Reseña del libro Ciencia y política en Karl Popper. Más nueve ensayos sobre otros temas de su obra. Blanca Inés Prada Márquez (2018). Windmills Editions. 366 pp.

El pensamiento crítico es uno de los objetivos generales de la educación, pero poco se conoce acerca de cómo se puede trasladar al aula. Este estudio explora la conceptualización de pensamiento crítico de los formadores/as de maestros/as y los ambientes de aprendizaje que diseñados para promoverlo. Se analizaron cinco entrevistas semiestructuradas a formadores/as de maestros/as mediante análisis de contenido. Los resultados mostraron que el pensamiento crítico se aborda implícitamente fomentando un aprendizaje activo contextualizado en problemas de la vida real. Este (...) estudio revela algunos desafíos relacionados con el diseño de ambientes de aprendizaje y procedimientos de evaluación. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda la poesía de Edith Stein a partir del tópico de la Revelación. Entendida como «la buena nueva» de la venida y la resurrección de Cristo, la Revelación se relaciona con el mandato del amor al prójimo, cuya sola posibilidad radica en el amor a Dios, pues «quiere que le amemos, cuando manda que amemos al prójimo», como explica sor Juana. Y así, se relaciona también con la mayor «fineza» de Jesús hacia a los hombres, según la carta (...) Atenagórica, que consiste en «los beneficios que nos deja de hacer» para contener nuestra ingratitud; en el amor al prójimo, la correspondencia del amor es para Él, pero la utilidad es nuestra. En la poesía de Edith Stein, la Revelación se corresponde con la revelación del lector, con lo que se consuma la representación de la mayor fineza: para el lector, y para él solo, es la utilidad de la lectura. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es describir la percepción de riesgo y los factores de protección y de riesgo frente al consumo de sustancias psicoactivas legales e ilegales en estudiantes de la Universidad de Boyacá. Es un estudio cuantitativo y descriptivo de corte transversal, para el cual se tomó una muestra de 573 estudiantes que fueron seleccionados mediante muestreo estratificado probabilístico. El instrumento utilizado fue la encuesta sobre consumo de drogas, factores y percepción de riesgo en estudiantes universitarios (CODEU) diseñado (...) por Beverido, Salas, De San Jorge, Pavón, Blázquez, Gogeascoechea y Cruz (2012), que consta de 73 preguntas. Este instrumento fue validado y obtuvo un alpha de Cronbach de 0.787. Los hallazgos muestran que entre los factores protectores se encuentran: adecuadas relaciones familiares y practicar un deporte, como factores de riesgo se identifican principalmente: la permisividad social y las construcciones de reconocimiento social presentes ante el consumo de sustancias legales. De las sustancias ilegales, la marihuana es la que se percibe como de menor riesgo frente a la cocaína, el bazuco, los inhalantes y la heroína. (shrink)

El artículo pretender mostrar y analizar las formas de acción colectiva de la Asociación de Trabajadores Campesinos del Carare (ATCC), en cuanto actor social y político de la región del Magdalena Medio colombiano. Las lógicas de acción desarrolladas nos conducen a señalar a la organización campesina como una forma de potenciar la dimensión política de los colectivos al ser constructores de procesos de democratización de la territorialidad regional. La dinámica campesina propuesta incluye a los distintos actores armados del conflicto, los (...) cuales han impuesto históricamente lógicas de exclusión y muerte sobre la población civil. Y esta inclusión se basa en la necesidad de la convivencia con todos los constituyentes sociales en un proyecto político de largo aliento. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to assess whether the construct of neural representations plays an explanatory role under the variational free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference; and (2) if so, to assess which philosophical stance - in relation to the ontological and epistemological status of representations - is most appropriate. We focus on non-realist (deflationary and fictionalist-instrumentalist) approaches. We consider a deflationary account of mental representation, according to which the explanatorily relevant contents of neural (...) representations are mathematical, rather than cognitive, and a fictionalist or instrumentalist account, according to which representations are scientifically useful fictions that serve explanatory (and other) aims. After reviewing the free-energy principle and active inference, we argue that the model of adaptive phenotypes under the free-energy principle can be used to furnish a formal semantics, enabling us to assign semantic content to specific phenotypic states (the internal states of a Markovian system that exists far from equilibrium). We propose a modified fictionalist account: an organism-centered fictionalism or instrumentalism. We argue that, under the free-energy principle, pursuing even a deflationary account of the content of neural representations licenses the appeal to the kind of semantic content involved in the aboutness or intentionality of cognitive systems; our position is thus coherent with, but rests on distinct assumptions from, the realist position. We argue that the free-energy principle thereby explains the aboutness or intentionality in living systems and hence their capacity to parse their sensory stream using an ontology or set of semantic factors. (shrink)

In European science and technology policy, various styles have been developed and institutionalised to govern the ethical challenges of science and technology innovations. In this paper, we give an account of the most dominant styles of the past 30 years, particularly in Europe, seeking to show their specific merits and problems. We focus on three styles of governance: a technocratic style, an applied ethics style, and a public participation style. We discuss their merits and deficits, and use this analysis to (...) assess the potential of the recently established governance approach of ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’. Based on this analysis, we reflect on the current shaping of RRI in terms of ‘doing governance’. (shrink)

Antígona es uno de los más grandes y conocidos personajes de la tragedia griega, y ha merecido la mayor atención por parte de la posteridad. Otros personajes de la tragedia homónima de Sófocles no han merecido, sin embargo, la misma atención. Algo especialmente llamativo en lo que se refiere al de Ismena, la hermana de Antígona, quien se enfrenta con el mismo problema que ésta, pudiendo, por tanto, convertirse en protagonista junto con ella. Así las cosas, en las páginas que (...) siguen no analizaremos todos los personajes, todas las concepciones de la justicia, incluidas en la tragedia de Sófocles, sino sólo las representadas por Antígona e Ismena, y ello desde nuestro horizonte de praxis. (shrink)

The adoption of Big Data analytics in insurance has proved controversial but there has been little analysis specifying how insurance practices are changing. Is insurance passively subject to the forces of disruptive innovation, moving away from the pooling of risk towards its personalisation or individualisation, and what might that mean in practice? This special theme situates disruptive innovations, particularly the experimental practices of behaviour-based personalisation, in the context of the practice and regulation of contemporary insurance. Our contributors argue that behaviour-based (...) personalisation in insurance has different and broader implications than have yet been appreciated. BDAs are changing how insurance governs risk; how it knows, classifies, manages, prices and sells it, in ways that are more opaque and more extensive than the black boxes of in-car telematics. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical reconstruction of neglected post-WWI writings and political action of W. E. B. Du Bois, this volume offers a normative account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Pointing out the limitations of Kant's cosmopolitanism through a novel contextual account of Perpetual Peace, Transnational Cosmopolitanism shows how these limits remain in neo-Kantian scholarship. Inés Valdez's framework overcomes these limitations in a methodologically unique way, taking Du Bois's writings and his coalitional political action both as text that should inform our theorization (...) and normative insights. The cosmopolitanism proposed in this work is an original contribution that questions the contemporary currency of Kant's canonical approach and enlists overlooked resources to radicalize, democratize, and transnationalize cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Cet article est la synthèse d’une recherche approfondie sur l’archétype de la déesse mère exposée dans mon livre, Mère terrible, la déesse dans la religion du Mexique ancien (2007). Ici est présenté un résumé schématique des changements et métamorphoses dans la conception de la divinité féminine tout au long d’une histoire de plus de 4000 ans (2500 avant à 1520 après J.‑C.). Voici certaines des questions qui guident la recherche : Comment les habitants du Mexique ancien concevaient‑ils le mystère de (...) la féminité? Quelle relation mythique détient la déesse avec le miracle de la germination du maïs? Quelle place occupe la déesse, symbole cosmique de la naissance et de la mort, dans la société sacrificielle et guerrière des Aztèques? (shrink)

In this paper we propose a pragmatic approach to the evolution of language based on analysis of a particular element of human communication: discourse coherence. We show that coherence is essential for effective communication. Through analysis of a collection of neuropsychological and neurolinguistic studies, we maintain that the proper functioning of executive processes responsible for planning and executing actions plays a key role in the construction of coherent discourses. Studies that tested the discursive and conversational abilities of bonobos have showed (...) that apes are unable to construct a flow of discourse governed by coherence, and therefore, apes’ conversational interactions are quite different from those of humans. We then propose that the emergence of coherence in communication occurred after the split between great apes’ and humans’ lines of descendants and that this emergence might have been the result of a specific gradual development in the course of hominin evolution of the executive functions. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to analyze the reasons behind users’ selection of news results on the news aggregator website, Google News, and the role that news factors play in this selection. We assume that user’s cognitive elaboration of users influences their news selection. In this study, a multi-method approach is used to obtain a complete picture of the users’ news selection reasoning: an open survey, a closed survey, and a content analysis of screen recording data. The results were (...) determined from online news selection of 90 news results from 47 users on Google News. Different news values could be identified as relevant for selection: time-referenced news factors and news factors of social significance were shown to be more important than the news factors of deviance. News cues (presence of a picture, position of a news result, source) were identified as selection reasons regardless of the level of cognitive elaboration during the online browsing process. (shrink)

A universal basic income (UBI) would be a guaranteed income floor for both the employed and the unemployed, from which economic theory predicts a gain in bargaining power and a disincentive to work. For high earners, the increase in taxes necessary to fund this program would decrease their motivation to earn. To assess these aspects, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment at a State Employment Service office in Spain. The unemployed participants received either an initial unconditional endowment, framed under the logic (...) of the solidarity condition of UBI (UBI treatment) – to examine the taxes’ effect – or as a participation fee (FEE) or no initial endowment (NONUBI). Subsequently, they faced one default randomized task from a set of four paid real-effort tasks. To study bargaining power, they could change the task up to three times and/or skip all tasks and conclude the experiment. In the FEE treatment, they yielded the highest earnings. While we did not find a statistically significant difference in earnings between the FEE and the NON-UBI treatments, the UBI differed from the NON-UBI and FEE. A likely reason could be a crowding-out of motivation by the pressure to reciprocate without believing in other participants’ deservingness of the UBI. In addition, the results reveal that females change tasks more frequently than males. (shrink)

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of imperial (...) logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

This article explores the distinctions among European peoples’ character established in Kant’s anthropology and their connection with his politics. These aspects are neglected relative to the analysis of race between Europeans and non-Europeans, but Kant’s anthropological works portray the people of Mediterranean Europe as not capable of civilization because of the dominance of passion in their faculty of desire, which he ties to ‘Oriental’ influences in blood or government. Kant then superimposes this racialized anthropology over the historical geopolitics of Europe, (...) obscuring the indebtedness of Northern European trade dominance to Mediterranean historical tactics and financial wealth. By relegating the Mediterranean to the margins and dismissing contentious commercial exchange in the region as mere violence spearheaded by North African corsairs, Kant gives us an elitist cosmopolitanism unable to cope with hierarchy and inequality, diminishing its potential for egalitarian global projects today. (shrink)

This edited book deepens the engagement between 21st century philosophy of mind and the emerging technologies which are transforming our environment. Many new technologies appear to have important implications for the human mind, the nature of our cognition, our sense of identity and even perhaps what we think human beings are. They prompt questions such as: Would an uploaded mind be 'me'? Does our reliance on smart phones, or wearable gadgets enhance or diminish the human mind? and: How does our (...) deep reliance upon ambient artificial intelligence change the shape of the human mind? Readers will discover the best philosophical analysis of what current and near future 21st technology means for the metaphysics of mind. Important questions are addressed on matters relating to the extended mind and the distributed self. Expert authors explore the role that the ubiquitous smart phone might have in creating new forms of self-knowledge. They consider machine consciousness, brain enhancement and smart ambient technology, and what they can tell us about phenomenal consciousness. While ideas of artificial general intelligence, cognitive enhancements and the smart environment are widely commented on, serious analysis of their philosophical implications is only getting started. These contributions from top scholars are therefore very timely, and are of particular relevance to students and scholars of the philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, computer science and psychology. (shrink)

This paper addresses how impairments in prediction in young adults with autism spectrum disorder relate to their behavior during a collaboration. To assess it, we developed a task where participants play in collaboration with a synthetic agent to maximize their score. The agent’s behavior changes during the different phases of the game, requiring participants to model their sensorimotor contingencies to play collaboratively. Our results (n = 30) show differences between autistic and neurotypical individuals in their behavioral adaptation to the other (...) partner. Contrarily, there are no differences in the self-reports of that collaboration. (shrink)

Transition experienced by trans people shakes Social Sciences conven-tional understanding of time and space as static analytical units based on tradi-tional biological and physical axioms. Overcoming sexual binarism entails also questioning time and space as isolated elements to become, instead, entangled realities. Departing from trans studies and Halberstam´s concepts of queer temporalities and space as theoretical framework, this papers lines up the indi-vidual story of a trans man with physical disability and ASD with social “trans-formations”, by linking the exposition of (...) the body with the transgression of heteronormative cis time, to be replaced, gradually by trans temporality and new ways of cohabitating spaces. (shrink)

Una de las críticas más habituales contra el utilitarismo consiste en señalar su incapacidad para reconocer la relevancia moral de la distinción entre acciones y omisiones. Según esta crítica, afirmar la irrelevancia de esta distinción 1) va en contra de las intuiciones del sentido común, 2) elimina la diferencia entre lo obligatorio y lo meritorio y 3) hace inviable la propuesta utilitarista, al proponer una moral demasiado exigente. En este trabajo nos centraremos en el segundo aspecto de esta crítica, y (...) defenderemos que el utilitarismo sí dispone de los medios para distinguir entre lo obligatorio y lo meritorio. Asimismo, defenderemos que l utilitarismo no necesita renunciar a afirmar la irrelevancia moral de la distinción entre acciones y omisiones para responder adecuadamente a esas críticas. Para ello, nos valdremos fundamentalmente del análisis ofrecido por John S. Mill en el capítulo cinco de su obra Utilitarismo, en el que a nuestro juicio puede encontrase la versión clásica de la respuesta a esta crítica, que de una u otra manera los utilitaristas contemporáneos han asumido y desarrollado. (shrink)

En replaçant les travaux de Philippe Walter dans les cadres historique et théorique des analyses bachelardiennes et durandiennes sur l’imaginaire, Blanca Solares met en évidence les apports spécifiques de ses thèses, tant du point de vue méthodologique que du point de vue idéologique. Cette entreprise de reconstruction des présupposés conceptuels de Philippe Walter permet de souligner l’importance d’une réévaluation en profondeur d’un imaginaire médiéval trop souvent compris à l’aune d’une conception simplificatrice de la christianisation, tout en montrant la nécessité (...) d’une approche nuancée et renouvelée des sources traditionnelles. By putting the work of Philippe Walter in the historical and theoretical contexts of the Bachelard and Durand’s analysis on the imaginary, Blanca Solares highlights the specific contributions of his theses, both from methodological and ideological points of view. This reconstruction effort on the conceptual presuppositions of Philippe Walter serves to accentuate the importance of a thorough revaluation of a medieval imaginary too often understood, at the beginning of a simplified design to the Christianization, while showing the need for a nuanced and renewed approach to traditional sources. Al situar las investigaciones de Philippe Walter dentro del marco histórico-teórico de los análisis de Bachelard y Durand sobre el imaginario, Blanca Solares evidencia sus aportes específicos, tanto metodológicos como ideológicos. Esta labor de reconstrucción de los fundamentos conceptuales de Philippe Walter muestra cuánto importa cambiar el enfoque al imaginario medieval empobrecido por unas aproximaciones a la cristianización demasiado simplificadoras y justifica plenamente una aproximación renovada y fina a las fuentes tradicionales. (shrink)

Admiration and adoration have been considered as emotions with the power to change people, yet our knowledge of the specific nature and function of these emotions is quite limited. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we present a prototype approach to admiration and what has variously been labelled adoration, worship, or reverence. Both admiration and adoration contribute to the formation of personal and collective ideals, values, and identities, but their workings differ. We offer a detailed theoretical account of commonalities and differences in (...) the appraisal patterns and action tendencies associated with the two emotions. This analysis reveals that admiration motivates the internalisation and emulation of ideals embodied by an outstanding role model. Adoration motivates adherence to the teachings and expectations of a meaning maker and benefactor perceived as superhuman or sacred. Thus, the primary function of admiration is to promote individual learning and change, whereas adoration primarily serves to bind communities together. (shrink)

El presente artículo expone la investigación que se está llevando a cabo en la tesis doctoral que lleva por título “La presencia de la mujer artista en las exposiciones barcelonesas (1888-1936)” cuyo objetivo es cuantificar la participación de estas en exposiciones individuales y colectivas en la ciudad y analizar la consideración social y fortuna crítica que lograron a partir de su recepción en el público y en la crítica de la época.

One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. This paper claims that the Free Energy Principle (FEP), by virtue of unifying particles with mind, is the simplest. Motivated by Hilbert’s 24th problem of simplicity, the argument is made that the FEP takes a seemingly mathematical complex domain and reduces it to something simple. More specifically, it is attempted to show that every ‘thing’, from particles to mind, can be partitioned into systemic states by virtue of (...) self-organising symmetry break, i.e. self-entropy in terms of the balance between risk and ambiguity to achieve epistemic gain. By virtue of its explanatory reach, the FEP becomes the simplest principle under quantum, statistical and classical mechanics conditions. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...) entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

Recurrent, unvarying, and seemingly purposeless patterns of action and cognition are part of normal development, but also feature prominently in several neuropsychiatric conditions. Repetitive stereotyped behaviors can be viewed as exaggerated forms of learned habits and frequently correlate with alterations in motor, limbic, and associative basal ganglia circuits. However, it is still unclear how altered basal ganglia feedback signals actually relate to the phenomenological variability of RSBs. Why do behaviorally overlapping phenomena sometimes require different treatment approaches−for example, sensory shielding strategies (...) versus exposure therapy for autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder, respectively? Certain clues may be found in recent models of basal ganglia function that extend well beyond action selection and motivational control, and have implications for sensorimotor integration, prediction, learning under uncertainty, as well as aesthetic learning. In this paper, we systematically compare three exemplary conditions with basal ganglia involvement, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and autism spectrum conditions, to gain a new understanding of RSBs. We integrate clinical observations and neuroanatomical and neurophysiological alterations with accounts employing the predictive processing framework. Based on this review, we suggest that basal ganglia feedback plays a central role in preconditioning cortical networks to anticipate self-generated, movement-related perception. In this way, basal ganglia feedback appears ideally situated to adjust the salience of sensory signals through precision weighting of new sensory information, relative to the precision of predictions based on prior generated models. Accordingly, behavioral policies may preferentially rely on new data versus existing knowledge, in a spectrum spanning between novelty and stability. RSBs may then represent compensatory or reactive responses, respectively, at the opposite ends of this spectrum. This view places an important role of aesthetic learning on basal ganglia feedback, may account for observed changes in creativity and aesthetic experience in basal ganglia disorders, is empirically testable, and may inform creative art therapies in conditions characterized by stereotyped behaviors. (shrink)

In this article we propose that executive functions play a key role in the origin of language. Our proposal is based on the methodological assumption that some of the cognitive systems involved in language functioning are also involved in its phylogenetic origin. In this regard, we demonstrate that a key property of language functioning is discourse coherence. Such property is not dependent on grammatical elements but rather is processed by cognitive systems that are not specific for language, namely the executive (...) functions systems of action planning, control and organization. Data from cognitive archaeology on the making of stone tools show that the processes requested to produce Prehistoric tools imply action organization operations similar to those involved in the processing of coherence. Based on these considerations, we propose that executive functions represent the link between stone tool making and language origins and suggest that they allowed our ancestors to develop forms of proto-discourse governed by coherence. (shrink)

El suroriente de la península de Yucatán se transformó de ser un territorio de emancipación para los mayas en el siglo XVII en una región disputada por los imperios británico y español durante el XVIII. En este conflicto, destaca el papel de los mayas como actores históricos.

When discussing genetic prenatal enhancement, we often encounter objections related to “eugenics.” Those who want to defend prenatal enhancement either try to avoid using the term “eugenics” or talk about “liberal eugenics”, implying that what was wrong with the old eugenics was its coercive character, and claiming that while old eugenics went against reproductive freedom, the new liberal eugenics promotes freedom. In this paper we first explore the objection that genetic enhancement is a form of eugenics that limits parental freedom. (...) We then show how the same objection appears in other bioethical debates. Finally, we answer the objection, showing that genetic enhancement does not limit reproductive freedom in any important sense. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the treatment/enhancement distinction as employed by those against using the newest biomedical technologies for purposes other than those strictly curative. First, we analyze the most common definitions related to treatment, such as health, disease or medicine, showing their limitations and problems. Secondly, we consider three different tasks usually assigned to the treatment/enhancement distinction: 1) to establish what we owe to others, 2) to establish what should be included as part of a medical (...) insurance system and 3) to distinguish the morally permissible from the morally impermissible. We conclude that the treatment/enhancement distinction is a useful, if limited, tool for the first two tasks, but an inadequate one for the third. (shrink)

The ethic of care has often been opposed to the ethic of justice as offering a different and even a contradictory approach to moral problems. This article argues that, from the perspective of the discourse ethic, both approaches are complementary in a very fundamental sense, since each one applies to one of two stages of moral reasoning that are as different as they are interconnected. It argues, in particular, that while justice is concerned with the justification and elaboration of norms, (...) care is concerned with finding a solution for specific moral situations. The article then places considerations of care at the centre of ideal discourse and subordinates the importance of rational understanding and moral justification to intuitive communication. (shrink)

Ante la falta o disminución de la motivación de los alumnos universitarios la enseñanza, y con ello la Universidad se ve en la tesitura de poner en práctica nuevas metodologías más activas y motivantes que permitan a los alumnos tener un rol más protagonista en el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje que el que han tenido hasta ahora.En el este artículo se expone una experiencia que consiste en el diseño de un escape room on line enmarcado en el Máster en (...) Educación Especial. Se plantea como objetivo motivar a los alumnos y facilitar el aprendizaje de la asignatura. (shrink)