The present study aimed to translate and identify the psychometric properties of the Behavioral Emotion Regulation Questionnaire in 315 university students from Lima, Peru, aged 16 to 44 years. The BERQ and the Multicultural Inventory of Trait State Depression were administered for the assessment. Evidence of internal structure validity was obtained through confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling, while evidence of validity in relation to other variables was obtained through linear regression analysis. The results indicate that the pentafactorial (...) structure is replicated in the Peruvian sample; that adaptive strategies significantly predict eutres, and that maladaptive strategies predict distress; in addition, reliability values were acceptable. At the end, theoretical and practical aspects of the findings and the importance of continuing to provide evidence for its use in different populations and contexts are discussed, taking into account that this is the first time that a Spanish version of the BERQ has been analyzed. (shrink)
Methodological norms in economic theorizing are interpreted as rational strategies to optimize some epistemic utility functions. A definition of ?empirical verisimilitude? is defended as a plausible interpretation of the epistemic preferences of researchers. Some salient differences between the scientific strategies of physics and of economics are derived from the comparison of the relative costs associated with each strategy. The classical discussion about the ?realism of assumptions? in economics is also considered under the light of the concept of ?empirical verisimilitude?
Quoting Flaubert through time, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Madame B brings Madame Bovary’s reflections on love and emotions to the present day, in a productive anachronism. Their work produces an intertemporal space where the past is relevant for the present, and the present enables us to understand the past. Intimacy and routine are central in their exploration of Flaubert’s contemporaneity. Those issues are precisely one of the keys in Karl Ove Knausgård’s project of literary autobiography, where he expands (...) narration foreclosing the ellipsis and giving visibility to small things and emotions; a project with some resonances with Munch’s crude-obscene uses of intimacy. This essay explores how both proposals, Bal and Williams Gamaker in film, and Knausgård in literature, can serve us to connect present and past sensibilities and, more than that, demonstrate resistances to the hegemonic discourses of temporality. (shrink)
Speech Acts, Criteria and Intentions What makes a speech act a speech act? Which are its necessary and sufficient conditions? I claim in this paper that we cannot find an answer to those questions in Austin's doctrine of the infelicities, since some infelicities take place in fully committing speech acts, whereas others prevent the utterance from being considered as a speech act at all. With this qualification in mind, I argue against the idea that intentions—considered as mental states accomplishing a (...) causal role in the performance of the act—should be considered among the necessary conditions of speech acts. I would thus like to deny a merely ‘symptomatic’ account of intentions, according to which we could never make anything but fallible hypotheses about the effective occurrence of any speech act. I propose an alternative ‘criterial’ account of the role of intentions in speech acts theory, and analyse Austin's and Searle's approaches in the light of this Wittgensteinian concept. Whether we consider, with Austin, that speech acts ‘imply’ mental states or, with Searle, that they ‘express’ them, we could only make sense of this idea if we considered utterances as criteria for intentions, and not as alleged behavioural effects of hidden mental causes. (shrink)
According to the standard view, Montaigne’s Pyrrhonian doubts would be in the origin of Descartes’ radical Sceptical challenges and his cogito argument. Although this paper does not deny this influence, its aim is to reconsider it from a different perspective, by acknowledging that it was not Montaigne’s Scepticism, but his Stoicism, which played the decisive role in the birth of the modern internalist conception of subjectivity. Cartesian need for certitude is to be better understood as an effect of the Stoic (...) model of wisdom, which urges the sage to build an inner space for self-sufficiency and absolute freedom. (shrink)
One of the most pressing issues in contemporary semantics is whether propositions are structured entities that should be individuated in terms of their components or, contrarily, they lack structure and should be individuated in terms of their inferential relations. Another one is whether propositions should always contain all the information that is needed to deem them true or false—whether they should always be Fregean propositions. The latter debate might seem to presuppose a certain position in the former. However, it is (...) the first aim of this paper to argue that the two debates are orthogonal. Moreover, we will use Frege’s thoughts as an example of what we would contemporarily call ‘propositions’ that, though trivially Fregean, lack structure. Since it is not uncontroversial that Frege’s thoughts are unstructured, it is the second aim of this paper to show that it follows from Frege’s writings that they are. (shrink)
The questions ‘Do I know p?’ and ‘shall I take p as a reason to act?’ seem to belong to different domains — or so claims Ernest Sosa in his Judgment and Agency, the latest version of his virtue epistemology. According to Sosa, we may formulate the first question in a purely epistemological way — a matter of knowledge “full stop” —, while the second one is necessarily intruded by pragmatic factors — a matter of “actionable knowledge”. Both should be (...) answered, in his view, considering the reliability of my belief, but the former could be faced in total abstraction from my personal practical concerns. In this paper I dispute Sosa’s view, and claim that no purely epistemic level of knowledge “full stop” is conceivable, at least within a reliabilist framework. A case is put forward in order to show that some given belief may not be considered as reliable by itself, as a token, but always as a member of a type, belonging to some class of reference of other beliefs. And the relevant class of reference may only be chosen considering personal practical interests. (shrink)
The aim of this paper is to discuss a basic assumption tacitly shared by many philosophers of mind and language: that whatever can be meant, can be said. It specifically targets John Searle’s account of this idea, focussing on his Principle of Expressibility (PE henceforth). In the first part of the paper, PE is exposed underlining its analyticity (1) and its relevance for the philosophy of language (2), mind (3), society and action (4). In the critical part, the notion of (...) Background is taken into account in order to re-evaluate two basic distinctions: the one between sentence and utterance meanings (5), and the one between native and type speakers (6). PE is reconsidered in the light of the previous arguments as a methodological strategy that does not prevent uses of language from eventual semantic excesses and deficits (7), and a complementary Principle of Expression Fallibility is finally proposed (8). (shrink)
Answers to the question, “What is a farm animal?” often revolve around genetics, physical attributes, and the animals’ functions in agricultural production. The essential and defining characteristics of farm animals transcend these limited models, however, and require an answer that avoids reductionism and encompasses a de-atomizing point of view. Such an answer should promote recognition of animals as beings with extensive mental and social capabilities that outline the extent of each individual animal’s existence and—at the same time—define the animals as (...) parts of wholes that in themselves are more than the sum of their parts and have ethological as well as ethical relevance. To accomplish this, the concepts of both anthropomorphism and sociobiology will be examined, and the article will show how the possibility of understanding animals and their characteristics deeply affects both ethology and philosophy; that is, it has an important influence on our descriptive knowledge of animals, the concept of what animal welfare is and can be, and any normative ethics that follow such knowledge. (shrink)
Luce Irigaray is widely recognised as one of the leading figures in the study of women, language and culture. She is arguably the most original and provocative feminist theorist in contemporary French thought. Over recent years her ideas have become massively influential, not least in feminist literary theory, where they have opened up possibilities for reading women's writing and theorizing language. In _Je, Tu, Nous_ Luce Irigaray offers the clearest introduction available to her own work. In a series of brief (...) and direct pieces on gender, language, power and patriarchal mythologies, she lays out what for her is the central problem for women in the modern world. The essays span Irigaray's thought on the importance of difference in culture, in a style that is remarkably informal, open and engaging. This is a remarkable book which will introduce Irigaray's philosophy, with her vision of necessary cultural change, to the widest audience so far. (shrink)
Ve svém článku ‘Je elementární logika totéž co predikátová logika prvního řádu?’ (Pokroky matematiky, fyziky a astronomie 42, 1997, 127-133) klade Jiří Fiala nesmírně zajímavou otázku, zda je opodstatněné ztotožňovat elementární logiku s predikátovou logikou prvního řádu; s pomocí argumentů propagovaných již delší dobu finským logikem a filosofem Jaako Hintikkou (viz již jeho Logic, Language-Games and Information, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973; nejnověji jeho The Principles of Mathematics Revisited, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996) naznačuje, že by tomu tak být nemuselo. Myslím, (...) že uváděná argumentace stojí za bližší rozbor. Hintikka v podstatě říká: Kvantifikované formule predikátové logiky jsou svou podstatou o vybírání prvků z univerza; například ∀x∃yR(x,y) neříká nic jiného než to, že ke každému x můžeme vybrat y, které je k němu ve vztahu R. Obecněji říká Hintikka to, že každá formule je vlastně zápisem určité hry (ve smyslu matematické teorie her), jejíž některé tahy spočívají ve vybírání individuí. Na základě tohoto se pak ptá: je nějaký rozumný důvod, proč se omezovat jenom na hry toho typu, které jsou vyjádřitelné formulemi standardního predikátového počtu? Proč připouštět jen hry s úplnou informací (tj. ty, při kterých jsou při každém tahu k dispozici všechny tahy předchozí), proč vylučovat hry jiné; tudíž proč připouštět jen lineárně uspořádané kvantifikátory, a nepřipustit i kvantifikátory uspořádané třeba jen částečně? Hintikkova argumentace je příkladem argumentace typu formule logiky prvního řádu jsou ve skutečnosti o tom a o tom, tudíž ... . Uveďme pro ilustraci jiný nedávný příklad stejného argumentačního schématu, který pochází od Johana van Benthema (Exploring Logical Dynamics, CSLI, Stanford, 1997). Ten říká: Kvantifikátory jsou v podstatě modality, kvantifikované formule jsou tedy formule modální a jsou tudíž o existenci nějakých alternativ: formule ∀xP(x) říká, že P(x) je nutné, neboli že P(x) platí v každém „dosažitelném možném stavu věcí“, zatímco formule ∃xP(x) říká, že P(x) je možné, neboli že platí alespoň v jednom takovém stavu věcí.. (shrink)
According to robust versions of virtue epistemology, the reason why knowledge is incompatible with certain kinds of luck is that justified true beliefs must be achieved by the agent . In a recent set of papers, Pritchard has challenged these sorts of views, advancing different arguments against them. I confront one of them here, which is constructed upon scenarios affected by environmental luck, such as the fake barn cases. My objection to Pritchard differs from those offered until now by Carter (...) , Jarvis or Littlejohn in that it is based on the claim that cognitive performances may not be properly considered as achievements beyond the scope of the agent’s intentional action—an idea that confers more explanatory power on my argument, and contributes to stregthening links between knowledge and agency. (shrink)
Based on his Inclosure Schema and the Principle of Uniform Solution, Priest has argued that Curry’s paradox belongs to a different family of paradoxes than the Liar. Pleitz argued that Curry’s paradox shares the same structure as the other paradoxes and proposed a scheme of which the Inclosure Schema is a particular case and he criticizes Priest’s position by pointing out that applying the PUS implies the use of a paraconsistent logic that does not validate Contraction, but that this can (...) hardly seen as uniform. In this paper, we will develop some further reasons to defend Pleitz’ thesis that Curry’s paradox belongs to the same family as the rest of the self-referential paradoxes & using the idea that conditionals are generalized negations. However, we will not follow Pleitz in considering doubtful that there is a uniform solution for the paradoxes in a paraconsistent spirit. We will argue that the paraconsistent strategies can be seen as special cases of the strategy of restricting Detachment and that the latter uniformly blocks all the connective-involving self-referential paradoxes, including Curry’s. (shrink)
In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from others that calls for an account (...) of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making. (shrink)
Sandra Harding’s Objectivity and Diversity deals with the epistemic and political limitations of a conception of scientific objectivity that, according to the author, is still in force in our societies. However, in this conception of objectivity, diversity (e.g., of individuals and communities of knowledge, but also, and especially, agendas, models of participation and even styles of reasoning in decision making) still plays a limited and undeserved role.
A passionate celebrator of "sexual difference," Luce Irigaray was never simply after the social equality that her generation so publicly demanded. She was seeking more fundamentally a society that celebrated the differences between the genders and their coming together in a union without hierarchy. As she formulates it in this compellingly readable introduction to her own thought, Irigaray is writing about how "I" and "You" become "We." Exploring along the way women’s experiences of motherhood, abortion, the AIDS crisis and the (...) beauty industry, this book presents one of the most important thinkers of our day in her own words. (shrink)
Jeffrey conditioning allows updating in Bayesian style when the evidence is uncertain. A weighted average, essentially, over classically updating on the alternatives. Unlike classical Bayesian conditioning, this allows learning to be unlearned.
[What It’s Like, or What It’s About? The Place of Consciousness in the Material World] Summary: The book is both a survey of the contemporary debate and a defense of a distinctive position. Most philosophers nowadays assume that the focus of the philosophy of consciousness, its shared explanandum, is a certain property of experience variously called “phenomenal character,” “qualitative character,” “qualia” or “phenomenology,” understood in terms of what it is like to undergo the experience in question. Consciousness as defined in (...) terms of its phenomenal aspect is often called “phenomenal consciousness.” The major issue that occupies most thinkers is whether this phenomenal character happens to be a physical property, or whether it is rather sui generis. Those who believe the former are materialists; those who conclude the latter are dualists. As the currently dominant metaphysic is materialism – also sometimes called physicalism – the challenge appears to be to slot phenomenal properties among the physical properties that ultimately make up the world. David Chalmers argued powerfully that we can go very far in situating many mental properties in the physical world – namely, the properties that can be understood in functional terms – but that phenomenal properties resist such a treatment. Chalmers calls this “the hard problem” of consciousness. But there are also some quite powerful positive arguments for dualism. The two most influential ones are the modal argument, also offered by Chalmers, and the knowledge argument invented by Frank Jackson. Chalmers invites us to conceive of creatures that are exactly like human beings – physically, functionally, behaviorally – only bereft of phenomenal consciousness. If such creatures are conceivable, says Chalmers, they are metaphysically possible. And if they are metaphysically possible, materialism is false. Jackson, for his part, suggests we imagine Mary who has spent her entire life inside a black-and-white room and has seen the world through a black-and-white TV screen. But she also happens to know everything there is to know about the physics of color. And yet, Jackson suggests that once Mary is finally released from her room and sees a lawn outside, she learns something new: that this is what it is like to experience green color. The current work on consciousness is by and large characterized by attempts to answer these two dualistic arguments. I try to make sense of the positions within the domain of philosophy of consciousness by means of two major distinctions that mutually intersect. First, there is a distinction between dualism and materialism. An apparent third alternative currently on offer, the so-called Russellian monism, is unstable, collapsing into either dualism (panpsychism) or materialism (Russellian physicalism). Materialism comes in two main flavors: either the a posteriori physicalism, which detects an epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical truths, hence denying that the former could be derived from the latter; or the a priori physicalism, which does not acknowledge any such obstacle. The second major distinction is between phenomenism and representationalism. It’s true that Ned Block, who introduced this contrast, meant to distinguish between two kinds of materialism. But I believe that the distinction actually intersects the one between materialism and dualism. We thus arrive at a table with six slots, representing six main positions in the philosophy of consciousness: (1) dualist phenomenism (Chalmers, the early Jackson, and Tyler Burge); (2) dualist representationalism (René Descartes); (3) aposteriori materialist phenomenism (Block); (4) a posteriori materialist representationalism (Michael Tye, Fred Dretske, David Rosenthal); (5) a priori materialist phenomenism (David Lewis); and (6) a priori materialist representationalism (Daniel Dennett, Derk Pereboom). However, this scheme is in fact somewhat misleading. It is true that Dennett is usually classified as an apriori materialist (or, more precisely an apriori materialist representationalist), but I believe that needs to be corrected. In order to understand why, I first analyze varieties of materialist representationalism in detail, in particular various construals of phenomenal character in terms of representation, or intentionality, which includes a discussion of the identity of its content (the issue of externalism). By contrast, Dennett rejects the concept of phenomenal character. Consciousness has no intrinsic, publicly inaccessible properties. On that ground, Dennett builds an empirical, fully functionalist theory of consciousness, which he also tries to integrate within a general Darwinian framework. From that point of view, one can contrast Dennettian and representationalist views on the issue of animal consciousness. In addition to his rejection of phenomenal character, Dennett also abstains from the regular metaphysical departure point of regular materialism. He does not so much ask how an enigmatic property of consciousness fits an antecedently characterized world, but rather how far we can investigate all aspects of the world, including consciousness, using the scientific method. He is thus a methodological naturalist, rather than a metaphysical materialist. While this approach removes obstacles to the science of consciousness, it does not solve what might be called “the hardest problem” – of intentionality, not phenomenal consciousness. The hardest problem consists in the fact that our intentional discourse involves conflicting commitments that prevent a coherent metaphysic of representational states. However, it does not follow that we should give up on this discourse as a theoretical means of reduction as well as a practical tool of explanation. But it might be that intentional discourse is a somewhat pseudo one. (shrink)
Globalisation has given rise to a new field of debate due to the growing mobility of the workers and the consequent cultural diversity inside companies. In this sense, a complex world like ours demands a review of the professional profile which should include the so called intercultural competences as a structuring element of companies’ policy and strategic plan. Subsequently it is suggested that, as the intercultural competences affect the cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects, they actually imply a transformation of the (...) person’s identity. (shrink)
8 March, now known as International Women’s Day, is a day for feminist claims where demonstrations are organized in over 150 countries, with the participation of millions of women all around the world. These demonstrations can be viewed as collective rituals and thus focus attention on the processes that facilitate different psychosocial effects. This work aims to explore the mechanisms involved in participation in the demonstrations of 8 March 2020, collective and ritualized feminist actions, and their correlates associated with personal (...) well-being and collective well-being, collective efficacy and collective growth, and behavioral intention to support the fight for women’s rights. To this end, a cross-cultural study was conducted with the participation of 2,854 people from countries in Latin America and Europe, with a retrospective correlational cross-sectional design and a convenience sample. Participants were divided between demonstration participants and non-demonstrators or followers who monitored participants through the media and social networks. Compared with non-demonstrators and with males, female and non-binary gender respondents had greater scores in mechanisms and criterion variables. Further random-effects model meta-analyses revealed that the perceived emotional synchrony was consistently associated with more proximal mechanisms, as well as with criterion variables. Finally, sequential moderation analyses showed that proposed mechanisms successfully mediated the effects of participation on every criterion variable. These results indicate that participation in 8M marches and demonstrations can be analyzed through the literature on collective rituals. As such, collective participation implies positive outcomes both individually and collectively, which are further reinforced through key psychological mechanisms, in line with a Durkheimian approach to collective rituals. (shrink)
