Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Este artículo perteneciente a la sección de Bioética en Práctica de la revista Persona y Bioética 24, fue publicado originalmente en El Mundo, el primero de abril de 2019. La columna puede consultarse en esta URL https://www.elmundo.com/noticia/ Diagnosticospresupuestos-y-mercados/376170. Así mismo, el texto se dejó tal y como aparece en el publicado. El autor autorizó la publicación en esta revista y por ser una publicación para El Mundo, los derechos de autor no están bajo la licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional (...) de la Revista. (shrink)

El revisionismo austríaco discutió la tesis de la historiografía económica clásica en torno a una supuesta incomprensión escolástica del mercado fundada en el �justo precio� y en la concepción aristotélica del valor, y vio en dicha concepción la raíz de la teoría subjetiva del valor sostenida por la primera generación de austríacos. Aquí mostramos, sin embargo, que los principales revisionistas austríacos realizaron una interpretación sesgada de la distinción entre valor de uso y valor de cambio en Aristóteles, e indicamos (...) las claves esenciales en torno a las cuales debería girar la recuperación de la auténtica dimensión del valor económico en Aristóteles. (shrink)

This paper compares two normative theories of education in Chile, one centered in the republican tradition, mainly in the XIX and partly in the XXth century, and the other imposed by the military dictatorship and who uses the market freedom and the market efficiency as justificatory devices. The republican theory argues in favor of a central role of the state in the design of a public, universal, obligatory and tuitionless educational system, understood as essential to the formation of citizens in (...) common and to the construction of an egalitarian society. One can think of education, in this perspective, as a common property, a public good of which nobody can, in principle be excluded. To the market theory, education is conceived as a consumer good –or, in another version, as an investment– who means high rates of return to individual users and for that reason must be paid by them. From another perspective, a private system of education is justified in terms of the freedom to offer educational goods in the market, and the freedom to choose this goods by theconsumers. In Chile an educational system very similar to the republican one, has existed till 1973. This system has had a relatively peaceful coexistence with private education in all levels. In current discussions on education, this mixed system is considered a good thing. The paper argues that this coexistence is no more possible with the actual market model who seeks to exclude any other system, which is incompatible with a strong public system of high quality and who points therefore to the destatisation of all education. (shrink)

Las actuales sociedades de mercado han dado lugar a situaciones de extrema desigualdad y descontento social, lo que constituye una de las principales causas de la actual crisis de la democracia en casi todos los países de Occidente, en especial en Latinoamérica. Debido a lo anterior, han vuelto a cobrar vigencia las tesis que desde un principio hicieron frente a la concepción liberal de la libertad y la democracia. En este ensayo se examinan brevemente estas corrientes “contraliberales” de la (...) democracia y se ponen en evidencia serios inconvenientes a los que pueden llevar por cuenta de uno de sus elementos esenciales: el cultivo de la virtud cívica de las personas y la identidad y responsabilidad con la sociedad que aquélla implica. (shrink)

La posmodernidad es una tendencia emergente a lo largo del siglo XX, un proceso general de la cultura occidental que fue aglutinando síntomas contrapuestos, y que acabó por dominar la escena filosófico-cultural a medida que avanzaba el siglo. En la época de la multiplicación de los discursos y del triunfo universal del mercado, y tras la pérdida posmoderna de los horizontes totalizantes de la civilización, se impone cartografiar de nuevo nuestra comprensión de la realidad. Índice: Prólogo de Miguel Morey.- (...) Introducción.- Notas para una genealogía de la posmodernidad.- De la crítica de la alienación a la fragmentación de la subjetividad.- Últimas tribulaciones (¿la decadencia de la posmodernidad?).- Cronología filosófica del siglo posmoderno.- Bibliografía. (shrink)

El artículo presenta un análisis de la categoría “estado de naturaleza” en John Locke para lo cual se hace un recorrido por el capítulo II del texto Segundo Tratado sobre el Gobierno Civil publicado por el autor en 1690. Para ello se identifican las características que, según el autor, configuran el estado de naturaleza del hombre, como son la libertad, la igualdad, la vida, la relación con Dios. Se analiza además, la actividad primordial y fundante del estado de naturaleza como (...) es la actividad económica que a partir del trabajo, conduce a la propiedad y al mercado. (shrink)

En este trabajo argumentaré primero que para entender las relaciones entre el populismo la democratización y el autoritarismo hay que partir de las experiencias latinoamericanas donde los populismos han retado al poder y han gobernado desde los años 40. Los científicos sociales latinoamericanos teorizaron y debatieron sobre el populismo desde que Gino Germani escribió en los años 50 sobre el peronismo y los investigadores europeos y norteamericanos deberían tomar en serio la larga y compleja bibliografía latinoamericana sobre el tema. Además, (...) Latinoamérica es la región en la que se han dado los populismos más benignos e incluyentes, mientras que las caras más autoritarias del populismo de derecha se han manifestado en los Estados Unidos y en algunos países de Europa. Mi segundo argumento es que hay que diferenciar las críticas populistas al poder constituido que señalan los déficits de participación y representación de las democracias de sus soluciones que reducen la complejidad de la democracia, la sociedad civil y la esfera pública a la lucha entre dos campos antagónicos. Mi tercer argumento es que hay que diferenciar entre inclusión y democratización. Los populismos latinoamericanos, desde el peronismo hasta el chavismo, han incluido políticamente, étnicamente y socio-económicamente a los sectores marginados. Sin embargo a su vez han atentado en contra del pluralismo, han manufacturado enemigos y han cerrado espacios a la oposición. Mi cuarto argumento es que si bien los populismos comparten una lógica política no todos son iguales. Algunos politizan las exclusiones alrededor del eje mercado-estado, otros alrededor de temas culturales como la identidad del pueblo y la nación. Unos usan criterios étnicos para construir al pueblo, mientras que otros politizan las exclusiones socioeconómicas. (shrink)

Uno de los fenomenólogos de la nueva generación que sigue la línea de Husserl, Heidegger, Marion y Lévinas es Richard Kearney. Este filósofo irlandés, católico, propone una cuarta reducción fenomenológica, esto es, volver al eschaton enraizado en la existencia cotidiana: encontrar la voz y el rostro de lo más alto en lo más bajo. Es como la realización de aquella idea heideggeriana de que “Sólo aquello del mundo que es de poca monta llegará alguna vez a ser cosa.” . En (...) el lenguaje cotidiano, en la vida diaria, se encuentra una posibilidad de superar el escepticismo, la indiferencia y el hastío del mundo vuelto consumo y del hombre convertido en pieza del mercado. En el encuentro cara a cara se da la posibilidad de una revelación que hace de la relación con el otro, y especialmente con el extranjero, un maravillarse y nos implemente una duda, una sospecha y una desconfianza. (shrink)

En los estudios de Marx sobre el modo de producción específicamente capitalista en la periferia, más allá de Europa occidental, encontramos un doble movimiento: sus estudios históricos configuran todo un campo de tensiones en el que podemos examinar sus posiciones políticas y teóricas entrecruzadas con los cambios y las contradicciones históricas del siglo xix. Analizando las opiniones de Marx sobre la cuestión colonial y la cuestión nacional en casos tan variados como los de India, América Latina, China, Irlanda, Polonia o (...) Rusia comprobamos su distanciamiento creciente pero irregular con respecto al “sistema” hegeliano, que nunca dejó de inspirarlo, en un intento de superar la teleología de la historia. En cuestionamiento se encontraba el presupuesto de que las formas sociales superiores surgen del agotamiento y la aniquilación de las directamente inferiores. Aunque imperfecta, la superación de la teleología acercó a Marx al reconocimiento de la coexistencia en el espacio y en el tiempo de formas sociales heterogéneas, lo que apuntaba hacia una concepción diferente de la teoría y la acción política. (shrink)

En la actualidad algunas de las tradicionales diferencias entre lo rural y lo urbano se van haciendo menos claras y existe una corriente de pensamiento denominada nueva ruralidad, para designar los cambios ocurridos en las sociedades agrarias con la ampliación de la pluriactividad no agrícola de los campesinos y en las ciudades con la llamada agricultura periurbana e incluso urbana. Actualmente entre el campo y la ciudad existen mayores interconexiones que en el pasado, dando lugar a que el engranaje entre (...) ambos se intensifique y, en algunas partes (principalmente en los países desarrollados) algunas ciudades de hacen más “rurales” (huertos familiares) y el campo se “urbaniza” por el acceso a servicios metropoli-tanos (drenaje, electricidad, telefonía, etc.) y por la instalación en el medio rural de industrias y establecimientos de servi-cios otrora inexistentes. Los vínculos entre los dos sectores se han intensificado y se complejizan, lo que se expresa en la diversificación de actividades y de relaciones que antes no se presentaban, todo lo anterior dentro del marco de una mayor integración de la agricultura al mercado internacional. Sin embargo en el nuevo panorama de mayor articulación entre ambos sectores, persiste la antagónica relación entre campo-ciudad ya que la contradicción agricultura-industria, no ha desaparecido, por el contrario, se volvió más compleja; y esta variación la neoruralidad sólo la describe, sin llegar a constituir un nuevo paradigma explicativo. (shrink)

El revisionismo austríaco discutió la tesis de la historiografía económica clásica en torno a una supuesta incomprensión escolástica del mercado fundada en el “justo precio” y en la concepción aristotélica del valor, y vio en dicha concepción la raíz de la teoría subjetiva del valor sostenida por la primera generación de austríacos. Aquí mostramos, sin embargo, que los principales revisionistas austríacos realizaron una interpretación sesgada de la distinción entre valor de uso y valor de cambio en Aristóteles, e indicamos (...) las claves esenciales en torno a las cuales debería girar la recuperación de la auténtica dimensión del valor económico en Aristóteles. (shrink)

El punto de partida de esta investigación se concentra en el estudio de la crisis de lashumanidades en una economía de mercado hegemónica, movida por el lucro y la explotación. Enel proyecto del que se deriva este artículo y que tiene la fenomenología hermenéutica como enfoquemetodológico, conforme lo presentó Max van Manen (2016), se muestra el alcance y el aporte de una ética contemporánea frente a estos dos movimientos; asimismo, desde una lectura crítica de conjunto, las variantes de la (...) formación ética frente a la crisis actual de las humanidades en la que se reduce la persona a sujeto de rendimiento. El artículo se estructura en cuatro partes: primero, se contextualiza la investigación y la publicación misma; segundo, se detalla el proceso metodológico;tercero, se muestra brevemente el estado de la cuestión; y cuarto, se precisa el sedimento teóricocon variantes que integran la respuesta a la pregunta problema del proyecto, esto es: fundamentarla importancia de atender a la temporalidad como un problema ético sustantivo; la necesidad dedeconstruir la libertad como estrategia neoliberal de control; el sentido de desinstrumentalizar las emociones; y, la necesidad de cultivar la capacidad de indignarse y de promover una vidacontemplativa como prácticas experienciales del mundo de la vida. (shrink)

Durante la última década se ha producido un importante desarrollo de prácticas que formulan propuestas alternativas a los modos de producción, consumo e intercambio dominantes. Este artículo analiza el tejido de prácticas económicas alternativas en la ciudad de Valladolid, una ciudad media alejada de los contextos urbanos sobre los que se ha construido el cuerpo teórico que indaga en el potencial transformador de redes de consumo, mercados de trueque, bancos de tiempo, monedas sociales o huertos comunitarios. El trabajo, consciente del (...) valor del contexto y de la escala, propone para ciudades como la estudiada una relectura que sitúa dicho potencial no en el ámbito económico, sino en el de la práctica y la experiencia social y en el de la cultura política.The last decade has witnessed an important development of practices that involve alternative proposals to the dominant production, consumption and exchange patterns. In the present article, we present an analysis of the interwoven patterns of alternative economic practices in Valladolid, a mid-sized city in Spain. This urban profile differs from the cities that have typically been used to design the body of research on the transformation power that consumer networks, bartering, time banking, social coin and community orchards have. Taking into account the value of both the context and the scale under investigation, this study proposes a reanalysis for these types of cities: under this view, the potential is not placed in the economic sphere but rather in the social practice and experience as well as in the political culture. (shrink)

This paper extends earlier work by its authors on formal aspects of the processes of contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition and revising a theory to introduce a proposition. In the course of the earlier work, Gardenfors developed general postulates of a more or less equational nature for such processes, whilst Alchourron and Makinson studied the particular case of contraction functions that are maximal, in the sense of yielding a maximal subset of the theory (or alternatively, of one of (...) its axiomatic bases), that fails to imply the proposition being eliminated. In the present paper, the authors study a broader class, including contraction functions that may be less than maximal. Specifically, they investigate "partial meet contraction functions", which are defined to yield the intersection of some nonempty family of maximal subsets of the theory that fail to imply the proposition being eliminated. Basic properties of these functions are established: it is shown in particular that they satisfy the Gardenfors postulates, and moreover that they are sufficiently general to provide a representation theorem for those postulates. Some special classes of partial meet contraction functions, notably those that are "relational" and "transitively relational", are studied in detail, and their connections with certain "supplementary postulates" of Gardenfors investigated, with a further representation theorem established. (shrink)

In this article, Carlos Pereda introduces the concept of “colonial reason” and explores how philosophical practices and modes of thought are entwined with colonial political structures of exploitation, exclusion, and oppression. Pereda argues that philosophy in Latin America risks perpetuating and reinforcing the colonial gesture, either by turning to the European centers of thought (thus pursuing debates that always take place elsewhere) or by isolating itself and idealising the “own.” According to Pereda, both approaches fail to dismantle colonial violence (...) within philosophy. In his alternative approach, Pereda outlines principles and methodological criteria for the decolonisation of reason and philosophy. He emphasises the importance of methodological prudence that discerns between innocent, paralysing, and strategic uses of identity expressions and advocates for modes of reading and argumentation that conceive philosophy as an inclusive and ongoing dialogue. In Pereda’s terminology, this entails fostering “permeable reason” that manifests itself through “nomadic thinking,” a form of thinking that is capable of questioning itself and being questioned. (shrink)

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time offers an innovative philosophical account of the most fundamental kinds of time representation.

One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, Rovelli examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the 21-year-old Werner Heisenberg first developed quantum theory, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be (...) magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercly debate the theory's meaning, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships, not substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for understanding the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better understand our place in it. (shrink)

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from (...) philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem. (shrink)

In this passage, Zavaleta describes the connections between the moment of real subsumption, social totalisation, the production of social-scientific knowledge that takes the resultant totality as its object, including Marxist theory, and finally, the emergence of a broad intersubjectivity with the capacity to become a revolutionary historical actor.

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze two argumentation methods that can be used when engaged in arguments with people whose opinions are radically opposed and which tend to take place amidst heightened emotions, or in which one of the interlocutors is very likely to, as in the case of an argument with a religious or political fanatic, resort to verbal or physical violence. The first method, proposed by Philippe Breton, is based on a protocol that includes three actions: distancing, active listening (...) and reasoning. The second method, proposed by Hubert Schleichert, entails what he calls “subversive reasoning”. (shrink)

Models developed using machine learning are increasingly prevalent in scientific research. At the same time, these models are notoriously opaque. Explainable AI aims to mitigate the impact of opacity by rendering opaque models transparent. More than being just the solution to a problem, however, Explainable AI can also play an invaluable role in scientific exploration. This paper describes how post-hoc analytic techniques from Explainable AI can be used to refine target phenomena in medical science, to identify starting points for future (...) investigations of causal relationships, and to generate possible explanations of target phenomena in cognitive science. In this way, this paper describes how Explainable AI—over and above machine learning itself—contributes to the efficiency and scope of data-driven scientific research. (shrink)

In a context of pervasive digitalization of the social world, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of education has undergone major changes with the development of digital practices and settings. However, the physical presence of the subjects and the body remain something primordial and irreplaceable in traditional educational processes. Thus, it is often assumed that virtuality is opposed to the corporeal reality of the subjects involved in teaching, learning and studying. In this paper we aim to critically (...) challenge this assumption by addressing the phenomenon of virtuality in a more original sense: as a fundamental dimension of corporeality itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, we argue that the experience of the virtual is inherently embodied and fully real. We understand corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, this leads us to rethink the digital as only one possible medium in which virtuality can appear as inherent to embodied experience. We develop our phenomenological approach in three instances. First, we question and bracket two common assumptions about corporeality. From our critical perspective, assumptions about a disembodied digitality and a devirtualized corporeality represent extremes within which educational discourses currently move. Second, we address the inherent virtuality of embodied experience. We outline the heuristic concept of the virtual body to describe corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena that encompass extension, intercorporeality and intermediality. Finally, we make some remarks on the relationships of corporeality and virtuality considering the challenges of digital education. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with formal aspects of the logic of theory change, and in particular with the process of shrinking or contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition. It continues work in the area by the authors and Peter Gärdenfors. The paper defines a notion of safe contraction of a set of propositions, shows that it satisfies the Gärdenfors postulates for contraction and thus can be represented as a partial meet contraction, and studies its properties both in general and (...) under various natural constraints. (shrink)

Although inclusion in formal value chains extends the prospect of improving the livelihoods of rural small-scale producers, such a step is often contingent on compliance with internationally-promoted food safety standards. Limited research has addressed the challenges this represents for small rural producers who, grounded in culturally-embedded food safety conceptions, face difficulties in complying. We address this gap here through a multiple case study involving four public school feeding programs that source meals from local rural providers in the Bolivian Altiplan. Institutional (...) logics theory is used to describe public food safety regulations and to compare them to food safety conceptions in the local indigenous Aymara rural setting. We identify a value-based conflict that leads to non-compliance of formal food safety rules that jeopardizes the participation of small farmers in the market. These include: partial adoption of formal rules; selective adoption of convenient rules; and ceremonial adoption to avoid compliance. Decoupling strategies allow local actors to largely disregard the formal food safety regulations while accommodating traditional cultural practices and continuing to access the market. However, these practices put the long-term sustainability of the farmers’ participation in potentially favorable opportunities at risk. (shrink)

Bayesian reverse-engineering is a research strategy for developing three-level explanations of behavior and cognition. Starting from a computational-level analysis of behavior and cognition as optimal probabilistic inference, Bayesian reverse-engineers apply numerous tweaks and heuristics to formulate testable hypotheses at the algorithmic and implementational levels. In so doing, they exploit recent technological advances in Bayesian artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, but also consider established principles from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Although these tweaks and heuristics are highly pragmatic in character and (...) are often deployed unsystematically, Bayesian reverse-engineering avoids several important worries that have been raised about the explanatory credentials of Bayesian cognitive science: the worry that the lower levels of analysis are being ignored altogether; the challenge that the mathematical models being developed are unfalsifiable; and the charge that the terms ‘optimal’ and ‘rational’ have lost their customary normative force. But while Bayesian reverse-engineering is therefore a viable and productive research strategy, it is also no fool-proof recipe for explanatory success. (shrink)

A study in the logic of theory change, examining the properties of maxichoice contraction and revision operations.

The book is a comprehensive introduction to the work of the Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. After a first introductory chapter by Morten Tønnessen and a second chapter on Uexküll's life and philosophical background, it contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of his main works; they are followed by a vast eighth chapter which deals with the influence Uexküll had on other philosophers and scientists, and by a conclusions focused on the possibility of updating Uexküll's work. The monograph combines (...) a careful reconstruction of the historical context in which the Uexküllian concepts emerged (the debate between mechanism and vitalism, contemporary scientific studies) and a thorough analysis of the philosophical contents of the Uexküllian views. As far as the key issue is concerned, Uexküll's notion of Umwelt refers to the perceptive and operative world which surrounds animal species; it is a subjective species-specific construction which provides living organisms with great security and behaviour stability. Moreover, the relationship that the animal carries out with its environment proves to be a complex system of semiotic interactions: its behaviour is not a set of mechanical reactions, but the result of a spontaneous attribution of meaning to the outside world, whose environmental elements are actively interpreted by the subject. The environment of animal species becomes a field of meaning, an exceedingly complex subjective elaboration; this can lessen the distance between animals and men, crediting both with the cognitive ability to grasp meanings and to use signs. (shrink)