En el ámbito del derecho procesal penal, particularmente en el contexto del tránsito, existe una carencia de disposiciones legales que regulen el aspecto probatorio para demostrar infracciones por parte de las autoridades competentes. Específicamente, la falta de regulación sobre el uso de fotografías o videos como evidencia dificulta el proceso de aplicación de la ley, ya que ni el COIP ni la LOTTTSV ni sus reglamentos abordan adecuadamente cómo deben obtenerse pruebas mediante medios digitales. Esta laguna normativa plantea interrogantes sobre (...) qué aspectos pueden capturarse en contenido digital, cómo llevar a cabo dicho proceso y qué requisitos deben cumplir los dispositivos utilizados. Ante esta situación, se justifica la necesidad de realizar una investigación exhaustiva para determinar qué aspectos deben incorporarse en la normativa de tránsito con el fin de garantizar un debido proceso. El objetivo principal de esta investigación fue identificar las deficiencias en la regulación del aspecto probatorio en casos de infracciones de tránsito, así como proponer recomendaciones para mejorar el marco normativo existente. Se buscó determinar qué aspectos deben ser incorporados en la normativa de tránsito para garantizar un debido proceso y una aplicación justa de la ley. Para abordar esta problemática, se llevó a cabo una investigación cualitativa con un enfoque descriptivo. Se empleó el método dogmático-jurídico analítico-sintético para analizar en detalle la legislación existente y las lagunas normativas relacionadas con la obtención de pruebas digitales en casos de infracciones de tránsito. Además, se realizaron entrevistas a expertos en derecho procesal penal y se recopiló información de jurisprudencia relevante. Este enfoque metodológico permitió una comprensión profunda de los desafíos y las posibles soluciones en este ámbito. Los resultados de la investigación revelaron importantes lagunas en la regulación del aspecto probatorio en casos de infracciones de tránsito. Se identificaron problemas relacionados con la falta de claridad en los procedimientos de obtención de pruebas digitales y la ausencia de criterios específicos para la admisibilidad de dichas pruebas en los procesos legales. Además, se destacó la necesidad de establecer estándares claros y procedimientos adecuados para garantizar la integridad y fiabilidad de la evidencia digital en el contexto del tránsito. Esta investigación resalta la importancia de abordar las deficiencias en la regulación del aspecto probatorio en casos de infracciones de tránsito. Se recomienda la implementación de medidas específicas para mejorar la recopilación y admisibilidad de pruebas digitales, así como la revisión y actualización de la normativa existente. Esto contribuirá a garantizar un proceso legal justo y transparente en el ámbito del tránsito, fortaleciendo así el Estado de derecho y la confianza en el sistema judicial. (shrink)

Papers on nanotechnology in the Scientific Electronic Library Online database were studied bibliometrically. The terms ‘nanotechnology’, ‘nanoparticle’, ‘graphene’, ‘fullerene’, ‘nanotube’ and ‘quantum dot’ were used for the search in their singular and plural forms in three languages, and a total of 1205 papers were selected for the study to assess the frequency rates of the study variables. The results of the study are presented in this article focusing on gender differences.

Background The prioritization protocols for accessing adult critical care in the extreme pandemic context contain tiebreaker criteria to facilitate decision-making in the allocation of resources between patients with a similar survival prognosis. Besides being controversial, little is known about the public acceptability of these tiebreakers. In order to better understand the public opinion, Quebec and Ontario’s protocols were presented to the public in a democratic deliberation during the summer of 2022. Objectives (1) To explore the perspectives of Quebec and Ontario (...) citizens regarding tiebreakers, identifying the most acceptable ones and their underlying values. (2) To analyze these results considering other public consultations held during the pandemic on these criteria. Methods This was an exploratory qualitative study. The design involved an online democratic deliberation that took place over two days, simultaneously in Quebec and Ontario. Public participants were selected from a community sample which excluded healthcare workers. Participants were first presented the essential components of prioritization protocols and their related issues (training session day 1). They subsequently deliberated on the acceptability of these criteria (deliberation session day 2). The deliberation was then subject to thematic analysis. Results A total of 47 participants from the provinces of Quebec (n = 20) and Ontario (n = 27) took part in the online deliberation. A diverse audience participated excluding members of the healthcare workforce. Four themes were identified: (1) Priority to young patients - the life cycle - a preferred tiebreaker; (2) Randomization - a tiebreaker of last resort; (3) Multiplier effect of most exposed healthcare workers - a median acceptability tiebreaker, and (4) Social value – a less acceptable tiebreaker. Conclusion Life cycle was the preferred tiebreaker as this criterion respects intergenerational equity, which was considered relevant when allocating scarce resources to adult patients in a context of extreme pandemic. Priority to young patients is in line with other consultations conducted around the world. Additional studies are needed to further investigate the public acceptability of tiebreaker criteria. (shrink)

Informed consent forms have been useful in clinical practice and they constitute a part of the shared decision making in the informed consent process. They provide information to patients about clinical procedures and techniques. They also act as a remainder of the information discussed after the medical interview. Sometimes these documents are not readable to everybody. Belgian law specifies that all information that patients receive has to be proportionate verbally, but written information is also handled. The present research analyzes the (...) readability of the Flemish informed consent forms located in the webs of all General Hospitals using a simple random sample of 75 informed consent forms. By using the Douma tool, which bases its analysis in the length of words and sentences, the readability mean of the sample was 46, level “Difficult”. The 59% of them had a difficult level. The 11% were normal. It is a fact, then, that the 59% of the informed consent forms evaluated in this study are not suitable for everybody in Flanders, especially those people with low literacy. There were some researches made in other countries that agreed with these results. Written clinical information was poorly written so the informed consent forms were not working helping patients to recall information nor helping patients to become a part in the shared decision making about their health. The use of readability formulas represented a simple way to discriminate those informed consent forms that had normal readability scores from those that should be adapted. (shrink)

Este artículo traza una relación entre tres de los autores más influyentes de la doctrina del atomismo lógico a partir de la noción de análisis lógico, sin embargo, dicha relación busca no solo la constatación de su cercanía doctrinal sino la concepción ontológica que subyace a la posibilidad de dicho análisis, para el caso de Russell y Wittgenstein, o su ausencia, para el caso de Carnap, lo cual, no obstante, no aleja a este de preocupaciones de carácter metafísico, ya que (...) en los tres autores la relación entre lenguaje y mundo, ya sea desde la dimensión ontológica o epistemológica, comporta una reflexión de primer orden. Para exponer lo anterior se recurre a dilucidar la relación entre nombres propios y hechos (Russell), objetos simples y estado de cosas (Wittgenstein) y la postura de la Ciencia Unificada (Carnap) con respecto a la representación de hechos o cosas. (shrink)

Este artículo sostiene que la exacerbación autoritaria y totalitaria del capitalismo, en la primera mitad del siglo xx, tuvo su origen en la crisis experimentada por el capitalismo de libre mercado, debido a dinámicas propias de la sociedad liberal. El resultado fue una masiva violación de los derechos humanos liberales que habían posibilitado la consolidación y legitimación del propio capitalismo de libre mercado. De esta manera, en el texto se esboza que a la sociedad liberal moderna le es inherente una (...) tendencia autoritaria, vinculada a la dinámica inestable y propensa tendencia a la crisis de la reproducción del capital. Este rasgo estructural es ilustrado con los debates de la Escuela de Frankfurt sobre el fin del capitalismo liberal. Y dentro de este horizonte general, se sigue con especial detalle el análisis crítico que Franz Neumann realiza, en tensión con “la tesis del capitalismo de Estado” de Friedrich Pollock, sobre el devenir totalitario de la República de Weimar. (shrink)

The following exercise start from the assumption of social space—the field of action and influence in which a series of social relations converge, which differ and distribute in the social universe formulated by Pierre Bourdieu—, and the dimensions of the social world when the principles of differentiation and distribution operate, and hypothetically, the set of properties that act from them in the social universe, to give way to practices that describe experiences, both objective and subjective, of resistance anti-violence.

The health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed limitations in health systems worldwide, making it necessary to establish a bioethical framework that provides tools to drive health professionals’ decision-making amid scarce health resources. Bioethical models such as principlism, utilitarianism, and personalism seek to focus clinical decisions on respect for people’s rights and dignity, thus protecting the medical practice. Personalism provides a person-centered approach to respect for human dignity during health emergencies to avoid giving material meaning to the individual. Decision (...) criteria are required to face bioethical conflicts in clinical practice, reducing the legal, emotional, and ethical burden of decision-making in pandemic situations. (shrink)

Antonius Andreae was one of the most distinguished disciples and disseminators of John Duns Scotus’s doctrines within the Crown of Aragon and his works, which had an outstanding editorial success,...

Antonius Andreae was one of the most distinguished disciples and disseminators of John Duns Scotus’s doctrines within the Crown of Aragon and his works, which had an outstanding editorial success, can be considered as complete philosophical treatises ad mentem Scoti. This article focusses on his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where Andreae completes and reformulates the metaphysical views of his teacher, which results in a systematic treatise of Scotist metaphysics. To assess the scope of his reformulation and its value, I examine (...) his interpretation of the concept of science and the scientific status of metaphysics as is exposed in the sixth book of this commentary. For it, I present a detailed overview and transcription of his Quaestiones super Metaphysicam Aristotelis VI, which is based on Oxford, Oriel College Library, ms. 65. (shrink)

Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Volume 62, Issue, Page 91-168, January 2020.

La disminución de dopamina en los ganglios basales es la principal causa de la enfermedad de Parkinson. Además de las disfunciones motrices, los individuos con EP presentan alteraciones cognitivas que incluyen déficits de control atencional y temporal, de percepción del ritmo de la música y del habla, y de procesamiento del lenguaje. El circuito estriado-tálamo-cortical, participa en la comprensión musical y del habla. Personas con EP presentan problemas en distinguir las estructuras rítmicas por verse afectado el funcionamiento de los GB (...) y, por lo tanto, el control de su pulso interno en el CETC. Sin embargo, se ha encontrado que personas con EP pueden mejorar su sincronización temporal interna mediante el acompañamiento de señales auditivas externas temporalmente predecibles. Estudios argumentan que señales de este tipo pueden compensar la vía disfuncional CETC mediante una interface con el circuito cerebelo-tálamo-cortical el cual es sensible a la codificación de eventos temporales. (shrink)

This is a unique, groundbreaking study in the history of philosophy, combining leading men and women philosophers across 2600 years of Western philosophy, covering key foundational topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Introductory essays, primary source readings, and commentaries comprise each chapter to offer a rich and accessible introduction to and evaluation of these vital philosophical contributions. A helpful appendix canvasses an extraordinary number of women philosophers throughout history for further discovery and study.

We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)

In their article ‘Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI’, Durán and Jongsma discuss the epistemic and ethical challenges raised by black box algorithms in medical practice. The opacity of black box algorithms is an obstacle to the trustworthiness of their outcomes. Moreover, the use of opaque algorithms is not normatively justified in medical practice. The authors introduce a formalism, called computational reliabilism, which allows generating justified beliefs on (...) the algorithm reliability and trustworthy outcomes of artificial intelligence systems by means of epistemic warrants, called reliability indicators. However, they remark the need for reliability indicators specific to black box algorithms and that justified knowledge is not sufficient to justify normatively the actions of the physicians using medical AI systems. Therefore, Durán and Jongsma advocate for a more transparent design and implementation of black box algorithms, providing a series of recommendations to mitigate the epistemic and ethical challenges behind their use in medical practice. In this response, I argue that a peculiar form of black box algorithm transparency, called design publicity, may efficiently implement these recommendations. Design publicity encodes epistemic, that is, reliability indicators, and ethical recommendations for black box algorithms by means of four subtypes of transparency. These target the values and goals, their translation into design requirements, the performance and consistency of the algorithm altogether. I discuss design publicity applying it to a use case focused on the automated classification of skin lesions from medical images. (shrink)

Erudition as a cultist topic and style, recreated in countless traditional sources, helps Colombian writer R. H. Moreno-Durán to establish a delicate equilibrium between the parodic forms of linguistics research and the recreational contents that reflect the thinking conscience of men and the dialogic sphere of their existence. All these elements are present in his novel, El toque de Diana (Diana’s touch) and are conjugated to the theoretical contribution of Mijail Bajtín, and they make it possible to explain the (...) exploration of a fictional legacy that depends on the willful language of its characters to metaphorize the unfinished and multifaceted character of a violent society, in continuous crisis, such as the Colombian society. (shrink)

"How can human beings, who are liable to error, possess knowledge, since the grounds on which we believe do not rule out that we are wrong? Andrea Kern argues that we can disarm this skeptical doubt by conceiving knowledge as an act of a rational capacity. In this book, she develops a metaphysics of the mind as existing through knowledge of itself."--Provided by publisher.

This paper explores an idea of Stoic descent that is largely neglected nowadays, the idea that an argument is valid when the conditional formed by the conjunction of its premises as antecedent and its conclusion as consequent is true. As it will be argued, once some basic features of our naıve understanding of validity are properly spelled out, and a suitable account of conditionals is adopted, the equivalence between valid arguments and true conditionals makes perfect sense. The account of validity (...) outlined here, which displays one coherent way to articulate the Stoic intuition, accords with standard formal treatments of deductive validity and encompasses an independently grounded characterization of inductive validity. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and (...) human sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally. (shrink)

Andrea Falcon's work is guided by the exegetical ideal of recreating the mind of Aristotle and his distinctive conception of the theoretical enterprise. In this concise exploration of the significance of the celestial world for Aristotle's science of nature, Falcon investigates the source of discontinuity between celestial and sublunary natures and argues that the conviction that the natural world exhibits unity without uniformity is the ultimate reason for Aristotle's claim that the heavens are made of a special body, unique (...) to them. This book presents Aristotle as a totally engaged, systematic investigator whose ultimate concern was to integrate his distinct investigations into a coherent interpretation of the world we live in, all the while mindful of human limitations to what can be known. Falcon reads in Aristotle the ambition of an extraordinarily curious mind and the confidence that that ambition has been largely fulfilled. (shrink)

is accounted for, among other things, in terms of particular relations between events (or states1) and places or times. Roughly speaking, an event α is said to occur in a place p (or interval t) if the spatial (temporal) extension of α is located in p (or t). Let the predicate ‘Occ’ denote such a relation. From this point of view, part of the content of the above sentences can be associated, respectively, with formulas such as.

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...) a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language. (shrink)

This collection of essays seeks to expand the parameters of the debate on pornography. In an effort to move away from the divisive frameworks of which side are you on? and who counts as women worthy to be listened to? in feminist debates on pornography, this volume seeks to understand what pornography means to those who consume it, fight against it, work within it, and to those engaged in changing its meaning. By opening up a space for divergent points of (...) view to address the complexityof sexual material, this volume seeks to forge solidarity amongst a diverse array of constituencies, including academics, activists, and sex workers from diverse socio-political contexts. Through seeking to address the relationship between imperialism, the exotic, and the pornographic, the collection moves away from Eurocentric perspectives on pornography, by including the perspectives of women involved in struggles for national liberation in the South. This volume explores a wide range of issues, such as, how the meaning of pornography is shaped by changing historical and political realities; the role law should play, if any, in the sex industry; whether union organizing can change the working conditions in the sex industry; kinds of representational politics available for redefining pornography; and how sexually explicity literature, videos, art, and music can serve the purpose of sexual freedom. Contributors to the volume include Diana Russell, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Wendy Brown, Becki Ross, Mallek Alloula, M. Jacqui Alexander, Victoria Ortiz, bell hooks, Rey Chow, Judith Butler, Candida Royalle, Zoraida Ramirez Rodriguez, amongst others. (shrink)

.This paper discusses Aristotle’s thesis and Boethius’ thesis, the most distinctive theorems of connexive logic. Its aim is to show that, although there is something plausible in Aristotle’s thesis and Boethius’ thesis, the intuitions that may be invoked to motivate them are consistent with any account of indicative conditionals that validates a suitably restricted version of them. In particular, these intuitions are consistent with the view that indicative conditionals are adequately formalized as strict conditionals.

Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems right in the more (...) popular lines of critique. I distinguish between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, and argue that some disagreement over the value of blame can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several distinct forms. Critiques of blame, I suggest, properly target what we might call judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, the sort of blaming that passes judgment on the wrongdoer him- or herself, and treats him or her as deserving of the blamer’s hostile or “punishing” reactions. This kind of blaming, I argue, tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers, an effect that is particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts. In such contexts, it is often more appropriate—and more constructive—to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. I argue, moreover, that strongly verdictive blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and I challenge the idea that there is in any case a sharp or clear dividing line between therapeutic and non-therapeutic responses to wrongdoers. Holding answerable in a non-judgmental mode is a response that may have a therapeutic dimension, but it nonetheless engages a wrongdoer as a moral peer and partner in moral dialogue. This account of non-judgmental answerability, I suggest, captures much of what moral philosophers have taken to be valuable about blame, while accommodating the insights of those who criticize its more toxic forms. (shrink)

According to a view called 'nihilism', sentences containing vague expressions cannot strictly speaking be true or false, because they lack definite truth conditions. While most theorists of vagueness tend to regard nihilism as a hopeless view, a few isolated attempts have been made to defend it. This paper aims to develop such attempts in a new direction by showing how nihilism, once properly spelled out, can meet three crucial explanatory challenges that respectively concern truth, assertibility, and communication.

The theoretical perspectives of intersectionality and poststructuralism have contributed meaningfully to advancing issues of social injustice within the realm of women's health research. However, the question of whether the two approaches are epistemologically commensurate has been at the heart of a polarized debate within third‐ and fourth‐wave feminist literature in recent years. In this paper, we draw on the extant literature to explore existing dilemmas within this debate and critically reflect on points of epistemological tension and congruence between the two (...) perspectives. It will be demonstrated that intersectionality and poststructuralism, especially feminist poststructuralism, represent concordant theoretical perspectives and a synthesized theoretical framework for application in qualitative research into women's health will be proposed. We argue that an intersectional feminist poststructuralist framework contributes to a deepened analysis of women's disparate healthcare experiences, and the social mechanisms, power relations, and discourses that mediate these experiences, while offering avenues for advocacy and political praxis on a multitude of levels. (shrink)

A long-standing puzzle for moral philosophers and psychologists alike is the concept of psychopathy, a personality disorder marked by tendencies to defy moral norms despite cognitive knowledge about right and wrong. Previously, discussions of the moral deficits of psychopathy have focused on willingness to harm and cheat others as well as reasoning about rule-based transgressions. Yet recent research in moral psychology has begun to more clearly define the domains of morality, en- compassing issues of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and spiritual (...) purity. Clinical descriptions and theories of psychopathy suggest that deficits may exist primarily in the areas of harm and fairness, although quantitative evidence is scarce. Within a broad sample of participants, we found that scores on a measure of psychopathy predicted sharply lower scores on the harm and fairness subscales of a measure of moral concern, but showed no relationship with authority, and very small relationships with ingroup and purity. On a measure of willingness to violate moral standards for money, psychopathy scores predicted greater willingness to violate moral concerns of any type. Results are further explored via potential mediators and analyses of the two factors of psychopathy. (shrink)

This paper articulates in formal terms a crucial distinction concerning future contingents, the distinction between what is true about the future and what is reasonable to believe about the future. Its key idea is that the branching structures that have been used so far to model truth can be employed to define an epistemic property, credibility, which we take to be closely related to knowledge and assertibility, and which is ultimately reducible to probability. As a result, two kinds of claims (...) about future contingents—one concerning truth, the other concerning credibility—can be smoothly handled within a single semantic framework. (shrink)

Autonomy, at least in one sense of the term, requires sovereign authority over one’s choices and actions. In this paper, I argue that such authority is relational in at least two respects. First, I argue that sovereign authority may be shared – and, indeed, must be shareable – with others through the exercise of normative powers. Second, I argue that normative powers are themselves relational powers, powers that depend in part on the recognition of agents as having an equal basic (...) authority to exercise such powers in the first place. Drawing on feminist speech-act analyses of silencing and subordination, I examine how failures of uptake for exercises of normative powers compromise personal autonomy. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a conception of joint practical deliberation as a special type of shared cooperative activity, through which co-deliberators jointly accept reasons as applying to them as a pair or group. I argue, moreover, that the aspiration to deliberative “pairhood” is distinguished by a special concern for mutuality that guides each deliberator’s readiness to accept a given consideration as a reason-for-us. It matters to each of us, as joint deliberators, that each party’s (individual) reasons for accepting something (...) as a reason-for-us support a conception of our relationship as one characterized by mutual, non-instrumental concern for one another. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whether future contingents are knowable, that is, whether one can know that things will go a certain way even though it is possible that things will not go that way. First I will consider a long-established view that implies a negative answer, and draw attention to some endemic problems that affect its credibility. Then I will sketch an alternative line of thought that prompts a positive answer: future contingents are knowable, although our epistemic access of (...) them is limited in some important respects. (shrink)

There are essentially two ways to develop the Peircean idea that future contingents are all false. One is to provide a quantificational semantics for "will," as is usually done. The other is to define a quantificational postsemantics based on a linear semantics for "will." As we will suggest, the second option, although less conventional, is more plausible than the first in some crucial respects. The postsemantic approach overcomes three major troubles that have been raised in connection with Peirceanism: the apparent (...) scopelessness of "will" with respect to negation, the failure of Future Excluded Middle, and the so-called zero credence problem. (shrink)

Each Aristotelian science consists in the causal investigation of a specific department of reality. If successful, such an investigation results in causal knowledge; that is, knowledge of the relevant or appropriate causes. The emphasis on the concept of cause explains why Aristotle developed a theory of causality which is commonly known as the doctrine of the four causes. For Aristotle, a firm grasp of what a cause is, and how many kinds of causes there are, is essential for a successful (...) investigation of the world around us. (shrink)

This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative study to understand how active adherence to the Christian faith influences the way SME owner-managers conceptualise their business practices. The study was based on in-depth interviews with 21 Christian SME owner-managers in Germany and the UK. Using a socio-psychological approach, the data analysis yielded a range of linguistic and conceptual resources that are peculiar to Christian discourse and that have the potential to influence business activity in rather distinctive ways. This paper (...) particularly focuses on those Christian concepts that could be regarded as distinct 'frames' for action. It outlines what effect these concepts had on the respondents and how they were related to business practices. The paper also discusses how this study could inform further research into the influence of other socio-cultural forms of identity on economic actors' conceptualisations of their own practice. (shrink)

Certain characteristics make machine learning a powerful tool for processing large amounts of data, and also particularly unsuitable for explanatory purposes. There are worries that its increasing use in science may sideline the explanatory goals of research. We analyze the key characteristics of ML that might have implications for the future directions in scientific research: epistemic opacity and the ‘theory-agnostic’ modeling. These characteristics are further analyzed in a comparison of ML with the traditional statistical methods, in order to demonstrate what (...) it is specifically that makes ML methodology substantially unsuitable for reaching explanations. The analysis is given broader philosophical context by connecting it with the views on the role of prediction and explanation in science, their relationship, and the value of explanation. We proceed to show, first, that ML disrupts the relationship between prediction and explanation commonly understood as a functional relationship. Then we show that the value of explanation is not exhausted in purely predictive functions, but rather has a ubiquitously recognized value for both science and everyday life. We then invoke two hypothetical scenarios with different degrees of automatization of science, which help test our intuitions on the role of explanation in science. The main question we address is whether ML will reorient or otherwise impact our standard explanatory practice. We conclude with a prognosis that ML would diversify science into purely predictively oriented research based on ML-like techniques and, on the other hand, remaining faithful to anthropocentric research focused on the search for explanation. (shrink)