This book is the first monograph fully devoted to analyzing the philosophical aspects of affordances. The concept of affordance, coined and developed in the field of ecological psychology, describes the possibilities for action available in the environment. This work offers a systematic approach to the key philosophical features of affordances, such as their ontological characterization, their relation to normative practices, and the idea of agency that follows from viewing affordances as key objects of perception, while also proposing an innovative philosophical (...) characterization of affordances as dispositional properties. The Philosophy of Affordances analyzes the implications that a proper understanding of affordances has for the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, and aims to intensify the dialogue between philosophy and ecological psychology in which each discipline benefits from the tools and insights of the other. (shrink)

En este texto se plantea el análisis de la fisiocracia, el movimiento de economía política dirigido al mundo rural que surgió en Francia a mitad del siglo XVIII. Para ello, se parte de los trabajos y las publicaciones de economistas y de especialistas en historia de la economía, historia del pensamiento económico, y economía política. La bibliografía existente es inabarcable, máxime en el contexto de un artículo, no obstante, en las fuentes analizadas hay ciertas coincidencias a las que nos remitimos. (...) Sin ánimo de exhaustividad, se presenta una aproximación general a la fisiocracia, primera teoría de economía técnico-científica propiamente dicha, que incluye elementos y conceptos que forman parte de la economía como la noción de producto neto, la libertad de comercio (laissez-faire), la tasación, el impuesto único, la inversión del capital, el circuito económico, etc. Además, se destacan algunos de los presupuestos teóricos de la fisiocracia como economía política respecto a las preocupaciones agroecológicas y ecofeministas del presente, concretamente la puesta en valor de la producción primaria y la economía agraria. (shrink)

This paper aims to defend that the best framework for characterizing dispositions is a Rylean, non-factualist dispositionalism. I follow Tugby, 451–480, 2013) in explaining which are the main candidates for characterizing the ontology of dispositions. Tugby, 451–480, 2013) concludes that the best metaphysical framework for characterizing dispositions is Platonism, because it is the only theory that can account for the central and the intrinsic platitudes. Following this I show that Platonism is not desirable because it is difficult to reconcile with (...) ontological naturalism and because it is not parsimonious. Thus, I offer a different candidate: Rylean non-factualist dispositionalism. This approach retains the explanatory power of our dispositional vocabulary without appealing to facts, entities, or properties. In conclusion, non-factualist dispositionalism is preferable over naturalism and Platonism for characterizing dispositions. (shrink)

In this paper we explore in what sense we can claim that affordances, the objects of perception for ecological psychology, are related to normativity. First, we offer an account of normativity and provide some examples of how it is understood in the specialized literature. Affordances, we claim, lack correctness criteria and, hence, the possibility of error is not among their necessary conditions. For this reason we will oppose Chemero’s normative theory of affordances. Finally, we will show that there is a (...) way in which taking advantage of affordances could be considered as possessing a normative character, but only when they are evaluated within the framework of social normative standards in particular situations. This reinforces our claim that affordances, per se, lack normativity and can only be taken to be rule-governed in relation to established normative practices. (shrink)

On analyzing the problem that arises whenever the set of maximal elements is large, and a selection is then required (see Peris & Subiza 1998), we realize that logical ways of selecting among maximals violate the classical notion and axioms of rationality. We arrive at the same conclusion if we analyze solutions to the problem of choosing from a tournament (where maximal elements do not necessarily exist). So, in our opinion the notion of rationality must be discussed, not only in (...) the traditional sense of external conditions (Sen 1993), but in terms of the internal information provided by the binary relation. (shrink)

A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play (...) a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent's conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to show the evolution of the relationship between nonmonotonic logic and logic programming. I think that there are two periods in the evolution of this relationship. The first one isthe point of contact between these two fields that had been developed independently. In the second period, as I will show, the motivation to propose three-valued nonmonotonic logic comes from the study of the relationship between these two fields, and not from the study of nonmonotonic (...) logic itself. (shrink)

The following article aims to consider the problem of the empirical consummation of the teleological programme of practical reason in Kant. In other words, it highlights the question about the possibility of achieving the final end in the world. Nature is the domain of mechanical causality, but also of free causality and the highest good. Specifically, I will focus on the field of Kantian philosophy of history, examining it with regard to the possibility of biological evolution and the possibility of (...) moral evolution of humankind. (shrink)

Este trabajo consta de tres partes: en un primer momento, partiendo de la definición de “vida” de I. Kant, explicitamos la fundamentación moral del deber de vivir y explicamos el porqué de la censura del suicidio y la eutanasia por parte de Kant. En la segunda parte, desde la fundamentación kantiana de la vida, subrayamos las insuficiencias y contradicciones de determinados planteamientos que, apelando al principio de autonomía, defienden el suicidio y la eutanasia. En una tercera parte, manteniéndonos fieles a (...) la fundamentación kantiana del valor de la vida, exploramos sin embargo la posibilidad de defender la legitimidad del suicidio y la eutanasia.This work has three parts. In the first one, if we use the meaning of life by I.Kant, we explain the moral base of the duty to live and why Kant censures suicide and euthanasia. Secondly, if we use the Kantian moral theory of life we highlight the lacks and contradictions of certain proposals that –referring to the principle of autonomy– defend suicide and euthanasia. In the third part, although following Kant’s approach of the value of life, we explore the possibility of defending the legitimacy of suicide and euthanasia. (shrink)

El objetivo de mi trabajo estriba en reconocer sucintamente algunos de los puntos principales en que se fundamenta la posición de Nietzsche en relación a la teleología natural. El modo de atajar la cuestión será, en esta oportunidad, oponer la visión de Nietzsche al estado en que dejó Schopenhauer la cuestión. Para ello, abordaré en primer lugar algunos de los elementos que emparentan ambos proyectos y, en segundo lugar, un aspecto clave que parece alejarlos irremediablemente. Además de esclarecer este último (...) aspecto, intentaré un acercamiento a la especificidad y originalidad del proyecto nietzscheano sobre el tema. (shrink)

In recent years, several studies have advocated the need to expand the concept of patient autonomy beyond the capacity to deliberate and make decisions regarding a specific medical intervention or treatment (decision-making or decisional autonomy). Arguing along the same lines, this paper proposes a multidimensional concept of patient autonomy (decisional, executive, functional, informative and narrative) and argues that determining the specific aspect of autonomy affected is the first step towards protecting or promoting (and respecting) patient autonomy. These different manifestations of (...) autonomy are not mutually dependent; there may be patients who have problems in one dimension, while at the same time being fully autonomous in others. Nevertheless, a close interaction has been observed between the various dimensions and indeed, a phenomenological analysis shows that damage to or a reduction in one aspect of people’s capacity for self-government generally affects other aspects of their autonomy, which in turn disrupts their identity and the way in which they see themselves and are seen by others. In this paper, I shall examine some of these interactions and show how they may lie at the heart of the problem of poor treatment adherence (where adherence is defined as being the extent to which a patient’s behavior over time coincides with the recommendations made by and agreed with their health professional). One example given is that of psoriasis, a chronic skin disease with a very poor adherence record. In Spain, it is calculated that 85% of patients diagnosed with mild to moderate psoriasis fail to comply properly with their treatment, and figures from other parts of the world are similar. Although there are many possible causes for non-adherence among psoriasis patients, assessing their decisional, executive and narrative capacities and taking appropriate action based on the results may help increase adherence rates. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the evolutionary role of affordances, that is, the possibilities for action available in our environments. There are two allegedly competing views for explaining the evolutionary role of affordances: the first is based on natural selection; the second is based on niche construction. According to the first, affordances are resources that exert selection pressure. The second view claims that affordances are ecological inheritances in the organism’s niche that are the product of a previous alteration of the (...) environment. While there seems to be a mutually exclusive definition of affordances in each of these views, I argue in this paper that the views are not competing but, rather, complementary. In this sense, affordances play the role of either resources or ecological inheritances depending on the temporal stage of the evolutionary process. I make this argument by analyzing how natural selection and niche construction affect each other even when they function independently from each other. In this light, if these two evolutionary mechanisms exert their power in parallel but at two different stages in the evolutionary history of a given econiche, then there is room to claim that affordances can be understood as both resources and ecological inheritances. This dual aspect of affordances shows their evolutionary role. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the (...) history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one and the personal one. If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology. (shrink)

In argumentation studies, almost all theoretical proposals are applied, in general, to the analysis and evaluation of argumentative products, but little attention has been paid to the creative process of arguing. Mathematics can be used as a clear example to illustrate some significant theoretical differences between mathematical practice and the products of it, to differentiate the distinct components of the arguments, and to emphasize the need to address the different types of argumentative discourse and argumentative situation in the practice. I (...) consider some issues of recent papers associated with mathematical argumentation in an attempt to contribute to the discussion about the role of arguing in mathematical practice and in the evaluation of the products of this practice. I apply this discussion to learning environments to defend the thesis that argumentative practice should be encouraged when teaching technical subjects to convey a better understanding and to improve thought and creativity. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of the ethical behavior of managers making goodwill impairment decisions following the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standard 3 on Business Combinations. Replacing the systematic amortization of goodwill with the impairment-only approach has been a highly controversial step. Although the aim of IFRS 3 was to provide users with more value-relevant information regarding the underlying economics of the business, it has been criticized for the potential earnings management inherent in impairment testing. This study is (...) based on a sample of Spanish-listed companies between 2005 and 2011, a period that embraces the economic crisis. After controlling for the underlying economic factors of the firms, the results suggest that managers are exercising discretion in the reporting of goodwill impairment losses, and big bath and smoothing strategies are influencing the decisions, whether or not to impair goodwill and about the magnitude of the impairment. Firm size is an attribute that appears significant in the analysis, suggesting that the cost and complexity of running the impairment test affect managers’ decisions. Additional analyses suggest that the macroeconomic environment influences opportunistic and unethical behaviors. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: This commentary highlights some controversial aspects of enactivism and ecological psychology, specifically the notions of subjectivity and ecological information. I argue that, instead of choosing between them, both theories could complement each other at different levels of analysis in a single research framework for explaining cognition from a situated perspective.

El presente artículo tiene como propósito poner de relieve el contraste trágico entre la afirmación de una teleología natural y la ausencia de teleología moral en el pensamiento de Schopenhauer. Se comprenderá su gesto filosófico como el vaciamiento de la finalidad. Concretamente, se examinará cómo el absurdo que tiene lugar en virtud del contraste mencionado, sumado a la concepción de vida que late en el proyecto schopenhaueriano, conduce a una consideración necesariamente irracionalista y pesimista de la existencia. Desde la perspectiva (...) del autor, ante la ausencia de una finalidad racional del mundo no existe otra vía más que el pesimismo. En esta dirección, quisiera centrarme en una de las consecuencias más profundas de las premisas mencionadas (a saber, la carencia de finalidad final, apariencia de ajuste teleológico, pesimismo, irracionalidad, concepción de vida, etc). Me refiero a la imposibilidad de la historia y, con ella, a la imposibilidad de cualquier clase de cambio o transformación. Por último, intentaré despejar dos posibles suspicacias en relación con la irracionalidad y ausencia de fin final en la filosofía de Schopenhauer. (shrink)

Taking into account that no subordering of a scattered partial ordering is dense, we are going to define one idea of rank of a partial ordering which will make possible an equivalent but more operative definition of a scattered partial ordering. Using this notion of rank and the Scott’s sentence associated with the ordering, we are going to characterise in the infinitary language Lw1.w each element of a subclass of the partial orderings, this of the strongly scattered countable partial orderings.

In this paper we reject the nature–culture dichotomy by means of the idea of affordance or possibility for action, which has important implications for landscape theory. Our hypothesis is that, just as the idea of affordance can serve to overcome the subjective–objective dichotomy, the ideas of landscape and ecological niche, properly defined, would allow us to also transcend the nature–culture dichotomy. First, we introduce an overview of landscape theory, emphasizing processual landscape theory as the most suitable approach for satisfying both (...) cultural and naturalist approaches. After that, we introduce the idea of affordance and we analyze a tension between sociocultural and transcultural affordances (affordances that depend on cultural conventions and affordances that depend on lawful information and bodily aspects of agents). This tension has various implications for landscape theory and ecological niches. Our proposal is that sociocultural and transcultural aspects of affordances could be systematically accommodated if we apply niche construction theory (the theory that explains the process by which organisms modify their selective environments) as a methodological framework for explaining the emergence of ecological niches. This approach will lead us to an integrative account of landscapes as the products of the interaction between human and environmental elements, making it a clear example of a concept that transcends the nature–culture dichotomy. (shrink)

In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how deep learning machine vision relies on photography, its technical regimes and epistemic advantages, and (...) we propose a novel way to identify the latent camera through which the BBC archive was seen by machine. (shrink)

A lo largo del Cuaderno azul, Wittgenstein usa reiteradamente la figura del Sócrates platónico como una especie de figura antagonista contra la cual presenta sus nuevos puntos de vista filosóficos a la altura de los años 30. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar esos puntos de vista atendiendo al papel que tienen en su elaboración las alusiones críticas al Sócrates platónico. Nos centraremos principalmente en el examen que hace Wittgenstein de la forma de la pregunta socrática «¿Qué es X?», (...) en el modo en que entiende la relación del Cuaderno azul con la filosofía platónica, en su valoración crítica del conflicto socrático-platónico con el lenguaje cotidiano y, por último, en el análisis de las fuentes de lo que llama «nuestro ansia de generalidad». (shrink)

Previous studies suggest a relationship between second-language learning and voice recognition processes, but the nature of such relation remains poorly understood. The present study investigates whether phoneme learning relates to voice recognition. A group of bilinguals that varied in their discrimination of a second-language phoneme contrast participated in this study. We assessed participants’ voice recognition skills in their native language at the behavioral and brain electrophysiological levels during a voice-avatar learning paradigm. Second-language phoneme discrimination positively correlated with behavioral and brain (...) measures of voice recognition. At the electrophysiological level, correlations were present at two time windows and are interpreted within the dual-process model of recognition memory. The results are relevant to understanding the processes involved in language learning as they show a common variability for second-language phoneme and voice recognition processes. (shrink)

This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue against this view by describing the main features and problems of (...) reductionism and enactivism and then we will offer two arguments against this shared factualist assumption: (1) normative vocabulary is ineliminable if we want a complete explanation of our situated practices; and (2) the factualist assumption is a species of the is-ought fallacy. Finally, we will claim that a folk psychological explanation of our normative practices is fully compatible with ontological naturalism when such descriptivist or factualist assumption is rejected. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Extended Synthesis, ecological information, and biosemiotics are complementary approaches whose engagement will help us explain the organism-environment interaction at the cognitive level. The Extended Synthesis, through niche construction theory, can explain the organism-environment interaction at an evolutionary level because niche construction is a process guided by information. We believe that the best account that defines information at this level is the one offered by biosemiotics and, within all kinds of biosemiotic information available, we believe that (...) ecological information is the best candidate for making sense of the organism-environment relation at the cognitive level. This entanglement of biosemiotics, ecological information and the Extended Synthesis is promising for understanding the multidimensional character of the organism-environment reciprocity as well as the relation between evolution, cognition, and meaning. (shrink)