The role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) in influencing creative thinking has been investigated by many researchers who, while succeeding in proving an effective involvement of PFC, reported suggestive but sometimes conflicting results. In order to better understand the relationships between creative thinking and brain activation in a more specific area of the PFC, we explored the role of dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC). We devised an experimental protocol using transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS). The study was based on a 3 (kind of stimulation: (...) anodal vs. cathodal vs. sham) × 2 (priming: divergent vs. convergent) design. Forty-five healthy adults were randomly assigned to one stimulation condition. Participants’ creativity skills were assessed using the Product Improvement subtest from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). After 20 min of tDCS stimulation, participants were presented with visual images of common objects. Half of the participants were instructed to visualize themselves using the object in an unusual way (divergent priming), whereas the other half were asked to visualize themselves while using the object in a common way (convergent priming). Priming was aimed at inducing participants to adopt different attitudes toward the creative task. Afterwards, participants were asked to describe all of the possible uses of the objects that were presented. Participants’ physiological activation was recorded using a biofeedback equipment. Results showed a significant effect of anodal stimulation that enhanced creative performance, but only after divergent priming. Participants showed lower skin temperature values after cathodal stimulation, a finding which is coherent with studies reporting that, when a task is not creative or creative thinking is not prompted, people show lower levels of arousal. Differences in individual levels of creativity as assessed by the Product Improvement test were not influential. The involvement of DLPFC in creativity has been supported, presumably in association to shift of attention modulated by priming. (shrink)

Bilateral proof systems, which provide rules for both affirming and denying sentences, have been prominent in the development of proof-theoretic semantics for classical logic in recent years. However, such systems provide a substantial amount of freedom in the formulation of the rules, and, as a result, a number of different sets of rules have been put forward as definitive of the meanings of the classical connectives. In this paper, I argue that a single general schema for bilateral proof rules has (...) a reasonable claim to inferentially articulating the core meaning of all of the classical connectives. I propose this schema in the context of a bilateral sequent calculus in which each connective is given exactly two rules: a rule for affirmation and a rule for denial. Positive and negative rules for all of the classical connectives are given by a single rule schema, harmony between these positive and negative rules is established at the schematic level by a pair of elimination theorems, and the truth-conditions for all of the classical connectives are read off at once from the schema itself. (shrink)

Why must incompatibility be symmetric? An odd question, but recent work in the semantics of non-classical logic, which appeals to the notion of incompatibility as a primitive and defines negation in terms of it, has brought this question to the fore. Francesco Berto proposes such a semantics for negation argues that, since incompatibility must be symmetric, double negation introduction must be a law of negation. However, he offers no argument for the claim that incompatibility really must be symmetric. Here, I (...) provide such an argument, showing that, insofar as we think of incompatibility in normative pragmatic terms, it can play its basic pragmatic function only if it is symmetric. The upshot is that we can vindicate Berto’s claim about the symmetry of incompatibility but only if we, pace Berto, think about incompatibility, in the first instance, as a pragmatic relation between acts rather than a semantic relation between contents. (shrink)

I motivate and develop a use-based semantic theory in opposition to the dominant paradigm in philosophical and linguistic semantics. Drawing inspiration from Wilfrid Sellars, I argue that contemporary semantic theories are faced with a basic problem of explanatory circularity. These theories universally presuppose that worldly knowledge of such things as properties or sets of possible worlds precedes and underlies knowledge of meaning. However, I argue that it is only through learning a language--mastering the rules governing the use of the expressions (...) belonging to that language--that speakers can possibly have knowledge of the worldly entities appealed to by semanticists at the base level of their semantic theories. In response to this fundamental problem, I develop a formal semantic framework in which the meaning of a sentence is understood directly in terms of its role in discourse. In contrast to existing semantic frameworks, this framework does not presuppose speakers' worldly knowledge, and so is actually able to explain it. The result is not just a new kind of semantic theory, but a new conception of the relation between meaning and the world. (shrink)

An “inferentialist” semantic theory for some language L aims to account for the meanings of the sentences of L solely in terms of the inferential rules governing their use. A “hyper-inferentialist” theory admits into the semantics only “narrowly inferential” rules that normatively relate sentences of L to other sentences of L. A “strong inferentialist” theory also admits into the semantics “broadly inferential” rules that normatively relate perceptual states to sentences of L or sentences of L to intentional actions. It is (...) widely thought that only the latter of these two sorts of semantic theories is at all viable. I argue here that the opposite is so. Negatively, strong inferentialism is viciously circular: including rules into the semantic theory that relate perceptual states to sentences of the language requires us to appeal, in individuating those perceptual states, to the very meanings for which we are supposed to be inferentially accounting. Hyper-inferentialism does not face this problem because it does not appeal to any nonlinguistic states. Positively, though hyper-inferentialism is widely thought to be a theoretical non-starter, I argue here that it is a genuine theoretical possibility insofar as it essentially includes cross-perspectival inferences, inferences along the lines of the one from the sentences “The ball is in front of n,” “The ball is red,” and “The lighting is good” to the sentence “n sees that the ball is red.” I make the further exegetical claim that Robert Brandom, though unanimously taken to be a strong inferentialist, is in fact a hyper-inferentialist. (shrink)

How a human observer perceives duration depends on the amount of events taking place during the timed interval, but also on psychological dimensions, such as emotional-wellbeing, mindfulness, impulsivity, and rumination. Here we aimed at exploring these influences on duration estimation and passage of time judgments. One hundred and seventeen healthy individuals filled out mindfulness (FFMQ), impulsivity (BIS-11), rumination (RRS), and depression (BDI-sf) questionnaires. Participants also conducted verbal estimation and production tasks in the multiple seconds range. During these timing tasks, subjects (...) were asked to read digits aloud that were presented on a computer screen. Each condition of the timing tasks differed in terms of the interval between the presentation of the digits, i.e., either short (4-s) or long (16-s). Our findings suggest that long empty intervals (16-s) are associated with a relative underestimation of duration, and to a feeling that the time passes slowly, a seemingly paradoxical result. Also, regarding more mindful individuals, such a dissociation between duration estimation and passage of time judgments was found, but only when empty intervals were short (4-s). Relatively speaking, more mindful subjects showed an increased overestimation of durations, but felt that time passed more quickly. These results provide further evidence for the dissociation between duration estimation and the feeling of the passage of time. We discuss these results in terms of an alerting effect when empty intervals are short and events are more numerous, which could mediate the effect of dispositional mindfulness. (shrink)

In Evidence and Inquiry, Susan Haack presents a dual-aspect account of evidence in which both casual and logical relations play a necessary factor. In this paper, I reformulates how these two aspects fit together to form a comprehensive picture of discursive justification. Drawing from Quine’s work on the “observation sentence,” I show how we can move from causal justifications to inferential justifications. Conversely, I also attempt to show how we can correct and improve our causally justified, noninferential beliefs by challenging (...) and inferentially justifying them. The resulting account should be one in which our beliefs are connected to the world, but one which is non-foundationalist and allows any belief to be called into question. (shrink)

In recent work, Robert Brandom has articulated important connections between the deontic normative statuses of entitlement and commitment and the alethic modal statuses of possibility and necessity. In this paper, I articulate an until now unexplored connection between Brandom’s core normative statuses of entitlement and commitment and the agentive modal statuses of ability and compulsion. These modals have application not only in action, but also in perception and inference, and, in both of these cases, there is a direct mapping between (...) the normative statuses that one bears towards various claims, articulated from the perspective of the attributor of commitments and entitlements, and the agentive modal statuses that one bears towards various judgments, articulated from the perspective of the undertaker of commitments. I will highlight this correspondence, focusing on the case of perception, and show how it sheds light on the account of mindedness that emerges from Brandom’s theory of discursive practice. (shrink)

An important debate in the current literature is whether “all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to [a variable at; LM] logical form” (Stanley, ‘Context and Logical Form’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 23 (2000) 391). That is, according to Stanley, the only truth-conditional effects that extra-linguistic context has are localizable in (potentially silent) variable-denoting pronouns or pronoun-like items, which are represented in the syntax/at logical form (pure indexicals like I or today are put aside in this discussion). According to (...) Recanati (‘Unarticulated Constituents’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 25 (2002) 299), extra-linguistic context can have additional truth-conditional effects, in the form of optional pragmatic processes like ‘free enrichment’. This paper shows that Recanati’s position is not warranted, since there is an alternative line of analysis that obviates the need to assume free enrichment. In the alternative analysis, we need Stanley’s variables, but we need to give them the freedom to be or not to be generated in the syntax/present at logical form, a kind of optionality that has nothing to do with the pragmatics-related optionality of free enrichment. (shrink)

This paper investigates young children's knowledge of scalar implicatures and downward entailment. In previous experimental work, we have shown that young children access the full range of truth-conditions associated with logical words in classical logic, including the disjunction operator, as well as the indefinite article. The present study extends this research in three ways, taking disjunction as a case study. Experiment 1 draws upon the observation that scalar implicatures (SIs) are cancelled (or reversed) in downward entailing (DE) linguistic environments, e.g., (...) in the scope of negation (Chierchia, 2000). Experiment 2 was designed to determine if scalar implicatures are used by children, like adults, to influence the interpretation of disjunction in non-DE contexts, yielding an implicature of exclusivity for disjunction. Whereas adult controls always rejected assertions of the form A or B in positive (non-DE) contexts in which assertions of the form A and B were also true, many children accepted assertions with disjunction in such contexts. To provide an interpretation to the findings from Experiment 2, a new experimental technique was devised and used in Experiment 3. The new technique presents pairs of assertions to children, who are asked to judge which assertion is a ‘better’ description of the context. The findings from Experiment 3 demonstrated children's awareness that A and B is more informative than A or B in positive contexts, where both statements are true. Taken together, the findings of Experiments 2 and 3 are compatible with the view that some children lack the computational resources to apply scalar implicatures when a single assertion is presented alone (see Reinhart, 1999). (shrink)

Donald Davidson argues that the very nature of belief ensures that, if we have any beliefs at all, most of them must be true. He takes this to show that Cartesian skepticism is fundamentally mistaken. Many commentators, however, find this response to skepticism to be lacking. In this paper, I draw from recent work by Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance and attempt to give Davidson’s argument a newfound force by applying it to our acts of ostension, of pointing others to (...) features in our shared environment. The sort of ostensive argument that I extract from Davidson remains largely unexplored in skepticism’s vast literature, and I argue that this is the strongest way to read Davidson’s epistemological work, providing a response to some influential objections to his arguments. (shrink)

Social robotics entertains a particular relationship with anthropomorphism, which it neither sees as a cognitive error, nor as a sign of immaturity. Rather it considers that this common human tendency, which is hypothesized to have evolved because it favored cooperation among early humans, can be used today to facilitate social interactions between humans and a new type of cooperative and interactive agents - social robots. This approach leads social robotics to focus research on the engineering of robots that activate anthropomorphic (...) projections in users. The objective is to give robots "social presence" and "social behaviors" that are sufficiently credible for human users to engage in comfortable and potentially long-lasting relations with these machines. This choice of ’applied anthropomorphism’ as a research methodology exposes the artifacts produced by social robotics to ethical condemnation: social robots are judged to be a "cheating" technology, as they generate in users the illusion of reciprocal social and affective relations. This article takes position in this debate, not only developing a series of arguments relevant to philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, and robotic AI, but also asking what social robotics can teach us about anthropomorphism. On this basis, we propose a theoretical perspective that characterizes anthropomorphism as a basic mechanism of interaction, and rebuts the ethical reflections that a priori condemns "anthropomorphism-based" social robots. To address the relevant ethical issues, we promote a critical experimentally based ethical approach to social robotics, "synthetic ethics," which aims at allowing humans to use social robots for two main goals: self-knowledge and moral growth. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars is widely known for two positions that he calls “nominalism.” On the one hand, there is his “psychological nominalism,” according to which any awareness one might have of abstract entities—be they properties, relations, or facts—is a thoroughly linguistic affair, and so cannot be presupposed in thinking about the process of learning a (first) language. On the other hand, there is his ontological nominalism, according to which the world, as it is in itself, is fundamentally a world of concrete (...) particulars and so does not ultimately contain such things as properties, relations, or propositionally-structured facts. Sellars clearly takes these two sorts of “nominalism” to go together. However, one of the most influential inheritors of Sellars's philosophy, Robert Brandom, thinks that they do not. Brandom endorses the former, but denies that the latter “is in the end so much as intelligible.” In this paper, I articulate the connection between Sellars's psychological and ontological nominalism and draw on Brandom's own development of Sellars's functional role semantics to argue, against Brandom, that Sellars's ontological nominalism not only harmonizes with the rest of his philosophical commitments, but is actually made fully intelligible by the very aspect of Sellars's theory that Brandom himself develops. (shrink)

We propose a method to associate a coalitional interval game with each strategic game. The method is based on the lower and upper values of finite two-person zero-sum games. Associating with a strategic game a coalitional interval game we avoid having to take either a pessimistic or an optimistic approach to the problem. The paper makes two contributions to the literature: It provides a theoretical foundation for the study of coalitional interval games and it also provides, studies, and characterizes a (...) natural method of associating coalitional interval games with strategic games. (shrink)

According to existing accounts of indicative conditionals, any argument of the following form is valid: ϕ → ψ, ( ϕ ∧ ψ ) → χ ∴ ϕ → χ. Here, I present a set of counterexamples to show that there exist invalid arguments of this form. I argue that this data poses serious problems to variably strict accounts of conditionals, as such accounts are structurally unable to accommodate it. Dynamic strict accounts, however, are a different story. While existing dynamic strict (...) accounts do not accommodate the data, they are in principle able to, and I propose a modified dynamic strict account, drawing from von Fintel, that does. The key modification is this: whereas existing dynamic strict accounts take into account only the effects of conditional antecedents in changing the semantic context, the data shows that we must also take into account the effects of conditional consequents in changing the semantic context. (shrink)

El secreto en todas sus vertientes, en todas sus facetas, vericuetos, senderos. Pero sobre todo el Secreto en la literatura, pues como dice Luisa Valenzuela, en su estilo mordaz, agudo, siempre entre guinos y complicidades: "No hay literatura sin secreto."Detras de cada palabra se esconde el misterio, un laberinto en el que todo puede suceder: de la pasion a la ternura; del crimen a la sublimacion. Encontrar el hilo conductor, salvador, descifrador, o ahondar sus diversidades, es papel de quien (...) aspira a lo literario, bien como escritor, bien como lector.Precisas, directas, divertidas, las palabras de Luisa Valenzuela se deslizan sobre las paginas de un libro lleno de humor del mas fino, de ironia inteligente, como sucede en sus novelas, en sus cuentos, pero ahora provenientes del ciclo de conferencias y el dinamico taller de escritura breve que impartio en el marco de la Catedra Alfonso Reyes del Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Nils Kürbis argues that bilateral natural deduction systems in which assertions and denials figure as hypothetical assumptions are unintelligible. In this paper, I respond to this claim on two counts. First, I argue that, if we think of bilateralism as a tool for articulating discursive norms, then supposition of assertions and denials in the context of bilateral natural deduction systems is perfectly intelligible. Second, I show that, by transposing such systems into sequent notation, one can make (...) perfect sense of them without talking about supposition at all, just talking in terms of relations of committive consequence. I conclude by providing some motivation for adopting this normative interpretation of bilateralism on which this response to Kürbis’s argument is based. (shrink)

Argues that affirming the irreducible differences between men and women can lead to more transformative politics than the struggle for abstract equality between the sexes. In The Symbolic Order of the Mother Luisa Muraro identifies the bond between mother and child as ontologically fundamental to the development of culture and politics, and therefore as key to achieving truly emancipatory political change. Both corporeal development and language acquisition, which are the sources of all thinking, begin in this relationship. However, Western (...) civilization has been defined by men, and Muraro recalls the admiration and envy she felt for the great philosophers as she strove to become one herself, as well as the desire for independence that opposed her to her mother. This conflict between philosophy and culture on the one hand and the relationship with the mother on the other constitutes the root of patriarchy’s symbolic disorder, which blocks women’s (and men’s) access to genuine freedom. Muraro appeals to the feminist practice of gratitude to the mother and the recognition of her authority as a model of unconditional nurture and support that must be restored. This, she argues, is the symbolic order of the mother that must overcome the disorder of patriarchy. The mediating power of the mother tongue constitutes a symbolic order that comes before all others, for both women and men. Luisa Muraro is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Verona, Italy. Francesca Novello is an instructor at the University of Oklahoma. Timothy S. Murphy is Houston-Truax-Wentz Professor and Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. (shrink)

En su infancia Mohamed Chukri se ve arrastrado por la miseria, la violencia intrafamiliar, consume prostitución y se prostituye, fuma kif, trasnocha en los bares, roba y trabaja con contrabandistas. Todo ello lo narra en la novela El pan a secas (1973). En este artículo se analiza la novela en clave de esperanza/desesperanza. La novela se divide en dos: episodios de infancia (negativos, desesperanza) y de adolescencia (positivos, esperanza recuperada). Resiliencia, libertad y esperanza están íntimamente ligadas.

"Cover " -- "Title Page " -- "Copyright " -- "Contents " -- "Preface to the English Edition" -- "Introduction" -- "1. The Substitute" -- "2. Animals, Machines, Cyborgs, and the Taxi " -- "3. Mind, Emotions, and Artificial Empathy " -- "4. The Other Otherwise " -- "5. From Moral and Lethal Machines to Synthetic Ethics " -- "Notes" -- "Works Cited" -- "Acknowledgments" -- "Credits.

This paper investigates scalar implicatures and downward entailment in child English. In previous experimental work we have shown that adults’ computation of scalar implicatures is sensitive to entailment relations. For instance, when the disjunction operator or occurs in positive contexts, an implicature of exclusivity arises. By contrast when the disjunction operator occurs within the scope of a downward entailing linguistic expression, no implicature of exclusivity is computed. Investigations on children’s computation of scalar implicatures in the same contexts have led to (...) a slightly different picture. In particular it has proven difficult to demonstrate that children compute scalar implicatures (in non- downward entailing contexts) using the Truth Value Judgment task, a technique that has been used successfully in showing children’s sensitivity to other semantic phenomena. Adopting a different experimental technique called the Felicity Judgment task, however, we demonstrated children’s knowledge of the prerequisites to the computation of scalar implicatures (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni, 2001). (shrink)

In this paper I demonstrate that there is an explanation of the number marking we see on nouns when they combine with the numeral _zero_ which combines Martí’s (Semant. Pragmat., 2020a, https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.3 ) account of the morphosyntax and semantics of the numeral-noun construction with Bylinina and Nouwen’s (Glossa 3(1):98, 2018 ) semantics for _zero_ and which does not need to appeal to any further principles (e.g., agreement).

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of communicative intention on action. In Experiment 1 participants were requested to reach towards an object, grasp it, and either simply lift it or lift it with the intent to communicate a meaning to a partner . Movement kinematics were recorded using a three-dimensional motion analysis system. The results indicate that kinematics was sensitive to communicative intention. Although the to-be-grasped object remained the same, movements performed for the ‘communicative’ condition (...) were characterized by a kinematic pattern which differed from those obtained for the ‘individual’ condition. These findings were confirmed in a subsequent experiment in which the communicative condition was compared to a control condition, in which the communicative exchange was prevented. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive pragmatics and current knowledge on how social behavior shapes action kinematics. (shrink)

At the end of the 1960s “Supports/Surfaces” artists start deconstructing paintings to jeopardize their representational qualities. Claude Viallat and Daniel Dezeuze, for example, process canvases and frames to highlight their phisical aspect as opposed to the illusionistic realm or representation. This way polarities such as form/space and illusionistic space/real space start having a new, dialectic relationship.

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a class of algebraic structures related to many-valued ukasiewicz algebras. They are symmetrical Heyting algebras with a set of modal operators indexed by a finite completely symmetric poset. A representation theorem is given for these (not functionally complete) algebras.

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 221 - 248 One of the peculiarities of Peter Abelard’s analysis of incomplete and non-assertive sentences is his use of the notion of desire: in both _Dialectica_ and _Glosses on Peri hermeneias_ the terms _desiderium_ and _desidero_ move to the foreground side by side with _optatio, expectatio, suspensio_ and the related verbs. Desire plays a structural role in Abelard’s descriptions of the compositional way in which the linguistic message is received, changing step by (...) step from incomplete to complete: the person who receives the incomplete message desires to get further information through other words since he knows that the purpose of such words or sequences of words is to combine with other words in order to form a complete sentence. On the other hand, the expression of the speaker’s attention to his inner affections renders the same semantic content a different complete sentence. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza la historicidad del lenguaje como prioridad ontológica del humanismo retórico . Esta indagación se proyecta en el seguimiento de la relación que establece Unamuno entre la palabra y el pensamiento.This work analyses the historicity of language as an ontological priority of rhetorical humanism . The research is linked to the relationship established by Unamuno between word and thought.