Finding truth is an art that was learned and unlearned. Truth can only be found by looking for independent confirmation of our beliefs, by reality. This methodology is difficult to apply in personal- and social settings, because power and politics turn 'seeking independent confirmation' into 'avoiding dependent rejection'. A completely different social order is implied and the one keeps running the other into the ground like a tectonic plate. Philosophical Modernism showed us how dualism works, before Post-Modernism challenged it, regressing (...) to monism. (shrink)

Ontologies formally represent reality in a way that limits ambiguity and facilitates automated reasoning and data fusion, but is often daunting to the non-technical user. Thus, many researchers have endeavored to hide the formal syntax and semantics of ontologies behind the constructs of Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs), which retain the formal properties of ontologies while simultaneously presenting that information in a comprehensible natural language format. In this paper, we build upon previous work in this field by evaluating prospects of implementing (...) International Technology Alliance Controlled English (ITACE) as a middleware for ontology editing. We also discuss at length a prototype of a natural language conversational interface application designed to facilitate ontology editing via the formulation of CNL constructs. (shrink)

Esta entrevista realizada al vicedirector de la Real Academia Española, José Manuel Sánchez Ron, busca resolver las inquietudes que se formulan a partir de las posibilidades de hallar una conjunción metodológica entre la Literatura y la Física. Para ello, se toma en cuenta la organización especializada de la RAE, que se encarga de la difusión y la preservación del buen uso del lenguaje y la creación literaria. El discurso, junto con las personalidades que se dedican a desarrollarlo, cumplen también un (...) rol importante para ello, ya que sirven como ejes para construir un lenguaje apropiado del castellano. Para terminar, este intercambio de conocimientos será de utilidad para desentrañar cómo se desenvuelve esta dicotomía de disciplinas en otros ámbitos, como el universitario. (shrink)

Este es un álbum de fotografías "robadas" de La Habana y otros lugares de Cuba. Los textos asociados a las fotografías son versos extraídos de cinco poemas de José Martí (“Yo soy un hombre sincero”, “Bosque de rosas”, “En ti pensaba, en tus cabellos”, “La copa envenenada” y “Es rubia: el cabello suelto”), sacados de contexto y organizado en desorden.

Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution replaces the pursuit of one type of good by another; frustration, where opportunities for practitioners to discover goods or develop new (...) standards of excellence are frustrated by institutional priorities and resource allocation; and injustice, which undermines the integrity of relationships within the organization and/or with partners. These threats, though analytically distinct, are often mutually reinforcing. This conceptual contribution is illustrated both by the extant literature and by a novel context, the three-ring circus. (shrink)

A teacher controls the release of materials in attempt to get students to appreciate the appeal of a popular yet wrongheaded argument before exposing them to its shortcomings. An instructor uses body language, tone of voice, and images in a Power-Point presentation that appeal to non-deliberative mechanisms in order to influence the students to pay more attention, maintain their focus, or to remember the content better. How do we draw the line between such innocuous educational practices and problematic manipulation, such (...) as deterring students from questioning certain views by instilling fear or shame? I help answering this question by illuminating one significant danger, which hasn’t been accurately identified in the relevant literature: the danger that manipulations in education—even when they’re non-deceptive and aim for the good of the students—will hinder the development or fulfillment of the students’ deliberative projects. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the Hasidic view, namely, that human flaws do not function as a barrier between a fallen humanity and a perfect deity, since the whole of creation stems from a divine act of self-contraction. Thus, we need not be discouraged by our own shortcomings, nor by those of our loved ones. Rather, seeing our flaws in the face of another should remind us that imperfection is an aspect of the God who created us. Such a positive approach (...) to human fallibility arouses forgiveness, mutual acceptance, and a hope for repair, and, therefore, has much to recommend itself. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the notion of a perfect God derives from the Greeks rather than the Hebrew Bible. A review of classical philosophies and the idea of God’s imperfection is followed by a consideration of several Jewish attempts to resolve the dichotomy between Divine perfection and an imperfect creation. I focus on Lurianic Kabbalah, Hans Jonas, and on the Hasidic concept of "Ayin " or “nothingness” as the very source of redemption. This Hasidic idea, which was further expanded upon by the Baal Shem Tov’s students, appears in a tale recounted by his great-grandson R. Nachman of Bratslav called “The Hanging Lamp.” I focus on the tale, which illustrates the idea that knowledge of human imperfection is itself a means of perfection and redemption. (shrink)

Race is one of the most common variables in the social sciences, used to draw correlations between racial groups and numerous other important variables such as education, healthcare outcomes, aptitude tests, wealth, employment and so forth. But where concern with race once reflected the view that races were biologically real, many, if not most, contemporary social scientists have abandoned the idea that racial categories demarcate substantial, intrinsic biological differences between people. This, in turn, raises an important question about the significance (...) of race in those social sciences: if there is no biological basis of race, why are racial categories useful to social scientists? More specifically, in virtue of what are racial categories a successful basis of informative, important social scientific generalizations? 2 We’ll call this social science’s race puzzle. (shrink)

Editorial introduction to series of papers resulting from a European Commission Project on mental capacity.

The European Association for Cognitive Systems is the association resulting from the EUCog network, which has been active since 2006. It has ca. 1000 members and is currently chaired by Vincent C. Müller. We ran our annual conference on December 08-09 2016, kindly hosted by the Technical University of Vienna with Markus Vincze as local chair. The invited speakers were David Vernon and Paul F.M.J. Verschure. Out of the 49 submissions for the meeting, we accepted 18 a papers and 25 (...) as posters (after double-blind reviewing). Papers are published here as “full papers” or “short papers” while posters are published here as “short papers” or “abstracts”. Some of the papers presented at the conference will be published in a separate special volume on ‘Cognitive Robot Architectures’ with the journal Cognitive Systems Research. - RC, VCM, YS, MV. (shrink)

Leading cosmological theories engender a controversial puzzle which has prompted philosophers to propose competing epistemological solutions and physicists to propose methodological changes to cosmology. The puzzle arises from the prediction that every brain on Earth will eventually be vastly outnumbered by physical duplicates formed by random collisions of particles in outer space. Supposing that this prediction is correct, shouldn't you believe that your brain is probably one of these vastly more typical extraterrestrial brains, since you cannot infer your brain's origin (...) from your experiential state? But supposing that your brain is one of these extraterrestrial brains, why be confident in the cosmological theories, since you never actually received testimony supporting these theories? Proposals in the literature either deny the rationality of believing theories that make the prediction or deny the typicality of your brain among its duplicates. This paper argues that these proposals are not entirely satisfactory. Instead, one should be confident in theories making the prediction on the supposition that your brain is one of the extraterrestrial brains. The upshots include that it may be rational to believe that your brain is probably an extraterrestrial brain and that cosmologists should not alter their methodology in response to the puzzle. (shrink)

Referent Tracking (RT) advocates the use of instance unique identifiers to refer to the entities comprising the subject matter of patient health records. RT promises many benefits to those who use health record data to improve patient care. To further the adoption of the paradigm we provide an illustration of how data from an EHR application needs to be decomposed in order to make it accord with the tenets of RT. We describe the ontological principles on which this decomposition is (...) based in order to allow integration efforts to be applied in similar ways to other EHR applications. We find that an ordinary statement from an EHR contains a surprising amount of “hidden” data that are only revealed by its decomposition according to these principles. (shrink)

Rinard (2019) brings to our attention the fact that, typically, the questions What should I believe? and What should I do? are treated differently. A typical answer to the first question is Believe according to the evidence, and a typical answer to the second question is Do what is right. But Rinard rejects this dichotomy. In its place, she argues for a view which she calls “Equal Treatment” in which one should believe according to the same considerations that govern what (...) one should do. Christensen (forthcoming) aptly situates Equal Treatment as a limit case of a recent movement towards taking pragmatic factors as partly determining what one should believe, in that Equal Treatment is a purely pragmatic view. Does Rinard’s case for a purely pragmatic view succeed? This paper argues that the answer is no. Three objections that target key parts of Rinard’s case for Equal Treatment are presented. The upshot is that the dichotomy between the answers to What should I believe? and What should I do? seems robust against strong attempts to dismantle it. (shrink)

Human social intelligence comprises a wide range of complex cognitive and affective processes that appear to be selectively impaired in autistic spectrum disorders. The study of these neuro- developmental disorders and the study of canonical social intelligence have advanced rapidly over the last twenty years by investigating the two together. Specifically, studies of autism have provided important insights into the nature of ‘theory of mind’ abilities, their normal development and underlying neural systems. At the same time, the idea of impaired (...) development of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying ‘theory of mind’ has shed new light on the nature of autistic disorders. This general approach is not restricted to the study of impairments but extends to mapping areas of social intelligence that are spared in autism. Here we investigate basic moral judgment and find that it appears to be substantially intact in children with autism who are severely impaired in ‘theory of mind’. At the same time, we extend studies of moral reasoning in normal development by way of a new control task, the ‘cry baby’ task. Cry baby scenarios, in which the distress of the victim is ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unjustified,’ do not elicit moral condemnation from normally developing preschoolers or from children with autism. Judgments of moral transgressions in which the victim displays distress are therefore not likely the result of a simple automatic reaction to the distress and more likely involve moral reasoning. Mapping the cognitive co-morbidity patterns of disordered development should encompass both impairments and sparings because both will be needed to make sense of the neural and genetic levels. (shrink)

A critical reply to the anti-mindfulness critics in the collection, who oppose the popular secularized adoption of mindfulness on various grounds (it is not Buddhism, it is Buddhism, it is a tool of neo-capitalist exploitation, etc.), I argue that mindfulness is a quality of consciousness, opposite mindlessness, that may be cultivated through practice, and is almost always beneficial to those who cultivate it.

When the U.S. conducts warfare, elements of a force are drawn from different services and work together as a single team to accomplish an assigned mission. To achieve such unified action, it is necessary that the doctrines governing the actions of members of specific services be both consistent with and subservient to joint Doctrine. Because warfighting today increasingly involves not only live forces but also automated systems, unified action requires that information technology that is used in joint warfare must be (...) aligned with joint doctrine. It requires also that the separate information systems used by the different elements of a joint force must be interoperable, in the sense that data and information that is generated by each element must be usable (understandable, processable) by all the other elements that need them. Currently, such interoperability is impeded by multiple inconsistencies among the different data and software standards used by warfighters. We describe here the on-going project of creating a Joint Doctrine Ontology (JDO), which uses joint doctrine to provide shared computer-accessible content valid for any field of military endeavor, organization, and information system. JDO addresses the two previously mentioned requirements of unified action by providing a widely applicable benchmark for use by developers of information systems that will both guarantee alignment with joint doctrine and support interoperability. (shrink)

One approach to science treats science as a cognitive accomplishment of individuals and defines a scientific community as an aggregate of individual inquirers. Another treats science as a fundamentally collective endeavor and defines a scientist as a member of a scientific community. Distributed cognition has been offered as a framework that could be used to reconcile these two approaches. Adam Toon has recently asked if the cognitive and the social can be friends at last. He answers that they probably cannot, (...) posing objections to the would-be rapprochement. We clarify both the animosity and the tonic proposed to resolve it, ultimately arguing that worries raised by Toon and others are uncompelling. (shrink)

A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more general elements. Thus, we offer a case study (...) that one cannot offer a comprehensive model of the causal power of racial categories as social constructions without careful attention both to local meanings and more general mechanisms. (shrink)

An updated survey of the research scope in Integral Biomathics.

En este capítulo, defendemos la tesis de que ciertas injusticias epistémicas relacionadas al testimonio que afectan a las personas privadas de la libertad están en tensión con la deliberación democrática. En la primera sección, ofrecemos una breve discusión de la noción de la deliberación democrática. En la segunda sección, presentamos cuatro variedades de injusticia epistémica relacionadas al testimonio. En la tercera sección, consideramos algunos casos de estas variedades de injusticia epistémica en el sistema carcelario a modo ilustrativo y explicaremos cómo (...) esto crea una tensión con la deliberación democrática. (shrink)

Contemporary political philosophy is, to a certain degree, dominated by a family of theories that invoke hypothetical procedures as a method of normative justification. This article intends to analyze Axel Honneth’s critique of the so-called “proceduralism” in theories of justice, as well as to examine the author’s alternative proposal for a justification method, what he calls “normative reconstruction”. Honneth’s complaints are divided in three parts: critiques of the understanding of justice, the method of justification, and the scope of proceduralist theories (...) of justice are raised, each one receiving an alternative formulation by the author. After reading texts by Axel Honneth, John Rawls — author of "A theory of justice", in which he presents one of the most well-known proceduralist arguments — Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, who raise problems for Honneth’s normative reconstruction, we suspect that even though Honneth’s critique of proceduralism and his proposal of normative reconstruction seem initially plausible, they are only possible if we abandon the framework of political philosophy to do what is usually called “social philosophy”. (shrink)

The ability to access and share data is key to optimizing and streamlining any industrial production process. Unfortunately, the manufacturing industry is stymied by a lack of interoperability among the systems by which data are produced and managed, and this is true both within and across organizations. In this paper, we describe our work to address this problem through the creation of a suite of modular ontologies representing the product life cycle and its successive phases, from design to end of (...) life. We call this suite the Product Life Cycle (PLC) Ontologies. The suite extends proximately from The Common Core Ontologies (CCO) used widely in defense and intelligence circles, and ultimately from the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which serves as top level ontology for the CCO and for some 300 further ontologies. The PLC Ontologies were developed together, but they have been factored to cover particular domains such as design, manufacturing processes, and tools. We argue that these ontologies, when used together with standard public domain alignment and browsing tools created within the context of the Semantic Web, may offer a low-cost approach to solving increasingly costly problems of data management in the manufacturing industry. (shrink)

We describe on-going work on IAO-Intel, an information artifact ontology developed as part of a suite of ontologies designed to support the needs of the US Army intelligence community within the framework of the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A). IAO-Intel provides a controlled, structured vocabulary for the consistent formulation of metadata about documents, images, emails and other carriers of information. It will provide a resource for uniform explication of the terms used in multiple existing military dictionaries, thesauri and metadata registries, (...) thereby enhancing the degree to which the content formulated with their aid will be available to computational reasoning. (shrink)

Se expone, en este trabajo, una teoría que muestra cómo es que el hombre extrae desde su propio fondo ciertas ideas innatas que proyecta en los entes que percibe y que piensa, particularmente las ideas de ser y de unidad. Además, se muestra que el grado de proyección de estas ideas (las ideas de ser y de unidad) sobre los entes que el entendimiento percibe, está en función del grado de alegría o de angustia que un hombre siente. Para el (...) análisis de las ideas innatas y de las emociones, me baso sobre todo en la filosofía racionalista (Descartes, Spinoza y Leibniz). Aunque, para el análisis de las emociones, también me apoyo en la filosofía heideggeriana. Por último, reflexionando a partir del horizonte del pensamiento analógico, trazado por Beuchot, se expone cómo esta teoría innatista de la proyección puede servir para responder al relativismo absoluto de la posmodernidad. (shrink)

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

While the recent special issue of JCS on machine consciousness (Volume 14, Issue 7) was in preparation, a collection of papers on the same topic, entitled Artificial Consciousness and edited by Antonio Chella and Riccardo Manzotti, was published. 1 The editors of the JCS special issue, Ron Chrisley, Robert Clowes and Steve Torrance, thought it would be a timely and productive move to have authors of papers in their collection review the papers in the Chella and Manzotti book, and include (...) these reviews in the special issue of the journal. Eight of the JCS authors (plus Uziel Awret) volunteered to review one or more of the fifteen papers in Artificial Consciousness; these individual reviews were then collected together with a minimal amount of editing to produce a seamless chapter-by-chapter review of the entire book. Because the number and length of contributions to the JCS issue was greater than expected, the collective review of Artificial Con- sciousness had to be omitted, but here at last it is. Each paper’s review is written by a single author, so any comments made may not reflect the opinions of all nine of the joint authors! (shrink)

A recording or performance of a song is a cover if there is an earlier, canonical recording of the song. It can seem intuitive to think that properly appreciating a cover requires considering it in relation to the original, or at least that doing so will yield a deeper appreciation. This intuition is supported by some philosophical accounts of covers. And it is complicated by the possibility of hearing in, whereby one hears elements of the original version in the cover. (...) We argue that it can nevertheless be just as legitimate to consider a cover version on its own as it is to consider it in relation to the earlier recording that it is covering. In some cases, these two modes of appreciation will offer distinct rewards. In other cases, one mode will be substantially more rewarding than the other. The details matter, especially in complicated cases like covers of covers, but neither mode is privileged in principle. (shrink)

Este estudio se ocupa del control social del cuerpo y de la reconfiguración de la memoria popular en películas de horror a través de la perspectiva genealógica de Foucault, presentada en su libro Vigilar y Castigar, publicado hace 40 años. Por lo tanto, tomaremos, À l’interieur e Frontière (s), dos producciones de horror cinematográfico hechas por directores franceses, ambos publicados en 2007. La hipótesis principal es que las películas de terror se muestran como una nueva forma de vigilancia y control (...) social del cuerpo. Por otro lado, también puede recodificar la memoria popular apropiándose de acontecimientos polítcos y/o revolucionarios como en las películas comentadas por Foucault en la revista Cahiers de Cinéma en 1974 políticas, aunque no sean las películas de terror. (shrink)

Este roteiro de leitura, que ora apresentamos, tem como objetivo principal tornar mais acessível, ou melhor, mais inteligível A ordem do discurso de Michel Foucault para aqueles que se arriscam a entrar nesta ordem por meio de sua análise do discurso redimensionada nesta sua aula inaugural. É um roteiro simples que procurou atender minimamente aos leitores iniciantes deste texto que se tornou um clássico no campo das Humanidades e das ciências empíricas como o Direito e a própria Medicina, campos que (...) passaram pelo crivo das análises arqueogenealógicas empreendidas por Foucault. (shrink)

This chapter describes how philosophical theorizing about justice can be connected with empirical research in the social sciences. We begin by drawing on some received distinctions between ideal and non-ideal approaches to theorizing justice along several different dimensions, showing how non-ideal approaches are needed to address normative aspects of real-world problems and to provide practical guidance. We argue that there are advantages to a transitional approach to justice focusing on manifest injustices, including the fact that it enables us to set (...) aside some reasonable disagreements about justice. The ‘bottom-up’ approach we advocate, for which we borrow Wolff’s term ‘real-world political philosophy’, is an empirically-informed normative analysis that attends to specific, identifiable injustices, and thus is partial, though not isolationist. We illustrate our approach by considering how different models of the nature of disability suggest different kinds of remedy for injustices faced by persons living with disabilities. We reflect on the nature and significance of vulnerabilities, and we assess the role of public opinion in normative theorizing, suggesting a particular significance for the opinions and experiences of marginalized groups. We finally reflect on the relevance of European legal and institutional frameworks for theorizing justice in Europe. (shrink)

Awareness growth—coming to entertain propositions of which one was previously unaware—is a crucial aspect of epistemic thriving. And yet, it is widely believed that orthodox Bayesianism cannot accommodate this phenomenon, since that would require employing supposedly defective catch-all propositions. Orthodox Bayesianism, it is concluded, must be amended. In this paper, I show that this argument fails, and that, on the contrary, the orthodox version of Bayesianism is particularly well-suited to accommodate awareness growth. For it entails what I call the refinement (...) view, which allows us to capture that awareness growth consists in the increase of one’s capacity of discernment. (shrink)

El derecho a una muerte digna es ampliamente ignorado por el ordenamiento jurídico brasileño. Esta invisibilidad del proceso de finitud y sus consecuencias son el objeto de este estudio, que tiene como objetivo realizar una encuesta exploratoria para identificar los puntos relevantes que deben desarrollarse para garantizar un proceso de finitud digno. Se analizaron 50 publicaciones a través de una encuesta online y física de obras publicadas hasta marzo de 2023. Los estudios analizados expresan preocupación por los dilemas éticos de (...) la atención a seres humanos en finitud, pero no analizan las formas de pro-tección a la finitud existentes ni cuáles son las áreas que aún necesitan regulación para hacer efectiva esta atención. Se espera que esta investigación contribuya a fortalecer la visión crítica de la finitud, considerando la protección actual de la finitud, los límites jurídicos del Estado y los posibles pasos futuros para avanzar en los estudios aplicados a la actualización práctica del sistema jurídico brasileño. (shrink)

Niche construction theory highlights the active role of organisms in modifying their environment. A subset of these modifications is the developmental niche, which concerns ecological, epistemic, social and symbolic legacies inherited by organisms as resources that scaffold their developmental processes. Since in this theory development is a situated process that takes place in a culturally structured environment, we may reasonably ask if implicit cultural biases may, in some cases, be responsible for maladaptive developmental niches. In this paper we wish to (...) argue for an affirmative answer. In order to do so, we first propose to conceptualize implicit bias as embodied perceptual habits, and then proceed to show that these habits are at least partially responsible for maladaptive developmental niches of children with Down syndrome and autism. With this framework we thus hope to bring together two fields of research that haven’t been explicitly connected: implicit bias and niche construction theory. Linking these two theories may bring benefits both to implicit bias researchers, who can extend this concept to characterize other sets of processes as biased, as well as to niche construction theorists, who will have a useful theoretical tool to diagnose maladaptive features of niches brought about by sociocultural biases. (shrink)

We review the history of the philosophy of fondue since Aristotle so as to arrive at the formulation of the paradox of Swiss fondue. Either the wine and the cheese cease to exist (Buridan), but then the fondue is not really a mixture of wine and cheese. Or the wine and the cheese continue to exist. If they do, then either they continue to exist in different places (the chemists), but then a fondue can never be perfectly homogenous (it is (...) a French fondue). Or the wine and the cheese continue to exist in the same place (the Stoïcs), but then wine and cheese have to be, oddly, penetrable and spatially expansible. Aristote attempted to solve this paradox by arguing that the cheese and wine continue to exist, but only potentially in the fondue. We sketch an alternative answer. The wine and the cheese continue to exist, but only non-spatially in the fondue. Wine and cheese, once mixed, become non-spatial constituents of the fondue, a bit like character traits are non-spatial constituents of persons. The wine and the cheese are in the fondue, but only the fondue is there in the fondue pot. (shrink)

Este ensaio celebra as cinco décadas da publicação do livro A ordem do discurso de Michel Foucault, realizando uma reflexão acerca de sua repercussão entre as ciências sociais e sobre seus usos, principalmente, no campo da linguagem na parte relacionada à análise do discurso de linha francesa. Portanto, trata-se de uma retrospectiva crítica cuja análise começa com a entrevista que Foucault concedeu algumas semanas antes de proferir esta aula aos brasileiros Sergio Paulo Rouanet e José Guilherme Merquior. Em seguida, o (...) presente trabalho faz uma breve história da entrada de Foucault ao Collège de France e, por fim, lida com a microfísica do discurso que se encontra nesta aula, sobretudo, da rarefação do sujeito, além dos seus usos nas ciências humanas e sociais mais o campo da linguagem em torno da pragmática e das análises de discurso. (shrink)

Este estudo tem como objetivo principal discutir qual o lugar da memória nas pesquisas históricas empreendidas pelo filósofo francês Michel Foucault, o qual foi responsável pelo desenvolvimento de duas frentes metodológicas de trabalho: a arqueologia do saber e a genealogia do poder, conhecidas hoje como arqueogenealogia foucaultiana. Ao longo de mais de 30 anos dedicados a estas pesquisas, Michel Foucault ganhou projeção nacional e internacional pela sua inquietante forma de aliar a militância política com o trabalho acadêmico, demonstrando, com isso, (...) qual era o papel do intelectual frente aos desafios e demandas no mundo do pós-guerra. Recebeu a maior honraria no mundo da intelectualidade francesa ao ser eleito professor do célebre Collège de France, assumindo, por mais de uma década, a cátedra história dos sistemas de pensamentos. Em uma de suas últimas entrevistas, declarou que todos os seus gestos tinham como principal objetivo: criar a história como os seres humanos se tornam sujeitos em nossa cultura. Esta declaração deixa evidente qual o lugar que a história ocupa em sua obra, mas qual seria o lugar da memória nesses seus empreendimentos? Por que a história aparece em seu trabalho como lugar privilegiado enquanto a memória tem um lugar de coadjuvante? São estas as reflexões iniciais que buscamos realizar neste nosso trabalho. (shrink)

Computational tools might tempt us to renounce complete cer- tainty. By forgoing of rigorous proof, we could get (very) probable results for a fraction of the cost. But is it really true that proofs (as we know and love them) can lead us to certainty? Maybe not. Proofs do not wear their correct- ness on their sleeve, and we are not infallible in checking them. This suggests that we need help to check our results. When our fellow mathematicians will be (...) too tired or too busy to scrutinize our putative proofs, computer proof assistants could help. But feeding a mathematical argument to a computer is hard. Still, we might be willing to undertake the endeavor in view of the extra perks that formalization may bring—chiefly among them, an enhanced mathematical understanding. (shrink)

As a nexus of fertility’s finitude and female midlife, menopause is a physical and cultural phenomenon through which the relation between the medicalization of the female reproductive cycle and normative attitudes toward aging become expressed. Age, like other systems of separation, can function as an “instrument of regulatory regimes” and shows similarities to gender in its body-bound, surface-focused, and morally coded position in the sociomedical sphere. However, although age is an influential social category, its reliance on historical and epistemic constructions (...) of the body has not been politicized to a degree comparable to other categories like gender, race, and sexuality. As Kathleen. (shrink)

Este trabalho reflete sobre o modo como nossos ancestrais negros resistiram à necropolítica colonial mobilizando saberes para recriar no Brasil outros espaços religiosos sob o nome de terreiros de candomblé. Mas o objetivo principal da discussão é tratar sobre as noções de sincretismo religioso, desconstruindo-a teoricamente conforme a decolonialidade aplica tal conceito derridiano. O termo necropolítica é usado aqui conforme Achille Mbembe o emprega. Como uma forma de contribuir com o debate em voga e, ao mesmo tempo, fazer o diagnóstico (...) do presente, a discussão se justifica também porque a questão do sincretismo religioso tem sido alvo de muitos questionamentos por parte dos movimentos negros e por parte dos teóricos da decolonialidade. (shrink)

A estrutura argumentativa deste artigo pode ser resumida no seguinte raciocínio: 1) Espinosa foi recorrentemente acusado de eleatismo; 2) há ruptura com o eleatismo quando se admite a multivocidade dos operadores lógicos “é” e “não é”; como se vê, por exemplo, 2.1) na discussão que introduz os Grandes Gêneros no So sta de Platão, e 2.2) em certo uso que Aristóteles faz da doutrina das categorias para exibilizar a versão parmenídica do Princípio de Não-Contradição. 3) Espinosa admite a multivocidade do (...) “é” e do “não-é”. Logo, Espinosa não deve ser colocado entre os eleatas mas sim na irmandade dos suspeitos do chamado parricídio contra Parmênides. Este raciocínio, quase um truísmo, permitirá, não obstante, duas apreciações interessantes: uma acerca de como certa tradição interpretativa da loso a de Espinosa colocou mal o problema da relação da ontologia espinosana com os princípios lógicos; outra acerca do tipo de lógica subjacente à teoria dos modos de percepção ou gêneros de conhecimento. (shrink)

Este artigo busca adentrar pelas questões relacionadas à biopolítica do corpo, sobretudo, daquelas ligadas à estatização do biológico e do racismo do Estado, que aparecem nos trabalhos de Michel Foucault e que aqui evocamos para analisar o corpo enquanto objeto discursivo analisável dessa biopolítica em duas produções francesas de horror, - Frontière(s) e em À l’interieur – que exibem imagens dos tumultos de Outubro de 2005, acontecimento marcado pelos protestos contra a política de perseguição aos sans-papiers que vitimou três jovens (...) de origem africana. É a partir daí que retomaremos a discussão do “quem somos nós”, em Foucault, para refletir sobre o sujeito, a menoridade e a liberdade na estatização do corpo, um lugar da memória nacional. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have come to accept that contextual values can play unavoidable and desirable roles in science. This has raised concerns about the need to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate value influences in scientific inquiry. I discuss here four such concerns: epistemic distortion, value imposition, undermining of public trust in science, and the use of objectionable values. I contend that preserving epistemic integrity and avoiding value imposition provide good reasons to attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values (...) in science. However, the trust and the objectionable values concerns constitute no good reason for demarcation criteria. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the following hypotheses: The Davidsonian language thesis, which presupposes a set of beliefs and shared desires, is a quasi-rational phenomenon that weights the truths, and from them, is able to derive other objective thoughts in the domain of values. This view of Davidson conceives that thinking and language are prior to convention, and that necessarily implies the acknowledgement of humans as thinking beings; capable of understanding even when deprived of content, this is to say, (...) negating naturalism or substance in beliefs and innate desires. (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)

Higher‐order evidence can make an agent doubt the reliability of her reasoning. When this happens, it seems rational for the agent to adopt a cautious attitude towards her original conclusion, even in cases where the higher‐order evidence is misleading and the agent's original reasons were actually perfectly good. One may think that recoiling to a cautious attitude in the face of misleading self‐doubt involves a failure to properly respond to one's reasons. My aim is to show that this is not (...) so. My proposal is that (misleading) higher‐order evidence can undermine the agent's possession of her first‐order reasons, constituting what I call a dispossessing defeater. After acquiring the higher‐order evidence, the agent is no longer in a position to rely competently on the relevant first‐order considerations as reasons for her original conclusion, so that such reasons stop being available to her (even if they remain as strong as in the absence of the higher‐order evidence). In this way, an agent with misleading higher‐order evidence can adopt a cautious stance towards her original conclusion, while properly responding to the set of reasons that she possesses–a set that is reduced due to the acquisition of higher‐order dispossessing defeaters. (shrink)

Este trabalho trata do conceito Exu Diaspórico, o qual foi forjado para lidar com as pesquisas empíricas situadas dentro do quadro teórico da vaga decolonial. Sua concepção está ligada às tradições iorubanas diaspóricas nessa parte do Atlântico Sul onde emergiram outros sistemas resultantes, quer seja de fragmentos e vestígios de narrativas em gestos de memória e resistência, quer seja da tradução realizada pelo outro, muitas vezes, por meio de um processo de carnavalização cultural, que, por sua vez, se deu pela (...) convivência com os bantu, com os povos autóctones e com o colonizador europeu. Este conceito se articula com o conceito de língua-linguagem como encruzilhada apresentado por Araújo (2021a), mas pode ser tomado, ainda, de forma independente. Portanto, trata-se de uma discussão conceitual que visa contribuir com as reflexões e pesquisas decoloniais. O conceito também está a cargo de noções como negritude e Baianidade. Contudo, ele aparece para reunir todas as representações de Exu que resultaram da diáspora negra em meio a um processo de carnavalização das tradições iorubanas em contato com outras culturas e cosmologias. (shrink)

Several authors claim that, according to Wittgenstein, ethics has no particular subject matter and that, consequently, there is and can be no such thing as meta-ethics. These authors argue that, for Wittgenstein, a sentence’s belonging to ethics is a classification by use rather than by subject matter and that ethics is a pervasive dimension of life rather than a distinguishable region or strand of it. In this article, I will critically examine the reasons and arguments given for these claims. In (...) my view, a Wittgensteinian perspective does not exclude the possibilities of doing meta-ethics and of there being a particular subject matter of moral philosophy. These alleged impossibilities are not the distinguishing marks of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy. What distinguishes Wittgensteinian moral philosophy from traditional moral philosophy is, rather, its emphasis on alternative ways of thinking about the subject matter of moral philosophy. (shrink)

As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we call the (...) figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions. (shrink)

I argue that culpable ignorance can be irreducibly collective. In some cases, it is not fair to expect any individual to have avoided her ignorance of some fact, but it is fair to expect the agents together to have avoided their ignorance of that fact. Hence, no agent is individually culpable for her ignorance, but they are culpable for their ignorance together. This provides us with good reason to think that any group that is culpably ignorant in this irreducibly collective (...) sense is non-distributively collectively responsible for subsequent unwitting acts and consequences. (shrink)

A militância política de Jorge Amado no Partido Comunista é um capítulo à parte na história do comunismo no Brasil, que completou 100 anos no dia 25 de março. Ela também é algo marcante em sua obra, a ponto da crítica literária brasileira, de tradição uspiana, considerá-la uma forma de panfleto partidário da nossa esquerda. Nesta exposição, pretende-se realizar uma breve discussão acerca de suas lutas políticas, das quais se destacam as questões religiosa e racial, que levaram Jorge Amado a (...) criar um projeto de lei, no período que exerceu o mandato de deputado constituinte pelo PCB, em 1946, assegurando a liberdade religiosa no Brasil. Aqui, também se destaca a sua amizade com o povo de candomblé que lhe honrou com títulos, como o de Obá de Xangô e Ogã de Iansã; além da forma como a crítica o rotulava de regionalista e escritor panfletário. Contudo, esta é uma forma de homenagear tanto o mais famoso dos doze Obás de Xangô da Bahia, quanto o Partidão, nesse seu centenário. Em termos metodológicos, trata-se de uma leitura ensaística foucaultiana sobre esses fatos e acontecimentos que marcaram duplamente a vida de Jorge Amado e do Comunismo no Brasil, já que lançamos mão de uma parte da maquinaria teórica do militante comunista do PCF (Partido Comunista Francês), Michel Foucault, como vontade de verdade, comentário, discurso, autoria, obra, descontinuidade (na continuidade) e dispersão. (shrink)