Media ecology is not the theoretical stream of communication studies and it is not limited to Marshall McLuhan´s work and thinking; however, we focus on McLuhan’s approach to media ecology for this special issue on the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan. Media ecology is a complex and systemic metadiscipline whose object of study is the changes and effects that have occurred in society as a result of the evolution of technology and media throughout history.

In explaining the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum in the United Kingdom, can theories emphasizing the importance of economic factors be reconciled with the fact that many people appeared to vote against their economic self-interest? This article approaches this puzzle through case study research that draws on fieldwork and a process of reciprocal knowledge exchange with local communities in five local authorities in England and Wales. It argues that the Leave vote can be attributed partly to political discontent associated (...) with trajectories of relative economic decline and deindustrialization. Building on the growing literature about the role of narratives and discourses in navigating uncertainty, it contends that these localized economic experiences, interpreted through local-level narratives, paved the way for local-level discourses of resilience and nationwide optimistic messaging about the economic impacts of Brexit to resonate. Local and national-level discourses discounting the potential economic costs of leaving the European Union played a crucial role in giving precise, somewhat paradoxical, political content to the sense of discontent. The article contributes to the growing focus on place and community in understanding political behavior and invites further research on local discourses linking macro-level trajectories and micro-level voting decisions. (shrink)

Most non-human animals live in the wild and it is probable that suffering predominates in their lives due to natural events. Humans may at some point be able to engage in paradise engineering, or the modification of nature and animal organisms themselves, to improve the well-being of wild animals. We may, in other words, make nature 'red in tooth and claw' no more. We argue that this creates a tension between environmental ethics and animal ethics which is likely insurmountable. First, (...) we argue that concern for the environment can be compatible with helping individual wild animals but should see redesigning nature as morally impermissible. Second, we argue that if we are concerned with animal well-being, we may reject that we have a duty to help wild animals even to the point of redesigning nature, but we must nevertheless concede that it is permissible to do so under certain circumstances. We show how this permissibility can be derived from three animal rights views: Tom Regan's, a novel account inspired by Thomas Pogge and a libertarian approach to animal rights. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the search for explainable models and interpretable decisions in AI must be reformulated in terms of the broader project of offering a pragmatic and naturalistic account of understanding in AI. Intuitively, the purpose of providing an explanation of a model or a decision is to make it understandable to its stakeholders. But without a previous grasp of what it means to say that an agent understands a model or a decision, the explanatory strategies will (...) lack a well-defined goal. Aside from providing a clearer objective for XAI, focusing on understanding also allows us to relax the factivity condition on explanation, which is impossible to fulfill in many machine learning models, and to focus instead on the pragmatic conditions that determine the best fit between a model and the methods and devices deployed to understand it. After an examination of the different types of understanding discussed in the philosophical and psychological literature, I conclude that interpretative or approximation models not only provide the best way to achieve the objectual understanding of a machine learning model, but are also a necessary condition to achieve post hoc interpretability. This conclusion is partly based on the shortcomings of the purely functionalist approach to post hoc interpretability that seems to be predominant in most recent literature. (shrink)

Interest in ethical leadership from academics and practitioners has grown enormously in recent years. This article addresses this literature through a framework that identifies three interlocking questions. First, who are ethical leaders and what are their characteristics? Second, how do ethical leaders do what they do? Third, why do leaders do as they do and what are the outcomes of ethical leadership? Different dimensions to ethical leadership are examined and presented as three interlocking circles; Virtues, Purposes and Practices. This framework (...) presents an integrated approach to ethical leadership and argues that future research take this holistic framework and apply it to different sectors or contexts. (shrink)

Most nonhuman animals live on the terms imposed on them by human beings. This condition of being under the mastery of another, or domination, is what republicanism identifies as political unfreedom. Yet there are several problems that must be solved in order to successfully extend republicanism to animals. Here I focus on the question of whether freedom can be a benefit for individuals without a free will. I argue that once we understand the grounds that make freedom a desirable property (...) of choices, we can see how it is appropriate to predicate it of those made by any sentient agent. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the search for explainable models and interpretable decisions in AI must be reformulated in terms of the broader project of offering a pragmatic and naturalistic account of understanding in AI. Intuitively, the purpose of providing an explanation of a model or a decision is to make it understandable to its stakeholders. But without a previous grasp of what it means to say that an agent understands a model or a decision, the explanatory strategies will (...) lack a well-defined goal. Aside from providing a clearer objective for XAI, focusing on understanding also allows us to relax the factivity condition on explanation, which is impossible to fulfill in many machine learning models, and to focus instead on the pragmatic conditions that determine the best fit between a model and the methods and devices deployed to understand it. After an examination of the different types of understanding discussed in the philosophical and psychological literature, I conclude that interpretative or approximation models not only provide the best way to achieve the objectual understanding of a machine learning model, but are also a necessary condition to achieve post hoc interpretability. This conclusion is partly based on the shortcomings of the purely functionalist approach to post hoc interpretability that seems to be predominant in most recent literature. (shrink)

Wild animals probably have net negative lives. Christine Korsgaard rejects the view that we might engineer paradise by redesigning nature and animals so that they have the best possible existences. She believes the genetic changes required would not be identity-preserving, thereby causing animals to cease to exist. I argue, first, that paradise engineering is permissible. Many harms are caused by non-sentient natural entities and processes. Moreover, sentient animals can survive modifications compatible with their psychological persistence over time. Second, we are (...) required to re-engineer nature in order to satisfy animals' right to the resources necessary for a reasonable life. (shrink)

En este trabajo se hace un análisis aproximativo del estudio fenomenológico hermenéutico del dolor en la facticidad del vivir propio. Su objetivo es visualizar el dolor como determinante en la apertura a la existencia del ser, del ser-ahí, en perspectiva heideggeriana. Se expone la experiencia de la vida dolorosa como experiencia fáctica del vivir en sí mismo, y el conflicto ético que plantea la alteridad: la dificultad de comprender el dolor de los otros desde su propio experimentar dolor. Este conflicto (...) ético aparece en la conciencia del médico cuando éste asume el compromiso de ir más allá de la ayuda instrumental e intenta ver el sufrimiento del enfermo desde la realidad del otro como sí mismo. La hipótesis que subyace en este análisis es que el sufrimiento del dolor abre camino a la existencia propia; sin embargo, evidencia el obstáculo de comprensión del otro. Se concluye ratificando la idea de que el dolor tiene carácter de «existenciario» (término de Martin Heidegger, que significa un modo de ser-en-el-mundo). (shrink)

La historia de la matemática muestra como la intuición matemática ha estado presente en la invención y desarrollo de conceptos, teorías y procedimientos matemáticos. Así mismo, ha permeado el debate filosófico, los fundamentos de la matemática y los discursos educativos; otorgándole vigencia al estudio de este tema. En el presente artículo, se exponen los argumentos bajo los cuales es posible sustentar que la intuición es un proceso, que toma ideas que se presentan, inicialmente de manera “desordenada”, y que gracias al (...) contexto y los conocimientos previos del individuo las centran en una idea “fija” que será incorporada a la matemática por la lógica y la formalización. (shrink)

International research enrolling human subjects has raised an ethical concern regarding the just distribution of benefits between the countries that design the research and the host communities. Although several universal declarations have expressed this concern, a gap between theory and practice continues to exist, as well as a significant divergence between the design of the research protocol and the social context where it will be implemented. Although institutional review boards have made a valuable effort to evaluate international research, their sensitivity (...) to the just sharing of research benefits as well as their attention to the social context must be evaluated. This article analyzes the distribution of benefits in a review of international research in Mexico and produces an ethical reflection based on the results. (shrink)

On expectation, most wild animals have lives of net suffering due to naturogenic causes. Some have claimed that concern for their well-being gives us reasons to intervene in nature on their behalf. Against this, it has been said that many interventions to assist wild animals would be wrong, even if successful, because they would violate their freedom. According to the Freedom-based Approach I defend in this paper, this view is misguided. Concern for wild animal freedom does indeed gives us reasons (...) to secure these animals against control-undermining interferences, but also to intervene in nature in order to enrich their choices. (shrink)

Many different arguments have been put forward in order to assign the best place for a given element within Mendeleev's Table: its spectroscopy, its chemical activity, the crystalline structure of its solid state, etc. We here propose another criterion; the nature of the few body corrections to the pairwise additive energy. This argument is used here to address a question often brought forward by Eric Scerri in Foundations of Chemistry, namely the rightful place of helium; either above the column of (...) the alkaline earths (beryllium, etc.) or rather above the noble gas elements. (shrink)

Over the turn of the 21st century, the use of data from large electronic corpora has changed research on Spanish historical syntax, spurring interest in long-range evolutions and the shape of the correspondent diachronic curves. However, general reflections on diffusion and the factors that drive and influence it are still pretty much lacking. In this paper, I reflect on the research possibilities laid open by the availability of such large masses of data, focusing particularly on new knowledge on syntactic change (...) brought about by the study of low-frequency phenomena and of recessive changes, as well as on the exploration of changes conditioned by dialect contact and textual traditions. I conclude with some remarks on the general typology of diffusion in syntactic change. (shrink)

Nonhuman animals are unable to exert any direct control over the functioning of democratic institutions –the decisions of which, nevertheless, have a pervasive impact on their lives. Their interests are therefore likelier to be set back or unfairly discounted, and their choices are more vulnerable to arbitrary interference. Because of this, some authors have suggested that we ought to redesign our political institutions so that they are more responsive to the interests of animals. We argue that this strategy fails to (...) address the root of the problem, which is animals’ lack of robust political agency. We defend that, should it become technologically feasible, we have a pro tanto obligation, derived from the values that underpin democracy, to uplift, or radically enhance, the political agency of nonhuman animals, so that they can better participate in mass democratic politics, express their interests as they see them, self-organise to defend them, and hold their representatives accountable. Finally, we explain how our argument manages to resist the most important objections against animal enhancement and, in some cases, it does so better than alternative proposals based on the value of animal well-being. (shrink)

A widespread need to explain the behavior and outcomes of AI-based systems has emerged, due to their ubiquitous presence. Thus, providing renewed momentum to the relatively new research area of eXplainable AI (XAI). Nowadays, the importance of XAI lies in the fact that the increasing control transference to this kind of system for decision making -or, at least, its use for assisting executive stakeholders- already affects many sensitive realms (as in Politics, Social Sciences, or Law). The decision-making power handover to (...) opaque AI systems makes mandatory explaining those, primarily in application scenarios where the stakeholders are unaware of both the high technology applied and the basic principles governing the technological solutions. The issue should not be reduced to a merely technical problem; the explainer would be compelled to transmit richer knowledge about the system (including its role within the informational ecosystem where he/she works). To achieve such an aim, the explainer could exploit, if necessary, practices from other scientific and humanistic areas. The first aim of the paper is to emphasize and justify the need for a multidisciplinary approach that is beneficiated from part of the scientific and philosophical corpus on Explaining, underscoring the particular nuances of the issue within the field of Data Science. The second objective is to develop some arguments justifying the authors’ bet by a more relevant role of ideas inspired by, on the one hand, formal techniques from Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and on the other hand, the modeling of human reasoning when facing the explanation. This way, explaining modeling practices would seek a sound balance between the pure technical justification and the explainer-explainee agreement. (shrink)

Comparative thanatologists study the responses to the dead and the dying in nonhuman animals. Despite the wide variety of thanatological behaviours that have been documented in several different species, comparative thanatologists assume that the concept of death is very difficult to acquire and will be a rare cognitive feat once we move past the human species. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is based on two forms of anthropocentrism: an intellectual anthropocentrism, which leads to an over-intellectualisation of the (...) CoD, and an emotional anthropocentrism, which yields an excessive focus on grief as a reaction to death. Contrary to what these two forms of anthropocentrism suggest, we argue that the CoD requires relatively little cognitive complexity and that it can emerge independently from mourning behaviour. Moreover, if we turn towards the natural world, we can see that the minimal cognitive requirements for a CoD are in fact met by many nonhuman species and there are multiple learning pathways and opportunities for animals in the wild to develop a CoD. This allows us to conclude that the CoD will be relatively easy to acquire and, so, we can expect it to be fairly common in nature. (shrink)

RESUMENEste trabajo describe y analiza el libro de Roberto Augusto En defensa del ateísmo, publicado en 2012 por la editorial Laetoli de Pamplona (Colección «Libros abiertos»). La lectura de este libro, de indiscutible valor intelectual y claridad expositiva, induce de modo difícil de evitar a una reflexión personal. Más allá de una defensa del ateísmo, y de un alegato contra la religión (casi en exclusiva, la cristiana), razonado y razonable, el libro lleva al lector al planteamiento de la pregunta por (...) la más grave de todas las cuestiones filosóficas, la «costa de la metafísica», y ello desde una perspectiva personal. Es lo que he tratado de plasmar en mis reflexiones, que no suponen tanto una crítica de la obra cuanto un intento de prolongar su meditación.PALABRAS CLAVEATEÍSMO, FILOSOFÍA DE LA RELIGIÓN, CREENCIA, ROBERTO AUGUSTOABSTRACTThis note describes and analyzes the book by Roberto Augusto En defensa del ateísmo (Laetoli: Pamplona, 2012). The reading of this undoubtedly clear and valuable book results in a hardly avoidable personal reflexion. Besides offering a defence of atheism and a reasonable and wellreasoned denounce of religion (although almost exclusively focused on the Christianity), the book leads the reader to the most fundamental philosophical questions, and this from a personal perspective. These reflexions are not as much a criticism of the theses of the book as an attempt to prolong the discussion.KEYWORDSATHEISM, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, BELIEF, ROBERTO AUGUSTO. (shrink)

Explanation and understanding are intimately connected notions, but the nature of that connection has generally not been considered a topic worthy of serious philosophical investigation. Most authors have avoided making reference to the notion of understanding in their accounts of explanation because they fear that any mention of the epistemic states of the individuals involved compromises the objectivity of explanation. Understanding is a pragmatic notion, they argue, and pragmatics should be kept at a safe distance from the universal features of (...) explanation. My main contention in this dissertation is that there is a sense in which it is meaningful and useful to talk about objective understanding, and that to characterize this notion it is necessary to formulate an account of objective explanation that makes reference to the beliefs and epistemic goals of the participants in a cognitive enterprise. ;My account of explanation is based on the belief-doubt model of inquiry first proposed by Peirce. Using the tools provided by decision theory, and the models of belief revision developed by Isaac Levi and by Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makinson, I analyze the objective and pragmatic conditions that a piece of information must fulfill to be both explanatory and epistemically useful to an inquiring agent. The objective basis for an explanation is provided by the relation of probabilistic relevance that the fact described by the explanans bares to the fact described by the explanandum. But an explanation is much more than its foundation. As an epistemological notion, a potential explanation can only be a bona fide explanation if it becomes part of inquiry, that is, if an agent or a group of agents can see any value in it for their cognitive purposes. I provide a way to evaluate an explanation in terms of its credibility, its content, and its explanatory value. I argue that although an objective measure of the credibility and content of an explanation can be established, in many cases a complete determination of its explanatory value will ultimately depend on the interests and goals of the individual inquirers. (shrink)

This paper explores the political awakening of the Chilean people that began in October 2019. It puts forward an alternative reading of the people’s claim for a new constitution. The first section briefly describes the October outcry and provides some context with regards to the nature of the social movement at its root. The two following sections examine two periods in Chilean recent history, the Pinochet regime and the period that has come after its overturn, focusing on two elements: the (...) neoliberal model set up by the dictatorship and the Constitution of 1980, which was designed to block the people’s political agency for the purpose of protecting the model. The final section works with these two elements in order to provide an alternative scheme by which to examine Chile’s awakening, the central question being: what does the claim for a new constitution mean? And critical for these purposes: what constitution is being overturned? Pinochet’s political project distorted constitutional ideas in such a way that only by clarifying the conceptual horizon is it possible to visualize how the concept of constitution and its relationship with the idea of a constituent power of the people can be of help to understand Chile’s constitutional awakening. (shrink)

Violence has long been assumed to be an intrinsic trait of female prostitution. However, it has been mostly associated with the locale in which the activity is exercised, i.e. with working time and space. In this article, based on data gathered by direct observations, in-depth interviews and the compilation of so-called time-budgets, the authors demonstrate that violence is as pervasive and omnipresent a feature of prostitutes’ ostensibly private ‘off-duty’ time and space, though it takes on varied and distinct forms and (...) configurations, compared to violence in the workplace. (shrink)

In their target article, Mikhalevich & Powell (M&P) argue that we should extend moral protection to arthropods. In this commentary, we show that there are some unforeseen obstacles to applying the sort of individualistic welfare-based ethics that M&P have in mind to certain arthropods, namely, insects. These obstacles have to do with the fact that there are often many more individuals involved in our dealings with insects than our ethical theories anticipate, and also with the fact that, in some sense, (...) some insects count as more than an individual and, in another sense, they sometimes count as less than an individual. (shrink)

The Periodic Table has the column of the noble gas atoms (He, Ne, Ar, Kr, Xe, Rn) as one of its main pillars. Indeed the inert chemical nature of their closed shell structure is so striking that it is sometimes extended to all such structures. Is it true however that any closed shell, say a closed d-subshell will denote a lack of chemical activity? Take the noble metals for instance, so renowned for their catalytic capacity. Platinum has 10 electrons in (...) its valence shell which makes one of its excited states to be a closed 5d10–6s0 state. Surely this state would not be expected to be crucial to the catalytic activity of platinum, or would it? Or take palladium whose ground state is precisely the 4d10–5s0 state, should we expect that an isolated Pd atom at near zero-point temperature would attack a closed-shell hydrogen molecule efficiently? We shall here show that this is precisely the case; the closed-shell excited states of nickel and platinum are indeed crucial, through symmetry avoided crossings, for their reactivity. Other valuable catalysts as ruthenium depend on their excited states with maximal d-shell occupancy for their activity. The most notable confirmation of this new finding; that closed d-shells are vital to the catalytic activity of noble metals however, is the case of palladium whose closed-shell ground state is indeed capable of attacking hydrogen and hydrocarbon molecules even at temperatures well below 10 K as was predicted theoretically and immediately confirmed experimentally. (shrink)

El propósito de este texto es tematizar la precariedad con las herramientas de la filosofía política. Buscaremos equilibrar horizontes conceptuales con prácticas políticas para pensar la acción democrática en nuestro contexto. Nuestro argumento se compone de cuatro premisas. Primero, que elfalso dilema entre teoría y práctica nos permite explorar una relación de tensión creativa entre ambas para conceptualizar la precariedad. Segundo, que la construcción teórica de la precariedad responde tanto a ideas y conceptos como a instituciones y discursos que configuran (...) las vidas de quienes la experimentan. Tercero, que los distintos usos del concepto de precariedad permiten reconocer una fuente común de vulneración de derechos relacionada con la configuración del trabajo en el orden neoliberal. Cuarto, que relacionar la conceptualización de lo plebeyo con la de lo precario nos permite pensar prácticas democráticas renovadas. (shrink)

Using a sample of 124 managers and 248 subordinates, this study examines the mediating effect of subordinates’ job satisfaction in the relationship between ethical leadership and subordinate organizational citizenship and counter-productive work behaviour in the Colombian context. We additionally analyse the effect of ethical leadership on subordinates’ perception of leaders’ performance. Factor analyses of the ethical leadership scale revealed two factors, ethical person and ethical guidance, which were differentially associated to the outcomes. We offer an explanation from three cultural dimensions (...) by which Colombian employees seem to be more willing to follow leaders’ ethical example as a way to strengthen their membership to the leader's group, than leaders ethical disciplining by which norms are imposed. These findings have a number of implications for organizations and managers who aim to improve their employees’ behaviour. Our advice to them is that leaders’ deeds have a greater impact than their ethical words. (shrink)

To verify the occurrence of a singular instance of testimonial injustice three facts must be established. The first is whether the hearer in fact has an identity prejudice of which she may or may not be aware; the second is whether that prejudice was in fact the cause of the unjustified credibility deficit; and the third is whether there was in fact a credibility deficit in the testimonial exchange. These three elements constitute the facts of the matter of testimonial injustice. (...) In this essay we argue that none of these facts can be established with any degree of confidence, and therefore that testimonial injustice is an undetectable phenomenon in singular instances. Our intention is not to undermine the idea of testimonial injustice, but rather to set limits to what can be justifiably asserted about it. According to our argument, although there are insufficient reasons to identify individual acts of testimonial injustice, it is possible to recognize recurrent patterns of epistemic responses to speakers who belong to specific social groups. General testimonial injustice can thus be characterized as a behavioral tendency of a prejudiced hearer. (shrink)

There is a growing awareness that there are many subtle forms of exclusion and partiality that affect the correct workings of a judicial system. The concept of epistemic injustice, introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, is a useful conceptual tool to understand forms of judicial partiality that often go undetected. In this paper, we present Fricker’s original theory and some of the applications of the concept of epistemic injustice in legal processes. In particular, we want to show that the seed (...) planted by Fricker has flourished into a rich field of study in which the concept is used to analyze many different phenomena in law, not always following the original characterization provided by her. This has led to a distinction between what we will call the narrow version of the concept, which is closer to Fricker’s original account, and the wider version of epistemic injustice, which is a more controversial notion because it is always on the verge of morphing into other well-known concepts like sexism, racial discrimination, oppression, silencing, and gaslighting. We will show that the value of the narrow version is mostly theoretical, and that in order to use the concept of epistemic injustice one must adopt a more liberal understanding of it. (shrink)

La literatura sobre razonamiento probatorio busca incidir en la determinación de los hechos en los procesos judiciales. Para alcanzar dicho propósito, no basta con dirigir la mirada hacia disciplinas extrajurídicas exitosas e integrar lo que de ellas pueda extraerse a las teorías jurídicas de la prueba y a la práctica judicial. Es necesario, además, considerar el tipo de hechos a probar, los roles de las reglas jurídicas aplicables, y asumir que litigantes y jueces, actuando en un contexto institucional, podrán ser (...) más o menos agudos en la discusión fáctica, entre otras cosas. Minimizar la influencia de tales factores expone a los estudios probatorios a tener un bajo rendimiento práctico. Algo de esto ha ocurrido con la llamada concepción racionalista de la prueba. Su innegable aporte al debate académico en español no ha ido a la par de su impacto judicial. Para explicar esta brecha entre teoría y práctica, identificamos tres creencias-obstáculo que afectan a su discurso sobre la prueba y que deben ser sorteadas si lo que se busca es influir en la forma en que se juzgan los hechos en un sistema judicial realmente existente. (shrink)

We access most of our most cherished beliefs via testimony. Philosophy is no exception. We treat spoken and written philosophical testimony as evidence for philosophical claims. Nonetheless, this paper argues that philosophical testimony is unable to justify philosophical beliefs. If testimony is the only evidence we have to justify philosophical beliefs, this entails skepticism about philosophy. Call this the testimony challenge. First, the paper argues that philosophical testimony does not meet the conditions under which evidence can justify our beliefs. Second, (...) it shows that philosophical testimony cannot provide preemptive epistemic reasons as science and mathematics do. Finally, it answers the self‐defeat objection and a set of objections aiming to block the thesis that philosophical testimony does not justify philosophical beliefs. The paper aims to rethink the role of philosophical testimony in philosophy and reinforce the skeptical worries raised by methodological and disagreement challenges. (shrink)