El presente artículo analiza la técnica del fracking como una solución a la problemática que en materia hidrocarburos se había dado en las últimas dos décadas, y los impactos negativos que conlleva para la salud y el ambiente. Se plantea como solución la aplicación del principio de precaución que le permite al Estado actuar ante una situación de riesgo e incertidumbre. La metodología escogida fue de corte analítico-deductivo a partir de la normatividad vigente y de los postulados teóricos de algunos (...) autores que son referentes en la materia. Como resultados se presentan algunas reflexiones que invitan a considerar la aplicación de este principio, hasta tanto no se tengan estudios suficientes que garanticen que esta práctica preservará el ambiente y no afectará la salud humana. (shrink)

Abstract: Introspection reveals that one is frequently conscious of some form of inner speech, which may appear either in a condensed or expanded form. It has been claimed that this speech reflects the way in which language is involved in conscious thought, fulfilling a number of cognitive functions. We criticize three theories that address this issue: Bermúdez’s view of language as a generator of second-order thoughts, Prinz’s development of Jackendoff’s intermediate-level theory of consciousness, and Carruthers’s theory of inner speech as (...) a rehearsal of action-schemata. We contend they have problems to account for those cases in which inner speech is fragmentary, and for the difference with those instances in which it appears as more sentence-like. In addition, we present verbal overshadowing as a phenomenon that neither of them can easily explain. Finally, we propose an account in which inner speech is fundamentally silent outer speech and argue that it is more explanatory than the alternatives. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, namely in the specificity of the Conflict of interpretations category, is a fruitful resource in the constitution of Women's Studies as well as to legitimize the need for its full integration in the canons of humanistic knowledge. In general, they continue to ignore the immense body of knowledge and perspectives that Women's Studies have produced in recent decades. In this sense, it begins by presenting the general features of the hermeneutic problematic (...) and the theme of Conflict of Interpretations, and then showing its proven contribution to the development of Women's Studies and defending its possible contribution to enhancing their integration into canons. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as ?There is a fly here.? Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan's biosemantics, offers (...) an account of productivity in thought. This paper raises a basic worry about this account: that the use of mapping functions in the theory is unacceptable from a naturalistic point of view. (shrink)

This paper presents the Obstetric and Neonatal Ontology (OntONeo). This ontology has been created to provide a consensus representation of salient electronic health record (EHR) data and to serve interoperability of the associated data and information systems. More generally, it will serve interoperability of clinical and translational data, for example deriving from genomics disciplines and from clinical trials. Interoperability of EHR data is important to ensuring continuity of care during the prenatal and postnatal periods for both mother and child. As (...) a strategy to advance such interoperability we use an approach based on ontological realism and on the ontology development principles of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry, including reuse of reference ontologies wherever possible. We describe the structure and coverage domain of OntONeo and the process of creating and maintaining the ontology. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal (...) which makes progress in the treatment of this family of problems. I describe a procedure to derive a (unique) homeostatic property cluster [HPC] from facts having to do with the properties that a certain indicator relied on, in the events leading to its fixation in a certain population. This HPC is the one that should figure in the content attribution to the indicator in question. (shrink)

Electronic health records (EHRs) serve as repositories of documented data collected in a health care encounter. An EHR records information about who receives, who provides the health care and about the place where the encounter happens. We also observe additional elements relating to social relations in which the healthcare consumer is involved. To provide a consensus representation of common data and to enhance interoperability between different EHR repositories we have created a solution grounded in formal ontology. Here, we present how (...) an ontology for the obstetric and neonatal domain deals with these general elements documented in health care encounters. Our goal is to promote the interoperability of information among EHRs created in different specialties. To develop our ontology, we used two main approaches: one based on ontological realism, the other based on the principles of the OBO Foundry, including reuse of reference ontologies. (shrink)

We explore the contribution made by oscillatory, synchronous neural activity to representation in the brain. We closely examine six prominent examples of brain function in which neural oscillations play a central role, and identify two levels of involvement that these oscillations take in the emergence of representations: enabling (when oscillations help to establish a communication channel between sender and receiver, or are causally involved in triggering a representation) and properly representational (when oscillations are a constitutive part of the representation). We (...) show that even an idealized informational sender–receiver account of representation makes the representational status of oscillations a non-trivial matter, which depends on rather minute empirical details. (shrink)

Recent work on signaling has mostly focused on communication between organisms. The Lewis–Skyrms framework should be equally applicable to intra-organismic signaling. We present a Lewis–Skyrms signaling-game model of painful signaling, and use it to argue that the content of pain is predominantly imperative. We address several objections to the account, concluding that our model gives a productive framework within which to consider internal signaling.

We present a dynamic model of the evolution of communication in a Lewis signaling game while systematically varying the degree of common interest between sender and receiver. We show that the level of common interest between sender and receiver is strongly predictive of the amount of information transferred between them. We also discuss a set of rare but interesting cases in which common interest is almost entirely absent, yet substantial information transfer persists in a *cheap talk* regime, and offer a (...) diagnosis of how this may arise. -/- . (shrink)

I respond to an objection recently formulated by Barlassina and Hayward against first-order imperativism about pain, according to which it cannot account for the self-directed motivational force of pain. I am going to agree with them: it cannot. This is because pain does not have self-directed motivational force. I will argue that the alternative view—that pain is about dealing with extramental, bodily threats, not about dealing with itself—makes better sense of introspection, and of empirical research on pain avoidance. Also, a (...) naturalistic theory of body-involving commands falls straightforwardly out of our most prominent naturalistic metasemantic accounts, while the token-reflexive contents that would underlie self-directed motivation are more problematic. (shrink)

Linguistics of saying studies language in its birth. Language is the mental activity executed by speaking subjects. Linguistics of saying consists in analyzing speech acts as the result of an act of knowing. Speaking subjects speak because they have something to say. Tthey say because they define themselves before the circumstance they are in. And this is possible because they are able to know. Speaking, then, is speaking, saying and knowing. In this sense there is a progressive determination. Knowing makes (...) possible saying, and saying determines speaking, or, in other words: speaking involves saying and knowing, and saying involves knowing. The problem thus is to determine the meaningful intentional purpose of the individual speaker to say something in every speech act. (shrink)

It is widely held that it is unhelpful to model our epistemic access to modal facts on the basis of perception, and postulate the existence of a bodily mechanism attuned to modal features of the world. In this paper I defend modalizing mechanisms. I present and discuss a decision-theoretic model in which agents with severely limited cognitive abilities, at the end of an evolutionary process, have states which encode substantial information about the probabilities with which the outcomes of a certain (...) Bernoulli process occur. Thus, in the model, a process driven by very simple, thoroughly naturalistic mechanisms eventuates in modal sensitivity. (shrink)

A xurisprudencia constitucional española (STC 37/2011, de 28 de marzo, entre outras) ten establecido como fundamento do consentimento informado o dereito á integridade física e moral (art. 15 CE). O Tribunal Constitucional configura o consentimento informado como un deber de abstención do profesional sanitario, é dicir, como unha negación da competencia do profesional sanitario na terminoloxía de Hohfeld. Así pois, o consentimento informado queda conformado como un dereito negativo ou de defensa, polo que concibilo como liberdade xurídica ou facultade de (...) autodeterminación positiva esixiría a revisión do seu fundamento constitucional. O presente artigo pretende precisamente revisar a natureza iusfundamental do consentimento informado a partir da obra de W.N. Hohfeld e Robert Alexy. (shrink)

Altruism and solidarity are concepts that are closely related to organ donation for transplantation. On the one hand, they are typically used for encouraging people to donate. On the other hand, they also underpin the regulations in force in each country to different extents. They are often used indistinctly and equivocally, despite the different ethical implications of each concept. This paper aims to clarify to what extent we can speak of altruism and solidarity in the predominant models of organ donation. (...) It also raises the ethical question of whether these categories are adequate as a basis for such models, bearing in mind that organs are a scarce resource and that a shortage of them may mean that fewer lives are saved or improved. (shrink)

I construct a quantum-logical model of the type of situation that seems to be at the root of the problem of interpreting the projection postulate (Luders' rule) as a criterion of minimal disturbance. It is shown that the most natural way of characterizing minimal disturbance leads to contradictory conclusions concerning the final state.

El autor del artículo edita y estudia una inscripción funeraria inédita de época helenística encontrada en Aptera (Creta) por la arqueóloga griega V. Ninioú-Kindelí. El texto de la inscripción dice así: A) Σώσανδρος | Βίτωνος. B) Ἀμφιμήδης | Σωσάνδρω.

I sketch and defend an imperativist treatment of the phenomenology associated with disgusting smells. This treatment, I argue, allows us to make better sense than other intentionalist alter-natives both of the neuroanatomy of olfaction, and of a natural pre-theoretical stance regarding the sense of smell.

Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the perceptual system. We argue in favor (...) of the latter option. Intentionalism so conceived can make better sense of contemporary neuroscience of perception, and is better equipped to confront several influential objections to traditional intentionalism. (shrink)

La Educación Sensible es ayuda para que el “yo” habite en su “hogar interior” y crezca hacia su “apoteosis original” en el “nosotros”, donde se hace cocreador de belleza con libertad, sabiduría y amor. La educación sensible es pedagogía no invasiva pero radicalmente exigente para que la persona acepte desplegar su versión original y vivir con gozo en un “nosotros-maduro”. No es una pedagogía que protege a los sensibles; es una educación que atiende a todas las personas, independientemente de su (...) grado de sensibilidad: alta, media o baja (como intervalos comunes que se manejan en las ciencias de la sensibilidad). La sensibilidad personal es capaz de captar la propia originalidad y disponerse para interpretarla en los dos sentidos: comprenderla y actuarla. La sensibilidad humana necesita la educación sensible para que sea punto de partida de un desarrollo personal auténtico y pleno de la propia originalidad que es alterada y altera la de los “yoes” con quien habita la existencia formando “nosotros”, que a su vez, se impactan con interdependencia. Además de al “yo”, la educación sensible se orienta al “nosotros”, que será tanto más “sensible” en la medida que altera la intimidad de la persona con “amor-maduro” que es fuente de gozo, a pesar de los pesares. Sin educación sensible la vida daña y cuanta mayor es la sensibilidad de la persona, mayor es el daño, pero también es mayor la capacidad para detectarlo cicatrizarlo y ayudar a otros con educación sensible. Así, la educación sensible se manifiesta de tres maneras: como acción sanadora de la persona, destrucción creadora para evolucionar en el tiempo, como la crisálida se transforma en mariposa, y acción desarrollante del propio potencial con originalidad. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions on cognition (ranging from computational and representational approaches to the 4E fra-mework), on the one hand, and those on sound and auditory per-ception, on the other, have hitherto remained apart. In this paper, the author addresses the concept of “auditory cognition”. While committing to the conceptual analysis of the latter, the author in-troduces the discussion of modality-specif ic approaches. Since the contributions made so far in the domain of the philosophy of sound and auditory perception are prone to (...) favor computational-repre-sentational approaches —e.g., the perceptual coherence model (Méndez-Martínez, 2022)—, the exploration of 4E possibilities will lay down a series of questions aimed to encourage future developers from that viewpoint. In that sense, the author explores conceptual entailments and connections between the genealogy of theories within the philosophy of sound and auditory perception, and the hypothesis of the extended cognition (EX). (shrink)

O problema da naturalização da consciência se coloca como uma forma de consumação de um projeto de psicologia como uma ciência natural da mente que abranja todas as dimensões do que se considera como constituindo o mental. O principal paradigma para um tal projeto é fornecido hoje em dia pelo programa interdisciplinar de investigação que veio a ser denominado, coletivamente, como Ciência Cognitiva. Entretanto, mesmo com os seus avanços, que se destacam na interação das áreas da Filosofia, Psicologia, Biologia, Neurociência, (...) Etologia, Antropologia, Inteligência Artificial, Comunicação e Sociologia, o tradicional problema mente-corpo se coloca então na forma de um déficit explicativo, que se deve a uma lacuna entre os dados das estruturas neuronais ou estados cerebrais e os conteúdos da introspecção ou fenômenos da consciência. Uma vez que estes continuam a requerer melhor elucidação, a Ciência Cognitiva desenvolveu um projeto de naturalização da fenomenologia. Nesse contexto, a presente pesquisa teórica teve como objetivo uma análise das principais dimensões em que emerge e se expressa o problema concernente à chamada lacuna explicativa ¿ o qual tende a ensejar as propostas contemporâneas de naturalização da consciência ¿ culminando em uma reflexão sobre a possibilidade de uma revisão do referido problema a partir de uma via alternativa de fundamentação dos fenômenos da consciência mediante a filosofia merleau-pontyana. (shrink)

Mindset plays a vital role in tackling the barriers to improving the preservice mathematics teachers’ (PMTs) conceptual understanding of problem-solving. As the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to pose a challenge, online learning has been adopted. This led this study to determining the PMTs’ mindset and level of conceptual understanding in problem-solving in an online learning environment utilising Google Classroom and the Khan Academy. A quantitative research design was employed specifically utilising a descriptive, comparative, and correlational design. Forty-five PMTs were chosen (...) through simple random sampling and willingly took part in this study. The data was gathered using validated and reliable questionnaires and problem-solving tests. The data gathered was analysed using descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and simple linear regression. The results revealed that the college admission test, specifically numerical proficiency, influences a strong mindset and a higher level of conceptual understanding in problem-solving. Additionally, this study shows that mindset predicts the levels of conceptual understanding in problem-solving in an online environment where PMTs with a growth mindset have the potential to solve math problems. The use of Google Classroom and the Khan Academy to aid online instruction is useful in the preparation of PMTs as future mathematics teachers and problem-solvers. Further studies may be conducted to validate these reports and to address the limitations of this study. (shrink)

Our limited a priori-reasoning skills open a gap between our finding a proposition conceivable and its metaphysical possibility. A prominent strategy for closing this gap is the postulation of ideal conceivers, who suffer from no such limitations. In this paper I argue that, under many, maybe all, plausible unpackings of the notion of ideal conceiver, it is false that ideal negative conceivability entails possibility.

Author: Erzsébet Rózsa. Translated by Fernanda Medina and Pedro Sepúlveda Zambrano. La mujer correcta es la protagonista en el pensamiento maduro de Hegel. A decir verdad, ella nunca lo atrajo tanto como Antígona. Con todo, lo cierto es que él rebajó a Antígona: vulneró la singularidad de la grandeza del carácter de Antígona en la Fenomenología, mezcló su imagen de Antígona con rasgos modernos burgueses, y transfirió con ello algunas características de su singularidad a la imagen de la mujer (...) en el marco de la pequeña familia de la incipiente sociedad burguesa. Esta imagen fusionada de la grandeza de Antígona la acaba dañando, y tampoco ayuda a una interpretación y auto-interpretación apropiada de la mujer, o bien a la elucidación de sus roles sociales y de género en la modernidad naciente. Apartándose estrictamente de esta imagen mezclada, en la Filosofía del derecho Hegel ha ofrecido una imagen comprensible hasta el día de hoy, y en muchos sentidos aún relevante, acerca de los diferenciados roles sociales y de género, adecuados a las expectativas de la incipiente sociedad moderna, o bien acerca de una correspondiente auto-interpretación y autodeterminación para la mujer de la modernidad naciente. La mujer comparte del mismo modo con el hombre la orientación subjetiva-normativa en la actitud práctica: ella debe apropiar y ejercitar correctamente sus roles sociales y de género. Pero todas estas expectativas se encuentran muy alejadas de la grandeza de Antígona. Con ello Hegel abrió una perspectiva a través de su comprensión de la fragilidad de la existencia humana en la modernidad, en medio de la cual mujeres y hombres cuestionamos cada vez el sentido de nuestra propia existencia. (shrink)

Contextualist theorists have recently defended the views (a) that metaphor-processing can be treated on a par with other meaning changes, such as narrowing or transfer, and (b) that metaphorical contents enter into “what is said” by an utterance. We do not dispute claim (a) but consider that claim (b) is problematic. Contextualist theorists seem to leave in the hands of context the explanation about why it is that some meaning changes are directly processed, and thus plausibly form part of “what (...) is said”, while some others are not. While granting the role of context in this respect, we contend that there are that there are elements that play an instrumental role in providing direct access to the metaphorical content, namely, the conventionality of the expressions and the salience of the concepts involved. We will start by criticizing Recanati’s and Relevance Theory’s accounts of metaphor. Then we examine the claims of Carston’s and Giora’s two-process accounts that set the stage for a revision of the main elements involved, namely, the properties of conventionality and salience. Finally we examine a number of representative examples, explaining why some cases involve a direct access to the metaphorical content and others require an intermediate non-figurative interpretation. (shrink)

In the realm of the philosophy of sounds and auditory experience there is an ongoing discussion concerned with the nature of sounds. One of the contestant views within this ontology of sound is that of the Property View, which holds that sounds are properties of the sounding objects. A way of developing this view is through the idea of dispositionalism, namely, by sustaining the theory according to which sounds are dispositional properties (Pasnau 1999; Kulvicki 2008; Roberts 2017). That portrayal, however, (...) is not sufficient, as it has not inquired the metaphysical debates about dispositions beyond the conditional analysis. In this paper, I try to advance this view by including recent developments (for instance Bird 2007; Vetter 2015) in the field of dispositionalism and I analyse whether this new version can sort out known and new objections to Property View. (shrink)

Introduction: Traditionally, empathy has been studied from two main perspectives: the theory-theory approach and the simulation theory approach. These theories claim that social emotions are fundamentally constituted by mind states in the brain. In contrast, classical phenomenology and recent research based on enactive theories consider empathy as the basic process of contacting others’ emotional experiences through direct bodily perception and sensation. Objective: This study aims to enrich knowledge of the empathic experience of pain by using an experimental phenomenological method. Method: (...) Implementing an experimental paradigm used in affective neuroscience, we exposed 28 healthy adults to a video of sportspersons suffering physical accidents while practicing extreme sports. Immediately after watching the video, each participant underwent a phenomenological interview to gather data on embodied, multi-layered dimensions (bodily sensations, emotions, and motivations) and temporal aspects of empathic experience. We also performed quantitative analyses of the phenomenological categories. Results: Experiential access to the other person’s painful experience involves four main-themes. Bodily resonance: participants felt a multiplicity of bodily, affective, and kinesthetic sensations. Attentional focus: some participants centered their attention more on their own personal discomfort and sensations of rejection, while others on the pain and suffering experienced by the sportspersons. Kinesthetic motivation: some participants experienced the feeling in their bodies to avoid or escape from watching the video, while others experienced the need to help the sportspersons avoid suffering any injury while practicing extreme sports. Temporality of experience: participants witnessed temporal fluctuations in their experiences, bringing intensity changes in their bodily resonance, attentional focus, and kinesthetic motivation. Finally, two experiential structures were found: one structure is self-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the participant’s own experience of seeing the sportsperson suffering, and self-protective kinesthetic motivation; the other structure is other-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the sportsperson, and prosocial kinesthetic motivation to help them. Discussion: We show how phenomenological data may contribute to comprehending empathy for pain in social neuroscience. In addition, we address the phenomenological aspect of the enactive approach to the three dimensions of embodiment of human consciousness, especially the intersubjective dimension. Also, based on our results, we suggest an extension of the enactive theory for non-interactive social experience. (shrink)

Jenefer Robinson believes that feelings can play an important role in the critical evaluation of artworks. In this paper, I want to put some pressure on two important notions in her theory: emotional understanding and affective empathy. I will do this by focusing on the nature of self-conscious emotions. My strategy will be, firstly, to demonstrate the difficulty that Robinson’s two step theory of emotions has in accommodating higher cognitive emotional responses to art. Secondly, I will discuss how the tight (...) connection to the ‘self’ involved in self-conscious emotions makes it difficult to take the emotional perspective of another person as empathy requires. From here, I suggest that Peter Goldie’s feeling-towards and his critique of perspective-shifting may give a better understanding of the role of emotions in the appreciation of art, particularly in the case of reflective emotions. This issue will be explored through a discussion of the expression of autobiographical nostalgia in the work of the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. (shrink)

Imperativism is the view that the phenomenal character of the affective component of pains, orgasms, and pleasant or unpleasant sensory experience depends on their imperative intentional content. In this paper I canvass an imperativist treatment of pains as reason-conferring states.

Categorization behavior can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the trade‐off between as high as possible faithfulness in the transmission of information about samples of the classes to be categorized, and as low as possible transmission costs for that same information. The kinds of categorization behaviors we associate with conceptual atoms, prototypes, and exemplars emerge naturally as a result of this trade‐off, in the presence of certain natural constraints on the probabilistic distribution of samples, and the ways in which we (...) measure faithfulness. Beyond the general structure of categorization in these circumstances, the same information‐centered perspective can shed light on other, more concrete properties of human categorization performance, such as the results of certain prominent experiments on supervised categorization. (shrink)

Why do we have social norms—of fairness, cooperation, trust, property, or gender? Modern-day Humeans, as I call them, believe these norms are best accounted for in cultural evolutionary terms, as adaptive solutions to recurrent problems of social interaction. In this paper, I discuss a challenge to this “Humean Program.” Social norms involve widespread behaviors, but also distinctive psychological attitudes and dispositions. According to the challenge, Humean accounts of norms leave their psychological side unexplained. They explain, say, why we share equally, (...) but not why we disapprove of those who don’t. I defend the Humean Program against this challenge. In particular, I suggest an idea for how to extend the Program to account for the psychological side of norms. Socially adaptive behaviors aren’t just likely to emerge in a group; They are also likely to be widely taught within it. The transmission of these behaviors through instruction explains why they are associated with distinctive normative attitudes and dispositions. These attitudes play a pedagogical role in helping transmit these behaviors to children and newcomers. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relationship between logic and phenomenology at a historical moment that precedes the big divide between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. In analysing alternative derivations of phenomenological logic, the discussion focuses on the case of two notorious neo-Kantian Mexican philosophers from the first half of the XXth century: Adalberto García de Mendoza and Francisco Larroyo. It is argued that both García de Mendoza and Larroyo made an original contribution to the discussion on the relationship between phenomenology and logic. (...) Further, this paper attempts to present a charitable portrait of both García de Mendoza and Larroyo in contrast to underrating approaches to both Mexican philosophers. In so doing, this paper adopts a historical—though not strictly biographical— perspective. While it is true that neither García de Mendoza nor Larroyo could be considered “phenomenologists” or “Husserl scholars” according to contemporary standards it is worth noticing that they engage in the discussion of phenomenological logic. Both authors had the project of developing a grounding logic for science and, as the article argues, both attempts could be even linked. Their project, however, was unfinished. The plan of this paper is as follows. The first section addresses the problem of the relationship between logic and phenomenology. The second one focuses on García de Mendoza’s contributions. The third one elaborates on Larroyo’s Logic of Sciences. And, finally, the fourth section elaborates on these Mexican philosophers’ contributions to education, making as well further observations concerning the similarities and differences between both authors. (shrink)

An important objection to signaling approaches to representation is that, if signaling behavior is driven by the maximization of usefulness, then signals will typically carry much more information about agent-dependent usefulness than about objective features of the world. This sort of considerations are sometimes taken to provide support for an anti-realist stance on representation itself. The author examines the game-theoretic version of this skeptical line of argument developed by Donald Hoffman and his colleagues. It is shown that their argument only (...) works under an extremely impoverished picture of the informational connections that hold between agent and world. In particular, it only works for cue-driven agents, in Kim Sterelny’s sense. In cases in which the agents’ understanding of what is useful results from combining pieces of information that reach them in different ways, and that complement one another, maximizing usefulness involves construing first a picture of agent-independent, objective matters of fact. (shrink)

We aim to map out the points of confluence between phronesis and emotion, as well as the nature of this confluence. We do so based on philosophical and psychological explanations of emotions and phronesis. Making sound decisions, which requires phronesis, is an important matter, but its relationship with emotions has only just begun to be studied. We propose that the interplay between phronesis and emotion is possible (rather than inevitable) because both have a cognitive-behavioural structure and because emotions are hierarchical. (...) In the case of emotion, there are no gaps between the cognitive and behavioural dimensions, while phronetic acts can only manifest if cognitive and behavioural aspects are activated simultaneously. The confluence we identify is bidirectional and involves mutual enrichment in this dual dimension. On the one hand, phronesis enriches emotion because it involves extra subjective knowledge and allows emotion to be directed towards higher goals. On the other hand, emotions enrich phronesis because phronesis makes decisions based on sensitive preferences and because emotions confirm correctness in the context of moral decision making. Methodologically, this study is theoretical and interdisciplinary, as our approach is both philosophical and psychological. Philosophy helps us to improve the conceptual foundation of the construct, while psychology provides an analysis of the emotional process, allowing philosophy to understand how emotional evaluation-assessment and motivation lead to decision making. (shrink)

Linguistics of Saying is to be analyzed in the speech act conceived as an act of knowing. The speaking, saying and knowing subject, based on contexts and the principles of congruency and trust in the speech of other speakers, will create meanings and interpret the sense of utterances supplying the deficiencies of language by means of the intellective operations mentally executed in the act of speech. In the intellective operations you can see three steps or processes: first the starting point, (...) intuition or aísthesis; second, the process of abstraction; and third, the inverse: the process of determination or fixing the construct created. (shrink)

Godfrey-Smith advocates for linking deception in sender-receiver games to the existence of undermining signals. I present games in which deceptive signals can be arbitrarily frequent, without this undermining information transfer between sender and receiver.

This paper proposes some guidelines for the undeveloped discussion of auditory epistemology. Auditory epistemology is an approach concerned with the perceptual basis for knowledge and belief, specifically around audition. The article pursues two goals. Firstly, it claims that addressing auditory perception from the viewpoint of epistemology is more fruitful than the discussion on phenomenology which has thus far dominated the debates in the literature on sound. Secondly, it elaborates a concrete proposal pertaining to the cooperation of sense-modalities. In so doing, (...) a model for “Perceptual Coherence” is suggested. The first section of the paper critically reviews the problem of perception as it is usually understood in traditional epistemology. An ensuing section outlines the model of perceptual coherence. (shrink)

Entre las virtudes de la explicación de Gewirth, destaca su potencial para delimitar el objeto de los derechos humanos y contener la expansión incontrolada del discurso de los derechos. Al ceñirse al contexto de la acción y a los rasgos necesarios para la agencia intencional, dicha explicación proporciona un fundamento basado en la autonomía y libertad de los agentes intencionales prospectivos, tan solo limitadas por aquellas exigencias racionales derivadas de la igual consideración del status moral de todos los demás agentes (...) intencionales prospectivos quienes, en última instancia, se identifican con la humanidad en su conjunto mediante las ideas implícitas de reciprocidad y responsabilidad moral por los actos propios. En definitiva, el argumento de Gewirth desemboca en el PCG para proporcionar un fundamento racional de los derechos humanos limitado a la estructura normativa de la acción, la agencia intencional prospectiva potencial o actual de todos los seres humanos y los bienes necesarios para la acción intencional: la libertad y el bienestar. (shrink)

The systematicity argument only challenges connectionism if systematicity is a general property of cognition. I examine this thesis in terms of properties of concepts. First, I propose that Evans's Generality Constraint only applies to attributions of belief. Then I defend a variety of conceptual pluralism, arguing that concepts share two fundamental properties related to centrality and belief-attribution, and contending that there are two kinds of concepts that differ in their compositional properties. Finally, I rely on Dual Systems Theory and on (...) differences between animal and human cognition to suggest a scenario of two processing systems that work on different kinds of concepts, with only one of them supporting full systematicity. I sketch a non-classical systematicity argument that rules out classicism as the basis of one of those systems given that it would wrongly entail that both systems are fully systematic. (shrink)

Legal theorists seek to persuade other jurists of certain theories: Textualism or purposivism; formalism or realism; natural law theory or positivism; prison reform or abolition; universal or particular human rights? Despite voluminous literature about these debates, tremendous uncertainty remains about which views experts endorse. This Article presents the first-ever empirical study of American law professors about legal theory questions. A novel dataset of over six hundred law professors reveals expert consensus and dissensus about dozens of longstanding legal theory debates. -/- (...) Law professors also debate questions about the nature of the legal academy. Descriptively, which subjects (e.g. constitutional law) and methods (e.g. law & economics) are most central within the legal academy today? And prescriptively, should today’s legal academy prioritize additional areas (e.g. legislation) or methods (e.g. critical race theory)? There is great interest in these questions but no empirical dataset of experts’ views; this results in uncertainty about which views experts endorse. This Article’s empirical study also clarifies these questions, documenting law professors’ evaluation of over one-hundred areas of law. -/- The legal theory and legal academy findings support implications for legal scholarship, education, and practice. Clearly, debates about law and the legal academy’s evolution should not be settled by a survey. Nevertheless, insofar as law professors are experts about these issues, it is instructive to discover and carefully examine what views those experts hold, so as to help determine which views are most likely to be true and how the legal academy ought to develop. (shrink)

Some mental states have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. According to imperativism, valence depends on imperative content, while evaluativism tells us that it depends on evaluative content. We argue that if one considers valence’s informational profile, it becomes evident that imperativism is superior to evaluativism. More precisely, we show that if one applies the best available metasemantics to the role played by (un)pleasant mental states in our cognitive economy, then these states turn out to have imperative rather than evaluative content, (...) since: (i) they are much more informative about behaviour than they are about the world; and (ii) they occupy a stage in the information-processing chain that is closer to behaviour production than it is to the uptake of sensory information. This is our metasemantic argument for imperativism. (shrink)

We very often discover ourselves engaged in inner speech. It seems that this kind of silent, private, speech fulfils some role in our cognition, most probably related to conscious thinking. Yet, the study of inner speech has been neglected by philosophy and psychology alike for many years. However, things seem to have changed in the last two decades. Here we review some of the most influential accounts about the phenomenology and the functions of inner speech, as well as the methodological (...) problems that affect its study. (shrink)