Genetic determinism can be described as the attribution of the formation of traits to genes, where genes are ascribed more causal power than what scientific consensus suggests. Belief in genetic determinism is an educational problem because it contradicts scientific knowledge, and is a societal problem because it has the potential to foster intolerant attitudes such as racism and prejudice against sexual orientation. In this article, we begin by investigating the very nature of belief in genetic determinism. Then, we investigate whether (...) knowledge of genetics and genomics is associated with beliefs in genetic determinism. Finally, we explore the extent to which social factors such as gender, education, and religiosity are associated with genetic determinism. Methodologically, we gathered and analyzed data on beliefs in genetic determinism, knowledge of genetics and genomics, and social variables using the “Public Understanding and Attitudes towards Genetics and Genomics” instrument. Our analyses of PUGGS responses from a sample of Brazilian university freshmen undergraduates indicated that belief in genetic determinism was best characterized as a construct built up by two dimensions or belief systems: beliefs concerning social traits and beliefs concerning biological traits; levels of belief in genetic determination of social traits were low, which contradicts prior work; associations between knowledge of genetics and genomics and levels of belief in genetic determinism were low; and social factors such as age and religiosity had stronger associations with beliefs in genetic determinism than knowledge. Although our study design precludes causal inferences, our results raise questions about whether enhancing genetic literacy will decrease or prevent beliefs in genetic determinism. (shrink)

G e moore and ludwig wittgenstein were very different teachers, both because of their differing views on the nature and aims of philosophical investigation, and because of the differences in the way they thought, their educational backgrounds, and the kind of persons they were. this paper records experiences of the two philosophers as teachers and as personalities, and indicates the features of their teaching which stemmed from their views and from their personalities.

"A collection of essays on the early modern English writer, proto-feminist, and rhetorician Mary Astell. Includes discussions on human nature, equality, rationality, power, freedom, friendship, marriage, and education"--Provided by publisher.

Historically left to the margins, the topics of imagination and creativity have gained prominence in philosophy of science, challenging the once dominant distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’. The aim of this chapter is to explore imagination and creativity starting from issues within contemporary philosophy of science, making connections to these topics in other domains along the way. It discusses the recent literature on the role of imagination in models and thought experiments, and their comparison with fictions. (...) It then turns to the importance of constraints on imaginings in the scientific domain, as well as whether constraints can hinder creativity. The second part of the paper focuses on the social dimensions of science. It considers imagination and creativity of scientific communities, asks whether the institution of science promotes creativity (and whether we want it to) or if it encourages conservativeness, and ends with a reflection on the politics of imagination and creativity in science. (shrink)

Hamblin distinguished between formal and descriptive dialectic. Formal normative models of deliberation dialogue have been strongly emphasized as argumentation frameworks in computer science. But making such models of deliberation applicable to real natural language examples has reached a point where the descriptive aspect needs more interdisciplinary work. The new formal and computational models of deliberation dialogue that are being built in computer science seem to be closely related to some already existing and very well established computing technologies such as problem (...) solving and decision making, but whether or how dialectical argumentation can be helpful to support these systems remains an open question. The aim of this paper is to examine some real examples of argumentation that seem to hover on the borderlines between deliberation, problem solving and decision making. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to discussions about the prospects for a viable conceptualism, i.e., a viable view that represents our modes of awareness as conceptual all the way down. The article challenges the assumption, made by friends as well as foes of conceptualism, that a conceptualist stance necessarily commits us to denying animals minds. Its main argument starts from the conceptualist doctrine defended in the writings of John McDowell. Although critics are wrong to represent McDowell as implying that animals (...) are mindless brutes, it is difficult to see what is wrong with this critical unless we depart from McDowell's technical terminology and introduce a notion of a concept flexible enough to apply to the lives of some non-rational animals. The article closes with a discussion of observations that speak for attributing concepts, flexibly understood, to dogs. (shrink)

We add one point to Suddendorf & Corballis's (S&C's) story of mental time travel: For the future success of this hot, new area of research, it is imperative to pay attention to the fundamental distinction between the general brain/mind capacity that makes possible conscious awareness of the past and the future (the ), on the one hand, and specific expressions of this capacity in a large variety of future-related mental activities (the ), on the other.

Two types of formal models - landscape search tasks and two-armed bandit models - are often used to study the effects that various social factors have on epistemic performance. I argue that they can be understood within a single framework. In this unified framework, I develop a model that may be used to understand the effects of functional and demographic diversity and their interaction. Using the unified model, I find that the benefit of demographic diversity is most pronounced in a (...) functionally homogeneous group, and decreases with the increase of functional diversity. (shrink)

It is well‐established within linguistics that slang serves a group‐identifying function. In this paper, a new understanding of the notion of lexical metadata is developed to provide a philosophical treatment of said function. The proposed account explains the group‐identifying function of slang in terms of certain inferences about a speaker's group affiliations that people competent with a slang word will be disposed to make given the lexical metadata related to the word in question. The resulting view is theoretically simple and (...) may extend to a whole range of linguistic phenomena that speakers utilize to position themselves in social space. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had, and still has, the risk to have an enormous impact on how people socially interact with each other due to possible lockdowns, quarantine and isolation measures to reduce infection rates. Consequently, these measures hold great implications for those medical disciplines that inherently rely on social interaction, such as psychiatry. In their article, ‘Can you hear me?’— Communication, Relationship and Ethics in Video-based Telepsychiatric Consultations’, Frittgen and Haltaufderheide1 show that videoconferencing holds potential to ensure that this (...) social interaction is guaranteed, be it in a technology mediated manner. In this sense, videoconferencing needs to be conceived as a pharmakon, a medicine, having both curative and toxifying elements, depending on why and how it is used.2 For example, videoconferencing allows continuity of care when physical proximity is impossible. At the same time, it allows the patient to interrupt the therapy by muting the therapist or ending the call at his/her convenience. To guarantee the curative side of videoconferencing, and as such avoid the toxifying elements, an ethical prescription needs to be developed and used. Despite the fact that videoconferencing seems to have a similar clinical effectiveness as face-to-face interaction, Frittgen and Haltaufderheide rightly point out that there are ethical impacts to be addressed to avoid …. (shrink)

Contemporary epidemiological methods testing the associations between green space and psychological well-being treat all vegetation cover as equal. However, there is very good reason to expect that variations in ecological "quality" (number of species, integrity of ecological processes) may influence the link between access to green space and benefits to human health and well-being. We test the relationship between green space quality and restorative benefit in an inner city urban population in Bradford, UK. We selected 12 urban parks for study (...) where we carried out botanical and faunal surveys to quantify biodiversity and assessed the site facilities of the green space (cleanliness, provision of amenities). We also conducted 128 surveys with park users to quantify psychological restoration based on four self-reported measure of general restoration, attention-grabbing distractions, being away from everyday life, and site preference. We present three key results. First, there is a positive association between site facilities and biodiversity. Second, restorative benefit is predicted by biodiversity, which explained 43% of the variance in restorative benefit across the parks, with minimal input from other variables. Third, the benefits accrued through access to green space were unrelated to age, gender, and ethnic background. The results add to a small but growing body of evidence that emphasise the role of nature in contributing to the well-being of urban populations and, hence, the need to consider biodiversity in the design of landscapes that enhance multiple ecosystem services. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell is widely regarded as a major philosophical figure, and he is generally recognized to have devoted a great deal of his writing to ethical themes. Nevertheless, it is not an exaggeration to say that his work has not for the most part been received within Anglo-American analytic ethics. There is an impressively large body of commentary on Cavell’s contribution to moral philosophy, but most of it gets generated and discussed outside analytic circles. Paul Guyer’s remarks here on the (...) major strand of Cavell’s ethical thought that Cavell places under the heading of “moral perfectionism” are for this reason very welcome.1 Guyer’s main thesis is that Cavell’s perfectionist posture is more Kantian than.. (shrink)

The suffering of non-human animals is great and omnipresent. This is because animals are vulnerable to disease, disfigurement, injury, predation, age-related physical decline and death, and—today—it is also because human beings are subjecting animals to unprecedented violence in two different domains. Human activities and their byproducts are devastating wild animal habitats at such a fantastic rate that we are obliged to speak of a “sixth mass extinction”, and, while the crisis is typically measured in terms of the loss of entire (...) species, it plays itself out concretely on the bodies ofindividuals. At the same time, industrialized societies now objectify and “process” animals on a massive scale in a variety of settings, for instance—to mention but the numerically most significant—in CAFOs, industrial slaughterhouses and aquafarms, where each year the whole lifecycles of hundreds of billions of land and sea creatures are controlled without any consideration for their pain or terror except insofar as it threatens the economically efficient growth and harvesting of their edible tissues. How should we best respond to the awfulness, and the enormity, of animal suffering? (shrink)

Global structural injustices are harms caused by structural processes, involving multiple individuals, acting across more than one state. Young (2011) developed the concept of ‘political responsibility,’ to allocate responsibility for structural injustice. In this paper, I am going to argue that when considering the climate crisis Young’s model needs to be adapted— to have agency as a basis for allocating political responsibility instead of contribution. This is a more intuitive way to allocate responsibility for the climate crisis given its nature (...) as a threshold problem, and the subtle structural positions occupied by the individuals involved. (shrink)

According to the received view in the literature on homonymy and polysemy representation, there is a difference between how polysemes and homonyms are represented in our mental lexicons. More concretely, the received view holds that whereas the meanings associated with a homonymous expression are (mentally) represented in separate lexical entries, the meanings associated with a polysemous expression are represented together in a single lexical entry. It is usually argued that this is the picture that is supported by the growing body (...) of empirical evidence coming from psycholinguistics. Empirical studies of ambiguity processing and resolution consistently show that polysemous expressions enjoy various processing advantages compared to homonyms, and the received view is generally taken to be required in order to explain these results. The aim of this paper is not only to show that this is not the case but also, and more fundamentally, that the received view falls far short of explaining the available data to a sufficient degree. As a result, the received view is caught up in an explanatory dilemma that I dub the Continuum Puzzle. I then claim that the best way to escape this puzzle is to give up the received view’s core thesis in favor of an alternative view consistent with the empirical evidence. Reaching such an alternative will require rejecting the following pervasive but ill-motivated assumption: Differences in ambiguity processing and resolution can only be explained by there being some corresponding differences in the architecture of our mental lexicons. (shrink)

Este texto trata de uma experimentação na formação de professoras da educação infantil e dos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental de uma escola pública da região metropolitana de Porto Alegre (RS), por meio de práticas de leitura, escrita e conversação, as quais se desdobram em experimentações com as crianças. Tal processo é pensado nas companhias de Sêneca (2018), com seu conceito de leitura e escrita, de Kopenawa (Kopenawa; Albert, 2015), a partir do conceito de palavra, e de Foucault (2004, 2011), (...) considerando-se o conceito de subjetivação. Tal experimentação, que se deu no encontro entre a escrita e a oralidade, foi tomada para pensar nas contribuições para os estudos que compõem a filosofia com crianças. Nesse sentido, a leitura, a escrita e a contação de histórias teriam menos a ver com informações, e mais com o que estamos nos tornando, com a agilidade do nosso pensamento, com nossa sabedoria. Desse modo, conceitos da antiguidade greco-romana e das comunidades ameríndias brasileiras são tomados como ferramentas potentes para pensar a escola contemporânea como possibilidade, ainda, de formação humana. Para tanto, defende-se a conversação entre os vivos e os mortos via texto na escola, espaço público e coletivo, o que poderia ser tomado como uma perspectiva de subjetivação para um pensamento e uma vida mais afirmativos em tempos de tanta pobreza narrativa. (shrink)

The problem of necessity remains one of the central issues in modern philosophy. The authors of this volume, originally published in 1985, developed a new approach to the problem, which focusses on the logical grammar of necessary propositions. This volume gathers their seminal essays on the problem of necessity, together with new material at the original time publication.

A principal hipótese deste trabalho é a de que Sócrates, na Apologia de Platão, utiliza determinados jogos de palavras como uma específica ferramenta retórica. O intuito disso parece ser convencer o leitor de uma prevalência da verdade no conjunto do discurso socrático. Para tanto, busca-se contrabalancear um jogo entre os termos discurso (logon 18b, 19b, 20e, 23d, 27c 28b, 31b, 34b; logos 20c, 26b, 34e; logou 23b; logoi 28c, 32d, 34a, 40b), verdade (aletheian, 17b, 20d, 33c; aletheiai 23b, 28d, 36d; (...) aletheias 29e, 39b) e falsidade ou mentira (epseusanto 17a; pseude 18a; pseudei 26a; pseudetai 20e, 21b; pseudomenoi 34b; pseudos 34e). Nesse sentido, a proposta é apresentar como o discurso de defesa expõe, por meio desses termos, um sentido de hermenêutica socrática, como uma forma peculiar de interpretar oráculos e enigmas. Como obra dramática, a Apologia promove com essa encenação de Sócrates diante do tribunal um efeito retórico claro, pois o foco do discurso não é o júri, mas o leitor. Portanto, é necessário, no plano do discurso de defesa, que Sócrates utilize os recursos de linguagem que o mostrem ao leitor como distinto dos seus acusadores, que “muitas mentiras disseram” (ton pollon hon epseusanto). Palavras-chave: Sócrates; Hermenêutica; Verdade; Discurso. Speech, Truth and Enigma in the Apology Abstract: The main hypothesis of this work is that Socrates, in Plato's Apology, uses certain wordplays as a specific rhetorical tool. The purpose of this seems to be to convince the reader of the prevalence of truth in the whole of Socratic discourse. Therefore, we seek to counterbalance a game between the terms discourse (logon 18b, 19b, 20e, 23d, 27c 28b, 31b, 34b; logos 20c, 26b, 34e; logou 23b; logoi 28c, 32d, 34a, 40b), truth (aletheian, 17b, 20d, 33c; aletheiai 23b, 28d, 36d; aletheias 29e, 39b) and falsehood or lie (epseusanto 17a; pseude 18a; pseudei 26a; pseudetai 20e, 21b; pseudomenoi 34b; pseudos 34e). In this sense, the proposal is to present how the defense discourse exposes, through these terms, a sense of Socratic hermeneutics, as a peculiar way of interpreting oracles and enigmas. As a dramatic work, the Apology promotes with this staging of Socrates in front of the court a clear rhetorical effect, since the focus of the discourse is not the jury, but the reader. Therefore, it is necessary, at the level of the defense discourse, that Socrates uses the language resources that show him to the reader as distinct from his accusers, who “told many lies” (ton pollon hon epseusanto). Key-words: Socrates; Hermeneutics; Truth; Discourse. Discurso, verdad y enigma en la Apología Resumen: La principal hipótesis de este trabajo es que Sócrates, en la Apología de Platón, utiliza ciertos juegos de palabras como herramienta retórica específica. El propósito de esto parece ser convencer al lector del predominio de la verdad en todo el discurso socrático. Por lo tanto, buscamos contrapesar un juego entre los términos discurso (logon 18b, 19b, 20e, 23d, 27c 28b, 31b, 34b; logos 20c, 26b, 34e; logou 23b; logoi 28c, 32d, 34a, 40b), verdad (aletheian, 17b, 20d, 33c; aletheiai 23b, 28d, 36d; aletheias 29e, 39b) y falsedad o mentira (epseusanto 17a; pseude 18a; pseudei 26a; pseudetai 20e, 21b; pseudomenoi 34b; pseudos 34e). En ese sentido, la propuesta es presentar cómo el discurso de la defensa expone, a través de estos términos, un sentido de la hermenéutica socrática, como una forma peculiar de interpretar los oráculos y los enigmas. Como obra dramatica, la Apología promueve con esta puesta en escena de Sócrates frente a la corte un claro efecto retórico, ya que el centro del discurso no es el jurado, sino el lector. Por tanto, es necesario, a nivel del discurso de defensa, que Sócrates utilice los recursos lingüísticos que lo muestren al lector como distinto de sus acusadores, quienes “dijeron muchas mentiras” (ton pollon hon epseusanto). Palabras-clave: Sócrates; Hermenéutica; Verdad; Discurso. Data de registro: 02/08/2023 Data de aceite: 24/01/2024. (shrink)

The _Epic of Gilgamesh_, a 3600-year 12-tablet collection, was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War, and fraudulently imported into the United States. In September, 2021, UNESCO facilitated its repatriation to Iraq, which is seen as an occasion to consolidate Iraq’s efforts to rebuild its legacy, since the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ is of immense cultural, historical and religious value for Iraq The current study examines the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ in the light of the ancient Sumerian and Akkadian (...) traditions. This collection of tablets carries a great legacy of the contemporary Babylonian and Mesopotamian beliefs and socio-religious values, also evident in the use of cuneiform and clay tablets, being ancient forms of writings. The study made use of content analysis and historical and analytical approaches to retrieve data through a documentation research design. The study found that the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ is not only a work of religious literature, but a treatise on civilization. On one hand it narrates the stories engrained in the Mesopotamian mythology, such as those of Ninsun, Shamash and Utnapishtim; on the other hand, owing to its content, literary style and tone, characterization and symbolism, this study would be a great contribution to relive the story of Gilgamesh from current literary, and socio-religious perspective and provide a comprehensive account of the legacy and inheritance that it brings in for the modern generation. (shrink)

In certain cases, children can react strongly in favor of product placements inserted in movies. Scholars therefore argue that existing disclosures might be one strategy in protecting children from any negative effects. However, disclosure research indicates that viewers should both notice disclosures and, in cases of textual cues, read them. We conducted an experiment with 139 children (Mage = 8.46; SD = 1.12; girls = 53.2 %) and tested the influence of textual disclosure format on disclosure awareness as well as (...) brand-related effects. When comparing with no disclosure, results showed that exposure to an existing textual disclosure positively affects disclosure awareness while exposure to an expanded version of it (i.e., by using more textual elements) did not. Further analyses revealed that prior movie exposure positively affected brand evaluation. However, disclosure awareness reversed this effect. We conclude that children appear to be socialized with the existing textual disclosure and that disclosure awareness might be of importance in shielding children against persuasive influence. (shrink)

Chalmers’s two-dimensional argument against materialism (aka the zombie argument) is arguably the most ingenious attempt to ground a view about fundamental reality on epistemic considerations. From the conceivability of a being that is physically identical to a conscious being but that is deprived of phenomenal consciousness (a zombie), the argument draws on the interplay of the primary and the second intensions of the zombie hypothesis to infer the metaphysical possibility of a zombie world, and thus the falsity of physicalism about (...) phenomenality. By means of a detailed reconstruction of the two-dimensional argument, the paper tries to isolate its most central assumption: that the role played by an epistemic scenario (an intentional object) in the verification of the zombie hypothesis is played by a nonintentionally individuated metaphysical world (the zombie world) considered as actual. The paper argues that no non-viciously circular case for this assumption has been made. Thus, the two-dimensional argument is at best inconclusive. (shrink)

A sociedade brasileira no que diz respeito a sua estrutura de relações sociais como conhecemos, tem início no Brasil colônia a qual a instituição de maior força era a escravagista. Nesse sentido, as formações e interações de classes da sociedade brasileira foram arregimentadas pelo racismo, sendo ele escancarado no passado, com leis e naturalização das práticas de disciminação racial, e mantendo grande influência atualmente com a utilização de “máscaras” que encontram para legitimar sua atuação na sociedade contemporânea. Nesse contexto, nos (...) últimos anos tem-se observado a atuação irregular de ações policiais no país, principalmente nas comunidades periféricas, sendo utilizada a brutalidade e a violência física e moral dos sujeitos, violando direitos humanos e fundamentais, e colocando em perigo a vida de crianças e adolescentes que residem nesses ambientes, sobretudo, as negras, reconhecendo assim a existência do racismo estrutural. Considerando que o país é democrático, e reconhecendo que os atores sociais possuem a capacidade de influenciar nas mudanças e construções de políticas capazes de discutir os fundamentos da vida pública e social, esta proposta de pesquisa tem por objetivo refletir como a brutalidade policial afeta a confiança de crianças negras no Estado democrático por meio de instituições de segurança e proteção. Trata-se de uma pesquisa de revisão bibliográfica, qualitativa e descritiva. (shrink)