BackgroundGenetic/genomic testing (GGT) are useful tools for improving health and preventing diseases. Still, since GGT deals with sensitive personal information that could significantly impact a patient’s life or that of their family, it becomes imperative to consider Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI). Thus, ELSI studies aim to identify and address concerns raised by genomic research that could affect individuals, their family, and society. However, there are quantitative and qualitative discrepancies in the literature to describe the elements that provide content (...) to the ELSI studies and such problems may result in patient misinformation and harmful choices.MethodsWe analyzed the major international documents published by international organizations to specify the parameters that define ELSI and the recognized criteria for GGT, which may prove useful for researchers, health professionals and policymakers. First, we defined the parameters of the ethical, legal and social fields in GGT to avoid ambiguities when using the acronym ELSI. Then, we selected nine documents from 44 relevant publications by international organizations related to genomic medicine.ResultsWe identified 29 ELSI sub-criteria concerning to GGT, which were organized and grouped within 10 minimum criteria: two from the ethical field, four from the legal field and four from the social field. An additional analysis of the number of appearances of these 29 sub-criteria in the analyzed documents allowed us to order them and to determine 7 priority criteria for starting to evaluate and propose national regulations for GGT.ConclusionsWe propose that the ELSI criteria identified herein could serve as a starting point to formulate national regulation on personalized genomic medicine, ensuring consistency with international bioethical requirements. (shrink)

1. Le fe por la palabra -- 2. Topía y Utopía -- 3. Luz en la caverna.

In the study of cognitive processes, limitations on computational resources (computing time and memory space) are usually considered to be beyond the scope of a theory of competence, and to be exclusively relevant to the study of performance. Starting from considerations derived from the theory of computational complexity, in this paper I argue that there are good reasons for claiming that some aspects of resource limitations pertain to the domain of a theory of competence.

The problem of concept representation is relevant for many sub-fields of cognitive research, including psychology and philosophy, as well as artificial intelligence. In particular, in recent years it has received a great deal of attention within the field of knowledge representation, due to its relevance for both knowledge engineering as well as ontology-based technologies. However, the notion of a concept itself turns out to be highly disputed and problematic. In our opinion, one of the causes of this state of affairs (...) is that the notion of a concept is, to some extent, heterogeneous, and encompasses different cognitive phenomena. This results in a strain between conflicting requirements, such as compositionality, on the one hand and the need to represent prototypical information on the other. In some ways artificial intelligence research shows traces of this situation. In this paper, we propose an analysis of this current state of affairs. Since it is our opinion that a mature methodology with which to approach knowledge representation and knowledge engineering should also take advantage of the empirical results of cognitive psychology concerning human abilities, we outline some proposals for concept representation in formal ontologies, which take into account suggestions from psychological research. Our basic assumption is that knowledge representation systems whose design takes into account evidence from experimental psychology may therefore give better results in many applications. (shrink)

During the last decades it has emerged that concepts probably do not constitute a homogeneous set of entities from a psychological point of view. Various divides can be drawn between different types of concepts. Probably, the main empirical achievement in this field has been the inadequacy of the so-called “classical view”: most concepts cannot be characterised in terms of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions; rather, they exhibit typicality effects. In this chapter I will suggest that typicality effects, far from (...) being a symptom of some homogeneous underlying cognitive structure, are more plausibly the consequence of some “ecological constraints” acting on the mind. In other words, typicality effects could be the effect of some form of “convergent evolution” between heterogeneous mental structures. This should have important consequences on the role of the notion of “concept” itself: the status of the concept of “concept” in cognitive science should be similar to that of the concept of “fat plant” in botany, which can be of some utility in certain cases, but does not correspond to a genuine botanical kind. (shrink)

Eugenio Bulygin is a distinguished representative of legal science and legal philosophy as they are known on the European continent - no accident, given the role of the civil law tradition in his home country, Argentina. Over the past half-century, Bulygin has engaged virtually all major legal philosophers in the English-speaking countries, including H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz. Bulygin's essays, several written together with his eminent colleague and close friend Carlos E. Alchourrón, reflect the genre familiar from (...) Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, and Georg Henrik von Wright's Norm and Action. Bulygin's wide-ranging interests include most of the topics found under the rubric of analytical jurisprudence - interpretation and judicial reasoning, validity and efficacy of law, legal positivism and the problem of normativity, completeness and consistency of the legal system, the nature of legal norms, and the role of deontic logic in the law. The reader will take delight in the often agreeably unorthodox character of Bulygin's views and in his hard-hitting arguments in defence of them. He challenges the received opinion on gaps in the law, on legal efficacy, on permissory norms, and on the criteria for legal validity. Bulygin's essays have been wellnigh inaccessible in the past, appearing in specialized journals, often in Spanish or German. They are now available for the first time in an English-language collection. (shrink)

Concept representation is still an open problem in the field of ontology engineering and, more generally, of knowledge representation. In particular, the issue of representing “non classical” concepts, i.e. concepts that cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, remains unresolved. In this paper we review empirical evidence from cognitive psychology, according to which concept representation is not a unitary phenomenon. On this basis, we sketch some proposals for concept representation, taking into account suggestions from psychological research. In (...) particular, it seems that human beings employ both prototype-based and exemplar-based representations in order to represent non classical concepts. We suggest that a similar, hybrid prototype-exemplar based approach could also prove useful in the field of knowledge representation technology. Finally, we propose conceptual spaces as a suitable framework for developing some aspects of this proposal. (shrink)

Pour la plupart des systèmes de représentation de la connaissance orientés concept, l’un des problèmes principaux relève de la commodité technique. A savoir, la représentation de connaissance en termes prototypiques, tout comme la possibilité d’exploiter des formes de raisonnement conceptuel basées sur la typicalité, ne sont pas autorisées. Au contraire, dans les sciences cognitives, il existe des données en faveur de concepts prototypiques, et des formes non-monotoniques de raisonnement conceptuel ont été largement étudiées. Ce fossé cognitif concernant la représentation et (...) le raisonnement constitue un problème pour les systèmes computationnels, puisque l’information prototypique joue un rôle crucial dans plusieurs tâches importantes. Dans la lignée des théories du raisonnement et de la rationalité dites du double processus, nous soutenons que la représentation conceptuelle dans les systèmes computationnels devrait dépendre de (au moins) deux composantes représentationnelles, chacune spécialisée dans le traitement de différents genres de processus de raisonnement. Dans cet article, nous présentons les avantages computationnels de cette approche en termes de double processus, et les comparons brièvement avec d’autres solutions d’orientation logique, adoptées pour traiter du même problème. (shrink)

The project of neuroaesthetics could be interpreted as an attempt to identify a ?neural essence? of art, i.e., a set of necessary and sufficient conditions formulated in the language of neuroscience, which define the concept art . Some proposals developed within this field can be read in this way. I shall argue that such attempts do not succeed in individuating a neural definition of art. Of course, the fact that the proposals available for defining art in neural terms do not (...) work does not mean that such an enterprise is in principle doomed to failure. However, I maintain that there are good reasons to suspect that in general such a definition cannot be worked out. This does not mean, though, that the study of neural correlates in artwork production and fruition is a senseless project. Neuroaesthetics could succeed in individuating widespread mechanisms common to different forms of art coming from remote cultural contexts, which presumably rely on aspects of our mind and/or brain's functioning that are innate and biologically determined, thus contrasting the idea that artistic phenomena are entirely dependent on cultural factors. (shrink)

Standard citation-based bibliometric tools have severe limitations when they are applied to periods in the history of science and the humanities before the advent of now-current citation practices. This paper presents an alternative method involving the extracting and analysis of mentions to map and analyze links between scholars and texts in periods that fall outside the scope of citation-based studies. Focusing on one specific discipline in one particular period and language area—Anglophone philosophy between 1890 and 1979—we describe a procedure to (...) create a mention index by identifying, extracting, and disambiguating mentions in academic publications. Our mention index includes 1,095,765 mention links, extracted from 22,977 articles published in 12 journals. We successfully link 93% of these mentions to specific philosophers, with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. Moreover, we integrate the mention index into a database named EDHIPHY, which includes data and metadata from multiple sources and enables multidimensional mention analyses. In the final part of the paper, we present four case studies conducted by domain experts, demonstrating the use and the potential of both EDHIPHY and mention analyses more generally. (shrink)

A classical objection to pictorial communication is that pictures are intrinsically ambiguous and a picture, per se, can communicate an indeterminate number of different contents. The standard interpretation of this objection is that pictures are subordinate to language and that pictorial communication is parasitic on verbal communication. We argue that in many cases verbal communication presents a similar indeterminacy, which is resolved by resorting to pragmatic mechanisms. In this spirit, we propose a pragmatic approach which explains pictorial communication in terms (...) of implicatures in a wide sense. (shrink)

Para el autor de este artículo, el rechazo kantiano de la identificación de su concepto de a priori con la noción leibniciana de lo innato solo puede comprenderse de manera clara y precisa, si recurrimos a la concepción kantiana de la epigénesis como modelo epistemológico; es decir, si consideramos las facultades cognitivas como fuerzas formativas que se componen con otras fuerzas de la naturaleza para hacer posible la adquisición originaria de intuiciones y conceptos a priori.

‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’ (Proverbs 29:18) reads like a commentary on poor leadership. In the Vulgate prophetia is the word that the King James’ Bible translators rendered as ‘v...

Since the early eighties, computationalism in the study of the mind has been “under attack” by several critics of the so-called “classic” or “symbolic” approaches in AI and cognitive science. Computationalism was generically identified with such approaches. For example, it was identified with both Allen Newell and Herbert Simon’s Physical Symbol System Hypothesis and Jerry Fodor’s theory of Language of Thought, usually without taking into account the fact ,that such approaches are very different as to their methods and aims. Zenon (...) Pylyshyn, in his influential book Computation and Cognition, claimed that both Newell and Fodor deeply influenced his ideas on cognition as computation. This probably added to the confusion, as many people still consider Pylyshyn’s book as paradigmatic of the computational approach in the study of the mind. Since then, cognitive scientists, AI researchers and also philosophers of the mind have been asked to take sides on different “paradigms” that have from time to time been proposed as opponents of (classic or symbolic) computationalism. Examples of such oppositions are: -/- computationalism vs. connectionism, computationalism vs. dynamical systems, computationalism vs. situated and embodied cognition, computationalism vs. behavioural and evolutionary robotics. -/- Our preliminary claim in section 1 is that computationalism should not be identified with what we would call the “paradigm (based on the metaphor) of the computer” (in the following, PoC). PoC is the (rather vague) statement that the mind functions “as a digital computer”. Actually, PoC is a restrictive version of computationalism, and nobody ever seriously upheld it, except in some rough versions of the computational approach and in some popular discussions about it. Usually, PoC is used as a straw man in many arguments against computationalism. In section 1 we look in some detail at PoC’s claims and argue that computationalism cannot be identified with PoC. In section 2 we point out that certain anticomputationalist arguments are based on this misleading identification. In section 3 we suggest that the view of the levels of explanation proposed by David Marr could clarify certain points of the debate on computationalism. In section 4 we touch on a controversial issue, namely the possibility of developing a notion of analog computation, similar to the notion of digital computation. A short conclusion follows in section 5. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza los aspectos más destacados de la polémica entre Juan Carlos Bayón y Eugenio Bulygin acerca de las lagunas jurídicas, el principio de prohibición y el alcance de la discreción judicial. En esta disputa, Bulygin defiende cuatro tesis centrales, enunciadas en Normative Systems : una cuidadosa distinción entre normas y proposiciones normativas es esencial para resolver el problema de las lagunas jurídicas, la versión débil del principio de prohibición no sirve para mostrar que no existen lagunas, la (...) versión fuerte del principio de prohibición es verdadera solo cuando el sistema es completo, y en casos de lagunas jurídicas, los jueces tienen discreción para resolver estas situaciones. Sin embargo, Bayón señala que el problema no es la falta de distinción entre normas y proposiciones normativas sino el desacuerdo acerca de cuándo una solución jurídica es concluyente. La diferencia entre soluciones prima facie y concluyente es esencial porque en ciertas situaciones, el derecho no da una respuesta pero tampoco deja espacio para la discrecionalidad judicial. Según Bayón, en estos casos el principio de prohibición "todo lo que no está prohibido está permitido" juega un papel fundamental. Este trabajo muestra que los argumentos de Bayón son insuficientes para rechazar las tesis clásicas defendidas por Bulygin. In this paper I analyze the most relevant aspects of the controversy between Juan Carlos Bayón and Eugenio Bulygin about the existence of legal gaps, the so called "principle of prohibition" and the scope of judicial discretion. In this debate, Bulygin defends four classical theses advanced in his wellknown book, Normative Systems : a careful distinction between norms and norm propositions is actually needed in order to solve the problem of legal gaps, the analytical truth of the weak version of the principle of prohibition cannot guarantee the completeness of legal systems, the strong version of the principle of prohibition is true only if legal systems are complete, and judges have discretion in cases of legal gaps. However, Bayón claims that the problem is not the lack of distinction between norms and norm proposition but rather the identification of conclusive legal solutions. Conclusive legal solutions must be distinguished from the prima facie solutions provided by explicitly enacted norms. According to Bayón, the difference between conclusive and prima facie solutions is essential in legally irrelevant cases; in such cases the principle of prohibition plays an essential role because it entails the rejection of judicial discretion. In this paper I claim that the arguments advanced by Bayón fail to provide a sound ground for discarding the classical theses defended by Bulygin. (shrink)

The modelling of concepts, besides involving disciplines like philosophy of mind and psychology, is a fundamental and lively research problem in several artificial intelligence (AI) areas, such as knowledge representation, machine learning, and natural language processing. In this scenario, the most prominent proposed solutions adopt different (often incompatible) assumptions about the nature of such a notion. Each of these solutions has been developed to capture some specific features of concepts and support some specific (artificial) cognitive operations. This paper critically reviews (...) the most notable computational approaches to the representation of concepts. The main goals are (i) to provide a shared terminology for the desiderata of concepts and their computational representation; (ii) to classify and assess the heterogeneous computational approaches according to the provided terminology; (iii) to provide a reader who may not be very familiar with theories of concepts with an introduction to major themes in this research and with pointers to different research projects, and (iv) to offer philosophers, and potentially AI practitioners, a well-informed guide for selecting among various (and possibly competing) computational representations of concepts. (shrink)

In this work I argue that Descartes was not a trialist by showing that the main tenets of trialist interpretations of Descartes's theory of substance are either not supported by the text or are not sufficient for establishing the trialist interpretation.

In the long history of the interpretations of Hume's theses on the self and personal identity, it is by now widely accepted that the conclusions reached in the first book of the Treatise must be considered in light of what the philosopher adds on these themes in the second and third books. Furthermore, there is no longer much support for the reading, which saw a contradiction here, given that while in the Book 1 he denies the reality of the self (...) or of personal identity, he then accepts that reality when he turns to his discussion of the passions. In presenting a more comprehensive reading of the theses of Hume on the self in the Treatise as a whole, it is essential not to lose sight of what Hume himself declared in Book 1, that "we must distinguish betwixt personal identity, as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves". But having recognized the necessity of integrating the theses on the self of Book 1 with those advanced in the latter two books, there are still divergent opinions on what meaning should be assigned to this integration. The relationship between what Hume writes on the self in Books 2 and 3 and the discussion of that topic in Book 1 has been seen, variously, as a mere continuation, as a new development in a continuous interpretation, or, rather, as a completely new posing of the question, with its own new solution. (shrink)

This book offers an unprecedented quantitative portrait of analytic philosophy focusing on two seemingly marginal features of philosophical texts: citations and acknowledgements in academic publications. Originating from a little network of philosophers based in Oxford, Cambridge, and Vienna, analytic philosophy has become during the Twentieth century a thriving philosophical community with thousands of members worldwide. Leveraging the most advanced techniques from bibliometrics, citations and acknowledgments are used in this book to shed light on both the epistemology and the sociology of (...) this philosophical field, illuminating the intellectual trajectory of analytic philosophy as well as the social characteristics of the analytic community. Special attention is dedicated to the last forty years, providing insights into a phase of analytic philosophy which is still understudied by historians of philosophy. In the eight chapters of the book, readers will find not only numerous quantitative investigations and technical explanations, but also a robust theoretical framework and epistemological reflections on the strengths and limitations of quantitative methods for the study of philosophy. With its strong interdisciplinary appeal, this book will engage a wide range of scholars, including historians of philosophy seeking new methodologies, analytic philosophers interested in a new look at their discipline, and scholars in digital humanities, bibliometrics, and quantitative studies of science, who will find many innovative techniques for investigating disciplinary fields. (shrink)

La logica modale è nata per studiare i ragionamenti su ciò che è possibile e ciò che è necessario. Negli ultimi decenni, a partire dal lavoro di logici e filosofi quali Rudolf Carnap, Saul Kripke e David Lewis, la sua applicazione è stata progressivamente estesa ad altri ambiti, quali il ragionamento sul tempo, sulla conoscenza e sui sistemi di norme. Queste ricerche hanno condotto a un complesso e intrigante dialogo con alcune fondamentali branche della filosofia: la metafisica, l’epistemologia, la filosofia (...) del linguaggio. Lo scopo del volume è offrire una panoramica di questo dialogo al contempo accessibile e rigorosa, pensata sia per gli studenti di un corso universitario, sia per il lettore non specialista. Se da un lato tutte le necessarie nozioni tecniche sono rese accessibili ai non addetti ai lavori, dall'altro si restituisce un'immagine fedele delle sfide concettuali che la ricerca in questi settori è oggi chiamata ad affrontare. (shrink)

In this article, I report on a Bulgarian female migrant caregiver's “life-story,” especially focusing on her relationship with an old Italian woman, on the care practices performed in her favor in Italy, and on her daughter and parents still living in Bulgaria. I chose to do it by means of an anthropological approach based on experience as field of mediation between personal dimensions and historical and social processes and therefore centered on the body conceived as historical product, the influence of (...) political and social forces on shaping human lives, and finally interest in the specific link between bodies and work. From this analysis, based on language and narratives, I think useful cultural aspects may emerge about “gender” and care practices, regarding the two women linked by an assistance relationship, and the activities/strategies used by the Bulgarian caregiver to fulfill her family obligations. (shrink)

We examine the "Theaetetus" in the light of its juxtaposition of philosophical, mathematical and sophistical approaches to knowledge, which we show to be a prominent feature of the drama. We suggest that clarifying the nature of philosophy supersedes the question of knowledge as the main ambition of the "Theaetetus". Socrates shows Theaetetus that philosophy is not a demonstrative science, like geometry, but it is also not mere word-play, like sophistry. The nature of philosophy is revealed in Socrates' activity of examination (...) and his refusal to deny his ignorance about knowledge. (shrink)

Nel campo delle scienze cognitive molti oggi condividono l’ipotesi che siano necessari differenti tipi di rappresentazioni per modellare i sistemi cognitivi sia naturali, sia artificiali. Si considerino le rappresentazioni basate su reti neurali, i formalismi simbolici e rappresentazioni analogiche quali rappresentazioni diagrammatiche o modelli mentali. Tutti questi metodi hanno successo nello spiegare e modellare alcune classi di fenomeni cognitivi, ma nessuno è in grado di rendere conto di tutti gli aspetti della cognizione. A partire da queste considerazioni, riteniamo che sistemi (...) intelligenti e architetture cognitive possano trarre vantaggio dalla combinazione di sistemi di rappresentazione diversi. Si pone allora il problema di fare interagire rappresentazioni di natura differente in maniera cognitivamente e teoricamente fondata. La nostra ipotesi è che gli spazi concettuali possano offrire una sorta di lingua comune, che consentirebbe di integrare e generalizzare molti aspetti delle impostazioni sopra menzionate, superando i limiti delle varie proposte intese singolarmente. (shrink)

We provide a quantitative analysis of the philosophy-neuroscience nexus using citation analysis. Combining bibliometric indicators of cross-field visibility with journal citation mapping techniques, we investigate four dimensions of the nexus: how the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and of philosophy in neuroscience has changed over time, which areas of philosophy are more interested in neuroscience, which areas of neuroscience are more interested in philosophy, and how the trading zone between the two fields is configured. We also discuss two hypotheses: the (...) supposed occurrence of a neuro-revolution in philosophy and the role of psychology as the disciplinary link between neuroscience and philosophy. Both the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and the visibility of philosophy in neuroscience have increased significantly from 1980 to 2020, albeit the latter remains an order of magnitude lower than the former. Neuroscience is particularly visible in philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of science, but not in ‘core’ areas of analytic philosophy. Philosophy is particularly visible in cognitive and systems neuroscience and neuropsychiatry, but not in biomedical neuroscience. As for the trading zone between philosophy and neuroscience, our data show that it works differently in philosophy and in neuroscience. While some philosophy journals are active loci of bidirectional communication, neuroscience journals are divided between journals ‘importing’ philosophy in neuroscience and journals ‘exporting’ neuroscience to philosophy. Lastly, data do not support the hypothesis that a widespread neuro-revolution has transformed philosophy radically, but support the hypothesis that psychology functions as a mediating disciplinary link between philosophy and neuroscience. (shrink)

This article explores the link between religion and politics, religious liberty and the rights of religious minorities, by focusing on the constitutions which Italian states adopted and discarded from 1796 to 1849. It concerns questions about the ‘national character’ and the rights and duties of the citizen, and argues that – far from being ‘an outlet’ for material discontent – questions of religious identity and pluralism were integral to the Risorgimento definition of liberty. In this context, the author explores also (...) the Mazzinian vision of a democratic republic inspired by an acephalous and non-hierarchical civil religion, similar to the Unitarian Transcendentalism practiced by some of his New York admirers – a far cry from the ‘religions of politics’ inspired by Saint Simon and Auguste Comte. (shrink)

Using nonstandard methods we construct a model of an induction scheme called inside a "resource" of the form is a Turing machine of code is calculated in less than , where means the length of the binary expansion of and are nonstandard parameters in a model of . As a consequence we obtain a model theoretic proof of a witnessing theorem for this theory by functions computable in time , a result first obtained by Buss, Krajícek, and Takeuti using proof (...) theory. (shrink)

Dominique Wolton sustenta que as tecnologias da informática encontram-se aptas a promover um exercício tecnológico nos quais os usuários se encontrem em situação de igualdade. A partir dessa perspectiva, torna-se válido esperar que a vasta disseminação do uso de ferramentas on-line no Brasil repercuta o fenômeno referido, constituindo um contexto pautado pela cessão igualitária de visibilidade à expressão dos diversos indivíduos ali inseridos, instituindo, assim, um cenário apto ao diálogo educativo por permear-se por um tratamento igualitário dispensado a seus diversos (...) falantes. O presente artigo, oriundo da tese “Podcast na educação brasileira: natureza, potencialidades e implicações de uma tecnologia da comunicação”, busca investigar se a derrocada hierárquica aludida realmente ocorre no âmbito nacional on-line do podcast , tecnologia de oralidade distribuída sob demanda. Para isso, este trabalho irá analisar a origem produtiva dos podcasts de maior visibilidade na internet brasileira, considerando do mesmo modo as esferas dos blogs e micro-blogs , de modo a relativizá-las ao cenário do podcast . Os resultados desta investigação indicaram que, ao contrário do que se observou em outras esferas on-line, o uso nacional do podcast demonstrou promover a superação de hierarquias que privilegiam certos indivíduos, especialmente àqueles referidos como “celebridades”, em detrimento dos demais na visibilidade de suas expressões em meios tecnológicos. Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)