While poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions and non-verbal intelligence performance, as well as individual and environmental information was obtained from 131 5-year-old children. For the same level of SES, children in rural settings performed consistently worse (...) than children in urban settings. These differences could be accounted mostly by the months of past preschool attendance and the father’s completed level of education. These results should inform policies and programs for children living in rural poverty worldwide, and specially in Latin America. (shrink)

Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of the language or not. This (...) difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both “early” and “late” eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the visual representation of dignity, through the particular example of the seventeenth century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Velázquez works at a point in Western history when modern conceptions of dignity are beginning to be formed. It is argued that Velázquez' portraits of royalty and aristocracy articulate a tension between a feudal conception of majesty and a modern conception of the dignity of merit. On this level, modern conceptions of dignity of merit (...) are understood in terms of a struggle to excel in particular activities, and thus to overcome the risk of failure. More radically, Velázquez' portraits of dwarfs and the mentally disabled are argued to be expressive of dignity, not by finding a positive representation of the sitter's dignity, or to find scales of activities by which they can be positively assessed, but rather by grounding their dignity, negatively, in a protest against indignity and humiliation. Drawing on Honneth's analysis of dignity in terms of a theory of recognition, it is argued that the indignity of the court dwarf lies in the fracturing of their communication with the rest of society. The task of repairing that fractured communication is achieved, not by representing a dignified ideal, but rather by drawing attention to the prejudices that serve to exclude the humiliated from full participation in society. In conclusion, it is suggested that the conceptualisation and representation of the elderly today finds effective exemplars in Velázquez' portraits of court dwarfs, rather than in his portraits of the elderly. (shrink)

This Element engages with the epistemic significance of disagreement, focusing on its skeptical implications. It examines various types of disagreement-motivated skepticism in ancient philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and general epistemology. In each case, it favors suspension of judgment as the seemingly appropriate response to the realization of disagreement. One main line of argument pursued in the Element is that, since in real-life disputes we have limited or inaccurate information about both our own epistemic standing and the epistemic standing of (...) our dissenters, personal information and self-trust can rarely function as symmetry breakers in favor of our own views. (shrink)

One of the central aims of the neo-mechanistic framework for the neural and cognitive sciences is to construct a pluralistic integration of scientific explanations, allowing for a weak explanatory autonomy of higher-level sciences, such as cognitive science. This integration involves understanding human cognition as information processing occurring in multi-level human neuro-cognitive mechanisms, explained by multi-level neuro-cognitive models. Strong explanatory neuro-cognitive reduction, however, poses a significant challenge to this pluralist ambition and the weak autonomy of cognitive science derived therefrom. Based on (...) research in current molecular and cellular neuroscience, the framework holds that the best strategy for integrating human neuro-cognitive theories is through direct reductive explanations based on molecular and cellular neural processes. It is my aim to investigate whether the neo-mechanistic framework can meet the challenge. I argue that leading neo-mechanists offer some significant replies; however, they are not able yet to completely remove strong explanatory reductionism from their own framework. (shrink)

Based on a presentation at The Undivided Mind conference at Plymouth University, this article sketches out speculative applications of somatics, the first person, phenomenological study of sensation, perception and movement. I first introduce the subject of somatics through an experiential exercise for the reader before summarizing theoretical aspects of somatic study. Drawing from the literature in embodied cognition and from personal recollections of embodied experiences, I propose how somatic approaches could potentially be used in working with immigrant communities, living in (...) outer space, and empathizing with non-human animals. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the heuristic power of the theoretical distinction between framework and interaction theories applied to the case of General Relativity. According to the distinction, theories and theoretical elements can be classified into two different groups, each with clear ontological, epistemic and functional content. Being so, to identify the group to which a theory belongs would suffice to know a priori its prospects and limitations in these areas without going into a detailed technical analysis. We make the (...) exercise here with General Relativity, anticipate its ontological, epistemic and functional content and show afterwords that such expectations are justified in this case, being consistent with formal issues of General Relativity. With this, we attempt to make a case for the use of the distinction as a powerful tool for scientific and philosophical analysis. (shrink)

Sociology's main concerns can already be found in the social thought of the XVIII and XIX centuries. This essay seeks to recover some of the central preoccupations of the main characters of that early sociological historical period. This will further the understanding of the process of sociological consolidation of the XXth century, as a consequence of earlier periods, expressed in powerful intellectual programs for the construction of a new social order based on the consequences of the processes of generalized industrialization (...) and modernization in Western societies on the lives of individuals. (shrink)

Reconstructing some of the experiences of people living with tuberculosis in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century, as reflected not only in written and oral accounts but also in individual and collective actions, this article explores the ways in which patients came to grips with medical expertise in times of biomedical uncertainty. These negotiations, which inevitably included adaptations as well as confrontations, highlight a much less passive and submissive patient–physician relationship than is often assumed. Though patients were (...) certainly subordinate to medical doctors’ knowledge and practices, that subordination, far from absolute, was limited and often overthrown. The article focuses on patients’ demands to gain access to a vaccine not approved by the medical establishment. By engaging with media organizations, the sick invoked their “right to health” in order to obtain access to experimental treatments when biomedicine was unable to deliver efficient therapies. (shrink)

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. David Chalmerss version of two-dimensional semantics is an attempt at setting up a unified semantic framework that would vindicate both the Fregean and the Kripkean semantic intuitions. I claim that there are three acceptable ways of carrying out such a project, and that Chalmerss theory does not coherently fit any of the three patterns. I suggest that the theory may be seen as pointing to the possibility of a double reading for many linguistic expressions (a double reading which, however, (...) is not easily identified with straightforward semantic ambiguity). (shrink)

O artigo tem por objetivo contribuir para a já antiga discussão sobre a relação de Kant com a metafísica expondo os diversos sentidos que esta disciplina assume na filosofia crítica. Orientada por um interesse sistemático e tendo por base o capítulo sobre a Arquitetônica da Razão Pura da Crítica da razão pura, a presente investigação procura esclarecer a reformulação por que passam na filosofia crítica kantiana as disciplinas tradicionais da metafísica racionalista, mais precisamente a metaphysica generalis e a metaphysica specialis, (...) reconfiguradas em uma analítica do entendimento e em uma fisiologia da razão, respectivamente, e ancoradas no projeto propriamente kantiano de uma Metafísica dos Costumes e uma Metafísica da Natureza. (shrink)

This paper explores space as a core source of aesthetic pleasure in various codes of football. The paper begins by applying Kant’s distinction between the agreeable and the pleasurable to sport, arguing that the appreciation of sport entails more than just excitement. Pleasure comes from an appreciation of the rules, strategies and history of the game. The significance of the rules of various codes of football in articulating our experience of space will be taken as fundamental to such appreciation. Drawing (...) on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the ‘topoanalysis’ of Gaston Bachelard, it will be argued that the aesthetic appreciation of football lies, not simply in recognising the complexity and subtlety of the movement of players and ball about the pitch, but more significantly in the creative and poetic imagination that the player embodies, and the striving of the player to create places within the course of play within which they can exercise their own competence as a player, and inhibit the compete.. (shrink)

El presente trabajo indaga las condiciones históricas e ideológicas de la excomunión de Spinoza en 1656, y la vinculación de este episodio con las discutidas influencias de Van den Enden, Juan de Prado o Isaac la Peyrère en la temprana heterodoxia del joven Baruch, según las clásicas tesis de investigadores como Madelaine Francès, I. S. Rèvah, Jacob Teicher, Carl Gebhardt o, más recientemente, Richard Popkin, Josef Kaplan y Steven Nadler. A partir de este relevamiento historiográfico se sugiere una motivación “democrática” (...) en el fondo de la segregación de Spinoza por la Sinagoga y su puesta fuera de comunidad. (shrink)

En un intento de probar los límites de la interpretación más aceptada de lamecánica cuántica, de acuerdo con la cual los sistemas microscópicos seencuentran siempre en una superposición de estados, el premio Nobel defísica A. Leggett ha propuesto la tesis del macrorealismo, según la cual lassuperposiciones mecanico-cuánticas de estados microscópicamentediferentes nunca tienen lugar. Leggett ha mostrado también los elementosbásicos de algunas pruebas experimentales que podrían decidirdefinitivamente entre la mecánica cuántica y el macrorealismo. En este textopresento los elementos fundamentales de la (...) interpretación estándar de lamecánica cuántica y del macrorealimo, a fin de poner en evidencia que losresultados experimentales están más abiertos a interpretación de lo que Leggettestá dispuesto a aceptar. Dentro de las interpretaciones alternativas sedestaca la posibilidad de comprender los resultados como ejemplos deviolaciones al principio de inducción en que descansa el macrorealismo,abriendo así la puerta para resolver la tensión entre la MC y el macrorealismoen términos causalidad inversa, de acuerdo con la cual no es necesarioapelar a ningún papel especial desempeñado ni por los observadores ni porlos aparatos de medición a fin de explicar las diferencias entre los sistemasmecánico-cuánticos y los macroscópicos, una diferencia que puede ahoraser definida parcialmente en términos de su direccionalidad causal y temporal. (shrink)

Algunas consideraciones sobre la integración regional en el África Subsahariana. La experiencia del África Austral.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the connection between Arendt and Merleau-Ponty’s political thought based on the relation between the contingency of action and the spatiality of conflict. Even though the shared concern for developing a phenomenology of action institutes a common ground between their theories, I intend to show that there are significant philosophical differences when it comes to their understanding of conflict and the space in which it unfolds. Although both authors approach the question of action (...) by decentering the subject and by rejecting the notion of an objective and “egocentered” space, the way in which history and the social sphere inform their elucidation of the spatiality of conflict reveals a mismatch between Arendt’s plurality and Merleau-Ponty’s coexistence. I argue that this mismatch holds important consequences as to what each of them understands by political action. (shrink)

África Occidental representa a día de hoy un lugar clave para la geopolítica del islam contemporáneo. Esta situación no es una nueva, al contrario, ya que es un territorio que históricamente ha estado ligado a la religión musulmana. Actualmente, esta región supone un lugar estratégico prioritario para los intereses de los países occidentales, de países musulmanes aliados de estos y de insurgentes y rebeldes ligados a ideologías neo-fundamentalistas. El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar desde una perspectiva transdisciplinar el juego (...) geopolítico del islam en África Occidental, como influyen las diversas escuelas de pensamiento islámico contemporáneo en las identidades locales y que estrategias siguen las potencias actuales para intentar influir identitariamente en la zona. Para este propósito, abordaremos algunos hechos históricos acaecidos, especialmente, en Senegal, Mali, Nigeria y Mauritania. (shrink)