8,372 research outputs found
Attitudinal Objects
This paper defends the view that attitudinal objects such as claims, beliefs, judgments, and requests form an ontological category of its own sharply distinguished from that of events and states and that of propositions. Attitudinal objects play a central role in attitude reports and avoid the conceptual and empirical problems for propositions. Unlike the latter, attitudinal objects bear a particular connection to normativity. The paper will also discuss the syntactic basis of a semantics of attitude reports based on attitudinal objects
Ways of thinking about ways of being
Monism about being says that there is one way to be. Pluralism about being says that there are many ways to be. Recently, Trenton Merricks and David Builes have offered arguments against Pluralism. In this paper, I show how Pluralists who appeal to the relative naturalness of quantifiers can respond to these arguments
A stochastic approach for quantifying immigrant integration: the Spanish test case
We apply stochastic process theory to the analysis of immigrant integration.
Using a unique and detailed data set from Spain, we study the relationship
between local immigrant density and two social and two economic immigration
quantifiers for the period 1999-2010. As opposed to the classic time-series
approach, by letting immigrant density play the role of "time", and the
quantifier the role of "space" it become possible to analyze the behavior of
the quantifiers by means of continuous time random walks. Two classes of
results are obtained. First we show that social integration quantifiers evolve
following pure diffusion law, while the evolution of economic quantifiers
exhibit ballistic dynamics. Second we make predictions of best and worst case
scenarios taking into account large local fluctuations. Our stochastic process
approach to integration lends itself to interesting forecasting scenarios
which, in the hands of policy makers, have the potential to improve political
responses to integration problems. For instance, estimating the standard
first-passage time and maximum-span walk reveals local differences in
integration performance for different immigration scenarios. Thus, by
recognizing the importance of local fluctuations around national means, this
research constitutes an important tool to assess the impact of immigration
phenomena on municipal budgets and to set up solid multi-ethnic plans at the
municipal level as immigration pressure build
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