Ser modern és ser racionalista. Aquest llibre repassa amb detall les tesis de Descartes, la seva relació amb els contemporanis i les conseqüències de les seves teories.

L'utilitarisme té com a criteri bàsic aconseguir el màxim bé per al màxim nombre possible de persones. L'utilitarisme dóna molta importància a la recerca de la felicitat personal. Aquest llibre en descriu les tesis bàsiques i respon a les principals acusacions que ha rebut.

A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: Words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the tendency of more frequently used words to be shorter), and conformity to this general pattern has been seen in the behavior of a number of other animals. It has been (...) argued that the presence of this law is a sign of efficient coding in the information theoretic sense. However, no strong direct connection has been demonstrated between the law and compression, the information theoretic principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Here, we show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its frequency increases. Furthermore, we show that the mean code length or duration is significantly small in human language, and also in the behavior of other species in all cases where agreement with the law of brevity has been found. We argue that compression is a general principle of animal behavior that reflects selection for efficiency of coding. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that evolutionary debunking arguments against morality constitute a type of epistemological objection to our moral beliefs. In particular, the debunking force of such arguments is not supposed to depend on the metaphysical claim that moral facts do not exist. In this paper I argue that this standard epistemological construal of EDAs is highly misleading, if not mistaken. Specifically, I argue that the most widely discussed EDAs all make key and controversial metaphysical claims about the nature of (...) morality or the possibility of moral truth that belie their apparently epistemological character. I show that the debunking force of these EDAs derives largely from metaphysical claims about morality and their implications for the possibility of moral reduction, rather than from epistemological worries associated with the existence of an causal/non-moral explanation of our moral judgments. The paper briefly concludes with a dilemma that I believe confronts all EDAs such as those discussed in this paper: either such arguments are unsound, or else they prove too much, debunking our knowledge of science and the external world, as well as morality. (shrink)

A ‘companions in guilt’ strategy against moral error theory aims to show that the latter proves too much: if sound, it supports an implausible error-theoretic conclusion in other areas such as epistemic or practical reasoning. Christopher Cowie [2016 Cowie, C. 2016. Good News for Moral Error Theorists: A Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94/1: 115–30.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]] has recently produced what he claims is a ‘master argument’ against (...) all such strategies. The essence of his argument is that CG arguments cannot work because they are afflicted by internal incoherence or inconsistency. I argue, first, that Cowie's master argument does not succeed. Beyond this, I argue that there is no good reason to think that any such argument—one that purports to identify an internal incoherence in CG arguments—can succeed. Second, I argue that the main substantive area of disagreement between error theorists and CG theorists essentially concerns the conceptual profile of epistemic reasons—specifically, whether they are strongly categorical—not the ontological question of whether such reasons exist. I then develop an argument in favour of the CG theorist's position by considering the moral error theorist's arguments in support of the conceptual claim that moral reasons are strongly categorical. These include, notably, criticisms made by Joyce [2011] and Olson [2014] of Finlay's [2008] ‘end relational’ view of morality, according to which moral reasons are relative to some end or standard, hence not strongly categorical. Examining these criticisms, I argue that, based on what moral error theorists have said regarding the conceptual profile of moral reasons, there is a strong case to be made that moral reasons are strongly categorical if and only if epistemic reasons are. (shrink)

Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word yet in their lexicon rather than to a meaning that already has a word attached. In previous research, the strategy was shown to be optimal from an information theoretic standpoint. In that framework, interpretation is hypothesized to be driven by the minimization of (...) a cost function: the option of least communication cost is chosen. However, the information theoretic model employed in that research neither explains the weakening of that vocabulary learning bias in older children or polylinguals nor reproduces Zipf’s meaning-frequency law, namely the non-linear relationship between the number of meanings of a word and its frequency. Here we consider a generalization of the model that is channeled to reproduce that law. The analysis of the new model reveals regions of the phase space where the bias disappears consistently with the weakening or loss of the bias in older children or polylinguals. The model is abstract enough to support future research on other levels of life that are relevant to biosemiotics. In the deep learning era, the model is a transparent low-dimensional tool for future experimental research and illustrates the predictive power of a theoretical framework originally designed to shed light on the origins of Zipf’s rank-frequency law. (shrink)

The Qur’an has been transmitted as both a written text and an oral recital. This has led to the development of a reading tradition that permits numerous different vocalisations to be made upon the basic skeletal text of the established ʿUthmānī codex. Ibn al-Jazarī chose ten early readers whom he felt were most representative of this tradition and whose readings are treated as canonical up until this day. One of these, the Kufan linguist al-Kisāʾī has been characterised in the literature (...) as more focused on the grammar of the Qur’an than his reader peers. This article explores al-Kisāʾī’s process of ikhtiyār when deciding between various possible readings. The sample for analysis consists of Kisāʾī’s tafarrudāt, the approximately fifty cases in which his reading differs from the other nine readers. By comparing his reading with the comments of early scholars of Qur’anic linguistics, especially his near-contemporary al-Farrāʾ, it is possible to construct a typology of the suspected principal reasons for al-Kisāʾī’s tafarrudāt. Not only are many of these based on grammatical preferences, but they demonstrate a significant degree of consistency. Furthermore, analysis of a cluster of readings with implications for the interpretation of the sharīʿa provides evidence for a subtle exegetical dimension to al-Kisāʾī’s work as a reader-grammarian. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Artificial Intelligence and the many data science methods associated with it, such as machine learning and large language models, are first and foremost epistemic technologies. In order to establish this claim, I first argue that epistemic technologies can be conceptually and practically distinguished from other technologies in virtue of what they are designed for, what they do and how they do it. I then proceed to show that unlike other kinds of technology (_including_ other (...) epistemic technologies) AI can be uniquely positioned as an epistemic technology in that it is primarily designed, developed and deployed to be used in _epistemic contexts_ such as inquiry, it is specifically designed, developed and deployed to manipulate _epistemic content_ such as data, _and_ it is designed, developed and deployed to do so particularly through _epistemic operations_ such as prediction and analysis. As has been shown in recent work in the philosophy and ethics of AI (Alvarado, AI and Ethics, 2022a), understanding AI as an epistemic technology will also have significant implications for important debates regarding our relationship to AI technologies. This paper includes a brief overview of such implications, particularly those pertaining to explainability, opacity, trust and even epistemic harms related to AI technologies. (shrink)

The global path of capitalist development is continuously transformed as a result of the production and integration of advanced information and communication technologies within various forms of production. The first half of this paper conceptualises ICTs as capital’s appropriation and objectification of the productive forces of the general intellect in ‘the general artificial intellect’, a category that refers to the total processing power of networked ICTs in global society. The second half of the paper analyses Uber’s development of the elements (...) of capital’s artificial intellect as the cybernetic means of real subsumption in its immaterial production process. The paper concludes that Uber’s development of autonomous vehicles is an example of the global trend in transport automation that could raise the organic composition of capital of the transport industry, which I suggest would advance the stage of real subsumption toward a third and final stage of autonomous subsumption. (shrink)

Computer simulations have conventionally been understood to be either extensions of formal methods such as mathematical models or as special cases of empirical practices such as experiments. Here, I argue that computer simulations are best understood as instruments. Understanding them as such can better elucidate their actual role as well as their potential epistemic standing in relation to science and other scientific methods, practices and devices.

Establecido lo que es el uso de razón, estudia ahora el momento en que el hombre llega a él y la obligación de orientar entonces su vida al bien con el deseo o propósito de llevarlo a la práctica. En los que han crecido y se han educado en un ambiente de fe en Dios como máximo bien, su obligación moral es ordenarse a Él y proponerse actuar conforme a sus mandamientos. En los que han nacido y vivido en ambientes (...) desconocedores de Dios, su obligación es la de orientarse al bien en conformidad con el bagaje de sus conocimientos. Le inquieta el tema: cómo en ese momento les queda, particularmente a los últimos, abierto el camino de la salvación y la vida eterna. (shrink)