Behavior analysis emphasizes the study of overt animal (human and nonhuman) behavior as a subject matter in its own right. This paper provides a metaphysical foundation for such an emphasis via an elucidation of a thesis that I generically call "realism about behavior," where by "realism" I mean an assertion of mind-independent existence. The elucidation takes the form of a conceptual framework that combines a property-exemplification account of events with modal realism in the context of three opposing philosophies of mind: (...) property dualism, reductive physicalism, and type behaviorism. Each philosophy leads to the thesis that at least one possible world exists in which counterparts of all actual behavioral events occur and no counterpart of any actual "mental" (either nonphysical, neuro-mental, or behavioro-mental) event occurs. The third thesis is false because it violates the assumption that nothing can exist independently of itself, which leads to a rejection of type behaviorism. The other two theses provide the sought-after foundation through a counterfactual characterization of behavior qua behavior as a scientific subject matter. Its study thus becomes the study of behavior as if the nonphysical and the neural did not exist, even if they may factually exist and play a causal role in behavior. Some implications are discussed. (shrink)

In their account of learning and behavior, the authors define an interactor as emitted behavior that operates on the environment, which excludes Pavlovian learning. A unified neural-network account of the operant-Pavlovian dichotomy favors interpreting neurons as interactors and synaptic efficacies as replicators. The latter interpretation implies that single-synapse change is inherently Lamarckian.

Heidegger no advirtió la función del fenómeno narrativo en su proyecto de la «hermenéutica de la facticidad» (1923). Una investigación sobre este fenómeno profundiza en el significado de la comprensión del sí, pero plantea problemas metodológicos en la orientación ontológica del proyecto, lo que repercutirá en la lógica de Ser y tiempo.

En el debate entre contextualistas y anticontextualistas, señala Recanati, los últimos aventajan a los primeros por un argumento atribuible a Grice. Este argumento tiene corno premisa el Principio del Paralelismo que, según Recanati, convierte al argumento en circular y a la posición anticontextualista en injustificada. Si bien considero este argumento anticontextualista inadecuado, demostraré que no es atribuible a Grice. Grice no puede admitir el Principio del Paralelismo si se tiene en cuenta la explicación que elabora para ciertos ejemplos y su (...) teoria de las implicaturas. Grice, según esa explicación y algunas de sus propuestas, se muestra como un contextualista. (shrink)

En el debate entre contextualistas y anticontextualistas, señala Recanati, los últimos aventajan a los primeros por un argumento atribuible a Grice. Este argumento tiene corno premisa el Principio del Paralelismo que, según Recanati, convierte al argumento en circular y a la posición anticontextualista en injustificada. Si bien considero este argumento anticontextualista inadecuado, demostraré que no es atribuible a Grice. Grice no puede admitir el Principio del Paralelismo si se tiene en cuenta la explicación que elabora para ciertos ejemplos y su (...) teoria de las implicaturas. Grice, según esa explicación y algunas de sus propuestas, se muestra como un contextualista. (shrink)

Since Grice introduced the distinction between what is said and implicature, the literature shows a widespread interest in the delimitation of these notions. In this paper, I will identify and specify the criteria with which Grice distinctly determines the factors of the speaker’s meaning and I will use these criteria to compare the Gricean minimalist notion of what is said with the Relevance theoretic notion of explicature. In drawing this comparison, I aim to make it clear that the two approaches (...) have different commitments and motivations. Finally, taking these commitments into account, I will argue that the philosophical notion of saying fits harmlessly in the cognitive account of linguistic communication by Relevance Theory and thus it can coexist with the notion of explicature. (shrink)

Grice has been considered a linguistic minimalist. However, as I will show, this interpretation is incompatible with Grice’s proposal of conventional implicatures and with some of his less popular views such as his explanation of loose uses (Grice 1978/1989: 45; X) or his later acknowledgement of cases in which something is said without being conventionally meant (Grice 1987/1989: 359). Bearing in mind these proposals and the distinction between formality and dictiveness, I will present a new approach to the notion of (...) what is said in which the linguistic meanings that determine what is said are subordinated to cooperation. This approach, in contrast to the other minimalist notions, has the advantage of making what is said always part of the speaker’s meaning. Moreover, as the distance between linguistic meaning and what is said must be the shortest possible one that guarantees the rationality, in terms of cooperation, of the speaker, what is said allows us to keep the Gricean project of building a theory of expression from the speaker’s occasion meaning (Grice 1968/1989). (shrink)

Grice’s notion of what is said has been challenged in many directions and, since then, there are a lot of new proposals to understand it. One of these new proposals claims that what a speaker said is not part of the speaker meaning. In that sense, the content said by uttering a sentence is not intentioned by the speaker but a purely semantic and syntactic matter. Kent Bach argues for this proposal and is the main exponent of it. My aim (...) will be to show that Bach’s arguments do not work. There are two different arguments in Bach (1994, 1999, 2001). The first, that I call the direct argument, gives us three reasons against the idea that what is said is meant by the speaker. My goal in the first section will be to show that these reasons are not conclusive. Bach’s notion of what is said should rest on the second argument, the indirect argument. In it, he argues that if what is said is not part of the communicative intentions of the speaker, then it is possible that the content said is not propositional. With this idea, Bach uses what he calls the IQ test.. (shrink)

Event‐related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an adjective predicated of it. The rapid detection of this anomaly would indicate that the parser had established the coreference relation between the null subject and an antecedent, and that the processor (...) had rapidly consulted verb control information to select the proper antecedent of the null subject. The results showed that for both subject and object control items ungrammatical adjectives elicited a P600 effect. These data imply that the processor has coindexed the null subject with an antecedent, and that the antecedent has been selected on the basis of control information. These results are compatible with parsing models that emphasize the rapid influence of verb‐specific information on sentence processing. (shrink)

Both the target article and the precommentary demonstrate that relatively simple biobehavioral processes have the cumulative effect of fostering behavioral outcomes characteristic of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As such, the articles illustrate a central theme of Darwinian thinking – basic processes acting over time can produce complex and diverse outcomes. In this commentary, we indicate that tracing the action of processes over time can be facilitated by quantitative methods such as artificial neural networks.

mRNA synthesis in all organisms is performed by RNA polymerases, which work as nanomachines on DNA templates. The rate at which their product is made is an important parameter in gene expression. Transcription rate encompasses two related, yet different, concepts: the nascent transcription rate, which measures the in situ mRNA production by RNA polymerase, and the rate of synthesis of mature mRNA, which measures the contribution of transcription to the mRNA concentration. Both parameters are useful for molecular biologists, but they (...) are not interchangeable and they are expressed in different units. It is important to distinguish when and where each one should be used. We propose that for functional genomics the use of nascent transcription rates should be restricted to the evaluation of the transcriptional process itself, whereas mature mRNA synthesis rates should be employed to address the transcriptional input to mRNA concentration balance leading to variation of gene expression. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the presence and current situation of the game of skittles throughout the northern route of the Camino de Santiago. Thus, we considered its current practice, modalities, where it is played, and its different manifestations as an informal and formal game, comparing it with other traditional games on this pilgrimage route. To do this, a mixed qualitative-quantitative study was designed with 89 participants, constituting an informant for each municipality through which the Northern (...) Way passes. An ad hoc questionnaire was used for the data collection, which was processed through content analysis by expert judges and by using the IBM-SPSS statistical package. The results of the study show notable skittles activity on the Northern Camino, reflected in the number of skittles alleys, the number of clubs, associations, and peñas participating in federated leagues, and the wide range of varieties of skittles currently active on the Camino. The relationship between skittles and local culture, both symbols of identity in these northern Spanish regions, made it possible to preserve the traditional heritage in these places, keeping it alive today, despite the push toward new and more attractive leisure and sport trends. (shrink)

Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction _and_ and (inclusive) disjunction _or_. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (...) (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and reasoning processes neutered, thus potentially highlighting what might be the default meanings of the connectives under study. In Experiment 1 we show that the conjunctive reading of inclusive disjunction is available in positive contexts other than in syntactically intricate cases such as downward entailing and free choice contexts, contrary to what has been claimed in the literature. In Experiment 2 we show that negated conjunctions and disjunctions in Spanish can easily receive the same interpretation when contrasted against the same context and, moreover, that these interpretations match those available in English, despite claims from the literature that linguistic connectives and local negation interact differently in English and Romance languages. (shrink)

Economic and social activities are undergoing radical changes, which can be labelled as ‘knowledge economy and/or society’. In this sense, intellectual capital, or knowledge assets, as the fourth factor of production, is replacing the other ones – job, land and capital. This article tries to offer the origins and nature of the firm’s IC that can be labelled as ‘An Intellectual Capital-Based View of the Firm Competition’. This framework tries to highlight the strategic role of different intangible assets like talented (...) and committed workers, cultural values, or long-term relationships among the firm and its stakeholders – customers, allies, suppliers and society in general – in gaining and sustaining competitive advantages, being the management of IC a key issue in the management agenda. (shrink)

Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages have typically lexicalised only two of the possible 16 binary connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts—namely, the coordinatorsandandor—some of the remainder appear to be entertainable in a non-verbal, conceptual representational system—alanguage of thought—and this suggests a theoretical split between the “lexicalisation” of the connectives and the (...) “learnability” of invented words corresponding to unlexicalised connectives. In avisual worldexperiment aimed at tracking comprehension-related as well as reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word standing for logic's NAND operator, a result that indicates that unlexicalised logical connectives are not only conceptually available, but can also be mapped onto new function words, as in the case of coordinators, or connectives, a class of words that do not usually admit new coinages. (shrink)

Economic and social activities are undergoing radical changes, which can be labelled as 'knowledge economy and/or society'. In this sense, intellectual capital (IC), or knowledge assets, as the fourth factor of production, is replacing the other ones-job, land and capital. This article tries to offer the origins and nature of the firm's IC that can be labelled as 'An Intellectual Capital-Based View of the Firm Competition'. This framework tries to highlight the strategic role of different intangible assets like talented and (...) committed workers, cultural values, or long-term relationships among the firm and its stakeholders-customers, allies, suppliers and society in general - in gaining and sustaining competitive advantages, being the management of IC a key issue in the management agenda. (shrink)

Rawls says that public reason is the reason of the citizens of a democratic state and takes the Supreme Court in the USA as the exemplar of public reason. It differs from non public reason, which is used e.g., in universities and academic institutions. Rawls contrasts with Kant, which opposes the public reason of the scholar—or the philosopher—, who speaks before the world, to the private reason of state or church officials. The later, once they accept an authority, cannot think (...) by themselves (selbst denken). A closer examination shows that Rawls is not so far from Kant as it seems, because he takes the constitutional judges not as they are, but as they should be. However Rawls still apparently refuses Kant’s unity of reason. Further investigation of the relations between ethical reason, democratic reason and legal reason is needed. Democratic reason is tantamount both to public reason and to legal reason in a modern constitutional state. It is a requirement of ethics but still not identical with ethical reason, since it is possible to accept democratic reason and to argue against it from an ethical point of view. There is just one good way of reasoning, in spite of the constraints that the sources of law and the rules of procedure impose on legal reasoning, compared with ethics. Such constraints are based on the democratic principle, which is again based on ethical reason, which at last both grounds and limits the constraints that law imposes on reason. (shrink)

Does Duncan Kennedy successfully cannibalize jurisprudence? He attempts to do it by demonstrating the inexistence of rightness in legal argumentation. If there is no right legal argument, then there is no right answer in adjudication, adjudication is not a rational enterprise and legal doctrine cannot be said to be a science. It can be shown that skepticism is self-defeating. Duncan Kennedy can avoid self defeat only because he actually believes in a lot of legal arguments. His thesis that judges decide (...) questions of policy without any methodology that distinguishes them from legislators does not hold. Judicial reasoning is subject to constraints that do not affect legislators. It must be based on the sources of law and is limited by rules of procedure. Even when the judges have ‘interstitial’ legislative powers they are, unlike the legislator, bound to fit the system and their decisions are considered in procedure from the perspective of the right answer doctrine. The only work that can convincingly refute the skeptic argument against legal science is the reconstruction of jurisprudence as a scientific enterprise. Such work is beyond the scope of any single paper. The article aims to give some inspirations for such a task. (shrink)

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity (...) of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking. The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza los intentos llevados a cabo por Jeremy Bentham y John Stuart Mill para hacer converger algunos de los principales modelos de fundamentación moral: las éticas de la felicidad, como la aristotélica, o la propia ética utilitarista, las éticas del deber de raíz kantiana y las éticas de los derechos.Si conseguimos “reducir”, en primer lugar, las éticas de los derechos al modelo de la ética del deber, podremos simplificar mucho la cuestión y limitarnos a contrastar este último modelo (...) con las éticas de la felicidad, que a su vez deberían converger en la propia ética de la utilidad. No obstante, y aun reconociendo su gran interés, una convergencia completa entre modelos alternativos se revela como imposible. A pesar de los esfuerzos, sobre todo de John Stuart Mill, no es posible una unificación completa de los planteamientos utilitaristas con los de Aristóteles y Kant. La continuación de la empresa utilitarista de lucha por la unificación teórica en el ámbito del problema de la fundamentación moral encuentra un buen ejemplo actual en la obra de Esperanza Guisán. (shrink)

The development of X-ray diffraction photography was central to the discovery of the helical structure of DNA in 1953. Unfortunately the story of how this technique was developed receded into the background as subsequent attention focused on the moment of discovery by Watson and Crick. As a result the importance of photography as ‘data’ and the role it plays in scientific discovery is underplayed. We seek to rectify this situation by presenting this story and by drawing conclusions about the importance (...) of this form of photography in scientific investigation as well as for the insights it gives us regarding the process of discovery. (shrink)

Translator's summary The translated paper is an extract, published in 1945, of an unpublished thesis, of both historical and technical import, dealing with notions of definability and their relation to invariance under automorphisms. The author develops a metamathematical Galois theory, and discusses and anticipates some aspects of higher-order model theory in an informal but conceptually rich manner.

This edited collection of essays brings to light the rare virtues and uncommon merits of Raymond Aron, the main figure of French twentieth-century liberalism. The Companion to Raymond Aron is an essential supplement to Aron's autobiography Mémoires (1984) and main works, exploring the substance of his political, sociological, and philosophical thought.

Paul Ricoeur realizó su primera incursión sobre la temática del mal en su primer periodo, conocido como filosofía de la voluntad, que comprende especialmente los libros "Lo voluntario y lo involuntario", "El hombre lábil" y "La simbólica del mal!. Este estudio pretende presentar las claves internas a partir de las cuales Ricoeur realiza su investigación, analizando los conceptos fundamentales sobre los que gira y su posterior desarrollo. También busca incidir en los presupuestos antropológicos de los que parte, para después realizar (...) análisis de las consecuencias éticas que tienen dichos presupuestos. En este sentido se ha prestado una especial atención a la vinculación existente de la investigación de Ricoeur con la teoría del conocimiento kantiana y con la filosofía hegeliana.. (shrink)

Earth system science (ESS) has identified worrying trends in the human impact on fundamental planetary systems. In this conceptual article, we discuss the implications of this research for business schools and management education (ME). We argue that ESS findings raise significant concerns about the relationship between business and nature and, consequently, a radical reframing is required to embed economic and social activity within the global sustainability of natural systems. This has transformative implications for ME. To illustrate this reframing, we apply (...) the ESS lenses of social-ecological interdependence, multiscalar relations, environmental governance, and environmental values to the ME functional domains of institutional purpose, social context and engagement, pedagogical practice, curricular design, and research focus. Our work contributes to the literature on business education for sustainability and the business-society-nature nexus. We explore and apply key ESS findings and concepts, discuss normative implications of these ideas, and offer guidance on transformational pathways for business schools and ME. (shrink)