Recent trends towards an e-Science offer us the opportunity to think about the specific epistemological changes created by computational empowerment in scientific practices. In fact, we can say that a computational epistemology exists that requires our attention. By ‘computational epistemology’ I mean the computational processes implied or required to achieve human knowledge. In that category we can include AI, supercomputers, expert systems, distributed computation, imaging technologies, virtual instruments, middleware, robotics, grids or databases. Although several authors talk about the extended mind (...) and computational extensions of the human body, most of these proposals don’t analyze the deep epistemological implications of computer empowerment in scientific practices. At the same time, we must identify the principal concept for e-Science: Information. Why should we think about a new epistemology for e-Science? Because several processes exist around scientific information that require a good epistemological model to be understood. (shrink)

García Bacca inicia en 1936 un proyecto de filosofía actual, que marca la dirección del resto de su obra. Al giro copernicano añade una interpretación de la comprensión como “función trascendental de los sentimientos”. Propongo entender, en primer lugar, estas tesis como el núcleo duro del lugar hermenéutico desde el que García Bacca dialoga con Heidegger; y este diálogo, presente en su obra explícitamente hasta 1985, no como una interpretación al uso sino como ejemplo de su propia la práctica del (...) filosofar. En segundo lugar este artículo analiza la estrategia teórica de García Bacca, que propone una nueva ontología, de base antropológica, y conecta lo actual en filosofía con los cambios habidos en la fundamentación de las ciencias y las profundas modificaciones históricas. Un lugar especial ocupa el análisis del desmontar como modo de proceder constructivista y crítico de la filosofía actual que opone García Bacca al programa heideggeriano de destrucción de la metafísica. (shrink)

La presente investigación se ha centrado en describir los retos a los que se ha de enfrentar la comunidad educativa ante la presencia de alumnado con necesidades educativas especiales en los centros escolares. La metodología se ha centrado en la implementación de un cuestionario tomando como referencia cuatro elementos clave: familia, profesorado, alumnado y centro. El análisis posterior de los datos refleja que la comunidad educativa está a favor de promover un modelo de escuela inclusiva aunque falta un gran camino (...) por recorrer con respecto a la formación y la información sobre la inclusión en el aula. (shrink)

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero develops (...) a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to express spatial experience through language. This target article explores the language ofobjectsandplaces, asking what geometric properties are preserved in the representations underlying object nouns and spatial prepositions in English. Evidence from these two aspects of language suggests there are significant differences in the geometric richness with which objects and places (...) are encoded. When an object is named (i.e., with count nouns), detailed geometric properties – principally the object's shape (axes, solid and hollow volumes, surfaces, and parts) – are represented. In contrast, when an object plays the role of either “figure” (located object) or “ground” (reference object) in a locational expression, only very coarse geometric object properties are represented, primarily the main axes. In addition, the spatial functions encoded by spatial prepositions tend to be nonmetric and relatively coarse, for example, “containment,” “contact,” “relative distance,” and “relative direction.” These properties are representative of other languages as well. The striking differences in the way language encodes objects versus places lead us to suggest two explanations: First, there is a tendency for languages to level out geometric detail from both object and place representations. Second, a nonlinguistic disparity between the representations of “what” and “where” underlies how language represents objects and places. The language of objects and places converges with and enriches our understanding of corresponding spatial representations. (shrink)

Health Wearable Devices enhance the quality of life, promote positive lifestyle changes and save time and money in medical appointments. However, Wearable Devices store large amounts of personal information that is accessed by third parties without user consent. This creates ethical issues regarding privacy, security and informed consent. This paper aims to demonstrate users’ ethical perceptions of the use of Wearable Devices in the health sector. The impact of ethics is determined by an online survey which was conducted from patients (...) and users with random female and male division. Results from this survey demonstrate that Wearable Device users are highly concerned regarding privacy issues and consider informed consent as “very important” when sharing information with third parties. However, users do not appear to relate privacy issues with informed consent. Additionally, users expressed the need for having shorter privacy policies that are easier to read, a more understandable informed consent form that involves regulatory authorities and there should be legal consequences the violation or misuse of health information provided to Wearable Devices. The survey results present an ethical framework that will enhance the ethical development of Wearable Technology. (shrink)

According to the social ontology proposed by John Searle, there are ontologically objective facts or “brute facts”, independent from human attitudes, and ontologically subjective facts. Among the latter, the most notable are institutional facts, such as money or borders, which existence is explained through a collective attribution of status function within a certain social context. Could “moral truths” exist according to an ontology like this? Assuming the truth as correspondence, the notion of “moral truth” remits to the notion of “moral (...) fact”. As we will see, these moral facts, contrary to what authors such as Markus Gabriel suggest, are similar to institutional facts. For this reason, the truth or falsity of moral statements will be, as indicated by authors such as Gilbert Harman, relative to a social context; without that being an obstacle for acknowledging their expressive and directive function. (shrink)

La polémica entre feminismo y transactivismo lleva tiempo ocupando titulares, artículos, debates, etc. En este trabajo se intentan clarificar algunos de los problemas conceptuales que subyacen al conflicto. Para empezar, se abordan los conceptos de «sexo», «género» e «identidad de género» a partir del aparato conceptual proveniente de la ontología social presentada por John Searle. A continuación, ante la conveniencia de disponer de términos para hacer referencia unívoca a las personas de un sexo y de otro, se contrastan diferentes sentidos (...) de «mujer». La discusión de estas nociones permitirá abordar la cuestión política de fondo de si las categorías de género son un instrumento de opresión que abolir o, por el contrario, una identidad que reivindicar; así como una cuestión de cariz más jurídico como para qué deben servir las categorías «hombre» y «mujer» consignadas en leyes y documentos oficiales. (shrink)

It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere (...) with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental. (shrink)

The article argues that the relationship to time is at the root of what makes us human and that culture arises with and from efforts to transcend death, change and the rhythmicity of the physical environment. Time can be tracked through systems of time measurement and later transformed from a process of nature into clock time, a time to human design that is abstracted from context and content. In this form time can be traded with all other times. With contemporary (...) science and new information and communications technologies, which operate in a new all-encompassing temporal spectrum that extends from nanoseconds to millennia, clock time is no longer appropriate to the associated present-oriented transactions and futures are traversed in the dual sense of the word. By historically locating temporal relations, the article provides both a new understanding of socio-cultural relations and a perspective on social change. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers , 'we have good reason to suppose that consciousness has a fundamental place in nature' . This, he thinks is because the world as revealed to us by fundamental physics is entirely structural -- it is a world not of things, but of relations -- yet relations can only account for more relations, and consciousness is not merely a relation . Call this the 'structural argument against physicalism.' I shall argue that there is a view about (...) the relationship between mind and body, what I call, 'Russellian physicalism' that is consistent with the premises of the structural argument yet does not imply that consciousness is fundamental. (shrink)

Los centros de educación superior son por definición espacios de generación de conocimiento, derivado de ello se vincula la aplicación de los valores primordiales que rigen el desarrollo académico y científico. Entre estos valores subyacen tales como honestidad, justicia, respeto, responsabilidad y confianza. Existen múltiples interpretaciones de integridad académica, este estudio se promueve el cual abarca todos los elementos mencionados como valores básicos del desarrollo social y universitario: honestidad, justicia, respeto, responsabilidad y confianza.Este estudio se orienta a conocer el grado (...) de transparencia, compromiso e integridad presente en las universidades en el desarrollo de su labor académica e investigadora. (shrink)

The DNA‐passage activity of topoisomerase II accidentally produces DNA knots and interlinks within and between chromatin fibers. Fortunately, these unwanted DNA entanglements are actively removed by some mechanism. Here we present an outline on DNA knot formation and discuss recent studies that have investigated how intracellular DNA knots are removed. First, although topoisomerase II is able to minimize DNA entanglements in vitro to below equilibrium values, it is unclear whether such capacity performs equally in vivo in chromatinized DNA. Second, DNA (...) supercoiling could bias topoisomerase II to untangle the DNA. However, experimental evidence indicates that transcriptional supercoiling of intracellular DNA boosts knot formation. Last, cohesin and condensin could tighten DNA entanglements via DNA loop extrusion (LE) and force their dissolution by topoisomerase II. Recent observations indicate that condensin activity promotes the removal of DNA knots during interphase and mitosis. This activity might facilitate the spatial organization and dynamics of chromatin. (shrink)

Introduction: Connectedness to nature is a concept that reflects the emotional relationship between the self and the natural environment, based on the theory of biophilia, the innate predisposition to the natural environment. However, the biophobic component has largely been ignored, despite, given its adaptive functional role, being an essential part of the construct. If there is a phylogenetic component underlying nature connectedness, biophilic and/or biophobic, there should be evidence of this record from early childhood. The main aim of this study (...) is therefore to describe the emotional attributions identified in five-year-olds. Methodology: Two studies were conducted. In the first, 94 children expressed their concept of nature and made basic emotional attributions to a set of 60 images of natural and urban environments, using a software designed for the study. In the second, 39 children repeated the procedure and provided explanations for their responses. Results: The main results show that, in general, children use both positive and negative emotions, which may be related to a three-dimensional model of emotional attributions to nature. The most widely attributed emotion is happiness, for the images of both natural and built environments. However, fear is the second most common attribution. The role of happiness could be explained by a feeling of security and familiarity that the habitat of the built environment contributes to, while the importance of fear in nature could show an adaptive response of the fear of wild nature in children. This interpretation could be confirmed when analyzing specifically the emotional attributions to the natural environment, classifying the images according to biological and ecosystemic criteria. Thus, for example, more emotional attributions are explained by the "pleasantness" attributed to primary producers and landscapes (e.g. flora), versus attributions of "harm" to the images of secondary and tertiary consumers (e.g. hunters). Conclusions: These results provide evidence in favor of a didactic procedure to study emotional attributions to images of nature in preschool children. They suggest the incorporation of biophobia as an important adaptive factor in connectedness to nature and a tripartite emotional hypothesis based on the valences of the attributed emotions. (shrink)

I am going to argue that it is time to come to terms with the difficulty of understanding what it means to be physical and start thinking about the mind-body problem from a new perspective. Instead of construing it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally nonmental world, a world that is at its most fundamental level (...) entirely nonmental. The mind-body problem, I want to argue, is the problem of determining whether mentality can be accounted for in terms of nonmental phenomena. In other words, it is the question, ‘is mentality a fundamental feature of the world’. (shrink)

We investigated the interface between biomedia and humans by inviting participants to interact with biometric devices that measured and visualized their body data. At first, they struggled with the alienating and disembodying nature of the devices and the constrained, reductionist representation of data. Through their bodily interactions with these devices, however, participants reframed the data and inserted their bodies into the process of data collection. Drawing on the ideas of Bergson, Grosz, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, we argue that by working with (...) their subjectivity in a mediated process of becoming, participants ‘filled in the intervals’ of the visual representations of their bodies to interpret them in ways that marked the duration and meaning of their selves. We conclude that even when presented with artificial representations, individuals convert the representation of the data into narratives inspired by their embodied experience, and the ‘virtual’ pasts of their own lives. (shrink)

This article explores the process and meaning of occupational mobility among a selected sample of 40 immigrant and nonimmigrant women of Mexican descent in the San Francisco Bay Area who entered the secondary labor market of semiskilled clerical, service, and operative jobs in 1978-1979 and 1980-1981. This labor market was segmented along race and gender lines with few promotional ladders available as the work force became more nonwhite and female. When Chicanas and Mexicanas obtained jobs with fewer Chicano coworkers and (...) greater avenues for advancement, they reported escalating conflictual social relations at work. Occupational mobility contained both objective and subjective dimensions for the respondents. Often a woman felt mobile in a job that lacked the means for advancement because she compared herself to a local Chicano or Mexicano working-class reference group and a self-concept rooted in her class, race, and gender. (shrink)

This book considers the context of the colonial policies of Britain, Locke's contribution to them, and the importance of these ideas in his theory of property. It also reconsiders the debate about John Locke's influence in America. The book argues that Locke's theory of property must be understood in connection with the philosopher's political concerns, as part of his endeavour to justify the colonialist policies of Lord Shaftesbury's cabinet, with which he was personally associated. The author maintains that traditional scholarship (...) has failed to do justice to Locke by ignoring the implications of contemporary British imperial policy for the interpretation of his political thought. (shrink)

The intention in this paper is analyze how and why Pausanias relate the difference with the mythic Orpheus. This will reveal another face of the vast myth of the bard. For this particular research some aspects of Orpheus myth will be studied: place of birth, appearance, legend, magician’s role and his relation with Musaeus and the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye? In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers (...) a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people's senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live-and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today's most urgent critical tasks. (shrink)