A number of theories about the origins of musicality have incorporated biological and social perspectives. Darwin argued that musicality evolved by sexual selection, functioning as a courtship display in reproductive partner choice. Darwin did not regard musicality as a sexually dimorphic trait, paralleling evidence that both sexes produce and enjoy music. A novel research strand examines the effect of musicality on sexual attraction by acknowledging the importance of facial attractiveness. We previously demonstrated that music varying in emotional content increases the (...) perceived attractiveness and dating desirability of opposite-sex faces only in females, compared to a silent control condition. Here, we built upon this approach by presenting the person depicted (target) as the performer of the music (prime), thus establishing a direct link. We hypothesized that musical priming would increase sexual attraction, with high-arousing music inducing the largest effect. Musical primes (25 s, piano solo music) varied in arousal and pleasantness, and targets were photos of other-sex faces of average attractiveness and with neutral expressions (2 s). Participants were 35 females and 23 males (heterosexual psychology students, single, and no hormonal contraception use) matched for musical background, mood, and liking for the music used in the experiment. After musical priming, females’ ratings of attractiveness and dating desirability increased significantly. In males, only dating desirability was significantly increased by musical priming. No specific effects of music-induced pleasantness and arousal were observed. Our results, together with other recent empirical evidence, corroborate the sexual selection hypothesis for the evolution of human musicality. (shrink)

In the last decade, various analyses of beliefs in terms of dispositions have been advanced. One principled objection against dispositional accounts of belief is that they cannot accommodate first-...

Mirror neurons are a particular class of visumotorical neurons, originally discovered in area F5 of the monkey premotorical cortex. They discharge both (1) when the animal performs a specific action and (2) when it observes a similar action. Actually, it is often assumed that this unique functioning could explain different abilities ranging from imitation behaviour to faculty of speech. In this article, we discuss the question what is meant by the expression: The neuron x mirrors the action y by perception (...) z . The problem resulted from the fact, that neurons cannot mirror anything—except in the light of a metaphorical description. How can this metaphorical description be dissolved for a distinct and explicit scientific terminology? The basic steps of our argumentation are as follows. (1) The expression to mirror can be defined in mutual relation between different types of actions in respect of at least two participants: the proponent A, who conducts a special action x (e.g. grapping a peanut (A(x)) and the opponent B who observes these actions y (B(y)) and vice versa. (2) In order to detect different tokens as a type of action and to guarantee the changes of the participants there must be constituted a speech act in a dialogue, in which types of actions are defined by the invariance of special equivalence. (3) The change of the participants represents and defines the metaphorical expression to mirror in the light of a non-metaphorical and reproducible schema. (4) Then, the invariance of the type of action can be identified in different speech acts. Three of them (called narratives) were defined paradigmatically: (4.1) the ethological-narrative; (4.2) the neurophysiological-narrative; (4.3) the language-narrative. (5) These narratives are the modelling and explicit formulations of the primarily metaphorical expression: The neuron x mirrors the action y by perception z. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical reconstruction of neglected post-WWI writings and political action of W. E. B. Du Bois, this volume offers a normative account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Pointing out the limitations of Kant's cosmopolitanism through a novel contextual account of Perpetual Peace, Transnational Cosmopolitanism shows how these limits remain in neo-Kantian scholarship. Inés Valdez's framework overcomes these limitations in a methodologically unique way, taking Du Bois's writings and his coalitional political action both as text that should inform our theorization and (...) normative insights. The cosmopolitanism proposed in this work is an original contribution that questions the contemporary currency of Kant's canonical approach and enlists overlooked resources to radicalize, democratize, and transnationalize cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

LS Penrose was the first to propose a measure of voting power (which later came to be known as ‘the [absolute] Banzhaf index’). His limit theorem – which is implicit in Penrose (1952) and for which he gave no rigorous proof – says that, in simple weighted voting games, if the number of voters increases indefinitely while the quota is pegged at half the total weight, then – under certain conditions – the ratio between the voting powers (as measured by (...) him) of any two voters converges to the ratio between their weights. We conjecture that the theorem holds, under rather general conditions, for large classes of variously defined weighted voting games, other values of the quota, and other measures of voting power. We provide proofs for some special cases. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to assess whether the construct of neural representations plays an explanatory role under the variational free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference; and (2) if so, to assess which philosophical stance - in relation to the ontological and epistemological status of representations - is most appropriate. We focus on non-realist (deflationary and fictionalist-instrumentalist) approaches. We consider a deflationary account of mental representation, according to which the explanatorily relevant contents of neural (...) representations are mathematical, rather than cognitive, and a fictionalist or instrumentalist account, according to which representations are scientifically useful fictions that serve explanatory (and other) aims. After reviewing the free-energy principle and active inference, we argue that the model of adaptive phenotypes under the free-energy principle can be used to furnish a formal semantics, enabling us to assign semantic content to specific phenotypic states (the internal states of a Markovian system that exists far from equilibrium). We propose a modified fictionalist account: an organism-centered fictionalism or instrumentalism. We argue that, under the free-energy principle, pursuing even a deflationary account of the content of neural representations licenses the appeal to the kind of semantic content involved in the aboutness or intentionality of cognitive systems; our position is thus coherent with, but rests on distinct assumptions from, the realist position. We argue that the free-energy principle thereby explains the aboutness or intentionality in living systems and hence their capacity to parse their sensory stream using an ontology or set of semantic factors. (shrink)

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic severely strained the already unprepared Italian healthcare system. This had repercussions on healthcare workers, stemming, in particular, from a lack of clear guidelines, adequate protective equipment, and professional preparedness. Such conditions were especially prevalent in Northern Italy.Objectives: This study aimed to examine COVID-19-related professional and psychoemotional stress among nurses and doctors in two hospitals in Northern Italy, along with the worst critical incidents affecting healthcare personnel. A parallel objective was to elicit healthcare professionals' opinions about what (...) changes are needed in the healthcare system's operations, as well as about the relational/emotional skills that are needed to better manage relationships with patients in emergency situations.Participants: Snowball sampling was used to recruit participants and yielded 17 hospital professionals: six nurses and 11 doctors. Three of these professionals worked in intensive care and the others in different wards. All had close contact with COVID-19 patients.Methods: The study employed a qualitative research design, using in-depth interviews of ~60 min each that were conducted via Skype video calls. The interviews were recorded and transcribed, then analysed. The qualitative analysis employed mixed methods to identify the most relevant and recursive themes from the interviews.Results: Four fundamental themes emerged from our analysis of the interview texts: disorganisation and psychoemotional stress; urgency and critical incidents; everything surreal; and disruptions in empathetic relationships with patients.Conclusions: Through our analysis of the interview narratives, we found that systematic and in-depth psychological training is needed to prepare professionals for altered relationships with patients in emergencies; use of exceptional medical equipment; elaboration of new bioethical models suitable for disasters and pandemics; and engagement with the themes of death and dying. (shrink)

Admiration and adoration have been considered as emotions with the power to change people, yet our knowledge of the specific nature and function of these emotions is quite limited. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we present a prototype approach to admiration and what has variously been labelled adoration, worship, or reverence. Both admiration and adoration contribute to the formation of personal and collective ideals, values, and identities, but their workings differ. We offer a detailed theoretical account of commonalities and differences in (...) the appraisal patterns and action tendencies associated with the two emotions. This analysis reveals that admiration motivates the internalisation and emulation of ideals embodied by an outstanding role model. Adoration motivates adherence to the teachings and expectations of a meaning maker and benefactor perceived as superhuman or sacred. Thus, the primary function of admiration is to promote individual learning and change, whereas adoration primarily serves to bind communities together. (shrink)

This study investigates the integration of the interactive whiteboard into Science teaching during the primary educational cycle and teachers’ perceptions about the use of the information and communication technology in the school subject Science. An online questionnaire was distributed to Croatian schools in 2015/2016. A total of 104 teachers expressed their perceptions, 65 of them were from schools without an IWB, while the remaining 39 responded to our online questionnaire from schools with an implemented IWB. The results indicate the higher (...) usage of ICT in schools with an IWB compared to schools without an IWB. Teachers use IWBs and computers mostly once or twice per week and DVDs once per week. Additional results pointed to the positive teachers’ perceptions on technology in linking student motivation to outcome levels in science. The findings reveal the constant education focused on IWB integration, and internet and technical support as a starting point for an innovative practice in science. Future studies are directed to the investigation of the use of technology in all schools in the Republic of Croatia. U radu se prikazuju rezultati istraživanja o korištenju pametne ploče u nastavi Prirode i društva te stavova učitelja o uporabi informacijske i komunikacijske tehnologije u podučavanju tih nastavnih sadržaja. Istraživanje je provedeno putem online upitnika koji je bio poslan u škole u Hrvatskoj tijekom školske godine 2015/2016. Ukupno 104 učitelja iskazalo je svoje stavove: 65 učitelja iz škola bez pametne ploče, a 39 iz škola u kojima koriste pametnu ploču. Rezultati ukazuju na češću uporabu IKT u školama s pametnom pločom u usporedbi sa školama bez nje. Učitelji pametnu ploču i računala najčešće koriste jednom do dva puta tjedno, a DVD jednom tjedno. Rezultati također pokazuju pozitivne stavove učitelja o uporabi tehnologije za povećanje motivacije učenika i njihovih postignuća. Nalazi istraživanja ukazuju na kontinuiranu edukaciju usmjerenu na rad s pametnom pločom te tehničku podršku kao ključne za inovativnu nastavu. Buduća istraživanja trebala bi analizirati korištenje tehnologije u svim školama u Republici Hrvatskoj. (shrink)

This edited book deepens the engagement between 21st century philosophy of mind and the emerging technologies which are transforming our environment. Many new technologies appear to have important implications for the human mind, the nature of our cognition, our sense of identity and even perhaps what we think human beings are. They prompt questions such as: Would an uploaded mind be 'me'? Does our reliance on smart phones, or wearable gadgets enhance or diminish the human mind? and: How does our (...) deep reliance upon ambient artificial intelligence change the shape of the human mind? Readers will discover the best philosophical analysis of what current and near future 21st technology means for the metaphysics of mind. Important questions are addressed on matters relating to the extended mind and the distributed self. Expert authors explore the role that the ubiquitous smart phone might have in creating new forms of self-knowledge. They consider machine consciousness, brain enhancement and smart ambient technology, and what they can tell us about phenomenal consciousness. While ideas of artificial general intelligence, cognitive enhancements and the smart environment are widely commented on, serious analysis of their philosophical implications is only getting started. These contributions from top scholars are therefore very timely, and are of particular relevance to students and scholars of the philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, computer science and psychology. (shrink)

This article explores the distinctions among European peoples’ character established in Kant’s anthropology and their connection with his politics. These aspects are neglected relative to the analysis of race between Europeans and non-Europeans, but Kant’s anthropological works portray the people of Mediterranean Europe as not capable of civilization because of the dominance of passion in their faculty of desire, which he ties to ‘Oriental’ influences in blood or government. Kant then superimposes this racialized anthropology over the historical geopolitics of Europe, (...) obscuring the indebtedness of Northern European trade dominance to Mediterranean historical tactics and financial wealth. By relegating the Mediterranean to the margins and dismissing contentious commercial exchange in the region as mere violence spearheaded by North African corsairs, Kant gives us an elitist cosmopolitanism unable to cope with hierarchy and inequality, diminishing its potential for egalitarian global projects today. (shrink)

How is admiration different from adoration? We provided one answer to this question by examining the pathways through which admiration and adoration linked to self-expansion in a questionnaire and an experimental (autobiographical recall of emotion episodes) study. Both emotions were associated with increased potential efficacy to accomplish goals (i.e., self-expansion), but different action tendencies accounted for these links. While our emotion inductions did not successfully distinguish between admiration and adoration, we could statistically disentangle their effects through mediator models. In both (...) studies, self-reported admiration linked to self-expansion through the tendency to emulate admired others. Adoration related to self-expansion through the tendency to affiliate with adored others. These findings were obtained after controlling for other emotions in response to the target person (awe, love, hope, benign envy) and mutuality of the relationship. Our findings also suggest that considering specific emotions (rather than undifferentiated positive affect) helps uncover different pathways to self-expansion. (shrink)

BackgroundPerinatal bereavement is an event that greatly impacts the emotional, psychological, and psychosocial aspects of those who want to have a child.ObjectivesSince there are few studies on the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on couples grieving for perinatal loss, this research aimed to survey this experience.ParticipantsBetween 2020 and 2021, in Italian provinces highly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, 21 parents participated: 16 mothers and 5 fathers, among which there were 4 couples.MethodsA mixed-method design was used through self-report questionnaires and (...) in-depth interviews. Accompanied by a sociodemographic form, the following questionnaires were administered: Prolonged Grief-13, the Parental Assessment of Paternal Affectivity, the Parental Assessment of Maternal Affectivity, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale short version, the Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale, and the Impact of Event Scale-Revised. The texts obtained through the in-depth interviews underwent thematic analysis.ResultsFifty per cent of participants suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders symptoms and 20% suffered from relational dyadic stress. Four areas of thematic prevalence emerged: psychological complexity of bereavement, the impact of the COVID-19, disenfranchisement vs. support, and spirituality and contact with the lost child. Participants interpreted their distress as related to inadequate access to healthcare services, and perceiving the pandemic restrictions to be responsible for less support and lower quality of care. Furthermore, they needed psychological help, and most of them were unable to access this service. Spirituality/religiosity did not help, while contact with the fetus and burial did.ConclusionIt is important to implement psychological services in obstetrics departments to offer adequate support, even in pandemic situations. (shrink)

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, we provide arguments in favour of the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition, such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors rather than there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. The paper reviews the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition and a revisionary, new order variant of cognitivism – a Predictive Processing account of Cognition, or PPC. It (...) argues that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. In abandoning that way of understanding PPC, it offers a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, the possibility that culture permeates cognition is promoted. (shrink)

Many sentences can be interpreted both as a metaphor and as a literal claim, depending on the context. The aim of this paper is to show that there are discourse-based systematic constraints on the identification of an utterance as metaphorical, literal, or both (as in the case of twice-apt metaphors), from a normative point of view. We claim that the key is contextual coherence. In order to substantiate this claim, we introduce a novel notion of context as a rich and (...) heterogeneous body of information, including previous discourse, elements coming from the surroundings of the utterance, background information, and Questions Under Discussion (QUD) issued from these three sources. We then define contextual coherence as a relation between what we call the minimal paraphrase of the metaphor and the context, and argue that for an interpretation to be coherent two conditions must be met. First, the minimal paraphrase must address some question in the QUD stack. Second, it must be externally consistent, i.e. consistent with the available contextual information. Finally, we argue that an approach based on contextual coherence is better suited to deal with twice-true and twice-apt metaphors than traditional approaches based on semantic deviance or pragmatic lack of fit. (shrink)

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of imperial (...) logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...) entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

This compelling book defends realism concerning the aesthetic—in particular, concerning the aesthetic properties of works of art. Morais lucidly argues that art criticism, when referring to aesthetic properties, is referring not ultimately to the critic’s subjective reactions, but to genuine properties of the works. With a focus on contemporary discussion conducted in the analytic tradition, as well as on arguments by Hume and Kant, this book characterizes the debate in aesthetics and the philosophy of art concerning aesthetic realism, examining attacks (...) on the objectivity of values, the ‘autonomy thesis’, and Hume’s sentimentalism. Considering and defusing scepticism concerning the significance of the ontological debate about aesthetic realism, Morais discusses two powerful attacks on aesthetic realism before defending the doctrine against them and providing a positive realist account of aesthetic properties. (shrink)

One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. This paper claims that the Free Energy Principle (FEP), by virtue of unifying particles with mind, is the simplest. Motivated by Hilbert’s 24th problem of simplicity, the argument is made that the FEP takes a seemingly mathematical complex domain and reduces it to something simple. More specifically, it is attempted to show that every ‘thing’, from particles to mind, can be partitioned into systemic states by virtue of (...) self-organising symmetry break, i.e. self-entropy in terms of the balance between risk and ambiguity to achieve epistemic gain. By virtue of its explanatory reach, the FEP becomes the simplest principle under quantum, statistical and classical mechanics conditions. (shrink)

This paper proposes an account of neurocognitive activity without leveraging the notion of neural representation. Neural representation is a concept that results from assuming that the properties of the models used in computational cognitive neuroscience must literally exist the system being modelled. Computational models are important tools to test a theory about how the collected data has been generated. While the usefulness of computational models is unquestionable, it does not follow that neurocognitive activity should literally entail the properties construed in (...) the model. While this is an assumption present in computationalist accounts, it is not held across the board in neuroscience. In the last section, the paper offers a dynamical account of neurocognitive activity with Dynamical Causal Modelling that combines dynamical systems theory mathematical formalisms with the theoretical contextualisation provided by Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science. (shrink)

Los cambios en los modelos de familia se pueden considerar como un fenómeno complejo con múltiples dimensiones. Las formulas alternativas de convivencia van tomando legitimidad e incluso cobran los rasgos de un mayor compromiso emocional. Las razones que impulsan las uniones matrimoniales han cambiado. Una de las conclusiones más notables del estudio es la desaparición del concepto sacralizado del matrimonio y su sustitución por una idea más instrumental del mismo.….

Reconceptualizes central notions in political theory, utilizing insights from the Black radical tradition, to make sense of the systems of imperial popular sovereignty and self-determination. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.