The purpose of this paper is to provide a basis for a systematic development of signaling theory on CSR initiatives. The paper proposes signaling theory as a framework supportive of a strategic CSR approach; maps extant research on signaling through CSR initiatives; offers a comprehensive assessment of the most diffused CSR initiatives and discusses their eligibility as signaling devices; and outlines a research agenda to further develop and test signaling theory in business ethics. Specifically, the study reconsiders some key assumptions, (...) identifies key gaps in empirical validation, and proposes directions to extend multiple signal, signaling pattern, and target cases. (shrink)

This study examines how evidence is used differently in argumentative discourse compared to individual arguments. Applying a 1×2 crossover study design, 37 secondary school students were asked either to discuss a social issue with their partner before individually writing an essay outlining their opinion or, vice versa, first to discuss and then to write. As background information, they were provided with pieces of evidence with different levels of quality. Dialogs and essays were analyzed regarding (a) the type of evidence and (...) (b) the way evidence was used. Results showed that in their essays students referred more often to the pieces of evidence provided to them (shared evidence). In contrast, they used evidence more often to address the opposing viewpoint in dialogs by incorporating it in a more elaborated (clearer) line of reasoning. Findings suggest that dialogues are a more effective tool than individual writing production, and the study provides first hints regarding how to design curricula that will encourage students to use evidence in a more sophisticated way in their argumentation. (shrink)

New findings point to a role for mesolimbic DA circuits in the generation of dreaming. We disagree with Solms about these structures having an exclusive role in generating dreams. We review data suggesting that dreaming can be interrupted at different levels of processing and that anterior-subcortical lesions associated with dream cessation are unlikely to produce selective hypodopaminergic dynamic impairments. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms].

Subjekt, Objekt und Intersubjektivitat bilden drei der wohl zentralsten Elemente im menschlichen Erkenntnisprozess. Anhand einer kritischen Rekonstruktion der Erkenntnistheorien Hegels und Adornos beleuchtet die vorliegende Arbeit die Dialektik zwischen Subjekt und Objekt der Erkenntnis aus zwei verschiedenen Perspektiven. Durch den grundsatzlichen Paradigmenwechsel Habermas' von der Bewusstseinsphilosophie zu einem kommunikationstheoretischen Paradigma wird es moglich, <I>kommunikative Intersubjektivitat als unverzichtbares Element der Erkenntnis angemessen zu thematisieren.<BR> Der Gang von Hegel uber Adorno zu Habermas wird in der vorliegenden Monographie nicht als ein stetiger Fortschritt (...) verstanden, an dessen Zielpunkt die Habermas'sche Theorie als der Weisheit letzter Schluss stehen wurde. Vielmehr erweist sich der Dreischritt selbst als ein dialektischer, der am Ende, angereichert durch Erfahrungen, wieder in seinen Ausgangspunkt mundet. So endet die Untersuchung letztlich mit dem kommunikationstheoretisch angereicherten Desiderat einer modernen Subjekttheorie.". (shrink)

This volume brings together new papers advancing contemporary debates in foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues in cognitive neuroscience. The different perspectives presented in each chapter have previously been discussed between the authors, as the volume builds on the experience of Neural Mechanisms Online – webinar series on the philosophy of neuroscience organized by the editors of this volume. The contributed chapters pertain to five core areas in current philosophy of neuroscience. It surveys the novel forms of explanation developed in cognitive (...) neuroscience, and looks at new concepts, methods and techniques used in the field. The book also highlights the metaphysical challenges raised by recent neuroscience and demonstrates the relation between neuroscience and mechanistic philosophy. Finally, the book dives into the issue of neural computations and representations. Assembling contributions from leading philosophers of neuroscience, this work draws upon the expertise of both established scholars and promising early career researchers. (shrink)

Argument from analogy is a common and formidable form of reasoning in law and in everyday conversation. Although there is substantial literature on the subject, according to a recent survey ( Juthe 2005) there is little fundamental agreement on what form the argument should take, or on how it should be evaluated. Th e lack of conformity, no doubt, stems from the complexity and multiplicity of forms taken by arguments that fall under the umbrella of analogical reasoning in argumentation, dialectical (...) studies, and law. Modeling arguments with argumentation schemes has proven useful in attempts to refine the analyst’s understanding of not only the logical structures that shape the backbone of the argument itself, but also the logical underpinning of strategies for evaluating it, strategies based on the semantic categories of genus and relevance. By clarifying the distinction between argument from example and argument from analogy, it is possible to advance a useful proposal for the treatment of argument from analogy in law. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

Bare conditionals, I argue, exhibit Conditional Duality in that when they appear in downward entailing environments they differ from bare conditionals elsewhere in having existential rather than universal force. Two recalcitrant phenomena are shown to find a new explanation under this thesis: bare conditionals under only, and bare conditionals in the scope of negative nominal quantifiers, or what has come to be known as Higginbotham’s puzzle. I also consider how bare conditionals behave when embedded under negation, arguing that such conditionals (...) often involve denial negation. One important conclusion that emerges from the discussion is that an account of bare conditionals that validates Conditional Excluded Middle is not warranted. By limiting the scope of the strict analysis Conditional Duality is also a way of maintaining such an account. (shrink)

Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in ‘Cynthia will pass her exam’, will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints are (...) jointly satisfied by a novel modal account of will. On this account, will is a modal but doesn't work as a quantifier over worlds. Rather, the meaning of will involves a selection function similar to the one used by Stalnaker in his semantics for conditionals. The resulting theory yields a plausible semantics and logic for will and vindicates our intuitive views about the attitudes that rational agents should have towards future-directed contents. (shrink)

Cet article se propose de décrire le projet épistémique des sciences des systèmes complexes. Domaine interdisciplinaire fondé par le Santa Fe Institute en 1984 aux États-Unis, il a été décrit par ses représentants comme un champ d’étude interdisciplinaire, post-laplacien, holiste et antiréductionniste. Des journalistes populaires et des sociologues intéressés et qui ont soutenu ce domaine en ont repris les discours, en annonçant l’avènement d’un nouveau paradigme révolutionnaire pour tous les savoirs. Dans ce texte, on montrera que le projet épistémique des (...) sciences de la complexité est moins pluraliste, antipositiviste et antiréductionniste que ce que l’on en dit. Je tâcherai de montrer en quoi le cadre épistémologique et ontologique de ce champ d’études reste analytique et réductionniste dans un sens physicaliste, computationnaliste, mathématique et biologisant. (shrink)

The evolution of boundedly rational rules for playing normal form games is studied within stationary environments of stochastically changing games. Rules are viewed as algorithms prescribing strategies for the different normal form games that arise. It is shown that many of the “folk results” of evolutionary game theory, typically obtained with a fixed game and fixed strategies, carry over to the present environments. The results are also related to some recent experiments on rules and games.

So far, legal translation studies have generally been concerned with multilingual legislation, which they have dissected using comparative law methods. The time seems to have come for a differentiated research that recognises various types of legal translation, including the category of translation by professionals for public authorities and business concerns. This latter category’s context is rapidly changing. Globalization is aggravating the crisis of national legislation. First and foremost, networks of authorities have sprung up alongside international organisations. The texts translated are (...) regulatory rather than prescriptive. Then, in the field of international commerce, a standardization of contracts is occurring. Globalized administrative and commercial varieties of English are no longer the English of the common law but, rather, a neutral or hybrid English that needs to be further sub-classified by reference to specific legal sectors. Furthermore, by reducing costs and deadlines, globalization and digitalization have forced translation to be economically efficient. Several legislative provisions now allow the translation of legal texts by way of extracts or summaries. In multilingual monitoring translators are being asked to assess and select the documents for translation themselves. The quality required is often that which is “sufficient” to achieve the sought-after goal. All these changes must be incorporated into the university education of translators. (shrink)

_Formatividad_ es el concepto clave de la estética de Luigi Pareyson, pero también de su hermenéutica filosófica. El artículo no se propone ilustrar la teoría estética de Pareyson sino: analizar en qué consiste esa formatividad intrínseca a toda actividad humana ; aclarar porqué la formatividad nos obliga a concebir el conocimiento como interpretación y, por tanto, a legitimar la hermenéutica ; señalar algunas implicaciones de tal hermenéutica susceptibles de importantes y fecundos desarrollos.

Though predictive processing approaches to the mind were originally applied to exteroceptive perception, i.e., vision and action, recent work has started to explore the role of interoceptive perception, i.e., emotion and affect. This article builds on this work by extending PP beyond emotion to the construction of emotional dispositions. I employ principles from dynamical systems theory and PP to provide a model of how dispositional anger can develop in response to early experiences of psychosocial stress. The model is then deployed (...) to explain the established link between psychosocial stress in early life and the appearance of certain organic disease phenotypes in later life. This phenomenon can appear mysterious when viewed through the standard biomedical explanatory lens, which has difficulty accounting for the causal influence of subjective perceptions and evaluations of the social and material environment on the development of organic disease processes. The model provided presents such cases as instances of developmental mismatch. They occur when an organism develops an emotional disposition that leads them to make habitually-biased appraisals of what the social environment affords. The model provides a novel explanation of certain organic disease phenotypes with top-down and developmental causes, and demystifies one class of cases involving apparently spooky ‘mind-to-matter’ causation. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

The relationship between teaching and argumentation is becoming a crucial issue in the field of education and, in particular, science education. Teaching has been analyzed as a dialogue aimed at persuading the interlocutors, introducing a conceptual change that needs to be grounded on the audience’s background knowledge. This paper addresses this issue from a perspective of argumentation studies. Our claim is that argumentation schemes, namely abstract patterns of argument, can be an instrument for reconstructing the tacit premises in students’ argumentative (...) reasoning and retrieving the background beliefs that are the basis of their arguments. On this perspective, the process of premise reconstruction is followed by a heuristic reasoning process aimed at discovering the students’ previous intuitions that can explain the premises and concepts that are left unexpressed in their arguments. The theoretical insights advanced in this paper are illustrated through selected examples taken from activities concerning predictive claims on scientific issues. (shrink)

I motivate and characterize an intensional semantics for ‘ought’ on which it does not behave as a universal quantifier over possibilities. My motivational argument centers on taking at face value some standard challenges to the quantificational semantics, especially to the idea that ‘ought’-sentences satisfy the principle of Inheritance. I argue that standard pragmatic approaches to these puzzles are either not sufficiently detailed or unconvincing.

There are many authors who consider the so-called “moral nose” a valid epistemological tool in the field of morality. The expression was used by George Orwell, following in Friedrich Nietzsche’s footsteps and was very clearly described by Leo Tolstoy. It has also been employed by authors such as Elisabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hampshire, Mary Warnock, and Leon Kass. This article examines John Harris’ detailed criticism of what he ironically calls the “olfactory school of moral philosophy.” Harris’ criticism (...) is contrasted with Jonathan Glover’s defense of the moral nose. Glover draws some useful distinctions between the various meanings that the notion of moral nose can assume. Finally, the notion of moral nose is compared with classic notions such as Aristotelian phronesis, Heideggerian aletheia, and the concept of “sentiment” proposed by the philosopher Thomas Reid. The conclusion reached is that morality cannot be based only on reason, or—as David Hume would have it—only on feelings. (shrink)

The concept of corporate social responsibility has been the subject of several academic contributions, but in the health sector the development of an interest in this subject is very recent. Although many practices in healthcare are already socially responsible, progressing from a series of socially responsible behaviours to a socially responsible organization entails a more consolidated awareness of the health sector’s mission and the needs of its participants. In this paper, we will review the different studies published that address the (...) relationship between the healthcare sector’s corporate responsibility and society, with the aims of individuating the prevailing foci that are emerging and categorizing the proposed contributions according to these foci: social responsibility and organization; social responsibility and social impact; social responsibility and competitiveness. Finally, the paper finishes with a personal definition of CSR and its correlated ethical roots. (shrink)

La "Grande Morale," progettata da J.-P. Sartre tra il 1947 e il 1949 come naturale completamento della filosofia esistenzialista esposta ne L'essere e il nulla e L'esistenzialismo e un umanismo, non e mai stata pubblicata: abbandonata e ripresa piu volte nei successivi vent'anni, ha finito per costituire un serbatoio di annotazioni e di riflessioni sempre dirottate altrove, una specie di fantasma letterario, onnipresente, ma pronto a dileguarsi ogni volta che sembrava avere raggiunto una forma consistente. Sappiamo oggi, grazie alla pubblicazione (...) dei molti inediti sartriani, che la riflessione sulla morale ha accompagnato tutti gli snodi fondamentali del pensiero di Sartre, dai cosiddetti scritti giovanili alle opere della maturita, dalla svolta "dialettica" sino all'ultima discussa intervista, rilasciata poco prima della scomparsa. Gli studi qui riuniti hanno nei Quaderni per una morale (1947-48) il loro centro di gravita e di maggiore interesse. Di questo tentativo abortito di scrivere una "Morale" essi provano a disegnare la parabola, dalle origini remote nei Taccuini della strana guerra (1939) sino al Santo Genet commediante e martire (1952), che ne sancisce l'abbandono. Senza disdegnare qualche incursione nell'estetica sartriana, poiche della "morale introvabile" non c'e in realta testo che non rechi qualche traccia.". (shrink)

“Acme” è arrivata al suo settantacinquesimo anno.

The aim of the presentation is to focus on the differences between two scientific contexts: the genetic engineering context of the 1970s, with specific attention paid to the use of the recombinant DNA technique to generate genetically modified molecules, and the current genome editing context, with specific attention paid to the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology to modify human germ line cells genetically. In both events, scientists have been involved in discussions that have gone beyond mere professional deontology touching on specific (...) policy issues such as freedom of research, responsibility for the consequences of research, the right of the public to participate in the evaluation of the goals of research methods, the relationship between cost and benefit and possible social consequences. The comparison between these two scientific contexts suggests the need of handling such issues by defining procedures that meet the criteria of democracy and responsibility towards society. The underlying objective should be to effectively launch actions and interventions based not on a hierarchical approach but rather a reticular conception of knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Provisional draft, pre-production copy of my book “The Modal Future” (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).

Fra gli arredi marmorei di età romana si distingue un gruppo di sostegni realizzati in marmo Giallo antico, che presentano caratteristiche comuni di lavorazione e di decorazione, i cui esemplari sono stati ritrovati nel Mediterraneo occidentale (Sardegna, Francia meridionale, Spagna), con una concentrazione in alcuni centri antichi. Si propongono considerazioni su produzione, circolazione e riuso di questi oggetti di lusso.

We discuss the semantic significance of a puzzle concerning ‘ought’ and conditionals recently discussed by Kolodny and MacFarlane. We argue that the puzzle is problematic for the standard Kratzer-style analysis of modality. In Kratzer’s semantics, modals are evaluated relative to a pair of conversational backgrounds. We show that there is no sensible way of assigning values to these conversational backgrounds so as to derive all of the intuitions in Kolodny and MacFarlane’s case. We show that the appropriate verdicts can be (...) derived by extending Kratzer’s framework to feature a third conversational background and claiming that the relevant reading of ‘ought’ is sensitive to this parameter. (shrink)

Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewpoint. This book draws upon linguistics, legal theory, computing, and dialectics to present an argumentation-based approach to statutory interpretation. By translating and summarizing the existing legal interpretative canons (...) into eleven patterns of natural arguments - called argumentation schemes - the authors offer a system of argumentation strategies for developing, defending, assessing, and attacking an interpretation. Illustrated through major cases from both common and civil law, this methodology is summarized in diagrams and maps for application to computer sciences. These visuals help make the structures, strategies, and vulnerabilities of legal reasoning accessible to both legal professionals and laypeople. (shrink)

Contrastivists view ought-sentences as expressing comparisons among alternatives. Deontic actualists believe that the value of each alternative in such a comparison is determined by what would actually happen if that alternative were to be the case. One of the arguments that motivates actualism is a challenge to the principle of agglomeration over conjunction—the principle according to which if you ought to run and you ought to jump, then you ought to run and jump. I argue that there is no way (...) of developing the actualist insight into a logic that invalidates the agglomeration principle without also invalidating other desirable patterns of inference. After doing this, I extend the analysis to other contrastive views that challenge agglomeration in the way that the actualist does. This motivates skepticism about the actualist’s way of challenging agglomeration. (shrink)

This paper motivates and develops a novel semantic framework for deontic modals. The framework is designed to shed light on two things: the relationship between deontic modals and substantive theories of practical rationality and the interaction of deontic modals with conditionals, epistemic modals and probability operators. I argue that, in order to model inferential connections between deontic modals and probability operators, we need more structure than is provided by classical intensional theories. In particular, we need probabilistic structure that interacts directly (...) with the compositional semantics of deontic modals. However, I reject theories that provide this probabilistic structure by claiming that the semantics of deontic modals is linked to the Bayesian notion of expectation. I offer a probabilistic premise semantics that explains all the data that create trouble for the rival theories. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

The principle of autonomy, through various court rulings, gradually became part of medical practice and tradition in the second half of the 1800s, notably when the emergence of surgical anaesthesia began to raise serious questions regarding informed consent. In fact, surgical anaesthesia was initially used not only to avoid pain but also to combat patients’ resistance to operations.

Since March 2020, many countries throughout the world have been in lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Italy, the quarantine began on March 9, 2020, and containment measures were partially reduced only on May 4, 2020. The quarantine experience has a significant psychological impact at all ages but can have it above all on adolescents who cannot go to school, play sports, and meet friends. In this scenario, this study aimed to provide a general overview of the perceived (...) risk related to COVID-19 and the psychological experience of quarantine in a large sample of Italian adolescents. 978 adolescents (males = 339; females = 639) living in 13 Italian regions and attending upper secondary school (age range: 13–20, M = 16.57, SD = 1.20), responded to an internet-based questionnaire about perceived health risk related to COVID-19, knowledge and information on measures to control the pandemic, beliefs and opinions on stage two of the quarantine, and psychological experiences related to quarantine. 31.1% of the participants lived in "red zones," which are places where the government has imposed stricter measures of containment due to exponential and uncontrolled growth in contagion cases compared to other areas in Italy. According to our results, Italian adolescents had a low perception of risk of COVID-19. Perceived comparative susceptibility and perceived seriousness were also very low. However, they were aware of the restriction measures necessary to contain the spread of the virus, and they agreed with the limitations imposed by the government. Females and adolescents living in a “red zone” showed more significant psychological negative feelings about the quarantine experience. However, no significant differences were found about the regions where the teenagers of our sample live and the other variables related to the COVID-19 experience. This is very interesting data, leading us to hypothesize that the participants' negative feelings may be more related to the adolescent period than to the pandemic itself. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the scholastic approach to the intensity of complexions and presents some evidence as to how the meaning of complexio evolved in fourteenth-century Italian medicine: namely, h...