A growing body of evidence indicates that toxic contamination, both indoor and outdoor, negatively affects sociocultural systems and that this in turn affects the social and psychological responses to the contamination. Using secondary case studies and primary survey, interview and observation data from three toxic contamination situations, this paper conceptualizes and summarizes the findings ...

Wroe Alderson (1898–1965) is generally considered to be one of the giants of post-war marketing scholarship, a titanic thinker who did much to legitimize the study of marketing theory and thought. He is also widely regarded as someone who was incapable of communicating his ideas cogently. As Holbrook (2001: 37) unequivocally observes, ‘here was a writer who could not express himself clearly to ...

Philosophers have devoted a great deal of discussion to the question of whether an inverted spectrum thought experiment refutes functionalism. (For a review of the inverted spectrum and its many philosophical applications, see Byrne, 2004.) If Hoffman is correct the matter can be swiftly and conclusively settled, without appeal to any empirical data about color vision (or anything else). Assumi...

Computational systems can use sociocultural knowledge to understand human behavior and interact with humans in more natural ways. However, such systems are limited by their reliance on hand-authored sociocultural knowledge and models. We introduce an approach to automatically learn robust, script-like sociocultural knowledge from crowdsourced narratives. Crowdsourcing, the use of anonymous huma...

BACKGROUND The influence of sociocultural factors on human reliability within an open sociotechnical systems is highlighted. The design of such systems is enhanced by experience feedback. METHODS The study was focused on a survey related to the observation of working cases, and by processing of incident/accident statistics and semistructured interviews in the qualitative part. In order to con...

A common objection to deflationism is that it is unable to account for the normative import of truth as a norm for assertion and belief. Most of the versions of truth pluralism agree, against deflationsim that the normativity of truth is a substantive feature of it. Alethic functionalism, as defended by Lynch (2009) includes it among the platitudes characteristic of the role of truth which are ...

Over the past 50 years, the scale and intensity of livestock farming have increased significantly. At the same time, Western societies have become more urbanised and fewer people have close relatives involved in farming. As a result, most citizens have little knowledge or direct experience of what farming entails. In addition, more people are expressing concerns over issues such as farm animal ...

Arguments between adherents of different therapeutic models are often based on the assumption that empirical evidence is ultimately the judge of the merits of the respective approaches. The gathering of empirical evidence, however, is programmed by epistemological premises that in turn are not tested by "objective" demonstration but rather by their congruence with prevailing sociocultural value...