Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents:IntroductionAntónio ZILHÃO: Folk-Psychology, Rationality and Human ActionJoão BRANQUINHO: The Problem of Cognitive DynamicsJ.P. MONTEIRO: Hume, Induction and Single ExperimentsMarco RUFFINO: The Primacy of Concepts and the Priority of Judgments in Frege's LogicJoão Vergílio Gallerani CUTER: Die unanwendbare Arithmetik des TractatusSílvio PINTO: Wittgenstein's Anti-PlatonismFernando FERREIRA: A Substitutional Framework for Arithmetical ValidityJ.R. CROCA & R.N. MOREIRA: Indeterminism Versus CausalismLuíz MONIZ PEREIRA: The Logical Impingement of Artifical Intelligence.

INCONTINENCE, HONOURING SUNK COSTS AND RATIONALITY According to a basic principle of rationality, the decision to engage in a course of action should be determined solely by the analysis of its consequences. Thus, considerations associated with previous use of resources should have no bearing on an agent’s decision-making process. Frequently, however, agents persist carrying on an activity they themselves judge to be nonoptimal under the circumstances because they have already allocated resources to that activity. When this is the case, agents (...) are said to be honouring sunk costs. Honouring sunk costs is thus typically viewed as irrational economic behaviour. Two striking findings of the psychological literature on the sunk cost effect are that it is, in general, not lessened by having taken previously courses in economics, and that agents who did take such courses and that do honour sunk costs seem to be frequently aware of a cognitive dissonance in their behaviour. Davidson’s account of the possibility conditions of incontinent action renders continent action materially unfeasible. The very idea of incontinent action becomes thus a hollow one. I’ll present an alternative description of these possibility conditions that renders continent action materially feasible, and both, continent and incontinent action, cognitively plausible. In a nutshell, my proposal rests upon the drawing of an essential cognitive contrast between explicit processes of deliberative reasoning and lower level heuristic procedures. I conclude the paper arguing that my redescription of incontinent action accounts for the above mentioned cognitive dissonance effect better than the alternatives and that viewing at least an important subset of behaviours of honouring sunk costs as incontinent actions will enable us to consider them as peculiar manifestations of a more general and meaningful pattern in human behaviour. (shrink)

Evolutionary thinking has expanded in the last decades, spreading from its traditional stronghold – the explanation of speciation and adaptation in biology - to new domains. Fascinating pieces of work, the essays in this collection attest to the illuminating power of evolutionary thinking when applied to the understanding of the human mind. The contributors to_ Cognition, Evolution and Rationality_ use an evolutionary standpoint to approach the nature of the human mind, including both cognitive and behavioural functions. Cognitive science is by (...) its nature an interdisciplinary subject and the essays in this collection investigate the workings of the mind through a variety of disciplines including the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, game theory, robotics and computational neuroanatomy. Topics covered range from general methodological issues to long-standing philosophical problems such as how rational human beings actually are. With contributions from leading experts in the areas involved, this book will be of interest across a number of fields, including philosophy, evolutionary theory and cognitive science. (shrink)

Evolutionary thinking has expanded in the last decades, spreading from its traditional stronghold – the explanation of speciation and adaptation in biology - to new domains. Fascinating pieces of work, the essays in this collection attest to the illuminating power of evolutionary thinking when applied to the understanding of the human mind. The contributors to_ Cognition, Evolution and Rationality_ use an evolutionary standpoint to approach the nature of the human mind, including both cognitive and behavioural functions. Cognitive science is by (...) its nature an interdisciplinary subject and the essays in this collection investigate the workings of the mind through a variety of disciplines including the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, game theory, robotics and computational neuroanatomy. Topics covered range from general methodological issues to long-standing philosophical problems such as how rational human beings actually are. With contributions from leading experts in the areas involved, this book will be of interest across a number of fields, including philosophy, evolutionary theory and cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse different justifications for the claim that the minor premise of the libertarian argument is true, namely, intuition, van Inwagen’s argument from moral responsibility and an argument from rationality. I claim none of these is satisfactory. I conclude by suggesting a possible way of interpreting the meaning of the free will intuition libertarians claim we have.

Strategies purporting to determine the meaning of inner states of belief-content in terms of their inferential role usually assume the inner structure of the human inferential competence to be that of first order logic plus identity. Considerations of computational complexity and cumbersomeness of representation tend to undermine the plausibility of combining such strategies with this assumption. In this paper I contend that appealing to rules of default reasoning won’t make things turn out any better for the inferential role functionalist.

Ramseyan decision theory is the best explication of the philosophical model of folk-psychology. Davidson contends that its basic axioms are synthetic a priori truths of human psychology. This contention admits being reduced to the claim that human agents have to be regarded as rational betters. Tversky and Kahneman challenge this claim. Consideration of the evidence indicates that theory-contradicting interpretations of human actions make frequently more cognitive sense and are more 'commonsensical' than theory-preserving interpretations. Thus, the philosophical model of folk- psychology (...) fails in two ways: as an empirical theory of human action and as a model of our folk-psychological interpretive practices. (shrink)

Ramseyan decision theory is the best explication of the philosophical model of folk-psychology. Davidson contends that its basic axioms are synthetic a priori truths of human psychology. This contention admits being reduced to the claim that human agents have to be regarded as rational betters. Tversky and Kahneman challenge this claim. Consideration of the evidence indicates that theory-contradicting interpretations of human actions make frequently more cognitive sense and are more 'commonsensical' than theory-preserving interpretations. Thus, the philosophical model of folk- psychology (...) fails in two ways: as an empirical theory of human action and as a model of our folk-psychological interpretive practices. (shrink)

Both Quine and Davidson put forth programs of empirical semantics satisfying the conditions that characterize the so-called “standpoint of interpretation.” Quine’s less ambitious program of radical translation rests upon two buttresses: causality and empathy. Davidson’s more ambitious program of radical interpretation replaces causality with truth and empathy with rationality. Although the replacement of causality with intersubjective truth seems to me to be a fully justified move, I nevertheless contend that it is more realistic to develop the work of interpretation drawing (...) upon Quine’s less ambitious requirement of empathy than upon Davidson’s view of human agency as rational agency. In order to substantiate this contention, I present an argument to the effect that Davidson’s characterization of human agency as rational is not compatible with his other requirement that truth should pro-vide the essential link connecting speech with environment and action. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest a reconstruction of the traditional concepts of con-tinent and incontinent action. This reconstruction proceeds along the lines of a standpoint of bounded rationality. My suggestion agrees with some relevant aspects of Davidson’s treatment of this topic. One of these aspects is that incontinent action is typically signalled by the following two subjective experiences: a feeling of surprise towards one’s own action and a difficulty in understanding oneself; another is that incontinence cannot simply be disposed of (...) in terms of some inability of the agent to avoid “succumbing to temptation”; still another is the view that inconti-nent action is common in real human affairs. But my suggestion dis-agrees with other relevant aspects of Davidson’s treatment of inconti-nence too. In particular, it avoids what I take to be its two major draw-backs. These are a view of continent action that falls prey to a com-pletely unrealistic concept of psychological rationality and the idea that incontinence necessarily involves a dimension of essential irrationality. (shrink)

The debate concerning human rationality has been revolving around four main standpoints: 1) Unbounded rationality, 2) Optimization under constraints, 3) Heuristics and biases, and 4) Ecological rationality. Typically, proponents of 3) and 4) criticize models 1) and 2) for their cognitive unrealism. However, many ethologists contend that it makes sense to account for data gathered in animal behaviour research along the lines defined by the latter models. Elaborating upon this contention, Stanovich suggested recently a fifth standpoint in this debate – (...) I’ll call it ‘Brute Rationality’. According to it, traditional rational choice models are more appropriate to account for the behaviour of creatures endowed with simple cognitive architectures rather than to account for human behaviour. In my talk, I´ll contend that the term ‘rationality’ is being used in this debate to cover too wide a semantic area. In fact, once one distinguishes the different meanings associated with it, the positions defining this debate reveal themselves to be much less clear than what is usually taken to be the case. (shrink)

AUTORES Agnaldo Cuoco Portugal | Aires Almeida | António Zilhão | Célia Teixeira | Desidério Murcho | Iñigo González Ricoy | João Cardoso Rosas | Manuel García-Carpintero | Mathias Thaler | Pedro Galvão | Ricardo Santos | Sara Bizarro | Sofia Miguens | Susana Cadilha | Teresa Marques Sobre os autores Os autores deste livro partilharam o objetivo de conceber um guia de estudo para a Filosofia estruturado tematicamente – i.e. em função de questões, perspectivas e argumentos, sem (...) qualquer preocupação primariamente histórica. Nos onze capítulos que compõem o presente volume, encontramos assim um mapa conceptual da Filosofia que cobre não só as suas disciplinas principais, mas também muitas das suas áreas mais especializadas. Cada capítulo é autónomo, pode ser compreendido sem se recorrer a outros capítulos. O desafio que todos os autores enfrentaram foi o de apresentar uma determinada disciplina filosófica com clareza, rigor e concisão – três características difíceis de conciliar, sobretudo quando se aspira ainda a uma grande abrangência temática. No final de cada capítulo, o leitor poderá encontrar informação bibliográfica actualizada e apropriada para aprofundar o seu estudo. (shrink)

Evolution, Rationality, and Cognition: A Cognitive Science for the Twenty-First Century is a fine collection of essays edited by António Zilhão. Most of the essays are written by prominent philosophers of biology and psychology, while a roboticist, Inman Harvey, and a psychologist, Barbara Tversky, complete the list of contributors. Eight of the nine essays are original, although several of the essays are partly made up of material published elsewhere. Most of these articles belong to a growing field at (...) the intersection of evolutionary biology and cognitive science. However, as is often the case with collections of articles that grow out of conferences, the essays edited by Zilhão are somewhat heterogeneous. The issues examined range from the epistemology of hypothesis testing in evolutionary biology (Sober), to the nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying emotion recognition (Sripada and Goldman), to the optimal organization of the brain (Cherniak), to the improvement of critical thinking by means of computer-supported argument mapping (van Gelder). (shrink)

Paper presented at Cognition, Evolution and Rationality: Cognitive Science for the 21st Century. Oporto, September 2002. To appear in a volume based on that conference edited by Antonio Jose Teiga Zilhao.

The publication of this book is an event in the making. All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio (...) revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic. (shrink)

The paper shows how the Bohmian approach to quantum physics can be applied to develop a clear and coherent ontology of non-perturbative quantum gravity. We suggest retaining discrete objects as the primitive ontology also when it comes to a quantum theory of space-time and therefore focus on loop quantum gravity. We conceive atoms of space, represented in terms of nodes linked by edges in a graph, as the primitive ontology of the theory and show how a non-local law in which (...) a universal and stationary wave-function figures can provide an order of configurations of such atoms of space such that the classical space-time of general relativity is approximated. Although there is as yet no fully worked out physical theory of quantum gravity, we regard the Bohmian approach as setting up a standard that proposals for a serious ontology in this field should meet and as opening up a route for fruitful physical and mathematical investigations. (shrink)

Instead of the currently prevailing competitive model, a more collaborative strategy is needed to address the concerns related to the unsustainability of today’s business. This article aims to explore collaborative approaches where enterprises seek to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with all stakeholders and want to produce sustainable values for their whole business ecosystem. Cases here analyzed demonstrate that alternative ways of doing business are possible. These enterprises share more democratic ownership structures, more balanced and broader governance systems, and a (...) more comprehensive view of organizational goals and performance – which goes beyond the narrow concept of financial bottom line and into a stronger and systematic care of the needs and requirements of the different stakeholder groups. Thanks to this evidence and different theoretical and empirical contributions, we suggest that the strength and sustainability of enterprises come from their ability to fit into the environmental, social, and cultural context in which they operate. By creating values for all stakeholders, enterprises can involve them and gain deep support based on their commitment. This may lead to superior performance from a multiple-bottom-line perspective. (shrink)

A statement of hyperarithmetic analysis is a sentence of second order arithmetic S such that for every Y⊆ω, the minimum ω-model containing Y of RCA0 + S is HYP, the ω-model consisting of the sets hyperarithmetic in Y. We provide an example of a mathematical theorem which is a statement of hyperarithmetic analysis. This statement, that we call INDEC, is due to Jullien [13]. To the author's knowledge, no other already published, purely mathematical statement has been found with this property (...) until now. We also prove that, over RCA0, INDEC is implied by [Formula: see text] and implies ACA0, but of course, neither ACA0, nor ACA 0+ imply it. We introduce five other statements of hyperarithmetic analysis and study the relations among them. Four of them are related to finitely-terminating games. The fifth one, related to iterations of the Turing jump, is strictly weaker than all the other statements that we study in this paper, as we prove using Steel's method of forcing with tagged trees. (shrink)

For most philosophers, the work of Edith Stein continues to be eclipsed and relegated to obscurity. This work presents an excellent cross-section of Stein's writings and demonstrates the timeliness and relevance of her ideas for contemporary philosophical scholarship. Antonio Calcagno covers most of Edith Stein's philosophical life, from her early work with Husserl to her later encounters with medieval Christian thought, as well as a critical and analytical reading of major Steinian texts. Stein was an original thinker who challenged not (...) only the direction in which Husserlian phenomenology was progressing but also sought to bring to philosophical light the relevance of certain key questions, including the meaning of what it is to be human, the relevance of metaphysics to science, and fundamental questions about the nature of God. Working to correct the perception that Stein is either an "unfaithful and distorting" phenomenologist or a pious Catholic mystic, Calcagno presents important work that has been neglected by both secular and religious scholars. The essays are not merely expository, but discuss the philosophical questions raised by Stein's work from a contemporary perspective, using Stein's original German texts. In its attention to the breadth and depth of Stein's philosophy from its initial development to its more mature form, The Philosophy of Edith Stein offers a new understanding of an individual who left behind an incredible philosophical and literary legacy worthy of scholarly attention. The book will be of interest not only to Stein scholars, but to feminists, phenomenologists, and Heideggerians. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

A philosopher and political thinker describes a new political grammar free of modernist assumptions. In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories. Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can be (...) described as a “porcelain factory”: a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. Describing the years 1917-1968 as the “short century,” Negri suggests that by the end of it, all of the familiar markers of modernity had lost their relevance. Confronted with an intolerable reality, indignation and the revolutionary will to transform the world have both taken new forms and must be understood anew, free of modernist assumptions. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take.Antonio Negri is a philosopher and essay writer. A political and social activist in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, he taught political sciences for many years and has written numerous books on political philosophy including Marx beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, Insurgencies ; and in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Empire and Multitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nanotechnologies are an expression of the human ability to control and manipulate matter on a very small scale. Their use will enable an even and constant monitoring of human organisms, in a new and perhaps less invasive way. Debates at all levels – national, European and international – have pointed out the common difficulty of giving a complete, clear definition of nanotechnologies. This is primarily due to the variety of their components, to the fact that there is not just (...) one technology but several. The most significant medical applications of nanotechnologies are in the diagnostic and the therapeutic fields, eg biosensors and molecular imaging, providing diagnosis and drug delivery with no invasive methods involved. Like any other emerging field, such technologies imply new possibilities for improving health but, on the other hand, they are still at an experimental stage and therefore should be implemented under rigorous safety testing before going on general release. For this purpose, the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of nanotechnologies have been elaborated by study groups, in order to develop solutions before the results of the tests are diffused into medical practice. The aim of this paper is to define some of the ethical issues concerning biomedical applications and to evaluate whether there is a need for new or additional guidelines and regulations. (shrink)

San Isidoro de Sevilla destaca por poseer un saber universal. Esta universalidad de su saber también es expresada en su reflexión sobre el ministerio sacerdotal. A través de una triple aproximación «teológica», «pastoral» y «espiritual», invita a los obispos y presbíteros a vivir su ministerio de una forma «eclesial», «virtuosa» y «santa».

The text analyses the new images produced by artificial neural networks such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) from the perspective of photography and, more specifically, cameraless photography. The images produced by GANs are located within the wider framework of the impact of machine learning technologies on contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices. In the final section, the article focuses on the work of two artists who have explicity tackled the relations between GAN-generated images and the traditions of photography and (...) cameraless photography, with their multiple intertwinings of human and non-human agencies: Mario Klingemann and Grégory Chatonsky. (shrink)

Often presented as a new form of materialism, theories of media have been repeatedly fascinated by the idea of dematerialization—more precisely, by a vision of the history of technical media as a process teleologically oriented toward a future characterized by the overcoming of the weight, the opaqueness, and the resistance of materiality and by the advent of new, pervasive forms of instantaneous communication. Light, be it natural or artificial, has often played a key role in this historical narrative. With its (...) diffused presence, limitless plasticity, ultimate speed, ambiguous status between infinitely small particles and electromagnetic waves, and crucial role in the transmission of images and signals, light has often raised the question of the materiality of media itself, pointing to the possibility of immediacy—of an immediate, instantaneous, immaterial transmission. In this article I analyze the presence of this idea of dematerialization as the end point of media history in the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media is centered on the assumption that light is the most fundamental medium, one that leads the entire range of technical media to gradually dematerialize and merge within the environment or even dissolve into the atmosphere. (shrink)

Assuming that $0^\#$ exists, we prove that there is a structure that can effectively interpret its own jump. In particular, we get a structure $\mathcal A$ such that \[ \textit{Sp}({\mathcal A}) = \{{\bf x}'\colon {\bf x}\in \textit{Sp}({\mathcal A})\}, \] where $\textit{Sp}({\mathcal A})$ is the set of Turing degrees which compute a copy of $\mathcal A$. More interesting than the result itself is its unexpected complexity. We prove that higher-order arithmetic, which is the union of full $n$th-order arithmetic for all $n$, (...) cannot prove the existence of such a structure. (shrink)

Paul Grice’s theory of meaning has been widely adopted as a starting point for investigating the evolutionary and developmental emergence of linguistic communication. In this picture, reasoning about complexes of intentions is a prerequisite for communicating effectively at the prelinguistic level, as well as for acquiring a natural language. We argue that this broadly ‘Gricean’ picture rests on an equivocation between theories of communication and theories of cognition, and that it leads to paradoxical or implausible claims about human psychology. We (...) defend an alternative conception of prelinguistic communication, inspired by Bart Geurts and based on the notion of commitment. Adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to avoid the pernicious equivocation, and it provides a better systematization of the key empirical findings. We develop our argument with respect to infants’ sensitivity to ‘ostensive signals’; infants’ pointing; and infants’ endorsement of normative attitudes in joint activities. Finally, adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to argue that sophisticated forms of psychological reasoning are enabled by the mastery of a rich natural language, rather than being a prerequisite for acquiring one. (shrink)

This paper develops the very basic notions of analysis in a weak second-order theory of arithmetic BTFA whose provably total functions are the polynomial time computable functions. We formalize within BTFA the real number system and the notion of a continuous real function of a real variable. The theory BTFA is able to prove the intermediate value theorem, wherefore it follows that the system of real numbers is a real closed ordered field. In the last section of the paper, we (...) show how to interpret the theory BTFA in Robinson's theory of arithmetic Q. This fact entails that the elementary theory of the real closed ordered fields is interpretable in Q. (shrink)

_Factory of Strategy_ is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory. Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need to destroy (...) capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the proletariat's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien Régime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class configurations in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figuration in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. He ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally--not anarchically--dismantle centralized power. (shrink)

For several decades, historians have realized the limitations of analysing the historical past of science as a mere succession of theories. One of the most stimulating messages that the reinvention of the discipline has launched is that although there are obvious intellectual elements that promote the development and progress of science, there are also social, economic, and institutional aspects to consider. The history of science is no longer just a history of scientific ideas and theories, but also a history of (...) institutions, communities, spaces, objects, and practices as well as a history of the complex interaction among all these dimensions. Accompanying this new panorama is a broad consensus among scholars to accept that major social changes have inexorably some impact on scientific practice and vice versa. This premise, now widespread, is especially relevant to the history of early modern science and the question of its roots because it has allowed the introduction of new agents and spaces previously excluded from the domain of scientific development. In other words, this enriched perspective has multiplied both the processes of knowledge construction and the arenas in which these processes were undertaken. More specifically, historical research is no longer limited to spaces traditionally linked to the construction of science; it now embraces less orthodox ones. Within this broadened field of inquiry, practical knowledge and the objects of material culture have come to occupy a central place. This special issue explores how the new directions in which the history of science has expanded have a direct impact on the study of Iberian science in the Atlantic world. (shrink)