Volume 25, Issue 4

Across the world urban semioscapes emerge from multiple and mutually interlocking social activities of the members of sociocultural groups and are established through the deployment of layered configurations of semiotic resources and discourses which index patterns of these activities as well as the underlying norms and values of these groups. A particularly conspicuous semiotic practice which has established itself as a distinct semiotic layer in Slovakia’s urban semioscape is one through which social agents declare certain segments of space as private. By erecting ‘private property’ signs they impose a certain ‘power regime’ on a physical territory but also imprint upon that space a particular ideological meaning. This practice is particularly salient in Slovakia’s geopolitical environment in which the notion of ‘privateness’ was excluded from official ideology under socialism. As language is a principal semiotic mode for the construction of the practice of constructing private space, the practice can also be looked upon as a sociolinguistic phenomenon indexing the post-1989 political and economic transformation processes in Slovakia; that is, the re-establishment of ‘private ownership’ within the larger processes of ‘rectification’ which post-socialist societies underwent in the transformation period. My argument is that the practice is a manifestation of geocultural globalisation on a local scale-level which leads to the emergence of new forms of locality. In the paper I employ Blommaert’s (2010) innovative conceptual toolbox of the sociolinguistics of globalisation’ along with the analytical practices and procedures of geosemiotics and linguistic landscape, and apply them to the corpus of signs which I believe index this practice and establish the topography of private space’ in the urban semioscape examined.

The aim of the paper is to study socio-ethical aspects of Slovak higher education policy in the context of contemporary discussions on university assessment criteria. I conduct an ethical analysis and assess the criteria introduced in Slovakia that consider employment opportunities and the graduate unemployment rate, publishing in high impact journals, participation in European research programmes, etc., which often discriminates against the humanities and social sciences. On the other hand, I also point to the absence of a social contract regarding the common good provided by Slovak universities, drawbacks of a legislative nature which often provide a basis for unethical behaviour within the Slovak academic community and, most often, problems concerning academic ethics in contemporary Slovakia.

Socio-cultural changes (in families, society and culture) are frequently negatively reflected in the minds and actions of young people influenced by the media as part of the globalization of society. We often remark upon the growth in aggressiveness, violence and intolerance among young people both in school and outside school. We often consider these to be the symptoms of the moral crisis in our society.

The aim of the study was to verify the psychometric properties and the suitability of the Subjective Assessment of Quality of Life questionnaire (SAQL; Džuka, 2014) for use with seniors. The participants were 141 Slovak respondents aged 60-75 (M = 67.44, SD = 4.6). The values of the internal consistency of the subscales of the questionnaire representing four significant domains of quality of life- physical, cognitive, psychosocial and environmental-suggest the instrument has good reliability (α = .79 - .86). Construct validity was demonstrated on the basis of moderately strong to strong correlations between SAQL domains and domains with similar content in the generic instrument, WHOQOL-BREF (WHOQOL Group, 1998), and also a separate module-measuring the spiritual domain of quality of life (SDQL). The multi-factor ANOVA results demonstrated that the score obtained for the different scales is not dependent on the gender, marital status and education of the seniors although an exception was a physical domain, in which a significant effect of education was detected. This can be considered to support the discriminatory validity of the test methodology. The SAQL questionnaire can be considered an appropriate generic instrument for measuring subjective assessment of quality of life in the early senior age group.

The study verified self-esteem, extraversion, neuroticism and health as predictors of subjectively-assessed quality of life. The sample included 109 adolescents (69 healthy adolescents and 40 adolescents with upper respiratory tract disease). The research tools used were WHOQOL-BREF (WHO, 1998), Rosenberg´s self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965) and NEO-FFI personality questionnaire (Hřebíčková et al., 2002). The results were processed using the multiple linear regression analysis stepwise method. Health was not found to be a predictor of subjectively-assessed quality of life in the research sample. Self-esteem was found to be a predictor of psychological (48% of variance) and environmental (25% of variance) quality of life. Neuroticism was confirmed as a predictor only for physical quality of life (8% of variance). Extraversion was established as a universal predictor for all the aspects of quality of life measured: physical (20% of variance), psychological (8% of variance) and environmental (10% of variance).

The article deals with one of the most problematic principles of just war theory. It looks at the usage of the terms civilian, innocent and non-combatant and suggests how they can be interpreted. The principle of non-combatant immunity remains a real challenge for just war theory in the 21 st century as it is designed to protect a specific group of people in times of war. The article considers the problematic issue of targeting non-combatants in war times as well as suggesting how we might better comprehend the problem.

The cultural phenomenon of globalization has led to bilingualism and/or multilingualism (at least from a socio-pragmatic point of view). This brought to the attention of professionals the issue of the transformation of an identity from monolingual to multilingual. Due to the individual and at the same time social nature of the setting in which a man interacts, the study of the issue of personal identity has to be crossdisciplinary. We claim that in the course of this transformation the language-culture-identity interrelationship is vital and a multidisciplinary approach including (social) psychological, anthropological, philosophical, and discursive perspectives has to be undertaken. The paper approaches the issue of a multilingual’s identity through the prism of the four perspectives and in doing so offers justification for the above claim.

The critical decision method is a semi-structured retrospective interview used mainly in researching professional decision making within the naturalistic decision making paradigm. There are currently, two main methods of performing analysis: ETA - Emergent Themes Analysis and the structured approach (Wong, 2004). The structured approach consists of five steps: 1. decision chart, 2. incident summary, 3. decision analysis tables, 4. identification of items of interest and 5. collation and comparison of common items of interest across incidents. Naturalistic decision making can be time-consuming, involve high stakes, poorly-structured problems, uncertain dynamic environments and ill-defined or competing goals. For this reason we will demonstrate how to the structured approach to perform an analysis using the example of a decision making situation in emergency medicine.

The work of Jacques Ellul is useful in understanding and evaluating the implications of rapidly changing technologies for human values and democracy. Ellul developed three powerful theses about technology: technological autonomy, technological determinism, and technological bluff. In this essay, the authors explicate these views of technology, and place the work of Ellul in dialogue with the ides of other important theorists of technology (including Max Weber, Herbert Marcuse, Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner, and Hans Jonas). Ellul’s too-often overlooked theses about technology are relevant to our present technological society

The article looks at critical thinking in philosophical counselling and the concepts upon which it is based. In conceptions that place critical thinking as the basis of philosophical counselling, an important role is played by the Socratic approach to philosophising. The Socratic method in thinking allocates a fundamental role to conversation, and thus to intersubjectivity, and is therefore an alternative to individual ways of thinking. Conversation as philosophical reflection corresponds to the Socratic intersubjective understanding of truth. The author adopts the view of German philosopher H. Schnädelbach who distinguishes between dialogic and doctrinal approaches. The dialogic approach is found in the Socratic-Platonic tradition, while the doctrinal approach is found in Aristotelean approaches. Doctrinal philosophising is premised in the ideal of intersubjectivity which can be achieved by anyone (subjective thought is internalised subjectivity). Philosophical thought as reflection is always implicitly dialogic at the very least. The article considers definitions of critical thinking and provides examples of critical thinking based philosophical counselling from the thinking of Tim LeBon and Elliot D. Cohen, which link both philosophical and psychological approaches. In conclusion it is critical of an excessive focus on rationality in counselling.

This paper considers the possible application of quantum theory in political studies, especially in international relations. We introduce our classification based on three logical ways of how to connect areas so remote: through the relation of identity, analogy and metaphor which reflects three basic epistemic positions. Next, we review existing work against this classification before moving on to consider some of the uses and potential gains offered by quantum mind hypothesis, quantum models of reasoning and decisionmaking, and quantum metaphor.