Human Reason in Context

Beyond Mundane Reason: Conversation Analysis And Context

Conversation analysts have sometimes been taken to task for apparently choosing not to deal with the "context" of the conversational activities they examine (Cicourel, 1981). In Talking Culture Moerman (1988) describes a blend of ethnography and conversation analysis, and suggests that ethnography describes contextual data extrinsic to interaction while conversation analysis provides non-contex...

Reason-based choice and context-dependence

We introduce a “reason-based” framework for explaining and predicting individual choices. The key idea is that a decision-maker focuses on some but not all properties of the options and chooses an option whose “motivationally salient” properties he/she most prefers. Reason-based explanations can capture two kinds of contextdependent choice: (i) the motivationally salient properties may vary acr...

Red Reason and Green Rights Illuminationist.Anthropology and Human Rights

The Regional Context of Human Rights in the Middle East

Human rights situation in the Middle East (ME) is a central concern in contemporary political as well as academic discourses. There is a considerable amount of literature on the subject, both academic and journalistic, in the Western world. A large part of that literature blames the ME in different ways for its ‘terrible’ conception and treatment of human rights norms. They typically, do not he...

Using Situation Lattices to Model and Reason about Context!

Much recent research has focused on using situations rather than individual pieces of context as a means to trigger adaptive system behaviour. While current research on situations emphasises their representation and composition, they do not provide an approach on how to organise and identify their occurrences efficiently. This paper describes how lattice theory can be utilised to organise situa...