In this paper we show the embedding of Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programs into the rather general framework of Residuated Logic Programs, where the main results of (definite) logic programming are validly extrapolated, namely the extension of the immediate consequences operator of van Emden and Kowalski. The importance of this result is that for the first time a framework encompassing several quite distinct logic programming semantics is described, namely Generalized Annotated Logic Programs, Fuzzy Logic Programming, Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programs, and Possibilistic (...) Logic Programming. Moreover, the embedding provides a more general semantical structure paving the way for defining paraconsistent probabilistic reasoning with a logic programming semantics. (shrink)

O presente livro é um projeto corajoso e desafiador, mas um projeto já bem sucedido, pois não é sempre que em nosso país um livro acadêmico deste tipo chegue a uma segunda edição. É corajoso por convidar o leitor para dialogar com os autores e com duas escolas importantes da filosofia e da psicologia que são em geral mal compreendidas. É desafiador tanto para os autores quanto para seus leitores, pois o behaviorismo radical de Skinner (ou seu comportamentalismo, como os (...) autores preferem) e o pragmatismo americano têm sido alvos de críticas que desconhecem seus fundamentos. Aproximar as ideias de Skinner, atualizando-as, daquelas dos pragmatistas, principalmente Dewey, Mead e, mais recentemente, Rorty, presta um inestimável serviço para a filosofia e para a psicologia. O diálogo que este livro propõe aborda temas que parecem extrapolar o domínio do tipo de psicologia experimental cujos fundamentos Skinner lançou e explorou em sua longa carreira. Mas esses temas são também objeto das reflexões de Skinner, sendo que seu texto em que isso é mais flagrante é o livro Beyond Freedom and Dignity (traduzido no Brasil com o título de O mito da liberdade). Os temas relativos à organização da sociedade, da convivência humana em larga escala, os temas éticos e políticos, não estão fora do escopo das considerações de Skinner e dos pragmatistas sobre o comportamento e a ação humana em geral. E este livro nos convida a explorar também este rico universo de conceitos e questões. Ao aceitar o convite dos autores para este diálogo, o leitor vai lidar com ideias das quais a filosofia tem se ocupado desde sempre (e Aristoteles é lembrado pelos autores mais de uma vez), mas que têm sido tratados com muita timidez pela psicologia, temas como a identidade pessoal e a liberdade. Mas para entendermos bem o behaviorismo radical, devemos refletir também sobre esses assuntos. -/- Luiz Henrique de Araújo Dutra UFSC/UnB/CNPq. (shrink)

In this paper we show the embedding of Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programs into the rather general framework of Residuated Logic Programs, where the main results of (definite) logic programming are validly extrapolated, namely the extension of the immediate consequences operator of van Emden and Kowalski. The importance of this result is that for the first time a framework encompassing several quite distinct logic programming semantics is described, namely Generalized Annotated Logic Programs, Fuzzy Logic Programming, Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programs, and Possibilistic (...) Logic Programming. Moreover, the embedding provides a more general semantical structure paving the way for defining paraconsistent probabilistic reasoning with a logic programming semantics. (shrink)

Statistical Default Logic (SDL) is an expansion of classical (i.e., Reiter) default logic that allows us to model common inference patterns found in standard inferential statistics, e.g., hypothesis testing and the estimation of a population‘s mean, variance and proportions. This paper presents an embedding of an important subset of SDL theories, called literal statistical default theories, into stable model semantics. The embedding is designed to compute the signature set of literals that uniquely distinguishes each extension on a statistical default theory (...) at a pre-assigned error-bound probability. (shrink)

This essay explores some possibilities brought by the question about philosophy’s utility for science. We point to some arguments in favor of the importance of philosophy for science in general and Behavior Analysis in particular. We argue that philosophy is the consciousness of science. Without philosophical consciousness, science incurs epistemological naiveties; it uncritically defends scientific neutrality; it risks turning into a mere technique in the service of ideologies that endangers science’s existence. As the philosophy of Behavior Analysis, Radical Behaviorism can (...) play the role of conscience of that science. (shrink)

Modelos neurocognitivos têm sido propostos para investigar a consciência. O objetivo é responder à pergunta sobre como o cérebro é capaz de produzir estados conscientes qualitativos. Os modelos são representações teóricas baseadas em algumas pesquisas empíricas. Contudo, a questão central, aparentemente trivial para alguns autores, refere-se à representatividade e confiabilidade dos modelos, i.e., saber se são capazes de explicar como a consciência emerge de processos neurais. Esses modelos são considerados como guia no estudo científico da consciência: os modelos cognitivos de (...) Dennett e Baars, os modelos neurobiológicos de Edelman, Dehaene et al., de Damásio, e o modelo neurodinâmico proposto por Freeman. O presente texto visa a analisar a coerência e a plausibilidade dos modelos, i.e., se realmente explicam a “consciência” e suas propriedades em termos neurais ou se explicam apenas mecanismos neurobiológicos subjacentes no cérebro. O objetivo é avaliar escopo e limites dos modelos além da aplicabilidade na resolução do problema da consciência. Neurocognitive models are proposed in order to study the problem of consciousness. The models are attempts to answer the question of how the brain can generate conscious and qualitative states. Models are theoretical representations based on empirical data. Nonetheless, the central question concerns the reliability and the representativeness of the models, i.e., whether they in fact represent what they are supposed to explain, viz., how consciousness can emerge from neuronal processes. Such models are taken to be a guide for the scientific study of consciousness. Presently, there are six models: the multiple draft, the global workspace, the dynamic core, the global neuronal workspace, the somatic markers hypothesis, and the neurodynamic model. This text is a survey and a philosophical analysis of the models of consciousness, and it considers their plausibility and coherence. I will concentrate on two points: whether the neuroscientific models are able to explain ‘consciousness’ and its properties in neural terms, or whether the models only explain the neural correlates of conscious states, and the scope, limitations and applicability of the models in the attempt to solve the problem of consciousness. (shrink)

No presente artigo, analisamos as abordagens de António Damásio e Gerald Edelman sobre a consciência e fazemos um paralelo com as teses apresentadas pelo filósofo John Searle. Recorremos também às críticas dos filósofos Bennett e Hacker como pedras de toque da viabilidade de algumas teses. Desse modo, apresentamos uma revisão sistemática da obra de Damásio, Edelman e Searle, a fim de promover um diálogo produtivo entre as ideias defendidas por estes autores, os quais, segundo nossa interpretação, assumem uma (...) teoria do campo unificado da consciência. (shrink)

Se analiza el debate entre Eleonore Stump y Antonio Damasio respecto de dos posibles modelos de autorregulación que hoy día se asignan a la neuroética, neuropolítica y neuroeconomía a la hora de correlacionar la mente y el cerebro, a saber: o bien se sigue el modelo híbrido de tipo monista que utilizó Spinoza, siguiendo a su vez la interpretación materialista eliminativa de Antonio Damasio, para de este modo lograr corregir el «error» neurocientífico de Descartes, ya previamente denunciado por Popper y (...) Eccles; o bien se recurre a un modelo dualista de integración vital entre la mente y el cerebro, como el de Tomás de Aquino y aún antes Aristóteles, siguiendo a su vez la interpretación jerarquizada, interactiva y deliberativa de Eleonore Stump. Además, también se pretende mostrar la superioridad de este segundo materialismo vitalista sobre aquel otro meramente eliminativo a la hora de correlacionar mente y cerebro con ayuda de estos tres saberes.It is analysed the debate between Eleonore Stump and Antonio Damasio concerning two possible models of auto-regulation that today are assigned to the neuro-ethic, neuropolitic and neuro-economy when correlating the mind and the brain, with two possibilities: Or it follows the hybrid model of monist type that used Spinoza, following at the same time the Damasio’s eliminative materialist interpretation, for in this way attaining to correct the Descartes’s neuro-scientific «error»; or it is resorted to a dualist model of vital integration between the mind and the brain, as the one of Aquinas and still before Aristotle, following at the same time the Stump’s hierarchical, interactive and deliberative interpretation. Besides, it also attempts to show the superiority of this second vital materialism on that another merely eliminative when correlating relate mind and brain with the help of these three sciences. (shrink)

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)

Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

Scientists are rapidly mapping the chemical and physical pathways that constitute biological systems, making the complexity of processes such as inheritance, development, evolution, and even the origin of life increasingly tractable. Through genetics and neuroscience, biological understanding is now being extended deeply into the human sciences and has begun to transform our understanding of behavior, mind, culture, and values. The idea of a science-driven unity of knowledge has reemerged in several forms in both reductionist and nonreductionist frameworks. This volume examines (...) some of the extraordinary empirical discoveries that have caused a revival of this idea and presents theories from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, including E. O. Wilson, Eric Kandel, and Elaine Scarry. (shrink)

Damasio, an eminent neuroscientist explores the science of human emotion and what the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza can teach of how and why we feel. Damasio shows how joy and sorrow, those most defining of human feelings, are in fact the cornerstones of our survival and culture.

Inspired by Farshad Zahedi’s audiovisual essay The Petrified Object and the Poetics of Time in Cinema, this article briefly presents three philosophical approaches to cinema’s ways of expressing time – as articulated by Bergson, Tarkovsky, and Deleuze – and questions how absolute time and chronological time are brought to a state of crisis by this modern form of art.

From one of the world's leading neuroscientists--a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of the phenomenon of consciousness. In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the question of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings in neurobiology, psychology, and AI have given us the necessary tools to solve its mystery. Now, he not only elucidates its myriad aspects, but presents his analysis and insights in a way that is faithful to our own intuitive sense of (...) the experience of consciousness. In the 45 brief chapters of the book, he helps us understand the relation between consciousness and mind; why being conscious is not the same as either being awake or sensing; the essential role of feeling; and the biological brain and development of consciousness. He synthesizes the recent findings of various sciences with the outlook of philosophy, and, most significantly, presents his original research which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understanding consciousness, the fundamental human capacity for informing--and transforming--our experience of the world around us and our perception of our place in it. (shrink)

Grandes plumes de la science-fiction française ayant participé en 2017 à une anthologie de nouvelles devenue « culte », Au Bal des actifs, Demain le travail, Alain Damasio, Catherine Dufour et Norbert Merjagnan défendent tous trois les principes d’un revenu universel contre la précarisation généralisée du travail salarié. Aujourd’hui plus que jamais, tous trois revendiquent le caractère émancipateur qu’aurait sa mise en place. C’est le message de cette conversation, navigant sans cesse entre dystopie et utopie, et au final pas si (...) pessimiste que ça…. (shrink)

This paper extends earlier work by its authors on formal aspects of the processes of contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition and revising a theory to introduce a proposition. In the course of the earlier work, Gardenfors developed general postulates of a more or less equational nature for such processes, whilst Alchourron and Makinson studied the particular case of contraction functions that are maximal, in the sense of yielding a maximal subset of the theory (or alternatively, of one of (...) its axiomatic bases), that fails to imply the proposition being eliminated. In the present paper, the authors study a broader class, including contraction functions that may be less than maximal. Specifically, they investigate "partial meet contraction functions", which are defined to yield the intersection of some nonempty family of maximal subsets of the theory that fail to imply the proposition being eliminated. Basic properties of these functions are established: it is shown in particular that they satisfy the Gardenfors postulates, and moreover that they are sufficiently general to provide a representation theorem for those postulates. Some special classes of partial meet contraction functions, notably those that are "relational" and "transitively relational", are studied in detail, and their connections with certain "supplementary postulates" of Gardenfors investigated, with a further representation theorem established. (shrink)

One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, Rovelli examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the 21-year-old Werner Heisenberg first developed quantum theory, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be (...) magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercly debate the theory's meaning, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships, not substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for understanding the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better understand our place in it. (shrink)

In this article, Carlos Pereda introduces the concept of “colonial reason” and explores how philosophical practices and modes of thought are entwined with colonial political structures of exploitation, exclusion, and oppression. Pereda argues that philosophy in Latin America risks perpetuating and reinforcing the colonial gesture, either by turning to the European centers of thought (thus pursuing debates that always take place elsewhere) or by isolating itself and idealising the “own.” According to Pereda, both approaches fail to dismantle colonial violence (...) within philosophy. In his alternative approach, Pereda outlines principles and methodological criteria for the decolonisation of reason and philosophy. He emphasises the importance of methodological prudence that discerns between innocent, paralysing, and strategic uses of identity expressions and advocates for modes of reading and argumentation that conceive philosophy as an inclusive and ongoing dialogue. In Pereda’s terminology, this entails fostering “permeable reason” that manifests itself through “nomadic thinking,” a form of thinking that is capable of questioning itself and being questioned. (shrink)

The essays in this volume concern the topic of legal rights, how they are related to morality, the place of rights on moral theory, and the legal recognition of rights.

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored.Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerised lexicons for the automatic (...) treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects. (shrink)

After presenting Kripke’s criticism to Frege’s ideas on context dependence of thoughts, I present two recent attempts of considering cognitive aspects of context dependent expressions inside a truth conditional pragmatics or semantics: Recanati’s non-descriptive modes of presentation (MOPs) and Kaplan’s ways of having in mind (WHIMs). After analysing the two attempts and verifying which answers they should give to the problem discussed by Kripke, I suggest a possible interpretation of these attempts: to insert a procedural or algorithmic level in semantic (...) representations of indexicals. That a function may be computed by different procedures might suggest new possibilities of integrating contextual cognitive aspects in model theoretic semantic. (shrink)

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time offers an innovative philosophical account of the most fundamental kinds of time representation.

Effective vaccines for COVID‐19 are already available to humankind. In Peru, 86 million doses were administered to cover the demand for 33 million Peruvian people. Hence, vaccination has been prioritized in groups: health personnel, subjects with pre‐existing health conditions and those over 65 years of age. However, given the social problems and the public health situation in Peru, this work defends that the priority of vaccination should be focused on the population living in extreme poverty. The method used was an (...) ethical argumentation on the distribution of scarce antiSARS‐CoV2 vaccine in Peru. This argument is based on the analysis of the Peruvian population living in extreme poverty, which presents different layers of vulnerability, and that, in the face of an eventual SARS‐CoV2 infection, these would be exacerbated one after the other, through a cascade effect. This scenario would give rise to new vulnerabilities to those already existing, causing greater damage. Vaccination efforts on this key population would give them the opportunity to continue to find ways to bring food to their homes, significantly reducing the risk of contagion in their environment and mitigating the devastating effect of the local diseases to which they are already exposed. Four objections related to this argument are raised with their corresponding responses. Priority access to the vaccine would significantly reduce the humanitarian harm to people living in extreme poverty, prevailing the principles of justice and equity. (shrink)