In recent research, the concept of “media diets” has received increased attention. However, the concept remains vague and not fully developed, and rarely, if at all, do researchers ask citizens about their perceptions of their own and others’ media diets. With the ongoing transformation of the media landscape, there has never been a more pertinent time to explore these perceptions, which this research intends to do. The main goal of this paper then is to identify recommendations addressing recently voiced concerns (...) about news consumption patterns in contemporary society to relevant stakeholders. Empirically, the study is based on a series of focus group interviews with younger (18–25 years old) and older (over 55) adults in five European countries (Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK). Our results show important cohort differences as well as cross-country similarities, which are pertinent insights for the formulation of stakeholder recommendations. (shrink)

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of communicative intention on action. In Experiment 1 participants were requested to reach towards an object, grasp it, and either simply lift it or lift it with the intent to communicate a meaning to a partner . Movement kinematics were recorded using a three-dimensional motion analysis system. The results indicate that kinematics was sensitive to communicative intention. Although the to-be-grasped object remained the same, movements performed for the ‘communicative’ condition (...) were characterized by a kinematic pattern which differed from those obtained for the ‘individual’ condition. These findings were confirmed in a subsequent experiment in which the communicative condition was compared to a control condition, in which the communicative exchange was prevented. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive pragmatics and current knowledge on how social behavior shapes action kinematics. (shrink)

An important debate in the current literature is whether “all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to [a variable at; LM] logical form” (Stanley, ‘Context and Logical Form’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 23 (2000) 391). That is, according to Stanley, the only truth-conditional effects that extra-linguistic context has are localizable in (potentially silent) variable-denoting pronouns or pronoun-like items, which are represented in the syntax/at logical form (pure indexicals like I or today are put aside in this discussion). According to (...) Recanati (‘Unarticulated Constituents’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 25 (2002) 299), extra-linguistic context can have additional truth-conditional effects, in the form of optional pragmatic processes like ‘free enrichment’. This paper shows that Recanati’s position is not warranted, since there is an alternative line of analysis that obviates the need to assume free enrichment. In the alternative analysis, we need Stanley’s variables, but we need to give them the freedom to be or not to be generated in the syntax/present at logical form, a kind of optionality that has nothing to do with the pragmatics-related optionality of free enrichment. (shrink)

This paper investigates young children's knowledge of scalar implicatures and downward entailment. In previous experimental work, we have shown that young children access the full range of truth-conditions associated with logical words in classical logic, including the disjunction operator, as well as the indefinite article. The present study extends this research in three ways, taking disjunction as a case study. Experiment 1 draws upon the observation that scalar implicatures (SIs) are cancelled (or reversed) in downward entailing (DE) linguistic environments, e.g., (...) in the scope of negation (Chierchia, 2000). Experiment 2 was designed to determine if scalar implicatures are used by children, like adults, to influence the interpretation of disjunction in non-DE contexts, yielding an implicature of exclusivity for disjunction. Whereas adult controls always rejected assertions of the form A or B in positive (non-DE) contexts in which assertions of the form A and B were also true, many children accepted assertions with disjunction in such contexts. To provide an interpretation to the findings from Experiment 2, a new experimental technique was devised and used in Experiment 3. The new technique presents pairs of assertions to children, who are asked to judge which assertion is a ‘better’ description of the context. The findings from Experiment 3 demonstrated children's awareness that A and B is more informative than A or B in positive contexts, where both statements are true. Taken together, the findings of Experiments 2 and 3 are compatible with the view that some children lack the computational resources to apply scalar implicatures when a single assertion is presented alone (see Reinhart, 1999). (shrink)

"Cover " -- "Title Page " -- "Copyright " -- "Contents " -- "Preface to the English Edition" -- "Introduction" -- "1. The Substitute" -- "2. Animals, Machines, Cyborgs, and the Taxi " -- "3. Mind, Emotions, and Artificial Empathy " -- "4. The Other Otherwise " -- "5. From Moral and Lethal Machines to Synthetic Ethics " -- "Notes" -- "Works Cited" -- "Acknowledgments" -- "Credits.

Social robotics entertains a particular relationship with anthropomorphism, which it neither sees as a cognitive error, nor as a sign of immaturity. Rather it considers that this common human tendency, which is hypothesized to have evolved because it favored cooperation among early humans, can be used today to facilitate social interactions between humans and a new type of cooperative and interactive agents - social robots. This approach leads social robotics to focus research on the engineering of robots that activate anthropomorphic (...) projections in users. The objective is to give robots "social presence" and "social behaviors" that are sufficiently credible for human users to engage in comfortable and potentially long-lasting relations with these machines. This choice of ’applied anthropomorphism’ as a research methodology exposes the artifacts produced by social robotics to ethical condemnation: social robots are judged to be a "cheating" technology, as they generate in users the illusion of reciprocal social and affective relations. This article takes position in this debate, not only developing a series of arguments relevant to philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, and robotic AI, but also asking what social robotics can teach us about anthropomorphism. On this basis, we propose a theoretical perspective that characterizes anthropomorphism as a basic mechanism of interaction, and rebuts the ethical reflections that a priori condemns "anthropomorphism-based" social robots. To address the relevant ethical issues, we promote a critical experimentally based ethical approach to social robotics, "synthetic ethics," which aims at allowing humans to use social robots for two main goals: self-knowledge and moral growth. (shrink)

This paper investigates scalar implicatures and downward entailment in child English. In previous experimental work we have shown that adults’ computation of scalar implicatures is sensitive to entailment relations. For instance, when the disjunction operator or occurs in positive contexts, an implicature of exclusivity arises. By contrast when the disjunction operator occurs within the scope of a downward entailing linguistic expression, no implicature of exclusivity is computed. Investigations on children’s computation of scalar implicatures in the same contexts have led to (...) a slightly different picture. In particular it has proven difficult to demonstrate that children compute scalar implicatures (in non- downward entailing contexts) using the Truth Value Judgment task, a technique that has been used successfully in showing children’s sensitivity to other semantic phenomena. Adopting a different experimental technique called the Felicity Judgment task, however, we demonstrated children’s knowledge of the prerequisites to the computation of scalar implicatures (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni, 2001). (shrink)

Not unlike the Catholics, the English Reformed circles—the Church of England—upheld the legitimacy of the Revelation and miracles, recognised the Mosaic account of creation, original sin and the Trinity, the non-corporeal nature of spiritual substance, the eternity of punishment or reward and the primacy of Church over State. And so where did Locke’s hermeneutics fit into this complex panorama in terms of the interpretations of Christian anthropology and the resurrection? As underscored in the early chapters of The Reasonableness of Christianity, (...) Locke does not appear to consider that the sin of Adam has to fall on the whole of posterity, and again there is no positive affirmation of the Trinity in this work which, although it is not named, in effect proves to be incompatible with the definitions of person and individual identity which he provides in the Essay concerning human understanding. (shrink)

Cooperazione e competizione sembrano comporre un dualismo di difficile coesistenza. Tuttavia, l'intreccio tra il pensiero gruppoanalitico e il microcredito modello Grameen pare riesca a superare questa prospettiva. In questo articolo proponiamo una discussione focalizzata sulla cooperazione e sulla competizione intese come due bisogni; due diversi modi di stare nelle relazioni umane. Il gruppo č il protagonista principale di questo dibattito inteso nella sua identitÀ di generatore di beni relazionali teoricamente infiniti. Altro punto centrale in questa discussione č il significato relazionale (...) della parola oikos nomos, l'espressione greca da cui deriva la parola ‘economia'. Questo ci porta all'idea di un sistema di condivisione che nasce dalla famiglia per estendersi alla comunitÀ e alla societÀ piů vasta. (shrink)

Studies of adult sentence processing have established that the referential context in which sentences are presented plays an immediate role in their interpretation, such that referential features of the context mitigate, and even eliminate, so-called ‘garden-path’ effects. Perceivers experience garden path effects almost exclusively when they are attempting to parse locally ambiguous linguistic structures in the absence of context, or in infelicitous contexts. The finding that the referential context ordinarily obviates garden path effects is compelling evidence for the Referential Theory (...) of parsing, advanced originally by Crain and Steedman, (1985) and extended in Altmann and Steedman (1988). (shrink)

As Christians, all twelfth-century Latin thinkers identified true happiness with the happiness God promises in the afterlife. This happiness was believed to be entirely spiritual, consisting in the endless vision of God. Nevertheless, along with this beatitudo in patria we also find in some twelfth-century authors the idea of a beatitudo in via as the philosophical life. This life can be characterized either as completely contemplative and solitary, or as one that remains partially attached to material circumstances and action in (...) society. Within this broad framework, this paper emphasizes three points:a. the ascetic and almost purely contemplative character of the ideal of the philosophical life as we find it in twelfth-century authors like Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury;b. the role played by philosophers in some twelfth-century triads of human types;c. the fact that, in spite of the monastic touch which often color them, many theses held by twelfth-century defenders of the philosophical... (shrink)

In an article published in 2003, Klaus Jacobi—using texts partially edited in De Rijk's _Logica Modernorum_—demonstrated that twelfth-century logic contains a tradition of reflecting about some of the transcendental names. In addition to reinforcing Jacobi's thesis with other texts, this contribution aims to demonstrate two points: 1) That twelfth-century logical reflection about transcendental terms has its origin in the _logica vetus_, and especially in a passage from Porphyry _Isagoge_ and in Boethius's commentary on it. In spite of the loss of (...) the major part of the Aristotelian corpus, the twelfth-century masters in logic still received some Aristotelian theses concerning the notions of one and being via Porphyry and Boethius; on the basis of such theses, they were able to elaborate a sort of proto-theory of the transcendentals as trans-categorical terms. 2) That this theory is centred on the idea that there exists a particular group of names which have the property that they can be said of everything; this group includes "being", "one", "thing" and "something". Twelfth-century masters in logic try to question the thesis that these terms are equivocal, although they do not deny it completely. (shrink)

L’article de Luisa Simonutti traite de la critique et de la reprise de certains concepts clés de la pensée de Socin (liberté, volonté, responsabilité) par des arminiens de Hollande. Cet héritage complexe est plus qu’un épisode de la réaction vaste et articulée qui se manifesta à la fin du XVIe siècle – et qui s’étendit sur tout le XVIIe siècle – contre les œuvres et les idées du Siennois. Cet événement doit aussi être interprété comme le moment d’une confrontation (...) plus large en défense de la libertas prophetandi et du libre arbitre de l’homme face aux lois et à la volonté divines. (shrink)

Uneasiness is an issue of our time that has strongly resurfaced under the pressure of the pandemic. It is a kind of anxiety which is not caused only by the lack of something: it rather contains a push for change, releasing the power to choose and to act.

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a class of algebraic structures related to many-valued ukasiewicz algebras. They are symmetrical Heyting algebras with a set of modal operators indexed by a finite completely symmetric poset. A representation theorem is given for these (not functionally complete) algebras.

This article puts forward the following thesis: the legitimation of school subjects stems from an acknowledged epistemic field, from a science in its broadest sense. The more school subjects deviate from the science from which they originate the more they become weaken and disfigured. A focus on the Estado Novo period in Portugal allows for a particular understanding and emphasis placed on the context which legitimises Philosophy as a school subject in middle school. Thus, this article examines the avenues followed (...) by Philosophy as a school subject in this particular historical period, accounting for and explaining the link between educational and instructional plans, the interference of ideology and education policy, and the transformation of school into an instrument of political, ideological education. (shrink)

This article concerns mobile technologies and the possibilities of engendering mediated presences, perceived as usual actions. Those devices have been embedded into the individual everyday practices, occupying personal spaces and making us share emotional and affective moments giving continuity to our anxiety and comprehension of the world. The theoretical approaches bring the understanding of playing and experiencing sensory states as enactive knowledge and Goffman's thoughts about co-temporality and users behaviours as social rituals. The bodyspace relation and the technological artefacts have (...) been articulating the construction of the reality as a phenomenological experience. (shrink)

This article deals with the fear aroused by a pervasive and intangible disease caused by an imperceptible and indeterminate element: a virus. The author does not investigate the multiple historical-political-psychological aspects of the disease nor the social medicine issues which it arises. She rather wonders if and how this disease is intervening in our lives modifying our relationship with other people.

Catholicism played a main role in the long and controversial process of constructing the Spanish national identity. as a consequence, the christian creed ended up becoming a condition sine qua non for “being Spanish”. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912) and his Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles were to become a basic milestone in the conformation of this peculiar case of Spanish catholicism, to whom we direct our attention at the present study.

In this article we tackle the core question of machine emotion research – “Can machines have emotions?” – in the context of “social robots”, a new class of machines designed to function as “social partners” for humans. Our aim, however, is not to provide an answer to the question “Can robots have emotions?” Rather we argue that the “robotics of emotion” moves us to reformulate it into a different one – “Can robots affectively coordinate with humans?” Developing a series of (...) arguments relevant to theory of emotion, philosophy of AI, and the epistemology of synthetic models, we argue that the answer to this different question is positive, and that it lays grounds for an innovative ethical approach to emotional robots. This ethical project, which we introduced elsewhere as “synthetic ethics”, rejects the diffused ethical condemnation of emotional robots as “cheating” technology. Synthetic ethics focuses not on an ideological refusal, but on the concrete sustainability of the emerging mixed human-robot social ecologies. On this basis, in contrast to a purely negative ethical approach to social robotics it promotes an analytical case by case ethical inquiry into the type of human flourishing that can result from human-robot affective coordination. (shrink)

Argues that affirming the irreducible differences between men and women can lead to more transformative politics than the struggle for abstract equality between the sexes. In The Symbolic Order of the Mother Luisa Muraro identifies the bond between mother and child as ontologically fundamental to the development of culture and politics, and therefore as key to achieving truly emancipatory political change. Both corporeal development and language acquisition, which are the sources of all thinking, begin in this relationship. However, Western (...) civilization has been defined by men, and Muraro recalls the admiration and envy she felt for the great philosophers as she strove to become one herself, as well as the desire for independence that opposed her to her mother. This conflict between philosophy and culture on the one hand and the relationship with the mother on the other constitutes the root of patriarchy’s symbolic disorder, which blocks women’s (and men’s) access to genuine freedom. Muraro appeals to the feminist practice of gratitude to the mother and the recognition of her authority as a model of unconditional nurture and support that must be restored. This, she argues, is the symbolic order of the mother that must overcome the disorder of patriarchy. The mediating power of the mother tongue constitutes a symbolic order that comes before all others, for both women and men. Luisa Muraro is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Verona, Italy. Francesca Novello is an instructor at the University of Oklahoma. Timothy S. Murphy is Houston-Truax-Wentz Professor and Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a decompositional analysis of three kinds of plural indefinites in two related languages, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The three indefinites studied are bare plurals, the unos (Spanish)/uns (Portuguese) type, and the algunos (Spanish)/alguns (Portuguese) type. The paper concentrates on four properties: semantic plurality, positive polarity, partitivity, and event distribution. The logic underlying the analysis is that of compositionality, applied at the subword level: as items become bigger in form (with the addition of morphemes), they (...) also acquire more semantic properties. The paper proposes the “indefinite hierarchy", which establishes a set of components for languages to build their indefinites with, in a particular order. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.