Minimal representation of a semiorder

In a multicriteria decision problem it may happen that the preference of the decision-maker on some criterion is modeled by means of a semiorder structure. If the available information is qualitative, one often needs a numerical representation of the semiorder. We investigate the set of representations of a semiorder and show that, once a unit has been fixed, there exists a minimal representation. This representation can be calculated by linear programming and exhibits some interesting properties: all values are integer multiples of the unit and are as scattered as possible in the sense that, in the set of all representations contained in the same bounded interval, the minimal representation is a representation for which the minimal distance between two values is maximal. The minimal representation can also be interpreted as a generalisation of the rank function associated to linear orders.     

The Breakdown of the Hegemonic Representation of Madness in Africa

Social science has recently examined the dramatic increase of witchcraft and magic in everyday contemporary African. A study, which took place in the 1970's, on the representation of madness in postcolonial Congo, contributes to the elucidation of such an outgrowth. In line with the first version of La Psychoanalyse, it aimed at identifying variations in the images, beliefs, and attitudes associated with groups whose social positioning differed in relation to modernity. Sixty old men were interviewed. The respondents provided a representation in the making that neither reflected Western knowledge nor faithfully echoed local patterns. The Western elements were anchored in a strongly objectified local belief system. For “traditional” informants the meaning attributed to madness testifies to the transformation of a hegemonic representation into a polemical one since it addressed the question of their identity shaken by modernity. An emancipated representation emerged within the most educated group. A secondary analysis of the data contributes to current theoretical debates within social representations theory in focusing on tolerance/intolerance to alternative representations through semantic barriers. It brings more evidence to the fragmentation of the hegemonic system of belief and confirms how social—identity content and relations mediate knowledge construction.     

Altruism, motivation, and allocation: giving and using human organs

With tens of thousands of waiting recipients but only 4000-5000 organs available annually, there is a chronic and largely insatiable demand for organ transplants. This article draws on three sources of data regarding the sources of organs donated: a survey of the families of organ donors, a survey of the general public, and a prospective data collection effort from organ procurement agencies. It considers which Americans are willing to engage in this kind of altruism. Furthermore, it discusses the obligations imposed on the nation's public organ procurement and allocation system by the fact that organs are obtained as gifts. It argues that, as all Americans may be asked to donate and there would be social costs to excluding some from a moral community to givers and recipients, all Americans ought to have equal access to organ transplantation.     

Wittgenstein, Pretend Play and the Transferred Use of Language

This essay sketches the potential implications of Wittgensteinian thought for conceptualizations of socalled fictive mental states, e.g. mental calculating, imagination, pretend play, as they are currently discussed in developmental psychology and philosophy of mind. In developmental psychology the young child's pretend play and make-belief are seen as a manifestation of the command of an underlying individualistic "theory of mind". When saying "This banana is a telephone" the child's mind entertains simultaneously two mental representations, a primary or veridical representation about the real properties of banana's and a pretend representation. It is the task of psychology to explain how this "double knowledge" does not result in conceptual chaos. Various sorts of internal mechanisms are postulated. In this essay it is argued that the threat of chaos is misconceived, and that the solutions are irrelevant. Following Wittgenstein's sparse remarks about the secondary sense of words, I argue that pretend language does not refer to underlying individual mental representations but to the child's creative transference of words used in one, primary, domain of application to another, secondary domain. The command and use of the secondary domain logically presupposes the command and use of the primary domain. Since the latter domain is necessarily public and social, fictive mental states cannot be dealt with purely individualistically as current mentalism assumes.     

Sensory experiences and social representation – Embodied multimodality of common-sense thinking

Discussions on the body frequently foreground in empirical studies of social representations. However, there is scarce theoretical literature within social representations theory focusing on embodied social representation. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of embodied, sensory experiences as part of social representation. More precisely, it attempts to elaborate how individual, social, bodily, and material layers work together in embodied social representation. This paper approaches the topic from four viewpoints: (1) social representation as action, (2) phenomenology, (3) embodied and socially situated cognition, and (4) sensory epistemologies and sensescapes. These approaches are used to provide insight into the conscious and unconscious processes of social representation and the multimodality of social representation. The paper contributes to the understanding of the role of sensory experiences and embodiment in the theory of social representations.     

Sensitising Concept, Themata and Shareness: A Dialogical Perspective of Social Representations

This article aims at clarifying some critical, yet under-explored, conceptual issues of social representations from a dialogical perspective. The article recasts the notion of social representations as a sensitising, rather than a definitive, concept, based on the distinction between dialogical and monological epistemologies. It is argued that the introduction of the concept of themata into the theory suggests the dialogical interdependence between common thinking and social morphology, between the genesis and structure of social representations, and between implicit underlying themata and their pragmatic manifestations in structuring social representations. At the same time, the concept of themata implies that a social representation may be, at one and the same time, shared and communicated in hegemonic, emancipated and polemical ways in a complementary manner. These three ways of "sharing" are dialogically interrelated to each other.     

Social Representations and Repression: Examining the First Formulations of Freud and Moscovici

The English edition of Moscovici's classic work on the social representation of psychoanalysis enables us to reflect on the historical origins of psychoanalytic ideas and of social representation theory itself. Moscovici claimed that science was both univocal and abstract and, in these respects, it differs from the social representations of commonsense. This paper explores these notions, especially in relation to Moscovici's claim that psychoanalytic theory is to be found in Freud's first formulations. It is suggested that some of the processes, which Moscovici attributes to the passage of psychoanalytic ideas to commonsense, can be found occur in the early history of psychoanalysis. This can be seen in Freud's criticisms of the way Jung used the concept of “complex”. Moreover, psychoanalytic theory could never be univocal for it incorporated the voices of patients and their representations of the world. An examination of Studies on Hysteria reveals further multivocality as Freud uses both the “action” language of ordinary life and the reified, nominalized language of science. Examples are given in relation to the first formulations of the key psychoanalytic concept of “repression”. Some comparisons are made between Freud's first formulations of “repression” and Moscovici's first formulations of “social representation”.     

Rank-dependent,subjective expected-utility representations

Gambles are recursively generated from pure payoffs, events, and other gambles, and a preference order over them is assumed. Weighted average utility representations are studied that are strictly increasing in each payoff and for which the weights depend both on the events underlying the gamble and the preference ranking over the several component payoffs. Basically two results are derived: a characterization of monotonicity in terms of the weights, and an axiomatization of the representation. The latter rests on two important conditions: a decomposition of gambles into binary ones and a necessary commutativity condition on events in a particular class of binary gambles. A number of unsolved problems are cited.     

The Fallacy of Misplaced Intentionality in Social Representation Research

This paper argues that social representations cannot be used as independent variables in causal explanations of social behaviour. It is shown that the structure of investigations often follows a causally explanatory design despite explicit statements to the contrary by the researchers. This fact is analyzed with three investigations. It is argued that verbal data used to assess the contents of a representation as independent variable are logically equivalent to data obtained from the "dependent" overt behaviour. Therefore these two kinds of data must be seen as two illustrations of the same representational contents. The researchers'preference for using verbal data to assess the independent variable and the tendency to introduce a causal relationship between representation and behaviour is shown to result from misplacing folk-beliefs. Folk-beliefs about intentional causality, it is shown, pertain to the same level as other beliefs about the world on the part of the subjects. Hence they are part of the folk-representation itself and must be treated as such; their use in scientific accounts of the belief-action relationship is not implied by data on rational belief systems. It is suggested to conceptualize social representations as integral units of beliefs and action which may be used to explain causally subsequent contingent social events. The function of folk-beliefs in intentional causality for the self-concept of rational people and for social accountability is discussed.     

INCREASING INCREMENT GENERALIZATIONS OF RANK-DEPENDENT THEORIES

Empirical evidence from both utility and psychophysical experiments suggests that people respond quite differently—perhaps discontinuously—to stimulus pairs when one consequence or signal is set to `zero.' Such stimuli are called unitary. The author's earlier theories assumed otherwise. In particular, the key property of segregation relating gambles and joint receipts (or presentations) involves unitary stimuli. Also, the representation of unitary stimuli was assumed to be separable (i.e., multiplicative). The theories developed here do not invoke separability. Four general cases based on two distinctions are explored. The first distinction is between commutative joint receipts, which are relevant to utility, and the non-commutative ones, which are relevant to psychophysics. The second distinction concerns how stimuli of the form (x, C; y) and the operation of joint receipt are linked: by segregation, which mixes stimuli and unitary ones, and by distributivity, which does not involve any unitary stimuli. A class of representations more general than rank-dependent utility (RDU) is found in which monotonic functions of increments U(x)-U(y), where U is an order preseving representation of gambles, and joint receipt play a role. This form and its natural generalization to gambles with n > 2 consequences, which is also axiomatized, appear to encompass models of configural weights and decision affect. When joint receipts are not commutative, somewhat similar representations of stimuli arise, and joint receipts are shown to have a conjoint additive representation and in some cases a constant bias independent of signal intensity is predicted.     

Stereotypes as political resistance: the Irish police court columns,c.1820–1845

Police court columns were a popular and flourishing representation of the courtroom in the early nineteenth-century British and Irish press. Despite this, they have been little used by historians, perhaps due to their often humorous and comic depictions of the courtroom. This article re-evaluates the Irish police court columns as a site of debate around Irish national identity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It argues that these representations were not only sophisticated, but allowed the Irish to reformulate the stereotype of the stage Irishman. Moreover, as representations that captured behaviours of individuals within the courtroom, they provided an opportunity for a broad swathe of the community to engage in broader debates around the nature of Irishness and Irish political rights.     

The Theory of Conditionality: An Illustration of the Place of Norms in the Field of Social Thinking

In the field of the central core theory of social representations, research which has focused on the normative aspects is relatively recent as it dates back little more than ten years. The theory of conditionality which developed from research into the periphery of representation results from this. It is a particularly fruitful theory to explain “normative latitudes” and the behaviour accruing to them. One of the particularities of these works stresses the importance of linking the normative aspects with specific methods and/or analyses. In this paper, we will illustrate it via a specific tool developed in the field of traffic psychology: the Conditional Script Questionnaire (CSQ). This approach makes it possible to highlight the interactions between two systems of norms: the legal system and the social system. The implication of norms is fundamental in different processes already studied such as social influence or identity processes, and this article can be considered as an illustration of the place of norms in the field of social thinking.     

Social Representations,Alternative Representations and Semantic Barriers

Social representations research has tended to focus upon the representations that groups have in relation to some object. The present article elaborates the concept of social representations by pointing to the existence of “alternative representations” as sub‐components within social representations. Alternative representations are the ideas and images the group has about how other groups represent the given object. Alternative representations are thus representations of other people's representations. The present article uses data from Moscovici's (1976/2008 ) analysis of the diffusion of psychoanalysis to examine how people engage with alternative representations. It is demonstrated that there can be more or less dialogical relations with alternative representations. The analysis concludes by considering seven “semiotic barriers” which work to neutralise the dialogical potential of alternative representations, thus on the one hand enabling groups to talk about the views of others, while, on the other hand, remaining unchallenged by those views.     

Blocking the solution: Social representations of threats and (non)dialogue with alternative representations in Greek‐Cypriot newspapers during peace negotiations

This paper first identifies representations of threats in Greek‐Cypriot newspapers related to the negotiations for a Cyprus settlement. Then, it identifies how alternative representations to these core representations of threats are managed through the use of a number of semantic barriers. Therefore, it problematizes the role (function) that such representations of threats play in undermining the potential for transformative dialogue in a post‐conflict and divided country in need of conflict transformation. Focus is on the editorials of two newspapers during a four‐month period before the collapse of the July 2017 Cyprus peace talks. Both were suspicious and polemic vis‐à‐vis the said negotiations but used different strategies to oppose them. Simerini convened recurrently threats such as Turkification, state dissolution and threats against Hellenism. Phileleftheros focused on the issue of security drawing red lines on various dossiers under discussion in the negotiations. The paper contributes to the theoretical debate of the relationship between social representations and identities and the role of threats and historical narratives in undermining transformative dialogue through the use of semantic barriers.     

社会的制造与集体表象

本文通过对涂尔干思想中的社会概念尤其是集体表象理论的解读,深入剖析现代社会自我证成上的困境。涂尔干一方面继承了契约论传统对社会的人为制造性的强调,另一方面又反对该传统将社会还原为个体之间约定行为的结果。集体表象理论针对的正是这一理论困境。涂尔干认为,集会或集体欢腾之际所产生的集体表象犹如化合作用,不能还原为个体的约定或契约,它是社会的产物,优先于个体。它不仅表达了个体对社会的情感,而且在定期的社会再造中创造这一情感。图腾标记对集体表象的具体化,既构成了个体认识社会的中介,又成为社会定期再造的依凭。涂尔干反对将法国大革命诠释为个体意志主导的结果,而试图通过集体表象将其诠释为社会定期再造的体现并强调社会之于个体的优先性。集体表象的神圣性既不依靠凌驾于社会之上的彼岸化的上帝,也不是个体意志的产物,而是社会性的,来自于社会的自我生产和再造。     

The Processual Origins of Social Representations

Referring to some perceived difficulties in social representation theory, this paper offers an account of the genesis of social representations in a theory of valuing. Drawing on influential but previously largely unconnected ideas from interactionist theory, personal construct theory, and Rokeach's theory of values, it is suggested that a process of valuing can be presented as a crucial link between the individual and social levels of analysis, a present theoretical disjuncture that has been of concern to some commentators in social representations and widespread beliefs.     

College major choice, occupational structure and demographic patterning by gender, race and nativity

This paper asks whether and to what extent occupational segregation by gender, race/ethnicity and nativity at national level influences the patterning of individual college major choice. National Education Longitudinal Studies (NELS 1988-1994) provides college major information and the Public Use Micro data 1990 census 5% sample (PUMS 5%) provides occupational structure information, focusing on the demographic representation in broad occupational fields by gender, race and nativity. I match the occupational structure information from the PUMS data to the NELS data by group membership, after cross-classifying gender, race and nativity. This paper finds that the demographic group representations in technical and life/health science occupations at societal level have significant positive influence on choosing corresponding college major fields for students from the same groups. This may indicate that the seemingly individual choice of college major has deep structural roots at the societal level.     

Ethnophaulisms for Ethnic Immigrant Groups

Ethnophaulisms (Roback, 1944) are the words used as slurs to refer to ethnic immigrant outgroups. This article explores the effects of attributes of ethnic immigrant groups on the cognitive representations of these groups in ethnophaulisms and the effects of these cognitive representations on behavior toward these immigrant groups. The results of these analyses, based on archival data spanning a 150-year period of American history, provide a sobering picture of the cognitive representation of immigrants: a century and a half of thinking about smaller, less familiar, and more foreign ethnic immigrant groups in a simplistic and negative manner and a resultant tendency to exclude those immigrant groups from the receiving society. The implications of these results for theoretical approaches to intergroup perception and for immigration policy are considered.     

Game Trees For Decision Analysis

Game trees (or extensive-form games) were first defined by von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1944. In this paper we examine the use of game trees for representing Bayesian decision problems. We propose a method for solving game trees using local computation. This method is a special case of a method due to Wilson for computing equilibria in 2-person games. Game trees differ from decision trees in the representations of information constraints and uncertainty. We compare the game tree representation and solution technique with other techniques for decision analysis such as decision trees, influence diagrams, and valuation networks.