Discusses the decision making process and how it is influenced by the environment.

Mixed feelings, Daniel Gross reminds us, are at the heart of Jane Austen's novel, Sense and Sensibility. We think we know what "mixed feelings" means, like a recipe: combine two parts a feeling like gratitude, one part happiness, a dash of resentment, and you get something like Elinor. But mixed feelings in the novel and beyond, Gross insists, are poorly served by this dis-equilibrium model; in fact mixed feelings are a matter of negotiated circumstances where feelings may be at odds as they converge on character. Hence the significance of literature and particularly the sentimental novel as a cross-disciplinary research domain, where this kind of rhetorical situation is exquisitely detailed. Gross gets considerable play out of Jane Austin as one of his research arenas, while at the same time referencing the sciences of situated emotion and behavioral economics to offer a new way of understanding mixed feelings as rhetorically situated. While that is but one thrust among several here, Gross explores at the same time a methodological opportunity at the interface of science and the humanities, beyond recent work in "Cognitive Approaches to Literature," which as he sees it tends to proceed unecologically (uncontextually) toward theory of mind. In contrast to his previous landmark study The Secret History of Emotion, here Gross carves out a space for cross-disciplinary work on emotion with a "situated emotion" critique of the basic emotions program, a "situated cognition" critique of computational psychology, and a critique of evolutionary psychology from many angles including cognitive scientific. The outcome is collaborative work across the sciences and humanities, where uncomfortable situations provide a paradigm for study. New insight into brain-body-world dynamics may yet arise from experiments in neuroscience and the situational concerns of the humanities, and the two-cultures divide may dissolve when shared phenomena like human emotions are treated with the diversity of methods and cross-disciplinary conversation their complexity deserves.

This book, first published in 1991, offers an integrative approach to the study of formal models in the social and behavioural sciences. The theory presented here unifies both the representation of the social environment and the equilibrium concept. The theory requires that all alternatives that are available to the players be specified in an explicit and detailed manner, and this specification is defined as a social 'situation'. A situation, therefore, not only consists of the alternatives currently available to the players, but also includes the set of opportunities that might be induced by the players from their current environment. The theory requires that all recommended alternatives be both internally and externally stable; the recommendation cannot be self-defeating and, at the same time, should account for alternatives that were not recommended. In addition to unifying the representation and the solution concept, the theory also extends the social environments accommodated by current game theory.

An argument that pronouns, definite descriptions, and proper names have a common syntax and semantics, that of definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege.

Contains 365 devotions, each of which describes a dilemma a young person might face during the course of an ordinary day, and includes a list of possible options, and guidance from Scripture on making the right choice.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains the same title as book.

Racial Situations challenges perspectives on race that rely upon oft-repeated claims that race is culturally constructed and, hence, simply false and distorting. John Hartigan asserts, instead, that we need to explain how race is experienced by people as a daily reality. His starting point is the lives of white people in Detroit. As a distinct minority, whites in this city can rarely assume they are racially unmarked and normative--privileges generally associated with whiteness. Hartigan conveys their attempts to make sense of how race matters in their lives and in Detroit generally. Rather than compiling a generic sampling of white views, Hartigan develops an ethnographic account of whites in three distinct neighborhoods--an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city's wealthy suburbs. In tracking how racial tensions develop or become defused in each of these sites, Hartigan argues that whites do not articulate their racial identity strictly in relation to a symbolic figure of black Otherness. He demonstrates, instead, that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites' determinations of when and how race matters. In each community, the author charts a series of names--"hillbilly," "gentrifier," and "racist"--which whites use to make distinctions among themselves. He shows how these terms function in everyday discourses that reflect the racial consciousness of the communities and establish boundaries of status and privilege among whites in these areas.