In spite of being ubiquitous in life sciences, the concept of information is harshly criticized. Uses of the concept other than those derived from Shannon's theory are denounced as pernicious metaphors. We perform a computational experiment to explore whether Shannon's information is adequate to describe the uses of said concept in commonplace scientific practice. Our results show that semantic sequences do not have unique complexity values different from the value of meaningless sequences. This result suggests that quantitative theoretical frameworks do (...) not account fully for the complex phenomenon that the term “information” refers to. We propose a restructuring of the concept into two related, but independent notions, and conclude that a complete theory of biological information must account completely not only for both notions, but also for the relationship between them. (shrink)

We say that a sentence A is a permissive consequence of a set X of premises whenever, if all the premises of X hold up to some standard, then A holds to some weaker standard. In this paper, we focus on a three-valued version of this notion, which we call strict-to-tolerant consequence, and discuss its fruitfulness toward a unified treatment of the paradoxes of vagueness and self-referential truth. For vagueness, st-consequence supports the principle of tolerance; for truth, it supports the (...) requisite of transparency. Permissive consequence is non-transitive, however, but this feature is argued to be an essential component to the understanding of paradoxical reasoning in cases involving vagueness or self-reference. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the logic of gift and team performance. We explore this connection empirically, using a detailed data set from the National Basketball Association. In particular, we use the NBA Cares Community Assist Award as a way to measure gift-giving to the community. We explore the response of an entire team after one if its members has been recognized for his gift-giving behavior. Using two winners, we show that after a player has received the (...) award there is an increase in the number of assists given by each member of the team, and that there is also an increase in the number of wins. Therefore, our results show that the team’s performance would improve after a player has been recognized because of his gift-giving attitude. This finding to management implies that managers’ incentivization of a sharing and giving philosophy would not only improve their relationship bond but it would also help them increase their performance. (shrink)

RésuméAu cœur de la théorie de Sophia Moreau sur la discrimination répréhensible réside le devoir moral de traiter les autres comme des êtres égaux. Cet essai soulève quelques questions sur les contours de ce devoir et suggère des moyens de renforcer la théorie. En particulier, il suggère d'intégrer une vision cosmopolite de la portée de ce devoir, d’éclairer les caractéristiques à la base du statut moral égal des personnes afin d'en identifier les fondements, ainsi que d'identifier certaines considérations relatives à (...) des intérêts d'importance afin d'en préciser le contenu. La relation entre la théorie de Moreau et le discours sur les droits humains est également brièvement examinée, et une discussion plus approfondie de ce dernier est recommandée. (shrink)

Interest in ethical aspects associated to product acquisition and consumption is a growing trend among consumers. In this context, the concept of “product with ethical attributes” has arisen to refer to products with explicit social and environmental characteristics. However, one of the factors that most hinders the purchasing of these products is certainly price. Given the difficulty of reducing price, the question that arises is the extent to which other product attributes can attenuate the negative impact of price on perceived (...) value. We assume that the special benefits associated to this type of products are, at a different level, attenuators of the relationship between price and perceived value. Focusing on Fair Trade organic coffee, hypotheses are tested regarding survey data from 407 customers. They were interviewed in an actual purchasing scenario. The models are tested using conventional Structural Equation Models and the Latent Moderated Structural Equation method. The results obtained shed some light on a highly generalised belief that the marketing of these products can only be improved by reducing their price. However, although a price reduction could be desirable, albeit complicated in this product category, its effects could be reduced by acting on other variables such as the ethical aspects, quality and healthiness of this product category. (shrink)

How should political power and influence be allocated in democratic systems? That is, roughly, the core of the boundary problem in democratic theory. As of late, some authors have begun paying increased attention to the methodological aspects of this dispute. This paper attempts to make a twofold contribution to this ‘methodological turn’. On the one hand, it identifies and analyzes five desiderata of a successful principle of democratic inclusion. Any such principle, I argue, must be grounded in a clearly identifiable (...) set of values, must provide a clear standard of inclusion, must specify the relevant modalities of inclusion, must provide sound bridging principles, and must be extensionally adequate. In the first half of the paper, these desiderata are developed and critically scrutinized. On the other hand, I also extract three lessons from the previous discussion. First, that a unique answer to the boundary problem (i.e. one grounded in one single principle) is unlikely. Second, that a satisfactory answer to the boundary problem need not necessarily appeal, as some have argued, to distinctively democratic values. And third, that intuitions about political exclusion (i.e. those requiring or permitting the exclusion of some individuals) should be treated with special caution. (shrink)

For some time now we have noticed an increasing scepticism regarding the effectiveness of democracy, and its ability to represent citizens through elections. Elections are the central mechanism of political decision taking. However, there is a clear tendency to exploit electo­ rial processes by populist politicians. The ancient ideal of paideia was to educate citizens by following a civic program. Its aim was to enable the citizen to exercise the civil rights and duties. Since the 1970s, however, we had observed (...) two contrasting tendencies: a growth of individualization, and a ecrease of the level of civic education. In the 1990s populist politi­ cal parties entered the political scene of European democracies, some of which have man­ aged to establish a mob rule or ochlocracy (ὀχλοκρατία). Since then, ochlocratic parties have systematically intended to win the votes of politically less educated citizens by offering them a simplified political discourse. In fact, these parties have managed to neutralize the two­party system in many European countries. Thus they managed to block majority­based governments, forcing parties to form coalitions with ideologically opposing smaller parties. This has created a situation in which the “punishment vote” becomes the mean to gain the votes of undecided people who may be characterized as rebels without political culture. (shrink)

In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less prevalent (...) in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences. (shrink)

At a time in which labour markets are becoming increasingly globalised and precarisation processes are altering young people’s working and living conditions, a whole network of public and private agencies are developing different entrepreneurship programmes as the main mechanism to deal with youth exclusion and unemployment. Grounded in two on-going research projects conducted in Europe and Australia, this article proposes a preliminary, thought-provoking engagement with the concept of global grammars of enterprise to examine how the truth regimes are framed and (...) articulated in these networks. We argue that this concept enables us to identify, examine and analyse the shifting, unstable, but always strategic power relations between the governmental discourses on entrepreneurship and the enterprising behaviour and dispositions of persons and groups, and the particular «declensions» and local «translations» of the ideas of entrepreneurship that organisations and young people perform within a process of globalised precarisation.Al albur de la globalización de los mercados laborales, al mismo tiempo que ciertos procesos de precarización están alterando profundamente las condiciones de vida y de trabajo de las personas jóvenes, se despliega toda una red de agentes públicos y privados que buscan fomentar el emprendimiento como principal mecanismo para enfrentar la exclusión y el paro juvenil. Fundamentado en dos proyectos de investigación en curso en Europa y Australia, el artículo se involucra preliminar y provocativamente con el concepto analítico de gramáticas globales del emprendimiento para analizar cómo se enmarcan y articulan los regímenes de verdad de estas redes. Argumentamos que este constructo posibilita abordar las inestables y estratégicas relaciones de poder entre los discursos gubernamentales del emprendimiento y las disposiciones y los comportamientos; las declinaciones particulares y las «traducciones» locales que la juventud y algunas organizaciones afines realizan de ellos en el marco de un proceso de precarización globalizado. (shrink)

The main purpose of these introductory remarks is to give the reader a sense of Philip Rossi’s philosophical project and its importance. I will then advance an interpretation of what motivates Kant’s commitment to community, and, on its basis, object to Rossi’s views on radical evil –a point which affects how one should conceive the moral vocation of humanity and the role that politics and religion play within it. My reconstruction concludes with a sketch of how the five contributions to (...) this Symposium fit together and deepen our understanding of Rossi’s overall project. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Barrio, Tajer and Rosenblatt establish a correspondence between metainferences holding in the strict-tolerant logic of transparent truth ST+ and inferences holding in the logic of paradox LP+. They argue that LP+ is ST+’s external logic and they question whether ST+’s solution to the semantic paradoxes is fundamentally different from LP+’s. Here we establish that by parity of reasoning, ST+ can be related to LP+’s dual logic K3+. We clarify the distinction between internal and external logic and (...) argue that while ST+’s nonclassicality can be granted, its self-dual character does not tie it to LP+ more closely than to K3+. (shrink)

Supervaluationism is a well known theory of vagueness. Subvaluationism is a less well known theory of vagueness. But these theories cannot be taken apart, for they are in a relation of duality that can be made precise. This paper provides an introduction to the subvaluationist theory of vagueness in connection to its dual, supervaluationism. A survey on the supervaluationist theory can be found in the Compass paper of Keefe (2008); our presentation of the theory in this paper will be short (...) to get rapidly into the logical issues. This paper is relatively self-contained. A modest background on propositional modal logic is, though not strictly necessary, advisable. The reader might find useful the Compass papers Kracht (2011) and Negri (2011) (though these papers cover issues of more complexity than what is demanded to follow this paper). (shrink)

Michel Janssen and Harvey Brown have driven a prominent recent debate concerning the direction of an alleged arrow of explanation between Minkowski spacetime and Lorentz invariance of dynamical laws in special relativity. In this article, I critically assess this controversy with the aim of clarifying the explanatory foundations of the theory. First, I show that two assumptions shared by the parties—that the dispute is independent of issues concerning spacetime ontology, and that there is an urgent need for a constructive interpretation (...) of special relativity—are problematic and negatively affect the debate. Second, I argue that the whole discussion relies on a misleading conception of the link between Minkowski spacetime structure and Lorentz invari-ance, a misconception that in turn sheds more shadows than light on our understand-ing of the explanatory nature and power of Einstein’s theory. I state that the arrow connecting Lorentz invariance and Minkowski spacetime is not explanatory and uni-directional, but analytic and bidirectional, and that this analytic arrow grounds the chronogeometric explanations of physical phenomena that special relativity offers. (shrink)

Frost's article advocates for universal models of reading and critiques recent models that concentrate in what has been described as “cracking the orthographic code.” Although the challenge to develop models that can account for word recognition beyond Indo-European languages is welcomed, we argue that reading models should also be constrained by general principles of visual processing and object recognition.

I agree with the view expressed in the target article that the early structural organization of the mammalian neocortex (the primordial neocortical organization) is different from its final one and resembles the more primitive organization of reptilian cortex. During the early development of the neocortex, a distinctly mammalian multilayered pyramidal-cell plate is introduced within a more primitive reptilian-like cortex, establishing simultaneously layer I (marginal zone) above it and layer VII (subplate zone) below it. This multilayered pyramidal-cell plate represents a recent (...) mammalian innovation in the evolution of the cerebral cortex of vertebrates. Hence, the term neocortex is preferable to isocortex. (shrink)

To what degree can language be acquired from linguistic input alone? This question has vexed scholars for millennia and is still a major focus of debate in the cognitive science of language. The complexity of human language has hampered progress because studies of language–especially those involving computational modeling–have only been able to deal with small fragments of our linguistic skills. We suggest that the most recent generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) might finally provide the computational tools to determine empirically (...) how much of the human language ability can be acquired from linguistic experience. LLMs are sophisticated deep learning architectures trained on vast amounts of natural language data, enabling them to perform an impressive range of linguistic tasks. We argue that, despite their clear semantic and pragmatic limitations, LLMs have already demonstrated that human-like grammatical language can be acquired without the need for a built-in grammar. Thus, while there is still much to learn about how humans acquire and use language, LLMs provide full-fledged computational models for cognitive scientists to empirically evaluate just how far statistical learning might take us in explaining the full complexity of human language. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate a semantics for first-order logic originally proposed by R. van Rooij to account for the idea that vague predicates are tolerant, that is, for the principle that if x is P, then y should be P whenever y is similar enough to x. The semantics, which makes use of indifference relations to model similarity, rests on the interaction of three notions of truth: the classical notion, and two dual notions simultaneously defined in terms of it, (...) which we call tolerant truth and strict truth. We characterize the space of consequence relations definable in terms of those and discuss the kind of solution this gives to the sorites paradox. We discuss some applications of the framework to the pragmatics and psycholinguistics of vague predicates, in particular regarding judgments about borderline cases. (shrink)

In a previous paper (see ‘Tolerant, Classical, Strict’, henceforth TCS) we investigated a semantic framework to deal with the idea that vague predicates are tolerant, namely that small changes do not affect the applicability of a vague predicate even if large changes do. Our approach there rests on two main ideas. First, given a classical extension of a predicate, we can define a strict and a tolerant extension depending on an indifference relation associated to that predicate. Second, we can use (...) these notions of satisfaction to define mixed consequence relations that capture non-transitive tolerant reasoning. Although we gave some empirical motivation for the use of strict and tolerant extensions, making use of them commits us to the view that sentences of the form ‘ p∨¬p ’ and ‘ p∧¬p ’ are not automatically valid or unsatisfiable, respectively. Some philosophers might take this commitment as a negative outcome of our previous proposal. We think, however, that the general ideas underlying our previous approach to vagueness can be implemented in a variety of ways. This paper explores the possibility of defining mixed notions of consequence in the more classical super/sub-valuationist setting and examines to what extent any of these notions captures non-transitive tolerant reasoning. (shrink)

One way in which we might approach the challenge posed by the Sorites Paradox is considering that Sorites-susceptible predicates have several candidate extensions, or several ways in which these expressions can be made precise. For example, a candidate extension for the predicate ‘is a baby’ is the set of humans of less than two years, but also the set of those less than two years and one second, and of those less than two years and two seconds. In this chapter (...) we present and discuss two theories for vague predicates based on this idea: supervaluationism and subvaluationism. The chapter is structured in three parts. The first presents the super- and subvaluationist theories: their similarities and differences in the semantics, the resulting logics with their most characteristic features. The second reviews the super- and subvaluationist solutions to the Sorites Paradox and provides discussion on several controversies surrounding these theories. The third part introduces proof procedures for s’valuationist logics. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 634-645, July 2022.

This paper presents and defends a way to add a transparent truth predicate to classical logic, such that and A are everywhere intersubstitutable, where all T-biconditionals hold, and where truth can be made compositional. A key feature of our framework, called STTT (for Strict-Tolerant Transparent Truth), is that it supports a non-transitive relation of consequence. At the same time, it can be seen that the only failures of transitivity STTT allows for arise in paradoxical cases.

When we speak about different interpretations of quantum mechanics it is suggested that there is one single quantum theory that can be interpreted in different ways. However, after an explicit characterization of what it is to interpret quantum mechanics, the right diagnosis is that we have a case of predictively equivalent rival theories. I extract some lessons regarding the resulting underdetermination of theory choice. Issues about theoretical identity, theoretical and methodological pluralism, and the prospects for a realist stance towards quantum (...) theory can be properly addressed once we recognize that interpretations of quantum mechanics are rival theories. (shrink)