Human nature is a puzzling matter that must be analysed through a holistic lens. In this commentary, I foray into anthropology's biosocial dimensions to underscore that human relations span from microorganisms to global commodities. I argue that the future of social-cultural anthropology depends on the integration of evolutionary theory for its advancement. Ultimately, since the likelihood of novel zoonoses' emergence, digital ethnography could offer remarkable opportunities for ethical and responsible inquiries.

Cultural landscapes represent a complex category where the nature-culture dichotomy seem to not be able to unfold the main features and the profound relations that humans have with the environment. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the saltpans of Se-ovlje (Slovene Istria) and Janubio (Lanzarote--Canary Islands) this article examines informant`s perceptions about the awareness of the importance and the enhancement of the holistic values of both saltpans, as well as the impacts and benefits of tourism. Comparing these perceptions about both (...) cultural landscapes, I try to suggest that the complex fruitfully relations between humans and nature in these saltpans are at odds with the neoliberal logic of nature which exploit and commoditize its resources depriving them of their respective agency. A sustainability to contrast the harmful activities of the market ought to be understood not as a simply isolation and fencing of nature for the sake of conservation, but as a preservation that need to foster the continuity of the deep interactions between human culture and non-human nature which are the core of the cultural landscapes. (shrink)

It is well known the harmful effects that savage capitalism has been causing to the environment since its introduction in a sphere in which a different logic and approach to nature are the essential conditions for the maintenance of the ecosystem and its complex relations between humans and non-human organisms. The amazon rainforest is a portion of the planet in which for thousands of years its human dwellers have been interacting with nature that it is understood beyond its physical condition. (...) Thus, to what extent Amazonian’s approaches to nature could be considered as a moral philosophy through which the way of conceptualizing nature and its non-human denizens enhances the continuity of life and the intimate relations between entities? To answer this question, I will explore the cosmological system of the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon with whom I lived for 5 months between July and November 2018, and thereby elucidate the spiritual relations that this society has with the metaphysical domain of nature. (shrink)

Based on a discussion of the theoretical contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres, this article explores social relationships as more than a human dimension. Though strongly analysed by both anthropologists, these relationships appear to involve indigenous societies’ whole ecological and cosmological system. In this sense, reciprocity, social cohesion, and exchange can be understood as material and immaterial interrelationships between entities of a more than a corporeal world. I argue, then, that to go beyond the mere anthropocentric conceptualisation of sociality (...) in a nature good to think, we need to holistically conceive the interconnected levels of trophic, socio-structural and socio-cosmic relationships and exchanges between human and non-human beings in the ecosystem. (shrink)

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has threatened ethnographic inquiry, undermining its quintessential characteristic. Participant observation, then, has been thoroughly dismembered by the radical measures implemented to prevent the spread of the virus. This phenomenon, in short, has dragged anthropologists to a liminal state within which ethnography is paradoxically caught in an onto-epistemological unstable vortex. The question of being here and not there, during the pandemic, is epitomised in the instability of different spatio-temporal contexts that overlap through technological mediations. Reflecting on previous (...) fieldwork experiences and current virtual inquiries with the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon unfolds how COVID-19 has thoroughly reshaped how the author approaches subjects' socio-ecological settings. Against this background, the article argues that corporeal immersion remains a necessary condition for the anthropological scrutiny of multispecies relationalities amidst the challenging times of the Anthropocene. The article nevertheless demonstrates that the intellectual efforts to grasp the different material temporalities of virtual spaces embrace the ethical principles concerning the renunciation of fieldwork with vulnerable communities. Furthermore, a reflective and speculative stance is proposed to actualise the snapshots of faraway physicalities linking them to past embodied and multi-sensory experiences. It is ultimately theorised how these mnemonic devices operate as creative forms of inquiry that overcome the pandemic consequences, extra-stimulating our cognitive capabilities to reflect on prior and possible socio-material interactions. (shrink)

Al tratar de disolver la neta separación entre una mente racional y la materia inerte abogada por el dualismo Cartesiano, el monismo lucha por reunificar estas distintas realidades ontológicas. Tal como para Claude Lévi-Strauss y Baruch Spinoza, esa dicha unificación no puede prescindir de la trascendencia de la mente humana como locus del pensamiento y conocimiento de la naturaleza externa. A través de una discusión entre las abstracciones de la etnología Amerindia (animismo-perspectivismo), las teorizaciones del estructuralismo y las relaciones que (...) estos tienen con algunas especulaciones filosóficas occidentales, este artículo trata de analizar las intricadas interacciones humano-naturaleza entre los Shuar de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana. De esta forma, se argumenta que las realidades metafísicas de las experiencias oníricas y visionarias están ontológicamente determinadas por el grado de intensidad de contacto que los humanos establecen con las subjetividades materiales del ecosistema. (shrink)

La propuesta inmaterialista de Berkeley, elaborada definitivamente en sus Principles (1710), tiene como antecedente remoto los postulados del capadocio Gregorio de Nisa, quien en algunas de sus obras desarrolló argumentos, en relación con la materia, muy semejantes a los que planteó Berkeley casi catorce siglos después. El presente escrito tiene por objetivo mostrar que las concepciones de ambos pensadores tienen elementos en común, lo que permite sostener que el filósofo de Cesarea es un antecede lejano del inmaterialismo berkeleyano. // (...) Berkeley's immaterialism has as a remote antecedent in the postulates of the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, who in some of his works developed arguments, concerning the matter, very similar to those that Berkeley presented almost fourteen centuries later. This paper aims to show that both philosophical conceptions have elements in common, which allows us to assert that the Cappadocian father is a distant precedent of Berkeley's immaterialism. (shrink)

This article interrogates how both visual culture and queer futurity can be made visible in and through the Philippine archive as a case in point. It begins by problematizing a paradoxical specter of futurity that seems to haunt more the Global North. But despite such haunting, the Philippines in the Global South continues to have thin to nil (i.e., nearly absent) envisioning toward a queer futurity, for most Filipino LGBTQIA + scholars seem to still be engaged in recovering “lost histories” (...) from the archives and “thick descriptions” of the present, while focusing more on the textual than the visual. The article then proceeds to discuss mobilizing ekphrasis and representation as main conceptual tools in bridging the temporally opposite projects of queer archiving and queer futurity. It analyzes through ekphrastic re-reading the various LGBTQIA + representations from the Philippine archive – that is, a “palimpsestic site” of colonial confrontations, national (re)construction, and potentially global queer critique. These re-readings along the archival grain juxtapose the archival representations as historically authentic vis-à-vis their more present-day representations as visual proxies. Yet more crucially, the potency of these ekphrastic re-readings – in lieu of visually actual – lies in their capacity to reverberate queer possibilities, re-awakening them from their sleep within the archives, and thus re-mobilizing them toward becoming a useful part of academics, activists, and artists’ “shared arsenal” in re-envisioning and, hopefully in time, reifying such past possibilities into future queer actualities anew. (shrink)

There are many ways in which a speaker can confuse their audience. In this paper, I will focus on one such way, namely, a way of talking that seems to manifest a cross-level kind of cognitive dissonance on the part of the speaker. The goal of the paper is to explain why such ways of talking sound so twisted. The explanation is two-pronged, since their twisted nature may come either from the very mental states that the speaker thereby makes manifest, (...) or from how the speaker chooses to express themselves (even if there is nothing wrong with their mental states). So-called ‘Moore-paradoxical’ utterances are but one example of the phenomenon, and the explanation of what is wrong about them is subsumed under a more general explanation here—one that captures also the twisted-ness of utterances whereby questions are raised or intentions expressed. (shrink)

In 2010s, the love story between Sidapa and Bulan, two oft-described as male gods, widely circulated online and eventually became a folkloric representation about the LGBTQIA+ during the pre-colonial Philippines. But in 2019 this queer mythological romance was exposed to be a hoax. However, instead of dismissing the story altogether for being a hoax, especially given the story’s already irreversible circulation in popular culture today, this paper rather examines the “mythification” of Sidapa-Bulan queer romance as a case for historical rethinking. (...) Drawing from a bricolage of digital, ethnohistorical, and historiographical materials, this paper is divided into four sections. The first section dissects this paper’s conceptual tools: the use of seemingly anachronistic categories of “queer” and “LGBTQIA+,” and how these categories intersect with the concepts of “myth-making” as a sociological (and by extension, historical) phenomenon, and what came to be known as “neo-archiving” (i.e., the use of fiction in response to the gaps in history). The second section explains the paper’s methodology and sources, specifically its use of four historical thinking skills in dissecting the Sidapa-Bulan myth. The third section examines the Sidapa-Bulan myth as a historical case, specifically in terms of sourcing and close reading, corroborating, and contextualizing. And the fourth section attempts to offer, albeit in broad strokes, some potential ways to move forward from the damages caused by the Sidapa-Bulan myth. As such, this paper argues that only by maintaining transparency over its own history, that the Sidapa-Bulan queer romance, as a case of contemporary myth-making (where queer artists, authors, and allies did not merely passively consume the story, but rather actively re-define and appropriate it), can become useful and integral in rethinking and, thus, enriching the Philippine LGBTQIA+ past. But in a practical sense, this paper demonstrates how historical thinking skills can empower the public to detect, dissect, and dispel disinformation today. (shrink)

This capstone project aimed to enhance the operational efficiency of school transactions at Mary Perpetua E. Brioso National High School (MPEBNHS) in response to challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This goal was achieved by developing and implementing the Mobile-Based Selected School Services Application, "iSkulSerb." The development of iSkulSerb followed the systematic approach of Borg and Gall's (1983) Research and Development (R&D) methodology for creating and validating educational products. To ensure the validity and reliability of the application, it underwent rigorous (...) examination by both IT and education experts. Additionally, survey questionnaires were administered during the project's implementation to assess the impact of iSkulSerb's features on school stakeholders. The research findings highlighted positive perceptions and outcomes related to iSkulSerb. Stakeholders demonstrated a favorable acceptance of the application, as evidenced by an overall weighted mean of 4.34. The accessibility of school services saw a substantial improvement, reflected in the weighted mean of 4.37. User-friendliness also received positive feedback, with an overall weighted mean of 4.27. These findings suggest that iSkulSerb effectively addresses the challenges faced by the school, contributing to enhanced operational efficiency and improved stakeholder experiences. Given the demonstrated reliability and efficacy of iSkulSerb, there is a compelling case for its widespread adoption across other public schools within the Schools Division of Masbate Province. The positive reception and success metrics indicate that iSkulSerb can serve as a benchmark for other regional schools. (shrink)

In this paper I present reasons for us to accept the hypothesis that suspended judgment has correctness conditions, just like beliefs do. Roughly put, the idea is that suspended judgment about p is correct when both p and ¬p might be true in view of certain facts that characterize the subject’s situation. The reasons to accept that hypothesis are broadly theoretical ones: it adds unifying power to our epistemological theories, it delivers good and conservative consequences, and it allows us to (...) assess processes of reasoning involving attitudes of suspended judgment. (shrink)

Um alinhamento responsável à alguma versão do naturalismo filosófico requer a articulação explicita e cuidadosa de um argumento em sua defesa. Em quatro passos, o texto que segue abaixo expande e examina a validade de um argumento que é frequentemente rascunhado em favor do naturalismo. Como veremos, contudo, a versão do naturalismo que esse argumento nos permite é um pouco diferente dos naturalismos filosóficos mais populares.

What I call the Doxastic Puzzle, is the impression that while each of these claims seems true, at least one of them must be false: (a) Claims of the form ‘S ought to have doxastic attitude D towards p at t’ are sometimes true at t, (b) If Φ-ing at t is not within S’s effective control at t, then it is false, at t, that ‘S ought to Φ at t’, (c) For all S, p, and t, having doxastic (...) attitude D towards p at t is not within S’s effective control at t. All three natural replies to the puzzle have been pursued. Some have claimed that doxastic attitudes like believing that p are, in fact, within our effective control, or sufficiently so. Others have claimed that doxastic ought-claims, strictly speaking, are always false. And some have denied that effective control is required for the adequacy of doxastic ought-claims in general. I here pursue and examine a different strategy. In the first part of this paper, I argue that these claims are not only each true but actually not in tension with each other in the first place. Instead of attempting to dispel the puzzle, this solution proposes to evade it instead: to solve it by properly understanding, and by thereby accepting without contradiction, all of its constitutive claims. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the evasive strategy forces us to re-think our understanding of the place of normative reasons in epistemology. More exactly, it seems to come at the cost of one central way of thinking about our reasons for having doxastic attitudes, one where such reasons are good-standing exemplars of normative reasons in general. The evasive strategy, that is, threatens to lead us very quickly to a deflationary picture of epistemic normativity: it rescues normative talk, but sacrifices normative substance. I conclude by explaining why I think this is more consequential than some have made it out to be, and by suggesting that these consequences are welcome nonetheless. (shrink)

My starting point is what I call the Normative Authority Conception of justification, where S is justified in their belief that p at t (to some degree n) if and only if their believing that p at t is not ruled out by epistemic norms that have normative authority over S at t. With this in mind, this paper develops an account of doxastic justification by first developing an account of the normative authority of epistemic norms. Drawing from work in (...) political philosophy, I argue that (a) the cognitive and evaluative commitments and concerns behind our actual practices of holding each other and ourselves accountable for our beliefs reveal which epistemic norms we have consented to be under, and that (b) it is because we have consented to be under the authority of these norms – by actually holding ourselves and others accountable to them – that they in turn have normative authority over us. By connecting the authority of epistemic norms to the authority we have over ourselves in this way, the resulting account of doxastic justification (i) explains why it can be appropriate to criticize, resent, or sanction someone for having unjustified beliefs, (ii) avoids the phenomena of normative alienation and normative parochialism, and (iii) respects the social and collective nature of epistemic justification. (shrink)

Bakla signals “effeminacy” and “homosexuality,” which stigma signifies being “weak,” “fake woman,” and “unreal man.” This historical research interrogates the etymology of bakla, which etymology claims that bakla only became a label for gay identity since the 1960s. A newfound evidence, the Bienvenido N. Santos’ “Recollections” (1932), challenges this etymology; as the document used bakla to signify “effeminate” decades before the 1960s. -/- Mobilizing this newfound evidence alongside theoretical, historiographic, and archival data, this thesis asks: (1) How can the 1932 (...) “Recollections” help explain the crystallization of bakla into a label for “effeminate homosexual male” identity since the 1960s? (2) What can socio-historical processes further reveal about the etymology of bakla, and why the word bears so much stigma? (3) How did “effeminacy” and male “homosexuality” become semantically linked with bakla’s historic senses? At its core, the study argues that sexism and political instability coincide in the social history of the bakla. -/- Contextualizing bakla’s semantic shifts reveals that the word’s stigma comes from its earliest meaning; besides “fearful and weak,” it was bakla as “deceptive.” While tracking bakla’s semantic links with the pre-existing terms for gay identity shows that bakla was forged alongside historical biases against women. These biases rendered gay men and trans women undesirable. And archival data uncover five (5) factors explaining why bakla crystallized into a gender label, which also offer insights on how bakla has been reclaimed and reworked, despite its persisting stigma, in more recent years. -/- The thesis exposes bakla’s status as a “keyword” in the Philippine conceptual, sexual, and social history. It undresses bakla, opens it to critique, and recognizes the importance its etymology can play in undoing bakla’s stigma, and its potential in rethinking Philippine history itself. (shrink)

Contemporary studies in unconscious cognition are essentially founded on dissociation, i.e., on how it dissociates with respect to conscious mental processes and representations. This is claimed to be in so many and diverse ways that one is often lost in dissociation. In order to reduce this state of confusion we here carry out two major tasks: based on the central distinction between cognitive processes and representations, we identify and isolate the main dissociation paradigms; we then critically analyze their key tenets (...) and reported findings. (shrink)

Viruses and related infectious genetic parasites are the most abundant biological agents on this planet. They invade all cellular organisms, are key agents in the generation of adaptive and innate immune systems, and drive nearly all regulatory processes within living cells.

Foundational ontologies, central constructs in ontological investigations and engineering alike, are based on ontological categories. Firstly proposed by Aristotle as the very ur- elements from which the whole of reality can be derived, they are not easy to identify, let alone partition and/or hierarchize; in particular, the question of their number poses serious challenges. The late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg wrote around 1286 a tutorial that can help us today with this exceedingly difficult task. In this paper, I discuss (...) ontological categories and their importance for foundational ontologies from both the contemporary perspective and the original Aristotelian viewpoint, I provide the translation from the Latin into English of Dietrich's De origine II with an introductory elaboration, and I extract a foundational ontology–that is in fact a single-category one–from this text rooted in Dietrich's specification of types of subjecthood and his conception of intentionality as causal operation. (shrink)

Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...) and were essentially inseparable in medieval thought. This constitutes the foundation for a bridge, and this article analyzes the causality-based ontology of the late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg from the viewpoint of today's upper-ontology engineering. In this bridging attempt, it offers a translation into English of the first part of Dietrich's De origine (abbreviated title) that is a compromise between traditional scholarly translations of medieval Latin philosophical texts and contemporary ontology. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno’s letter correspondence with Walter Benjamin throughout the decade of the 1930’s entertains the central question concerning the possibility of philosophy in their intellectual milieu. The fate of this possibility for Adorno hinges on Benjamin’s work-in-progress Das Passagen-Werk—a fate that is catastrophically blocked by an uncritical tendency convicted repeatedly by the former as “undialectical.” And yet Adorno obstinately persists in clinging to the canon of a philosophically overdetermined demand he endearingly calls “my Arcades orthodoxy.” The threatening destruction of (...) the aura of this orthodoxy reaches a crisis in Adorno’s ruthless metacritique of Benjamin’s alleged undialectical treatment of aesthetic autonomy in a draft of the Kunstwerk essay, marking a critical wound in the correspondence which the following exposition tracks in the enigmatic changeover in the philosophical exigency of the said orthodoxy from prima philosophia to ultima philosophia. The lingering wound is registered in Adorno’s late philosophical work. (shrink)

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

In Leibniz’s New Essays stands out, within many important topics, his doctrine of innate ideas, which supposes the division between sense knowledge and innate knowledge and implies the distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact. That doctrine is particularly relevant for Leibniz’s philosophy, but implicitly entails the epistemological difference between belief, on one hand, and certainty, on the other. In this paper I outline, according to my interpretation, how Leibniz explains that humans can have certainty about innate ideas. (...) This topic is important because if Leibniz demonstrates the possibility of having certainty of those ideas, then, it is feasible to believe in its existence. However, if his explanation is unsatisfactory his metaphysical doctrine would be seriously weakened and, at the same time, both skepticism and Locke’s empiricist doctrine would be reinforced. (shrink)

3rd ed, 2021. A circumscription of the classical theory of computation building up from the Chomsky hierarchy. With the usual topics in formal language and automata theory.

For millennia, knowledge has eluded a precise definition. The industrialization of knowledge (IoK) and the associated proliferation of the so-called knowledge communities in the last few decades caused this state of affairs to deteriorate, namely by creating a trio composed of data, knowledge, and information (DIK) that is not unlike the aporia of the trinity in philosophy. This calls for a general theory of knowledge (ToK) that can work as a foundation for a science of knowledge (SoK) and additionally distinguishes (...) knowledge from both data and information. In this paper, I attempt to sketch this generality via the establishing of both knowledge structures and knowledge systems that can then be adopted/adapted by the diverse communities for the respective knowledge technologies and practices. This is achieved by means of a formal–indeed, mathematical–approach to epistemological matters a.k.a. formal epistemology. The corresponding application focus is on knowledge systems implementable as computer programs. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustices, according to Miranda Fricker, are injustices that occur “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker 2007, 1). For Fricker, the relevant injustice in these cases is the very lack of knowledge and understanding experienced by the subject. In this way, hermeneutical injustices are instances of epistemic injustices, the kind of injustice that “wrongs someone in their capacity as a subject of knowledge” (...) (Fricker 2007, 5). In this paper, however, I identify different means by which our hermeneutic activities lead to social injustices, of both a practical and epistemic kind, and I identify different ways in which those injustices manifest themselves. Since Fricker’s use of the notion of “hermeneutical injustices” to denote a well-defined kind of injustice is rightfully well-established, I here refer to the more general kinds of injustices I have in mind as “hermeneutic injustices” instead. (shrink)

To most of us – believers and non-believers alike – the possibility of a perfect God co-existing with the kinds of evil that we see calls out for explanation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the belief that God must have justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see has been a perennial feature of theistic thought. Recently, however, a growing number of authors have argued that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with the existence of gratuitous (...) evil. Given powerful, millenia-long sensibilities about power and love and justice, it isn’t hard to find that suggestion simply incredible. Nonetheless, in this paper I will argue that the most prominent theistic alternatives to what has seemed incredible to most of us throughout most of history are themselves patently unacceptable for the theist as well. On any of the most widely accepted accounts of how God could have justifying reasons for permitting some evils, God’s existence means that we have justifying reasons for perpetrating and allowing every evil that we see. That's hard to swallow too. If I’m right about all of this, then two competing outcomes seem to present themselves as a possible result. On the one hand, for the theist, the apparently outrageous suggestion that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with gratuitous evil no longer looks like it faces a formidable, hard-to-resist alternative. On the other hand, some like me might think that my arguments go no distance at all towards dispelling the incredibility of the gratuitous evil nouvelle vague. On this line, theism may seem now to be between the rock and the hard place: it seems hard to make sense of the existence of a perfect God whether or not He has justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see. (shrink)

In this article, we engage with a theory of management advanced by MacIntyrean scholars of business ethics and organization studies to develop an account of “chronic moral injury” in the workplace. In contrast to what we call “acute moral injury,” which focuses on grave, traumatic events, chronic moral injury results from poor institutional form—when an individual desiring excellence must function within a vicious institution that impedes the acquisition of virtues and marginalizes practices. In other words, chronic moral injury occurs when (...) practitioners who pursue excellence in their practice work within corrupt or malformed organizations. To demonstrate this point, we recount the events associated with the rise and fall of the biotech company, Theranos. This case study advances an empirical contribution to MacIntyrean studies by demonstrating how chronic moral injury can happen under such conditions and what the negative consequences may entail for workers. (shrink)

Not focusing on the history of classical logic, this book provides discussions and quotes central passages on its origins and development, namely from a philosophical perspective. Not being a book in mathematical logic, it takes formal logic from an essentially mathematical perspective. Biased towards a computational approach, with SAT and VAL as its backbone, this is an introduction to logic that covers essential aspects of the three branches of logic, to wit, philosophical, mathematical, and computational.

During the early modern age, the teaching of philosophy pivots on the systematic manual which replaces the traditional ‘commentarium’ also in the schools run by the religious orders of the Catholic Church. When confronted with the rise and diffusion of the new philosophy and of the new science, the authors of philosophical manuals basically follow three different directions: beside the defenders of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition and the enthusiastic innovators, there emerges a third conspicuous orientation, which tries to take a middle (...) course and draws inspiration from the ‘philosophia eclectica’ understood as a path independent of the various philosophical schools. At the same time, the historic-philosophical perspective starts to be introduced into the systematic manual of philosophy, to the extent that it becomes an autonomous treatment with respect to the manual itself. (shrink)

A. Newell and H. A. Simon were two of the most influential scientists in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the late 1950s through to the early 1990s. This paper reviews their crucial contribution to this field, namely to symbolic AI. This contribution was constituted mostly by their quest for the implementation of general intelligence and (commonsense) knowledge in artificial thinking or reasoning artifacts, a project they shared with many other scientists but that in their case was theoretically (...) based on the idiosyncratic notions of symbol systems and the representational abilities they give rise to, in particular with respect to knowledge. While focusing on the period 1956-1982, this review cites both earlier and later literature and it attempts to make visible their potential relevance to today's greatest unifying AI challenge, to wit, the design of wholly autonomous artificial agents (a.k.a. robots) that are not only rational and ethical, but also self-conscious. (shrink)

Genera, typically hand-in-hand with their branching species, are essential elements of vocabulary-based information constructs, in particular scientific taxonomies. Should they also feature in formal ontologies, the highest of such constructs? I argue in this article that the answer is “Yes” and that the question posed in its title also has a Yes-answer: The way medieval ontologists sliced up the world into genera does matter to formal ontology. More specifically, the way Dietrich of Freiberg, a Latin scholastic, conceived and applied strictly (...) generic criteria to slice up the world into its entities can provide some guidelines to the field of formal ontology with respect to not only its contents, but also its scope. In particular, Dietrich's information criterion plays here a central role. (shrink)

The gulf between philosophical and formal ontology can and should be bridged. In this Editorial, I elaborate briefly on this subject.

Paul Silva has recently argued that doxastic justification does not have a basing requirement. An important part of his argument depends on the assumption that doxastic and moral permissibility have a parallel structure. I here reply to Silva's argument by challenging this assumption. I claim that moral permissibility is an agential notion, while doxastic permissibility is not. I then briefly explore the nature of these notions and briefly consider their implications for praise and blame.

Given plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence and undercutting defeat, many believe that the force of the evidential problem of evil depends on sceptical theism’s being false: if evil is...

An analysis of--yet another--case of academic failure in multi- and interdisciplinarity. An editorial of the Journal of Knowledge Structures & Systems.

2nd edition. Many-valued logics are those logics that have more than the two classical truth values, to wit, true and false; in fact, they can have from three to infinitely many truth values. This property, together with truth-functionality, provides a powerful formalism to reason in settings where classical logic—as well as other non-classical logics—is of no avail. Indeed, originally motivated by philosophical concerns, these logics soon proved relevant for a plethora of applications ranging from switching theory to cognitive modeling, and (...) they are today in more demand than ever, due to the realization that inconsistency and vagueness in knowledge bases and information processes are not only inevitable and acceptable, but also perhaps welcome. The main modern applications of (any) logic are to be found in the digital computer, and we thus require the practical knowledge how to computerize—which also means automate—decisions (i.e. reasoning) in many-valued logics. This, in turn, necessitates a mathematical foundation for these logics. This book provides both these mathematical foundation and practical knowledge in a rigorous, yet accessible, text, while at the same time situating these logics in the context of the satisfiability problem (SAT) and automated deduction. The main text is complemented with a large selection of exercises, a plus for the reader wishing to not only learn about, but also do something with, many-valued logics. (shrink)

En The paradox of Addition and its dissolution (1969), Mario Bunge presenta algunos argumentos para mostrar que la Regla de Adición puede ocasionar paradojas o problemas semánticos. Posteriormente, Margáin (1972) y Robles (1976) mostraron que las afirmaciones de Bunge son insostenibles, al menos desde el punto de vista de la lógica clásica. Aunque estamos de acuerdo con las críticas de Margáin y Robles, no estamos de acuerdo en el diagnóstico del origen del problema y tampoco con la manera en la (...) que se proponen solucionarlo. En esta medida, en este texto mostraremos cómo la Regla de Adición sí trae problemas semánticos que pueden ser planteados desde diferentes perspectivas contemporáneas, como la extensionalidad del condicional, los principios proscriptivos y la validez conexiva. (shrink)

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that we ought to form and maintain our beliefs in accordance with our evidence. In this paper, I criticize two arguments in its defense. I begin by discussing Berit Broogard’s use of the distinction between narrow-scope and wide-scope requirements against W.K. Clifford’s moral defense of. I then use this very distinction against a defense of inspired by Stephen Grimm’s more recent claims about the moral source of epistemic normativity. I use this distinction once again to (...) argue that Hilary Kornblith’s criticism of Richard Feldman’s defense of is incomplete. Finally, I argue that Feldman’s defense is insensitive to the relation between normative requirements and privileged values: values that have normative authority over us. (shrink)

Aesthetic subjectivism takes the truth of aesthetic judgments to be relative to the individual making that judgment. Despite widespread suspicion, however, this does not mean that one cannot be wrong about such judgments. Accordingly, this does not mean that one cannot gain higher-order evidence of error and fallibility that bears on the rationality of the aesthetic judgment in question. In this paper, we explain and explore these issues in some detail.

Expressiveness and decidability are two core aspects of programming languages that should be thoroughly known by those who use them; this includes knowledge of their metalanguages a.k.a. formal grammars. The van Wijngaarden grammars (WGs) are capable of generating all the languages in the Chomsky hierarchy and beyond; this makes them a relevant tool in the design of (more) expressive programming languages. But this expressiveness comes at a very high cost: The syntax of WGs is extremely complex and the decision problem (...) for the generated languages is generally unsolvable. With this in mind, I provide here a short primer of the syntax of WGs, which includes syntactic restrictions that guarantee decidability for the corresponding generated languages. (shrink)

This is not a guide for your writing process. You should write in whatever way expressing and making sense of your ideas feels most natural and most productive to you. This is a guide for organizing your ideas, after you have captured some of them in fits and starts of prose, into a particular kind of final product: the basic philosophy paper.

Reasoning over our knowledge bases and theories often requires non-deductive inferences, especially – but by no means only – when commonsense reasoning is the case, i.e. when practical agency is called for. This kind of reasoning can be adequately formalized via the notion of supraclassical consequence, a non-deductive consequence tightly associated with default and non-monotonic reasoning and featuring centrally in abductive, inductive, and probabilistic logical systems. In this paper, we analyze core concepts and problems of these systems in the light (...) of supraclassical consequence. (shrink)

On how medieval philosophy is not (only) theology.

James Sterba has recently argued that the free will defense fails to explain the compossibility of a perfect God and the amount and degree of moral evil that we see. I think he is mistaken about this. I thus find myself in the awkward and unexpected position, as a non-theist myself, of defending the free will defense. In this paper, I will try to show that once we take care to focus on what the free will defense is trying to (...) accomplish, and by what means it tries to do so, we will see that Sterba’s criticism of it misses the mark. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of sound individuation (SI) and its connection to sound ontology (SO). It is argued that the problems of SI, such as aspatiality, extreme individuation, indexical perplexity and duration puzzles are due to SO’s uncertainties. Besides, I describe the views in SO, including the wave view (WV), the property view (PV), and the event view (EV), as Casey O’Callaghan defends it. According to O’Callaghan, EV offers clear standards to individuate sounds. However, this claim is countered by (...) the consideration that any view could also defend the standards in SO, and thus, EV does not solve any of the problems mentioned above. As a way of showing the difficulties inherited by sound’s inner ontology, the problem of its linguistic representation is also addressed. The problem of SI can be developed within the frame of the philosophy of language and, specifically, regarding the discussion about mass vs count-­sortal terms. Is the term sound a mass or a count­-sortal? It is shown that, for reasons pertaining SO, the decision regarding the case of sound as a mass or count-­sortal term remains open. SI is, thus, covered from the SO to the philosophy of language. (shrink)