1. Teoría de los signos, teoría de la gramática, epistemología del lenguaje -- 2. Teoría del significado.

An impossible world is a world which necessarily does not exist. Besides the paradigm of necessity, wich is logical necesslty, we must consider physical necessity and ethical necessity, both of wich can beexpressed in terms of logical necessity, in the way suggested by Montague. Accordingly, an impossible world can be logically impossible, physically impossible or ethically impossible, but in every case the impossibility can be reduced to logical impossibility, and in consequence an impossible world is irrational and cannot be understood (...) by us. An illustration is taken from the incongruities of Kafka’s story in Di Verwandlung. (shrink)

The object of the essay is to examine what is basically mental in humans as compared to animals. Differences in respect of the concept of will and in respect of the concept of intellect are examined following ideas expressed by Anthony Kenny in The Metaphysics of Mind, and some criticisms are suggested. Accepting the thesis put forward by Edelman as well as by Damasio that a neurological self is necessary for the development of consciousness, a scientific reading is given to (...) Kant�s idea of the self as well as to that of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. For the same reasons, Wittgenstein�s later rejection of the concept of self is criticized. (shrink)

Attempting to escape from the substantialist cartesian dualism, some take our conceptual schemes as dualist. Thus, Feigl makes the distinction between the mental and the physical from an epistemological viewpoint, accepting as distinctive of the mental a direct and immediate knowledge which has no place in the physical, but however he accepts the identity between mental states and neurological states. In a similar way, Davidson, stating that all events are physical, characterizes the mental as a specific manner of describing neurological (...) events, which is also accepted by Quine in his latest books. I take that theory as implying that there are mental properties, like those defined by Searle as macroproperties of the brain. But I see no reason to talk about the mind, unless with the purpose of abbreviating more complex expressions like ‘the set of mental properties’, or perhaps ‘the set of human psychological capacities’, as Kenny proposes. (shrink)

El intento de librarnos del dualismo sustancialista cartesiano conduce a algunos a traspasar el dualismo a nuestros esquemas de conceptualización. Así, Feigl coloca la distinción entre lo físico y lo mental en un nivel epistemológico, aceptando como distintivo de lo mental un conocimiento directo e inmediato que no tiene lugar con respecto a lo físico, aun cuando acepte la identidad entre los estados mentales y los estados cerebrales. De modo parecido, Davidson, manteniendo que todo suceso es físico, caracteriza lo mental (...) como una manera peculiar de describir los estados del cerebro, y es una idea... (Leer más) aceptada también por Quine en sus últimos libros. Me parece que esta explicación obliga a aceptar que haya propiedades mentales, como las que Searle, por ejemplo, define como macropropiedades del cerebro. Pero nada de ello justifica que sigamos hablando de la mente, a menos que sea para abreviar una expresión más compleja como �conjunto de las propiedades mentales�, o tal vez �conjunto de las capacidades psicológicas humanas�, como hace Kenny. (shrink)

Attempting to escape from the substantialist cartesian dualism, some take our conceptual schemes as dualist. Thus, Feigl makes the distinction between the mental and the physical from an epistemological viewpoint, accepting as distinctive of the mental a direct and immediate knowledge which has no place in the physical, but however he accepts the identity between mental states and neurological states. In a similar way, Davidson, stating that all events are physical, characterizes the mental as a specific manner of describing neurological (...) events, which is also accepted by Quine in his latest books. I take that theory as implying that there are mental properties, like those defined by Searle as macroproperties of the brain. But I see no reason to talk about the mind, unless with the purpose of abbreviating more complex expressions like ‘the set of mental properties’, or perhaps ‘the set of human psychological capacities’, as Kenny proposes. (shrink)

Mamerto Oyala Cuéllar -- Guillermo Francovich -- José Antonio Arze -- Roberto Prudencio -- Augusto Pescador -- Luis Carranza Siles -- Manfredo Kempff Mercado -- Federico Blanco Catacora -- Rubén Carrasco de la Vega -- Marvin Sandi.

This book is devoted to discussion of the views of Pierre Musso and starts with a central chapter written by Musso, entitled Network Ideology: from Saint-Simonianism to the Internet. Pierre Musso is a French philosopher and is one of the most original thinkers in the history of the network society. His thought develops a critique of information and communication technologies through their imaginary and social representations and of the information society, based on the network metaphor. The main question on which (...) Musso has focused his attention is how the network metaphor is one of the most powerful ways of understanding the complex societies in which we live. Showing characteristic attention to detail, and drawing on the history of ideas, political philosophy and sociology, Musso traces the genealogy of the network imaginary, and points out that it did not emerge with the Internet. He shows how its modern roots can be found in Henri de Saint-Simon and his disciples, engineers and entrepreneurs such as Michel de Chevalier, and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, who developed channel networks, railroads, and the telegraphic network in France in the nineteenth century. In addition to the central piece written by Musso, the book includes a general introduction and six commentaries from experts on information technologies and networks. It displays a wide range of perspectives from a diverse set of authors in terms of nationalities and universities, as well as disciplinary backgrounds. (shrink)

Patient-reported outcomes are frequently used for medical decision making, at the levels of both individual patient care and healthcare policy. Evidence increasingly shows that PROs may be influenced by patients’ response shifts and dispositions. We identify how response shifts and dispositions may influence medical decisions on both the levels of individual patient care and health policy. We provide examples of these influences and analyse the consequences from the perspectives of ethical principles and theories of just distribution. If influences of response (...) shift and disposition on PROs and consequently medical decision making are not considered, patients may not receive optimal treatment and health insurance packages may include treatments that are not the most effective or cost-effective. We call on healthcare practitioners, researchers, policy makers, health insurers, and other stakeholders to critically reflect on why and how such patient reports are used. (shrink)

BackgroundScientific literature on posttraumatic growth after terrorist attacks has primarily focused on persons who had not been directly exposed to terrorist attacks or persons who had been directly exposed to them, but who were assessed few months or years after the attacks.MethodsWe examined long-term PTG in 210 adults directly exposed to terrorist attacks in Spain a mean of 29.6 years after the attacks. The participants had been injured by a terrorist attack or were first-degree relatives of people who had been (...) killed or injured by a terrorist attack. They completed diagnostic measures of emotional disorders and measures of PTSD and depression symptomatology, optimism, and PTG.ResultsMultiple regression analyses revealed gender differences and a positive linear relationship between PTG and cumulative trauma after the terrorist attack. Some PTG dimensions were significantly associated with PTSD symptomatology, these associations being linear, not curvilinear. However, PTG was not associated with depression symptomatology, diagnosis of emotional disorders, age, elapsed time since the attack, or optimism. In comparison with survivors assessed 18 years after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Spanish victims of terrorism showed higher levels of appreciation of life, but lower levels of relating to others and spiritual change.ConclusionThe findings underscore the influence of gender on PTG and provide support to the hypothesis that some emotional distress may be a necessary condition of PTG. Future studies on PTG after terrorist attacks should take into consideration the characteristics of the terrorist attack itself and the contexts of violence and threat in which it occurred. The political, social, and cultural characteristics of the community affected by it and the profile and characteristics of other traumatic events suffered after the attack should also be taken into account in further research. (shrink)

Corporate America is institutionalizing ethics through a variety of structures, systems, and processes. This study sought to identify managerial perceptions regarding the institutionalization of ethics in organizations. Eighty-six corporate level marketing and human resource managers of American multi-national corporations responded to a mail survey regarding the various implicit and explicit ways by which corporations institutionalize ethics. The results revealed that managers found ethics to be good for the bottom line of the organizations, they did not perceive the need for additional (...) formalization of ethics, and that they perceived implicit forms of institutionalizing ethics (e.g., leadership, corporate culture, top management support) to be more effective than the explicit forms of institutionalizing ethics (e.g., ethics ombudspeople, ethics committees, ethics newsletters). Implications of the survey and future research directions conclude the paper. (shrink)

Disruptions in theory of mind faculties and the ability to relate to an intersubjective reality are widely thought to be crucial to schizophrenic symptomology. This paper applies a cognitive linguistic framework to analyze spontaneous perspective-taking in two corpora of stories told by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis. We elicited natural narrative language use through life story interviews and a guided storytelling task and analyzed the linguistic construal of viewpoint in these stories. For this analysis, we developed a reliable and widely (...) applicable viewpoint model that allows for the categorization and quantification of speakers’ linguistic presentation and navigation of spatiotemporal domains. We found that our participants skillfully presented, navigated and embedded different narrative viewpoints through a variety of linguistic viewpoint devices. They presented complex viewpoints of other people in both the here-and-now of the interaction and the there-and-then of a narrative, and made use of transition markers to demarcate spatiotemporal discourse domains. We found no differences in viewpoint variables when comparing their guided stories to a control group. If problems with intersubjectivity are indeed an essential part of schizophrenia, an explanation of how this group can take on and navigate complex linguistic viewpoints in natural narrative interaction is called for. (shrink)