Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

We investigate how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal and multimodal cues. A total of 187 preschoolers participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included Age, Condition and success on the ToM task. Performance improved with age, and was significantly better for the multimodal condition compared to both unimodal conditions, suggesting that even though unimodal cues were useful to children, (...) the presence of reinforcing information for the multimodal condition was more effective for detecting disbelief. However, results also point to the development of intonational and gestural comprehension in tandem. Children that passed the ToM task significantly outperformed those that failed it for all conditions, showing that children who can attribute a false belief to another individual may more readily access these intonational and gestural cues. (shrink)

This introductory essay conceptually situates the dialogue between Actor-Network Theory and Social Movement Studies that this special issue aims to foster. Rather than considering ANT as a theory in the classic sense, we define it as a theoretical sensibility open to permanently redrawing its own shape in response to the relational entanglements it studies. ANT and its sibling, assemblage theory, have allowed scholars to attend to the complex ecologies within which agents, both human and non-human, mobilise to effect change in (...) overlapping social, ecological, economic and technological realms. In these studies, relations take precedence over substances, thereby forging a radically decentred, redistributed approach to mobilisation. As such, ANT offers a point of departure from dominant understandings of social movements that rely on modernist, dualist epistemologies; ANT studies have expanded the body politic through the incorporation of non-human actants, and redefined collective action as a form of association between heterogeneous entities. Ultimately, we argue that ANT is a useful tool in the task of constructing forms of attention and care that aspire to learn from and think with social movements, rather than explaining them away. (shrink)

A science war is in full swing which has taken science's reproducibility crisis as a battleground. While conservatives and corporate interests use the crisis to weaken regulations, their opponent deny the existence of a science's crisis altogether. Thus, for the conservative National Association of Scholars NAS the crisis is real and due to the progressive assault on higher education with ideologies such as neo-Marxism, radical feminism, historicism, post-colonialism, deconstructionism, post-modernism, liberation theology. In the opposite field, some commentators claim that there (...) is no crisis in science and that saying the opposite is irresponsible. These positions are to be seen in the context of the ongoing battle against regulation, of which the new rules proposed at the US Environmental Protection Agency are but the last chapter. In this optic, Naomi Oreskes writes on Nature that what constitutes the crisis is the conservatives' attack on science. This evident right-left divide in the reading of the crisis is unhelpful and dangerous to the survival of science itself. An alternative reading ignored by the contendents would suggest that structural contradictions have emerged in modern science, and that addressing these should be the focus of our attention. (shrink)

Located at a distance of discussions that is immersed the experimental physics in the late nineteenth century's the figure of Albert Einstein emerges strongly in 1905 following the publication in his article Zur Eletrodynamik Bewegter Korper of un issue in the form of paradox that had made incompatible Galilean-Newtonian's principle of relativity and propagation of light law to date. In the first part of our paper we try to open the question presented by the young physicist on the basis of (...) an example and through their development to found in the second part "the conditions of possibility" that make it possible not only the development the special theory of relativity that would change the old concepts of space and time, but also a way of thinking which influenced by suspicion's empiricism of Mach and the power of imagination developed by Hume, it would open up a new way of looking the reality for contemporary thinking. (shrink)

This monograph brings together a number of articles that reconfigure the relationship between art and materiality: contributions focusing on theoretical, methodological and epistemological approaches as well as rather empirical studies on or from art practices and infrastructures.