The true is a moment of the false. Overview of the hoax in Italy, from Censor to Luther Blissett.

Clarifying the nature of possibility is crucial for an evaluation of the phenomenological approach to ontology. From a phenomenological perspective, it is ontological possibility, and not spatiotemporal existence, that has pre-eminent ontological status. Since the sphere of phenomenological being and the sphere of experienceability turn out to be overlapping, this makes room for two perspectives. We can confer foundational priority to the acts of consciousness over possibilities, or to pre-set possibilities over the activity of consciousness. Husserl’s position on this issue (...) seems to change over time. Ultimately, the establishment of a phenomenological perspective must involve a rejection of any hypostatization of pre-set possibilities, but not all implications of this theoretical step seem to be drawn in Husserl’s texts. This paper is devoted to an illustration of how the phenomenological notion of possibility should change when we reject the hypostatization of possibility, that is, when we reject the idea that all acts of consciousness are to be conceived as realizations of pre-set “ideal forms”. We examine this question, first, by trying to clarify the conceptual constellation of “possibility” in Husserl’s texts. This leads to an overall classification of the features of constituted possibilities. Then we distinguish such constituted possibilities from their constituting conditions, which outlines a different sense of “possibility”. In the last instance two “possibilizing” dimensions are shown to lie at the root of all ontic possibilities. This leads to a final suggestion on the nature of the relation between experience and possibility. Actual experiences create the room for possibility: they are possibilizations. In this sense, experience is to be taken as a generative sphere which goes beyond the customary boundary between epistemic and ontological. From this point of view all experience is to be conceived as emergence. (shrink)

Human extinction is something generally deemed as undesirable, although some scholars view it as a potential solution to the problems of the Earth since it would reduce the moral evil and the suffering that are brought about by humans. We contend that humans collectively have absolute intrinsic value as sentient, conscious and rational entities, and we should preserve them from extinction. However, severe threats, such as climate change and incurable viruses, might push humanity to the brink of extinction. Should that (...) occur, it might be useful to envision a successor to humans able to preserve and hand down its value. One option would be to resort to humanoid robots that reproduce our salient characteristics by imitation, thanks to AI powered by machine learning. However, the question would arise of how to select the characteristics needed for our successors to thrive. This could prove to be particularly challenging. A way out might come from an algorithm entrusted with this choice. In fact, an algorithmic selection both at the social and at the individual level could be a preferred choice than other traditional ways of making decisions. In this sense, reflecting on human extinction helps us to identify solutions that are also suitable for the problems we face today. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that subliminally presented stimuli accelerate or delay responses afforded by supraliminally presented stimuli. Our experiments extend these findings by showing that unconscious stimuli even affect free choices between responses. Thus, actions that are phenomenally experienced as freely chosen are influenced without the actor becoming aware of the manipulation. However, the unconscious influence is limited to a response bias, as participants chose the primed response only in up to 60% of the trials. LRP data in free choice (...) trials indicate that the prime was not ineffective in trials in which participants chose the non-primed response as then it delayed performance of the incongruently primed response. (shrink)

This paper depicts a case study of an organizational strategy for the promotion of ethical practice when introducing a new, high-risk, ethically-charged medical practice like Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). We describe the development of an interprofessional program that enables the delivery of high-quality, whole-person MAiD care that is values-based and sustainable. A “care ecology” strategy recognizes the interconnected web of relationships and structures necessary to support a quality experience of MAiD for patients, families, and clinicians. This program exemplifies a (...) care ecology approach that addresses common barriers to entry to MAiD practice, and also meets the needs of a variety of stakeholders through the creation of patient and family resources, team supports, standards of practice, professional development opportunities, organizational infrastructure, and community partnerships. We also describe how a thriving care ecology evolves to remain resilient, and to enable integration as the needs of the organization, team and program change over time. The design and development of this program may be adapted to other jurisdictions and organizations where MAiD is introduced, or where new patient populations become eligible for MAiD. This care ecology model may also be applicable to the creation of sustainable programs that provide other morally controversial or novel clinical services. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

By virtue of what do alarm calls and facial expressions carry natural information? The answer I defend in this paper is that they carry natural information by virtue of changing the probabilities of various states of affairs, relative to background data. The Probabilistic Difference Maker Theory of natural information that I introduce here is inspired by Dretske's [1981] seminal analysis of natural information, but parts ways with it by eschewing the requirements that information transmission must be nomically underwritten, mind-independent, and (...) knowledge-yielding. PDMT includes both a qualitative account of information transmission and a measure of natural information in keeping with the basic principles of Shannon's communication theory and Bayesian confirmation theory. It also includes a new account of the informational content of a signal, understood as the combination of the incremental and overall support that the signal provides for all states of affairs at the source. Finally, I compare and.. (shrink)

Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one’s sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly (...) associated with immoral behavior — psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traits may display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the prospects of a Neo-Aristotelian position—according to which the difference between the human species and non-human animals is a difference in ‘form’—in the context of the question of how the human form of life is related to the idea of education. Two interpretations of this idea have been suggested by contemporary Neo-Aristotelian philosophy that offer contrasting accounts of the role played by education. According to the first, the idea of a formal difference goes with a (...) notion of potentiality, according to which the distinctiveness of the human is mainly a product of education, and hence a matter of second nature. According to the second, the idea of the human is the idea of a formally distinctive kind of first nature that explains the very possibility of education. I maintain that both interpretations do justice to an important aspect of human life yet fail fully to grasp the significance of the notion of ‘form’ that they employ. I argue that to embrace the insight that the difference of the human is a difference in ‘form’, we must think of the human as a form of life whose very concept contains the concept of education. The concept of education, I argue, is a logical concept, contained in the concept of life that it describes. (shrink)

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some (...) of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value. (shrink)

The demand for social justice, especially in the context of the welfare state, is often framed as a demand of solidarity. But it is not clear why: in what sense, if any, is social justice best understood as a demand of solidarity? This article explores that question. There are two reasons to do so. First, very little has been written on the concept of solidarity, and almost nothing on why and how solidarity can both give rise to and be the (...) target of a moral obligation. The first aim of the article is to fill this gap. The second aim of the article is to explore the normative implications of this account of solidarity for the commitment to social justice at the heart of the welfare state, and in so doing, to put into question the idea that shared experience or shared identity are either necessary or sufficient bases for social justice qua solidarity. (shrink)

This book addresses two related questions that have first arisen in Toulmin’s seminal book on the uses of argument. The first question is the one of the relationship between the semantic analysis of modality and the structure of arguments. The second question is the one of the distinctive place, or role, of modality in the fundamental structure of arguments. These two questions concern how modality, as a semantic category, relates to the fundamental structure of arguments. The book addresses modality and (...) argumentation also according to another perspective by looking at how different linguistic modal expressions may be taken as argumentative indicators. It explores the role of modal expressions as argumentative indicators by using the Italian modal system as a case study. At the same time, it uses predictions/forecasts in the business-financial daily press to investigate the relation between modality and the context of argumentation. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been defined by Husserl as “theory of the essences of pure phenomena,” yet the ontological status of essences in Husserlian phenomenology is far from a settled issue. The late Husserlian emphasis on genetic constitution and the historicity of the lifeworld is not immediately reconcilablewith the ‘unchangeable’ nature that is prima facie attributed to essences. However, the problem of the nature of ideality cannot be dropped from phenomenological accounts without jeopardizing the phenomenological enterprise as such. Through an immanent analysis (...) of Husserl’s meditation on essences a positive account of their ontological status is provided. Essences are interpreted as ontological thresholds, primordially rooted in our motivated confrontation with sensuous transcendence. Essences appear as emergent ontological features, which are not reducible to their particular realizations and which exhibit a fundamental continuity between consciousness and being. They manifest themselves as prospectively a priori (a precondition for further experiences), but retrospectively a posteriori (they are founded in experience). Finally, essences manifest the ‘co-essential’ nature of consciousness and sensuous transcendence: they are the way in which we are motivated and constitutively bound to articulate being, which in turn is apt to be thus articulated. (shrink)

Previous studies of auditory statistical learning have typically presented learners with sequential structural information that is uniformly distributed across the entire exposure corpus. Here we present learners with nonuniform distributions of structural information by altering the organization of trisyllabic nonsense words at midstream. When this structural change was unmarked by low‐level acoustic cues, or even when cued by a pitch change, only the first of the two structures was learned. However, both structures were learned when there was an explicit cue (...) to the midstream change or when exposure to the second structure was tripled in duration. These results demonstrate that successful extraction of the structure in an auditory statistical learning task reduces the ability to learn subsequent structures, unless the presence of two structures is marked explicitly or the exposure to the second is quite lengthy. The mechanisms by which learners detect and use changes in distributional information to maintain sensitivity to multiple structures are discussed from both behavioral and computational perspectives. (shrink)

According to simulation or shared-substrates models of emotion recognition, our ability to recognize the emotions expressed by other individuals relies, at least in part, on processes that internally simulate the same emotional state in ourselves. The term “emotional expressions” is nearly synonymous, in many people's minds, with facial expressions of emotion. However, vocal prosody and whole-body cues also convey emotional information. What is the relationship between these various channels of emotional communication? We first briefly review simulation models of emotion recognition, (...) and then discuss neuroscientific evidence related to these models, including studies using facial expressions, whole-body cues, and vocal prosody. We conclude by discussing these data in the context of simulation and shared-substrates models of emotion recognition. (shrink)

This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well‐being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (...) (E3def2). We turn to an examination of how God's immanent causation relates to the activity of finite things in the Ethics. We consider two ways to think about the link between God, seen as immanent cause, and the activity of finite things: namely, in terms of entailment and in terms of production. We argue that the productive model is most promising for understanding the way in which the activity of finite things and God's immanent causality are connected in Spinoza's (mature) philosophy. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary Hannover Qualification Programme on ethics consultation has trained hospital staff to operate clinical ethics services in their respective hospitals since 2003. To evaluate Hannover Qualification Programme, all former participants were contacted using an online questionnaire including four domains: status quo before attending Hannover Qualification Programme, present status, impact of Hannover Qualification Programme, future challenges. Research objectives were the long-term satisfaction with Hannover Qualification Programme and its impact on clinical ethics services. The response rate was 45%. Hannover Qualification Programme (...) was evaluated as helpful and the responders were capable of applying their acquired skills. Most participants could contribute to the implementation of clinical ethics services. They were satisfied with Hannover Qualification Programme and with the degree of changes in their hospitals. In conclusion, clinical ethics education had long-term effects on trainees and on their respective hospitals. Problems were mentioned rather in the field of utilisation than with implementation or quality of clinical ethics services. (shrink)

The way people make career choices is often influenced by their idea of work. Alongside this concept, there is the idea of decent work, which takes the form of the opportunity, for men and women, to have productive, equal, safe, and rights-based work. We have conducted a study on these two concepts with a group of Italian adolescents, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We found that most of the participants consider work as a means to obtain economic benefits and (...) satisfy certain values, and decent work as characterized by the respect for rights and duties and economic benefits; a part of the participants fails in giving a definition of decent work or gives a negative definition of it. We deepened the study through quantitative analyses that revealed that those who have a more complex view of work and decent work also have higher levels of self-efficacy and career adaptability. These findings are discussed in the light of previous research and from a perspective that intends to give a contribution to career counseling practices. (shrink)

Abstract‘[T]he “mainstream” of global governance has changed course’ and in so doing, might well have ‘outrun the standard tools of critical, progressive, and reform-minded international lawyers’, Fleur Johns wrote in 2019. It is especially the critical tools of ‘appeals to history, context, language [and] the grassroots’ in response to universalist planning that Johns sees absorbed in the turn to prototyping as a new ‘style’ of governance. In this article, we take on this observation and explore how the ‘lean start-up mentality’ (...) that Johns described has taken hold of tech-based climate governance. We base our reflections on the ‘Tech for Our Planet’ challenge that took place over 2021 and was showcased at the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow. While a turn ‘from planning to prototypes’ is observable, we question how exactly this ‘change of course’ affects the high modernist style of global governance and its critique by international lawyers. The ‘digital solutions for climate challenges’ that were showcased in Glasgow are indeed based on localized experiments with data science, thereby seemingly overcoming high modernist impulses towards universalist ideals. Yet, these experimental prototypes are developed with the ambition of being replicable and scaled up, to become a stack of tools deployable in any given scenario. This form of scaling up neither breaks with modernist aspirations based on technologically-mediated replicability—of moving the same logic inscribed in code to different sites and contexts—nor with a modernist understanding of knowledge as universal in its application. In our analysis, the determining feature is then not so much a matter of planning or prototyping in ideal type forms, but of replicability of knowledge production and scalability of technological know-how that underpin both planning and prototyping. Prototyping in the start-up space does not depart from, but rather reinscribes, a modernist representation of the human subject that forces its epistemological lens onto a world of nonhuman objects amenable to governance. Critical international lawyers’ toolkits must therefore be reconfigured with a focus on a governance style of disembodied knowledge production that runs through both planning and prototyping. (shrink)

German universities come under fire: in contemporary political discourse they are considered to be antiquated, inefficient and unfit for international competition. Accordingly, the German government implemented an extensive program of reforms. Following the so‐called ‘Sorbonne Declaration’, the universities shall become part of an European higher education system with comparable and compatible structures. With the focus on the field of academic teaching and learning, this essay discusses the way of defining these activities in a new, entrepreneurial way, and the implications of (...) this process within the university. The reflections lead to the thesis that the actual reforms ask for new forms of critique, because the neoliberal offer of marketable ways to teach and to learn makes the enduring asymmetry of power relations within the educational field invisible, endangers the democratic character of the university and trivializes education. (shrink)

I argue that a form of animalism that does not include the belief that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal has a dialectical advantage over other versions of animalism. The main reason for this advantage is that Phase Animalism, the version of animalism described here, has the theoretical resources to provide convincing descriptions of the outcomes of scenarios problematic for other forms of animalism. Although Phase Animalism rejects the claim that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal, it is still appealing to those (...) who believe that our nature is continuous or of a similar kind to that of other physical entities. (shrink)

Hospital ethics committees (HECs) and ethicists generally describe themselves as engaged in four domains of practice: case consultation, research, education, and policy work. Despite the increasing attention to quality indicators, practice standards, and evaluation methods for the other domains, comparatively little is known or published about the policy work of HECs or ethicists. This article attempts to open the ?black box? of this health care ethics practice by providing two detailed case examples of ethics policy reviews. We also describe the (...) development and application of an evaluation strategy to assess the quality of ethics policy review work, and to enable continuous improvement of ethics policy review processes. Given the potential for policy work to impact entire patient populations and organizational systems, it is imperative that HECs and ethicists develop clearer roles, responsibilities, procedural standards, and evaluation methods to ensure the delivery of consistent, relevant, and high-quality ethics policy reviews. (shrink)

In their article ‘Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI’, Durán and Jongsma discuss the epistemic and ethical challenges raised by black box algorithms in medical practice. The opacity of black box algorithms is an obstacle to the trustworthiness of their outcomes. Moreover, the use of opaque algorithms is not normatively justified in medical practice. The authors introduce a formalism, called computational reliabilism, which allows generating justified beliefs on the (...) algorithm reliability and trustworthy outcomes of artificial intelligence systems by means of epistemic warrants, called reliability indicators. However, they remark the need for reliability indicators specific to black box algorithms and that justified knowledge is not sufficient to justify normatively the actions of the physicians using medical AI systems. Therefore, Durán and Jongsma advocate for a more transparent design and implementation of black box algorithms, providing a series of recommendations to mitigate the epistemic and ethical challenges behind their use in medical practice. In this response, I argue that a peculiar form of black box algorithm transparency, called design publicity, may efficiently implement these recommendations. Design publicity encodes epistemic, that is, reliability indicators, and ethical recommendations for black box algorithms by means of four subtypes of transparency. These target the values and goals, their translation into design requirements, the performance and consistency of the algorithm altogether. I discuss design publicity applying it to a use case focused on the automated classification of skin lesions from medical images. (shrink)

I discuss an interpretation, recently proposed by Mark Siderits, of the claim that within the Buddhist tradition the self is a convenient fiction. I subsequently propose a novel approach to fictionalism in contemporary metaphysics, outline an application of such an approach to the case of the self and then specify one version of fictionalism combined with some basic tenets of Buddhism.

Mangarevan traditionally contained two numeration systems: a general one, which was highly regular, decimal, and extraordinarily extensive; and a specific one, which was restricted to specific objects, based on diverging counting units, and interspersed with binary steps. While most of these characteristics are shared by numeration systems in related languages in Oceania, the binary steps are unique. To account for these characteristics, this article draws on—and tries to integrate—insights from anthropology, archeology, linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science more generally. The analysis (...) of mental arithmetic with these systems reveals that both types of systems entailed cognitive advantages and served important functions in the cultural context of their application. How these findings speak to more general questions revolving around the theoretical models and evolutionary trajectory of numerical cognition will be discussed in the. (shrink)

The domain of numbers provides a paradigmatic case for investigating interactions of culture, language, and cognition: Numerical competencies are considered a core domain of knowledge, and yet the development of specifically human abilities presupposes cultural and linguistic input by way of counting sequences. These sequences constitute systems with distinct structural properties, the cross-linguistic variability of which has implications for number representation and processing. Such representational effects are scrutinized for two types of verbal numeration systems—general and object-specific ones—that were in parallel (...) use in several Oceanic languages. The analysis indicates that the object-specific systems outperform the general systems with respect to counting and mental arithmetic, largely due to their regular and more compact representation. What these findings reveal on cognitive diversity, how the conjectures involved speak to more general issues in cognitive science, and how the approach taken here might help to bridge the gap between anthropology and other cognitive sciences is discussed in the conclusion. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that doxastic responsibility, i.e., responsibility for holding a certain doxastic attitude, is not based on direct doxastic control. There are two different kinds of direct doxastic control to be found in the literature, intentional doxastic control and evaluative doxastic control. Although many epistemologists agree that we do not have intentional doxastic control over our doxastic attitudes, it has been argued that we have evaluative doxastic control over the majority of our doxastic attitudes. (...) This has led to the assumption that doxastic responsibility is based on evaluative doxastic control. In the first part of this paper I will introduce the notion of doxastic responsibility and the framework of doxastic guidance control as well as the approaches to direct and indirect doxastic control. I will then argue that doxastic responsibility is not based on direct doxastic control by showing that doxastic responsibility is neither based on intentional nor on evaluative doxastic control. (shrink)

The current Covid-19 pandemic is illustrative of both the need of more experts and of the difficulties that can arise in the face of their decisions. This happens, we argue, because experts usually interact with society through a strongly naturalistic framework, which often places experts’ epistemic authority (understood as neutrality and objectivity) at the centre, sometimes at the expenses of other pluralistic values (such as axiological ones) that people (often non-experts) cherish. In this paper, we argue that we need to (...) supplement such a strong naturalistic framework used to promote epistemic authority with a number of virtues -both intellectual and ethical- which include i. intellectual humility, ii. courage, iii. wisdom and cares, as well as iv. relational autonomy. To illustrate this claim, we discuss these ideas in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and analyse a set of real-life examples where important decisions have been delegated to experts merely based on their epistemic authority. We use the illustrative failures described in the case studies above-mentioned to call for a revision of current understandings of expertise (merely based on epistemic soundness). Specifically, we argue that in social contexts we increasingly need “experts in action”; that is, people with certified specialist knowledge, who can however translate it into practical suggestions, decisions, and/or public policies that are ethically more balanced and that ultimately lead to fairer, more inclusive, and more representative decisions. (shrink)

Free will is usually defined by three conditions: the ability to do otherwise; control of one’s own choices; responsiveness to reasons. The compatibility of free will with determinism lies at the heart of the philosophical debate at the metaphysical level. This debate, while being increasingly refined, has not yet reached a conclusion. Recently, neuroscience and empirical psychology have tried to settle the problem of free will with a series of experiments that go in the direction of so-called illusionism: free will (...) as the conscious control of our behavior cannot exist, being a mere illusion. But even in this case, the experimental results are challenged at various levels. Considering that in most moral and legal systems, the subject’s liability derives from their freedom, the usefulness of preserving the concept of freedom – which incidentally responds to a very strong commonsensical intuition – suggests the need for an operational solution. This could be done by resorting to the concepts of capacity and cognitive control, which are measured by a set of well-established neuropsychological tests. Our preliminary proposal is to create an index, the first step towards a specific quantification and measurement of free will, to be used especially in ethical and legal contexts. Theoretical premises, practical difficulties and objections to this approach are also discussed and addressed. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on conceptual change by engaging in direct theoretical and empirical comparison of contrasting views. We take up the question of whether naïve physical ideas are coherent or fragmented, building specifically on recent work supporting claims of coherence with respect to the concept of force by Ioannides and Vosniadou [Ioannides, C., & Vosniadou, C. (2002). The changing meanings of force. Cognitive Science Quarterly 2, 5–61]. We first engage in a theoretical inquiry on the (...) nature of coherence and fragmentation, concluding that these terms are not well‐defined, and proposing a set of issues that may be better specified. The issues have to do with contextuality, which concerns the range of contexts in which a concept (meaning, model, theory) applies, and relational structure, which is how elements of a concept (meaning, model, or theory) relate to one another. We further propose an enhanced theoretical and empirical accountability for what and how much one needs to say in order to have specified a concept. Vague specification of the meaning of a concept can lead to many kinds of difficulties.Empirically, we conducted two studies. A study patterned closely on Ioannides and Vosniadou's work (which we call a quasi‐replication) failed to confirm their operationalizations of “coherent.” An extension study, based on a more encompassing specification of the concept of force, showed three kinds of results: (1) Subjects attend to more features than mentioned by Ioannides and Vosniadou, and they changed answers systematically based on these features; (2)We found substantial differences in the way subjects thought about the new contexts we asked about, which undermined claims for homogeneity within even the category of subjects (having one particular meaning associated with “force”) that best survived our quasi‐replication; (3) We found much reasoning of subjects about forces that cannot be accounted for by the meanings specified by Ioannides and Vosniadou. All in all, we argue that, with a greater attention to contextuality and with an appropriately broad specification of the meaning of a concept like force, Ioannides and Vosniadou's claims to have demonstrated coherence seem strongly undermined. Students' ideas are not random and chaotic; but neither are they simply described and strongly systematic. (shrink)

Individuals with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulties in the recollection of past experiences (Episodic Memory). Accumulating evidence suggests that they might have also difficulties in the ability to imagine potential future scenarios (Episodic Future Thinking, EFT) and in narrative generation skills. This investigation aimed to determine 1) whether impairments of EFT can be identified in a large cohort of children with high functioning ASD using a task with minimal narrative demands; and 2) if such impairments are related to the (...) ability to generate a narrative's scenario. 77 children with high-functioning ASD and 77 children with typical development were recruited for the study. The two groups were balanced for age, level of formal education, and IQ. EFT was assessed by administering a task with minimal narrative demands, whereas narrative generation skills were assessed with three tasks requiring children to generate past, middle or future episodes in a narrative discourse. With respect to control participants, a subgroup of children with ASD had impaired EFT skills and also showed significant impairments in the ability to generate adequate narratives. On the contrary, participants with spared EFT had normal performance on the narrative generation task. Interestingly, EFT skills predicted narrative generation abilities in both groups. The results of this study support the hypothesis that EFT may be impaired in some but not all children with ASD and of a relation between difficulties with EFT and impairments in the process of narrative generation. The assessment of EFT should employ tasks that do not require narrative production, as children with impaired EFT may also have reduced narrative skills. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the primacy of the present in Husserl’s philosophy is not an unquestioned ballast inherited from the tradition of metaphysics but rather a genuinely phenomenological discovery. First, I explore the present of things and argue that the phenomenological primacy of the present in this domain should be understood in terms of what Husserl calls “affection.” Strictly speaking originary affection and associative syntheses (as the most basic phenomena for the givenness of things) can only take place (...) in the present or starting from the present. Second, I consider the present in the egological sphere and analyze its primacy for both the transcendental and the personal ego. Finally, I move to the experience of the other and argue that only the perception of the other’s body in the present gives rise to an authentic empathic experience as the experience of the other’s governing in his own body. (shrink)