The study uncovers the drama of Stei Baita (Romania), a former uranium mine, which experienced during the communism period, an intensive industrialization. This shaped the territorial pattern, cultural, economic and social relationships, with a tremendous impact on the quality of the environment which was sacrificed against a rapid of a so-called economic growth. Stei Baita is a classic example of legacy mine land and the authors aim is to capture and assess all important aspects of sustainable development within this study-case (...) of disadvantaged community living in a radon prone area. More specifically, authors introduce their responses to several questions: (1) What do we know about social, economic and environmental capital of the selected settlement?; (2) Is the legacy of a uranium mine the platform of debate for negotiating for sustainable development?; and (3) What is the role of ethics in the current context of Stei Baita? Within the framework of analysis, equity, seen as part of ethics, is valued both as the premise of the debate and mandatory requirement for human development that should target sustainability. Authors have not discussed truths, but positions on identified problems by investigating community members’ perceptions. Thus, peculiarities of this community are dealt within a thematic context (e.g., resources and environment, individual development, social system). Finally, ethics is valued as social construct built by negotiating interpretations of morally desirable situations and behaviors accepted in a particular society at a certain historical moment. This view is consistent with ethical relativism which denies the existence of a unique moral truth and which sets the understanding of Stei Baita context on the path of the “new ethics”. The “new ethics” depicts the world in nuances, allowing society to surpass obstacles to the progress of understanding. (shrink)

Every art encounter requires making predictions given that art is rife with uncertainty. What is it to appreciate art while relying on predictions, and to what consequences? I argue that art appreciation involves engaging our predictive systems in such a way as to correct predictive failure at least at some levels in the processing hierarchy of information that we receive from art works. That art appreciation involves predictive processing best explains the mechanism for cognizing art works in categories, cases of (...) appreciative failure, and why art appreciation is a form of valuing. To articulate the explanatory value of predictive processing for cognizing art works in categories, I introduce a sub-type of predictions that I call art-historical estimates – i.e., predictions that take as their object the temporal relationships between works and their place in art history – and identify their features within a broader typology of predictions and related mental structures such as schemas and scripts. I examine the way predictive processing explains the correction of predictive failure, and its consequences for the affective value that we attach to the appreciation of art. (shrink)

The theme of this essay is rather simple, though its demonstration is not. It is that humans think reflexively or metamentally because -- and often in the forms in which -- they interpret each other. In this essay ‘metamental’ means ‘about mental’ and ‘reflexive mind’ means ‘a mind thinking about its own thoughts.’ To think reflexively or metamentally is to think about thoughts deliberately and explicitly, as in thinking that my current thoughts about metamentation are right. Thinking about thoughts requires (...) understanding thoughts as thoughts, as mental structures that represent; it also requires an ability to relate thoughts to other thoughts and to recognize such inter-thought relations. Since metamentation is essential to and uniquely distinctive of human minds, the idea that it originates in interpreting other minds can be encapsulated in the slogan that minds are minded because minds mind minds. This word play translates as: minds evolve into reflexive minds because they mind other minds -- where ‘minding other minds’ means interacting and bonding with other minds, being concerned or curious about them, representing their relations to the world, manipulating and using these relations for some purpose, and the like. All of this amounts (in my terminology) to interpreting other minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so on. It follows that intermental relations among individuals, handled by a distinct competence for interpretation, are essential to the evolution of abilities to represent intramental relations among thoughts, typical of a reflexive mind. I take ‘interpretation’ to be a convenient, short, and grammatically flexible label for what is known in philosophy as commonsense or folk psychology and in psychology as theory of mind, mindreading, or naive psychology. Interpretation is a cognitive rapport between an interpreter (she, in this book) and a subject (he), whereby she represents his mind-world relations, from the simplest, such as seeing.... (shrink)

I offer an analysis of the role of aesthetic value in the formation of cultural memory. More specifically, I examine how cultural memory is formed through cultural artifacts that embody a connection to the past via aesthetic means. My approach is motivated by artifacts from small-scale preindustrial societies, which make it apparent that aesthetic values, rather than being pursued for their own sake alone, enhance other functions, such as maintaining cultural identity and bringing the past into the present. I focus (...) on rock art painting from the Kimberley, Australia, and effigies animated during rituals in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea to argue that, to play a significant role in the formation of cultural memory, aesthetic value must be aligned with implicit conceptions of time which inform the production of artifacts mediating cultural memory. This argument has implications for understanding differences in apprehending memory values and aesthetic values across cultural domains. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics, ‘Remote Art: Engaging with Art from Remote Times and Places’, presents the notion of art’s remoteness in the context of debates about inter-cultural diversity. It discusses the various aspects of remoteness, how it figures in the individual contributions to the issue, and suggests possible avenues for future scholarship.

L’esthétique peut subir des transformations conceptuelles significatives lorsqu’elle est aux prises avec des formes d’art marquées du sceau de la différence culturelle. J’examine ces transformations à partir d’une étude de l’esthétique de Jean-Marie Schaeffer, notamment son rapport avec la philosophie de l’art, son évolution à la lumière des développements récents en sciences cognitives, et son interaction avec l’anthropologie de l’art. Je soutiens que le travail conceptuel de Schaeffer nous permet de comprendre comment on active esthétiquement des formes d’art provenant des (...) cultures éloignées des nôtres. Pour illustrer mon propos, je prends comme étude de cas la maison des esprits que l’on trouve parmi les peuples de la Nouvelle-Guinée, dans la région du Sepik. (shrink)

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.

This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information.

"In 2022, two cans of tomato soup were thrown over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London by two climate activists. The aim of this paper is not to explain the motives behind the protest in terms of environmental activism, but to address the implications of this phenomenon for the status of artistic images in our time. The protest in question is one of the many symptoms of the fact that images associated with a pure state of gaze (...) have become morally dubious due to a certain moralistic turn in contemporary discourses on art. Consequently, what seems to be lost in today’s movements of moralizing aesthetics, whether in art or in environmental activism, is not only the “aura” of an artwork, but also the idea that the contemplation of beauty in and for itself would provide a foundation for humans’ moral vocation. In a gaseous state of art (Y. Michaud) in which the transient effects of things are more important than their essence, the moralistic tendencies combined with the lack of moral foundations can no longer conceive of the ethical effects of images without explicit moral content, thus calling for a new form of heteronomy in art. Keywords: Kantian aesthetics, ethics, contemplation, natural beauty, autonomy of art, environmental activism. ". (shrink)

Economic profit is produced by entrepreneurs, those special individuals able to detect and seize as yet unexploited market opportunities. Many large capitalist firms manage to deliver positive profits even in the most competitive environments. They can do so, thanks to internal entrepreneurs, a subset of their employees able to drive change and develop innovation in the workplace. This paper argues that the goal of increasing economic profit is fully consistent with the corporation doing good for society. However, there is little (...) justification for corporations to transfer the whole economic profit to shareholders. Economic agents entitled to receive the economic profit are precisely those who create this profit, namely the internal entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Information is the fuel of cognition. At its most basic level, information is a matter of structures interacting under laws. The notion of information thus reflects the (relational) fact that a structure is created by the impact of another structure. The impacted structure is an encoding, in some concrete form, of the interaction with the impacting structure. Information is, essentially, the structural trace in some system of an interaction with another system; it is also, as a consequence, the structural fuel (...) which drives the impacted system's subsequent processes and behavior. Information takes various forms because the world has many levels of compositional and functional complexity, under different constraints. The key constraints that matter in the understanding of information are natural patterns of organization, or types, and systematic correlations among types, or laws. These level- sensitive constraints, in the form of types and laws, shape the very form in which information is tokened in some structure, that is, the very form in which it is encoded. As a result, the information-producing interactions bring about different sorts of structures, with various sorts of causal effects and functions, whence so many ways in which information is coded and utilized. (shrink)

A Selection of Papers Contributed to Sections IV, VI, and XI of the Fourth International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Bucharest, September 1971.

The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical to speculative, (...) are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science? (shrink)

Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics. Here, without presupposing a specific (...) analysis of commonsense psychology, I want to challenge a key implication of the 'folk-theory-theory' assumption to the effect that commonsense psychology is committed to a definite architecture of the mind. (shrink)

Cyber risk has become one of the greatest threats to firms in recent years. Accordingly, boards of directors must be continually vigilant about this danger. They have a duty to ensure that the companies adopt appropriate cybersecurity measures to manage the risk of cyber fraud. Boards should also ensure that the firm disclose material cyber risk and breaches. We examine how the board’s gender composition can influence the extent of such disclosure, based on a sample of the companies listed on (...) the S&P/TSX 60 Index over the period 2014–2018. Results show evidence of a positive association between the presence and level of cybersecurity disclosure and board gender diversity. However, the board must boast a critical mass of at least three women before this positive impact can be observed. Our findings contribute to the debate on the importance of gender diversity by adding the concept of the positive influence of heterogeneity on cyber disclosure. We also augment the literature on the critical mass of women in boardrooms by providing empirical evidence that three or more women constitute the threshold for better governance. Our study has important implications for investors, stakeholders and regulators. If investors wish to increase cybersecurity disclosure, they should ask for more diversified boards. Our findings support regulators in their efforts to increase women’s representation on boards by providing empirical evidence of better outcomes with this type of board composition. (shrink)

Leading invasion biologists sometimes dismiss critics and criticisms of their field by invoking “the straw man” fallacy. Critics of invasion biology are also labelled as a small group of “naysayers” or “contrarians”, who are sometimes engaging in “science denialism”. Such unfortunate labels can be seen as a way to possibly suppress legitimate debates and dismiss or minimize reasonable concerns about some aspects of invasion biology, including the uncertainties about the geographic origins and complex environmental impacts of species, and the control (...) programs against species perceived as “invasive”. In assessing the quality of the debate in this area, we examine the validity of the use of various strategies, including the “straw man” concept, and explore a range of potential logical fallacies present in some recent prominent discussions about invasion biology and so-called “invasive” species. The goal is to add some clarity to the concepts involved, point out some problematic issues, and improve the quality of the debates as the discussions move forward. (shrink)

Many philosophers and a few psychologists think that we understand our own minds before we understand those of others. Most developmental psychologists think that children understand their own minds at about the same time they understand other minds, by using the same cognitive abilities. I disagree with both views. I think that children understand other minds before they understand their own. Their self-understanding depends on some cognitive abilities that develop later than, and independently of, the abilities involved in understanding other (...) minds. This is the general theme of this chapter. (shrink)

This paper examines gradients of attention in relation to aesthetic appreciation. My main claim is that we should leave open the possibility that aesthetic response might be triggered by stimulations taking place far from the centre of one’s focused attention. In support of this claim I first discuss the notion of ‘periphery of attention’ and the challenges that it poses to contemporary psychological theories of aesthetics. I provide four criteria for differentiating between several types of attentional processes and then proceed (...) to single out the characteristics of non-focal types of attention processes with varying intensity such as pre-attentive processing, the mere exposure effect and psychic overtones. Finally, I reassess the periphery of attention in the light of its relation to aesthetic appreciation. I hold that given certain constraints such as repeated exposure, perceptual learning, encoding in long-term memory, and possibility of retrieval, subdued, inconspicuous forms of stimulation can elicit aesthetic responses. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to address some difficulties related to the development of an emerging research program called world art studies. While it originates as a European discipline in the German scholarly tradition around 1900, this program comes to the fore only recently, with recent advances in natural and cognitive sciences which hold promise for providing more inclusive categories that could serve the study of art as a worldwide phenomenon. I focus more specifically on the strengths and weaknesses (...) of psychology as explanatory framework for world art studies. Unlike the romantic art historiographers of the late 19th century, contemporary scholars no longer dwell on collective mentalities or spirits of an age but the problem of postulating mysterious faculties in relation to art behavior and aesthetic response is still present when adopting as an entry point the universality of human nature. (shrink)

The article presents the preliminary results of the author’s study of the unedited homily De transfiguratione et eleemosyna, ascribed to John Chrysostom. The question of the manuscript tradition is first discussed. The article shows that Maurice Sachot is right when he indicates only the manuscript Romanus Angelicus gr. 125 as a manuscript witness of this homily and that the other two witnesses indicated by Pinakes are erroneous. Then, the descriptions of the folios that preserve the homily are analysed in the (...) light of a new examination of them. This re-examination shows that hitherto several sources that inspired the compiler have gone unnoticed. This is followed by a brief summary of the contents of the homily and an analysis of the passages in which almsgiving is mentioned.Contribution: The article offers a re-examination of the folios 353v–361 from the manuscript Romanus Angelicus gr. 125, the first presentation of the content of the homily De transfiguratione et eleemosyna, and tries to shed light on the association of the theme of the Transfiguration with almsgiving. (shrink)

An important part of responsible business practices is compliance with the law. This article details what actually happens when the laws of the host country fail to ensure adequate protection. The focus here is on land dispossession and loss of livelihood in relation to a gold mine project in central Ghana. How is it that a well‐known international company—Newmont—with its own corporate social responsibility (CSR) statements sets up a project in the year 2003 that displaces subsistence farmers from their land (...) without compensating in cash or with replacement land? The analysis identifies the factors that lead the company to not compensate farmers for their lost land: cost‐cutting, strict adherence to the law, CSR commitment that was new and not internalized, complexities of the Ghanaian land tenure system, peer pressure to preserve the status quo, selection of an “old‐school” CSR manager, and the inadequacy of Ghanaian mining law to account for relatively novel, “open‐pit” mining techniques. However, the specter of famine raised by civil society activism, the involvement of the International Financial Corporation, and a better qualified CSR team constitute another set of factors that lead to a comprehensive package of livelihood improvement measures. There is a contrast between the complexity, long‐term, and advanced type of assistance Newmont currently envisages and the backward, short‐term, formalism, and brutality of denying compensation for land back in 2003. This research is based on the extensive documentation Newmont makes available on its web site, interviews conducted in Ghana, and literature research. (shrink)

In this original and provocative book, Bogdan proposes that the ability to interpret others' mental states should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation.

Our perceptions, beliefs, thoughts and memories have objects. They are about or of things and properties around us. I perceive her, have beliefs about her, think of her and have memories of her. How are we to construe this aboutness (or ofness) of our cognitive states?' There are four major choices on the philosophical market. There is an interaction approach which says that the object of cognition is fixed by and understood in terms of what cognizers physically and sensorily interact (...) with - or, alternatively, in terms of what the information delivered by such interaction is about. There is the satisfactional approach which says that the object of a cognitive state is whatever satisfies the representation constitutive of that state. There is also a hybrid approach which requires both physical/sensory interaction and representational satisfaction in the fixation of the object of cognition. And there is, finally, the direct acquaintance approach which says that only an immediate cognitive contact with things and properties can establish them as objects of cognition. The latter, as far as I can tell, goes the way perception goes, so only the remaining three approaches look like serious contenders. (shrink)

This book explores the evolution of the mental competence for self-reflection: why it evolved, under what selection pressures, in what environments, out of what precursors, and with what mental resources. Integrating evolutionary, psychological, and philosophical perspectives, Radu J. Bogdan argues that the competence for self-reflection, uniquely human and initially autobiographical, evolved under strong and persistent sociocultural and political pressures on the developing minds of older children and later adults. Self-reflection originated in a basic propensity of the human brain to (...) rehearse anticipatively mental states, speech acts, actions, and states of the world in order to service one's elaborate goal policies. These goal policies integrate offline representations of one's own mental states and actions and those of others in order to handle the challenges of a complex and dynamic sociopolitical and sociocultural life, calling for an adaptive intramental self-regulation: that intramental adaptation is self-reflection. (shrink)

Some of the topics presented in this volume of original essays on contemporary approaches to belief include the problem of misrepresentation and false belief, conscious versus unconscious belief, explicit versus tacit belief, and the durable versus ephemeral question of the nature of belief. The contributors, Fred Dretske, Keith Lehrer, William Lycan, Stephen Schiffer, Stephen P. Stich, and the editor, Radu Bogdan, focus on the mental realization of belief, its cognitive and behavioral aspects, and the semantic aspects of its content. (...) This interdisciplinary study takes advantage of many new theories in what has become an important area of research. (shrink)

In order to redefine barbarism, a hermeneutical framework is needed. The contemporary socio-cultural context and the transformations that have occurred during the last decades represent the premises for a new barbarism. In redefining barbarism, its relationship with civilization and culture should be first considered. Cultural mutations, together with the historical and political phenomena involved in contemporary civilizations’ reorganization as set forth in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Samuel P. Huntington), offer the theoretical background for the (...) discourse wherein barbarism could revive and take an appearance other than the common one. The necessity of reinterpreting barbarism is backed up by other variables such as its structural inconsistency and weakness, which most definitely diminish its impact on individuals. Following the 20th century philosophical tendency of harshly critical thinking, all these point to the current weak character of barbarism. Thus so-called “weak barbarism” is reinterpreted evolutionally for a better reception among contemporary cultural philosophy, axiological and ethical studies. (shrink)

In this book, Radu Bogdan proposes that humans think reflexively because they interpret each other's minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, ...

Although the Internet is frequently referred to as a global public resource, its functioning remains predominantly controlled by private actors. The Internet brought about significant shifts in the way we conceptualize governance. In particular, the handling of “big data” by private intermediaries has a direct impact on routine practices and personal lives. The implementation of the “right to be forgotten” following the May 2014 decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union against Google blurs the boundaries between the (...) public and the private, and extends the responsibilities of the latter to court-style decision making. This article analyzes the regulatory developments in this area and the implications of outsourcing of important governance practices to private intermediaries. It looks at the decision-making process for the “right to be forgotten” to illustrate the extent to which the hybridization of such procedures results in new arrangements between public and private ordering in Internet governance. (shrink)