The aim of this research is to ascertain whether a firm’s environmental motivations may help to predict how complete or incomplete its environmental management will be, understanding incomplete management to be that which neglects one or more of the three keys aspects of such management, namely, monitoring, action and results. We specifically posit that while motivations based on the search for legitimation lead to more incomplete styles of environmental management, competitive motivations entail a more complete management. The analyses conducted with (...) a sample of 1,902 plants provide empirical evidence in favour of such reasoning. The contribution this research makes, therefore, is not restricted solely to showing the effect motivations have on the environmental performance of organisations, as it also introduces a new dimension of environmental management—the degree of completeness, which needs to be considered when understanding and evaluating this effect. (shrink)

Aim: The presence of noise in urban environments is rarely considered a factor that causes damage to the environment. The primary generating source is transportation means, with vehicles being the ones that affect cities the most. Traffic noise has a particular influence on the quality of life of those who are exposed to it and can cause health alterations ranging from annoyance to cardiovascular diseases. This study aims to describe the relationship between the traffic noise level and the perceived annoyance (...) in the inhabitants of a city on the Northern Border of Mexico. The work carried out in a city represents the vulnerability characteristics: economic, social, and migratory of its sizable portion of the inhabitants. Due to that, it is impossible to identify precisely the number of residents as the number of vehicles in circulation.Methods: The streets and avenues with an annual average daily traffic of more than 1,000 vehicles were considered for the measurement of traffic noise. The equipment used was a vehicle gauge with non-invasive speed radar; type I integrating sound level meters, with their respective gauges and tripods. A questionnaire was applied to people living within 250 m of the streets and avenues in which the noise was measured.Results: The noise measurement found a parameter of LAeq estimated for 12 h during the day, exceeding 70 dBA. The data received from the questionnaire were statistically tested by using Pearson's correlation tests. A total number of 2,350 people were participated, of whom 1,378 were women and 972 were men. The age of participants is ranged from 18 to 75 years. The overall perception of traffic noise annoyance identified that 1,131 participants responded “Yes” as they considered the noise annoying. Participants who responded “No” as well as those who responded “Do not know” resulted in a total of 1,219 people.Conclusion: The results show that the population is desensitized to traffic noise and does not perceive it as an annoyance. The flow of vehicles and the type of vehicles are the significant factors for the propagation and increase in the traffic noise levels. Women present a considerable appreciation of traffic noise perception instead of younger people who demonstrate a higher tolerance to high-level exposure. This reflects the lack of information of the population around the noise problem and its effects. (shrink)

It is often thought that bets on the truth of known propositions become irrational if the losing costs are high enough. This is typically taken to count against the view that knowledge involves assigning credence 1. I argue that the irrationality of such extreme bets can be explained by considering the interactions between the agent and the bookmaker. More specifically, the agent’s epistemic perspective is altered by the fact that the bookmaker proposes that unusual type of bet. Among other things, (...) being willing to offer a bet with unnecessarily harmful losing costs is likely to undermine the baseline level of trustworthiness required for it to be rational to engage in betting exchanges. This sort of explanation does not require granting either that we assign credence lower than 1 to known propositions or that knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes. Moreover, I show that, in our ordinary lives, we frequently perform actions that we know would be disastrous if certain conditions did not obtain. This behaviour can be seen as a form of implicit extreme betting and, nevertheless, it is often rational. (shrink)

Success semantics is a theory of content that characterizes the truth-conditions of mental representations in terms of the success-conditions of the actions derived from them. Nanay : 151-165, 2013) and Dokic and Engel have revised this theory in order to defend it from the objections that assailed its previous incarnations. I argue that both proposals have seemingly decisive flaws. More specifically, these revised versions of the theory fail to deal adequately with the open-ended possibility of unforeseen obstacles for the success (...) of our actions. I suggest that the problem of ignored obstacles undermines success semantics quite generally, including alternative formulations such as Blackburn’s. (shrink)

This paper discusses practical akrasia from the perspective of the sophisticated form of moral subjectivism that can be derived from Nuno Venturinha’s (2018) remarks on moral matters.

We present an inferentialist account of collective rationality and intentionality, according to which beliefs and other intentional states are understood in terms of the normative statuses attributed to, and undertaken by, the participants of a discursive practice—namely, their discursive or practical commitments and entitlements. Although these statuses are instituted by the performances and attitudes of the agents, they are not identified with any physical or psychological entity, process or relation. Therefore, we argue that inferentialism allows us to talk of collective (...) intentionality and agency without needing to posit the existence of any sort of collective psychology or mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSeveral authors have claimed that indicative conditionals are sensitive to the epistemic perspective of agents. According to this sort of view, the truth of an indicative conditional depends on the background evidence of some relevant agent or group of agents. In this paper, I argue that the context-dependence of indicative conditionals goes beyond this. Indicative conditionals are not only sensitive to the evidence of agents, but also to contextual factors that determine what is inferable from such background evidence. More specifically, (...) my proposal is that when the inference associated with a conditional is defeasible, the truth of that conditional is sensitive to practical stakes. (shrink)

I argue that if there are nondisabled reasons to believe p, then there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something incompatible with p. I first defend a restricted version of the view, which applies only to situations where the relevant agent has complete evidence. Then, I argue for a generalized version of the view, which holds regardless of the agent's evidence. As a related result, I show that, given plausible assumptions, there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something false.

I argue for the possibility of the thesis that metaphors are indispensable for grasping and expressing certain propositions. I defend this possibility against the objection that, if metaphors express propositions, once these propositions are identified they should be specifiable by non‐metaphorical means. I argue that this objection loses its strength if one adopts a Wittgensteinian, particularist view of thought, according to which grasping a propositional thought requires the ongoing exercise of a suitable skill often not characterizable by algorithmic rules. Within (...) this particularist framework, thus, it becomes possible that metaphorical skills have an indispensable role in cognition and communication. (shrink)

There is an interesting contrast between permissions to act and permissions to believe. Plausibly, if it is permissible to believe something from a perspective with incomplete evidence, it cannot become impermissible to believe it from a second perspective with complete evidence. In contrast, it seems that something permissible to do for an agent in a perspective with limited evidence can become impermissible in a second perspective in which all the relevant evidence is available. What is more, an agent with incomplete (...) evidence may be permitted to do something that she knows would be impermissible if she occupied a perspective of complete evidence. In this paper, I argue that this contrast is explained by a disanalogy between the role played by belief in epistemic deliberation and the role played by action in practical deliberation. Epistemic deliberation may be closed by adopting other attitudes than belief, whereas in general, practical deliberation can only be closed by endorsing some course of action. Thus, when there are pressures to close some practical deliberation, agents have to make a decision about what to do even if they lack relevant information. By contrast, lacking relevant evidence, agents may always refrain from forming a belief and close instead their epistemic deliberation by adopting some other attitude. (shrink)

Traditional expressivists want to preserve a contrast between the representational use of declarative sentences in descriptive domains and the non-representational use of declarative sentences in other areas of discourse. However, expressivists have good reasons to endorse minimalism about representational notions, and minimalism seems to threaten the existence of such a bifurcation. Thus, there are pressures for expressivists to become global anti-representationalists. In this paper I discuss how to reconstruct in non-representationalist terms the sort of bifurcation traditional expressivists were after. My (...) proposal is that the relevant bifurcation can be articulated by appeal to the contrast between relativistic and non-relativistic assertoric practices. I argue that this contrast, which can be specified without appeal to representational notions, captures the core intuitions behind the expressivist bifurcation. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo diagnosticar el estado de la competencia comunicativa en estudiantes de primer año de pedagogía, considerando las competencias léxica, de comprensión lectora y de producción escrita. Para ello, en el marco de un estudio de caso, se diseñaron y adaptaron tres instrumentos, uno para cada competencia: test de disponibilidad léxica, test de comprensión lectora y rúbrica para evaluar una tarea de escritura argumentativa. Dentro de los principales hallazgos, destaca que el rendimiento más alto corresponde al desempeño (...) en lectura, por sobre escritura, quedando el desempeño léxico en tercer lugar. Se concluye que los resultados obtenidos permiten clasificar los desempeños en niveles iniciales y que, si bien no es posible hablar de la existencia de una correlación, los vínculos más estrechos se presentan entre lectura-escritura, léxico-escritura y léxico-lectura, respectivamente. (shrink)

Este estudio busca indagar en la relación entre las concepciones sobre la escritura que tienen estudiantes de doctorado y su relación con la calidad textual y argumentativa que poseen textos redactados por ellos. Se revisaron 31 textos producidos por los doctorandos y se evaluó la calidad textual y la calidad argumentativa; luego, se aplicó un cuestionario de procesos de escritura, lo que permitió conocer las concepciones de los estudiantes sobre las dos variables mencionadas. Se encontró que las dimensiones ‘bloqueo’ y (...) ‘procrastinación’ inciden en la calidad de la escritura, mientras que ‘transformación del conocimiento’ se relaciona con la calidad argumentativa. (shrink)

Pragmatist views inspired by Peirce characterize the content of claims in terms of their practical consequences. The content of a claim is, on these views, determined by what actions are rationally recommended or supported by that claim. In this paper I examine the defeasibility of these relations of rational support. I will argue that such defeasibility introduces a particularist, occasion-sensitive dimension in pragmatist theories of content. More precisely, my conclusion will be that, in the sort of framework naturally derived from (...) Peirce’s pragmatist maxim, grasping conceptual contents is not merely a question of mastering general rules or principles codifying the practical import of claims, but decisively involves being sensitive to surrounding features of the particular situation at hand. (shrink)

En este trabajo se indaga en el comportamiento de la atenuación en los verbos que expresan duda, presentes en el corpus AMERESCO de conversaciones coloquiales de Santiago de Chile. Se describen las funciones de la atenuación de estos verbos de acuerdo con (1) el tipo de acto de habla, (2) la actividad de imagen y (3) algunas características sintáctico-discursivas. Los principales hallazgos demuestran que la atenuación se manifiesta a través de verbos doxásticos (_creer_, _parecer_, _cachar_, etc.), verbos modales (_poder_, _deber_) (...) y el verbo “saber” con polaridad negativa (“_no sé_”). Esta surge cuando se presenta lo dicho como una duda, bien para suavizar una opinión contraria o crítica, en cuyo caso su significado es de opinión, bien para informar sobre un estado de cosas, cuando su significado es epistémico. En el reconocimiento de su carácter atenuante, resultan clave el tipo de acto de habla en el que ocurren, el rol proyectado por el hablante en la conversación, la gestión de las imágenes y sus características sintáctico-discursivas, elementos que determinan si estas construcciones verbales expresan mayor o menor atenuación. (shrink)

This paper discusses practical akrasia from the perspective of the sophisticated form of moral subjectivism that can be derived from Nuno Venturinha’s remarks on moral matters.

In the second half of the 20th century, Latin American poetry has had to deal with representing the phenomenon of forced disappearance in its various poetic productions. Some of those have incubated in the Central American civil wars, the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone and even in countries with supposed democratic stability such as Mexico and Colombia. Memorial de Ayotzinapa, by the Mexican poet Mario Bojórquez, and Carta de las mujeres de este país, by the Colombian poet and activist (...) Fredy Yezzed, experiment with the discursive forms of the long poem and the letter poem, respectively, to construct collective memories around a phenomenon that continues to take lives to this day. Bojórquez's text is concerned with constructing a testimony, apparently in situ, of the disappearance of the forty-three Mexican teacher trainees; Yezzed's work, for its part, refrains from referring to a specific event or place in order to provide a more complete testimony of the Colombian armed conflict, nearly seventy years old. The article analyzes the forms of the text, the subjects and their spaces of enunciation, as well as the memory strategies that are seen in both works. Thus, the testimonial status of poetry is confirmed, sometimes overshadowed by genres such as the novel and the short story. (shrink)

¿Cuáles son los márgenes de la cultura en la contemporaneidad? ¿Cómo se puede resistir desde estos? ¿Quiénes lo hacen o pueden hacerlo? Por supuesto, es imposible responder estas preguntas en esta corta presentación, tal vez sean imposibles de responder sin importar la extensión del texto que las analice. No obstante, nos parece necesario presentarlas para situarlas en un contexto que nos permita problematizar este dossier. Zygmunt Bauman4 planteó que tres campos de conocimiento: la filosofía de la historia, la antropología filosófica (...) y la estética, y un concepto: la cultura, emergieron en el siglo XVIII con el propósito de explicar la crisis de una forma de comprender y estar en el mundo, que se había pensado y vivido como natural y que parecía mutar en un orden radicalmente humano y, por ende, endeble, arbitrario y cambiante. (shrink)

Proponemos una revisión crítica a una corriente interpretativa de base lingüística de las religiones prerromanas del área indo-europea de la Península Ibérica que se ha venido desarrollando durante los últimos quince años; para ello tomamos como referencia un reciente trabajo de B.M. Prósper (Lenguas y religiones del occidente de la Península Ibérica, Salamanca, 2002) en el que se exponen los puntos de vista de dicha hipótesis interpretativa. Nuestro trabajo revisa sus tres planteamientos metodológicos básicos: su consideración de dichas religiones como (...) cultos idolátricos, su base evolucionista decimonónica y su manifiesto anti-dumezilianismo. Nuestra propuesta consiste en integrar el aporte de la lingüística dentro del ámbito de la Historia de las Religiones como un tipo de análisis que contribuya, con otros, a la construcción de hipótesis explicativas del fenómeno religioso de dichas sociedades. (shrink)

Scarcity acts as a mental burden that disrupts how people process information and make decisions (Mullainathan and Shafir in Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013; Mani et al. Science 342:976–980, 2013). In this study, we replicated Mani et al.’s (Science 342:976–980, 2013) experimental design to explore whether scarcity also taxes Colombian high school students’ mental bandwidth. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, we tested how 417 high school students from high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in Bogotá, (...) Colombia, responded to different scarcity situations. Students were first presented with hypothetical scenarios of harsh or soft scarcity. Next, participants had to solve a series of tasks that measured higher cognitive functions (i.e. Raven’s Progressive Matrices, Cognitive Reflection Task and questions to assess their Delay Discounting value) and had to explain how they would solve the scarcity situation. As opposed to Mani et al. (Science 342:976–980, 2013), we did not find that scarcity taxed individuals’ mental bandwidth, neither their cognitive nor executive functions. We found that low-SES individuals, under the harsh scarcity condition, displayed more empathic attributes than high-SES individuals. Taken together, the results of this study show the importance of replication in different cultures and environments. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is a distinctive norm of assertion. A plausible idea is that there is an analogous, perhaps weaker, norm for indirect communication via implicatures. I argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that the norm of assertion is a social norm governing public updates to the conversational record. Off the record implicatures are not subject to social norms of this type. I grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, off the record (...) communicative acts may be subject to normative assessments on different levels (for instance, regarding their moral or prudential appropriateness). However, such assessments do not generate distinctive norms that apply to all cases of implicature. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze some of the major difficulties of informed consent. We consider insufficient to base IC on the principle of autonomy. We must not forget that the patient may be in a situation of extreme vulnerability and the good doctor should assume a degree of commitment and responsibility with his/her decisions. Our aim is to introduce the ethics of responsibility of Levinas in practice and theory of IC in order to generate a beneficent medical practice in which (...) the supervision and overseeing of the patient do not undermine his/her autonomy. (shrink)

Teleosemantic theories aspire to develop a naturalistic account of intentional agency and thought by appeal to biological teleology. In particular, most versions of teleosemantics study the emergence of intentionality in terms of biological purposes introduced by Darwinian evolution. The aim of this paper is to argue that the sorts of biological purposes identified by these evolutionary approaches do not allow for a satisfactory account of intentionality. More precisely, I claim that such biological purposes should be attributed to reproductive chains or (...) lineages, rather than to individual traits or organisms, whereas the purposes underlying intentional agency and thought are typically attributed to individuals. In the last part of the paper I suggest that related difficulties are also faced, despite appearances, by accounts of intentionality relying on alternative organizational approaches to biological teleology. (shrink)

We discuss the role of practical costs in the epistemic justification of a novice choosing expert advice, taking as a case study the choice of an expert statistician by a lay politician. First, we refine Goldman’s criteria for the assessment of this choice, showing how the costs of not being impartial impinge on the epistemic justification of the different actors involved in the choice. Then, drawing on two case studies, we discuss in which institutional setting the costs of partiality can (...) play an epistemic role. This way we intend to show how the sociological explanation of the choice of experts can incorporate its epistemic justification. (shrink)

I argue that if there are nondisabled reasons to believe p, then there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something incompatible with p. I first defend a restricted version of the view, which applies only to situations where the relevant agent has complete evidence. Then, I argue for a generalized version of the view, which holds regardless of the agent's evidence. As a related result, I show that, given plausible assumptions, there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something false.

The goal of this dissertation is to offer a practice-based account of intentionality. My aim is to examine what sort of practices agents have to engage in so as to count as talking and thinking about the way the world is – that is, what sort of practices count as representational. Representational practices answer to the way the world is: what is correct within such practices depends on the way things are, rather than on the attitudes of agents. An account (...) of representation must explain how such objective standards of correctness are introduced in human practices: one must explain how the world gets to have a say in what is correct in human discursive practices. Roughly, my proposal is that human discursive practices become responsive to the way things are by virtue of involving practical interactions with the world. The outcomes of these interactions depend on the way the world is and the evaluation of such outcomes contributes to determining which moves within the practice count as correct. Due to our practical engagement with the environment, thus, the world gets to constrain discursive practices. In order to flesh out my proposal, I develop a practice-based characterization of intentional or representational content. On this sort of approach, expressing intentional contents is seen as a matter of playing a certain role in relevant practices, rather than as a matter of engaging in some word-world relation. The expression of content, thus, is explained in terms of use. In particular, I adopt an inferentialist perspective, according to which discursive moves express contents because of their role in practices of giving and asking for reasons. I investigate how practical engagement with the environment introduces friction with the world in these practices of giving and asking for reasons. One of the main conclusions reached in the dissertation is that defeasibility is an essential feature of objective representational practices – so that attributions of representational correctness are revisable in an open-ended way. The discussion of defeasible reasoning – and of the way in which defeasibility shapes human representational practices – is a central point of this dissertation. (shrink)

Higher‐order evidence can make an agent doubt the reliability of her reasoning. When this happens, it seems rational for the agent to adopt a cautious attitude towards her original conclusion, even in cases where the higher‐order evidence is misleading and the agent's original reasons were actually perfectly good. One may think that recoiling to a cautious attitude in the face of misleading self‐doubt involves a failure to properly respond to one's reasons. My aim is to show that this is not (...) so. My proposal is that (misleading) higher‐order evidence can undermine the agent's possession of her first‐order reasons, constituting what I call a dispossessing defeater. After acquiring the higher‐order evidence, the agent is no longer in a position to rely competently on the relevant first‐order considerations as reasons for her original conclusion, so that such reasons stop being available to her (even if they remain as strong as in the absence of the higher‐order evidence). In this way, an agent with misleading higher‐order evidence can adopt a cautious stance towards her original conclusion, while properly responding to the set of reasons that she possesses–a set that is reduced due to the acquisition of higher‐order dispossessing defeaters. (shrink)

Food choices are a key determinant of dietary intake, with brain regions, such as the mesolimbic and prefrontal cortex maturing at differential rates into adulthood. More needs to be understood about developmental changes in healthy and unhealthy food perceptions and preference. We investigated how food perceptions and preference vary as a function of age and how food attributes impact age-related changes. One hundred thirty-nine participants completed computerized tasks to rate high-calorie and low-calorie food cues for taste, health, and liking, followed (...) by 100 binary food choices based on each participant’s ratings. Dietary self-control was considered successful when the healthier food was chosen. Self-control success ratio was the proportion of success trials over total number of choices. Beta-weights for health and taste were calculated as each attribute’s influence on food preference. Adiposity measurements included BMI z-score and waist-to-height ratio. High-calorie foods were rated more tasty and less healthy with increasing age. Older participants liked high-calorie foods more, and β-taste was associated with age. Significant age-by-WHtR interactions were observed for health and taste ratings of high-calorie foods, β-taste, and marginally for preference of high-calorie foods. Stratifying by WHtR, we found age-related increases in taste and preference ratings of high-calorie foods in the high WHtR group alone. In contrast, age-related decreases in health ratings of high-calorie foods were significant in the low WHtR group alone. Age and β-taste were significantly associated in the high WHtR group and only marginally significant with low WHtR. Although participants rated low-calorie foods as less tasty and less healthy with increasing age, there was no association between age and preference for low-calorie foods. Participants made faster food choices with increasing age regardless of WHtR, with a significant age-by-WHtR interaction on reaction time. There were no age-related effects in self-control success ratio and β-health. These results suggest that individual differences in age and central adiposity play an important role in preference for high-calorie foods, and a higher importance of food tastiness in food choice may contribute to greater preference for high-calorie foods with increasing age. (shrink)