En Estados Unidos las teorías de la democracia han evolucionado de la mano de momentos políticos claves, como el primer debate sobre la Constitución y el establecimiento de un estado federal unitario. Este proceso influyó en la visión de la participación política, que pasó a estar supeditada a las n..

Digital technology has facilitated additional means for human communication, allowing social connections across communities, cultures, and continents. However, little is known about the effect these communication technologies have on the ability to accurately recognize and utilize nonverbal behavior cues. We present two competing theories, which suggest (1) the potential for technology use toenhancenonverbal decoding skill or, (2) the potential for technology use tohindernonverbal decoding skill. We present preliminary results from two studies to test these hypotheses. Study 1 (N= 410) found (...) that global screen time was unrelated to nonverbal decoding skill. However, how participants spent their time using technology mattered. Participants who reported more active technology use (i.e., posting content) self-reported that their nonverbal decoding skill (as measured by the Emotional Sensitivity subscale of the Social Skills Inventory) was superior but performed worse on objective measures of decoding skill (using standardized tests including the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-Adult Faces and the Workplace Interpersonal Perception Skill). By contrast, passive users performed significantly better on objective measures of nonverbal decoding skill; although they did not self-report any difference in their skill compared to less passive users. Study 2 (N= 190), and a mini-meta analysis of both studies, replicated this pattern. These effects suggest a roadmap for understanding the theoretical relationship between technology use and nonverbal communication skills. We also provide recommendations for future research, including the use of experimental designs to determine causal pathways and to advance our conceptual understanding of the relationship between technology use and nonverbal decoding skill. (shrink)

Clark has recently suggested that predictive processing advances a theory of neural function with the resources to put an ecumenical end to the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. In this paper I defend and develop this suggestion. First, I broaden the representation wars to include three foundational challenges to representational cognitive science. Second, I articulate three features of predictive processing’s account of internal representation that distinguish it from more orthodox representationalist frameworks. Specifically, I argue that it posits a resemblance-based (...) representational architecture with organism-relative contents that functions in the service of pragmatic success, not veridical representation. Finally, I argue that internal representation so understood is either impervious to the three anti-representationalist challenges I outline or can actively embrace them. (shrink)

Predictive processing has recently been advanced as a global cognitive architecture for the brain. I argue that its commitments concerning the nature and format of cognitive representation are inadequate to account for two basic characteristics of conceptual thought: first, its generality—the fact that we can think and flexibly reason about phenomena at any level of spatial and temporal scale and abstraction; second, its rich compositionality—the specific way in which concepts productively combine to yield our thoughts. I consider two strategies for (...) avoiding these objections and I argue that both confront formidable challenges. (shrink)

Why do well‐functioning psychological systems sometimes give rise to absurd beliefs that are radically misaligned with reality? Drawing on signalling theory, I develop and explore the hypothesis that groups often embrace beliefs that are viewed as absurd by outsiders as a means of signalling ingroup commitment. I clarify the game‐theoretic and psychological underpinnings of this hypothesis, I contrast it with similar proposals about the signalling functions of beliefs, and I motivate several psychological and sociological predictions that could be used to (...) distinguish it from alternative explanations of irrational group beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that explanations just ARE those sorts of things that, under the right circumstances and in the right sort of way, bring about understanding. This raises the question of why such a seemingly simple account of explanation, if correct, would not have been identified and agreed upon decades ago. The answer is that only recently has it been made possible to analyze explanation in terms of understanding without the risk of collapsing both to merely phenomenological states. (...) For the most part, theories of explanation were for 50 years held hostage to the historical accident that they far outstripped in sophistication corresponding accounts of understanding. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a substantial increase in alternative agrifood initiatives that attempt to use the market to curtail the negative social and environmental effects of production and trade in a globalized food system. These alternatives pose a challenge to capital accumulation and the externalization of environmental costs by large agribusiness, trading and retail firms. Yet the success of these alternatives also makes them an inviting target for corporate participation. This article examines these dynamics through a case study of the (...) two most significant such food system alternatives—organics and fair trade—focusing on corporate involvement in establishing and renegotiating the standards undergirding these initiatives. We compare the development of and contestation over the standards for both certified organic and certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. We provide a brief history of their parallel processes of rapid growth and market mainstreaming. We examine claims of cooptation by movement participants, as well as the divergences and similarities between the organic and fair trade cases. Analyzing these two cases provides useful insights into the strategic approaches that corporate firms have deployed to further capital accumulation and to defuse threats to their profit margins and to status quo production, pricing, labor, trading and retailing practices. It can also offer valuable lessons regarding the most effective means of responding to such counter-reforms and of protecting or reasserting the more transformative elements at the heart of these alternative systems. (shrink)

Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle in cognitive science and philosophy: that it identifies a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems; and that it has important implications for our understanding of how the brain works, defining a set of process theories—roughly, theories of the structure and functions of neural mechanisms—consistent with the free energy minimising imperative that it derives as a necessary feature of all self-organising systems. I argue that the conjunction (...) of claims and rests on a fallacy of equivocation. The FEP can be interpreted in two ways: as a claim about how it is possible to redescribe the existence of self-organising systems, and as a claim about how such systems maintain their existence. Although the Descriptive FEP plausibly does identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems, it has no important implications for our understanding of how the brain works. Although the Explanatory FEP would have such implications if it were true, it does not identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems. I consider various ways of responding to this conclusion, and I explore its implications for the role and importance of the FEP in cognitive science and philosophy. (shrink)

The notion of ‘revealed preference’ is unclear and should be abandoned. Defenders of the theory of revealed preference have misinterpreted legitimate concerns about the testability of economics as the demand that economists eschew reference to (unobservable) subjective states. As attempts to apply revealed-preference theory to game theory illustrate with particular vividness, this demand is mistaken.

Recent medical and bioethics literature shows a growing concern for practitioners’ emotional experience and the ethical environment in the workplace. Moral distress, in particular, is often said to result from the difficult decisions made and the troubling situations regularly encountered in health care contexts. It has been identified as a leading cause of professional dissatisfaction and burnout, which, in turn, contribute to inadequate attention and increased pain for patients. Given the natural desire to avoid these negative effects, it seems to (...) most authors that systematic efforts should be made to drastically reduce moral distress, if not altogether eliminate it from the lives of vulnerable practitioners. Such efforts, however, may be problematic, as moral distress is not adequately understood, nor is there agreement among the leading accounts regarding how to conceptualize the experience. With this article I make clear what a robust account of moral distress should be able to explain and how the most common notions in the existing literature leave significant explanatory gaps. I present several cases of interest and, with careful reflection upon their distinguishing features, I establish important desiderata for an explanatorily satisfying account. With these fundamental demands left unsatisfied by the leading accounts, we see the persisting need for a conception of moral distress that can capture and delimit the range of cases of interest. (shrink)

Understanding the interplay between memory and emotion is crucial for the work of researchers in many arenas--clinicians, psychologists interested in eyewitness ...

This paper argues that radical enactivism (RE) offers a framework with the required nuance needed for understanding of the full range of the various forms of pretense. In particular, its multi-storey account of cognition, which holds that psychological attitudes can be both contentless and contentful, enables it to appropriately account for both the most basic and most advanced varieties of pretense. By comparison with other existing accounts of pretense, RE is shown to avoid the pitfalls of representationalist theories while also (...) allowing us to combine the best elements of the praxeological enactivist (Weichold & Rucińska, 2021 ) and Langland-Hassan’s ( 2020, 2021 ) proposals about pretense, while avoiding their key shortcomings. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits (...) of knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

Jeffrey (1983) proposed a generalization of conditioning as a means of updating probability distributions when new evidence drives no event to certainty. His rule requires the stability of certain conditional probabilities through time. We tested this assumption (“invariance”) from the psychological point of view. In Experiment 1 participants offered probability estimates for events in Jeffrey’s candlelight example. Two further scenarios were investigated in Experiment 2, one in which invariance seems justified, the other in which it does not. Results were in (...) rough conformity to Jeffrey (1983)’s principle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 371-373 [Access article in PDF] Book Review French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, by Colin Davis & Elizabeth Fallaize; 160pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, $24.95. Like the Mitterrand era itself, Davis and Fallaize's French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years is somewhat uneven. The election of François Mitterrand in 1981 as the (...) President of the Fifth Republic was a milestone in modern French history. After the conservative politics of the 1960s and 70s, the election of a socialist president and legislature seemed to offer the possibility of a new political and intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency brought sweeping reforms. However, several scandals, continued economic problems and later "cohabitation" with a right-wing legislative majority muted the original verve. Mired in partisan politics, the government often appeared ineffectual.As with the political arena, French fiction of the 1980s was produced under the shadow of another long-standing French institution--the nouveau roman. Again we find a new direction, a turning-away from the past during the 1980s. Yet there was no outright refusal. There were no manifestos or polemical articles written by budding novelists, no claim to Literature. As Annie Ernaux describes her work Une Femme (1987): "Mon projet est de nature littéraire [...]. Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature" (My project is of a literary nature [...]. But I wish to remain, in a certain way, beneath literature (p. 144).This lack of pretension is important, for it helps us better understand the writing of the period. As Davis and Fallaize point out, in the fiction of the Mitterrand years we find a return to history, to the subject, and to storytelling, three areas disdained by the new novelists of the 1950s and 60s (pp. 12-15). But at the same time, there is not an elegiac return to the conventions of the past. There are no didactic tales of Lucien de Rubempré's lost illusions. A good example of this is Patrick Roegiers's Beau Regard (1990), the account of a dinner during which hardly anyone speaks, told by a narrator who knows no one else at the table. Davis and Fallaize note: "In these novels the event is merely an incident, the story no more than an anecdote, and the anecdote merely a fait divers" (p. 147). Although not inconsequential, argue Davis and Fallaize, there is an unquestionable modesty to these texts.In the introduction to their work Davis and Fallaize write: "The aim of the current book is to analyze some of the most important and interesting directions in French fiction through detailed discussions of a selection of texts, all published during François Mitterrand's period as President of the Fifth Republic (1981-95)" (p. 1). This is exactly what they accomplish, selecting six novels--Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), Pennac's Au bonheur des ogres (The Scapegoat, 1985), Semprun's La Montagne blanche (1986), Echenoz's Lac (Lake, 1989), Guilbert's A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save [End Page 371] my Life, 1990), and Ernaux's Passion simple (Simple Passion, 1991)--and spending one chapter on each. They also discuss some of the important features of the era's fiction including memory, especially of World War II, contemporary culture and postmodernism, and autofiction.However, the book's limited goal also leads to some of its problems. As a whole, the work lacks cohesion. Chapters often read like individual essays. Moreover, although some chapters are well-grounded critically and contextually, others are not. Finally, the conclusion is too brief to synthesize aptly the various topics discussed in the previous chapters. The reader does not have a solid grasp of the fictional landscape of the Mitterrand years, but rather, as the introduction indicated, knowledge of "some of the [...] interesting directions in French fiction."One of the most illuminating chapters considers Daniel... (shrink)

In a critique of my work on ‘taking the blame’ as a response to medical errors, my position on the potential goods of individual responsibility and blame is challenged. It is suggested that medicine is a ‘team sport’ and several rich examples are provided to support the possible harms of practitioner self-blame. Yet, it appears that my critics have misunderstood my demands and to whom they are directed. With this response, I offer several clarifications of my account, as well as (...) a reiteration on the role of self-blame after medical error. (shrink)

Widespread commercial use of the internet has significantly increased the volume and scope of data being collected by organisations. ‘Big data’ has emerged as a term to encapsulate both the technical and commercial aspects of this growing data collection activity. To date, much of the discussion of big data has centred upon its transformational potential for innovation and efficiency, yet there has been less reflection on its wider implications beyond commercial value creation. This paper builds upon normal accident theory to (...) analyse the broader ethical implications of big data. It argues that the strategies behind big data require organisational systems that leave them vulnerable to normal accidents, that is to say some form of accident or disaster that is both unanticipated and inevitable. Whilst NAT has previously focused on the consequences of physical accidents, this paper suggests a new form of system accident that we label data accidents. These have distinct, less tangible and more complex characteristics and raise significant questions over the role of individual privacy in a ‘data society’. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the risks of such data accidents might be managed or mitigated. (shrink)

Sex differences in mortality rates stem from genetic, physiological, behavioral, and social causes that are best understood when integrated in an evolutionary life history framework. This paper investigates the Male-to-Female Mortality Ratio (M:F MR) from external and internal causes and across contexts to illustrate how sex differences shaped by sexual selection interact with the environment to yield a pattern with some consistency, but also with expected variations due to socioeconomic and other factors.

Bruineberg et al. provide compelling clarity on the roles Markov blankets could (and perhaps should) play in the study of life and mind. However, here we draw attention to a further role blankets might play: as a hypothesis about cognition itself. People and other animals may use blanket-like representations to model the boundary between themselves and their worlds.

The ancient background -- Weiss and the pursuit of bodily excellence -- Huizinga and the homo ludens hypothesis -- Feezell, moderation, and irony -- The process of becoming virtuous.

The past twenty years have been an incredibly productive period in science studies. Still, because recent work in science studies puts a spotlight on agency and enabling situa tions, many practitioners in the field ignore, underplay, or dismiss the possibility that historically established, structurally stable attributes of the world may systemically shape practice at the laboratory level. This article questions this general position. Draw ing on data from a participant observation study of a university biology laboratory, it describes five features (...) of the institutional landscape that shape this laboratory's practice. (shrink)