Paul Ricoeur postula que una teoría de la imaginación se inicia en la literatura y al mismo tiempo es productiva en la vida de la praxis. En la estructura simbólica de la realidad social y política, la imaginación funda el imaginario social, constituye la ideología en su función integradora y suscita la utopía en su función transformadora. En este artículo estudiamos este enfoque, proponiendo el poder de la imaginación como medio de cohesión social y ensayo para la transformación de la (...) realidad, siempre perfectible.Paul Ricoeur postulates that a theory of the imagination begins in literature and at the same time it is productive in the life of praxis. In the symbolic structure of the social and political reality, the imagination founds the social imaginary, it constitutes the ideology in its integrative function and provokes the Utopia in its charging role. In this article, we study this approach, proposing the power of the imagination as a way of social cohesion and as a test for transformation of reality, always perfectible. (shrink)

Resumen El reconocimiento facial es una tecnología que se ha utilizado para el control de la población a fin de combatir los efectos de la pandemia por COVID-19. Sin embargo, esta tecnología se utiliza hace bastante tiempo en muchos ámbitos del quehacer económico, social y político. Este trabajo analiza el reconocimiento fa cial entendida como la captura de micro expresiones faciales mediante la cual se puede medir y evaluar emociones con el fin de vigilar movimiento, predecir com portamientos y anticipar (...) intenciones de compra y de voto. Nuestro objetivo es revisar los enfoques teóricos que sustentan esta tecnología que ha devenido en una nueva oportunidad de negocio, para proponer después algunas reflexiones éticas derivadas.Facial recognition is a technology that is used to control people in order to fight the impacts of COVID-19. However, this technology has been used formany years in many economical, social and political areas. This work provides an analysis of the new business based on technologies of facial micro-expressions recognition. By means of this procedure, the involved companies measure and evaluate emotions with the aim of monitoring the movement, predicting behaviors, intentions of purchase and vote, between other applications. Our purpose is to check the theoretical suppositions that sustain this business, to propose later some ethical derivative reflections. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The focus of this essay is Kant's argument in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals III that regarding oneself as rational implies regarding oneself as free. After setting out an interpretation of how the argument is meant to go, I argue that Kant fails to show that regarding oneself as free is incompatible with accepting universal causal determinism. However, I suggest that the argument succeeds in showing that regarding oneself as rational is inconsistent with accepting universal causal determinism (...) if one accepts a certain, plausible view of the explanation of events. RESUMEN El ensayo se enfoca en el argumento de Kant en la Fundamentación de la metafísica de las costumbres III según el cual considerarse racional implica verse a uno mismo como libre. Se interpreta la forma en que debe entenderse el argumento y se afirma que Kant no logra demostrar que considerarse libre es incompatible con la aceptación del determinismo casual universal. No obstante, se sugiere que el argumento sí logra demostrar que considerarse a uno mismo como racional es incompatible con la aceptación del determinismo casual universal, si se acepta una cierta versión plausible de la explicación de los eventos. (shrink)

Defeasible argumentation has been applied successfully in several real-world domains in which it is necessary to handle incomplete and contradictory information. In recent years, there have been interesting attempts to carry out argumentation processes supported by massive repositories developing argumentative reasoning applications. One of such efforts builds arguments by retrieving information from relational databases using the DBI-DeLP framework; this article presents eDBI-DeLP, which extends the original DBI-DeLP framework by providing two novel aspects which refine the interaction between DeLP programs and (...) relational databases. First, we expand the expressiveness of dbi-delp programs by providing ways of controlling how the information in databases is recovered; this is done by introducing filters that enable an improved fine-grained control on the argumentation processes which become useful in applications, providing the semantics and the implementation of such filters. Second, we introduce an argument comparison criterion which can be adjusted at the level of literals to model particular features such as credibility and topic expertise, among others. These new tools can be particularly useful in environments such as medical diagnosis expert systems, decision support systems, or recommender systems based on argumentation, where datasets are often provided in the form of relational databases. (shrink)

In a large Colombian teaching hospital, a fifty-five-year-old woman complaining of stomach pain is examined by a foreign-exchange medical student from the United States. Speaking in Spanish, the student elicits a medical history that suggests a possible recurrence of gallstones, but nothing further. Upon discussing the patient's case in private with the attending physician, the student is shocked to learn that the patient is suffering from terminal, metastatic gastric cancer but is unaware of her diagnosis. The attending physician explains that (...) the patient's husband instructed the health care providers not to tell the patient what her diagnosis is. The medical student feels uncomfortable withholding the diagnosis from the patient. The thought of disclosure feels equally uncomfortable, however, as it would mean contradicting the instructions of the attending physician at the host hospital as well as violating what the student suspects, but is not sure, may be acceptable medical practice in Colombia. How should the medical student proceed? (shrink)

We study the theories I∇n, L∇n and overspill principles for ∇n formulas. We show that IEn ⇒ L∇n ⇒ I∇n, but we do not know if I∇n L∇n. We introduce a new scheme, the growth scheme Crγ, and we prove that L∇n ⇒ Cr∇n⇒ I∇n. Also, we analyse the utility of bounded collection axioms for the study of the above theories.

Resumen Nuestro trabajo presenta una nueva propuesta de lectura de una inscripción hallada en Emporiae en honor de un M. Iuṇ[ius] cuya identidad tratamos de determinar, planteando la posibilidad de que se trate del pretor M. Iunius citado por Cicerón en su discurso Pro Cluentio y de que, por lo tanto, la inscripción corresponda a su posible proconsulado en Hispania Citerior hacia el año 68 a. C. Dicho supuesto nos permite al mismo tiempo poner al personaje en relación con las (...) circunstancias fundacionales de la ciudad romana de Emporiae, cuyo nacimiento sitúan hoy ciertos arqueólogos en las primeras décadas del siglo I a. C. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that cultural, linguistic, and sociodemographic peculiarities influence the measurement of trait emotional intelligence. Assessing trait EI in different populations fosters cross-cultural research and expands the construct’s nomological network. In mental health, the trait EI of clinical populations has been scarcely researched. Accordingly, the present study examined the relationship between trait EI and key sociodemographic variables on Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire datasets with mental healthcare patients from three different Spanish-speaking countries. Collectively, these datasets comprised 528 participants, 23% (...) from Chile, 28% from Peru, and 49% from Spain. The sociodemographic variables we used for trait EI comparisons were gender, age, educational level, civil status, and occupational status. Analyses involved Multigroup Exploratory Structural Equation Modelling and analysis of covariance. Our results revealed significant between-country differences in trait EI across the studied sociodemographic variables and interactions between these variables. Measurement invariance across the datasets was attained up to the scalar level regarding gender and education, although analyses on age, civil status, and occupation displayed non-invariance. The resultant psychometric evidence supports the suitability of the TEIQue-SF for the accurate cross-cultural assessment of trait EI in mental health settings. It also highlights the importance of incorporating trait EI into extant psychotherapeutic frameworks to enhance non-pharmacological treatment efficacy. (shrink)

Rapid individual cognitive phenotyping holds the potential to revolutionize domains as wide‐ranging as personalized learning, employment practices, and precision psychiatry. Going beyond limitations imposed by traditional lab‐based experiments, new efforts have been underway toward greater ecological validity and participant diversity to capture the full range of individual differences in cognitive abilities and behaviors across the general population. Building on this, we developed Skill Lab, a novel game‐based tool that simultaneously assesses a broad suite of cognitive abilities while providing an engaging (...) narrative. Skill Lab consists of six mini‐games as well as 14 established cognitive ability tasks. Using a popular citizen science platform (N = 10,725), we conducted a comprehensive validation in the wild of a game‐based cognitive assessment suite. Based on the game and validation task data, we constructed reliable models to simultaneously predict eight cognitive abilities based on the users’ in‐game behavior. Follow‐up validation tests revealed that the models can discriminate nuances contained within each separate cognitive ability as well as capture a shared main factor of generalized cognitive ability. Our game‐based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent task‐based measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of certain cognitive abilities with age in our large cross‐sectional population sample (N = 6369). Taken together, our results demonstrate the feasibility of rapid in‐the‐wild systematic assessment of cognitive abilities as a promising first step toward population‐scale benchmarking and individualized mental health diagnostics. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se pretende elucidar algunos de los aportes posibles de la filosofía deleuzeana a la teoría social y política, a través de un examen de su concepción del poder. La investigación arroja como un primer resultado que dicho examen requiere una reducción metodológica de los conceptos de lo “molar” y lo “molecular” -que constituyen su concepción más general de lo social- a los términos propios de sus desarrollos ontológicos: “virtual” y “actual” o “acontecimiento y “estado de cosas”. (...) Dicha reducción permitirá identificar dos concepciones cronológicamente sucesivas del poder, la segunda de las cuales, que incluye parcialmente a la primera, permite dar con una definición del poder como agente (no subjetivo) de producción de subjetividad, lo que constituye el resultado de la investigación y su mayor aporte. (shrink)

The possible linkages among liberty and power is a philosophical issue that gets to special important inside to contemporary political philosophy’s context. During this stage, a notion of legitimacy began to develop on which both freedom and power would be sustained, without being justified in a supposed statalist originin. Neither the legitimate power no the legitime freedom come to be backing by the juristic order up in the first instance, inasmuch up its source would be prior. From Foucault and Marcuse (...) outlooks on this issue, it will treat to inquire on the disquisitions that both their ever speeches propose. (shrink)

Discuto la semántica de las oraciones de acción de Davidson para argumentar que no tiene elementos suficientes para analizar contrafácticos. Presento dos críticas. En la primera, sostengo que dada la ontología del autor acerca de las acciones, resulta imposible considerar la misma acción en circunstancias contrafácticas. En la segunda, argumento que el carácter descriptivo de las oraciones impide que un hablante pueda extrapolar la semántica davidsoniana de oraciones que este conoce a oraciones de acción contrafácticas.

The beginning of university life can be a stressful event for students. The close social relationships that they can experience can have positive effects on their well-being. The objective of this paper is to estimate the effect of perceived social support on the changes of the hedonic and eudaimonic well-being of Chilean university students during the transition from the first to the second academic year. Overall, 205 students participated with an average age of 19.14 years, evaluated during their first academic (...) year and the succeeding one. For the evaluation of perceived social support, the Spanish version of the Perceived Social Support Questionnaire “MSPSS” was used, and PERMA-profiler was used to measure hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Changes through the time of hedonic well-being and social support and the correlations between the variables were analyzed. Changes in the perception of social support were analyzed according to four categories of hedonic well-being. The prediction of social support for eudaimonic well-being was evaluated. Results indicated that the perception of students’ social support did not change over time. Statistically significant differences were found in hedonic well-being scores in the two measurements, being significantly higher in the first measurement than in the second one. More than 50% of the participants presented a positive balance of affections. The perception of social support is associated with the two types of well-being. Students who had a high balance of affections had a greater perception of general social support than the groups of positive evolution of affections and a low balance of affections. In the case of the friends and family support dimensions, the perception in the high-balance group of affections concerning the low-scale group is greater. Improving the perception of social support increases the eudaimonic well-being of university students. The perception of support that students had during the beginning of their university life benefits their general well-being, which contributes to their mental health. (shrink)

El objetivo de la investigación es demostrar que la aplicación del Flipped Classroom mejora el nivel de logro del aprendizaje significativo en estudiantes universitarios. Para la recolección de datos en los grupos control y experimental se aplicaron dos instrumentos: el pre-test y el post-test. Concluido con la aplicación de los talleres basados en la metodología FC, en el postest se observó que en el grupo control, 26 estudiantes obtuvieron una calificación aprobatoria y 11 reprobatoria, mientras que en el grupo experimental, (...) 38 estudiantes, de acuerdo a los criterios de evaluación, todos lograron una calificación aprobatoria. (shrink)

BackgroundStudies and meta-analyses found individual, meso and micro-social factors that are associated with individual well-being, as well as a positive socio-emotional climate or collective well-being.AimThis article simultaneously studies and examines these factors of well-being.MethodWell-Being is measured as a dependent variable at the individual and collective level, as well as the predictors, in three cross-sectional and one longitudinal studies. Education and social intervention workers from Chile, Spain and Uruguay participate; a subsample of educators from the south central Chile and from Chile, (...) Uruguay and Spain ; workers from organizations in Latin America and Southern Europe, military cadets from Argentina ; and teams from Spanish companies.ResultsIndividual and collective well-being indicators were related, suggesting that the emotional climate as a context improves personal well-being. Individual factors, psychosocial factors were positively associated with personal well-being in education and social intervention context. Organizational dynamic or transformational culture is directly and indirectly associated with individual well-being through previously described psychosocial factors. Group processes such as internal communication and safe participation, task orientation or climate of excellence as well as leadership style that reinforces participation and belonging, were positively associated with collective well-being in labor and military context and predict team work socio-emotional climate in a longitudinal study- but were unrelated to individual well-being. Transformational leadership plays a mediating role between functional factors and social-emotional climate in work teams. Organizational role autonomy, functional organizational leadership, integration and resources were associated with collective well-being in organizations. Organizational leadership moderates the relationship between task orientation and collective well-being in military context.ConclusionIndividual and microsocial factors influence personal well-being. Meso level factors favorable to well-being through processes which reinforce social belonging, influence directly collective well-being and indirectly personal well-being. Leadership that reinforces participation and belonging play a central role for emotional climate. Stress and emotional climate playing an important pivotal role for psychological well-being. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconsider some colonial and contemporary readings around a paradigmatic figure: Malintzin. With this objective I will divide our approach into four correlated sections. The first introduces some elements around the construction of the term Malintzin, highlighting those that are related with the Nahua cultural world. The second takes up the colonial chronicles of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Diego Muñoz Camargo, identifying their specific contents related to her figure. The third delves into some contemporary contributions (...) of a literary, historiographical and philosophical nature. To this purpose I will recover the literary appreciations of Octavio Paz, the historical proposals of Matthew Restall, and the philosophical approach of Bolívar Echeverría. The fourth section functionalizes some final considerations related to Malintzin as useful perspective to problematize the contemporaneity of the conquest of Mexico. Lately, this article seeks to ask and reflect on Malintzin in terms of the construction of an imaginary that posits a multidirectional understanding of her figure. (shrink)

El proceso de creación de las Representaciones Sociales está permeado por la historia, contexto y cultura de las personas. Este trabajo constituyó un estudio procesual de la RS del maestro universitario. Un enfoque hermenéutico permitió recuperar los significados, el lenguaje y producciones simbólicas por medio de los cuales los estudiantes construyeron dichas RS.

The problem of knowledge evolution has received considerable attention over the years. Mainly, the study of the dynamics of knowledge has been addressed in the area of Belief Revision, a field emerging as the convergence of the efforts in Philosophy, Logic, and more recently Computer Science, where research efforts usually involve “flat” knowledge bases where there is no additional information about the formulas stored in it. Even when this may be a good fit for particular applications, in many real-world scenarios (...) different information items may be attached to formulas. For instance, when the reliability of the source of the piece of information is attached to it as a measure of some quality (e.g., strength) of the piece of information itself, or when some characteristic informs us on the desirability of the item (e.g., the potential benefit that could be obtained from it). If this type of information is available, we can use it to guide how the belief base is to be modified when new information arrives. In this work, we present a novel approach to the contraction of knowledge bases where formulas have values attached that measure some quality linked to those formulas, exploiting it to define their desirability, and uses such desirability to define which formulas need to be removed to solve conflicts. In this context, we introduce a set of properties for contraction operators by extending classic approaches. We also show how the local treatment of minimal conflicts can induce some counter-intuitive contractions, and we present a way to avoid them by considering optimal resolutions of conflicts using the additional information encoded. We show how the proposed formalization captures any contraction that is optimal under a set of features. Finally, we present a refinement based on the identification of related minimal conflicts that performs contraction in optimal ways without looking into the entire knowledge base. The approach is based on the use of the accrual of beliefs where several formulas collaboratively use their respective values to prevail in the resolution of conflicts. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene por objetivo analizar la equidad natural como criterio de interpretación jurídica. Contadas las excepciones, es posible aseverar que no ha sido objeto de un estudio sistemático y profundo por parte de filosofía del Derecho; no existe claridad respecto a cómo funciona la equidad natural, cuál es su naturaleza, cómo se aplica, si acaso es un concepto moral, jurídico o participa de ambas categorías. Frente a este panorama en este trabajo se busca responder a estas interrogantes, proponiendo un (...) análisis de las propiedades que constituyen la idea de equidad interpretativa. Ello no para alcanzar una definición final, sino para entregar claridad conceptual a los operadores jurídicos cuando hacen uso de este elemento hermenéutico. Para lograr este objetivo se realizará un análisis crítico de la bibliografía especializada en el tema, con la finalidad de repensar ciertos lugares comunes en torno a este concepto. (shrink)

Ante la devaluación de la formación universitaria debido a la escisión entre docencia e investigación, se propone la “investigación formativa” como fórmula de aprendizaje significativo. Se ofrece un marco epistemológico basado en la complejidad del conocimiento en Humanidades, y un planteamiento metodológico organizado sobre la transversalidad y convergencia disciplinar. Se presentan resultados de su aplicación en el estudio de problemas relacionados con el patrimonio arquitectónico y urbanístico. Se muestran casos de estudios diversos que demuestran su flexibilidad, su interactividad en el (...) aprendizaje y su potencialidad de transcender de la comunidad universitaria a la ciudadanía en general. (shrink)

A widespread need to explain the behavior and outcomes of AI-based systems has emerged, due to their ubiquitous presence. Thus, providing renewed momentum to the relatively new research area of eXplainable AI (XAI). Nowadays, the importance of XAI lies in the fact that the increasing control transference to this kind of system for decision making -or, at least, its use for assisting executive stakeholders- already affects many sensitive realms (as in Politics, Social Sciences, or Law). The decision-making power handover to (...) opaque AI systems makes mandatory explaining those, primarily in application scenarios where the stakeholders are unaware of both the high technology applied and the basic principles governing the technological solutions. The issue should not be reduced to a merely technical problem; the explainer would be compelled to transmit richer knowledge about the system (including its role within the informational ecosystem where he/she works). To achieve such an aim, the explainer could exploit, if necessary, practices from other scientific and humanistic areas. The first aim of the paper is to emphasize and justify the need for a multidisciplinary approach that is beneficiated from part of the scientific and philosophical corpus on Explaining, underscoring the particular nuances of the issue within the field of Data Science. The second objective is to develop some arguments justifying the authors’ bet by a more relevant role of ideas inspired by, on the one hand, formal techniques from Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and on the other hand, the modeling of human reasoning when facing the explanation. This way, explaining modeling practices would seek a sound balance between the pure technical justification and the explainer-explainee agreement. (shrink)

The literary genesis of Einbahnstraße by Walter Benjamin represents a very special case of the use of the procedures of surrealism in the philosophical-literary production of the author. The process of evolution of thinking that ended up in the writing of this piece is unveiled throughout the present analysis. This is a sign of both waiver and restart; the opening for a new productive dimension in the career of one of the most important —and misunderstood— philosophers of the 20th century. (...) More than enlightening a small master piece of philosophy from a literary perspective, or analyzing a small master piece of literature from the philosophy, what is being problematized here is the division, cultivated or figured throughout the years, between both disciplines. This work is intended to recover what is insoluble from the philosophical-literary labor of Walter Benjamin, besides tracing a possible reconfiguration for an interdisciplinary field of work to come up and contribute in the understanding of the problem called The Retreat of Metaphor by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the consolidation of Molecular Evolution, a field originating in the 1960s at the interface of molecular biology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, biophysics and studies on the origin of life and exobiology. The claim is made that Molecular Evolution became a discipline by integrating different sorts of scientific traditions: experimental, theoretical and comparative. The author critically incorporates Timothy Lenoir’s treatment of disciplines , as well as ideas developed by Stephen Toulmin on the same subject. On their account disciplines (...) are spaces where the social and epistemic dimensions of science are deeply and complexly interwoven. However, a more detailed account of discipline formation and the dynamics of an emerging disciplinary field is lacking in their analysis. The present essay suggests focusing on the role of scientific concepts in the double configuration of disciplines: the social/political and the epistemic order. In the case of Molecular Evolution the concepts of molecular clock and informational molecules played a central role, both in differentiating molecular from classical evolutionists, and in promoting communication between the different sorts of traditions integrated in Molecular Evolution. The paper finishes with a reflection on the historicity of disciplines, and the historicity of our concepts of disciplines. (shrink)

Patagonia: Land of Giants captures the wonders of the Patagonian landscape in hundreds of stunning color photographs by famed Argentine nature photographer Daniel Rivademar.

The use of molecules and reactions as evidence, markers and/or traits for evolutionary processes has a history more than a century long. Molecules have been used in studies of intra-specific variation and studies of similarity among species that do not necessarily result in the analysis of phylogenetic relations. Promoters of the use of molecular data have sustained the need for quantification as the main argument to make use of them. Moreover, quantification has allowed intensive statistical analysis, as a condition and (...) a product of increasing automation. All of these analyses are subject to the methodological anxiety characteristic of a community in search of objectivity. It is in this context that scientists compared and evaluated protein and nucleic acid sequence data with other types of molecular data – including immunological, electrophoretic and hybridization data. This paper argues that by looking at long-term historical processes, such as the use of molecular evidence in evolutionary biology, we gain valuable insights into the history of science. In that sense, it accompanies a growing concern among historians for big-pictures of science that incorporate the fruitful historical research on local cases of the last decades. (shrink)

This paper extends previous arguments against the assumption that the study of variation at the molecular level was instigated with a view to solving an internal conflict between the balance and classical schools of population genetics. It does so by focusing on the intersection of basic research in protein chemistry and the molecular approach to disease with the enactment of global health campaigns during the Cold War period. The paper connects advances in research on protein structure and function as reflected (...) in Christian Anfinsen’s The molecular basis of evolution, with a political reading of Emilé Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling’s identification of molecular disease and evolution. Beyond atomic fallout, these advances constituted a rationale for the promotion of genetic surveys of human populations in the Third World, in connection with international health programs. Light is shed not only on the experimental roots of the molecular challenge but on the broader geopolitical context where the rising role of biomedicine and public health had an impact on evolutionary biology. (shrink)

The thought of Pierre Klossowski, praised by Foucault, Blanchot, Deleuze, has been scarcely addressed by the philosophical community. We argue in this article that this is largely due to the frequent difficulty of understanding his work as a whole: both his artistic and literary production and his interpretations of Nietzsche or Sade form a coherent whole, whose significance has a deeply critical political scope. The notion of unproductive spending, which occupies a central place in Bataille's work, will be rearticulated in (...) Klossowski's reflections through the concepts of drive, phantasm, simulacrum, value and consumption. In The Living Currency, the political dimension of these terms appears clearly: relying on a rereading of Fourier and Sade, the author shows the extreme degree of deformation of what we assume as a reality in modern industrial society. In this sense, his thinking takes on special relevance today, as a revelation of the excess and unhingedness of a society in which production and consumption are reproduced without limit through the infinite reflections produced by the game between drives, ghosts and simulacra. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper explores the connection between the epistemic and the “political” dimensions of the metaphor of information during the early days of the study of Molecular Evolution. While preserving some of the meanings already documented in the history of molecular biology, the metaphor acquired a new, powerful use as a substitute for “history.” A rhetorical analysis of Emilé Zuckerkandl's paper, “Molecules as Documents of Evolutionary History,” highlights the ways in which epistemic claims on the validity and superiority of molecular evidence (...) for evolution were intimately connected with authority issues in evolutionary biology. The debate is situated within the framework of the battle for resources between traditional evolutionists and molecular biologists at the beginning of the 1960s. The architects of evolutionary synthesis questioned the idea that molecular characters constitute “cleaner” and “more direct” evidence of evolution. Nevertheless, the information discourse constituted a productive space for the development of a new research program that, paradoxically, has made explicit the limitations of the information metaphor in reconstructing life's history. (shrink)

In this special issue we explore practices of scientific inquiry into human populations in Latin America in order to generate new insights into the complex historical and sociopolitical dynamics that have made certain human groups integral to the production of scientific knowledge in and about the region. In important contributions, other scholars have shown that the science of human difference is racist and all too often has been a mediator of development ideologies. To further unpack these arguments we focus attention (...) on the complex interaction between scientists and the populations they study. We explore cases from across the fields of evolutionary biology, demography, epidemiology... (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...) in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). (shrink)