Two prevailing accounts of the structure of the mind have been provided, respectively, by the Dual System Theory and by the Massive Modularity Hypothesis. It has been claimed, however, that they cannot both be true at the same time, i.e., that they are incompatible and, thus, that one of them must be abandoned. I will offer some arguments to challenge this claim. I will show that a plausible understanding of each theory makes it possible for them both to be true (...) at the same time. Moreover, I will argue that by appealing to each other they can offer a more complete and detailed account of the architecture of the mind. (shrink)

Is there a notion of domain specificity which affords genuine insight in the context of the highly modular mind, i.e. a mind which has not only input modules, but also central ‘conceptual’ modules? Our answer to this question is no. The main argument is simple enough: we lay out some constraints that a theoretically useful notion of domain specificity, in the context of the highly modular mind, would need to meet. We then survey a host of accounts of what domain (...) specificity is, based on the intuitive idea that a domain specific mechanism is restricted in the kind of information that it processes, and show that each fails at least one of those constraints. (shrink)

En este ensayo exploramos una perspectiva epistemológica en la que el elemento social y colectivo del conocimiento juega un papel fundamental en la explicación de su producción y transmisión. Primero presentamos y criticamos una posición individualista que ha sido dominante en la epistemología contemporánea y cuyas raíces pueden trazarse, al menos, hasta Descartes. Posteriormente introducimos y defendemos nuestra propia mirada, una en la que el conocimiento es un proceso constituido por un conjunto de actividades y prácticas que tiene un carácter (...) material. (shrink)

The Mexican Network of Women Philosophers has devoted its 2024 Permanent Seminar to reflect upon the slogan “Decentering the Canon to think ourselves today”. The idea supporting the slogan is partly motivated by a concern regarding how the necessary critiques to the Philosophical Canon have often been formulated in terms of the indispensability to add voices to it, or as a recommendation to stop reading some of the texts that have traditionally made it up. Even while these positions have a (...) lot going on for their plausibility, we claim that it is essential not to give it up, and that subverting it requires more than just adding voices to it. The Philosophical Canon is part of our inheritance. If we accept that we are partly constituted by what we inherit, then canceling it means eliminating part of who we are. We claim that a better option to overturn the Canon is to Decenter it. That is, to acknowledge that there is not a single way of dealing with it, that it is mobile and open, that it is there to be transformed, to help us think of those problems that actually matter to us in our present lives. (shrink)

Diana I. Pérez y Antoni Gomila, Social Cognition and the Second Person in Human Interaction, Routledge, Nueva York, 2022, 194pp., ISBN 978–0–367–67859–3 (hbk); ISBN 978–0–367–67857–9 (pbk); ISBN 978–1–003–13315–5 (ebk).

La injusticia epistémica suele pensarse como una forma de exclusión. Así como hay distintas formas y grados de exclusión, las hay de injusticia epistémica. Aquí argumento que una herramienta fundamental para el combate de sus casos más robustos es la escucha, entendida como una disposición a dejarse afectar por las otras personas. La idea central es que escuchar tiene una dimensión colectiva y depende de una reestructuración de las relaciones sociales. Para defender esto, presento algunas de las maneras clásicas de (...) concebir la injusticia hermenéutica. Posteriormente hago ver su relación con distintos modos de exclusión. Este paso me lleva a proponer la noción de “injusticia hermenéutica arquitectónica”. Muestro que combatirla requiere más que mecanismos de inclusión y sugiero que vale la pena explorar otras vías para hacerlo, entre ellas la promoción de una cultura de la escucha que involucra una transformación de nuestras estructuras sociales. (shrink)

Presentación del dossier. Filosofía de la psicopatología: perspectivas sobre la mente, la racionalidad y la agencia.

A prevailing assumption in contemporary epistemology is that there exists a conceptual connection between the notions of belief and rationality. In this paper I examine a weak notion of rationality, according to which it is not necessary to assume the existence of a uniquc set of norms of rationality in order to be able to assign beliefi to a subject. From this point of view, belief attribution only requires that we understand a subject's utterances and, to do this, we only (...) need assume that she is similar to us in some epistemic relevant issues. (shrink)

In this manuscript, I claim that the search for justice implies a complete reconfiguration of public space and a (radical) transformation of our social relations. I will argue through a negative path, i.e. starting from the comprehension of the experience of injustice. I will focus on the case of epistemic injustice since it illustrates how the unjustified harm it produces is originated in the structure of social relations. To reach my goal, I will attempt to bring into dialogue two different (...) philosophical debates —that which deals with the notion of the public space and that which discusses epistemic injustice—. This will help me show that epistemology has a fundamental and profound political dimension which needs to be addressed to find better avenues to search for and reach (epistemic and otherwise) justice. My main contention is that the possibility of constructing a functional public space depends on recognizing the confrontational character of politics and on not trying to erase the differences that make up society, nor trying to undo them under the idea of a (rational) consensus. (shrink)

En este ensayo exploramos una perspectiva epistemológica en la que el elemento social y colectivo del conocimiento juega un papel fundamental en la explicación de su producción y transmisión. Primero presentamos y criticamos una posición individualista que ha sido dominante en la epistemología contemporánea y cuyas raíces pueden trazarse, al menos, hasta Descartes. Posteriormente introducimos y defendemos nuestra propia mirada, una en la que el conocimiento es un proceso constituido por un conjunto de actividades y prácticas que tiene un carácter (...) material. (shrink)

This essay considers the connections between, on the one hand, two kinds of justification, namely pragmatic and alethic, and on the other hand two cognitive systems, S1 and S2.

The three main concerns of epistemology throughout the XXth Century were the following: (1) provide a definition of knowledge; (2) provide plausible answers to the skeptical challenge and; (3) study our belief-forming processes in order to deter- mine which of them are leading towards the acquisit..

We examine two major perspectives in the literature on domain specificity in cognition: in one of them cognitive modules are "intuitive theories"; in the other they are dispositional structures. Both of these positions accept that there is a continuous line from ordinary to scientific reasoning; nevertheless they interpret this continuity differently. We propose an alternative way of understanding the relation between ordinary and scientific reasoning: the continuity thesis holds because heuristic structures play a fundamental role in both types of reasoning. (...) Our main contention is that cognitive modules can be thought of as heuristic structures and that, since science is a complex of practices that embody different heuristic structures, science should be understood as a complex of cognitive modules. (shrink)

El amanecer del año 1994 nos sorprendió con la aparición pública del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. Más de dos décadas después empezamos a percibir la fuerza, dimensión e importancia que han tenido las mujeres -su voz, su lucha- no sólo en la organización del movimiento armado y civil que desde entonces sigue sin cesar; sino también en la articulación del pensamiento y la teoria en que sustentan y que sostiene su actuar. La política que se articula en las comunidades (...) zapatistas, en este sentido, ha reafirmado y cuestionado las luchas feministas del mundo y de América Latina. En particular, ha hecho visible lo prescindible que es la idea de las oposiciones, de las disyuntivas excluyentes. En vez de ello, ellas proponen pensar en dos nociones básicas: “todo está en par” y “el mundo parejo”. Como haré ver en este texto, estas dos cosas están a la base de su creación de una vida colectiva, de una política de lo común. Si esto es así y si pensamos que lo común es “la posibilidad de una política en femenino” entonces veremos que la zapatista es una subversión en femenino.The uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional surprised us all in the dawn of 1994. More than two decades later, we are starting to fully appreciate the force, dimension, and importance that women —their voices, their struggle—has had not only in the organization of the social and armed movement that is still very vigorous in Chiapas, but also in the theoretical and practical articulation of their thinking and acting. The politics that are currently in play in the Zapatista communities has reinforced and questioned the feminist struggles all over the world and in Latin America. In particular, it has made visible how thinking in terms of oppositions or exclusive dilemmas is and should be dispensable. We should rather start thinking in terms of “everything being in pair” and “an even world”. I will contend that these two notions support their construction of a collective life, of a politics of what is common. If this is true and if we think that what is common opens the possibility of politics in feminine, then it makes sense to think of the Zapatistassubversion as feminine. (shrink)