In the mid-1980s, Dario Donatelli participated in a laboratory study of the effects of around 800 h of practice on digit-span and increased his digit-span from 8 to 104 digits. This study assessed changes in the structure of his memory skill after around 30 years of essentially no practice on the digit-span task. On the first day of testing, his estimated span was only 10 digits, but over the following 3 days of testing it increased to 19 digits. (...) Further analyses of his recall performance and verbal reports identified which mechanisms of the original memory skill he could retrieve or reacquire over the 3 days of practice. We discuss theoretical implications for the retention of skilled memory performance, the effects of age-related changes in memory on it, and for the future study of the effects of disuse on exceptional performance and complex skill. (shrink)

En este artículo intentaré reflexionar acerca del pedido de respeto y de reconocimiento que los estudiantes les demandan a los actores de la institución escolar. Las referencias empíricas están centradas en observaciones etnográficas y entrevistas a alumnas y alumnos que concurren a escuelas y Centros de Educación de Jóvenes y Adultos, localizados en la ciudad de La Plata, Argentina. Se podrán observar algunas dimensiones de la relativa insuficiencia de los métodos de disciplinamiento y cuáles son algunos de los modos de (...) expresión juvenil de los conflictos. Además es interesante problematizar la exigencia de reciprocidad que los jóvenes les solicitan a los agentes de los ámbitos institucionales educativos. Muchas de estas cuestiones relevan el carácter ficcional que suelen caracterizar a las situaciones intersubjetivas en la escuela, pero que pueden ser extendidas a otros escenarios que regulan lo social. (shrink)

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

Despite the substantial appeal of the safety condition, Kelp (J Philos Res 34:21–31, 2009; Am Philos Q 53:27–37; Good Thinking. A Knowledge First Virtue Epistemology, Routledge, London, 2018) has raised a difficult challenge for safety-theoretic accounts of knowledge. By combining Gettier-style fake barn cases with epistemic Frankfurt cases, he concludes that no formulation of safety can be strong enough to predict ignorance in the former and weak enough to accommodate knowledge in the latter. In this note, my contribution is two-fold. (...) Firstly, I take up Kelp’s challenge and I show that, once properly understood, safety successfully rises to it. Secondly, I draw a more general lesson on the safety condition: a satisfactory solution to Kelp’s challenge calls for a revision of the standard formulation of safety, which must be indexed to both methods and environments. My conclusion will be that an environment-relative version of safety not only meets Kelp’s challenge, but it also advances our understanding of the safety condition on knowledge. (shrink)

Dario Martinelli’s compact and enjoyable treatise on zoömusicology, _Of Birds, Whales and Other Musicians_ introduces musicologists, biologists, social scientists, and philosophers to a new theoretical model for studying how animal behavioral patterns relate to sound communication. Organized by musical trait rather than animal species, and drawing upon the work of such esteemed philosophers as Umberto Eco, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Thomas Sebeok, Martinelli’s analyses redefine the boundaries surrounding music and help readers—scholars and amateurs alike—to appreciate the relationship between animals (...) and musicological exchanges. (shrink)

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

Financial and prosocial biases in favor of attractive adults have been documented in the labor market, in social transactions in everyday life, and in studies involving experimental economic games. According to the taste-based discrimination model developed by economists, attractiveness-related financial and prosocial biases are the result of preferences or prejudices similar to those displayed toward members of a particular sex, racial, ethnic, or religious group. Other explanations proposed by economists and social psychologists maintain that attractiveness is a marker of personality, (...) intelligence, trustworthiness, professional competence, or productivity. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that attractive adults are favored because they are preferred sexual partners. Evidence that stereotypes about attractive people are causally related to financial or prosocial biases toward them is weak or nonexistent. Consistent with evolutionary explanations, biases in favor of attractive women appear to be more consistent or stronger than those in favor of attractive men, and biases are more consistently reported in interactions between opposite-sex than same-sex individuals. Evolutionary explanations also account for increased prosocial behavior in situations in which attractive individuals are simply bystanders. Finally, evolutionary explanations are consistent with the psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes that occur when individuals are exposed to potential mates, which facilitate the expression of courtship behavior and increase the probability of occurrence of mating. Therefore, multiple lines of evidence suggest that mating motives play a more important role in driving financial and prosocial biases toward attractive adults than previously recognized. (shrink)

We present computational modeling results based on a self‐paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k‐fold cross‐validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding‐based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval‐based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open‐ended responses, so that (...) both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model. (shrink)

This study investigated sex differences in interest in infants among children, adolescents, young adults, and older individuals. Interest in infants was assessed with responses to images depicting animal and human infants versus adults, and with verbal responses to questionnaires. Clear sex differences, irrespective of age, emerged in all visual and verbal tests, with females being more interested in infants than males. Male interest in infants remained fairly stable across the four age groups, whereas female interest in infants was highest in (...) childhood and adolescence and declined thereafter, particularly for the responses to visual stimuli. The observed developmental changes in female interest in infants are consistent with the hypothesis that they represent a biological adaptation for parenting. (shrink)

Podcasts have been described as “a cinema for the ears” and this application of a visual rhetoric to describe an audio-only experience results in an attempt to define what is still a relatively new medium. I argue that it is possible to consider something cinematic without the presence of moving images. Assertions in favour of the cinematic nature of podcasts often employ the visual imagination of listeners evoked by heightened audio characteristics that a particular podcast may possess. By focusing on (...) film-centred podcasts specifically, which, in terms of content and form, are implicitly and often explicitly concerned with properties of the cinematic, I argue for a more conceptual analysis of the idea of a visual form of audio. While many film-oriented podcasts provide a supplementary celebration of cinema culture rather than manifesting a unique cinematic experience of their own, there are examples of film-centred podcasts that attempt to actualise what I will call an “audio-cinematic” experience, deploying the creative potential of the podcast to manifest an experiential aura that evokes a cinematic imagination. I analyse the sonic dimensions of audio-cinematic podcasts including my work with Neil Fox on The Cinematologists Podcast. (shrink)

In our response, we review and address the comments on our target article made in the 25 commentaries. First, we review and discuss the commentaries that recognized the value of our approach, accepted the main premises and conclusions of our target article, and suggested further avenues for research on attractiveness-related biases. We then respond to commentators who either misinterpreted some parts of our target article or made statements with which we disagree. These commentaries provided us with an opportunity to clarify (...) some aspects of our target article, for example, the fact that we address both the functional significance of attractiveness-related biases and their underlying mechanisms. We provide a rebuttal to two commentaries, in which we are accused of poor scholarship. We conclude our response by addressing two commentaries that discussed the societal implications of the occurrence of attractiveness-related biases in the labor market by briefly discussing the relationship between scientific research and social policy. (shrink)

Allen Newell (1973) once observed that psychology researchers were playing “twenty questions with nature,” carving up human cognition into hundreds of individual phenomena but shying away from the difficult task of integrating these phenomena with unifying theories. We argue that research on cognitive control has followed a similar path, and that the best approach toward unifying theories of cognitive control is that proposed by Newell, namely developing theories in computational cognitive architectures. Threaded cognition, a recent theory developed within the ACT-R (...) cognitive architecture, offers promise as a unifying theory of cognitive control that addresses multitasking phenomena for both laboratory and applied task domains. (shrink)

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

Behavioural spillovers refer to the influence that a given intervention targeting behaviour 1 exerts on a subsequent, non-targeted, behaviour 2, which may or may not be in the same domain (health, finance etc.) as one another. So, a nudge to exercise more, for example, could lead people to eat more or less, or possibly even to give more or less to charity depending on the nature of the spillover. But what if spillovers also operate backwards; that is, if the expectation (...) of behaviour 1 influences behaviour 0 that precedes it? For example, a person may form an intention to exercise prompted by a policy intervention but overeat at present as a result. We define such a possibility as a "spillunder". In the proposed article, we critically review the few papers that we have identified through a narrative literature review which have demonstrated spillunder effects to date, and we propose a conceptual framework. Based on evidence about the human mind and behaviour from psychology and economics, we argue that spillunder effects may be more common than the limited empirical findings suggest. We propose six representative mechanisms through which the prospect of behaviour 1 may impact behaviour 0: executive functions, moral licensing and moral cleansing, emotion regulation, energization, construal level, and savouring and dread. We further discuss the policy and practical implications of spillunder effects and examine methodological issues that need to be considered when empirically testing these effects. As with our earlier paper on spillovers, we aim to motivate other behavioural scientists to research behavioural spillunders more systematically and extensively, and to prompt decision makers to consider these effects when designing behavioural interventions. (shrink)

In "My Own Life," Hume writes:1 During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature. After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of (...) his fortune. It is thus "chiefly" at La Flèche that Hume wrote one of the masterpieces of early modern philosophy. Hume's stay in France extended from July 1734 to August 1737. He spent a few weeks in Paris in the summer of 1734, hosted by Chevalier... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience, Embodiment, and History: Remarks on Waldow’s Experience EmbodiedDario Perinetti (bio)Anik Waldow’s Experience Embodied delves into what she calls the “early modern debate on the concept of experience.”1 In her rich and wide-ranging account, she shows how a group of key early modern philosophers dealt with a puzzle regarding the connection between the subjective and objective aspects of experience. The puzzle stems from the fact that experience reveals as (...) much about the experiencing subject as it does about the experienced world. Waldow believes that a one-sided focus on the role of “the way of ideas” in shaping the subjective aspect of experience has distorted our understanding of early modern views on experience.According to the traditional reading, the puzzle presents an intractable challenge to early modern philosophers. For if we experience the world through ideas, and ideas are internal mental states, it becomes difficult to reconcile the explanations required for the psychology of our mental states with those needed for the natural sciences dealing with objective states of affairs. But, so Waldow claims, the challenge can be successfully faced once we understand experience as embodied: “We have to think of experience as embodied to do justice to both explanatory requirements, because it is the body that connects the experiencing mind and its subjectivity with the factual realm of the world.”2Waldow disputes the commonly held view that early modern philosophers saw experience as an interaction between mind and world. She contends, instead, that most early modern philosophers understood experience as embodied. The thesis is presented through a series of “case studies” or “snapshots.” These snapshots focus on the way Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant accounted for the [End Page 319] embodied dimension of experience. The case studies are noteworthy because they succeed in revealing the significance of embodied experience for the authors in question. Waldow manages to expose the significance of embodied experience by focusing on the connection between the authors’ central philosophical views and their views on topics like education, the psychology of emotions, and history, which are often considered of lesser interest by contemporary philosophers.For example, in chapter 1, Waldow argues that connecting Descartes’s mind-body dualism with his understanding of reason as a tool for human self-determination and agency, makes it possible to see how, contrary to commonly held assumptions, Descartes’s dualism aligns well with an understanding of experience as embodied. This weakens the view that Descartes defended a conception of reason as disembodied, and instead, allows for a reading of Cartesian philosophy as aligned with a more naturalistic picture of human nature. In her chapters on Hume and Herder, Waldow sheds light on the way these philosophers perceived reason and experience as deeply rooted in bodily sensibility, as well as in historically shaped moral attitudes and social norms. This focus on embodied experience is central for highlighting how, in different ways, these philosophers endorsed the naturalistic project of understanding the human place in nature. Building on these results, Waldow approaches the problem of the relationship between naturalism and the methodology proper to philosophy from a different and original angle. Her final chapters on Herder and Kant present two ways of understanding the connection between philosophy and the empirical sciences. In her view, Herder advocates for a naturalistic methodology as a way to provide answers to deep metaphysical questions, as well as to empirical questions related to human nature and its connection to culture, society, and history. Unlike Herder, Kant appears as promoting a form of methodological dualism that distinguishes conceptual questions regarding the structure of experience from empirical questions regarding the experience of concrete, embodied human beings. Waldow succeeds in highlighting this contrast between two methodological approaches, thanks to a journey that takes us through the canonical texts of these two thinkers, as well as through less frequented texts such as Herder’s work on the origins of language and Kant’s writings on anthropology, geography, natural history, and history. As can be seen, Waldow’s book not only provides a valuable insight into the significance of embodied experience in early modern philosophy, but also offers refreshing and unexpected readings of the... (shrink)

Beccaria’s penal philosophy hinges on the doctrinal paradigm of liberty through law. Inconceivable in the absence of laws and unattainable in the presence of arbitrary powers, liberty is profiled as the legal situation of the person who may act, within the sphere of what is not forbidden and not bound, without suffering illicit interference from private individuals or organs of the state. Thus, the form of law becomes an essential matter in the construction of the political space suitable for free (...) living. In the analysis proposed in this article, the notion of “political liberty”–which Beccaria takes from Montesquieu–is declined in relation to the legal order, criminal law and the social contract. (shrink)

In Mossio & Taraborelli (2008) we challenged the assumption according to which the ecological and sensorimotor approaches are mere conceptual variations on the same enactive theme. We showed, on the contrary, that they endorse substantially different notions of an 'action-dependent perceptual invariant' and we submitted that this distinction has interesting theoretical and empirical implications. This dissimilarity between ecological and sensorimotor theories stems, in our view, from a more fundamental divergence on the nature of perceptual information. Since Gibson's work, the ecological (...) approach has adopted a fundamentally realist stance, according to which this information is 'picked up', 'revealed', 'encountered' and 'exploited' by the organism (as a range of affordances) but not 'constituted' by the activity of the organism. In contrast, sensorimotor approaches take an explicit interactivist position, which sees the perceiver's motor activity as a determinant of perceptual information itself. Pascal & O'Regan (2008) suggest that our analysis of the relationship between ecological, sensorimotor and enactive theories would benefit from a further distinction. The original enactive approach (Varela et al. 1991; Maturana, 2002; Thompson, 2007), they argue, should not be lumped together with contemporary sensorimotor approaches to perception: whereas sensorimotor theories endorse an externalist view of perception, according to which 'perception can only be understood as a form of interaction of the organism with the environment', the original enactive approach by Varela and collaborators would have strong 'idealist underpinnings'. (shrink)

This special issue on Forms of Life was conceived on the top floor of a café overlooking one of Rome's wonderful Piazzas, after a conference, hosted by Piergiorgio Donatelli, on Forms of Life and Ways of Living. Piergiorgio, Sandra Laugier and I thought the subject cried out for a small collection of essays in which several voices would elucidate the genesis, use and potential of Wittgenstein's concept of form of life -- and we committed to producing it. This is (...) the fruit of our Roman resolution. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. (shrink)

Il mondo dell'immaginazione.--La libertà religiosa.--Religione e coesistenza.--L'itinerario filosofico di Benedetto Croce.--Ancora sull'itinerario filosofico di Benedetto Croce.--Rosmini e il sensismo.--Il senso della storia.--Socrate.--La metafisica, ieri e oggi.--Di al cune aporie della teologia naturale.--Filosofi tedeschi d'oggi.

La teoría del conocimiento en Tomás de Aquino es uno de los temas más controversiales de los últimos años entre los medievalistas debido a la interpretación de las teorías escolásticas en base a los modelos cognitivos contemporáneos. En estos debates, la noción de semejanza ocupa un lugar central, a pesar de que su estatus como una relación no es lo suficientemente tratado. En el presente trabajo abordo el problema del conocimiento en Tomás de Aquino como un término del orden de (...) los relativos. Primero presento el modo en el cual el autor incluye el conocimiento dentro de esta categoría como una relación «asimétrica» exponiendo los criterios que distinguen a este tipo de relativos y argumentando de qué modo el conocimiento cumple con ellos. Luego destaco la importancia del término «semejanza» en la gnoseología de Tomás y lo analizo desde el punto de vista de la relación, señalando diversos problemas y ambigüedades que se desprenden de la presentación de Tomás de Aquino. (shrink)

When Crisis Becomes the Norm: What Can We Do to Demand Change? Crisis dominates the present historical moment. The economy is in crisis, politics in both its past and present forms is in crisis and our own individual lives are in crisis, made vulnerable by the fluctuations of the labor market and by the undoing of social and political ties we inherited from modernity. Yet, traditional views of crises as just temporary setbacks do not seem to hold any longer; this (...) crisis seems permanent, with no way out and no alternatives on the horizon. Reconstructing a political genealogy of the term from the Greek world to today's neoliberalism, this book demonstrates that crisis, understood as a "choice" between revolution and conservation, is a peculiarity of the modern era that does not apply to the present day. However, since its origin, the trope of crisis has proven to be one of the most effective instruments of social discipline and administration. The analytical trajectory followed by this book - which spans from Plato to Hayek, from the juridical and medical science of antiquity to the current technocracy, passing through the "weapons of criticism" of Marx and Gramsci - finally identifies, following Benjamin and Foucault, precariousness as the "form of life" that characterizes crisis understood as an art of government. But we still need to answer the question: "How can we recreate the possibility of political alternatives?". (shrink)

This article seeks to revise the common scholarly assumption that in early modern Europe there was no single word for the study of the universe as a whole until the word “cosmology” appeared in Christian Wolff’s Cosmologia generalis methodo scientifica pertractata (1731). In fact, the term “cosmology” had circulated in both Latin and European languages since at least the 1530s in the context of critical appraisals of the largely dominant Aristotelian and scholastic frameworks. The aim of this study is to (...) unearth the earliest attempts to define cosmology as a philosophical discipline and, thereby, to highlight the lasting authority of traditional disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop and motivate a novel formulation of the safety condition in terms of etiological proper function. After testing this condition against the most pressing objections to safety-theoretic accounts of knowledge in the literature, my conclusion will be the following: once safety is suitably understood in terms of etiological proper function, it stands a better chance as the right anti-Gettier condition on knowledge.

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