Neste ensaio, gostaria de esclarecer, por meio da filosofia de Mayz Vallenilla, a estreita relação que existe entre técnica e alienação, como uma filosofia da técnica que se preocupa com o comportamento do homem, portanto, com sua alienação. Como resultado, este ensaio será dividido em três partes: na primeira seção, será desenvolvido um diálogo entre um historiador e um sociólogo, para construir uma breve história da técnica; na segunda seção apresentarei um diálogo sobre o conceito de alienação entre Marx e (...) Heidegger a partir do pensamento do filósofo venezuelano Mayz Vallenilla e na última seção apresentarei a conexão entre ética e meta-técnica como alternativa atraente à alienação técnica. (shrink)

We report five experiments showing that the activation of the end-terms of a syllogism is determined by their position in the composite model of the premises. We show that it is not determined by the position of the terms in the rule being applied (Ford, 1994), by the syntactic role of the terms in the premises (Polk & Newell, 1995; Wetherick & Gilhooly, 1990), by the type of conclusion (Chater & Oaksford, 1999), or by the terms from the source premise (...) (Stenning & Yule, 1997). In our first experiment we found that after reading a categorical premise, the most active term is the last term in the premise. In Experiments 2, 3, and 4 we demonstrated that this pattern of activity is due to the position of the concepts in the model of the premises, regardless of the delay after reading the premises (150 or 2000 msec) or the quantity of the quantifiers (universal or existential). The fifth experiment showed that the pattern switches around after participants evaluate a conclusion. We propose that the last element in the model maintains a higher level of activity during the comprehension process because it is generally used to attach the incoming information. After this process, the first term becomes more active because it is the concept to which the whole representation is referred. These results are predicted by the mental model theory (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991), but not by the verbal reasoning theory (Polk & Newell, 1995), the graphical methods theory (Yule & Stenning, 1992), the attachment-heuristic theory (Chater & Oaksford, 1999), or the mental rules theory (Ford, 1994). (shrink)

In recent years, the publication of the studies on the transmissibility in mammals of the H5N1 influenza virus and synthetic genomes has triggered heated and concerned debate within the community of scientists on biological dual-use research; these papers have raised the awareness that, in some cases, fundamental research could be directed to harmful experiments, with the purpose of developing a weapon that could be used by a bioterrorist. Here is presented an overview regarding the dual-use concept and its related international (...) agreements which underlines the work of the Australia Group Export Control Regime. It is hoped that the principles and activities of the AG, that focuses on export control of chemical and biological dual-use materials, will spread and become well known to academic researchers in different countries, as they exchange biological materials and scientific papers. To this extent, and with the aim of drawing the attention of the scientific community that works with yeast to the so called Dual-Use Research of Concern, this article reports case studies on biological dual-use research and discusses a synthetic biology applied to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, namely the construction of the first eukaryotic synthetic chromosome of yeast and the use of yeast cells as a factory to produce opiates. Since this organism is considered harmless and is not included in any list of biological agents, yeast researchers should take simple actions in the future to avoid the sharing of strains and advanced technology with suspicious individuals. (shrink)

This article reviews the didactic units in biology and environmental education in the context of Latin America, analyzing their design, implementation, and effectiveness in the teaching of environmental and biological topics. Through a literature review and case analysis, the most commonly used teaching strategies are identified and their impact on student learning is evaluated. It highlights best practices and proposes recommendations to improve the quality of biology and environmental education in the region.

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from (...) philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem. (shrink)

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Bayesian reverse-engineering is a research strategy for developing three-level explanations of behavior and cognition. Starting from a computational-level analysis of behavior and cognition as optimal probabilistic inference, Bayesian reverse-engineers apply numerous tweaks and heuristics to formulate testable hypotheses at the algorithmic and implementational levels. In so doing, they exploit recent technological advances in Bayesian artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, but also consider established principles from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Although these tweaks and heuristics are highly pragmatic in character and (...) are often deployed unsystematically, Bayesian reverse-engineering avoids several important worries that have been raised about the explanatory credentials of Bayesian cognitive science: the worry that the lower levels of analysis are being ignored altogether; the challenge that the mathematical models being developed are unfalsifiable; and the charge that the terms ‘optimal’ and ‘rational’ have lost their customary normative force. But while Bayesian reverse-engineering is therefore a viable and productive research strategy, it is also no fool-proof recipe for explanatory success. (shrink)

In some recent papers, the authors and Peter Gärdenfors have defined and studied two different kinds of formal operation, conceived as possible representations of the intuitive process of contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition. These are partial meet contraction (including as limiting cases full meet contraction and maxichoice contraction) and safe contraction. It is known, via the representation theorem for the former, that every safe contraction operation over a theory is a partial meet contraction over that theory. The purpose (...) of the present paper is to study the relationship more finely, by seeking an explicit map between the component orderings involved in each of the two kinds of contraction. It is shown that at least in the finite case a suitable map exists, with the consequence that the relational, transitively relational, and antisymmetrically relational partial meet contraction functions form identifiable subclasses of the safe contraction functions, over any theory finite modulo logical equivalence. In the process of constructing the map, as the composition of four simple transformations, mediating notions of bottom and top contraction are introduced. The study of the infinite case remains open. (shrink)

Whereas most branches of neuroscience are thought to provide mechanistic explanations, systems neuroscience is not. Two reasons are traditionally cited in support of this conclusion. First, systems neuroscientists rarely, if ever, rely on the dual strategies of decomposition and localization. Second, they typically emphasize organizational properties over the properties of individual components. In this paper, I argue that neither reason is conclusive: researchers might rely on alternative strategies for mechanism discovery, and focusing on organization is often appropriate and consistent with (...) the norms of mechanistic explanation. Thus, many explanations in systems neuroscience can also be viewed as mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the importance of attention skills in the development of universal associative learning, and it explains why the centrality of attention in UAL presents a considerable difficulty for the UAL approach. Attentional abilities are not just developmentally related to UAL but are in fact explanatory of UAL. The main problem is that all the types of attention involved in UAL can be dissociated from consciousness. This means that while attention skills for UAL might be necessary for consciousness, (...) they are not sufficient because they can all occur unconsciously. Thus, the possibility that UAL capacities might not be sufficient for consciousness cannot be eliminated, thereby challenging the key claim of the UAL approach. (shrink)

La humanidad ya dispone de vacunas eficaces contra el COVID‐19. En Perú se administraron 86 millones de dosis para cubrir la demanda de 33 millones de peruanos. Para ello, se ha priorizado la vacunación en grupos clave: personal de salud, sujetos con condiciones de salud preexistentes y mayores de 65 años. Sin embargo, dada la problemática social y la situación de la salud pública en Perú, este trabajo defiende que la prioridad de la vacunación debe centrarse en la población que (...) vive en extrema pobreza. El método utilizado fue una argumentación ética sobre la distribución de la vacuna contra el COVID‐19 en Perú. Esta argumentación se basa en el análisis de la población peruana que vive en extrema pobreza, la cual presenta diferentes estratos de vulnerabilidad, y que, ante una eventual infección por SARS‐CoV‐2, se irían agravando uno tras otro, a través de un efecto en cascada. Este escenario daría lugar a nuevas vulnerabilidades de las ya existentes, causando mayores daños. Los esfuerzos de vacunación en esta población clave les brindaría oportunidad de seguir encontrando formas de llevar alimentos a sus hogares, reduciendo significativamente el riesgo de contagio en su entorno y mitigando el efecto devastador de las enfermedades locales a las que ya está expuesta. Se plantean cuatro objeciones relacionadas con este argumento, con sus correspondientes respuestas. El acceso prioritario a la vacuna reduciría significativamente el daño a las personas que viven en la extrema pobreza, haciendo prevalecer los principios de justicia y equidad. (shrink)

Algunas experiencias del siglo XX -Auschwitz, el Gulag, Hiroshima- han vuelto a herir la conciencia ilustrada y replanteado el problema del mal en nuestra cultura. Más que una indagación metafísica sobre la naturaleza del mal, el artículo aboga por un análisis de cómo llegamos a elaborar su experiencia, un proceso que aquí prefiere concebirse como una indagación en torno al daño. Se analizan las estructuras conceptuales, modales y temporales de esa experiencia y, en la segunda parte, se propone la idea (...) de que la elaboración pública del daño es una clave para comprender la dimensión normativa del espacio público. (shrink)

In a context of pervasive digitalization of the social world, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of education has undergone major changes with the development of digital practices and settings. However, the physical presence of the subjects and the body remain something primordial and irreplaceable in traditional educational processes. Thus, it is often assumed that virtuality is opposed to the corporeal reality of the subjects involved in teaching, learning and studying. In this paper we aim to critically (...) challenge this assumption by addressing the phenomenon of virtuality in a more original sense: as a fundamental dimension of corporeality itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, we argue that the experience of the virtual is inherently embodied and fully real. We understand corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, this leads us to rethink the digital as only one possible medium in which virtuality can appear as inherent to embodied experience. We develop our phenomenological approach in three instances. First, we question and bracket two common assumptions about corporeality. From our critical perspective, assumptions about a disembodied digitality and a devirtualized corporeality represent extremes within which educational discourses currently move. Second, we address the inherent virtuality of embodied experience. We outline the heuristic concept of the virtual body to describe corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena that encompass extension, intercorporeality and intermediality. Finally, we make some remarks on the relationships of corporeality and virtuality considering the challenges of digital education. (shrink)

The goal of this study was to test the role of message framing for effective communication of self-care behaviors in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting health and economic-focused messages. We presented 319 participants with an unforced choice task where they had to select the message that they believed was more effective to increase intentions toward self-care behaviors, motivate self-care behaviors in others, increase perceived risk and enhance perceived message strength. Results showed that gain-frame health messages increased intention to (...) adopt self-care behaviors and were judged to be stronger. Loss-framed health messages increased risk perception. When judging effectiveness for others, participants believed other people would be more sensitive to messages with an economic focus. These results can be used by governments to guide communication for the prevention of COVID-19 contagion in the media and social networks, where time and space for communicating information are limited. (shrink)

Independientemente de qué considere cada persona como saludable, lo más seguro es que cualquiera de nosotros quiera vivir una vida sin molestias ni dolores. De alguna manera todos queremos bienestar. Pues bien, el libro _Holistic Healing _editado por Peter A. Dunn nos presenta diferentes teorías, prácticas y el cambio social que estas traen consigo. Para algunos sectores y personas del ámbito de la salud, el término “holístico” puede causar desconfianza, recelo o simplemente indiferencia, ya que el término “holístico” ha sido (...) usado para referirse a prácticas de sanación que no hacen parte de la biomedicina o de la llamada medicina occidental. Lo interesante de este libro es que los autores de cada capítulo evidencian de distintas maneras que una aproximación más completa al ser humano permite abordar la salud desde una perspectiva que va más allá de curar las enfermedades físicas. Como veremos a continuación, una mirada holística considera las dimensión física, psicológica, emocional y espiritual del ser humano, cómo interactúan entre ellas y cómo se ven influenciadas por la realidad social, económica y ambiental. (shrink)

Having a “normal” professional job and doing research impose different social and personal connotations. These differences materialize at least in two clear ways. First, it is common that researchers in the making find it very difficult to communicate to their closest social network (e.g., family and old close friends) the content and the importance of their work, as they lose known sources of social comparison. Meanwhile, professional job titles (e.g., brand manager, auditor, lawyer) are self-explanatory, and they provide for the (...) owner an immediate social contextualization and recognition. Second, students normally receive delayed and ambiguous feedback and reinforcement while doing a PhD, contrasting with the continuous flow of assessment that companies give to their employees. In this article, I analyze how young researchers may develop a feeling of social isolation as the communication bridges with family, old friends, and undergraduate colleagues become narrower than before, making it difficult to receive external reinforcement on their social position and comparative achievement. This feeling, combined with the ambiguous feedback during the early stages of a research career, challenges the self-esteem of PhD students, forcing them to develop a self-contained personal security in order to cope with those two social contexts. Some young researchers might even withdraw from PhD programs should they fail to develop such psychological strength. I approach the issue through my own experience, first as a junior consultant in a multinational firm and then as a PhD candidate in economics. Second, I explore the behavioral phenomena that occur beneath those feelings in order to understand how to build such psychological strength. My goal is, through the exploration of my personal experience of becoming a researcher, to offer young researchers a useful narrative to help face the potentially negative feelings that may emerge when learning to balance these conflicting social roles. (shrink)

Desde el terreno de la filosofía como estilo de vida, y de la subjetividad social y la interpretación como quehacer investigativo, analizo primero los relatos autobiográficos en su relación con la acción social y sus sentidos, es decir, la subjetividad social. Luego, presento una reflexión sobre la reconstrucción de la experiencia personal durante el relato (y el papel que juega la memoria en dicho proceso), que culmina con la incorporación del mito, como forma de configurar la narración desde un saber (...) colectivo de gran plasticidad. Termino presentando la utilidad metodológica del relato de vida en una investigación de corte praxeológico. (shrink)

Quantified hybrid logic is quantified modal logic extended with apparatus for naming states and asserting that a formula is true at a named state. While interpolation and Beth's definability theorem fail in a number of well-known quantified modal logics , their counterparts in quantified hybrid logic have these properties. These are special cases of the main result of the paper: the quantified hybrid logic of any class of frames definable in the bounded fragment of first-order logic has the interpolation property, (...) irrespective of whether varying, constant, expanding, or contracting domains are assumed. (shrink)

This paper traces the concept and phenomenon of generosity from Aristotle to Emannuel Levinas and beyond. The question motivating this investigation is: must the generous act be restricted by a rational calculation of correct, or prudent, giving? Answers to this question vary. Aristotle and Kant would answer in the affirmative, while Emerson and Levinas would not. The bulk of this paper is dedicated to Levinas's characterization of excessive generosity as a condition for the fundamental ethical relation, namely, the generous welcome (...) of the Other. I end by considering the phenomenon of generosity from the point of view of the mid‐20th century Mexican philosopher, Emilio Uranga. (shrink)

En este trabajo, el autor analiza las contradicciones que el multiculturalismo plantea en las sociedades actuales, resaltando la importante mediación que el sistema político democrático lleva a cabo en la resolución de las mismas. A partir de los artículos de tres autores ('The Politics ofRecognition" de CH Taylor: "Struggles for Recognition in Constitutional States" de J. Habermas y "Legitimacy and Diversity: Dialectical Reflections on Analytical Distinctions" de T. McCarthy) y de la referencia final al trabajo de Rawls 'The Law of (...) the People", expone una serie de momentos teóricos que representan diferentes estadios en la discusión entre el pensamiento liberal y el comunitarismo, y que componen un proceso explicativo en el que cada uno de esos momentos supondría una superación teórica del anterior. En concreto, el autor trata de situar la discusión sobre el reconocimiento del derecho a la diferencia, en el terreno en el que del análista del modelo teórico del liberalismo más acorde con el reconocimiento de derechos a las colectividades-el republicanismo comunitarista al que se refiere Taylor-, se pase al análisis del tipo de sistema político dentro del cual se reconozca la diferencia y la existencia de otras culturas como algo que ya estaba implícito en la teoría de los derechos. Este sistema político sería la democracia deliberativa y su procedimiento discursivo para tomar decisiciones y llegar a acuerdos, propuesto por J. Habermas. El trabajo de McCarthy tratarla de resolver algunas fisuras en la democracia deliberativa que afectarían a su legitimidad por cuanto suponen un menoscabo a la idea misma de las diferencias. Finalmente, la alusión a Rawls permite al autor erigir el sistema de los derechos humanos en el estándar mínimo necesario para llegar a un acuerdo global lo suficientemente amplio y abstracto como para garantizar el máximo respeto a las diferencias. Un acuerdo que, insiste el autor, sólo puede enmarcarse en un proyecto democrático con dimensión internacional, al que llama "horizonte cosmopolitamente democrático". (shrink)

The article elaborates an exegetical study of the figure of “Hell” present in the work of the martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. This trope is thought of as a core element of the narrative of Black Skin, White Masks that is linked to reflections on racist alienation, the epidermis, the gaze, and the zone of non-being. Exploring the different modulations of “Hell”, the article makes a displacement that seeks to argue how the infernal of Fanon’s story, more than a metaphor, accounts (...) for the “real-lived” of the colonial world. Consequently, the racialized body and its lived experience offer a reading about “Hell” in an anaphoric and existential key that strains the modern-hegemonic grammars about the identities. From this starting point, the work discusses the problem of temporality linked to the critical tenor that at various moments in Black Skin... assumes the infernal architecture of colonialism narrated by Fanon. (shrink)

The mental model theory predicts that reasoners normally represent what is true, but not what is false. One consequence is that reasoners should make "illusory" inferences, which are compelling but invalid. Three experiments confirmed the existence of such illusions based on disjunctions of disjunctions. They also established a successful antidote to them: Reasoners are much less likely to succumb to illusions if the inferences concern disjunctions of physical objects (alternative newspaper advertisements) rather disjunctions of the truth values of assertions. The (...) results shed light both on the cause of the illusions and on the current controversy among different theories of reasoning. (shrink)

Según la caracterización extendida del debate entre endurantistas y perdurantistas, los objetos materiales persisten temporalmente o bien en virtud de estar totalmente presentes en distintos momentos de tiempo, o bien en virtud de poseer partes temporales en distintos momentos de tiempo. El presente artículo se propone realizar una defensa de la teoría endurantista de las objeciones presentadas por Barker y Dowe (2003; 2005) y Hofweber y Velleman (2011). Dichas objeciones intentan mostrar que el Endurantismo (i) supone lógicamente la tesis característica (...) de la teoría perdurantista y (ii) es internamente incoherente. En contra de estas objeciones, argumento que al menos en algunas de sus versiones, la teoría endurantista es perfectamente coherente y no supone ningún compromiso con la existencia de partes temporales. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is Mexican historicism. It has three objectives: first, to introduce English-speaking readers to the nature and history of Mexican historicism; second, to defend Mexican historicism against the charges of relativism usually raised against historicism in general and “Mexican” philosophy in particular; and third, to argue for what I call the transcendental, or alternatively, “liberatory,” nature of Mexican historicism—a nature with philosophical and political consequences. The hope is that by making the clarifications and determinations made here, (...) the tradition of Mexican philosophy, of which Mexican historicism is a key moment, may find its place in the increasingly pluralistic US philosophical landscape. (shrink)

This paper is a short essay that claims that a systemic problem cannot be rightly understood and even less solved on the same level, in the same framework or with the same tools that entail the very same problem. This is a radical variation of Einstein’s idea set out in the context of the Copenhaguen debate according to which a problem cannot be solved if we do not change the conditions in which the problem arose originally. More exactly, a systemic (...) problem cannot be tackled and solved with tools, approaches and rods of the very same kind, level, nature of framework that define the problem. To truly tackle and solve any problem, the approach, tools, concepts, models, and the like need have a higher or heavier calibre so to speak than the problem. Otherwise, we do not solve a problem at all. At its best, we displace it. This essay argues that to solve any systemic problem a complexity endeavour is needed. Reasons for the insufficiency of systems science and about the rationale of complexity theory are provided.Key words: problem solving; systems science; complexity theory; epistemology; world. (shrink)

La evolución orgánica es objeto de discusión en los ámbitos religiosos, con defensores y detractores. Entre los científicos no existen dudas acerca de la evolución orgánica como un hecho debidamente comprobado, que incluso es admitido dentro de la Iglesia católica. Las implicancias metafísicas de este hecho científico no necesariamente abonan una visión materialista, sino todo lo contrario, e incluso tales implicancias son perfectamente compatibles con la perspectiva aristotélico-tomista y hasta refuerzan los conceptos de creación y providencia.

Ao cabo de toda uma carreira universitária que quase pode ser confundida com a reflexão sobre Hume em língua portuguesa, a ponto de outros interesses, capazes de originar empresas como a tradução do Leviathan de Hobbes (também na INCM), serem como que laterais ao percurso do seu autor, João Paulo Monteiro publica Realidade e Cognição, uma obra que não se afasta dos domínios de gnoseologia e epistemologia contemporâneas que lhe são familiares nem da influência humeana que aqui surge explicitam...

This editorial provides an overview of topics covered in Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 13:2. Adopting ‘criticality’ as an interpretative framework, four research articles are introduced which discuss relevant matters in ethics, rhetoric, political philosophy and cultural critique from a communicational standpoint.

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar las actuales reivindicaciones que se presentan, globalmente, en el desarrollo de los derechos humanos de las personas menores de edad, tomando como punto de partida la Convención sobre los Derechos del Niño, y su incorporación a la normativa interna, especialmente al ordenamiento jurídico estatal y autonómico. Teniendo en cuenta la actualización normativa, a través de las recientes reformas de la legislación española y catalana, se apunta hacia una tendencia paulatina de conf iguración de (...) una disciplina jurídica autónoma, que toma en consideración el protagonismo de niños, niñas y adolescentes, en la construcción y consolidación de sus derechos, en cuanto a su def inición y a su ejercicio por sus verdaderos titulares, y de acuerdo a su capacidad progre- siva. A partir de la delimitación de los temas que en la actualidad requieren de una mayor y mejor intervención, se pretende, asimismo, potenciar las redes de estudio e investigación sobre derechos de la infancia y la adolescencia, desde la idea de su utilidad social para el progreso hacia la plena realización y el respeto de los derechos subjetivos de niños, niñas y adolescentes. (shrink)