This paper discusses the semiotic dimension of patent interpretation. Patent documents are at the same time disclosure of information and a granting of rights. The claim section expresses the granted rights. In this paper, we view the claims as signs that express the granted rights. The semantics to interpret the signs is given by the all-elements rule, as pragmatics. The description and drawings sections of the patent document provide metapragmatics in the form of lexicon and syntax to help the understanding (...) the claims as signs that express the granted rights. This semiotic approach for patent interpretation has important practical consequences to the correct structuring of a patent document. We highlight this contribution through an instance of a patent application in which a claim includes examples of use. Examples are not allowed in the claim text, as examples do not describe the invention, but consist of metapragmatics to better understand the invention. In this way, examples consist of metapragmatics and belong to the description section of the patent, which has the goal to facilitate the understanding of claims. In the patent application used to highlight our semiotics approach for patent interpretation, the examples initially presented in the claims were rephrased in the final granted patent, significantly reducing the scope of the claim. (shrink)

Our memories elicit, in us, both beliefs about what the external world was like in the past, and beliefs about what our own past experience of it was like in the past. What explains the power of memories to do that? I tackle this question by offering an account of the content of our memories. According to this account, our memories are ‘token-reflexives’, in that they represent their own causal origin. My main contention will be that our memories are able (...) to provide us with evidence for the two types of beliefs due to the self-referential nature of their content. First, I will put forward a series of thought-experiments intended to raise several intuitions about the veridicality of memories. Next, I will introduce the view that memories are token-reflexives, and I will motivate it by pointing out that the view accommodates the relevant intuitions. And, then, I will return to the two types of beliefs prompted by our memories, and argue that conceiving memories as token-reflexives allows us to explain why memory has the power to elicit the two types of beliefs in us. (shrink)

Memories are mental states with a number of interesting features. One of those features seems to be their having an intentional object. After all, we commonly say that memories are about things, and that a subject represents the world in a certain way by virtue of remembering something. It is unclear, however, what sorts of entities constitute the intentional objects of memory. In particular, it is not clear whether those are mind-independent entities in the world or whether they are mental (...) entities of some kind. The purpose of this chapter is to map the different positions on this issue, and to highlight the virtues and difficulties for each of the options. In Section 2, I will specify the question of what the intentional objects of memory are by clarifying the relevant notions of memory and intentional object. In Section 3, I will motivate the significance of identifying the intentional objects of memory by exploring the relations between, on the one hand, the intentionality of memory and, on the other hand, the phenomenology and the epistemology of memory. In Section 4, I will consider two natural candidates for being the intentional objects of memory, namely, worldly entities and mental entities, and I will raise some concerns for each of the two candidates. A promising alternative will emerge, in Section 5, as preserving the virtues of the two original candidates while avoiding their difficulties. The alternative will concern a certain combination of worldly and mental entities; a combination that involves both causal and truth-making relations. I will conclude by sketching how the alternative candidate can shed some light on the phenomenological and epistemological issues raised in the third section. (shrink)

_Global Religious and Secular Dynamics_ integrates European theories of modern secularization and theories of global religious revival as interrelated dynamics. Casanova contrasts the internal European road of secularization with the external colonial road of global interreligious encounters and the globalization of the secular immanent frame with the expansion of global religious denominationalism.

En este artículo, el autor desarrolla el problema de la tolerancia en una sociedad multicultural según el planteamiento de Karl-Otto Apel y el punto de vista de la ética del discurso. En este sentido, parte explicando que el problema actual de la tolerancia consiste en el desafío de abrir un espacio a las diferentes formas de vida socio cultural. Así, expone las contradicciones de la versión de tolerancia negativa en el liberalismo y las insuficiencias de la crítica comunitarista. Luego, se (...) presenta la propuesta de fundamentación ético-discursiva de lo que el filósofo alemán llama como ‘tolerancia afirmativa'. Se concluye con algunas consideraciones valorativas: primero, para cuestionar la necesidad de la tolerancia afirmativa en un régimen constitucional, y segundo, para postular que la fundamentación ético-discursiva de la tolerancia encuentra su derivación más coherente en la categoría del respeto. In this article the author develops the problem of tolerance in a multicultural society according to Karl-Otto Apel's position and the point of view of the ethics of discourse. The author explains that the challenge of opening a space to different forms of socio-cultural life is the current problem of tolerance. This way, he exposes the contradictions of the negative tolerance in liberalism and the communitarian critical insufficiencies. Therefore, he presents the proposal of ethical-discursive basis about what the German philosopher has called ‘affirmative tolerance'. This study concludes with some value considerations which are meant to question the necessity of affirmative tolerance in a constitutional regime, in first place, and to postulate, in second place, that the ethical-discursive basis of tolerance finds a more coherent derivation in the category of respect. (shrink)

El debate en torno a la antropología aborda aquí una cuestión de categorías fundamentales en torno a la estructura básica del ser humano: hombre y mujer, niño y anciano. La terminología articulada por la categoría «espíritu - pneuma» abre las posibilidades de una nueva comprensión ante los retos planteados por las ciencias experimentales, la ética, la moral, incluso la religión. El esquema diádico «cuerpo y alma» se muestra agotado ante los callejones sin salida con los que se ha encontrado al (...) llegar hasta nuestros días. Por este motivo, el artículo defiende poder recuperar la antropología brotando de los datos de la revelación judeocristiana, tomados como auténticos y válidos para vehicular la verdad de la realidad humana. En efecto, resulta necesario recuperar la originalidad de la estructura triádica de espíritu, alma y cuerpo, presentada por el apóstol Pablo, de forma totalmente inesperada en su primera carta a los Tesalonicenses (1Te 5,23). (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the study of equality-free logic, that is, first-order logic without equality. We mainly devote ourselves to the study of algebraic characterizations of its relation of elementary equivalence by providing some Keisler-Shelah type ultrapower theorems and an Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé type theorem. We also give characterizations of elementary classes in equality-free logic. As a by-product we characterize the sentences that are logically equivalent to an equality-free one.

In procedural-law scholarship as well as in the theoretical analysis of the notion of proof as a result of the joint assessment of all items of evidence introduced in a trial, reference is frequently made to notions such as the conviction, belief, or certainty of a judge or a jury member about what happened. All these notions underscore the mental states involved in the process of determining the facts on the part of a judge or a jury. In this analysis, (...) I look at the links between beliefs and the justification in the findings of fact provided by the judge or jury in her or its verdict. (shrink)

In this introduction, I consider different problems posed by the use of singular terms in fiction (section 1), paying especial attention to proper names and, in particular, to names of real people, places, etc. As we will see (section 2), descriptivist and Millian theories of reference face different kinds of problems in explaining the use of fictional names in fiction-related contexts. Moreover, the task of advancing a uniform account of names in these contexts—an account which deals not only with fictional (...) names but also with “real” names—will prove to be very hard no matter whether we favour realist or antirealist intuitions about fictional discourse (section 3). Section 4 offers an overview of the content of this volume, with emphasis on the discussion between Manuel García-Carpintero and Stacie Friend about the meaning of “real” names in fiction-related contexts, the main topic of the Third Blasco Disputatio. (shrink)

Este artículo constituye una investigación sobre el estatuto ontológico de las categorías. Examina cuatro tesis: que las categorías son lingüísticas, que son meramente lógicas, que son reales todas y que algunas son reales y otras lógicas con fundamento en la realidad. Prueba que la cuarta tesis es la correcta y muestra algunos de sus presupuestos más importantes, desarrollos e implicaciones.

In jurisprudential literature, the adjective ‘defeasible’ appears as a predicate of many terms: concepts, laws, rules, reasoning, justification, proof, and so on. In this paper, we analyze the effects of some versions of the thesis of the defeasibility of legal norms on the reconstruction of the notion of legal validity. We analyze some possible justifications of this thesis considered as a claim concerning validity, and enquire into two possible sets of problems related to the defeasibility of the criteria of identification (...) of a legal system. We also provide a formalization of some options regarding defeasible criteria of identification, which can be used as a tool for meta-jurisprudential analysis. Finally, the thesis according to which defeasibility is better conceived of as a feature of legal application is examined and questioned. (shrink)

The conceptualization of the notion of subjectivity within the Anthropocene finds in Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism one of its most explicit and profuse modulations. This essay argues that Braidotti’s model powerfully accounts for the Anthropocene’s subjectivity by conceiving the “self” as a transversal multiplicity and its relationality to the “others” and the “world” as non-hierarchized by nature–culture distinctions; however, by being ontologically grounded on a neo-Spinozistic monism, Braidotti’s model blurs the notions of finitude, agency, and change, obscuring the possibility of critical (...) dissent while decreasing the overall theory’s consistency. An alternative ontological model capitalizing on these elements can be found in Object-Oriented Ontology and its notion of withdrawal. By associating OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism with Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, this essay aims at ontologically discretizing the latter in order to overcome these limitations. Grounded on this association and invoking a narrative imaginary propelled by the Greek terms xenos and xenia, the article paves the way for a form of subjectivity deviating from Braidotti’s ecological model and defined as xenological, arguing that, within the context of the Anthropocene, it constitutes an adequate alternative to Braidotti’s subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper presents an example of a supersimple nonlow theory and characterizes its independence relation.

Avicenna was a physician and philosopher in an era known as the Islamic Golden Age. His early medical encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine, was a groundbreaking text that scholars and healers read for centuries afterward.

The ontological abyss that separates real objects from sensual objects is one of the central principles of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which has its most explicit and profuse modulation in Timothy Morton’s notion of rift. This article argues that, despite succeeding in explaining the radical difference that inhabits every object, Morton’s rift fails to explain the object’s unification, rendering the overall theory inconsistent. An alternative approach that accounts simultaneously for disjunction and conjunction between essences and appearances can be found in Eugenio (...) Trías’s philosophy of the limit, a term widely ignored in OOO despite its deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things. The article further argues that the reinterpretation of Trías’s twofold liminal approach in light of OOO successfully addresses the inconsistencies found in Morton’s rift, paving the way for a theory of limits within Harman’s ontological framework. (shrink)

Current research on construction of the female body focuses on non-Hispanic women in the United States. The idealized Latina body, however, is rapidly becoming commodified and objectified in global popular culture. Using standardized and open-ended surveys and group and individual interviews, the author examines the negotiation of sociocultural ideals and body image by adolescents at the intersection of gender, race, and beauty. These young women hold racist beauty ideals but are flexible when judging the appearance of real-life women. They perceive (...) two competing or complementary prototypes of beauty, one white and one Latina. This study fills a gap in the literature on beauty and the body by examining a non-U.S. sample that does not fit into the usual Black-white dichotomy of race. (shrink)

Causality is the most important topic in the history of western science, and since the beginning of the statistical paradigm, its meaning has been reconceptualized many times. Causality entered into the realm of multi-causal and statistical scenarios some centuries ago. Despite widespread critics, today deep learning and machine learning advances are not weakening causality but are creating a new way of finding correlations between indirect factors. This process makes it possible for us to talk about approximate causality, as well as (...) about a situated causality. (shrink)

Esta investigación pretende aportar datos para determinar en qué medida el feedback influye en el rendimiento académico.Se ha realizado una experimentación con estudiantes universitarios de los grados de marketing y de educación física. Se ha dividido la muestra en tres grupos en función del tipo de información -feedback- que se les proporcionaba.Los resultados muestran que hay correlación entre la información facilitada y los resultados obtenidos. El rendimiento mejora en función de la información cuando ésta es correcta. Estos resultados han de (...) servir para reforzar el compromiso del docente en ofrecer retroalimentación con responsabilidad y rigor. (shrink)

Ante los indicadores de insostenibilidad ambiental y social, se busca un enfoque educativo eficaz que contribuya a revertirla. A tal efecto, se propone una educación moral, que no se centre tanto en contenidos como en facilitar que cada estudiante aprenda a buscarlos, hacerlos propios y los traduzca en compromisos de conducta personal. La propuesta educativa se presenta ejemplificada en una asignatura concreta, que sirve de hilo expositivo y ejemplo de aplicación. Tras una breve introducción sobre los indicadores de insostenibilidad, se (...) presenta la planificación, metodología y objetivo de la asignatura. A continuación, se reflexiona sobre dos de los obstáculos a los que se enfrenta la educación moral en la actualidad: la fragmentación del saber y la dificultad para que los aprendizajes teóricos se traduzcan en conductas. Por último, se exploran dos oportunidades para la educación moral que pueden facilitar ese vínculo: la búsqueda de las causas profundas de problemas ambientales y sociales actuales, y el empleo de la belleza. (shrink)

After September 11, Sullivan wrote that while he wasn’t worried about the heartland, “decadent coastal liberals may well mount a fifth column.†This in response, as is well known, to a thoughtful New Yorker essay by Susan Sontag. Sullivan, who Eric Alterman—not usually a sharp wordsmith—memorably calls “Young Roy Cohn†later issued “Sontag awards.†His attitude and his popularization of a sort of Lynne Cheneyist position on what “Views†are improper and thus should not be publicly aired, probably did far (...) more damage to civil liberties than Joe McCarthy’s pal Roy, who at the very least didn’t take himself seriously. (shrink)

Although most consumers are positive about socially responsible companies, in order to benefit from CSR efforts, effective and clear CSR communication is important. However, due to the constantly rising profusion of eco-labels, based on either own claims from the organization or claims made by an external third party, consumers may encounter difficulties in identifying truly responsible firms, which could result in less effective CSR initiatives, even for those responsible firms. Therefore, building on attribution theory, this study seeks to identify how (...) uncertified internal CSR claims and external third-party CSR labels should be used in order to deter greenwashing and increase positive consumer evaluations. Within a 3 × 2 design, respondents are exposed to different coffee product packages measuring their attitude toward the brand, corporate credibility, purchase intention, and scent perception, as well as perceived attributional CSR motives. Overall, findings indicate that especially an external CSR label affects consumer responses toward the firm. Moreover, perceived CSR motives serve as a mediator between an external CSR label and corporate credibility and brand attitude, respectively. These findings warrant further consideration of introducing an external multilevel rating systems by governmental law. (shrink)

All paradoxes of self-reference seem to share some structural features. Russell in 1908 and especially Priest nowadays have advanced structural descriptions that successfully identify necessary conditions for having a paradox of this kind. I examine in this paper Priest’s description of these paradoxes, the Inclosure Scheme (IS), and consider in what sense it may help us understand and solve the problems they pose. However, I also consider the limitations of this kind of structural descriptions and give arguments against Priest’s use (...) of IS in favour of dialetheism. IS fails to identify sufficient conditions for having a paradox of self-reference. That means that, even if we identified a problem common to any reasoning satisfying IS, that problem would not explain why some of those reasonings are paradoxical and some others are not. Therefore IS cannot justify by itself the claim that some particular theory offers the best solution to the paradoxes of self-reference. We still need to consider aspects concerning the content and context of occurrence of every paradox. (shrink)

El artículo tiene como objetivo ofrecer un panorama de los problemas que enfrenta la motivación de las resoluciones judiciales. Así, se intenta responder básicamente a tres cuestiones: ¿qué se motiva?, ¿qué significa motivar dado el rol de la función judicial? Y, derivado de ellas, ¿cuáles son las exigencias para una correcta motivación?

Environmental sensitivity and Christianism Contemporary environmental sensitivity has characterized for decades the emerging culture in the developed world. It is not yet mainstream in influencing behavior at a global level, as the growing environmental impact of consumerism testifies particularly to it. Present day environmental sensitivity seems somehow at odds with Christianism, charged for decades alongside Judaism with major responsibility in the environmental crisis. This paper explains and discusses on seven interlinked aspects of the environmental value amply recognized across environmentalism. In (...) examining them, Christian environmentalism learns particularly some demands of the Christian vocation that may remain neglected and demand a moral conversion both of Christians and of no non-Christians and non-believers. In accepting this demand, the Christian discerns the life-giving presence of Christ in many traits of the environmental sensitivity and culture. This encounter offers grounds for a reciprocal understanding and enrichment of Christians and non-believers or non-Christians, towards the attainment of a wider and deeper respect of environmental and human shared values. (shrink)

Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on self-information processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance (...) predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel . Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future. (shrink)

En este trabajo exponemos algunas categorías modales orientadas al estudio y comprensión de los sistemas autoorganizados que muestran complejidad. Para ello centramos nuestra investigación en el área de la ecología y, más en particular, en el ámbito de la ecología aural, es decir, en el estudio de los sonidos que componen los ecosistemas. Las categorías modales aquí desarrolladas son, por un lado, la «repertorialidad», referida a la coherencia y estabilidad interna de todo sistema autoorganizado; la «disposicionalidad» o experimentación y variación (...) inherente a estos sistemas y, finalmente, el «paisaje», que tiene en consideración lo realmente efectivo, lo dado. Este conjunto de categorías nos lleva a explorar el sistema modal de necesidad-contingencia-posibilidad-imposibilidad, el cual, aplicado a los estudios sonoros se convierte en el juego de señales-redundancia-ruido-silencio. Estas categorías, aplicadas a ejemplos en la naturaleza, nos ayudan a comprender el devenir inherente a todo ecosistema. Finalmente, descubrimos cómo la investigación categorial de los paisajes sonoros aporta información sobre el comportamiento evolutivo y el estado de conservación de estos sistemas. (shrink)

Base-of-the-pyramid business models aim to achieve profitability and poverty reduction by including poor people into corporate value chains. This goal duality creates tensions. Actors’ responses to these tensions are influenced by their cognitive frames of the phenomena building the tension. Applying a cognitive perspective, I investigate how corporate actors with different frames of poverty respond proactively or defensively to the poverty–profitability tension by adapting business model elements. I find that proactive and defensive responses differ for actors holding different cognitive frames (...) of poverty. The responses have consequences for the poverty impact potential of BOP business models. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the notion and role of metaphors and illustrations in Maxwell's works in exact science as a pathway into a broader and richer philosophical conception of a scientist and scientific practice. While some of these notions and methods are still at work in current scientific research-from economics and biology to quantum computation and quantum field theory-, here I have chosen to attest to their entrenchment and complexity in actual science by attempting to make some conceptual sense (...) of Maxwell's own usage; this endeavour includes situating Maxwell's conceptions and applications in his own culture of Victorian science and philosophy. I trace Maxwell's notions to the formulation of the problem of understanding, or interpreting, abstract representations such as potential functions and Lagrangian equations. I articulate the solution in terms of abstract-concrete relations, where the concrete, in tune with Victorian British psychology and engineering, includes the muscular as well as the pictorial. This sets the basis for a conception of understanding in terms of unification and concrete modelling, or representation. I examine the relation of illustration to analogies and metaphors on which this account rests. Lastly, I stress and explain the importance of context-dependence, its consequences for realism-instrumentalism debates, and Maxwell's own emphasis on method. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Rhizomata Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 148-176.