Philosophers have claimed that education aims at fostering disparate epistemic goals. In this paper we focus on an important segment of this debate involving conversation between Alvin Goldman and Harvey Siegel. Goldman claims that education is essentially aimed at producing true beliefs. Siegel contends that education is essentially aimed at fostering both true beliefs and, independently, critical thinking and rational belief. Although we find Siegel’s position intuitively more plausible than Goldman’s, we also find Siegel’s defence of it wanting. We suggest (...) novel argumentative strategies that draw on Siegel’s own arguments but look to us more promising. (shrink)

Priority of the “self” is thought to be evolutionarily advantageous. However, evidence for this priority has been sparse. In this study, subjects performed a gender categorization task on self- and non-self target faces preceded by either congruent or incongruent periliminal or subliminal primes. We found that subliminal primes induced a priming effect only on self target faces. This discovery of a self-specific priming effect suggests that functional specificity for faces may include timing as well as spatial adaptations.

Studies on age-related differences in risk perception in a real-world situation, such as the recent COVID-19 outbreak, showed that the risk perception of getting COVID-19 tends to decrease as age increases. This finding raised the question on what factors could explain risk perception in older adults. The present study examined age-related differences in risk perception in the early stages of COVID-19 lockdown, analyzing variables that can explain the differences in perception of risk at different ages. A total of 1,765 adults (...) aged between 18 and 87 years old completed an online survey assessing perceived risk severity and risk vulnerability of getting COVID-19, sociodemographic status, emotional state, experience relating to COVID-19, and physical health status. Results showed that the older the participants, the lower the perceived vulnerability to getting COVID-19, but the higher the perceived severity. Different predictors explain the perception of risk severity and vulnerability at different ages. Overall, self-reported anxiety over the pandemic is a crucial predictor in explaining risk perceptions in all age groups. Theoretical and practical implications of the empirical findings are discussed. (shrink)

In questo articolo, seguendo la critica di Rahel Jaeggi alle forme di vita, sostengo che per identificare un autentico pensiero critico dovremmo partire da un'analisi della natura normativa delle forme di vita come costituenti di base del mondo sociale. In questa visione, il pensiero critico può essere visto come un comportamento critico. Mentre le genuine forme di vita possono riconoscere e considerare la varietà di situazioni concrete e diverse, al contrario la razionalità critica delle forme di vita non funzionanti comprende (...) la norma come applicata dall'esterno. In questo caso la norma, erroneamente intesa come un principio neutrale e universalmente applicabile, come la razionalità economica, non è in grado di considerare la particolarità delle forme di vita come beni in sé. Difendo l'idea che un'educazione al pensiero critico deve basarsi sulla razionalità genuina e funzionale che caratterizza gli esseri umani in un mondo sociale. (shrink)

On the one hand, it is often assumed that the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is constrained by a structural body model so that one cannot implement supernumerary limbs. On the other hand, several recent studies reported illusory duplication of the right hand in subjects exposed to two adjacent rubber hands. The present study tested whether spatial constraints may affect the possibility of inducing the sense of ownership to two rubber hands located side by side to the left of the subject's (...) hand. We found that only the closest rubber hand appeared both objectively (proprioceptive drift) and subjectively (ownership rating) embodied. Crucially, synchronous touch of a second, but farther, rubber hand disrupted the objective measure of the RHI, but not the subjective one. We concluded that, in order to elicit a genuine RHI for multiple rubber hands, the two rubber hands must be at the same distance from the subject's hand/body. (shrink)

In this piece we explore the COVID pandemic as an opportunity for the articulation and realization of digital health futures. Our discussion draws on an engagement with emergent discourse around COVID-19 and ongoing work on imaginaries of future care associated with digital tools for the detection of cognitive decline and the risk of dementia. We describe how the post-COVID futures of digital health are narrated in terms of the timing and speed with which they are being brought into being, as (...) market actors attempt to establish the scale and durability of the COVID transformation. However, we also point to the particularly spatial changes to medical practice they envisage. In a time of distancing and isolation, the ability to operate effectively at a distance has become integral to the future of medical assessment, diagnosis and care. However, spatialized promises of digital health and the ability to act remotely are unevenly spread – some organizations and entities inevitably have greater reach. (shrink)

While populism has accumulated an extensive research, its gender dimension has remained largely understudied. Only recently has a literature emerged that focuses on the gender dimension of radical right populist parties in Europe, where they have risen from marginal to government positions. In this article, I provide a guide to the topics and results of this recent development and delineate future research lines. In doing so, I will illustrate the relevance of adopting a gender perspective in studying the phenomenon of (...) populism. (shrink)

Competence based education (CBE) and Bildung oriented education (BOE) fare differently when faced with problems that afflict our societies. CBE intends learning as the acquisition of separate competences thought of as objective measurable dispositions and goals to achieve, characterised by motivational states and intellectual and technical skills. By contrast, BOE is holistic and transmission oriented. BOE is understood as a process of interaction between the self and the world in the most general and widest possible way. BOE conceptualises learning as (...) a kind of construction of a meaningful picture of the world in learners’ minds. In this paper, I make a general case in support of BOE and against CBE that draws on Rahel Jaeggi’s conception of a form of life as an organised cluster of practices with a normative character. Forms of life are basic constituents of the social world. I first dissect the notion of form of life and that of immanent critique, which is, according to Jaeggi, the type of critique used by participants in a form of life to overcome problems and crises and make the form of life flourish (Jaeggi, 2022). I then contend––following Jaeggi––that forms of life can be conceptualised as collective problem-solving and learning activities with normative structure and historical character. This is so, because emancipatory forms of life are those that progressively resolve their own problems by learning about social reality through the exercise of immanent critique. Next, I argue that CBE and BOE represent two distinct types of critical attitude which ground respectively to diverse ways to conceive the norm underlying a certain form of life. I contend that CBE is a deviant form of life because its capacity for critical transformation is structurally limited due to a normative failure. This type of failure happens when the norm – and the critique -- is external to the form of life and applies to it from outside. Here the norm aims to be universally applicable because it is conceived as neutral, in line with the so-called “ideal of impartiality” -- that is the idea that there are neutral and impartial criteria by which it is possible to assess forms of life -- or alternatively when the norm assumes the form of an ideal perceived as never perfectly obtained in practice. One mode of the ideal of impartiality is represented by instrumental rationality which is exclusively concerned with the search for efficient means, and which consequently is not concerned with assessing the goals or ends pursued, differently from forms of life’s attitude. Furthermore, instrumental rationality is considered a dominant view because due to its alleged neutrality, it shapes not only the economic field but also those social practices that involve people and institutions (cf. Cruickshank, 2014, Mattei, 2023, Popp Berman 2022). However, the feeling is that neutral (instrumental) rationality allows to evade the question of meaning that social practices and forms of life have for people involved in them, and which have a distinct normative nature. By contrast, the type of rationality that BOE endows learners with is a form of immanent rationality, i.e. a form of rationality which considers contingencies and different contexts and situations which pose different problems to solve. BOE asks for reflection and this, in turn requires the use of historically, culturally and socially situated notions. In immanent critique trade-off procedures are used to strike a balance between the need to preserve the characteristics of a temporally situated form of life to safeguard its identity and the need to change some of them to cope with new problems. I conclude that while CBE does not stimulate the abilities required to heal the pathologies of forms of life and might even hinder their development, BOE is well suited to equip students with these abilities. In this work I will refer to ‘continental’ as well as to ‘analytical’ philosophers, while the style is more analytical as what pertains argument presentation. (shrink)

In this paper I individuate some important differences between formal inference and material inference and how they affect two different ways of understanding human reasoning. I will claim that understanding reasoning as characterised by formal inference can generate epistemic injustice in education. To explain this claim, I will go through two examples of errors in evaluation. In the first one—the “shelves case” — I will show how epistemic injustice generates oppression because it does not take into account the difference generated (...) by the consideration of individuals as concrete individuals rather than abstract individual or “the generalised other”. I will contend that given the nature of human reasoning, thought is not reducible to "logical" reasoning but rather requires knowledge of conceptual contents. In the second example—the “Backtracking fallacy”—I will contend that a fallacy in assessment procedures may arise from the lack of distinction between the "public" framework of knowledge and individual epistemic states. From what will emerge about the two examples, the importance of the transmission of cultural heritage, in the form of knowledge and content, also as the sets of inferences involving concepts, will be seen. For it becomes necessary to set aside the misleading idea that these legacies are mere conceptual structures that have always been implicitly present in the student’s mind, and that it is sufficient to stimulate the student’s mind to make them explicit. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Let Me Pay Taxes!Alessia MinicozziThe first memory I have of knowing that I was different was when I was five years old and a caseworker entered my house to verify that I existed.At the age of one and a half, I was diagnosed with a chronic disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Type II (SMA). This left me in need of constant care and, at times, hospitalizations. My whole (...) life, I’ve been confined to a wheelchair, and the disease has always affected me profoundly, on a physical and mental level. I have limited range of motion and strength in my arms, muscle weakness affects my speech and breathing, and, like a monkey on my back, SMA has been a constant reminder of my fragility and mortality.In order to comply with Pennsylvania’s disability requirements, a state–appointed caseworker had to make regular home visits to make sure my needs were being met under my parents’ care and that my parents were not lying about my medical needs. These visits would leave me confused and annoyed. I still remember the events that took place the first time a caseworker entered my house and the emotional impact it had on me.The time read 8:09 a.m. on my white clock radio. I wore my favorite pink satin nightgown. My mother came to lift me out of bed and enclose me in my robe. She whispered in my ear that a gentleman was here to meet me—he’d arrived early—and he wanted to ask me some questions. As my mother carried me down the flight of stairs and sat me in my wheelchair, I felt the man’s eyes on our every move. This strange man sat with a scrutinizing look and asked me if I live in this house and do I normally wake up so late? I quickly turned to my [End Page 210] mother and gave her a perplexed stare. Why was this person here at all, and what right did he have to inquire about me like this?Later, my mother would explain that the man was there to make sure that she was not lying when she asked the government for money to care for me. I endured countless visits from that caseworker over many years. Finally, I asked my mother, “When is this man going to stop visiting me and asking me the same questions?” She looked at me and tenderly replied that when my father finished his residency program, then we would have enough money to pay for all my care. I accepted this response and continued playing with my Barbie. Two years later, my father completed his residency program and the visits from the caseworker stopped.In eighth grade, I left an all disabled school and enrolled in a mainstream public school, which seemed odd to me. I asked my parents why the change in schools? My parents explained that they will not live forever and in order for me to live outside an institution, I will need a salary that is above average to pay for personal care. They went on to explain that the only way to accomplish this goal is to succeed in school and to perform better than everyone else. They informed me that because I use a wheelchair, prospective employers will view me as daunting and they may be less likely to hire me. They stressed that the only way to stand out above other non–disabled candidates is to excel in an academic environment. Mom and Dad have always ended the conversation by reassuring me that as long as they are alive, they will make sure I accomplish everything I set out to achieve and that I never feel alone.Since that conversation over twenty years ago, I had only one goal in mind: employment. The possibility of being institutionalized has always been my motivation for persevering through late nights of writing papers and studying for exams. As promised, my parents were the ones who proofread my papers and stayed up with me in order to help me to bed once I was done. When I graduated from the University of... (shrink)

We focus on issues of learning assessment from the point of view of an investigation of philosophical elements in teaching. We contend that assessment of concept possession at school based on ordinary multiple-choice tests might be ineffective because it overlooks aspects of human rationality illuminated by Robert Brandom’s inferentialism––the view that conceptual content largely coincides with the inferential role of linguistic expressions used in public discourse. More particularly, we argue that multiple-choice tests at schools might fail to accurately assess the (...) possession of a concept or the lack of it, for they only check the written outputs of the pupils who take them, without detecting the inferences actually endorsed or used by them. We suggest that school tests would acquire reliability if they enabled pupils to make the reasons of their answers or the inferences they use explicit, so as to contribute to what Brandom calls the game of giving and asking for reasons. We explore the possibility to put this suggestion into practice by deploying two-tier multiple-choice tests. (shrink)

According to Brandom’s conceptual role semantics, to grasp a concept involves a commitment to drawing certain inferences. This is a consequence of the inferentialist thesis that the meaning of a term is given by its justification through assertibility conditions. Inferential commitments come out from a material notion of inference which underwrites human rational discourse and activity. In this paper I discuss a problem of Brandom’s semantics allegedly exposed in an argument by Paul Boghossian against Dummett’s and Brandom’s substantive conception of (...) meaning. I contend that Boghossian’s analysis is dubious because it overlooks an important difference between Dummett’s and Brandom’s positions related respectively to a monotonic and a non-monotonic view of the norm underwriting meaning. (shrink)

La rinascita negli ultimi decenni di un nutrito dibattito intorno alla nozione di analiticità dopo le critiche a suo tempo mosse da Quine alla batteria di nozioni utilizzate da Rudolf Carnap (ad esempio, postulati di significato, regole semantiche, definizioni implicite, convenzioni e stipulazioni esplicite) prende le mosse da una riflessione critica sulle argomentazioni di Quine e tenta, da un lato, di approfondire meglio il legame fra analiticità e conoscenza a priori, e, dall’altro, di capire meglio il ruolo che la definizione (...) può svolgere nella costituzione del significato e nella formulazione di verità concettuali. Questa nuova concezione è detta “epistemica” ed ha fra i suoi più autorevoli fautori Crispin Wright, Bob Hale e Paul Boghossian. Boghossian, al pari di molti filosofi critici della nuova concezione epistemica, come Timothy Williamson, conviene però con Quine nel sostenere che gli enunciati analitici hanno portata fattuale e vertono anch’essi sul mondo, oltre che sul linguaggio. Anche per questa ragione essi possono rendere possibile una genuina estensione delle nostre conoscenze. Tuttavia una seconda linea di obiezioni facenti capo dapprima a Paul Horwich, e in seguito agli stessi Wright e Hale, mette in evidenza rispettivamente due difficoltà corrispondenti alle questioni dell’arroganza e dell’accettazione. In questa discussione una parte importante è svolta dalla ripresa e della discussione del condizionale di Carnap, impiegato per rendere conto del ruolo che i termini teorici svolgono nel quadro dell’intera teoria cui appartengono, senza con ciò sposare le conseguenze dell’olismo quineano. La tesi centrale che questo lavoro cerca di rendere plausibile è che una lettura attenta degli ultimi scritti di Carnap mostri come il carattere aperto che egli attribuisce ai termini teorici in ragione, sia dello loro intrinseca indeterminatezza, sia delle revisioni imposte dalle scoperte scientifiche, è perfettamente compatibile con la fattorizzazione del contenuto di una teoria scientifica data in una parte linguistica, il condizionale di Carnap, riguardante la costituzione del significato di un certo termine teorico, e nella sua controparte empirica, che consente di registrare l’impatto dell’esperienza sulla teoria in questione. Se praticabile, questa concezione può a buon diritto entrare nel novero delle teorie epistemiche dell’analiticità, senza accampare alcuna pretesa di far rivivere i fasti della conoscenza a priori classica. (shrink)

In this paper I individuate and analyse a new type of epistemic injustice that can arise in education and depends on the so-called ‘backtracking fallacy’ in student assessment, which occurs when a teacher confuses (or does not distinguish between) the logical dimension of a framework of disciplinary concepts and its psychological dimension. I will also touch upon a different type of social injustice that might transpire in education. I suggest that familiarity with Paul Hirst's view of liberal education, which presupposes (...) a neat distinction between a public framework of knowledge and the psychological process of gradually learning it, can contribute to prevent or reduce both forms of injustice. (shrink)

On March 29,2000, in U.S. v. Wood, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that a physician cannot be convicted of murder simply for adopting, in an emergency setting, a risky course of treatment intended to prolong life that, when carried out, effectively hastened death. Finding the government's evidence flawed, based on several evidentiary errors and an erroneous denial of a motion for judgment of acquittal on murder charges, the court reversed the conviction of involuntary manslaughter and (...) ordered a new trial.Virgil Dykes, an 86-year-old man, was suffering from severe abdominal pain when he arrived at the Veterans Administration hospital in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on February 5, 1994. (shrink)

John Tradescant the Elder was probably born in England in the 1570s. The earliest known historical record of his life documents his marriage to Elizabeth Day, at Meopham on 18 June 1607.1 A long career working as gardener in the service of England’s nobility—among his employers were Robert and William Cecil, Edward Wotton, and George Villiers —provided numerous opportunities for travel abroad in pursuit of the exotic species for which his eminent employers clamored. As a result of his voyages, Tradescant (...) not only imported hundreds of plant varieties for his clients, but also amassed thousands of artefacts and other.. (shrink)

We revisit the construction of the gravitational functional renormalization group equation tailored to the Arnowitt–Deser–Misner formulation emphasizing its connection to the covariant formulation. The results obtained from projecting the renormalization group flow onto the Einstein–Hilbert action are reviewed in detail and we provide a novel example illustrating how the formalism may be connected to the causal dynamical triangulations approach to quantum gravity.

With the advent of the severe acute respiratory syndrome-Corona Virus type 2 pandemic, the theme of emotion recognition from facial expressions has become highly relevant due to the widespread use of face masks as one of the main devices imposed to counter the spread of the virus. Unsurprisingly, several studies published in the last 2 years have shown that accuracy in the recognition of basic emotions expressed by faces wearing masks is reduced. However, less is known about the impact that (...) wearing face masks has on the ability to recognize emotions from subtle expressions. Furthermore, even less is known regarding the role of interindividual differences in emotion processing. This study investigated the perception of all the six basic emotions, both as a function of the face mask and as a function of the facial expressions’ intensity in terms of participants’ uncertainty in their responses, misattribution errors, and perceived intensity. The experiment was conducted online on a large sample of participants. Participants completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Autistic Spectrum Quotient and then performed an emotion-recognition task that involved face stimuli wearing a mask or not, and displaying full or subtle expressions. Each face stimulus was presented alongside the Geneva Emotion Wheel, and participants had to indicate what emotion they believed the other person was feeling and its intensity using the GEW. For each combination of our variables, we computed the indices of ‘uncertainty’, ‘bias’, and ‘perceived intensity’. We found that face masks increase uncertainty for all facial expressions of emotion, except for fear when intense, and that disgust was systematically confused with anger. Furthermore, when faces were covered by the mask, all the emotions were perceived as less intense, and this was particularly evident for subtle expressions. Finally, we did not find any evidence of a relationship between these indices and alexithymic/autistic traits. (shrink)

This paper reports an experiment designed to test whether prior consultation within a group affects subsequent individual decision-making in tasks where demonstrability of correct solutions is low. In our experiment, subjects considered two paintings created by two different artists and were asked to guess which artist made each painting. We observed answers given by individuals under two treatments: In one, subjects were allowed the opportunity to consult with other participants before making their private decisions; in the other, there was no (...) such opportunity. Our primary findings are that subjects in the first treatment evaluate the opportunity to consult positively, but they perform significantly worse and earn significantly less. (shrink)

Music is an ancient and ubiquitous form of human expression. One important component for which music is sought after is its aesthetic value, whose appreciation has typically been associated with largely learned, culturally determined factors, such as education, exposure, and social pressure. However, neuroscientific evidence shows that the aesthetic response to music is often associated with automatic, physically- and biologically-grounded events, such as shivers, chills, increased heart rate, and motor synchronization, suggesting the existence of an underlying biological platform upon which (...) contextual factors may act. Drawing on philosophical notions and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that, although there is no denying that social and cultural context play a substantial role in shaping the aesthetic response to music, these act upon largely universal, biological mechanisms involved with neural processing. I propose that the simultaneous presence of culturally-influenced and biologically-determined contributions to the aesthetic response to music epitomizes Baumgarten’s equation of sensory perception with taste. Taking the argument one step further, I suggest that the heavily embodied aesthetic response to music bridges the cleavage between the two discrepant meanings—the one referring to sensory perception, the other referring to judgments of taste—traditionally attributed to the word “aesthetics” in the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

Among Leibniz’s contributions to the philosophy of mind, two topics bear relevance to contemporary discussions in cognitive sciences: the mind-body problem, and the universal language. Leibniz’s deterministic view rejects inter-substance causality between mental and bodily states, as well as between mental or bodily states of different individuals. In addition, Leibniz believed in the need to enhance communication through a universal language based on symbolic representations. Here I reconsider Leibniz’s ideas in the light of experimental evidence coming from mirror neurons. These (...) recently discovered brain cells, responsive to both action execution and observation, are thought to enable the interpretation of the action performer’s intentions through their representation in the observer’s own brain, thus storing embodied shared representations. I propose that mirror neurons’ cross-modal responsiveness, whereby seeing an action being performed by somebody else triggers similar neural response to that of performing that action oneself, can be interpreted as an instantiation of intersubstance causality. I suggest that mirror neurons’ properties speak not only to the non-dualistic equation, supported by brain science in general, whereby in a given individual, mental states arise from bodily states but also introduce the possibility that bodily states may arise from someone else’s bodily states. In addition, I propose that this automatic embodied flow of information between individuals (from performer to observer) bears relevance to Leibniz’s intuitions on symbols. Specifically, I suggest that the shared representations stored in mirror neurons, thought to enable the interpretation of the action performer’s intentions, may be seen as a biological instantiation of Leibniz’s planned, but never realized, universal characteristic. (shrink)

The self/non-self distinction is essential for survival, but its neural bases are poorly understood. Studies have sought neural specificity for 'self ' in cortical regions. However, behavioural evidence showing that humans are able to single out self-relevant information in the absence of awareness suggests that the cognitive self/non-self distinction might be rooted in subcortical structures involved in automatic, unconscious functions. Here we employ subliminal presentation of self and non-self faces and repetition suppression to show neural specificity for 'self ' in (...) the brainstem reticular formation, providing the first evidence for self/non-self distinction in subcortical structures. Our finding suggests that the brainstem may act as a neural substrate for the sense of 'self '. (shrink)