In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vitoria, Cajetan, and the ConciliaristsKatherine Elliot van LiereFrancisco de Vitoria, professor of theology at the University of Salamanca from 1526 until his death in 1546, is widely recognized as the leader of the sixteenth-century scholastic revival and one of the foremost Catholic political thinkers of his day. His surviving relectiones (the lectures given in Salamanca at the end of each university term) cover a wide range of issues from (...) the morality of cannibalism to the legality of Henry VIII’s divorce. 1 Yet modern scholarly interest in Vitoria and his disciples (collectively known as “the School of Salamanca”) has focused mainly on issues relevant to the moral and legal problems of secular nation-states. Between this century’s two great wars Spanish and American scholars took a renewed interest in Vitoria’s published relectiones, seeing in them early expressions of the doctrine of international law, and arguing that Vitoria deserved some of the credit generally given to Hugo Grotius as the inventor of this concept. 2 Since then Spanish, American, and British scholarship on Vitoria and the School of Salamanca has continued to center mainly on such issues as just war, conquest, and slavery. 3 In the 1980s Anthony Pagden [End Page 597] revisited these questions, interpreting the School of Salamanca’s neo-Scholastic teachings as part of the “ideological armature of what [was arguably] the first early modern nation state.” 4 From a similar methodological perspective, Richard Tuck and Quentin Skinner have described the neo-Thomist revival of natural law as an important influence on the development of modern legal and political concepts like the subjective theory of natural rights and the Lockean contractual theory of political obligation. 5 Most recently, Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance have edited and translated into English a selection of Vitoria’s “political writings,” which will serve as a welcome aid for future research on any of these themes. 6Yet Vitoria’s end-of-term lectures in Salamanca also discussed a number of other themes apart from the political theory of secular states. Among these, the theme of the structure and power of ecclesiastical government has so far received less attention than it deserves. 7 Ecclesiastical power, or “the power of the Church,” was one of only two subjects to which Vitoria devoted two relectiones each (the other being the famous debate about Spanish rights to dominion in America). Vitoria delivered his two lectures on ecclesiastical government, both entitled De potestate ecclesiae, in 1532 and 1533. In 1534 he lectured on the closely related theme of “the power of the pope and the council” (De potestate papae et concilii). 8 Vitoria’s treatment, in these three lectures, of the authority of the Church, the pope, and the general council is worth examining more closely not only for the intrinsic interest of these issues but perhaps even more for the light it sheds on the formation of Vitoria’s thinking about secular political power. All three relectiones preceded the two famous Relectiones de indiis (“On the American Indians”) which Vitoria delivered in [End Page 598] 1538 and 1539. For churchmen like the Dominican Vitoria, ecclesiastical and secular political power were inextricably linked; theories posited in one sphere had implications in the other, and in some cases these implications proved politically or theologically awkward enough to force a thinker back to the drawing board. The political theories about the natural origins of secular political power which Vitoria articulated in the late 1530s in his Relectiones de indiis reflect this painful process. They were not only inspired by Vitoria’s awareness of the plight of the American Indians under Spanish colonial rule; they were also shaped by his protracted struggle with the theological implications of natural law theory, a struggle which can be observed in his lectures of the early 1530s on ecclesiastical power.Observing this intellectual struggle in Vitoria’s writing affords more than just one more illustration of how all political thought is rooted in particular social contexts. For Francisco de Vitoria stood at a particularly significant juncture in the history of political thought. The position he carefully defined in the 1530s was characterized by a strong emphasis on the distinction between... (shrink)

We investigate the notion of minimal cognition, and claim that this notion already applies to bacterial behavior. On the basis of the example of E. coli, we argue that the basis of cognition can be profitably cast as sensorimotor coordinations which subserve the metabolic requirements of organisms.

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and (...) complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular. (shrink)

We give in this paper a sufficient condition, cast in semantic terms, for Hallden-completeness in normal modal logics, a modal logic being said to be Hallden-complete (or Ήallden-reasonable') just in case for any disjunctive formula provable in the logic, where the disjuncts have no propositional variables in common, one or other of those disjuncts is provable in the logic.

The need for urgent, structural transformations to dominant food systems is increasingly recognized in research and policy. The direction these transformations take is in great part influenced by how the problem is framed and what future pathways become seen as plausible and desirable. Scientific knowledge and the organizations producing it hold considerable authority in suggesting what alternatives are or are not worth pursuing, ultimately shaping frames and in turn being shaped by them. This paper examines Brazil’s federal Agricultural Research Corporation (...) (Embrapa), a major contributor to technological advances that made Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse. We examine the ways in which Embrapa’s leadership has framed sustainable agriculture in its public communication and the wider implications for food systems transformation. Drawing from Embrapa news articles in the period 2015–2020, we identify four interrelated frames forming Embrapa’s prevalent position on sustainability. Our results show that while Embrapa promotes practices based on alternative approaches such as agroecology, its deeper framing often reflects the core assumptions driving dominant industrial food systems. This framing reinforces underlying logics of control, efficiency, and competition aligned with the productivist paradigm and excludes divergent perspectives that exist within the organization. (shrink)

Recent developments in AI-research suggest that an AI-driven science might not be that far off. The research of for Melnikov et al. (2018) and that of Evans et al. (2018) show that automated systems can already have a distinctive role in the design of experiments and in directing future research. Common practice in many of the papers devoted to the automation of basic research is to refer to these automated systems as ‘agents’. What is this attribution of agency based on (...) and to what extent is this an important notion in the broader context of an AI-driven science? In an attempt to answer these questions, this paper proposes a new methodological framework, introduced as the Four-Fold Framework, that can be used to conceptualize artificial agency in basic research. It consists of four modeling strategies, three of which were already identified and used by Sarkia (2021) to conceptualize ‘intentional agency’. The novelty of the framework is the inclusion of a fourth strategy, introduced as conceptual modeling, that adds a semantic dimension to the overall conceptualization. The strategy connects to the other strategies by modeling both the actual use of ‘artificial agency’ in basic research as well as what is meant by it in each of the other three strategies. This enables researchers to bridge the gap between theory and practice by comparing the meaning of artificial agency in both an academic as well as in a practical context. (shrink)

A blockchain can be considered a technological phenomenon that is made up of different interconnected and autonomous systems. Such systems are referred to here as cyber-physical systems: complex interconnections of cyber and physical components. When cyber-physical systems are interconnected, a new whole consisting of a system of systems is created by the autonomous systems and their intercommunication and interaction. In a blockchain, individual systems can independently make decisions on joint information transactions. The decision-making procedures needed for this are executed based (...) on fault-tolerant communication and voting and consensus procedures, while the results of these decision-making procedures are stored in distributed ledgers. Due to the intercommunication, interaction, and independent decision making by autonomous systems, the new whole of a blockchain is a complex entity. Complexity science rather than the usual reductionist scientific approach can help us better understand the behaviour of the new and continuously developing whole of a blockchain as a technological phenomenon. (shrink)

We are currently in the middle of the transformation from Martin Heidegger’s modern society to a society based on digital technology. In the developing digital society, humans in their current state of ‘Being’ are increasingly surrounded by systems that are networked and run based on algorithms, software, and data. These interconnected systems function, communicate, and interact in networks and driven by these algorithms, software, and data, which give them the ability to connect, calculate, and reveal. Jointly, these systems thus create (...) a new and actual reality based on their mathematical and scientific background. In the present-day digital society, humans’ actual ‘state of Being’ is increasingly framed by what the digital technology reveals to us and enables. The transition to this new digital reality conjures up more and more questions as to whether we as humans sufficiently understand the essence of digital technology and whether we as humanity have sufficient knowledge and insight to be able to analyze and fathom the essence of the new digital ecology around us. In this article, I will use Heideggerian phenomenology as a philosophy to create a framework that will allow us to, based on phenomenological research into our current ‘Dasein’ or ‘being there’, gain deeper insight into the ‘Being’ of digital technology and the ensuing development of a digital reality for humanity as a whole. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vitoria, Cajetan, and the ConciliaristsKatherine Elliot van LiereFrancisco de Vitoria, professor of theology at the University of Salamanca from 1526 until his death in 1546, is widely recognized as the leader of the sixteenth-century scholastic revival and one of the foremost Catholic political thinkers of his day. His surviving relectiones (the lectures given in Salamanca at the end of each university term) cover a wide range of issues from (...) the morality of cannibalism to the legality of Henry VIII’s divorce. 1 Yet modern scholarly interest in Vitoria and his disciples (collectively known as “the School of Salamanca”) has focused mainly on issues relevant to the moral and legal problems of secular nation-states. Between this century’s two great wars Spanish and American scholars took a renewed interest in Vitoria’s published relectiones, seeing in them early expressions of the doctrine of international law, and arguing that Vitoria deserved some of the credit generally given to Hugo Grotius as the inventor of this concept. 2 Since then Spanish, American, and British scholarship on Vitoria and the School of Salamanca has continued to center mainly on such issues as just war, conquest, and slavery. 3 In the 1980s Anthony Pagden [End Page 597] revisited these questions, interpreting the School of Salamanca’s neo-Scholastic teachings as part of the “ideological armature of what [was arguably] the first early modern nation state.” 4 From a similar methodological perspective, Richard Tuck and Quentin Skinner have described the neo-Thomist revival of natural law as an important influence on the development of modern legal and political concepts like the subjective theory of natural rights and the Lockean contractual theory of political obligation. 5 Most recently, Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance have edited and translated into English a selection of Vitoria’s “political writings,” which will serve as a welcome aid for future research on any of these themes. 6Yet Vitoria’s end-of-term lectures in Salamanca also discussed a number of other themes apart from the political theory of secular states. Among these, the theme of the structure and power of ecclesiastical government has so far received less attention than it deserves. 7 Ecclesiastical power, or “the power of the Church,” was one of only two subjects to which Vitoria devoted two relectiones each (the other being the famous debate about Spanish rights to dominion in America). Vitoria delivered his two lectures on ecclesiastical government, both entitled De potestate ecclesiae, in 1532 and 1533. In 1534 he lectured on the closely related theme of “the power of the pope and the council” (De potestate papae et concilii). 8 Vitoria’s treatment, in these three lectures, of the authority of the Church, the pope, and the general council is worth examining more closely not only for the intrinsic interest of these issues but perhaps even more for the light it sheds on the formation of Vitoria’s thinking about secular political power. All three relectiones preceded the two famous Relectiones de indiis (“On the American Indians”) which Vitoria delivered in [End Page 598] 1538 and 1539. For churchmen like the Dominican Vitoria, ecclesiastical and secular political power were inextricably linked; theories posited in one sphere had implications in the other, and in some cases these implications proved politically or theologically awkward enough to force a thinker back to the drawing board. The political theories about the natural origins of secular political power which Vitoria articulated in the late 1530s in his Relectiones de indiis reflect this painful process. They were not only inspired by Vitoria’s awareness of the plight of the American Indians under Spanish colonial rule; they were also shaped by his protracted struggle with the theological implications of natural law theory, a struggle which can be observed in his lectures of the early 1530s on ecclesiastical power.Observing this intellectual struggle in Vitoria’s writing affords more than just one more illustration of how all political thought is rooted in particular social contexts. For Francisco de Vitoria stood at a particularly significant juncture in the history of political thought. The position he carefully defined in the 1530s was characterized by a strong emphasis on the distinction between... (shrink)

“New communities” are a real force in the contemporary Catholic landscape. However, a certain number of them are affected by crises of various types. Abuses of all kinds and sectarian excesses can create stigmas in the lives of communities and their members. In short, new communities are proving to be more fragile than we initially understood them to be. What are the causes of these struggles? To examine this question, the author proposes to take stock of the current situation by (...) pointing out the critical and focal elements in the life of suffering communities. This step, preliminary to all others, aims to open the door to further research and interventions. (shrink)

Pessoa et al. (1998a) underexposed the broad and rich variety of stimuli in the amodal completion domain. The disambiguation of occluded shapes depends on very specific figural properties. Elaborations on such disambiguations of rich and complex stimuli, tied up with a visuo-cognitive origin of amodal completion, further position Pessoa et al.'s considerations on neural filling-in and the personal-subpersonal distinction.

This Handbook documents the main trends in current research between logic and language, including its broader influence in computer science, linguistic theory and cognitive science. The history of the combined study of Logic and Linguistics goes back a long way, at least to the work of the scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. At the beginning of this century, the subject was revitalized through the pioneering efforts of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Polish philosophical logicians such as Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Around (...) 1970, the landmark achievements of Richard Montague established a junction between state-of-the-art mathematical logic and generative linguistic theory. Over the subsequent decades, this enterprise of Montague Grammar has flourished and diversified into a number of research programs with empirical and theoretical substance. This appears to be the first Handbook to bring logic-language interface to the fore. Both aspects of the interaction between logic and language are demonstrated in the book i.e. firstly, how logical systems are designed and modified in response to linguistic needs and secondly, how mathematical theory arises in this process and how it affects subsequent linguistic theory. The Handbook presents concise, impartial accounts of the topics covered. Where possible, an author and a commentator have cooperated to ensure the proper breadth and technical content of the papers. The Handbook is self-contained, and individual articles are of the highest quality. (shrink)

Intensional logic is the technical study of such intensional phenomena in human reasoning as modality, knowledge, or flow of time. These all require a richer semantic picture than standard truth values in one static environment. Such a picture is provided by so-called possible worlds semantics, a paradigm which is surveyed in this book, both as to its external sources of motivation and as to the internal dynamics of the resulting program. In particular, Manual of Intensional Logic presents the major classical (...) topics, including modal logic, tense logic, and conditional logic, all of which illustrate motivations coming from philosophy and linguistics. The Book also discusses recent computational applications in computer science and AI. Finally, Manual of Intensional Logic takes up recent developments in the study of language and information making themselves felt in the area. The Book examines the role of partial information--with illustrations drawn from different branches of Intensional Logic--and various influences stemming from current theories of the semantics of natural language, involving generalized quantifiers and theories of types. (shrink)

In this paper thecanonicalmodal logics, a kind of complete modal logics introduced in K. Fine [4] and R. I. Goldblatt [5], will be characterized semantically using the concept of anultrafilter extension, an operation on frames inspired by the algebraic theory of modal logic. Theorem 8 of R. I. Goldblatt and S. K. Thomason [6] characterizing the modally definable Σ⊿-elementary classes of frames will follow as a corollary. A second corollary is Theorem 2 of [4] which states that any complete modal (...) logic defining a Σ⊿-elementary class of frames is canonical.The main tool in obtaining these results is the duality between modal algebras and general frames developed in R. I. Goldblatt [5]. The relevant notions and results from this theory will be stated in §2. The concept of a canonical modal logic is introduced and motivated in §3, which also contains the above-mentioned theorems. In §4, a kind of appendix to the preceding discussion, preservation of first-order sentences under ultrafilter extensions is discussed.The modal language to be considered here has an infinite supply of proposition letters, a propositional constant ⊥, the usual Boolean operators ¬, ∨, ∨, →, and ↔ —with ¬ and ∨ regarded as primitives—and the two unary modal operators ◇ and □ — ◇ being regarded as primitive. Modal formulas will be denoted by lower case Greek letters, sets of formulas by Greek capitals. (shrink)

In the modal literature various notions of "completeness" have been studied for normal modal logics. Four of these are defined here, viz. completeness, first-order completeness, canonicity and possession of the finite model property -- and their connections are studied. Up to one important exception, all possible inclusion relations are either proved or disproved. Hopefully, this helps to establish some order in the jungle of concepts concerning modal logics. In the course of the exposition, the interesting properties of first-order definability and (...) preservation under ultrafilter extensions are introduced and studied as well. (shrink)

The book Hidden Harmony—The Connected Worlds of Physics and Art by J.R. Leibowitz is critically reviewed. The book is intended for a general audience and does not assume prior knowledge of physics or the arts.

Alan Musgrave, Michael Friedman, Jeffrey Foss, and Richard Creath raised different objections against the Distinction between observables and unobservables when drawn within the confines of Bas C. van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism, to the effect that the Distinction cannot be drawn there coherently. Van Fraassen has only responded to Musgrave but Musgrave claimed not to understand van Fraassen's succinct response. I argue that van Fraassen's response is not enough. What remains in the end is an unsolved problem which CE cannot afford (...) to leave unsolved, or so I argue; I then strengthen Musgrave's criticism and indicate that an extension of the epistemic policy of CE is mandatory to solve the problem. I also argue that Friedman's and Foss' objection against the Distinction in CE misses the mark on closer inspection. An objection due to Creath does hit the mark but can be taken care of without too much ado. All these objections seem alive and kicking until the present day; I try to put them all to rest. (shrink)

Retornando al modelo dialógico del discurso racional de la antigüedad, describimos a la lógica como el estudio del flujo general de la información: inferencia, observación y comunicación. Mostramos cómo esta perspectiva aúna ideas de la lógica estándar, la filosofía, la lingüística, la informática y la teoría de juegos.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kinship:The Relationship Between Johnstone's Ideas about Philosophical Argument and the Pragma-Dialectical Theory of ArgumentationFrans H. van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser1. Johnstone on the Nature of Philosophical ArgumentAs he himself declared in Validity and Rhetoric in Philosophical Argument (1978, 1), the late philosopher Henry W. Johnstone Jr. devoted a long period of his professional life to clarifying the nature of philosophical argument. His well-known view was that philosophical arguments are (...) sui generis, i.e., not to be judged by the standards of argumentation in science or everyday discourse. Philosophical arguments are not ad rem, but are based on premises that are expressed or implied commitments of a party in dialogue. This is why philosophical argumentation is, according to Johnstone, always ad hominem. In philosophical argumentation, every ad rem argument begs the question.Usually, ad hominem argumentation is dismissed as invalid. Johnstone, however, maintains that making use of argumentum ad hominem is the only way to establish a philosophical conclusion. In an argumentum ad hominem, inferences are drawn from propositions stated or implied by the other party and critical questions are raised about the conclusions that were drawn, so that it can be used to refute a philosophical position by showing that this position is inconsistent. As Walton (2001) rightly observes, this type of ad hominem argumentation boils down to arguing from commitments of the other party, i.e., ex concessis.The use of ad hominem argumentation as the criticism of a position in terms of its own presuppositions is, in Johnstone's view, the only valid argument in philosophy, if any philosophical argument is indeed valid. All philosophical polemic is in this perspective in fact addressed ad hominem. This applies not only to philosophical argumentation that concerns self-referential refutation but also to other ad hominem types of philosophical argumentation, including the tu quoque argument (1978, 11–12).According to Johnstone, there is no objective criterion for determining the validity of ad hominem argumentation. Validity must, says Johnstone in the [End Page 51] epilogue of his collected essays on philosophical argument, be viewed as "a regulative ideal" (135). Much earlier, Johnstone had already come to the conclusion that "the valid argument is the one that maintains philosophical discussion" (38). It is this self-perpetuating feature that is the distinctive rationality of philosophy. By forcing the interlocutor to elaborate his philosophical position rather than just repeat it, the gap between the interlocutors is bridged.In order to distinguish between constructive persuasive argumentation and mere repetition or other forms of paralyzing the discourse, the line must be drawn between responsible and irresponsible persuasion. This is a problem for Johnstone. Where the Ancients solved the problem by insisting that the persuader be virtuous, Johnstone proposed to base the distinction between responsible and irresponsible persuasion on the attitude of the philosopher and his interest in maintaining the philosophical enterprise. The philosopher is a critic who criticizes con amore. His intention to do so, however, is revealed "only in the way he goes about his work" (84).A more down to earth criterion for responsible persuasion that Johnstone proposed is that the discourse should not tend to degenerate. Logic, as the discipline concerned with reason, serves to prevent the discussion from degenerating, but it can do so only if the parties concerned have jointly committed themselves to certain logical principles. If in philosophical argument a defendant is under no obligation to acknowledge an inconsistency when the other party points out an inconsistency in his position, then the other party's criticism cannot count as valid. According to Johnstone, however, it will depend on the parties' presuppositions whether or not they consider two statements as being inconsistent. In other words, what is inconsistent for the one party may not be inconsistent for the other party.Few obligations are imposed on everyone; most obligations arise from commitments made by specific individuals or groups of individuals. As Johnstone says, "Even the cogent philosophical argument is not, of course, absolutely cogent; it is cogent only relatively to interlocutors who maintain the premises on which it depends" (27). Once we abandon the search for objective conditions under which philosophical arguments can be valid, according... (shrink)