Laureano Vallenilla Lanz es uno de los intelectuales más influyentes de la Venezuela de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Pertenece a la generación de teóricos que se nutrió fundamentalmente de la doctrina positivista e hizo de ella la herramienta para desarrollar la interpretación de nuestra realidad con el fin de edificar una estable y próspera nación. Las ideas que guían el presente examen recogen su postura ante la historia, el individuo y la sociedad, la religión, (...) la educación, el centralismo, la guerra y la paz. (shrink)

"Libro sumamente valioso. Tras sendas visiones de conjunto, muy logradas, del positivismo en América Latina en general y en Venezuela en particular, siguen capítulos sobre: Adolfo Ernst; Rafael Villavicencio; Vicente Marcano; Lasandro Alvarado; Luis Razetti; Guillermo Delgado Palacios; Luis López Méndez; José Gil Fortoul; Laureano Vallenilla Lanz; César Zumeta y Manuel Arcaya. Tiende a hacer comparaciones con otras manifestaciones del positivismo latinoamericano"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

En el estudio que aquí se presenta se analiza hasta qué punto se puede llegar a una situación democrática estable, siguiendo los planteamientos del Cesarismo Democrático de Laureano Valenilla Lanz, que para conseguir los objetivos utilitaristas señalados por Simón Bolívar en su Manifiesto de Cartagena, intentó construir un sistema autoritario de gobierno. En contra de los razonamientos expresados por el autor venezolano, y desde una óptica más actual, hablar de democracia no supone quedarse en la mera constatación de las (...) realidades concretas, sino hacerlo desde una perspectiva de deber ser. Aceptar los hechos tal y como son, tiene como consecuencia teórica la ausencia de criterio demarcador que oriente la política concreta y, cómo no, la labor intelectual. Entre los objetivos de estas páginas resaltan dos: la democracia se refuerza con un mayor grado de democracia; y que la lucha por las condiciones económicas, sociales o laborales, no puede ser desgajada de la pugna política por conseguir cada vez mayores espacios democráticos, tanto en la sociedad como en el Estado. (shrink)

We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviors that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale (...) underlying this process is as follows: if a behavior is approved, then it is good; if it is disapproved, then it is bad. The evaluative guidance on how to behave most probably spread among peers in situations of mutual benefit, such as cooperative child rearing. We argue that our hominin ancestors provided with this capacity for assessor teaching were ideally positioned to develop the two specifically human levels of morality proposed by Tomasello: the morality of fairness and the morality of justice. Assessor teaching could have facilitated the genesis of rudimentary codes of behavior tied with the need to agree about how to behave to succeed in joint cooperative activities. Moreover, learning through assessor teaching provides a plausible explanation for the origin of the objectivist and prescriptive dimensions of human morality. First, we emphasize that individuals feel that they evaluate the behavior of others objectively to guide their learning, and, second, we underline the imperative intention that any moral manifestation possesses. (shrink)

This paper explores and rehabilitates the value of decisional privacy as a conceptual tool, complementary to informational privacy, for critiquing personalized choice architectures employed by self-tracking technologies. Self-tracking technologies are promoted and used as a means to self-improvement. Based on large aggregates of personal data and the data of other users, self-tracking technologies offer personalized feedback that nudges the user into behavioral change. The real-time personalization of choice architectures requires continuous surveillance and is a very powerful technology, recently coined as (...) “hypernudging.” While users celebrate the increased personalization of their coaching devices, “hypernudging” technologies raise concerns about manipulation. This paper addresses that intuition by claiming that decisional privacy is at stake. It thus counters the trend to solely focus on informational privacy when evaluating information and communication technologies. It proposes that decisional privacy and informational privacy are often part of a mutually reinforcing dynamic. Hypernudging is used as a key example to illustrate that the two dimensions should not be treated separately. Hypernudging self-tracking technologies compromise autonomy because they violate informational and decisional privacy. In order to effectively judge whether technologies that use hypernudges empower users, we need both privacy dimensions as conceptual tools. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with new self-tracking technologies. In particular, it focuses on a conceptual tension between the idea that disclosing personal information increases one’s autonomy and the idea that informational privacy is a condition for autonomous personhood. I argue that while self-tracking may sometimes prove to be an adequate method to shed light on particular aspects of oneself and can be used to strengthen one’s autonomy, self-tracking technologies often cancel out these benefits by exposing too much about oneself to (...) an unspecified audience, thus undermining the informational privacy boundaries necessary for living an autonomous life. (shrink)

According to the dual inheritance theory, cultural learning in our species is a biased and highly efficient process of transmitting cultural traits. Here we define a model of cultural learning where social learning is integrated as a complementary element that facilitates the discovery of a specific behavior by an apprentice, and not as a mechanism that works in opposition to individual learning. In that context, we propose that the emergence of the ability to approve or disapprove of offspring behavior, orienting (...) their learning, transformed primate social learning into a cultural transmission system, like that which characterizes our species. Assessor teaching facilitates the replication and/or reconstruction of behaviors that are difficult to imitate and helps to determine which behaviors should be imitated. We also explore the form in which assessor teaching has conditioned the evolution of our abilities to develop cultures in the hominin line, converting us into individuals equipped with what we call a suadens psychology. Our main point is to defend the hypothesis that suadens psychology determines the stability and dynamics that affect the trajectories of many cultural characters. We compare our proposal with other theories about cultural evolution, specifically with dual inheritance theory and cultural attraction theory. (shrink)

We propose certain clases that seem unable to form a completed totality though they are very small, finite, in fact. We suggest that the existence of such clases lends support to an interpretation of the existence of proper clases in terms of availability, not size.

The Russellian argument against the possibility of absolutely unrestricted quantification can be answered by the partisan of that quantification in an apparently easy way, namely, arguing that the objects used in the argument do not exist because they are defined in a viciously circular fashion. We show that taking this contention along as a premise and relying on an extremely intuitive Principle of Determinacy, it is possible to devise a reductio of the possibility of absolutely unrestricted quantification. Therefore, there are (...) intuitive reasons to believe that the counter-argument fails to support the possibility of absolutely unrestricted quantification. (shrink)

Humans have developed the capacity to approve or disapprove of the behavior of their children and of unrelated individuals. The ability to approve or disapprove transformed social learning into a system of cumulative cultural inheritance, because it increased the reliability of cultural transmission. Moreover, people can transmit their behavioral experiences (regarding what can and cannot be done) to their offspring, thereby avoiding the costs of a laborious, and sometimes dangerous, evaluation of different cultural alternatives. Our thesis is that, during ontogeny, (...) the evaluative communication (approval/disapproval) between parents and offspring is substituted by other evaluative communications among peers, like individuals of the same generation. Each person belongs to a reference social group with individuals that interact more intensively. Humans have developed psychological mechanisms that enable cultural transmission by being receptive to parental advice as well as their reference social group. The selective pressure that promoted these new evaluative interactions arose to facilitate the establishment of efficient cooperative relationships. In short, the social control of behavior is essential to understand human cultural transmission. (shrink)

Thema dieser philosophischen Untersuchung ist das phanomenale oder sinnliche Bewusstsein. Darunter fallen die mit Horen, Sehen, Schmecken, Riechen, Tasten und Fuhlen gegebenen Erfahrungen oder Erlebnisse. Ausgehend von einer Prufung des in der zeitgenossischen analytischen Philosophie gefuhrten einschlagigen Diskurses wie auch unter Bezug auf die im 17. Jahrhundert u.a. von Descartes und Locke entwickelte Lehre von den sekundaren Qualitaten unternimmt das Buch eine Verteidigung zweier Hauptthesen: Konstitutiv fur sinnliches Bewusstsein (im Unterschied zu dem mit Denken, Meinen oder blossem Vorstellen verbundenen Bewusstsein) (...) ist die unmittelbare Prasenz sinnlicher Qualitaten. Diese Qualitaten treten nicht vor oder jenseits der Sinnesorgane auf, sondern sind bloss im Bewusstsein exemplifiziert. Die mit jeder einzelnen Sinnesmodalitat gegebenen sinnlichen Qualitaten bilden jeweils spezifische Strukturen (Beziehungen der Ahnlichkeit, des Ausschlusses, der Anordnung/Abfolge), die fur sie wesentlich sind. Fur eine jede dieser Sinnesmodalitaten wird gezeigt, dass die physikalischen Reize, die fur die entsprechenden Sinneseindrucke kausal verantwortlich sind, untereinander nicht die Strukturen aufweisen, die wir an den sinnlichen Qualitaten selbst finden und die wesentlich fur diese Qualitaten sind. Sie lassen sich, so die zweite Hauptthese des Buches, demzufolge nicht mit den physikalischen Merkmalen von Gegenstanden und Medien vor den Sinnesorganen identifizieren. Dies hat einschneidende Konsequenzen fur Theorien des menschlichen Bewusstseins. Im Gegensatz zu den meisten philosophischen Arbeiten zum Thema unternimmt es diese Untersuchung, alle Sinnesmodalitaten grundlich zu diskutieren und dabei den einschlagigen fachwissenschaftlichen Stand der Diskussion fur die philosophische Argumentation nutzbar zu machen. Dies macht die Arbeit sowohl fur Philosophen wie fur Fachwissenschaftler interessant, die mit dem Thema Bewusstsein befasst sind. (shrink)

Computationalism is the claim that all possible thoughts are computations, i.e. executions of algorithms. The aim of the paper is to show that if intentionality is semantically clear, in a way defined in the paper, then computationalism must be false. Using a convenient version of the phenomenological relation of intentionality and a diagonalization device inspired by Thomson's theorem of 1962, we show there exists a thought that cannot be a computation.

El objeto de este análisis es examinar —naturalmente, de un modo introductorio— cuál puede ser la repercusión de los eventuales avances en los objetivos transhumanistas en el terreno de la responsabilidad criminal. A mi juicio, el análisis de las posibles consecuencias del transhumanismo en el dominio del Derecho penal afecta a dos ámbitos distintos: (i) en primer lugar, puede incidir en los factores que, hoy en día, vertebran la imputación de responsabilidad penal; (ii) por otro lado, es preciso abordar la (...) repercusión que el transhumanismo podría tener ya no en el juicio de imputación de responsabilidad penal, sino en la determinación de las consecuencias asignadas a los responsables penales y en su proceso de ejecución. Como más adelante se verá, esta reflexión arroja hoy en día más preguntas que respuestas. (shrink)

In this paper we address three concepts that are much talked about in the animal robotics community. These concepts are (1) representations, (2) goals, and (3) minimal cognition. We want to distinguish between information as an objective commodity and representation as something which involves a user, i.e. a system which accesses and uses information. Information per se lies out there and exists independently of any system that makes use of it. Representations presuppose design and require a user. We want to (...) distinguish different kinds of purposive behaviour, which involve different notions of goals, which themselves appear to be different from the point of view of the agent, the designer and the naive observer. We want to try to define cognition in terms of the minimal criteria that would be acceptable in view of our definitions of representations and goals. We recognise that full‐blown cognition may require ingredients other than those of minimal cognition. (shrink)

I address the claim by Valor and Martínez that Goldstein's cassationist approach to Liar-like paradoxes generates paradoxes it cannot solve. I argue that these authors miss an essential point in Goldstein's cassationist approach, namely the thesis that paradoxical sentences are not able to make the statement they seem to make.

The Foundations of Meta-Technics is a rigorous phenomenological analysis of the transcendence of anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, and geocentric technology in terms of the new meta-technical forms of space and time. The book draws out the epistemological and ontological implications of an emerging meta-technical supernature in which space and time are perceived by trans-human means and from trans-terrestrial perspectives. This book is especially valuable to philosophers in either the phenomenological or continental tradition.

This paper presents the hypothesis that linguistic capacity evolved through the action of natural selection as an instrument which increased the efficiency of the cultural transmission system of early hominids. We suggest that during the early stages of hominization, hominid social learning, based on indirect social learning mechanisms and true imitation, came to constitute cumulative cultural transmission based on true imitation and the approval or disapproval of the learned behaviour of offspring. A key factor for this transformation was the development (...) of a conceptual capacity for categorizing learned behaviour in value terms - positive or negative, good or bad. We believe that some hominids developed this capacity for categorizing behaviour, and such an ability allowed them to approve or disapprove of their offsprings- learned behaviour. With such an ability, hominids were favoured, as they could transmit to their offspring all their behavioural experience about what can and cannot be done. This capacity triggered a cultural transmission system similar to the human one, though pre-linguistic. We suggest that the adaptive advantage provided by this new system of social learning generated a selection pressure in favour of the development of a linguistic capacity allowing children to better understand the new kind of evaluative information received from parents. (shrink)

Norms play a crucial role in governing human societies. From an early age, humans possess an innate understanding of norms, recognizing certain behaviours, contexts, and roles as being governed by them. The evolution of normativity has been linked to its contribution to the promotion of cooperation in large groups and is intertwined with the development of joint intentionality. However, there is no evolutionary consensus on what normatively differentiated our hominin ancestors from the phylogenetic lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos. Here (...) we propose that the development of teaching through a process of evaluative feedback between parent and offspring functioned as a prerequisite for the later development of normativity. Parents approve or disapprove of offspring’s behaviours based on their own learned knowledge of what is appropriate or inappropriate. We argue our proposition using a simple model of cultural transmission, which shows the adaptive advantage offered by these elementary forms of teaching. We show that an important part of this adaptive advantage can arise from the benefits derived from guidance about which behaviours to adopt or reject. We propose that this type of guidance has fundamental elements that characterise the normative world. We complete our argument by reviewing several studies that examine the emergence of normativity in young children without prior exposure to a normative framework with respect to the behaviours under analysis. We suggest that this normativity is best interpreted as manifestations of teaching among young children rather than as norm recognition among early normative children. (shrink)

The strong law of large numbers and considerations concerning additional information strongly suggest that Beauty upon awakening has probability 1/3 to be in a heads-awakening but should still believe the probability that the coin landed heads in the Sunday toss to be 1/2. The problem is that she is in a heads-awakening if and only if the coin landed heads. So, how can she rationally assign different probabilities or credences to propositions she knows imply each other? This is the problem (...) I address in this article. I suggest that ‘p whenever q and vice versa’ may be consistent with p and q having different probabilities if one of them refers to a sample space containing ordinary possible worlds and the other to a sample space containing centred possible worlds, because such spaces may fail to combine into one composite probability space and, as a consequence, ‘whenever’ may not be well defined; such is the main contribution of this article. 1The Sleeping Beauty Game2Groisman’s and Peter Lewis’s Approaches3Discussing Beauty’s Credences4The Principle of Equivalence's Failure5Making Sense of the Principle of Equivalence's Failure6Elga’s and Lewis’s Approaches7ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

A common argument in support of a beginning of the universe used by advocates of the kalām cosmological argument (KCA) is the argument against the possibility of an actual infinite, or the “Infinity Argument”. However, it turns out that the Infinity Argument loses some of its force when compared with the achievements of set theory and it brings into question the view that God predetermined an endless future. We therefore defend a new formal argument, based on the nature of time (...) (just as geometrical reasoning is based on the nature of space), which addresses more directly the question of beginningless time. (shrink)

The Monist’s call for papers for this issue ended: “if formalism is true, then it must be possible in principle to mechanize meaning in a conscious thinking and language-using machine; if intentionalism is true, no such project is intelligible”. We use the Grelling-Nelson paradox to show that natural language is indefinitely extensible, which has two important consequences: it cannot be formalized and model theoretic semantics, standard for formal languages, is not suitable for it. We also point out that object-object mapping (...) theories of semantics, the usual account for the possibility of non intentional semantics, doesn’t seem able to account for the indefinitely extensible productivity of natural language. (shrink)

El presente ensayo se propone examinar cómo los individuos en contextos de confinamiento carcelario - quienes han contribuido activamente en el desarrollo de esta investigación - pueden no solo experimentar la libertad de manera gradual, sino también producir libertad creadora a través de un proceso dialéctico en relación con su pasado, presente y futuro; y cómo este último –al que le daremos una mayor preponderancia– tiene como elemento inherente el potencial de transformar ontológicamente su existencia. Para ello, nos basamos en (...) tres tesis fundamentales: la idea de "libertad" en Jean-Paul Sartre, el "hombre histórico" en Friedrich Nietzsche y el concepto de "ser de lejanías" de Vicente Fatone. La imbricación de estas perspectivas permite comprender cómo una persona en un entorno de confinamiento puede desarrollar una libertad ontológica que trasciende las limitaciones ónticas y deterministas de su situación, modificando su ser y proyectándose hacia un futuro distinto. (shrink)

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in organizations has fundamentally changed from performing routine tasks to supervising human employees. While prior studies focused on normative perceptions of such AI supervisors, employees’ behavioral reactions towards them remained largely unexplored. We draw from theories on AI aversion and appreciation to tackle the ambiguity within this field and investigate if and why employees might adhere to unethical instructions either from a human or an AI supervisor. In addition, we identify employee characteristics affecting this (...) relationship. To inform this debate, we conducted four experiments (total N = 1701) and used two state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms (causal forest and transformers). We consistently find that employees adhere less to unethical instructions from an AI than a human supervisor. Further, individual characteristics such as the tendency to comply without dissent or age constitute important boundary conditions. In addition, Study 1 identified that the perceived mind of the supervisors serves as an explanatory mechanism. We generate further insights on this mediator via experimental manipulations in two pre-registered studies by manipulating mind between two AI (Study 2) and two human supervisors (Study 3). In (pre-registered) Study 4, we replicate the resistance to unethical instructions from AI supervisors in an incentivized experimental setting. Our research generates insights into the ‘black box’ of human behavior toward AI supervisors, particularly in the moral domain, and showcases how organizational researchers can use machine learning methods as powerful tools to complement experimental research for the generation of more fine-grained insights. (shrink)