In dicephalus conjoined twinning, it appears that two heads share a body; in cephalopagus, it appears that two bodies share a head. How many human animals are present in these cases? One answer is that there are two in both cases—conjoined twins are precisely that, conjoined twins. Another is that the number of humans corresponds to the number of bodies—so there is one in dicephalus and two in cephalopagus. I show that both of these answers are incorrect. Prominent accounts of (...) biological individuation, which treat the organism as an integrated whole, reveal that in these and other cases of conjoined twinning the ‘twins’ share a single human animal. This has a number of consequences for the debate about what we are. First, if animalism is true, individuals of our kind can be—and are—profoundly psychologically divided. Second, cephalopagus twinning does not divide animalism from its rivals, as has been claimed. Finally, animalists can reply to a vicious species of the ‘too many thinkers’ problem to which they are allegedly uniquely vulnerable. (shrink)

Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology: it involves “mentally reliving” a past event. It has been suggested that characterising episodic memory in terms of this phenomenology makes it impossible to test for in animals, because “purely phenomenological features” cannot be detected in animal behaviour. Against this, I argue that episodic memory's phenomenological features are impure, having both subjective and objective aspects, and so can be behaviourally detected. Insisting on a phenomenological characterisation of episodic memory consequently does nothing to damage the (...) prospects for detecting it in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

The paper deals with the role of the concept of force in different classical mechanical and field theories, pointing out the existence in all cases of a Lorentz-type expression for force. In the case of the classical theory of the gravitational field we obtain the same Lorentz-type expression.

The literature on transnational civil society encompasses a number of conflicting views regarding civil society organizations’ (CSOs) behavior and impacts and the desirability of civil society involvement in international policymaking. This piece suggests that this lack of consensus arises from the diverse range of contexts in which CSOs operate and the wide variety of activities in which it engages. This article seeks to organize and analyze the disparate data on civil society by developing a context-based standard of democratic legitimacy for (...) CSOs. The article disaggregates democracy into input, throughput, and output components, and shows how CSOs must support or manifest different aspects of democracy in order to be democratically legitimate in a given context. Applying this standard to existing works, the article identifies several problems in current research, including a failure to recognize ways the democratic imperatives of transnational advocacy differ from national advocacy, and the potential for international civil society interventions to undermine local democratic processes. Keywords: transnational civil society; democracy; global governance; NGOs; international policymaking (Published: 1 September 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2010, pp. 217-238. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i3.4882. (shrink)

Comparative cognitive science often involves asking questions like ‘Do nonhumans have C?’ where C is a capacity we take humans to have. These questions frequently generate unproductive disagreements, in which one party affirms and the other denies that nonhumans have the relevant capacity on the basis of the same evidence. I argue that these questions can be productively understood as questions about natural kinds: do nonhuman capacities fall into the same natural kinds as our own? Understanding such questions in this (...) way has several advantages: it preserves the intuition that these are substantive empirical questions worth asking; it helps us to understand why they so frequently give rise to disagreements of the kind described; and it provides clues about how to diagnose and resolve them. (shrink)

For South Africans, heart transplantation centers are prized assets—symbols of the country's self‐sufficiency, a source of national pride, and perhaps necessary to retain any capacity to provide advanced coronary care. They are also expensive to maintain in a country in which many citizens are afflicted with a low standard of living and inadequate medical attention.

Overwhelming evidence points to the existence of separate sensory channels in the nervous system. The power of this type of parallel organization is that information is first processed in neurons specialized to code it most efficiently. However, sensory pathways are convergent and divergent at each level as well, as is necessary to interpret multimodal and conflicting information.

Mindreaders can ascribe representational states to others. Some can ascribe representational states – states with semantic properties like accuracy-aptness. I argue that within this group of mindreaders, there is substantial room for variation – since mindreaders might differ with respect to the representational format they take representational states to have. Given that formats differ in their formal features and expressive power, the format one takes mental states to have will significantly affect the range of mental state attributions one can make, (...) and the ease or difficulty with which one can make them. I illustrate this by considering what it would be to take mental states to be map-like in format, showing that this would result in a distinctively limited form of mindreading. I close by articulating the significance of this for the emerging picture of great ape mindreading. (shrink)

Many recent AI systems take inspiration from biological episodic memory. Here, we ask how these ‘episodic-inspired’ AI systems might inform our understanding of biological episodic memory. We discuss work showing that these systems implement some key features of episodic memory whilst differing in important respects, and appear to enjoy behavioural advantages in the domains of strategic decision-making, fast learning, navigation, exploration and acting over temporal distance. We propose that these systems could be used to evaluate competing theories of episodic memory’s (...) operations and function. However, further work is needed to validate them as models of episodic memory and isolate the contributions of their memory systems to their behaviour. More immediately, we propose that these systems have a role to play in directing episodic memory research by highlighting novel or neglected hypotheses as pursuit-worthy. In this vein, we propose that the evidence reviewed here highlights two pursuit-worthy hypotheses about episodic memory’s function: that it plays a role in planning that is independent of future-oriented simulation, and that it is adaptive in virtue of its contributions to fast learning in novel, sparse-reward environments. (shrink)

This article contributes to the emerging intersectional analyses of religious studies and disability studies by conceptualizing counterprivates specific to religious spaces. To accomplish this task, we investigate the ways in which persons with disabilities, both physical and cognitive, engender counterprivate spaces within Evangelical and Mormon churches. Specifically, we posit that those with disabilities constitute a counterprivate within evangelical communities through theological incongruence and within Mormon spaces through the ways in which counterprivates inform counterpublics. Throughout this paper, we elucidate Mormon and (...) Evangelical spaces as a means of investigating the heterogeneity of private, religious spaces often unrecognized by scholarship. (shrink)

This paper identifies and analyzes what constitutes special education in the revised Swedish preschool curriculum. The paper also contributes with an analytical mode of understanding political, as well as other, documents, in, for example, an educational system. The analytical strategy is mainly built upon discourse theory and discourse analysis, using the ideas of Ernesto Lacalu, Chantal Mouffe and Michel Foucault. The results show a fortified hegemonic discourse about a preschool for all children, where child-centred and inclusive approaches are dominant and (...) where special education, to a large extent, is constituted by more management, stimulation and special support. The paper raises questions about the possible effects the hegemonic discourse may contribute to.Nyckelord: diskurs, diskursanalys, diskursteori, läroplan, specialpedagogik, inkludering, pedagogik, styrdokument, svensk förskola för alla barn, utbildning. (shrink)

We review studies of an evolution operator ℒ for a discrete Langevin equation with a strongly hyperbolic classical dynamics and a Gaussian noise. The leading eigenvalue of ℒ yields a physically measurable property of the dynamical system, the escape rate from the repeller. The spectrum of the evolution operator ℒ in the weak noise limit can be computed in several ways. A method using a local matrix representation of the operator allows to push the corrections to the escape rate up (...) to order eight in the noise expansion parameter. These corrections then appear to form a divergent series. Actually, via a cumulant expansion, they relate to analogous divergent series for other quantities, the traces of the evolution operators ℒn. Using an integral representation of the evolution operator ℒ, we then investigate the high order corrections to the latter traces. Their asymptotic behavior is found to be controlled by sub-dominant saddle points previously neglected in the perturbative expansion, and to be ultimately described by a kind of trace formula. (shrink)

Episodic memory is the form of memory involved in remembering personally experienced past events. Here, I address two questions about episodic memory’s function: what does episodic memory do for us, and why do we have it? Recent work addressing these questions has emphasized episodic memory’s role in imaginative simulation, criticizing the mnemonic view on which episodic memory is “for” remembering. In this paper, I offer a defense of the mnemonic view by highlighting an underexplored mnemonic function of episodic memory – (...) namely, its role in the encoding, storage and retrieval of the type of information more standardly associated with semantic memory. I argue that in healthy individuals, episodic memory plays a central role in the encoding, storage and retrieval of prototypically semantic information, analogous to the role played by mind palaces in the method of loci, and may have been selected on for this reason. This suggests new directions for studying episodic memory, particularly in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "De Abrahamo. De Josepho. De vita Mosis (I-II). De decalogo".

Episodic memory—memory for personally experienced past events—seems to afford a distinctive kind of cognitive contact with the past. This makes it natural to think that episodic memory is centrally involved in our understanding of what it is for something to be in the past, or to be located in time—that it is either necessary or sufficient for such understanding. If this were the case, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. In (...) this paper, I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy. As such, it is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency. This should inform our theoretical predictions about the manifestations of episodic memory in nonhuman behaviour. (shrink)

One of Clayton’s major contributions to our understanding of animal minds has been her work on episodic-like memory. A central reason for the success of this work was its focus on ecological validity: rather than looking for episodic memory for arbitrary stimuli in artificial contexts, focussing on contexts in which episodic memory would serve a biological function such as food caching. This review aims to deepen this insight by surveying the numerous functions that have been proposed for episodic memory, articulating (...) a philosophically grounded framework for understanding what exactly functions are, and drawing on these to make suggestions for future directions in the comparative cognitive psychology of episodic memory. Our review suggests four key insights. First, episodic memory may have more than one function and may have different functions in different species. Second, cross-disciplinary work is key to developing a functional account of episodic memory. Third, there is scope for further theoretical elaboration of proposals relating episodic memory to food caching and, in particular, future-oriented cognition. Finally, learning-related functions suggested by AI (artificial intelligence)-based models are a fruitful avenue for future behavioural research. (shrink)

In addition to ethical aspects Citizen Science projects also involve social, economic and—not least—regulatory challenges that arise from their very openness and opportunities for participation. So...

Research suggests that metacognitive monitoring ability does not decline with age. For example, judgments-of-learning accuracy is roughly equivalent between younger and older adults. But few studies have asked whether younger and older adults’ metacognitive ability varies across different types of memory processes. The current study tested the relationship between memory and post-decision confidence ratings at the trial level on item and associative memory recognition tests. As predicted, younger and older adults had similarmetacognitive efficiency, when using meta-d’/d’, a measure derived from (...) Signal Detection Theory, despite a significant age effect favoring younger adults on memory performance. This result is consistent with previous work showing age-equivalent metacognitive efficiency in the memory domain. We also found that metacognitive efficiency was higher for associative memory than for item memory across age groups, even though associative and item recognition memory were statistically equivalent. Higher accuracy on post-test decision confidence ratings for associative recognition relative to item recognition on resolution accuracy itself and when corrected for performance differences are novel findings. Implications for associative metacognition are discussed. (shrink)