Thomas Aquinas maintained that God foreknows future contingent events and that his foreknowledge does not entail that they are necessarily the case. More specifically, he stated that if God knows a future contingent event, this future contingent event will be necessarily the case de sensu composito, but not de sensu diviso. After emphasizing the unified nature of Aquinas’ notion of necessity, we propose an interpretation of his theses by restating them within the framework of non-normal modal logics. In this (...) framework, the K-axiom does not hold, i.e. the necessity operator does not distribute over the material implication. Moreover, assuming that Aquinas rejected the K-axiom is not only consistent, but also leads to a logical framework that allows us to understand other theses maintained by the Doctor Angelicus. In particular, we argue that Aquinas’ remarks on the principle of non-contradiction rest on an impossible worlds semantics for non-normal modal logics. (shrink)

Apologetisch overzicht van de wijsgerige en theologisch inzichten van de middeleeuwse filosoof (1224-1274).

Already in the Middle Ages the honorary title Doctor communis was conferred on Aquinas, but in fact he was never "the common teacher". About twenty-five years after his death (1274), the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus voiced an uncommonly severe criticism: he cannot imagine a theologian and a philosopher maintaining that which Aquinas teaches. The conflict between these thinkers of stature is the subject of this essay. (1) We first describe the epistemological problem, that of the "adequate object of the (...) intellect", from which Scotus develops his criticism, and than analyze (2) his theological and (3) philosophical objections to Aquinas's position. But something is to be said against the analysis of the Doctor subtilis: (4) his criticism proves to be onesided and departs from suppositions, not shared by his opponent. (shrink)

De apostel Paulus spreekt in één van zijn brieven over ‘de verduistering van het verstand’ — een verduistering die het gevolg is van zonde.1 In het werk van een groot aantal filosofen uit de westerse filosofische traditie heeft dit woord van Paulus op een of andere wijze weerklank gevonden. Bij Augustinus, Anselmus, Thomas van Aquino, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman en Franz von Baader bijvoorbeeld, en in ons land bij Abraham Kuyper en Herman Dooyeweerd, vindt men reflecties (...) over de noëtische gevolgen van de zonde.2 Deze denkers hebben de noëtische doorwerking van de zonde onder meer aangewezen in de volgende verschijnselen: dat mensen allerlei onware gedachten hebben dat onze kenvermogens lang niet altijd naar behoren functioneren, zoals onder andere blijkt uit geheugenzwakte, misperceptie en foutief redeneren dat mensen het vaak onderling oneens zijn. (shrink)

The free energy principle is sometimes put forward as accounting for biological self-organization and cognition. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it can be described as minimising its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from particles to organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the abiotic to the biotic. Because the FEP is so general in its application, one might wonder whether this framework can capture anything specific to (...) biology. We take steps to correct for this here. We first explicate the worry, taking pebbles as examples of an abiotic system, and then discuss to what extent the FEP can distinguish its dynamics from an organism’s. We articulate the notion of ‘autonomy as precarious operational closure’ from the enactive literature, and investigate how it can be unpacked within the FEP. This enables the FEP to delineate between the abiotic and the biotic; avoiding the pebble worry that keeps it out of touch with the living systems we encounter in the world. (shrink)

Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalities. Indeed, in a state space description, this can be taken as a skewing of sensorimotor variables that influences social interaction and so also enculturation and habituation. We argue that this construal leads to autism being treated on a (...) par with other sensorimotor atypicalities such as blindness or atypical height. This leads to our conclusion that, insofar there is an ethical call to inclusion in our public sphere regardless of contingent bodily difference, an enactivist take on autism naturally leads to extending such inclusion to autism. Moreover, our analysis suggests a concrete way forward to achieve inclusion of autistics: by being more attentive to autistic sensorimotor specifics. (shrink)

The free energy principle (FEP) portends to provide a unifying principle for the biological and cognitive sciences. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its (information-theoretic) free energy. Under the FEP, to minimise free energy is equivalent to engaging in approximate Bayesian inference. According to the FEP, therefore, inference is at the explanatory base of biology and cognition. In this paper, we discuss a specific challenge to this inferential formulation of adaptive (...) self-organisation. We call it the universal ethology challenge: it states that the FEP cannot unify biology and cognition, for life itself (or adaptive self-organisation) does not require inferential routines to select adaptive solutions to environmental pressures (as mandated by the FEP). We show that it is possible to overcome the universal ethology challenge by providing a cautious and exploratory treatment of inference under the FEP. We conclude that there are good reasons for thinking that the FEP can unify biology and cognition under the notion of approximate Bayesian inference, even if further challenges must be addressed to properly draw such a conclusion. (shrink)

In the mid-1260s in Paris, a dispute raged that concerned the relationship between faith and the Augustinian theological tradition on the one side and secular leaning as represented by the arrival in Latin of Aristotle and various Islamic and Jewish interpreters of Aristotle on the other. Masters of the arts faculty in Paris represented the latter tradition, indicated by the phrase "double truth theory." In 1269, Thomas Aquinas wrote the polemical work On There Being Only One Intellect, Against the (...) Averroists (De unitate intellectus contra averroistas). Thomas is intent on countering two views: first, that intellect is not a faculty of the soul that animates our body, and second, that there is a single intellect existing separately that suffices for all people. Brief as it is, this work puts into play all the significant strands of Thomas's teaching on man - historical doctrinal, philosophical, and theological. It is a valuable source for discussing Thomas's views on the relationship between Aristotle and Christianity and puts to rest the misleading claim that Thomas baptized Aristotle." The introduction places the work historically and sketches the controversy to which it was a contribution. Part 2 includes the Latin Leonine text and McInerny's translation. Part 3 analyzes the basic arguments of Thomas's work and provides a series of interpretive essays meant to make Thomas accessible to today's readers. (shrink)

Where does enactivism fit on the question of realism or idealism for perception? In recent years all general positions have been argued to be adequate. I will argue that enactivism is neither realist nor idealist, and requires a completely different game altogether. In short: it is not idealist because it sees cognition as inherently world-involving, and isn’t realist because it emphasizes the agent’s role in shaping the world through our own historical, bodily activity. More generally, I argue that the question (...) itself assumes a reified, abstract notion of perception. This introduces a wedge between organism and environment that is incompatible with enactivism’s view of organism and environment as mutually constitutive. This problematizes the intermediate position between realist and idealist extremes as has traditionally been argued for in enactivism. I also touch on the ethical implications of this question, and how enactivism provides a promising path to grapple with the contradiction of the objective, shared space and our individual, historically shaped encounters with it. In sum, I suggest it is time for enactivism to go off the beaten path, and lay its own path in walking again. (shrink)

Green human resource management (HRM) leverages the workforce to advance environmental sustainability. While prior research predominantly examined green HRM’s impact on employees’ environmental dedication, this study takes a more comprehensive approach by investigating employees’ broader commitment to the organization and examining a potential boundary condition. We posit that employees’ perceptions of green HRM, along with their beliefs in its authenticity, interact and relate to both pro-environmental behavior and affective organizational commitment. Results from a vignette experiment indicate that these effects are (...) stronger when green HRM is perceived as authentic rather than inauthentic. A subsequent time-lagged field survey study extends these findings, suggesting that green HRM fosters pro-environmental behavior, which in turn spills over into affective organizational commitment. This indirect relationship is more pronounced among employees with stronger authenticity beliefs. These results offer novel insights into green HRM’s role in promoting commitment to both the environment and the organization, highlighting the importance of adopting this role authentically. (shrink)

Predictive processing is an increasingly popular approach to cognition, perception and action. It says that the brain is essentially a hierarchical prediction machine. It is typically construed in a representationalist and inferentialist fashion so that the brain makes contentful inferences on the basis of representational models. In this paper, I argue that the predictive processing framework is inconsistent with this epistemic position. In particular, I argue that the combination of hierarchical modeling, contentful inferentialism and representationalism entail an internal inconsistency. Specifically, (...) for a particular set of states, there will be both a representation requirement and not. Yet a system cannot both be required to represent a certain set of states and not be required to represent those states. Due to this contradiction, I propose to reject the standard view. I suggest that predictive processing is best interpreted in terms of reliable covariation instead, entailing an instrumentalist approach to the statistical machinery. (shrink)

People often use memes to express their ideological stance on real world events. This study departs from a recent COVID-19-related meme which makes use of elements known from the animated televisio...

Although most consumers are positive about socially responsible companies, in order to benefit from CSR efforts, effective and clear CSR communication is important. However, due to the constantly rising profusion of eco-labels, based on either own claims from the organization or claims made by an external third party, consumers may encounter difficulties in identifying truly responsible firms, which could result in less effective CSR initiatives, even for those responsible firms. Therefore, building on attribution theory, this study seeks to identify how (...) uncertified internal CSR claims and external third-party CSR labels should be used in order to deter greenwashing and increase positive consumer evaluations. Within a 3 × 2 design, respondents are exposed to different coffee product packages measuring their attitude toward the brand, corporate credibility, purchase intention, and scent perception, as well as perceived attributional CSR motives. Overall, findings indicate that especially an external CSR label affects consumer responses toward the firm. Moreover, perceived CSR motives serve as a mediator between an external CSR label and corporate credibility and brand attitude, respectively. These findings warrant further consideration of introducing an external multilevel rating systems by governmental law. (shrink)

As one approach to examining the way ethical decisions are made, we asked experts and novices to review a set of scenarios that depict some important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists for the analysis of expert performance. The participants were asked to verbalize their normally unexpressed thought processes as they responded to the scenarios, and to make recommendations for courses of action. We found that experts spent more time (...) working through the decision-making process than novices and also raised substantially more concerns than novices. Differences also exist among the three groups of experts. (shrink)

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they (...) are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective–meaning pairs—indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow‐up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound‐meaning associations. (shrink)

This book addresses late modern debates in Christian theology over the question of whether knowledge of God is available only through God's gracious self-revelation or through revelation plus philosophy or natural reason. The author examines the position of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as an exemplar of the latter, and the countervailing position of Karl Barth as an exemplar of the former, and then shows how Aquinas's grammar of God both dissolves and transcends these contentious debates altogether.

Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a non-representational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has received from both representationalists and non-representationalists. I analyze this debate, and distinguish four sorts of objections: the objection of the wrongfully cut middleman, the argument against explanatory exclusionism, the (...) case for scientific benefits of representations, and the charge of inconsistent ascription of representational status in EV. I argue that the middleman was never cut in EV, and is controversial to boot, otherwise equal, non-representational explanations have primacy over representational explanations, due to the lack of naturalistic grounds for representations and the unnecessarily ascribed cognitive load to the system. Further, I show that puts the cart before the horse, and the arguments on offer are viciously circular. However, the final objection, lays bare a deeper issue for EV. At the cost of giving up the middle position, however, the explanatory tools already available to EV can be shown to cover the work initially thought to require representation. I conclude that EV is best altered to be a non-representational theory of perception. (shrink)

This paper presents methods and challenges attendant on the use of protocol analysis to develop a model of heuristic processing applied to research ethics. Participants are exposed to ethically complex scenarios and asked to verbalize their thoughts as they formulate a requested decision. The model identifies functional parts of the decision-making task: interpretation, retrieval, judgment and editing and seeks to reliably code participant verbalizations to those tasks as well as to a set of cognitive tools generally useful in such work. (...) Important difficulties in the reliability and external validity of measurement are evaluated and a small set of illustrative data is used in support of that discussion. Results indicate that both intuitive emotional but also more deliberative cognition is present which is consistent with work in related literatures in expertise and in neuropsychology. Finally, the theoretical and practical potential of the approach is elaborated, particularly through links to a framing in Aristotelian ethics. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...) entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

In deze bijdrage worden twee alternatieve visies op de verhouding van geloof en weten geschetst aan de hand van twee middeleeuwse denkers: Bernardus van Clairvaux en Thomas van Aquino. De auteur betoogt dat zowel de ‘rationalistische’ positie van Thomas van Aquino als de ‘anti-rationalistische’ positie van Bernardus van Clairvaux beide, geloof en rede, als op waarheid betrokken zien, waarmee zicht wordt geboden op het wijsgerige belang van dit vermeende anti-rationalisme.

This paper begins to explore how corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved in Mexico. It looks at Mexico's social and political history to see the values that shaped expectations about how Mexican firms should address the needs and desires of their stakeholders in various periods in the 20th century. Particular attention is given to firms in Monterrey because they pioneered a form of company paternalism that reflected early CSR initiatives. Finally the paper briefly examines some contemporary CSR practices by large (...) Mexican firms. The paper begins to fill a gap in the business-andsociety literature about CSR practices outside the U.S. and Western European countries, which have received most attention by business-and-society scholars. (shrink)

ABB words in Chinese, e.g., hēi-qīqī ‘pitch black’, have been studied for a long time. Most traditional studies analyze these words through derivational rules involving empty suffixes. However, this is problematic, as they are better seen as compounds involving a prosaic A and an ideophonic BB part. By treating ABB as a schema sanctioned by collocate–ideophonic constructions, it is possible to investigate other similar patterns. A corpus study (more than 5,000 tokens) revealed that on the level of schemas, ABB truly (...) acts as a prototype of such constructions, but that it is far from the only pattern to be identified. A second corpus-based study on the level of exemplars showed there are different pockets of salience and non-uniformity in the data from four angles: cue validity, frequency, dispersion, and constructional preference. This paper provides evidence that the traditional ABB narrative needs to be complemented with usage-based data, and grapple with the lexical salience effects this brings along for words involving iconicity. (shrink)

It has often been observed that color is a highly preferred attribute for use in distinguishing descriptions, that is, referring expressions produced with the purpose of identifying an object within a visual scene. However, most of these observations were based on visual displays containing only colors that were maximally different in hue and for which the language of experimentation possessed basic color terms. The experiments described in this paper investigate whether speakers’ preference for color is reduced if the color of (...) the target referent is similar to that of the distractors. Because colors that look similar are often also harder to distinguish linguistically, we also examine the impact of the codability of color values. As a third factor, we investigate the salience of available alternative attributes and its impact on the use of color. The results of our experiments show that, while speakers are indeed less likely to use color when the colors in a display are similar, this effect is mostly due to the difficulty in naming similar colors. Color use for color with a basic color term is affected only when the colors of target and distractors are very similar (yet still distinguishable). The salience of our alternative attribute size, manipulated by varying the difference in size between target and distractors, had no impact on the use of color. (shrink)

Iconic words are supposed to exhibit imitative relationships between their linguistic forms and their referents. Many studies have worked to pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophones from different languages. The correspondence patterns show similarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be, remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus on how to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances that make an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created and analysed a (...) database of 1,860 ideophones across 13 languages, and found that seven articulatory features, physiologically accessible to all spoken language users, pattern according to semantic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for future research to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test and explain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language. The perspective taken here fits in with ongoing research of embodiment, motivation, and iconicity research, three major strands of research within Cognitive Linguistics. The results support that there is a degree of unity between the concepts of imitative communication and the spoken forms through cross-domain mappings, which involve physical articulatory movement. (shrink)

We target the ontological and epistemological ramifications of the proposed distinction between Friston and Pearl blankets. We emphasize the need for empirical testing next to computational modeling. A peculiar aspect of the free energy principle (FEP) is its purported support of radically opposed ontologies of the mind. In our view, the objective ontological aspiration itself should be rejected for a pragmatic instrumentalist view.