This paper is a conceptual analysis of the theory debate in psychology, as carried out by cognitivists and radical behaviorists. The debate has focused on the necessity of theories in psychology. However, the logically primary issue is the nature of theories, or what theories are. This claim stems from the fact that cognitivists and radical behaviorists adopt disparate accounts of the nature of theories. The cognitivists' account is closely akin to the received view from logical positivism, where theories are collections (...) of statements and theoretical terms are restricted to designate unobservable entities. Radical behaviorists also conceive theories as collections of statements, but restrict theoretical terms in psychology to designate observable entities. If each side approaches the necessity issue with its preferred account, both agree that theories are necessary in psychology. Hence, there is no disagreement over the necessity of theories in psychology per se, only over the nature of theories. The received view, however, has been shown to suffer from irreparable difficulties that have led to its total rejection in post-positivistic philosophy of science. Alternative accounts, like the structuralist and semantic views, do not raise the issue of whether theories are necessary in psychology. (shrink)

The rationale, scientific necessity, and character of intentionality ascriptions (assertions that attribute beliefs, expectations, wishes and such to certain systems) remain unresolved issues in the philosophy of mind and psychology. Foxall's proposed resolution (2007), which he calls "Intentional Behaviorism" (IB), is that intentionality ascriptions should be tied to the experimental analysis of behavior, nervous systems, and evolutionary considerations. Foxall's tone of scientific pluralism and attention to academic philosophy and psychology are steps in the right direction. However, I remain skeptical about (...) IB's adequacy as a philosophical underpinning of psychology. My skepticism stems from IB's a-ontological character (which ignores the nature of intentionality, a major issue in psychology), pragmatist inclination (which invites relativism), and adoption of the linguistic view of intentionality, where intensionality is the defining criterion of intentionality. The linguistic view forces us either to restrict intentionality to humans, a deal-breaker for animal cognition psychologists, of to talk of mental language, a deal-breaker for operant psychologists. Also, an emphasis on extensionality, which is about logical validity and not soundness, fails to capture the emphasis of scientific psychology on evidence as a rationality criterion. Finally, if IB presupposes or entails linguistic anti-nativism, it is unlikely to appeal to evolutionary psychologists. IB would thus be better off by abandoning the linguistic view of intentionality. (shrink)

In their account of learning and behavior, the authors define an interactor as emitted behavior that operates on the environment, which excludes Pavlovian learning. A unified neural-network account of the operant-Pavlovian dichotomy favors interpreting neurons as interactors and synaptic efficacies as replicators. The latter interpretation implies that single-synapse change is inherently Lamarckian.

This paper is a rejection of parsimonious behaviorism (PB). PB was proposed by Stemmer (2003) to avoid certain problems with radical behaviorism's (RB) appeal to covert behavior to account for mental phenomena. According to Stemmer, covert behavior was not clearly defined and its existence was not supported by empirical evidence. However, overt behavior is not as undefined, nor its existence as empirically unsupported as Stemmer claimed. Nor does PB avoid the problems, as it does not encourage us to seek a (...) definition or empirical evidence that supports this existence. Moreover, Stemmer did not define the entities he accepted as existent (physiological traces), nor did he cite empirical evidence that supported their existence or his proposed interpretation of mental phenomena. Also, his claim that PB is more parsimonious than RB rests on a fallacious acceptance of the existence of physiological traces and a misinterpretation of the explanatory role of physiological events in RB. Finally, Quine's repudiation theory does not avoid the questions of the status, nature, and location of mental entities in identity theories. Such questions are not fundamentally different from those raised by material entities in general. The questions are thus faced by any materialist position, Quine's repudiation theory included. (shrink)

Behavior analysis emphasizes the study of overt animal (human and nonhuman) behavior as a subject matter in its own right. This paper provides a metaphysical foundation for such an emphasis via an elucidation of a thesis that I generically call "realism about behavior," where by "realism" I mean an assertion of mind-independent existence. The elucidation takes the form of a conceptual framework that combines a property-exemplification account of events with modal realism in the context of three opposing philosophies of mind: (...) property dualism, reductive physicalism, and type behaviorism. Each philosophy leads to the thesis that at least one possible world exists in which counterparts of all actual behavioral events occur and no counterpart of any actual "mental" (either nonphysical, neuro-mental, or behavioro-mental) event occurs. The third thesis is false because it violates the assumption that nothing can exist independently of itself, which leads to a rejection of type behaviorism. The other two theses provide the sought-after foundation through a counterfactual characterization of behavior qua behavior as a scientific subject matter. Its study thus becomes the study of behavior as if the nonphysical and the neural did not exist, even if they may factually exist and play a causal role in behavior. Some implications are discussed. (shrink)

Édouard Le Roy as early as 1901 observed the existence of an intellectual movement seeking to break from traditional positivism and set for himself the task of drawing up the program of this new positivism. Noting that this program precedes the Vienna Circle, I endeavor to determine its nature and to evaluate its impact on logical positivism. Viewed in this light, the discussions between Le Roy, Poincaré and Duhem appear more prolonged and substantial than is usually thought. What we have (...) here is perhaps not a homogeneous doctrine but a vigorous intellectual movement, from which logical positivists were able to borrow specific theses in their attempts to mitigate Mach's strict positivism; more important still, they had before them an example of neopositivism. History is not the only concern: among the issues debated, one encounters the claim that facts are theory-laden. This claim still stirs controversy today. An inquiry into the origins of the claim is one way of clarifying the arguments involved. (shrink)

Heidegger no advirtió la función del fenómeno narrativo en su proyecto de la «hermenéutica de la facticidad» (1923). Una investigación sobre este fenómeno profundiza en el significado de la comprensión del sí, pero plantea problemas metodológicos en la orientación ontológica del proyecto, lo que repercutirá en la lógica de Ser y tiempo.

En el debate entre contextualistas y anticontextualistas, señala Recanati, los últimos aventajan a los primeros por un argumento atribuible a Grice. Este argumento tiene corno premisa el Principio del Paralelismo que, según Recanati, convierte al argumento en circular y a la posición anticontextualista en injustificada. Si bien considero este argumento anticontextualista inadecuado, demostraré que no es atribuible a Grice. Grice no puede admitir el Principio del Paralelismo si se tiene en cuenta la explicación que elabora para ciertos ejemplos y su (...) teoria de las implicaturas. Grice, según esa explicación y algunas de sus propuestas, se muestra como un contextualista. (shrink)

En el debate entre contextualistas y anticontextualistas, señala Recanati, los últimos aventajan a los primeros por un argumento atribuible a Grice. Este argumento tiene corno premisa el Principio del Paralelismo que, según Recanati, convierte al argumento en circular y a la posición anticontextualista en injustificada. Si bien considero este argumento anticontextualista inadecuado, demostraré que no es atribuible a Grice. Grice no puede admitir el Principio del Paralelismo si se tiene en cuenta la explicación que elabora para ciertos ejemplos y su (...) teoria de las implicaturas. Grice, según esa explicación y algunas de sus propuestas, se muestra como un contextualista. (shrink)

Since Grice introduced the distinction between what is said and implicature, the literature shows a widespread interest in the delimitation of these notions. In this paper, I will identify and specify the criteria with which Grice distinctly determines the factors of the speaker’s meaning and I will use these criteria to compare the Gricean minimalist notion of what is said with the Relevance theoretic notion of explicature. In drawing this comparison, I aim to make it clear that the two approaches (...) have different commitments and motivations. Finally, taking these commitments into account, I will argue that the philosophical notion of saying fits harmlessly in the cognitive account of linguistic communication by Relevance Theory and thus it can coexist with the notion of explicature. (shrink)

Grice has been considered a linguistic minimalist. However, as I will show, this interpretation is incompatible with Grice’s proposal of conventional implicatures and with some of his less popular views such as his explanation of loose uses (Grice 1978/1989: 45; X) or his later acknowledgement of cases in which something is said without being conventionally meant (Grice 1987/1989: 359). Bearing in mind these proposals and the distinction between formality and dictiveness, I will present a new approach to the notion of (...) what is said in which the linguistic meanings that determine what is said are subordinated to cooperation. This approach, in contrast to the other minimalist notions, has the advantage of making what is said always part of the speaker’s meaning. Moreover, as the distance between linguistic meaning and what is said must be the shortest possible one that guarantees the rationality, in terms of cooperation, of the speaker, what is said allows us to keep the Gricean project of building a theory of expression from the speaker’s occasion meaning (Grice 1968/1989). (shrink)

Grice’s notion of what is said has been challenged in many directions and, since then, there are a lot of new proposals to understand it. One of these new proposals claims that what a speaker said is not part of the speaker meaning. In that sense, the content said by uttering a sentence is not intentioned by the speaker but a purely semantic and syntactic matter. Kent Bach argues for this proposal and is the main exponent of it. My aim (...) will be to show that Bach’s arguments do not work. There are two different arguments in Bach (1994, 1999, 2001). The first, that I call the direct argument, gives us three reasons against the idea that what is said is meant by the speaker. My goal in the first section will be to show that these reasons are not conclusive. Bach’s notion of what is said should rest on the second argument, the indirect argument. In it, he argues that if what is said is not part of the communicative intentions of the speaker, then it is possible that the content said is not propositional. With this idea, Bach uses what he calls the IQ test.. (shrink)

An assessment of Relational Frame Theory (RFT) is benefited by a distinction among goals, experiments, and theorizing/philosophizing. The goals are laudable, but not new. The experiments are interesting, but they largely involve an expansion of the concept of relational responding from equivalence to nonequivalence relations, the obvious next step. The theorizing, where RFT's bona fide novelty supposedly lies, I found to be ambiguous, opaque, and contradictory. Inasmuch as unintelligibility allowed me to understand, I found RFT to be a hypothetico-deductive and (...) essentialistic proposal that amounts to little more than applications of basic set-theoretic (class and membership) and logical concepts (negation, material implication, biconditional) to verbal behavior. (shrink)

The book "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience" (2003) is an engaging criticism of cognitive neuroscience from the perspective of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of ordinary language. The authors' main claim is that assertions like "the brain sees" and "the left hemisphere thinks" are integral to cognitive neuroscience but that they are meaningless because they commit the mereological fallacy—ascribing to parts of humans, properties that make sense to predicate only of whole humans. The authors claim that this fallacy is at the heart of (...) Cartesian dualism, implying that current cognitive neuroscientists are Cartesian dualists. Against this claim, we argue that the fallacy cannot be committed within Cartesian dualism either, for this doctrine does not allow for an intelligible way of asserting that a soul is part of a human being. Also, the authors' Aristotelian essentialistic outlook is at odds with their Wittgensteinian stance, and we were unconvinced by their case against explanatory reductionism. Finally, although their Wittgensteinian stance is congenial with radical behaviorism, their separation between philosophy and science seems less so because it is based on a view of philosophy as a priori. The authors' emphasis on the a priori, however, does not necessarily commit them to rationalism if it is restricted to conceptual or analytical (as opposed to synthetic) truths. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the presence and current situation of the game of skittles throughout the northern route of the Camino de Santiago. Thus, we considered its current practice, modalities, where it is played, and its different manifestations as an informal and formal game, comparing it with other traditional games on this pilgrimage route. To do this, a mixed qualitative-quantitative study was designed with 89 participants, constituting an informant for each municipality through which the Northern (...) Way passes. An ad hoc questionnaire was used for the data collection, which was processed through content analysis by expert judges and by using the IBM-SPSS statistical package. The results of the study show notable skittles activity on the Northern Camino, reflected in the number of skittles alleys, the number of clubs, associations, and peñas participating in federated leagues, and the wide range of varieties of skittles currently active on the Camino. The relationship between skittles and local culture, both symbols of identity in these northern Spanish regions, made it possible to preserve the traditional heritage in these places, keeping it alive today, despite the push toward new and more attractive leisure and sport trends. (shrink)

mRNA synthesis in all organisms is performed by RNA polymerases, which work as nanomachines on DNA templates. The rate at which their product is made is an important parameter in gene expression. Transcription rate encompasses two related, yet different, concepts: the nascent transcription rate, which measures the in situ mRNA production by RNA polymerase, and the rate of synthesis of mature mRNA, which measures the contribution of transcription to the mRNA concentration. Both parameters are useful for molecular biologists, but they (...) are not interchangeable and they are expressed in different units. It is important to distinguish when and where each one should be used. We propose that for functional genomics the use of nascent transcription rates should be restricted to the evaluation of the transcriptional process itself, whereas mature mRNA synthesis rates should be employed to address the transcriptional input to mRNA concentration balance leading to variation of gene expression. (shrink)

Event‐related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an adjective predicated of it. The rapid detection of this anomaly would indicate that the parser had established the coreference relation between the null subject and an antecedent, and that the processor (...) had rapidly consulted verb control information to select the proper antecedent of the null subject. The results showed that for both subject and object control items ungrammatical adjectives elicited a P600 effect. These data imply that the processor has coindexed the null subject with an antecedent, and that the antecedent has been selected on the basis of control information. These results are compatible with parsing models that emphasize the rapid influence of verb‐specific information on sentence processing. (shrink)

Both the target article and the precommentary demonstrate that relatively simple biobehavioral processes have the cumulative effect of fostering behavioral outcomes characteristic of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As such, the articles illustrate a central theme of Darwinian thinking – basic processes acting over time can produce complex and diverse outcomes. In this commentary, we indicate that tracing the action of processes over time can be facilitated by quantitative methods such as artificial neural networks.

Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction _and_ and (inclusive) disjunction _or_. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (...) (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and reasoning processes neutered, thus potentially highlighting what might be the default meanings of the connectives under study. In Experiment 1 we show that the conjunctive reading of inclusive disjunction is available in positive contexts other than in syntactically intricate cases such as downward entailing and free choice contexts, contrary to what has been claimed in the literature. In Experiment 2 we show that negated conjunctions and disjunctions in Spanish can easily receive the same interpretation when contrasted against the same context and, moreover, that these interpretations match those available in English, despite claims from the literature that linguistic connectives and local negation interact differently in English and Romance languages. (shrink)

Economic and social activities are undergoing radical changes, which can be labelled as ‘knowledge economy and/or society’. In this sense, intellectual capital, or knowledge assets, as the fourth factor of production, is replacing the other ones – job, land and capital. This article tries to offer the origins and nature of the firm’s IC that can be labelled as ‘An Intellectual Capital-Based View of the Firm Competition’. This framework tries to highlight the strategic role of different intangible assets like talented (...) and committed workers, cultural values, or long-term relationships among the firm and its stakeholders – customers, allies, suppliers and society in general – in gaining and sustaining competitive advantages, being the management of IC a key issue in the management agenda. (shrink)

Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages have typically lexicalised only two of the possible 16 binary connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts—namely, the coordinatorsandandor—some of the remainder appear to be entertainable in a non-verbal, conceptual representational system—alanguage of thought—and this suggests a theoretical split between the “lexicalisation” of the connectives and the (...) “learnability” of invented words corresponding to unlexicalised connectives. In avisual worldexperiment aimed at tracking comprehension-related as well as reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word standing for logic's NAND operator, a result that indicates that unlexicalised logical connectives are not only conceptually available, but can also be mapped onto new function words, as in the case of coordinators, or connectives, a class of words that do not usually admit new coinages. (shrink)

Economic and social activities are undergoing radical changes, which can be labelled as 'knowledge economy and/or society'. In this sense, intellectual capital (IC), or knowledge assets, as the fourth factor of production, is replacing the other ones-job, land and capital. This article tries to offer the origins and nature of the firm's IC that can be labelled as 'An Intellectual Capital-Based View of the Firm Competition'. This framework tries to highlight the strategic role of different intangible assets like talented and (...) committed workers, cultural values, or long-term relationships among the firm and its stakeholders-customers, allies, suppliers and society in general - in gaining and sustaining competitive advantages, being the management of IC a key issue in the management agenda. (shrink)

A genuine commitment to ethics and compliance (E&C) programs means that top management adopt them for what they represent and not for other purposes. Only then can they truly build socially responsible behavior and a successful and sustainable business, as stated in the latest international standard for compliance management practice (ISO 37301:2021), which we found to be consistent with a new business narrative as conceptualized in Freeman's work. However, it also requires that top managers place a moral value on these (...) practices, rather than simply using them for instrumental reasons. Building on Kohlberg's six stages of moral development as applied to managers' moral thinking, this manuscript offers a model to explain how top managers' moral valuing of these practices varies along a moral reasoning continuum, resulting in four distinct modes. It also theorizes that each mode of moral valuing yields an archetype of E&C programs. It thus offers a new approach that contributes to the business ethics and management literature by incorporating a morally grounded perspective on the adoption and implementation of E&C practices and how it might shape their features and characteristics. It also aims to improve professional practice and business contributions to Freeman's ideas through genuine ethics‐based E&C programs. (shrink)

La creatividad artística, específica dimensión de la libre autoactividad del individuo pero también de alcance social o institucional, es contemplada jurídicamente como una manifestación de la libertad de expresión. En este artículo se intenta determinar cuándo, cómo y bajo qué circunstancias la libertad de creación artística puede y debe ser limitada. Se analizan diversas experiencias litigiosas resueltas por los Tribunales internacionales de Europa e Iberoamérica , de acuerdo con principios procedimentales de cobertura legal, finalidad legítimo y necesidad en una sociedad (...) democrática y proporcionalidad, desde la elaboración jurisprudencial de conceptos y apreciaciones como “la protección del derecho de otros” y “el razonable equilibrio de sacrifi cios”. Asimismo con relación a la interferencia de parámetros extrasistemáticos, políticamente o religiosamente correctos , limitadores de facto de la libertad de expresión artística.The artistic creativity, specifi c dimension of the free individual selfactivity but also of social or institutional reach, is regarded legally as a manifestation of freedom of expression. In this article tries to determine when, how and under what circumstances freedom of artistic creativity can and must be limited. Diverse litigious experiences solved by the international Courts of Europe and Ibero-America are analyzed, in agreement with the procedural principles of legal cover, legitimate purpose and necessity in a democratic society and proportionality, from the jurisprudential elaboration of concepts and appreciations like “the protection of the right of others”, “the intensity, gravity or gratuitous character of the offense” and “the reasonable balance of sacrifices”. Also with relation to the interference of politically or religiously correct extra-systematic parameters , limitors of facto of the freedom of artistic expression. (shrink)

La lógica modal epistémica estándar se ha constituido en una herramienta realmente útil para los estudiosos interesados en la descripción formal de diferentes nociones epistémicas, tales como las de conocimiento y creencia, que desempeñan un importante papel en muchos estudios ? losó? cos. En este trabajo se muestra cómo el mayor poder expresivo de las modalidades graduadas puede ser utilizado en la lógica epistémica para poder hacer referencia a un tipo de conocimiento que no es siempre absolutamente verdadero, sino que (...) puede admitir excepciones e incertidumbre. (shrink)

This essay argues that we should find Crimmigration, which is the collapsing of immigration law with criminal law, morally problematic for three reasons. First, it denies those who are facing criminal penalties important constitutional protections. Second, it doubly punishes those who have already served their criminal sentence with an added punishment that should be considered cruel and unusual (i.e., indefinite imprisonment or exile). Third, when the tactics aimed at protecting and serving local communities get usurped by the federal government for (...) immigration enforcement purposes, they often undermine these original aims or get used in ways that conflict with the U.S. Constitution. These concerns should prompt us therefore either to reject the government’s plenary power over immigration or require the federal government to be more consistent about maintaining the separation between criminal law and immigration law. (shrink)