Reasoning, defined as the production and evaluation of reasons, is a central process in science. The dominant view of reasoning, both in the psychology of reasoning and in the psychology of science, is of a mechanism with an asocial function: bettering the beliefs of the lone reasoner. Many observations, however, are difficult to reconcile with this view of reasoning; in particular, reasoning systematically searches for reasons that support the reasoner’s initial beliefs, and it only evaluates these reasons cursorily. By contrast, (...) reasoners are well able to evaluate others’ reasons: accepting strong arguments and rejecting weak ones. The argumentative theory of reasoning accounts for these traits of reasoning by postulating that the evolved function of reasoning is to argue: to find arguments to convince others and to change one’s mind when confronted with good arguments. Scientific reasoning, however, is often described as being at odds with such an argumentative mechanisms: scientists are supposed to reason objectively on their own, and to be pigheaded when their theories are challenged, even by good arguments. In this article, we review evidence showing that scientists, when reasoning, are subject to the same biases as are lay people while being able to change their mind when confronted with good arguments. We conclude that the argumentative theory of reasoning explains well key features of scientists’ reasoning and that differences in the way scientists and laypeople reason result from the institutional framework of science. (shrink)

Coherence plays an important role in psychology. In this article, I suggest that coherence takes two main forms in humans’ cognitive system. The first belong to ‘system 1’. It relies on the degree of coherence between different representations to regulate them, without coherence being represented. By contrast other mechanisms, belonging to system 2, allow humans to represent the degree of coherence between different representations and to draw inferences from it. It is suggested that the mechanisms of explicit coherence evaluation have (...) social functions. They are used as means of epistemic vigilance—to evaluate what other people tell us. They can also be turned inwards to examine the coherence of our own beliefs. Their function is then to minimize the chances that we are perceived as being incoherent. Evidence from different domains of psychology is briefly reviewed in support of these hypotheses. (shrink)

Background Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?Methods To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).Results Across (...) various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge.Conclusions We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric, i.e., stronger for opposition than for approval. (shrink)

We elaborate on the approach to syllogistic reasoning based on “case identification” (Stenning & Oberlander, 1995; Stenning & Yule, 1997). It is shown that this can be viewed as the formalisation of a method of proof that dates back to Aristotle, namely proof by exposition ( ecthesis ), and that there are traces of this method in the strategies described by a number of psychologists, from St rring (1908) to the present day. We hypothesised that by rendering individual cases explicit (...) in the premises, the chance that reasoners would engage in a proof by exposition would be enhanced, and thus performance improved. To do so, we used syllogisms with singular premises (e.g., this X is Y ). This resulted in a uniform increase in performance as compared to performance on the associated standard syllogisms. These results cannot be explained by the main theories of syllogistic reasoning in their current state. (shrink)

Alfred Schmidt se coloca fuera del dogma del “marxismo soviético”. Considera textos inéditos en la vida de Marx, que permiten comprender los resultados en las obras centrales. Desde el concepto de naturaleza, discute la relación sujeto-objeto y necesidad- libertad. La naturaleza está mediada socio- ..

The Volksunie, partly from the opposition and partly from its participation in cabinet/coalitions made an important contribution to the processes of state reforms that remodeled Belgium in the 80's and 90's into a federal state. The party strongly introduced the federalist ideas in the political arena. In the seventies it played a pro-active role in the negociations with the French interlocuteurs. Although these negociations did not succeed, the solutions advocated in that period went on as possible outcomes for later negociations (...) and played a catalyst role. When taking part in the cabinets either the national and for the Flemish cabinets in the 80's and the 90's, its minister advocated and carried on a maximalizing federalist policy. Inside and outside the party, it was not easy to perform this policy. Even the electorate did not reward the party that much for its achievements, which can be summarized as an undeniable contribution to the federal state reform of Belgium. (shrink)

This study contributes to understanding stakeholder engagement strategies by examining competitive responses alongside sociopolitical implications after a major exogenous shock—the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between the “Big Four” U.S. tobacco firms and 46 state attorneys general. We compare the different stakeholder engagement strategies of the two remaining U.S. tobacco manufacturers, Philip Morris (PM) and R. J. Reynolds (RJR), between 1998 and 2017. Implications for stakeholder theory from a relatively rare natural experiment highlight the importance of simultaneously managing multiple stakeholders, (...) inclusive of domestic and international sociopolitical and value chain stakeholders over time, for sustained value creation. Although PM and RJR initially pursued heterogeneous strategies by re-configuring relationships with relevant stakeholders, each firm’s growth prospects for the first decade post-MSA were exacerbated by various stakeholders through withholding and selective engagement strategies. Implications for how multiple, simultaneous stakeholder relationships can serve as important resources for achieving or limiting sustained growth are discussed. (shrink)

Recent discussions of civil disobedience show the world of scholarship and public affairs in disarray. Not only is there considerable disagreement over how civil disobedience is to be justified, there is hardly less disagreement over what civil disobedience is. Can it be violent, or must it be nonviolent, in intention and in outcome? Can civil disorder be a special case of mass civil disobedience? Must civil disobedience proceed within the framework of the existing politico-legal system or may it be revolutionary (...) in intention? Could it be anarchistic? Should the authorities endeavor to prosecute and punish the civil disobedient as though he were a common criminal? Is disobedience which results in no punishment of the disobedient not civil disobedience after all? Because of disagreements over the answers to these questions, the description of an act as an act of civil disobedience is likely to be ambiguous and controversial not only for the general public and the government but even in some cases for the protesters themselves. Confusion rooted in honest misunderstanding is compounded by bad faith, by basic disagreements over the ideal and the actual relations between the individual and the state, and by obscurity in the facts surrounding the intentions of the protesters and the consequences of their acts. (shrink)

In 2005, The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) developed four new ethical principles of organic agriculture to guide its future development: the principles of health, ecology, care, and fairness. The key distinctive concept of animal welfare in organic agriculture combines naturalness and human care, and can be linked meaningfully with these principles. In practice, a number of challenges are connected with making organic livestock systems work. These challenges are particularly dominant in immature agro-ecological systems, for example those that (...) are characterized by industrialization and monoculture. Some of the current challenges are partly created by shortages of land and manure, which encourage zero-grazing and other confined systems. Other challenges are created in part by the conditions for farming and the way in which global food distribution systems are organized, e.g., how live animals are transported, how feed is traded and transported all over the globe, and the development of infrastructure and large herds. We find that the overall organic principles should be included when formulating guidelines for practical organic animal farming. This article explores how the special organic conceptions of animal welfare are related to the overall principles of organic agriculture. The aim is to identify potential routes for future development of organic livestock systems in different contexts and with reference to the specific understanding of animal welfare in organic agriculture. We include two contrasting cases represented by organic livestock systems in northwestern Europe and farming systems in tropical low-income countries; we use these cases to explore the widely different challenges of organic livestock systems in different parts of the world. (shrink)

This article questions the place of the child in the metaphysics and imaginary of Western colonization, racialization, and decolonization. In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, children appear not only as victims but also as a problem for which Fanon struggles to account as a theorist of decolonization as much as a psychiatric practitioner. Through a reading of one of the cases, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations (...) while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune. The work of decolonization, to proceed, thus would demand us to rethink childhood, and in doing so break free of Western metaphysics. (shrink)

How is the role of context in moral philosophy to be understood? Why is the consideration of context important here? This paper is a small contribution to answering these questions. The kind of context that is in focus does not help us answer moral questions but is essential for understanding what kind of moral question arises – indeed, if any question arises at all. For whom does the question arise? What form does the question have for him or her? What (...) relation does the person for whom it arises have to the events in the example as described by the philosopher? In considering such issues, the importance of thinking from an existentially and morally engaged perspective becomes evident. (shrink)

Modern societies depend on a growing production of scientific knowledge, which is based on the functional differentiation of science into still more specialised scientific disciplines and subdisciplines. This is the basis for the paradox of scientific expertise: The growth of science leads to a fragmentation of scientific expertise. To resolve this paradox, the present paper investigates three hypotheses: 1) All scientific knowledge is perspectival. 2) The perspectival structure of science leads to specific forms of knowledge asymmetries. 3) Such perspectival knowledge (...) asymmetries must be handled through second order perspectives. We substantiate these hypotheses on the basis of a perspectivist philosophy of science grounded in Peircean semiotics and autopoietic systems theory. Perspectival knowledge asymmetries are an unavoidable and necessary part of the growth of scientific knowledge, and more awareness of this fact can help avoid blind and futile struggles between scientific perspectives, and direct efforts toward more appropriate ways of handling these fundamental knowledge asymmetries. Concretely, we show how different kinds of scientific knowledge, expertise, disagreement and learning can be correlated to the perspectival structure of science, and propose how polyocular communication based on observations of the observations made by specialised perspectives can be used to handle such perspectival knowledge asymmetries. This can help overcome the observed problems in carrying out cross-disciplinary research and in the collective use of different kinds of scientific expertise, and thereby make society better able to solve complex, real-world problems. (shrink)

En El Príncipe, las prescripciones políticas que Maquiavelo ofrece a sus lectores se presentan de manera predominante en la forma de reflexiones sobre ejemplos particulares. En este ensayo expongo tres interpretaciones distintas sobre Agatocles (las de Victoria Kahn, John McCormick y Erica Benner), quien figura en el libro como el principal ejemplo del príncipe criminal, apartado textualmente entonces del grupo de «hombres excelentes» que son llamados a imitar por los nuevos príncipes. A pesar de sus diferencias, estas diferentes lecturas muestran (...) el modo en que la virtù del príncipe es para Maquiavelo inseparable de la capacidad para juzgar ejemplos y extraer la verdad de ellos. (shrink)

Maudemarie Clark is a leading interpreter of Nietzsche’s theory of truth, and as such we are fortunate to have her papers on his ethics, politics and metaphysics collected in one volume. Opening her section on politics – the subject of this review – with a critique of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, she condemns Bloom’s Straussian demand that philosophers lie about the fact that no truth exists to protect their way of life as a recurrence of the nihilist (...) ascetic ideal Nietzsche rejected at the end of the Genealogy. In doing so, she definitively frees Nietzsche from Strauss’ grip, and opens up the possibility of questioning anew Nietzsche’s relationship to feminism, queer theory, democracy and community. Her most striking claim is that Nietzsche’s aristocratic ethics can be reconciled with modern democratic politics. Whether that is the case or not is up for debate, but what clearly isn’t, as this collection reminds us, is that we cannot do our thinking about politics without him. (shrink)

The ethics of physical restraint in the Emergency Department has always been an emotive and controversial issue. Recently a vanguard of advocacy groups and regulatory agencies have...

The “post-truth” phenomenon is not primarily a cognitive problem, but a moral or existential problem, a problem of self-deception. But what does this mean? In order to clarify that, two things need to be discussed. First, if the conception of belief is rejected according to which a belief has sense in isolation from the roles it, and the holding of it, plays in our lives, then the problem of self-deception needs to be met as a problem of life. Second, a (...) problem of life is not something that individuals get into all by themselves. In other words, ways of living can be self-deceptive. The task of the text is hence to discuss some of the ways in which truth, belief and self-deception unfold on this non-individual level, specifically on the political one. Keywords: post-truth, self-deception, belief, democracy, Simone Weil. (shrink)

Investigamos o problema da continuidade entre (1) cognições básicas e (2) complexas, especificamente em relação à linguagem. Nossa hipótese é a de que visões contemporâneas da linguagem não inviabilizam necessariamente a abordagem bottom-up ― abordagens tipicamente enativistas. Primeiro apresentamos a posição de Daniel Hutto e Erik Myin (2013, 2017), representantes do Radically Enactive Cognition (REC), a qual assume o desafio da continuidade e identifica na linguagem o critério para uma distinção de tipo entre (1) e (2). Em seguida, estabelecemos a (...) posição Wittgensteiniana defendida por Moyal-Sharrock (2019), na qual a linguagem seria apenas mais uma habilidade de possível desenvolvimento para (1) e (2). Haveria, portanto, somente uma distinção de grau , não de tipo. Por mais que a avaliação de Moyal-Sharrock seja interessante no sentido de que parece evitar um ceticismo de continuidade (identificado por ela no REC), também encontramos problemas em sua visão. (shrink)

The Pigeonhole Principle states that if n items are sorted into m categories and if n > m, then at least one category must contain more than one item. For instance, if 22 pigeons are put into 17 pigeonholes, at least one pigeonhole must contain more than one pigeon. This principle seems intuitive, yet when told about a city with 220,000 inhabitants none of whom has more than 170,000 hairs on their head, many people think that it is merely likely (...) that two inhabitants have the exact same number of hair. This failure to apply the Pigeonhole Principle might be due to the large numbers used, or to the cardinal rather than nominal presentation of these numbers. We show that performance improved both when the numbers are presented nominally, and when they are small, albeit less so. We discuss potential interpretations of these results in terms of intuition and reasoning. (shrink)

This study investigates: the changes in three major health-related factors—physical activity, non-physical-activity health behavior, and depressive symptoms, and how changes in physical activity were associated with changes in one’s depressive symptoms among young adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults while controlling non-physical-activity health behavior and sociodemographic characteristics among young, middle-aged, and older adults before and after the COVID-19 outbreak lockdown in the United States. A total of 695 participants completed an online questionnaire via MTurk, and participants were asked to recall (...) their physical activity, depressive symptoms, and non-physical-activity health behavior status in January and May of 2020. The IPAQ-SF was used to evaluate individuals’ physical activity, while the CES-D-10 was used to assess depressive symptoms. Covariates included non-physical-activity health behavior and sociodemographic factors. A Bayesian significance testing of changes was used to examine significant changes in physical activity, non-physical-activity behavior, and depressive symptoms in each age group while Bayesian regression analysis was employed to examine how the changes in physical activity were associated with respondents’ depressive symptoms while controlling for individual NHB and sociodemographic characteristics. The results showed that the participants tended to maintain their physical activity levels after the lockdown despite significant increases in sitting time among young and older adults. Decreases in moderate physical activity frequency were associated with a higher level of depressive symptoms. Although young and middle-aged cohorts experienced fewer differences in depressive symptoms compared to their counterparts in the older group, we found no significant heterogeneity effects in the relationships of interest across all age groups. Considering different influences of physical activity on depressive symptoms depending on different levels of activity and ages, more randomized clinical trials with program-based intervention studies should be conducted with different physical activity programs for different age populations. (shrink)

ResumenBasado en elementos de la filosofía clásica, el common sense británico y la Escuela de Frankfurt, el autor postula un sentido común guiado críticamente, que serviría para evaluar las tendencias históricas y los modelos de modernización en el Tercer Mundo. Evitando extremos, este teorema rechazaría tanto las pretensiones de verdad de muchos enfoques racionalistas como el relativismo epistemológico y ético. La existencia de leyes y etapas obligatorias de la historia es uno de esos extremos; otro es la opción teórica que (...) afirma que los modelos culturales son incomparables e inconmensurables entre sí. La existencia de un solo paradigma normativo-positivo de desarrollo es insostenible, pero igualmente la posición que decreta la diversidad e incomparabilidad totales de los regímenes civilizatorios. Es conveniente adoptar una línea intermedia entre universalismo y particularismo y alcanzar una síntesis fructífera de ambos.Palabras claveEscuela de Frankfurt, Habermas, Kant, particularismo, sentido común, universalismoAbstractBased on elements of classical philosophy, the British common sense and the Frankfurt School, the author proposes a critically guided common sense, which could be used to evaluate historical tendencies and specially the modernization efforts in the Third World. Avoiding extremes, this theorem rejects the pretensions of truth of rationalist theories and also the epistemic and ethic relativism. The existence of obligatory laws and periods of historical development is one of these extremes; the other one is the position which states that cultural models are incomparable and immeasurable. It is reasonable, for instance, to take a middle way between universalism and particularism and also to reach a fruitful synthesis between both currents.KeywordsCommon sense, Frankfurt School, Habermas, Kant, particularism, universalism. (shrink)

Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this article provides evidence regarding the choices of children in the Kogi indigenous community of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a traditional society living in the mountains of Northern Colombia that practices (...) swidden agriculture, cattle-raising, and enjoys a special cultural status granted by the Colombian Constitution. Two groups of 6–7 and 10–11 year olds were tested on a modified dictator game and several scenarios from a resource distribution task including different fairness criteria. Our results point to the lack of focality of the idea of merit among Kogi children at these ages when deciding on third-party allocation tasks, even when the design prevented equal distribution. (shrink)

This work mainly concerns the—here introduced—category of \(\mathscr {Q}\) -sets and functional morphisms, where \(\mathscr {Q}\) is a commutative semicartesian quantale. We prove it enjoys all limits and colimits, that it has a classifier for regular subobjects (a sort of truth-values object), which we characterize and give explicitly. Moreover: we prove it to be \(\kappa \) -locally presentable, (where \(\kappa =max\{|\mathscr {Q}|^+, \aleph _0\}\) ); we also describe a hierarchy of monoidal structures in this category.

Introduction. Art and commodity in Vanuatu -- Art, anthropology, and tourism -- Arts of Vanuatu -- Making authenticity -- Selling authenticity -- Commodities and authenticity -- Museums -- Conclusion. Artifak: the value of art in Vanuatu.