Existem diversos estudos que indicam os fatores de risco relacionados ao uso de drogas, entre eles, está a adolescência, considerada um período de maior vulnerabilidade. No entanto, pesquisas atuais estão interessadas em conhecer os fatores promotores de saúde e proteção, com o objetivo de prevenir o desenvolvimento de comportamentos de risco, mesmo em situações de vulnerabilidade. Nessa perspectiva, a religiosidade vem sendo identificada como fator protetor ao uso de drogas; mas, apesar disso, pouco se sabe sobre os mecanismos causais desse (...) importante fenômeno. Esse artigo, apresenta uma pesquisa que buscou investigar as dimensões pedagógicas das práticas religiosas de um grupo de adolescentes pertencentes a uma igreja evangélica do município de Canoas/RS, que atuam na proteção ao uso de drogas na adolescência. Para isso, foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas com seis jovens que atuam como líderes do grupo de adolescentes da instituição religiosa participante da pesquisa. Esse contexto caracteriza a pesquisa como um estudo de caso. Para a análise dos dados, utilizaram-se os princípios da grounded-theory, ou teoria fundamentada nos dados. Dessa forma, foram observadas quatro dimensões pedagógicas nas práticas religiosas do grupo participante da pesquisa, que poderiam atuar de maneira protetiva ao uso de drogas na adolescência. São elas: educação para o apoio social, educação para a autorregulação, educação para o entretenimento consciente e educação para a espiritualidade. Os resultados da pesquisa apontam a relevância do tema para a saúde pública e para a possibilidade da inserção das dimensões pedagógicas, encontradas nesse contexto religioso, em programas educativos de prevenção ao uso de drogas na adolescência. (shrink)

Este artículo expone algunos antecedentes sobre el origen y las vertientes actuales del campo del capital social en las ciencias sociales en tanto instrumento analítico de la realidad social. Trata de los fundadores y de sus posiciones, así como de los trabajos emprendidos desde las organizaciones internacionales, especialmente, el Banco Mundial. Discute sobre las dimensiones e indicadores, señalando los principales aportes y los desafíos necesarios de considerar.

Me circunscribo a la química, en cuanto ciencia empírica natural. Aquélla comprende el mundo como totalidad de fenómenos químicos y abstrae de estos los objetos químicos. Examino los confines de la química, entendidos como límites estructurales, cognitivos y a priori. Ahora bien, la investigación química se realiza en campos de experimentación observacional, donde interactúan el observador químico, el lenguaje científico de la química, los sensores químicos y los fenómenos químicos. Por lo tanto, examino los confines de cada uno de (...) estos factores. I restrict myself to Chemistry, as a natural empirical science. That one understands the world as a totality of chemical phenomena and it abstracts from these one the chemical objects. I examine the boundaries of Chemistry, as structural, cognitive and a priori limits. Now then, chemical research takes place as observation-experimentation fields, where chemical observer, scientific language of Chemistry, chemical sensors and phenomena interact. Therefore, I examine the boundaries of everyone of these factors. (shrink)

"Crónica à clef" es fruto de la lectura a Estrella de dos puntas (Ariel, 2021), libro reconocido con el Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, que presenta una disertación basada en la investigación epistolar entre Carlos Fuentes y Octavio Paz. Gracias al seguimiento, Malva Flores propone algunas conclusiones que generarán un debate en la discusión sobre el campo cultural en México.

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo determinar el fundamento teológico del concepto de soberanía propuesto por el jurista alemán Carl Schmitt. Según nuestra hipótesis, tal fundamento teológico se encuentra en la filosofía del pensador danés Søren Kierkegaard, quien, en diferentes obras, desarrolló los importantes conceptos de excepción, decisión y suspensión teleológica de la ética en relación a la experiencia religiosa de la repetición. Como veremos, tales conceptos forman parte del fundamento teológico de la famosa definición schmittiana de la soberanía: “soberano (...) es quien decide sobre el estado de excepción”, la cual define el decisionismo del jurista alemán. Así, por medio del concepto de decisión, extraído de la obra kierkegaardiana e introducido en la doctrina de la soberanía, Schmitt logra tres objetivos. Por un lado, no solo inicia la crítica al parlamentarismo liberal y al Estado burgués de Derecho, sino que revela el fundamento teológico-existencial de la unidad política del Estado moderno. En segundo lugar, en el marco jurídico-político, actualiza la teología fideísta desarrollada por Kierkegaard en su obra. Finalmente, en el marco teológico-metafísico, introduce el papel de la decisión como actualizador del rol público de la trascendencia en la modernidad secularizada frente a la reserva escatológica de la teología. Para lograr nuestro objetivo, utilizaremos el método de la analogía conceptual teológico-política creado y aplicado por el mismo Carl Schmitt a la historia de la soberanía europea. (shrink)

Much ado – and increased complexity – is generally the case when it comes to checking formally the (intended) meaning of programs, as formal semantics for programs are typically extrinsic to both them and the formal grammars that generate the programming languages in which they are written. The van Wijngaarden grammars, on the contrary, have an intrinsic semantics in the sense that their rules contain or express the (intended) meaning of the terminal strings generated by them. This intrinsicness allows for (...) preservation of meaning both in syntactic change and context-sensitive conditions. In order better to show the intrinsicness of the semantics of the van Wijngaarden grammars I contrast them with the attribute grammars, a frequent choice when the semantic analysis of programming languages is called for (e.g., in compilation). (shrink)

Mi propuesta versa sobre ciertas condiciones de posibilidad cognitivas y antropológicas que tratan de las ciencias naturales. En este sentido, la imaginación desempeña un papel fundamental en el origen de las ciencias. Sin embargo, el debate filosófico acerca de este tópico es insuficiente. Defino "imaginación científica" como una ensoñación sofisticada, controlada por la razón y la experiencia (o los experimentos), cuyo papel es producir nuevos objetos científicos. Hay tres tipos de imaginación científica: vaga, operacional y exacta. La primera concierne las (...) metáforas y las analogías. La segunda versa sobre los modelos en el sentido de representaciones imaginarias que simplifican e idealizan la realidad. La tercera es acerca de los modelos en el sentido matemático estricto. Finalmente, la imaginación científica está conectada con el mundo de la vida cotidiana. Así, el observador científico es un observador encarnado y, en consecuencia, su corporalidad provee las percepciones que son necesarias para la imaginación. (shrink)

Foundational ontologies, central constructs in ontological investigations and engineering alike, are based on ontological categories. Firstly proposed by Aristotle as the very ur- elements from which the whole of reality can be derived, they are not easy to identify, let alone partition and/or hierarchize; in particular, the question of their number poses serious challenges. The late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg wrote around 1286 a tutorial that can help us today with this exceedingly difficult task. In this paper, I discuss (...) ontological categories and their importance for foundational ontologies from both the contemporary perspective and the original Aristotelian viewpoint, I provide the translation from the Latin into English of Dietrich's De origine II with an introductory elaboration, and I extract a foundational ontology–that is in fact a single-category one–from this text rooted in Dietrich's specification of types of subjecthood and his conception of intentionality as causal operation. (shrink)

Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...) and were essentially inseparable in medieval thought. This constitutes the foundation for a bridge, and this article analyzes the causality-based ontology of the late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg from the viewpoint of today's upper-ontology engineering. In this bridging attempt, it offers a translation into English of the first part of Dietrich's De origine (abbreviated title) that is a compromise between traditional scholarly translations of medieval Latin philosophical texts and contemporary ontology. (shrink)

This article comprises an up-to-date critical review of the field known as Economic Methodology or Philosophy of Economics (EM/PE). Two edited volumes (Kincaid and Ross 2021; Heilmann and Reiss 2021), a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology (2021), and a recent bibliometric analysis of the field (Claveau et al. 2021) constitute the basis of the review. Drawing on these sources, we identify a number of problematic trends in current EM/PE research. We claim that these trends could be interpreted (...) as two kinds of biases, namely a micro-level bias and a mainstream bias. We discuss the respective details of these biases and their normative implications for the discipline. (shrink)

For millennia, knowledge has eluded a precise definition. The industrialization of knowledge (IoK) and the associated proliferation of the so-called knowledge communities in the last few decades caused this state of affairs to deteriorate, namely by creating a trio composed of data, knowledge, and information (DIK) that is not unlike the aporia of the trinity in philosophy. This calls for a general theory of knowledge (ToK) that can work as a foundation for a science of knowledge (SoK) and additionally distinguishes (...) knowledge from both data and information. In this paper, I attempt to sketch this generality via the establishing of both knowledge structures and knowledge systems that can then be adopted/adapted by the diverse communities for the respective knowledge technologies and practices. This is achieved by means of a formal–indeed, mathematical–approach to epistemological matters a.k.a. formal epistemology. The corresponding application focus is on knowledge systems implementable as computer programs. (shrink)

The concept of unconscious knowledge is fundamental for an understanding of human thought processes and mentation in general; however, the psychological community at large is not familiar with it. This paper offers a survey of the main psychological research currently being carried out into cognitive processes, and examines pathways that can be integrated into a discipline of unconscious knowledge. It shows that the field has already a defined history and discusses some of the features that all kinds of unconscious knowledge (...) seem to share at a deeper level. With the aim of promoting further research, we discuss the main challenges which the postulation of unconscious cognition faces within the psychological community. (shrink)

3rd ed, 2021. A circumscription of the classical theory of computation building up from the Chomsky hierarchy. With the usual topics in formal language and automata theory.

A. Newell and H. A. Simon were two of the most influential scientists in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the late 1950s through to the early 1990s. This paper reviews their crucial contribution to this field, namely to symbolic AI. This contribution was constituted mostly by their quest for the implementation of general intelligence and (commonsense) knowledge in artificial thinking or reasoning artifacts, a project they shared with many other scientists but that in their case was theoretically (...) based on the idiosyncratic notions of symbol systems and the representational abilities they give rise to, in particular with respect to knowledge. While focusing on the period 1956-1982, this review cites both earlier and later literature and it attempts to make visible their potential relevance to today's greatest unifying AI challenge, to wit, the design of wholly autonomous artificial agents (a.k.a. robots) that are not only rational and ethical, but also self-conscious. (shrink)

Not focusing on the history of classical logic, this book provides discussions and quotes central passages on its origins and development, namely from a philosophical perspective. Not being a book in mathematical logic, it takes formal logic from an essentially mathematical perspective. Biased towards a computational approach, with SAT and VAL as its backbone, this is an introduction to logic that covers essential aspects of the three branches of logic, to wit, philosophical, mathematical, and computational.

Knowledge representation (KR) is actually more than representation: It involves also inference, namely inference of “new” knowledge, i.e. new facts. Logic programming is a suitable KR medium, but more often than not discussions on this programming paradigm focus on aspects other than KR. In this paper, I elaborate on the general theory of logic programming and give the essentials of two of its main implementations, to wit, Prolog and Datalog, from the viewpoint of deductive computing over knowledge bases, which includes (...) deductive programming. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that a correct analysis of knowledge must take empirical data into consideration. The data here provided is from experimental psychology, namely from phenomena involving unconscious cognition.

2nd edition. Many-valued logics are those logics that have more than the two classical truth values, to wit, true and false; in fact, they can have from three to infinitely many truth values. This property, together with truth-functionality, provides a powerful formalism to reason in settings where classical logic—as well as other non-classical logics—is of no avail. Indeed, originally motivated by philosophical concerns, these logics soon proved relevant for a plethora of applications ranging from switching theory to cognitive modeling, and (...) they are today in more demand than ever, due to the realization that inconsistency and vagueness in knowledge bases and information processes are not only inevitable and acceptable, but also perhaps welcome. The main modern applications of (any) logic are to be found in the digital computer, and we thus require the practical knowledge how to computerize—which also means automate—decisions (i.e. reasoning) in many-valued logics. This, in turn, necessitates a mathematical foundation for these logics. This book provides both these mathematical foundation and practical knowledge in a rigorous, yet accessible, text, while at the same time situating these logics in the context of the satisfiability problem (SAT) and automated deduction. The main text is complemented with a large selection of exercises, a plus for the reader wishing to not only learn about, but also do something with, many-valued logics. (shrink)

Since Freud and his co-author Breuer spoke of dissociation in 1895, a scientific paradigm was painstakingly established in the field of unconscious cognition. This is the dissociation paradigm. However, recent critical analysis of the many and various reported dissociations reveals their blurred, or unveridical, character. Moreover, we remain ignorant with respect to the ways cognitive phenomena transition from consciousness to an unconscious mode. This hinders us from filling in the puzzle of the unified mind. We conclude that we have reached (...) a Kuhnian crisis in the field of unconscious cognition, and we predict that new models, incorporating partly the relevant findings of the dissociation paradigm—but also of dynamic psychology—, will soon be established. We further predict that some of these models will be largely based on the pairs representation–process and analog–digital. (shrink)

The representational nature of human cognition and thought in general has been a source of controversies. This is particularly so in the context of studies of unconscious cognition, in which representations tend to be ontologically and structurally segregated with regard to their conscious status. However, it appears evolutionarily and developmentally unwarranted to posit such segregations, as,otherwise, artifact structures and ontologies must be concocted to explain them from the viewpoint of the human cognitive architecture. Here, from a by-and-large Classical cognitivist viewpoint, (...) I show why this segregation is wrong, and elaborate on the need to postulate an ontological and structural continuity between unconscious and conscious representations. Specifically, I hypothesize that this continuity is to be found in the symbolic-based interplay between the syntax and the semantics of thought, and I propose a model of human information processing characterized by the integration of syntactic and semantic representations. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a methodological analysis of the empirical research on the causal effects of trade liberalisation, and assess whether such studies can be of any use for guiding policy prescriptions in real-world economies. The analysis focuses on the mainstream economic research that has been used to support arguments in favour of trade liberalisation during the last decades. Even though there are empirical results that could be taken as valid evidence for a causal connection between free trade and (...) economic gains, none of the existing evidence licences trustworthy inferences about the policy effectiveness of trade liberalisation reforms in real-world cases. There are three aspects of the empirical literature that make it highly problematic for making reliable policy inferences: (a) the criteria used to define the notion of ‘free trade’, (b) the background assumptions embedded in the econometric techniques used for estimating causal effects, and (c) the widespread desire among academic economists to attain scientific results in terms of universally valid generalisations. The analysis exposes a worrisome mismatch between, on the one hand, the research aims and outcomes of scientific economics and, on the other, the kind of evidence that would be useful for guiding actual policy deliberations. (shrink)

Contemporary studies in unconscious cognition are essentially founded on dissociation, i.e., on how it dissociates with respect to conscious mental processes and representations. This is claimed to be in so many and diverse ways that one is often lost in dissociation. In order to reduce this state of confusion we here carry out two major tasks: based on the central distinction between cognitive processes and representations, we identify and isolate the main dissociation paradigms; we then critically analyze their key tenets (...) and reported findings. (shrink)

The traditional model of human cognition (TMHC) postulates an ontological and/or structural gap between conscious and unconscious mental representations. By and large, it sees higher-level mental processes as commonly conceptual or symbolic in nature and therefore conscious, whereas unconscious, lower-level representations are conceived as non-conceptual or sub-symbolic. However, experimental evidence belies this model, suggesting that higher-level mental processes can be, and often are, carried out in a wholly unconscious way and/or without conceptual representations, and that these can be processed unconsciously. (...) This entails that the TMHC, as well as the theories on mental representation it motivates and that in turn support it, is wrong. (shrink)

En Tecnoceno, Flavia Costa se propone abordar algunas de las preguntas centrales que plantea el acelerado proceso de tecnificación y mediatización que enfrentan las sociedades contemporáneas. El libro consta de una introducción, tres capítulos y un epílogo, centrándose cada capítulo en uno de los elementos del subtítulo: algoritmos, biohackers y nuevas formas de vida.

Translation from the Latin into Portuguese, with extensive introduction and notes, of Dietrich of Freiberg's De origine rerum praedicamentalium, Chapter 5. This text, a late medieval treatise on reality and human cognition (or human cognition and reality), is a particularly hard nut to crack; hence my having translated it (O.K., I also enjoyed the Latin part).

Translation from the Latin into Portuguese, with extensive introduction and notes, of Dietrich of Freiberg's De origine rerum praedicamentalium, Chapters 1 and 2. This text, a late medieval treatise on reality and human cognition (or human cognition and reality), is a particularly hard nut to crack; hence my having translated it (O.K., I also enjoyed the Latin part).

The 14th Conference of the International Network for Economic Method was held in Finland at the University of Helsinki, from 18th to 21st of August 2019. It was the second time the biannual...

Resumen Es muy conocida la opinión de Kant en relación con la inmoralidad del suicidio. De ahí que, muchos autores lo consideren como un prohibicionista absoluto. Sin embargo, no hay hasta el momento un análisis puntual sobre la definición metafísica-conceptual del suicidio en la teoría kantiana. En este artículo propongo entender el suicidio en Kant como una muerte física, total, autorreferencial, voluntaria e inmoral. Esta definición contrastará con la privación de la vida, la cual no implica inmoralidad. Al ser voluntarios, (...) tanto la privación de la vida, como el suicidio son actos racionales y entendibles a partir de las máximas de acción. La inmoralidad del suicidio sólo surgirá al considerar la primacía de las razones morales por encima de razones no morales.It is common knowledge theposition of Kant regarding the immorality of suicide. Several authors attribute him an absolutist-forbidden criterion. Nerveless, there is no extended analysis about the metaphysical-conceptual definition of suicide in Kantian theory. In this paper I hold that suicide in Kant can be defined asphysical death, full, self-referential, voluntary, and immoral. This definition conflicts with the definition of deprivation of life which is not immoral. As voluntarily acts, both suicide and deprivation of life are rational acts that can be understood as maxims of action. The immorality property of suicide is due to the primacy of moral over non-moral reasons. (shrink)

Genera, typically hand-in-hand with their branching species, are essential elements of vocabulary-based information constructs, in particular scientific taxonomies. Should they also feature in formal ontologies, the highest of such constructs? I argue in this article that the answer is “Yes” and that the question posed in its title also has a Yes-answer: The way medieval ontologists sliced up the world into genera does matter to formal ontology. More specifically, the way Dietrich of Freiberg, a Latin scholastic, conceived and applied strictly (...) generic criteria to slice up the world into its entities can provide some guidelines to the field of formal ontology with respect to not only its contents, but also its scope. In particular, Dietrich's information criterion plays here a central role. (shrink)

The gulf between philosophical and formal ontology can and should be bridged. In this Editorial, I elaborate briefly on this subject.

In Who's Afraid of Idealism? the philosophical concept of idealism, the extent to which reality is mind-made, is examined in new light. Author Luis M. Augusto explores epistemological idealism, at the source of all other kinds of idealism, from the viewpoints of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, two philosophers who spent a large part of their lives denigrating the very concept. Working from Kant and Nietzsche's viewpoints that idealism was a scandal to philosophy and the cause of nihilism, (...) Augusto evaluates these philosophers and their role in shaping epistemological idealism. Using textual evidence from their writings and their reactions to western philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Hegel, Who's Afraid of Idealism? argues that in fact Kant and Nietzsche were really idealists at heart. In accessible prose, this text puts forward a theory that goes against current scholarly opinion, and even Kant and Nietzsche's opinions of themselves. (shrink)

An analysis of--yet another--case of academic failure in multi- and interdisciplinarity. An editorial of the Journal of Knowledge Structures & Systems.

What are the roles of scientific causal knowledge in relation to the evidential requirements of policy making? In this chapter, I review the existing approaches in philosophy of science to the policy relevance of causal knowledge. I assess the specific concerns and questions on which these philosophical accounts have focused and show how they only offer a partial perspective of the relation between causal knowledge and policy making. Most existing views are top-down approaches: they start from philosophical concerns about causation (...) and evidence, and then make general claims about (potential) policy implications, but leave the notion of “policy” unanalyzed. As an alternative, I put forward some ideas toward a bottom-up approach: one that understands policy making as a dynamic process with several stages, and that starts from concrete policy problems, to then examine how causal notions and methods can contribute in various ways to the specifics of the process of policy making. (shrink)

PreámbuloEl sentimiento contiene una sabiduría que la razón desconoce. Esta intuición es de los filósofos, los poetas, los artistas, los cantores como Violeta en "Volver a los 17". Nació Violeta a quien está dedicado el libro Sabiduría Chamánica del Sentimiento, y con ella los colores que ella y nosotros nos corresponde siempre redescubrir.En la portada de libro de Peter Wild, los colores aparecen distorsionados, quizás acá ya esté el primer indicio de encuentro con esta sabiduría del sentimi..

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

The intention of this paper is crossed by a double view. First, reread from an existential point of view, some considerations about corporeality and intersubjectivity, as studied by G. Marcel, and second, reflect, from a phenomenological approach, projections and relationships between these intuitions and the world of biology, and specifically, cognitive science.

Expressiveness and decidability are two core aspects of programming languages that should be thoroughly known by those who use them; this includes knowledge of their metalanguages a.k.a. formal grammars. The van Wijngaarden grammars (WGs) are capable of generating all the languages in the Chomsky hierarchy and beyond; this makes them a relevant tool in the design of (more) expressive programming languages. But this expressiveness comes at a very high cost: The syntax of WGs is extremely complex and the decision problem (...) for the generated languages is generally unsolvable. With this in mind, I provide here a short primer of the syntax of WGs, which includes syntactic restrictions that guarantee decidability for the corresponding generated languages. (shrink)

On how medieval philosophy is not (only) theology.

La tendencia natural de identificar complejidad con algo complicado y confuso, es una forma también natural de simplificar las redes complejas del fenómeno del conocimiento y de los saberes. En este artículo se presentan las orientaciones y puntos de partida del pensamiento complejo en la perspectiv..