The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

Presuppositions are perspective‐sensitive: They may be evaluated with respect to the beliefs of a salient protagonist. This happens not only in well‐known cases of perspective shift such as free indirect discourse, but also when the perspective shift is less obvious, but still present, such as in examples of so‐called protagonist projection. In this paper, I show that this simple observation explains many puzzling facts noted in connection with presuppositions over the last 50 years, concerning, for example, emotive and cognitive factives, (...) temporal clauses, and reason clauses. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new explanation for the oddness of presuppositional and negative islands, as well as the puzzling observation that these islands can be obviated by certain quantificational elements. The proposal rests on two independently motivated assumptions: (i) the idea that the domain of manners contains contraries and (ii) the notion that degree expressions range over intervals. It is argued that, given these natural assumptions, presuppositional and negative islands are predicted to lead to a presupposition failure in any context.

In Category Mistakes, Magidor proposes that sortal restrictions should be viewed as pragmatic presuppositions. This contrasts with recent linguistic theories of successfully resolved category mistakes, e.g. coercions or copredication. It has been argued that for the proper treatment of such examples, sortal restrictions should be expressed by semantic presuppositions since they need to interact with compositional semantics. I explore possible ways in which Magidor’s theory could be extended to explain examples of coercion and copredication. The outcome of the discussion is (...) that incorporation of these facts into Magidor’s pragmatic system might be possible, but ecessitates choices that are far from trivial. (shrink)

In my book Category Mistakes, I discuss a range of potential accounts of category mistakes and defend a pragmatic, presuppositional account of the phenomenon. Three commentators discuss the book: Márta Abrusán focuses on a comparison between my book and Asher’s Lexical Meaning in Context, suggesting that Asher’s theory has the advantage of accounting not only for category mistakes, but also for additional phenomena such as so-called ‘coertion’ and ‘co-predication’. I argue that Asher’s account of all three phenomena is (...) deficient, and, moreover, that it is far from clear that the latter two phenomena are related to that of category mistakes. James Shaw challenges two of my arguments against the MBT view. I respond to these challenges. Paul Elbourne provides a novel argument in support of my account of category mistakes, involving multi-sentence discourses and ERP experiments. I show that it is not entirely straightforward for my account to explain this data, but that his argument does ul... (shrink)

This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. -/- Following a detailed introduction by the editors, (...) The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies. -/- Table of Contents 1:Introduction, Emar Maier and Andreas Stokke Part I: Truth, Reference, and Imagination 2:Fictional reference as simulation, François Recanati 3:Sharing real and fictional reference, Hans Kamp 4:Fictional truth: In defense of the reality principle, Nils Franzén 5:On the generation of content, Sandro Zucchi 6:Do the imaginings that fictions invite have a direction of fit?, Manuel García-Carpintero Part II: Storytelling 7:In search of the narrator, Regine Eckardt 8:Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources, Emar Maier and Merel Semeijn 9:Narrative and point-of-view, Samuel Cumming 10:A puzzle about narrative progression and causal reasoning, Daniel Altshuler 11:Isomorphic mapping in fictional interpretation, Matthias Bauer and Sigrid Beck Part III: Perspective Shift 12:Metalinguistic acts in fiction, Nellie Wieland 13:Computing perspective shift in narratives, Márta Abrusán 14:Derogatory terms in free indirect discourse, Isidora Stojanovic 15:Protagonist projection, character-focus, and mixed quotation, Andreas Stokke. (shrink)

In a series of three behavioral experiments, we found a systematic distortion of probability judgments concerning elementary visual stimuli. Participants were briefly shown a set of figures that had two features (e.g., a geometric shape and a color) with two possible values each (e.g., triangle or circle and black or white). A figure was then drawn, and participants were informed about the value of one of its features (e.g., that the figure was a “circle”) and had to predict the value (...) of the other feature (e.g., whether the figure was “black” or “white”). We repeated this procedure for various sets of figures and, by varying the statistical association between features in the sets, we manipulated the probability of a feature given the evidence of another (e.g., the posterior probability of hypothesis “black” given the evidence “circle”) as well as the support provided by a feature to another (e.g., the impact, or confirmation, of evidence “circle” on the hypothesis “black”). Results indicated that participants’ judgments were deeply affected by impact, although they only should have depended on the probability distributions over the features, and that the dissociation between evidential impact and posterior probability increased the number of errors. The implications of these findings for lower and higher level cognitive models are discussed. (shrink)

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances nonmusical abilities. This possibility has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities su...

In this paper we focus on a kind of perceptual states that we call perceptual motivations, that is, perceptual experiences that plausibly motivate us to act, such as itching, perceptual salience and pain. Itching seems to motivate you to scratch, perceiving a stimulus as salient seems to motivate you to attend to it and feeling a pain in your hand seems to motivate actions such as withdrawing from the painful stimulus. Five main accounts of perceptual motivation are available: Descriptive, Conative, (...) Imperativist, Reflexive and Dual Content views. Some of these have been developed in detail and others are natural extensions of existing views. However, we argue that none provides a satisfactory account of the target perceptual states. Driven by the failings of each account, we identify three conditions that any satisfactory theory of perceptual motivation must meet: Direct Motivational Force, Non-Obligatory Force and Intention-Independent Influence. Then we offer an account that attempts to fulfil these conditions: the Affordance Model. This model of perceptual motivation is premised on the claim that each of the target states involves the perception of a specific affordance for action and the triggering of Automatic Motor Initiations. We suggest that AMIs can explain the motivational force of these perceptual states. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on a kind of perceptual states that we call perceptual motivations, that is, perceptual experiences that plausibly motivate us to act, such as itching, perceptual salience and pain. Itching seems to motivate you to scratch, perceiving a stimulus as salient seems to motivate you to attend to it and feeling a pain in your hand seems to motivate actions such as withdrawing from the painful stimulus. Five main accounts of perceptual motivation are available: Descriptive, Conative, (...) Imperativist, Reflexive and Dual Content views. Some of these have been developed in detail and others are natural extensions of existing views. However, we argue that none provides a satisfactory account of the target perceptual states. Driven by the failings of each account, we identify three conditions that any satisfactory theory of perceptual motivation must meet: Direct Motivational Force, Non-Obligatory Force and Intention-Independent Influence. Then we offer an account that attempts to fulfil these conditions: the Affordance Model. This model of perceptual motivation is premised on the claim that each of the target states involves the perception of a specific affordance for action and the triggering of Automatic Motor Initiations (AMIs). We suggest that AMIs can explain the motivational force of these perceptual states. (shrink)

The critical discourse analysis is the tool used in this article, to study how audiovisual media have constructed mental representation about the historical facts occurred in Spain between the final stage of the Spanish Civil War and the late 1980s: the theft of newborn babies. The State has failed in an attempt to establish policies that support truth, justice and reparation as it has been recalled by United Nations experts to the Government of Spain, and the reports and documentaries have (...) become vehicles to capture and recover memories. Our objective is to analyze how this collective awareness has been realized and the contribution of reports and documentaries. Our results show that the Spanish television channels silence the Francoist context to depict the thefts as the product of economical mobs focused on child trafficking. The international channels, however, put the origin of the dictatorship at the center of the discourse. (shrink)

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophrenia who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (Sz-AVH) and people within the Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). We focus on these two populations because they represent two different ways in which IS can (...) fail to help in EF tasks, which can be illustrative for other mental conditions. First, we review the main components of EF (Section 1). Then we explain the functions that IS is taken to perform in the domain of EF (Section 2) and review the evidence concerning problems about EF in the two populations of our study: Sz-AVH (Section 3) and ASC (Section 4). After this we further detail our account about what a properly functioning IS can do for both populations and how different IS profiles may impact EF performance: in the case of Sz-AVH, the uncontrolled and intrusive character of IS negatively affects EF performance, whereas in ASC, EF is not sufficiently supported by IS, given the tendency in this population to present a diminished use of IS (Section 5). We finally briefly discuss Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Developmental Language Disorders (DLD). (shrink)

Much of the current research in regenerative medicine concentrates on stem-cell therapy that exploits the regenerative capacities of stem cells when injected into different types of human tissues. Although new therapeutic paths have been opened up by induced pluripotent cells and human mesenchymal cells, the rate of success is still low and mainly due to the difficulties of managing cell proliferation and differentiation, giving rise to non-controlled stem cell differentiation that ultimately leads to cancer. Despite being still far from becoming (...) a reality, these studies highlight the role of physical and biological constraints (e.g., cues and morphogenetic fields) placed by tissue microenvironment on stem cell fate. This asks for a clarification of the coupling of stem cells and microenvironmental factors in regenerative medicine. We argue that extracellular matrix and stem cells have a causal reciprocal and asymmetric relationship in that the 3D organization and composition of the extracellular matrix establish a spatial, temporal, and mechanical control over the fate of stem cells, which enable them to interact and control (as well as be controlled by) the cellular components and soluble factors of microenvironment. Such an account clarifies the notions of stemness and stem cell regeneration consistently with that of microenvironment. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es realizar un repaso de las teorías de las emociones más importantes de las últimas décadas y valorar en qué medida tales teorías ofrecen una buena caracterización del fenómeno en cuestión. Para alcanzar una comprensión adecuada de las diferentes teorías, así como del rumbo que ha tomado el debate actual sobre las emociones, es importante que prestemos especial atención a algunos de los compromisos filosóficos involucrados en la formulación de estas teorías. La revisión cuidadosa (...) de algunos de estos compromisos nos llevará a plantearnos si algunas de las dificultades a las que se enfrentan varias de las teorías de las emociones actuales podrían tener origen en tales compromisos filosóficos y no, como suele pensarse, en la complejidad de las emociones.: The aim of this paper is to review the most important theories of emotions in recent decades and to assess the extent to which these theories provide a good characterisation of the phenomenon in question. In order to achieve an appropriate understanding of the different theories, as well as of the direction that the current debate on emotions has taken, it is important that we pay special attention to some of the philosophical commitments involved in the formulation of these theories. Careful examination of some of these commitments will lead us to consider whether some of the difficulties faced by several of the current theories of emotions might stem from such philosophical commitments rather than, as is often thought, from the complexity of emotions. Palabras clave: episodios, intencionalidad, fenomenología, propiedades evaluativas. Keywords: episodes, intentionality, phenomenology, evaluative properties. (shrink)

BackgroundUnder COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations developed guidelines to deal with the ethical aspects of resources allocation. This study describes the results of an argument-based review of ethical guidelines developed at the European level. It aims to increase knowledge and awareness about the moral relevance of the outbreak, especially as regards the balance of equity and dignity in clinical practice and patient’s care. MethodAccording to the argument-based review framework, we started our research from the following two questions: what are the ethical (...) principles adopted by the ethical guidelines produced at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak related to resource allocation? And what are the practical consequences in terms of 'priority' of access, access criteria, management of the decision-making process and patient care?ResultsTwenty-two ethical guidelines met our inclusion criteria and the results of our analysis are organized into 4 ethical concepts and related arguments: the equity principle and emerging ethical theories; triage criteria; respecting patient’s dignity, and decision making and quality of care.ConclusionFurther studies can investigate the practical consequences of the application of the guidelines described, in terms of quality of care and health care professionals’ moral distress. (shrink)

Ce volume envisage l'amour en tant qu'objet polymorphe : Eros, Philia, Agapé, mais aussi Storgé. Les mots grecs rendent compte, du large spectre amoureux : amour romantique, amour sexuel, amour de soi, de l'autre, pour l'autre... des catégories qui placent les manifestations du sentiment amoureux dans un espace de contraintes et de possibilités qui relève du social et du discursif. Les travaux qui sont ici réunis s'attachent ainsi à interroger des genres artistiques et discursifs dans lesquels s'ancre l'amour, ils abordent (...) la littérature et le cinéma, mais aussi l'histoire, l'histoire des idées, la sociologie l'ethnologie ou la psychologie. Ces recherches mettent en avant que l'amour constitue une manière d'appréhender et d'expliquer le monde puisqu'on peut lire à travers lui les rapports qui définissent nos sociétés et qui le définissent à leur tour. (shrink)

This book proposes an approach to Eurocentrism as a paradigm of knowledge production and interpretation rooted in the Western narrative of modernity and its racial governmentalities. It contributes to the critique of the contemporary workings of Eurocentrism and racism that have frustrated the struggles for the decolonization of knowledge and continue to shape our understandings of the world order in racially hierarchical terms, by re-centering the West/Europe"--Provided by publisher.

Essa publicação requer esclarecimentos: os trabalhos escritos ou transcritos são o resultado de um evento com algumas peculiaridades. A primeira por ser um evento que convocou psicanalistas a refletir sobre o campo social, promovendo uma interlocução entre a psicanálise e a política. A segunda, e essa talvez a principal razão da singularidade, é que tal convocação se deu a partir do testemunho vivo de um evento traumático. Os diferentes textos que compõem esse livro procuram fazer um verdadeiro diálogo, tendo como (...) ponto de partida o depoimento de Estela Carlotto, presidente das Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Um depoimento que transmite, ainda que sob as mais terríveis condições, a possibilidade de resistir, criando práticas e prosseguir lutando, sem se acomodar diante de vitórias aparentes. Uma ação intensa, contínua, que evidencia que a ação política se refere a acreditar que o impossível é possível. A "Coleção Departamento Formação em Psicanálise" reúne obras produzidas a partir de eventos científicos e culturais organizados por este Departamento, assim como de reflexões sobre a clínica psicanalítica contemporânea e de estudos desenvolvidos por seus integrantes. Os temas tratados são diversos: desde questões metapsicológicas, técnicas e teóricas, na tentativa de abarcar as diferentes formas de expressão do sofrimento psíquico, até a extensão da psicanálise além do setting analítico habitual e suas interfaces com outras ciências. Dessa forma, o espaço é pensado como um vetor de formação permanente, interlocução e pesquisa, marcado por uma psicanálise engajada nas questões políticas e sociais, e em conformidade com a Carta de Princípios do Instituto Sedes Sapientiae. (shrink)

People are often inaccurate in their predictions of performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. We tested whether receptivity to bullshit – the tendency to perceive meaningless statements as profound – would relate to the accuracy of metacognitive judgments on several problem-solving tasks. Individuals who were highly receptive to bullshit were less accurate in their predictions of performance on creative problem-solving tasks, but not on verbal analogy or recall tasks. Further, individuals with high BS receptivity were less able to discriminate (...) between solvable and unsolvable problems when making metacognitive judgments. These findings support the possibility that the tendency to perceive semantic connections where none exist, as indicated by high bullshit receptivity, may lead to inaccurate predictions of performance on tasks that require noticing and utilizing distant semantic connections. (shrink)

Several arguments suggest that motor planning may share embodied neural mechanisms with mental rotation (MR). However, it is not well established whether this overlap occurs regardless of the type of stimulus that is manipulated, in particular manipulable or non-manipulable objects and body parts. We here used high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the cognitive similarity between MR of objects that do not afford specific hand actions (chairs) and bodily stimuli (hands). Participants had identical response options for both types of stimuli, and (...) they gave responses orally in order to prevent possible interference with motor imagery. MR of hands and chairs generated very similar behavioral responses, time-courses and neural sources of evoked-response potentials (ERPs). ERP segmentation analysis revealed distinct time windows during which differential effects of stimulus type and angular disparity were observed. An early period (90–160 ms) differentiated only between stimulus types, and was associated with occipito-temporal activity. A later period (290–330 ms) revealed strong effects of angular disparity, associated with electrical sources in the right angular gyrus and primary motor/somatosensory cortex. These data suggest that spatial transformation processes and motor planning are recruited simultaneously, supporting the involvement of motor emulation processes in MR. (shrink)

Psychiatric disorders like eating disorders might be underpinned by differences in decision making. However, little previous research has investigated this potential relationship using longitudinal data. This study aimed to understand how components of decision making measured by the Cambridge Gambling Task in the United Kingdom’s Millennium Cohort Study at age 11 might explain clusters/types of ED prodrome involving body dissatisfaction, intention to lose weight, dietary restraint, excessive exercise and significant under/overweight measured in the MCS at age 14. Latent class analysis (...) revealed two groups within the cohort: a non-prodromal eating pathology group, who were more likely to be of “average” weight, according to the UK90, with minimal disordered attitudes and behaviors in relation to eating and weight; and a second group with prodromal eating pathology, who had more body dissatisfaction, a desire to lose weight, were using dietary restriction and exercise to influence weight and were more likely to be “overweight” according to the UK90. Logistic regression showed that, after adjustment for confounding, higher risk-taking scores were associated with a 60% greater probability of being in the prodromal eating pathology group, and higher scores on quality of decision making were associated with a 30% lower probability of being in the prodromal eating pathology group. Helping young people to engage in moderate risk taking and improving decision making might reduce the later presence of ED prodromes. (shrink)

Anxiety patients over-generalize fear, possibly because of an incapacity to discriminate threat and safety signals. Discrimination trainings are promising approaches for reducing such fear over-generalization. Here we investigated the efficacy of a fear-relevant vs. a fear-irrelevant discrimination training on fear generalization and whether the effects are increased with feedback during training. Eighty participants underwent two fear acquisition blocks, during which one face, but not another face, was associated with a female scream. During two generalization blocks, both CSs plus four morphs (...) were presented. Between these generalization blocks, half of the participants underwent a fear-relevant discrimination training with or without feedback and the other half a fear-irrelevant discrimination training with or without feedback. US expectancy, arousal, valence ratings, and skin conductance responses indicated successful fear acquisition. Importantly, fear-relevant vs. fear-irrelevant discrimination trainings and feedback vs. no feedback reduced generalization as reflected in US expectancy ratings independently from one another. No effects of training condition were found for arousal and valence ratings or SCR. In summary, this is a first indication that fear-relevant discrimination training and feedback can improve the discrimination between threat and safety signals in healthy individuals, at least for learning-related evaluations, but not evaluations of valence or arousal. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de este artículo es mostrar el tratamiento de lo sagrado en el pensamiento del filósofo y poeta Ramón Xirau. Autor de gran profundidad, perteneció, al igual que su padre, el filósofo y pedagogo Joaquín Xirau, a la tradición humanista cristiana. Después de exponer brevemente su biografía intelectual, nos detendremos en su particular concepción de la filosofía, en su interés por la poesía, para pasar a analizar uno de los temas que más le preocuparon, junto con la crisis (...) del mundo occidental: la búsqueda de Dios y de lo sagrado. (shrink)

Clarke and Beck discuss in their sections on congruency and confounds literature that has challenged the claim that the approximate number system represents numerical content. We argue that the propositions put forward by these studies aren't that far from the indirect model of number perception suggested by C&B.

There is room for everyone in the Catholic Church, but there is no consent for same-sex marriage in that Church as marriage only between a baptized man and a woman is a sacrament. Same-sex marriage is inconsistent with the Holy Scripture where marriage is based on God’s natural law. This official Scripture’s interpretation results in lack of possibility to reconciliate the official teaching of the Church with the recognition of same-sex marriage. The world is moving forward and so are the (...) opinions of Christians and their growing support for same-sex marriage. Such marriage is recognized in thirty states worldwide, including states with dominant Catholic religion. Regardless the official teaching, the Catholic Church’s position is not uniform. The paper discusses the official interpretation of the Scripture concerning homosexuals, analyses the position of the Catholic Church toward same-sex marriage and indicates differences in Christians’ attitudes with respect to same-sex couples in Western and Eastern Europe. (shrink)

Las normas internacionales, como la Convención sobre los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad, suponen un avance hacia la equidad. Asimismo, im­plican tanto un incremento de la legislación nacional y autonómica, como una mayor complejidad institucional, para hacer efectivos estos derechos. Por ello, queremos conocer cómo se ha implementado el derecho a la accesibilidad univer­sal en la legislación. Se realizó un análisis de contenido de 36 normas relaciona­das con la discapacidad y la dependencia en Aragón. Finalmente, se detectó que, a (...) pesar de ciertos avances, la adaptación de la normativa no se ha consolidado, afectando al reconocimiento de derechos de las personas con discapacidad, espe­cialmente de las más jóvenes y aquellas con grandes necesidades de apoyo. (shrink)

Współczesna nauka wymaga międzynarodowej kooperacji, której wynikiem jest synergia, jej efekty są łatwiej komercjalizowane, wspólne publikacje stają się lepiej rozpoznawalne przez społeczność naukową i częściej cytowane. Autorki artykułu omawiają wsparcie Fundacji na rzecz Nauki Polskiej w umiędzynarodowieniu polskiej nauki. Prezentują ufundowane przez nią międzynarodowe stypendia i nagrody oraz, z uwagi na tematykę tego numeru, szczegółowo omawiają współpracę polskich i francuskich naukowców w ostatnich latach.

The ruling of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal of October 22, 2020 introduced a near-complete ban on abortion in Poland, as it removed from the law the embryopathological condition that allowed abortion when the fetus had an incurable, severe disease. The ruling raises a number of questions regarding the recognition of international protection of human rights, the equal protection status of human rights, and the principle of trust in the state. The Tribunal’s ruling resulted in massive public protests in Poland, the (...) adoption of condemnatory resolutions by the European Parliament, and the submission of a new bill by members of the parliament from the opposition groups. The purpose of the paper is to show the questionable ruling issued by the Constitutional Tribunal from the perspective of protection of human rights and the attempts of opposition MPs to change the legal order. The Tribunal’s ruling violates women’s human rights and is therefore a form of discrimination against women. Attempts by opposition MPs to “civilize” the right to abortion have proved unsuccessful. The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights may establish a breakthrough, as the Tribunal has received a complaint concerning the prevention of abortion on embryopathological grounds in connection with the ruling of the Constitutional Court of October 22, 2020. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis of degree questions, the logical form of a degree question contains a variable that ranges over individual degrees and is bound by the degree question operator how. In contrast with this, we claim that the variable bound by the degree question operator how does not range over individual degrees but over intervals of degrees, by analogy with Schwarzschild and Wilkinson's proposal regarding the semantics of comparative clauses. Not only does the interval-based semantics predict the existence (...) of certain readings that are not predicted under the standard view, it is also able, together with other natural assumptions, to account for the sensitivity of degree questions to negative islands, as well as for the fact, uncovered by Fox and Hackl, that negative islands can be obviated by some properly placed modals. Like Fox and Hackl, we characterize negative island effects as arising from the fact that the relevant question, due to its meaning alone, can never have a maximally informative answer. Contrary to Fox and Hackl, however, we do not need to assume that scales are universally dense, nor that the notion of maximal informativity responsible for negative islands is blind to contextual parameters. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

This paper considers a host of definitions and labels attached to the concept of smart cities to identify four dimensions that ground a review of ethical concerns emerging from the current debate. These are: (1) network infrastructure, with the corresponding concerns of control, surveillance, and data privacy and ownership; (2) post-political governance, embodied in the tensions between public and private decision-making and cities as post-political entities; (3) social inclusion, expressed in the aspects of citizen participation and inclusion, and inequality and (...) discrimination; and (4) sustainability, with a specific focus on the environment as an element to protect but also as a strategic element for the future. Given the persisting disagreements around the definition of a smart city, the article identifies in these four dimensions a more stable reference framework within which ethical concerns can be clustered and discussed. Identifying these dimensions makes possible a review of the ethical implications of smart cities that is transversal to their different types and resilient towards the unsettled debate over their definition. (shrink)

In what ways and how far does virtue shield someone against suffering evils? In other words, how do non-moral evils affect the lives of virtuous people and to what extent can someone endure evils while staying happy? The central purpose of this chapter is to answer these questions by exploring what Aristotle has to say about the effects of evils in human well-being in general and his treatment of extreme misfortunes.