The present study investigated 3-year-old children’s learning processes about object functions. We built on children’s tendency to commit scale errors with tools to explore whether they would selectively endorse object functions from a linguistic in-group over an out-group model. Participants ( n = 37) were presented with different object sets, and a model speaking either in their native or a foreign language demonstrated how to use the presented tools. In the test phase, children received the object sets with two modifications: (...) the original tool was replaced by one that was too big to achieve the goal but was otherwise identical, and another tool was added to the set that looked different but was appropriately scaled for goal attainment. Children in the Native language condition were significantly more likely to commit scale errors – that is, choose the over-sized tool – than children in the Foreign language condition (48 vs. 30%). We propose that these results provide insight into the characteristics of human-specific learning processes by showing that children are more likely to generalize object functions to a category of artifacts following a demonstration from an in-group member. (shrink)

Lately, nanotechnology has become one of the main topics in the debates regarding what has been called the _Next Industrial Revolution_ within what are known as _emergent technologies_. This paper contains a comparative analysis of the different philosophical groundings, arguments and principles invoked in the official ethical approaches proposed by each of two of the main Western communities. By _official ethical approaches_ or _official positions_ we mean the opinions officially expressed by the government institutions about how ethical considerations prompted by (...) nanotechnologies should be tackled. The analysis is based, then, on the official points of view, expressed through two documents, namely two official releases issued by governmental offices or institutions in both communities, Europe and the United States of America, and considered by the authors as representative of the official opinions of the governmental institutions in each society. (shrink)

After Lavoisier's execution, the leading French chemists were Antoine-François Fourcroy , Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau and Claude-Louis Berthollet . At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Berthollet introduced a new conception of chemical change that challenged the theory of elective affinities which had dominated chemistry for nearly a hundred years. Berthollet's new affinities raised controversy among chemists and had to coexist with the firmly established theory of elective affinities. Apart from the public debate in research articles, Berthollet's affinities also had (...) to compete with the influence of Fourcroy and his school in the textbook market. This paper seeks to assess the extent to which French textbooks published at the beginning of the nineteenth century were committed to Berthollet's innovation, and how they contributed to its marginalization. (shrink)

Esports have transformed playing video games into a competitive activity that bears similarities to sports and the processes of sportization. Taking as a starting point the concept of sports as competitive games, the objective of this work is to analyse the sportization of esports, as well as the impact of esports on the concept of sports and their implications on sports in the immediate future. Sports and esports are two different realities that interact with each other. This is a conceptual (...) problem for sports, and it also defines a practical challenge in the immediate future of sports. The virtual environment offers new possibilities in sports, such as broadening the possibilities of confrontation and competition development, contributing to reducing the environmental impact of certain sports, improving safety and maintaining the physical integrity of athletes, and increasing social justice and equality of chances in sports competitions. The challenge, therefore, is to try to bring esports and sports closer together, even moving toward hybrid sports, as addressed throughout this article. (shrink)

O objetivo do artigo consiste em apresentar alguns fios da relação entre a noção de sensus communis, a história e a política em Kant, de modo que se estabeleçam as bases de uma análise da filosofia da história de Kant como o equibalente, para sua filosofia político-jurídica, do esquematismo dos conceitos puros.

L’auteur présente trois témoignages. Le premier montre l’influence que la figure de frère Charles de Jésus a exercée sur lui et sur ceux qui l’ont accompagné en pèlerinage. Le second explique pourquoi, aux yeux de l’auteur, le Père de Foucauld peut être considéré comme un martyr de la foi et de la charité. Le troisième raconte comment, mettant ses pas dans les pas de frère Charles, l’auteur a passé presque deux ans dans un ermitage, sur l’Assekrem, dans le Hoggar. C’est (...) là qu’est née l’intuition fondatrice des Fraternités Monastiques de Jérusalem. (shrink)

The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox (1935) is reexamined in the light of Shannon’s information theory (1984). The EPR argument did not take into account that the observer’s information was localized, like any other physical object.

Bell inequalities are derived for any number of observers, any number of alternative setups for each one of them and any number of distinct outcomes for each experiment. It is shown that if a physical system consists of several distant subsystems, and if the results of tests performed on the latter are determined by local variables with objective values, then the joint probabilities for triggering any given set of distant detectors are convex combinations of a finite number of Boolean arrays, (...) whose components are either 0 or 1 according to a simple rule. This convexity property is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of local objective variables. It leads to a simple graphical method which produces a large number of generalized Clauser-Horne inequalities corresponding to the faces of a convex polytope. It is plausible that quantum systems whose density matrix has a positive partial transposition satisfy all these inequalities, and therefore are compatible with local objective variables, even if their quantum properties are essentially non-local. (shrink)