This article intends to show that the defense of ‘‘understanding’’ as one of the major goals of science education can be grounded on an anti-reductionist perspective on testimony as a source of knowledge. To do so, we critically revisit the discussion between Harvey Siegel and Alvin Goldman about the goals of science education, especially where it involves arguments based on the epistemology of testimony. Subsequently, we come back to a discussion between Charbel N. El-Hani and Eduardo Mortimer, on the one (...) hand, and Michael Hoffmann, on the other, striving to strengthen the claim that rather than students’ belief change, understanding should have epistemic priority as a goal of science education. Based on these two lines of discussion, we conclude that the reliance on testimony as a source of knowledge is necessary to the development of a more large and comprehensive scientific understanding by science students. (shrink)

This article intends to show that the defense of “understanding” as one of the major goals of science education can be grounded on an anti-reductionist perspective on testimony as a source of knowledge. To do so, we critically revisit the discussion between Harvey Siegel and Alvin Goldman about the goals of science education, especially where it involves arguments based on the epistemology of testimony. Subsequently, we come back to a discussion between Charbel N. El-Hani and Eduardo Mortimer, on the one (...) hand, and Michael Hoffmann, on the other, striving to strengthen the claim that rather than students’ belief change, understanding should have epistemic priority as a goal of science education. Based on these two lines of discussion, we conclude that the reliance on testimony as a source of knowledge is necessary to the development of a more large and comprehensive scientific understanding by science students. (shrink)

Disputes about the causal structure of natural selection have implications for teleosemantics. Etiological, mainstream teleosemantics is based on a causalist view of natural selection. The core of its solution to Brentano’s Problem lies in the solution to Kant’s Puzzle provided by the Modern Synthesis concerning populational causation. In this paper, I suggest that if we adopt an alternative, statisticalist view on natural selection, the door is open for two reflections. First, it allows for setting different challenges to etiological teleosemantics that (...) arise if a statisticalist reading of natural selection is right. Second, by providing a different solution to Kant’s Puzzle based on individual causes of evolution, statisticalism promotes a different answer to Brentano’s Problem, what I label as Agential Teleosemantics. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved (...) in natural selection processes. An important prerequisite for the explanation is the ability to understand development in a teleological way. Here, the concept of Umwelt plays a crucial role: if organisms are responsible for generating adaptive variation in specific environments, we need a theory that explains the context-dependent nature of adaptively oriented processes. The Umwelt is thus a central element in determining the goal that an adaptive process pursues. The second path in my analysis also has a historical dimension. I will present Karl Ernst von Baer’s reflections on teleological development and his influence on von Uexküll's thinking. I will present various ideas developed by von Baer, such as the distinction between Ziel and Zweck and the use of musical metaphors, which can help to understand development teleologically and give von Uexküll’s theory a central place in this framework. (shrink)

The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...) this context is the possibility of naturalizing teleology, a classical nightmare for the history of biology itself. This requires, principally, understanding the causes of teleological explanations without assuming an unfashioned backward causation of sorts. As the riddles of teleological explanations are about their temporal dimension, I analyze different temporal scales of biological processes: evolutionary, developmental, and physiological. -/- The first one is the one defended in the context of the Modern Synthesis. As expected, one of the aims of this thesis is to evaluate the adequacy of an evolutionary account of teleological explanation. The scrutiny is negative. Evolutionary explanations in the context of the Modern Synthesis lack the necessary causal roots to naturalize teleology. Concerning the physiological scale, a long tradition pushed up by Kant and the organicist movement in the 20th century allows us to better understand how teleological explanations can be naturalized in physiological process. The key notions in this temporal scale are self-organization and the recursive, looped character of physiological process. While the physiological scale may be suitably accounted by contemporaries views, such as Autonomous Systems Theory, different central teleological phenomena remain unexplained from a purely physiological perspective. In particular, different issues concerning the (adaptive) construction of organism ---such as plasticity, robustness, variation, novelty, inheritance--- deserve an ontogenetic analysis. -/- The principal aim of this thesis is to provide a theory of teleological development that falls beyond the Modern Synthesis' framework and is prompted by different insights from the history of biology. I call it Agential Teleosemantics. It rests on two central pillars. First, that developmental processes, beyond any gene-centered stance, can be understood in informational terms; i.e. developmental processes are about the interaction of developmental resources conveying biological information. The second ingredient is agentivity, namely the idea that development is regulated by an agentive system according to the adaptiveness of the phenotypic outcomes produced. The role of agency in Agential Teleosemantic is equivalent to the role of genes in the Modern Synthesis: it is responsible for explaining the order and the adaptive complexity in the living realm. -/- The second target of this thesis regards the possibility of naturalizing intentional explanations in cognitive science. The central project involved in such an aim is known as teleosemantics. Classical teleosemantics however is etiological: it explains the teleofunctions of representational systems in terms of evolutionary processes. The different disputes in the contemporary philosophy of biology provide two insights to analyze teleosemantics in cognitive science. First, the challenges against the Modern Synthesis must be extended to the evolutionary approach of etiological teleosemantics. Second, as Agential Teleosemantics suggests an alternative source for teleofunctions ---ontogeny, I offer an attempt to integrate Agential Teleosemantics into cognitive science in order to provide an alternative teleosemantic project to understand intentional explanations in cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper, I will conduct three interrelated analyses. First, I will develop an analysis of various concepts in the history of biology that used to refer to individual-level phenomena but were then reinterpreted by the Modern Synthesis in terms of populations. Second, I argue that a similar situation can be found in contemporary biological theory. While different approaches reflect on the causal role of developing organisms in evolution, proponents of the Modern Synthesis avoid any substantial change by reinterpreting and (...) explaining individual-level phenomena from a population perspective. Finally, I will approach this debate by advocating the statistical reading of natural selection, which holds that explanations by natural selection are statistical. I will argue that the above historical conceptual reinterpretations belong to a new explanatory strategy developed by the Modern Synthesis based on population thinking. The reinterpretation of concepts at the individual level is part of the explanatory framework of the Modern Synthesis and the empty role of development within this framework. Moreover, the statistical perspective adopted here allows for the integration of two explanatory models: population-statistical and individual-causal. Finally, I will argue that this pluralistic framework can help to define the explanatory scope of the different biological approaches in order to achieve a coherent integration of development into evolution without rejecting population thinking. (shrink)

The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...) two ways: from a theoretical standpoint, exploring the centrality of the cognitive sciences in current theoretical biology; and from a historical perspective, examining the resemblance between the current state of theoretical biology and the Cognitive Revolution of the mid-20th century. Both inquiries yield affirmative answers, though important nuances will be emphasized. The cognitive sciences' explanatory framework is employed to elucidate the agentic characteristics of organisms, establishing a clear parallelism between the Cognitive Revolution and the present state of theoretical biology. (shrink)

Explanatory Externalism states that the only adaptive force in evolution is natural selection. Explanatory Externalism is a central thesis of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. The etiological theory of natural selected-effect functions also advocates Explanatory Externalism. According to this theory, natural selection is the process responsible for determining the proper natural functions of traits. However, I will point out several challenges to Explanatory Externalism that are proposed primarily by developmental biology and its various subfields. Based on these challenges, this paper will (...) argue why biological functions cannot be fully explained by the selected-effect theory, i.e., that a theory of biological functions must adopt some kind of Explanatory Internalism. At the end of this paper, I will discuss whether or not Explanatory Internalism entails a pluralistic view of biological functions, and how this discussion is related to the different explanations of fit and diversity found in evolutionary biology. (shrink)

El objetivo de este ensayo es analizar cómo confluyen en una misma base teórica tres discursos de diferentes áreas. Uno de ellos es la ciencia, mediante el genocentrismo defendido en la síntesis moderna en Biología. Otro es el de la religión, mediante la perspectiva finalista del alma y del diseño divino, que comparten las religiones abrahámicas. Y finalmente, en la esfera político-social, donde diferentes movimientos conservadores se oponen a replantear la agenda de derechos. La confluencia teórica que nuclea a las (...) tres áreas mencionadas es un preformismo sobre los organismos. Por lo tanto, primero, veremos cómo el preformismo se encuentra presente en biología. Segundo, señalaremos dos ideas relacionadas al preformismo que subyacen tanto en la biología como en la religión. Finalmente, analizaremos cómo ambos discursos, el científico y el religioso, se encuentran presentes y empleando un rol argumentativo en debates actuales sobre derechos humanos, específicamente, relacionados al aborto ya los derechos de la población lgtbiq+. La principal conclusión es que la síntesis moderna promueve erróneamente una defensa de un preformismo genético, con connotaciones religiosas, que es usado por movimientos conservadores en el ámbito político-social. (shrink)

A prevailing view in moral psychology holds that empathy and sympathy play key roles in morality and in prosocial and altruistic actions. Recently, Jesse Prinz (2011a, 2011b) has challenged this view and has argued that empathy does not play a foundational or causal role in morality. He suggests that in fact the presence of empathetic emotions is harmful to morality. Prinz rejects all theories that connect empathy and morality as a constitutional, epistemological, developmental, motivational, or normative necessity. I consider two (...) of Prinz’s theses: the thesis that empathy is not necessary for moral development, and the thesis that empathy should be avoided as a guide for morality. Based on recent research in moral psychology, I argue that empathy plays a crucial role in development of moral agency. I also argue that empathy is desirable as a moral emotion. (shrink)

Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model general terms representing types that appear in a domain, and for building sound (...) taxonomic structures involving them. For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. At the core of this enterprise, there has been a theory of types specially designed to address these issues. This theory is ontologically well- founded, psychologically informed, and formally characterized. These results have led to the development of a Conceptual Modelling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed on conceptual model design in a variety of domains including academic, industrial, and governmental settings. These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for both the OntoUML language and its underlying theory, UFO. In this paper, we revise the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of OntoUML’s meta-types (e.g. kind, role, phase, mixin) should be considered not as restricted to substantial types but instead should be applied to model endurant types in general, including relator types, quality types, and mode types. We also contribute with a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a new metamodel for OntoUML (termed OntoUML 2). To demonstrate that the benefits of this approach are extended beyond OntoUML, the proposed formal theory is then employed to support the definition of UFO-based lightweight Semantic Web ontologies with ontological constraint checking in OWL. Additionally, we report on empirical evidence from the literature, mainly from cognitive psychology but also from linguistics, supporting some of the key claims made by this theory. Finally, we propose a computational support for this updated metamodel. (shrink)

I argue that newborn infants are conscious. I propose a methodology for investigating infant consciousness, and I present two approaches for determining whether newborns are conscious. First, I consider behavioral and neurobiological markers of consciousness. Second, I investigate the major theories of consciousness, including both philosophical and scientific theories, and I discuss what they predict about infant consciousness.

Enterprise Risk Management and security have become a fundamental part of Enterprise Architecture, so several frameworks and modeling languages have been designed to support the activities associated with these areas. Archi- Mate’s Risk and Security Overlay is one of such proposals, endorsed by The Open Group. We investigate the capabilities of the proposed security-related con- structs in ArchiMate with regard to the necessities of enterprise security modeling. Our analysis relies on a well-founded reference ontology of security to uncover ambiguity, missing (...) modeling elements, and other deficiencies of the security mod- eling capabilities in ArchiMate. Based on this ontologically-founded analysis, we propose a redesign of security aspects of ArchiMate to overcome its original limitations. (shrink)

Freud held complex and fascinating views on the question of mental causation. In this chapter, I propose an interpretation of Freud's views on this question, bringing together ideas from psychoanalysis, philosophy of psychoanalysis, and philosophy of mind. Faced with the impasse of the problem of how the mind interacts with the body, Freud created a two-dimensional picture of mental causation, with one dimension involving mechanistic causes and the other involving intentional causes. My thesis is that Freud's best-developed picture of mental (...) causation thesis describes mental causes as intentional causes using psychological vocabulary. I analyze three moments in Freud's work with a focus on mental causation. In the first topography, Freud uses a hybrid vocabulary, describing the mind in terms of both mechanistic causes and intentional causes. In his second topography, the mind increasingly assumes an intentional description. The third moment is Freud’s theory of anxiety, in which the arational cause of the unconscious drives, initially presented as a motor of the mind, gives rise to anxiety as an affective state that forces the self to find a solution for its mental conflicts. In the last part, I argue that Freud’s theory gradually moves from a reductionist approach to the mind-body problem on which mental causation is understood in terms of physical mechanisms, to a non-reductionist view where the mental becomes causally efficacious in its own right. (shrink)

Enterprise Risk Management involves the process of identification, evaluation, treatment, and communication regarding risks throughout the enterprise. To support the tasks associated with this process, several frameworks and modeling languages have been proposed, such as the Risk and Security Overlay (RSO) of ArchiMate. An ontological investigation of this artifact would reveal its adequacy, capabilities, and limitations w.r.t. the domain of risk and security. Based on that, a language redesign can be proposed as a refinement. Such analysis and redesign have been (...) executed for the risk elements of the RSO grounded in the Common Ontology of Value and Risk. The next step along this line of research is to address the following research problems: What would be the outcome of an ontological analysis of security-related elements of the RSO? That is, can we identify other semantic deficiencies in the RSO through an ontological analysis? Once such an analysis is provided, can we redesign the security elements of the RSO accordingly, in order to produce an improved artifact? Here, with the aid of the Reference Ontology for Security Engineering (ROSE) and the ontological theory of prevention behind it, we address the remaining gap by proceeding with an ontological analysis of the security-related constructs of the RSO. The outcome of this assessment is an ontology-based redesign of the ArchiMate language regarding security modeling. In a nutshell, we report the following contributions: (1) an ontological analysis of the RSO that identifies six limitations concerning security modeling; (2) because of the key role of the notion of prevention in security modeling, the introduction of the ontological theory of prevention in ArchiMate; (3) a well-founded redesign of security elements of ArchiMate; and (4) ontology-based security modeling patterns that are logical consequences of our proposal of redesign due to its underlying ontology of security. As a form of evaluation, we show that our proposal can describe risk treatment options, according to ISO 31000. Finally, besides presenting multiple examples, we proceed with a real-world illustrative application taken from the cybersecurity domain. (shrink)

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

Social animals need to share space and resources, whether sexual partners, parents, or food. Sharing is indeed at the core of social life. Humans, however, of all social animals, have distinct ways of sharing. They evolved to become Homo Negotiatus; a species that is prone to bargain and to dispute the value of things until some agreement is reached.

Our goal is to investigate the notion of self-agency in William James and Donald Winnicott. With James, we examine the descriptive element of what constitutes a self. With Winnicott, we explore his explanatory theory on self-emergence. Winnicott's perspective is presented here as the prehistory of the Jamesian self. James's conception of self is similar to the Winnicottian notion of an "integrated self", an embodied position that emerges from the organism's actions in the experiential field. The combination of the two approaches (...) leads to the idea that the self is a flux of identities emerging in interaction with others in the "transitional space" (an intermediate area of experience). (shrink)

In Risk Management, security issues arise from complex relations among objects and agents, their capabilities and vulnerabilities, the events they are involved in, and the value and risk they ensue to the stakeholders at hand. Further, there are patterns involving these relations that crosscut many domains, ranging from information security to public safety. Understanding and forming a shared conceptualization and vocabulary about these notions and their relations is fundamental for modeling the corresponding scenarios, so that proper security countermeasures can be (...) devised. Ontologies are instruments developed to address these conceptual clarification and terminological systematization issues. Over the years, several ontologies have been proposed in Risk Management and Security Engineering. However, as shown in recent literature, they fall short in many respects, including generality and expressivity - the latter impacting on their interoperability with related models. We propose a Reference Ontology for Security Engineering (ROSE) from a Risk Treatment perspective. Our proposal leverages on two existing Reference Ontologies: the Common Ontology of Value and Risk and a Reference Ontology of Prevention, both of which are grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). ROSE is employed for modeling and analysing some cases, in particular providing clarification to the semantically overloaded notion of Security Mechanism. (shrink)

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. This ontology has led to the development of an Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed in a number of academic, industrial and governmental settings to create conceptual models in a variety of different domains. (...) These experiences have pointed out to opportunities of improvement not only to the language itself but also to its underlying theory. In this paper, we take the first step in that direction by revising the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of the meta-types present in OntoUML (differentiating Kinds, Roles, Phases, Mixins, etc.) should be considered not as restricted to Substantial types but instead should be applied to model Endurant Types in general, including Relator types, Quality types and Mode types. We also contribute a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a metamodel for OntoUML 2.0. Finally, we propose a computational support tool implementing this updated metamodel. (shrink)

The course delivered by Heidegger during the Summer semester of 1923, and published later under the title of Ontology – The hermeneutics of facticity, is one of the most important loci in which we can have a glimpse of Kierkegaard’s influence on and importance to Heidegger, as well as of some of his interpretations about the thought of the Dane philosopher. One of them, notwithstanding puts forward a very interesting assessment of the relation between Kierkegaard and Hegel – through F. (...) A. Trendelenburg –, one of hottest topics in the Kierkegaardian scholarship, is not usually analyzed by that scholarship. Hence, this paper aims to show and analyze Heidegger’s theses on the relation between Kierkegaard-Hegel in that work in order to evaluate their correctness. As final remarks, this paper presents some metaphilosophical reflections on the very notions of relation and dependence between philosophers. (shrink)

O percurso construído pelo pensamento de Albert Camus (1913-1960) perfaz uma unidade profunda entre Ética e Estética. Par- tindo de uma preocupação explicitamente ética, o autor acaba por ter de desenvolver uma antropologia filosófica, ou seja, um discurso sobre o homem que tem como núcleo um conceito que o reenvia àquilo que podemos chamar de dimensão estética para então, a partir daí, oferecer uma resposta àquele problema ético. Desse modo, pretendemos neste trabalho explicitar o caminho ao qual aludimos em três (...) momentos: (a) a existência humana como problema ético; (b) o discurso camusiano sobre o homem que tem como núcleo a noção de Passion e, por fim, (c) a elaboração de um novo éthos, partindo da noção de Paixão, como res- posta necessária ao problema existencial configurada como uma re-cri- ação ou correção permanente, à semelhança do ofício do Artista. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that accurately identifying and classifying competitors is a challenge for many companies and entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, it is a paramount activity which provide valuable insights that affect a wide range of strategic decisions. One of the main challenges in competitor identification lies in the complex nature of the competitive relationships that arise in business envi- ronments. These have been extensively investigate over the years, which lead to a plethora of competition theories and frameworks. Still, the concept of (...) competition remains conceptually complex, as none of these approaches properly formalized their assumptions. In this paper, we address this issue by means of an ontological analysis on the notion of competition in general, and of business competition, in particular, leveraging theories from various fields, including Marketing, Strategic Management, Ecology, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences. Our analysis, the first of its kind in the literature, is grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and allows us to formally characterize why competition arises, as well as to distinguish between three types of business competitive relationships, namely market-level, firm-level and potential competition. (shrink)

The first work that René Descartes wrote was the Compendium Musicæ in 1618, this was his first experiment with the future cartesian method. As a work of youth, the author must have studied music in your education, mainly in the college of La Flèche. Conventionally, the work of Gioseffo Zarlino had been considered the main source, because was cited in the Compendium. Since the text starts with music´s definition and eight propositions, about which the rest of work was developed; check (...) the way that them appear in other treatises of the time could help to deduce the possible musical sources that the author used.This dissertation starts with a necessary reconstitution of philosophical and musical context of the epoch, followed by an analysis of jesuits conceptions of knowledge and music. In this way, it can be considered what motivated the author to write about music, as his the debates. In resemblance to his mature work, the text proposes a methodological turn that is only perceived with the context of the time in mind. After an interpretation of the definition of the music and the eight propositions, it could be possible compare with the others works form the epoch to verify his musical sources. With this process, it could evidence the influence of Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Jean de Murs, Pontus de Tyard, Gioseffo Zarlino and Francisco de Salinas. (shrink)

The philosopher René Descartes wrote the Compendium musicæ in 1618. Even though he was not known for his music production, he maintained a long correspondence around the subject in dialogue with Marin Mersenne, Constantjin Huygens, Isaac Beeckman and Joan-Albert Ban. However, his musical propositions appear as a marginal subject in his intellectual journey. To understand whether the musical theme relates to the development of his ideas, first, the organization of his correspondence about music and the citations to it in his (...) works was necessary, either in smaller texts or in the works published by the author. We analyzed the hypotheses about the forgetfulness of music in studies about the development of Descartes´ ideas. With these materials, we analyzed and historically contextualized the trajectory of the author's musical conceptions with the development of his main themes. Thus, it is possible to verify Descartes' musical dialogues with his own work and with his historical context. (shrink)

The principal aim of the thesis is to develop a developmental account of conscious experience. In this account, the objective is to understand and explain the phenomenal experience of newborns and pre-linguistic infants. The question that guides the investigation concerns the phenomenality of babies' experiences: what is it like to be a baby? There are some crucial philosophical issues that any account of the nature of infant consciousness must face: the ontology of early conscious states; the epistemic status of infants' (...) experiences; the content of infants' experiences. The thesis addresses how we evolve as conscious beings from early states of life until we become full self-conscious beings who are morally responsible for our actions. The thesis involves four chapters. The first chapter explores phenomenal consciousness in newborns, first addressing the epistemological and methodological problems, and then arguing that newborns are phenomenally conscious and have a variety of phenomenal experiences. The second chapter addresses representation in newborns, claiming that their conscious experiences represent the world and discussing the consequences for representationalism. The third chapter focuses on the sense of agency, arguing that infants have a sense of agency and a sort of self-consciousness. The fourth chapter discusses moral agency, focusing mainly on the role of empathy. (shrink)

This paper explores the enduring impact of Cartesian dualism on the formulation of autism diagnosis and its subsequent implications for our contemporary understanding of the condition. It presents a concise historical overview tracing the evolution of autism diagnosis through the lenses of two traditional reductionist paradigms: a psychological framework (emphasizing it as a mental disorder) and a biological framework (viewing it as a neurological dysfunction). However, the paper argues for a revised perspective that transcends the limitations inherent in both conventional (...) viewpoints and challenges the Cartesian dichotomy between the physical and the mental realms. Instead, it proposes an instrumentalist conception of mental phenomena. This conceptual shift is motivated by the ethical imperative of affording autistic individuals a more dignified and inclusive standing within society, one that acknowledges their moral value. (shrink)

Este ensaio visa refletir sobre as questões de tradução levantadas por Jacques Derrida (1987), questões essas que não chegam a formalizar uma teoria da tradução, mas têm elas o ato de traduzir o original como veredas a ser percorridas por um sujeito endividado, ou seja, o tradutor. No dizer de Derrida, “a tarefa do tradutor indica a lei e a missão outorgada pelo outro a que o tradutor deve responder”. Neste sentido, entendemos aqui a tradução como um ato de diálogo, (...) de negociação, uma vez que a língua, nesta perspectiva, é aquilo que não se deixa possuir. Com isso, os problemas da tradução são - de um lado - o problema da língua, de sua natureza heterogênea, fugidia; e, do outro, do modelo tradicional de tradução que se apoia na concepção de língua como algo homogêneo em que a diversidade, o diferente são vistos como pecado, como transgressão da linguagem (adâmica). (shrink)

Na década de 1980, um programa de pesquisa se popularizou no campo da filosofia e psicologia das emoções. Esse programa, denominado construcionismo social, afirmava que emoções eram produtos de fatores sociais e não poderiam ser compreendidas em um vocabulário adaptacionista. No entanto, ao longo do tempo essas teorias perderam grande parte de sua força e popularidade, e praticamente desapareceram da filosofia das emoções contemporânea. O objetivo do presente artigo será diagnosticar esse predicamento, e perguntar se o construcionismo social ainda poderia (...) ser uma via teórica interessante para o estudo das emoções. Para isso, iremos clarificar o significado da metáfora da “construção” e examinar algumas das principais teorias construcionistas de emoções. Embora nossas conclusões sejam negativas em relação ao rótulo da construção social, elas podem ainda assim trazer algum alívio para aqueles que se simpatizam com suas pretensões teóricas, prescrições metodológicas e foco de análise. (shrink)

Risk propagation encompasses a plethora of techniques for analyzing how risk “spreads” in a given system. Albeit commonly used in technical literature, the very notion of risk propagation turns out to be a conceptually imprecise and overloaded one. This might also explain the multitude of modeling solutions that have been proposed in the lit- erature. Having a clear understanding of what exactly risk is, how it be quantified, and in what sense it can be propagated is fundamental for devising high-quality (...) risk assessment and decision-making solutions. In this paper, we exploit a previous well-established work about the nature of risk and related notions with the goal of providing a proper interpre- tation of the different notions of risk propagation, as well as revealing and harmonizing the alternative semantics for the links used in common risk propagation graphs. Finally, we discuss how these results can be leveraged in practice to model risk propagation scenarios. (shrink)

On 25 May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated George Floyd in Minneapolis — a murder that was captured in a confronting nine-minute bystander video that set off a firestorm of activity on online social networks, in the streets of the United States, and even worldwide. These protests captured the collective rage, dissatisfaction, and resentment personally and vicariously experienced towards the widespread systematic injustice and mistreatment of African Americans by police and vigilantes. The scale of these protests, both online and in (...) the streets, has been estimated to have far exceeded the civil rights marches of the 1960s (Buchanan et al. 2020). Considering the widespread extent of these protests, our research aims to analyse conflictual intergroup moral dynamics in terms of the reactive attitudes expressed by distinct online communities on Twitter. This paper examines the extent to which the Strawsonian (1962) reactive attitudes framework is applicable to the Twitter discourse around the Black Lives Matter protests reignited by the murder of George Floyd. In particular, we argue that the Strawsonian framework is inadequate to understand a range of prevalent attitudes expressed in this discourse — attitudes that we call reactionary as opposed to merely reactive. Reactionary attitudes include counter-indignation on behalf of the accused rather than Strawsonian indignation on behalf of the victim of a moral wrong. We document the expression of such attitudes among the right-wing participants in the online discourse about the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

Contemporary mainstream economics cannot be seen as disconnected from philosophical concerns. On the contrary, it should be understood as a defence for a specific philosophy, namely, crude quantitative hedonism where money would measure pleasure and pain. Disguised among a great mathematical apparatus involving utility functions, supply, and demand, lies a specific hedonist philosophy that every year is lectured to thousands of economic and business students around the world. This hedonist philosophy is much less sophisticated than that in ancient hedonist philosophers (...) as Epicurus or Lucretius. Furthermore, it does not solve any of the systematic difficulties regularly faced by hedonist philosophy. However, the argument that economics is detached from philosophy works as a rhetorical artifice to protect its dominant underlying philosophy: Philosophical disputes would have to be addressed within the biased mathematical apparatus of quantitative hedonism. Economists and business students must learn to identify the underlying philosophy in mainstream economics and alternative philosophical systems. (shrink)

The current economic and societal production system gives money a magnified importance, overlooking other essential flows necessary for human survival and existence. It focuses on monetary indicators like profits, dividends, and GDPs to evaluate organizational production, while often disregarding outputs that harm the biosphere. Money is treated as the constitutive being (ousia) and attributed undemonstrated explanatory properties. Intangible flow theory helps eliminate this metaphysical status of money by recognizing that monetary flows are just one of many necessary flows for human (...) survival and existence. Organizations deliver product-flows that require input-flows from and send output-flows back to the encompassing biosphere, whether they explicitly engage in environmentally friendly activities or not. Therefore, every organization is an ecological entity because it has a relationship with the biosphere, which participates in the manner through which humans integrate into their surrounding environment and relate to other living beings. Eliminating the metaphysical status of money integrates every organization in the biosphere, making organizations accountable for environmental harm caused by their activities. This can be achieved by deconstructing the metaphysical status of money in business models. (shrink)

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of (...) UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.). (shrink)

This article aims to discuss on Rousseau's justification for his Metaphysical position. We note in Rousseau a justification of personal nature in response to the arguments of materialist and atheist philosophers. Rousseau also criticizes the "systems spirit". In this context that Rousseau back to read Descartes to develop a doctrine of his own. This expedient opens the perspective of a moral and personal dimension in research for truth.

Purpose: Illicit financial flows are targeted by the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, these illicit flows are not entirely understood. Furthermore, they can benefit from economic norms, laws, and regulations that lack mechanisms to detect and penalize them. This paper investigates whether a recent test, the embezzler test, can be used to identify regulatory architectures that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. -/- Design/methodology/approach: To develop a more advanced version of the embezzler test in terms (...) of definitions and practical implementation methodology. -/- Findings: In this test, the definition of embezzlement can be understood to be the occurrence of illicit financial flows crossing the boundaries of organizations and/or countries. This is a multi-stage test, which intentionally simulates illicit financial flows to observe how well equipped is the regulatory architecture to deal with other financial offences that are related with these flows, such as theft, money laundering, fraud, corruption, market manipulation, and tax evasion. -/- Originality: This is the first explicit test that has been presented to identify norms, laws, and regulations that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. -/- Research implications: Future research can employ the version of this test to stress test a large range of economic norms, laws, and regulations. -/- Practical/Social implications: This test’s new version can assist achieve the UN SDGs’ illicit financial flow reduction target. Furthermore, it can be used to study both existing and proposed norms, laws, and regulation. (shrink)

As the use of algorithmic decision‐making becomes more commonplace, so too does the worry that these algorithms are often inscrutable and our use of them is a threat to our agency. Since we do not understand why an inscrutable process recommends one option over another, we lose our ability to judge whether the guidance is appropriate and are vulnerable to being led astray. In response, I claim that a process being inscrutable does not automatically make its guidance inappropriate. This phenomenon (...) is not restricted to algorithms, and there are many social processes which we should conform to but are similarly unable to judge for ourselves. I provide a framework for how we can depend on inscrutable processes by introducing a distinction between knowing conformity (where I understand what justifies the guidance) from mere conformity (where I merely do what I am told) and showing how mere conformity is often positively valuable because it allows for extended processes that in turn allow us to accomplish more than we could on our own. This is in effect a division of deliberative labour, which I argue is something commonplace but not often recognised, of which algorithmic guidance can be an example. (shrink)

O objetivo desta publicação é incentivar a produção filosófica de excelência por parte de pesquisadores notadamente influenciados pela filosofia de Wittgenstein e cujos temas possam suscitar um debate aprofundado. Além de desafiar o empreendimento filosófico contemporâneo, os temas aqui apresentados abordam questões que muitas vezes estão além daquelas consideradas por Wittgenstein em seu tempo. O leitor encontrará neste volume questões relacionadas ao ceticismo semântico e epistêmico, ao relativismo ético, às leituras literárias de Wittgenstein, ao problema das outras mentes e percepção (...) de aspectos, a intersubjetividade e o caráter contrassensual do Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, e, também, relacionadas ao Paradoxo de Moore. (shrink)