The main objective of this work is to examine the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population from the main currently existing theoretical perspectives of psychopathy, using for this purpose the five-factor or Big Five model as a common language that allows the comparison and integration of the personality traits considered as defining psychopathy by these different perspectives. The NEO Personality Inventory-Revised was applied to a sample of 682 adults of the general Spanish population. The prevalence of clinical and (...) subclinical psychopathy was calculated according to six different definitions of these two constructs based on Hare’s, Lilienfeld’s, triarchic, and DSM-5-hybrid models, and the simultaneous presence of a minimum number of personality traits that differed from the sample mean by one standard deviation. Prevalence rates for the different definitions were consistently low, indicating that the prevalence of clinical psychopathy in the general Spanish population is around 0.55%, and that of subclinical psychopathy is around 1.65%. There were no significant sex differences in the prevalence of psychopathy. These results question the alarmist claims that warn about the existence in society of a very high number of people with psychopathy who can cause many social, economic, physical, and psychological damage to others. (shrink)

Induced abortion is a worldwide practice and its legalisation is a persistent demand of the women’s movement. Although in the academic literature there are numerous studies that address the study of fertility, nowhere near as much attention has been given to the analysis of induced abortion and its determining factors, and even less to the consideration of gender equality as a variable through which to understand it. This article focuses on the influence of gender equality on the rate of induced (...) abortion in different European countries. To that end the authors have constructed an econometric panel data model with information from 26 European countries for the period 2006–2011. They have analysed comparative indicators of the gender gap in terms of education, employment and wages. In addition, they have taken into account sociodemographic covariables such as the average age of motherhood, the migration rate and the percentage of births to unmarried mothers in each country. Also, as contextual factors the authors used the Human Development Index and an indicator of the legislation on abortion in the countries studied, as well as the percentage of the population who identify as having religious beliefs. The results show that the induced abortion rate is conditioned not only by national legislation on abortion, but also by gender equalities, specifically that as gender inequality decreases, so too does the frequency of induced abortions. These findings have clear political implications, showing as they do how improvements in the status of women, particularly with respect to their social and economic rights, impact on women’s reproductive decisions. (shrink)

La Filosofía para Niños y Niñas de M. Lipman, promueve una praxis de la vida que considera la libertad como el auténtico proyecto de realización individual y social, que debe ser asumido desde la infancia. Propiciar una experiencia investigativa y dialógica que le permita a los niños y las niñas problematizar filosóficamente la realidad, es decir, indagar acerca del sentido de cualquier acción, acto, praxis tiene su punto de origen en un interrogar-se por la libertad como experiencia que hace posible (...) el desarrollo de la sensibilidad y la racionalidad. La conciencia de ser y estar libres, depende de la autonomía de una voluntad para decidir y del deseo para elegir el sentido que debe orientar la vida en su presente y proyección futura. Niños y niñas estimulados con experiencias de este tipo, podrán llegar a ser ciudadanos y ciudadanas capaces de lograr la transformación de la sociedad desde una justicia, bien, equidad y paz, compartida por todos. (shrink)

A continuación se plantean las bases epistemológicas de un modelo que busca explicar y guiar el tratamiento informativo de los conflictos en la prensa. El aporte teórico parte del discurso; desde el lenguaje y hacia el lenguaje. Se recomienda el estudio de las estrategias lingüístico-comunicativas q..

En este trabajo se propone la interpretación de cuatro movimientos alternativos para repensar las ciencias sociales desde una episteme liberadora desde el Sur. Se trata, también, además de repensar, por supuesto, de recrear a partir de la filosofía inter- cultural, el otro logos científico del pensamiento socio-político latinoamericano. Para lograr estos fines, las alternativas se conciben a partir de: i) un proyecto epistémico que de cabida a la investigación complejaya la formación transdisciplinar de investigadores; ii) un proyecto ético que permita (...) fundar valores de convivencia pública y derechos de paz entre hombre y naturaleza; iii) un proyecto político que permita el desarrollo de estados interculturales a favor de la pluralidad de las identidades ciudadanas; y, finalmente, iv) un proyecto económico que parta de la crítica a la producción tecno-científica del consumo, a la vez que justifica el desarrollo de una economía de bienes necesarios. En este tiempo de crisis de los modelos de la racionalidad cartesiana, es en América Latina donde las praxis alternativas hacen posible descubrir esos orígenes insurgentes de la emancipación frente a la decolonialidad. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo confrontar la cosmovisión de Octavio Paz, desde la configuración ominosa que le atribuye al hombre y la sugerencia inferida por conllevar su tránsito óptimo de una suspensión o un truncamiento al dinamismo o la concretización de proyectos y utopías. Esa interpretación literaria se desarrolla de «Máscaras del alba» y «Repaso nocturno» de su poemario La estación violenta (1958). Para demostrar esa condensación autoral y comprender su intención, añado la epistemología de Stefano Arduini en función de (...) los campos figurativos que son de utilidad como sistema organizativo de los tropos y que se rigen de pensamientos metafórico, sinecdóquico, metonímico, elíptico, antitético y repetitivo, según cada caso. Esta taxonomía ha sido estudiada por el crítico Camilo Fernández Cozman, quien incorpora para un análisis más fructuoso la intervención de los interlocutores que participan en el discurso lírico. (shrink)

It has been argued that neural data are an especially sensitive kind of personal information that could be used to undermine the control we should have over access to our mental states, and therefore need a stronger legal protection than other kinds of personal data. The Morningside Group, a global consortium of interdisciplinary experts advocating for the ethical use of neurotechnology, suggests achieving this by treating legally ND as a body organ. Although the proposal is currently shaping ND-related policies, it (...) is not clear what its conceptual and legal basis is. Treating legally something as something else requires some kind of analogical reasoning, which is not provided by the authors of the proposal. In this paper, I will try to fill this gap by addressing ontological issues related to neurocognitive processes. The substantial differences between ND and body organs or organic tissue cast doubt on the idea that the former should be covered by bodily integrity. Crucially, ND are not constituted by organic material. Nevertheless, I argue that the ND of a subject s are analogous to neurocognitive properties of her brain. I claim that s’ ND are a ‘medium independent’ property that can be characterized as natural semantic personal information about her brain and that s’ brain not only instantiates this property but also has an exclusive ontological relationship with it: This information constitutes a domain that is unique to her neurocognitive architecture. (shrink)

Experiments in cognitive neuroscience build a setup whose set of controlled stimuli and rules elicits a cognitive process in a participant. This setup requires researchers to decide the value of quite a few parameters along several dimensions. We call ‘’contextual factors’’ the parameters often assumed not to change the cognitive process elicited and are free to vary across the experiment’s repetitions. Against this assumption, empirical evidence shows that many of these contextual factors can significantly influence cognitive performance. Nevertheless, it is (...) not entirely clear what it means for a cognitive phenomenon to be context-sensitive and how to identify context-sensitivity experimentally. We claim that a phenomenon can be context-sensitive either because it is only triggered within a specific context or because different contexts change its manifestation conditions. Assessing which of these forms of context-sensitivity is present in a given phenomenon requires a criterion for individuating it across contextual variations. We argue that some inter-level experiments that, within the mechanistic approach to explanation, are required to identify relations of constitutive relevance between a phenomenon and a mechanism, are also necessary for individuating the phenomenon across its contextual variations. We articulate a criterion according to which behavioral variations across contexts indicate different phenomena if and only if the mechanistic activities, components and/or organizational properties recruited in each context are different. We support this approach by showing how it is applied in paradigmatic studies addressing cognitive performance differences resulting from contextual variations of task features, such as stimulus type and response modality. Finally, we address the challenge that a form of context-sensitivity possessed by the so-called ‘multifunctional mechanisms’ is incompatible with our proposal because it entails that the same mechanism can be recruited in different contexts to produce different phenomena. We examine key cases of multifunctionality and argue that they are consistent with our proposal because a single mechanism can have different components, activities and/or organizational properties in different contexts. Thus, these modifications may not affect the identity of a mechanism, and they could explain how it produced different phenomena in those contexts. (shrink)

The extent to which English law remedies injury to autonomy as a stand-alone actionable damage in negligence is disputed. In this article I argue that the remedy available is not only partial and inconsistent but also gendered and discriminatory against women. I first situate the argument within the broader feminist critique of tort law as failing to appropriately remedy gendered harms, and of law more broadly as undervaluing women’s interest in reproductive autonomy. I then show by reference to English remedies (...) law’s first principles how imposed motherhood cases—Rees v Darlington and its predecessor McFarlane v Tayside Health Board—result in gender injustice when compared with other autonomy cases such as Chester v Afshar and Yearworth v North Bristol NHS Trust: A minor gender-neutral ITA is better remedied than the significant gendered harm of imposing motherhood on the claimant; men’s reproductive autonomy is protected to a greater extent than women’s; women’s reproductive autonomy is protected by an exceptional, derisory award. Worst of all, courts refuse to recognise imposed motherhood as detriment; and the deemed, mansplained, nonpecuniary joys of motherhood are used to offset pecuniary upkeep costs, forcing the claimant into a position she sought to avoid and thus further undermining her autonomy. The recent Singaporean case ACB v Thomson Medical Pte Ltd, awarding compensation for undermining the claimant’s genetic affinity in an IVF wrong-sperm-mix-up demonstrates some improvement in comparison to English law, and some shared gender injustices in the context of reproductive autonomy. ACB’s analysis is oblivious to the nature of reproductive autonomy harm as gendered; and prioritises the father’s interest in having genetic affinity with the baby over a woman’s interest in not having motherhood imposed upon her. (shrink)

The adaptive BCI known as ‘closed-loop deep brain stimulation’ (clDBS) is a device that stimulates the brain in order to prevent pathological neural activity and automatically adjusts stimulation levels based on computational algorithms that detect or predict those pathological processes. One of the prominent ethical concerns raised by clDBS is that, by inhibiting or modulating the undesirable neural states of a cognitive agent automatically, the device potentially undermines her autonomy. It has been argued that clDBS is not a threat because (...) autonomy is fundamentally relational, i.e., it essentially depends on external (e.g., social or cultural) factors. If the relational approach to autonomy includes human-computer interaction, then the mechanisms of clDBS, even if external to the brain and exerting some degree of control over the individual, may support her autonomy. However, DBS applications are substantially different from one another, each involving a specific neurological or psychiatric condition, neural target, mechanism and symptom(s), and therefore at least some of them may not fit into the relational analysis. I examine different clDBS applications for treatment resistant depression and claim that while internal capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS) clDBS is a case of relational autonomy, subgenual cingulate gyrus (Cg25) clDBS is not. Autonomy (relational or otherwise) requires some degree of self-regulation of our motivational states, which is supported by VC/VS DBS but is absent in Cg25 DBS. In Cg25 DBS the device itself directly influences motivational states, thus substituting or overriding (instead of supporting) the auto-regulatory cognitive processes required for autonomous action. (shrink)

Pritchard sostiene que la condición de habilidad y la condición de seguridad le imponen demandas independientes al conocimiento, i.e., que la satisfacción de una no implica la satisfacción de la otra y que, por lo tanto, ninguna de ellas es suficiente por sí misma para ofrecer una caracterización adecuada de esta noción. Argumento, por el contrario, que no hay buenas razones para pensar que la condición de seguridad es insuficiente. Empleando algunos conceptos de Greco y Pritchard y Kallestrup para caracterizar (...) a las habilidades cognitivas y el caso del mentiroso consistente de Lackey, argumento que TEMP, el caso clave de Pritchard para mostrar que puede haber seguridad sin habilidad, no funciona porque el proceso cognitivo relevante constituye una realización legítima, aunque anómala, de una habilidad. Pritchard maintains that the ability and the safety conditions impose independent demands on knowledge, i.e., that satisfying only one of them is not sufficient to acquire knowledge. I argue that there are no good reasons to suppose that the safety condition is not sufficient. I claim that TEMP, the key case proposed by Pritchard to show that there can be safety without ability, fails because therelevant cognitive process constitutes a legitimate, although anomalous, realization of a cognitive ability. (shrink)

Resumen El objetivo de este trabajo es determinar la relevancia de la teoría informacional del conocimiento para el problema de la suerte epistémica. Argumento que el clásico enfoque de Dretske es equivalente a la condición de seguridad de Pritchard. Sin embargo, considero que esta manera de eludir la suerte epistémica exige lidiar con el llamado "problema de la generalidad". Argumento que una respuesta a este problema requiere una noción de seguridad diferente y propongo un enfoque informacional equivalente a esta versión (...) del requisito. Concluyo que este enfoque es preferible a la condición de seguridad propuesta porque desvela relaciones conceptuales entre los elementos que constituyen el conocimiento.The aim of this paper is to determine the relevance of an informational theory of knowledge to address recently discussed epistemic problems. I argue that Dretske's classical approach is equivalent to the safety condition proposed by Pritchard to avoid epistemic luck. However, I claim that Pritchard's condition has to be modified to avoid the so-called "generality problem" for reliabilism. I propose an alternative version of the requirement to deal with these problems and provide an equivalent informational condition. I conclude that this informational version is preferable since it reveals conceptual relationships between the constituents of knowledge. (shrink)

Although the study of emotion regulation constitutes a thriving research field, there is still an ongoing debate about the very notion of emotion regulation. According to a popular approach, regulation is a second-order process which is different from (and modifies) emotion. This view has been challenged by the fact that emotion regulates itself through different feedback loops. Emotional feedback suggests that regulation may be a form of control (as defined in control theory). In this paper, I argue that none of (...) these characterizations captures all the intended applications of the notion and propose instead to identify regulation with modulation. In neuroscience, modulation is the process of changing the shape of an input-output relation. This is a notion that can be applied to the different regulatory strategies proposed in the literature and which is compatible both with second-order and feedback regulation. (shrink)

RESUMEN D. Pritchard ha sostenido que el conocimiento requiere la satisfacción de una condición de habilidad y una anti-suerte que no guardan relación de implicación entre sí. Se sostiene que la satisfacción de una condición anti-suerte implica cumplir con la condición de habilidad, primero, porque, las características centrales del caso de D. Pritchard en contra de esta implicación son compartidas con casos en los que hay habilidad; y segundo, el caso de A. Goldman del dios benevolente es más efectivo que (...) TEMP, pero involucra un tipo de seguridad diferente a la requerida para el conocimiento. Por último, se muestra que la respuesta de D. Pritchard al problema de la generalidad bloquea la implicación de seguridad a habilidad. Se propone un contraejemplo, adaptando un caso tomado de la epistemología del testimonio. ABSTRACT D. Pritchard holds that knowledge requires the satisfaction of an ability condition and an anti-luck condition that bear no relation of implication to each other. The article argues that the satisfaction of the anti-luck condition implies satisfying the ability condition for two reasons: first, that the main characteristics of Pritchard's case against this implication are shared by cases in which there is ability; and, second, that although A. Goldman's benevolent demon case is more effective than TEMP, it involves a different type of certainty than that required for knowledge. Finally, the article shows that Pritchard's response to the generality problem blocks the implication between certainty and ability, and proposes a counterexample that draws on the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

Previously, the author tried to show that some arguments in one of the two versions of Nicholas of Autrecourt’s Quaestio de intensione visionis are taken almost verbatim from the anonymous Tractatus de sex inconvenientibus. This paper concentrates on the arguments themselves in order to consider two main issues: the ‘translatability’ of limit decision problems, manifest in Autrecourt’s juxtaposition of questions de maximo et minimo, de primo et ultimo instanti, and the intension and remission of forms; the importance of Parisian discussions (...) of limit decision problems prior to the adoption of the new analytical languages developed at Oxford. Thus, the paper is divided in two sections, the first concerning some arguments of Autrecourt’s question, the second focusing on the link between one of Autrecourt’s arguments and the medieval tradition of commentaries on Aristotle’s De caelo, in which it is possible to find some antecedents of the analytical approach that later Parisian scholars would apply to these problems. (shrink)

Kant is not typically considered a major figure in the just war tradition's canon, although his work has informed recent discussions about international justice and just war theory. More specifically, philosophers have suggested that Kant's work may provide a coherent, normatively practical just war theory, basing this claim, in the main, on his views on the goal of peace and its purpose of establishing a cosmopolitan civil society.1 Such discussions are mostly concerned with jus ad bellum and jus in bello (...) constraints on nations and how Kant's writings can guide deliberation and, perhaps, the considered policy and practices of governments. Yet, the fact remains that it is embodied men and women and not the metaphysical ?nation? who actually conduct war. Hence, this paper seeks to determine the extent to which Kant's thought might contribute to the moral deliberation of those individuals who a fortiori will be bound to jus in bello constraints. To this end, the idea of moral learning will be explored, emphasizing the Kantian idea of autonomy. The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate how some aspects of Kant's thought would contribute to ethics education in a military academy. (shrink)

In the present article, we attempt to elucidate the conceptual rela- tionship between censorship and emotional development. We employ a framework from emotion regulation studies in order to clarify how censorship works and to ex- plain why it cannot affect emotional development in the same way as the remaining types of emotional regulation. Nevertheless, we argue that, by focusing on Plato’s ac- count of censorship, and specifically of its sociocultural function, one can find that it is not a useless device (...) for emotional development. Censorship affects relevant variables in the dynamics of contraposed emotional processes that compete for dominance. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a new approach to integrating philosophical phenomenology with qualitative research. The approach uses phenomenology’s concepts, namely existentials, rather than methods such as the epoché or reductions. We here introduce the approach to both philosophers and qualitative researchers, as we believe that these studies are best conducted through interdisciplinary collaboration. In section 1, we review the debate over phenomenology’s role in qualitative research and argue that qualitative theorists have not taken full advantage of what philosophical phenomenology (...) has to offer, thus motivating the need for new approaches. In section 2, we introduce our alternative approach, which we call Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research (PGQR). Drawing parallels with phenomenology’s applications in the cognitive sciences, we explain how phenomenological grounding can be used to conceptually front-load a qualitative study, establishing an explicit focus on one or more structures of human existence, or of our being in the world. In section 3, we illustrate this approach with an example of a qualitative study carried out by one of the authors: a study of the existential impact of early parental bereavement. In section 4, we clarify the kind of knowledge that phenomenologically grounded studies generate and how it may be integrated with existing approaches. (shrink)

The two leading theoretical approaches to tort law — economic analysis and corrective justice — are blind to distributive considerations. Moreover, even the main distributive approaches to tort law — loss-spreading and fairness — fail to emphasize egalitarianism as a distributive consideration. This article argues that egalitarianism should influence the normative evaluation of one’s conduct as negligent or not. It first explains why normatively negligence law should be sensitive to the egalitarian concern, suggesting three different accounts for this claim, based (...) on needs, equality, and desert as criteria for distribution. Second, it argues that egalitarianism is commensurate with the basic understanding of negligence law as reflecting corrective justice and notions of fault. The notion of fault is, therefore, reformulated from within, in order to accommodate egalitarianism. Third, I maintain that in order for egalitarianism to accommodate notions of corrective justice, egalitarian concerns should matter also at the stage of the standard of care. While the egalitarian concern can and should be integrated into the duty stage, I argue that such integration is insufficient. A correct and full understanding of the egalitarian concern and the tort of negligence requires a conclusion that the normative evaluation of one’s action as negligent or not cannot be separated from the distributive results that this action entails. The egalitarian concern works at the duty stage as an excuse for not imposing liability for wrongful activity. In contrast, at the standard stage, it works as a justification that turns an otherwise wrongful activity into a legitimate one. My claim is that morally we should usually expect more care from the better-off than from the disadvantaged. Findings of negligence are based on the failure to balance properly between one’s interests and those of another. In deciding to what extent the defendant should burden herself in order to prevent a loss to potential victims, one morally relevant criterion is the relative ability of the injurer and victim to bear precaution costs and expected accident loss, respectively. (shrink)

El autor realiza una lectura en clave perspectivista de la neurofenomenología, enfoque transdisciplinar y metodológico iniciado a mediados de los 90 por el neurobiólogo Francisco J. Varela desde el ámbito experimental de las ciencias de la mente. La originalidad del artículo reside en que estudia comparativamente el problemático entrecruce de la neurofenomenología de Varela con el perspectivismo científico de Ronald N. Giere, mostrándonos que la neurofenomenología no sólo lo antecedió cronológicamente, sino que fue mucho más radical al tener en cuenta (...) la la dimensión fenomenológica y trascendental de la experiencia vivida humana y al aplicarla en los protocolos de las neurociencias cognitivas. // The author makes a perspectivist reading of neurophenomenology, a transdisciplinary and methodological approach pioneered in the 90’s by the neurobiologist Francisco J. Varela, who worked in the experimental field of the science of mind. The originality of the article consists in studying with a comparative method the problematic intertwine of Varela’s neurophenomenology and the scientific perspectivism recently defended by Ronald N. Giere. In this way, the autor shows how neurophenomenology notonly came before Giere’s proposal but also how it was more radical in considering the phenomenological and transcendental human dimension and in trying an implementation in cognitive neuroscience protocols. (shrink)

The Modern concept of truth, which subjects truth to certainty, broke the harmonious relation between reality and truth, that prevailed in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Hans-Georg Gadamer thinks that the main task of contemporary Philosophy is to recover the original harmony of being and knowledge. To shed light on the nature of this problem, we expound the metaphysical-theological foundation of truth, which is at the roots of Aristotelian and Thomistic Philosophies. Specifically, we analyze here the relation between being, truth and (...) logos in the Aristotelian treatise Perì Hermeneías, and in its Thomistic commentary. (shrink)

The dichotomy between the qualitative and the quantitative has been a classic throughout the history of science. As will be seen, this dichotomy permeates all ontological levels of reality. In this work, phenomenological examples potentially related to semiosis are presented at the different levels established by Mario Bunge and Josep Ferrater Mora, contrasting the qualitative categorizations with the quantifiable physical reality. Likewise, the need to continue in the quantification of the biosemiotic and linguistic studies will be presented, while, in contrast, (...) the need to establish a qualitative framework in the little-addressed study of technosemiotics will be raised, of potential interest given the notable advances that are expected in communication systems for inert artifacts in the next years. In short, in the thesis defended here the qualitative precedes the quantitative in the defining path of science. (shrink)

Se problematiza la conexión entre la libertad práctica y trascendental en la Crítica de la razón pura. La intención es explicitar las dificultades que enfrenta Kant al relacionar estos sentidos de libertad dentro del marco de la filosofía crítica. Por lo general, los intérpretes entienden la relació..

Se problematiza la conexión entre la libertad práctica y trascendental en la Crítica de la razón pura. La intención es explicitar las dificultades que enfrenta Kant al relacionar estos sentidos de libertad dentro del marco de la filosofía crítica. Por lo general, los intérpretes entienden la relación entre estos dos sentidos de libertad como ontológica o como conceptual. Se quiere mostrar que ninguna de estas interpretaciones alcanza a superar los presuntos dogmatismos racionalista y empirista que, en conformidad con Kant, sustentan (...) las posturas del proponente de la Tesis y de la Antítesis, respectivamente. The article discusses the connection between practical and transcendental freedom in the Critique of Pure Reason, in order to reveal the difficulties faced by Kant when he relates these two meanings of freedom in the context of critical philosophy. Interpreters have generally understood the relation between these two meanings of freedom as ontological or conceptual. The objective of this article, however, is to show that neither of those interpretations manages to overcome the rationalist and empiricist dogmatism that, according to Kant, support the positions of the proponents of the Thesis and the Antithesis, respectively. (shrink)

La responsabilidad ética de las acciones de un hombre que pudiera tornarse invisible reabre en Cicerón el debate entre lo honestum y lo utile y con él la necesidad de presentar un modelo de ciudadano que vincule elementos políticos, éticos y jurídicos en orden a la conservación de una serie de valores necesarios para la convivencia. Dicho modelo se presenta en De officiis como una traducción de la filosofía de Panecio en la que el complejo término decorum adquiere una dimensión (...) central. El artículo analiza dicho concepto y la posición que ocupa en el pensamiento político ciceroniano la imitación de los exempla virtutis como forma de garantizar la estabilidad política en un momento de grave crisis de los valores republicanos. (shrink)

Recently, several scholars have argued in support of the idea that folk psychology involves a primary capacity for regulating our mental states and patterns of behavior in accordance with a bunch of shared social norms and routines :259–281, 2015; Zawidzki, Philosophical Explorations 11:193–210, 2008; Zawidzki, Mindshaping: A new framework for understanding human social cognition, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013). This regulative view shares with the classical Dennettian intentional stance its emphasis on the normative character of human socio-cognitive capacities. Given those similarities, (...) it makes sense to assess the regulative view by considering some of the classical arguments against the normative nature of the intentional stance :76–100, 1985; Stich, Philosophical Topics 12:39–62, 1981; Stich, The fragmentation of reason: Preface to a pragmatic theory of cognitive evaluation, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990). The aim of this paper is to argue that the priority that the regulative view lays on the pluralistic and regulative character of folk psychology leaves the theory well-placed to resist these arguments. In this sense, the regulative view possesses better theoretical options to defend the normative character of human social cognition. (shrink)

Technoscience is increasingly present in our daily lives, establishing new social rules and patterns of communication and interaction in a physical space, which implements electronic devices and telematic systems in its design. In the race for scientific progress, the goal is making man a God, like Nietzsche’s Superman, without determining how the new human morphology will be fitted. This paradigm is treated by artists who warn of the possible fate of humanity while the technoscientific, as if he or she was (...) Prometheus, dares to defy the laws of nature. Art exposes the actual course of science, and some artists complain that the false promises of scientific discourse, which is dominated by male vision, fail to be aware of the impossibility that technology is going to improve the moral dimension of human being. Some artists say that the science sermon does not deal with humanity and that the building of our future is merely phallocentric, an excessive anthropocentric vision. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model and the direct social perception model. In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to (...) which human, socio-cognitive competences rely on a myriad of social norms and routines that mediate our social interactions in such a way that we can make sense of each other without taking into consideration their mental states. In sections 4 and 5, we find some common premises shared by the two prior models and offer some arguments against them. In section 6, we advance some possible arguments against our approach and offer some responses against them. (shrink)

The current human rights framework can shield people from many of the risks associated with neurotechnological applications. However, it has been argued that we need either to articulate new rights or reconceptualise existing ones in order to prevent some of these risks. In this paper, we would like to address the recent discussion about whether current reconceptualisations of the right to mental integrity identify an ethical dimension that is not covered by existing moral and/or legal rights. The main challenge of (...) these proposals is that they make mental integrity indistinguishable from autonomy. They define mental integrity in terms of the control we can have over our mental states, which seems to be part of the authenticity condition for autonomous action. Based on a fairly comprehensive notion of mental health (ie, a notion that is not limited to the mere absence of illness), we propose an alternative view according to which mental integrity can be characterised both as a positive right to (medical and non-medical) interventions that restore and sustain mental and neural function, and promote its development and a negative right protecting people from interventions that threaten or undermine these functions or their development. We will argue that this notion is dissociated from cognitive control and therefore can be adequately distinguished from autonomy. (shrink)

My purpose in this essay is to clarify the notion of explanation by computer simulation in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. My contention is that computer simulation may be understood as providing two different kinds of explanation, which makes the notion of explanation by computer simulation ambiguous. In order to show this, I shall draw a distinction between two possible ways of understanding the notion of simulation, depending on how one views the relation in which a computing system that performs (...) a cognitive task stands to the program that the system runs while performing that task. Next, I shall suggest that the kind of explanation that results from simulation is radically different in each case. In order to illustrate the difference, I will point out some prima facie methodological difficulties that need to be addressed in order to ensure that simulation plays a legitimate explanatory role in cognitive science, and I shall emphasize how those difficulties are very different depending on the notion of explanation involved. (shrink)