RESUMEN Las investigaciones en el campo de la teoría de la comunicación apuntan a que en la actualidad el proceso es, desde lo social, una vía para el logro de las relaciones interpersonales y posee sus potencialidades estratégicas para la construcción social y cultural del hombre. Se realizó una revisión bibliográfica para el acercamiento inicial al estudio de las temáticas de la comunicación social en salud y la prevención de enfermedades en la comunidad. Por ello el objetivo del presente trabajo (...) estriba en establecer los fundamentos teóricos que sustentan el estudio de las relaciones entre la comunicación en salud y la concreción del trabajo preventivo desde la comunidad. Se defiende que la comunicación social en salud promueve el diálogo y el intercambio de información y es un componente imprescindible de todos los servicios de salud. ABSTRACT Research on the theoretical basis of communication point to the fact that nowadays, the process is, from a social point of view, a means of achieving interpersonal relationships and it has strategic potential toward men’s social and cultural construction. A bibliographic review was carried out in order to approach the study of subject matters related to social communication in health and disease prevention in the community. Therefore, this paper aims at stablishing the theoretical basis that support the study of the relationship between communication in health and the implementation of precautionary work from the community. It is defended that social communication in health promotes dialogue and information exchange and it is an essential element in all health services. (shrink)

Philosophy of biology before biology -/- Edited by Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe -/- Table of contents -/- Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. Introduction -/- 1. Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. The idea of “philosophy of biology before biology”: a methodological provocation -/- Part I. FORM AND DEVELOPMENT -/- 2. Stéphane Schmitt. Buffon’s theories of generation and the changing dialectics of molds and molecules 3. Phillip Sloan. Metaphysics and “Vital” Materialism: The Gabrielle Du Châtelet Circle and French (...) Vitalism 4. John Zammito. The Philosophical Reception of C. F. Wolff’s Epigenesis in Germany, 1770-1790: Herder, Tetens and Kant -/- Part II. ORGANISM & ORGANIZATION 5. François Duchesneau. Senebier and the Advent of General Physiology 6. Tobias Cheung. Organization and Process. Living Systems Between Inner and Outer Worlds: Cuvier, Hufeland, Cabanis. -/- Part III. SYSTEMS 7. Georg Toepfer. Philosophy of Ecology Long Before Ecology: Kant’s Idea of an Organized System of Organized Beings 8. Ina Goy. "All is leaf". Goethe's plant philosophy and poetry 9. Snait Gissis. ‘Biology’, Lamarck, Lamarckisms -/- POSTSCRIPTS 1. Lynn Nyhart. A Historical Proposal Around Prepositions -/- 2. Philippe Huneman. Philosophy after Philosophy of Biology before Biology -/- Cécilia Bognon-Küss and Charles T. Wolfe. Conclusion . (shrink)

In this article, we describe a longitudinal inquiry into what it means to be a person in our contemporary world. Our method constitutes a dynamic, non-objectifying fusion of empirical and philosophical anthropology. Field-based anthropology examines actualities: how people lead their lives and talk about them. Philosophical anthropology addresses possibilities: who and what people could become in light of actualities while not being determined by them. We describe and illustrate our fieldwork in the classrooms of 16 teachers who work in New (...) York City public schools. We have sought in our observations to identify and think about signs or expressions of persons-in-the-making. We also touch on a series of dinner-discussions we have held with the teachers. These meetings have centered on the question of becoming a person in today’s political and cultural environment, and how education figures into the equation. Finally, we also describe the weekly meetings we have held as a research team, in which we engage the play of concepts and percepts. We close with remarks on the conceptual and existential ties that can link philosophy and fieldwork in schools. (shrink)

This article explores the motives underlying corporate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis begins with Thomas Dunfee’s Statement of Minimum Moral Obligation, which specifies, more precisely than any other contribution to the business ethics canon, the level of corporate beneficence required during a pandemic. The analysis then turns to Milton Friedman’s neoliberal understanding of human nature, critically contrasting it with the notion of stoic virtue that informs the works of Adam Smith. Friedman contends that beneficence should play no role (...) in corporate settings. Smith, by contrast, emphasizes the need for prudence, beneficence and self-command in all human endeavours. The article then uses these competing frameworks to reflect on a published survey of 145 corporate responses to COVID-19. In many of these responses, the benefit to a non-financial stakeholder is clear, while the financial consequence to the firm remains nebulous. This supports the contention that during a pandemic, beneficence provides a more complete explanation of many corporate actions than the profit motive alone. The article contests Friedman’s Chicago School profit imperative and goes beyond Dunfee’s SMMO by endorsing the more full-throated embrace of beneficence and stoic virtue found in the works of Smith. (shrink)

Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or “forces”, over and (...) above the system of causal relations studied by mechanistic science, rejecting the weaker form, organicism, as well. But there has been some significant scholarly “push-back” against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the 18th-century Montpellier vitalists to show that there are different historical forms of vitalism, including how they relate to mainstream scientific practice. Additionally, some trends in recent biology that run counter to genetic reductionism and the informational model of the gene present themselves as organicist. Here, we examine some cases of vitalism in the twentieth century and today, not just as a historical form but as a significant metaphysical and scientific model. We argue for vitalism’s conceptual originality without either reducing it to mainstream models of science or presenting it as an alternate model of science, by focusing on historical forms of vitalism, logical empiricist critiques thereof and the impact of synthetic biology on current theorizing of vitalism. (shrink)

The sense of agency – the subjective feeling of being in control of our own actions – is one central aspect of the phenomenology of action. Computational models provided important contributions toward unveiling the mechanisms underlying the sense of agency in individual action. In particular, the sense of agency is believed to be related to the match between the actual and predicted consequences of our own actions. In the study of joint action, models are even more necessary to understand the (...) mechanisms underlying the development of coordination strategies and how the subjective experiences of control emerge during the interaction. In a joint action, we not only need to predict the consequences of our own actions; we also need to predict the actions and intentions of our partner, and to integrate these predictions to infer their joint consequences. Understanding our partner and developing mutually satisfactory coordination strategies are key components of joint action and in the development of the sense of joint agency. Here we discuss a computational architecture which addresses the sense of agency during intentional, real-time joint action. We first reformulate previous accounts of the sense of agency in probabilistic terms, as the combination of prior beliefs about the action goals and constraints, and the likelihood of the predicted movement outcomes. To look at the sense of joint agency, we extend classical computational motor control concepts - optimal estimation and optimal control. Regarding estimation, we argue that in joint action the players not only need to predict the consequences of their own actions, but also need to predict partner’s actions and intentions and to integrate these predictions to infer their joint consequences. As regards action selection, we use differential game theory – in which actions develop in continuous space and time - to formulate the problem of establishing a stable form of coordination and as a natural extension of optimal control to joint action. The resulting model posits two concurrent observer-controller loops, accounting for ‘joint’ and ‘self’ action control. The two observers quantify the likelihoods of being in control alone or jointly. Combined with prior beliefs, they provide weighing signals which are used to modulate the ‘joint’ and ‘self’ motor commands. We argue that these signals can be interpreted as the subjective sense of joint and self agency. We demonstrate the model predictions by simulating a sensorimotor interactive task where two players are mechanically coupled and are instructed to perform planar movements to reach a shared final target by crossing two differently located intermediate targets. In particular, we explore the relation between self and joint agency and the information available to each player about their partner. The proposed model provides a coherent picture of the inter-relation of prediction, control, and the sense of agency in a broader range of joint actions. (shrink)

El perfeccionamiento del desempeño profesional del laboratorista clínico constituye una necesidad, por lo que el objetivo de la investigación fue elaborar una estrategia para la superación profesional del tecnólogo de la salud en laboratorio clínico a partir de la integración con las ciencias básicas biomédicas. La estrategia se efectuó en la Facultad de Tecnología de la Salud de Camagüey. Su factibilidad fue valorada por expertos y la validación se llevó a cabo con un pre experimento pedagógico que se desarrolló en (...) el curso 2014- 2015. Los resultados corroboran su efectividad. The improvement in professional performance of clinical lab technicians is a continuous necessity. As such, the aim of the research was to develop a strategy for achieving improved professional development for health technologists specialized in clinical laboratory practices through integration with basic biomedical sciences. The study was conducted at the School of Health Technology in Camagüey. Its feasibility was assessed by experts and validation was performed with a pre-pedagogical experiment that developed during the 2014- 2015 academic year. Results confirm the effectiveness of the strategy as developed within the scope of the study. (shrink)

Escritos por onze renomados filósofos os ensaios pretendem, de forma acessível e didática, explicitar as principais tendências e perspectivas da reflexão ética contemporânea. Indicado a estudantes e docentes de filosofia ética, teologia, sociologia e interessados em geral. -/- Prefàcio 1.Tendencias neoaristotelicas na etica atual - Sergio Cremaschi 2. Alasdair MacIntyre e o retorno as tradicoes morais de pesquisa racional - Helder Buenos Aires de Carvalho 3. Etica da finitude - Zeljko Loparic 4. Por uma etica ilustrada e progressista: uma defesa (...) do utilitarismo - Maria Cecilia Maringoni de Carvalho 5. A relacao da filosofia analitica com a teologia moral - Terence Kennedy 6. Rawls: uma teoria etico-politica da justica - Sonia T. Felipe 7. Etica do discurso - F. Javier Herrero 8. Hans Jonas: o principio responsabilidade - Oswaldo Giacoia Junior 9. Etica de coerencia dialetica - Carlos Cirne-Lima 10. Etica intencionalista-teleologica em vittorio hosle - Manfredo Araujo de Oliveira. (shrink)

Parental burnout is a unique and context-specific syndrome resulting from a chronic imbalance of risks over resources in the parenting domain. The current research aims to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Parental Burnout Assessment across Spanish-speaking countries with two consecutive studies. In Study 1, we analyzed the data through a bifactor model within an Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling on the pooled sample of participants obtaining good fit indices. We then attained measurement invariance across both gender (...) and countries in a set of nested models with gradually increasing parameter constraints. Latent means comparisons across countries showed that among the participants’ countries, Chile had the highest parental burnout score, likewise, comparisons across gender evidenced that mothers displayed higher scores than fathers, as shown in previous studies. Reliability coefficients were high. In Study 2, we tested the relations between parental burnout and three specific consequences, i.e., escape and suicidal ideations, parental neglect, and parental violence toward one’s children. The medium to large associations found provided support for the PBA’s predictive validity. Overall, we concluded that the Spanish version of the PBA has good psychometric properties. The results support its relevance for the assessment of parental burnout among Spanish-speaking parents, offering new opportunities for cross-cultural research in the parenting domain. (shrink)

Top scholars examine the work of Donald T. Campbell, one of the first to emphasize the social structure of science.

A common view is that ceteris paribus clauses render lawlike statements vacuous, unless such clauses can be explicitly reformulated as antecedents of ?real? laws that face no counterinstances. But such reformulations are rare; and they are not, we argue, to be expected in general. So we defend an alternative sufficient condition for the non-vacuity of ceteris paribus laws: roughly, any counterinstance of the law must be independently explicable, in a sense we make explicit. Ceteris paribus laws will carry a plethora (...) of explanatory commitments; and claims that such commitments are satisfied will be as (dis) confirmable as other empirical claims. (shrink)

Responding to Allen and Bekoff's (this issue) critique of Heyes and Dickinson's (1990) analysis of the intentionality of animal action, we reiterate that our approach does not assume that a hypothesis can be definitively falsified by the results of a single experiment, and argue that the evolutionary analysis favoured by Allen and Bekoff insulates intentional accounts of animal behaviour from rejection in the usual‘holistic’process of scientific evaluation. Specifically, we present data showing that the maintenance of behaviour on an omission schedule (...) cannot be construed as rational because on these schedules it is reward for withdrawal that restores approach. In addition, we argue that, since behaviour can be affected by the non‐intentional properties of representations such as search images and cognitive maps, whether or not these representations have intentional properties can be assessed empirically only through research on instrumental behaviour. (shrink)

© 2016 Regents of the University of California.The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 3,062 new measurements from 721 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous (...) tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 117 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including those on Pentaquarks and Inflation. The complete Review is published online in a journal and on the website of the Particle Data Group. The printed PDG Book contains the Summary Tables and all review articles but no longer includes the detailed tables from the Particle Listings. A Booklet with the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the review articles is also available. (shrink)

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents’ perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents’ (...) unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism by K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn KirkCecilia Herles (bio)K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk, Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. ISBN- 978-1-7936-3946-2K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk are leading feminist authors who have beautifully woven together an inspiring and diverse collection of essays in the (...) anthology, Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. What does it take to gather together some of the most eloquent voices of activists, teachers, farmers, artists, and organizers in an anthology focused on engaging with and beyond ecowomanism and ecofeminism, and what could this cultivate? I find Hall and Kirk's reflections on the process and their approach to collaboration illustrate some of the tools needed to address complex issues of disasters, the global pandemic, climate justice, white supremacy, gender oppression, and practices of domination. Their approach is to build relationships, acknowledge vulnerability, and appreciate differences in experiences. It seems fitting that this project initially began with Margo Okazawa-Rey who connected Hall and Kirk together. Okazawa-Rey's introduction generated the openness needed to bring this collection to fruition. Mapping as the thematic image of this collection is found in destructive boundary-making, the violence of enslavement, wars, and the dumping of contaminants in the environment. Mapping is also evident in the physical, temporal, and evolving locations in which Okazawa-Rey's work of sustaining community and recognizing interconnections across locations opens up the time and spaces to envision peace.This collection marks a shift away from the elitism of academic spaces by illuminating connections between community and university, and actively resisting against patriarchal notions of what counts as expertise and scholarship. The anthology draws attention to personal experiences as fundamentally relevant to perspectives about place, location, and [End Page 97] belonging and relations with land, water, sky and nonhumans. It begins with an autobiographical account by Hall who brilliantly weaves together her life story with her analytical insight in illustrating how Black geographies show spaces as often hard to map and in flux for the marginalized. In "Darkness All around Me: Black Waters, Land, Animals, and Sky" Hall notes how she is unable to discuss her understanding and relationship with Nature outside of being a Black Woman. When she poses the question, "how would our maps be different if they were rooted in the histories and realities of people of color?" (23) Hall pivots mapping to the contingent, unstable complexities that mark Black people's relations with land and food. In doing so, Hall reveals compelling insights into trauma, anxieties, and relationships with land and water in shifting landscapes. Connecting to the mission of Soul Fire Farm, to resist the US food apartheid and mobilize towards food justice, Hall reveals the possibilities for reparative healing properties in agricultural activities at Soul Fire Farm. Hall's narrative about racialized hierarchies recognizes how human hierarchies are connected to human-nonhuman animal divisions, raising the question of "How might we imagine freeing ourselves and other animals from the systems that seek to devalue us as (human and nonhuman) beings?" (27). Hall intervenes and challenges geographical mapping centered in white frameworks rooted in claims of stolen territories and measured in segregation and displacement. Pointing to Black shoals, Black food geographies, and Afrofuturism, to name a few, Hall is marking potential paths to shared liberation. Although Hall does not identify strongly as ecofeminist nor ecowomanist, this provides a promising direction for ecowomanist and ecofeminist inquiries, speaking to the need to explore what it takes for shared liberation. This direction also has the potential to offer insight into an alternative mapping for disability justice. Hall's acknowledgement of "being out of place" connects to the disability justice work of Sunaura Taylor (2014) and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) in the mapping of access in describing surroundings and focusing on interconnectedness.In Kirk's autobiographical account, "Roots, Branches, Wings" she points to how Margo Okazawa-Rey (2020) introduced her to philosopher Alan Rosenberg's (1998) distinction between knowing and understanding. In contrast to knowing facts that... (shrink)

El relativismo acerca de las atribuciones de conocimiento de John MarFarlane pretende ser una teoría que explica la corrección de las intuiciones centrales que tenemos acerca de ellas. Sin embargo, el relativismo es incompatible con la corrección de algunas intuiciones que tenemos con respecto a casos de Stanley, a conjunciones de estos casos y a casos en los que la situación práctica del evaluador es menos apremiante que la del sujeto o la del emisor de la atribución. Esto, no obstante, (...) no señala un límite a las posibilidades del relativismo, sino que insta a dar versiones más sofisticadas del mismo. MarFarlane's relativism about knowledge attributions aspires to be a theory that explains why the central intuitions about them are correct. Nevertheless, relativism is incompatible with the accuracy of some intuitions about Stanley's cases, with conjunctions of them and with intuitions about cases in which there is less at stake from the assessor than what is at stake from the subject or the attributor. Nevertheless, this doesn't establish a limit to the possibilities of relativism, but calls for an improvement of it. (shrink)

This book draws upon Vygotsky's idea of perezhivanie, emotions and imagination, and introduces the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration. These concepts are crucial for explaining and understanding children's development from a cultural-historical perspective. A book which theorises the relations between the social and the individual through a study of a child's perezhivanie, which analyses emotions more holistically, and advances the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration, is much needed. This book examines the complexity of human development through (...) a comprehensive elaboration of these concepts, allowing for new insights to be put forward. It doesn't always follow the chronological order of Vygotsky's publications, as many of his works remained in the family archives until the 1980s, when his Selected Works were first published in Russian. There has long been a need for a contemporary book on the scholarly treatment of perezhevanie, emotions, and subjectivity, and as such this book revisits dominant representations of these concepts and then puts forward new ways of conceptualising and using them in empirical research. The chapters cover a broad range of case studies where the concepts of perezhivanie, emotions and imagination and subjective sense and subjective configuration are used to give new empirical and theoretical insights into the study of human development. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt at drawing a philosophical picture about Cicero's ideas on after death survival. In spite of the fact that this issue has not been paid much attention in contemporary discussion, it deserves consideration because of its great humanistic value.

In this chapter we argue for biophilosophy as a queerfeminist and posthumanities methodology that attends to the question of life by focusing on multiple differences and transformations, materiality and processuality, as well as relations, intra-actions, and disconnections. By combining both the ontological and ethical concerns that go beyond what is conventionally seen as “life”, biophilosophy offers a critical and innovative approach to the issues of death, extinction, (un) liveability, terminality, and toxicity, among others, which all form the backbone of the (...) environmental crises and changing conditions of life on Earth, often framed as the Anthropocene. In what follows, we first discuss select theorisations and implications of the “life/death” coupling as an ethico-political question; subsequently we elaborate the concept of biophilosophy as a methodology; and finally, we propose two examples where we test biophilosophy as a framework that allows us: (1) to engage with the enmeshment of life and death through the concept of the non/living, and (2) to explore the concept of toxic embodiment as an onto-ethical condition we all (human and non-human) are differentially immersed in. (shrink)

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents' perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents' (...) unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making. (shrink)

This chapter describes some basic, often puzzling features of intentionality, with an eye to its role not so much in ordinary folk ascriptions but in serious psychological explanations, especially in many of Noam Chomsky's own presentations of his theory. It then considers Chomsky's censure of the notion, leading him to deny what would seem to be the explicit intentionalisms on which he seems to rely. Implicit in Chomsky's treatment of grammar is the idea that the positing of the language faculty (...) offers an “abstract” perspective on a physical system (the human brain) that implements the relevant features of the abstracta in ways we currently don’t understand. Two initial problems might be raised for this picture, one regarding inference and the other, generalization. The proposed model is effectively saying that theorists track states and generalizations of the linguistic system in an explicitly representational format, but what the theory is true of need not have such representational properties. (shrink)

Lo studio prende in esame sei questioni di Thomas Wylton sulla visione beatifica e una questione dal Quodlibet di Siberto di Beka, carmelitano, contemporaneo di Wylton. Il saggio confronta in modo analitico le posizioni dei due autori sul ruolo e la necessità del lumen gloriae nella visione beatifica nelle singole questioni di cui si dà a seguito l'edizione. I codici sono V’ = Vat. Borgh. 36; T' = Tortosa 88; S' = Vat. Borgh. 39. L'edizione, posta in appendice allo studio, (...) riguarda le seguenti porzioni testuali: Thomas Wylton, q. 2 [V', ff. 55va-56va]; q. 3 [V', ff. 56va-58ra]; q. 4 [V', ff. 58ra-va] T16 [T', ff. 46ra-48rb]; T19 [T', ff. 50ra-61vb]; T20 [T', ff. 61vb-62vb]; Siberto di Beka, Quodlibet, q. 16 [S', ff. 270va-272vb]. (shrink)

Uncoupling proteins (UCPs) regulate mitochondrial function, and thus cellular metabolism. Angiotensin‐converting enzyme (ACE) is the central component of endocrine and local tissue renin–angiotensin systems (RAS), which also regulate diverse aspects of whole‐body metabolism and mitochondrial function (partly through altering mitochondrial UCP expression). We show that ACE expression also appears to be regulated by mitochondrial UCPs. In genetic analysis of two unrelated populations (healthy young UK men and Scandinavian diabetic patients) serum ACE (sACE) activity was significantly higher amongst UCP3‐55C (rather than (...) T) and UCP2 I (rather than D) allele carriers. RNA interference against UCP2 in human umbilical vein endothelial cells reduced UCP2 mRNA sixfold (P < 0·01) whilst increasing ACE expression within a physiological range (<1·8‐fold at 48 h; P < 0·01). Our findings suggest novel hypotheses. Firstly, cellular feedback regulation may occur between UCPs and ACE. Secondly, cellular UCP regulation of sACE suggests a novel means of crosstalk between (and mutual regulation of) cellular and endocrine metabolism. This might partly explain the reduced risk of developing diabetes and metabolic syndrome with RAS antagonists and offer insight into the origins of cardiovascular disease in which UCPs and ACE both play a role. (shrink)

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

Elsewhere I have argued that standard theories of linguistic competence are committed to taking seriously talk of “representations of” standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”), such as NPs, VPs, morphemes, phonemes, syntactic and phonetic features. However, it is very doubtful there are tokens of these “things” in space and time. Moreover, even if were, their existence would be completely inessential to the needs of either communication or serious linguistic theory. Their existence is an illusion: an extremely stable perceptual state we regularly enter (...) as a result of being stimulated by the wave forms we regularly produce when we execute our intentions to utter such tokens (a view I call “Folieism”). In his Ignorance of Language, Michael Devitt objects to this view, arguing that, “On Rey’s view, communication seems to rest on miraculous guesses.” I argue here that my view is not prey to his objections, and actually affords a scientifically more plausible view than his “empiricist” alternative. Specifically, I reply to his objections that my view couldn’t explain the conventionality of language and success of communication (§2.1), that I am faced with intractable difficulties surrounding the identity of intentional inexistents (§2.2), and that, contrary to my view, SLEs can be relationally defined (§2.3). Not only can Folieism survive Devitt’s objections, but (§3) it also provides a more satisfactory account of the role of linguistic intuitions than the “empirical” account on which he insists. (shrink)

Resumen: El corpus, siendo una herramienta eficaz, se está empleando en múltiples ámbitos, entre los que se encuentran los estudios de traducción. Sin embargo, dicho recurso no se utiliza con mucha frecuencia en las investigaciones traductológicas cuando una de las lenguas en cuestión es chino clásico (la lengua escrita empleada antiguamente en China), y autores que sí hacen estas investigaciones suelen no mencionar los pasos a seguir cuando se trata un corpus paralelo ad hoc. El objetivo del presente artículo es (...) presentar cómo se elabora un corpus paralelo chino clásico-español tomando como ejemplo la novela histórica Romance de los Tres Reinos y sus traducciones al español. Para ello, hemos descrito la problemática de creación y explotación de este tipo de corpus, siguiendo el orden de las fases del proceso. Resulta que algunas fases del proceso son universales, mientras que otras son propias de lenguas clásicas y de la combinación lingüística chino-otra lengua, en cuyo caso sí faltan aplicaciones eficaces. Con el trabajo, esperamos deparar información a los estudiosos que quieran realizar y profundizar las investigaciones basadas en corpus paralelo y en las obras clásicas de China. Abstract: The corpus, being an effective tool, is utilized in multiple fields. One of them is the Translation. However, this resource isn´t used frequently in translation studies when one of the languages in question is classical chinese (written language used anciently in China). And when it comes to an ad hoc parallel corpus, the steps of how to create it are usually omitted by researchers who make such investigations. The objective of this article is to present how to elaborate a classic Chinese-Spanish parallel corpus taking as example the historic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and its two translations into Spanish. To reach the objective, we have described the problem of creation and exploitation of this type of corpus, following the order of the phases of the process. We’ve found that some of the phases are universal while other phases are unique for old languages and for the linguistic combination Chinese-other language. And in this latter case, there’s a lack of effective applications. With the current work, we hope to offer useful information to those scholars who are willing to carry out their own investigations based on self-built parallel corpus and at the same time related to the classic Chinese works. (shrink)

Shoemaker (1996) presented a priori arguments against the possibility of ‘self-blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we (...) make about the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case of only our own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self- blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that the a priori arguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self-attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub-routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal. (shrink)

In asking what it means to be an empiricist, the present volume does not seek to provide a definitive or authoritative introduction to the foundation and establishment of empiricism. Instead, our objectives are to deconstruct some misleading preconceptions and to propose some new perspectives on this much used but still somehow ambiguous concept. It marks the beginning of a new reflection rather than a conclusion.Throughout this volume, we aim to present empiricism as the result of two parallel dialogues. First, it (...) was born out of an exchange between several distinct observational and experimental traditions in Europe. We therefore advocate speaking in the plural about empirical methods, underlining the distinctions between local uses and grand, national standards, while also highlighting the complex discussion around the values and norms of empiricism.Secondly, it emerged as part of a dialog between several positions within the theory of knowledge which for too long have been reduced to a simple dualism. The most important lesson to be learned from the eighteenth century is that there wasn’t such a thing as a war between rationalism and empiricism, but rather a constant attempt to accommodate both. This forces us to conceive of a more complex and fruitful relationship, but also a much more interesting one. (shrink)

Pets are truly great companions. Some individuals feel that owning a pet can help them prepare for a growing family by giving them a taste of what it would be like to have children. This study also looks into the psychological well-being and life experiences of LGBT fur parents. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) With the presence of fur babies, participants had the ease to overcome stressful events, especially the ones that affect their (...) mental health. With these, they have the desire to take care of their fur babies under all circumstances because they see their fur babies as family members. Fur babies are excellent sources of motivation, confidence, and happiness for fur parents. They are treated as family members because they contribute to the mental and emotional aspects of fur parents. Moreover, the majority of respondents valued their pets far more than their actual family members, however, some didn't spend as much time with their relatives and friends. This study comes to the conclusion that a stronger bond with one's dog was also linked to higher anxiety about being unloved and rejected by family members and people surrounding us, which was linked to a heavier impact on one's psychological well-being. In reality, fur parents, especially LGBT parents, offer their fur babies a lot of love and attention compared to other things. (shrink)

One would have thought that Fodor's justly famous computational views about the mind and his covariation approaches to content owed a lot to the twentieth century that he now reviles. On the other hand, a number of lines he pursues in the target article make one wonder whether he hasn’t perhaps changed his mind about those famous views. Specifically, I argue that his own theory of content is open to the very same objections he raises against ‘sorting’ theories, and that (...) the supposed circularity in implicit definitions of logical particles can easily be avoided by the very functional/computational definitions that he fathered decades ago. Fodor's rejection here of sorting and implicit definition does make one worry that he is now opting for what seems the only atomistic alternative that would seem to be left, the first‐person meaning mysticism of the very Cartesian sort he now claims to favor, but from which I would have thought twentieth century role and discrimination views were a welcome relief. Despite all these worries, however, I concede that one could probably do worse than assume for the nonce that meaning is atomic, or, anyway, unanalyzed, and get on with investigating the mind on that basis—but keeping the options open. (shrink)