False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

This paper aims at an account of the German “reportive subjunctive”, where the mood signals that the proposition is the object of an utterance report. The report can be explicit in the sentence or in the context, or more or less implicit. We interpret these uses as a more or less local verification or accommodation of a presupposition introduced by the subjunctive, thus accounting for a range of facts and contributing to the theory of presuppositions.

Summary Fabricius ab Aquapendente commissioned coloured paintings of the reproductive parts and foetuses of a vast spectrum of animals. His published works on generation feature corresponding engravings. In contrast, his student William Harvey questioned the accuracy and usefulness of anatomical illustrations and used alternative approaches to represent his observations. I discuss these anatomists' criteria for selecting specimens, their techniques of investigation, and how these decisions affected their observations and representations of animal generation. I consider what each medium—paintings, intaglios, written (...) accounts—discloses or highlights and also their respective limitations. My study of Fabricius's colour plates also reveals the possibility that they served as inspiration for the first colour anatomical prints: a copy of the illustrations of foetuses is bound with drafts of Aselli's plates, and I suggest a possible link between the colour images. (shrink)

Given W.V. Quine’s and Donald Davidson’s extensive agreement about much of the philosophy of language and mind, and the obvious methodological parallels between Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation, many—including Quine and Davidson—are puzzled by their occasional disagreements. I argue for the importance of attending to these disagreements, not just because doing so deepens our understanding of these influential thinkers, but because they are in fact the shadows thrown from two distinct conceptions of philosophical inquiry: Quine’s “naturalism” and what (...) I call Davidson’s “humanism.” The clash between Quine and Davidson thus provides valuable insight into the history of analytic naturalism and its malcontents. (shrink)

Die Demonstratio evangelica des Eusebios von Kaisareia hat zu allen Zeiten weit weniger Interesse und Leser gefunden als ihr Gegenstück, die Praeparatio evangelica. Dementsprechend spärlich ist auch die handschriftliche Überlieferung des Textes in byzantinischer Zeit. Die zweite Hälfte des Werkes , die Photios wohl noch kannte, ging bis auf einige Fragmente des XV. Buches verloren, die erste Hälfte ist in vergleichsweise wenigen Handschriften überliefert, von denen nur drei vor dem 15. Jh. entstanden sind. Nach Heikel, von dem die heute noch (...) maßgebende Edition stammt, gehen alle erhaltenen Textzeugen auf den Codex Parisinus gr. 469 aus dem 12. Jh. zurück. Dieser Sachverhalt läßt sich schon daraus erschließen, daß alle weiteren Handschriften – mit zwei zu besprechenden Ausnahmen – zu Beginn , in Buch V und am Ende Lücken aufweisen, die durch Blattverluste im Parisinus bedingt sind. Vor allem die umfangreiche Lücke von 8 Folien zu Beginn des Parisinus hatte eine erhebliche Verstümmelung des Werkes zur Folge, die in den frühen Drucken nicht beseitigt werden konnte. Erst Johann Albert Fabricius druckte in seinem 1725 in Hamburg erschienenen Delectus argumentorum et syllabus scriptorum veritatis religionis Christianae den fehlenden Text des Anfangs und Endes aus einem Codex der Bibliothek des Fürsten der Walachei, Nikolaos Mavrokordatos, ab. Den fehlenden Abschnitt von Buch V ergänzte dann Heikel selbst aus dem Codex Bononiensis 3644 , der nach ihm ebenso wie der ‚Codex Maurocordati‘ des Fabricius eine Abschrift aus dem noch nicht verstümmelten Parisinus ist. (shrink)

At first glance, this case might give the impression that a resolution would have been straightforward. A 17-year-old young man with moderate to severe learning disabilities and other conditions discussed below required a kidney transplant–the Court of Protection was tasked with determining whether this was in his best interests. However, the case of WV was in fact far more technical and required nuanced discussion and expert medical evidence from a range of specialists to objectively balance the needs of WV and (...) the risks to WV, and to ultimately determine his fate of life or death based on receiving a kidney transplant.Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust applied for a declaration in relation to the capacity of William Verdon and for the court to consider whether an order should be made that it was not in his best interests to have a kidney transplant with sedation and ventilation post-operatively. (shrink)

In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer (1644–1710) set out on a truly visionary project. In 1704, on a family property just outside his hometown Copenhagen,...

A semiotic theory of systems derived from language would have the purpose of classifying all the systems of linguistic expression: philosophy, ideology, myth, poetry, art, as much as the dream, lapsus, and free association in a pluridimensional matrix that will interact with many diversified fields. In each one of these discourses it is necessary to consider a plurality of questions, the essence of which will only be comprehensible by the totality; it will be necessary to ask, in the first place, (...) what will be the purpose of this language, what function does it fulfill and for which reason has it been constructed. The concept of World vision (WV) is introduced and its relation with Generalized Collective Conscience (GCC) and Particularized Collective Conscience. Culture implies a particular WV. Culture creates GCC. The semantic field is a structure that formalizes the units of a certain culture constituting a portion of the vision of the Reality that owns this culture. An ecological case is explained. (shrink)

Based on the newly discovered, extensive manuscript notes of a virtually unknown German medical student by the name of Johann Konrad Zinn, who studied in Padua from 1593 to 1595, this paper offers a detailed account of what medical students could expect to learn about anatomy in late sixteenth-century Padua. It highlights the large number and wide range of anatomical demonstrations, most of which were private anatomies for a small circle of students and do not figure in Acta of the (...) German Nation, the principal source historians have so far relied upon. While the large audience in the big, celebrated public anatomies made it difficult if not impossible for the students to see the details of the anatomical structures, the much more numerous private anatomies offered a view from close up. As Zinn’s notes show, the two leading Paduan anatomists, Hieronymus Fabricius Aquapendente and Giulio Casseri often focused on a specific part of the body, like the brain or the pregnant uterus, and, following the Galenic model, consistently linked the demonstration of the fabric of that part to a discussion of its action and uses. In this sense, the different kinds of valves in the body, including those in the veins, were shown and discussed, as a subsection on William Harvey underlines, and the vivisection of animals for a group of students even allowed them to see the beating heart and other organs in action. In retrospect, much of the anatomical knowledge that students acquired in late sixteenth-century Padua was of limited relevance for medical practice but the anatomists did their best to point out such clinical uses and even used anatomical demonstrations to show different kinds surgical interventions on the corpse. (shrink)

Using the World Values Survey (WVS) as a background the paper discusses a tension between the general evaluative outlook of Swedish teacher students and the educational values established by The Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE). According to the results from WVS, which maps evaluative differences between approximately 80 countries in the world, Sweden stands out as a country that rejects traditional values and embraces so called secular self-expression values. However, the values established by SNAE include both traditional values, such (...) as “sharing a common cultural heritage”, and secular self-expression values, such as “individual freedom and integrity”. Against this background we conducted a survey of 179 Swedish teacher students in order to investigate the relation between their evaluative outlook and the values they are supposed to convey to their pupils as established by SNAE. The result of the survey indicates that these students do not differ in any significant respect from the Swedish population in general as regards secular vs traditional evaluations. The fact that the traditional values emphasized by SNAE seem to be scarcely represented among the teacher students, makes questionable whether they will be present in their future teaching. On the assumptions that there are important educational values among the traditional as well as the secular self-expression ones, and that values are reproduced within an educational system, we argue that there is reason to take the imbalance in the evaluative outlook of the students seriously. (shrink)

Human beings, even very young infants, and members of several other species, exhibit remarkable capacities for attending to and engaging with others. These basic capacities have been the subject of intense research in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind over the last several decades. Appropriately characterizing the exact level and nature of these abilities and what lies at their basis continues to prove a tricky business. The contributions to this special issue investigate whether and to (...) what extent the exercise of such capacities count as, or are best explained by, a genuine understanding of minds, where such understanding depends on the creatures in question possessing capacities for attributing a range of mental states and their contents in systematic ways. The question that takes center stage is: Do the capacities for attending to and engaging with others in question involve mindreading or is this achieved by other means? In this editorial we will review the state of the debate between mindreading and alternative accounts of social cognition. The issue is organized as follows: the first two papers review the experimental literature on mindreading in primates (Bermúdez) and children (Low & Wang), and the kinds of arguments made for mindreading and alternative accounts of social cognition. The next set of papers (Hedger & Fabricius, Lurz & Krachun, Zawidzki, and de Bruin et al.) further critique the existing experimental data and defend various mindreading and non-mindreading accounts. The final set of papers address further issues raised by phenomenological (Jacob, Zahavi), enactive (Michael), and embodied (Spaulding) accounts of social cognition. (shrink)

Background: Recent studies on public attitudes toward life extension technologies show a mix of ambivalence toward and support for extending the human lifespan. Attitudes toward genetic modification of organisms and technological enhancements may be used to categorize individuals according to political or ideological orientation such as technoprogressive or conservative and it could be easy to assume that these categories are related to more general categorizations related to culture, e.g. between Traditional and Secular-rational values in the World Values Survey. This paper (...) discusses how attitudes toward aspects of radical life extension may be related to cultural values as revealed in an online deliberative survey among university students conducted between January 2012 to January 2013. Survey results suggest that attitudes toward radical life extension tend to be mixed among groups categorized as Traditional, Secular-rational, Survivalist, and Self-expressionist. The study explored the relation between responses of 326 university students to 5 key questions on radical life extension and the cultural values they tend to favor as indicated by their response to 20 statements from the World Values Survey.Design and Method: The survey consisted of 3 stages: an online pre-discussion survey, face-to-face discussion, and post-discussion survey. After completing the 5 main survey questions in stage 1, participants were presented two additional questionnaires: one on cultural attitudes using 20 statements from the 2004-2008 World Values Survey and another on health attitudes with 12 statements from Dutta-Bergman’s 2004 study. In stage 2, participants were engaged in a face-to-face discussion in class focusing on their responses to the five key questions. After the discussion, they were invited to reconsider the choices and reasons they posted in stage 1 in the light of the face-to-face class discussion in stage 2.Results: Responses to the five survey questions showed that there tended to be more individuals across groups who disagreed with adopting technologies that radically extend the human lifespan beyond the current limit of 120 years. Attitudes toward radical life extension did not correspond to cultural attitudes indicated by responses to the WVS questions. The proportion of agreement/disagreement to statements presented in each of the five questions varied across cultural groups and there tended to be more individuals who disagreed with radical life extension in all groups. Changes in responses after the discussion stage were not significant and most respondents maintained their prior views.Discussion: Cultural attitudes associated with familiar technologies may not correspond with attitudes toward newer technologies since beliefs and values may need to be adapted to new imagined situations that the new technologies elicit. Moral understandings associated with familiar technological habits and beliefs are not necessarily carried over to new technologies. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal investigar a relação existente entre a percepção da felicidade dos brasileiros, sua satisfação com a vida e a satisfação com o regime democrático no período de 2017 a 2020. Nossa hipótese de trabalho postula que o declínio da felicidade e da satisfação com a vida, de uma forma geral, guarda relação de associação com a satisfação com a democracia e suas instituições. Assim, o artigo sugere que felicidade e democracia no Brasil são duas variáveis (...) associadas que ajudam a explicar em parte as fragilidades de nosso regime democrático e devem ser foco de atenção de nossas políticas públicas. A base empírica deste artigo é a sétima onda da Pesquisa Mundial de Valores (WVS, 2017-2020), por meio de pesquisa quantitativa, tipo survey, que utilizaremos para demonstrar nosso argumento. (shrink)

En este trabajo ofreceré argumentos para mantener que el entorno co-textual de una expresión configura su significado y también conforma su referente. Donde el referente es resultado de una actividad metalingüística cuya base se encuentra en las operaciones lingüísticas de condensación, síntesis y reificación, entre otras. Lo anterior implica que se puede mantener una teoría referencial sin la necesidad de asumir compromisos ontológicos tal como lo manifestaron Russell y especialmente W. V. Quine. Me valdré de la construcción nominal “la radiación (...) adaptativa” con el objetivo de responder a qué tipo de entidades se refiere esta expresión. Una respuesta parcial e incompleta a esta interrogante la encontramos en Quine por esta razón intentaré desarrollarla más recurriendo a la lingüística operacional y a la lingüística de texto. In this paper I will offer arguments to show that the co-textual environment of an expression configures its meaning and also conforms its referent. Where reference is a result of a metalinguistic activity which is based on linguistic operations of condensation, synthesis and reification, among others. The above implies that we can maintain a referential theory without the necessity to assume ontological commitments as they manifested especially Russell and WV Quine. I will use the nominal construction “la radiación adaptativa” in order to respond to what kind of entities is covered by this expression. A partial and incomplete answer to this question is found in Quine for this reason I will try to develop appealing to operational linguistics and textual linguistics. (shrink)