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)

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)

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.

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)

Es preciso practicar una cierta arqueología para encontrar, tras el texto de los Ensayos , los vestigios de un poderoso esfuerzo: aquel que realizó su autor para transformar los textos de otros en lenguaje acerca de sí. La obra de Montaigne surge así a partir de lo ajeno, atraviesa los caminos del yo, y vuelve a encontrar al otro en la figura del lector.It's necessary to practice some kind of archeology in the text of the Essays, to find the signs (...) of a powerful effort: the one that its author took to transform other's text in language about himself. Montaigne's work emerges from the others and crosses the way of the self, to meet again the other as a reader. (shrink)

¿Fue realmente la necesidad de responder a los retos del escepticismo –y, en concreto, del escepticismo de Montaigne– lo que incitó a Descartes a formular el argumento del cogito? Este artículo defiende una respuesta negativa, pues no fue la herencia del escepticismo sino la del estoicismo clásico, también revitalizado en el Renacimiento, lo que fue determinante en el surgimiento del internalismo epistémico moderno.Palabras claves: Montaigne, Descartes, Epicteto, escepticismo, estocismo, internalismo epistémico moderno.Was Descartes’ Cogito argument an answer to the challenges of (...) Scepticism and, in particular, to Montaigne’s version of it? This paper claims that the answer to this question should be negative, since it was not the influence of Scepticism, but the one of classic Stoicism –a trend that was also retrieved in the Renaissance– the one that had the main role in the rise of modern epistemic internalism.Keywords: Montaigne, Descartes, Epictetus, Scepticism, Stoicism, modern epistemic internalism. (shrink)

We show that Bayesian ex post aggregation is unstable with respect to refinements. Suppose a group of Bayesians use ex post aggregation. Since it is a joint problem, each agent’s problem is captured by the same model, but probabilities and utilities may vary. If they analyze the same situation in more detail, their refined analysis should preserve their preferences among acts. However, ex post aggregation could bring about a preference reversal on the group level. Ex post aggregation thus depends on (...) how much information is used and may keep oscillating (‘‘flipping’’) as one keeps adding more information. (shrink)

Anne-Lise Rey | : L’article montre qu’après la « révolution scientifique » opérée par l’introduction des idées de Newton en France, Émilie du Châtelet a construit un dispositif épistémique inventif qui lui permet d’articuler principes métaphysiques et experimental philosophy. Je cherche à exposer que, s’il y a bien une relative invisibilité du travail philosophique d’Émilie du Châtelet dans l’historiographie des Lumières, cela tient à la fois au statut de femme savante à cette époque, mais aussi à la situation philosophique d’Émilie (...) du Châtelet, qui ne peut se réduire à aucune filiation et qui élabore une philosophie naturelle originale. | : This paper shows that after the “Scientific Revolution” stemming from the introduction of Newton’s ideas in France, Émilie du Châtelet developed an innovative epistemic framework that allowed her to reconcile metaphysical principles with experimental philosophy. The author aims to show that the relative invisibility of Émilie du Châtelet’s philosophical work within the historiography of the enlightenment is due both to her status as a learned woman at that time and to the philosophical position of Émilie du Châtelet, which cannot be reduced to a single philosophical affiliation and which allows her to develop an original account of natural philosophy. (shrink)

El autor aprovecha el fallido debate que tuvo lugar entre John Searle y Jacques Derrida desde finales de los anos setenta, en torno a la teoria de los actos de habla de John L. Austin. Este desencuentro no solo es analizado minuciosamente sino que ofrece sendas visiones retrospectivas de las tradiciones de Searle y Derrida, al tiempo que aprovecha el episodio para retratar algunos momentos de la filosofia contemporanea y reflexionar sobre los grande problemas de la filosofia del lenguaje y (...) de la mente: la palabra como instrumento de comunicacion, la intencionalidad de la conciencia y la diferancia como aspecto constitutivo de todo texto. (shrink)

Suele considerarse que los ensayos de Montaigne contienen el germen del subjetivismo moderno: incapaz de superar su crisis escéptica, Montaigne habría iniciado el giro de la filosofía hacia la interioridad del yo, ensayándose a sí mismo en su escritura, replegándose sobre sí. Sin embargo, conviene no olvidar que los Ensayos carecieron del firme -y falaz- apoyo de la certeza; por ese motivo Montaigne no nos ofrece un decálogo a seguir por un sujeto solitario en el ejercicio autárquico de su razón. (...) Por el contrario, consciente de que la incertidumbre nunca podrá ser despejada, centra su reflexión en el ejercicio de la conversación asumiendo la relación y el comercio con el otro como elementos constitutivos de su propia identidad. (shrink)

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)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1, Ahead of Print.

In this paper the relations between the almost unknown Spanish mathematician Ventura Reyes Prósper (1863-1922) with Charles S. Peirce and Christine Ladd-Franklin are described. Two brief papers from Reyes Prósper published in El Progreso Matemático 12 (20 December 1891), pp. 297-300, and 18 (15 June 1892) pp. 170-173 on Ladd-Franklin, and on Peirce and Mitchell, respectively, are translated for first time into English and included at the end of the paper.

The author argues that the atheist does not commit the so called “philosophy fallacy” but rather simply answers the theist’s arguments. The principle that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence, although very sound, is nevertheless context-dependent and cannot be accepted without further qualifications. Also, any systematic study of religiousness should explore its links to emotions (prophets often invite people to open their hearts, not their minds or reasons) and its role in the constitution of identity (people often (...) claim that they are Catholics, they are Moslems, etc). (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe ‘Scientific Culture at Enterprises’ project aims to identify the different factors that characterize the image of science held by entrepreneurs and business managers, explore the relationships among these factors, and shed light on the role they play in defining this image and ultimately in developing a culture of science in the business sector. This article is based on the results of the SCe 2016 survey with a specially designed telephone survey questionnaire of a representative sample of Spanish companies. The (...) novelty of our approach lies in the application of a model developed in the fields of Social Studies of Science and Public Understanding of Science to the business sector, in order to obtain information on the dispositions of perception, interest, knowledge and action and their relationships with science and innovation in the business sector in Spain. Using the PIKA model of the image of science, we found this image in the business sector to be shaped by entrepreneurs... (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)

This paper investigates the differences between ancient Greek and modern ethical naturalism, through the account of the whole classical tradition provided by Cicero in De finibus bonorum et malorum. Ever since Hume’s remarks on the topic, it is usually held that derivations of normative claims from factual claims require some kind of proper justification. It ́s a the presence of such justifications in the Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic-Peripatetic ethical theories (as portrayed in De finibus), and, after a negative conclusion, I (...) argue that we should conceive of this issue within a social-historical perspective: The radical difference between ancient and modern naturalistic ethics is due (in Weber’s terms) to the rationalization processes that generated the modern outlook on nature. (shrink)

This article develops a feminist perspective on militarism in Africa, drawing examples from the Nigerian, Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars spanning several decades to examine women's participation in the conflict, their survival and livelihood strategies, and their activism. We argue that postcolonial conflicts epitomise some of the worst excesses of militarism in the era of neoliberal globalisation, and that the economic, organisational and ideological features of militarism undermine the prospects for democratisation, social justice and genuine security, especially for women, (...) in post-war societies. Theorisations of ‘new wars’ and the war economy are taken as entry points to a discussion of the conceptual and policy challenges posed by the enduring and systemic cultural and material aspects of militarism. These include the contradictory ways in which women are affected by the complex relationship between gendered capitalist processes and militarism, and the manner in which women negotiate their lives through both. Finally, we highlight the potential of transnational feminist theorising and activism for strengthening intellectual and political solidarities and argue that the globalised military security system can be our ‘common context for struggle'1 as contemporary feminist activist scholars. 1Mohanty, 2003. (shrink)