This is a broad overview of how the prevalent family systems in the developing world influence sex preference for children. Son preference is evident in the data in East Asia and South Asia, and in the Middle East and North Africa, where patriarchal family systems make sons more valuable than daughters to parents in terms of economic, physical, and emotional sustenance. In sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, there is little difference between the levels of support parents can expect (...) from sons and daughters—and little revealed sex preference in the data. (shrink)

The Determined Rebellion Paradox describes a self-referential cognitive loop in which an individual's attempt to resist what they perceive as predetermined becomes, paradoxically, a predetermined act itself. This paradox highlights the complex interplay between free will, determinism, and self-awareness. It demonstrates how the very act of reflecting on one's freedom can generate psychological tension and recursive mental entrapment, revealing the intricate limits of human autonomy.

Over the last two decades there has been a proliferation of partnerships between business and government, multilateral bodies, and/or social actors such as NGOs and local community organizations engaged in promoting development. While proponents hail these partnerships as an important new approach to engaging business, critics argue that they are not only generally ineffective but also serve to legitimate a neo-liberal, global economic order which inhibits development. In order to understand and evaluate the role of such partnerships, it is necessary (...) to appreciate their diversity with respect to not only the activities that they engage in, but also the degree to which they are subject to social control. This paper distinguishes four different types of business partnerships, based upon differing degrees of social control: conventional business; corporate social responsibility; corporate accountability; and social economy. Each type of partnership is described, their basic forms are noted, and the conditions and prospects for them contributing to development are examined. By way of conclusion, an analysis is offered of how the different types of business partnerships relate to different conceptions of development and function as policy paradigms to promote different globalization agendas. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to test whether artists and technologists evaluate artificial intelligence (AI)-generated art differently with respect to authorship, ownership, ethics, public perception and market impact, thereby clarifying how creative and technical stakeholders view emerging copyright and pricing debates. Design/methodology/approach A closed-ended questionnaire using five-point Likert items was administered to 119 master-level artists and 119 AI developers in India. Paired-sample t-tests compared the two groups across six constructs derived from the recent literature. Findings Authorship and market-impact scores did not (...) differ significantly (p = 0.229; p = 0.168). However, large gaps emerged for ownership (Δ = 1.02; t = 15.31; p < 0.001) and public perception (Δ = 1.24; t = 11.25; p < 0.001). Artists favored limited copyright and lower prices for AI art, whereas technologists endorsed full protection and price parity under defined conditions. Both groups supported minimal yet dedicated regulation. Research limitations/implications Findings are based on self-reported perceptions from a single country; cross-cultural replication is needed. Practical implications Results inform policymakers drafting adaptive copyright frameworks and gallery curators setting valuation benchmarks for AI-generated art. Social implications Balanced regulation and weighted authorship could preserve human creativity while legitimizing algorithmic contributions. Originality/value This is the first paired statistical investigation that juxtaposes creative practitioners and AI developers, quantifies their attitudinal distance and links the results to the legal triad of fixation, originality and creativity. The Global South sample broadens a debate dominated by Western case studies. (shrink)

We agree with Barnes et al. (2025) that nonfungible tokens (NFTs), unique digital identifiers recorded on a blockchain, used to certify ownership and authenticity of specific assets, as popularized...

In a multi-lingual setting, there is a chance for the minority languages to fall into the clutches of linguistic phenomena such as language shift, language variation, and so on. The Tiwa community living in the plains of Assam (also known as the Datiyalis) provides a serious example in this regard. Most of the plain Tiwas have stopped using their own language which is considered to be an endangered language by UNESCO and have shifted to the dominant language of the state, (...) i.e., Assamese owing to different political, economic, and social reasons. Intergenerational language transmission is considered to be the golden standard by (Fishman in Reversing language shift: theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Multilingual Matters, 1991) as far survival of an endangered language is concerned as it refers to the language being transmitted from one generation to the next generation. If it happens, the language will survive; otherwise, it will lead to language shift or death. This present paper will help us in shedding light upon the intergenerational language choice in family as well as intra-community discourse such as peer interactions. Moreover, it would also help us in delving deeper into the sociolinguistic phenomena such as language shift and variation that has been taking place. The research methods such as conversational recordings and participant observation are used in examining if processes such as code-switching or code-mixing have been taking place. Also, sending out questionnaires helped us in studying the attitudes of the speakers towards their own language. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 590-602, May 2022.

This essay returns to a founding figure of the discipline of creolistics, or Creole linguistics: the German scholar Hugo Schuchardt. I offer a close reading of the tract on the language he called “Malaioportugiesisch”, or Malay-Portuguese, published in 1890 as Kreolische Studien IX. The critical apparatus that Schuchardt provides here deviated from the philological methods of the neogrammarians and their quest for universalism based on a hierarchy of languages bound together filially in a ‘family tree’. Instead, Schuchardt privileges affiliation, proximity, (...) and serendipitous encounter of unlike languages that result in unpredictable, improvised, and sensorially rich Creoles. In Schuchardt’s imagination, Germanic, Romance, and Malay languages all come together to create new Creole possibilities for the world through revelling in porosity and impurity. These qualities enable us re-creolise creole as a concept, and creolisation as process and praxis. Creolising universality then emerges as a viable alternative to universalism’s epistemic hegemonies. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 590-602, May 2022.

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 3, Page 826-828, September 2022.

The motivation of someone who is locked-in, that is, paralyzed and mute, is to find relief for their loss of function. The data presented in this report is part of an attempt to restore one of those lost functions, namely, speech. An essential feature of the development of a speech prosthesis is optimal decoding of patterns of recorded neural signals during silent or covert speech, that is, speaking “inside the head” with output that is inaudible due to the paralysis of (...) the articulators. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the importance of both fast and slow single unit firings recorded from an individual with locked-in syndrome and from an intact participant speaking silently. Long duration electrodes were implanted in the motor speech cortex for up to 13 years in the locked-in participant. The data herein provide evidence that slow firing single units are essential for optimal decoding accuracy. Additional evidence indicates that slow firing single units can be conditioned in the locked-in participant 5 years after implantation, further supporting their role in decoding. (shrink)

Human development can be seen as the process of giving more effective expression to human values. Modern business philosophy has a certain viewpoint or perspective on human potential based on the secular humanistic values of the west and the scientific theories on the nature of man and his evolution. We are bound to welcome the New Paradigm in Business because it opens the path for a decisive step forward in evolution from an authoritarian, mechanistic, Taylorian era to a freer and (...) a more humanistic ethos in business. (shrink)

In the course of reading David Lapoujade’s Aberrant Movements, readers will undoubtedly encounter its overtly nuanced positioning. In relation to the existent patterns of critical engagement with Deleuze’s works, Lapoujade chooses to make his book seem like an expressive tissue of an expanding poetic universe rather than a measurable extensity from some representational whole. So the potency of his book, as Rajchman makes evident in the ‘Introduction’ to Aberrant Movements, doesn’t lie in unfolding like a teleological mimicry of what stands (...) before us as some kind of palimpsestic accretion of a-categorical Deleuzean readings. Rather his work is a perversely creative exercise in repeating these readings into openings of inassimilable differences. Such an inclusively ‘exclusive positioning’ of his book brings about what we may call a transformative de-familiarization of it, rendering it as indistinct patterns of aberrant movements that continuously and creatively shift us from one kind of complex territorial intensity to another. (shrink)

In recent years India has been moving further in the direction of adopting an Anglo-American model of corporate governance. This decision, the result more of international economic and political pressures than public debate, in effect represents a new development strategy for the world's most populous democracy. In light of this situation, it is important to ask two basic questions: 1) why has the Anglo-American model of corporate governance been adopted? and; 2) can it be justified? This paper addresses the first (...) of these questions by distinguish and examining three historical models of governance in India: 1) the managing agency model in the colonial period; 2) the business house model that emerged after independence, and; 3) the Anglo-American model which has recently been adopted (and is still emerging). The second question is approached through an examination of the "development impact" of the new model, as indicated by such measures as growth, employment and respect for shareholder rights. (shrink)

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological..

As social media becomes increasingly popular, human subjects researchers are able to use these platforms to locate, track, and communicate with study participants, thereby increasing participant retention and the generalizability and validity of research. The use of social media; however, raises novel ethical and regulatory issues that have received limited attention in the literature and federal regulations. We review research ethics and regulations and outline the implications for maintaining participant privacy, respecting participant autonomy, and promoting researcher transparency when using social (...) media to locate and track participants. We offer a rubric that can be used in future studies to determine ethical and regulation-consistent use of social media platforms and illustrate the rubric using our study team’s experience with Facebook. We also offer recommendations for both researchers and institutional review boards that emphasize the importance of well-described procedures for social media use as... (shrink)

This book offers a novel account of the relationship of experience to knowledge. The account builds on the intuitive idea that our ordinary perceptual judgments are not autonomous, that an interdependence obtains between our view of the world and our perceptual judgments. Anil Gupta shows in this important study that this interdependence is the key to a satisfactory account of experience. He uses tools from logic and the philosophy of language to argue that his account of experience makes available (...) an attractive and feasible empiricism. (shrink)

Legal documents are notorious for their length, density, and jargon-heavy language, making them challenging to navigate and comprehend. This highlights a strong need for clear and accessible documentation for a diverse audience. Text simplification at multiple levels, tailored to individuals with diverse backgrounds and expertise, is essential in making legal content universally accessible. To this effect, in this work, we focus on paragraph-level simplification of legal contracts and introduce Graded Simplification for Legal Data, a framework that adapts contract clauses across (...) three competency levels: Skilled, Intermediate, and Basic. We employ Large language models (LLMs) to perform graded simplification, supported by a Token efficient Compression mechanism that incrementally encodes document context across paragraphs within fixed tokens, making it well suited to lengthy contracts. To address the challenge of reliably evaluating legal simplification at scale, we design a multi-criteria evaluation framework that jointly assesses readability, lexical simplicity, semantic preservation, and entailment. This framework enables the creation of our key resource, the SimpLegal dataset, an English-language preference dataset of paragraph-level contract simplifications. Using this dataset for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), we achieve notable gains ( $$\uparrow $$ 5 points) in readability and simplicity over zero-shot prompting-based baselines. Collectively, these contributions underscore the importance of graded, paragraph-level simplification for contracts and demonstrate that small and medium-scale LLMs, when fine-tuned on preference data, can achieve performance comparable to larger models, providing a scalable pathway for accessible and comprehensible legal documentation. Our code and dataset are made available at https://github.com/GSLD-SimpLegal/FromJargonToClarity.git. (shrink)

Climate change is one of the most significant challenges of our time leading humanity towards a catastrophic future. Its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development. Increases in global temperature, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and other climate change impacts seriously affect coastal areas and low-lying coastal countries, including many least-developed countries and small island developing states. The survival of many societies and the biological support systems of the planet is at risk.The global economic system (...) and policy planning need to be fully prepared to face the challenges of climate change, although it can play a pivotal role in addressing it. Green finance has emerged as an effective alternative to address the challenges of global climate change. Green finance refers to using private and governmental funds for initiatives that protect the environment from harm and its associated effects, such as climate change and air pollution, produce a wide range of social advantages, and provide investors with adequate financial returns. In addition to tools for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change, green finance has emerged as a strategy that includes financial services and products that address a more comprehensive range of environmental issues, such as industrial pollution control, waste management, sanitation, and hygiene, and ecological protection.This chapter explores the idea of green finance in the present scenario and its potential to achieve the goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Further, it will examine how green finance can be integrated into global economic governance. The study finds a deep correlation between global economic governance and the achievement of sustainability. Further, it is found that economic governance and policy planning are crucial in achieving a carbon-neutral state across the globe. (shrink)

Environment has both positive as well as negative impact on the life of (wo)men on Earth. Due to widespread human activities irreparable loss has happened to the environment and continues to happen which has a deep impact on the lives of (wo)men across the globe. Environment and environmentalism have been in dominant discourse since the sixties. Noted author and thinker Ramachandra Guha argues, ‘environmentalism must be viewed as a social program, a charter of action which seeks to protect cherished habitats, (...) protest against their degradation, and prescribe less destructive technologies and lifestyle’ (Guha, Environmentalism: A global history, Allen Lane (Penguin Group), 2014). Environment is common to humankind and environmental issues such as loss of biodiversity, climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, desertification, global warming, etc. are also causes of common concern for all regardless of culture, nationality and national border to protect the environment. Environmental activism is on the rise across the globe which implies ‘the actions of individuals or groups that protect or aid the environment’. It is not a new phenomenon; it is as old as the environmental concern itself. History is replete with instances of such activism locally, nationally and globally. Chipko movement (embrace the trees to oppose felling) was a significant movement in India led by local villagers and women in Doon valley to protect the forest and Himalayan ecology which was followed by numbers of local movements for the protection of environment. Twenty million people demonstrated against destruction of the environment on April 22, 1970, in all 50 states. Similar activist movements have happened and continue to happen locally, nationally and globally for the greater cause of the environment and humanity (Earth Day 2022). Also, such activism is being shown by individuals, groups (large and small), civil society, and NGOs (national and international). This chapter aims at conceptualising the idea of ‘environmental activism’ and discussing how that is taking place from local to global level. Further, it will examine the outcome of such activism and the way forward from it. (shrink)

Anil Gupta; XV*—Remarks on Definitions and the Concept of Truth1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 89, Issue 1, 1 June 1989, Pages 227–246, https.

Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy provides crucial insights for assessing the post-neoliberal era in this cutting-edge volume of anti-capitalist scholarship. It maps the critical new assemblages emerging out of decades of neoliberalism to diagnose contemporary and future discontent. Contributors argue that current critiques of neoliberalism ignore the determining role of colonialism and the accelerated threat of climate breakdown. The volume considers new modes of capitalism, societies built on exhaustion, digital power, education, agroforestry, and literary texts that characterise the post-neoliberal era. Together, these essays (...) remap the antagonisms, discontents and tensions of current post-neoliberal becoming. (shrink)

_An Introduction to Indian Philosophy_ offers a profound yet accessible survey of the development of India’s philosophical tradition. Beginning with the formation of Brahmanical, Jaina, Materialist, and Buddhist traditions, Bina Gupta guides the reader through the classical schools of Indian thought, culminating in a look at how these traditions inform Indian philosophy and society in modern times. Offering translations from source texts and clear explanations of philosophical terms, this text provides a rigorous overview of Indian philosophical contributions to epistemology, (...) metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics. This is a must-read for anyone seeking a reliable and illuminating introduction to Indian philosophy. (shrink)

_The Disinterested Witness_ is a detailed, contextual, and interpretive study of the concept of saksin (or that which directly or immediately perceives) in Advaita Vedanta, and a fascinating and significant comparison of the philosophies of the East and West. Addressing a wide range of epistemological dilemmas, as well as perceived commonalities and differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, it is a major contribution to comparative philosophy and forms a vantage point for cross-cultural comparison.

In this groundbreaking book, psychiatrist and ethicist Mona Gupta analyzes the basic assumptions of Evidence-based medicine (EBM), and critically examines their applicability to psychiatry. Highlighting ethical tensions between psychiatry and EBM, she asks the controversial question - should psychiatrists practice evidence-based medicine at all?

This volume reprints eight of Anil Gupta's essays, some with additional material. The essays bring a refreshing new perspective to central issues in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology.

We argue that distinct conditionals—conditionals that are governed by different logics—are needed to formalize the rules of Truth Introduction and Truth Elimination. We show that revision theory, when enriched with the new conditionals, yields an attractive theory of truth. We go on to compare this theory with one recently proposed by Hartry Field.

This chapter addresses the problem: what is the contribution of experience to knowledge? It argues that the problem is best appreciated by reflection on two commonplace ideas about experience and knowledge—ideas that appear to be in some tension with one another. These ideas are labelled as “Insight of Empiricism” and the “Multiple-Factorizability of Experience”.

I discuss in this paper a criticism of modal logic due to Donald Davidson and John Wallace. They have claimed that, to quote Wallace, “modal predicate calculus does not provide a reasonable standpoint from which to interpret a language” (1970, p. 147). The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate their argument for this claim.

Spirituality in the workplace is gaining recognition and value among researchers, academicians, and business professionals. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of spirituality in the workplace on job satisfaction by measuring four dimensions of spirituality in the workplace: meaningful work, sense of community, organizational values, and compassion. The impact of each dimension on job satisfaction is hypothesized. A cross-sectional survey was used to collect data from 100 payroll employees in private insurance companies in Punjab. A correlation (...) analysis showed a positive relationship between all the dimensions of spirituality in the workplace and job satisfaction. A regression analysis revealed that although all the dimensions of spirituality in the workplace are important, organizational values and a sense of community are the most important in terms of the job satisfaction level of employees. This work will help insurance companies to better understand the concept of spirituality in the workplace and its importance. Insurance companies can improve their functioning by encouraging employee spirituality in the workplace. (shrink)

This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assisted reproduction technologies under neo-liberal economic globalisation, wherein the ideology of trade without borders is central, as well as under liberal feminist ideals, wherein the right to self-determination is central. Two aspects of the body in western medicine—the fragmented body and the commodified body, and the integral relation between these two—are highlighted. This is done in order to analyse the implications of local and global transactions (...) in women’s reproductive body parts for their right to self-determination and individual agency and what this means for their embodiment. We conclude by exploring whether women can become embodied subjects by exercising their proprietary right to their bodies through directing technology to achieve their own goals, while at the same time being fragmented into parts and losing their personhood and bodily integrity. (shrink)

A vibrant example of living literature, the Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text written in Sanskrit verse. Finding its present form by the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as well as schools of dance and drama, and continues to permeate popular Hindu art and ritual in both India and the diaspora. Introducing the Bhagavata Purana's key themes while also examining its extensive influence on Hindu thought and practice, this collection conducts (...) the first multidimensional reading of the entire text. Each essay focuses on a key theme of the Bhagavata Purana and its subsequent presence in Hindu theology, performing arts, ritual recitation, and commentary. The authors consider the relationship between the sacred text and the divine image, the text's metaphysical and cosmological underpinnings, its shaping of Indian culture, and its ongoing relevance to contemporary Indian concerns. (shrink)

Perceptual load plays a critical role in identification and awareness of stimuli. Given the differences in emotion–attention interactions, we investigated the perception of distractor emotional faces in two different load conditions under divided attention with a task based on the inattentional blindness paradigm. Participants performed a low- or high-load task with a string of letters presented against a happy, sad or neutral face (in a circular form) as the background. Participants were asked to identify the face that appeared in the (...) critical trial. Results indicate an interaction between emotion and load. First, identification of faces with happy expression was better than chance and unaffected by load. Second, performance was worse than chance for faces with sad expression in the high-load condition, indicating inhibition of unattended sad distractor faces in the critical trial. This indicates that inhibitory processes during a difficult attentional task under divided attention influence subsequent perception of distractor stimuli especially sad faces. The results have implications for the theories of selective attention as well as the role of emotions in conscious perception. (shrink)