This article states that research in skill acquisitionand executionhas underestimated the relevance of some features of attention. We present and theoretically discuss two essential features of attention that have been systematically overlooked in the research of skill acquisitionandexecution. First, attention alters the appearance of the perceived stimuli in an essential way; and second, attention plays a fundamental role in action, being crucial for solving the so called ’many-many problem’, that is to say, the problem of generating a coherent behavior byselecting (...) between many inputs and many potential outputs. We discuss the importance of these features for skill acquisition in sport. We also suggest empirical ways to assess the precise impact of taking them into consideration and at the same time we propose important implications for training derived from the ideas discussed in the paper. (shrink)

Bajo el título «Utopías, distopías y otras nostalgias», la cuarta edición del Congreso de Pensamiento Interdisciplinar, organizado por alumnos del grado de Filosofía, Política y Economía de la Alianza 4 Universidades, abordó el controvertido fenómeno woke, una supuesta mezcla de izquierda identitaria y progresismo políticamente correcto al que se acusa de promover la censura y la llamada «cultura de la cancelación». Sobre esta cuestión conversaron la escritora y filósofa Elizabeth Duval, la investigadora Ayme Román y el director académico y profesor (...) del Instituto Superior de Sociología, Economía y Política (ISSEP), Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, en un debate moderado por dos de los alumnos organizadores del congreso, Guzmán Díez e Isabel Rodríguez. (shrink)

En 1968 Raquel Carson comenzaba una revolución en el pensamiento, quizá una de las de mayor peso en la actualidad. En su libro "La primavera silenciosa" acusaba del deterioro ambiental al poder ilimitado del ser humano. La creencia surgida en la modernidad de que todo lo que el hombre decidía era en sí mismo lo mejor por haber sido fruto de una voluntad libérrima, daba primacía y legitimidad absoluta a su acción sobre la naturaleza. Surgieron con gran fuerza numerosos grupos (...) ecologistas que adoptaron un pensamiento que responde al nombre de "ecología profunda" o "Deep Ecology" descrito por primera vez por Arme Naess en un artículo publicado por la revista Inquiry y titulado "The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movement". Los principios que proponía este movimiento (Naess 1984) pueden ser resumidos en ocho grandes puntos: 1) la vida de los seres no humanos es un valor en sí: 2) la riqueza y la diversidad de estas formas de vida son también valores en sí; 3) los seres humanos no pueden intervenir de manera destructiva en la vida; 4) a este respecto, la intervención humana actual es eminentemente excesiva; 5) por consiguiente, las reglas de juego deben ser radicalmente modificadas; 6) esta modificación radical debe hacerse tanto a nivel de las estructuras económicas como de las estructuras ideológicas y culturales; 7) a nivel ideológico, el cambio principal consiste en apreciar más la calidad de la vida que el goce de los bienes materiales; 8) las personas que acepten estos principios tienen la obligación de contribuir, directa o indirectamente a la realización de los cambios fundamentales que aquellos implican. (shrink)

In having an experience one is aware of having it. Having an experience requires some form of access to one's own state, which distinguishes phenomenally conscious mental states from other kinds of mental states. Until very recently, Higher-Order (HO) theories were the only game in town aiming at offering a full-fledged account of this form of awareness within the analytical tradition. Independently of any objections that HO theories face, First/Same-Order (F/SO) theorists need to offer an account of such access to (...) become a plausible alternative. My aim in this paper is twofold. In the first place, I wish to widen the logical space of the discussion among theories of consciousness by offering a distinction, orthogonal to that between F/SO and HO theories, between what I will call 'Self-Involving' (SI) and 'Mental-State-Involving' (MSI) theories and argue in favor of the former one. In the second place, I will present the basics of a characterization of such a Self-Involving theory in Same-Order terms. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories of consciousness attempt to explain what it takes for a mental state to be conscious, rather than unconscious, by means of a HOT that represents oneself as being in the state in question. Rosenthal Consciousness and the self: new essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) stresses that the way we are aware of our own conscious states requires essentially indexical self-reference. The challenge for defenders of HOT theories is to show that there is a way to explain (...) the required reference-fixing mechanisms that is compatible with the theory. According to Rosenthal, the reference to oneself as such is grounded in the disposition to identify the individual the HOT refers to as the individual who has that HOT. I argue that this leads to a vicious infinite regress on the more than plausible assumption that our cognitive capacities are limited. This leaves such theories without a foundation, since self-reference is thought essential to consciousness. (shrink)

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. (...) From a representationalist frameworkregarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognitionconstitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will arguethat in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum,representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience isde se.Ishow that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective characterof the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodilyactivity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied. (shrink)

The well-known distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness has moved away from the conceptual domain into the empirical one, and the debate now is focused on whether the neural mechanisms of cognitive access are constitutive of the neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I want to analyze the consequences that a negative reply to this question has for the cognitive phenomenology thesis – roughly the claim that there is a “proprietary” phenomenology of thoughts. If the mechanisms responsible (...) for cognitive access can be disentangled from the mechanisms that give rise to phenomenology in the case of perception and emotion, then the same disentanglement is to be expected in the case of thoughts. This, in turn, presents, as I argue, a challenge to the cognitive phenomenology thesis: either there are thoughts with cognitive phenomenology we lack cognitive access to or there are good reasons to doubt that there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology. I discuss a... (shrink)

Cognitive theories claim, whereas non-cognitive theories deny, that cognitive access is constitutive of phenomenology. Evidence in favor of non-cognitive theories has recently been collected by Block and is based on the high capacity of participants in partial-report experiments compared to the capacity of the working memory. In reply, defenders of cognitive theories have searched for alternative interpretations of such results that make visual awareness compatible with the capacity of the working memory; and so the conclusions of such experiments remain controversial. (...) Instead of entering the debate between alternative interpretations of partial-report experiments, this paper offers an alternative line of research that could settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness. Here I relate the neural correlates of cognitive access to empirical research into the neurophysiology of dreams; cognitive access seems to depend on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, that area is strongly deactivated during sleep; a period when we entertain conscious experiences: dreams. This approach also avoids the classic objection that consciousness should be inextricably tied to reportability or it would fall outside the realm of science. (shrink)

Representations are not only used in our folk-psychological explanations of behaviour, but are also fruitfully postulated, for example, in cognitive science. The mainstream view in cognitive science maintains that our mind is a representational system. This popular view requires an understanding of the nature of the entities they are postulating. Teleosemantic theories face this challenge, unpacking the normativity in the relation of representation by appealing to the teleological function of the representing state. It has been argued that, if intentionality is (...) to be explained in teleological terms, then the function of a state cannot depend on its phylogenetical history, given the metaphysical possibility of a duplicate of an intentional being that lacks an evolutionary history. In this paper, I present a method to produce, according to our current knowledge in genetic engineering, human-like individuals who are not the product of natural selection in the required sense. This variation will be used to shed light on the main replies that have been offered in the literature to the Swampman thought experiment. I argue that these replies are not satisfactory: representations should better not depend on natural selection. I conclude that a non-etiological notion of function is to be preferred for characterizing the relation of representation. (shrink)

In this essay we discuss recent attempts to analyse the notion of representation, as it is employed in cognitive science, in purely informational terms. In particular, we argue that recent informational theories cannot accommodate the existence of metarepresentations. Since metarepresentations play a central role in the explanation of many cognitive abilities, this is a serious shortcoming of these proposals.

In der Kritik der Urteilskraft vertritt Kant noch die analogische Beziehung zwischen Schönheit und Sittlichkeit (KU, AA 05: 351–354). Aber wir befinden uns hier in einem ganz anderen Zusammenhang. Und dies nicht nur, weil die Erörterung dieser analogischen Beziehung eine Lösung für das Problem der Verknüpfung zwischen theoretischer und praktischer Vernunft beansprucht. Die Reflexionen in den Vorlesungen über Anthropologie über die pragmatische Dimension des Geschmacks setzten die Möglichkeit dieser Verknüpfung bereits voraus, bevor Kant eine kritische Begründung derselben erreichte. Wir dürfen (...) aber diese Reflexionen nicht als das Ergebnis unreifer Versuche zur Lösung dieses kritischen Problems der Rationalitätstheorie Kants deuten. Während der Paragraph 59 der Kritik der Urteilskraft Teil der spekulativen Philosophie ist, wird die Kritik des Geschmacks in den Vorlesungen über Anthropologie vielmehr insofern sinnvoll, da sie zu einem pragmatischen, populären und aufgeklärten Bildungsprogramm der Anthropologie Kants gehört. (shrink)

Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories of consciousness maintain that the kind of awareness necessary for phenomenal consciousness depends on the cognitive accessibility that underlies reporting. -/- There is empirical evidence strongly suggesting that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report visual experiences depends on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). This area, however, is highly deactivated during the conscious experiences we have during sleep: dreams. HOT theories are jeopardized, as I will argue. I will briefly present HOT (...) theories in the first section. Section 2 offers empirical evidence to the effect that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report depends on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: dlPFC is the neural correlate of HOTs. Section 3 shows the evidence we have of the deactivation of this brain area during dreams and, in section 4, I present my argument. Finally, I consider and rejoin two possible replies that my opponent can offer: the possibility of an alternative neural correlate of HOTs during dreams and the denial that we have phenomenally conscious experiences during sleep. (shrink)

Aunque no es posible ofrecer aquí un análisis detallado de las diferentes cues tionesimplicadas en la teoría de las representaciones en la Modernidad, sí pode mos atender auno de sus aspectos más relevantes, presente en la exposición de Leibniz, Wolff,Baumgarten y Kant, a saber: el reconocimiento progresivo y la vin dicación de unconocimiento específicamente sensible como un tipo específico de conocimiento en lafilosofía escolar alemana del siglo XVIII. A pesar de que Leibniz atribuye al conocimiento claro y confuso el grado (...) más bajo en su esquema de los niveles del conocimiento, tambiénes cierto que su exposición apunta ya a la irre ductibilidad de este ámbito en unconocimiento finito como el humano. Por lo demás, lo confuso aquí adquiere sentido en elsistema del saber en la medida en que Leibniz considera que todos los conocimientos obre cuestiones de hecho, si bien falibles, se encuentran en conexión con la verdad en lamedida en que parti cipan de la misma, al expresar el fundamento último de lo real y sersusceptibles de perfectibilidad en el seno de una subjetividad dinámica que comienza aser entendida como unidad vital. En Wolff y Baumgarten se profundiza en la vía que esabierta ya por Leibniz: la exposición de los niveles de conocimiento en el marco de unaimbricación de la lógica de la representación con una psicología vitalista, en la que sereconocerá la experiencia del sentimiento como expresión subjetiva de la perfectibilidaddel conocimiento humano. Aunque la filosofía de Kant supondrá una ruptura con laexposición escolar de esta teoría de los niveles de conocimiento o los tipos derepresentación, lo cierto es que el nacimiento de su teoría de la sensi bilidad tiene lugar enel marco histórico de esta concepción tradicional. (shrink)

The non-transitivity of the relation looks the same as has been used to argue that the relation has the same phenomenal character as is non-transitive—a result that jeopardizes certain theories of consciousness. In this paper, I argue against this conclusion while granting the premise by dissociating lookings and phenomenology; an idea that some might find counter-intuitive. However, such an intuition is left unsupported once phenomenology and cognitive access are distinguished from each other; a distinction that is conceptually and empirically grounded.

The different “postmodern” philosophies that arose from the 1970s to the 1990s have often been considered as a kind of irrationalist-skeptical-relativist “ideology” or assorted amalgam, which in our time would dangerously take over the philosophical academy and western cultures, with grave risk for universalist or simply rationalist projects. Nevertheless, as the title of this article shows, a closer examination of some trends of postmodern thought would be able to perceive that they not only are uncomfortable with the label “relativist,” “irrationalist” (...) or “skeptical,” but also that they offer substantial arguments against, for example, the main theses of relativism. Naturally, none of these trends has any qualms about abominating universalism as well (the presumed mortal enemy of the relativists). Thus the most sensible conclusion would be that what really seems erroneous to authors such as those we shall approach here is the presumed dilemma (presented as inevitable) between relativism and universalism (it is curious that, at least as far as faith in the existence of such a dichotomy is concerned, these presumed irreconcilable enemies, which both the relativists and the universalists believe themselves to be, are plainly in agreement). Only if they subscribe to such a rejection of this dilemma could it be explained that important thinkers of the heterogeneous postmodern group (such as those whom I propose to have a dialogue with in this article) have scorned, on the one hand, any and all universal project of rationality, but have also strongly disallowed relativist proposals (just as, naturally, they have likewise taken advantage of the issue to deny their presumed adherence to relativism as such). This idea, however, has not been understood by a large part of the scholars involved today in epistemology and practical philosophy (the two philosophical specialties in which one most frequently faces the question of relativism). To approach this understanding, therefore, perhaps it would not be amiss to review the different arguments that some postmodern thinkers use against relativism. Specifically, we shall tale a look at the reasoning in this sense that has come from Gianni Vattimo (1936), Paul K. Feyerabend (1924-1994), and Richard Rorty (1931). All of them have too often had to suffer from the suspicion of being considered as relativists. To absolve philosophers such as these from such an accusation seems to be a sine qua non condition for understanding their true position towards the universalism versus relativism dilemma. (shrink)

When reasoning about dependence relations, philosophers often rely on gradualist assumptions, according to which abrupt changes in a phenomenon of interest can result only from abrupt changes in the low-level phenomena on which it depends. These assumptions, while strictly correct if the dependence relation in question can be expressed by continuous dynamical equations, should be handled with care: very often the descriptively relevant property of a dynamical system connecting high- and low-level phenomena is not its instantaneous behaviour but its stable (...) fixed points (those in the vicinity of which it spends most of the time, after comparatively short transitory periods), and stable fixed points can change abruptly as a result of infinitesimal changes of the low-level phenomenon. We illustrate this potential gradualist trap by showing that Chalmers’ fading qualia argument falls into it. (shrink)

Si decidiésemos clasificar las teorías éticas en “inmanentistas” (aquellas que cifran lo éticamente aceptable en algún tipo de eventos del mundo, como por ejemplo el crecimiento utilitarista del beneficio general) y “trascendentalistas” (aquellas que ubican en algún espacio más allá de este mundo y esta vida el motivo de por qué comportarnos éticamente –por ejemplo, debido a alguna suerte de recompensa ultraterrena–), entonces el pensamiento moral del llamado “primer” Wittgenstein ocuparía un lugar especial entre ambos extremos de tal dicotomía. En (...) cierta medida, podría decirse que la propuesta ética del Wittgenstein que reflexionaba en torno a los años de composición del Tractatus guarda un delicado equilibrio que evita tanto su exclusivo sometimiento ante instancias trascendentales (fundamentos), como su asimilación total por parte de motivaciones inmanentes (provechos) a la hora de justificar el hecho de actuar de un modo correcto. En el presente artículo nos asomaremos a tal pirueta wittgensteiniana entre ambos miembros del dualismo trascendente-inmanente, y sugeriremos que el peculiar lugar en que deja lo ético, entre lo celestial y lo terrenal, acaso no sea del todo ajeno a tesis de la religión cristiana como la de la encarnación de lo divino en el mundo terreno. (shrink)

Además de las numerosas concomitancias que a menudo se han venido señalando en los últimos años entre la filosofía de Immanuel Kant y la de Ludwig Wittgenstein, es posible detectar una coincidencia ulterior entre ambos en el ataque que los dos realizan a la teoría disposicionalista de la normatividad (esto es, la tesis según la cual el agente que sigue una regla correctamente debe contar para ello en su interior con una especie de mecanismo causal o disposición que produzca, ante (...) el estímulo de una norma, el efecto del seguimiento correcto). Las razones por la cual ambos consideran defectuosa esta teoría son, fundamentalmente, tres: el hecho de que esa especie de mecanismo interno es incompatible con nuestra idea de lo que son los mecanismos; la ausencia en el dibujo que nos hace esta tesis disposicionalista de las prácticas reguladas de precisamente algún poder regulativo (es decir, un “deber ser” diferenciado de lo que de hecho se da, de lo fáctico; o, dicho en términos kantianos, la distinción entre actuar “según concepciones de reglas” y actuar “según reglas”); y lo inapropiado de aplicar el concepto de causa a mecanismos internos como aquellos por los cuales abogan los disposicionalistas. En nuestra comunicación examinaremos esta acometida conjunta kantiano-wittgensteiniana a la tesis disposicionalista, lo cual acaso sirva para comprender a su vez mejor los íntimos vínculos que ligaron al pensador alemán y al pensador austríaco en más de un recodo de sus respectivos caminos del pensar. (shrink)

El objetivo de esta ponencia es abordar diversas temáticas propias de la filosofía wittgensteiniana desde una interpretación netamente pragmatista de las mismas. Concretamente, este será el caso del largamente debatido “argumento del lenguaje privado” (que desde una interpretación pragmatista no sólo conseguirá una mayor plausibilidad como tal argumento, sino que además será capaz de aportar luz sobre otros debates filosóficos contemporáneos en los que no siempre se detecta su íntima conexión con las cuitas wittgensteinianas); o la idea de parecidos de (...) familia (que sólo en un sentido pragmatista logrará escapar tanto de la vaguedad que le han achacado ciertas lecturas, como de cierta rigidez poco acorde, a todas luces, con las intenciones originarias de Wittgenstein); o la noción de “forma de vida” (que, por ejemplo, en la exégesis que el neopragmatista Richard Rorty hace de la misma, puede conectar así con otra de las nociones claves de otro pensador crucial del siglo XX, Martin Heidegger: se trata, en efecto, de la reflexión heideggeriana en torno a la Lichtung, a su vez conectable por parte de Rorty a la idea kuhniana de paradigma). Para finalizar, debatiremos brevemente la cuestión de hasta qué punto estas lecturas pragmatistas de Wittgenstein casarían con la imagen que el propio filósofo austríaco tenía de sí mismo como pensador. (shrink)

En las últimas décadas han proliferado un conjunto de planteamientos teológicos cristianos que, por primera vez, incorporan a su reflexión sobre Dios la perspectiva de las personas con género, orientación o identidad sexual minoritarias. Bebiendo en algunos casos de los desarrollos de la teología de la liberación (especialmente en autores procedentes de Iberoamérica) y en otros casos de la teología feminista, estas teologías pretenden hablar de lo divino desde y para las realidades del conjunto de personas que a menudo se (...) agrupan bajo el acrónimo LGTBIAA (lesbianas, gays, transexuales, bisexuales, intersexuales, asexuales y aliados). El propósito de nuestra comunicación es, en primer lugar, trazar un panorama general de cuáles son las principales aportaciones que se han hecho al pensamiento sobre Dios desde estos ámbitos. Para ello, examinaremos brevemente el modo en que las filosofías constructivistas de género (no necesariamente vinculadas a lo divino) han incidido en este tipo de pensamiento sobre lo divino. En segundo lugar, abordaremos un planteamiento crítico de las fortalezas, debilidades, amenazas y oportunidades que presenta este tipo de reflexión teológica. Por último, sugeriremos algunas posibles vías de desarrollo futuro de este tipo de teologías, así como de aportaciones que pueden hacer a otras esferas (filosóficas, éticas, sociales, eclesiales, políticas, etc.). (shrink)

Philosophy has rendered a close attention to audiovisual communication in recent times, but this interest has not always had a parallel in the attention that television has paid to philosophical themes. Nevertheless, some examples of television approaches to philosophy have reached a quite remarkable level of quality. This paper will focus on one of such instances (the DVD Gadamer. Memoria de un siglo, produced by the Spanish Open National University). By means of an analysis of its main virtues and its (...) flaws (from a communicational outlook), we will try to obtain some general conclusions about how philosophical didactics and television can move ahead in their just begun cooperation. (shrink)

Alleged self-evidence aside, conceivability arguments are one of the main reasons in favor of the claim that there is a Hard Problem. These arguments depend on the appealing Kripkean intuition that there is no difference between appearances and reality in the case of consciousness. I will argue that this intuition rests on overlooking a distinction between cognitive access and consciousness, which has received recently important empirical support. I will show that there are good reasons to believe that the intuition is (...) misguided—at least on the reading that the conceivability arguments require—and hence that the arguments are unsupported. This, in turn, alleviates the Hard Problem but leaves us with what I think is a not easy problem. (shrink)

Our interest here will be limited to decide how we could use the philosophy of Wittgenstein to oppose Marxist theorizations. We will not imply, thus, that Wittgenstein himself made that use or wanted anybody else to make it. Our focus here is not Wittgenstein’s possible intentions against Marxism, but his implications against it. We have found five possible implications of this kind. The first one links his private language argument and Ludwig von Mises’ argument about why Marxists fail in determining (...) prices. The second one goes from that very private language argument to a liberal argument against the dictatorship of proletariat. The third is a skeptical argument for participatory democracy that undermines some of Marx’s ideas about power. Finally, the fourth and fifth implications use Wittgenstein’s philosophy against the Marxist ideas of an essential divide in society and a common human progress, respectively. (shrink)

¿Cuál debe ser la actitud de un pensamiento genuinamente postmoderno ante el fenómeno religioso? ¿Debe contribuir a desterrarlo de nuestras sociedades (en alianza con cierto racionalismo ilustrado que siempre miró con suspicacia cuanto no cabía dentro de sus estrechos criterios) o, por el contrario, debe colaborar en su emergente renacimiento (y aliarse, por tanto, con los diversos tradicionalismos que lo reivindican)? La filosofía de Gianni Vattimo constituye una respuesta a esta disyuntiva (típicamente moderna) desde una perspectiva que pretende distorsionar (verwinden) (...) tal dicotomía. La idea clave para ello es el concepto de secularización que, a la vez que reconoce nuestra dependencia, como occidentales, de un cierto discurso religioso, lo debilita con el fin de eliminar de él su violencia (pues, de modo circular, reconoce que dentro de él ya existía in nuce el proyecto de esta eliminación, el proyecto de la kénosis). El presente artículo analiza someramente estas ideas y traza algunas de sus conexiones (no siempre explicitadas por el propio Vattimo) con el pensamiento teológico más reciente, para después reseñar algunas de las consecuencias que han tenido en los debates filosóficos hispanos. (shrink)

For centuries, several disciplines have tried to tackle the topic of how legitimate it is to use violence in order to solve social problems. One of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches (and one of the most successful in present-day Latin America) is the so-called “Ethics of Liberation,” designed by Enrique Dussel. Based on the Theology of Liberation, this theory goes beyond the limits of theology as a discipline and pleads for three ethical criteria that every political revolution must fulfill to (...) use violence in a legitimate way. The first is a formal criterion, which basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and purports to be rooted in yet another discipline, linguistics. The second is a material criterion, defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all citizens, thus intimately linked with the discipline of economy and political philosophy. The third is a criterion of feasibility, which makes a revolt legitimate if, and only if, it has a reasonable possibility of succeeding; hence strategic issues take a leading role. This essay contends that each of these criteria is conceptually incompatible with violence. Hence, Dussel’s arguments involve multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the use of violence precisely with these interdisciplinary criteria. (shrink)

We intend to analyze the plausibility of the two kind of ethical justifications that are most commonly used in order to defend the concept of an “intellectual property” of copyrights. Firstly, we will examine justifications of property based on natural law, like the one originally provided by John Locke. We will argue, with the help of authors like Lysander Spooner, that the same arguments that Locke uses for property in general are entirely applicable to intellectual property, although this is certainly (...) a peculiar kind of property. Secondly, we will examine whether or not we can apply to intellectual property the same two arguments that Utilitarian authors use for justifying property in general: the “tragedy of the commons” argument and the scarcity argument. We will claim that the first one is fully pertinent here, and that the second one is not: but this is a problem of that kind of justification of property in general, and not a problem of intellectual property as such. (shrink)

Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, have either shown their sympathy for, or explicitly endorsed, the following two principles: Panpsychism—roughly the thesis that the mind is ubiquitous throughout the universe—and Organizational Invariantism—the principle that holds that two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. The purpose of this paper is to show the tension between the arguments that back up both principles. This tension should lead, or so I will argue, defenders of one of the principles (...) to give up on the other. (shrink)

Parece que en tiempos de postmetafísica, donde se quiere huir de todo autoritarismo (ya sea epistémico, ya sea ético o político), la democracia cuenta con la baza a su favor de ser el sistema político que más favorece el diálogo sobre la imposición, la tolerancia por encima de la opresión. Ahora bien, una democracia que asuma plenamente su condición postmetafísica habrá de contar con ciertas características si quiere ser del todo coherente con este su avatar contemporáneo. Concretamente, en nuestra comunicación (...) pergeñamos unas cuantas de ellas: así, la democracia deberá adecuarse a la sociedad civil postmoderna siendo capaz, en primer lugar, de fundamentarse no en algo así como una teoría política fuerte (que crea haber hallado de una vez por todas el mejor de los ordenamientos políticos posibles), sino que más bien los demócratas deberán hacer de la carencia de fundamentos absolutos y perentorios que caracterizan a la posibilidad democrática su mejor virtud. Esta cierta “modestia” de la democracia postmetafísica le marcará a ésta, además, un camino en el cual deberá escapar de dos extremos parejamente desdeñables: tanto de la fe ciega en la “salvación” del hombre por medio de la actividad política (que deja en manos de “ideólogos” o “iluminados” la esfera pública), como el sometimiento del espacio de lo político a una tecnocrática racionalidad medios-fines (que deja en manos de los “expertos” o “científicos” toda la acción común). Por el contrario, la política democrática, consciente de que debe dejar en manos de la sociedad civil gran parte del tráfico de interacciones humanas, se limitará tan sólo a ofrecer el marco donde estas se lleven a cabo del modo más tolerante y pacífico, no autoritario, que sea menester; no pretenderá competir con las religiones, verbigracia, a la hora de llenar de sentido la vida de los hombres (como haría un planteamiento estrictamente laicista de la misma), sino que más bien habría de facilitar a estas las condiciones mínimas para su libre y fecundo desarrollo. (shrink)

Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver a metasemantic theory of representation. (...) Furthermore, we argue that these difficulties derive from their exclusive reliance on the notion of information, so we suggest that pure informational accounts should be complemented with functional approaches. (shrink)