Michel Foucault Zrození biopolitiky. Překlad a doslov Petr Horák. 1. vyd. Brno: CDK, 2009, 352 s., ISBN 978-80-7325-181-9.

Social networks can influence people’s behaviour and therefore it is assumed that central individuals in social networks, also called “opinion leaders”, play a key role in driving change in agricultural and food systems. I analyse the outcomes of an intervention (that encouraged Sulawesi smallholder farmers to take a specific action toward improving the health of their cocoa trees) to assess the impact of engaging opinion leaders in agricultural programs that aim to change farmers’ practices. The intervention has been implemented through (...) (a) 18 opinion leaders identified by interviews and a social network survey of 1885 cocoa farmers; and (b) 18 randomly selected farmers who were not central in local social networks. The obtained social networks and statistical data were quantitatively analysed and the results were interpreted with input from the field staff. Contrary to expectations, the highly socially central opinion leaders were not more effective in promoting the initiative in their communities. On average, randomly selected low-centrality farmers convinced almost twice as many of their peers to take the recommended action as compared to the identified opinion leaders (17.1 versus 8.6) but the variation within the random group was also significantly higher. Importantly, while the identified opinion leaders were mostly senior men, women performed better in influencing others into taking action even when their centrality in local social networks of agricultural advice was lower. I discuss the implications of the conventional selection of perceived opinion leaders as model farmers for achieving sustainable and equitable change at scale in agriculture and propose practical alternatives. (shrink)

V příspěvku připomínáme originální spolupráci s prof. P. Maternou, která začala v 60. letech minulého století a vedla ke vzniku třísložkové teorie jazyka, jejímiž autory jsou spolu s Pavlem Maternou Karel Pala a Aleš Svoboda. Články o třísložkové teorii byly publikovány v r. 1976 a 1979, ovšem jméno P. Materny se v titulcích článků ne­smělo objevit, byl tak komunistickým režimem trestán za vyloučení z KSČ v r. 1969. Třísložková teorie jazyka, jak název naznačuje, pokrývá tři základní komponenty sys­tému jazyka, tedy (...) syntax, sémantiku a pragmatiku, a je plně srovnatelná s podobnými pokusy u nás i v zahraničí. Stala se východiskem pro další propojení logiky, lingvistiky a informatiky díky působení K. Paly a P. Materny na Fakultě informatiky od roku 1995. Do této spolupráce se zapojili studenti Fakulty informatiky, zejména Aleš Horák, jehož zásadním příspěvkem je počítačová implementace systému transparentní intenzionální logiky (TILu) ve vztahu ke zpracování přirozeného jazyka (češtiny). (shrink)

The possibility of performing germline modifications on currently living individuals targets future generations’ health and well-being by reducing the diversity of the human gene pool. This can have two negative repercussions: reduction of heterozygosity, the latter being associated with a health or performance advantage; uniformization of the genes involved in reproductive recombination, which may lead to the health risks involved in asexual reproduction. I argue that germline interventions aimed at modifying the genomes of future people cannot be ethically justifiable if (...) there is no possibility of controlling the intervention either by reversing or altering it, whenever need demands it. This argument is challenged on six different grounds: safety, population versus individual focus, spontaneous mutations, exceptionalism, the intentional pursuit of genetic diversity through germline interventions, and harm reduction potential. (shrink)

Following the recent call for advancement in knowledge about business ethics in East Asia, this study proposes a complementary perspective on business ethics in South Korea. We challenge the conventional view that South Korea is a strictly collectivist country, where group norms and low trust determine the norms and values of behavior. Using the concept of civil religion, we suggest that the center of the South Korean civil religion can be seen in the affective ties and networks pervading the economic, (...) political, and social institutions, embedded in and guided by Confucian ideals. We argue that South Korea should be seen not as a collectivist low-trust society, but rather as an affective-relational society, in which the relational context determines whether collectivism or individualism prevails. Further, we assert that trust, the cohesive factor of affective ties and networks, has until now been inadequately captured by conventional surveys. Our proposed perspective contributes to a more holistic picture and a more firmly grounded understanding of business ethics in South Korea. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 32, Issue 1, Page 33-54, Spring 2021.

So far overlooked by the international business ethics literature, we introduce, characterize, and normatively analyze the use of affective ties and networks in South Korea from an ethical point of view. Whereas the ethics of using Guanxi in China has been comprehensively discussed, Korean informal networks remain difficult to manage for firms in South Korea due to the absence of existing academic debate and research in this field. In this study, we concentrate mainly on the question of whether foreign firms (...) will and can use affective ties in Korea. The informal social network forms are classified and contrasted with the conventional ethical approaches used in international business ethics to assess which categories can be regarded as ethical or unethical. Finally, foreign firms are advised how to cope with and use different affective network types. Although the nature of affective ties and networks in Korea differs from that found for instance in China, consistent with the conclusion of prior research, we recommend particularistic analysis and decision making regarding the circumstances in which to conclude affective ties and networks and when to opt out. We conclude that foreign firms in Korea should invest in establishing Inmaek, refrain from engaging in Yonjul, and support host country nationals’ Yongo ties. Moreover, it is suggested that foreign firms should find ways to monitor and manage informal ties effectively. (shrink)

We discuss cultural group selection under the view of the frozen plasticity theory and the different explanatory power and predictions of this framework. We present evidence that cultural adaptations and their influence on the degree of cooperation may be more complex than presented by Richerson et al., and conclude with the gene-environment-culture relationship and its impacts on cultural group selection.

Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy's underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences' findings, the book's chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving (...) a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and explores how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions towards political irrationality This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy and the future of democracy. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) represent the currently most relevant incarnation of artificial intelligence with respect to the future fate of democratic governance. Considering their potential, this paper seeks to answer a pressing question: Could LLMs outperform humans as expert advisors to democratic assemblies? While bearing the promise of enhanced expertise availability and accessibility, they also present challenges of hallucinations, misalignment, or value imposition. Weighing LLMs’ benefits and drawbacks compared to their human counterparts, I argue for their careful integration to augment (...) democracy’s ability to address complex policy issues. The paper posits that time-tested democratic procedures like deliberation and aggregation by voting provide safeguards effective against both human and machine advisor imperfections. Additional protective measures include custom LLM training for the advisory role, boosting representatives’ competencies in query formulation, or implementation of adversarial proceedings in which LLM advisors could debate each other and provide dissenting opinions. These could further mitigate the risks that LLMs present in advisory roles and empower human decision-makers toward increased autonomy and quality of their collective choices. My conceptual exploration offers a roadmap for the co-evolution of AI and democratic institutions, setting the stage for an empirical research agenda to finetune the implementation specifics. (shrink)

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to determine (...) the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

The paper begins by emphasizing the fact that, on a historical scale, one can have several views of the relationship that has existed over time between ethics and capitalism, namely: missionary, ‘Nietzschean’, critical, and ‘regulatory’. It is argued that, nowadays, the capitalization of the contributions supplied, over time, by the four views embraces the form of two modern diametrically opposed perspectives, i.e.: on the one hand, there is the interpretation given by the neo-classical school of thought (mainstream economics) and, on (...) the other hand, it comes to the interpretation given by the Austrian praxeological economic school (libertarian economics). The emphasis of the analysis is put on the assertions developed by the last one, libertarian thinking, that insists on the necessity to operate with a well-defined distinction between the legal level of the matter, the ethical level and the moral one. At the core of the libertarian analysis there is the understanding of the capitalist system being naturally impregnated by ethical values. And this intrinsic ethical nature of capitalism is organically bound to the sphere of the ownership-type relationship. In line with the understanding of the economic system, based on the institutions of the free market as representing ethical capitalism per se, the paper argues that the realities of the world today show governmental interventionism as a main factor that supports non-ethical economic behaviour. As a consequence, the more limited government intervention is, the greater the chance of ethical capitalism, that is, voluntary, non-conflictual and non-aggressive economic market relationships. Under such conditions, a ‘minimal state’ institutional arrangement (that is, the legitimate use of power by the state is limited to preventing fraud or the use of force; it does not include the power to tax or to confiscate property) is the basic condition for the existence of an ethical capitalism that works, which is to say that the chance of an economic system based on ethical values stands in people’s willingness to be part of such an evolution in society that aims to minimise the role of the state. Further, the paper argues that any historical analysis on how societies asserted such a willingness outlines the expression of a secular and unshaken option for growing rather than diminishing state involvement in the economy. It is about people’s perennial preference for the state, namely for the organization of society based on state interventionism (respectively, their preference for the coercive order imposed by the state authorities, order based, through its own nature, on the subjugation of private property and the aggression against individual freedom), with a preference for the government intervention over the organization of a society based on free market functioning (which is equivalent, in fact, to their rejection of a voluntarily and spontaneously non-violent order, based on the observance of private property and individual freedom, brought about by the free functioning of markets). In the last part of the paper there are put forward for discussion the possible explanations for this perennial preference for non-ethical capitalism, the analysis focusing on two directions: firstly, on that of social ontology; and then, on that of human psychology. (shrink)

The paper proposes a synthesis between human scientists and artificial representation learning models as a way of augmenting epistemic warrants of realist theories against various anti-realist attempts. Towards this end, the paper fleshes out unconceived alternatives not as a critique of scientific realism but rather a reinforcement, as it rejects the retrospective interpretations of scientific progress, which brought about the problem of alternatives in the first place. By utilising adversarial machine learning, the synthesis explores possibility spaces of available evidence for (...) unconceived alternatives providing modal knowledge of what is possible therein. As a result, the epistemic warrant of synthesised realist theories should emerge bolstered as the underdetermination by available evidence gets reduced. While shifting the realist commitment away from theoretical artefacts towards modalities of the possibility spaces, the synthesis comes out as a kind of perspectival modelling. (shrink)

Analyzing different philosophical and theological components of Aquinas’s view regarding the relation between human agency and divine providence, the monograph shows this view to be compatibilist, based on a determinist conception of causation and an aristocratic understanding of goodness.

This monograph presents a general theory of weakly implicative logics, a family covering a vast number of non-classical logics studied in the literature, concentrating mainly on the abstract study of the relationship between logics and their algebraic semantics. It can also serve as an introduction to algebraic logic, both propositional and first-order, with special attention paid to the role of implication, lattice and residuated connectives, and generalized disjunctions. Based on their recent work, the authors develop a powerful uniform framework for (...) the study of non-classical logics. In a self-contained and didactic style, starting from very elementary notions, they build a general theory with a substantial number of abstract results. The theory is then applied to obtain numerous results for prominent families of logics and their algebraic counterparts, in particular for superintuitionistic, modal, substructural, fuzzy, and relevant logics. The book may be of interest to a wide audience, especially students and scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, computer science, or related areas, looking for an introduction to a general theory of non-classical logics and their algebraic semantics. (shrink)

Many democratic countries have failed to stand up to the challenge presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that the collective response to the pandemic has been incapacitated by an ‘epistemic crisis’, (i.e., a breakdown in the social division of epistemic labor) that led to a failure of citizens’ beliefs to converge towards a shared perception of the situation. Neither a paucity of relevant expert knowledge nor democratic citizens’ irrationality is required for the crisis to emerge. In particular, I highlight (...) three obstacles capable of preventing relevant expert testimony from gaining democratic legitimacy necessary for an effective policy response: 1) the proper domain of expertise is uncertain; 2) regular citizens’ meta-expertise – (i.e., ability to discriminate among the putative experts based on their relative epistemic merit) – is not efficacious enough to trigger truth-convergence of the public opinion; 3) the prominent sources of third-party meta-expertise lack credibility due to their conflicts of interest. Since the first two problems appear irresolvable, I propose that the search for a path towards preclusion of future epistemic crises concentrates on upgrading the institutional fundament for meta-expertise provision. Social epistemology plays a vital role in this search, but its close cooperation with other disciplines is a must. (shrink)

We explored differences in the course of physiological functions and in the subjective evaluations in response to listening to a 7-min recording of the sound of a chainsaw and to the sounds of a forest. A Biofeedback 2000x-pert apparatus was used for continual recording of the following physiological functions in 50 examined persons: abdominal and thoracic respiration and their amplitude and frequency, electrodermal activity, finger skin temperature, heart rate and heart rate variability. The group of 25 subjects listening to the (...) sound of a chainsaw exhibited significantly lower values of blood volume pulse amplitude, lower values in peak alpha frequency HRV and higher values in peak high-frequency HRV. In the time interval from 80 s to 209 s, in which the two groups showed the greatest differences, lower values of blood volume pulse were also recorded while listening to the sound of a chainsaw. Listening to the sound of a chainsaw is associated with a greater feeling of fatigue and higher tension, while listening to the sounds of a forest is even considered to elicit feelings of improved learning abilities. The assumption that listening to the sound of a chainsaw results in higher defense arousal was confirmed. The greater variability which is exhibited by a majority of physiological functions while listening to the forest sounds may also be an innovative finding. It seems that there are two types of arousal following from correlations between physiological functions and subjective assessment. Low values of blood volume pulse amplitude are especially important from the health perspective. They correspond to the amount of vasoconstriction which occurs in the endothelial dysfunction related to increased mortality, incidence of myocardial infarction, leg atherosclerosis and topically to COVID-19. (shrink)

While the assumption that the sociopolitical and economic situation affects adolescents’ well-being, encompassing life satisfaction and a positive sense of self, is plausible, few studies have confirmed such macrosocial influences. The case of the Czech Republic offers an example of a society transitioning from totalitarian government to western democracy. Our study provides statistical description of Czech adolescents’ well-being over the past 30 years in association with the subjective perception of everyday problems. These daily hassles represent experiences and conditions of daily (...) living that have been appraised as salient and harmful or threatening to adolescents’ well-being. We analyzed four samples of adolescents aged 14–17 years surveyed at four time points over the last three decades—1992, 2001, 2011, and 2019, total N = 4,005. The results show that life satisfaction, self-esteem, and self-reported daily hassles changed only marginally from 1992 to 2019 with small differences related to the post-revolution 1992 cohort. Adolescents reported increasing problems in school, relationships with parents, sports, and leisure time over the study period. A model linking daily hassles and self-esteem to life satisfaction across four cohorts showed that daily hassles strongly predicted life satisfaction except in the post-revolution cohort of 1992 when life satisfaction was also the lowest. The effect was slightly higher in females. Across the cohorts, gender differences in life satisfaction changed from males being more satisfied in 1992 to females being more satisfaction in 2019. Limitations stemming from sampling differences across cohorts are discussed. (shrink)

Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying “xis true” and satisfying the “dequotation schema”for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Łukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

Despite their flaws, large language models (LLMs) deserve a fair chance to prove their mettle against human experts, who are often plagued with biases, conflicts of interest, and other frailties. For epistemically unprivileged laypeople struggling to access expert knowledge, the accessibility advantages of LLMs could prove crucial. While complaints about LLMs' inconsistencies and arguments for human superiority are often justified (for now), they distract from the urgent need to prepare for the likely scenario of LLMs' continued ascent. Experimentation with both (...) the capabilities and institutional architecture of LLMs is necessary. Neither tech-bashing nor excessive gatekeeping will suffice. As LLMs are here to stay and they keep improving, it is high time we started thinking about how to navigate the impending wave of their proliferation. (shrink)

In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity initially formed by John Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continuity or persistence through time, the Continental tradition focuses on what constitutes ipseity in the sense of individuality or uniqueness of the human being “constituted” by its continuous transformation through changing experience. In this study, I claim that contemporary phenomenological research in France—especially the “phenomenology of the event” as represented by Henri Maldiney and Claude Romano—contributes to this Continental (...) discussion in a significant way: it formulates the conditions of personal uniqueness or distinctiveness with regard to other persons, conditions not to be found in Heidegger’s existential conception of selfhood in Being and Time. More precisely, Maldiney and Romano allow us to answer the principal questions of this study: In what does the personal uniqueness consist? What exactly individualizes the first-person selfhood disclosed in Dasein’s relation to death? In my three-stage analysis, I first deal with Heidegger’s conception of selfhood in Being and Time and its limits with respect to the question of personal uniqueness. Next, I analyse Maldiney’s conception of “eventful selfhood” in which he “completes” Heidegger’s conception of selfhood by describing Dasein’s openness to ontical, and yet fully authentic events. Finally, I develop the argumentation by presenting Romano’s even more radical conception of the “happening subjectivity”, which allows us to return to the second major feature of personal identity: personal persistence. Nonetheless, I conclude that the connection between personal uniqueness and persistence is not sufficiently examined in the phenomenology of the event, which opens the path towards another related inquiry into the following problem: What is the proper subjective dimension or the “underlying thing” in the background of personal persistence which somehow resists events? (shrink)

People have always tried to make predictions; they are necessary and useful, but very often they commit obvious errors, which have negative consequences on decision-making. Prediction errors are in some cases, not few, unavoidable, because the world itself is unpredictable, subject to chance (or randomness in mathematics). Chance is a property of nature. The causes of random events are physically determined, but so numerous and complex that they (the events) are unpredictable. Science is not about certainty. Human knowledge itself is (...) not certain. We can only have provisional truths. Therefore, we must manage to reach a state of accommodation with uncertainty and unpredictability. The complexity of natural phenomena generates events that we cannot control through theoretical modeling precisely because of the ignorance of the causal mechanisms, which exist in their privacy but have not (yet) been revealed by the data and observations at our disposal. We have, on the one hand, life experience taken over and assimilated and established in society and, on the other hand, experience gained from real life. Norm and chance follow each other rather chaotically. The duration of validity of a norm and the moment of occurrence of the random event are unpredictable. However, norms and events coexist in our consciousness. Order and predictability are born (formed and exist) from rules; chance and unpredictability are born from the lack of rules. The highest truths, recognized as such by society cannot be transposed into the life of society only by the force of reason. It is imperative that they are reinforced and embedded in the social behavior of all citizens. Rules are needed. Without rules there is no freedom. (shrink)

Substructural logics extending the full Lambek calculus FL have largely benefited from a systematical algebraic approach based on the study of their algebraic counterparts: residuated lattices. Recently, a nonassociative generalization of FL has been studied by Galatos and Ono as the logic of lattice-ordered residuated unital groupoids. This paper is based on an alternative Hilbert-style presentation for SL which is almost MP -based. This presentation is then used to obtain, in a uniform way applicable to most substructural logics, a form (...) of local deduction theorem, description of filter generation, and proper forms of generalized disjunctions. A special stress is put on semilinear substructural logics. Axiomatizations of the weakest semilinear logic over SL and other prominent substructural logics are provided and their completeness with respect to chains defined over the real unit interval is proved. (shrink)

Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vast interdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of how interdisciplinarity may help to solve problems which are common in many areas of knowledge. Chaos and complexity certainly put limits on what we can (...) know. High complexity, asymmetry and/or non-linearity are universal types of imprecision. Can hazard have purpose and direction?The idea is that the more effort we put into project design to cover as many details and possible consequences as possible we can grasp in our in-depth analysis aiming to create the project (in art or science or society), the greater the chances that the random occurrence of the unpredictable event will settle on the project's purpose and direction and not on contrary to them. There is no vicious circle here. This kind of method can explain many good results already obtained in such circumstances. Simplicity, beauty, rationalistic optimism, are features of unshakeable scientific results We may call this feature of scientific theory or art _uniqueness. _Uniqueness is strongly correlated with _essentialization. _Science is working in that sense: to simplify a phenomenon to its essence in order to study it easily without losing anything important in the analysis. That is _essentialization. _Why and how complex systems move to the edge of chaos? And what do they do to stay there? They are in constant struggle to create or keep order in complexity. That is the pattern of self-organization, the specific feature of human nature. That is why our action is meant to build resilience to deal better with unpredictable events and prevent the emergence of a critical threshold. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and contradictions appear, not as non-essential substances of debate to be eliminated by explanation, but as everlasting ingredients of our conception of reality. There are compelling reasons to believe that it is impossible to make accurate, nontrivial predictions concerning human behavior. Logic and reason are and remain priority, but unpredictability forces us to imagination and creative thinking. Indeed we are confronted with a new human landscape. The anomalies become the new normal. (shrink)

Transfer theorems are central results in abstract algebraic logic that allow to generalize properties of the lattice of theories of a logic to any algebraic model and its lattice of filters. Their proofs sometimes require the existence of a natural extension of the logic to a bigger set of variables. Constructions of such extensions have been proposed in particular settings in the literature. In this paper we show that these constructions need not always work and propose a wider setting in (...) which they can still be used. (shrink)

This edition of The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution includes a lecture, not previously published, in which Ouspensky givers some details of the "School of the Fourth Way," with which he was connected, and an account of some of its fundamental principles, methods, and rules. The psychology Ouspensky sets forth in this introductory lectures has existed in one form or another for thousands of years and, unlike modern psychology, studies man from the point of view of what he may become. (...) Once a man realizes how little control he has over his reactions to external circumstances and internal stimuli, he may wish to find a way to becomoe free of this mechanical way of living. Ouspensky describes how a man must work simultaneously on his knowledge and his being to find inner unity and why although his development depends on his own efforts, this is very difficult to achieve without guidance from a "School.". (shrink)