El trabajo tiene como objetivo el estudio de los modelos de civilización en dos novelas de gauchos: Aventuras de un centauro en la América Meridional , de José J. de Vedia, y Pablo, o la vida en las pampas de Eduarda Mansilla. Ambas obras elaboran una etopeya del paisano, que más adelante otros autores consagrarían, pero además establecen nuevas convenciones genéricas en cuanto novelas sentimentales. La realidad carente de cultura -religión, educación y civilidad- del gaucho conforma nuevos modelos culturales que (...) dialogan con los discursos políticos, la prensa y la literatura; y, además, convierten el romance nacional en vehículo de denuncia, discurso que se entronca más con la estética realista que con la romántica. The aim of this paper is to analyze the cultural models in two Gaucho novels: José J. de Vedia’s Aventuras de un centauro en la América Meridional , and Eduarda Mansilla’s Pablo, o la vida en las pampas . Both novels propose a gaucho’s ethopoeia. This was later developed by others writers, who also established new generic conventions for sentimental novels. The Gaucho´s lack of culture about religion, education and citizenship entail new cultural paradigms . These are linked to political discourses, the press and literature, and also turn the national romance into a means of complaint, a discourse more rooted onto a realistic aesthetics than onto a romantic one. (shrink)

We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in fact, they seem to resent high-quality ones, and are (...) inclined to put pressure on or avoid dealing with agents who deliver high quality. The equilibrium among low-quality producers relies on an unusual preference ranking which differs from that associated with the Prisoners’ Dilemma and similar games, whereby self-interested rational agents prefer to dish out low quality in exchange for high quality. While equally ‘lazy’, agents in our low-quality worlds are oddly ‘pro-social’: for the advantage of maximizing their raw self-interest, they prefer to receive low-quality goods and services, provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by the intrusion of high quality. We argue that high-quality collective outcomes are endangered not only by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities. (shrink)

The modal interpretation of quantum mechanics allows one to keep the standard classical definition of realism intact. That is, variables have a definite status for all time and a measurement only tells us which value it had. However, at present modal dynamics are only applicable to situations that are described in the orthodox theory by projective measures. In this paper we extend modal dynamics to include positive operator measures. That is, for example, rather than using a complete set of orthogonal (...) projectors, we can use an overcomplete set of nonorthogonal projectors. We derive the conditions under which Bell's stochastic modal dynamics for projective measures reduce to deterministic dynamics, showing that Brown and Hiley's generalization of Bohmian mechanics [quant-ph/0005026, ] cannot be thus derived. We then show how deterministic dynamics for positive operators can also be derived. As a simple case, we consider a Harmonic oscillator, and the overcomplete set of coherent state projectors. We show that the modal dynamics for this POM in the classical limit correspond to the classical dynamics, even for the nonclassical number state |n>. This is in contrast to the Bohmian dynamics, which for energy eigenstates, the dynamics are always non-classical. (shrink)

This book explores the factors which govern the range of educational decisions confronting individuals between compulsory school education and university. The data on which it draws come from two surveys conducted in north-west Italy, one of unemployed young people and one of high-school pupils. The author is in effect testing the two fundamental and opposed paradigms of explanation which are generally applied in the sociology of education; one which holds that the individual agents are essentially passive, being either constrained by (...) lack of alternatives or pushed by causal factors of which they are unaware; and the other in which they are regarded as capable of purposive action, of weighing the available alternatives with respect to some future rewards. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

1. Sae sidae rŭl yŏrŏ gan saramdŭl -- 2. Ŏdum ŭi sidae.

The AGI alignment problem has a bimodal distribution of outcomes with most outcomes clustering around the poles of total success and existential, catastrophic failure. Consequently, attempts to solve AGI alignment should, all else equal, prefer false negatives (ignoring research programs that would have been successful) to false positives (pursuing research programs that will unexpectedly fail). Thus, we propose adopting a policy of responding to points of philosophical and practical uncertainty associated with the alignment problem by limiting and choosing necessary assumptions (...) to reduce the risk of false positives. Herein we explore in detail two relevant points of uncertainty that AGI alignment research hinges on---meta-ethical uncertainty and uncertainty about mental phenomena---and show how to reduce false positives in response to them. (shrink)

In a recent article Duncan Purves, Ryan Jenkins, and B. J. Strawser argue that in order for a decision in war to be just, or indeed the decision to resort to war to be just, it must be the case that the decision is made for the right reasons. Furthermore, they argue that this requirement holds regardless of how much good is produced by said action. In this essay I argue that their argument is flawed, in that it mistakes what (...) makes an agent morally good for what makes an act morally good. I argue that the main thrust of Purves et al.’s argument in fact undermines the conclusion they wish to draw, and that the reasons for one’s action do not make an in principle difference to the morality of actions in war. I further argue that this position undermines the traditional ad bellum just war constraint of right intention, and that the morality of actions in war is, at core, only concerned with outcomes. I conclude by clarifying that one’s reasons for action do in fact matter when deciding to enter war or kill in war, but only because one’s reasons significantly impact the way in which one acts. The purpose of this paper is to clear the theoretical space by showing why intentions/reasons do not in principle matter when assessing the morality of war (or killing), but this should not be taken as an argument that we should ignore intentions/reasons altogether. (shrink)

A directory of archives and manuscript repositories, with links to web pages for the repositories and to online finding aids. Searchable by: collection name; city; state; National Inventory of Documentary Sources (NIDS) number; and National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) number.

Est-il possible de trouver une herméneutique œcuménique pour que toutes les confessions chrétiennes puissent lire les Saintes Ecritures ensemble ? C'est à cette question que tente de répondre l'A. dans cet article. Après avoir formulé précisément la nature de sa problématique théologique en introduction, l'A. axe sa première partie sur l'état actuel de la question posée. En seconde partie, il propose un modèle possible d'herméneutique transconfessionnelle. En dernière partie, il procède à une étude comparative entrre les diverses confessions sur la (...) réflexion scripturaire. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

MATERIALISTS claim that in principle mentality could be accounted for entirely by properties of matter. They must, of course, clarify, as far as possible, the precise scope of the concept "properties of matter." According to materialists there exists only one type of "substance" in the universe, namely matter. Sophisticated experimental and theoretical analyses have led contemporary physicists to interpret known material entities as being composed of two classes of elementary particles, namely quarks and leptons and constituents of interaction fields that (...) mediate interactions between some or all of the elementary particles and which comprise photons, gluons, intermediate bosons and gravitons. For instance, protons and neutrons are composed--by hypothesis--of quarks, while electrons are probably the most familiar leptons. Whether any analyzed and postulated elementary particles and constituents of interaction fields are "ultimate" components of matter can never be known. It remains always possible that more basic subcomponents of known components will be discovered. This has happened repeatedly throughout the history of physics. Hence, what physicists understand by the "physical properties" of the basic components of matter must always remain expressed in terms of usually intricate hypothetico-deductive theories which are tentative and fallible. Contemporary relativistic quantum mechanics of elementary particles and of interaction fields provide typical examples of such hypothetico-deductive theories relating to present known basic components of matter. (shrink)