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This Element introduces a biological approach to cognition, which highlights the significance of allostatic regulation and the navigation of challenges and opportunities. It argues that cognition is best understood as a juggling act, which reflects numerous ongoing attempts to minimize disruptions while prioritizing the sources of information that are necessary to satisfy social and biological needs; and it provides a characterization of the architectural constraints, neurotransmitters, and affective states that shape visual perception, as well as the regulatory capacities that sustain flexible patterns of thought and behavior.
Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestiço, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.
Scholars and practitioners seek development solutions through the engineering and strengthening of state institutions. Yet, the state is not the only or the primary arena shaping how citizens, service providers and state officials engage in actions that constitute politics and development. These individuals are members of religious orders, ethnic communities, and other groups that make claims on them, creating incentives that shape their actions. Recognizing how individuals experience these claims and view the choices before them is essential to understanding political processes and development outcomes. This Element establishes a framework elucidating these forces, which is key to knowledge accumulation, designing future research and effective programming. Taking an institutional approach, this Element explains how the salience of arenas of authority associated with various communities and the nature of social institutions within them affect politics and development. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Does democratization lead to more meritocracy in the civil service? The Element argues that electoral accountability increases the value of competence over personal loyalty in the civil service. While this resembles an application of merit principles, it does not automatically reduce patronage politics or improve public goods provision. Competent civil servants are often used to facilitate the distribution of clientelistic goods at mass scale to win competitive elections. The selection of competent but less loyal civil servants requires the increased use of control mechanisms, like the timing of promotions, to ensure their compliance. The Element tests these claims using novel micro-level data on promotions in Indonesia's civil service before and after democratization in 1999. The Element shows that national- and local-level elections led to increased promotion premiums for educated civil servants, and simultaneously generated electoral cycles in the timing of promotions, but did little to improve public goods provision.
This Element explores the role of public managers as designers. Drawing from systems-thinking and strategic management, a process-tracing methodology is used to examine three design processes whereby public managers develop strategies for adapting to climate change, build the requisite capabilities and evaluate outcomes. Across three cases, the findings highlight the role of managers as 'design- oriented' integration agents and point to areas where additional inquiry is warranted. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), the UK's first female professor of philosophy, was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. Stebbing wrote the world's first accessible book on the new polyadic logic and its philosophy. She made major contributions to the philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophical logic, critical thinking and applied philosophy. Nonetheless she has remained largely neglected by historians of analytic philosophy. This Element provides a thorough yet accessible overview of Stebbing's positive, original contributions, including her solution to the paradox of analysis, her account of the relation of sense data to physical objects, and her anti- idealist interpretation of the new Einsteinian physics. Stebbing's innovative work in these and other areas helped move analytic philosophy from its early phase to its middle period.
Why are some subnational governments more likely to lobby the national government than others? Extant research in social sciences has widely discussed lobbying dynamics in the private sector. However, governments lobby governments, too. In the United States, lobbying is a popular strategy for state and local governments to obtain resources from and influence policies in the federal government. Nevertheless, extant research offers limited theoretical analysis or empirical evidence on this phenomenon. This Element provides a comprehensive study of intergovernmental lobbying activities in the United States and, in particular, an institutional analysis of the lobbying decisions of state and local governments. The study findings contribute to public administration, public policy, and political science literature by offering theoretical and empirical insights into the institutional factors that might influence subnational policymaking, fiscal resource management, intergovernmental relations, and democratic representation.
This Element examines the current crisis of capitalism's legitimacy and concludes that it derives principally from business pursuing an aberration of capitalism known as shareholder capitalism, in which firms sought to maximize shareholder value as reflected in the current share price, at the expense of all other stakeholders and society. Shareholder capitalism began in the 1970s and was renounced by the Business Roundtable in 2019, but continues behind a façade of stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is the most widely cited form of capitalism today, but it is incoherent as a practical guide to action for an entire firm. This Element concludes that a recent evolution of capitalism--customer capitalism--which gives primacy to co-creating value for customers and users, enables firms to master the challenges of the digital age, shower benefits on society, and meet the needs of all the stakeholders.
This Element introduces Kongish as a translingual and multimodal urban dialect emerging in Hong Kong in recent years and still in the making. Through the lens of translanguaging and linguistic commodification, and using the popular Facebook page Kongish Daily as a case in point, the study outlines the semiotic profile of Kongish. It examines how Kongish communications draw on a full range of performative resources, thriving on social media affordances and a creative-critical ethos. The study then turns to look at how Kongish is commoditized in a marketing context in the form of playful epithets emplaced on locally designed products, demonstrating how the urban dialect is not merely a niche medium of communication on social media, but has become integral to commercial, profit-driven practices. The Element concludes by challenging the proposition that Kongish must be considered a 'variety' of English, arguing instead that it is an innominate term embodying translanguaging-in-action.
This Element examines the contemporary literature on essence in connection with the traditional question whether essence lies within or without our world. Section 1 understands this question in terms of a certain distinction, the distinction between active and latent facts. Section 2 steps back to investigate the connections between essence and other philosophical concepts. Section 3 brings the results of this investigation to bear on the traditional question, sketching an argument from the premise that essentialist facts are explained by the origins of things to the conclusion that such facts are active.
The 'real-world' commitment of cognitive linguistics is demonstrated by increasingly extensive collaboration between researchers and industry partners. Yet, there has been little critical reflection on the lessons learnt from these collaborative efforts. Beginning researchers may benefit from in-depth discussion of how various practical realities inform, constrain, or otherwise shape important methodological and/or analytic decisions. This Element reflects on long-term collaborative work between a metaphor researcher and psychotherapists, offering practical advice on navigating the latent realities of this type of research. The three foundational components of psychotherapy – the therapist, the client, and the interactional setting itself – are discussed in turn, covering issues like ethically engaging therapists in research design and data analysis, dealing with underexplored variabilities in client responses, and managing the inherent tension between spontaneity and control in an interactional setting like psychotherapy. Some thoughts on how the lessons are transferable to other research contexts are offered.
This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life.
China has witnessed numerous incidents of social protests over the past three decades. Protests create uncertainty for authoritarian governments, and the Chinese government has created, strengthened, and coordinated multiple dispute-resolution institutions to manage social conflicts and protests. Accommodating the aggrieved prevents the accumulation of grievances in society, but concessions require resources. As the frequency and scale of collective action are closely tied to the political opportunity for action, the Chinese government has also contained protest by shaping the political opportunity available to the aggrieved. Cai and Chen show that when the Chinese central government prioritizes social control, as it has under Xi Jinping's leadership, it signals that it will tolerate local governments' use of coercion. The result is an environment that is not conducive to the mobilization of collective action, large-scale occurrences of which have been uncommon in China in recent years.
KCNQ2 and KCNQ3 encode subunits (KV7.2, KV7.3) that combine to form a voltage-gated potassium ion (K+) channel responsible for generating an ionic current (M-current) important for controlling activity in the nervous system. Pathogenic variants in both genes are associated with a spectrum of genetic neurological disorders that feature epilepsy of variable severity and can be accompanied by debilitating impaired neurodevelopment. These two genes were among the first discovered causes of monogenic epilepsy, and are frequently identified in persons with early-life epilepsy. This Element provides a comprehensive review of the clinical features, genetic basis, pathophysiology, pharmacology and treatment of these prototypical neurological disorders accompanied by perspectives shared by affected families and scientists who have made seminal contributions to the field. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
How is God related to the state? Could the existence of robust political authority somehow be evidence for God? In this Element, the author explores these questions, pro and con, looking at various major positions. At the start of the volume, they defend a political argument for God's existence. Having motivated a theistic account of political authority, they then discuss the role God plays or could play in classical liberalism, Marxism, and postliberalism. While they sympathetically survey each political theory in turn, at the end of each section, they raise various objections to the view being discussed. Finally, at the end of the Element, the author articulates desiderata for theists who are looking for political frameworks.
This Element reviews what we know about parental investments and children's human capital in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs). First, it presents definitions and a simple analytical framework; then discusses determinants of children's human capital in the form of cognitive skills, socioemotional skills and physical and mental health; then reviews estimates of impacts of these forms of human capital; next considers the implications of such estimates for inequality and poverty; and concludes with a summary suggesting some positive impacts of parental investments on children's human capital in LMICs and a discussion of gaps in the literature pertaining to both data and methodology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Mental control refers to the ability to control our own minds. Its primary expression, attention has become a popular topic for philosophers in the past few decades, generating the need for a primer on the concept. It is related to self-control, which typically refers to the maintenance of preferred behavior in the face of temptation. While a distinct concept, criticisms of self-control can also be applied to mental control, such as that it implies the existence of an unscientific homunculus-like agent or is not a natural kind. Yet, as this Element suggests, a scientifically-grounded account of mental control remains possible. The Element is organized into five main sections, which cover the concept of mental control, the relationship between mental control and attention, the phenomena of meditation and mind-wandering, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and emergence-based accounts of mental control, including an original account by the author.
This Element discusses the global role of the RMB. After recapitulating its economic and trade growth experiences, we recount China's evolving exchange rate policy in the post-reform era, review the debate over whether the RMB is overvalued or undervalued, present China's policies to globalize the RMB, describe offshore RMB trading, assess the current global status of the RMB, and discuss geopolitical tensions in the last few years. Since 2009, the process of globalizing RMB has not been smooth sailing and progressed quite unevenly over time. Despite the strong performance in the early 2010s, the RMB is under-represented in the global market and its global role does not match China's economic might. The path of RMB internationalization is affected by both China's economic performance and geopolitical factors.
This Element analyzes the features of current feminist movements in Latin America and their responses to conservative reactions. For this, it focuses on the pro-choice movement vis-à-vis the anti-abortion countermovement in Mexico and Brazil. It offers a relational approach embracing the dynamics within the feminist field and between feminism and the state to capture the movements' potential effects. First, the Element proposes the concept of nested feminist networks, which comprises of three dimensions revealing the plurality of the movement across intersectional and sexual identity issues (horizontal), its relationship with the multifaceted state (vertical), and the intermediation of political parties and participatory institutions in this relationship (intermediary). Second, it argues that nested networks allow feminists to enable policies and block actions from conservatives. In sum, it explores how feminists, leveraging their plurality and connection with the state, can counter conservative attacks.
The echinoderms are an ideal group to understand evolution from a holistic, interdisciplinary framework. The genetic regulatory networks underpinning development in echinoderms are some of the best known for any model group. Additionally, the echinoderms have an excellent fossil record, elucidating in in detail the evolutionary changes underpinning morphological evolution. In this Element, the echinoderms are discussed as a model group for molecular palaeobiological studies, integrating what is known of their development, genomes, and fossil record. Together, these insights shed light on the molecular and morphological evolution underpinning the vast biodiversity of echinoderms, and the animal kingdom more generally.