El artículo presenta la vertiente práctica del escepticismo alemán de Odo Marquard y Wilhem Weischedel en tres momentos: inicio con la propuesta de Marquard, quien lo define como la sensibilidad para lo usual, en vez de un sistema de criterios veritativos; prosigo con la Ética Escéptica de Weischedel, mostrando que la cuestionabilidad radical de la realidad abre un espacio para que el escéptico pueda formular siempre una pregunta; y termino mostrando que, a partir de Weischedel y Marquard, la despedida se (...) erige como la actitud fundamental del escepticismo práctico. (shrink)

El presente artículo presenta cuatro visiones sobre la función de la abducción en el pragmatismo de Peirce y el modo en que afronta el tema de la novedad en la ciencia. La primera visión reduce la abducción a una intuición. La segunda indica que la abducción no sirve sin un “instinto descubridor”, la tercera apunta a que la abducción es insuficiente para explicar la novedad en la ciencia. La cuarta visión, que es la que se sostiene en este artículo, afirma (...) que desde el pensamiento de Peirce se dan las herramientas suficientes para resolver el problema de la novedad en la ciencia desde el pragmatismo como lógica de la abducción. Estas herramientas son las tres tesis cotarias. (shrink)

This paper aims to show current philosophical anthropology pertinence to face up the question of meaning of human life. Exploring Marquard’s theory and his comprehension of human being as Homo Compensator‒ which allow to overcome the problems of modernity plunged in the gnosis dilemma, that in the absence of an absolute meaning it fails to understand the problem of evil‒ this paper firstly analyzes how modernity answered that problem from theodicy and philosophy of history. Afterwards, due to the failures of (...) these attempts, Marquard’s compensation proposal will be discussed as a search on a substitute meaning in the context of a philosophy of finitude, which advocates for a rhetorical-narrative meaning. The paper concludes with the problem of the non-compensable and its dilemmas on understanding meaning. (shrink)

Throughout humanities’ history, telling the truth has always been seen or for that matter understood, as a challenge, as a defiance of the status quo or what is established or known, and could very easily be torn down by an announced truth at any given moment. That is the main reason a speaker, in most cases, will avoid expressing their interpretation of what is real and true, and will prefer to intentionally alter it with convenient and accommodating lies that will (...) not result in any type of discomfort for the people around them. This text presents a general overview of three very important and crucial moments in history, in which daring to tell the truth came to be the very philosophical foundation and gave some specific characters in history the importance and relevance they have been given today. First, it covers a brief review of the ancient Greek term Parrhesia, its relation to other relevant philosophical terms and its importance within the different philosophy schools of the era. Later, the process of how truth is started to be manipulated from a Christian stance and later the proposal of relativity from Friedrich Nietzsche. Finally, there will be a reflection about Michael Foucault’s proposal that relates parrhesia to the care of the self. As a conclusion, an open discussion focusing on the recent post-truth issues illustrating the mechanics involved since ancient times in regard to telling the truth. (shrink)

Cet article revient sur la couverture médiatique espagnole de l'attentat survenu à la gare d'Atocha à Madrid en mars 2004. L'étude repose sur trois quotidiens madrilènes et un quotidien basque. Il analyse les orientations du discours développé par cette presse dans les jours qui ont suivi cet événement. Il montre qu'intervenant dans un contexte pré-électoral, les différents supports ont, après un moment d'incertitude quant à l'identité des terroristes, orienté essentiellement leurs discours en fonction de leurs orientations idéologiques et de leurs (...) positions à l'égard du gouvernement. Il souligne les convergences observables entre les supports espagnols qui épousent tout en l'accentuant l'émotion ressentie par le lectorat. Il atteste cependant que c'est l'enjeu interne des élections qui a sous-tendu en permanence le traitement de cet événement.This article looks at the media coverage of the Spanish attack in Atocha train station in Madrid in March 2004. The study is based on three daily Madrid and Basque daily. It analyzes the stand taken by the press in the days following the event. It shows a speaker in a pre-electoral context, different media have, after a moment of uncertainty about the identity of the terrorists, their speech directed primarily based on their ideological orientations and their positions in relation to the government. It emphasizes the similarities observed between the Spanish media who marry while accentuating the emotion felt by the audience. It demonstrates, however, that the issue is internal elections has always underpinned the processing of this event. (shrink)

After compulsory secondary education; many teenagers face the process of choosing a university degree. This process involves uncertainties referred to their personal abilities, interests, social expectations and professional future. The present work is aimed at determining whether the reasons behind the selection of a particular university degree differ depending on the chosen degree. Another objective is determining whether these reasons differ significantly according to gender. The sample comprises 983 students belonging to the area of social and legal sciences at the (...) University of Seville. The obtained results reveal the existence of four main reasons behind the selection of university degrees for which significant gender-related differences were observed: easy degree, job opportunities, high wages and provision of social services. Besides, these seven reasons are observed to differ widely in six of the considered degrees. (shrink)

Resumen: Mediante un ejercicio hermenéutico se sostiene que la identidad personal supera la aporía del tiempo al construirse como relato de ficción. Primero, se plantea que el relato de ficción se inscribe en el círculo de la mimesis; segundo, que la imaginación es la facultad que crea el sentido de la identidad personal como relato de ficción; tercero, que es la imaginación la que establece la relación entre relato de ficción, innovación semántica e identidad personal; y cuarto, que la identidad (...) personal se crea a sí misma por medio de la generación sentido gracias al relato de ficción. Abstract: Through a hermeneutical approach, this paper states that personal identity overcomes the aporetic of time when built as a fictional narrative. First, it proposes that the fictional narrative is inscribed in the mimesis circle. Secondly, that imagination is the faculty that creates the meaning of personal identity as fictional narrative. Thirdly, that it is the imagination that establishes the relation among fictional narrative, semantic innovation, and personal identity. Fourthly, that personal identity as fictional narrative stresses the importance of the narrative, which creates itself as a generator of meanings. (shrink)

Digital competencies were part of online education and now when returning to the classroom what will happen or what we expect for the future in education. The objective is to analyze and describe the perspectives of the level of digital competence, the non-experimental descriptive quantitative methodology is used with 1987 university students. Resulting that the instrument adapted to the Peruvian version is adequate according to statistics such as Cronbach's Alpha. Concluding that the digital competences improved the academic quality and have (...) a good level. Society is waiting for the next step to know what is presented to us in education. (shrink)

This article focuses on reading some of Zapata Olivella’s early writings, scattered in little known journals and newspapers, in order to reconstruct part of the processes that informed his thinking about the African diaspora in the Americas in general and in Colombia in particular. The analysis reveals the basis upon which Zapata Olivella built his tireless counterpoint to the images created by the local cultural and political elites around the idea of both the nation-state and the African Diaspora in Colombia, (...) from colonial times throughout the twentieth century. (shrink)

Como respuesta a las inquietudes que deja el debate sobre el pluralismo cultural en el marco del Forum de las culturas 2004, celebrado en Barcelona, el artículo presenta la tesis de que la pluralidad cultural responde más a la lógica del mercado que a un esfuerzo denodado por comprender la dinámica de la diversidad cultural. En este sentido, los esfuerzos por pensar el pluralismo cultural en el marco del evento, por argumentar en contra de tesis como las del choque de (...) civilizaciones de Samuel P. Huntington, intentan aclarar los difundidos temores de una uniformidad cultural fruto de un proceso de globalización económica potenciado por el avance tecnológico aplicado a las comunicaciones. El problema está en que el temor difundido puede servir al mismo propósito que lo convoca. En este orden de ideas, la estructura del análisis se divide en tres partes. Primero, una precisión conceptual de globalización a partir del trabajo de Manuel Castells en su trilogía titulada La era de la información; segundo, presentación de las líneas del debate sobre globalización y cultura en el marco del Forum; y tercero presenta la circularidad del argumento que afirma al pluralismo cultural en contra de la globalización. (shrink)

El artículo ilumina los modos rivales de articular el modernismo estético y socialismo propuestos hacia fines del siglo XIX por Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones y Manuel Ugarte. Tomando como hilo conductor las disímiles acepciones del término “burgués” por las que parecen haber optado estos escritores, reconstruimos el deslindamiento que intenta Darío entre las dos tendencias modernizadoras, luego analizamos la conexión entre modernismo y socialismo revolucionario que realiza Lugones en el periódico La Montaña (1897), para finalmente explorar los cuestionamientos del (...) joven Ugarte al “esteticismo descomprometido” de Darío y al “socialismo aristocratizante” de Lugones, así como su alianza con el “socialismo pedagógico” de Juan B. Justo. The article focuses on the rival ways of linking aesthetic modernism and socialism that were proposed by Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones and Manuel Ugarte at the end of the 19th century. Taking as a thread the dissimilar meanings of the term “bourgeois”, we rebuild the intent of Darío to mark the boundaries of the two modernizing tendencies; then we analyze the connection between modernism and revolutionary socialism that Lugones proposes in the newspaper La Montaña (1897); finally we explore Ugarte’s arguments with Darío’s “uncompromising aestheticism” and Lugones’ “aristocratizing socialism”, as well as the alliance of Ugarte with the “pedagogical socialism” of Juan B. Justo. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former, S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter, S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and (...) Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist. (shrink)

Why are we still intrigued by Nietzsche? This chapter argues that sustained interest stems from Nietzsche’s challenge to what we might call the ‘staticism’ inherent in our ordinary experience. Staticism can be defined, roughly speaking, as the view that the world is a collection of enduring, re-identifiable objects that change only very gradually and according to determinate laws. The chapter discusses Nietzsche’s rejection of remnants of staticism in Hegel and Schopenhauer (1). It outlines why Nietzsche deems belief in any variant (...) of the staticist picture as problematic (2); and examines his adualistic-dialetheic stance towards, for example, first-person and third-person descriptions in the philosophy of mind (3). The chapter closes with a discussion of the contributions of "Nietzsche on Time and History". (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, one key challenge is ensuring that AI aligns with certain values. However, in the current diverse and democratic society, reaching a normative consensus is complex. This paper delves into the methodological aspect of how AI ethicists can effectively determine which values AI should uphold. After reviewing the most influential methodologies, we detail an intuitionist research agenda that offers guidelines for aligning AI applications with a limited set of reliable moral intuitions, each underlying a (...) refined cooperative view of AI. We discuss appropriate epistemic tools for collecting, filtering, and justifying moral intuitions with the aim of reducing cognitive and social biases. The proposed methodology facilitates a large collective participation in AI alignment, while ensuring the reliability of the considered moral judgments. (shrink)

«En nuestros días la situación respecto de los valores y la ética fundada en ellos resulta realmente sorprendente. Ya no se habla tan sólo de valores bursátiles. Ahora también los pedagogos ensayan desde sus tarimas la educación en valores, los políticos apelan desde sus escaños a los valores constitucionales, los comités de ética disciernen en los hospitales los valores que han de respetarse en la actividad clínica, los filósofos de la ciencia se reúnen en sus institutos para cavilar sobre la (...) relación de ésta con los valores, los colectivos feministas reivindican en sus foros la consideración de la dependencia entre valores y 'género', hasta los sacerdotes exhortan desde sus ambones a la realización de los valores del Reino... Y, sin embargo, esta ubicua y recurrente alusión a los valores y a sus exigencias va acompañada a la vez de un clamoroso y tenaz silencio filosófico acerca de la naturaleza y el conocimiento de esos singulares objetos, al parecer tan importantes y omnipresentes. Las páginas que dan cuerpo a este libro han nacido de la necesidad de poner esas cosas de que tanto se habla en la tela de juicio de la filosofía.». (shrink)

The paper gives an overview of primate research and the economic-ethical 'lessons' we can derive from it. In particular, it examines the complex, multi-faceted and partially conflicting nature of (non-) human primates. Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, apparently walk on two legs: a selfish and a groupish leg. Given evolutionary continuity and gradualism between monkeys, apes and humans, human primates seem to be bipolar apes as well. They, too, tend to display a dual structure: there seems to (...) be a pro-social and a self-interested side to our species and a bipolar tension seems to exist between competition and cooperation respectively between self-interest and the common good. We are apparently at the same time Homines oeconomici and Homines culturali. Our inner ape tries to combine self-interested and common good motives. Based on de Waal's Russian doll model, the essay investigates the evolutionary origins of morality and 'eusociality'. With the help of selected case studies stemming from behavioural sciences/economics, the paper illustrates examples of empathy, altruism, reciprocal fairness, pro-social and other-regarding preferences, inequity aversion and altruistic punishment in (non-)human primates. Beside this selfless and groupish side, the paper also reflects on the self-interest and egoistic nature of (non-)human primates and the behavioural and cognitive differences between monkeys, apes and humans. (shrink)

The notion of individualised evidence holds the key to solve the puzzle of statistical evidence, but there’s still no consensus on how exactly to define it. To make progress on the problem, epistemologists have proposed various accounts of individualised evidence in terms of causal or modal anti-luck conditions on knowledge like appropriate causation, sensitivity and safety. In this paper, I show that each of these fails as satisfactory anti-luck condition, and that such failure lends abductive support to the following conclusion: (...) once the familiar anti-luck intuition on knowledge is extended to individualised evidence, no single causal or modal anti-luck condition on knowledge can succeed as the right anti-luck condition on individualised evidence. This conclusion casts serious doubts on the fruitfulness of the move from anti-luck conditions on knowledge to anti-luck conditions on individualised evidence. I expand on these doubts and point out further aspects where epistemology and the law come apart: epistemic anti- luck conditions on knowledge do not adequately characterise the legal notion of individualised evidence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically examine David Shaw, Wybo Dondorp, and Guido de Wert’s arguments in favour of the procurement of human organs from human/nonhuman-primate chimeras, specifically from great-ape/human chimeras. My main claim is that their arguments fail and are in need of substantial revision. To prove this I first introduce the topic, and then reconstruct Shaw et al.’s position and arguments. Next, I show that Shaw et al.: (1) failed to properly apply the subsidiarity and proportionality (...) principles; (2) neglected species overlapping cases in their ethical assessment; (3) ignored the ethics literature on borderline persons; and (4) misunderstood McMahan’s two-tiered moral theory. These mistakes render an important part of their conclusions either false or problematic to the point that they would no longer endorse them. Finally I will briefly mention a possible multipolar solution to the human organ shortage problem that would reduce the need for chimeras’ organs. (shrink)

Se investiga el valor fundamental del constructivismo para el proceso educativo y se establecen conclusiones valiosas al respecto. Se analizan ideas claves de J. Dewey, L. Vigotsky y H. Maturana sobre educación, para concluir con una consideración positiva del constructivismo como proyecto pedagógico consciente y realista respecto al valor del ser humano, y de las necesidades y desafíos que las personas tienen en la actual realidad social. The article explores the fundamental values of constructivism for the educational process and draws (...) conclusions in that respect. It analyzes the key ideas of J. Dewey, L. Vigotsky, and H. Maturana regarding education and closes with a positive evaluation of constructivism as a conscious and realistic pedagogical project with respect to the value of human beings and the needs and challenges people face in contemporary social reality. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the note-taking experiences of university students using paper-based and paperless resources. By means of a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the note-taking experiences of 18 students from an international program at a university in Belgium were examined throughout a semester. In order to document these students’ practices with paper-based and paperless resources, four data collection methods were used: in-depth interviews observations focus group discussions and document analysis of students’ lecture notes. The results showed that (...) students experience note-taking as a complex phenomenon in which lived body, lived human relations, lived space and lived time come into play, and in which they try to find a balance between multiple engagements, between autonomy and authority, between attention and distraction, and between being original and mirroring others. This struggle for balance occurs irrespective of which medium they choose to use. These results provide an in-depth view of the phenomenon, and also highlight the complexity of the note-taking experience. (shrink)

In this paper I explore some of the moral issues that could emerge from the creation of human–nonhuman chimeras capable of human gamete production and human pregnancy. First I explore whether there is a cogent argument against the creation of HNH-chimeras that could produce human gametes. I conclude that so far there is none, and that in fact there is at least one good moral reason for producing such types of creatures. Afterwards I explore some of the moral problems that (...) could emerge from the fact that a HNH-chimera could become pregnant with a human conceptus. I focus on two sets of problems: problems that would arise by virtue of the fact that a human is gestated by a nonhuman creature, and problems that would emerge from the fact that such pregnancies could affect the health of the HNH-chimera. (shrink)

The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in post-colonial contexts, founded on (...) postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national identity by drawing on Homi Bhabha’s thinking about cultural identity, drawing on his concepts of liminality, splitting, and ambivalence. Then, building on Bhabha's notion of hybridity, I propose a distinction between national identity portrayals as either fixed or malleable. Finally, I demonstrate the implications of such a conceptual distinction on the way that national identity is taught in post-colonial schools; by way of an example, I envision a concrete approach to teaching national identity that views national identity as malleable rather than fixed, set in a hypothetical postcolonial school in the Philippines. By beginning from postcolonial assumptions about national identity, I hope to indicate new directions that the debates about the teaching of national identity in schools might proceed. (shrink)

This paper illustrates cognitive modeling constructs designed to make learning by instruction more robust, including (1) flexible grounding of language to execution, (2) inference of implicit instruction knowledge, and (3) interactive clarification of instructions during both learning and execution.

Presupposition, vagueness, and oddness can lead to some sentences failing to have a clear truth value. The homogeneity property of plural predication with definite descriptions may also create truth-value gaps: The books are written in Dutch is true if all relevant books are in Dutch, false if none of them are, and neither true nor false if, say, half of the books are written in Dutch. We study the projection property of homogeneity by deploying methods of general interest to identify (...) truth-value gaps. Method A consists in collecting both truth judgments and, independently, falsity judgments. The second method, employed in experiment series B and C, is based on one-shot ternary judgments: completely true vs. completely false vs. neither. After a calibration of these methods, we use them to demonstrate that homogeneity projects out of negation, the scope of universal sentences and the scope of non-monotonic quantifiers such as exactly two, to some extent. We assess our results in light of different theoretical approaches to homogeneity—approaches based on presuppositions, scalar implicatures, and something like supervaluations, respectively. We identify free parameters in these theories and assess various variants of them based on our results. Our experimental paradigms may be of broader significance insofar as they can be applied to other phenomena which result in the failure of a sentence to have a definite truth value. (shrink)

Destacamos el balance ugarteano de la contribución histórica del modernismo hispanoamericano. El lugar que ocupa la llamada “generación de Darío” en la historia intelectual de América Latina es significativo por su papel determinante en la construcción de la figura del intelectual latinoamericano. La dinámica estatuida por la modernización continental a fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX promovió la autonomización del campo literario. Este hecho produjo una serie de modificaciones de la práctica de los intelectuales que operó como condición (...) de posibilidad de un discurso que acentuó las expectativas acerca de la eficacia histórico-política de la escritura científica, filosófica y literaria. Analizamos los tópicos en torno de los cuales se construyeron aquellas expectativas a la luz del balance que realizara el escritor argentino Manuel Ugarte en dos textos tardíos como El dolor de escribir (1933) y Escritores iberoamericanos de 1900 (1943). We emphasize the ugartean balance of the historic contribution of the Spanish-American modernism. The place that occupies the so called “Generation of Darío” in the intellectual history of Latin America is significant by its determining role in the building of the figure of the Latin-American intellectual. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the dynamic chartered by the continental modernization promoted the autonomization of the literary field. This fact produced a series of modifications of the practice of the intellectuals that operated as a condition of possibility of a speech that accentuated the expectations about the historical and political effectiveness of scientific, philosophical and literary writings. We analyze the topics around which those expectations were built in the light of the balance that was carried out by the argentine writer Manuel Ugarte in two late texts, The pain of writing (1933) and Latin American Writers of 1900 (1943). (shrink)

Previous accounts of cognitive skill acquisition have demonstrated how procedural knowledge can be obtained and transformed over time into skilled task performance. This article focuses on a complementary aspect of skill acquisition, namely the integration and reuse of previously known component skills. The article posits that, in addition to mechanisms that proceduralize knowledge into more efficient forms, skill acquisition requires tight integration of newly acquired knowledge and previously learned knowledge. Skill acquisition also benefits from reuse of existing knowledge across disparate (...) task domains, relying on indexicals to reference and share necessary information across knowledge components. To demonstrate these ideas, the article proposes a computational model of skill acquisition from instructions focused on integration and reuse, and applies this model to account for behavior across seven task domains. (shrink)

This paper discusses the logical space of alternative conceptual engineering projects, with a specific focus on (1) the processes, (2) the targets and goals, and (3) the methods of such projects. We present an overview of how these three aspects interact in the contemporary literature and discuss those alternative projects that have yet to be explored based on our suggested typology. We show how choices about each element in a conceptual engineering project constrain the possibilities for the others, thereby giving (...) rise to distinct groupings of possible projects under the banner of conceptual engineering. We conclude with a critical reflection on the potential ethical issues that arise as a result of effectively putting conceptual engineering into practice. (shrink)

This article describes the path‐mapping theory of how humans integrate analogical mapping and general problem solving. The theory posits that humans represent analogs with declarative roles, map analogs by lower‐level retrieval of analogous role paths, and coordinate mappings with higher‐level organizational knowledge. Implemented in the ACT‐R cognitive architecture, the path‐mapping theory enables models of analogical mapping behavior to incorporate and interface with other problem‐solving knowledge. Path‐mapping models thus can include task‐specific skills such as encoding analogs or generating responses, and can (...) make behavioral predictions at the level of real‐world metrics such as latency or correctness. We show that the path‐mapping theory can successfully account for the major phenomena addressed by previous theories of analogy. We also describe a path‐mapping model that can account for subjects' incremental eye‐movement and typing behavior in a story‐mapping task. We discuss extensions and implications of this work to other areas of analogy and problem‐solving research. (shrink)

Uno de los acontecimientos más importantes en las sociedades contemporáneas es la emergencia y consolidación de nuevas elites cuya importancia en la dirección de asuntos nacionales e internacionales va en constante aumento. La fuerza que tiene cada una de estas elites depende directamente del impacto creciente de los conocimientos de alto nivel en casi todo el quehacer social, y de la fusión de estos conocimientos con el poder político (Gyarmati 1984: 17). Los conocimientos científicos y tecnológicos que orientan el destino (...) de las sociedades contemporáneas se adquieren sólo tras largos años de estudios formales, de naturaleza compleja y en instituciones especializadas. Bajo esa premisa, este artículo realiza un recorrido histórico por los procesos de construcción, consolidación y transformación de los saberes y haceres modernos. (shrink)

The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in post- colonial contexts, founded (...) on postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national identity by drawing on Homi Bhabha’s thinking about cultural identity, drawing on his concepts of liminality, splitting, and ambivalence. Then, building on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, I propose a distinction between national identity portrayals as either fixed or malleable. Finally, I demonstrate the implications of such a conceptual distinction on the way that national identity is taught in post-colonial schools; by way of an example, I envision a concrete approach to teaching national identity that views national identity as malleable rather than fixed, set in a hypothetical postcolonial school in the Philippines. By beginning from postcolonial assumptions about national identity, I hope to indicate new directions that the debates about the teaching of national identity in schools might proceed. (shrink)

Different explanations of color vision favor different philosophical positions: Computational vision is more compatible with objectivism (the color is in the object), psychophysics and neurophysiology with subjectivism (the color is in the head). Comparative research suggests that an explanation of color must be both experientialist (unlike objectivism) and ecological (unlike subjectivism). Computational vision's emphasis on optimally prespecified features of the environment (i.e., distal properties, independent of the sensory-motor capacities of the animal) is unsatisfactory. Conceiving of visual perception instead as the (...) visual guidance of activity in an environment that is determined largely by that very activity suggests new directions for research. (shrink)

Among the extra-physical aspects of team sports, the ways in which players talk to each other are among the more colorful but understudied dimensions of competition. To contribute an empirical basis for examining the nature of “trash talk,” we present the results of a study of 291 varsity athletes who compete in the top division among US universities. Based on a preliminary review of trash-talk topics among student-athletes, we asked participants to indicate the frequency with which they have communicated or (...) heard others talk about opposing players’ athleticism, playing ability, physical appearance, boyfriends, girlfriends, sexual behavior, parents, and home institution during competitions. Our three main findings are: Trash-talking is most commonly about the proximately important topic of playing ability while ultimately relevant topics such as physical appearance also appear to be common; Men appear to trash-talk significantly more than women, and consistently across topics; and contact sports such as football, hockey, lacrosse, and wrestling are associated with trash talk significantly more than other sports. We also examined whether the anonymity provided by face-masked helmets in “combat sports” was associated with more trash talk than contact sports played without a helmet and found no consistent association with face masks. Our findings highlight the ways in which competitors in physical sporting contests attempt to use language—often in ways that focus on players’ kin or reproductive interests—in pursuit of victory while establishing a baseline for future research into trash-talking. (shrink)