Roderick Chisholm (1916–1999) was among the most creative and influential figures in twentieth-century American philosophy. This essay considers how Chisholm’s cartooning contributed to his philosophical charisma.

There is a need to value health technologies in a way that accommodates their broader economic impacts and competing approaches for doing so have emerged. The Pareto principle (PP) requires policymakers to resolve intrapersonal trade-offs by deferring to the preferences of the individuals facing those trade-offs. Many broad value frameworks such as cost-utility analysis and its extensions, health-centric multicriteria decision analysis, and poverty-free life expectancy are not sufficiently deferential to these preferences, violating PP. I propose using the health-augmented lifecycle model (HALM) to value health technologies in a way that flexibly incorporates the interactions among health and economic factors – specifically mortality and morbidity risks, paid and unpaid work, consumption, leisure, and public and private transfer inflows and outflows--over the life course. It relies on individual preferences, satisfying PP. It is compatible with cost-benefit analysis, social welfare functions, and equivalent income approaches. I calibrate the HALM for the US setting and apply it to a pediatric vaccine.

The economic shock of the Covid-19 crisis has disproportionately impacted small businesses and the self-employed. Around the globe, their survival during the pandemic often relied heavily on government assistance. This article explores how economic relief to business is understood through the lens of deservingness in the public. It examines the case of Germany, where the government has responded to the pandemic by implementing an extensive support programme. Notably, in this context, the self-employed are typically outsiders to the state insurance system. Combining computational social science methods and a qualitative analysis, the article focuses on the debate about direct subsidies on the social media platform Twitter/X between March 2020 and June 2021. It traces variation in the patterns of claim making in what is a rich debate about pandemic state support, finding that this discourse is characterised by the concern that economic relief threatens to blur existing boundaries of worth in society. The reciprocity principle of deservingness theory is pivotal in asserting business identities in times of crisis, yet it also reveals a fundamentally ambiguous relationship with the principle of need. Additionally, the claim of justice-as-redress, as a novel dimension of reciprocity, surfaces as an important theme in this debate.

Many parasitoids alter their reproductive behaviour in response to the quality of encountered hosts. They make adaptive decisions concerning whether to parasitise a potential host, the number of eggs laid on an accepted host, and the allocation of sex to their offspring. Here we present evidence that Goniozus jacintae Farrugia (Hymenoptera: Bethylidae), a gregarious ectoparasitoid of larval tortricids, adjusts its reproductive response to the size and developmental stage of larvae of the light brown apple moth (LBAM), Epiphyas postvittana (Walker) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae). Goniozus jacintae parasitises instars 3–6 of LBAM, but most readily parasitises the later, larger, instars. Brood sizes were bigger on larger hosts and brood sex ratios were female biased (proportion of males = 0.23) with extremely low variance (never >1 male in a brood at emergence), perhaps the most precise of all studied bethylids. Host size did not influence brood development time, which averaged 19.64 days, or the body size of male offspring. However, the size of females was positively correlated with host size and negatively correlated with brood size. The sizes of individual males and females were positively related to the average amount of host resource available to individuals within each brood, suggesting that adult body size is affected by scramble competition among feeding larvae. Average brood sizes were: 3rd instar host, 1.3 (SE ± 0.075); 4th instar, 2.8 (SE ± 0.18); 5th instar, 4.7 (SE ± 0.23); 6th instar, 5.4 (SE ± 0.28). The largest brood size observed was 8 individuals (7 females, 1 male) on the 6th instar of LBAM. These results suggest that later instars would give the highest yield to optimise mass-rearing of G. jacintae if used for augmentative biological pest control.

I argue that Charles Travis’s interpretation of Frege, in Frege: The Pure Business of Being True, as consistent with Travis’s conception of occasion-sensitivity does not in fact require any modal notions, and so is consistent with the amodalist interpretation of Frege I elaborate in Necessity Lost.

This study aims to explore the target concepts of metonymical and metaphorical uses of ‘head’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA) compared to those used in Tunisian Arabic (TA). Extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) as envisaged by Kövecses (2020, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 18, 112–-130) is adopted as the theoretical framework. Data analysis reveals that through metonymic metaphors, the head in JA is used to profile character traits, mental faculty, cultural values and emotions. The head in JA is also capitalized upon to provide explanations of several daily life experiences. The primacy of head in JA was clear in the informants’ comprehension of the means by which embodiment provides the grounding for cognition, perception and language, which supports Gibbs’ (2014, The Bloomsbury companion to cognitive linguistics, pp. 167–184) ‘embodied metaphorical imagination’. Similarities in the cultural model of head between the two dialects were found, yet differences were also detected. In contrast to TA, the head is more productive in JA in profiling character traits and emotions. These differences were attributed to the existence of a cultural filter that has the ability to function between two cultures that belong to one matrix Arab culture and differences in experiential focus between the two examined speech communities.

While elections are an instrument to hold politicians accountable, corrupt politicians are often re-elected. A potential explanation for this paradox is that citizens trade-off integrity for competence. Voters may forgive corruption if corrupt politicians manage to deliver desirable outcomes. While previous studies have examined whether politicians’ competence moderates the negative effect of corruption, this paper focuses on voters’ priorities and directly assesses what citizens value more: integrity or favourable outcomes. Using a survey experiment, we assess citizens’ support for politicians who violate the law in order to improve the welfare of their community and, in some cases, benefit personally from these violations. The results indicate that citizens prefer a politician who follows the law, even if this leads to a suboptimal outcome. However, voters are more likely to overlook violations of the law that benefit the community if these do not result in a personal gain for politicians (i.e., in the absence of corruption). These findings suggest that the mild electoral punishment of corruption may be due to the public’s unawareness of private gains from malfeasance, or to the delay in these private benefits becoming apparent by election day.

The ideological conflicts of Japan's subnational politics have tended to be interpreted as either being largely muted or contained within national dimensions. Following two decades of substantial decentralization and growing local autonomy, however, a diversity of new ideological responses to local issues have appeared. These include neo-liberal parties and executives in wealthier regions such as Tokyo and Osaka or a rising regionalist identity politics such as that found in Okinawa. Nativist right and populist left along with single-issue parties are also now fielding candidates for subnational elections. Despite this increasingly crowded field, there is still no systematic understanding of the divergent ideological worldviews and dimensions of conflict operating at the subnational level. Nor do we know how these worldviews “deviate” from the traditional “norm” of a progressive vs. conservative conflict dimension assumed to characterize Japanese subnational politics. This paper begins to fill this gap by investigating the campaign discourse of gubernatorial candidates both before and after the pandemic outbreak. We find that the language, and underlying ideological orientation, of these candidates can be separated into four clusters: “mainstream”, “old left”, “neo-liberal”, and “fringe”. In addition, “regionalist” and “new left” populism can also be identified in select elections.

Surviving in excellent condition on papyri and wax tablets, the Commentary and other late antique shorthand manuals offer a new way to investigate the complexity and diversity of non-elite intellectual culture in the later Roman Empire. Stenographical skill and obedience were hymned by elite authors, but the methods used to inculcate that skill and extract that compliance have rarely been examined. This article, the first to subject shorthand pedagogy to social historical analysis, argues that the difficulty of the shorthand system increased the potency of the ideological lessons it delivered to its (predominantly non-elite, often enslaved) students. It finds that, in addition to technical instruction, the Commentary communicated a coherent, if troubling, vision of late ancient society and of the proper dispensation of power within it. Student-authored marginalia point to the successes and limits of the Commentary's moral pedagogy and raise fresh questions about how non-elite communities developed their own intellectual identities and traditions.

During the “steam century” between 1830 and 1930, major political and economic entities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas became increasingly connected by steam navigation and railway transportation. Against this global backdrop, steam navigation was established and became regular on the formidable Upper Yangzi River in China between the 1870s and the 1920s. This breakthrough hinged on developments in the methods of tackling rapids (tan) – fierce and unpredictable currents descending like small waterfalls. Previous studies have mostly focused on how agents of the British Empire and other imperial powers tried to solve such constraints in steam navigation through charts, sailing directions, and other initiatives to make the Upper Yangzi riverscape legible. Incorporating previously unused archives, this article highlights how local environmental and social conditions shaped the steam shipping system on the Upper Yangzi River. This article argues that rapids, as well as local boatmen's experiential knowledge of them, propelled British and other foreign agents to transform their ways of organizing steam shipping in terms of vessel design, crew recruitment, and infrastructure allocation. More broadly, this article exemplifies the need to look beyond imperial agents and employ more locally situated perspectives to explain the technological developments underlying the modern world.

This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doing. Recent research has indeed highlighted aspects such as transcendence of boundaries, hinting at a version of multilingualism among migrants that does not feature enough of their experience of constraints. In contrast, other scholars have emphasised structural inequalities often focusing on macro-social pressures that migrants have to navigate. Approaching lived experiences as they emerge while researcher and informant build rapport-in-talk, the study concentrates on a young Gambian in Italy. He speaks of a lack of institutional support and being in a position where certain languages cannot be used, despite concrete help from a local NGO and personal efforts. The data also show suffering beyond language-related constraints and the progressive mutual surfacing of linguistic repertoires in interaction, evidencing more broadly the merits of this type of qualitative study. (Migration, constraints, Gambia, Italy)*

This essay argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 historical-fiction novel Gardens in the Dunes enables Indigenous-centered interventions into Victorian studies, ecocriticism, and their intersection. Dramatizing an animistic Native American view of nature as agentic and enspirited, Silko's novel critiques Victorian plant hunting as rooted in settler-colonial logic that treats nature as inert. In turn, through representations of late Victorian gardeners, Silko suggests that British horticulture was also informed by colonial and capitalist ways of thinking about plants. At the same time, however, the novel locates an animistic strain running through Victorian gardening discourses, which I demonstrate through readings of Victorian garden books depicting plants as agentic and enspirited. Silko, I argue, invites us to revisit the late nineteenth century as characterized by a cultural revival of animistic thought, even as this period also saw the racist stigmatization of animism in the field of Victorian anthropology. I connect this fraught discursive moment in British history to an inherited hesitation toward animism in contemporary Victorian studies and ecocriticism, a hesitation that has contributed to uneven engagement with Indigenous thought in both fields. In response, this essay explicates and emulates Silko's critical methodology for an undisciplining engagement with animism in white-authored, ecocritical Victorian studies.

What candidates do voters perceive as best to combat corruption? While recent studies suggest that parties recruit women in order to restore legitimacy, we know less about whether voters believe that women candidates are better equipped than male candidates to fight corruption. This study suggests that women mayors are seen as more likely to fight corruption, yet that the credibility of both male and female politicians increases if they are ascribed traits traditionally seen as ‘female,’ including being risk averse or specializing in the provision of welfare services. Leveraging the diverse levels of socio-economic development, corruption, and gender equality across 25 EU member countries, our unique conjoint experiment shows support for these claims. Both women and male candidates benefit from being described as risk averse and prioritizing social welfare issues, while outsider status has no effect. Male candidates, however, have a consistent disadvantage, particularly among women voters. Moreover, the effects of candidate gender are strongest in areas of Europe with the highest levels of political gender equality.

This paper introduces the idea of testimonial compression, which I introduce as the audience enforcement of how testifiers may engage in testimonial exchange. More specifically, testimonial compression occurs when an audience requires the speaker to engage in the limited format of simple testimony. Using examples of dialogue from healthcare settings and scholarship on health communication, I illustrate the concept further. Dimensions of testimonial compression include its directness, the roles of audience enforcement and testifier resistance, the fuzziness surrounding structural and agential aspects, and ways in which compression can be negotiated between interlocutors. I further detail some rippling effects of testimonial compression, including impacts of patient-provider communication and the potential for epistemic harms (specifically informational and participatory prejudices). While testimonial compression is not unique to healthcare contexts, many contextual factors specific to medical discourse make testimonial compression especially useful.

For a class of uncertain systems, a non-overshooting sliding mode control is presented to make them globally exponentially stable and without overshoot. Even when the unknown stochastic disturbance exists, and the time-variant reference trajectory is required, the strict non-overshooting stabilisation is still achieved. The control law design is based on a desired second-order sliding mode (2-sliding mode), which successively includes two bounded-gain subsystems. Non-overshooting stability requires that the system gains depend on the initial values of system variables. In order to obtain the global non-overshooting stability, the first subsystem with non-overshooting reachability compresses the initial values of the second subsystem to a given bounded range. By partitioning these initial values, the bounded system gains are determined to satisfy the robust non-overshooting stability. In order to reject the chattering in the controller output, a tanh-function-based sliding mode is developed for the design of smoothed non-overshooting controller. The proposed method is applied to a UAV trajectory tracking when the disturbances and uncertainties exist. The control laws are designed to implement the non-overshooting stabilisation in position and attitude. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by the flying tests.

Kinematics remains one of the cornerstones of robotics, and over the decade, Robotica has been one of the venues in which groundbreaking work in kinematics has always been welcome. A number of works in the kinematics community have addressed metrics for rigid-body motions in multiple different venues. An essential feature of any distance metric is the triangle inequality. Here, relationships between the triangle inequality for kinematic metrics and so-called trace inequalities are established. In particular, we show that the Golden-Thompson inequality (a particular trace inequality from the field of statistical mechanics) which holds for Hermitian matrices remarkably also holds for restricted classes of real skew-symmetric matrices. We then show that this is related to the triangle inequality for $SO(3)$ and $SO(4)$ metrics.

Insurers draw on sophisticated models for the probability distributions over losses associated with catastrophic events that are required to price insurance policies. But prevailing pricing methods don’t factor in the ambiguity around model-based projections that derive from the relative paucity of data about extreme events. I argue however that most current theories of decision making under ambiguity only partially support a solution to the challenge that insurance decision makers face and propose an alternative approach that allows for decision making that is responsive to both the evidential situation of the insurance decision maker and their attitude to ambiguity.