to be addressed. The search to understand and explain behavior is pushing the discipline to enlarge its methodology beyond the standard instrumental prediction goals. This complicates analysis as multiple motivations for behavior are considered and interest in the formation of utility functions begins to creep into economic consciousness again. Moral reflection is relevant as game theory, cooperation models, and theories of trust enter into the discussion. Psychological tendencies and institutional changes involve reference to the moral life as essential for social coordination. The final chapter offers an interdisciplinary framework to incorporate values more directly into economic methods by building on the human passions as discussed by Adam Smith and the behavioral instincts described by Thorstein Veblen. This enlarges the scope of economic actors beyond the homo economicus model without abandoning some of the valuable features of that model.

This is a collection of chapters by the leading proponent of process reliabilism, explaining its relation to rival and/or neighboring theories including evidentialism, other forms of reliabilism, and virtue epistemology. It addresses other prominent themes in contemporary epistemology, such as the internalism/externalism debate, the epistemological upshots of experimental challenges to intuitional methodology, the source of epistemic value, and social epistemology. The Introduction addresses late-breaking responses to ongoing exchanges with friends, rivals, and critics of reliabilism.

This book provides a compendium to the empirical work investigating the hypotheses generated by recent banking theory. Since the publication of the The Microeconomics of Banking by Xavier Freixas and Jean Charles Rochet, work in empirical banking has further blossomed, not only in sheer volume but also in the variety of questions being tackled, datasets becoming available, and methodologies being introduced. This book follows the structure in Freixas and Rochet’s book and arranges the relevant methodologies, applications, and results according to each of their original chapters in order to have a coherent synthesis between available theory and supporting empirics. Each chapter contains a modest introduction (where possible and appropriate), a concise methodology section with one or more relevant methodologies, and several illustrative applications. In a “muscular” results section the authors summarize the main robust and seminal findings in the literature that are in the text, and provide the details of many other studies in figures and tables.

Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our minds? This book is about these two questions. The essays in its pages variously defend and critique answers to each, grapple over the proper methodology for addressing them, and wonder whether either question is worth pursuing. In so doing, they carry on a long and esteemed tradition – for our two questions are among the oldest of philosophical issues, and have vexed almost every major philosopher, from Plato, to Kant to Wittgenstein. Fifteen contributors bring fresh perspectives, renewed energy and original answers to debates that have been the focus of a tremendous amount of interest in the last three decades, both within philosophy and the culture at large.

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases. This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: Only if philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence are data about non-philosophers’ intuitions of any interest to us. Our alleged reliance on the intuitive makes many philosophers who don’t work on meta-philosophy concerned about their own discipline: they are unsure what intuitions are and whether they can carry the evidential weight we allegedly assign to them. The goal of this book is to argue that this concern is unwarranted since the claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively (or even a little bit) on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of ‘intuition’-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: It has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

It is frequently claimed that, as a result of the institutionalization of environmentalism in the years following its rapid rise in the 1970s and 1980s, the environmental movement has been demobilized, and that once radical groups have been incorporated into the web of policy‐making and consultation and have moderated their tactics to the point that lobbying and partnerships have displaced protest. Such claims were, however, based on casual observation and anecdote rather than systematic investigation of the incidence of protest, and during the 1990s, in several western European countries, the conventional wisdom was challenged by a resurgence of environmental protest that was sometimes markedly more confrontational than that of the 1980s. To determine whether there had indeed been a decline or deradicalization of protest, protest event analysis was undertaken of the environmental protests reported in one quality newspaper in each of eight countries–Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the Basque Country – during the 10 years 1988–97. No universal or monotonic decline of environmental protests was apparent during the decade, with reported protests declining and becoming less confrontational in some countries, but rising and becoming more confrontational in others. Most reported environmental protest was moderate and nondisruptive throughout the decade, and violent action remained rare. It was expected that opportunities created by the increased environmental competence of the European Union would produce a Europeanization of environmental protest, but there was no evidence of any increase in the proportions of protest mobilized on the level of, stimulated by, or targeted at the European Union and its institutions, all of which remained at very low levels in all of the countries. Nor was there evidence of Europeanization of environmental protest in the shape of convergence of national patterns of the incidence of protest. The patterns of the incidence of protest varied considerably and remained nationally idiosyncratic, with considerable cross‐national variations in the issues and the forms of protest tending to persist over time. Protest event methodology encounters problems of selection bias associated with cycles of media attention, and so, in the attempt better to understand these biases and their impact upon the pattern of reported protest, journalists and editors associated with the production of those reports were interviewed. On the basis of a protest event analysis of newspaper reports during a decade in which environmental protest was no longer novel, this investigation concludes that there is little or no evidence of the demobilization of environmentalism, and some that the institutionalization of environmental activism may be self‐limiting.

In this work, the author applies the conceptual framework developed in Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations to the varied repertoire of the 20th century. Analyzing the diverse compositions of four canonical composers—Simbolo from Dallapiccola's Quaderno musicale di Annalibera; Stockhausen's Klavierstuck III; Webern's Op. 10, No. 4; and Debussy's Feux d'articifice—the author brings forth structures which he calls “transformational networks” to reveal interesting and suggestive aspects of the music. In this complementary work, the author stimulates thought about the general methodology of musical analysis and issues of large-scale form as they relate to transformational analytic structuring.