In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how deep learning machine vision relies on photography, its technical regimes and epistemic advantages, and (...) we propose a novel way to identify the latent camera through which the BBC archive was seen by machine. (shrink)

Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its ‘pick up’ in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be “RECtified” so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In (...) this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified. (shrink)

This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue against this view by describing the main features and problems of (...) reductionism and enactivism and then we will offer two arguments against this shared factualist assumption: (1) normative vocabulary is ineliminable if we want a complete explanation of our situated practices; and (2) the factualist assumption is a species of the is-ought fallacy. Finally, we will claim that a folk psychological explanation of our normative practices is fully compatible with ontological naturalism when such descriptivist or factualist assumption is rejected. (shrink)

While some form of loss of control is often assumed to be a common feature of the diverse manifestations of addiction, it is far from clear how loss of control should be understood. In this paper, I put forward a concept of decrease in control in addiction that aims to fill this gap and thus provide a general framework for thinking about addictive behavior. The development of this account involves two main steps. First, I present a view of degrees of (...) control as the degree to which an agent would be responsive to potential or counterfactual sufficient reasons to do otherwise. Second, I sketch an account of the relevant control-undermining factors in addiction that is consonant with my proposed view of degrees of control. Being a high-level functional property, reasons-responsiveness is particularly well suited to frame an account of control-undermining factors that is doubly pluralistic: it encompasses the contribution of factors both internal and external to the agent, and it is consistent with various proposals as to the precise nature of the anomaly taking place in the psychology of addiction. (shrink)

Following the proposal of a new kind of selective structural realism that uses as a basis the distinction between framework and interaction theories, this work discusses relevant applications in fundamental physics. An ontology for the different entities and properties of well-known theories is thus consistently built. The case of classical field theories—including general relativity as a classical theory of gravitation—is examined in detail, as well as the implications of the classification scheme for issues of realism in quantum mechanics. These applications (...) also shed light on the different range of applicability of the ontic and epistemic versions of structural realism. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a criticism, inspired by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, of the enactivist account of perception and action. We start by setting up a non-descriptivist naturalism regarding the mind and continue by defining enactivism and exploring its more attractive theoretical features. We then proceed to analyse its proposal to understand normativity non-socially. We argue that such a thesis is ultimately committed to the problematic idea that normative practices can be understood as private and factual. Finally, we offer a (...) characterization of normativity as an essentially social phenomenon and apply our criticisms to other approaches that share commitments with enactivism. (shrink)

In actuarial parlance, the price of an insurance policy is considered fair if customers bearing the same risk are charged the same price. The estimate of this fair amount hinges on the expected value obtained by weighting the different claims by their probability. We argue that, historically, this concept of actuarial fairness originates in an Aristotelian principle of justice in exchange (equality in risk). We will examine how this principle was formalized in the 16th century and shaped in life insurance (...) during the following two hundred years, in two different interpretations. The Domatian account of actuarial fairness relied on subjective uncertainty: An agreement on risk was fair if both parties were equally ignorant about the chances of an uncertain event. The objectivist version grounded any agreement on an objective risk estimate drawn from a mortality table. We will show how the objectivist approach collapsed in the market for life annuities during the 18th century, leaving open the question of why we still speak of actuarial fairness as if it were an objective expected value. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

A restrictive view of self-control identifies exercises of self-control with synchronic intrapsychic processes, and pictures diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies not as proper instances of self-control, but as clever ways of avoiding the need to exercise that ability. In turn, defenders of an inclusive view of self-control typically argue that we should construe self-control as more than effortful inhibition, and that, on grounds of functional equivalence, all these diverse strategies might be properly described as instances of self-control. In this paper, I (...) take a fresh look at this debate by focusing on cases of addiction. I argue that addicted agents face a paradigmatic sort of self-control challenge, which makes addiction an important test case for theories of self-control. And I discuss evidence that highlights both the unreliability of synchronic intrapsychic strategies and the crucial role that is played by diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies in successful attempts at achieving abstinence by addicted individuals. Abstaining addicts are a paradigmatic case of agents who successfully exercise self-control, and they mostly do so by relying on diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies. This, I argue, lends further support to an inclusive view of self-control. (shrink)

This work is a conceptual analysis of certain recent developments in the mathematical foundations of Classical and Quantum Mechanics which have allowed to formulate both theories in a common language. From the algebraic point of view, the set of observables of a physical system, be it classical or quantum, is described by a Jordan-Lie algebra. From the geometric point of view, the space of states of any system is described by a uniform Poisson space with transition probability. Both these structures (...) are here perceived as formal translations of the fundamental twofold role of properties in Mechanics: they are at the same time quantities and transformations. The question becomes then to understand the precise articulation between these two roles. The analysis will show that Quantum Mechanics can be thought as distinguishing itself from Classical Mechanics by a compatibility condition between properties-as-quantities and properties-as-transformations. -/- Moreover, this dissertation shows the existence of a tension between a certain "abstract way" of conceiving mathematical structures, used in the practice of mathematical physics, and the necessary capacity to specify particular states or observables. It then becomes important to understand how, within the formalism, one can construct a labelling scheme. The “Chase for Individuation” is the analysis of different mathematical techniques which attempt to overcome this tension. In particular, we discuss how group theory furnishes a partial solution. (shrink)

The question I address in this paper is what is it exactly for desires to possess a certain strength. And my aim is twofold. First, I argue for a pluralistic account of desire strength. On this view, there are several dimensions along which desires possess greater or lesser strength, and none of them is intrinsically privileged. My second aim is to highlight some time-based properties of desires, recurrence and persistence. Both desires’ degree of persistence across time and their rate of (...) episodic recurrence are, I argue, further dimensions of desire strength. (shrink)

Las soluciones a la paradoja de la ficción propuestas por Kendall Walton y Gregory Currie, a pesar de diferir en puntos de detalle importantes, suponen dos movimientos conceptuales comunes para entender la situación de quien está inmerso en una obra de ficción, a través del recurso a la noción de “cuasi-emociones” y de la idea de construcción de escenarios imaginarios. Aquí propondré que sus propuestas fallan en sus dos puntos centrales, a partir de problemas que son, sin embargo, independientes. Por (...) un lado, sus ideas sobre las emociones que sentimos al estar atrapados por una obra de ficción fallan al suponer una versión inaceptable de la tesis cognitivista acerca de las emociones. Por otro, sus ideas sobre la construcción de mundos imaginarios por parte de los “consumidores de ficción” fallan al suponer una dicotomía entre mundos de ficción y realidad. Finalmente, discutiré brevemente el modo en que ambos tipos de problemas repercuten sobre la viabilidad del planteo de la paradoja misma. (shrink)

Escribir hoy en día un libro sobre hermenéutica, que tal hermenéutica se refiera a la desarrollada por G. Gadamer en su conocido Verdad y método y que se pretenda añadir algo nuevo a lo mucho escrito sobre el tema parecería, a primera vista, empresa irrealizable. Que ambas pretensiones inspiren la sólida monografía de María G. Navarro —titulada Interpretar y argumentar— constituye empresa audaz y arriesgada, plena de coraje innovador, que provoca admiración, curiosidad e interés. Contra lo que pudiera parecer a (...) primera vista, el libro contiene un alto componente de originalidad y creatividad, debido a la estratagema metodoló-gica de que se sirve la autora. A saber, una hermenéutica in obliquo, estrategia consistente en interpretar a la hermenéutica gadameriana a través del prisma de la lógica de la argumentación. (shrink)

The Normative Structure of Responsibility deals with responsibility in legal, moral, and linguistic contexts. The book builds on conceptual analysis and data from everyday language, ethics, and the law in order to defend the thesis that responsibility is fundamentally normative, that is, it cannot be reduced to purely descriptive factors. The book is divided in three parts: the first part draws a conceptual map of various responsibility concepts, conceptions and conditions and their interaction with different kinds of rules; the second (...) part engages with arguments in favour of a descriptive understanding of responsibility based on ethics, neuroscience, and metaphysics and argues against it; the third part investigates the language of responsibility and its use in formal and informal contexts. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the attempt to reorient the discussion (...) about moral expertise. (shrink)

According to Marshall et al. (2024), some of the patients who refuse to stay in observation after being resuscitated following an opioid overdose are likely not making an autonomous choice. While I do not intend to dispute this claim, it merits discussion what is the concept of autonomy at play in making this assessment. I contend that the concept at work is more substantive than Marshall et al. acknowledge—and more substantive, too, than the form of autonomy usually thought to underpin (...) the moral justification of the requirement of informed consent . (shrink)

We discuss the mathematical structures that underlie quantum probabilities. More specifically, we explore possible connections between logic, geometry and probability theory. We propose an interpretation that generalizes the method developed by R. T. Cox to the quantum logical approach to physical theories. We stress the relevance of developing a geometrical interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Can addiction be credibly invoked as an excuse for moral harms secondary to particular decisions to use drugs? This question raises two distinct sets of issues. First, there is the question of whether addiction is the sort of consideration that could, given suitable assumptions about the details of the case, excuse or mitigate moral blameworthiness. Most discussions of addiction and moral responsibility have focused on this question, and many have argued that addiction excuses. Here I articulate what I take to (...) be the best argument for this view, based on the substantial difficulty that people with severe addiction experience in controlling drug-related behavior. This, I argue, may in some cases be sufficient to ground a mitigating excuse, given the way in which addiction undermines agents’ responsiveness to relevant moral reasons to do otherwise. Much less attention has been devoted to a second set of issues that critically affect the possibility of applying this mitigating excuse in particular cases, derived from the ambivalent nature of agential control in addiction. In order to find a fitting response to moral harm, the person with the right standing to blame must make a judgment about the extent to which the agent possessed certain morally relevant capacities at the time of the act. In practice, this will often prove tremendously difficult to assess. The ethical challenge for the person with the right standing to blame is fundamentally one of making a judgment about matters that seem underdetermined by the available evidence. (shrink)

It is often assumed that, except perhaps in a few rare cases, people with addiction can be aptly held responsible for having acquired the condition. In this chapter, I consider the argument that supports this view and draw attention to a number of challenges that can be raised against it. Assuming that early decisions to use drugs were made in possession of normal-range psychological capacities, I consider the key question of whether drug users who later became addicted should have known (...) that addiction was a likely outcome of their decisions to use drugs in a way that makes them blameworthy for their lack of foresight. I focus on three different points of contention surrounding this claim: how likely the outcome to be predicted was, how tolerable risk should be weighed against the expected value of decisions to use, and how reliable the relevant predictive abilities of the average person are. Once we consider in some detail what would have to be true in order for someone to be aptly held responsible for becoming addicted, the prospects for making a convincing case to that effect look, I argue, somewhat more uncertain than they might at first appear. (shrink)

Philosophy has always been concerned with mental health and mental disorder, and many prominent historical figures have held views that have drawn attention to these issues. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of interest in philosophical issues surrounding psychiatry. As a result, the philosophy of psychiatry has emerged as a distinct, well-established field of inquiry.

This paper addresses the problem of articulating ethics with justice, as it would seem impossible to think the practical application of one without denying the other at the same time. Indeed, as Levinas puts it, justice is violence within ethics when trying to compare the incomparable. On the contrary, ethics is an asymmetrical and irreversible relationship between two, where justice seems to have no room at all. This work seek to provide an articulation between both immeasurable dimensions by a renewed (...) attention to the issue of temporality of ethics and by including the concept of impure, taken from the work of Jean Guitton, from which it is understood that both dimensions are co-implicated from the very difference that constitute them. (shrink)

In this paper I provide some linguistic evidence to the thesis that responsibility judgments are normative. I present an argument from negation, since the negation of descrip- tive judgments is structurally different from the negation of normative judgments. In particular, the negation of responsibility judgments seem to conform to the pattern of the negation of normative judgments, thus being a prima facie evidence for the normativity of responsibility judgments. I assume — for the argument’s sake — Austin’s distinction be- tween (...) justification and excuse, and I sketch how to accommodate the distinction between internal (justification) and external (excuse) nega- tion of responsibility within a language with a second-order analogous of existential generalization and λ operator. In the end I confront with and refute some objections against this argument. (shrink)

In this work, we focus on the philosophical aspects and technical challenges that underlie the axiomatization of the non-Kolmogorovian probability framework, in connection with the problem of quantum contextuality. This fundamental feature of quantum theory has received a lot of attention recently, given that it might be connected to the speed-up of quantum computers—a phenomenon that is not fully understood. Although this problem has been extensively studied in the physics community, there are still many philosophical questions that should be properly (...) formulated. We analyzed different problems from a conceptual standpoint using the non-Kolmogorovian probability approach as a technical tool. (shrink)

In the Indian philosophical debate, the relationship between the structure of knowledge and external reality has been a persistent issue. This debate has been particularly prominent in Buddhism, as evidenced by the earliest Buddhist attestations in the Pāli canon, where reality is described as a perceptual defection. The world (loka) is perceived through cognition (citta), and the theme of designation (paññatti) is central to the analysis of the Abhidhamma. Buddhism can be viewed as navigating between nominalism and cognitive normativism, as (...) it deconstructs language, which is seen as an obfuscating element that separates the subject from the world. In this article, we explore these issues through a philosophical dialogue between Early Buddhism, Abhidhamma, and Madhyamaka, utilizing methodological tools from Western philosophical traditions, both ancient and modern. We engage in a clash between nihilism and absolutism, in search of the substantiality of entities, which, behind the emptiness of conventional designations, conceals a complex fractal network of pansematism. (shrink)

Exploramos aquí la conexión entre los conceptos de riesgo e igualdad en el argumento del observador imparcial. La concepción de la justicia que elegiría un observador imparcial se justifica por la pureza del procedimiento de elección. Sin embargo, si modelizamos esta decisión utilizando medidas del riesgo habituales en matemática financiera, veremos cómo el criterio de elección del observador bajo el velo de la ignorancia contiene una preferencia implícita por el grado de desigualdad resultante. Esto nos obliga a reconsiderar la pureza (...) procedimental de la elección. (shrink)

In this paper we challenge the notion of ‘normativity’ used by some enactive approaches to cognition. We define some varieties of enactivism and their assumptions and make explicit the reasoning behind the co-emergence of individuality and normativity. Then we argue that appealing to dispositions for explaining some living processes can be more illuminating than claiming that all such processes are normative. For this purpose, we will present some considerations, inspired by Wittgenstein, regarding norm-establishing and norm-following and show that attributions of (...) normativity to non-social agents are deeply paradoxical. The main conclusions of our discussion are: (1) circular and internal explanations centred on the stability of living systems are insufficient to account for processes where the environment plays an important role, such as adaptation. Enactivism is not an explanatory alternative to evolutionary biology but needs it as a complement to accounts focused on the internal self-assembly of organisms; (2) though we share enactivism’s anti-representational spirit, we argue that ecological psychology can offer a better account of perception. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the (...) strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes. (shrink)

Intuitively, we can conceive of the existence of a conscious state as a pure activity that does not necessarily require a body (or even a brain). This idea has found new support in certain recent theories that present the possibility of a totally disconnected and disembodied consciousness. Against this hypothesis, I argue that human experience is intrinsically embodied and embedded, though in a specific way. Using Sartre’s phenomenology of the body, I first analyze the concept of consciousness as intentionality and (...) a world-disclosing activity, thus explaining how conscious activity can only be expressed through a body that is spatiotemporally related to the world. Then, I argue that bodily consciousness does not necessarily imply the actual presence of an anatomical body but, rather, a process of spatialization and temporalization (hodological space and temporal synthesis) through the “spatiotemporal body”. Finally, I test my thesis by critiquing some cases of apparent disembodied/disconnected consciousness, i.e., dreams, out-of-body experiences, and the brain-in-a-vat scenario. (shrink)

Music can contaminate us. Sometimes, listeners perceive music as expressing some emotion (say, sadness), and this elicits the same emotion in them (they feel sad). What is musical contagion? This entry presents the main theories of musical contagion that crystallize around the challenge to the leading theory of emotions as experiences of values. How and why does music contaminate us? Does musical contagion elicit garden variety emotions, such as sadness, joy, and anxiety? Does music contaminate us by simply moving us? (...) Which role does imagination play in our affective responses to music? Is musical arousal elicited by automatic mimicry? What does musical contagion teach us about emotions? Musical contagion addresses fundamental theoretical and practical issues. (shrink)

How are we to understand the intentionality of desire? According to the two classical views, desire is either a positive evaluation or a disposition to act. This essay examines these conceptions of desire and argues for a deontic alternative, namely the view that desiring is representing a state of affairs as what ought to be. Three lines of criticism of the classical pictures of desire are provided. The first concerns desire’s direction of fit, i.e. the intuition that the world should (...) conform to our desires. The second concerns the “death of desire” principle, i.e. the intuition that one cannot desire what one represents as actual. The last pertains to desire’s role in psychological explanations, i.e. the intuition that desires can explain motivations and be explained by evaluations. Following these criticisms, three positive arguments in favor of the deontic conception are sketched. (shrink)

Music can infect us. In the dominant approach, music contaminates listeners through emotional mimicry and independently of value appraisal, just like when we catch other people’s feelings. Musical contagion is thus considered fatal to the mainstream view of emotions as cognitive evaluations. This paper criticizes this line of argument and proposes a new cognitivist account: the value metaphor view. Non-cognitivism relies on a contentious model of emotion transmission. In the competing model (social appraisal), we catch people’s emotions by appraising value (...) through their emotional expressions. Social appraisal debunks the main motivation for non-cognitivism and offers fruitful insights into musical contagion. Combining it with metaphor theory, I claim that musical contagion involves experiencing the music as a metaphor for emotions and values. Just like people infect us as we appraise value through their emotional expressions, music contaminates listeners because they hear it metaphorically-as some emotional expression and hereby appraise it metaphorically-as some value. As infectious music “sounds like” emotions and values, cognitivism is safe. (shrink)

This paper deals with the relationship between legal responsibility and causation. I argue that legal responsibility is not necessarily rooted in causation. The general claim I aim to disprove is that responsibility is descriptive because it is fundamentally rooted in causality, and causality is metaphysically real and founded. My strategy is twofold. First, I show (in §1) that there are significant and independent non- causal form of responsibility that cannot be reduced to causal responsibility; second, in §2, I show that (...) the very notion of causality is— lato sensu—not plainly descriptive. I will suggest that even causation is tied to evaluative elements, contrary to what is assumed by many theorists and practitioners working in normative domains. (shrink)

In this article I try to prove that the crisis of the West is necessarily linked to the crisis of a monotheism, which has lost its primordial sense. Indeed, because God was conceived of in Western civilization on the basis of the Plotinian unus—that is, on the basis of identity—and every other relationship to alterity was conceived of following this very same criterion, sociality was defined as plurality of the individual, as a mere numerical multiplicity. Against this conception I sketch (...) a new schema for thinking of God and thinking of the relation to otherness based on a differentiality irreducible to any identity. I depict this differentiality as based on the Husserlian conception of time consciousness, defining it not only as a mere lack of identity but as a non-indifference for the other. Hence, I conclude that it is possible to think of a true monotheism that fosters a multiplicity of religions that are not indifferent but responsible to each other. (shrink)

We discuss the relationship between logic, geometry and probability theory under the light of a novel approach to quantum probabilities which generalizes the method developed by R. T. Cox to the quantum logical approach to physical theories.

En el presente artículo se intenta poner de relieve cómo la comp- rensión levinasiana del tiempo contribuye a la recuperación del valor y del sentido del instante presente, el cual ha sido menospreciado hasta nuestros días en gran parte de la tradición filosófica en tanto concebido a partir del tiempo, pensado este último como duración. Se trata así pues de pensar el sentido propio del instante en sí mismo, en cuanto momento presente, independientemente del sentido fun- cional que se le (...) asigna como parte de un conjunto –la duración– que lo abarca y en el que se absorbe. Se tratará por lo tanto de imaginar otras metáforas para explicar el acaecer temporal, distintas de la del punto, de la línea o de la del flujo del devenir; metáforas a partir de las cuales el tiempo ha sido siempre comprendido como un continuo homogéneo. Estas representaciones abstractas del tiempo presentan un orden que reúne los instantes, pero carecen de la noción de un instante central: ese instante por excelencia que es el presente. (shrink)

Desire has not been at the center of recent preoccupations in the philosophy of mind. Consequently, the literature settled into several dogmas. The first part of this introduction presents these dogmas and invites readers to scrutinize them. The main dogma is that desires are motivational states. This approach contrasts with the other dominant conception: desires are positive evaluations. But there are at least four other dogmas: the world should conform to our desires (world-to-mind direction of fit), desires involve a positive (...) evaluation (the “guise of the good”), we cannot desire what we think is actual (the “death of desire” principle), and, in neuroscience, the idea that the reward system is the key to understanding desire. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contributions to this volume. The hope is to contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on this neglected, albeit crucial, aspect of the mind. (shrink)

Paraconsistent logics are logical systems that reject the classical principle, usually dubbed Explosion, that a contradiction implies everything. However, the received view about paraconsistency focuses only the inferential version of Explosion, which is concerned with formulae, thereby overlooking other possible accounts. In this paper, we propose to focus, additionally, on a meta-inferential version of Explosion, i.e. which is concerned with inferences or sequents. In doing so, we will offer a new characterization of paraconsistency by means of which a logic is (...) paraconsistent if it invalidates either the inferential or the meta-inferential notion of Explosion. We show the non-triviality of this criterion by discussing a number of logics. On the one hand, logics which validate and invalidate both versions of Explosion, such as classical logic and Asenjo–Priest’s 3-valued logic LP. On the other hand, logics which validate one version of Explosion but not the other, such as the substructural logics TS and ST, introduced by Malinowski and Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij, which are obtained via Malinowski’s and Frankowski’s q- and p-matrices, respectively. (shrink)

This brief note explores Sorainen's (1939) contribution to the birth of deontic logic. He maintained that imperatives can be true or, respectively, false.

We study the origin of quantum probabilities as arising from non-Boolean propositional-operational structures. We apply the method developed by Cox to non distributive lattices and develop an alternative formulation of non-Kolmogorovian probability measures for quantum mechanics. By generalizing the method presented in previous works, we outline a general framework for the deduction of probabilities in general propositional structures represented by lattices (including the non-distributive case).

The main thesis of this work is as follows: there are versions of Yablo’s paradox that, if Cook is right about the non-circular character of his version of it, are truly paradoxical and genuinely non-circular, and Cook’s version of Yablo’s paradox is one of them. Here I will not evaluate the"circular" or"non-circular" side to Cook’s proposal. In fact, I think that he is right about it, and that his version of Yablo’s list is non-circular. But is it paradoxical? In order (...) to be so, the principles that lead to (i) the derivation of a contradiction, or (ii) the impossibility to give a stable assignment of truth values to the relevant set of sentences, must be acceptable. I will explore two ways to argue that they are not. I will conclude that these attempts lead to a very narrow conception of a theory of truth, or to deny that a paradigmatic case of paradox, such as the"Old-Fashioned Liar," is truly paradoxical. La tesis principal de este trabajo es la siguiente: hay versiones de la paradoja de Yablo tales que, si Cook está en lo cierto acerca del carácter no-circular de su propia versión de ella, son genuinamente paradójicas y auténticamente no-circulares, y la versión de Cook en cuestión es una de ellas. Aquí no voy a evaluar su carácter circular o no-circular. Creo, de hecho, que Cook está en lo correcto sobre el punto. Pero, ¿es su versión auténticamente paradójica? Para que lo fuera, los principios que llevan a (i) derivar una contradicción, o (ii) la imposibilidad de dar una asignación de valores de verdad estables al conjunto relevante de oraciones, deben ser aceptables. Voy a explorar dos modos de argumentar que no lo son. voy a concluir que estos intentos llevan a una concepción de la teoría de la verdad muy estrecha, o a negar que un caso paradigmático de paradoja, como el"mentiroso Tradicional", sea auténticamente paradójica. (shrink)

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) defines four risk categories for AI systems: unacceptable, high, limited, and minimal. However, it lacks a clear methodology for the assessment of these risks in concrete situations. Risks are broadly categorized based on the application areas of AI systems and ambiguous risk factors. This paper suggests a methodology for assessing AI risk magnitudes, focusing on the construction of real-world risk scenarios. To this scope, we propose to integrate the AIA with a framework developed by (...) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and related literature. This approach enables a nuanced analysis of AI risk by exploring the interplay between (a) risk determinants, (b) individual drivers of determinants, and (c) multiple risk types. We further refine the proposed methodology by applying a proportionality test to balance the competing values involved in AI risk assessment. Finally, we present three uses of this approach under the AIA: to implement the Regulation, to assess the significance of risks, and to develop internal risk management systems for AI deployers. (shrink)

People display recognizably characteristic behavioral patterns across time and situations, with a given degree of regularity. These patterns may justify the attribution of personality traits. It is arguably the commonsense view that the proper explanation of these behavioral regularities is given by intrinsic properties of the agent’s psychology. In this paper, I argue for an externalistic view of the causal basis of personality-characteristic behaviors. According to the externalistic view, the relevant behavioral regularities are better understood as the result of a (...) systematic interaction between features internal to the agent and environmental-situational factors. Moreover, if the premise is granted that people are typically able to exercise a certain degree of control over the environmental-situational conditions they find themselves in, the resulting picture is of active sort of externalism, as people may at times engage in selection and manipulation of environmental-situational conditions as a way of managing their own behavioral tendencies. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of the bust of Galileo that Vincenzo Vela created for his house and studio at Ligornetto. The work carries symbolic significance in that it was conceived by the Ticinese artist for the pilaster on the right hand side of the principal entrance to the villa, as a counterpart to the bust of Christopher Columbus on the left. It thus served to perpetuate a long-standing literary topos which started at the beginning of the 17th century and (...) which was made use of during the Risorgimento to celebrate Italian ascendency within a European context. Through this work Vela reveals his adherence to patriotic ideals that he had previously expressed through his active participation in the first Italian War of Independence, fighting in the anti-Austrian ranks. (shrink)

In this article, we will present a number of technical results concerning Classical Logic, ST and related systems. Our main contribution consists in offering a novel identity criterion for logics in general and, therefore, for Classical Logic. In particular, we will firstly generalize the ST phenomenon, thereby obtaining a recursively defined hierarchy of strict-tolerant systems. Secondly, we will prove that the logics in this hierarchy are progressively more classical, although not entirely classical. We will claim that a logic is to (...) be identified with an infinite sequence of consequence relations holding between increasingly complex relata: formulae, inferences, metainferences, and so on. As a result, the present proposal allows not only to differentiate Classical Logic from ST, but also from other systems sharing with it their valid metainferences. Finally, we show how these results have interesting consequences for some topics in the philosophical logic literature, among them for the debate around Logical Pluralism. The reason being that the discussion concerning this topic is usually carried out employing a rivalry criterion for logics that will need to be modified in light of the present investigation, according to which two logics can be non-identical even if they share the same valid inferences. (shrink)

Quantum Mechanics is a fundamental physical theory about atomic-scale processes. It was built between 1920 and 1940 by the most distinguished physicists of that time. The accordance between the predictions of the theory and experimental results is remarkable. The physical interpretation of its mathematical constructs, however, raised unprecedented controversies. Ontological, semantic, and epistemic vagueness abound in the orthodox interpretations and have resulted in serious misunderstandings that are often repeated in textbooks and elsewhere. In this work, we identify, criticize, and clarify (...) the most spread ones. (shrink)

Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...) of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? -/- Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? -/- This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind. (shrink)