School bullying among young adolescents is a globally pervasive problem, but is less common when bystanders are motivated to defend victims. Thus, the focus of this experimental study is on motivation to defend victims of bullying.Methods: A total of 388 students from two Turkish public schools participated in a vignette experiment. Students were randomized to one of two vignettes. Self-report measures of motivation to defend, trait anxiety, depression, and identification with the victim or bully were used.Results: Participants reported more autonomous (...) motivation in the cyberbullying condition, while those who witnessed direct bullying reported higher anxiety and depression.Results also revealed that this type of condition was associated with anxiety and depression, while anxiety was associated with autonomous motivation to defend. Finally, participants in the direct bullying condition were more likely to identify with the bully.Conclusion: Findings advance our understanding of when and why adolescents are motivated to help victims of bullying because they give a richer picture of what they assess when deciding whether or not they should intervene. (shrink)

Although the scribbling stage of drawing has been historically regarded as meaningless and transitional, a sort of prelude to the "actual" drawing phase of childhood, recent studies have begun to re-evaluate this important moment of a child's development and find meaning in what was once considered mere motor activity and nothing more. The present study analyzes scribbling in all its subphases and discovers a clear intention behind young children's gestures. From expressing the dynamic qualities of an object and the child's (...) relationship with it, to gradually reducing itself to a simple contour of a content no more "alive" on the paper, but only in the child's own imagination, we trace the evolution of the line as a tool that toddlers use to communicate feelings and intentions to the world that surrounds them. We will provide a selected number of graphical examples that are representative of our theory. These drawings (13 in total) were extracted from a much wider sample derived from our studies on children's graphical-pictorial abilities, conducted on children aged 0 to 3 years in various Italian nurseries. Our results appear to indicate that scribbling evolves through a series of stages, and that early graphical activity in children is sparked and maintained by their relationship with their caregivers and the desire to communicate with them. (shrink)

Introduction: Publications arguing against the null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) procedure and in favor of good statistical practices have increased. The most frequently mentioned alternatives to NHST are effect size statistics (ES), confidence intervals (CIs), and meta-analyses. A recent survey conducted in Spain found that academic psychologists have poor knowledge about effect size statistics, confidence intervals, and graphic displays for meta-analyses, which might lead to a misinterpretation of the results. In addition, it also found that, although the use of ES (...) is becoming generalized, the same thing is not true for CIs. Finally, academics with greater knowledge about ES statistics presented a profile closer to good statistical practice and research design. Our main purpose was to analyze the extension of these results to a different geographical area through a replication study. Method: For this purpose, we elaborated an on-line survey that included the same items as the original research, and we asked academic psychologists to indicate their level of knowledge about ES, their CIs, and meta-analyses, and how they use them. The sample consisted of 159 Italian academic psychologists (54.09% women, mean age of 47.65 years). The mean number of years in the position of professor was 12.90 (SD = 10.21). Results: As in the original research, the results showed that, although the use of effect size estimates is becoming generalized, an under-reporting of CIs for ES persists. The most frequent ES statistics mentioned were Cohen’s d and R2/η2, which can have outliers or show non-normality or violate statistical assumptions. In addition, academics showed poor knowledge about meta-analytic displays (e.g., forest plot and funnel plot) and quality checklists for studies. Finally, academics with higher-level knowledge about ES statistics seem to have a profile closer to good statistical practices. Conclusions: Changing statistical practice is not easy. This change requires statistical training programs for academics, both graduate and undergraduate. (shrink)

While Susan Moller Okin found much to celebrate in Rawls's earlier articulation of his theory of justice, she worried that his later turn to political liberalism evacuated his theory of its feminist potential. Here, I argue that we need not be so pessimistic: some of the strongest arguments for pursuing certain feminist projects can and should be made from within a politically liberal framework. In advancing this claim, I develop Rawls's idea of primary goods—namely those goods that all citizens need (...) qua citizens—as a key conceptual resource for arguing for the elimination of the gendered division of labor using public reason. Drawing on recent empirical literature, I point out that the gendered division of labor continues to distribute to women an unfair allocation of primary goods. I then advocate for a specific public policy, which I call Gender Egalitarian Daddy Quota—a parental leave policy that sets aside time specifically for fathers to encourage men and women to engage in childcare related leave-taking to similar extents—on the grounds that this policy would help secure a fairer distribution of primary goods, and thus is required as a matter of justice. (shrink)

What if a blind person could 'see' with her ears? Thanks to Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs), blind people now have access to out-of-reach objects, a privilege reserved so far for the sighted. In this paper, we show that the philosophical debates have fundamentally been mislead to think that SSDs should be fitted among the existing senses or that they constitute a new sense. Contrary to the existing assumption that they get integrated at the sensory level, we present a new thesis (...) according to which they are not sensory, and get vertically integrated on the top of existing sensory abilities, from which they should be theoretically distinguished. (shrink)

Despite facing significant criticism for assigning human-like characteristics to artificial intelligence, phrases like “trustworthy AI” are still commonly used in official documents and ethical guidelines. It is essential to consider why institutions continue to use these phrases, even though they are controversial. This article critically evaluates various reasons for using these terms, including ontological, legal, communicative, and psychological arguments. All these justifications share the common feature of trying to justify the official use of terms like “trustworthy AI” by appealing to (...) the need to reflect pre-existing facts, be it the ontological status, ways of representing AI or legal categories. The article challenges the justifications for these linguistic practices observed in the field of AI ethics and AI science communication. In particular, it takes aim at two main arguments. The first is the notion that ethical discourse can move forward without the need for philosophical clarification, bypassing existing debates. The second justification argues that it’s acceptable to use anthropomorphic terms because they are consistent with the common concepts of AI held by non-experts—exaggerating this time the existing evidence and ignoring the possibility that folk beliefs about AI are not consistent and come closer to semi-propositional beliefs. The article sounds a strong warning against the use of human-centric language when discussing AI, both in terms of principle and the potential consequences. It argues that the use of such terminology risks shaping public opinion in ways that could have negative outcomes. (shrink)

A strong claim, often found in the literature, is that it is impossible to categorize perceptual properties unless one possesses the related concepts. The evidence from visual perception reviewed in this paper however questions this claim: Concepts, at least canonically defined, are ill-suited to explain perceptual categorisation, which is a fast, and crucially a largely involuntary and unconscious process, which rests on quickly updated probabilistic calculations. I suggest here that perceptual categorisation rests on non-conceptual sorting principles. This changes the claim (...) that categorisation cannot occur without concepts: It does not preclude that the concepts remain necessary for categorisation, but opens the possibility that they are not and that those sorting principles could be here sufficient. (shrink)

Synaesthesia is a strange sensory blending: synaesthetes report experiences of colours or tastes associated with particular sounds or words. This volume presents new essays by scientists and philosophers exploring what such cases can tell us about the nature of perception and its boundaries with illusion and imagination.

We examine how insights made in socio-anthropological and evolutionary schools of thought necessitate us to reevaluate the classic philosophical distinction between epistemology and ontology. We adopt an applied evolutionary epistemological stance and demonstrate that both epistemology and ontology evolve. Epistemology is broadened to include all knowledge and information that all life forms evolve, and ontology encompasses all biologically informed realities that life builds. Through processes such as symbiosis and niche construction, organisms acquire and extend information and knowledge into their offspring, (...) onto unrelated organisms, and onto their niches. Life builds biorealities that change over time. Consequently, knowledge and reality are mutable and truth is spatiotemporally bounded. We conclude that the classic distinction between epistemology and ontology has become superfluous and instead, we argue that the evolving knowledge that comes in the form of organisms and their extended niches equals ontological realities. (shrink)

Human language, hominin tool production modes, and multimodal communications systems of primates and other animals are currently well-studied for how they display compositionality or combinatoriality. In all cases, the former is defined as a kind of hierarchical nesting and the latter as a lack thereof. In this article, I extend research on combinatoriality and compositionality further to investigations of everyday primate skills. Daily locomotion modes as well as behaviors associated with subsistence practices, hygiene, or body modification rely on the hierarchical (...) nesting of different behavioral and cognitive actions into complex skills. I introduce a scheme which uses hierarchical organization to differentiate combinatorial from compositional skills. Combinatorial skills are defined either as aggregational or linearly hierarchical depending on whether the skill occurs momentarily in space or unfolds sequentially over time. Compositional skills are defined either as nested or interactionally hierarchical depending on whether the skill results in new constructs or in new interactions between existing constructs. The methodology I propose combines epistemological hierarchy theory with data from primatological field research and experimental and comparative psychological research and provides a means to integrate current constructionist and extended views on cognition and action with older research on behavioral logics in psychology and operational chain thinking in anthropology. The approach furthermore synchronizes with ongoing research on teleonomy, intentionality, and creativity. -/- . (shrink)

Written for non-experts, this volume introduces the mechanisms that underlie reticulate evolution. Chapters are either accompanied with glossaries that explain new terminology or timelines that position pioneering scholars and their major discoveries in their historical contexts. The contributing authors outline the history and original context of discovery of symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, hybridization or divergence with gene flow, and infectious heredity. By applying key insights from the areas of molecular (phylo)genetics, microbiology, virology, ecology, systematics, immunology, epidemiology and computational science, (...) they demonstrate how reticulate evolution impacts successful survival, fitness and speciation. Reticulate evolution brings forth a challenge to the standard Neo-Darwinian framework, which defines life as the outcome of bifurcation and ramification patterns brought forth by the vertical mechanism of natural selection. Reticulate evolution puts forward a pattern in the tree of life that is characterized by horizontal mergings and lineage crossings induced by symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, hybridization or divergence with gene flow, and infective heredity, making the “tree of life” look more like a “web of life.” On an epistemological level, the various means by which hereditary material can be transferred horizontally challenges our classic notions of units and levels of evolution, fitness, modes of transmission, linearity, communities, and biological individuality. The case studies presented examine topics including the origin of the eukaryotic cell and its organelles through symbiogenesis; the origin of algae through primary and secondary symbiosis and dinoflagellates through tertiary symbiosis; the superorganism and holobiont as units of evolution; how endosymbiosis induces speciation in multicellular life forms; transferrable and non-transferrable plasmids and how they symbiotically interact with their host; the means by which pro- and eukaryotic organisms transfer genes laterally (bacterial transformation, transduction and conjugation as well as transposons and other mobile genetic elements); hybridization and divergence with gene flow in sexually-reproducing individuals; current (human) microbiome and viriome studies that impact our knowledge concerning the evolution of organismal health and acquired immunity; and how symbiosis and symbiogenesis can be modelled in computational evolution. (shrink)

This paper discusses the establishment of a governance framework to secure the development and deployment of “good AI”, and describes the quest for a morally objective compass to steer it. Asserting that human rights can provide such compass, this paper first examines what a human rights-based approach to AI governance entails, and sets out the promise it propagates. Subsequently, it examines the pitfalls associated with human rights, particularly focusing on the criticism that these rights may be too Western, too individualistic, (...) too narrow in scope and too abstract to form the basis of sound AI governance. After rebutting these reproaches, a plea is made to move beyond the calls for a human rights-based approach, and start taking the necessary steps to attain its realisation. It is argued that, without elucidating the applicability and enforceability of human rights in the context of AI; adopting legal rules that concretise those rights where appropriate; enhancing existing enforcement mechanisms and securing an underlying societal infrastructure that enables human rights in the first place, any human rights-based governance framework for AI risks falling short of its purpose. (shrink)

Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to othersensory domains. They also cannot easily organise odour sensations in a general conceptual space like with colours. We challenge the conclusion that there is no olfactory conceptual map at all. Instead we propose a new framework, with local conceptual spaces.

In this chapter Nathalie Sigot argues that Bentham’s interest in international trade lies in the consideration of the redistributive effects of trade and its consequences on happiness for one’s society. Sigot demonstrates that Bentham’s view on international trade changed between 1786 and 1821, when the principle of the limitation of industry by capital disappeared from his writings. Sigot explains how Bentham’s approach is driven by a focus on security and on a calculus of gains and losses in terms of (...) happiness. (shrink)

A common sense view is illustrated by Doubting Thomas, and surfaces in many philosophical and psychological writings : Touching is better than seeing. But can we make sense of this privilege? We rule out that it could mean that touch is more informative than vision, more ‘objective’ or more directly in contact with reality. Instead, we propose that touch offers not a perceptual, but a metacognitive advantage: touch is not more objective than vision but rather provides comparatively higher subjective certainty.

It is important to understand the drivers of green consumption, because of growing concern for the health of the planet. In this paper, the assumption that a virtue-green product relationship exists is tested. The objective is to understand how product morality can influence the valuation of green products. Relying on virtue theory and positive spillover as conceptual bases, the research implicitly and explicitly tests and confirms green product virtue. The results demonstrate that perceived green product virtue leads to positive emotions, (...) which explain heightened purchase intentions. In line with the conceptualization, I show that the effect is moderated by the importance consumers place on their own morality. Importantly, explicitly framing green products as virtuous activates positive spillover by consumers; when green products are branded with a virtue cue, they encourage consumers to be more virtuous. Beyond being perceived as better people, when consumers interact with green products they effectively engage in more moral acts, such as making donations. The results confirm the perception of green products as moral agents and provide marketers with insights into the marketing value of virtue cues in green product consumption. (shrink)

In this special issue, Steins and Edwards introduced the notion of nested platforms for resource use negotiation as a tool to facilitate collective action amongst multiple-users in complex common-pool resource management scenarios. Five discussion statements were put forward to aid the debate on multi-use platforms. This paper is a synthesis of the responses to these statements by the other contributors to this special issue. It aims to further stimulate the debate on the management of complex, multiple-use common-pool management scenarios.

Through the public debates which are unfolding about Genetically Modified Organisms in Europe, new issues have taken shape. This article attempts to understand the possibility of such novelties in light of the political positions taken by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. In order to bring about the necessity of an active public, taking an active part in the definition and realisation of political ends, he makes two radical proposals: a perspective of the emergence of the State, and political experimentation as (...) the method needed by this perspective. The possibility of the emergence of new forms of the State, of new public issues, is the goal of political experimentation. And the formation of a public - a public taking active part in the elaboration of the knowledge needed to decide on issues which are always specific - is the causal event which has to emerge in and through such experimentation. (shrink)

Traditionally defined as the science of the living, or as the field that beyond anatomical structure and bodily form studies functional organization and behaviour, physiology has long been excluded from evolutionary research. The main reason for this exclusion is that physiology has a presential and futuristic outlook on life, while evolutionary theory is traditionally defined as the study of natural history. In this paper, I re-evaluate these classic science divisions and situate physiology within the history of the evolutionary sciences, as (...) well as within debates on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and the need for a Third Way of Evolution. I then briefly point out how evolutionary physiology in particular contributes to research on function, causation, teleonomy, agency and cognition. (shrink)

To see "democracy as a tragic regime", as Cornelius Castoriadis did, is to recognize the ever-present risk of democracy’s cancellation, but it also means to emphasize the anti-democratic nature of such cancellation, thus its incompatibility with democracy. In the context of this understanding of democracy, the article takes the political to consist of those relations among people and among institutions within the polis, which aim at deciding about the polis’ fate. It takes the social to be those relations among people (...) and among institutions within the polis, to whom such decisions about the polis’ fate apply and whom they create. If democracy is understood as tension between the two, then the relation between those who decide and those who are subject of the decision is never entirely pacified – hence, always contested and in need of specification. Using the examples of the state of exception and totalitarianism (temporary and permanent self-cancellation), the article argues that these situations are outside a linear continuation with the democratic phenomenon and are due to a displacement, which is akin to the hubristic displacement. (shrink)

This paper investigates how reticulate evolution contributes to a better understanding of human sociocultural evolution in general, and community formation in particular. Reticulate evolution is evolution as it occurs by means of symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity, and hybridization. From these mechanisms and processes, we mainly zoom in on symbiosis and we investigate how it underlies the rise of (1) human, plant, animal, and machine interactions typical of agriculture, animal husbandry, farming, and industrialization; (2) diet-microbiome relationships; and (3) (...) host-virome and other pathogen interactions that underlie human health and disease. We demonstrate that reticulate evolution necessitates an understanding of behavioral and cultural evolution at a community level, where reticulate causal processes underlie the rise of synergistic organizational traits. (shrink)

Scholarly opinions vary on what language is, how it evolved, and from where or what it evolved. Long considered uniquely human, today scholars argue for evolutionary continuity between human language and animal communication systems. But while it is generally recognized that language is an evolving communication system, scholars continue to debate from which species language evolved, and what behavioral and cognitive features are the precursors to human language. To understand the nature of protolanguage, some look for homologs in gene functionality, (...) brain areas, or anatomical structures such as the supralaryngeal vocal tract; others point toward primates, their gestural, vocal, multimodal, and in later evolving hominins also their pantomimic communication systems; and still others draw parallels between the musicality that characterizes language and the pitch found in the numerous sounds produced by animals. Accordingly, protolanguage theories today are multiple and diverse, and protolanguages might have also been diverse. This special issue on Evolving (Proto)Language/s for Lingua bundles several of the protolanguage theories that were put forward at the sixth edition of the Ways to Protolanguage conference series, held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, in 2019. Not aimed at surveying all the different ways there are to conceptualize, study, and model protolanguage/s, this issue provides interested readers with good overviews on the role played in current theorizing on protolanguage/s by (paleo)anthropology, genetics, physiology, developmental, evolutionary, ecological, and pragmatic research lines. (shrink)

The fundamental difference between Castoriadis' and Papaioannou's accounts of the link between tragedy and the political is that Castoriadis insists on a political form whilst Papaioannou insists on a social actor. The starting point for this essay, then, are two thinkers: one whose main interest was a political and philosophical reflection on the social-historical and one whose main interest was a philosophical reflection on the arts. Surprisingly, however, the end situation is one where Castoriadis gives us a political explanation of (...) the link between tragedy and the political whilst Papaioannou gives us a social explanation of the same phenomenon. How can this difference be accounted for? First, distinguishing their respective conceptualisations of the political allows us to see that where one thinker privileges restlessness and revolution, the other privileges law and regime. Second, looking at their depictions of the essential aspects of tragedy places them on opposing sides of the couple hubris- dike, in a way that leads to two radically different conceptualisations of the relation in question. (shrink)

New definitions are proposed for communication and language. Communication is defined as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange. Language is defined as community communication whereby the information exchanged comprises evolving individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs, that are enacted, narrated, or otherwise conveyed by evolving rule-governed and meaningful symbol systems, that are grounded, interpreted, and used from within evolving embodied, cognitive, ecological, sociocultural, and technological niches. These definitions place emphasis on the evolutionary aspects of communication (...) and language, and they are here differentiated from four older paradigms that instead focus either on the referential or social aspects of language, or the informational or semantic aspects of communication. In contrast with these paradigms, the definitions proposed here for communication and language are in line with a pluralistic evolutionary worldview, one that necessitates the recognition that a multitude of units, levels, mechanisms and processes are involved in bringing forth communication and language. (shrink)

The paper aims at reconsidering the problem of “practical knowledge” at a proper level of generality, and at showing the role that personal abilities play in it. The notion of “practical knowledge” has for long been the focus of debates both in philosophy and related areas in psychology. It has been wholly captured by debates about ‘knowledge’ and has more recently being challenged in its philosophical foundations as targeting a specific attitude of ‘knowing-how’. But what are the basic facts accounted (...) in the “knowing-how” debate? The problem is much more fundamental than knowledge: it addresses the need for an explanation of intelligent or guided behaviour, that could account for some distinctive aspects involved in the performance, but without positing too much beyond the observable actions. This is what I call the problem of “practical mastery” (PM). PM raises three questions: what kind of behaviour require such an explanation? What is distinctive about practical mastery? What does it consist in: a form of knowledge, or something else? I argue here that the notion of ability offers a less restrictive, though no less powerful answer to these three questions. It can offer an independent objective grasp on the subjects of attribution. I conclude that the notion is central both to account for common-sense psychology and to understand what experimental psychology actually measures and tests for. (shrink)

Black Existential Freedom looks at the ways in which Black cultural productions reflect a constant struggle for freedom and a refusal to surrender to the destructive forces of dehumanization. This book offers a counter-narrative to current Afro-Pessimist theorizations of Blackness that choose the power of death and nihilism over life.

Many who evoke the term solidarity are influenced by an underlying sense of urgency and whether the use of the term plays upon an intellectual concept or harnesses solidarity’s more practical expressions, this political buzzword wields influence. _European Solidarity_ proposes a variety of sophisticated historical and theoretical conceptualizations of solidarity, while simultaneously exposing the practical implications of its contemporary expressions. An empirical investigation of solidarity’s crucial challenges in the EU today and a comprehensive consideration of the history of the term (...) in the context of changing social, religious, and political conditions within Europe, _European Solidarity_ will be required reading for scholars and students of social theory and European studies alike. (shrink)

The last couple of years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the study of crossmodal correspondences – the tendency for our brains to preferentially associate certain features or dimensions of stimuli across the senses. By now, robust empirical evidence supports the existence of numerous crossmodal correspondences, affecting people’s performance across a wide range of psychological tasks – in everything from the redundant target effect paradigm through to studies of the Implicit Association Test, and from speeded discrimination/classification tasks through (...) to unspeeded spatial localisation and temporal order judgment tasks. However, one question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is whether crossmodal correspondences automatically affect people’s performance , as opposed to reflecting more of a strategic, or top-down, phenomenon. Here, we review the latest research on the topic of crossmodal correspondences to have addressed this issue. We argue that answering the question will require researchers to be more precise in terms of defining what exactly automaticity entails. Furthermore, one’s answer to the automaticity question may also hinge on the answer to a second question: Namely, whether crossmodal correspondences are all ‘of a kind’, or whether instead there may be several different kinds of crossmodal mapping . Different answers to the automaticity question may then be revealed depending on the type of correspondence under consideration. We make a number of suggestions for future research that might help to determine just how automatic crossmodal correspondences really are. (shrink)