The book illustrates the concept of action in three different contexts - the justification of actions, people's life history, and pragmatism. The special feature of this book is that a comprehensive view of this kind marks a departure from the atomistic approach of action theory, which in itself raises a number of questions. If actions are not justified by mental states, how can persons then act for reasons? How can persons' actions over time be described, and what is the connection with the question of personal identity? If there is to be a unified understanding of the person, does the practical have to take precedence over the theoretical, and what does this mean for epistemology, for example? The ten contributors to this volume engage in an instructive manner with these and similar questions in the three sections of the book.

This work investigates the close relationship between language and culture. It explains key concepts such as social context and cultural authenticity, using insights from fields which includes linguistics, sociology, and anthropology.

Search computing, which has evolved from service computing, focuses on building the answers to complex search queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using the ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The field is multi-disciplinary in nature and takes advantage of contributions from other research areas such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economics, and legal sciences. This book, the second in the Search Computing series, describes the evolution of theories, technologies, and methods related to search computing. The book has been divided into eight parts, reflecting the main research directions within the Search Computing project. The parts focus on: search as an information exploration task; interaction design issues when dealing with multi-domain search results; modeling and semantic description of search services; the rank-join problem; query processing techniques and architectures; tools and mashups for application development; the application of search computing to bio-informatics; and the exploitation potentials of project results.

CoLIS 5 was the ?fth in the series of international conferences whose general aim is to provide a broad forum for critically exploring and analyzing research inareassuchascomputerscience,informationscienceandlibraryscience.CoLIS examinesthehistorical,theoretical,empiricalandtechnicalissuesrelatingtoour understanding and use of information, promoting an interdisciplinary approach to research. CoLIS seeks to provide a broad platform for the examination of context as it relates to our theoretical, empirical and technical development of information-centered disciplines. The theme for CoLIS 5 was the nature, impact and role of context within information-centered research. Context is a complex, dynamic and multi- - mensional concept that in?uences both humans and machines: how they behave individually and how they interact with each other. In CoLIS 5 we took an interdisciplinary approach to the issue of context to help us understand and the theoretical approaches to modelling and understanding context, incorporate contextual reasoning within technology, and develop a shared framework for promoting the exploration of context.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. Current grammatical knowledge about particular sign languages is fragmentary and of varying reliability, and it appears scattered in scientific publications where the description is often intertwined with the analysis. In general, comprehensive grammars are a rarity. The SignGram Blueprint is an innovative tool for the grammar writer: a full-fledged guide to describing all components of the grammars of sign languages in a thorough and systematic way, and with the highest scientific standards. The work builds on the existing knowledge in Descriptive Linguistics, but also on the insights from Theoretical Linguistics. It consists of two main parts running in parallel: the Checklist with all the grammatical features and phenomena the grammar writer can address, and the accompanying Manual with the relevant background information (definitions, methodological caveats, representative examples, tests, pointers to elicitation materials and bibliographical references). The areas covered are Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon, Syntax and Meaning. The Manual is endowed with hyperlinks that connect information across the work and with a pop-up glossary. The SignGram Blueprint will be a landmark for the description of sign language grammars in terms of quality and quantity.

This volume contains the papers presented at the third biennial Information Systems Foundations ('Theory, Representation and Reality¿) Workshop, held at The Australian National University in Canberra from 27-28 September 2006. The focus of the workshop was, as for the others in the series, the foundations of Information Systems as an academic discipline. The particular emphasis was, as in past workshops, the adequacy and completeness of theoretical underpinnings and the research methods employed. At the same time the practical nature of the applications and phenomena with which the discipline deals were kept firmly in view. Accordingly, the papers in this volume range from the unashamedly theoretical n their focus (Designing for Mutability in Information Systems Artifacts; Towards a Unified Theory of Fit: Task, Technology and Individual) to the much more practically oriented (An Action-Centred Approach to Conceptualising Information Support for Routine Work).

No detailed description available for "Text and Thinking".

This important new collection considers Jurgen Habermas's discourse theory from a variety of feminist vantage points. Habermas's theory represents one of the most persuasive current formulations of moral and political notions of subjectivity and normativity. Feminist scholars have been drawn to his work because it reflects a tradition of emancipatory political thinking rooted in the Enlightenment and engages with the normative aims of emancipatory social movements. The essays in Feminists Read Habermas analyze various aspects of Habermas's theory, ranging from his moral theory to political issues of identity and participation. While the contributors hold widely different political and philosophical views, they share a conviction of the potential significance of Habermas's work for feminist reflections on power, norms and subjectivity.