Desde la publicación de la encíclica Laudato si ‘(LS) del Papa Francisco en 2015, se han llevado a cabo múltiples acciones para fomentar una visión integral de la ecología en la Iglesia Católica. El objetivo fue el desarrollo de una propuesta curricular que incluye el desarrollo sostenible e integral en la enseñanza de la religión católica. El curso CHANCES ofrece un nuevo paradigma de la enseñanza de la religión católica, mostrando cómo desde ella se pueden descubrir motivaciones profundas, y potenciar (...) actitudes y virtudes, que pueden contribuir al desarrollo de competencias en sostenibilidad. (shrink)

IntroductionRheumatologists are the primary healthcare professionals responsible for patients with rheumatic diseases and should acquire medical ethical competencies, such as the informed consent process. The objective clinical structured examination is a valuable tool for assessing clinical competencies. We report the performance of 90 rheumatologist trainees participating in a station designed to evaluate the ICP during the 2018 and 2019 national accreditations.MethodsThe station was validated and represented a medical encounter in which the rheumatologist informed a patient with systemic lupus erythematosus with (...) clinically active nephritis about renal biopsy. A trained patient–actor and an evaluator were instructed to assess ICP skills in obtaining formal informed consent, delivering bad news and overall communication with patients. The evaluator used a tailored checklist and form.ResultsCandidate performance varied with ICP content and was superior for potential benefit information but significantly reduced for potential complications and biopsy description. Only 17.8% of the candidates mentioned the legal perspective of ICP. Death was omitted by the majority of the candidates ; after the patient–actor challenged candidates, only 57.1% of them gave a clear and positive answer. Evaluators frequently rated candidate communications skills as superior, but ≥1 negative aspect was identified in 69% of the candidates.ConclusionsEthical competencies are mandatory for professional rheumatologists. It seems necessary to include an ethics competency framework in the curriculum throughout the rheumatology residency. (shrink)

Background: Serious games have shown positive results in increasing motivation, adherence to treatment and strengthening the therapeutic alliance in multiple psychiatric disorders. In particular, patients with impulse control disorders and other disorders in which the patient suffers from inhibitory control deficits have been shown to benefit from serious games.Aim: The aim of this study was to describe the characteristics and to evaluate the usability of a new serious videogame, e-Estesia. This serious videogame was designed to improve emotion regulation in patients (...) with gambling disorder. Preliminary results from a pilot sample are also reported.Method: A pilot sample of 26 patients undergoing treatment for GD was recruited. Participants used e-Estesia on a tablet, which was connected to a thoracic band that sent heart rate and heart rate variability data to the videogame platform in order to provide biofeedback. The System Usability Scale was completed by patients to determine the usability of e-Estesia.Results and Discussion: e-Estesia performed comparatively well for all the explored groups. Around 84.6% of the patients endorsed that it was easy to use. Female patients with GD presented higher HRV during the use of the serious videogame compared to men. (shrink)

En 1790, Josefa Amar y Borbon, déjà traductrice de renom, lectrice passionnée, membre de diverses sociétés éclairées, auteure d'un « Discours pour défendre le talent des femmes et leur aptitude au gouvernement et autres charges où l'on emploie des hommes », donna naissance à ce qui sera son œuvre la plus célèbre, le « Discours sur l'éducation physique et morale des femmes ». Celle qui s'était exclamée, citant Mme Lambert qu'elle admirait : « il est nécessaire de dépendre le moins (...) possi... (shrink)

En 1790, Josefa Amar y Borbon, déjà traductrice de renom, lectrice passionnée, membre de diverses sociétés éclairées, auteure d'un « Discours pour défendre le talent des femmes et leur aptitude au gouvernement et autres charges où l'on emploie des hommes », donna naissance à ce qui sera son œuvre la plus célèbre, le « Discours sur l'éducation physique et morale des femmes ». Celle qui s'était exclamée, citant Mme Lambert qu'elle admirait : « il est nécessaire de dépendre le moins (...) possi... (shrink)

The present article deals with a kind of parapsychology called metapsychics ( metapsíquica) as conceived and practised in Spain between 1923 and 1925. First we focus on the reception of a treatise by Richet that evoked both support (Ferrán) and criticism (Mira). Then we examine some experiments on clairvoyance performed at the Marquis of Santa Cara’s home, dealing chiefly with the rise and fall of a case of prodigious vision. The analysis gives special attention to the question of how metapsychics (...) was understood and to which discussions it gave rise. The authors argue that the project of metapsychics must be understood within a frame of two tendencies, namely, the increasing popularization and the demarcation of science that were under way in modern society. (shrink)

RESUMEN El pensamiento y las prácticas sociales de los atenienses de la Época Clásica se hallaban jerarquizados en favor de los varones, que se consideraban superiores naturalmente y con capacidad y derecho a gobernar en la polis y en la casa. Se muestra cómo el Agamenón de Esquilo cuestiona la naturalización de esta superioridad mediante el personaje de Clitemnestra, quien actúa, piensa y habla como varón, y muestra que matar a un familiar, cambiar de pareja, luchar por el mando se (...) justificaban si lo realizaba Agamenón. ¿Por qué se condenaban estas acciones cuando eran llevadas a cabo por Clitemnestra? ABSTRACT The thought and social practices of Athenians during the Classical period were hierarchized in favor of males, who were considered naturally superior and endowed with the capacity and right to rule the polis and the home. The article shows how Aeschylus' Agamemnon questions the naturalization of that superiority through the character of Clytemnestra, who acts, thinks, and speaks like a man, and shows that killing a family member, changing partners, and fighting for power were justified if Agamemnon did those things. Why were such actions condemned if Clytemnestra carried them out? (shrink)

In Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López reassembles Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on a Hegelian basis, as a conceptual-historical totality, both defending him and proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique that raises problems for Marxian philosophy as a whole.

In most domains of human life, we are willing to accept that there are experts with greater knowledge and competencies that distinguish them from non-experts or laypeople. Despite this fact, the very recognition of expertise curiously becomes more controversial in the case of “moral experts”. Do moral experts exist? And, if they indeed do, are there ethical reasons for us to follow their advice? Likewise, can emerging technological developments broaden our very concept of moral expertise? In this article, we begin (...) by arguing that the objections that have tried to deny the existence (and convenience) of moral expertise are unsatisfactory. After that, we show that people have ethical reasons to ask for a piece of moral advice in daily life situations. Then, we argue that some Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can play an increasing role in human morality by becoming moral experts. Some AI-based moral assistants can qualify as artificial moral experts and we would have good ethical reasons to use them. (shrink)

In this chapter, we offer a reconstruction of the evolution of Leibniz’s thought concerning the problem of the infinite divisibility of bodies, the tension between actuality, unassignability, and syncategorematicity, and the closely related question of the possibility of infinitesimal quantities, both in physics and in mathematics.Some scholars have argued that syncategorematicity is a mature acquisition, to which Leibniz resorts to solve the question of his infinitesimals – namely the idea that infinitesimals are just signs for Archimedean exhaustions, and their unassignability (...) is a nominalist maneuver. On the contrary, we show that syncategorematicity, as a traditional idea of classical scholasticism, is a feature of young Leibniz’s thinking, from which he moves away in order to solve the same problem, as he gains mathematical knowledge.We have divided Leibniz’s path toward his mature view of infinitesimals into five phases, which are especially significant for reconstructing the entire evolution. In our reconstruction, an important role is played by Leibniz’s text De Quadratura Arithmetica. Based on this and other texts, we dispute the thesis that fictionality coincides with syncategorematicity, and that unassignability can be bypassed. (In this chapter, we employ “syncategorematic” as a shorthand for “eventually identifiable with a procedure of exhaustion” and, as a consequence, “involving only assignable quantities.” We also identify syncategorematicity with potentiality, as suggested by some part of the scholastics, and in Sect. 2.2, we show that the two characterizations are equivalent, provided that “potentiality” is intended in the correct way: namely as in the unending iterative procedures of Greek mathematics.) On the contrary, we maintain that unassignability, as incompatible with the principle of harmony, is the ultimate reason for the fictionality of infinitesimals. (shrink)

Innovation in medieval studies is the creative ability to go back to sources. Digging, exploring, and connecting material pieces of evidence, facts, and individuals uncover new knowledge. One of the most significant sources for the medieval textual production is the university. Understanding the writings stemming from different faculties of medieval universities requires skills, curiosity, and tools. Among such instruments, the statutes of universities help researchers not only to decipher the organization of the academic institutions and interpret the rules that apply (...) to scholars and to their professors, but also to decode how and why texts were produced. The faculty of theology represents the highest level where education led during the Middle Ages and delivers the highest degree such as the master in theology. All over Europe, such faculties become the impetus that drives the intelligentsia to produce a textual heritage that today generates inspiration for magisterial carriers. Among them, Professor Maarten Hoenen is one to praise today. Taking as a point of departure a recent publication of Maarten Hoenen, 1 I will propose to investigate the relation between the statute of universities and of intellectual practices within medieval academia-more precisely, how a researcher should dig for complementary sources when the main documentation depicting an intellectual practice, such as the protestatio and gratiarum actio, is missing. I do not intend to be exhaustive, but simply to focus on how we should understand these two actions, protestatio and gratiarum actio, in connection with the Sentences commentaries. 2 The paradox is that we have traces of these two practices in the surviving manuscripts stemming from the university, but we do not always have a description of these actions in their statutes. Protestatio represents an oath that bachelors take at the beginning of an academic exercise, and the gratiarum actio is the final paragraph that closes the same exercise by thanks addressed to the public. The span of time I will focus on is between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, since this is the period from which some testimonies survived that today help to better clarify how these actions were performed in medieval academia. It is also the period of naissance of the new faculties of theology all around Europe, as it is the case with Bologna, Vienna, Cracow, or Prague. They all embraced the model disseminated in Paris and Oxford on reading on the Sentences of Peter Lombard to obtain the degree of doctor in theology, and they contribute to building tradition, and therefore to produce sources for us today. (shrink)

Most philosophers would agree that loving one’s romantic partner (i.e., being in love) is, in principle, a good thing. That is, romantic love can be valuable. It seems plausible that most would then think that the process leading to being in love—i.e. falling in love—can be valuable too. Surprisingly, that is not the case: among philosophers, falling in love has a bad reputation. Whereas philosophy of love has started to depart from traditional (and often unwarranted or false) tropes surrounding romantic (...) life, this tendency has not yet reached the analysis of falling in love. The phenomenon continues to be looked at mostly through a compendium of generalisations taken as metaphysical truths—the view of falling in love being akin to “losing one’s mind” or “not being able to think about anything else”. Here, I analyse some of these generalisations to show that although they may reflect some experiences of what falling in love feels like, they wrongly reduce falling in love to two related, but distinct, phenomena: limerence and infatuation. My aim is to refine the current terminology to lay the foundations for a neutral view of falling in love. (shrink)

This text, commissioned by the OSUN Global Observatory of Academic Freedom, discusses how the concept of academic freedom is codified in Colombian Law and regulations of public and private higher education institutions. It also explores common conceptions of academic freedom among Colombian scholars, as well as commonly observed threats to it.

This book tells the story of the Scientific Buddha, "born" in Europe in the 1800s but commonly confused with the Buddha born in India 2,500 years ago. The Scientific Buddha was sent into battle against Christian missionaries, who were proclaiming across Asia that Buddhism was a form of superstition. He proved the missionaries wrong, teaching a dharma that was in harmony with modern science. And so his influence continues. Today his teaching of "mindfulness" is heralded as the cure for all (...) manner of maladies, from depression to high blood pressure.In this potent critique, a well-known chronicler of the West's encounter with Buddhism demonstrates how the Scientific Buddha's teachings deviate in crucial ways from those of the far older Buddha of ancient India. Donald Lopez shows that the Western focus on the Scientific Buddha threatens to bleach Buddhism of its vibrancy, complexity, and power, even as the superficial focus on "mindfulness" turns Buddhism into merely the latest self-help movement. The Scientific Buddha has served his purpose, Lopez argues. It is now time for him to pass into nirvana. This is not to say, however, that the teachings of the ancient Buddha must be dismissed as mere cultural artifacts. They continue to present a meaningful challenge, even to our modern world. (shrink)

In contrast to individualistic explanations of social injustice that appeal to implicit attitudes, structural explanations are unintuitive: they appeal to entities that lack clear ontological status, and the explanatory mechanism is similarly unclear. This makes structural explanations unappealing. The present work proposes a structural explanation of one type of injustice that happens in conversations, discursive injustice. This proposal meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural (...) explanation that overcomes their unattractiveness. The main idea is that discursive injustice is not the result of biased interlocutors, but of problematic discursive norms. (shrink)

Ethical leadership matters in the context of organizational change due to the need for followers to trust the integrity of their leaders. Yet, there have been no studies investigating ethical leadership and organizational change. To fill this gap, we introduce a model of the moderating role of involvement in change. Organizational change and involvement in change are proposed as context-level moderators in the relationships of ethical leadership and work-related attitudes and performance. We employ a sample of 199 supervisor–subordinate pairs from (...) a wide variety of organizations. Results support a three-way interaction (ethical leadership, organizational change, and involvement in change) for performance and OCBs. Our results have important implications for organizational change since ethical leadership appears to complement follower involvement when change is happening. (shrink)

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

As a neonatal neurologist, I serve families facing tragic decisions in which they must balance trade-offs between death and life with profound disability. I often find myself in complex discussions about future outcome, in which families sort through in real-time what information they value most in making such a choice. Will he laugh? Will he be in pain? Will he know how much he’s loved? In this month’s feature article, Brick et al share the results of an online survey aimed (...) at assessing public views on when a life is not worth living, in an effort to inform ongoing legal and clinical debates about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for children. These findings raise important questions about how we define and measure outcomes that matter to parents as they make these tragic decisions. It is challenging to interpret these findings in the absence of context of how decision-making for infants occurs in real-time. The nature of this study and its objective required that cases be substantially simplified. As the authors acknowledge, the prognoses and function of the children involved in these cases were often deeply contested. Prognostic uncertainty is common for children with significant …. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

Blockchain is an open digital ledger technology that has the capability of significantly altering the way that people operations operate in organizations. This research takes a first step in proposing several ways in which the blockchain technology can be used to improve current organizational practices, while also considering the ethical implications. Specifically, the paper examines the role that blockchain technology plays in three primary areas of people operations: entry to the organization, intraorganizational processes, and exit. In each section, the paper (...) reviews the ethical implications from the lenses of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology and contractarianism. The paper concludes that in whole the implementation of blockchain technology in people operations processes can create a more ethical work environment. However, careful implementation is necessary and requires extensive examination of ethical implications in advance. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the role of new urban agriculture models to increase local food production capacity in cities of the Global North. Urban rooftop greenhouses and hydroponics are examples of such models receiving increasing attention as a technological approach to year-round local food production in cities. Yet, little research has addressed the unintended consequences of new modes of urban farming and food distribution, such as increased competition with existing peri-urban and rural farmers. We examine how small-scale farmers perceive (...) and have responded to a recently established rooftop greenhouse and online marketplace enterprise in Montréal, Canada. Drawing on interviews with key informants and small-scale farmers, we find that peri-urban and rural producers have been affected in three key ways that represent tensions, adaptations, and synergies arising from this new urban agriculture and food distribution enterprise. First, many farmers are concerned about increased competition and value conflation with the ideals of community supported agriculture and organic farming. Second, some farmers have adapted by developing novel marketing strategies and working with local bridge organizations to collectively market their produce to urban consumers. Third, a few farmers have decided to wholesale their produce to this new enterprise, allowing them to specialize production and avoid marketing their produce directly to urban consumers. Our study suggests that the emergence of a new form of alternative food network in Montréal has created both positive and negative disruptions for existing small-scale producers. Advocates for the expansion of new urban food production and distribution models should therefore give greater consideration to the effects on other actors in the local food system. (shrink)

Given that mitigating climate change is a large-scale global issue, what obligations do individuals have to lower their personal carbon emissions? I survey recent suggestions by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Dale Jamieson and offer models for thinking about their respective approaches. I then present a third model based on the notion of structural violence. While the three models are not mutually incompatible, each one suggests a different focus for mitigating climate change. In the end, I agree with Sinnott-Armstrong that people have (...) limited moral obligations to directly lower personal emissions, but I offer different reasons for this conclusion, namely that the structural arrangements of our lives place a limit on how much individuals can restrict their own emissions. Thus, individuals should focus their efforts on changing the systems instead (e.g., the design of cities, laws and regulation, etc.), which will lead to lower emissions on a larger scale. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

This essay examines how early moderns used birth horoscopes (genitures) to assess the compatibility of prospective spouses before marriage. Astrologers could probe the horoscope of an individual to investigate his or her present and future physical and moral qualities or compare charts to reveal the personal compatibility of a couple and help establish the best time to consummate their marriage. These practices aimed at ensuring a fruitful marriage and the harmony and happiness of the couple and their families. Focusing on (...) a few key examples, the essay outlines both the astrological theories and the social politics that propelled astrological matching, suggesting that its appeal lay in the promise of informed choice while also preserving free will. Finally, the author suggests ways in which astrological practices and the use of vast amounts of astronomical data share affinities with data-driven matching in our own time. (shrink)

This paper provides an exploratory comparative assessment of the institutional pressures influencing corporate social responsibility in a developed country, UK, vs. a developing country, Brazil, based on a survey of different actors. Information on sustainability concerns, organizational strategies and mechanisms of pressure was collected through interviews with environmental regulatory agencies, financial institutions, media and non-governmental organizations. Our results confirm that the more advanced awareness and CSR responsiveness in the UK is a consequence of a predominance of coercive and normative forces (...) on the organizational field. The institutional forces tend to build a Brazilian organizational field that is relational based and risk intensive. The findings lend support to the view that CSR responses are unlikely to be easily transformed into uniform standardized practices across the globe. This paper contributes to a collective understanding of the organizational field and a common template for CSR in the context of developed and developing countries. (shrink)

Hinge epistemology is a family of views that offers a novel approach to avoiding skeptical conclusions about the possibility of a posteriori justification of our empirical beliefs. They claim that at the basis of our empirical beliefs lie certain commitments whose rational status is not determined by our evidence. These are called hinge commitments. Prominent hinge epistemologists have claimed that hinge commitments are either rational or arational but yet not beliefs. I argue that such views are subject to decisive objections. (...) I then offer what I consider to be the best version of hinge epistemology. On this view, hinge commitments are best understood as arational beliefs that contingently inform our worldview. I call this view the Arational Beliefs View. (shrink)

Significant scientific and technological advances in intensive care have been made. However, patients in the intensive care unit may experience discomfort, loss of control, and surreal experiences. This has generated relevant debates about how to humanize the intensive care units and whether humanization is necessary at all. This paper aimed to explore how humanizing intensive care is described in the literature. A scoping review was performed. Studies published between 01.01.1999 and 02.03.2020 were identified in the CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus (...) databases. After removing 185 duplicates, 363 papers were screened by title and abstract. Full-text screening of 116 papers led to the inclusion of 68 papers in the review based on the inclusion criteria; these papers mentioned humanizing or dehumanizing intensive care in the title or abstract. Humanizing care was defined as holistic care, as a general attitude of professionals toward patients and relatives and an organizational ideal encompassing all subjects of the healthcare system. Technology was considered an integral component of intensive care that must be balanced with caring for the patient as a whole and autonomous person. This holistic view of patients and relatives could ameliorate the negative effects of technology. There were geographical differences and the large number of studies from Spain and Brazil reflect the growing interest in humanizing intensive care in these particular countries. In conclusion, a more holistic approach with a greater emphasis on the individual patient, relatives, and social context is the foundation for humanizing intensive care, as reflected in the attitudes of nurses and other healthcare professionals. Demands for mastering technology may dominate nurses’ attention toward patients and relatives; therefore, humanized intensive care requires a holistic attitude from health professionals and organizations toward patients and relatives. Healthcare organizations, society, and regulatory frameworks demanding humanized intensive care may enforce humanized intensive care. (shrink)

We examine change across U.S. cohorts born between 1920 and 2000 in their probability of having had sex with same-sex partners in the last year and since age 18. Using data from the 1988–2018 General Social Surveys, we explore how trends differ by gender, race, and class background. We find steep increases across birth cohorts in the proportion of women who have had sex with both men and women since age 18, whereas increases for men are less steep. We suggest (...) that the trends reflect an increasingly accepting social climate, and that women’s steeper trend is rooted in a long-term asymmetry in gender change, in which nonconformity to gender norms is more acceptable for women than men. We also find evidence that, among men, the increase in having had sex with both men and women was steeper for black than for white men, and for men of lower socioeconomic status; we speculate that the rise of mass incarceration among less privileged men may have influenced this trend. (shrink)

Why does social injustice exist? What role, if any, do implicit biases play in the perpetuation of social inequalities? Individualistic approaches to these questions explain social injustice as the result of individuals’ preferences, beliefs, and choices. For example, they explain racial injustice as the result of individuals acting on racial stereotypes and prejudices. In contrast, structural approaches explain social injustice in terms of beyond-the-individual features, including laws, institutions, city layouts, and social norms. Often these two approaches are seen as competitors. (...) Framing them as competitors suggests that only one approach can win and that the loser offers worse explanations of injustice. In this essay, we explore each approach and compare them. Using implicit bias as an example, we argue that the relationship between individualistic and structural approaches is more complicated than it may first seem. Moreover, we contend that each approach has its place in analyses of injustice and raise the possibility that they can work together—synergistically—to produce deeper explanations of social injustice. If so, the approaches may be complementary, rather than competing. (shrink)

This paper’s main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by (...) long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place. (shrink)