Atop El Castillo, the largest pyramid within the Maya site of Chichen Itza, in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, stand two ruined columns that once portrayed the feathered serpent deity K’uk’ulkan. 3D-imaging technologies have identified scattered sculptural fragments belonging to these columns, allowing a digital reconstruction that opens new possibilities for their conservation.

What explains the demand and supply of criminal governance? Contrary to traditional explanations of criminal governance as top-down control, this study integrates bottom-up demands for assistance and top-down supply of aid and coercion. We argue that the demand for criminal governance stems from civilians’ drive to satisfy their primary necessities, while security concerns motivate criminals to supply governance to prevent civilian resistance. The theory focuses on three main factors: economic difficulties, articulation/resistance capacity, and government response. The empirical strategy uses multiple list experiments conducted in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. On the demand side, results indicate that economic difficulties and civilian articulation capacity shape the demand for criminal aid. On the supply side, criminals largely neglect people’s economic needs. When criminals help, they do it for cheap and to neutralize potential civilian resistance or to compete against the state. However, when economic conditions worsen, criminals revert to imposing lockdowns.

Current models of scientific inquiry assume scientists to all share the same evaluative standards. However, science is often characterised by multiple ones, that is by evaluative diversity. We investigate how scientific success is affected by evaluative diversity through computer-based simulations. Our results show that communities with diverse standards profit immensely from scientists sharing all the approaches they explored, regardless of whether they considered them valuable. Moreover, we find that even a moderate degree of evaluative diversity can, under certain conditions, lead scientists to reach more satisfying results than those they would reach in homogeneous communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between expressivism and disagreement. More in particular, the aim is to defend that one of the desiderata that can be derived from the study of disagreement, the explanation of ‘crossed disagreements’, can only be accommodated within a semantic theory that respects, at the meta-semantic level, certain expressivistic restrictions. We will compare contemporary dynamic expressivism with three different varieties of contextualist strategies to accommodate the specificities of evaluative language –indexical contextualism – truth-conditional pragmatics –, pragmatic strategies using implicatures, and presuppositional accounts. Our conclusion will be that certain assumptions of expressivism are necessary in order to provide a semantic account of evaluative uses of language that can allow us to detect and prevent crossed disagreements.