Traducción de Jaime Bermúdez Escamilla sobre Political Aphorisms (1659), en The Oceana and other Works of James Harrington, with an Account of his Life by John Toland, Londres, printed for T. Becket, T. Cadell y T. Evans, 1771, pp. 483-490. Texto inglés consultado en The Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund (www.libertyfund.org).

Many philosophers consider that memory is just a passive information retention and retrieval capacity. Some information and experiences are encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved in a passive way, without any control or intervention on the subject’s part. In this paper, we will defend an active account of memory according to which remembering is a mental action and not merely a passive mental event. According to the reconstructive account, memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past experience. A key feature of the (...) reconstructive account is that given the imperfect character of memory outputs, some kind of control is needed. Metacognition is the control of mental processes and dispositions. Drawing from recent work on the normativity of automaticity and automatic control, we distinguish two kinds of metacognitive control: top-down, reflective control, on the one hand, and automatic, intuitive, feeling-based control on the other. Thus, we propose that whenever the mental process of remembering is controlled by means of intuitive or feeling-based metacognitive processes, it is an action. (shrink)

In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution [WWA] influenced by an agent’s violations of best judgment and/or resolution, and by the moral valence of the agent’s action? (2) Do any of these influences depend on the cognitive dispositions of the judging individual? We implemented a factorial 2x2x2 between–subjects design with judgment violation, resolution violation, and action valence as independent (...) variables, and measured participants’ cognitive dispositions using Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test [CRT]. We conclude that intuitive and reflective individuals have two different concepts of weakness of will. The study supports this claim by showing that: a) the WWA of intuitive subjects is influenced by the action’s (and probably also the commitment’s) moral valence, while the WWA of reflective subjects is not; b) judgment violation plays a small role in the WWA of intuitive subjects, while reflective subjects treat resolution violation as the only relevant trait. Data were collected among students at two different universities. All subjects (N=710) answered the CRT. A three-way ANOVA was first conducted on the whole sample and then on the intuitive and reflective groups separately. This study suggests that differences in cognitive dispositions can significantly impact the folk understanding of philosophical concepts, and thus suggests that analysis of folk concepts should take cognitive dispositions into account. (shrink)

To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strategies as significantly more effective for people tempted to break moral relative to (...) immoral commitments, even when controlling for perceived temptation and trait self-control. Experiment 3 showed that as people perceived commitments to have more positive moral valence, they judged attentional focus strategies to be significantly more effective relative to attentional distraction strategies. Moreover, this effect was partly mediated by perceived differences in motivation. These results indicate that moralization informs decision-making processes related to self-control strategy selection. (shrink)

A very important event took place on January 15, 2017. On that day, the Jeffrey Beall blog was silently, and suddenly, shut down by Beall himself. A profoundly divisive and controversial site, the Beall blog represented an existential threat to those journals and publishers that were listed there. On the other hand, the Beall blog was a ray of hope to critics of bad publishing practices that a culture of public shaming was perhaps the only way to rout out those (...) journals—and their editors—and publishers who did not respect basic publishing ethical principles and intrinsic academic values. While members of the former group vilified Beall and his blog, members of the latter camp tried to elevate it to the level of policy. Split by extreme polar forces, for reasons still unknown to the public, Beall deliberately shut down his blog, causing some academic chaos among global scholars, including to the open access movement. (shrink)

As mandated reporters, health care providers have a duty to report concerns about vulnerable adults if they believe abuse, neglect, or financial exploitation has occurred. Filing a report for conce...

We show how Peirce's architectonics folds on itself and finds local consequences that correspond to the major global hypotheses of the system. In particular, we study how the pragmaticist maxim can be technically represented in Peirce's existential graphs, well-suited to reveal an underlying continuity in logical operations, and can provide suggestive philosophical analogies. Further, using the existential graphs, we formalize — and prove one direction of — a “local proof of pragmaticism,” trying thus to explain the prominent place that existential (...) graphs can play in the architectonics of pragmaticism, as Peirce persistently advocated. Finally, we present a web of “continuous iterations” of some key Peircean concepts that supports a “lattice of partial proofs” of pragmaticism. (shrink)

Résumé Plusieurs aspects de la personnalité, de la pensée et de l’œuvre de Don Vasco de Quiroga sont aujourd’hui connus, mais un approfondissement de sa pensée juridique permettrait de mieux comprendre les motivations de son action en Nouvelle-Espagne et dans la région du Michoacán. Il convient pour ce faire de replacer le personnage dans le cadre conceptuel, institutionnel et juridique où il s’est formé et où il a évolué tout au long de sa vie. Versé dans les différents systèmes de (...) lois existant à l’époque, il fera siennes les lois romaines qu’il respectait comme l’œuvre de savants vénérables tout en fondant sa mission évangélique au Mexique sur les canons de l’Église. Le droit qui va réglementer les villages qu’il crée sur un modèle nouveau sera en outre fondé sur la coutume qui vient d’en-bas. (shrink)

The way health is conceptualized determines the actions taken to protect and promote it and, in turn, the actors responsible for such actions in an increasingly inter-dependent world. This essay presents a brief description of health policies in Peru during the last ten years in order to analyze the implications of paradigms of medical ethics, human rights and quality of care. These paradigms offer distinct ways of formulating, applying and evaluating health policies and understanding the relationship among different actors at (...) various levels. Building upon other detailed analyses of sexual and reproductive health policy in Peru (Coe, 2004; Miranda and Yamin, 2004), as well as critical appraisals of health services models (Gericke, Kurowski, Ranson and Mills, 2005; Krieger, Northridge, Gruskin, Quinn, Kriebel, Davey Smith, Bassett, Rehkopf and Miller, 2003), this article advocates the importance of construing and promoting health as a human right. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza los discursos de las mujeres/garzonas, que trabajan en las salas de cerveza (schoperías) sobre la discriminación de género y los modelos relacionales que se establecen en estos espacios entre clientes y garzonas. Se postula que estos aspectos recién mencionados, coadyuvan a la permanencia de una identidad masculina hegemónica, que se intensifica en el contexto de la minería. Los antecedentes obtenidos muestran que las garzonas- en su mayoría mujeres oriundas de los países limítrofes y/o del sur de Chile-, (...) se encuentran afectadas por una situación de vulnerabilidad social y económica, precariedad laboral y, además, cargan con una serie de imaginarios sociales en torno a ellas, a los lugares en los que trabajan (schoperías) y a la ciudad en la que habitan. Es decir, son mujeres discriminadas. Estas trabajadoras se encuentran atrapadas entre el proceso de crecimiento económico y atracción que ofrece la industria minera en el norte del país y, a la vez, a las expectativas que tienen por mejorar su situación familiar. Asimismo, se ven confrontadas por la fuerza de un sistema sociocultural de sexo/género hegemónico que favorece relaciones de poder asimétricas y la subordinación femenina, lo que contribuye a reforzar identidades de género y modelos relacionales de inequidad, que son naturalizados en este entorno productivo. (shrink)

This essay traces the genealogy and evolution of the category of the subject as it developed in the thought of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou. As will be seen, within the fruitful and complementary dialogue about the subject and subjectivity formation among these three French thinkers, there are major discrepancies in their approaches, from Althusser’s seemingly passive view of the subject as a victim of state oppression, to Foucault’s one, embedded in power but with the capacity of resistance, (...) and, finally, to Badiou’s understanding, in his book Théorie du sujet (Theory of the Subject, 1982), of the subject as the one who courageously takes risks to put into practice the truth brought about by the event in order to radically transform the present situation. (shrink)

Resumen: En este estudio nos proponemos abordar la cuestión de la esencia de la relación entre sujeto y mundo, entre Ser y subjetividad, en el marco de la “fenomenología asubjetiva” elaborada por el filósofo checo Jan Patočka. Para ello, examinamos algunas de las nociones de “mundo” presentes en diferentes lugares de la fragmentaria obra de Patočka con objeto de confrontarlas con su concepción de la subjetividad como aquello que se retira para permitir la manifestación efectiva de todo lo demás. La (...) conclusión es que el pensamiento de Patočka pertenece plenamente a un tipo de fenomenología “objetivista” opuesta a la perspectiva fenomenológica “inmanentista” o “intersubjetiva” adoptada por pensadores como Henry o Levinas.: The purpose of this study is to broach the question about the essence of the relation between subject and world, between Being and subjectivity, in the context of the “asubjective phenomenology” developed by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. To do so, we examine some of the concepts of “world” that can be found in different spots of Patočka´s fragmentary work in order to contrast them with his conception of subjectivity. Subjectivity understood as what withdraws to allow for the effective manifestation of everything else. Our conclusion is that Patočka´s thought entirely belongs to an “objectivist” kind of phenomenology opposed to the “immanentist” or “intersubjective” phenomenological outlook adopted by thinkers such as Henry or Levinas. (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente estudio tratamos de aportar algunas concisas indicaciones relativas a la posibilidad de reconstruir una “teoría estética” a partir de las indicaciones formuladas en este sentido por el filósofo checo Jan Patočka. Partiendo de su distinción entre “arte tradicional” y “arte moderno”, esto es, entre el arte concebido como “signo” y el arte entendido de forma autónoma, se trata de mostrar el modo en el que Patočka localiza la esencia del arte en el acto de revelar la (...) cara oculta de lo real. Aquella dimensión extraordinaria de las cosas que se pone de manifiesto en su puro y simple aparecer: más allá de toda mirada pragmática o utilitaria.: In the present work we try to provide some concise remarks concerning the possibility of rebuilding an “aesthetical theory” from the indications framed in this respect by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. On the basis of his distinction between “traditional art” and “modern art”, that is, between the art conceived as a “sign” and the art intended in an authonomous manner, we try to show the way in which Patočka places the essence of art in the act of revealing the hidden side of reality. It would be that extraordinary dimension of the things that is revealed in its pure and simple appearing: beyond all utilitarian or pragmatic gaze. (shrink)

Written in response to what he recognizes as the problematic philosophical underpinnings of “orthodox research ethics,” Alex John London’s For the Common Good reimagines what is called for in any effort to create a better system of oversight and regulation in biomedical research. London weaves a common thread — justice — through this historical and critical account of the practice of research ethics and its organization of stakeholders, institutions and regulations. By introducing the idea of “a common good” London reframes (...) the narrative and responsibilities of the research ethics field to demonstrate that scientific research and regard for the rights and welfare of individuals are not mutually exclusive. This impressive monograph encourages its readers to push past the limitations of traditional research ethics to consider the context in which the discipline is embedded. That is, rather than settling for analysis at the level of researchers and research participants alone, London encourages us to expand our inquiry to encompass a wider array of stakeholders who co-labor in the social undertaking of biomedical knowledge production. London accomplishes the difficult task of upstream analysis — turning his attention to the conditions and assumptions which create ethical dilemmas rather than applying a retrospective ethical salve to injuries near-guaranteed by a broken system. As opposed to the limited domain of orthodox research ethics (researchers, participants, and the institutional bodies which regulate interaction between the two) London also considers the role and contributions of affected communities, pharmaceutical firms, philanthropic organizations, and journal editors among others. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo analiza un conjunto de entrevistas realizadas a poetas mapuche proponiendo una articulación metadiscursiva entre el campo literario y el campo periodístico. El análisis del corpus sugiere la existencia de tensiones en la práctica poética que es posible visualizar en las entrevistas a los autores mapuches. Estas tensiones se manifiestan en tres binomios fundamentales que funcionan aquí como categorías de análisis y que son: alta-baja cultura; distinción público-privado y dinámicas de articulación entre identidad-alteridad. Por último, se propone (...) la dimensión intercultural como pivote articulador de las categorías antes desplegadas y analizadas en la poesía mapuche.: This article analyzes a set of interviews with Mapuche poets proposing a metadiscursive articulation between the literary field and the journalistic field. The corpus analisys`s suggest the existence of three tension in poetic practice that can be seen in interviews with the authors. These tensions are manifested in three fundamental binomials that function here as categories of analysis: high-low culture; public-private distinction and dynamic articulation between identity-alterity. Finally, an intercultural dimension it is proposes as an articulating pivot of categories previously implemented and analyzed in Mapuche poetry. (shrink)

El artículo esboza algunos hitos fundamentales del desarrollo de las ciencias sociales en el siglo XX que dieron cabida al interés por las vidas ordinarias, en disputa con el privilegio de atención concedido entonces a las élites y los grandes personajes, de donde se configura un marco epistemológico que acoge el estudio de los individuos y grupos sociales subordinados en la modernidad, dotado de un nuevo arsenal de métodos y técnicas basados en los testimonios orales y documentos personales. A través (...) del seguimiento de dicha ruta, condicionada por los múltiples tributos de las ciencias de la cultura, la literatura, la sistematización del pensamiento pedagógico y la variopinta experiencia histórica global, se comprenden las condiciones de emergencia del paradigma biográfico narrativo en educación. (shrink)

Thinking Without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Jose Luis Bermudez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. The book is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

Decision Theory and Rationality offers a challenging new interpretation of a key theoretical tool in the human and social sciences. This accessible book argues, contrary to orthodoxy in politics, economics, and management science, that decision theory cannot provide a theory of rationality.

The essays in this volume investigate the norms of reason--the standards which contribute to determining whether beliefs, inferences, and actions are rational. Nine philosophers and two psychologists discuss what kinds of things these norms are, how they can be situated within the natural world, and what role they play in the psychological explanation of belief and action. Current work in the theory of rationality is subject to very diverse influences ranging from experimental and theoretical psychology, through philosophy of logic and (...) language, to metaethics and the theory of practical reasoning; this range is well represented here. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

Frames and framing make one dimension of a decision problem particularly salient. In the simplest case, framesprimeresponses (as in, e.g., the Asian disease paradigm, where the gain frame primes risk-aversion and the loss frame primes risk-seeking). But in more complicated situations frames can function reflectively, by making salient particular reason-giving aspects of a thing, outcome, or action. For Shakespeare's Macbeth, for example, his feudal commitments are salient in one frame, while downplayed in another in favor of his personal ambition. The (...) role of frames in reasoning can give rise torational framing effects. Macbeth can prefer fulfilling his feudal duty to murdering the king, while also preferring bravely taking the throne to fulfilling his feudal duty, knowing full well that bravely taking the throne just is murdering the king. Such patterns ofquasi-cyclicalpreferences can be correct and appropriate from the normative perspective of how one ought to reason. The paper explores three less dramatic types of rational framing effects: (1) Consciously framing and reframing long-term goals and short-term temptations can be important tools for self-control. (2) In the prototypical social interactions modeled by game theory, allowing for rational framing effects solves longstanding problems, such as the equilibrium selection problem and explaining the appeal of non-equilibrium solutions (e.g., the cooperative solution in the Prisoner's Dilemma). (3) Processes for resolving interpersonal conflicts and breaking discursive deadlock, because they involve internalizing multiple and incompatible ways of framing actions and outcomes, in effect create rational framing effects. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...) satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly context-sensitive, fine-grained control processes required to select, revise and (...) correct strategies during self-control exertion? The skill model borrows conceptual tools from ‘hierarchical models’ recently developed in the context of motor skills, and asserts that self-control crucially involves the ability to manage the implementation and monitoring of regulatory strategies as the self-control exercise unfolds. Skilled agents are able do this by means of flexible practical reasoning: a fast, context-sensitive type of deliberation that incorporates non-propositional representations into the formation and revision of the mixed-format intentions that structure self-control exertion. The literatures on implementation intentions and motivation framing offer corroborating evidence for the theory. As a surprising result, the skill of self-control that allows agents to overcome the contrary motivations they experience is self-effacing: instead of continuously honing this skill, expert agents replace it with a different one, which minimizes or prevents contrary motivations from arising in the first place. Thus, the more expert you are at self-control, the less likely you are to use it. (shrink)

The author challenges the view that birth cannot be a morally relevant fact in the process of development from zygote to child. He reviews specific arguments against giving any moral significance to the fact of birth. Drawing on recent work in developmental psychology, he contends that the lives of neonates can have a level of self-consciousness that confers moral significance but can only be possessed after birth. He shows that the position he has argued for provides a framework within which (...) the move from the moral validity of aborting sentient fetuses to the moral validity of infanticide might be resisted. He concludes that arguments suggesting that birth can be morally significant support the view that the acquisition of moral significance is a gradual and multilayered phenomenon. (shrink)

"The book presents in accessible fashion recent important work on the self and self-consciousness and also moves the issues forward with interesting new ideas. It provides a notably crisp and clear treatment of some extremely intriguing topics." -- Jane Heal, Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge In this book, José Luis Bermú dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of (...) more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Bermú dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox ofself-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer. (shrink)