This paper presents ongoing research towards understanding the discourse and workspace in computer-mediated interactions. We present a series of methods developed to study non-collocated computer-mediated interactions. These methods were developed originally to study interactions involving teams composed of architecture, engineering, and construction management students as part of the AEC Global Teamwork course offered at Stanford University in collaboration with universities worldwide since 1993. The methods stress the value of using ethnographic approaches, particularly the role that both discourse and workspace have (...) in developing the communication processes involved in the interactions. We used the AEC Global Teamwork course as a testbed and focused on issues regarding the nature of the communication act in building design projects when mediated by computers. We successfully tested these new methods and present the preliminary results. (shrink)

This paper addresses the possibility of measuring perceived usability in an absolute way. It studies the impact of the nature of the tasks performed in perceived software usability evaluation, using for this purpose the subjective evaluation of an application’s performance via the Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI). The paper reports on the post-hoc analysis of data from a productivity study for testing the effect of changes in the graphical user interface (GUI) of a market leading drafting application. Even though one (...) would expect similar evaluations of an application’s usability for same releases, the analysis reveals that the output of this subjective appreciation is context sensitive and therefore mediated by the research design. Our study unmasked a significant interaction between the nature of the tasks used for the usability evaluation and how users evaluate the performance of this application. This interaction challenges the concept of absolute benchmarking in subjective usability evaluation, as some software evaluation methods aspire to provide, since subjective measurement of software quality will be affected most likely by the nature of the testing materials used for the evaluation. (shrink)

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

En este artículo postulamos que el trabajo de Kuhn es una revolución filosófica para la filosofía de la ciencia. La búsqueda de revoluciones filosóficas es una extensión de las ideas de Kuhn acerca de las revoluciones científicas. Las revoluciones filosóficas se distinguen de las revoluciones científicas en algunos aspectos que discutimos en este trabajo. Defendemos que la revolución kuhniana consiste en la naturalización de la filosofía de la ciencia que se desprende de sus trabajos y discutimos la analogía biológica que (...) Kuhn empleó como un ejemplo ilustrativo. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se propone un estudio comparativo de las producciones de algunos referentes de la Investigación Participativa. Se revisan algunos de los textos de Orlando Fals Borda, Paulo Freire, João Bosco Guedes Pinto, Michel Thiollent, María Teresa Sirvent y Joel Martí. Este trabajo se inscribe en el proceso reciente de transformación universitaria en Uruguay, en particular, en una de sus iniciativas: la de la integración curricular de la extensión a través de lo que se ha denominado “prácticas universitarias (...) integrales”. En este marco, la reflexión teórico-metodológica sobre la extensión crítica y las prácticas de investigación-acción conectadas con ella resultan fundamentales para dotar las iniciativas en curso de mayor pertinencia académica y potencial transformador. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Donald Davidson have explained that we cannot derive predictions from judgments such as "he boasted from vanity." Such judgments are also the source of countless painful mistakes. However, are they necessarily unreliable? Often enough, even if only gradually and partially, we get people right. Assuming that we do is already assuming that there must be a connection, if not causal then at least casual, between what a person is, what she does, and how she (...) acts; and that we may describe it correctly. If no ironclad generalizations can be made that connect the way a person is, her reasons, and her actions, how might we describe correctness in judgments such as this?Anscombe... (shrink)

Our purpose in this essay is to introduce new concepts in a wide and recursive view of the systemic consequences of the following biological facts that I and we have presented that can be resumed as: that as living systems we human beings are molecular autopoietic system; that living systems live only as long as they find themselves in a medium that provides them with all the conditions that make the realization of their living possible, that is, in the continuous (...) conservation of their relation of adaptation to the circumstances in which they find themselves; that as a living system exists only in a relation of adaptation with the medium that operates as its ecological niche, its reproduction necessarily occurs as a process of systemic duplication or multiplication of the ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates; that the worlds of doings that we generate as languaging beings in our conversations, explanations, reflections and theories are part of our ecological niche; and that we human beings as living beings that exist in languaging, are biological–cultural beings in which our cultural and our biological manners of existences can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Of the systemic consequences of these biological facts that we consider in this essay, we wish to mention two as the principal: that the diversification of manners of living produced in biological evolution is the result of differential survival in a changing medium through the conservation of adaptation, and not through competitive survival of the best; and that we in our living as languaging human beings are the epistemological fundament of all that we do and know as such. (shrink)

The causal theory of action is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency -- the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources (...) while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action ; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action -oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. Contributors: Fred Adams, Jesús H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

En la formación inicial docente, el estudio de la epistemología constituye una pieza fundamental para que los futuros profesores puedan filosofar sobre la realidad de los diversos contextos educativos y se pregunten cómo mejorarla desde los principios que rigen la investigación científica. De este modo, gracias al sustento epistemológico, los estudiantes de pedagogía pueden formarse como docentes investigadores capaces de analizar los cambios sociales propuestos por las múltiples realidades y conocer cómo se construye el conocimiento científico de una especialidad dada. (...) La finalidad de este trabajo, es presentar una reflexión filosófica-epistemológica sobre la imperiosa necesidad de desarrollar el conocimiento epistemológico en la formación inicial del profesorado de matemática e historia, considerando los fundamentos disciplinares, pedagógicos y cognitivos de dichas áreas. (shrink)

editorial changes not yet reviewed by author Purpose My intent in this essay is to reflect on the history of some biological notions such as autopoiesis, structural coupling, and cognition, that I have developed since the early 1960’s as a result of my work on visual perception and the organization of the living. No doubt I shall repeat things that I have said in other publications (Maturana and Varela 1980 and 1988), and I shall present notions that once they are (...) said appear as obvious truisms. But the reader it is not invited to attend to the truisms, rather he or she is invited to attend to the consequences that they entail for the understanding of biological processes. After all, explanations or demonstrations always become self evident once they are understood and accepted. KEYWORDS Autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition, explanations, self consciousness, 1. Autopoiesis 1.1 Origins of the notion In November 1960, a first year medical student asked me the question “What began three thousand eight hundred million years ago so that you can say now that living systems began then?” I realized that I could not properly answer that question, so I said “I cannot answer this question now, but if you come back next year I shall propose an answer then.” Thus I accepted the question of the student to be answered later, and as I did so, I accepted also the question for myself. I realized that to answer this question I had to create a living system, either conceptually or practically, because I had to be able to say what kind of systems were living system to be able to say how they began. While in the attempting to answer the dual questions of what kind of systems are living systems, and of how did they begin so that I could now speak of their origin, it became obvious to me that living systems exist as autonomous entities in the form of self contained closed molecular dynamics of self production, open to the flow of molecules through them. Indeed, one can say that living systems arose in the history of the earth in the moment in which some spontaneous networks of molecular autocatalytic processes became closed upon themselves.. (shrink)

Na medida em que o termo espiritualidade é em si mesmo ambíguo, o desafio específico da pesquisa em espiritualidade e saúde enquanto campo é definir de que maneiras o conceito ‘espiritualidade’ pode ser frutiferamente aplicado à saúde física e mental. Uma vez que a relatividade hermenêutica de um conceito humanístico tem de se relacionar com os resultados mensuráveis das ciências empíricas, algumas dificuldades inevitavelmente surgem. Isso não impediu, contudo, a formação de duas abordagens claramente definidas na pesquisa em espiritualidade e (...) saúde; uma a que poderíamos chamar hermenêutica-existencial e a outa mais relacionada às ciências da natureza. Por falharmos em distinguir essas opções, muitas das interações entre a ciência da religião ou os estudos da religião e a pesquisa em espiritualidade e saúde é prejudicada ao ponto da quase ausência de diálogo. Nosso intuito aqui é apresentar e conceituar as duas alternativas nos termos das ciências humanas. (shrink)

Diante das presentes dificuldades de fundamentação da ética, ocasionadas pelas cisões necessárias, mas logo extrapoladas, entre natureza e subjetividade, conhecimento e ação, muitos pensadores têm se voltado para a grande síntese tomasiana do pensamento ocidental. Com numerosas releituras nos campos da ética, do direito, da epistemologia e da metafísica, o pensamento tomasiano vive sem exageros uma pequena renascença, particularmente em língua inglesa, ensejando inúmeras abordagens revisionistas, históricas ou adaptações às pesquisas da filosofia e da teologia analíticas. Mais como informativo deste (...) processo do que como análise sistemática, elencamos aspectos centrais da ética tomasiana e seus fundamentos metafísicos de acordo com autores contemporâneos que participam desta renovação do tomismo, buscando evidenciar a importância da disposição natural do ser humano para moralidade neste quadro teórico. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 46-59, March 2022.

En el marco de estas conferencias conmemorativas del cuatricentenario del nacimiento de René Descartes, quisiera aproximarme al pensamiento de este gran filósofo francés, preguntando qué relación guarda con el escepticismo.No se trata de una pregunta del todo novedosa, pero su significación es indiscutible tanto para comprender el sentido como para discutir el alcance y las limitaciones del proyecto cartesiano de fundamentación del conocimiento.

La respuesta a la pregunta del título se ofrece en tres niveles. A veces las diferencias se deben a las limitaciones del equipo empleado, deficiencias en el muestreo o preferencias en la interpretación de los datos. Otras veces se deben a que los investigadores operan en base a paradigmas diferentes..

We propose that to understand the biological and neurophysiological processes that give rise to human mental phenomena it is necessary to consider them as behavioral relational phenomena. In particular, we propose that: a) these phenomena take place in the relational manner of living that human language constitutes, and b) that they arise as recursive operations in such behavioral domain. Accordingly, we maintain that these phenomena do not take place in the brain, nor are they the result of a unique operation (...) of a human brain, but arise with the participation of the brain as it generates the behavioral relational dynamics that constitutes language. (shrink)

Una revisión somera de la teorí­a contemporánea de la democracia ofrece el siguiente panorama: por un lado, una valoración positiva de la forma efectiva de la democracia, es decir, la democracia liberal y representativa porque provee estabilidad, se respetan las libertades y tienen altos niveles de legitimidad; y, por el otro, una crí­tica de la democracia por ineficiente, representativa y no participativa y por liberal en oposición a social. El problema, evidentemente, es el siguiente: la democracia, ¿podrí­a ser como deberí­a (...) ser o sólo puede ser como de hecho es? Evidentemente, no se puede ofrecer a esta pregunta una respuesta definitiva y, en su lugar, se revisan los argumentos de aquellos autores que defienden a la democracia liberal y representativa como la única forma de gobierno posible en el mundo moderno con la intención de determinar si tienen o no razón, es decir, si la democracia representativa y liberal es, en efecto, la única forma de democracia posible. Dos ejemplos clásicos de esta tesis se encuentran en las obras de Publius y Alexis de Tocqueville."œThe conditions of a possible democracy: The Federalist and Tocqueville"A superficial review of the contemporary theory of democracy ofers the following panorama. On the one hand, a positive appraisal of the efective form of democracy, that is, liberal and representative democracy because it provides stability, freedom is respected and there are high levels of justice. On the other, a criticism of democracy for being ineficient, representative and non-participatory, and for being liberal in opposition to social. Obviously the problem is the following: could democracy be what it should be or can it only be de facto? Obviously a definite answer cannot be given to this question and, instead, the arguments of those authors who defend liberal and representative democracy as the only possible form of government in the modern world are revised with the intention of determining whether they are right or not, that is, if representative and liberal government is, in efect, the only form of possible government. Two classic examples of this thesis are found in the works of Publius and Alexis de Tocqueville. (shrink)

La lección de Weber sobre la democracia es doble. Por un lado, la precisión acerca de qut actores y qut procesos son claves en su estudio -lidera, burocracia, partidos, búsqueda del poder, responsabilidad, &c.- y, por otro, la convicción acerca de los limites de lo posible en una democracia. P..

We present a description of the Stern–Gerlach type experiments using only the concepts of classical electrodynamics and the Newton’s equations of motion. The quantization of the projections of the spin (or the projections of the magnetic dipole) is not introduced in our calculations. The main characteristic of our approach is a quantitative analysis of the motion of the magnetic atoms at the entrance of the magnetic field region. This study reveals a mechanism which modifies continuously the orientation of the magnetic (...) dipole of the atom in a very short time interval, at the entrance of the magnetic field region. The mechanism is based on the conservation of the total energy associated with a magnetic dipole which moves in a non uniform magnetic field generated by an electromagnet. A detailed quantitative comparison with the (1922) Stern–Gerlach experiment and the didactical (1967) experiment by J.R. Zacharias is presented. We conclude, contrary to the original Stern–Gerlach statement, that the classical explanations are not ruled out by the experimental data. (shrink)

Natura 2000 is a network of natural sites whose aim is to preserve species and habitats of relevance in the European Union. The policy underlying Natura 2000 has faced widespread opposition from land users and received extensive support from environmentalists. This paper addresses the ethical framework for Natura 2000 and the probable moral assumptions of its main stakeholders. Arguments for and against Natura 2000 were analyzed and classified according to “strong” or “weak” versions of the three main theories of environmental (...) ethics – anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. Weak (intergenerational) anthropocentrism was found to underlie the Natura 2000 network itself and the positions of environmentalists, while strong (traditional) anthropocentrism pervaded the positions of economic developers. Land users seemed to fall somewhere between weak and strong anthropocentrism. The paper discusses the relation between ethics and different attitudes towards Natura 2000, highlighting some of the implications for the network’s ongoing implementation. It is shown that Natura 2000 achieves a strong reversal of the burden of proof from conservation to economic development and land use change under anthropocentrism. It is argued that the alleged theoretical divide between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism in relation to the burden of proof does not seem to hold in practice. Finally, it is predicted that the weak versions of anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism, are likely to converge extensively in respect to nature conservation policy measures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of ReligionClemens CavallinThe Absolute Wise ManIn the beginning of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], Thomas Aquinas remarks that, according to the Philosopher (that is, Aristotle), the wise man orders "things rightly and governs them well."1 To do this, the wise man needs to pay attention to the proper goal of his activity, that is, the good toward which he is to (...) order things. This means that there can be wise politicians, carpenters, and philologists; but Aquinas has primarily in mind "the absolute wise man" (simpliciter sapiens), who queries both the origin of the universe and its end: God.Moreover, not only does the absolute wise man contemplate the nature of God, the ultimate source and truth of the universe, but as even the highest theoretical wisdom (in the Aristotelean sense of sophia) has a practical, ordering dimension, it is also proper for such a person to teach truth and oppose falsehood—in other words, to be a teacher.2Toward the end of the first chapter of SCG, "The Office of the Wise [End Page 1207] Man," Aquinas returns to his introductory quote from Proverbs 8:7: "My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate impiety." Aquinas interprets impiety (impietas) as "falsehood against the divine truth," and its opposite, piety (pietas), he writes, is another word for religion.3 The absolute wise person is, therefore, in the business of ordering religion toward its proper goal, God as the origin and end of the universe. As a result, besides the mistaken views of heretics, the Christian wise man, according to Aquinas, has to oppose the errors of Jews, gentiles, and Muslims, that is, all non-Christian religions. In refuting the latter two, he has to use natural reason, as they accept neither the Old nor the New Testament.4 And this philosophical task is the fundamental errand of SCG.Moreover, the quest for and ordering of knowledge in relation to ultimate wisdom brings with it a joyous union of "man to God in friendship," as God, the creator, made everything in wisdom, as ordered to himself, the Supreme Being and Truth.5 To pursue wisdom thus divinizes man.However, my goal in this article is not primarily to deepen our understanding of the Thomist spirituality of higher wisdom, but to probe the possibility of a Catholic "religious studies" endeavor inspired by Aquinas's approach in SCG I. My main question is, therefore, whether the office of the wise man is compatible with (or at least complementary to) the idea and practice of religious studies. Or if a Catholic approach to religious studies must do without absolute wisdom and settle for a lower-level goal such as ordering the relations between the diverse religious traditions of global society with the goal of harmonious coexistence? In that case, the spirituality of the scholar turns from divinization to humanization, but in what way would such studies be Catholic?A Catholic "religious studies" is here understood as different from theology of religions, and more generally from dogmatic theology.6 Theology of religions is concerned with questions such as the possible salvific role of non-Christian religions, with how to understand the principle of extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("no salvation outside the Church") and [End Page 1208] the trichotomy of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.7 The main concern of religious studies is not such evaluations, but rather the details of the history of religions and the contemporary diversity and changes of religion and spirituality. The theoretical thrust of religious studies aims at understanding the natural inclination for religion and its manifold manifestations (beliefs, rituals, and myths). It is also distinct from natural theology (for example as found in SCG), as the latter deals with the possibility and scope of rational knowledge of the divine.Moreover, religious studies as a field differs from that of Catholic studies, which has Catholicism itself as the object of study and which combines perspectives from religious studies and theology, often with the aim of cultivating the Catholic identity of a college or university.8Moreover, the interreligious-dialogue active component of interre-ligious studies is more limited... (shrink)

When the Church of Sweden ceased to be a state church in the year 2000, the parameters for a change in the relation between academic theology and religious studies ( religionsvetenskap ) at the state universities in Sweden was in place. My article, which is intended as a contribution to the sometimes unnecessarily agonistic discussion following the sharp critique levelled by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education (Högskoleverket) in 2008, focuses on two basic oppositions underlying the present discourse, namely (...) the tension between the expectation of economic utility and the ideal of a free search for knowledge; and that between, on the one hand, confessional neutrality and, on the other hand, the education of priests and pastors. As a conclusion, I suggest a way forward in three points: 1. The education of priests for the Church of Sweden must change as a result of the abandonment of the state church system. 2. At the same time, the state system should nurture a more positive attitude toward theological reflections developed at nongovernmental university colleges. 3. Thirdly, the interrelationship between secular religious studies at state universities and the tradition specific theologies developed at private university colleges could be essential for the balancing of the demand of economic utility and the principle of academic freedom as it concerns religious studies. (shrink)