Several attempts have been made previously to provide a biological grounding for cognitive architectures by relating their components to the computations of specific brain circuits. Often, the architecture's action selection system is identified with the basal ganglia. However, this identification overlooks one of the most important features of the basal ganglia—the existence of a direct and an indirect pathway that compete against each other. This characteristic has important consequences in decision-making tasks, which are brought to light by Parkinson's disease as (...) well as genetic differences in dopamine receptors. This paper shows that a standard model of action selection in a cognitive architecture cannot replicate any of these findings, details an alternative solution that reconciles action selection in the architecture with the physiology of the basal ganglia, and extends the domain of application of cognitive architectures. The implication of this solution for other architectures and existing models are discussed. (shrink)

Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one’s sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly (...) associated with immoral behavior — psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traits may display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms. (shrink)

This 1995 book takes as its starting point Plato's incorporation of specific genres of poetry and rhetoric into his dialogues. The author argues that Plato's 'dialogues' with traditional genres are part and parcel of his effort to define 'philosophy'. Before Plato, 'philosophy' designated 'intellectual cultivation' in the broadest sense. When Plato appropriated the term for his own intellectual project, he created a new and specialised discipline. In order to define and legitimise 'philosophy', Plato had to match it against genres of (...) discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens. By incorporating the text or discourse of another genre, Plato 'defines' his new brand of wisdom in opposition to traditional modes of thinking and speaking. By targeting individual genres of discourse Plato marks the boundaries of 'philosophy' as a discursive and as a social practice. (shrink)

Does the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks require a re-evaluation of his thought? In the present text we will deal with this question and reach the conclusion that a change of theoretical perspective on Heidegger’s work is indeed justified. The franker and less cautious style of the Black Notebooks puts in the foreground stances that were already known, but were previously relegated to the background: it becomes possible thereby to establish that Heidegger’s philosophical views host a significant lot of (...) unwarranted prejudices, which are incorporated in his picture of the ‘history of being’. We argue that in his process of radical questioning Heidegger progressively drops all available rational methods and epistemic criteria, and that this paves the way to the unwitting reception of personal prejudices in his theoretical frame: Heidegger knowingly abandons all the theoretical instruments that could enable him to discriminate between deeply felt prejudices and proper philosophical intuitions. We conclude our analysis by proposing some criticisms that should be acceptable also to scholars sympathetic with Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s vindication of an ‘erratic’ way of thinking, where the journey is more qualifying than the result, turns out to be incompatible with the assertiveness of the many unjustified claims disseminated across the Black Notebooks. Moreover, Heidegger wants to show the narrowness of an overwhelmingly dialectical and argumentative attitude, while his late style of thinking unwittingly discredits an alternative philosophical style, that widely appeals to a ‘principle of charity’ in the collaboration between author and reader. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 36 Heft: 2 Seiten: 286-304.

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy.

Citizen science models of public participation in scientific research represent a growing area of opportunity for health and biomedical research, as well as new impetus for more collaborative forms of engagement in large-scale research. However, this also surfaces a variety of ethical issues that both fall outside of and build upon the standard human subjects concerns in bioethics. This article provides background on citizen science, examples of current projects in the field, and discussion of established and emerging ethical issues for (...) citizen science in health and biomedical research. (shrink)

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...) a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language. (shrink)

Simondon adopts some concepts of social psychology as ‘in group’ and ‘out group’, namely from Kurt Lewin and Gordon Allport, that allow him to describe the fundamental processes shaping the domain of collective individuation, and to challenge Bergson’s distinction between a ‘closed’ community and an ‘open’ society. Reconstructing Simondon’s sources is necessary to understand how he tries to provide an analysis of the social system without presupposing a given anthropology, but rather exploring different perspectives on the human/nature threshold through the (...) concept of transindividual. In his study of the social system Simondon progressively gives conceptual shape to the processes he calls transindividual thanks to the ontogenetic analysis of the phenomena of belief, work and language. In all these domains, a ‘basic community’ emerges just over the threshold of the biological group, where the structural ambivalence of all collective processes as simultaneously closed and open becomes clear. That is why Simondon does not present the concept of the transindividual as a solution to the epistemological problem of psychic and collective individuation, but rather as the ‘field’ in which a whole series of social, biological and technical dimensions can be made converge towards a science of anthropogenic processes. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

In fourth-century Greece, the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths. This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria. In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic (...) appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies. (shrink)

The essay discusses Donald Davidson’s concept of anomalous monism in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. It develops in four stages. Section 1 is devoted to a critical presentation of the argument for anomalous monism. Section 2 succinctly examines those Husserlian notions that best provide the ground for a discussion parallel to Davidson’s. In Sect. 3, the aporetic status of “mental causation” is analyzed by providing a genetic-phenomenological account of efficient causation. Section 4 draws some general conclusions concerning the kind of (...) efficaciousness that must be attributed to consciousness and discusses the sense in which anomalous monism can be defended in a phenomenological framework, but not in a naturalistic one. (shrink)

The article investigates Dostoevsky’s juridical discourse and demonstrates that the apologist of the Russian soul had a genuinely European mind. In his novel The Idiot in particular, in which the death penalty and imprisonment are explored, Dostoevsky unmasks—more radically even than Victor Hugo—the supposedly civilised and lenient forms of modern criminal justice. Dostoevsky’s criticism is ahead of its time; his arguments resemble those subsequently put forward by Foucault. A comparison with Anatoly Pristavkin’s report on post-Communist crime and jurisdiction underscores the (...) topicality of these reflections. (shrink)

In the current debate on theodicy, the problem of animal suffering is becoming increasingly relevant, as demonstrated by some recent books devoted to this topic. Such a problem is particularly challenging for a theistic theodicy, as its traditional arguments do not seem able to deal with it. In the first instance, the article aims to provide a brief overview of the main arguments sustained by theists regarding animal suffering, and secondly to provide an evaluation of such arguments which might be (...) useful for further research on this topic. (shrink)

Political theorists aiming to articulate normative standards for the EU have almost entirely focused on whether or not the EU suffers from a ‘democratic deficit'. Almost nothing has been written, by contrast, on one of the central values underpinning European integration since at least the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), namely solidarity. What kinds of principles, policies, and ideals should an affirmation of solidarity commit us to? Put another way: what norms of socioeconomic justice ought to apply to the (...) EU? This is not an empirical or narrowly legal question. We are not trying to gauge the degree of attachment there currently is in the EU by, for example, citing the latest Eurobarometer poll. We are also not attempting to state the implicit rationale followed by the Court of Justice in its recent ‘solidarity’ jurisprudence, let alone trying to fix what the Commission might mean by it. In this article, I ask the more fundamental question underlying both the legal and the empirical questions: What principles of social solidarity ought to apply between states and citizens of the emerging European polity? This question has rarely been asked or answered by political theorists in an EU context, so we are entering largely uncharted territory. The article develops a tripartite model of EU solidarity in Section 2, and then applies it to the case of free movement of persons in Section 3. (shrink)

This is the first complete critical commentary of Husserl s seminal work Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. Leading international scholars offer a close reading, examining arguments and phenomenological descriptions, connecting them to Husserl s earlier and later works, and engaging important secondary sources. The book will be invaluable reading for scholars and students of phenomenology and 20th century philosophy.".

In this paper I explore the issue of how our personal life is given to us in experience as a whole to be actively shaped and determined. I examine in detail Husserl’s analysis of the kind of experience responsible for this achievement, which he terms Überschau and which thus far has never been addressed by scholars of phenomenology. First, I locate Überschau in the context of self-determination and highlight the difference between the unthematic pre-givenness of life in the phenomenon of (...) self-awareness and the actual, i.e. thematic givenness of life in acts of Überschau. Second, I contextualize Husserl’s discovery of Überschau in his analyses of ethical life and the possibility of a universal epoché. I argue that for Husserl the very possibility of ethical life and of phenomenology itself rest on the totalizing apprehension of one’s life rendered possible by Überschau. In the third section I spell out the essential characteristics of Überschau by contrasting this peculiar kind of consciousness with reproductive forms of consciousness such as recollection and expectation, which otherwise might be easily conflated with Überschau. In section four I reply to a possible objection to the very possibility of Überschau based on the consideration of the infinitely open stream of time-consciousness. I argue that the possibility of Überschau is tightly connected with the egological nature of consciousness as understood by Husserl. The ego does not coincide with its own conscious acts and thus enjoys a special vantage point on the totality of its own life. To conclude, I advance a speculative suggestion about the phenomenological origin of Überschau in the structure of self-awareness. This opens up a variety of possible lines of research that would connect Husserl with philosophers such as Augustine or Heidegger who are more immediately associated with the issue of personal life and its unity or lack thereof. (shrink)

Clinical Ethics, Ahead of Print. ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to assess if a relationship existed between audiologists’ perceptions of moral distress, occupational wellbeing, and patient-practitioner orientation.DesignThe Moral Distress Thermometer, Health and Safety Executive Management Standards Indicator Tool and Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale was sent out to all audiologists registered with the professional body Audiology Australia.Study sample: A total of 43 audiologists completed the questionnaires.ResultsUsing a multiple linear regression model there was no evidence of a relationship between patient-practitioner orientation and (...) either moral distress or occupational wellbeing. However, an association between higher moral distress and lower occupational wellbeing was demonstrated. The occupational wellbeing subscales of ‘managerial support’, ‘peer support’, ‘relationships’, ‘role’, and ‘change’ were strongly associated with poorer scores on moral distress.ConclusionFor our sample of audiologists, ethical conflict appeared to be linked to reduced job satisfaction. There is a need to consider ways of providing supportive organisational structures in which ethical conflicts can be openly discussed and negotiated in order to improve occupational wellbeing in the profession. (shrink)

Anecdotal evidence has long lamented the status of social studies in elementary classrooms as observed by preservice teachers. As standardized testing has risen for mathematics and language arts, social studies has been pushed aside. In the aftermath of accountability legislation such as No Child Left Behind, research indicates that social studies is less visible in elementary classrooms due to an instructional focus on tested content areas (e.g. math, language arts, reading). In this study, approximately 90 elementary preservice teachers enrolled in (...) a social studies methods course responded to a survey and indicated the frequency and quality of lessons they observed over the course of a single semester. Findings report that preservice elementary teachers witnessed few, if any, lessons in social studies in the elementary classroom. Implications for teacher education are discussed. (shrink)

According to a traditional view, logical validity consists in necessary truth preservation. Such an account has been argued to carry an apparent commitment to a unique property of truth to be preserved from premises to conclusion. Recent discussions, however, have concluded that if the metaphor of truth preservation is carefully unpacked, no need for a unique property is there. All is needed is that certain structural relations among instantiations of truth properties hold. Against this view, we argue that a unique (...) general truth property is indeed required by logical validity. We first show that the unpacking should be correctly understood since it imposes constraints on the concept and the properties of truth. We then demonstrate that, under such constraints, a general property is not imposed by truth preservation but by another feature of validity: its uniformity. Finally, some options that could be attempted to resist this result are discussed, showing that (strong) truth pluralism and deflationism are affected in different ways. (shrink)

Current debates on collective intentionality focus on the cognitive capacities, attitudes, and mental states that enable individuals to take part in joint actions. It is typically assumed that collective intentionality is a capacity which is added to other, pre-existing, capacities of an individual and is exercised in cooperative activities like carrying a table or painting a house together. We call this the additive account because it portrays collective intentionality as a capacity that an individual possesses in addition to her capacity (...) for individual intentionality. We offer an alternative view according to which the primary entity to which collective intentionality has to be ascribed is not the human individual, but a “form of life.” As a feature of a form of life, collective intentionality is something more than the specific capacity exercised by an individual when she cooperates with others. Collective intentionality transforms all the capacities of the bearers of this specific form of life. We thus call our proposal the transformative account of collective intentionality. (shrink)

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In contemporary philosophy, it is tempting to apply the metaphysics of properties to the specific case of truth, in the hope of making progress on the investigation of the latter. In this paper, I argue that a different approach, mostly independent from the metaphysics of properties and based on the naturalness, in Lewis’ sense, of semantic nations, is often a better alternative, both in general and in some specific cases. In particular, adopting the new perspective, I present a new problem (...) of combining logical validity and strong truth pluralism, and offer a way to sharply distinguish deflationism and primitivism about truth. The main original upshot of the paper is offering a perspective on philosophy of truth that sheds new light on the general problem of truth and on some particular issues. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Jaspers’ theory of worldviews with regard to the contemporary problem of naturalism. In particular, I consider the frequent characterization of naturalism as a worldview. First, I situate Jaspers’ conception of worldviews in the context of the philosophical debate of his time. I then turn to Jaspers’ distinction between substantial worldviews and derivative shapes of worldviews and present his construal of naturalism as a derivative shape of what he calls the sensory- spatial Weltbild. I then argue (...) that contemporary naturalism still fits Jaspers’ description and can thus be considered a derivative shape, rather than a genuine worldview in its own right. I draw on some writings by Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Dilthey to further substantiate my claim. I conclude by arguing that if naturalism wishes to present itself as a worldview it should orient itself toward our human experience of nature. (shrink)

This paper argues that Spinoza's notions of “conatus” and “power of acting” are derived by means of generalization from the notions of “force of motion” and “force of determination” that Spinoza discussed in his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy to account for interactions among bodies on the basis of their degrees of contrariety. I argue that in the Ethics, Spinoza's ontology entails that interactions must always be accounted for in terms of degrees of “agreement or disagreement in nature” among interacting things. (...) The notion of “power of acting” is used to express the extent to which a thing's conatus is aided or restrained by external causes on the basis of its degree of agreement or disagreement in nature with them. “Power of acting” generalizes the same approach and method of resolution at the basis of the notion of “force of determination” in order to account for causal interactions not only among the simplest bodies but also among more complex individuals. (shrink)

Le rêve de l’histoire, faut-il le lier au marxisme et à l’utopie d’une société sans classe? Mais en quoi le rêve participe-t-il lui même au récit de l’histoire? Introduisant une citation de Proust sur « la lampe nocturne de Flaubert [qui] faisait aux mariniers l’effet d’un phare », la liasse K du livre des Passages remarque non sans ironie que « ce petit échantillon d’analyse matérialiste [serait] plus précieux que la plupart des choses qui existent en ce domaine ». Proust (...) et Flaubert plutô... (shrink)

This essay explores the connection between representation and explanation in the sciences. I suggest that scientific representation schemes be viewed as pragmatic tools for acquiring the sort of articulated awareness that is the hallmark of nontrivial knowledge. Crystal field theory in chemistry illustrates this perspective. Certain representations achieve the status of being paradigmatically explanatory, thereby shaping models of intelligibility. In turn, these explanatory preferences serve largely to define and differentiate disciplinary communities by implicitly endorsing particular epistemic aims and values. In (...) this way, the pragmatic nature of explanatory discourse effectively grants its intellectual utility. (shrink)

PurposeThe COVID-19 lockdown interrupted normal daily activities, which may have led to an increase in sedentary behavior. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the level of physical activity among Swiss office workers.MethodsOffice workers from two Swiss organizations, aged 18–65 years, were included. Baseline data from January 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic became effective in Switzerland were compared with follow-up data during the lockdown phase in April 2020. Levels of physical activity were (...) assessed using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Paired sample t-tests or Wilcoxon signed-rank test were performed for statistical analysis.ResultsData from 76 participants were analyzed. Fifty-four participants were female. The mean age was 42.7 years at baseline. About 75% of the participants met the recommendations on minimal physical activity, both before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the lockdown. Weak statistical evidence for a decline in total physical activity in metabolic equivalent of task minutes per week was found, with no evidence for a decrease in the three types of activity: walking, moderate-intensity activity and vigorous-intensity activity. Across the three categories “high,” “moderate,” and “low” physical activity, 17% of the participants became less active during the lockdown while 29% became more active.ConclusionThe COVID-19 pandemic did not result in a reduction in total physical activity levels among a sample of Swiss office workers during the first weeks of lockdown. Improved work-life balance and working times may have contributed to this finding.Clinical Trial Registrationwww.ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04169646. Registered 15 November 2019 – Retrospectively registered, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04169646. (shrink)

The state regulates the way in which social power is exercised. It sometimes permits, enables, constrains, forbids how we may touch others, make offers, draw up contracts, use, alter, possess and destroy things that matter to people, manipulate, induce weakness of the will, coerce, engage in physical force, persuade, selectively divulge information, lie, enchant, coax, convince, … In each of these cases, we (sometimes unintentionally) get others to act in ways that serve our interests. Which such exercises of power should (...) the state forbid? Which should it permit? An intuitively appealing way to answer this question is, with Ripstein and Kant, to point to the role of freedom: exercises of social power can be legitimately prohibited when (and only when) they restrict people's freedom. But this raises a further question: How do we identify when such exercises of power make people unfree in the relevant sense? Ripstein, in defending Kant, draws a crucial distinction between actions that subject others’ wills to our choices (and which it would therefore be presumptively legitimate for the state to forbid) and actions that merely affect the contexts in which others act (and which it would therefore be presumptively illegitimate for the state to forbid). I query that distinction, and argue that the idea of independence cannot bear, on its own, the weight it is expected to bear within the Kantian framework. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Husserl and Mathematics by Mirja HartimoAndrea StaitiMirja Hartimo. Husserl and Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 214. Hardback, $99.99.Mirja Hartimo has written the first book-length study of Husserl's evolving views on mathematics that takes his intellectual context into full consideration. Most importantly, Hartimo's historically informed approach to the topic benefits from her extensive knowledge of Husserl's library. Throughout the book, she provides references to texts and articles (...) that Husserl read, marked, and annotated, although regrettably, very few of these sources are quoted explicitly in his published works. The overall picture that emerges from Hartimo's book shows that Husserl continued to read and engage with mathematics throughout his career, and, even though extensive discussions of mathematical issues are not frequent in his later works, some of the ideas he develops, for instance, in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, can be read against the backdrop of the developments of mathematics in his time.Chapter 1 sets the method for the rest of the book. Hartimo emphasizes the importance of a methodological device that takes center stage in Husserl's work from the 1920s onward: Besinnung. Hartimo claims that Besinnung is a method to reactivate the "goals and purposes" (21) that originally motivated scientists engaging in a particular line of research. According to Husserl, as specialized research progresses and becomes standard practice, such original goals and purposes might be blurred by other concerns. When applied to mathematics, Besinnung thus amounts to a reflection "on what mathematicians should do, on what the genuine goal of their activities should be" (21–22). Hartimo argues that this kind of approach to mathematics comes close to Penelope Maddy's naturalism, which takes its departure from what mathematicians are actually doing and then proceeds to inquire into the ontological status of mathematical objects and theories. Hartimo identifies particularly in David Hilbert, a colleague of Husserl's at Göttingen, a vivid embodiment of what Husserl considered to be exemplary work oriented toward the ideal goal of mathematics.In chapters 2 and 3, Hartimo expands upon Husserl's conception of what the true goal of mathematics should be. She does so, first, by addressing the classical topic of Husserl's psychologism in his first (and only) work entirely devoted to mathematics, The Philosophy of Arithmetic, and Frege's well-known critical review of it. In Hartimo's rendition, Husserl criticizes Frege for his attempt to provide formal definitions of basic notions, such as equality. For Husserl, such basic notions are intuitively available and require no definition—rather, they should be put to work to clarify vague notions. Frege, in return, attacks what he takes to be Husserl's wishy-washy psychological account of numbers, which revolves around the concrete act of collecting items and abstracting from their specific contents. Ultimately, Hartimo argues, Husserl takes Frege's criticism to heart and in his later Prolegomena no longer pursues a psychological foundation of number, but rather emphasizes the distinction between the subjective and the objective sides of mathematics, with philosophers studying the former and mathematicians focusing on the latter. While Hartimo's verdict on the philosophical yield of the debate is in line with the standard interpretation of Frege's review as prompting Husserl's antipsychologistic turn, she makes a remark that might be worthy of further discussion: "While for Husserl the debate was about logicism, Frege shifts the debate to be about psychologism and here commentators have followed Frege's example" (50). It would be interesting to imagine what a Fregean reply to Husserl's view about the uselessness of formal definitions for basic notions like equality might look like. In any case, Hartimo's reconstruction makes it clear that, however motivated, Husserl's rejection of psychologism does not amount to an acceptance of logicism.In chapter 3, Hartimo puts forward two of her central claims: (1) Husserl was a structuralist about mathematics; and (2) for Husserl, the goal of modern mathematics is encapsulated in the concept of definiteness. According to (1), mathematics is about the formal structures of systems, which can be isolated and compared. Definiteness, in turn, is the property of systems... (shrink)

Several experimental studies have reported that an otherwise robust regularity—the disparity between Willingness-To-Accept and Willingness-To-Pay—tends to be greatly reduced in repeated markets, posing a serious challenge to existing reference-dependent and reference-independent models alike. This article offers a new account of the evidence, based on the assumptions that individuals are affected by good and bad deals relative to the expected transaction price (price sensitivity), with bad deals having a larger impact on their utility (`bad-deal’ aversion). These features of preferences explain the (...) existing evidence better than alternative approaches, including the most recent developments of loss aversion models. (shrink)

In _The Boundaries of Babel_, Andrea Moro tells the story of an encounter between two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. The study of language within a biological context has been ongoing for more than fifty years. The development of neuroimaging technology offers new opportunities to enrich the "biolinguistic perspective" and extend it beyond an abstract framework for inquiry. As a leading theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imaging (...) technology, Moro is uniquely equipped to explore this. Moro examines what he calls the "hidden" revolution in contemporary science: the discovery that the number of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This radical but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, he claims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind. Moro searches for neurobiological correlates of "the boundaries of Babel" -- the constraints on the apparent chaotic variation in human languages -- by using an original experimental design based on artificial languages. He offers a critical overview of some of the fundamental results from linguistics over the last fifty years, in particular regarding syntax, then uses these essential aspects of language to examine two neuroimaging experiments in which he took part. He describes the two neuroimaging techniques used, but makes it clear that techniques and machines do not provide interesting data without a sound theoretical framework. Finally, he discusses some speculative aspects of modern research in biolinguistics regarding the impact of the linear structure of linguistics expression on grammar, and more generally, some core aspects of language acquisition, genetics, and evolution. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la inducción analítica como método científico de investigación, es decir, como modo válido de hacer ciencia. En 1934, su creador, el filósofo y sociólogo Florian Znaniecki, afirmó que este era el método que debía ser adoptado en toda investigación sociológica. Su relevancia radica en que se propone encontrar explicaciones globales de los fenómenos sociales a partir de la utilización de técnicas cualitativas de investigación. Aquí adopto una perspectiva histórica que permite inscribir su (...) emergencia y evolución en un contexto mayor del desarrollo de metodologías cualitativas en sociología, para luego reflexionar sobre sus presupuestos epistemológicos y las críticas de las que fue objeto. Por último, realizo un balance de los aportes de esta metodología a la disciplina.: The aim of this article is to study analytic induction as a scientific research method, that is, as a valid way of making science. In 1934, the philosopher and sociologist Florian Znaniecki, its creator, referred to this methodology as the method that should be adopted by any sociological research. Its relevance lies on the fact that its goal is to find global explanations to social phenomena by using qualitative research techniques. I adopt a historical perspective to inscribe this method’s emergency and evolution in a larger context of the development of qualitative methods in sociology, and then reflect upon its epistemological basis and the criticisms made in relation to it. Finally, I evaluate this method’s contributions to the discipline. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la inducción analítica como método científico de investigación, es decir, como modo válido de hacer ciencia. En 1934, su creador, el filósofo y sociólogo Florian Znaniecki, afirmó que este era el método que debía ser adoptado en toda investigación sociológica. Su relevancia radica en que se propone encontrar explicaciones globales de los fenómenos sociales a partir de la utilización de técnicas cualitativas de investigación. Aquí adopto una perspectiva histórica que permite inscribir su (...) emergencia y evolución en un contexto mayor del desarrollo de metodologías cualitativas en sociología, para luego reflexionar sobre sus presupuestos epistemológicos y las críticas de las que fue objeto. Por último, realizo un balance de los aportes de esta metodología a la disciplina.: The aim of this article is to study analytic induction as a scientific research method, that is, as a valid way of making science. In 1934, the philosopher and sociologist Florian Znaniecki, its creator, referred to this methodology as the method that should be adopted by any sociological research. Its relevance lies on the fact that its goal is to find global explanations to social phenomena by using qualitative research techniques. I adopt a historical perspective to inscribe this method’s emergency and evolution in a larger context of the development of qualitative methods in sociology, and then reflect upon its epistemological basis and the criticisms made in relation to it. Finally, I evaluate this method’s contributions to the discipline. (shrink)