Ideally, decisions regarding one’s health should be made after assessing the objective probabilities of relevant outcomes. Nevertheless, previous beliefs and emotional reactions also have a role in decision-making. Furthermore, the comprehension of probabilities is commonly affected by the presentation format, and by numeracy. This study aimed to assess the extent to which the influence of these factors might vary between different medical conditions. A sample of university students were presented with two health scenarios containing statistical information on the prevalence of (...) breast cancer and hypertension either through icon arrays ( N = 71) or natural frequencies ( N = 72). They also received information regarding a preventive measure (mammogram/low-sodium diet) and the likelihood of a positive mammogram or a rich-sodium diet either when suffering or not suffering from the disease. Before seeing the data, participants rated the severity of the disease and the inconvenience of the preventive measure. After reading the health scenario, participants had to rate its difficulty, and how worrisome it was. They had also to rate the prior probability of suffering from this medical condition, and the posterior probability of it, provided a positive mammogram or a rich-sodium diet. Finally, they rated the extent to which they would recommend the preventive measures. All the rates used the same 1 (little)-8 (a great deal) scale. Participants’ numeracy was also assessed. The scenarios differed significantly in perceived severity and worry, with the cancer scenario obtaining higher scores. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the recommendations in the two health scenarios depended on different variables. A model taking into consideration severity and worry rates best explained decisions in the cancer scenario; in contrast, in the hypertension scenario the model that best explained the recommendations comprised both the posterior probability estimate and the severity rate. Neither numeracy nor presentation format affected recommendation but both affected difficulty, worrying and probability rates. We conclude that previous perceptions of the severity of a health condition modulate the use of probabilistic information for decision-making. The roles of presentation format and numeracy in enabling patients to understand statistical information are also discussed. (shrink)

Javier Rodríguez-Ferreiro e Itxaso Barberia Dep. de Cognició, Desenvolupament i Psicologia de l’Educació, Universitat de Barcelona, España La correlación ilusoria … Read More →.

The objective of this research is to develop accurate forecasting models for chlorophyll-α concentrations at various depths in El Mar Menor, Spain. Chlorophyll-α plays a crucial role in assessing eutrophication in this vulnerable ecosystem. To achieve this objective, various deep learning forecasting techniques, including long short-term memory, bidirectional long short-term memory and gated recurrent uni networks, were utilized. The models were designed to forecast the chlorophyll-α levels with a 2-week prediction horizon. To enhance the models’ accuracy, a sliding window method (...) combined with a blocked cross-validation procedure for time series was also applied to these techniques. Two input strategies were also tested in this approach: using only chlorophyll-α time series and incorporating exogenous variables. The proposed approach significantly improved the accuracy of the predictive models, no matter the forecasting technique employed. Results were remarkable, with |$\overline{\sigma}$| values reaching approximately 0.90 for the 0.5-m depth level and 0.80 for deeper levels. The proposed forecasting models and methodologies have great potential for predicting eutrophication episodes and acting as decision-making tools for environmental agencies. Accurate prediction of eutrophication episodes through these models could allow for proactive measures to be implemented, resulting in improved environmental management and the preservation of the ecosystem. (shrink)

La obra de Laín Entralgo se fundamenta principalmente en la preocupación por el ser humano, por sus interrogantes, sus necesidades y las respuestas que puede obtener en el transcurso de su vida. La maduración de su pensamiento hacia este tema viene dada de una estructura dinámica del ser humano. Es una crítica a Marcel y Paul Ricoeur, al desconocimiento zubiriano de una teoría filosófica del ser humano como actualización y presencia física de un animal de realidades. Para Laín la realidad (...) humana es la compresión de la realidad del hombre a través de su realidad constitutiva, de su realidad dinámica, de su realidad copartícipe con el cosmos y de su realidad conductual. (shrink)

La construcción de maquetas arquitectónicas como herramienta pedagógica aplicada en la etapa de bachillerato permite al estudiante comprender arquitectónicamente el edificio analizado, al mismo tiempo que aumenta su visión espacial, familiarizándose con el uso de planos de arquitectura. Además, el estudio histórico del edificio, en este caso, en el que ha desarrollado sus estudios en los últimos años, le inicia en el hábito de la investigación universitaria, implicándose desde el principio en conseguir los objetivos marcados, por lo que este tipo (...) de proyectos puede considerarse una interesante experiencia de enseñanza-aprendizaje. (shrink)

Se discuten varias concepciones con respecto al carácter normativo de la filosofía de la ciencia. De entre éstas, se aboga por una forma de naturalismo comprometido con la necesidad de discutir los valores (epistémicos o no) de la ciencia. El ejemplo de la "ciencia reguladora" ilustra esa necesidad.

These are some of the topics discussed in this book, both theoretically and with reference to concrete cases.

Epistemology had to come to terms with “the social” on two different occasions. The first was represented by the dispute about the epistemological status of the “social” sciences, and in this case the already well established epistemology of the natural sciences seemed to have the right to dictate the conditions for a discipline to be a science. But the social sciences could successfully vindicate the legitimacy of their specific criteria for scientificity. More recently, the impact of social factors on the (...) construction of our knowledge (including scientific knowledge) has reversed, in a certain sense, the old position and promoted social inquiry to the role of a criterion for evaluating the purport of cognitive (including scientific) statements. But this has undermined the traditional characteristics of objectivity and rigor that seem constitutive of science. Moreover, in order to establish the real extent to which social conditionings have an impact on scientific knowledge one must credit sociology with a sound ground of reliability, and this is not possible without a preliminary “epistemological” assessment. These are some of the topics discussed in this book, both theoretically and with reference to concrete cases. (shrink)

En este articulo se examina la tradicional caracterización de la filosofía de la ciencia como una disciplina normativa. Se discuten varias concepciones de esta disciplina, cada una de las cuales ofrece una respuesta diferente a la pregunta de si es posible, y cómo, una filosofía de la ciencia genuinamente normativa. De entre esas concepciones, se opta por una forma de naturalismo que se diferencia de otras en la exigeneia de que la normatividad de la filosofía de la ciencia inc!uya la (...) discusión de los objetivos y valores, epistémicos o no, de la ciencia. La necesidad de esta inc!usión se ilustra, finalmente, con el ejemplo de la aetividad conocida como “cicncia reguladora”.This article examines the traditional characterization of the philosophy of science as a normative discipline. Several understandings of this discipline are discussed; each of them offering a different answer to the question whether, and how, a genuinely normative philosophy of science might be possible. Among these views, I choose one variety of naturalism that differs from others in its commitment with the discussion of science’s aims and values, either epistemic or non-epistemic. Finally, the need for this inclusion is illustrated with the example of the so-called “regulatory science”. (shrink)

Los análisis recientes de José Casanova, Jürgen Habermas, Gordon Lynch, Hans Joas, Robert Bellah, David Martin o el último Peter Berger -entre otros- han puesto el foco en las limitaciones asociadas a la teoría general de la secularización, convertida, durante décadas, en paradigma a partir del cual comprender e interpretar las relaciones entre lo secular y lo religioso. A través de la teoría de la post-secularización se ha podido re-graduar la mirada sociológica en torno a dichas relaciones, poniendo el énfasis (...) en la vitalidad y pluralidad de formas que adquiere lo religioso en la actualidad. Partiendo de este presupuesto, el objetivo de nuestro trabajo es realizar una genealogía sociológico-conceptual de la post-secularización centrada en el análisis de algunas de las principales aportaciones teóricas que han contribuido al desarrollo de esta nueva forma de aproximación a la secularización. Dicha genealogía no se va a limitar al análisis de la obra de autores que han articulado sus propuestas como respuesta a las insuficiencias de la teoría general de la secularización, sino también queremos estudiar brevemente algunas aportaciones de clásicos del pensamiento sociológico –concretamente de Durkheim y de Weber- cuyas reflexiones ya apuntaban a un horizonte de post-secularización. Así, tras la introducción presentaremos un primer apartado centrado en estudiar el politeísmo moderno según Weber y la cosa sagrada en la obra de Durkheim. Posteriormente presentaremos tres análisis teóricos actuales, concretamente los de Habermas, Casanova y Lynch, que nos ayudarán a perfilar los contornos conceptuales de la post-secularización. (shrink)

Tras décadas de olvido de la escuela rural, y de la que hoy se denomina >, en los últimos tiempos, distintas voces han logrado que ambas hayan ganado una mayor visibilidad. Pese a ello, queda un largo camino que recorrer, y con un único objetivo: proporcionar a las escuelas rurales la importancia que tienen. Como respuesta, surge el presente estudio, en el cual se muestra un instrumento de medición de la percepción del profesorado de los Colegios Rurales Agrupados (en adelante (...) CRA) de la Comunidad Autónoma de Castilla-La Mancha. Validado, y aplicable a otras Comunidades que cuenten con CRA. (shrink)

The research focuses on the study of public housing built in response to the urgent housing needs in Europe throughout the 20th century. These developments share many of the characteristics of their European counterparts. The Spanish case presents certain peculiarities in its development. The research aims to analyse the context -social, economic and political- that conditioned the massive construction of housing in Spain between 1939 and 1976. An analysis is made of the approved urban planning legislation, housing regulation and the (...) identification of the responsible bodies. (shrink)

El artículo intenta promover una recepción más amplia de los trabajos recientes sobre filosofía de la actividad científica experimental. Primero se comentarán los orígenes y las características de la tradición teoreticista predominante, criticando sus presupuestos y sus "miserias". Se analizará luego la función de los instrumentos, proponiendo una tipología de la actividad experimental, aunque elemental --esperamos-- útil. Tras analizar la estructura del experimento, empleando contribuciones de Pickering y otros, discutiremos la dinámica de la experimentación: los procesos de formación de datos. (...) Ésta es, obviamente, la cuestión más crucial y debatida, de la que depende la especificidad y fiabilidad de los métodos científicos. /// This paper attempts to promote a more widespread reception of recent work on the philosophy of experimental scientific activity. First, we comment on the origins and character of the predominant theoreticist tradition, offering critical remarks on its assumptions and "poverty". Then we analyze the function of instruments, proposing a coarse but hopefully useful typology of experimental activity. After analyzing the structure of experiment, drawing on work by Pickering and others, we discuss the dynamics of experimentation --the processes of data formation. This is obviously the most crucial and disputed issue, on which the specificity and reliability of scientific methods depends. (shrink)

Delusions are one of the most classical symptoms described in schizophrenia. However, despite delusions are often emotionally charged, they have been investigated using tasks involving non-affective material, such as the Beads task. In this study we compared 30 patients with schizophrenia experiencing delusions with 32 matched controls in their pattern of responses to two versions of the Beads task within a Bayesian framework. The two versions of the Beads task consisted of one emotional and one neutral, both with ratios of (...) beads of 60:40 and 80:20, considered, respectively, as the “difficult” and “easy” variants of the task. Results indicate that patients showed a greater deviation from the normative model, especially in the 60:40 ratio, suggesting that more inaccurate probability estimations are more likely to occur under uncertainty conditions. Additionally, both patients and controls showed a greater deviation in the emotional version of the task, providing evidence of a reasoning bias modulated by the content of the stimuli. Finally, a positive correlation between patients’ deviation and delusional symptomatology was found. Impairments in the 60:40 ratio with emotional content was related to the amount of disruption in life caused by delusions. These results contribute to the understanding of how cognitive mechanisms interact with characteristics of the task in the context of delusional thinking. These findings might be used to inform improved intervention programs in the domain of inferential reasoning. (shrink)

How should automated vehicles (AVs) react in emergency circumstances? Most research projects and scientific literature deal with this question from a moral perspective. In particular, it is customary to treat emergencies involving AVs as instances of moral dilemmas and to use the trolley problem as a framework to address such alleged dilemmas. Some critics have pointed out some shortcomings of this strategy and have urged to focus on mundane traffic situations instead of trolley cases involving AVs. Besides, these authors rightly (...) point out the political nature of the most interesting debates involving AVs. However, in our view, they do not offer an adequate account of the distinction between ethics and politics and still see their proposals as contributions to the ethics of AVs. We argue that many of the interesting questions about how AVs should behave, both in emergency and other situations, are of political, and not moral, nature. This view is based on a conception of politics and political normativity that we have developed elsewhere and that we call “political minimalism.” Additionally, we show that this proposed perspective has significant consequences for the design, management, and regulation of transport systems. (shrink)

What is the relationship between morals and politics? What is the relationship between moral philosophy and political philosophy? Defenders of political moralism postulate moral aims or constraints for politics, and hence they see political philosophy as a chapter of moral philosophy. Contrastingly, advocates of political realism describe politics as an independent endeavor aiming at providing order and security, and conceive of political philosophy as an autonomous discipline. This article claims that political moralism and political realism share the mistake of assuming (...) that politics has substantial, permanent goals or constraints. After criticizing political substantialism, the article explains the main ingredients of its alternative, political minimalism: the idea that politics, understood as collective instrumental rationality, aims at providing adequate means for the accomplishment of people's goals, whatever these are; and the conception of the relationship between morality and politics as one of “reciprocal containment.” Finally, it addresses some foreseeable criticisms of political minimalism. (shrink)

According to political minimalism, a debate is considered political when it revolves around the question “What shall we do?” This account suggests that certain issues related to human enhancement technologies (HETs), which have traditionally been addressed in the realm of applied ethics, could be better approached from a political standpoint. However, this raises the question of who constitutes the “we” – the communities that face the political challenges posed by HETs. We argue that there is a global human community that (...) directly faces at least some of these challenges, and this fact underscores the relevance of a cosmopolitan perspective. While some authors have already advocated for a cosmopolitan approach in addressing issues such as poverty or climate change, they often do so from a moral outlook, without adequately distinguishing between ethics and politics. In contrast, we assert that HETs present compelling arguments in favour of cosmopolitanism as a political stance. In support of this claim, we consider two cases: the pills that would allow people to eat at will without gaining weight, and the choice between different types of cognitive enhancers. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

A faulty understanding of the relationship between morality and politics encumbers many contemporary debates on human enhancement. As a result, some ethical reflections on enhancement undervalue its social dimensions, while some social approaches to the topic lack normative import. In this essay, I use my own conception of the relationship between ethics and politics, which I call “political minimalism,” in order to support and strengthen the existing social perspectives on human-enhancement technologies.

In this paper we analyze some of the major difficulties of informed consent. We consider insufficient to base IC on the principle of autonomy. We must not forget that the patient may be in a situation of extreme vulnerability and the good doctor should assume a degree of commitment and responsibility with his/her decisions. Our aim is to introduce the ethics of responsibility of Levinas in practice and theory of IC in order to generate a beneficent medical practice in which (...) the supervision and overseeing of the patient do not undermine his/her autonomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Empathy is relevant to sociomoral development, especially in relation to prosociality and the penalization of acts as faults and crimes. The objective of this research was to test whether empathy is a predictor of prosociality and of perceptions of seriousness of delinquent acts among research participants in Argentina and Spain. The Argentinian sample comprised 215 high school and university students. The Spanish sample comprised 199 university students. The proposed theoretical model showed good fit in both countries. Although empathy was (...) found to predict prosocial conduct more than the perception of the seriousness acts as offenses and crimes, empathy was a significant of both prosocial conduct and perception of the seriousness acts as faults and crimes. Thus, the importance of empathy in morality was supported for both countries, supporting the influence of in different cultural context. (shrink)

This article tries to elucidate the Deleuzian project of the reversal of Platonism in relation to that of Nietzsche. To this aim, I have made a predominantly historiographic sketch of the question in both authors. In the case of Nietzsche, I inquired about both the relationship that the reversal of Platonism presents in his philosophy with the problem of nihilism and the evolution that the topic undergoes throughout his vast intellectual production, until it reaches its final formulation. With regard to (...) Deleuze, I offer a broad overview of his work aimed at tracing the subject, from his interpretation of the Nietzschean formulation, as opposed to that of Heidegger, to the meticulous way in which it fits into his own philosophy as a shift of the essence in favour of the event as a source of singularities. (shrink)

The process of democratic consolidation in Mexico has not resolved the issues of trust in public institutions due to the lack of mechanisms to implement public policies related to transparency and accountability. Municipal governments have struggled to meet transparency and accountability obligations due to the heterogeneity in their demographic, economic, cultural, and institutional composition. In the case of Sonora, most municipalities have faced difficulties in fulfilling these basic information obligations on their portals and assuming responsibility for the management of resources. (...) The aim of this study is to explain the main factors that have hindered the fulfillment of these transparency and accountability obligations in the municipalities of the state of Sonora and to analyze the institutional instruments involved. This research reveals findings on the relationship between transparency and accountability policies and the municipal institutional design, and how the latter has represented an obstacle for the efficient implementation of these policies in Sonora’s municipalities. (shrink)

El presente trabajo pretende explorar la actualidad del pensamiento de Baltasar Gracián a propósito del sujeto y la cultura a partir de las filosofías de Michel Foucault y José Ortega y Gasset. En primer lugar, se analizará la caracterización del sujeto graciano desde el prisma de La hermenéutica del sujeto como representante de una modernidad alternativa en que la separación entre la filosofía y la espiritualidad no llega a consumarse. En segundo lugar, se elucidará la ambivalencia de Gracián a propósito (...) del artificio en relación con la crítica de la cultura y la técnica, tomando como referencia la crisis de la capacidad de desear planteada en Meditación de la técnica como causa de la crisis cultural de la época. Ambas incursiones tratarán de poner de manifiesto la relevancia del pensamiento de Gracián en la época contemporánea, caracterizada frecuentemente como un Neobarroco. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende, en primer lugar, bosquejar la crítica de la imagen dogmática del pensamiento planteada por Deleuze en relación con la búsqueda del pensar sin presupuestos típicamente cartesiana, con miras a mostrar que detrás está la renuncia al fundamento o a los principios trascendentes en filosofía y, por ende, al sistema de la representación. Consecuentemente, en la segunda parte del artículo se trata de dilucidar la naturaleza de los principios en que, según el autor, ha de arraigar el pensamiento (...) filosófico y el tipo de necesidad que puede reivindicarse para el mismo en lo sucesivo, a la vista del requisito de una pura inmanencia que se sigue de la renuncia al fundamento. (shrink)

The consideration of racial differences in the biology of disease and treatment options is a hallmark of modern medicine. However, this time-honored medical tradition has no scientific basis, and the premise itself, that is, the existence of biological differences between the commonly known races, is false inasmuch as races are only sociocultural constructions. It is time to rid medical research of the highly damaging exercise of searching for supposed racial differences in the biological manifestations of disease. The practice not only (...) condoned but required by the National Institutes of Health of utilizing racial identification as a demographic characteristic with assumed biological implications is at best badly flawed, and at worst unintentionally contributes to perpetuating the fallacy of natural differences between persons of different skin color, which has been used in the past to advance the cause of racial discrimination. (shrink)