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2019 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 14 of 101

Rationality and Time Bias

Rationality and Time Bias
  • Abelard Podgorski
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • We often care not only about what happens to us, but when it happens to us. We prefer that good experiences happen sooner, rather than later, and that our suffering lies in our past, rather than our future. Common sense suggests that some ways of caring about time are rational, and others are not, but it is surprisingly challenging to provide justifying explanations for these tendencies. This Element is an opinionated, non-technical guided tour through the main philosophical issues about the relevance of the temporal location of our experiences to our desires and our choices, and the major arguments for and against different kinds of so-called time bias.
Medieval Finitism

Medieval Finitism
  • Mohammad Saleh Zarepour
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • Discussing various versions of two medieval arguments for the impossibility of infinity, this Element sheds light on early stages of the evolution of the notion of INFINITIES OF DIFFERENT SIZES. The first argument is called 'the Equality Argument' and relies on the premise that all infinities are equal. The second argument is called 'the Mapping Argument' and relies on the assumption that if one thing is mapped/ superposed upon another thing and neither exceeds the other, the two things are equal to each other. Although these arguments were initially proposed in the context of discussions against the possibility of infinities, they have played pivotal roles in the historical evolution of the notion of INFINITIES OF DIFFERENT SIZES.
Outsight

Outsight
  • Restoring the Role of Objects in Creative Problem Solving
  • Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
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  • The way we understand creativity in psychology is built on a fundamental asymmetry between people and objects: people have thoughts, intentions, and the ability to act, while objects lack these qualities. However, despite this distinction, objects that are created communicate with their creator. During the process of creation, objects being formed by the creator take on certain characteristics and behave in certain ways, resulting in a kind of conversation between the person working on solving a problem and the results physically produced. In essence, while the traditional view focuses on the person's thoughts and intentions as the driving force of creativity, the dialogue between the creative individual and the evolving product of their work is overlooked. This Element proposes a methodology and theoretical vocabulary that restore the role of objects in the dynamic unfolding of creative problem solving. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Tip-toeing through the Tulips with Congress

Tip-toeing through the Tulips with Congress
  • How Congressional Attention Constrains Covert Action
  • Dani Kaufmann Nedal, Madison V. Schramm
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • Over the years, the US has intervened covertly in many countries to remove dictators, subvert elected leaders, and support coups. Explanations for this focus on characteristics of target countries or strategic incentives to pursue regime change. This Element provides an account of domestic political factors constraining US presidents' authorization of covert foreign-imposed regime change operations (FIRCs), arguing that congressional attention to covert action alters the Executive's calculus by increasing the political costs associated with this secretive policy instrument. It shows that congressional attention is the result of institutional battles over abuses of executive authority and has a significant constraining effect independent of codified rules and partisan disputes. These propositions are tested using content analysis of the Congressional Record, statistical analysis of Cold War covert FIRCs, and causal-process evidence relating to covert interventions in Chile, Angola, Central America, Afghanistan, etc.
Queering Language Revitalisation

Queering Language Revitalisation
  • Navigating Identity and Inclusion among Queer Speakers of Minority Languages
  • John Walsh, Michael Hornsby, Eva J. Daussà, Renée Pera-Ros, Samuel Parker, Jonathan Morris, Holly R. Cashman
  • Published online:
    08 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • This Element aims to deepen our understanding of how the fields of multilingualism, second language acquisition and minority language revitalisation have largely overlooked the question of queer sexual identities among speakers of the languages under study. Based on case studies of four languages experiencing differing degrees of minoritisation – Irish, Breton, Catalan and Welsh – it investigates how queer people navigate belonging within the binary of speakers/non-speakers of minoritised languages while also maintaining their queer identities. Furthermore, it analyses how minoritised languages are dealing linguistically with the growing need for 'gender-fair' or 'gender-neutral' language. The marginalisation of queer subjects in these strands of linguistics can be traced to the historical dominance of the Fishmanian model of 'Reversing Language Shift' (RLS), which assumed the importance of the deeply heteronormative model of 'intergenerational transmission' of language as fundamental to language revitalisation contexts.
Structural Priming in Sentence Production

Structural Priming in Sentence Production
  • Giulia M. L. Bencini
  • Published online:
    07 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element provides an overview of structural priming research across the three main populations on which experimental priming studies have concentrated: adult monolingual speakers, first language learners, second language learners, and bilinguals. Priming studies with monolingual adults were originally designed to inform psycholinguistic models of grammatical encoding in language production. Thanks to the the implicit nature of the task, priming has turned out to be suitable for experimentally addressing questions about linguistic representation and use at the sentence level in speakers of any age. The view that priming is a form of implicit learning has sparked an interest in exploring continuity and life-long learning in language, opening up rich research areas in second language acquisition and bilingualism. Priming rightly deserves to be a part of every language scientist's tool kit.
Professional Supervision for Principals

Professional Supervision for Principals
  • A Primer for Emerging Practice
  • Mary Ann Hunter, Geoffrey Broughton
  • Published online:
    07 January 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • School leaders work in increasingly complex systems. Alongside leading learning, they daily navigate the needs and expectations of educational departments, teachers, students, parents, society, and themselves. Leadership can therefore be a dynamic vocational calling, but studies show that principals' professional agency, career sustainability, and wellbeing are diminishing. This Element brings a fresh perspective to how educational leaders can be better served and supported by collaborative, co-agentic partnerships at this time. It makes the case for professional supervision, a practice commonplace in clinical and pastoral professions that offers facilitated, action-oriented attention to the interplay of role, 'soul', and context. As a practice-based primer, this Element reclaims supervision against outdated associations with performance management by drawing on interdisciplinary research and the authors' own experience as supervisor partners with principals. It proposes a new schema of professional supervision in education informed by curiosity, unlearning, resonance, and attunement in a rapidly changing world.
Corruption and the Voter's Decision

Corruption and the Voter's Decision
  • Experimental Evidence from Brazil
  • Miguel F. P. de Figueiredo
  • Published online:
    07 January 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
  • Despite voters' distaste for corruption, corrupt politicians frequently get reelected. This Element provides a framework for understanding when corrupt politicians are reelected. One unexplored source of electoral accountability is court rulings on candidate malfeasance, which are increasingly determining politicians' electoral prospects. The findings suggest that (1) low-income voters – in contrast to higher-income voters – are responsive to such rulings. Unlike earlier studies, we explore multiple trade-offs voters weigh when confronting corrupt candidates, including the candidate's party, policy positions, and personal attributes. The results also surprisingly show (2) low-income voters, like higher-income voters, weigh corruption allegations and policy positions similarly, and are slightly more responsive to candidate attributes. Moreover, irrespective of voter income, (3) party labels insulate candidates from corruption, and (4) candidate attributes like gender have little effect. The results have implications for when voters punish corrupt politicians, the success of anti-corruption campaigns, and the design and legitimacy of electoral institutions.
Historians' Autobiographies as Historiographical Inquiry

Historians' Autobiographies as Historiographical Inquiry
  • A Global Perspective
  • Jaume Aurell
  • Published online:
    06 January 2025
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • This Element analyses the autobiographies of historians from a global perspective and looks at all eras, from antiquity to the present day. It includes twenty autobiographies: Caesar's and Lucian of Samosata's memories in antiquity; an autobiography of a medieval king such as Peter IV of Aragon; Vico's, Gibbon's and Adams' intellectual self-accounting in modernity; autobiographical revelations and social activism of twentieth century women historians such as Carolyn Steedman, Jill Conway and Gerda Lerner; classical Chinese and Islamic traditions through the autobiographies of Sima Quian and Ibn Khaldun; the perplexities inherent in the modernisation of Japan (Fukuzawa Yukichi), China (Gu Jiegang), India (Nirad Chaudhuri) and Egypt (Taha Hussein); postmodernists such as Rosenstone; and traumatic postcolonial experiences in Africa (Bethwell Ogot), Latin America (Carlos Eire) and Southeast Asia (Wang Gungwu). This Element proposes a literary and historical approach to these autobiographies, emphasising its historiographical dimension and value.
Visions of Hierarchy and Inequality in Early Medieval England

Visions of Hierarchy and Inequality in Early Medieval England
  • Stuart Pracy
  • Published online:
    06 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
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  • This Element examines the socio-political hierarchy of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries, focusing upon the plasticity of the boundary between the ranks of ceorl and thegn. Offering a nuanced analysis of terms such as thegn and ceorl in both early medieval texts and modern scholarship, the Element highlights the mechanisms that allowed these non-institutional signifiers to hold such social weight while conferring few tangible benefits. To better describe the relative social positions, the author argues that a compound method is preferable, supporting this proposal via a thorough deconstruction of writings by Archbishop Wulfstan II of York − responsible for many of scholars' ideas about rank in the period − and the examination of sources that evidence a blurring of 'middling' social boundaries across the two centuries under discussion. Together, these strands of interrogation allow for a fuller understanding of how status was constructed in early medieval England.
Metaphysics of Causation

Metaphysics of Causation
  • Max Kistler
  • Published online:
    03 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
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  • This Element presents the main attempts to account for causation as a metaphysical concept, in terms of 1) regularities and laws of nature, 2) conditional probabilities and Bayes nets, 3) necessitation between universals and causal powers, 4) counterfactual dependence, 5) interventions and causal models, and 6) processes and mechanisms. None of these accounts can provide a complete reductive analysis. However, some provide the means to distinguish several useful concepts of causation, such as total cause, contributing cause, direct and indirect cause, and actual cause. Moreover, some of these accounts can be construed so as to complement each other. The last part presents some contemporary debates: on the relation between grounding and causation, eliminativism with respect to causation in physics, the challenge against 'downward' causation from the Closure and Exclusion principles, robust and proportional causation, and degrees of causation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The European Ideological Space in Voters' Own Words

The European Ideological Space in Voters' Own Words
  • Noam Gidron, Thomas Tichelbaecker
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • There is a broad consensus that the ideological space of Western democracies consists of two distinct dimensions: one economic and the other cultural. In this Element, the authors explore how ordinary citizens make sense of these two dimensions. Analyzing novel survey data collected across ten Western democracies, they employ text analysis techniques to investigate responses to open-ended questions. They examine variations in how people interpret these two ideological dimensions along three levels of analysis: across countries, based on demographic features, and along the left-right divide. Their results suggest that there are multiple two-dimensional spaces: that is, different groups ascribe different meanings to what the economic and cultural political divides stand for. They also find that the two dimensions are closely intertwined in people's minds. Their findings make theoretical contributions to the study of electoral politics and political ideology.
Abortion Attitudes and Polarization in the American Electorate

Abortion Attitudes and Polarization in the American Electorate
  • Erin C. Cassese, Heather L. Ondercin, Jordan Randall
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • About two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion in many or all circumstances, and this group finds itself a frustrated majority following the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned the legal precedent set in Roe v. Wade. Previous scholarship argues intense minorities can secure favorable policy outcomes when facing off against a more diffuse and less motivated majority, creating incongruence between public opinion and policy. This Element focuses on the ways that preference intensity and partisan polarization have contributed to the current policy landscape surrounding abortion rights. Using survey data from the American National Election Studies, the authors identify Americans with intense preferences about abortion and investigate the role they play in electoral politics. They observe a shift in the relationship between partisanship and preference intensity coinciding with Dobbs and speculate about what this means for elections and policy congruence in the future.
Legal Rights and Moral Rights

Legal Rights and Moral Rights
  • Matthew H. Kramer
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • In a short span, this Element will delineate the general nature of legal and moral rights and the general nature of the holding of rights, and it will also sketch the justificatory foundations of rights. Hence, the Element will treat of some major topics within legal, political, and moral philosophy as it combines analytical theses and ethical theses in a complex pattern.
The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge

The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge
  • Consensus, Controversy, and Coproduction
  • Boaz Miller
  • Published online:
    30 December 2024
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • This Element is about the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. The first section asks in what ways scientific knowledge is social. The second section develops a conception of scientific knowledge that accommodates the insights of the first section, and is consonant with mainstream thinking about knowledge in analytic epistemology. The third section asks under what conditions we can tell, in the real world, that a consensus in a scientific community amounts to shared scientific knowledge, as characterized in the second section, and how to deal with scientific dissent. The fourth section reviews the ways epistemic and social elements mutually interact to coproduce scientific knowledge. This Element engages with literature from philosophy of science and social epistemology, especially social epistemology of science, as well as Science, Technology, and Society (STS), and analytic epistemology. The Element focuses on themes and debates that date from the start of the second millennium.
Willingness to Communicate in a Second Language

Willingness to Communicate in a Second Language
  • Jian-E Peng
  • Published online:
    25 December 2024
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
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  • This Element offers a review of advancements in willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language (L2) over the past twenty-five years. It begins with the origin of the concept of WTC in first language (L1) communication research and the seminal and novel conceptualizations of WTC in the L2 context. This Element then categorizes six key perspectives that have informed WTC research: social psychological, cultural, dynamic, ecological, multimodal, and digital. By analyzing representative studies, it elucidates insights gained from these perspectives. The Element then discusses key factors associated with WTC, including individual attributes, situational factors, and outcome factors. This is followed by an overview of and critical commentary on methodological approaches in WTC research. Implications for enhancing L2 learners' WTC in in-class, out-of-class, and digital contexts are discussed. The Element concludes by proposing important venues for future WTC research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Digital Assets

Digital Assets
  • A Portfolio Perspective
  • Henrique Schneider
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • From the perspective of an investor, digital assets are an alternative class of assets. They have several features that differentiate them from traditional investments. This makes them well-suited for a diversified portfolio. The question is how to accommodate them in such a portfolio, how to manage their potential and risk, and how to evaluate them. This short book explains how to include digital assets is a diversified portfolio. It focuses on their differentiating use cases, their idiosyncracies, and how they relate to other types of investment. This is a volume for practitioners and students in finance, asset management, or portfolio construction.
Contemplation and Civic Happiness in Plato and Aristotle

Contemplation and Civic Happiness in Plato and Aristotle
  • Dominic Scott
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • This Element concerns the civic value of contemplation in Plato and Aristotle: how does intellectual contemplation contribute to the happiness of the ideal state? The texts discussed include the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, works in which contemplation is viewed from a political angle. The Element concludes that in the Republic contemplation has purely instrumental value, whereas in the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics it has purely intrinsic value. To do justice to the complexity of the issues involved, the author addresses a broader question about the nature of civic happiness: whether it is merely the aggregate of individual happiness or an organic quality that arises from the structure of the state. Answering this question has implications for how contemplation contributes to civic happiness. The Element also discusses how many citizens Plato and Aristotle expected to be engaged in contemplation in the ideal state.
Extensive Reading

Extensive Reading
  • Jing Zhou
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • This Element focuses on extensive reading (ER), a language learning and teaching approach that encourages language learners to read a large amount of interesting and level-appropriate reading materials. Extensive reading has been adopted across educational spectrums, including higher, secondary, and elementary levels, and implemented in diverse language contexts such as English, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and French. The primary objective of this Element is to offer comprehensive insights into the theoretical foundations of ER, analyze its multifaceted benefits to language learning, address the challenges encountered in its implementation, and propose effective strategies drawn from research for these challenges. The Element concludes with an overview of the latest trends and developments in ER.
Monotheism and Paradise

Monotheism and Paradise
  • Caitlin Smith Gilson
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • This Element will provide an essential tracing of selected Greek views of the afterlife which engage in dynamic tension with the Christian understanding of Paradise as fulfilled in the Resurrected state. The main three sections in this Element are Ideas of the Afterlife in the Greek Tragedians; Plato: The Difficulty of Paradise; and Holiness and Violence: A Christian View of the Resurrected State. The imposition of justice and the expiation of guilt through suffering are necessary prerequisites to our approach to the relationship between Monotheism and Paradise. Additional discussions will focus on weak theology and of a God not transcendent enough to ensure the desire for Heaven. As such, the sections are organized to isolate and trace this thread.

Page 14 of 101