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.

At the end of the 1960s “Supports/Surfaces” artists start deconstructing paintings to jeopardize their representational qualities. Claude Viallat and Daniel Dezeuze, for example, process canvases and frames to highlight their phisical aspect as opposed to the illusionistic realm or representation. This way polarities such as form/space and illusionistic space/real space start having a new, dialectic relationship.

Smell can be understood as a cultural phenomenon, historically signified, enforcing social structures or transgressing them, creating social bonds – empowering or disempowering people. The perception of smell consists not only of the sensation of the odours themselves, but of the experiences and emotions associated with them. Odours, unlike colours, for instance, cannot be named, only described; in the realm of olfaction, we must make do with descriptions, analogies and recollections. It is an elusive phenomenon. From natural environments to urban (...) spaces, the large variety of odours can stimulate our olfactory senses and evoke experiences, in which pleasant and unpleasant, and even non-smelling scents, can be combined as parameters of spatial limits and social bounds. Thus, smell can be used to structure and classify different aspects of the world, from time and space to gender and selfhood. The aim of this text is to comprehend some chemical and cultural aspects of smells and odours, and their potential to elaborate social connections and configure spatial orientations. Based on some examples from the Bororo of Brazil and the aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, odours are understood as cultural classification systems and means of ordering the world. At the end, some artists – such as Usman Haque, Rion Willard and Jenny Marketou – will be presented since their art works proposals of mapping and describing physical spaces through smells and odours can be apprehended as a medium to create evocative experiences. (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)

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)

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)

Living with the Robots. A Conversation about social Robotics This interview aims at focusing some aspects of an intriguing discipline known as social Robotics. In particular, we try to get familiar with concepts and philosophical frameworks which deal with this new human enterprise. Paul Dumouchel and Luisa Damiano will help us to get in contact with a scenario in which emotions, reason and ethics will be partially revised by a somehow different perspective about human-robot interaction and sociality.

Many experimental investigations of human sentence processing have shown that listeners do not wait until they reach the end of a sentence before they begin to compute an interpretation. Rather, listeners incrementally make commitments to an interpretation as the linguistic input unfolds in real time. A consequence of this property of sentence comprehension is that it sometimes gives rise to so-called garden-path effects. In the presence of a temporary ambiguity, listeners may assign an interpretation that later turns out to be (...) unviable and must, therefore, be abandoned in favor of an alternative interpretation. Various explanations have been proposed to account for garden- path effects that have been documented in certain experimental contexts (Frazier and Rayner, 1982; Trueswell and Tanenhaus, 1994; MacDonald, 1994, among others). One line of research has claimed, however, that the referential contexts in which sentences ordinarily appear often mitigate, or even completely eliminate, garden-path effects. This is the Referential Theory proposed by Crain and Steedman (1985) and extended by Altmann and Steedman (1988). According to the Referential Theory, people experience garden-path effects primarily when sentences are interpreted outside any referential context or in infelicitous contexts. If the Referential Theory is correct, garden-path effects are largely experimental artifacts. Recent work by Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill and Logrip, (1999) suggests that children might not be sensitive to features of the referential context to the same.. (shrink)

Pensando no instigante sucesso do desenho animado "A Bela e a Fera", da Walt Disney, que teve grande repercussão mundial na época em que fora exibido, este artigo propõe-se a compreender o desenvolvimento psicológico da personagem Bela. Para tanto, algumas cenas do filme foram escolhidas para anális..

From Gerdil to Marugi: Malebranchean Revival and Lockean Readings. For the Cardinal Gerdil, the only philosophical reflection able to combine aspects of Post-Cartesian philosophy with Augustinian Platonism and to provide an explanation of the spirituality of the soul and of the philosophically plausible and pragmatic mind-body interaction in an apologetic reflection on religion was the philosophy of Malebranche. Committed to the defence of the immortality of the soul and the vision of all things in God which found favour in English (...) neo-Platonic thinking, Gerdil becomes one of the protagonists of Italian culture engaged in the European philosophical debate developed against Lockean reason and in defence of Neoplatonism and Cartesianism. To form an emblem of rationalistic rationalism and materialism in metaphysics and religion was a task of certain Italian thinkers, including Muratori, Francesco Zanotti, Marugi and Francesco Soave, and in particular Cardinal Gerdil. (shrink)

Damaris Cudworth Masham was convinced that the “useful knowledge” has a theoretical, practical and pedagogic content. Man has a social destiny and we cannot offend the divine wisdom assuming that religion precludes this approach and expects the breakdown of society. Reason therefore has a prominent character on the will and free will is the pillar of moral practice. This thought reveals an affinity with the Lockean concept of “person” and “identity” and the central role of individual liberty for love of (...) God and for an ordered and social life. Thanks also to her intellectual relationship with Locke, her “philosophical salon” at Oates become the meeting point for overseas and English scholars, such as Jean Le Clerc, Pierre Des Maizeaux, Pierre Coste, the III Earl of Shaftesbury. Through original sources the paper focus the intellectual legacy of Damaris Masham. (shrink)

Depressive mood can be involved in the moral judgments made by people with depression. Here, we focus on the negative judgments depressed patients have of themselves and the world. Possibly, the alterations in moral judgment in subjects with depression can be understood by taking into account the neural basis of depression.

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)

In this paper I demonstrate that there is an explanation of the number marking we see on nouns when they combine with the numeral _zero_ which combines Martí’s (Semant. Pragmat., 2020a, https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.3 ) account of the morphosyntax and semantics of the numeral-noun construction with Bylinina and Nouwen’s (Glossa 3(1):98, 2018 ) semantics for _zero_ and which does not need to appeal to any further principles (e.g., agreement).

El secreto en todas sus vertientes, en todas sus facetas, vericuetos, senderos. Pero sobre todo el Secreto en la literatura, pues como dice Luisa Valenzuela, en su estilo mordaz, agudo, siempre entre guinos y complicidades: "No hay literatura sin secreto."Detras de cada palabra se esconde el misterio, un laberinto en el que todo puede suceder: de la pasion a la ternura; del crimen a la sublimacion. Encontrar el hilo conductor, salvador, descifrador, o ahondar sus diversidades, es papel de quien (...) aspira a lo literario, bien como escritor, bien como lector.Precisas, directas, divertidas, las palabras de Luisa Valenzuela se deslizan sobre las paginas de un libro lleno de humor del mas fino, de ironia inteligente, como sucede en sus novelas, en sus cuentos, pero ahora provenientes del ciclo de conferencias y el dinamico taller de escritura breve que impartio en el marco de la Catedra Alfonso Reyes del Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico. (shrink)

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)

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.

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.

Issues of immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics have drawn increased interest among migration scholars. This paper contributes to debates in this field by examining the role of networks, partnerships and collaborations of immigrant community organizations as mechanisms for immigrant political participation both locally and transnationally. These issues are addressed through an ethnographic study of the Hispanic Development Council, an umbrella advocacy organization representing settlement agencies serving Latin American immigrants in Toronto, Canada. Analysis of HDC’s three sets of networks (at (...) the community, city and transnational levels) from a geographic and relational approach demonstrates the potentials and limits of nonprofit sector partnerships as mechanisms and concrete spaces for immigrant mobilization, empowerment, and social action in a context of neoliberal governance. It is argued that a combination of partnerships with a range of both state and non-state actors and at multiple scales can be significant in enabling nonprofit organizations to advance the interests of immigrant, minority and disadvantaged communities. (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)

It is widely assumed that the scope of indefinites is island insensitive, i.e., that, generally, an indefinite inside of a syntactic island, such as an adjunct clause, is capable of taking scope outside of that island. This paper challenges this assumption by studying the scope behaviour of the Spanish plural indefinite algunos ’). It presents an experimental study that shows that the scope of algunos is not free and depends on its syntactic environment, at least in the dialect of Spanish (...) studied here. The paper discusses some of the implications of the study for current theories of indefinite scope: it points out the problems that choice functions and singleton indefinites have with the Spanish data, and it also discusses the implications for Schwarzschild's solution to the so-called ‘Donald Duck’ problem. (shrink)

The article aims to provide a point of view for understanding the conceptual genesis of ‘post-history’, the key idea of Danto’s theory of contemporary art. To do this, reference is made to an essay from Beyond the Brillo Box which analyzes the various forms the past has assumed in the Western tradition, from the point of view of the influence exerted from narrative structures on artists and their practices. Danto’s argument will be clarified through the notion of ‘regime of historicity’ (...) (Hartog). Based on this, the article discusses three different paradigms of the historicity of art: each is the expression of a specific experienced mediation between the temporal dimensions of the past, present and future. First of all: the relationship of imitative recovery of the past, corresponding to the pre-modern scheme of history understood as exemplary and repeatable. Later, the article focuses the link of transformation/negation of the artistic past, both corresponding to the modern, linear and vectoral view of history. Finally, it will emerge the spatialized exploration of the past, that is, a neutral relationship with it no longer marked by the principle of authority: Danto’s post-history points out a situation in which the historical past of art is an available repertory of styles to be used. (shrink)

The volume presents the illuminating research carried out by international scholars of Locke’s thought and the early modern period in general. The essays address the theoretical and historical contexts of Locke’s analytical methodology and come together in a multidisciplinary approach that sets biblical hermeneutics in relation to his philosophical, historical, and political thought, and to the philological and doctrinal culture of his time. Centring on the last decade of Locke’s life and the publication of his posthumous works, these studies illustrate (...) the influence that his interpretation of the Bible and the Christian tradition had on eighteenth-century thinkers and controversialists. The contextualization of Locke’s biblical hermeneutics within the contemporary reading of the Bible contributes to the analysis of the figure of Christ and the role of Paul, St.’s theology in political and religious thought from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment. The volume sheds light on how Locke was appreciated by his contemporaries as a biblical interpreter and exegete. It also offers a reconsideration that overarches interpretations confined within specific disciplinary ambits and his own intellectual biography to address Locke’s thought in a global historic context. (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)

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)