As a result of the public demand for higher ethical standards, business schools are increasingly taking ethical matters seriously. But their effort has concentrated on teaching business ethics and on students' ethical behavior. Business faculty, in contrast, has attracted much less attention. This paper explores the context and the implications of an alleged case of plagiarism in a master's dissertation submitted to a university lacking both an ethical code of conduct and a formalized procedure to deal with academic misconduct. The (...) events evolved into a bitter political process in which the more ethically aware members of faculty challenged efforts to cover-up. Here the focus is on the motives and behavior of faculty members involved in this case rather than the alleged plagiarist's. The role played by the main actors involved in the process in examined using the theory of moral development and the organizational politic perspective. The paper discusses the mechanisms available to raise ethical awareness and prevent academic misconduct, and the limitations of self-regulation and self-monitoring that prevails in the university system. It also examines the impact of ethics instruction and faculty ethical standards on students' behavior and concludes that ethics instruction can only be effective when the principles taught are in line with daily actions of their instructors. (shrink)

No mais profundo centro: João da Cruz e o Sufismo Sadili cantam a união transformante Carlos Frederico Barboza de Souza O camelô em Belo Horizonte: aspectos da informalidade e da identidade Maria Aparecida Carvalho de Castro Igreja, povo de Deus, sujeito da comunhão e da missão Cleto Caliman A literatura como questionamento do sujeito da modernidade: Memórias do cárcere, de Graciliano Ramos, e A peste, de Albert Camus João Pereira Pinto O ensino religioso na rede pública estadual de Belo (...) Horizonte -MG: história, modelos e percepções de professores sobre formação e docência Douglas Cabral Dantas. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Resumo O texto trata da Folia de Reis na Comunidade de Cruzeiro dos Peixotos - Uberlândia - MG, que foi alvo de um projeto de pesquisa, financiado pelo Programa Institucional de Bolsas de Extensão (PIBEX/UFU) e pelo Programa de Extensão e Integração UFU/Comunidade (PEIC/UFU). Os autores partem da premissa de que foliões, festeiros e devotos são, na feliz expressão de Carlos Rodrigues Brandão, "especialistas" do saber da devoção, por sentirem-se incumbidos de representar (...) a Igreja em cada uma da partes que compõem a Folia, desde a saída do Terno até chegar o dia da festa de Santos Reis. O texto procura mesclar reflexão teórica conceitual sobre a festa com os métodos de pesquisa da História Oral, a partir da observação in loco . Conclui com a constatação de que esta importante tradição popular mantem-se ainda muito viva e forte, não apenas na comunidade em foco, mas ainda na região do Triângulo Mineiro. Reconhece que seu sentido se modificou ao longo do tempo e procura afirmar que esta festa não sofre da 'ameça da extinção', como quer a doxa corrente, representada pela voz da mídia, pelos agentes das secretarias de cultura, pesquisadores acadêmicos ou ainda pelos próprios devotos. Palavras-chave : devoção; Folia de Reis; festa.This paper covers the 'Folia de Reis' (a traditional folk celebration of the visit from the Three Kings, during Epiphany) in the community of Cruzeiro dos Peixotos - Uberlândia - MG, which was the target of a research project, funded by the Institutional Program of Extension Fellowships (PIBEX / UFU) and the Extension and Integration Program UFU/Comunidade (PEIC/UFU). The authors begin with the premise that revelers, "party goers" ( festeiros ) and devotees are, in the fortunate expression of Carlos Rodrigues Brandão, "experts" in the knowledge of devotion, for they feel responsible to represent the Church in each of the component parts of the Folia, from the departure of the Terno (group of musicians) up to the celebration of the Three Kings. The text seeks to merge a theoretical conception about the party with the research methods of oral history, based on direct observation. In conclusion, it observes that this important folk tradition has been kept very much alive and strong, not only in the community that was the focus of this study, but also in the Triangulo Mineiro region. It acknowledges that the meaning of the party has changed over time and intends to assert that this party does not suffer from the 'threat of extinction', as wants to believe the current doxa , represented by the voices of the media, by the officials from the departments of culture, by academic researchers or even by their own devotees. Key words : devotion; Folia de Reis (a traditional folk celebration of the visit from the Three Kings, during Epiphany); party. (shrink)

Em 25 de maio de 2020 um homem negro americano, chamado George Floyd, morreu após ser asfixiado por mais de oito minutos por um policial branco na cidade de Minneapolis, nos EUA. Violentos protestos se seguiram ao longo do país com cartazes contendo as últimas súplicas de Floyd: “I can’t breathe” (Eu não consigo respirar). Pouco tempo depois, ainda sob o calor dos horrores da hora, outro fato também vinculado ao acontecimento recém-referido roubou a cena e chamou a atenção dos (...) principais meios de comunicação ao redor do planeta: tratava-se de um casal branco americano de moradores de um bairro nobre, em frente ao jardim de sua mansão de dois andares, esbravejando contra um grupo de negros que se dirigia para um protesto e resolveu cortar caminho passando por entre os casarões do bairro onde se encontrava o referido casal. O “detalhe” marcante dessa demonstração gratuita de ódio por parte do casal branco é que, enquanto o homem portava um potente fuzil moderno e a mulher uma pistola automática, ambos apontavam as armas contra os transeuntes negros que tiveram a “audácia” de se deslocar por entre os casarões da elite americana. O mais absurdo da situação foi um momento de transtorno colérico do casal branco que em certa altura do descontrole chegou a apontar a arma um contra o outro, revelando o completo desvario em que ambos se encontravam [...]. (shrink)

The internationalization strategies are analyzed in this article in order to understand the power of the Brazilian media. The study is based on bibliographic and documental research, interviews and case studies. It comes to the following findings: Brazilian media groups need a better understanding of their performance in the local and the international scenario; they must know and respect all legislation, as well as their local insertion, and the public targeted to validate their necessities.

Neste capítulo demonstra-se a importância da educação cidadã para a vida de cada indivíduo que opta pela prática da autoinseminação, pois por meio das informações adquiridas, as pessoas teriam uma Competência Crítica em Informação, desenvolvendo dessa forma, certo entendimento de possíveis consequências e efeitos da técnica da Autoinseminação, fato que poderia levá-las à procura por técnicas mais seguras para satisfação do desejo de ter um filho. É exposto durante todo o embasamento que, quanto mais se conquista clareza e explicações através (...) da prática educativa, se torna perceptivo o instrumento privilegiado que se tem disponível - a educação, entretanto, observa-se também pouca exploração desse recurso. Portanto, durante a leitura deste capitulo, será possível visualizar a apresentação do papel contributivo que educação desempenha em relação à problemática que a autoinseminação estabelece atualmente a fim de evitar consequências à saúde da mulher, da criança e de toda a prole e eventuais efeitos jurídicos. (shrink)

Neste artigo pretendemos discutir a noção de construção da mente consciente a partir da perspectiva de Antonio Damásio. Para isso, centraremos nossa análise em Self comes to Mind. Em um primeiro momento é necessário delimitarmos o conceito de consciência na visão de Damásio, visando, com isso, a evitarmos equivocidades, na medida em que há várias definições de consciência. Acreditamos que, para uma melhor compreensão acerca do surgimento da mente consciente, é necessário levarmos em consideração os processos evolutivos aos quais o (...) homem está sujeito. A consciência é, pois, fruto de um desenvolvimento evolutivo já bem estabelecido pela ciência. Compreender o desenvolvimento evolutivo do self se torna tarefa de suma importância, na medida em que Damásio estrutura sua compreensão de mente consciente a partir do papel desempenhado pelo self na tarefa de agregar conteúdos mentais. Para Damásio, a origem da mente está associada ao momento em que um processo do self é adicionado a um processo mental básico. Quando não ocorre um self na mente, esta mente não é propriamente consciente, o que significa dizer que é o self que garante consciência a uma mente. Isso quer dizer que precisaremos discutir de forma clara e distinta o conceito de self e seus estágios, para que finalmente possamos entender os passos delimitados por Damásio para discutir a construção da mente consciente. (shrink)

Este artigo objetiva estudar o potencial de significação das fotografias em livros didáticos para o Ensino Fundamental. Utilizando como base a teoria semiótica de Charles Sanders Peirce, foi realizada uma análise comparativa entre fotografias publicadas em três diferentes edições de livros de História, de um único autor. Com base nas análises, pudemos identificar os potenciais de significação dos diferentes tipos de fotografias.

O texto objetiva a discussão de como o design de embalagem contribui para construção da identidade de um produto no segmento de marca própria. Para isso, foi realizada uma análise comparativa entre embalagens de produtos da marca Qualitá, e embalagens de marcas líderes, onde verificou-se que as embalagens de marca própria utilizam-se de estratégias de semelhança e diferença para criar a sua identidade.

The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanations for patterns in human behavior challenges the notion of personal (...) autonomy and, in turn, undermines libertarian arguments against state paternalism appealing to autonomy and personal choice. (shrink)

According to Peirce one of the most important philosophical problems is continuity. Consequently, he set forth an innovative and peculiar approach in order to elucidate at once its mathematical and metaphysical challenges through proper non-classical logical reasoning. I will restrain my argument to the definition of the different types of discrete collections according to Peirce, with a special regard to the phenomenon called ?premonition of continuity? (Peirce, 1976, Vol. 3, p. 87, c. 1897).

L’apparition du musée « moderne » qui cherche à repenser, dans la première moitié du XX e siècle, les fonctions de l’institution muséale et la nature des objets qu’elle expose, requiert l’élaboration de projets architecturaux spécifiques. Le plan libre et la transparence se substituent alors à la traditionnelle boîte compartimentée et opaque, pour des raisons qui excèdent le simple souci de flexibilité fonctionnelle. La comparaison des propositions radicales d’édifices-musées modernes de Le Corbusier et de Mies van der Rohe permet de (...) mettre en évidence, au-delà de certaines caractéristiques formelles communes, le caractère réducteur d’une lecture uniforme du modernisme architectural appliqué au musée. (shrink)

This article inspects Peirce’s resonances on Deleuze’s semiotic. Whereas most of the literature agrees that Deleuze adapts Peirce’s semiotic to serve his Bergsonian-based theory of sign, this article claims that the relationship of Deleuze with Peirce’s writings is more foliated than it may appear at first. The development of this hypothesis invites to trace back Deleuze’s works before his very acquaintance with Peirce in the 1980s. Therefore, one of Peirce’s classical issues – the role that relations and habits play for (...) the triadic conception of sign – is considered with Deleuze’s early studies, in which he developed this same issue as to approach Hume and Proust. This background echoes years later in Deleuze’s incursion to Peirce’s semiotic in the 1980s ninety-two classes and two books on cinema. In fact, Deleuze’s own triadic conception of sign and his acknowledged pragmatist inclination prove to be closer to Peirce’s pragmatism than the scholarly literature tends to think or argue. The aim of this article is not, however, to build an overwhelming philosophical identity between Deleuze and Peirce, it sets up instead a steadier basis from where to understand their differences. Deleuze’s ignored five-year long lectures on cinema shows to be exegetically revealing with respect to his debts towards Peirce. (shrink)

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from (...) philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem. (shrink)

Tradução das três primeiras cartas de Leibniz a des Bosses.

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Models developed using machine learning are increasingly prevalent in scientific research. At the same time, these models are notoriously opaque. Explainable AI aims to mitigate the impact of opacity by rendering opaque models transparent. More than being just the solution to a problem, however, Explainable AI can also play an invaluable role in scientific exploration. This paper describes how post-hoc analytic techniques from Explainable AI can be used to refine target phenomena in medical science, to identify starting points for future (...) investigations of causal relationships, and to generate possible explanations of target phenomena in cognitive science. In this way, this paper describes how Explainable AI—over and above machine learning itself—contributes to the efficiency and scope of data-driven scientific research. (shrink)

Evoca-se neste artigoo P. António Alves Durão enquanto professor de filosofia, desenvolvendo especialmente a partir de duas temáticas da sua docência - a mentira e a sociedade mundial - as suas qualidades de mestre eminente. /// Cet article évoque le Père António Alves Durâo en tant que professeur de philosophie, en développant spécialement à partir de deux thématiques de son enseignement - le mensonge et la société mondiale - ses qualités de maître éminent. /// This article recalls Father António Alves (...) Durão, in his role as professor of philosophy. It seeks to describe his pedagogical qualities with special reference to two themes: lying and word society. (shrink)

O objectivo príncipal deste artigo consiste em evidenciar o contributo do pensamento médico para a revolução científica, tendo em consideraçāo a especificidade da medicina no âmbito dos saberes. O autor delineia um percurso cujos marcos sāo A. Vesalius, G. Borelli, W. Harvey, F. Glisson e G.-E Stahl. Trata-se de uma escolha que, nāo sendo arbitrária, é razoavelmente contingente. Ao longo dos séculos XVI-XVIII, a medicina acompanhou o esforço de renovaçāo, em especial no domínio anátomo-físio-patológico, introduziu modos de inteligibilidade, perspectivas, ângulos (...) de visāo inovadores. A representaçāo do corpo está no cerne da inteligibilidade médica. As diferentes figurações do corpo - fábrica, mecanismo, organismo - indicam estratégias de olhar distintas, podendo falar-se de duas culturas científicas no interior da medicina ao longo do período considerado: uma cultura científica pautada pelos cânones matemático-experimentais, que tende a isolar e objectivar o corpo; uma outra cultura científica guiada pelo reconhecimento da especificidade do corpo vivo e pela inscriçāo deste no facto humano total. The main goal of this paper consists in the contribution of medical thought to the scientific revolution, bearing in mind the specificity of medicine within the scope of sciences. The author draws a path whose boundary marks are A. Vesalius, G. Borelli, W. Harvey, F. Glisson, G.-E. Stahl. It is all about a choice which, although not arbitrary, is significantly contingent. Throughout the XVI-XVIIIth Centuries, medicine accompanied the general attempt of intellectual renovation, namely within the anatomo-physio-pathological field, and brought into use innovative ways of intelligibility, perspectives, angles of view. The picture of the living body is in the core of medical intelligibility. Different pictures of the body - fabric, mechanism, organism - point out distinguished strategies of viewing, making it possible to mention two scientific cultures within medicine during this period: a scientific culture ruled by the mathematico-experimental canons, which tends to isolate and objectify the body; another scientific culture ruled by the acknowledgement of the specificity of living bodies, and by the view of human body within the whole human fact. acknowledgement of the specificity of living bodies, and by the view of human body within the whole human fact. (shrink)

The variety of religious communities present in today’s western-European countries, and their subsequent political impact, urgently calls for a new model of articulation between church and state, religion and politics. This essay makes some suggestions for one such model based on Saint Augustine’s sermons and letters. In those writings, Augustine shows us the everyday political practices of his Christian community – practices based on which this article proposes a model where both the religious communities are entitled to be present in (...) the public arena, and the political authorities have the tools to assure peace and order. For that reason, revisiting Augustine’s work is crucial for a contemporary reflection on the relationship between state and church. Finally, this essay also systematizes the Augustinian distribution of political tasks between Monks, Christian laity, Christian magistrates, and Bishops. (shrink)

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using a list of characteristic features, focusing on life’s effects, or categorizing biospheres rather than life itself; treating life as a fuzzy category, a process or a cluster of contingent properties; or advocating a ‘wait-and-see’ approach until other examples of life are created or discovered. But these skeptical, operational, and pluralistic approaches have intensified the debate, (...) rather than settled it. Given the failure of even these approaches, we advocate a new strategy. In this paper, we reverse the usual line of reasoning and argue that the “life problem” arises from thinking incorrectly about the nature of life. Scientists most often conceptualize life as a class or kind, with earthly life as a single instance of it. Instead, we advocate thinking about Earth’s Life as an individual, in the way that species are now thought to be. In this view, Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last universal common ancestor, and includes all its descendants. We can continue to use the category ‘life’ pragmatically to refer to similarities between various phenomena and Life. But the relevant similarities are a matter of interest and preference, not a matter of fact. The search for other life in the Universe, then, is merely a search for entities that resemble parts of Life in whatever sense astrobiologists find most appealing. This does not mean that the search for evolved complexity elsewhere in the universe or its creation in the lab are futile endeavors, but that debates over whether they count as ‘life’ are. Ironically, finally abandoning the concept ‘life’ may make our searches for evolved complexity more fruitful. We explain why. (shrink)

The regulation of the activity of multiple autonomous entities represented in a multi-agent system, in environments with no central design (and thus with no cooperative assumption), is gaining much attention in the research community. Approaches to this concern include the use of norms in so-called normative multi-agent systems and the development of electronic institution frameworks. In this paper we describe our approach towards the development of an electronic institution providing an enforceable normative environment. Within this environment, institutional services are provided (...) that assist agents in forming cooperative structures whose commitments are made explicit through contracts. Our normative framework borrows some concepts from contract law theory. Contracts are formalized using norms which are used by the institution while monitoring agents’ activities, thus making our normative environment dynamic. We regard the electronic institution as a means to facilitate both the creation and the enforcement of contracts between agents. A model of “institutional reality” is presented that allows for monitoring the fulfillment of norms. The paper also distinguishes our approach from other developments of the electronic institution concept. We address the application of our proposal in the B2B field, namely regarding the formation of Virtual Organizations. (shrink)

This paper reviews computational models of surprise, with a specific focus on the authors’ probabilistic, contrast model. The contrast model casts surprise, and its intensity, as emerging from the difference between the probability of the surprising event and the probability of the highest expected‐event in a given situation. Strong arguments are made for the central role of surprise in creativity and learning by natural and artificial agents.

Bayesian reverse-engineering is a research strategy for developing three-level explanations of behavior and cognition. Starting from a computational-level analysis of behavior and cognition as optimal probabilistic inference, Bayesian reverse-engineers apply numerous tweaks and heuristics to formulate testable hypotheses at the algorithmic and implementational levels. In so doing, they exploit recent technological advances in Bayesian artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, but also consider established principles from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Although these tweaks and heuristics are highly pragmatic in character and (...) are often deployed unsystematically, Bayesian reverse-engineering avoids several important worries that have been raised about the explanatory credentials of Bayesian cognitive science: the worry that the lower levels of analysis are being ignored altogether; the challenge that the mathematical models being developed are unfalsifiable; and the charge that the terms ‘optimal’ and ‘rational’ have lost their customary normative force. But while Bayesian reverse-engineering is therefore a viable and productive research strategy, it is also no fool-proof recipe for explanatory success. (shrink)

"Epistola a Memeceo, Maximas capitales, Sentencias vaticanas, fragmentos y testimonios; texto griego y traduccion": p. [87]-161.

This paper discusses the varieties of capitalism in transitional societies in Latin America and Central / Eastern Europe. The intended purpose of these transitions from semi-closed import-substituting economies in the first case and state socialist ones in the second was to institutionalize open-market economies. Twenty or thirty years later, there is a variety of types of capitalism in these countries, which I classify into three: open-market, neo-mercantilist, and anemic. The question for sociology is whether these quite different variants represent temporary (...) stages or distortions in the same process of transition or whether, on the contrary, they may institutionalize as discrete forms of peripheral capitalism. Neither standard “legacy” argu­ments nor institutionalist theories offer satisfactory answers to this question. The multiple modernities approach, on the other hand, is more appropriate as a theoretical perspective, but it has not produced yet specific propositions applicable to this question. My paper makes two claims. First, the successful transfer of institutions depends on the congruence between these institutions and the broader institutional framework of the recipient economies, a point not developed by institutionalist theories. I offer a hypothesis in this regard: Two critical nodes of congruence are the regulatory and extractive capacity of the state and the strength of civil society. Second, market capitalism (as liberal democracy as well) is a complex institution, and some of its components “travel” more easily across societies and institutional frameworks, and therefore are easier to institutionalize. This is the source of the hybrid variants. (shrink)

The philosophical conception of mechanistic explanation is grounded on a limited number of canonical examples. These examples provide an overly narrow view of contemporary scientific practice, because they do not reflect the extent to which the heuristic strategies and descriptive practices that contribute to mechanistic explanation have evolved beyond the well-known methods of decomposition, localization, and pictorial representation. Recent examples from evolutionary robotics and network approaches to biology and neuroscience demonstrate the increasingly important role played by computer simulations and mathematical (...) representations in the epistemic practices of mechanism discovery and mechanism description. These examples also indicate that the scope of mechanistic explanation must be re-examined: With new and increasingly powerful methods of discovery and description comes the possibility of describing mechanisms far more complex than traditionally assumed. (shrink)

We comment on the last chapter of Henrich where the author offers a ‘key’ to Hegel’s Logic focusing on the problem of the passage from self-reference to determination in the beginning of the Logic. We argue that what he offers as a ‘key’ is actually a reduction of Hegel to the logic of understanding from the point of view of an autonomous Ego; consequently, he excludes dialectics. Contrarily, we present Hegel’s own solution, eliciting the remark where he shows that the (...) proposition “Being and Nothing are the same” negates itself insofar as it is uttered and reflected on the Other’s understanding. We conjecture that this remark offers a privileged point from which to consider the connection Hegel-Lacan, provided we recognize the Absolute in Hegel as the big Other in Lacan. We suggest that the dialectical identity of identity and difference is actually an operation in the Agora and that the Hegel-Marx-Lacan theory can be properly denominated dialectical materialism. We also offer an answer to Žižek’s question of how a “neutral medium of designation” can emerge within a “life-world practice” or out of a “universe of matter. (shrink)

In De vita contemplativa, Philo of Alexandria describes a pious group of Hebrew philosophers. They established their residence in a small village near Lake Mareotis, outside Alexandria. The members of the congregation, called Therapeutae because of their dedication to the cure or care of souls, were both male and female. They lived in isolation from each other in small, humble houses, although on special occasions they had moments of fraternal contact. The presence of women in a regime of equality with (...) men is one of the most striking and original features of this unique Jewish ascetic community. (shrink)

Explora-se o conceito de que a diversidade propicia robutez nos sistemas processadores de informação e como seria aplicável às areas neurais e sociais, incluindo o fenômeno religioso. Avaliação de estatísticas populacionais indica que o último não é essencial ao humano, apesar de ser praticamente constante nas culturas. Discutem-se os aspectos cognitivos e afetivos na ciência e na religião, sob a proposta de que demarcação adequada pode auxiliar na redução de conflitos. Nesse mesmo sentido pode contribuir a elaboração sobre as tensões (...) entre verdades – determinismos – e liberdades, que decorreriam do uso dos conceitos de crenças fortes e fracas, ou seja, entre crenças e hipóteses que parecem promissoras – merecedoras de créditos de confiança. Indica-se a possibilidade de se considerar um sistema de culturas distintas e diversas, apesar das tendências globalizadoras que podem incidir sobre os aspectos mais materiais. Palavras-chave : Estabilidade; Sistema; Evolução; Biologia; Sociedade; Cognição; Afetividade; Essência; Transcendência; Hipótese; Verdade.The concept that diversity propitiates robustness in information processing systems is explored and indicated to be applicable in the neural and social areas, including the religious phenomenon. Evaluation of statistics in populations indicates that the latter is not essential to the human, in spite of being a constant among cultures. Cognitive and affective aspects in science and religion are discussed under the proposition that adequate demarcation may help in reducing conflicts. Elaboration on the tensions between truths – deterministic – and freedom may contribute in the same direction. Tensions may arise from the utilization of the concepts of strong and weak concepts of belief, that is, between beliefs and seemingly fruitful hypotheses – deserving credits of trustfulness. The possibility of considering a system of distinct and diverse cultures is indicated, in spite of the globalizing tendencies that may prevail over other more material aspects. Key words : Stability; System; Evolution; Biology; Society; Cognition; Affection; Essence; Transcendence; Hypothesis; Truth. (shrink)