A nationwide survey that included personal interviews in 1,021 households studied the incidence, species, and numbers of nonhuman animals kept in Costa Rican households. A total of 71% of households keep animals.The proportion of households keeping dogs is 3.6 higher than the proportion of households keeping cats . In addition to the usual domestic or companion animals kept in 66% of the households, 24% of households keep wild species as pets. Although parrots are the bulk of wild species kept as (...) pets, there is vast species diversity, including other birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, fishes, and invertebrates - typically caught in their natural habitat to satisfy the pet market. The extraction from the wild and the keeping of such animals is by-and-large illegal and often involves endangered species. Costa Ricans, in a conservative estimate, keep about 151,288 parrots as pets. More than half the respondents have kept a psittacid at some point in their lives. Pet keeping is a common practice in Costa Rican society, and its incidence is high by international standards. (shrink)

El ensayo intenta conectar y defender el concepto de “verosímil” en la obra de Carlos Vaz Ferreira. Esto se justifica a través de la teoría del “Razonablismo” desarrollada en las obras de Lógica viva, Un paralogismo de actualidad y Conocimiento acción. Por tanto, con esto pretendemos una mejor comprensión de los conceptos de razón y acción.

We report three experimental studies of reasoning with double conditionals, i.e. problems based on premises of the form: If A then B. If B then C. where A, B, and C, describe everyday events. We manipulated both the logical structure of the problems, using all four possible arrangements (or ''figures" of their constituents, A, B, and C, and the believability of the two salient conditional conclusions that might follow from them, i.e. If A then C , or If C then (...) A . The experiments showed that with figures for which there was a valid conclusion, the participants more often, and more rapidly, drew the valid conclusion when it was believable than when it was unbelievable. With figures for which there were no valid conclusions, the participants tended to draw whichever of the two conclusions was believable. These results were predicted by the theory that reasoning depends on constructing mental models of the premises. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with formal aspects of the logic of theory change, and in particular with the process of shrinking or contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition. It continues work in the area by the authors and Peter Gärdenfors. The paper defines a notion of safe contraction of a set of propositions, shows that it satisfies the Gärdenfors postulates for contraction and thus can be represented as a partial meet contraction, and studies its properties both in general and (...) under various natural constraints. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

It is essential to engage the public in conservation measures to conserve insects. We investigate the Protection Motivation Theory, as well as knowledge, attitudes, and sociodemographic variables as predictors of willingness to donate and actual donations to insect conservation for a representative German sample. The PMT subcomponents severity, self-efficacy, and response efficacy, as well as attitudes toward insects, income, and education level, significantly predicted WTD. In contrast, severity, response barriers, age, gender, and the WTD significantly influenced actual donations. Overall, components (...) of the PMT have high predictive power for both dependent variables. Our results suggest that an intention-behavior gap exists between the intention to donate and the actual donation toward insect conservation. Measures to increase WTD and actual donations for insect conservation are discussed. (shrink)

Hybrid languages are expansions of propositional modal languages which can refer to worlds. The use of strong hybrid languages dates back to at least [Pri67], but recent work has focussed on a more constrained system called $\mathscr{H}$. We show in detail that $\mathscr{H}$ is modally natural. We begin by studying its expressivity, and provide model theoretic characterizations and a syntactic characterization. The key result to emerge is that $\mathscr{H}$ corresponds to the fragment of first-order logic which is invariant for generated (...) submodels. We then show that $\mathscr{H}$ enjoys interpolation, provide counterexamples for its finite variable fragments, and show that weak interpolation holds for the sublanguage $\mathscr{H}$. Finally, we provide complexity results for $\mathscr{H}$ and other fragments and variants, and sharpen known undecidability results for $\mathscr{H}$. (shrink)

El artículo es una propuesta de lectura del poema de Parménides. Contra la exégesis que de él han hecho las interpretaciones tradicionales estrechándolo en el inmovilismo, el autor enfatiza una idea de habla que permite acoger la diferencia irreductible entre cosa y palabra, cuyas consecuencias son fundamentales para el pensamiento: en lugar del modo dialéctico, la relación presencia-ausencia se lleva a cabo en una escritura que concibe el ser como donación (de sentido) y el pensamiento como máscara.

Las ciencias sociales, desde sus orígenes, consideraron sencillo explicar sucesos relevantes y, en general, todas las manifestaciones de la vida humana, a través de un discurso que tenía como meta la reducción del significado de las acciones sociales a explicaciones nomológicas que se asumieron como verdades absolutas. Sostengo que este paradigma epistemológico fue asumido por las ciencias sociales como si el conocimiento de los hechos del pasado y del presente no fuese más que el resultado de explananda, inferidos de la (...) corroboración o ‘falsación’ de explanans, en conformidad con la aplicación de métodos inductivos e, incluso, deductivos. El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer, siguiendo a Hannah Arendt, que la tarea del teórico social no consiste en intentar someter a prueba, a través del “método científico”, sus hipótesis, sino que debe hurgar y analizar aquellos hechos que se presumen que son relevantes para las experiencias humanas concretas, acudiendo a la hermenéutica; un enfoque que vislumbro como más apropiado si lo que se desea es determinar la verdad relativa de los resultados de las actividades, instituciones y manifestaciones sociales, dentro del contexto histórico-político en el cual se insertan. (shrink)

El presente ensayo intenta explorar, siguiendo un filón abierto por Hannah Arendt, la hipótesis de que, en buena medida, el más eximio representante del liberalismo contemporáneo John Rawls no sólo asume el modelo contractualista hobbesiano, sino que vía Adam Smith, se apoya en su metafísica. Del mismo modo se sugiere que si el punto de partida de la teoría de la justicia de Rawls es la concepción del individuo : "como un sujeto autónomo capaz de orientarse por fines generalizables en (...) la vida pública", tal premisa no sólo muestra la deuda de Rawls con Kant, sino que ella ha sido igualmente determinante para la filosofía de Hobbes y para la teoría económica de Smith. Por último, mi tesis es que tanto la "mano invisible" de Adam Smith como "los dos principios de la justicia" de John Rawls persiguen mutatis mutandi el mismo telos del "Leviathan" de Thomas Hobbes; a saber, instaurar una "Sociedad Bien Ordenada". (shrink)

This paper discusses the varieties of capitalism in transitional societies in Latin America and Central / Eastern Europe. The intended purpose of these transitions from semi-closed import-substituting economies in the first case and state socialist ones in the second was to institutionalize open-market economies. Twenty or thirty years later, there is a variety of types of capitalism in these countries, which I classify into three: open-market, neo-mercantilist, and anemic. The question for sociology is whether these quite different variants represent temporary (...) stages or distortions in the same process of transition or whether, on the contrary, they may institutionalize as discrete forms of peripheral capitalism. Neither standard “legacy” argu­ments nor institutionalist theories offer satisfactory answers to this question. The multiple modernities approach, on the other hand, is more appropriate as a theoretical perspective, but it has not produced yet specific propositions applicable to this question. My paper makes two claims. First, the successful transfer of institutions depends on the congruence between these institutions and the broader institutional framework of the recipient economies, a point not developed by institutionalist theories. I offer a hypothesis in this regard: Two critical nodes of congruence are the regulatory and extractive capacity of the state and the strength of civil society. Second, market capitalism (as liberal democracy as well) is a complex institution, and some of its components “travel” more easily across societies and institutional frameworks, and therefore are easier to institutionalize. This is the source of the hybrid variants. (shrink)

The central claim of this article is that narrative agency, which I will define as a subject’s capacity to make sense of herself as an ‘I’ over time and in relation to other ‘I’s, is a precondition for identity formation. I engage with two critiques of this claim: first, that narrative agency is limited by, rather than primary to, subordinating gender norms and, second, that a view of narrative agency as primary is committed to too ambitious a conception of the (...) communicability of narratives. I argue that the narrative model survives these two criticisms by emphasising its irreducibility, its inherent relationality and its generative potential. I then suggest some of the ways in which a concept of narrative agency might help feminist critical theory to posit mutual recognition and respect as productive criteria for progressive self and social transformation. (shrink)

Models developed using machine learning are increasingly prevalent in scientific research. At the same time, these models are notoriously opaque. Explainable AI aims to mitigate the impact of opacity by rendering opaque models transparent. More than being just the solution to a problem, however, Explainable AI can also play an invaluable role in scientific exploration. This paper describes how post-hoc analytic techniques from Explainable AI can be used to refine target phenomena in medical science, to identify starting points for future (...) investigations of causal relationships, and to generate possible explanations of target phenomena in cognitive science. In this way, this paper describes how Explainable AI—over and above machine learning itself—contributes to the efficiency and scope of data-driven scientific research. (shrink)

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using a list of characteristic features, focusing on life’s effects, or categorizing biospheres rather than life itself; treating life as a fuzzy category, a process or a cluster of contingent properties; or advocating a ‘wait-and-see’ approach until other examples of life are created or discovered. But these skeptical, operational, and pluralistic approaches have intensified the debate, (...) rather than settled it. Given the failure of even these approaches, we advocate a new strategy. In this paper, we reverse the usual line of reasoning and argue that the “life problem” arises from thinking incorrectly about the nature of life. Scientists most often conceptualize life as a class or kind, with earthly life as a single instance of it. Instead, we advocate thinking about Earth’s Life as an individual, in the way that species are now thought to be. In this view, Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last universal common ancestor, and includes all its descendants. We can continue to use the category ‘life’ pragmatically to refer to similarities between various phenomena and Life. But the relevant similarities are a matter of interest and preference, not a matter of fact. The search for other life in the Universe, then, is merely a search for entities that resemble parts of Life in whatever sense astrobiologists find most appealing. This does not mean that the search for evolved complexity elsewhere in the universe or its creation in the lab are futile endeavors, but that debates over whether they count as ‘life’ are. Ironically, finally abandoning the concept ‘life’ may make our searches for evolved complexity more fruitful. We explain why. (shrink)

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, because attention and consciousness appear to share similar qualities. But, Montemayor and Haladjian point out, attention is defined functionally, whereas consciousness is generally defined in terms of its phenomenal character without a clear functional purpose. They offer new insights and proposals about how best to understand and study the relationship between consciousness and attention (...) by examining their functional aspects. The book's ultimate conclusion is that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. -/- Undertaking a rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work on attention and consciousness, Montemayor and Haladjian propose a spectrum of dissociation—a framework that identifies the levels of dissociation between consciousness and attention—ranging from identity to full dissociation. They argue that conscious attention, the focusing of attention on the contents of awareness, is constituted by overlapping but distinct processes of consciousness and attention. Conscious attention, they claim, evolved after the basic forms of attention, increasing access to the richest kinds of cognitive contents. -/- Montemayor and Haladjian's goal is to help unify the study of consciousness and attention across the disciplines. A focused examination of conscious attention will, they believe, enable theoretical progress that will further our understanding of the human mind. (shrink)

What are the limits of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the relational aspects of medical and nursing care? There has been a lot of recent work and applications showing the promise and efficiency of AI in clinical medicine, both at the research and treatment levels. Many of the obstacles discussed in the literature are technical in character, regarding how to improve and optimize current practices in clinical medicine and also how to develop better data bases for optimal parameter (...) adjustments and predictive algorithms. This paper argues that there are also in principle obstacles to the application of AI in clinical medicine and care where empathy is important, and that these problems cannot be solved with any of the technical and theoretical approaches that shape the current application of AI in specific areas of clinical medicine in which care for patients is fundamental. This is important, because it generates specific risks that may be overlooked otherwise, and it justifies the necessity of human monitoring and emotional intervention in clinical medicine. Consequently, difficult issues concerning moral and legal responsibility may ensue if these in principle problems are ignored. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Work on Stanley Cavell in contemporary political theory tends to foreground Cavell’s reading of Emersonian moral perfectionism, but this aspect of Cavell’s thought is often left out of feminist readings of his work. In this paper, I give an overview of Cavell’s importance to political theory, and I also trace two Cavellian-inspired feminisms: Sandra Laugier’s ordinary language inflected ethics of care and Toril Moi’s understanding of feminist theory as the close and careful reading (...) of examples. I argue that Cavellian-Emersonian moral perfectionism enhances these feminist readings of Cavell because it helps us explain certain practices in feminist activism, such as resisting conformity, acknowledging the limits of our understanding and being receptive to other members of our feminist community. (shrink)

This paper explores aspects of GPT-3 that have been discussed as harbingers of artificial general intelligence and, in particular, linguistic intelligence. After introducing key features of GPT-3 and assessing its performance in the light of the conversational standards set by Alan Turing in his seminal paper from 1950, the paper elucidates the difference between clever automation and genuine linguistic intelligence. A central theme of this discussion on genuine conversational intelligence is that members of a linguistic community never merely respond “algorithmically” (...) to queries through a selective kind of pattern recognition, because they must also jointly attend and act with other speakers in order to count as genuinely intelligent and trustworthy. This presents a challenge for systems like GPT-3, because representing the world in a way that makes conversational common ground salient is an essentially collective task that we can only achieve jointly with other speakers. Thus, the main difficulty for any artificially intelligent model of conversation is to account for the communicational intentions and motivations of a speaker through joint attention. These joint motivations and intentions seem to be completely absent from the standard way in which systems like GPT-3 and other artificial intelligent systems work. This is not merely a theoretical issue. Since GPT-3 and future iterations of similar systems will likely be available for commercial use through application programming interfaces, caution is needed regarding the risks created by these systems, which pass for “intelligent” but have no genuine communicational intentions, and can thereby produce fake and unreliable linguistic exchanges. (shrink)

Bayesian reverse-engineering is a research strategy for developing three-level explanations of behavior and cognition. Starting from a computational-level analysis of behavior and cognition as optimal probabilistic inference, Bayesian reverse-engineers apply numerous tweaks and heuristics to formulate testable hypotheses at the algorithmic and implementational levels. In so doing, they exploit recent technological advances in Bayesian artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, but also consider established principles from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Although these tweaks and heuristics are highly pragmatic in character and (...) are often deployed unsystematically, Bayesian reverse-engineering avoids several important worries that have been raised about the explanatory credentials of Bayesian cognitive science: the worry that the lower levels of analysis are being ignored altogether; the challenge that the mathematical models being developed are unfalsifiable; and the charge that the terms ‘optimal’ and ‘rational’ have lost their customary normative force. But while Bayesian reverse-engineering is therefore a viable and productive research strategy, it is also no fool-proof recipe for explanatory success. (shrink)

Freire is one of the most powerful voices challenging the hegemony of bureaucratic and banking educational systems. His voice was particularly influential impacting revolutionary processes and progressive social movements while at the same time learning from their practices. However, some silences in his oeuvres requires further examination. In this article, we focus on the silences of Freire regarding education and its relationship with work and labor, gender issues, and citizenship building.

We investigate the expressive power of memory logics. These are modal logics extended with the possibility to store (or remove) the current node of evaluation in (or from) a memory, and to perform membership tests on the current memory. From this perspective, the hybrid logic (↓), for example, can be thought of as a particular case of a memory logic where the memory is an indexed list of elements of the domain.

Im Werk von Gilles Deleuze und Michel Foucault sind Körper und Körperlichkeit zentrale Aspekte, die in diesem Band erstmalig vergleichend in den Fokus gerückt werden. Die Beiträger_innen stellen die Entwürfe beider Denker zur Ästhetik und Ethik als Reflexionen der Beziehung zwischen Körper und Bild vor und betonen die Verkettungen von Körper, Macht und Ästhetik. Gleichzeitig werden spezifische Fragen der jüngeren Deleuze- und Foucault-Forschung angesprochen. Der interdisziplinäre Band bietet Wissenschaftler_innen aus Philosophie und Kunstgeschichte sowie den Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften einen thematischen Überblick (...) und weiterführende Lektüre. (shrink)

On a highly influential way to think of modality, that I call ‘relationalism’, the modality of a state is explained by its being composed of properties, and these properties being related by a higher-order and primitively modal relation. Examples of relationalism are the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong account of natural necessity, many dispositional essentialist views, and Wang’s incompatibility primitivism. I argue that relationalism faces four difficulties: that the selection between modal relations is arbitrary, that the modal relation cannot belong to any logical order, (...) that to explain how the modal relation can relate properties of different adicities additional ideological complexity has to be introduced, and that not all modal constraints are relational. From the discussion, I will extract desiderata for a successor theory of modality. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to present a logical framework that allow to formalize a kind of prima facie duties, defeasible conditional duties, indefeasible conditional duties and actual (indefeasible) duties, as well as to show their logical interconnections.

This chapter subsumes David Marr’s levels of analysis account of explanation in cognitive science under the framework of mechanistic explanation: Answering the questions that define each one of Marr’s three levels is tantamount to describing the component parts and operations of mechanisms, as well as their organization, behavior, and environmental context. By explicating these questions and showing how they are answered in several different cognitive science research programs, this chapter resolves some of the ambiguities that remain in Marr’s account, and (...) shows that many different areas and traditions of cognitive scientific research can be unified under the mechanistic framework. (shrink)

This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology, that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we (...) examine how the inherently reciprocal dynamics of “earth” and “world,” as thematised by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, have become opaque. Second, we analyse whether it is possible to find those same dynamics at play behind Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” which we propose to reread in binary key in dialogue with contemporary anthropology, from Bateson and Lévi-Strauss to Wagner and Viveiros de Castro, and in light of Guattari’s notion of “trans-entitarian generativity.” Third, we stress the need to reposition Heidegger’s thought alongside contemporary concerns on “worlding” and we explore its plausible intersections with today’s object-oriented ethnography. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of rereading Heidegger’s Fourfold afresh against the backdrop of Heidegger’s non-foundational thinking, as a conceptual metaphor for the joint dynamics of Abgrund and Grund. (shrink)

Expressivists claim that normative judgments (NJ) are non-cognitive states. But what kind of states are they, exactly? Expressivists need to provide us with an adequate account of their nature. Here, I argue that there are structural features that render this task rather daunting. The worry takes the form of a looming dilemma: NJ are either conative states (i.e. states with a world-to-mind direction of fit) or they are not. If they are, then they are either attitudes de se (i.e. attitudes (...) about oneself) or they are not. If they are, then they’re unable to account for disagreement. If they are not, then they're unable to account for agent-relative NJ. So NJ cannot be conative states (they cannot have a world-to-mind direction of fit). On the other hand, however, if NJ are not conative states (if they are states without a direction of fit, like affective or other sui generis non-cognitive, non-conative attitudes) then it remains a mystery how they support relations of disagreement. (shrink)

Between the two horns of Jørgensen's dilemma, the authors opt for that according to which logic deals not only with truth and falsity but also with those concepts not possessing this semantic reference. Notwithstanding the “descriptive” prejudice, deontic logic has gained validity among modal logics. The technical foundation proposed consists in an abstract characterization of logical consequence. By identifying in the abstract notion of consequence the primitive from which to begin, it is possible to define the connectives - even those (...) of obligation - by means of the rules of introduction or elimination in a context of derivation. (shrink)

The Polish logician Roman Suszko has extensively pleaded in the 1970s for a restatement of the notion of many-valuedness. According to him, as he would often repeat, “there are but two logical values, true and false.” As a matter of fact, a result by W´ojcicki-Lindenbaum shows that any tarskian logic has a many-valued semantics, and results by Suszko-da Costa-Scott show that any many-valued semantics can be reduced to a two-valued one. So, why should one even consider using logics with more (...) than two values? Because, we argue, one has to decide how to deal with bivalence and settle down the tradeoff between logical 2-valuedness and truth-functionality, from a pragmatical standpoint. -/- This paper will illustrate the ups and downs of a two-valued reduction of logic. Suszko’s reductive result is quite non-constructive.We will exhibit here a way of effectively constructing the two-valued semantics of any logic that has a truth-functional finite-valued semantics and a sufficiently expressive language. From there, as we will indicate, one can easily go on to provide those logics with adequate canonical systems of sequents or tableaux. The algorithmic methods developed here can be generalized so as to apply to many non-finitely valued logics as well —or at least to those that admit of computable quasi tabular two-valued semantics, the so-called dyadic semantics. (shrink)

The frame problem, a long-standing issue in Artificial Intelligence (AI), revolves around determining the relevance of information in an ever-changing array of contexts, posing a formidable challenge in modeling human reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that emotions are able to solve, or at least enable a substantial step towards a solution. I argue that, while emotions are integral to cognitive processes, they do not offer a solution to the frame problem, nor can they play (...) a significant role in a solution. In the course of the argument, I’ll show why some previous claims that emotions could be helpful towards a solution rely on a problematic analysis of what the frame problem is. Ultimately, the conclusion is that no context-dependent feature can play a non-trivial role in solutions to the frame problem, and that is the case of emotions. (shrink)

: "We are invisible": this melancholic assertion alludes to the "non-place" that we occupy as Latin American philosophers or, in general, as philosophers in the Spanish or Portuguese languages. We tend to survive as mere ghosts teaching courses and writing texts, perhaps some memorable ones, which, however, seldom spark anybody's interest, among other reasons, because almost no one takes the time to read them. In saying this, I do not mean to call upon a useless pathos, nor do I mean (...) to complain, or thrust forth a challenge. I am simply confirming a fact, and a widely acknowledged one at that. I wish to inquire a little into this invisibility. Later I will look into how the experience of our much acclaimed essay may help in fighting it. (shrink)