Una de las características predominantes en la obra de Nicos Poulantzas es su marcada subjetividad, la cual estuvo atravesada por el momento histórico en que transcurrió su vida, pues se trataba de una época en donde los procesos revolucionarios perdían vigencia y quedaban amargas, pero al mismo tiempo, importantísimas lecciones; donde a pesar de la constante inestabilidad, el capitalismo lograba restaurarse y transformarse a expensas del Estado. El presente escrito explora la vigencia teórica de la obra intelectual de Poulantzas, su (...) originalidad distinguida por pertenecer a un marxismo heterodoxo más preocupado por la cuestión del Estado; al mismo tiempo, se incluyen explícitamente elementos de análisis como la dependencia, el desarrollo y la gestión global neoliberal del capital en la actualidad. Esto a partir de la lectura de su obra desde y con una perspectiva latino-mericana que permita concluir con algunos elementos teóricos para la construcción y actualización de una teoría del Estado que tenga en cuenta las particularidades de esta parte del mundo. (shrink)

This book is divided in two parts, the first of which shows how, beyond paleontology and systematics, macroevolutionary theories apply key insights from ecology and biogeography, developmental biology, biophysics, molecular phylogenetics, and even the sociocultural sciences to explain evolution in deep time. In the second part, the phenomenon of macroevolution is examined with the help of real life-history case studies on the evolution of eukaryotic sex, the formation of anatomical form and body-plans, extinction and speciation events of marine invertebrates, hominin (...) evolution and species conservation ethics. The book brings together leading experts, who explain pivotal concepts such as Punctuated Equilibria, Stasis, Developmental Constraints, Adaptive Radiations, Habitat Tracking, Turnovers, (Mass) Extinctions, Species Sorting, Major Transitions, Trends, and Hierarchies – key premises that allow macroevolutionary epistemic frameworks to transcend microevolutionary theories that focus on genetic variation, selection, migration and fitness. Along the way, the contributing authors review ongoing debates and current scientific challenges; detail new and fascinating scientific tools and techniques that allow us to cross the classic borders between disciplines; demonstrate how their theories make it possible to extend the Modern Synthesis; present guidelines on how the macroevolutionary field could be further developed; and provide a rich view of just how it was that life evolved across time and space. In short, this book is a must-read for active scholars and, because the technical aspects are fully explained, it is also accessible for non-specialists. Understanding evolution requires a solid grasp of above-population phenomena. Species are real biological individuals, and abiotic factors impact the future course of evolution. Beyond observation, when the explanation of macroevolution is the goal, we need both evidence and theory that enable us to explain and interpret how life evolves at the grand scale. (shrink)

En La enfermedad mortal Anti-Climacus describe enfáticamente la desesperación como la consecuencia de la negación de la posibilidad producida por el deseo humano cuando este insiste en ser sí mismo u otro sin Dios. Esta negación genera una relación no efectiva del individuo consigo mismo y con los otros, dando lugar a la condición del pecado, entendido en su connotación religiosa. Lo anterior conduce al problema de cómo llegar a ser un verdadero cristiano en el marco de una crítica, realizada (...) frecuentemente por el pensador danés, del egoísmo moderno. En el siguiente artículo realizaré un análisis hermenéutico de la desesperación considerando el contexto de la objetividad moderna, en contraposición al concepto del amor planteado por Kierkegaard como un proyecto ético-existencial en Las obras del amor. (shrink)

Durante las décadas de los años 80s y 90s tuvieron lugar tres acontecimientos internacionales que marcarían la historia política, social y económica de principios de siglo XXI: la Caída del Muro de Berlín y la Perestroika; la Cumbre Ambiental en Rio de Janeiro y la Unión Europea. Acontecimientos históricos que profundizaron nuevas formas de administración pública en el seno de las naciones desarrolladas y en vías de desarrollo. Sucesos internacionales que fueron y son respuesta a las demandas de ciudadanos por (...) gobiernos más responsables con la gestión de sus necesidades de participación en: decisiones políticas, preservación del medio ambiente y seguridad económica. Pero, ¿de qué manera estos tres acontecimientos alteraron el orden económico, político y social en Colombia, y cómo esas nuevas tendencias de gestión pública han sido incorporadas en el municipio de Sabaneta-Antioquia? Visibilizar dichos cambios de gobernanza desde finales de los años 80s y 90s en Colombia capaces de explicar el buen desempeño alcanzado por el municipio de Sabaneta durante el periodo 2003-2013, es el objeto del presente ensayo de investigación. (shrink)

Johannes Kepler dedicated much of his work to discover a law for the refraction of light. Unfortunately, he formulated an incorrect law. Nevertheless, it was useful for anticipating the behavior of light in some specific conditions. Some believe that Kepler did not have the elements to formulate the law that was later accepted by the scientific community, that is, the Snell–Descartes law. However, in this paper, we propose a model that agrees with Kepler’s heuristics and that is also successful in (...) anticipating the behavior of light when it passes through a surface that separates two media with different optical densities. This model adopts strategies that were recommended by Kepler in two types of analogies. The obstacles that led to the failure of the two types of analogies are presented in the article, and we argue that the model proposed here could overcome these specific obstacles. Finally, we show how the proposed model could be articulated with Kepler’s metaphysics of light. (shrink)

Today, a consistent part of our everyday interaction with art and aesthetic artefacts occurs through digital media, and our preferences and choices are systematically tracked and analyzed by algorithms in ways that are far from transparent. Our consumption is constantly documented, and then, we are fed back through tailored information. We are therefore witnessing the emergence of a complex interrelation between our aesthetic choices, their digital elaboration, and also the production of content and the dynamics of creative processes. All are (...) involved in a process of mutual influences, and are partially determined by the invisible guiding hand of algorithms. -/- With regard to this topic, this paper will introduce some key issues concerning the role of algorithms in aesthetic domains, such as taste detection and formation, cultural consumption and production, and showing how aesthetics can contribute to the ongoing debate about the impact of today’s “algorithmic culture”. (shrink)

Este número monográfico de la revista Co-herencia que tenemos el gusto de presentar es para nosotros un motivo de satisfacción y orgullo. Después de varios meses de trabajo, logramos concretar un valioso conjunto de textos sobre teoría de la historia y la historiografía, dos áreas de investigación que hasta hace unos años eran más bien exóticas en nuestro medio.

1. The opinions expressed are the author's own. They do not reflect any position or policy of the National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service, Department of Health and Human Services, or any of the authors affiliated organizations.

In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed-false presupposition the speaker intends to convey. These judgements are robust and remain so when the participants are given the possibility of classifying the utterances as misleading or as deceiving. (...) The judgements contrast with judgements participants give about cases of misleading or deceptive behaviour, and they pattern with judgements participants make about declarative lies. Finally, the possibility of lying with non-declaratives is not confined to questions: ordinary speakers also judge utterances of imperative, exclamative and optative sentences carrying believed-false presuppositions to be lies. (shrink)

It is widely held that all lies are assertions: the traditional definition of lying entails that, in order to lie, speakers have to assert something they believe to be false. It is also widely held that assertion contrasts with presupposition and, in particular, that one cannot assert something by presupposing it. Together, these views imply that speakers cannot lie with presuppositions—a view that Andreas Stokke has recently explicitly defended. The aim of this paper is to argue that speakers can lie (...) with presuppositions, and to discuss some of the implications this outcome has for current research on lying, assertion and presupposition. (shrink)

Drawing on evolutionary epistemology, process ontology, and a social-cognition approach, this book suggests cognitive evolution, an evolutionary-constructivist social and normative theory of change and stability of international social orders. It argues that practices and their background knowledge survive preferentially, communities of practice serve as their vehicle, and social orders evolve. As an evolutionary theory of world ordering, which does not borrow from the natural sciences, it explains why certain configurations of practices organize and govern social orders epistemically and normatively, and (...) why and how these configurations evolve from one social order to another. Suggesting a multiple and overlapping international social orders' approach, the book uses three running cases of contested orders - Europe's contemporary social order, the cyberspace order, and the corporate order - to illustrate the theory. Based on the concepts of common humanity and epistemological security, the author also submits a normative theory of better practices and of bounded progress. (shrink)

In Emanuel Adler's distinctive constructivist approach to international relations theory, international practices evolve in tandem with collective knowledge of the material and social worlds. This book - comprising a selection of his journal publications, a new introduction and three previously unpublished articles - points IR constructivism in a novel direction, characterized as 'communitarian'. Adler's synthesis does not herald the end of the nation-state; nor does it suggest that agency is unimportant in international life. Rather, it argues that what mediates (...) between individual and state agency and social structures are communities of practice, which are the wellspring and repositories of collective meanings and social practices. The concept of communities of practice casts new light on epistemic communities and security communities, helping to explain why certain ideas congeal into human practices and others do not, and which social mechanisms can facilitate the emergence of normatively better communities. (shrink)

Molecular biologists exploit information conveyed by mechanistic models for experimental purposes. In this article, I make sense of this aspect of biological practice by developing Keller’s idea of the distinction between ‘models of’ and ‘models for’. ‘Models of (phenomena)’ should be understood as models representing phenomena and are valuable if they explain phenomena. ‘Models for (manipulating phenomena)’ are new types of material manipulations and are important not because of their explanatory force, but because of the interventionist strategies they afford. This (...) is a distinction between aspects of the same model. In molecular biology, models may be treated either as ‘models of’ or as ‘models for’. By analysing the discovery and characterization of restriction–modification systems and their exploitation for DNA cloning and mapping, I identify the differences between treating a model as a ‘model of’ or as a ‘model for’. These lie in the cognitive disposition of the modeller towards the model: a modeller will look at a model as a ‘model of’ if interested in its explanatory force, or as a ‘model for’ if interested in the material manipulations it can possibly afford. (shrink)

Este estudio pretende indagar en el trato de la España vacía; mientras que este asunto se ha tratado ampliamente desde las ciencias sociales, no se ha tenido en cuenta la potencial labor de las humanidades en revertir este proceso de despoblación. El cielo gira, documental de Mercedes Álvarez,trata sobre los últimos habitantes de Aldealseñor, un pueblo soriano al borde de su extinción. Además de ofrecer un novedoso enfoque sobre el problema del abandono rural, el documental de Álvarez ha convertido a (...) Aldealseñor en un pueblo con reconocimiento internacional al que han viajado espectadores procedentes de todo el mundo. (shrink)

La batalla del Ebro enfrento, durante 115 días personas y máquinas. Se experimentaron nuevas técnicas y tecnologías que jugarían un papel determinante en el inminente conflicto mundial. La aviación se utilizó, por primera vez, de manera masiva y su actuación fue decisiva. Sin embargo, su rastro patrimonial y es escaso. Al entorno de la guerra aérea en la Batalla del Ebro el presente trabajo plantea una experiencia de investigación transversal y holística que plantea la socialización didáctica del conocimiento histórico y (...) arqueológico a partir de propuestas metodológicas museográficas, de iconografía didáctica y de recuperación de la memoria histórica. El objetivo de esta acción combinada es generar y socializar conocimiento científico sobre el pasado y su legado material, incidir en la formación de una ciudadanía crítica y fomentar el desarrollo económico sostenible en base a la acción de industrias culturales relacionadas con el patrimonio. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Principles of Biomedical Ethics. By Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress.

The distinction between lying and mere misleading is commonly tied to the distinction between saying and conversationally implicating. Many definitions of lying are based on the idea that liars say something they believe to be false, while misleaders put forward a believed-false conversational implicature. The aim of this paper is to motivate, spell out, and defend an alternative approach, on which lying and misleading differ in terms of commitment: liars, but not misleaders, commit themselves to something they believe to be (...) false. This approach entails that lying and misleading involve speech-acts of different force. While lying requires the committal speech-act of asserting, misleading involves the non-committal speech-act of suggesting. The approach leads to a broader definition of lying that can account for lies that are told while speaking non-literally or with the help of presuppositions, and it allows for a parallel definition of misleading, which so far is lacking in the debate. (shrink)

This paper examines the methodology used by Kepler to discover a quantitative law of refraction. The aim is to argue that this methodology follows a heuristic method based on the following two Pythagorean principles: (1) sameness is made known by sameness, and (2) harmony arises from establishing a limit to what is unlimited. We will analyse some of the author's proposed analogies to find the aforementioned law and argue that the investigation's heuristic pursues such principles.

Recently, Stefan Wintein published an article in which he presents four objections to my modal-epistemic argument for the existence of God. His first objection is an alleged counterexample to the argument’s first premise, and the second objection is an alleged counterexample to the argument’s second premise. Wintein’s third objection attempts to show that the modal-epistemic argument is circular. Finally, the fourth objection is a parody objection. In this paper, I show that Wintein’s four objections all fail.

In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with migrant subjects and migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half of the migrant/predicate-pairings (...) reflect the dictionary definitions of migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings. (shrink)

A pergunta pelo ser do homem é a origem da antropologia tanto filosófica quanto pedagógica. Neste horizonte, pode-se resumir a resposta à pergunta dizendo: o ser humano não só é efeito do diálogo, mas humaniza e se humaniza por meio do diálogo. Quando se planeja ambientes orientados a desenvolver as potências anímicas do diálogo em todos, e em cada um dos participantes da cena pedagógica, igualmente se está tanto em meio a uma antropologia pedagógica quanto a uma didática antropológica. Esta (...) foi a tradição que Christoph Wulf, na segunda metade do século XX e no começo do século XXI, sistematizou. Dentro desta corrente de pensamento se enquadra a investigação intitulada Diálogo: condição de formação. Assim, pode-se afirmar que este projeto se baseia na tradição alemã que põe a Bildung no centro, como uma categoria que, ao mesmo tempo, tem uma fundamentação filosófica e alguns efeitos tanto na concepção quanto na ação pedagógica. Palavras-chave: Diálogo. Antropologia pedagógica. Christoph Wulf. Gadamer. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta una reflexión respecto a la dimensión política de quienes ejercemos la labor bibliotecaria o bibliotecológica, enmarcada en la educación inclusiva del Sur Global, donde se parte del reconocimiento de la labor bibliotecaria y bibliotecológica asociada, generalmente, con un conocimiento práctico de las cosas o techné, debido a las condiciones históricas en que la disciplina científica se consolidó como tal. Empero, cada vez más se hace necesario que esta labor se proyecte de manera consciente y decidida hacia el (...) afianzamiento de la bibliotecología como campo de conocimiento necesario y útil para el logro de los principios sociales de la democracia, la justicia social y los derechos humanos; reconociendo, así, su dimensión política. Inicialmente se presenta una introducción histórica a la bibliotecología como ciencia. Después, se expone el significado sobre ser bibliotecario en Latinoamérica a la luz de las funciones sociales de la biblioteca y la bibliotecología. A continuación, se interpela la necesidad de que quien ejerce la labor bibliotecaria debe ser un sujeto político, incluso a pesar de sí mismo. Como preámbulo al cierre se presentan, a través de casos específicos y manifestaciones de acción social comunitaria, ejemplos de la dimensión política del bibliotecario. Finalmente, se cierra con una serie de propuestas y desafíos para trabajar en el fortalecimiento de una práctica política en la labor bibliotecaria o bibliotecológica en el Sur Global. (shrink)

El pluralismo cultural y la diversidad social atraviesan diferentes contextos sociales en el mundo contemporaneo, ejerciendo diferentes impactos sobre las instituciones oficiales. En el contexto de los servicios de salud de una ciudad cosmopolita como Montreal, la realización de nuevos proyectos de investigación y de intervención se hace necesaria, con el fin de evaluar la manera como los diversos grupos poblacionales entran en relación con dichos servicios. A nivel investigativo, se hace indispensable la creación de colaboraciones interdisciplinarias con las cuales (...) poder examinar las situaciones clínicas, a la luz de los diferentes elementos que la componen: sociales, culturales y étnicos. En este artículo, expongo algunas reflexiones que se derivan de una investigación interdiscip-linaria entre antropólogos y médicos, cuyo tema central giro en torno de los desórdenes funcionales del intestino dentro de la población infantil. Este trabajo en antropología médica permitió documentar y analizar los discursos de las familias y de los niños alrededor de la percepción de dicho problema de salud, así como de las prácticas y soluciones que estos ponen en marcha y con las cuales buscan aliviar el dolor y lograr un estado de bienestar. Las reflexiones que comparto en este artículo tienen como centro de interés los principales referentes teóricos y metodológicos utilizados desde la disciplina antropológica, los cuales seran ilustrados con la ayuda de algunos extractos de entrevistas realizadas. Mas allá de simplemente enumerar los resultados de la investigación, muestro un ejemplo de colabora-ción fructífera entre la antropología y la pediatría, la cual abre perspectivas de investigación y de aplicación futuras en lo que atañe a las relaciones entre las familias, las comunidades y los servicios institucionales. (shrink)

We conducted a thorough investigation of the impact of representativeness on reasoning and metacognitive processes by employing the Linda problem. In congruent versions, the more representative res...

Intentionalism is the view that demonstratives, gradable adjectives, quantifiers, modals and other context‐sensitive expressions are intention‐sensitive: their semantic value on a given use is fixed by speaker intentions. The first aim of this paper is to defend Intentionalism against three recent objections, according to which speakers at least sometimes do not have suitable intentions when using supposedly intention‐sensitive expressions. Its second aim is to thereby shed light on the so far little‐explored question of which kinds of intentions can be semantically (...) relevant. (shrink)

Four ethical values — maximizing benefits, treating equally, promoting and rewarding instrumental value, and giving priority to the worst off — yield six specific recommendations for allocating medical resources in the Covid-19 pandemic: maximize benefits; prioritize health workers; do not allocate on a first-come, first-served basis; be responsive to evidence; recognize research participation; and apply the same principles to all Covid-19 and non–Covid-19 patients.

Many recent definitions of lying are based on the notion of what is said. This paper argues that says-based definitions of lying cannot account for lies involving non-literal speech, such as metaphor, hyperbole, loose use or irony. It proposes that lies should instead be defined in terms of assertion, where what is asserted need not coincide with what is said. And it points to possible implications this outcome might have for the ethics of lying.

For many contemporary artists, failure has been an instrument of experimentation and self-expression, of investigation into existential questions and manifestation of utopian tensions. In this paper, I will discuss how some of the well-known strategies of experimental and avant-garde artistic practices with failure involve risky actions, challenging or impossible attempts, loss of control, and compulsive repetition of inconclusive acts. In those experimentations, the ideal model of an effective and successful action performance (in which a goal is defined through a clear (...) intention, a plan and a well-controlled execution) is willfully sabotaged in its stages. In this regard, a distinction between failure and mistake will be highlighted: if failure could be traced back to the tradition of heroic or tragic defeat in front of adverse odds, mistake on the contrary means doing something wrong that one is expected to control. While failure negatively reflects our tension toward autonomy, the focus on mistakes is the expression of rigidity and heightened risk aversion in contexts where maximal efficiency and self-optimization are expected. This paper will argue that equating the category of failure with that of mistake is not faithful to the motives underlying those artistic traditions. In this respect, artistic experimentations in the “aesthetic of failure” can also be viewed as a critical response toward a general mindset defined by the anxiety of control and obsessive mistake avoidance that seems typical of our current times. (shrink)

To understand the endogenous components of the event-related brain potential (ERP), we must use data about the components' antecedent conditions to form hypotheses about the information-processing function of the underlying brain activity. These hypotheses, in turn, generate testable predictions about the consequences of the component. We review the application of this approach to the analysis of the P300 component. The amplitude of the P300 is controlled multiplicatively by the subjective probability and the task relevance of the eliciting events, whereas its (...) latency depends on the duration of stimulus evaluation. These and other factors suggest that the P300 is a manifestation of activity occurring whenever one's model of the environment must be revised. Tests of three predictions based on this “context updating” model are reviewed. Verleger's critique is based on a misconstrual of the model as well as a partial and misleading reading of the relevant literature. (shrink)

Background: The health professionals are involved in the paths of care for patients with different medical conditions. Their life is frequently characterized by psychopathological outcomes so that it is possible to identify consistent burdens. Besides the possibility to develop pathological outcomes, some protective factors such as resilience play a fundamental role in facilitating the adaptation process and the management of maladaptive patterns. Personal characteristics and specific indexes such as burdens and resilience are essential variables useful to study in-depth ongoing conditions (...) and possible interventions. The study was aimed at highlighting the presence and the relations among factors as personal variables, burdens, and resilience, to understand health professionals' specific structure and functions.Methods: The observation group was composed of 210 participants, 55 males, and 155 females, aged from 18 to 30 years old with a mean age of 25.92 years old. The study considered personal characteristics of the subjects, such as age, gender, years of study, days of work per week, hours of work per week, and years of work. Our study had been conducted with the use of measures related to burdens and resilience.Results: The performed analyses consisted of descriptive statistics, correlations, and regressions among the considered variables. Several significant correlations emerged among personal characteristics, CBI, and RSA variables. Specifically, age and work commitment indexes appeared to be significantly related to the development of burdens, differently from the years of study. Significant correlations emerged among personal and RSA variables, indicating precise directions for both domains. Age and gender were identified as predictors to perform multivariate regression analyses concerning CBI factors. Significant dependence relations emerged with reference to all CBI variables.Conclusion: Pathological outcomes and resilience factors represent two sides of the health professionals' experiences, also known as “invisible patients.” Greater knowledge about present conditions and future possibilities is a well-known need in literature so that the current analyses considered fundamental factors. In line with state of the art, future studies are needed in order to deepen elusive phenomena underlying maladjustment. (shrink)

We introduce the property “F-linked” of subsets of posets for a given free filter F on the natural numbers, and define the properties “μ-F-linked” and “θ-F-Knaster” for posets in a natural way. We show that θ-F-Knaster posets preserve strong types of unbounded families and of maximal almost disjoint families. Concerning iterations of such posets, we develop a general technique to construct θ-Fr-Knaster posets (where Fr is the Frechet ideal) via matrix iterations of <θ-ultrafilter-linked posets (restricted to some level of the (...) matrix). This is applied to prove consistency results about Cichoń's diagram (without using large cardinals) and to prove the consistency of the fact that, for each Yorioka ideal, the four cardinal invariants associated with it are pairwise different. At the end, we show that three strongly compact cardinals are enough to force that Cichoń's diagram can be separated into 10 different values. (shrink)

In arguing against a supposed ambiguity, philosophers often rely on the zeugma test. In an application of the zeugma test, a supposedly ambiguous expression is placed in a sentence in which several of its supposed meanings are forced together. If the resulting sentence sounds zeugmatic, that is taken as evidence for ambiguity; if it does not sound zeugmatic, that is taken as evidence against ambiguity. The aim of this article is to show that arguments based on the second direction of (...) the test are misguided: ambiguous expressions, and in particular philosophically contested ones, do not reliably lead to zeugmaticity, so an absence of zeugmaticity provides no meaningful evidence for an absence of ambiguity. (shrink)

Pictures are notably absent from the current debate about how to define lying. Theorists in this debate tend to focus on linguistic means of communication and do not consider the possibility of lying with photographs, drawings and other kinds of pictures. The aim of this paper is to show that such a narrow focus is misguided: there is a strong case to be made for the possibility of lying with pictures and this possibility allows for insights concerning the question of (...) how lying should be defined. (shrink)

El presente trabajo pretende reflexionar y visibilizar el papel político que han tenido las mujeres como guardianas, custodias y transmisoras de las culturas ancestrales de los pueblos indígenas, afrocolombianos y campesinos. Así mismo, reconocer la resistencia y re-existencia de algunas experiencias organizativas de diversas mujeres en Medellín que luchan, desde su autonomía, por mantener su identidad, sus prácticas y saberes en un contexto de ciudad hegemónico y excluyente. Esto con el fin de transformar las realidades que las afectan y subvertir (...) el modelo político, social, económico y cultural que como mujeres afros, indígenas y campesinas las niega, invisibiliza y ubica en un lugar de subordinación. La importancia de este trabajo radica en darle lugar y legitimidad a los saberes ancestrales y, en este sentido, posicionar a la mujer como sujeto fundamental en las luchas políticas y culturales que se gestan, desde procesos particulares, y emergen como propuestas interculturales y decoloniales que ayudan a combatir el modelo occidental capitalista “de muerte”. (shrink)

In the past few years, machine learning (ML) tools have been implemented with success in the medical context. However, several practitioners have raised concerns about the lack of transparency—at the algorithmic level—of many of these tools; and solutions from the field of explainable AI (XAI) have been seen as a way to open the ‘black box’ and make the tools more trustworthy. Recently, Alex London has argued that in the medical context we do not need machine learning tools to be (...) interpretable at the algorithmic level to make them trustworthy, as long as they meet some strict empirical desiderata. In this paper, we analyse and develop London’s position. In particular, we make two claims. First, we claim that London’s solution to the problem of trust can potentially address another problem, which is how to evaluate the reliability of ML tools in medicine for regulatory purposes. Second, we claim that to deal with this problem, we need to develop London’s views by shifting the focus from the opacity of algorithmic details to the opacity of the way in which ML tools are trained and built. We claim that to regulate AI tools and evaluate their reliability, agencies need an explanation of how ML tools have been built, which requires documenting and justifying the technical choices that practitioners have made in designing such tools. This is because different algorithmic designs may lead to different outcomes, and to the realization of different purposes. However, given that technical choices underlying algorithmic design are shaped by value-laden considerations, opening the black box of the design process means also making transparent and motivating (technical and ethical) values and preferences behind such choices. Using tools from philosophy of technology and philosophy of science, we elaborate a framework showing how an explanation of the training processes of ML tools in medicine should look like. (shrink)

In the past few years, the ethical ramifications of AI technologies have been at the center of intense debates. Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how a morally responsible practice of data science can be promoted and which values have to shape it. In this context, ethics and moral responsibility have been mainly conceptualized as compliance to widely shared principles. However, several scholars have highlighted the limitations of such a principled approach. Drawing from microethics and the virtue theory tradition, (...) in this paper, we formulate a different approach to ethics in data science which is based on a different conception of “being ethical” and, ultimately, of what it means to promote a morally responsible data science. First, we develop the idea that, rather than only compliance, ethical decision-making consists in using certain moral abilities, which are cultivated by practicing and exercising them in the data science process. An aspect of virtue development that we discuss here is moral attention, which is the ability of data scientists to identify the ethical relevance of their own technical decisions in data science activities. Next, by elaborating on the capability approach, we define a technical act as ethically relevant when it impacts one or more of the basic human capabilities of data subjects. Therefore, rather than “applying ethics”, data scientists should cultivate ethics as a form of reflection on how technical choices and ethical impacts shape one another. Finally, we show how this microethical framework concretely works, by dissecting the ethical dimension of the technical procedures involved in data understanding and preparation of electronic health records. (shrink)