Esta comunicación pretende reflexionar sobre lo que se entiende por �dominación� y como ella se relaciona con la �soberanía�. Para ello se hará un pequeño recorrido histórico para analizar las distintas formas soberanas. Con este análisis se llegará a la época actual reinada por el libre mercado, con lo que se hará necesario reflexionar sobre él y vincularlo, si es preciso, con la dominación, a pesar de la contradicción incial.

Despite the radical importance of embryology in the development of organi- cism, developmental biology remains philosophically underexplored as a theoretical and empirical resource to clarify the nature of organisms. This paper discusses how embryology can help develop the organisational definition of the organism as a differentiated, function- ally integrated, and autonomous system. I distinguish two conceptions of development in the organisational tradition that yield two different conceptions of the organism: the life- history view claims that organisms can be considered as (...) such during their whole ontogeny; the constitutive view distinguishes two periods in the life history, a period of generation and a period of self-maintenance of a constitutive organisation. Arguing in favour of the con- stitutive view, it will be claimed that the organisational criteria for the definition of organ- ism (i.e., differentiation, functional integration, and autonomy) can only be applied to the developmental system when it has entered the period of self-maintenance of a constitutive organisation. under the light of current research in developmental biology, it is possible to make explicit how organisms come to be as organisms. To this end, I explore key onto- genetic events that help us clarify the core aspects of animal organisation and allow us to identify the developmental stage that marks the ontological transition between an organism in potency and an organism in actuality. The structure of this ontogenetic unfolding paral- lels the conceptual structure of the very notion of organism; the generation of the being of a particular organism parallels its definition. (shrink)

This study analyzes shells of marine gastropods of a zoological museum and the Latin epithets expressing perceptual and connotative attributes that they have received in the standard, Linnaean nomenclature. Making use of the Osgood semantic differential, we presented the subjects with digital 3-D reproductions of the shell specimens to be subjectively evaluated according to 17 pairs of attributes. The results show that, overall, the subjective evaluations given by the subjects are consistent, which suggests that an intersubjective characterization of the shells (...) as wholes according to their qualitative and morphological traits is possible and scientifically explicable. This may apply to other biological items as well. The results also show that the epithets given to the shells by taxonomists do not always reflect the perceptual evaluation of the general population, being a product of the well-known ambiguity in taxonomic categorization and naming. (shrink)

Ofrecemos un estudio introductorio del papel que tuvo el concepto de partícula en los artículos fundacionales de la mecánica cuántica. Nos centramos en el período 1925-1927, lo que incluye el análisis de los primeros trabajos de Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Schrödinger y Dirac, y también las primeras formulaciones de la complementaridad de Bohr. Nuestro objetivo es discutir hasta qué punto se puso en duda entre los creadores de la nueva teoría, justo en el momento de su creación y cuando aún no (...) existía una interpretación consensuada ni establecida, el concepto de partícula. Posteriores desarrollos, como la teoría cuántica de campos, pusieron la vigencia de ese concepto bajo sospecha. Mostramos que un análisis historiográfico articulado mediante este concepto permite caracterizar la relación que los distintos autores de la mecánica cuántica mantuvieron con la visualización de los procesos atómicos. En algunos casos, como el de Heisenberg, su evolución es especialmente significativa. Asimismo, también citaremos algunos fragmentos donde los autores considerados reclaman para sí el legado de la antigua teoría cuántica, tratando de legitimar sus propios desarrollos a partir de su coherencia con los primeros descubrimientos de los Planck, Einstein o De Broglie. De prácticamente todos ellos hemos encontrado textos en este sentido. (shrink)

This study analyzes shells of marine gastropods of a zoological museum and the Latin epithets expressing perceptual and connotative attributes that they have received in the standard, Linnaean nomenclature. Making use of the Osgood semantic differential, we presented the subjects with digital 3-D reproductions of the shell specimens to be subjectively evaluated according to 17 pairs of attributes. The results show that, overall, the subjective evaluations given by the subjects are consistent, which suggests that an intersubjective characterization of the shells (...) as wholes according to their qualitative and morphological traits is possible and scientifically explicable. This may apply to other biological items as well. The results also show that the epithets given to the shells by taxonomists do not always reflect the perceptual evaluation of the general population, being a product of the well-known ambiguity in taxonomic categorization and naming. (shrink)

Study on views of Rāmadāsa, 1608-1681, on philosophy and aesthetics of Hindustani classical music, expressed in Dāsabodha, Marathi verse work on Hindu religious life.

The importance of socio-economic impacts from the introduction and use of genetically modified crops is reflected in increasing efforts to include them in regulatory frameworks. Aiming to identify and understand the present knowledge on SEI of GM crops, we here report the findings from an extensive study of the published international scientific peer-reviewed literature. After applying specified selection criteria, a total of 410 articles are analysed. The main findings include: limited empirical research on SEI of GM crops in the scientific (...) literature; the main focus of the majority of the published research is on a restricted set of monetary economic parameters; proportionally, there are very few empirical studies on social and non-monetary economic aspects; most of the research reports only short-term findings; the variable local contexts and conditions are generally ignored in research methodology and analysis; conventional agriculture is the commonly used comparator, with minimal consideration of other substantially different agricultural systems; and there is the overall tendency to frame the research upon not validated theoretical assumptions, and to over-extrapolate small-scale and short-term specific results to generalized conclusions. These findings point to a lack of empirical and comprehensive research on SEI of GM crops for possible use in decision-making. Broader questions and improved methodologies, assisted by more rigorous peer-review, will be required to overcome current research shortcomings. (shrink)

Homework have different familiar impact in each familiar environment. In order to uncover the attitudes parents take towards their children’s homework, a national study about family balance, where 471 people have been interviewed, is done. The results show that women are more likely to help children doing homework. The study concludes making evidence some changes.

El presente artículo desarrolla un análisis crítico de papel metodológico que desempeña la libre fantasía en Ideas I. Haciendo visible la estrecha relación entre las modalizaciones de conciencia y la estructura noético-noemática de los actos intencionales, se demostrará la necesaria complementariedad de los métodos de las reducciones eidética y fenomenológica para el proyecto de Husserl de una crítica fenomenológica del conocimiento. Con ello se busca poner de relieve que el rendimiento de la fantasía tuvo un impacto metodológico decisivo para la (...) conversión trascendental de la fenomenología. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

Para Michel Foucault existe una relación intrínseca entre ética, estética y política; y, en este ensayo interesa reflexionar sobre la parrhesía como ese decir franco que permite la interpelación insolente y escandalosa, por medio del cual los sujetos son interpelados a conocerse a sí mismos. En ese sentido, se analiza el accionar de los escraches, realizados por H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio) en los albores del siglo XXI en Argentina, como la (...) producción e irrupción de una justicia paralela que liga ética y estética en un proceso de subjetivación e interpelación política. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

In this paper I explore alternative ways of addressing the infinite regress problem of inference, as it was depicted in Lewis Carroll’s ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’. Roughly put, the problem is that if a claim to the effect that one’s premises give support to one’s conclusion must itself be part of one’s premises, then an infinite regress of reasons ensues. I discuss some recent attempts to solve that problem, but I find all of them to be wanting. Those (...) attempts either require the reasoner to believe that her premises give support to her conclusion, or to take her premises to give support to her conclusion, where taking is not a doxastic attitude. I conclude that, on the face of the failure of those attempts to solve the problem, there is a strong prima facie case for allowing inference to be blind. (shrink)

This article takes its retrospective lead from the oppressive schooling years during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to reflect on the educational significance of artistic activities through considering aesthetic virtues and moral agency cultivated in these activities. Describing an unconventional educational milieu where schooling was deliberately ‘dismantled’, I emphasize the important role that artistic endeavours can play in building a person’s aesthetic strength and moral power to overcome the adversity of life, hence for the fuller human development. By blending philosophical discussion (...) with historical manifestation, I stress the less articulated educational discourse that makes dance relevant to the educational formation of epistemic virtues and moral sensibilities. Joining in the emerging efforts to improving the worlds of schools, curricula, and pedagogies, I argue that the contingent integration of different histories, life conditions, and social and cultural discourses are ‘transformative’ sites for pedagogy. Thus, I seek to shed historically fresh light on the ways of thinking of schooling, education, and the arts for hope and possibility to ultimately argue for ways that can speak to the diversity of global societies today. (shrink)

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological (...) account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that the tradition of political philosophy which follows in John Rawls's footsteps is obligated to concern itself not only with the realizability, but also with the realization, of justice. Although Rawls himself expresses a commitment only to the former of these, I argue that the roles which he assigns to political philosophy require him to take on the further commitment to realization. This is because these roles are meant to influence not only political philosophers, but (...) the citizens of the wider community as well. The realistically utopian role, which I take to be the central one, requires political philosophy to inspire in that population a hope which I argue that realizability alone cannot provide. Given the deep revisions regarding the political nature of justice as fairness which Rawls made on the basis of realizability concerns, I argue that his theory must in this case be committed to a similar revision. The hope which political philosophy is meant to provide is simply not realizable until the discipline concerns itself centrally with the task of realization. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that opposite-sex couples planning weddings have a duty to make their choices in ways that undermine the harmful norms that lead to most women taking their husband’s last names when they marry, and most weddings being extremely expensive. This duty, however, is not a duty to significantly reduce the prevalence of those norms, since doing so is generally not in the power of individual couples. Rather, it is a duty to provide observing couples around them (...) with new live options for their own weddings. (shrink)

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events. Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these (...) two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans. (shrink)

If you are an anthropologist wanting to use digital methods or programming as part of your research, where do you start? In this commentary, we discuss three ways in which anthropologists can use computational tools to enhance, support, and complement ethnographic methods. By presenting our reflections, we hope to contribute to the stirring conversations about the potential future role of data science vis-a-vis anthropology and ethnography, and to inspire other anthropologists to take up the use of digital methods, programming, and (...) computational tools in their own research. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the received view that the anti-nativist arguments of Book I of Locke’s Essay conclusively challenge nativism. I begin by reconstructing the chief argument of Book I and its corollary arguments. I call attention to their dependence on (what I label) “the Awareness Principle”, viz., the view that there are no ideas in the mind of which the mind either isn’t currently aware or hasn’t been aware in the past. I then argue that the arguments’ (...) dependence on this principle is question begging on two counts. Unless this principle is defended, Locke’s arguments beg the question against Descartes and Leibniz because their nativism implies the denial of the Awareness Principle. And even when Locke defended the principle, his arguments remain question begging because they presuppose the empiricism they aim to prove. The disclosure of the question-begging status of these arguments debunks a seemingly powerful way of attacking nativism. (shrink)

The recruitment of respondents belonging to ethnic minorities poses important challenges in social and health research. This paper reflects on the enablers and barriers to recruitment that we encountered in our research work with persons belonging to ethnic minorities. Additionally, we applied the Matching Model of Recruitment, a theoretical framework concerning minority recruitment, to guide our reflection. We also explored its applicability as a research design tool. In assessing our research experience, we learned that minority recruitment in social and health (...) research is influenced by the social context of all key players involved in the research. Also, there are enablers and barriers within that social context facilitating or delaying the recruitment process. The main enablers to recruit respondents belonging to ethnic minorities include working with community agencies and gatekeepers who share a common vision with researchers and the latter’s ability to gain the trust of potential respondents. The main barriers include demanding too much from these same community agencies and gatekeepers and ignoring factors that could delay the completion of the research. Although we found the Matching Model of Recruitment to be an effective tool in assessing the processes of recruiting respondents belonging to ethnic minorities, further empirical research is needed to explore its usefulness during the research planning phase. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the relationship between neutralization and “as if” consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology, in particular, from its convergence in intuitions concerning phantasy. Starting from a critique of a line of interpretation that, in its attempt to approach phenomenologically to an “aesthetic consciousness”, homologates the neutrality modification with the Epoché, the article seeks to expose the methodological function that the modalization of belief fulfills in the project of Ideas I, as well as highlighting the growing importance that phantasy (...) and the “as if” consciousness will acquire in the subsequent development of Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

Resumen Esta investigación sobre la aplicación para teléfonos móviles inteligentes WhatsApp se enfoca desde los presupuestos del análisis de la conversación coloquial. Se propone una configuración estructural de estas conversaciones basada en secuencias de apertura, continuidad y cierre. Nuestro objetivo es describir las estrategias comunicativas y discursivas empleadas en este canal de comunicación tan cotidiano, y comprobar, por un lado, cómo los elementos no exclusivamente lingüísticos funcionan como anclajes semánticos que sirven para cohesionar y referenciar la información inferida de (...) cada acto de habla y, por otro, cómo se utilizan estos elementos en la negociación de las relaciones sociales y guían la interacción. Así pues, la funcionalidad de los emoticonos es múltiple; a veces pueden sustituir a unidades léxicas y, en ocasiones, vehiculan la interpretación de la emoción del enunciador. Además, otras veces recapitulan la intención del enunciador y también pueden ser elementos de cortesía. Por otra parte, su uso está relacionado con variables diatópicas, diastráticas y diafásicas. Para esta investigación hemos analizado cien conversaciones de once grupos integrados por un número variable de tres a doce individuos por grupo, con edades comprendidas entre los doce y los sesenta años. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer two counterexamples to the so-called ‘Uniqueness Thesis.’ As one of these examples rely on the thesis that it is possible for a justified belief to be based on an inconsistent body of evidence, I also offer reasons for this further thesis. On the assumption that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, the counterexamples seem to work.

Pritchard sostiene que la condición de habilidad y la condición de seguridad le imponen demandas independientes al conocimiento, i.e., que la satisfacción de una no implica la satisfacción de la otra y que, por lo tanto, ninguna de ellas es suficiente por sí misma para ofrecer una caracterización adecuada de esta noción. Argumento, por el contrario, que no hay buenas razones para pensar que la condición de seguridad es insuficiente. Empleando algunos conceptos de Greco y Pritchard y Kallestrup para caracterizar (...) a las habilidades cognitivas y el caso del mentiroso consistente de Lackey, argumento que TEMP, el caso clave de Pritchard para mostrar que puede haber seguridad sin habilidad, no funciona porque el proceso cognitivo relevante constituye una realización legítima, aunque anómala, de una habilidad. Pritchard maintains that the ability and the safety conditions impose independent demands on knowledge, i.e., that satisfying only one of them is not sufficient to acquire knowledge. I argue that there are no good reasons to suppose that the safety condition is not sufficient. I claim that TEMP, the key case proposed by Pritchard to show that there can be safety without ability, fails because therelevant cognitive process constitutes a legitimate, although anomalous, realization of a cognitive ability. (shrink)

In a backlash against the prevalence of statistical methods, recently social scientists have focused more on studying causal mechanisms. They increasingly rely on a technique called process-tracing, which involves contrasting the observable implications of several alternative mechanisms. Problematically, process-tracers do not commit to a fundamental notion of causation, and therefore arguably they cannot discern between mere correlation between the links of their purported mechanisms and genuine causation. In this paper, I argue that committing to Woodward's interventionist notion of causation would (...) solve this problem: process-tracers should take into account evidence for possible interventions on the mechanisms they study. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the capabiliti...

It is well known that experts’ opinion and testimony take on a decisive weight in judicial fact-finding, raising issues and perplexities that have long been under scholarly scrutiny. In this paper I argue that expert’s opinions have a much wider impact on legal decision-making. In particular, they may generate a problem that I will call ‘the opacity of law’. A legal text, such as a statute or regulation, becomes opaque if a legal authority is not able to grasp its full (...) linguistic content but is nevertheless in a position to use it, thanks to an expert’ opinion, in legal decision-making. When this occurs, not only do experts contribute to fact-finding but also to determining the content of the law. In the paper I analyse the linguistic and cognitive sources of this phenomenon, its characteristics and troublesome consequences, and the different kinds of opacity that may affect legal decision-making. (shrink)

In this article I suggest that in arguing that God has only present knowledge, falling short of the classical understanding of divine forekowledge, openview theologians imply a paradigmatic change in the hermeneutical principles of theological methodology. This change takes place when they abandon t..

In this paper, I deal with a version of the epistemic regress problem. After rejecting foundationalism as a solution to it, I consider two versions of infinitism. The first one is found to be unacceptable, for it fails both to cohere with certain attributions of justification and also to maintain its internal coherence. The second one avoids both problems, and it is found to be the best way of addressing the epistemic regress problem. As the successful version of infinitism makes (...) use of the notion of a rational disposition to form and deploy reasons, I also manage to explicate that notion. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

Epistemologists often describe subjects as being capable of adopting a third kind of categorical doxastic stance regarding whether something is the case, besides belief and disbelief. They deploy a variety of idioms in order to ascribe that stance. In this paper, I flesh out the properties that the third kind of categorical stance is supposed to have and start searching for the best ways to ascribe it. The idioms ‘suspends judgment about whether’ and ‘is agnostic about whether’, among others, are (...) found to be unfit to play the desired role. In the end, I suggest that ‘is in doubt as to whether’ is our best choice among the alternatives surveyed here. (shrink)

Sober and Wilson have recently claimed that evolutionary theory can do what neither philosophy nor experimental psychology have been able to, namely, "break the deadlock" in the egoism vs. altruism debate with an argument based on the reliability of altruistic motivation. I analyze both their reliability argument and the experimental evidence of social psychology in favor of altruism in terms of the folk-psychological "laws" and inference patterns underlying them, and conclude that they both rely on the same patterns. I expose (...) the confusions that have led Sober and Wilson to defend a reliability argument while rejecting the experimental evidence of social psychology. (shrink)

Resumen: Durante la comisión de un crimen, testigos o víctimas, expuestos al habla del agresor pueden ser llamados, en forma posterior, a reconocer la voz de quien se sospecha es el autor del delito, con el fin de establecer si ellos la reconocerían como la voz del delincuente. Un ejemplo de esta situación, donde se vio involucrado el testimonio de testigos auditivos, fue durante el proceso del caso de Emilio Berkhoff, el joven universitario que fue declarado culpable de los delitos (...) de porte ilegal de armas y municiones y condenado a cinco años y un día de cárcel. El caso no estuvo exento de cierta controversia debido a las declaraciones públicas del imputado sobre supuestas violaciones al debido proceso. En este trabajo se revisa el procedimiento ocupado para la recolección de la evidencia auditiva a la luz de los criterios más ampliamente compartidos sobre la materia.: During the commission of a crime, witnesses or victims, exposed to the speech of the aggressor can be called, later, to recognize the voice of the person suspected of being the perpetrator of the crime, in order to establish whether they would recognize it as the voice of the offender. An example of this situation, where the testimony of hearing witnesses was involved, was during the case of Emilio Berkhoff, the young university student who was found guilty of the crimes of illegal bearing of arms and ammunition and sentenced to five years and one day in jail. The case was not exempt from some controversy due to the public statements of the accused about alleged violations of due process. In this paper we review the procedure used to collect the auditory evidence in light of the most widely shared criteria on the subject. (shrink)

Classical evolutionary explanations of social behavior classify behaviors from their effects, not from their underlying mechanisms. Here lies a potential objection against the view that morality can be explained by such models, e.g. Trivers’reciprocal altruism. However, evolutionary theory reveals a growing interest in the evolution of psychological mechanisms and factors them in as selective forces. This opens up perspectives for evolutionary approaches to problems that have traditionally worried moral philosophers. Once the ability to mind-read is factored-in among the relevant variables (...) in the evolution of moral abilities and counted among the selection pressures that have plausibly shaped our nature as moral agents, an evolutionary approach can contribute, so I will argue, to the solution of a long-standing debate in moral philosophy and psychology concerning the basic motivation for moral behavior. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Engage or Not to Engage:An Interpreter and a Mother's Need for Connection in the Cardiothoracic UnitRosa C. MorenoFive minutes into my shift, I arrived at my assigned area for the day, the cardiothoracic intensive care unit. Soon after, I received a phone call from the charge nurse that my interpreting services were being requested—words that set the tone for what would be a busy day. I took my (...) notepad, clipped my pen onto my lanyard, and off I went. As I turned the corner of the long hospital corridor, I saw a group of providers standing outside a room, and I knew it was going to be one of those "tough" conversations. I was escorted inside the hospital room. As is customary, I scanned the room and noticed the patient was a female in her teens and her mama of a humble demeanor.Interpreters serve as vital conduits in bridging the linguistic and cultural gaps between individuals who speak different languages. Interpreters convey spoken messages faithfully and impartially, striving to maintain the integrity and tone of the original communication.I interpreted for the cardiologist and for Mama, whose look of worry was evident. Her daughter had gone into cardiac arrest during the night on the oncology unit and was unconscious, initially admitted for recently diagnosed leukemia. Between every piece of information, Mama invoked her faith and, with it, the hope of her daughter pulling through. The patient would get an MRI to find a plausible explanation. We all left the room except Mama. I waited outside in case other providers needed me. Mama walked out to the hallway and asked me to please not leave her side the rest of the day. "Of course," I replied.To patients: Understand that interpreters are bound by professional ethics, including confidentiality and impartiality. Avoid engaging in side-conversations with interpreters, as their primary focus should be on facilitating communication between you and healthcare providers.Mama and I waited outside the MRI room. Wait time was filled with the telling of stories and [End Page E7] anecdotes of Mama and her two daughters. They arrived in the US three years prior, leaving their home and family to escape inevitable violence. They journeyed on foot and ride-hopped through the country of Mexico and then endured the detention center experience. A woman they encountered was kind enough to rent the family of three a room in her home. Mama shared with me anecdotes about the rebellious nature of the patient as a 15-year-old determined to figure out her identity and the quiet and observant nature of the younger sister. I listened to Mama's own story of hope and despair. Sprinkled between every story, Mama invoked her faith and, with it, the hope of her daughter pulling through. I listened, nodded, validated, encouraged, and smiled when Mama smiled.To healthcare providers: Recognize and respect cultural differences that may impact communication and healthcare decision-making. Be open to learning about your patient's cultural background and preferences and adapt your approach accordingly.My shift was ending. I told Mama I would see her tomorrow morning and let her know her daughter was in my prayers.To healthcare providers: While their primary role is to bridge the communication gap between healthcare providers and patients who speak different languages, interpreters also understand the emotional weight that accompanies medical situations.The following morning, I went straight to the patient's room. From afar, I saw Mama outside in the hallway. As I got closer, she spread her arms and hugged me whilst letting me know her daughter had passed away during the night. No tears were showing—only sad and somber eyes. I gave her my most sincere condolences. We stood in the middle of the hospital corridor as she recounted the events of the night. Mama asked me if I could accompany her inside the room, which I did. She asked if I could hold her daughter's hand, and so I held it. She then asked me if I could tell her daughter what a beautiful and wonderful young lady she was. I struggled with this last request, for... (shrink)