Contextualizing legal norms: a multi-dimensional view of the 2014 legal capital reform in China

This paper intends to shed light on the contentious theme of the reception of legal transplantation in the host environment, by examining the 2014 legislative reform of legal capital in China, which at least on paper imitates the enabling settings of US Revised Model Business Corporation Act (RMBCA). The paper looks at the interconnections between national-specific contextual elements, the resultant complexities, and the spillover effects of transplanted configurations in the unique Chinese socio-cultural setting, implicating the discrepancy between the ‘law in practice’ and the borrowed words ‘on the books’, and suggesting the importance of gaining a holistic understanding of ‘law’ involving the legal traditions in both the donor country and the recipient nation

Satisfaction conditions in anticipatory mechanisms

The purpose of this paper is to present a general mechanistic framework for analyzing causal representational claims, and offer a way to distinguish genuinely representational explanations from those that invoke representations for honorific purposes. It is usually agreed that rats are capable of navigation (even in complete darkness, and when immersed in a water maze) because they maintain a cognitive map of their environment. Exactly how and why their neural states give rise to mental representations is a matter of an ongoing debate. I will show that anticipatory mechanisms involved in rats’ evaluation of possible routes give rise to satisfaction conditions of contents, and this is why they are representationally relevant for explaining and predicting rats’ behavior. I argue that a naturalistic account of satisfaction conditions of contents answers the most important objections of antirepresentationalists