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)

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 paper is concerned with formal aspects of the logic of theory change, and in particular with the process of shrinking or contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition. It continues work in the area by the authors and Peter Gärdenfors. The paper defines a notion of safe contraction of a set of propositions, shows that it satisfies the Gärdenfors postulates for contraction and thus can be represented as a partial meet contraction, and studies its properties both in general and (...) under various natural constraints. (shrink)

Hybrid languages are expansions of propositional modal languages which can refer to worlds. The use of strong hybrid languages dates back to at least [Pri67], but recent work has focussed on a more constrained system called $\mathscr{H}$. We show in detail that $\mathscr{H}$ is modally natural. We begin by studying its expressivity, and provide model theoretic characterizations and a syntactic characterization. The key result to emerge is that $\mathscr{H}$ corresponds to the fragment of first-order logic which is invariant for generated (...) submodels. We then show that $\mathscr{H}$ enjoys interpolation, provide counterexamples for its finite variable fragments, and show that weak interpolation holds for the sublanguage $\mathscr{H}$. Finally, we provide complexity results for $\mathscr{H}$ and other fragments and variants, and sharpen known undecidability results for $\mathscr{H}$. (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)

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)

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)

Effective vaccines for COVID‐19 are already available to humankind. In Peru, 86 million doses were administered to cover the demand for 33 million Peruvian people. Hence, vaccination has been prioritized in groups: health personnel, subjects with pre‐existing health conditions and those over 65 years of age. However, given the social problems and the public health situation in Peru, this work defends that the priority of vaccination should be focused on the population living in extreme poverty. The method used was an (...) ethical argumentation on the distribution of scarce antiSARS‐CoV2 vaccine in Peru. This argument is based on the analysis of the Peruvian population living in extreme poverty, which presents different layers of vulnerability, and that, in the face of an eventual SARS‐CoV2 infection, these would be exacerbated one after the other, through a cascade effect. This scenario would give rise to new vulnerabilities to those already existing, causing greater damage. Vaccination efforts on this key population would give them the opportunity to continue to find ways to bring food to their homes, significantly reducing the risk of contagion in their environment and mitigating the devastating effect of the local diseases to which they are already exposed. Four objections related to this argument are raised with their corresponding responses. Priority access to the vaccine would significantly reduce the humanitarian harm to people living in extreme poverty, prevailing the principles of justice and equity. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notions of mediational fields and dynamic situated senses as a way to identify the structure of experiences, thoughts and their relations. To reach this purpose I draw some lessons from the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about the structure of experience, from Cussins’s conception of mediational contents, and from Evans’s account of singular senses. I notice firstly that McDowell’s answer to Dreyfus consists in developing a practical and demonstrative notion of the (...) products of our conceptual capacities. A conception that entails that human experience is not entirely characterised in terms of an abstract specification of truth-conditions. McDowell and Cussins endorse Evans’s conception of singular senses. A specification that takes into account the dynamic and situated abilities involved in making reference. Whereas the first argues in favour of a conceptual conception of experience, the second one argues in favour of a nonconceptual conception. I introduce the notions of mediational fields and dynamic situated senses to argue that both converge in conceiving the contents of experience as mediational and not reducible to an abstract specification of truth-conditions. My proposal is to define a bidimensional space orthogonal to the conceptual/ nonconceptual, experience/thought, know-how/know-that dichotomies. Cognitive contents are ways to disclose the world both as mediational fields and as referential structures. The degree in which those elements are presented determine different varieties of cognition. I use the previous notions to develop the sketch of an account of singular, objective and contextual ways of cognition, and to argue that it is better to begin an enquiry about cognition with notions that do not presuppose a distinction between practical and intellectual capacities. (shrink)

This article focuses on the dangers to democratic processes of one of the main instruments of political propaganda, the so-called political microtargeting. This type of microtargeting allows you to direct specific content, towards specific people, at specific times and link them directly to their individual characteristics, biases, and vulnerabilities. The objective of this article is to expose the operation and the various types of political microtargeting, show the harmful consequences of this technique on democratic processes and propose solutions to address (...) these negative consequences. To achieve this objective, on the one hand, the extraction, exploitation, and use of large data sets for the creation of various types of personalized political propaganda will be detailed and, on the other hand, the various existing proposals will be analyzed to limit the negative effects that can cause political microtargeting and to enhance the functioning of Western democracies. Este artículo se centra en los peligros para los procesos democráticos de uno de los principales instrumentos de propaganda política, el llamado microtargeting político. Este tipo de microtargeting permite dirigir contenidos específicos, hacia votantes específicos, en momentos específicos y vincularlos directamente con sus características, sesgos y vulnerabilidades individuales. El objetivo de este artículo es exponer el funcionamiento y los diversos tipos de microtargeting político y mostrar las posibles consecuencias nocivas de esta técnica en los procesos democráticos. Para lograr este objetivo, por una parte, se detallará la extracción, explotación y utilización de grandes conjuntos de datos para la creación de diversos tipos de propaganda política personalizada y, por otra parte, se analizarán las diversas propuestas existentes para limitar los efectos negativos que puede causar el microtargeting político y para mejorar el funcionamiento de las democráticas occidentales. (shrink)

Interfaith dialogue has been a border issue in theology at least in the last five decades of the last century. Different theoretical possibilities of approaches to such a question have been raised, e.g., exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. Therefore, there are remarkable contributions to this from a Catholic perspective, by Westerner theologians: Europeans, Americans, Brazilians and by Asians alike. Technical literature in Brazil has its focus mainly on this Catholic contribution. As a consequence, not much about the Protestant understanding of the (...) theme has been said. Therefore, this article intends to present some Protestant contributions to the theory of interfaith dialogue. (shrink)

En esta edicción de la Revista presentamos una serie de artículos que en su diversidad temática y en sus diferentes énfoques teóricos tiene en común dos temas cruciales en la reflexión filósofica que hoy cuentan con extrema vigencia: la cuestion de la escritura y la de la subjetividad (en sus vertienes estética y política). En ese orden de ideas, resulta de gran relevancia el cumulo de debates aquí presentados, asi como las opciones teóricas para abordarlos.

The lack of conceptual analysis within cognitive science results in multiple models of the same phenomena. However, these models incorporate assumptions that contradict basic structural features of the domain they are describing. This is particularly true about the domain of mathematical cognition. In this paper we argue that foundational theoretic aspects of psychological models for language and arithmetic should be clarified before postulating such models. We propose a means to clarify these foundational concepts by analyzing the distinctions between metric and (...) linguistic compositionality, which we use to assess current models of mathematical cognition. Our proposal is consistent with the scientific methodology that determines that careful conceptual analysis should precede theoretical descriptions of data. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The wide use of the word “cloning” in public discussion could lead to a confusion in the judgement of different situations. The variety of legal regulation of cloning in Europe shows examples of these confusions. But there are some other reasons that make difficult a complete legal regulation of scientific research on cloning.

The aim of this paper is to present a reflection on the idea of religiousness or religious sentiment in Benjamin Constant de Rebecque and the importance of this in free societies. For the author, the religious sentiment avoids the evils of selfishness and individualism and, at the same time, the dangers of political despotism and religious. In this sense, religion is seen as necessary to free societies. However, it must be separated from the priestly factions. Constant presents a strategy of (...) fusing a perspective of Enlightenment - with the concepts of progress and civilization - with aspects of the thought of Edmund Burke who advocated a more local interest. Thus, the "Greeks" - an "ideal type" avant la lettre - are presented with real people in history, which can help to think of our civilization. An "intermediate political principle", avoiding the excesses of philosophical abstraction. (shrink)

The Polish logician Roman Suszko has extensively pleaded in the 1970s for a restatement of the notion of many-valuedness. According to him, as he would often repeat, “there are but two logical values, true and false.” As a matter of fact, a result by W´ojcicki-Lindenbaum shows that any tarskian logic has a many-valued semantics, and results by Suszko-da Costa-Scott show that any many-valued semantics can be reduced to a two-valued one. So, why should one even consider using logics with more (...) than two values? Because, we argue, one has to decide how to deal with bivalence and settle down the tradeoff between logical 2-valuedness and truth-functionality, from a pragmatical standpoint. -/- This paper will illustrate the ups and downs of a two-valued reduction of logic. Suszko’s reductive result is quite non-constructive.We will exhibit here a way of effectively constructing the two-valued semantics of any logic that has a truth-functional finite-valued semantics and a sufficiently expressive language. From there, as we will indicate, one can easily go on to provide those logics with adequate canonical systems of sequents or tableaux. The algorithmic methods developed here can be generalized so as to apply to many non-finitely valued logics as well —or at least to those that admit of computable quasi tabular two-valued semantics, the so-called dyadic semantics. (shrink)

A partir de una consideración sobre la incidencia del lenguaje en la tarea filosófica, en especial sobre la filosofía del lenguaje, examinaré, en primer lugar, los alcances de las caracterizaciones más relevantes: análisis lingüístico y semiología, para cotejarlos con los desarrollos de la hermenéutica contemporánea. Procuraré mostrar que las consecuencias sobre los rendimientos del lenguaje son de mayor radicalidad en el caso de esta última, por la específica atención que presta a las diversas modalidades de experiencia lingüística. Una vez reconocida (...) la especificidad de ese enfoque, distinguiré los aportes de las tres versiones que se destacan en el panorama hermenéutico actual: la ontológica, la crítica y la analógica. Finalmente, presentaré a la tercera en relación de comparación con las anteriores como una contribución de gran poder heurístico para revisar las consecuencias generales del giro lingüístico. (shrink)