Do psychopaths make moral judgments but lack motivation? Or are psychopaths’ judgments are not genuinely moral? Both sides of this debate seem to assume either externalist or internalist criteria for the presence of moral judgment. However, if moral judgment is a natural kind, we can arrive at a theory-neutral criterion for moral judgment. A leading naturalistic criterion suggests that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment; the capacity is neither fully present nor fully absent. Psychopaths are therefore not counterexamples (...) to internalism. Nonetheless, internalism is empirically problematic because it is unable to explain psychopaths’ moral deficits. (shrink)

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

El pensamiento es incorporado por la articulación de los dos algoritmos: la estructura interna para conocer y la realidad, externa, a ser reconocida. La realidad interna está dada desde la estructura de la lengua, la cual más adelante dará lugar a un formato lógica-matemática. La realidad externa, que es también antropológica, está mediada por las áreas somatosensoriales cerebrales, que protológicamente acercan a lo distinto del humano. La filosofía y la ciencia tienen la tarea de acercarse a estas realidades para enhebrarlas, (...) de lo cual resulta un conocimiento general y una ciencia epistemológicamente bien fundada, puesto que hay una estructura ontológica y lógica que les da razón. Desde este fundamento no resultan bien libradas ni el empirismo ni es racionalismo y se abre una ventana para una metafísica menos unilateral y más rigurosa. (shrink)

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., tree, picnic table) and phrasal nominals (e.g., black bird, birds that like rice) are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped onto kind representations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations but not kind representations. Experiment 1 found that phrasal nominals, unlike lexical nominals, are mapped onto categories whose members need not be (...) of a single kind. Experiments 2 and 3 found that categories named by lexical nominals enter into both class inclusion and kind hierarchies and thus support both class inclusion (is a) and kind specification (kind of) relations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations which support only class inclusion relations. Experiment 4 showed that the two types of nominals represent hierarchical relations in different ways. Phrasal nominals (e.g., white bear) are mapped onto classes that have criteria of membership in addition to those specified by the class picked out by the head noun of the phrase (e.g., bear). In contrast, lexical nominals (e.g., polar bear) specify one way to meet the criteria specified by the more general kind concept (e.g., bear). Implications for the language–conceptual system interface, representation of hierarchical relations, lexicalization, and theories of conceptual combination are discussed. (shrink)

The paper comments and elaborates upon five pages of P. F. Strawson’s Individuals , together with his ‘Entity and Identity’ and ‘Universals’. The focus is on Strawson’s understanding of individual non-particulars as types or universals, and on his contention that the most obvious non-particular entities are the broadly conceived artefacts including the works of art. The narrow focus is on the implications of Strawson’s suggestion that ‘an appropriate model for non-particulars of these kinds is that of a model particular - (...) a kind of prototype, or ideal example, itself particular, which serves as a rule or standard for the production of others’ . The paper analyzes the relation between Strawson’s position and the issue of artefacts and their ontology. It also asks about some less obvious affinities between the problem of the non-particulars and Strawson’s concept of a person. (shrink)