This article presents the results of the analysis of a number of linguistic metaphors found in a corpus of opinion articles published in the Spanish newspaper El País. The authors included in the corpus, who tend towards the left of the political spectrum, use metaphor to express moral judgements on the actions and decisions of the conservative, centre-right People’s party, which governs Spain with an overall majority. With the aim of describing this discourse, we have undertaken a qualitative analysis with (...) a conceptual framework deriving from CDA and cognitive linguistics. First, therefore, we have made use of the methodology developed by Steen and the Pragglejaz group to extract the discourse units that could be considered as the lexical expression of an underlying mapping between domains, that is, the metaphors; second, according to the descriptions of Talmy, Croft, Sweetser, Sullivan, and Dancygier and Sweetser, we have verified that the different types of grammatical structure in which the lexical items appeared also indicated the existence of a metaphorical thought process; and third, in the words of van Dijk, we have studied the ideological semantics underlying conceptual structures and conceptual content. As we have demonstrated, all the samples of linguistic metaphors found led readers to construct the same interpretation of the meaning: The Spanish People’s party government is the past, a past that provokes rejection and which was thought to be definitively ended. (shrink)

Los objetivos del presente estudio son evaluar la aceptabilidad de los estudiantes del modelo de portafolio electrónico de casos clínicos virtuales, lineales e integradores y su percepción sobre la metodología de aula invertida y aprendizaje en equipo modificado.El modelo de enseñanza mixta del portafolio electrónico, aula invertida y del aprendizaje en equipo modificado para estudiantes de pregrado permitió mejorar la satisfacción de los estudiantes al promover el aprendizaje activo y reflexivo. Los alumnos encontraron el modelo útil para una variedad de (...) propósitos en su educación de ciencias clínicas en el periodo de brote pandémico COVID-19. (shrink)

Este artículo trata sobre las violencias entre estudiantes y las aborda como constitutivas de la conformación de un entramado de vinculación juvenil en la escuela media; allí donde se juegan cotidianamente procesos identitarios que implican la tensión entre identificación y diferenciación, a través de la re-constitución de taxonomías sociales. Dentro de la tradición de investigación cualitativa nos centramos en la perspectiva narrativa de análisis, en base a la cual construimos un esquema analítico que fue aplicado a micro relatos de situaciones (...) conflictivas entre jóvenes de primer año de escuelas secundarias de Córdoba, Argentina. Este proceso de análisis nos ha permitido diferenciar contextos relacionales de emergencia de violencias así como caracterizar distintas formas de manifestación y sentidos que adquiere para los actores que la vivencian, ya sea como protagonistas o como espectadores. (shrink)

El grano de ben es un fruto que ha sido utilizado con fines terapéuticos desde la Antigüedad. Su descripción está incluida en el libro VI del De simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus de Galeno (s. II), una de las obras farmacológicas más importantes de la historia de la medicina. En este artículo compararemos desde una perspectiva filológica la entrada que Galeno dedicó a este simple en dos de sus traducciones medievales: la árabe de Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (s. IX) y la latina de (...) Gerardo de Cremona (s. XII). Nuestro análisis ayudará a profundizar en el estudio de estas dos traducciones y en la técnica de Gerardo de Cremona, el traductor más prolífico de obras de medicina griega y árabe al latín en la Edad Media. (shrink)

La Dra. Marina Trakas, coordinadora del dossier "Memoria y emoción" de la Revista de Psicología de la UNLP presenta los contenidos del mismo: -/- Trakas - Memoria y emoción: introducción al dossier Ramirez, Ruetti et al. - Memoria emocional en niñas y niños de diferentes condiciones socio-ambientales Saive - Reír para recordar: mejora de la memoria en relación con el humor Diaz Abrahan, Justel et al. - Memoria emocional. Una revisión sistemática de la capacidad modulatoria de la música, de (...) la actividad física y del bilingüismo Bonilla, Forcato et al. - Mejora de las memorias maladaptativas durante el sueno y la vigilia: una visión interdisciplinaria Fierro - Eros el memorioso Trakas - Dimensiones de análisis de los recuerdos personales como recuerdos afectivos Vieira Lopes - Sentimientos existenciales y memoria corporal: dos casos en la filosofía de la psiquiatría . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iconicity, Romance and History in the Crónica SarracinaMarina S. Brownlee (bio)Though seemingly alien discourses, romance and historiography are perennially linked. Far from offering an atemporal imaginary universe that bears no resemblance to historical specificity, romance is constructed as a response to it. Rather than simply projecting for the reader the naïve appeal of a prelapsarian escapism from the harsh realities of history, romance involves a continuous and sophisticated reinvention (...) of itself as a response to an ever-changing historico-political configuration. It is, in fact, a reciprocal relationship. We frequently see history appropriating romance paradigms explicitly, as, for example, when Bernal Díaz chooses to present Spain’s New World conquest and colonization as a continuation of the exploits of Amadís [see Gilman].Whatever form it takes, romance is committed to the celebration of a coherent system of socio-political values. This extra-textual frame of reference can take a variety of forms—from political propaganda that offers a self-aggrandizing depiction of the nobility or patron for whom the text is produced, to escapist fantasy—futuristic or archaizing. It is nostalgia for the lost world of chivalric romance which Cervantes embodies in the figure of Don Quijote, a foolish old man driven mad by his obsession with this perennial literary form. Cervantes is rightly credited with a brilliant and programmatic use of romance constructs to communicate the ongoing historical crisis of the Spanish empire. A byproduct of this romance scrutiny of history was his invention of the modern novel.Testimony to the long-standing interaction between romance and history in Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, is evident in the fact that its first romances were based on history, the so-called “romances of antiquity.” In those texts historical figures and events are evoked for the purpose of legitimating the present, vernacular poets as they celebrate the empowering myths projected by their society, as well as their own literary endeavors by invoking venerable Latin models. The well known translatio studii et imperii topos offers such allegory of empire.At the same time, the confrontation of romance and historical representation can also have a destabilizing effect, and this is programmatically explored in Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina (c. 1430). His text ponders the possibilities of romance and historiography in an obsessive manner and he accomplishes his task by examining representation of the most iconic figures associated with the fall of Spain in 711, namely, La Cava and her father, Count Julián, King Rodrigo, and Pelayo, the messianic hope of the Reconquest effort which would last nearly 800 years.Of related and perhaps even broader importance, Corral’s text merits careful reading because its exploration of iconicity related to Spain’s fall offers meditations on the workings of ideology, which inevitably proposes “imaginary or formal solutions to unresolvable contradictions” [Jameson 79]. Ideology—its unmasking—is intriguingly posited by Corral in powerful ways.If we turn to Corral’s text, we find a work offering an extraordinary consideration of history and romance—their profound interaction—whose full title reads, La crónica [End Page 119] del rey don Rodrigo con la destrucción de España (The Chronicle of King Rodrigo with the Destruction of Spain). My interest in the Crónica here is primarily to consider the mechanisms by which it gestures boldly toward what Žižek has described as the project of the postmodern critique of ideology—though it is clearly a recurring cultural constant—namely to “designate the elements which point towards the system’s antagonistic character, and thus ‘estrange’ us to the self-evidence of its established identity” [Žižek 7]. A reading of the Crónica provides an extended paradigm of such estrangement.Iberia is the area of the Mediterranean which underwent the most protracted encounter between Christianity and Islam, and the events of the Moorish invasion of 711 constitute Spain’s unique foundational subject-matter—on a par with the Troy legend and with King Arthur [see Deyermond 355]. Like them, the retelling of 711 is all about forging mythic connections in order to legitimize empire in a temporally remote time-frame. What interests me in this essay is... (shrink)

The notion of epistemic responsibility applied to memory has been in general examined in the framework of the responsibilities that a collective holds for past injustices, but it has never been the object of an analysis of its own. In this article, I propose to isolate and explore it in detail. For this purpose, I start by conceptualizing the epistemic responsibility applied to individual memories. I conclude that an epistemic responsible individual rememberer is a vigilant agent who knows when to (...) engage in different kinds of mental and non-mental actions in order to monitor and update her memories, and who develops and nurture different kinds of virtuous attitudes that guide those actions. These (epistemic) virtuous attitudes are oriented not only towards herself but also towards others. Whereas this conception of epistemic responsibility does not pose a problem to understand shared memories of family members and friends, it may seem suspicious when applied to large-scale collective memories. These memories, which I name historical memories, are memories of events that have a traumatic impact for the community, are permeated by unequal relations of power, keep a complex relationship with historical science, and present other characteristics that distinguish them from individual memories. But despite these differences, the analysis undertaken in this work shows that the general principles that govern the epistemic responsibility of individual and (large-scale) collective rememberers are similar, and are based on similar grounds: pragmatic considerations about the consequences of misremembering or forgetting and a feeling of care. The similarities at the individual and collective scale of the epistemic vigilant attitude that is and should be taken toward our significant past may partially justify the use of the same epithet—“memory”—to refer to these different kinds of representations. (shrink)

When the richest 85 individuals in the world own as much as the poorest 3 billion people, one must ask about equity and social justice. Yet, the problem is not just individual, but also systemic. Just as nations have developed poverty lines to identify people who need help, so too, as this book argues, we need a measure of relative wealth that can guide policy makers, governments, development specialists, and economists. Approaching the question through theological, ethical, and economic analysis, the (...) book probes the dynamics of wealth creation, the effectiveness of national and international policies, and the underlying questions of poverty, wealth, and widening economic disparities. [Subject: Religious Studies, Ethics, Social Justice, Economic Policy]. (shrink)

It seems natural to think that emotional experiences associated with a memory of a past event are new and present emotional states triggered by the remembered event. This common conception has nonetheless been challenged at the beginning of the 20th century by intellectuals who considered that emotions can be encoded and retrieved, and that emotional aspects linked to memories of the personal past need not necessary to be new emotional responses caused by the act of recollection. They called this specific (...) kind of memories “affective memories” and defended their existence. My aim here is to expound the historical background of this debate as well as the characterization and development of the notion of affective memory since its first inception. I aim to show that although the debate was left unresolved and the term disappeared from academy around 1930, many of the characterizations of the nature of emotions and memory done by the advocates of affective memory have reappeared in the scientific agenda and been further developed during the last decades. (shrink)

An important question in the debate regarding the nature of politically significant human kinds, such as gender, race, and sexual orientations, is concerned with the question of whether these human kinds are socially constructed (Stein 1999; Root 2000; Haslanger 2012; and Ásta 2013). In order to settle this debate, a more fundamental question needs to be answered: what does it mean to say that a category is socially constructed? -/- Recently, many philosophers have become interested in this issue (Hacking 1999; (...) Stein 1999; Haslanger 2003; Mallon 2007; Diaz-Leon 2015; Ásta 2015). They all seem to agree that there is not a single notion of social construction, but rather, there are different notions of social construction for different purposes. The important question in order to formulate a useful notion of social construction, then, is which project is at issue, and which notion of social construction is more useful for the purposes of that project. In this chapter I will focus on two projects that social constructivists are often interested in, namely, (i) the project of arguing against the inevitability of a trait, that is, to show that those features are not determined by human nature; and (ii) the project of arguing against the universality of a trait, that is, to show that a certain human category or kind is not a universal, transcultural, culture-independent property and that it cannot be applied to other cultures, places, and times; and I will discuss which notion of social construction is more useful with respect to each project. -/- My main questions, then, will be the following: (a) Is there any notion of social construction that entails that if X is socially constructed, then X is not inevitable, that is, X is not determined by human nature? (b) Is there any notion of social construction that entails that if X is socially constructed, then X is not transcultural or universal? (shrink)

Sigmund Freud sah die Anziehungskraft christlich-religiöser „Illusionen“ in der möglichen Aussöhnung des Menschen mit dem Tod begründet. Heute hat die moderne Industriegesellschaft die Religion jedoch weitestgehend hinter sich gelassen, die Vorstellungen von Tod und Sterben haben sich gewandelt. Marina Brandes untersucht, wie, in welchem Alter, an welchen Orten und unter welchen Umständen heute im Vergleich zu vormodernen Epochen normalerweise gestorben wird. Sie zeigt, welche Assoziationen mit dem Tod verknüpft sind und entwickelt vor dem Hintergrund der Medizinalisierung, der Institutionalisierung des (...) Sterbens und der Ausgrenzung der Sterbenden, Perspektiven für ein versöhntes, gutes Sterben. (shrink)

Are feelings an essential part or aspect of emotion? Cases of unconscious emotion suggest that this is not the case. However, it has been claimed that unconscious emotions are better understood as either (a) emotions that are phenomenally conscious but not reflectively conscious, or (b) dispositions to have emotions rather than emotions proper. Here, I argue that these ways of accounting for unconscious emotions are inadequate, and propose a view of emotions as non-phenomenal attitudes that regard their contents as relevant (...) to one's motivations. (shrink)

Nadie sabe lo que quiere la Justicia porque la justicia no se deja escribir. Cuando digo escribir, digo instituir. La Justicia no se deja instituir. Con ello debe lidiar la actividad judicial, con el límite mismo, con la propia imposibilidad. Límite que exhibe oculto que hay algo allí que no hace cuerpo. Que hay algo que el orden de lo simbólico no logra apresar. Legendre decía: en occidente, instituir es escribir. Instituir a los hombres es ante todo, escribirlos, inscribirlos, ¿marcar (...) sus cuerpos? Kafka lo sabía bien. La democracia enfrenta también un desafío similar: asumir que el signo de lo ilimitado la acompaña en el regazo mismo que la dialéctica de la modernidad le ofrece. Los escritores, señala Milner, han descripto lo ilimitado para condenar sus consecuencias y sustraerse a ellas, como el caso de Rousseau, o para constatarlas y combatirlas mediante estrategias de inversión, de Baudelaire a Brecht.Arrasar con la diferencia es no soportar el límite, aquello que hace borde, aquello que no se deja decir. En otras palabras no aceptar la falta en el lenguaje. El presente trabajo pretende mostrar que es, precisamente, el punto de cruce que constituye el límite mismo, el lugar que aloja un encuentro posible entre justicia y democratización. El límite, lejos de clausurar, posibilita aquel enlace, lo augura. Es a nivel del lenguaje que esta relación requiere ser situada. Democratizar la lengua supone horizontalizarla, en otras palabras, abogar por la apertura y circulación del sentido. Son las teorías críticas del derecho las que aportan las herramientas necesarias para pensar esta articulación. Como señala Cárcova, es en el campo del sentido en donde el derecho adquiere su especificidad y produce los efectos que le son propios. Profundizar la democracia desde el campo jurídico exige, ante todo, democratizar al derecho mismo. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on an influential account of phenomenal concepts, the recognitional account, and defend it from some recent challenges. According to this account, phenomenal concepts are recognitional concepts that we use when we recognize experiences as “another one of those.” Michael Tye has argued that this account is viciously circular because the relevant recognitional abilities involve descriptions of the form “another experience of the same type,” which is also a phenomenal concept. Tye argues that we avoid the (...) circularity worry if we explain the reference-fixing of phenomenal concepts in terms of dispositions to re-identify tokens of the same type without appealing to any further phenomenal concepts. However, he argues, this account is incompatible with the intuitive claim that phenomenal concepts seem to involve rich modes of presentation of their referents. Philip Goff and others have similarly argued that a recognitional account of phenomenal concepts would make phenomenal concepts opaque, that is, unable to reveal anything about their referents, which seems problematic. In this paper, I present a new version of the recognitional account that avoids the circularity worry without entailing that phenomenal concepts are opaque. (shrink)

Die Hauptthese dieses Buches ist es, Krankheit und Gesundheit mit Nietzsche auf zwei verschiedenen Ebenen zu denken, nämlich als Ereignisse des Willens zur Macht in einem zirkulär-relationalen Modell, in dem sie sich gegenseitig behaupten, sowie die Metaebene der Konzeptualisierung anzuerkennen. Es behandelt die Schwierigkeit des begrifflichen Denkens, diese Ereignisse einzuholen, und diskutiert kritisch Modellbildungen, die darauf hinauslaufen, dass Krankheit zu überwinden und als lineares singuläres Ereignis zu verstehen sei. In Nietzsches Spätwerk wird die Figur des "dionysischen Künstlers" als Idealisierung der (...) Gesundheit gemäß seiner interpretierenden Sichtweise der Welt dargestellt. Die Relevanz des Buches liegt darin, eine Analyse der Begriffe von Gesundheit und Krankheit (tragischer und schlechter Pessimismus) in direkter Beziehung zu leiblichen Vorgängen vorzulegen, die sich von metaphysisch-dialektischen Voraussetzungen befreit. Zu diesem Zweck widmet die Untersuchung sich einer intertextuellen Lektüre der fünf Vorreden, die Nietzsche 1886/87 zu seinen früheren Schriften verfasste, und verknüpft sie mit der Interpretation des Nachlasses und weiterer Veröffentlichungen aus seiner letzten Schaffensphase. (shrink)

This paper develops a largely neglected parallel between prudence and population ethics. Prudence is generally understood to be concerned with the balancing of well-being over time. How, precisely, well-being ought to be balanced over time, however, is a fervently debated question. I argue that developing a standard guiding such evaluations is exceedingly challenging. This is due to an often overlooked fact about prudence, namely that it shares a structural similarity with population ethics: In both contexts, we assess the comparative value (...) of populations of personstages/people, which may vary in number and level of well-being. Based on this analogy, I show that the development of an adequate theory of prudence runs into very similar impossibility results as obtain in population ethics. In particular, I prove that Arrhenius’ fifth impossibility theorem can be applied to prudence. I develop and compare four possible answers to this challenge. First, I discuss the possibility of accepting the very repugnant conclusion intrapersonally. Second, I present and further develop Donald Bruckner’s Minimax Regret approach, which gives up Transitivity. Third, I apply Jacob Nebel’s Lexical Threshold View to prudence and critically evaluate it. Lastly, I introduce what I call the Negative Lexicality View, which is based on Lexical Threshold View but overcomes some of its problems. (shrink)

A widespread need to explain the behavior and outcomes of AI-based systems has emerged, due to their ubiquitous presence. Thus, providing renewed momentum to the relatively new research area of eXplainable AI (XAI). Nowadays, the importance of XAI lies in the fact that the increasing control transference to this kind of system for decision making -or, at least, its use for assisting executive stakeholders- already affects many sensitive realms (as in Politics, Social Sciences, or Law). The decision-making power handover to (...) opaque AI systems makes mandatory explaining those, primarily in application scenarios where the stakeholders are unaware of both the high technology applied and the basic principles governing the technological solutions. The issue should not be reduced to a merely technical problem; the explainer would be compelled to transmit richer knowledge about the system (including its role within the informational ecosystem where he/she works). To achieve such an aim, the explainer could exploit, if necessary, practices from other scientific and humanistic areas. The first aim of the paper is to emphasize and justify the need for a multidisciplinary approach that is beneficiated from part of the scientific and philosophical corpus on Explaining, underscoring the particular nuances of the issue within the field of Data Science. The second objective is to develop some arguments justifying the authors’ bet by a more relevant role of ideas inspired by, on the one hand, formal techniques from Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and on the other hand, the modeling of human reasoning when facing the explanation. This way, explaining modeling practices would seek a sound balance between the pure technical justification and the explainer-explainee agreement. (shrink)

This handbook presents the conceptions and principles central to every aspect of Hegel’s systematic philosophy. In twenty-eight thematically linked chapters by leading international experts, The Palgrave Hegel Handbook provides reliable, scholarly overviews of each subject, illuminates the main issues and debates, and details concisely the considered views of each contributor. Recent scholarship challenges traditional, largely anti-Kantian, readings of Hegel, focusing instead on Hegel’s appropriation of Kantian epistemology to reconcile idealism with the rejection of foundationalism, coherentism and skepticism. Focused like Kant (...) on showing how fundamental unities underlie the profusion of apparently independent events, Hegel argued that reality is rationally structured, so that its systematic structure is manifest to our properly informed thought. Accordingly, this handbook re-assesses Hegel’s philosophical aims, methods and achievements, and re-evaluates many aspects of Hegel’s enduring philosophical contributions, ranging from metaphysics, epistemology, and dialectic, to moral and political philosophy and philosophy of history. Each chapter, and The Palgrave Hegel Handbook as a whole, provides an informed, authoritative understanding of each aspect of Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

Are emotions bodily feelings or evaluative cognitions? What is happiness, pain, or “being moved”? Are there basic emotions? In this chapter, I review extant empirical work concerning these and related questions in the philosophy of emotion. This will include both (1) studies investigating people’s emotional experiences and (2) studies investigating people’s use of emotion concepts in hypothetical cases. Overall, this review will show the potential of using empirical research methods to inform philosophical questions regarding emotion.

The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...) in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). (shrink)

Hegel's Philosophy of Nature constitutes the second part of his mature philosophical system presented in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and covers an exceptionally broad spectrum of themes and issues, as Hegel considers the content and structure of how humanity approaches nature and how nature is understood by humanity. The essays in this volume bring together various perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, emphasizing its functional role within the Encyclopaedia and its importance for understanding the complexity of Hegel's philosophical (...) project. Together they illuminate the core ideas which form Hegel's philosophical framework in the realm of nature. (shrink)

A recent quarrel over faultless disagreements assumes that disputes over evaluative sentences should be understood as regular, factual disagreements. Instead, I propose that evaluative disagreements should be understood in Lewisian terms. Language use works like a rule-governed game. In it, the assertion of an evaluative sentence is an attempt to establish one value as default in the conversation; its rejection, in turn, is in most cases the refusal to accept this move.

We explore different ways in which the human visual system can adapt for perceiving and categorizing the environment. There are various accounts of supervised (categorical) and unsupervised perceptual learning, and different perspectives on the functional relationship between perception and categorization. We suggest that common experimental designs are insufficient to differentiate between hypothesized perceptual learning mechanisms and reveal their possible interplay. We propose a relatively underutilized way of studying potential categorical effects on perception, and we test the predictions of different perceptual (...) learning models using a two‐dimensional, interleaved categorization‐plus‐reconstruction task. We find evidence that the human visual system adapts its encodings to the feature structure of the environment, uses categorical expectations for robust reconstruction, allocates encoding resources with respect to categorization utility, and adapts to prevent miscategorizations. (shrink)

The essays in this volume address topics prominent in current debates about Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, which originally appeared as the third part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Together, a group of internationally recognized Hegel scholars presents a sophisticated, well-researched, and considered account of Hegel's text, approaching it from different perspectives, philosophical schools, and traditions. Each essay focuses on a specific issue relevant to Hegel scholarship, carefully and clearly setting out established views of the text and putting forward (...) incisive new interpretations. The essays will enable readers to obtain a broad yet analytically nuanced understanding of Hegel's thought and in particular of the Philosophy of Spirit, a rich and important work that has relevance for contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of law and religion, ethics, aesthetics, and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Canguilhem’s contemporary relevance lies in how he critiques the relation between knowledge and life that underlies Kantian rationality. The latter’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment represent life in the form of an exception: life is simultaneously included and excluded from understanding. Canguilhem’s critique can be grouped into three main strands of argument. First, his reference to concepts as preserved problems breaks with Kant’s idea of concepts regarding the living as a ‘unification of the manifold’. Second, Canguilhem’s vital (...) normativity represents life as the potential to resist normative orders that judge the living, relegating Kant’s ‘lawfulness of the contingent’ to a ‘mediocre regularity’. Third, Canguilhem’s introduction of the environment as a ‘category of contemporary thought’ decentres the living/knowing subject and introduces contingency. His idea of the ‘knowledge of life’ leads to the conclusion that life is the condition of possibility of rationality, rather than rationality’s ‘blind spot’. (shrink)

Criticism is a staple of the scientific enterprise and of the social epistemology of science. Philosophical discussions of criticism have traditionally focused on its roles in relation to objectivity, confirmation, and theory choice. However, attention to criticism and to criticizability should also inform our thinking about scientific pursuits: the allocation of resources with the aim of developing scientific tools and ideas. In this paper, we offer an account of scientific pursuitworthiness which takes criticizability as its starting point. We call this (...) the apokritic model of pursuit. Its core ideas are that pursuits are practices governed by norms for asking and answering questions, and that criticism arises from the breach of these norms. We illustrate and advertise our approach using examples from institutional grant review, neuroscience, and sociology. We show that the apokritic model can unify several indices of criticizability, that it can account for the importance of criticizing pursuits in scientific practice, and that it can offer ameliorative advice to erstwhile pursuers. (shrink)

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether the resistance to extinction obtained in evaluative conditioning (EC) studies implies that EC is a qualitatively distinct form of classical conditioning (Baeyens, Eelen, & Crombez, 1995 Baeyens, F, Eelen, P, and Crombez, G, (1995a). Pavlovian associations are forever: On classical conditioning and extinction, Journal of Psychophysiology 9 ((1995a)), pp. 127–141.[Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]a) or whether it is the result of an nonassociative artefact (Field & Davey, 1997 Field, AP, and Davey, GCL, (...) (1997). Conceptual conditioning: Evidence for an artifactual account of evaluative learning, Learning and Motivation 25 ((1997)), pp. 446–464.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 1998 Field, AP, and Davey, GCL, (1998). Evaluative conditioning: Arti‐fact or ‐fiction?‐ A reply to Baeyens, De Houwer, Vansteenwegen, and Eelen (1998), Learning and Motivation 29 ((1998)), pp. 475–491.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 1999 Field, AP, and Davey, GCL, (1999). Reevaluating evaluative conditioning: A nonassociative explanation of conditioning effects in the visual evaluative conditioning paradigm, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 25 ((1999)), pp. 211–224.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). Both experiments included between‐subjects control groups in addition to standard within‐subjects control conditions. In Experiment 1, only verbal ratings were measured in order to evaluate the effect of postacquisition CS‐only exposures on EC whereas in Experiment 2, verbal ratings and postextinction priming effects were measured. The results showed that the EC effects are demonstrable in a between‐subjects design and that the extinction procedure did not have any influence on the acquired evaluative value of CSs regardless of whether the verbal ratings or the priming effects were used as dependent variables. The present results provide evidence that EC is resistant to extinction and suggest an interpretation of EC as a qualitatively distinct form of associative learning. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper, I respond to James Sterba’s recent book ‘Is a Good God Logically Possible?’ I show that Sterba concludes that God is not logically possible by ignoring three important issues: (a) the different functions of leeway indeterminism (and the political freedom presupposed by it) and autonomy (the two are very different things, even though both go under the name of freedom), (b) the differences in the conditions of agency in God and in creatures, (there is non-parity in (...) how each must apply the single moral law), and (c) the non-parity between our knowledge and God’s. I provide a brief summary of Sterba’s arguments, and I develop the following points: 1. Sterba’s argument against a Free-Will Defense hinges on his conflation of political freedom and autonomy; 2. Sterba’s crucial premise for his argument against soul-making theodicies (namely, that the “Pauline Principle” should be applied univocally across God and creatures) is false; 3. Sterba’s arguments against skeptical theism depend on his assumption that our knowledge is comparable to that of God. In each case, Sterba either does not recognize non-parity between God and creatures or does not recognize the difference between the profane (e.g., political matters) and the sacred, (e.g., spiritual matters having to do with the inner nature of the soul’s development). (shrink)