Among the non-monotonic reasoning processes, abduction is one of the most important. Usually described as the process of looking for explanations, it has been recognized as one of the most commonly used in our daily activities. Still, the traditional definitions of an abductive problem and an abductive solution mention only theories and formulas, leaving agency out of the picture. Our work proposes a study of abductive reasoning from an epistemic and dynamic perspective. In the first part we explore syntactic definitions (...) of both an abductive problem in terms of an agent’s information and an abductive solution in terms of the actions that modify the agent’s information. We look at diverse kinds of agents, including not only omniscient ones but also those whose information is not closed under logical consequence and those whose reasoning abilities are not complete. In the second part, we look at an existing logical framework whose semantic model allows us to interpret the previously stated formulas, and we define two actions that represent forms of abductive reasoning. (shrink)

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference— and key axioms of the system merely postulate "deductive closure". In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and hence (...) we also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we use a static base from the existing awareness literature, extending it into a dynamic system that includes traditional acts of observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the current ' awareness' set. We give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Then we extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. Our contribution can be seen as a ' dynamification' of existing awareness logics. (shrink)

Epistemic logic with its possible worlds semantic model is a powerful framework that allows us to represent an agent’s information not only about propositional facts, but also about her own information. Nevertheless, agents represented in this framework are logically omniscient: their information is closed under logical consequence. This property, useful in some applications, is an unrealistic idealisation in some others. Many proposals to solve this problem focus on weakening the properties of the agent’s information, but some authors have argued that (...) solutions of this kind are not completely adequate because they do not look at the heart of the matter: the actions that allow the agent to reach such omniscient state. Recent works have explored how acts of observation, inference, consideration and forgetting affect an agent’s implicit and explicit knowledge; the present work focuses on acts that affect an agent’s implicit and explicit beliefs. It starts by proposing a framework in which these two notions can be represented, and then it looks into their dynamics, first by reviewing the existing notion of belief revision, and then by introducing a rich framework for representing diverse forms of inference that involve both knowledge and beliefs. (shrink)

We look at two fundamental logical processes, often intertwined in planning and problem solving: inference and update. Inference is an internal process with which we uncover what is implicit in the information we already have. Update, on the other hand, is produced by external communication, usually in the form of announcements and in general in the form of observations, giving us information that might not have been available (even implicitly) before. Both processes have received attention from the logic community, usually (...) separately. In this work, we develop a logical language that allows us to describe them together. We present syntax, semantics and a complete axiom system; we discuss similarities and differences with other approaches and mention how the work can be extended. (shrink)

This work proposes an understanding of deductive, default and abductive reasoning as different instances of the same phenomenon: epistemic dynamics. It discusses the main intuitions behind each one of these reasoning processes, and suggest how they can be understood as different epistemic actions that modify an agent’s knowledge and/or beliefs in a different way, making formal the discussion with the use of the dynamic epistemic logic framework. The ideas in this paper put the studied processes under the same umbrella, thus (...) highlighting their relationship and allowing a better understanding of how they interact together. (shrink)

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference—and key axioms of the system merely postulate “deductive closure”. In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and hence we (...) also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we use a static base from the existing awareness literature, extending it into a dynamic system that includes traditional acts of observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the current ‘awareness’ set. We give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Then we extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. Our contribution can be seen as a ‘dynamification’ of existing awareness logics. (shrink)

As a new type of epistemic logics, the logics of knowing how capture the high-level epistemic reasoning about the knowledge of various plans to achieve certain goals. Existing work on these logics focuses on axiomatizations; this paper makes the first study of their model theoretical properties. It does so by introducing suitable notions of bisimulation for a family of five knowing how logics based on different notions of plans. As an application, we study and compare the expressive power of these (...) logics. (shrink)

The paper develops an interface between syntax-based logical models of awareness and dynamic epistemic logic. The framework is shown to be able to accommodate a variety of notions of awareness and knowledge, as well as their dynamics. This, it is argued, offers a natural formal environment for the analysis of epistemic phenomena typical of multi-agent information exchange, such as how agents become aware of relevant details, how they perform inferences and how they share their information within a group. Technically, the (...) logics presented are all simple refinements of the logic of public announcements. (shrink)

El presente documento intenta colocar diversas discusiones sobre la realidad latinoamericana, particularmente en la forma como diversos escenarios nacionales han asumido críticos periodos de violencia política en décadas recientes. Ello teniendo en cuenta que hay toda una serie de variantes y contextos políticos en la región, en donde se imponen por un lado, diferentes regímenes de gobierno y por otro, distintos posicionamientos políticos de los movimientos sociales. En ambos casos, estos se despliegan acorde al momento socioeconómico experimentado en una determinada (...) nación. El énfasis de esta propuesta, acentúa en abrir un debate respecto a cómo cada sociedad instaurada dentro de los marcos nacionales, ha enfrentado posterior o simultáneamente, críticos periodos de violación de los Derechos Humanos ocurridos en periodos de aguda confrontación política y social. Han sido momentos históricos donde se concentran las contradicciones sociales, ya sea bajo la forma de dictaduras o bajo la imposición de gobiernos autoritarios encubiertos en un sistema democrático. Son etapas pasadas y presentes que aún hoy dejan una huella profunda en la conciencia y vida de muchos activistas, de académicos, de organizaciones sociales y de víctimas del terrorismo de Estado. (shrink)

En el campo de la intervención clínica en psicología existen diversos modelos psicoterapéuticos, cada uno de los cuales está apoyado de manera particular en una cosmovisión y en una concepción antropológica del hombre. La concepción antropológica influye directamente en la manera como se realiza la invención terapéutica. En el caso de la Logoterapia considerada como uno de los modelos más representativos de la psicoterapia existencial, es posible identificar claramente que tanto su concepción antropológica como su intervención clínica se fundamentan en (...) principios éticos ampliamente reconocidos y sostenidos por la bioética, como son: el respeto por la vida y la dignidad de la persona, la importancia de la dimensión espiritual en el hombre o el sentido trascendente de la existencia humana, entre otros. (shrink)

This paper introduces and studies a notion of cautious distributed belief. Different from the standard distributed belief, the cautious distributed belief of a group is inconsistent only when all group members are individually inconsistent. The paper presents basic results about cautious distributed belief, investigates whether it preserves properties of individual belief, and compares it with standard distributed belief. Although both notions are equivalent in the class of reflexive models, this is not the case in general. While we argue that an (...) understanding of the concept of cautious distributed belief from first principles is important, cautious distributed belief can be expressed using standard distrbuted belief and we show that the propositional language extended only with cautious distributed belief is in fact strictly less expressive than the propositional language extended only with standard distributed belief. We, finally, identify a small extension of the language making the former as expressive as the latter. (shrink)

La presente obra reúne los temas imprescindibles de un curso de filosofía política, dirigido tanto a estudiantes como a lectores interesados en la historia, los fundamentos y las implicaciones actuales de esta disciplina. La primera parte trata de la tradición liberal, los socialismos, las dimensiones del nacionalismo, el feminismo como proyecto filosófico-político y la institución de la democracia. La segunda parte aborda en profundidad un amplio abanico de cuestiones, desde la globalización o los problemas de legitimación del poder, pasando por (...) las relaciones entre Estado y nación, los derechos humanos como legado de la Modernidad o la actualidad y perspectivas de la ciudadanía, hasta la multiculturalidad y la inmigración, los movimientos sociales, la ecología o la justicia social. (shrink)

This paper is part of an on-going programme on the study of the logical aspects of social network formation. It recalls the so-called social network model, discussing the properties of a notion of closeness between agents ; then introduces an extended social network model in which different agents might assign different values to different traits, discussing the properties of the notion of weighted closeness that arises. These notions are used to define social network creation operations by means of a threshold (...) strategy. The paper studies the properties of the social networks the updates create, providing sound and complete axiom systems for formal languages describing these updates’ effects. (shrink)

We investigate dynamic operations acting over a knowing how logic. Our approach makes use of a recently introduced semantics for the knowing how operator, based on an indistinguishability relation between plans. This semantics is arguably closer to the standard presentation of knowing that modalities in classic epistemic logic. Here, we discuss how the semantics enables us to define dynamic modalities representing different ways in which an agent can learn how to achieve a goal. In this regard, we study two types (...) of updates: ontic updates (for which we provide axiomatizations over a particular class of models), and epistemic updates (for which we investigate some semantic properties). (shrink)

The paper focuses on a recent challenge brought forward against the interventionist approach to the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. According to this objection, interventionism cannot account for the interpretation of right-nested counterfactuals, the problem being its strict interventionism. We will report on the results of an empirical study supporting the objection. Furthermore, we will extend the well-known logic of intervention with a new operator expressing an alternative notion of intervention that does away with strict interventionism. This new notion of intervention (...) operates on the valuation of the variables in a causal model, and not on their functional dependencies. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the relation between an agent’s doxastic attitude and her arguments in support of a given claim. Our main contribution is the design of a logical setting that allows us reason about binary arguments which are either in favour or against a certain claim. This is a setting in which arguments and propositions are the basic building blocks so that the concept of argument-based belief emerges in a straightforward way. We work against the background of Dung’s (...) abstract argumentation framework, extending it to a new setting in which we can study the formal properties of binary arguments as well as the larger structures they establish. This paper introduces a formal ‘two-dimensional’ language to talk about propositions and arguments, for which a sound and complete axiom system is provided. (shrink)

This manuscript presents a topological argumentation framework for modelling notions of evidence-based (i.e., justified) belief. Our framework relies on so-called topological evidence models to represent the pieces of evidence that an agent has at her disposal, and it uses abstract argumentation theory to select the pieces of evidence that the agent will use to define her beliefs. The tools from abstract argumentation theory allow us to model agents who make decisions in the presence of contradictory information. Thanks to this, it (...) is possible to define two new notions of beliefs, grounded beliefs and fully grounded beliefs. These notions are discussed in this paper, analysed and compared with the existing notion of topological justified belief. This comparison revolves around three main issues: closure under conjunction introduction, the level of consistency and their logical strength. (shrink)

Abductive problems and their solutions are presented by means of justification logic. We introduce additional meta-constructions in order to generate and compare different solutions to the same abductive problem. Our approach has three advantages: (i) it makes structurally explicit the solution to an abductive problem (as it has a syntactic nature); (ii) it gives a precise meaning to the notion of evidence; (iii) it provides clear definitions and procedures for the comparison of solutions that can be adapted to different needs.

This chapter contains sections titled: Acosta, José de (1539–1600) Alberdi, Juan Bautista (1810–84) Bello, Andrés (1781–1865) Bilbao, Francisco (1823–65) Bolkvar, Simón (1783–1830) Casas, Bartolomé de las (1484–1566) Caso, Antonio (1883–1946) Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la (1651–95) da Costa, Newton Carneiro Affonso (b. 1929) Dussel, Enrique (b. 1934) Frondizi, Risieri (1910–83) Gaos, José (1900–69) González Prada, Manuel (1848–1918) Gracia, Jorge J. E. (b. 1942) Haya de la Torre, Victor Raúl (1895–1979) Hostos, Eugenio Marka de (1839–1903) Ingenieros, José (1877–1925) Korn, Alejandro (...) (1860–1936) Lastarria, José Victorino (1817–88) Lemos, Miguel (1854–1917) Mariátegui, José Carlos (1895–1930) Martk, José (1853–95) Méndez Sierra, Justo (1848–1912) Mora, José Maria Luis (1794–1850) Miró Quesada, Francisco (b. 1918) Rabossi, Eduardo (1930–2005) Ramos, Samuel (1897–1959) Rodó, José Enrique (1872–1917) Romero, Francisco (1891–1962) Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de (1499–1590) Salazar Bondy, Augusto (1925–74) Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino (1811–88) Ofelia Schutte (b. 1945) Sepslveda, Juan Ginés de (ca. 1494–1573) Torretti, Roberto (b. 1930) Vasconcelos, José (1882–1959) Vaz Ferreira, Carlos (1872–1958) Villoro, Luis (b. 1922) Vitoria, Francisco de (ca. 1483–1546) Zea Aguilar, Leopoldo (1912–2004) Acknowledgment Further Reading. (shrink)

This text offers both a clear and thorough introduction to normative ethical theory and an extensive survey of moral issues that show how ethical theory is applied in practice. The first section presents a survey of the main methods of ethical reasoning, introducing four normative theories in four separate chapters. A case study introduces each chapter to provide a background for further explanations and to illustrate relevant features of the theory. The second section of the text presents separate chapters on (...) ten ethical issues-including such subjects as nuclear war, euthanasia, sexual ethics and capital punishment. (shrink)

Nada hay más confortable para el hombre, ni más peligroso, que las certezas. Nuestra mejor defensa es la filosofía, que consiste engran medida en el arte de cuestionarlas, de atreverse a pensar, de interpelar las verdades establecidas y ver qué esconden. En estepaseo por la historia de la filosofía, Fernando Savater nos presenta a los grandes personajes que con sus preguntas, y en ocasiones con sus respuestas, han marcado el pensamiento occidental. Platón, Aristóteles, Hobbes, Tomás de Aquino, Nietzsche, Marx, (...) Ortega, Wittgenstein y hasta dieciocho filósofos más desfilan por estas páginas de la mano de Savater, que con su habitual estilo lúcido, ameno e inteligente explica sus ideas más importantes y resume sus trayectorias. Un canto al irrenunciable ejercicio de la libertad intelectual, este libro es en realidad una invitación a huir de los tópicos y a compartir con los grandes filósofos la maravillosa aventura de pensar. (shrink)

El presente artículo, en primera instancia, presentará la melancolía como mirada redentora del objeto, es decir, en la distancia de un “mundo desalojado” se halla la disposición sublime del hombre frente a las cosas. En segundo lugar se expondrá el papel de este objeto, representado por la técnica en las relaciones que el melancólico, _la figura de poder_, establece con los _otros _y cómo estas resultan coercitivas. Al final se concluirá con una exposición sobre una _dialéctica _que se instaura en (...) la contradicción de ese carácter melancólico de la no-acción contemplativa y la _acción _de los otros como _resistencia _en la utopía de la redención del sí mismo. Esta última es una posibilidad deconstructiva de la “condición humana”. (shrink)

François Mauriac desarrolló fundamentalmente su producción literaria en la primera mitad del siglo pasado, un periodo marcado por las dos Guerras Mundiales en una Francia en creciente proceso de secularización. Así las cosas, con motivo del cincuenta aniversario de su fallecimiento la pretensión de este trabajo es hacer emerger la figura de Mauriac como apologeta que, desde el ámbito literario, defendió algunos de los principales postulados católicos cuestionados por el alma moderna. En efecto, el premio Nobel de literatura pertenece a (...) esa constelación de autores católicos que, profundizando en las raíces del Cristianismo, intentan dar una salida a la crisis de la Modernidad, cimentada fundamentalmente en el positivismo y el materialismo. De hecho, veremos cómo plantea el problema del mal en el mundo y la solución al mismo desde el ámbito de la caridad por medio de mártires inmolados. Asimismo, asistiremos a la crítica sistemática del novelista francés contra el antitestimonio cristiano o contra el fariseísmo religioso como elementos clave de su pedagogía apologética. (shrink)

El libro "E-physicalism - A Physicalist Theory of Phenomenal Consciousness" presenta una teoría en el área de la metafísica de la conciencia fenomenal. Está basada en las convicciones de que la experiencia subjetiva -en el sentido de Nagel - es un fenómeno real, y de que alguna variante del fisicalismo debe ser verdadera.

Social media companies commonly design their platforms in a way that renders them addictive. Some governments have declared internet addiction a major public health concern, and the World Health Organization has characterized excessive internet use as a growing problem. Our article shows why scholars, policy makers, and the managers of social media companies should treat social media addiction as a serious moral problem. While the benefits of social media are not negligible, we argue that social media addiction raises unique ethical (...) concerns not raised by other, more familiar addictive products, such as alcohol and cigarettes. In particular, we argue that addicting users to social media is impermissible because it unjustifiably harms users in a way that is both demeaning and objectionably exploitative. Importantly, the attention-economy business model of social media companies strongly incentivizes them to perpetrate this wrongdoing. (shrink)

The phenomenal properties of conscious mental states happen to be exclusively accessible from the first-person perspective. Consequently, some philosophers consider their existence to be incompatible with materialist metaphysics. In this paper I criticise one particular argument that is based on the idea that for something to be real it must (at least in principle) be accessible from an intersubjective perspective. I argue that the exclusively subjective access to phenomenal contents can be explained by the very particular nature of the epistemological (...) relation holding between a subject and his own mental states. Accordingly, this subjectivity does not compel us to deny the possibility that phenomenal contents are ontologically objective properties. First, I present the general form of the argument that I will discuss. Second, I show that this argument makes use of a criterion of reality that is not applicable to the case of subjective experience. Third, I discuss a plausible objection and give an argument for rejecting observation models of self-knowledge of phenomenal contents. These models fall prey to the homunculus illusion. (shrink)

Philosophy affected the birth of Latin America in two ways. First it inspired the famous men who started the independence movements, which led to the definitive liberation from the Spanish yoke. Once the revolution was over, philosophy influenced the development of the legal and political systems that were created to organize the life of the new states.

En su Teoría del Reconocimiento, Honneth plantea que es la interacción entre los seres humanos la que determina la constitución de estos, siendo el reconocimiento, el elemento fundamental para dicha constitución en tres esferas: el amor, el derecho y la solidaridad. Pellegrino identifica que la medicina es una empresa moral, construida sobre ciertas creencias de lo bueno y lo malo, y presenta una caracterización del acto médico constituida por tres elementos: el hecho de la enfermedad, el acto de profesión y (...) el acto de medicina. En este artículo se evaluará las implicancias éticas del acto médico, en el marco de la Teoría del Reconocimiento de Honneth y el modelo tripartito de la relación médico paciente propuesta por Pellegrino. (shrink)

It is well known that Frege's system in the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent. Frege's instantiation rule for the second-order universal quantifier makes his system, except for minor differences, full (i.e., with unrestricted comprehension) second-order logic, augmented by an abstraction operator that abides to Frege's basic law V. A few years ago, Richard Heck proved the consistency of the fragment of Frege's theory obtained by restricting the comprehension schema to predicative formulae. He further conjectured that the more encompassing Δ₁¹-comprehension (...) schema would already be inconsistent. In the present paper, we show that this is not the case. (shrink)

Through a discussion with current perspectives in philosophy of history and a rigorous reading of his oeuvre this book highlights the possibilities of the best Marx in terms of his capacity to account for the development of spatiotemporally complex societies.