Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (_N_ = 1,080 participants) (...) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain setup. The second experiment (_N_ = 1,200 participants) used the same material, but participants were asked whether or not they would share the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network or with their friends, in their favorite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorization and reproduction are involved in the transmission—as in oral transmission—than when they are not—as in online sharing. Negative content seems to be reliably favored in both modalities of transmission. (shrink)

This note makes a contribution to the issue raised in a paper by Popper and Miller (1983) in which it was claimed that probabilistic support is purely deductive. Developing R. C. Jeffrey's remarks, a new general approach to the crucial concept of "going beyond" is here proposed. By means of it a quantitative measure of the inductive component of a probabilistic inference is reached. This proposal leads to vindicating the view that typical predictive probabilistic inferences by enumeration and analogy are (...) purely inductive. (shrink)

There are two interpretations of what it means for a singular term to be referentially direct, one truth-conditional and the other cognitive. It has been argued that on the former interpretation, both proper names and indexicals refer directly, whereas on the latter only proper names are directly referential. However, these interpretations in fact apply to the same singular terms. This paper argues that, if conceived in purely normative terms, the linguistic meaning of indexicals can no longer be held to make (...) these terms referentially indirect under the second interpretation. This result is then generalized to proper names, by ascribing them a normative meaning as well. (shrink)

On multiple occasions, Theodor W. Adorno turned to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a resource for the critical anatomy of a capitalist society in which laissez-faire liberalism was being overtaken by an authoritarian coordination of the political and the economic. This article revisits Spengler’s reactionary prophecies about late capitalist civilization in light of Adorno’s arguments. It explores a dimension of Spengler’s thought insufficiently addressed in Adorno’s writings and resonant with our present moment, namely the claim that an (...) emergent “Caesarism” would be helmed by figures like Cecil Rhodes, entrepreneurial Übermenschen spawned by racial imperialism. (shrink)

I argue that there are significant moral reasons in addition to harm prevention for making vaccination against certain common infectious diseases compulsory. My argument is based on an analogy between vaccine refusal and tax evasion. First, I discuss some of the arguments for compulsory vaccination that are based on considerations of the risk of harm that the non‐vaccinated would pose on others; I will suggest that the strength of such arguments is contingent upon circumstances and that in order to provide (...) the strongest defence possible of compulsory vaccination, such arguments need to be supplemented by additional arguments. I will then offer my additional argument for compulsory vaccination: I will argue that in both cases of vaccine refusal and of tax evasion individuals fail to make their fair contribution to important social and public goods, regardless of whether each individual contribution ‘makes a difference’. While fairness considerations have sometimes been used to support a moral duty to vaccinate, they have not been appealed to in order to argue for a legal duty to vaccinate. I will suggest that this is due, among other things, to a misapplication of the principle of the least restrictive alternative in public health. Finally, I will address nine possible objections to my argument. (shrink)

DIVA sophisticated theoretical reconsideration of Latin American studies, critiquing past work and proposing new frameworks for the discipline./div.

This paper will study the Hanian critique of technology and dataism, as well as its implications. For this purpose, we will investigate the Heideggerian bases on which his thought is based, which show the modern essence of technology as a current stage of the metaphysics of presence. It will then be shown how the Hanian thesis accepts these premises in order to present dataism as an intervening agent in our horizons of understanding, as well as an element of contemporary systems (...) of control. Despite the value of this contribution, which challenges the alleged neutrality of technology, its adherence to the Heideggerian thesis prevents us from conceiving of other modes of uncovering and unfolding the poietic facet of technique. (shrink)

This essay follows Jean-Luc Nancy’s meditation on whether it is possible for thought to stand before the untenable in the present predicament and his call to confront the alló, the irreducibly other. It looks into Martin Heidegger’s considerations regarding the refusal of world and the possibility of its reversal. It discusses Catherine Malabou on two kinds of outside for philosophy and her privileging of the decolonial outside, which she uses to critique Reiner Schürmann’s position on the possibility of justice. Against (...) Malabou, it then examines Schürmann’s understanding of justice in a Nietzschean vein, and it concludes with a reflection on nihilism and its other side with a view to establish Schürmann’s fundamental position. (shrink)

There are close similarities between the Weihrauch lattice and the zoo of axiom systems in reverse mathematics. Following these similarities has often allowed researchers to translate results from one setting to the other. However, amongst the big five axiom systems from reverse mathematics, so far $\mathrm {ATR}_0$ has no identified counterpart in the Weihrauch degrees. We explore and evaluate several candidates, and conclude that the situation is complicated.

A filosofia política de Philip Pettit realiza a leitura normativa da matriz republicana de pensamento político. Na sua construção historiográfica e normativa do significado do republicanismo é reafirmada a centralidade da liberdade como não-dominação. Pettit mantém o intuito de releitura da cidadania republicana como sendo inclusivista e que possui o cunho de realidade política em sua notória preocupação com a condição social dos cidadãos. O republicanismo apregoa que a liberdade como não-dominação é o princípio necessário para avaliação de qualquer organização (...) social e política. Esse princípio não se constitui como valor apriorístico da teoria política porque as relações não-dominadas serão compreendidas em suas diferentes formas e contextos. No âmbito social, ela exigirá que as relações entre indivíduos sejam justas e que não haja motivo para que se tenha medo ou deferência perante as diferenças econômicas ou sociais. A liberdade como não-dominação poderá oferecer os recursos sociais necessários para que não se tenha as relações assimétricas de capacidade de influência e escolha na sociedade política. No âmbito político, a liberdade republicana será representada pela capacidade dos cidadãos de influenciar e direcionar as decisões dos representantes políticos. Por isso, iremos abordar os elementos políticos necessários para a contenção da dominação pública. No âmbito político democrático, a oportunidade de participação política, a discussão das desvantagens sociais e políticas e as formas de contenção da dominação pública serão mecanismos para a diminuição da dominação pública. O exercício da contestação e o controle popular podem ser os mecanismos políticos para a saída da forma minimalista de compreender a ação política como realização das preferências individuais e significa a possibilidade de realização do ideal de bem comum pelo procedimento discursivo de formação da opinião e da vontade política. O debate e a contestação se constituem como o ambiente para o entendimento sobre as normas comuns que alicerçam a comunidade política. Nesse sentido, o modelo republicano de democracia prioriza o exercício dos direitos básicos políticos como sendo a ferramenta para a formação da vontade política. Além disso, ele salienta a atitude contestatória dos cidadãos perante as formas injustificadas de desigualdades de tratamento. A democracia republicana possibilita o compartilhamento dos direitos políticos entre os cidadãos e incentiva que eles exerçam o controle popular sobre as decisões governamentais. Palavras-chave: Republicanismo. Democracia. Contestação. Philip Pettit. (shrink)

The use of algorithmic prediction in insurance is regarded as the beginning of a new era, because it promises to personalise insurance policies and premiums on the basis of individual behaviour and level of risk. The core idea is that the price of the policy would no longer refer to the calculated uncertainty of a pool of policyholders, with the consequence that everyone would have to pay only for her real exposure to risk. For insurance, however, uncertainty is not only (...) a problem – shared uncertainty is a resource. The availability of individual risk information could undermine the principle of risk-pooling and risk-spreading on which insurance is based. The article examines this disruptive change first by exploring the possible consequences of the use of predictive algorithms to set insurance premiums. Will it endanger the principle of mutualisation of risks, producing new forms of discrimination and exclusion from coverage? In a second step, we analyse how the relationship between the insurer and the policyholder changes when the customer knows that the company has voluminous, and continuously updated, data about her real behaviour. (shrink)

For María Zambrano all forms of knowledge are articulated from tradition, because what is essential is located in the past, as if it were a question of a substratum per se which is always known and transmitted. Wisdom increases by accumulation: knowledges add up, they become part of a ..

Las interpretaciónes de la física cuántica de Everett-DeWitt hablan de una multiplicidad de mundos físicamente coexistenrtes. Éstas imaginativas reacciones a los problemas conceptuales de la mecánica cuántica estándar forman una família de propuestas de “universos múltiples” que, sin pleno éxito, han sido tachadas de incoherentes.Everett-DeWitt interpretations of quantum physics speak of a multiplicity of physically coexisting worlds. These imaginative reactions to the conceptual problems of standard quantum mechanics form a family of physicalist “many-worlds” proposals that have been variously dismissed as (...) “incoherent”, so far without full success. A renewed charge by Hilary Putnam now seems to pose deeper trouble for PMW. In a recent paper, he seizes on “Schrödinger’s cat” situations to expose how PMW relativization of actuality and basic combinatorics jointly ruin probabilistic talk. Putnam focuses on confirmation and luck. His case against PMW is thought-provoking but also questionable, or so I suggest in this paper. First I argue that, as presented, Putnam’s charge doesn’t go through. I then consider his argument proper. According to Putnam, experimental DeWittians must count themselves as “lucky” in a seriously incoherent sense. I consider his take on “luck” and deny that defenders of PMW need to so regard themselves. Although extravagant, their position cannot be fruitfully dismissed as incoherent on metascientific grounds. Indeed it attests to the way science rationally helps the imagination to grow. (shrink)

We discuss the relationship between expertise, expert authority, and trust in the case of vaccine research and policy, with a particular focus on COVID-19 vaccines. We argue that expert authority is not merely an epistemic notion, but entails being trusted by the relevant public and is valuable if it is accompanied by expert trustworthiness. Trustworthiness requires, among other things, being transparent, acknowledging uncertainty and expert disagreement (e.g., around vaccines’ effectiveness and safety), being willing to revise views in response to new (...) evidence, and being clear about the values that underpin expert recommendations. We explore how failure to acknowledge expert disagreement and uncertainty can undermine trust in vaccination and public health experts, using expert recommendations around COVID-19 vaccines as a case study. (shrink)