It is widely held that propositions perform a plethora of theoretical roles. They are believed to be the semantic values of sentences in contexts, the objects of attitudes, the contents of illocutionary acts, the referents of ‘that’-clauses, and the primary bearers of truth. This assumption is often combined with the claim that propositions have their truth-values eternally. Following Kaplan’s ...

Third University Department of Cardiology Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece e-mail: [email protected]

Software piracy has become a global problem that hinders the development of software industry. Therefore, it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms that drive users’ software piracy behavior. Previous literature on this issue heavily relied on the general deterrence theory (GDT) suggesting that two key punishment perceptions namely punishment severity and punishment certainty dete...

We argue that many future-eternal inflating spacetimes are likely to violate the weak energy condition. It is possible that such spacetimes may not enforce any of the known averaged conditions either. If this is indeed the case, it may open the door to constructing non-singular, past-eternal inflating cosmologies. Simple non-singular models are, however, unsatisfactory , and it is not clear if ...

In social dilemmas punishment costs resources, not just from the one who is punished but often also from the punisher and society. Reciprocity on the other side is known to lead to cooperation without the costs of punishment. The questions at hand are whether punishment brings advantages besides its costs, and how its negative side-effects can be reduced to a minimum in an environment populated...

Theoretical and experimental research underscores the role of punishment in the evolution of cooperation between humans. Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and that withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has b...

Cooperation, where one individual incurs a cost to help another, is a fundamental building block of the natural world and human society. It has been suggested that costly punishment can promote the evolution of cooperation, with the threat of punishment deterring free-riders. Recent experiments, however, have revealed the existence of 'antisocial' punishment, where non-cooperators punish cooper...

We run several experiments which allow us to compare cooperation under perfect and imperfect information in a centralized and decentralized punishment regime. Under perfect and extremely noisy information, aggregate behavior does not differ between institutions. Under intermediate noise, punishment escalates in the decentralized peer-to-peer punishment regime which badly affects efficiency whil...

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Punishing defectors is an important means of stabilizing cooperation. When levels of cooperation and punishment are continuous, individuals must employ suitable social standards for defining defectors and for determining punishment levels. Here we investigate the evolution of a social reaction norm, or psychological response function, for determining the punishment level meted out by individual...