The "theory of mind" framework has been the fastest growing body of empirical research in contemporary psychology. It has given rise to a range of positions on what it takes to relate to others as intentional beings. This book brings together disparate strands of ToM research, lays out historical roots of the idea, and indicates better alternatives.

The philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia engages fifteen prominent scholars on race, ethnicity, nationality, and Hispanic/Latino identity in the United States. Their discussion joins two distinct traditions: the philosophy of race begun by African Americans in the nineteenth century, and the search for an understanding of identity initiated by Latin American philosophers in the sixteenth century. Participants include Linda M. Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, Richard J. Bernstein, Lawrence Blum, Robert Gooding-Williams, Eduardo Mendieta, and Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., and their dialogue (...) reflects the analytic, Aristotelian, Continental, literary, Marxist, and pragmatic schools of thought. These intellectuals start with the philosophy of Hispanics/Latinos in the United States and then move to the philosophy of African Americans and Anglo Americans in the United States and the philosophy of Latin Americans in Latin America. Gracia and his interlocutors debate the nature of race and ethnicity and their relation to nationality, linguistic rights, matters of identity, and Affirmative Action, binding the concepts of race and ethnicity together in ways that open new paths of inquiry. Gracia's Familial-Historical View of ethnic and Hispanic/Latino identity operates at the center of each of these discussions, providing vivid access to the philosopher's provocative arguments while adding unique depth to issues that each of us struggles to understand. (shrink)

¿Estuvo la cultura de autoría impresa fuera del alcance de las mujeres antes de 1887 en Costa Rica? El propósito principal de este artículo es ofrecer una primera respuesta a dicha pregunta con base en una revisión preliminar de periódicos y revistas que permiten considerar el problema planteado desde una perspectiva más amplia.En breve, el argumento central que se va a desarrollar es que la construcción de esa autoría pasó por tres etapas: en la primera, durante las décadas de 1840 (...) y 1850, tal proceso se basó en la redacción de anuncios comerciales; en la segunda, centrada en los decenios de 1860 y 1870, predominaron los discursos de alumnas y maestras relacionados con actividades de enseñanza; y en la tercera, ubicada a partir de 1885, se dieron dos tendencias paralelas. Por un lado, algunas docentes comenzaron a dar a conocer sus producciones literarias; y por el otro, el Estado, en vísperas de la reforma educativa de 1886, implementó una política para que las educadoras oraran informes de sus actividades escolares y los enviaran a una revista especializada para ser publicados. (shrink)

O utopianismo científico de Neurath é a proposta para que as ciências sociais se envolvam na elaboração, desenvolvimento e comparação de cenários contrafactuais, as ‘utopias’. Tais cenários podem ser entendidos como peças centrais de experimentos de pensamento científicos, isto é, em exercícios da imaginação que não apenas promovem a revisão conceitual, mas também estimulam a criatividade para lidar com problemas vivenciados, já que utopias são esforços para imaginar como o futuro poderia ser. Ademais, experimentos de pensamento utópicos podem oferecer conhecimento (...) científico para informar debates e decisões políticas, contribuindo para formatar a sociedade. Este ensaio reconstrói um evento histórico como um exemplo da metodologia utopianista de Neurath. No final dos anos 1970 e início dos anos 1980, uma comissão científica e política designada pelo parlamento da Alemanha Ocidental inventou e comparou quatro cenários para políticas energético-econômicas futuras. Conclusões da comissão informaram decisões políticas que puseram a Alemanha Ocidental (e depois reunificada) em um caminho para se tornar uma potência industrial verde. Uma parte fundamental do trabalho da comissão envolveu um apelo à imaginação, permitindo a caracterização sob a metodologia de Neurath. (shrink)

ARAGÃO, Ivan Rêgo. “ Vinde todas as pessoas, e vede a minha dor ”: A Festa/Procissão ao Nosso Senhor dos Passos como Atrativo Potencial Turístico em São Cristóvão-Sergipe-Brasil. 2012. 198f. Dissertação (Mestrado) Cultura e Turismo – Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (UESC), Ilhéus-BA. Palavras-chave: Turismo Cultural-Religioso Católico. Religiosidade Popular. Festa do Senhor dos Passos. Keywords: Catholic Religious-Cultural Tourism. Popular Religiosity. Party of Lord of the Steps.

Given this bewildering abundance, how we can speak of a single thing called "music"? This book argues that we can.

¿Estuvo la cultura de autoría impresa fuera del alcance de las mujeres antes de 1887 en Costa Rica? El propósito principal de este artículo es ofrecer una primera respuesta a dicha pregunta con base en una revisión preliminar de periódicos y revistas quepermiten considerar el problema planteado desde una perspectiva más amplia. En breve, el argumento central que se va a desarrollar es que la construcción de esa autoría pasó por tres etapas: en la primera, durante las décadas de 1840 (...) y 1850, tal proceso se basó en la redacción de anuncios comerciales; en la segunda, centradaen los decenios de 1860 y 1870, predominaron los discursos de alumnas y maestras relacionados con actividades de enseñanza; y en la tercera, ubicada a partir de 1885, se dieron dos tendencias paralelas. Por un lado, algunas docentes comenzaron a dar a conocer sus producciones literarias; y por el otro, el Estado, en vísperas de la reforma educativa de 1886, implementó una política para que las educadoras elaboraran informes de sus actividades escolares y los enviaran a una revista especializada para ser publicados. (shrink)

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a (...) large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages. (shrink)

In this study we replicated the explanatory effect of a label which had been found by Giffin et al.. In their experiments, they used vignettes describing an odd behavior of a person based on culturally specific disorders that were unfamiliar to respondents. It turned out that explanations which explain an odd behavior through a person’s tendency to behave that way seemed more persuasive if the disorder was given a label that was used in the explanation. We replicated these results in (...) Experiment 1, and in a follow-up Experiment 2 we examined the familiarity with category information and the evaluation of that category over time. We realized that the label effect persists even when people make judgments based on their recollections about a category. Furthermore, according to a content analysis of the recollections, participants in the label condition remembered more information from the vignettes but tended to forget an artificial label; however, they used other words from the disorder domain instead. This allowed us to suggest a new interpretation of this effect: we suppose that in the Giffin et al. experiments the label did not bring any new features to a category itself, but pointed to a relevant domain instead, so the effect appeared from the activation of areas of knowledge in semantic memory and the application of relevant schema for learning a new phenomenon. (shrink)

Recent theological anthropology emphasizes a dynamic and integral understanding of the human being, which is also related to Karl Rahner's idea of active self-transcendence and to the imago Dei doctrine. The recent neuroscientific discovery of the “visual word form area” for reading, regarded in light of the concept of cultural neural reuse, will produce fresh implications for the interrelation of brain biology and human culture. The theological and neuroscientific parts are shown in their mutual connections thus articulating the notion that (...) human beings shape and transcend themselves both at the biological and at the cultural level. This will have relevant implications for the timely topic of human uniqueness in science and theology, and in proposing a new research perspective in which theology may consider culture along with its biological import, but not necessarily in strictly evolutionary terms alone. (shrink)

In the research we focus on the construction of the sexual lifestyles of young people—undergraduates—in Slovakia and ask “which cultural sources are used?” and “which cultural demands exert pressures on these constructions?” The analysis was based on the answers respondents provided to a questionnaire relating to the preferences of values, aspirations regarding partner and sexual life as well as the socio-economic background of respondents. On the basis of the factor analysis and other steps, we obtained five groups of respondents with (...) different lifestyles: 1. Liberal—free, 2. Partner—monogamous, 3. Natural—instinctive, 4. Hedonistic—free, 5. Submissive—partner. The research proves that while constructing their sexual lifestyles, young people experience confusion as to their personal interests, preferences, internal orientation of partner relationships, and culturally prescribed norms of monogamous relationships. (shrink)

We distinguish between literal and metaphorical applications of Bayesian models. When intended literally, an isomorphism exists between the elements of representation assumed by the rational analysis and the mechanism that implements the computation. Thus, observation of the implementation can externally validate assumptions underlying the rational analysis. In other applications, no such isomorphism exists, so it is not clear how the assumptions that allow a Bayesian model to fit data can be independently validated.

Analysis of the Slovak Discourses of Sex Education Inspired by Michel Foucault The aims, rules and topics of sex education exist on paper, but have yet to be implemented in Slovakia. Although the curriculum creates the illusion of openness in this field, the silence on sex education in schools provides space for the alternative, "more valuable" quiet discourses of religious education. Under these conditions, it is silence that is proving to be an advantageous strategy for the majority of those who (...) should be voicing their opinions. Instead, they listen and control. By contrast, those who do speak out, children and young people, do not in fact, speak to them, but mainly among themselves. Those who are silent and listen are not prepared for the younger generations confessions on sexuality, which are mostly taken from the liberal area of media, especially the internet. The silent frequently lack, at the very least, the basic ability to react and debate in this changed situation. Those who are involved in the discussion on sexuality in Slovakia are those who should listen and supervise. (shrink)

Resumo Este artigo apresenta um referencial pragmatista para compreender o estatuto epistêmico da valoração que é produzida na reflexão acerca das consequências sociais de propostas científicas e tecnológicas. O problema é posto, seguindo-se as considerações de Bertrand Russell sobre o impacto da ciência na sociedade. Russell argumenta que a valoração de arranjos sociais fica fora dos limites do conhecimento, porque valorações não podem ser verdadeiras ou falsas, em sentido correspondencial. Isso leva o pensamento social a um impasse, pois não se (...) pode saber que dado arranjo social seria indesejável ou inadequado. Este texto esboça uma alternativa, a partir dos trabalhos sobre valoração de Clarence Irving Lewis, tomados em continuidade com a teoria da investigação de John Dewey. Esse referencial alternativo assume noções epistêmicas de verdade e justificação, o que permite que valorações possam ser concebidas em contextos de investigação e, assim, como objetos de conhecimento.This article presents a pragmatist framework to understand the epistemic status of valuations produced upon reflection on social consequences of scientific and technological proposals. The problem is set following Bertrand Russell’s considerations on the impact of science on society. Russell argues that valuating social arrangements falls beyond the limits of knowledge, because valuations cannot be true or false in the sense of correspondence. This leads social thought to a deadlock, since one cannot know that a given social arrangement would be undesirable or inadequate. This article sketches an alternative from Clarence Irving Lewis’s works on valuation taken in continuity with John Dewey’s theory of inquiry. This alternative framework assumes epistemic notions of truth and justification, allowing that valuations can be construed in contexts of inquiry and thus as objects of knowledge. (shrink)

Rumelhart and McClelland's chapter about learning the past tense created a degree of controversy extraordinary even in the adversarial culture of modern science. It also stimulated a vast amount of research that advanced the understanding of the past tense, inflectional morphology in English and other languages, the nature of linguistic representations, relations between language and other phenomena such as reading and object recognition, the properties of artificial neural networks, and other topics. We examine the impact of the Rumelhart and McClelland (...) model with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight. It is not clear who “won” the debate. It is clear, however, that the core ideas that the model instantiated have been assimilated into many areas in the study of language, changing the focus of research from abstract characterizations of linguistic competence to an emphasis on the role of the statistical structure of language in acquisition and processing. (shrink)

Lackey’s (2007) class of “selfless assertions” is controversial in at least two respects: it allows propositions that express Moorean absurdity to be asserted warrantedly, and it challenges the orthodox view that the speaker’s belief is a necessary condition for warranted assertibility. With regard to the former point, I critically examine Lackey’s broadly Gricean treatment of Moorean absurdity and McKinnon’s (2015) epistemic approach. With regard to the latter point, I defend the received view by supporting the knowledge account, on which knowledge (...) is the necessary condition for warranted assertion. After examining two defenses of KA, by Montminy and Turri, I propose two alternative approaches. Although I remain neutral between them, I develop in more detail the view which classifies “selfless assertions” as “presentations”, a type of assertives distinct from genuine assertions. This account is motivated further by allowing for the expansion of the normative approach to other assertives, a feature we may be interested in, in the light of a recent wave of normative accounts of speech acts. (shrink)

An overview on archaeological evidence, provided by Colagè and d’Errico, reveals that the timing, location, and pace of cultural innovations are more consistent with scenarios that take culture, rather than genetic evolutionary processes, as the key driving force for human cognition. The authors elaborate on those mechanisms by which cultural evolution operates, with a specific focus on cultural exaptation and cultural neural reuse.

Orthomodular posets form an algebraic formalization of the logic of quantum mechanics. A central question is how to introduce implication in such a logic. We give a positive answer whenever the orthomodular poset in question is of finite height. The crucial advantage of our solution is that the corresponding algebra, called implication orthomodular poset, i.e. a poset equipped with a binary operator of implication, corresponds to the original orthomodular poset and that its implication operator is everywhere defined. We present here (...) a complete list of axioms for implication orthomodular posets. This enables us to derive an axiomatization in Gentzen style for the algebraizable logic of orthomodular posets of finite height. (shrink)