bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Juristocracy vs. Theocracy: Constitutional Courts and the Containment of Sacred Law
Authors: Hirschl Ran 
Published: July 2010

AbstractOne of the fascinating yet seldom explored phenomena in predominantly religious polities in the Middle East and elsewhere is the growing reliance on constitutional courts and their jurisprudential ingenuity to contain the spread of religiosity or advance a pragmatic version of it. In this article, I explore the scope and nature of this phenomenon. I proceed in several main steps. First, I define what may be termed "constitutional theocracy" with its often conflicting legal commitments, political interests, and social realities. Second, I examine the main epistemological, juridical and political reasons why constitutional law and courts are so appealing to secularist, modernist, cosmopolitan, and other non-religious social forces in polities facing deep divisions along secular/religious lines. Third, I look at various modes of interpretive ingenuity drawn upon by constitutional courts in Egypt, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey in order to contain, limit, and mitigate the resurgence of religiosity in their respective polities. All of these countries have experienced a growth in the influence of religious political movements, with a commensurate increase in the levels of popular support that they receive. Despite the considerable differences in these countries' formal recognition of, and commitment to, religious values, there are, however, some striking parallels in the way that the constitutional courts in these (and in other similarly situated countries) have positioned themselves as important secularizing forces within their respective societies. I conclude by drawing some general lessons concerning the political construction of judicial review and the secularizing role of constitutional courts in an increasingly religious world.
The Muslim-Majority Character of Israeli Constitutional Law
Authors: Hofri-Winogradow Adam 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThis article offers a novel interpretation of Israel's constitutional discourse. It is well-known that despite its Jewish majority, Israel orders marriage and divorce in a manner similar to that prevalent in most Muslim-majority countries: by granting the traditional religious community courts of the various religious groups which make up its population exclusive jurisdiction over community members' matters of marriage and divorce. What is less well known is that Israel's constitutional discourse, too, fits a pattern common in Muslim-majority jurisdictions, in espousing a double commitment to both a religion—in Israel's case, Judaism—and human rights. The Israeli Supreme Court has for decades emphasized Israeli constitutional law's commitment to liberalism and human rights while de-emphasizing its commitment to religion. Consistently with this approach, the Court has considered Israel's marriage regime an anachronistic blot on the law, and has constructed an alternative, civil marriage regime to serve the needs of Israel's secular liberals, whose views the Court often echos. I argue that the Court should strive to render its liberal policy choices more palatable for Israel's conservatives, by presenting them as the results of a harmonization of the religious and human rights pillars of Israel's constitutional discourse, investing in a close analysis of religious texts directed at legitimating those choices, where possible, in religious terms. A recent Israeli case hints in this direction. I conclude by suggesting that Israel's Muslim-majority type marriage regime, updated to include a civil marriage alternative, could be seen as a reflection of its complex constitutional order.
Foundations in China
Authors: Ming Wang , Yushan Xu 
Published: July 2010

AbstractFoundations are rooted in public interest; they are built from wealth; they are a form of involvement in the public interest for the wealthy; they represent a systemic arrangement in which society may, through organizing, compel the rich to express their concern for society through public-interest donations to the poor; and they are a legal form in which, in the name of the public interest, wealth can be redistributed and perpetuated. After defining foundations, offering a classification, and discussing foundations’ properties, this article endeavors to examine the historical development of foundations in the West and in China, and analyze the unique characteristics of Chinese foundations and their opportunities going forward. It will proceed to analyze the systemic characteristics of foundations’ property rights, introduce the concept of public-interest property rights, discuss foundation governance structures, analyze the basic principles behind foundation legislation, discuss preferential tax policies and innovations in foundation governance, and, finally, raise several policy recommendations for the expansion and strengthening of China’s foundations. This article represents the author’s effort at a general analytic framework for and basic research theory of foundations, based on empirical research, for the reference of his esteemed colleagues.
Thoughts on Comparative Civil Society Evaluation Indices Based on China's Conditions
Authors: Chen Jian 
Published: July 2010

AbstractOver the past few decades, civil society has witnessed significant global growth. How to establish a measurement system that is able to effectively evaluate the development of civil society is an important question facing scholars from all countries. This paper will first provide an overview of the meaning behind civil society indices and those that exist today and then carry out an indepth comparison of indices, as created by the scholars Lester Salamon and Helmut Anheier. Using this as a foundation, this paper will then incorporate the current state of civil society in China, analyzing the applicability of its current indices and offer some constructive amendment proposals.
Comparison of the Transparency Levels of Donor-Funded Earthquake Relief Organizations
Authors: Zhu He , Tao Chuanjin 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThrough researching and comparing the transparency levels of disaster relief organizations involved in the Wenchuan Earthquake, we discovered that the overall transparency levels of foundations were not very high. Moreover, the levels of transparency we found did not match the results of the A-level evaluations. Conversely, the group of organizations without A-level ratings had a higher transparency level because it included many organizations operating with bottom-up socialized mechanisms. This result means that, from society's perspective, having a small number of large, government-designated, legally registered organizations authorized to accept donations is not the most ideal organizational form.
Wenchuan Earthquake Civic Donation and the Inspiration of Modern Philanthropy within China
Authors: Zheng Yuanchang 
Published: July 2010

AbstractCivic donation work following the Wenchuan earthquake represents the largest donation initiative and one-time philanthropic undertaking ever in Chinese history. While conducting an in-depth summary of relevant experiences related to this work, it is necessary to provide a careful analysis of the inherent contradictions and questions raised by such a donation initiative. These factors include difficulties and incomplete mechanisms within the donor management system, significant disparities between existing donor policies and their actual operation, and an extremely weak overall sense of philanthropy within modern society as a whole. This is compounded by the absence of a government department in the field of philanthropic work. As such, donors lack the necessary statistical information on which to base their efforts, making compilation of data particularly difficult. These contradictions and issues compel China to accelerate improvements in its philanthropic institutions and mechanisms, such as building statistical information systems, cultivating professionals, establishing grass-roots organizations, and fostering awareness throughout the entire society to improve and hasten the pace of Chinese philanthropic development.
Learning from Self-Organization among Service Volunteers after the Wenchuan Earthquake – The Case of Ad Hoc Volunteer Organization K388
Authors: Jiang Shujie 
Published: July 2010

Abstract“Self-organization” describes coordinated actions by members of a system through a process of social evolution and without prompting by outside forces that result in action unified in temporal, spatial, or functional terms and also in an orderly, living structure. After the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, some volunteers spontaneously coordinated effective, unified actions. K388 is one such volunteer team. By analyzing K388, this paper looks at how volunteers in the disaster area innovated, self-organized, and formed orderly organizations.
Defining Manipulative Discourse: The Pragmatics of Cognitive Illusions
Authors: Maillat Didier , Oswald Steve 
Published: July 2010

AbstractManipulative discourse has attracted a lot of attention in various adjacent domains of linguistic research, notably in rhetoric, argumentation theory, philosophy of language, discourse analysis, pragmatics, among others. We start with a review of the existing definitions provided in these fields and highlight some of the difficulties they encounter. In particular, we argue that there is still a need for an analytic model that makes predictions about manipulative discourse. We propose an alternative account of manipulation couched in the relevance-theoretic framework which treats manipulation as a two-step communicative attempt at misleading the context-selection process when interpreting a target utterance. We argue further that such attempts systematically exploit the inherent weaknesses or flaws of the human cognitive system that are amply discussed in cognitive psychology under the heading of “cognitive illusions”. We claim that such a model correctly captures classical instances of manipulative discourse which fall outside the scope of other accounts.
The Explicit/Implicit Distinction in Pragmatics and the Limits of Explicit Communication
Authors: Carston Robyn 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThis paper has two main parts. The first is a critical survey of ways in which the explicit/implicit distinction has been and is currently construed in linguistic pragmatics, which reaches the conclusion that the distinction is not to be equated with a semantics/pragmatics distinction but rather concerns a division within communicated contents (or speaker meaning). The second part homes in on one particular way of drawing such a pragmatically-based distinction, the explicature/implicature distinction in Relevance Theory. According to this account, processes of pragmatic enrichment play a major role in the recovery of explicit content and only some of these processes are linguistically triggered, others being entirely pragmatically motivated. I conclude with a brief consideration of the language-communication relation and the limits on explicitness.
On Three Theories of Implicature: Default Theory, Relevance Theory and Minimalism
Authors: Borg Emma 
Published: July 2010

AbstractGrice's distinction between what is said by a sentence and what is implicated by an utterance of it is both extremely familiar and almost universally accepted. However, in recent literature, the precise account he offered of implicature recovery has been questioned and alternative accounts have emerged. In this paper, I examine three such alternative accounts. My main aim is to show that the two most popular accounts in the current literature (the default inference view and the relevance theoretic approach) still face signifi cant problems. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternative account, emerging from semantic minimalism, is best placed to accommodate Grice's distinction.
Neo-Gricean Pragmatics and the Lexicon
Authors: Huang Yan 
Published: July 2010

AbstractInterest in the pragmatics of the lexicon is probably as old as that in pragmatics itself, as can be seen in the early work by e.g.the 19 th century British philosophers John Stuart Mill and Augustus De Morgan, and the more recent, seminal work by Grice (1975, 1989) and McCawley (1978). However, a revival of this interest has occurred since the 1990s, and there has since been an acceleration in the development of a separate branch of lexical pragmatics. Currently, lexical pragmatics - the systematic study of aspects of meaning-related properties of lexical items that are dependent on or modifi ed in language in use, i.e.that part of lexical meaning which is parasitic on what is coded but is not part of what is coded (e.g.Huang 1998) – is a hot pursuit within at least three diff erent theoretical frameworks of pragmatics, namely, neo-Gricean pragmatic theory (e.g.Horn 1984, 1989, 2003, 2006a, b, 2007, Huang 1998, 2005, 2008, 2009, Levinson 2000), neo-Gricean oriented bidirectional optimality-theoretic (OT) pragmatics (e.g.Blutner 1998, 2004, forthcoming) and relevance theory (e.g.Carston 1997, Wilson 2003, Wilson and Carston 2007). e aim of this article is to present a neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis of four central topics in lexical pragmatics: lexical narrowing, lexical cloning, lexical blocking, and asymmetry in the lexicalization of certain logical operators.
Towards an Alternative Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Interjections
Authors: Cruz Manuel Padilla 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThe current relevance-theoretic approach to interjections (Wharton 2000, 2001, 2003) analyses these as procedural elements that contribute to the recovery of the higher-level explicatures of utterances. is analysis seems to work satisfactorily for those emotive/expressive interjections accompanying another proposition or appended to another utterance. However, it does not seem to apply to interjections occurring alone, as independent utterances, and to the so-called type of conative/volitive interjections. For this reason, based on previous work on interjections and some relevance-theoretic postulates, this paper seeks to suggest a more general procedural analysis of interjections, according to which the procedures they encode would not lead hearers to construct higher-level explicatures, but to access contextual material that is necessary for the correct interpretation of interjectional utterances. As a result of such procedural meaning, interjections can be used with a rather precise informative intention, can be taken to communicate propositions and result in cognitive effects.
Following the Rules of Discourse
Authors: Peregrin Jaroslav 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThis review article discusses Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance's (2009) book on normative speech act theory and Joseph Heath's (2008) book on rule following, putting them into the context of the general problem of normativity of human discursive practices (and human practices in general). The upshot of the discussion is that while Heath's book advances our understanding of the normative dimension of human life, prominently including human language, Kukla and Lance's one presents a deeply interesting attempt at a framework for the study of discourse taking normativity of language at face value.
Infant Communication: A Problem for Relevance Theory?
Authors: Pfister Jonas 
Published: July 2010

AbstractIn this article I clarify an argument by Richard Breheny against Relevance Theory based on a problem posed by infant communication. I present Sperber and Wilson's solution and argue that Breheny's objection to it does not hold. I argue that Breheny's alternative notion of communication does not meet the requirement of the overtness of communication. If one drops this requirement, then the way is open for a theoretically simpler notion of communication.
Content Similarity and Communicative Success
Authors: Kjøll Georg 
Published: July 2010

AbstractIn this paper, I discuss the relevance theoretic view of shared content and ask how one can use the theory to understand in what situations communication is successful and when it's not. The paper is meant as a case study in the philosophy of linguistics, in which I aim to draw some conclusions based on a particular debate between two very influential groups of theorists. I look at Cappelen and Lepore's (2007) critique of Sperber and Wilson (1995) and claim that, contrary to standard conceptions in philosophy, it is possible to be a coherent similarity theorist about communicated content, postulating another level of content as the locus of identity. I emphasize the importance of basing a similarity view of communication on a foundation of identity, and argue, against Wedgwood (2007), that it's not possible for relevance theorists to abstract away from this issue.
Multisensory Processing in Review: from Physiology to Behaviour
Authors: Alais David , Newell Fiona , Mamassian Pascal 
Published: July 2010

AbstractResearch in multisensory processes has exploded over the last decade. Tremendous advances have been made in a variety of fields from single-unit neural recordings and functional brain imaging through to behaviour, perception and cognition. These diverse approaches have highlighted how the senses work together to produce a coherent multimodal representation of the external world that enables us to function better by exploiting the redundancies and complementarities provided by multiple sensory modalities. With large numbers of new students and researchers being attracted to multisensory research, and the multi-disciplinary nature of the work, our aim in this review is to provide an overview of multisensory processing that includes all fields in a single review. Our intention is to provide a comprehensive source for those interested in learning about multisensory processes, covering a variety of sensory combinations and methodologies, and tracing the path from single-unit neurophysiology through to perception and cognitive functions such as attention and speech.
Where's the Floor?
Authors:   Jenkin,   Jenkin,   Harris,   Dyde,   Oman
Published: July 2010

AbstractVisual and balance cues concerning the relative orientation of ourselves and our environment combine to direct our steps to select a secure footing. How are visual cues used to select the best support surface? Here we show that, when exposed to tilted, rectangular rooms of various aspect ratios, subjects do not necessarily choose the surface with its normal oriented closest to the gravity-defined vertical. Rather their decision is also strongly biased by the visual area subtended by each candidate surface.
On the Perceptual/Motor Dissociation: A Review of Concepts, Theory, Experimental Paradigms and Data Interpretations
Authors: Gorea Andrei , Cardoso-Leite Pedro 
Published: July 2010

AbstractWith its roots in Ungerleider and Mishkin's (1982) uncovering of two distinct — ventral and dorsal — anatomical pathways for the processing of visual information, and boosted by Goodale and Milner's (1992; Milner and Goodale, 1995) behavioral study of patients with lesions of either of these pathways, the perception–action dissociation became a standard reference in the sensorimotor literature. Here we present briefly the anatomical, neuropsychological and, more extensively, the psychophysical evidence favoring such dissociation and pit it against counteracting evidence as well as against potential methodological and conceptual pitfalls. We also discuss classes of models accounting for a number of 'dissociation' results and conclude that the most general and parsimonious one posits the existence of one single processing stream that accumulates information up to a decision criterion modulated by stimulation conditions, response mode (motor vs. verbal/perceptual), task constraints (speeded vs. free time responses) and the nature of the task (detection, discrimination, temporal order judgment, etc.). The reviewed evidence is not meant to refute or validate the hypothesis of a perceptual–motor dissociation. Rather, its main objective is to show that, beyond its self-evidence, such dissociation is difficult if not impossible to test.
Measuring Perceptual Hysteresis with the Modified Method of Limits: Dynamics at the Threshold
Authors: Hock Howard , Schöner Gregor 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThis article describes modifications to the psychophysical method of limits that eliminate artifacts associated with the classical method, and thereby indicate whether or not there is perceptual hysteresis. Such hysteresis effects, which are characteristic of dynamical systems, would provide evidence that the near-threshold perception of an attribute is affected by stabilization mechanisms intrinsic to individual neural detectors, and by nonlinear interactions that functionally integrate the detectors when there is sufficient stimulus-initiated activation, thereby stabilizing activation at suprathreshold levels. The article begins with a review of research employing the modified method of limits. It concludes with a model and computational simulations showing how detection instabilities inherent in neural dynamics can create 'activational gaps' between the functionally-integrated and functionally-independent states of neural ensembles, resulting in clear and distinct discrimination between the perception and non-perception of an attribute. The 'self-excitation' threshold for engaging such functionally-integrating detector interactions is differentiated from the traditional 'read-out' threshold (criterion) that determines whether or not the attribute in question can be perceived.
The Ukrainian “Friday” and the Russian “Robinson”: The Uneasy Advent of Postcoloniality
Authors: Ryabchuk Mykola 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThe paper addresses the problem of Russian-Ukrainian asymmetric relations as revealed in the struggle of two discourses—the discourse of imperial dominance and the discourse of national/nationalistic resistance and liberation. Critical discourse analysis is applied to deconstruct the imperial discourse as a major obstacle for the normalization of Russian-Ukrainian relations. Postcoloniality is suggested as a desirable condition for both Russian and Ukrainian cultures to achieve internal freedom and eliminate colonial stereotypes and anti-colonial mobilization, respectively.
Defending the Cultural Nation before and after 1991: Ivan Dziuba
Authors: Pavlyshyn Marko 
Published: July 2010

AbstractThe Ukrainian literary and cultural critic Ivan Dziuba (b. 1931) exerted his greatest impact on Ukrainian public life as a dissident in the 1960s and as a public intellectual from the late 1980s onward. Throughout his writings Dziuba has urged state and society to develop Ukrainian culture proactively and to defend it against encroachment by dominant cultures allied to politically and economically dominant powers.
Religion and Refugee Resettlement: Evolving Connections to Ukraine since World War II
Authors: Wanner Catherine 
Published: July 2010

AbstractSeveral waves of Ukrainian refugees have arrived in the United States since 1945, each following a remarkably different resettlement and assimilation path. This article offers a comparative analysis of the role of religious affiliation and transnational religious organizations and networks in shaping processes of resettlement, ethnic group formation and the creation of attachments to Ukraine to explain the lower than expected levels of engagement of the last two waves with the Ukrainian diaspora and with Ukraine. Evolving global forces and the social structures within them render diasporic identities, which are closely associated with a territorially anchored sense of national culture, less appealing than the highly fluid transnational networks of religious groups. The role of religious-based resettlement organizations and their networks in the United States is likely to exert an ever greater effect on refugee resettlement and migration more generally.