In this paper, I will focus on a type of confabulation that emerges in relation to questions about mental attitudes whose causes we cannot introspectively access. I argue against two popular views that see confabulations as mainly offering a psychological story about ourselves. On these views, confabulations are the result of either a cause-tracking mechanism or a self-directed mindreading mechanism. In contrast, I propose the view that confabulations are mostly telling a normative story: they are arguments primarily offered to justify (...) one’s attitudes, and they are produced by our argumentative reasoning mechanism driven by the biological goal of presenting ourselves as good reasoners and as reliable sources of information. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 3, Page 295-311, September 2021.

One main argument that has been offered in support of the Knowledge Account of Assertion is that it successfully makes sense of a variety of Moorean-paradoxical claims. David Sosa has objected to the Knowledge Account by arguing that it does not generalize satisfactorily to make sense of the oddity of iterated conjunctions of the form “p but I don’t know whether I know that p”. Recently, Martin Montminy has offered a defense of the Knowledge Account. In this paper, I show (...) that both Montminy’s and Sosa’s arguments fail. First, I argue that Montminy does not offer a good reply to Sosa; then I show that Sosa’s objection actually does not constitute a real threat to the Knowledge Account. (shrink)

Many of our beliefs behave irrationally: this is hardly news to anyone. Although beliefs’ irrational tendencies need to be taken into account, this paper argues that beliefs necessarily preserve at least a minimal level of rationality. This view offers a plausible picture of what makes belief unique and will help us to set beliefs apart from other cognitive attitudes.

Why do people share or publicly engage with fake stories? Two possible answers come to mind: (a) people are deeply irrational and believe these stories to be true; or (b) they intend to deceive their audience. Both answers presuppose the idea that people put the stories forward as true. But I argue that in some cases, these outlandish (yet also very popular) stories function as signals of one's group membership. This signaling function can make better sense of why, despite their (...) unusual nature or lack of a factual basis, some of these stories are so widespread. (shrink)

Many agree that one cannot consciously form a belief just because one wants to. And many also agree this is a puzzling component of our conscious belief-forming processes. I will look at three views on how to make sense of this puzzle and show that they all fail in some way. I then offer a simpler explanation that avoids all the pitfalls of those views, which is based instead on an analysis of our conscious reasoning combined with a commonly accepted (...) account of the concept of belief. I conclude that no epistemic norm or aim is actually needed to explain why we cannot deliberatively believe whatever we want. (shrink)

The error theory is a metaethical theory that maintains that normative judgments are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, and that these properties do not exist. In a recent paper, Bart Streumer argues that it is impossible to fully believe the error theory. Surprisingly, he claims that this is not a problem for the error theorist: even if we can’t fully believe the error theory, the good news is that we can still come close to believing the error theory. In this (...) paper I show that Streumer’s arguments fail. First, I lay out Streumer’s argument for why we can’t believe the error theory. Then, I argue against the unbelievability of the error theory. Finally, I show that Streumer’s positive proposal that we can come close to believing the error theory is actually undermined by his own argument for why we can’t believe the error theory. (shrink)

Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put (...) forth for and against them. (shrink)

PENULTIMATE DRAFT. At times, weird stories such as the Pizzagate spread surprisingly quickly and widely. In this paper I analyze the mental attitudes of those who seem to take those absurdities seriously: I argue that those stories are often imagined rather than genuinely believed. Then I make room for the claim that often these imaginings are used to support group ideologies. My main contribution is to explain how that support actually happens by showing that motivated cognition can employ imagination as (...) a seemingly rational tool to reinforce and protect beliefs. (shrink)

Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put (...) forth for and against them. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed light on the nature of belief and provide support to the view that I call ‘Minimalism’. It shows that Minimalism is better equipped than the traditional approach to separating belief from imagination and addressing cases of belief’s evidence- resistance. The key claim of the paper is that no matter how epistemically irrational humans’ beliefs are, they always retain a minimal level of rationality.

Multiple Authors - please see paper attached. -/- AI systems have seen dramatic advancement in recent years, bringing many applications that pervade our everyday life. However, we are still mostly seeing instances of narrow AI: many of these recent developments are typically focused on a very limited set of competencies and goals, e.g., image interpretation, natural language processing, classification, prediction, and many others. We argue that a better study of the mechanisms that allow humans to have these capabilities can help (...) us understand how to imbue AI systems with these competencies. We focus especially on D. Kahneman’s theory of thinking fast and slow , and we propose a multi-agent AI architecture (called SOFAI, for SlOw and Fast AI) where incoming problems are solved by either system 1 (or "fast") agents (also called "solvers"), that react by exploiting only past experience, or by system 2 (or "slow") agents, that are deliberately activated when there is the need to reason and search for optimal solutions beyond what is expected from the system 1 agent. (shrink)

[Multiple authors] In this paper, we propose a general architecture that is based on fast/slow solvers and a metacognitive component. We then present experimental results on the behavior of an instance of this architecture, for AI systems that make decisions about navigating in a constrained environment. We show how combining the fast and slow decision modalities allows the system to evolve over time and gradually pass from slow to fast thinking with enough experience, and that this greatly helps in decision (...) quality, resource consumption, and efficiency. (shrink)

Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini argues that we can believe the error theory. In this reply, I explain why I still think we cannot.

Marianna PapastephanouUniversity of CyprusSince Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (reali...

At times, weird stories such as the Pizzagate spread surprisingly quickly and widely. In this paper I analyze the mental attitudes of those who seem to take those absurdities seriously: I argue that those stories are often imagined rather than genuinely believed. Then I make room for the claim that often these imaginings are used to support group ideologies. My main contribution is to explain how that support actually happens by showing that motivated cognition can employ imagination as a seemingly (...) rational tool to reinforce and protect ideologies. (shrink)

Adjectives such as “environmental”, “social”, “cosmopolitan”, “relational”, “distributive”, etc. reflect how scholars discern the many faces of justice and put several claims to, and claimants of, justice in perspective. They have also helped related research to focus on some surfaces of justice, that is, on spaces that invite justice, localities and formations, such as the state, social policies, social institutions, etc. within which ethical-political challenges unravel. Diverse philosophical perspectives enable context-specific explorations of (sur)faces of justice. However, I argue, there is (...) more to the concept of justice than what perspectives (considered alone or in their sum total) allow us to view. To theorize how this surplus may be more discernible through stereoscopic rather than perspectival optics I first describe how educational-philosophical perspectives, old and new, discuss just education or education for justice; and then I critique the very notion of perspective on which scholarly work relies. Despite their merits, perspectival framings of justice fail to address the interconnectivity of various (sur)faces of justice. (shrink)

Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. Current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form in this special issue, and directly compared and discussed in a lively debate, reported at the end of each chapter. The main results are reported in the editors’ introduction.

Today humanity is in the midst of the massive expansion of new and fundamental technology, represented by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The ongoing revolution of these technologies and their profound impact across various sectors, has triggered discussions about the characteristics and values that should guide their use and development in a responsible manner. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review with the aim of pointing out existing challenges and required principles in AI-based systems in different industries. We (...) discuss our findings and provide general recommendations to be considered during AI deployment in production. The results have shown many gaps and concerns towards responsible AI and integration of complex AI models in the industry that the research community could address. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to address three positions on forgiveness that could be encouraged in schools. They are the strict view defended by Philip Barnes, the relaxed view promoted by Patricia White and the idea of forgiving the unforgivable discussed by Jacques Derrida. I shall examine the tradition from which they emerge and explore some of their problems. This will lead me to a rehabilitation of what is other to that tradition (within and without)—an other that can serve as (...) a corrective to the problems of those positions. I shall conclude the article with an exposition of the radicalisation of the teaching of forgiveness if we focus on the perspective of the one who seeks forgiveness. (shrink)

v. 1. 1814-1934.--v. 2. 1935-1966.--v. 3. 1821-1915.--v. 4. 1916-1973.--v. 5. 1973-1981.--v. 6. Indici generali -- v. 7. 1981-1989.--v. 8. 1989-1995.--v. 9. 1995-1998.--v. 10. Parte prima : Scritti di Antonio Rosmini, volume quinto, 1999-2003. Parte seconda : Scritti su Rosmini, volume decimo, 1998-2003, con integrazioni 1851-1997 -- v. 11. Parte prima : Scritti di Antonio Rosmini, VI. Parte seconda : Scritti su Rosmini, XI, con integrazioni 1863-2003.

v. 1. 1797-1823 -- v. 2. 1823-1826 -- v. 3. 1827-1828.

Conf(l)essioni conclude l'itinerario in quattro tappe dedicato all'operazione del pensare. Giunge ora la morale, che, in queste Conf(l)essioni, illustra che cosa il pensiero possa donare all’esistenza del pensatore.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 303-325.

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the (...) upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The politics of lifelong learning and learnification have triggered educational philosophy’s justified indignation and blanket critiques of learning. The market logic of learning has, meanwhile, seized the city and caused a further educational-philosophical reactive response, which I critique in the form that it has taken inter alia in many prominent recent educational-philosophical works. After explaining what I mean by ‘reactive response’ I focus on the educational-philosophical reaction to the shift toward lifelong learning. Then I move to how this shift (...) has been translated into a discourse of city learning and how some educational theory responds to this discourse. My critique concludes with suggestions for an ethic of stereoscopically tackling facets of learning. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

While the notion of risk remains under-theorised in moral philosophy, risk aversion and moralist self-protection appear as dominant cultural tendencies saturating educational orientation and practice. Philosophy of education has responded to the educational emphasis on risk management by exposing the unavoidable and positive presence of risk in any endeavour to learn and teach. Taking such responses into account, I discuss how the theoretical connection of risk and education could be radicalised through an ethical approach combined with epistemological and existential concerns. (...) My aim is to propose an ethics that is sensitive to the difference between risks taken and risks imposed and to the cultural variations of what counts as danger. Finally, I explain how the educational relevance of such an ethics requires a prior questioning of the western understanding of self and world that has functioned as a subtext of the dominant view of risk. (shrink)

With Ukraine as its subtext, this pamphlet-like text considers the recent U-turns of global reality and the need for well-meant universalist (pamphilic) ends. Such ends impel reconsideration of the standard educational-philosophical view on national affect, state sovereignty and international relations. After indicating interconnections of these issues with ecological and nuclear catastrophe, I discuss the argument that post-humanist educational theory has failed to critique the full and inherent educational complicities in the current global situation. While I agree with such diagnostics, I (...) argue that, instead of essentializing educational complicities, we may explore education as open to catastrophe in its double meaning of ‘disaster’ and ‘radical turn’. (shrink)

Political liberalism purports to be independent from any controversial philosophical presuppositions, and its basic principles and features are often presented as the most accommodating of difference and heterogeneity, so long as the latter is not illiberal, oppressive and fanatic. Educational theory welcomes this assumption and attempts to utilise it in citizenship curriculum debates, often in a receptive and arguably uncritical way. I shall critique the above by unveiling the contestable epistemological and anthropological theses underlying Rawls' difference principle and by discussing (...) the conception of education that they ground. I shall draw especially on sociology of education and its questioning of the ‘racism of intelligence’ in order to show that political liberalism mistakes its self- and world-understanding as a reflection of general and undisputed facts. Further, I shall explain how a more critical perspective would give educational theory a more active role by challenging the so-called ‘reproductive’ conception of education. I shall conclude by assessing the significance of such a critique for teaching citizenship, putting forward some suggestions for a reorientation of political education. (shrink)

Curiosity’s connection with democracy remains neglected and unexplored. Various disciplines have mostly treated curiosity as an epistemic trait of the individual. Beyond epistemology, curiosity is studied as a moral virtue or vice of the self. Beyond epistemic and moral frameworks, curiosity is examined politically and decolonially. However, all frameworks remain focused on the individual and rarely imply a relevance of curiosity to democracy. The present article departs from such explorative frameworks philosophically to expand the research scope on curiosity in the (...) direction of democratic theory. It highlights the complex politics of curiosity as a collective, rather than merely individual, desire for knowledge. I argue that curiosity should become a key analytical category for studying democracy as a political attitude and as a way of life. Investigations of the multifaceted curiosity of the demos may enhance the visibility of ethico-political issues that often escape the curious eye of citizens and researchers. (shrink)

The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales is a set of psychometrically sound scales that is widely used to assess negative emotional states in adults. In this project, we developed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales for Youth and tested its psychometric properties. Data were collected from 2,121 Australian children and adolescents aged 7–18. This sample was split randomly into a calibration group and a cross-validation group. First, we used Confirmatory Factor Analysis on the calibration group to test the 3-factor DASS model on (...) 40 items we had developed in previous exploratory studies. We then selected the best-performing 21 items based on both statistical and theoretical considerations, guided by the structure and item content of the adult DASS. We cross-validated this new 21-item model in the second half of the sample. Results indicated good fit for the final 21-item 3-factor DASS model in both groups of children and adolescents. Multiple regression analyses showed that when scores on the other DASS-Y scales were held constant, the DASS-Y Depression scale had a strong negative relationship with positive affect and life satisfaction, the DASS-Y Anxiety scale was strongly associated with physiological hyperarousal, and the DASS-Y Stress scale was associated with excessive worrying. However, the relationship between Stress and worrying was only evident from age 10 onwards. Our results show that the core symptoms that define depression, anxiety and stress in children and adolescents are similar to those previously found in adults. The DASS-Y is a public domain instrument that we hope will prove useful in both research and clinical contexts. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan educational ideal and its theoretical underpinnings. I argue that, in spite of its merits, it overlooks the historical-relational dimension of cross-cultural encounters and the impediments posed by unresolved historical conflicts to the goal of cultural reconciliation. I suggest a rehabilitation of the historical-relational dimension by applying the insights of Paul Ricoeur to this context. My steps comprise a description of Nussbaum’s position, an exploration of its shortcomings, an interpolation of Ricoeur’s ideas and (...) some concomitant suggestions. (shrink)

While there is a widespread acceptance of the link between religiosity and ethics, there is less certainty how this influence occurs exactly, necessitating further research into these issues. A main roadblock to our understanding of this influence from an Islamic perspective is the absence of a validated measurement tool. The purpose of this study therefore is to develop a Scale of Muslims’ Views of Allah. This article discusses how the SMVA was developed through the following five steps: establishment of content (...) and face validity; application of a cognitive interviewing technique to pretest the SMVA with sixteen participants; pilot testing of the SMVA with twelve participants; administration of the SMVA online to marketing and management professionals via a multi-stage cluster sampling process to verify the scale’s reliability and validity; and testing criterion-related validity. The results showed that the newly constructed 13-item scale had adequate psychometric properties. Finally, the implications for organisations, limitations and future research are discussed. (shrink)

The logic of Conditional Beliefs has been introduced by Board, Baltag, and Smets to reason about knowledge and revisable beliefs in a multi-agent setting. In this article both the semantics and the proof theory for this logic are studied. First, a natural semantics forCDLis defined in terms of neighbourhood models, a multi-agent generalisation of Lewis’ spheres models, and it is shown that the axiomatization ofCDLis sound and complete with respect to this semantics. Second, it is shown that the neighbourhood semantics (...) is equivalent to the original one defined in terms of plausibility models, by means of a direct correspondence between the two types of models. On the basis of neighbourhood semantics, a labelled sequent calculus forCDLis obtained. The calculus has strong proof-theoretic properties, in particular admissibility of contraction and cut, and it provides a decision procedure for the logic. Furthermore, its semantic completeness is used to obtain a constructive proof of the finite model property of the logic. Finally, it is shown that other doxastic operators can be easily captured within neighbourhood semantics. This fact provides further evidence of the naturalness of neighbourhood semantics for the analysis of epistemic/doxastic notions. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the way in which proximity and distance have been made relevant to cosmopolitanism and I discuss the significance contemporary theory attributes to border crossing. By employing colonial border crossing and its rationalization as an example, and by drawing from Alain Badiou's critique of political philosophy, I expose some of the problems of facile and faddish approaches to planetary movement. I argue that the real borders to be crossed by true cosmopolitans are internal and, regrettably, traversible, (...) raised at an early age, preserved through education and carried along wherever one goes. Then, I show how this thesis relativizes the drastic choice between cosmopolitanism and patriotism that is imposed by many current theories. By elaborating on Heraclitus's dictum that ‘the citizens must defend the law, as they would defend the wall of the city’, I sketch an account of patriotism that is (a) compatible with, and conducive to, cosmopolitanism as well as (b) mindful of the duplicity of the interplay of proximity and distance. (shrink)

The conception of time that dominates in the educational world of today is that of measurable, invested and managed chronological time. It is the conception of time that corresponds to current priorities such as performativity, global synchronization of educational systems, raising standards and meeting the challenges of the market. The educational transformation of the self and the world, however, requires another conception of time, one that frames another kind of thought and another meaning of education. This article discusses these two (...) conceptions of time by employing the distinction between chronos and kairos. The aim is not to turn this distinction into a dichotomy; instead, the aim is to recuperate the conception of time as kairos and connect it with a desire of philosophy and with education as a lifelong effort towards transformation rather than success. In a complex relation with chronosophy as time management, kairosophy is thus introduced as a critical reflection on lived time. (shrink)

Responding to Jan Masschelein's discussion of critical distance and the trivialisation of critique in his ‘How to Conceive of Critical Educational Theory Today?’, I draw attention to the antinomic character of immanence and transcendence—that is, to the way that it entails both non-circumventible necessity and omnipresent risks. I argue that the discourse of critical thinking in education is exemplary of the tensions generated by such consolidated meanings. Through this prism, I aim to offer a nuanced account of ways in which (...) the trivialisation of critique nurtures narcissistic and conformist tendencies that do not leave unaffected any critical philosophical line of thought. To illustrate my critique of contemporary critical education of all persuasions, I deal with an ethics of reading and writing. I suggest that, rather than encouraging cynicism and an abdication of responsibility, this antinomic character of critique should discourage any complacent and one-sided reliance on one's own tradition. (shrink)