The New Evil Demon Problem presents a serious challenge to externalist theories of epistemic justification. In recent years, externalists have developed a number of strategies for responding to the problem. A popular line of response involves distinguishing between a belief’s being epistemically justified and a subject’s being epistemically blameless for holding it. The apparently problematic intuitions the New Evil Demon Problem elicits, proponents of this response claim, track the fact that the deceived subject is epistemically blameless for believing as she (...) does, not that she is justified for so believing. This general strategy—which I call the “unjustified-but-blameless maneuver”—is motivated, in part, by the assumption that the distinction between epistemic justification and blamelessness is merely an extension of the familiar distinction between moral justification and blamelessness. In this paper, I consider three ways of drawing the distinction between justification and blamelessness familiar from the moral domain: the first in terms of a connection with reactive attitudes, the second in terms of the distinction between wrongness and wronging, and the third in terms of reasons-responsiveness. All three ways of drawing the distinction, I argue, make it difficult to see how an analogous distinction in the epistemic domain could help externalists explain away the intuitions which underwrite the New Evil Demon Problem. Motivating the unjustified-but-blameless maneuver, I conclude, is a much less straightforward task than its proponents tend to assume. (shrink)

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always (...) includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor emotional content, but rather the fact that ‘chink’ is lexically marked as belonging to different registers than ‘Chinese’. It is, moreover, partly such facts which makes slurring ethically unacceptable. (shrink)

Este artículo explora el uso del cuento “¡Quiero dinero!”, parte de la colección “Cuentos para pensar” de Angélica Sátiro, como recurso pedagógico en sesiones de filosofía para niños y niñas, en distintos contextos. Entre 2015 y 2019, se organizaron talleres tanto en escuelas primarias como en espacios de organización ciudadana, involucrando a adultos en proyectos relacionados con la “otra economía”. Los talleres tenían como objetivos fomentar la conciencia sobre los significados personales atribuidos a conceptos y prácticas económicas, así como los (...) vinculados a la participación en comunidades de diálogo. Se empleó también como herramienta para recolectar datos en investigación de campo. Los resultados de las sesiones con adultos destacan que el cuento facilitó el diálogo necesario para construir un sentido común en torno a prácticas colectivas, mediante la reflexión sobre la propia praxis. El artículo concluye con una comparación de dos sesiones, una con niños y otra con adultos. (shrink)

Se aplicó el asistente de prueba Tree Proof Generator (TPG) para determinar la corrección lógica de la primera vía tomista sobre la existencia de Dios, así como la corrección de algunas relaciones conceptuales en metafísica modal (necesidad y posibilidad), en epistemología (conocimiento) y en la formulación estructural del árbol de Porfirio. La investigación procura no solo abordar las tesis en cuestión desde el punto de vista computacional, sino que ofrece un marco reflexivo sobre tres condiciones necesarias para una filosofía asistida (...) por computadora; en tal sentido, la investigación se compromete con la idea de que la filosofía es análisis conceptual y argumentación, que pensar filosóficamente no supone un privilegio epistémico o cognitivo y que se requiere de un lenguaje formalmente especificable para ‘hacer’ filosofía. (shrink)

Disponibile anche in versione cartacea: in Almanacco Equilibri 2024, La società dell’educazione, P. Alfieri e N. Zanardi (curatori). Collana Equilibri Magazine, Mimesi edizioni, Milano. -/- **Abstract:** -/- Questo articolo esplora l'importanza della filosofia pratica e della cittadinanza creativa nel contesto delle attuali transizioni epocali. Riprendendo le origini del concetto di "scuola" nell'Antica Grecia, l'autrice evidenzia come il processo di insegnamento-apprendimento fosse centrato sull'auto-direzione della crescita individuale. Rifacendosi alle riflessioni di filosofi come Hadot e Foucault, si sottolinea il carattere pratico della (...) filosofia antica, fondata non solo sulla teoria ma anche su esercizi spirituali e pratiche di cura di sé. -/- L'articolo discute il cambiamento nell'insegnamento della filosofia nelle scuole secondarie italiane, passando da una prospettiva storicista a un approccio che favorisce il confronto diretto con i testi della tradizione filosofica. Vengono esplorate anche esperienze educative alternative, come la pedagogia proposta da Danilo Dolci e la Scuola di Barbiana, che enfatizzano il dialogo, la cooperazione e la promozione della creatività. -/- Inoltre, si esamina il ruolo della Philosophy for Children (P4C) nel promuovere il pensiero complesso e la partecipazione attiva degli studenti attraverso il dialogo filosofico. Si illustrano le sfide e i successi dell'implementazione della P4C in Italia, evidenziando l'importanza della formazione dei docenti e delle pratiche di ricerca filosofica nelle comunità educative. -/- Infine, si introduce il concetto di Filosofia Ludica e il Curriculum Noria, sottolineando il loro approccio ludico e multiculturale alla promozione del pensiero critico e della cittadinanza creativa. Si evidenzia come queste pratiche si inseriscano nel movimento più ampio della Cittadinanza Creativa, offrendo agli studenti strumenti per affrontare le sfide contemporanee e contribuire alla costruzione di un futuro migliore. (shrink)

A recent quarrel over faultless disagreements assumes that disputes over evaluative sentences should be understood as regular, factual disagreements. Instead, I propose that evaluative disagreements should be understood in Lewisian terms. Language use works like a rule-governed game. In it, the assertion of an evaluative sentence is an attempt to establish one value as default in the conversation; its rejection, in turn, is in most cases the refusal to accept this move.

The Internet has been identified in human enhancement scholarship as a powerful cognitive enhancement technology. It offers instant access to almost any type of information, along with the ability to share that information with others. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the enhancement potential of the Internet. We argue that unconditional access to information does not lead to cognitive enhancement. The Internet is not a simple, uniform technology, either in its composition, or in its use. We will (...) look into why the Internet as an informational resource currently fails to enhance cognition. We analyze some of the phenomena that emerge from vast, continual fluxes of information–information overload, misinformation and persuasive design—and show how they could negatively impact users’ cognition. Methods for mitigating these negative impacts are then advanced: individual empowerment, better collaborative systems for sorting and categorizing information, and the use of artificial intelligence assistants that could guide users through the informational space of today’s Internet. (shrink)

Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the collective irrationality of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as partisanship and ideology, exposure to misinformation and conspiracy theories or the effectiveness of public messaging. This paper presents a complementary explanation to epistemic accounts of collective irrationality, focusing on the moral reasons underlying people’s decisions regarding vaccination. We argue that the moralization of COVID-19 risk mitigation measures contributed to the polarization of groups along moral values, which ultimately led to the emergence of collective irrational (...) behaviors. Collective irrationality arises from groups explicitly or implicitly endorsing values that ultimately harm both themselves and those around. The role of social media platforms in amplifying this polarization and contributing to the emergence of collective irrationality is also examined. Finally, potential strategies for addressing the moral sources of collective irrationality are discussed. (shrink)

Although Husserlian phenomenology appears to require that practitioners bracket all metaphysical questions and claims, this requirement runs against the evidence of experience in which objects themselves are presented as constituents of experience. Moreover, to completely bracket metaphysical considerations would suggest that phenomenology is compatible with metaphysical views it should in principle deny. Nonetheless, permitting metaphysical claims threatens to contravene the critical limits of phenomenology, to invite claims that would require a perspective different in kind than our own to verify. These (...) tensions raise an important question, namely, what are the metaphysical implications of the phenomenologically intuitive claim that objects themselves are constituents of experience? To answer this question, I draw on a broad swath of thought on transcendental idealism and phenomenology. I argue that a modest metaphysics of appearance is warranted within the critical limits of Husserlian phenomenology. Through discussing and addressing the problems that typically plague transcendental arguments, I show that Husserlian phenomenology permits stronger claims about objects of experience than deflationary accounts allow but does not permit claims about intrinsic properties allowed by some forms of transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Subtractive schooling is a type of pedagogy that subtracts from the student aspects of her identity in order to assimilate and reshape her identity to fit the American mainstream. Here, I question the value of assimilation as it takes place in our public school systems. Currently, immigrant children are often made to feel inadequate for being culturally different. This is detrimental to their development as students given that at their young age they do not yet have the emotional maturity to (...) know that their experience, language and culture are legitimate and valuable. My goal is to shift the focus of subtractive schooling to one that fosters the growth of students through recognition. I suggest that John Dewey’s and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of recognition is a helpful approach to this problem. Both Dewey and Freire’s pedagogy emphasize recognition as central to their pedagogy. (shrink)

L.A. Paul calls “deep” the kind of essentialism according to which the essential properties of objects are determined independently of the context. Deep essentialism opposes “shallow essentialism”, of which David Lewis is said to be a prominent advocate. Paul argues that standard forms of deep essentialism face a range of issues (mainly based on an interpretation of Quinean skepticism) that shallow essentialism does not. However, Paul claims, shallow essentialism eliminates the very heart of what motivates essentialism, so it is better (...) to be deep than shallow. Accordingly, she proposes a very sharp novel account of essentialism, which, while attempting to preserve some of the advantages of shallow essentialism over the classical forms of deep essentialism, can be deemed to be deep. In this paper, I compare Paul’s proposal for a kind of deep essentialism with Lewis’s account, as it is presented by Paul. My aim is to show that the differences between the two approaches are not as significant as Paul takes them to be, and that Paul’s account can be taken to be deeper than Lewis’s only at the cost of sacrificing the very idea at the bottom of deep essentialism. This might be taken to suggest that, if Paul is correct in asserting that shallow essentialism is better equipped to address some skeptical challenges, but it is generally preferable to be deep than shallow, then Lewis’s account should be re-evaluated, since, as shallow as it can be, it might be deeper than it looks. (shrink)

This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative minipublics such as citizen juries, Deliberative Polls, citizen’s assemblies, and so forth. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative minipublics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of minipublics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawing from a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, I propose several uses of minipublics that could (...) enhance the democratic legitimacy of political decision-making in current societies. (shrink)

In this essay, I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts. In particular, I address some implications of my critique of deep pluralism; distinguish between three senses of ‘blind deference’: political, reflective, and informational; draw a critical parallelism between the populist conception of representation as embodiment and the conception of ‘citizen-representatives’ often ascribed to participants in deliberative minipublics; defend the democratic attractiveness of participatory uses over empowered uses (...) of deliberative minipublics; clarify why accepting public reason constraints does not imply limiting deliberation to questions about constitutional rights, and argue that overcoming a state-centric conception of democracy does not require replacing the ‘all subjected’ principle with the ‘all affected’ principle. (shrink)

Lewis (1968) claims that his language of Counterpart Theory (CT) interprets modal discourse and he adverts to a translation scheme from the language of Quantifed Modal Logic (QML) to CT. However, everybody now agrees that his original translation scheme does not always work, since it does not always preserve the ‘intuitive’ meaning of the translated QML-formulas. Lewis discusses this problem with regard to the Necessitist Thesis, and I will extend his discourse to the analysis of the Converse Barcan Formula. Everyone (...) also agrees that there are CT-formulas that can express the QMLcontent that gets lost through the translation. The problem is how we arrive to them. In this paper, I propose new translation rules from QML to CT, based on a suggestion by Kaplan. However, I will claim that we cannot have ‘the’ translation scheme from QML to CT. The reason being that de re modal language is ambiguous. Accordingly, there are diferent sorts of QML, depending on how we resolve such ambiguity. Therefore, depending on what sort of QML we intend to translate into CT, we need to use the corresponding translation scheme. This suggests that all the translation problems might just disappear if we do what Lewis did not: begin with a fully worked out QML that tells us how to understand de re modal discourse. (shrink)

Evaluative judgments imply positive or negative regard. But there are different ways in which something can be positive or negative. How do we tell them apart? According to Evaluative Sentimentalism, different evaluations (e.g., dangerousness vs. offensiveness) are grounded on different emotions (e.g., fear vs. anger). If this is the case, evaluation differentiation requires emotional awareness. Here, we test this hypothesis by looking at alexithymia, a deficit in emotional awareness consisting of problems identifying, describing, and thinking about emotions. The results of (...) Study 1 suggest that high alexithymia is not only related to problems distinguishing emotions, but also to problems distinguishing evaluations. Study 2 replicated this latter effect after controlling for individual differences in attentional impulsiveness and reflective reasoning, and found that reasoning makes an independent contribution to evaluation differentiation. These results suggest that emotional sensibilities play an irreducible role in evaluative judgment while affording a role for reasoning. (shrink)

En su trabajo acerca del debate Putnam-Rorty, Luis Robledo supone una concepción reduccionista de la justificación en Rorty, y defiende contra ella la indepen-dencia entre justificación y consenso, a través del argumento de la posibilidad de un consenso sin justificación. A su juicio, el no sostener una independencia tal conduciría a problemas desfavorables para el pragmatismo. En este trabajo buscaré presentar una interpretación alternativa y no reduccionista de la justificación rortiana, que aún sin reconocer una total independencia entre ambas instancias, (...) no sólo evita estos proble-mas, sino que además muestra que es poco pragmático el ejemplo proporcionado por Robledo en su argumentación. (shrink)

Husserl’s theory of types is most often associated with his account of perception. Here, types operate as pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception of objects. In this paper, I will argue that Husserl’s theory of types is also central to his account of intersubjectivity. More specifically, I will show that a foundational kind of typical subjectivity is entailed by his discussion of the sphere of ownness. It is by way of this type that even a solitary subject can (...) tacitly anticipate the possibility of other subjects. It is also this type that is enriched through interactions between actual subjects. (shrink)

This book provides a historical and theoretical analysis of the Ayotzinapa social movement from the perspective of Latin American philosophy. The author addresses questions such as how a social movement is born, how (and if) the distinct social movement organizations should be defined, and what (if any) should be the extent of these organizations.

Las descripciones definidas pueden ser interpretadas de acuerdo con las dos lecturas propuestas por Donnellan. El presente trabajo presenta una interpretación contextualista de la lectura referencial de estas expresiones.

La teoría de los hacedores de verdad, como la vieja teoría correspondentista, intenta comprender la relación que, ligando proposiciones y hechos, resulta en la verdad (o falsedad) de las primeras. Esta teoría presenta una versión débil, que da cuenta de dicha relación en términos de la noción de implicación, y una fuerte, fundada en la relación de "ser verdadero en virtud de". La diferencia fundamental entre ambas es la adhesión y el rechazo, respectivamente, del Principio de Implicación, según el cual (...) dos proposiciones ligadas por implicación serán hechas verdaderas por el mismo hecho. El presente trabajo muestra cómo esta adhesión conduce a las versiones débiles al colapso, por lo cual sólo las versiones fuertes tienen oportunidades de prosperar. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, David Chalmers introduced the meta-problem of consciousness as “the problem of explaining why we think consciousness poses a hard problem” (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). A solution to the meta-problem could shed light on the hard problem of consciousness. In particular, it would be relevant to elucidate whether people’s problem intuitions (i.e. intuitions holding that conscious experience cannot be reduced to physical processes) are driven by factors related to the nature of consciousness, or rather (...) by factors that are independent of consciousness. Whether people hold problem intuitions, and what factors drive those intuitions, are largely empirical questions. However, there is a lack of empirical research on these issues to date. The results of four studies will show that (1) problem intuitions are not widespread, and (2) when they arise, they do so because of factors that are unrelated to the nature of consciousness. This suggests that consciousness is, after all, not so problematic. (shrink)

El artículo tiene como objetivo explorar el papel del juego y del enfoque lúdico dentro de la Filosofía Lúdica (Filú), un movimiento educativo arraigado en la Filosofía para Niños y Niñas (FpN). Desde la perspectiva de un aprendiz, se subraya que, en la evolución de Filú, el juego no se considera simplemente un componente adicional, sino un pilar esencial, especialmente cuando lo lúdico se integra de manera crucial en el proceso de aprendizaje junto al cuerpo. La dimensión lúdica abarca diversos (...) aspectos, incluyendo el movimiento emocional, verbal, cognitivo y corporal, ofreciendo la posibilidad de vivenciar el proceso de aprendizaje de forma holística. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that (...) emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way. (shrink)

In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to this special issue on my book ‘Democracy without Shortcuts’. First, I clarify different aspects of my cri...

David Lewis may be regarded as an antiessentialist. The reason is that he is said to believe that individuals do not have essential properties independent of the ways they are represented. According to him, indeed, the properties that are determined to be essential to individuals are a matter of which similarity relations among individuals are salient, and salience, in turn, is a contextual matter also determined to some extent by the ways individuals are represented. Todd Buras argues that the acknowledgment (...) of natural properties in counterpart theoretic ontology affects Lewis’s theory with regard to essentialism. Buras’s reasoning is appealing. He claims that, since natural properties determine the existence of similarity relations among individuals that are salient independent of context, Lewis can no longer be claimed to be an antiessentialist. The aim of this paper is to argue, against Buras, that if counterpart theory was antiessentialist before natural properties were taken into account, then it remains so afterwards. (shrink)

El objetivo principal del artículo es hacer notar la dimensión jurídico-normativa del problema del aborto, considerando que acentuar excesivamente su dimensión ético-moral conduce a una estéril contraposición que impide una discusión serena del abortoy de su dimensión irremediablemente pública. En este sentido, aún reconociéndole su perspectiva moral, en el artículo se plantea la posibilidad de pensar el aborto como una conducta que pueda reconducirse a un modelo de regulación jurídica “blando”, dondela perspectiva moral del legislador no adquiera las características de (...) una moral común, igual para todos ,y que,por el contrario,mediante la modalidad jurídica del permiso, cada individuo ponga en acto su propia convicción moral. De ahí puede surgir una legislación en la que el aborto no sea objeto ni de un deber jurídico ni de una prohibición: abortaro no abortar, en este modelo de regulación jurídica, son decisiones que los individuos toman con base en sus propias convicciones. (shrink)

The Lewisean counterpart theorist– despite not defending a genuinely essentialist view of what is possible, de re, of individuals – generally has a way to make essentialist claims come out as true, in those contexts in which they are endorsed by a committed essentialist. In this paper, I am going to show that the normal system that the Lewisean adopts when she wants to make the essentialist a truth-teller does not work with Kit Fine: his essentialist beliefs, which support his (...) counterexamples to the modal account of essentialism, cannot come out as true, in any contexts whatsoever, under the Lewisean view. After arguing that this represents a genuine problem for Lewis’s theory, I will propose a solution. I will indeed show that the Lewisean has a principled way to account for Fine’s essentialist beliefs, consistently with her own counterpart-theorist reading of them. (shrink)

In this study, we examine the philosophical bases of one of the leading clinical psychological methods of therapy for anxiety, anger, and depression, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). We trace this method back to its philosophical roots in the Stoic, Buddhist, Taoist, and Existentialist philosophical traditions. We start by discussing the tenets of CBT, and then we expand on the philosophical traditions that ground this approach. Given that CBT has had a clinically measured positive effect on the psychological well-being of individuals, (...) it becomes important to study the philosophical foundations on which this therapy is based. (shrink)

Can we experience emotion without the feeling of accelerated heartbeats, perspiration, or other changes in the body? In his paper “What is an emotion”, William James famously claimed that “if we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind” (1884, p. 193). Thus, bodily changes are essential to emotion. This is known as the Subtraction Argument. The Subtraction Argument is still (...) used to support Embodied theories of emotion. Proponents of Disembodied theories, however, have different intuitions regarding the role of bodily changes in the experience of emotion. In order to advance this debate, I conducted a series of studies testing people’s intuitions regarding the Subtraction Argument. Results show that, against James’ claims, most people consider that their hypothetical (Study 1) and actual (Study 2) emotions persist in the absence of bodily feelings. Furthermore, Study 1 found that participants’ responses were not related to individual differences in reflection or interoceptive awareness. These results pose a problem for Embodied theories of emotion and challenge extant explanations for the persistence of emotional experience in cases of impaired interoception. (shrink)

Are feelings an essential part or aspect of emotion? Cases of unconscious emotion suggest that this is not the case. However, it has been claimed that unconscious emotions are better understood as either (a) emotions that are phenomenally conscious but not reflectively conscious, or (b) dispositions to have emotions rather than emotions proper. Here, I argue that these ways of accounting for unconscious emotions are inadequate, and propose a view of emotions as non-phenomenal attitudes that regard their contents as relevant (...) to one's motivations. (shrink)

In emotion research, both conceptual analyses and empirical studies commonly rely on emotion reports. But what do people mean when they say that they are angry, afraid, joyful, etc.? Building on extant theories of emotion, this paper presents four new studies (including a pre-registered replication) measuring the weight of cognitive evaluations, bodily changes, and action tendencies in people’s use of emotion concepts. The results of these studies suggest that the presence or absence of cognitive evaluations has the largest impact on (...) people’s emotion attributions, and that bodily changes and action tendencies are considered to depend on cognitive evaluations. Implications for theories of emotion (concepts) and the interpretation of emotion reports are discussed. (shrink)

The paper addresses the methodology used by the teacher-KEYWORDS: facilitator to plan P4C sessions. The classic method consists of identifying the guidelines of the dialogue from a provisional mapping of the text, but this can be supplemented or replaced by other tools‡. GrupIREF and the Filosofía Lúdica movement§ use an approach that focuses on thinking skills. The P4C session is planned from the choice of the thinking skills to be trained - or possibly the attitudes and ethical values that appear (...) in the stimulus used. This article proposes an alternative to the classical planning approach, examining the basis of the model considered and offering a practical example. ITA_Focus dell’articolo è la modalità di pianificazione delle sessioni di Philosophy for Children, P4C, da parte del docente-facilitatore. Il metodo classico consiste nell’individuazione di linee-guida del dialogo a partire da una mappatura orientativa del testo-pretesto, ma ciò può essere integrato, o sostituito da altre modalità*. Il GrupIREF e il movimento della Filosofía Lúdica† utilizzano un approccio che privilegia le abilità di pensiero. La sessione P4C viene pianificata a partire dalla scelta dell’abilità di pensiero da allenare – o eventualmente dell’atteggiamento etico e dei valori legati al pre-testo utilizzato. Il presente lavoro suggerisce un’alternativa alla progettazione classica, attraverso una disamina delle basi del modello considerato, e ne offre un esempio pratico. (shrink)

Emergency situations require individuals to make important changes in their behavior. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, official recommendations to avoid the spread of the virus include costly behaviors such as self-quarantining or drastically diminishing social contacts. Compliance (or lack thereof) with these recommendations is a controversial and divisive topic, and lay hypotheses abound regarding what underlies this divide. This paper investigates which cognitive, moral, and emotional traits separate people who comply with official recommendations from those who don't. In (...) four studies (three pre-registered) on both U.S. and French samples, we found that individuals' self-reported compliance with official recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic was partly driven by individual differences in moral values, disgust sensitivity, and psychological reactance. We discuss the limitations of our studies and suggest possible applications in the context of health communication. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that some features, such as gender, race and sexual orientation, are socially constructed? Many scholars claim that social constructionism about a kind is a version of realism about that kind, according to which the corresponding kind is a social construction, that it, it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructionism, then, is a version of realism about a kind that asserts that the kind is real, and puts forward a particular view about (...) the nature of the kind, namely, that it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructivists about human kinds such as gender, race and sexual orientation often make an additional claim, namely, that these kinds are social constructions but they are typically believed to be biological kinds (that is, people are typically wrong about the nature of these kinds). Ron Mallon (2017) calls social constructions that are (falsely) taken to be biological kinds covert social constructions. This paper is about how we could have terms in our natural language that come to refer to covert social constructions. (shrink)

In the present paper, we shall discuss the notion of prototype and show its benefits. First, we shall argue that the prototypes of common-sense concepts are necessary for making prompt and reliable categorisations and inferences. However, the features constituting the prototype of a particular concept are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for determining category membership; in this sense, the prototype might lead to conclusions regarded as wrong from a theoretical perspective. That being said, the prototype remains essential to handling most (...) ordinary situations and helps us to perform important cognitive tasks. To exemplify this point, we shall focus on disease concepts. Our analysis concludes that the prototypical conception of disease is needed to make important inferences from a practical and clinical point of view. Moreover, it can still be compatible with a classical definition of disease, given in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. In the first section, we shall compare the notion of stereotype, as it has been introduced in philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam, with the notion of prototype, as it has been developed in the cognitive sciences. In the second section, we shall discuss the general role of prototypical information in cognition and stress its centrality. In the third section, we shall apply our previous discussion to the specific case of medical concepts, before briefly summarising our conclusions in section four. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objeto llevar a cabo un estudio pragmático y analítico sobre la acción de valoración, el valor y los valores a la luz de la ciencia semiótica y de la ciencia cibernética. Por ello, se desarrollará un proceso axiológico que ilustre cómo sucede el ingreso, la transición y la salida de códigos morales en función de un esquema cognitivo. Así pues, el proceso axiológico se postula, primero, en fundamento de tres sistemas: de mentalidad, de valores y (...) de biomoralidad y, segundo, conforme a la teoría de la información y de la teoría general de sistemas. (shrink)

Las oraciones con predicados evaluativos son sensibles a la valoración realizada según un parámetro evaluativo contextual. Dos teorías han proporcionado explicaciones para este tipo de sensibilidad: el contextualismo y el relativismo de apreciación. En este trabajo presentaré una tercera opción que logra lo mismo que estas de una manera más sencilla. La teoría se centrará en dos pilares: una reconsideración del contenido expresado por las oraciones con predicados de gusto que parte de la articulación del parámetro evaluativo como una función (...) diádica, y los compromisos que la aserción de este tipo de oraciones impone sobre los hablantes y sobre el auditorio. Con ambas herramientas se logrará una teoría que podrá dar cuenta de acuerdos, desacuerdos y usos ecóicos de las oraciones evaluativas sin apelar a contextos de apreciación suplementarios a la teoría semántica estándar o a presupuestos de comunidad de los parámetros evaluativos. Sentences with evaluative predicates are sensitive to the valuation carried on under an evaluative parameter in the context. Two theories have provided an account for this kind of context-sensitivity: contextualism and assessment relativism. In this paper I will present a third alternative that achieves the same results in a simpler way. This theory is based on two main ideas: understanding the content expressed on the basis of an articulation of the evaluative parameter as a dyadic function, and the practical and linguistic commitments that the assertion of these sentences imposes over speakers and hearers. Both tools will result in a theory that can manage agreements, disagreements and echoic uses of evaluative sentences without the need to supplement the standard semantic theory with contexts of assessment or with presuppositions of commonality of the evaluative standard. (shrink)

In his genetic phenomenology, Husserl introduces types, pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception and cognition of objects. In this essay, I argue that there are two types that are functionally almost identical to Kant’s schemata. To support this conclusion, I first present an interpretation of Kant’s discussion of schemata. I argue that we must see schemata as pure, a priori cognitions that involve only pure intuition, pure concepts of the understanding, and the imagination. I offer two analogies to (...) explain how schemata function to subsume objects under concepts and to anticipate possible objects of experience before moving on to discuss the schema of substance. Next, I present a brief explanation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, organizing my presentation around the idea of apperception. This paves the way for a demonstration of how the fundamental type is best understood as standing at the center of a cluster of concepts, including apperception, passive belief, natural bodies, and the one spatio-temporal horizon of experience. I argue that the fundamental type is central to Husserl’s attempt to ground logic in pre-predicative experience. Finally, I compare two specific types with schemata on the grounds cultivated in the previous sections. The first of these types, the fundamental type, functions to pre-predicatively anticipate objects of possible experience, just as schemata do. The second of these types, which is implied by but never discussed in Husserl’s work, serves to mediate between a formal system of rules and an intuitive grasp of the world, just as schemata do. (shrink)

The relation between slurs and their neutral counterparts has been put into question recently by the fact that some slurs can be used to refer to subsets of the referential classes determined by their associated counterparts. This paper aims to reinforce this relation by offering a way of explaining referential restriction that distinguishes between two kinds of slurs: those performing a normalizing role upon (some) individuals inside a class (mostly, a gender) and those used to derogate a marginalized out- group.

Human emotional expressions can communicate the emotional state of the expresser, but they can also communicate appeals to perceivers. For example, sadness expressions such as crying request perceivers to aid and support, and anger expressions such as shouting urge perceivers to back off. Some contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) systems can mimic human emotional expressions in a (more or less) realistic way, and they are progressively being integrated into our daily lives. How should we respond to them? Do we have reasons (...) to reply to the appeals made by AI emotional expressions? In this paper, we examine the conditions under which AI emotional expressions could give us prudential or even moral reasons to change our behavior. We argue that these conditions do not depend on whether the emotional expression is genuine or not, but rather on the presence of features some of which can be implemented in emotive AI given our current level of technological development. We extract recommendations and warnings for the development of emotive AI. (shrink)

This chapter explains the rationale behind the book. It provides basic definitions of the concept of the sharing economy as well as the primary meanings related to the subject of the analysis undertaken in the subsequent chapters. This Introduction also includes a description of the main benefits of the analysis of the sharing economy from a European perspective. It highlights that the idea of the book emerged from the collaboration of most co-authors in the COST Action CA16121 ‘From Sharing to (...) Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy.’ Finally, the outline of the book is presented, providing a description of the content of each chapter within this academic collection. (shrink)

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. The main (...) advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply. (shrink)

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field (such as, in the first place, the Web Ontology Language - OWL) do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms (...) of typical traits. The need of representing concepts in terms of typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific disorders. We favour a hybrid approach to concept representation, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual space. As a preliminary step to apply our proposal to mental disorder concepts, we started to develop an OWL ontology of the schizophrenia spectrum, which is as close as possible to the DSM-5 descriptions. (shrink)

El propósito central del presente artículo, es formular un enfoque sistémico-jurídico para el análisis de los sistemas sociales. Para esto, se proponen tres tipologías de consensos denominados límites del sistema social: consenso normal, consenso normativo y consenso legítimo. La función de estas tipologías es, primero elaborar una explicación sobre la constitucionalización y democratización del poder político, con base en la regla de reconocimiento y la norma fundamental de un Estado; segundo postular dos metodologías normativas, un registro positivo y una demarcación (...) positiva, que desplieguen, tanto sobre las conductas sociales como sobre la estructura del sistema social, un proceso de legalidad emergente, cuya función sea, tercero regular, realimentar y optimizar el funcionamiento de la constitución política. Finalmente, se analizan los conceptos de completitud y de legitimidad del sistema normativo, con el fin de definir el alcance institucional que debe poseer un sistema jurídico sobre los subsistemas culturales del sistema social. (shrink)

It is often claimed that fear has an important epistemological function in making us aware of danger. Reactive theories challenge this view. According to them, fear is a response to real or apparent danger. In other words, real or apparent danger is the reason for which we experience fear. Thus, fear depends on awareness of danger instead of making us aware of danger. Proponents of the reactive theory have appealed to phenomenological and, most prominently, linguistic observations to support their views. (...) In particular, they argue that how we talk about the objects of fear supports the view that fear is a response (rather than a perception), and that how we talk about reasons for fear supports the view that reasons for fear are necessarily evaluative (about danger). Building on systematic linguistic observations in the form of corpus analyses and survey data, we argue that how we talk about the objects of fear and how we talk about reasons for fear do not support the reactive theory. Indeed, these linguistic considerations undermine the reactive theory. Most importantly, they suggest that there are non-evaluative reasons for fear. This is good news for rival theories, like perceptual theories, which hold that emotions have epistemic value in contributing to knowledge of evaluative properties such as danger. (shrink)

Necessitism is the controversial thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something, namely that everything, everywhere, necessarily exists. What is controversial about necessitism is that, at its core, it claims that things could not have failed to exist, while we have a pre-theoretical intuition that not everything necessarily exists. Contingentism, in accordance with common sense, denies necessitism: it claims that some things could have failed to exist. Timothy Williamson is a necessitist and claims that David Lewis is a necessitist too. The (...) paper argues that, granted the assumptions that lead to interpret the Lewisian as a necessitist, she can preserve contingentist intuitions, by genuinely agreeing with the folk that existence is contingent. This is not just the uncontroversial claim that the Lewisian, as a result of the prevalence of restricted quantification in counterpart theoretic regimentations of natural language, can agree with the folk while disagreeing with them in the metaphysical room. Rather, this is the claim that it is in the metaphysical room that the Lewisian can endorse the intuitions lying behind contingentism. (shrink)

Philosophers have proposed accounts of forgiveness in which the victim is warranted in forgiving only if the wrongdoer makes amends for the wrong done. According to such an account, forgiveness is made rational by the wrongdoer apologizing. But this account creates a puzzle because it seems to render cases of undeserved elective forgiveness (where there is no apology or repentance) unjustified. My aim in the present contribution is to argue that electively forgiving unrepentant wrongdoers can be justified if we accept (...) as genuine a minimalist form of forgiveness, according to which a victim can forgive and still resent. Further, I suggest that undeserved elective forgiveness can be admirable if we extend our conception of reasons to include non- desert-type reasons, such as reasons of altruism, generosity or reasons of social context. (shrink)