8 March, now known as International Women’s Day, is a day for feminist claims where demonstrations are organized in over 150 countries, with the participation of millions of women all around the world. These demonstrations can be viewed as collective rituals and thus focus attention on the processes that facilitate different psychosocial effects. This work aims to explore the mechanisms involved in participation in the demonstrations of 8 March 2020, collective and ritualized feminist actions, and their correlates associated with personal (...) well-being and collective well-being, collective efficacy and collective growth, and behavioral intention to support the fight for women’s rights. To this end, a cross-cultural study was conducted with the participation of 2,854 people from countries in Latin America and Europe, with a retrospective correlational cross-sectional design and a convenience sample. Participants were divided between demonstration participants and non-demonstrators or followers who monitored participants through the media and social networks. Compared with non-demonstrators and with males, female and non-binary gender respondents had greater scores in mechanisms and criterion variables. Further random-effects model meta-analyses revealed that the perceived emotional synchrony was consistently associated with more proximal mechanisms, as well as with criterion variables. Finally, sequential moderation analyses showed that proposed mechanisms successfully mediated the effects of participation on every criterion variable. These results indicate that participation in 8M marches and demonstrations can be analyzed through the literature on collective rituals. As such, collective participation implies positive outcomes both individually and collectively, which are further reinforced through key psychological mechanisms, in line with a Durkheimian approach to collective rituals. (shrink)

... With those who identify happiness [faring happily or well] with virtue or some one virtue our account is in harmony; for to virtue belongs virtuous activity. But it makes, perhaps, no small difference whether we place the chief good in possession or in use, in state of mind or in activity. For the state of mind may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the activity (...) cannot; for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well. And as in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete, so those who act win, and rightly win, the noble and good things in life. (shrink)

Research Integrity (RI) is high on the agenda of both institutions and science policy. The European Union as well as national ministries of science have launched ambitious initiatives to combat misconduct and breaches of research integrity. Often, such initiatives entail attempts to regulate scientific behavior through guidelines that institutions and academic communities can use to more easily identify and deal with cases of misconduct. Rather than framing misconduct as a result of an information deficit, we instead conceptualize Questionable Research Practices (...) (QRPs) as attempts by researchers to reconcile epistemic and social forms of uncertainty in knowledge production. Drawing on previous literature, we define epistemic uncertainty as the inherent intellectual unpredictability of scientific inquiry, while social uncertainty arises from the human-made conditions for scientific work. Our core argument—developed on the basis of 30 focus group interviews with researchers across different fields and European countries—is that breaches of research integrity can be understood as attempts to loosen overly tight coupling between the two forms of uncertainty. Our analytical approach is not meant to relativize or excuse misconduct, but rather to offer a more fine-grained perspective on what exactly it is that researchers want to accomplish by engaging in it. Based on the analysis, we conclude by proposing some concrete ways in which institutions and academic communities could try to reconcile epistemic and social uncertainties on a more collective level, thereby reducing incentives for researchers to engage in misconduct. (shrink)

Survey results are in the first instance utterances, which require interpretation. Moreover, when the results seem to involve disagreement in intuitive responses to a thought experiment, the results are most directly responsive to the scenario as envisaged by the particular subject, where the text of the example can give rise to relevantly different scenarios, depending on how the scenario is shaped by the subjects involved, under the guidance of the text. All of this opens up a defense of intuitions against (...) results that ostensibly imply extensive intuitive disagreement based on cultural or socio-economic background. Critics of the armchair have replied to this defense in recent publications. This paper takes up some of those replies. (shrink)

There are widespread calls for increased demographic diversity in science, often linked to the epistemic claim that including more perspectives will improve the quality of the knowledge produced. By distinguishing between demographic and epistemic diversity, we show that this is only true some of the time. There are cases where increasing demographic diversity will not bring about the necessary epistemic diversity and cases where failing to exclude some voices reduces the quality of the scientific debate. We seek to resolve these (...) tensions with an analysis that turns on the way the experience-based expertise of non-scientists can be absorbed into mainstream science. Mostly it has to be done via what we call ‘virtual diversity’, in which scientists take responsibility for acquiring interactional expertise in the non-scientific expertise-based domains which they consider provide knowledge valuable to the science. We argue that virtual diversity represents the only feasible option in most scenarios, with cases where demographic diversity or full cultural mergers provide the solution being the exception rather than the rule. This analysis is an exercise in the sociology of knowledge, which is considered as being continuous with philosophy. The paper is prescriptive as well as descriptive, and the moral, cultural, political, and educational implications of the argument are drawn out. A main conclusion is that the acquisition of virtual diversity should be a new norm for science, allowing the voices of experienced non-scientist citizens to be heard but without eroding the institution of science, which continues to be a vital foundation of truth in democracy. (shrink)

Fringe science has been an important topic since the start of the revolution in the social studies of science that occurred in the early 1970s. The revolution was what Collins and Evans refer to as the "second wave of science studies," while this paper is best thought of as an exercise in "third wave science studies." The first wave was that period which reached its apogee in the aftermath of the Second World War when science was seen as unquestionably the (...) pre-eminent form of knowledge-making, and the role of philosophy and sociology was to understand how it was so and how societies could be arranged to nurture it best; the second wave was "social constructionism" which became folded into post-modernism in... (shrink)

In this paper we summarize observations bridging the declared aspirations of pictorial semiotics and its real achievements. Pictorial semiotics is here understood as the general study of pictures as signs and it constituted a fundamental step beyond the art historical captivation with individual images. In the first part of our contribution we present a review of the most important methods that have been proposed as an answer to deal with several pictorial problems (multiple instances, segmentation, non-figurative meaning). In the second (...) part, we offer some positive and on-going implementations designed to remedy the shortcomings observed. What is suggested is the proof of concept that human researchers need the assistance of computing methodologies. However, computers can only do their job once an adequate phenomenology of human experience is fed into the process. (shrink)

Life may turn sour and, in extremis, not worth living. On occasion it may be best, moreover, to lay down one's life for a greater cause. None of this is any news, debatable though it may remain, in general or case by case. Now comes the news that life does not matter in the way we had thought. No resurgence of existentialism, nor tidings from some ancient religion or some new cult, the news derives from the most sober and probing (...) philosophical argument (the extraor- dinary Parfit, 1984, Part III), and takes more precisely the following form: Even though life L is optimal (in all dimensions), and even though if it were extended L would continue to be optimal, it does not follow that it is best to extend it, even for the subject whose life L is. What is the argument? Section II will defend a certain view of the nature of persons and personal identity, and Section III will then argue for the Paradox on that basis, and reflect on its philosophical implications and on the options it presents. (shrink)

True, the believing could not in those cir- cumstances be there the object of belief being there. accept a notion of correspondence or reference according to which a word or a brain state of ours can refer to some external or or independent (This no more forces.

In the paper [8], the first author developped a topos- theoretic approach to reference and modality. (See also [5]). This approach leads naturally to modal operators on locales (or spaces without points). The aim of this paper is to develop the theory of such modal operators in the context of the theory of locales, to axiomatize the propositional modal logics arising in this context and to study completeness and decidability of the resulting systems.

This work analyzes Cartesian doubt as a fundamental element describing the human attitude in modernity from the philosophical field, based on the criteria of Hannah Arendt. Arendt explains that the growth of doubt and science, introspection and the loss of common sense were simultaneous, as well..

Social suffering commands increasing public attention in the wake of several historical processes that have changed the ways victims are perceived. In making suffering eloquent by rendering it in conceptual form, philosophy runs the risk of muting suffering, thereby neutralizing its ability to mobilize responses. In the experience of suffering philosophy finds a limit it must recognize as its own. Yet only by fulfilling its duty towards suffering - only by having the abolition of suffering as its ultimate goal - (...) can philosophical thinking withstand a tacit complicity with injustice. (shrink)

Hace veinte años se publicó en México el ensayo de Walter Benjamin, La obra de arte en su época de reproductibilidad técnica, traducido por Andrés Echeverría Weikert y con un texto introductorio de Bolívar Echeverría, titulado “Arte y utopía” (Editorial Ítaca, México, 2003). Aprovechando la visita de Andrés a la Ciudad de México, quien reside actualmente en Quito, tuvimos la oportunidad de conversar con él sobre algunas cuestiones en torno a las dificultades que implicó la traducción del texto de Benjamin, (...) la importancia de la labor traductiva y de la relevancia de las reflexiones de Benjamin sobre la técnica para nuestro presente. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene el propósito de describir y analizar de manera sistemática la naturaleza de la lógica de la investigación científica que viene principalmente caracterizada por el método científico y el razonamiento o inferencia abductiva propuesta por el filósofo pragmatista Charles Sanders Peirce. El texto inicia con una crítica hacia la postura racionalista de Descartes y trascendentalista de Kant. Prosigue tanto con una explicación de las nociones de “duda” y “creencia” como con una descripción de los métodos para fijar (...) nuestras “creencias” (método de la tenacidad, método de la autoridad, método a priori y método científico). Y concluye con la dilucidación del método científico, cuya naturaleza se encuentra determinada por las tres formas de razonamiento o inferencia: abducción, deducción e inducción. (shrink)

Hubo pensadores que supieron leer en su tiempo signos de la catástrofe venidera. No eran profetas sino finos analistas. Nos referimos a Rosenzweig, Benjamin y Kafka. Rosenzweig denunció en el "idealismo" de la filosofía que viene desde Jonia y llega hasta Jena la tendencia a un totalitarismo que la convertía en potencialmente en una "ontología de la guerra". Benjamin dejó constancia de la ambigüedad radical del concepto de progreso, tan fundamental para el pensamiento ilustrado. La barbarie, en general, y el (...) fascismo, en particular, no son lo opuesto al progreso sino una de sus posibilidades. Esa fatal posibilidad es, para la víctima, la norma. Kafka capta anticipadamente la reducción fascista del hombre a nuda vida en la recurrente animalización de sus personajes, así como la negación del otro en sus personajes víctimas de la incomunicación. (shrink)

Laureano Vallenilla Lanz es uno de los intelectuales más influyentes de la Venezuela de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Pertenece a la generación de teóricos que se nutrió fundamentalmente de la doctrina positivista e hizo de ella la herramienta para desarrollar la interpretación de nuestra realidad con el fin de edificar una estable y próspera nación. Las ideas que guían el presente examen recogen su postura ante la historia, el individuo y la sociedad, la religión, la educación, (...) el centralismo, la guerra y la paz. (shrink)

The emergent Coronavirus Disease 2019 caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 could produce a maternal immune activation via the inflammatory response during gestation that may impair fetal neurodevelopment and lead to postnatal and adulthood mental illness and behavioral dysfunctions. However, so far, limited evidence exists regarding long-term physiological, immunological, and neurodevelopmental modifications produced by the SARS-CoV-2 in the human maternal-fetal binomial and, particularly, in the offspring. Relevant findings derived from epidemiological and preclinical models show that a MIA (...) is indeed linked to an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring. We hypothesize that a gestational infection triggered by SARS-CoV-2 increases the risks leading to neurodevelopmental disorders of the newborn, which can affect childhood and the long-term quality of life. In particular, disruption of either the maternal or the fetal cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway could cause or exacerbate the severity of COVID-19 in the maternal-fetal binomial. From a translational perspective, in this paper, we discuss the possible manifestation of a MIA by SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent neurodevelopmental disorders considering the role of the fetal-maternal cytokine cross-talk and the CAP. Specifically, we highlight the urgent need of preclinical studies as well as multicenter and international databanks of maternal-fetal psychophysiological data obtained pre-, during, and post-infection by SARS-CoV-2 from pregnant women and their offspring. (shrink)

¿Fue realmente la necesidad de responder a los retos del escepticismo –y, en concreto, del escepticismo de Montaigne– lo que incitó a Descartes a formular el argumento del cogito? Este artículo defiende una respuesta negativa, pues no fue la herencia del escepticismo sino la del estoicismo clásico, también revitalizado en el Renacimiento, lo que fue determinante en el surgimiento del internalismo epistémico moderno.Palabras claves: Montaigne, Descartes, Epicteto, escepticismo, estocismo, internalismo epistémico moderno.Was Descartes’ Cogito argument an answer to the challenges of (...) Scepticism and, in particular, to Montaigne’s version of it? This paper claims that the answer to this question should be negative, since it was not the influence of Scepticism, but the one of classic Stoicism –a trend that was also retrieved in the Renaissance– the one that had the main role in the rise of modern epistemic internalism.Keywords: Montaigne, Descartes, Epictetus, Scepticism, Stoicism, modern epistemic internalism. (shrink)

The term “pragmatism” has been used and abused by doctrines that are even contradictory among them. For the founder of Pragmatism as a philosophical tradition, Charles Peirce, this situation might seem a sad misunderstanding, and that is why he came up with the term “pragmaticism” in order to distinguish his own particular version of Pragmatism. However, Peirce himself did not leave a systematic treaty that explained what kind of specific conditions distinguish his pragmatism from other versions. In this essay I (...) introduce some criteria that I deem fundamental to disambiguate the meaning of Pragmatism: the use of the logical principle known as the ‘pragmatic maxim’, upon which the corner stone of the tradition should rest; the need to adopt Scholastic Realism and reject Nominalism; and, the operationalist character of Peirce’s pragmatism. In addition, I offer some views avowing that in spite of the differences and distinctions that these criteria establish, there is a core of convergence between the different kinds of pragmatisms present in the philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Con la crisis de la Modernidad como contexto, se presenta en este ensayo una discusión sobre el Estudio de Caso como modalidad de investigación cualitativa. Su fundamentación epistémica incluye elementos marginados o excluidos del paradigma moderno, tales como: la complejidad, el investigador como e..