The Freud Wars offers a comprehensive introduction to the crucial question of the justification of psychoanalysis. Part I examines three powerful critiques of psychoanalysis in the context of a recent controversy about its nature and legitimacy: is it a bankrupt science, an innovative science, or not a science at all but a system of interpretation? The discussion makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about the validity of psychoanalysis, and demonstrates how the disagreement is rooted in the theoretical ambiguity of the (...) central concept of psychoanalysis, the unconscious. This ambiguity is then presented as the pathway to a new way of understanding psychoanalysis, based on a mode of thinking that precedes division into mental and physical. The reader is drawn into a lively and thought-provoking analysis of the central issues: · What would it mean for psychoanalysis to count as a science? · Is psychoanalysis a form of hermeneutics? · How can mental and physical explanations coincide? Part II contains the source material for Part I: the influential critiques of psychoanalysis by Adolf Grünbaum, Thomas Nagel and Jürgen Habermas. No specialised knowledge is assumed, and the book is clear and accessible while still conveying the complexity and richness of the subject. It provides a fascinating introduction to philosophical thinking on psychoanalysis for students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and philosophy. (shrink)

Despite recent efforts by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community to move towards standardised procedures for documenting models, methods, systems or datasets, there is currently no methodology focused on use cases aligned with the risk-based approach of the European AI Act (AI Act). In this paper, we propose a new framework for the documentation of use cases that we call use case cards, based on the use case modelling included in the Unified Markup Language (UML) standard. Unlike other documentation methodologies, we (...) focus on the intended purpose and operational use of an AI system. It consists of two main parts: firstly, a UML-based template, tailored to allow implicitly assessing the risk level of the AI system and defining relevant requirements, and secondly, a supporting UML diagram designed to provide information about the system-user interactions and relationships. The proposed framework is the result of a co-design process involving a relevant team of EU policy experts and scientists. We have validated our proposal with 11 experts with different backgrounds and a reasonable knowledge of the AI Act as a prerequisite. We provide the 5 use case cards used in the co-design and validation process. Use case cards allows framing and contextualising use cases in an effective way, and we hope this methodology can be a useful tool for policy makers and providers for documenting use cases, assessing the risk level, adapting the different requirements and building a catalogue of existing usages of AI. (shrink)

The methodology applied for measuring the public sector performance is a disputed topic both in academia and for decision-making policies implementation. Thus, in this paper, we analyze the importance of the topic for researches and also try to identify the methodologies considered within the literature for measuring public sector performance, which would allow comparison between states, and reporting to certain values. The novelty of our approach is that, firstly, we draw a content analysis, with a focus on the methodologies applied (...) for measuring the performance in the public sector in terms of productivity, efficiency, and performance. Secondly, with the support provided by the VOSviewer it is performed a bibliometric analysis and science mapping. We focus our research on keywords co-occurrence, authors co-citation and co-authorship to observe countries and institutions that generate publications on “public sector performance”. On the one hand, our results reveal that entail Analysis of Main Components has proven to be an effective tool to perform complex analysis of public sector performance, through the composite indicator that achieves an aggregation of several important areas of the public sector, considering its complexity and large size. On the other hand, strong links between keywords, researcher’s networks and country and institutions where the research is concentrated where highlighted. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

This book proposes a philosophical exploration of the educational role that media plays in university study practices, with a focus on the practices of lecturing and academic writing. Are the media employed in university study practices mere accessories, or rather constitutive of these practices? While this seems to be a purely theoretical question, its practical implications are wide and concern whether such a thing as a ‘digital university’ is possible. The 'digital university' has been, for a long time, a theoretical (...) construct. However, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, moving the university into the digital realm has become a necessity. The difficulties in transitioning to an online university during the 2020 pandemic showed the increased urgency of the questions explored in this book. -/- The book describes lecturing and academic writing through the lens of a phenomenology of gestures and arrives at a description of the experience of university thinking as expanding the subject’s range of experiences about the world and about one’s modes of thinking about the world. The media configuration characteristic for university study practices is a movement of rendering inoperative one medium through another medium so that thinking can emerge, a movement called ‘mediatic displacement’. The question of the digital university becomes then a question whether mediatic displacement is possible on a digital screen. Although this is conceivable, digital technologies are still relatively new, and we are not used to playing with them in a profanatory way as the book discusses through the example of videoconferencing and MOOCs. The promise of the digital university seems to remain utopian until we figure out how to enact the techniques of mediatic displacement currently flourishing at the physical university. (shrink)

Deflationists claim that the truth predicate was introduced into our language merely to full a certain logico-linguistic function. Oddly enough, the question what this function exactly consists in has received little attention. We argue that the best way of understanding the function of the truth predicate is as enabling us to mimic higher-order quantification in a first-order framework. Indeed, one can show that the full simple theory of types is reducible to disquotational principles of truth. Our analysis has important consequences (...) for our understanding of truth. In this paper, we can only touch on one of them: we will argue that the insubstantiality of truth does not imply a conservativity requirement on our best theories of truth. (shrink)

In this work a double exponential time inseparability result is proven for a finitely axiomatizable first order theory Q₊. The theory, subset of Presburger theory of addition S₊, is the additive fragment of Robinson system Q. We prove that every set that separates Q₊` from the logically false sentences of addition is not recognizable by any Turing machine working in double exponential time. The lower bound is given both in the non-deterministic and in the linear alternating time models. The result (...) implies also that any theory of addition that is consistent with Q₊—in particular any theory contained in S₊—is at least double exponential time difficult. Our inseparability result is an improvement on the known lower bounds for arithmetic theories. Our proof uses a refinement and adaptation of the technique that Fischer and Rabin used to prove the difficulty of S₊. Our version of the technique can be applied to any incomplete finitely axiomatizable system in which all of the necessary properties of addition are provable. (shrink)

Recently, a new algebraic structure called pseudo-equality algebra has been defined by Jenei and Kóródi as a generalization of the equality algebra previously introduced by Jenei. As a main result, it was proved that the pseudo-equality algebras are term equivalent with pseudo-BCK meet-semilattices. We found a gap in the proof of this result and we present a counterexample and a correct version of the theorem. The correct version of the corresponding result for equality algebras is also given.

Citizen participation, by now one of the main topics on the institutional agenda in many European countries, involves different fields of public action, mostly on a local level – social inclusion, urban renewal, development, the environment, health/social services, etc. It still remains, however, vague as a concept with a great variety of actors, procedures and powers involved in its practices. In this scenario, the present article asks two questions: what powers and what freedoms are involved in participation? How are they (...) constructed and increased? The article then goes on to argue how voice is relevant for understanding the many stories of participation, referring to the classic concept of voice formulated by Albert Hirschman and the elaborations offered by Amartya Sen and Arjun Appadurai in their dialogue over capabilities and capacities. (shrink)

What requirements must deflationary formal theories of truth satisfy? This chapter argues against the widely accepted view that compositional and Tarskian theories of truth are substantial or otherwise unacceptable to deflationists. First, two purposes that a formal truth theory can serve are distinguished: one descriptive, the other logical (i.e., to characterise the correctness of inferences involving ‘true’). The chapter argues that the most compelling arguments for the incompatibility of compositional and Tarskian theories concern descriptive theories only. -/- Second, two requirements (...) that any deflationist truth theory intended to serve a logical purpose must satisfy are put forward. These requirements, it is argued, suggest that (i) many well-known compositional and Tarskian theories are acceptable from a deflationist standpoint (including CT); (ii) certain other popular theories of truth (including KF and FS) are not similarly acceptable; (iii) there are no conclusive reasons to impose a conservativeness requirement on deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

I defend the hypothesis that the semantic paradoxes, the paradoxes about collections, and the sorites paradoxes, are all paradoxes of reference fixing: they show that certain conventionally adopted and otherwise functional reference-fixing principles cannot provide consistent assignments of reference to certain relevant expressions in paradoxical cases. I note that the hypothesis has interesting implications concerning the idea of a unified account of the semantic, collection and sorites paradoxes, as well as about the explanation of their “recalcitrance”. I also note that (...) it does not necessarily imply that one should not expect the sometimes hoped for “unique” solution to a paradox of these kinds. (shrink)

If the classic history of events is written in the spirit of winners, the approaches of collective mental reveal that wars are disasters and collective traumas for all of the involved communities. In the following pages we will present the decantation in long term memory of a relevant fact – the deportation of German ethnics from Romania to forced labor in the Soviet Union. On the base of a secret directive, sent by Stalin, approximately 75 000 Romanian citizens of German (...) ethnicity were forced to work three-four years, some even more, at the reconstruction of the “Soviet country”. The source of the decision, its place and extent, and also the way to atone for the “collective guilt” was hidden from the deportees. At the end of the punishment, they were forbidden to speak about the deportation in the public and private space. When they returned home, all of their material evidence of the years spent in the Soviet Union was confiscated and destroyed. In a project financed by the European Union, 50 interviews with survivors of deportation and their descendants were published. The resulting accounts allowed this psycho-sociological analysis of the memory of deportation, centered on ethical and religious aspects of the behaviors and attitudes of victims and their descendants. (shrink)

From the perspective of meta-analysis done in a qualitative structure, the study puts forward an inventory of the communist regime studies in the following ways: 1. The re-evaluation of the social ideology-propaganda-practice relationship of the equality between sexes in the communist regime. 2. The contextualization and the evolution of the social representations of a woman's role. 3. The effects of some political decisions, which can count as aggressiveness of a state towards its citizens (770/1966 Decree).

In this concise and accessible introductory text, Gómez-Lobo and Keown introduce a "human goods" approach to bioethics as an alternative to the dominant principle-based method in the field (best illustrated by Beauchamp and Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, OUP). Following Aristotle and the natural law tradition, the authors demonstrate how an emphasis on human goods--such as health, life, family, friendship, work and play, the experience of beauty, knowledge, and integrity--provides a necessary context for medical decisions and can help us understand (...) critical issues at the beginning and end of life. The manuscript includes two parts: Foundations and Issues. In the Foundations section the authors explain how one can think about bioethics, offering definitions of ethics and ontology (the study of being) and prudential reasoning. In the Issues section they address genetics, abortion, infanticide, suicide and physician-assisted suicide, nutrition and hydration, and transplantation ethics. The book includes appendices featuring personal statements by Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and criteria for the determination of death. (shrink)

“Hay momentos en la vida en los que la cuestión de saber si se puede pensar distinto de como se piensa o percibir distinto de como se ve es indispensable para seguir contemplando o reflexionando” (Foucault, 2003, p. 8). Esta declaración foucaultiana es la que impulsa la voluntad genealógica que presenta este ensayo, así como su pretensión proyectiva para pensar hoy la educación. El momento filosófico crítico consiste en volver sobre las prácticas que día a día llevamos a cabo y (...) configuran nuestras vidas y nuestras instituciones. Este es necesario para realimentar y reorientar la savia de las instituciones, y especialmente la savia de nuestras instituciones académicas, suelo en el cual se teje la sustancia ética que posteriormente dará lugar a la articulación social. Si se aplica el elemento crítico que la actividad filosófica supone a la experiencia de la educación, entendiendo por ella la correlación dentro de una cultura entre campos de saber, tipos de normatividad y formas de subjetividad, podemos preguntarnos: qué es la educación y qué función desempeña hoy con respecto al ejercicio mismo del pensamiento en un contexto atravesado por las nuevas tecnologías y la IA. (shrink)

La sociedad del siglo XXI ha sufrido una mutación histórica en lo que respecta a los métodos de producción y los impactos derivados de la generación de información. Este período se caracteriza por su inmersión en el entorno digital, donde los individuos, como ciudadanos, se encuentran bajo la manipulación, por un lado, de sus datos mediante técnicas de vigilancia y, por otros, expuestos a cámaras de resonancia mediática. Este panorama plantea desafíos significativos en cuanto a la manera en que interactúan (...) con la información y cómo esta afecta sus vidas. La relación entre los medios de comunicación y los acontecimientos, además, se encuentra atravesada por el concepto de interpretación, donde la capacidad de comprender y la habilidad para reconstruir narrativas son elementos que determinan la comprensión y el sentido de lo que ocurre en nuestro mundo. (shrink)

Quien enseña sin emancipar no solo embrutece, predicaba Joseph Jacotot, sino que también adoctrina. Pasado un siglo y medio desde entonces, el filósofo y esteta francés emérito de la Universidad de París VIII y European Graduate School Jacques Rancière, en un ejercicio característico de la filosofía de la educación, publica en 1987 El maestro ignorante a partir de la experiencia de Jacotot. A lo largo de su vida y producción literaria, Rancière reflexiona concienzudamente sobre la naturaleza del proceso de enseñanza (...) y aprendizaje humano y se pregunta: ¿es posible enseñar? ¿qué decide el alumnado en su proceso de aprendizaje? ¿Cuáles son los límites de la palabra transmitida en el aprendizaje? ¿Es la determinación del saber un ejercicio del poder? ¿Son todos los seres humanos capaces de comprender lo que otros hacen y saben? ¿Qué relación hay entre el poder del maestro y el poder de la palabra? (shrink)

Explorar la posibilidad de una nueva micropolítica crítica del signo a partir de Foucault, inspirada en la genealogía nietzscheana, y examinar las políticas y estrategias de alfabetización mediática e informacional necesarias para desarrollar competencias digitales en la transformación del ecosistema mediático es una tarea fundamental del quehacer filosófico actual. La pregunta por la posibilidad de la verdad retorna en un contexto en el que el pluralismo semiótico y la conducción mediática son dos elementos que rigen y ordenan la sociedad actual, (...) sociedad que se caracteriza por la abundancia de información y la omnipresencia de los medios de comunicación como tecnologías de poder. Desgranar su significado y vínculo nos conduce directamente al estudio del poder y el signo en relación con los efectos de la verdad de la posverdad. En este marco conceptual, la obra de Foucault proporciona herramientas teóricas valiosas para afrontar esta problemática. (shrink)

Self-reference has played a prominent role in the development of metamathematics in the past century, starting with Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. Given the nature of this and other results in the area, the informal understanding of self-reference in arithmetic has sufficed so far. Recently, however, it has been argued that for other related issues in metamathematics and philosophical logic a precise notion of self-reference and, more generally, reference is actually required. These notions have been so far elusive and are surrounded (...) by an aura of scepticism that has kept most philosophers away. In this paper I suggest we shouldn’t give up all hope. First, I introduce the reader to these issues. Second, I discuss the conditions a good notion of reference in arithmetic must satisfy. Accordingly, I then introduce adequate notions of reference for the language of first-order arithmetic, which I show to be fruitful for addressing the aforementioned issues in metamathematics. (shrink)

I apply the notions of alethic reference introduced in previous work in the construction of several classical semantic truth theories. Furthermore, I provide proof-theoretic versions of those notions and use them to formulate axiomatic disquotational truth systems over classical logic. Some of these systems are shown to be sound, proof-theoretically strong, and compare well to the most renowned systems in the literature.

Weakening classical logic is one of the most popular ways of dealing with semantic paradoxes. Their advocates often claim that such weakening does not affect non-semantic reasoning. Recently, however, Halbach and Horsten have shown that this is actually not the case for Kripke’s fixed-point theory based on the Strong Kleene evaluation scheme. Feferman’s axiomatization $\textsf{KF}$ in classical logic is much stronger than its paracomplete counterpart $\textsf{PKF}$, not only in terms of semantic but also in arithmetical content. This paper compares the (...) proof-theoretic strength of an axiomatization of Kripke’s construction based on the paraconsistent evaluation scheme of $\textsf{LP}$, formulated in classical logic with that of an axiomatization directly formulated in $\textsf{LP}$, extended with a consistency operator. The ultimate goal is to find out whether paraconsistent solutions to the paradoxes that employ consistency operators fare better in this respect than paracomplete ones. (shrink)

Different societies came to consider certain behaviors as morally wrong, and, in time, due to a more or less general practice, those behaviors have also become legally prohibited. While, nowadays, the existence of legal responsibility of states and individuals for certain reprehensible acts committed during an armed conflict, international or non-international, is hard to be disputed, an inquiry into the manner in which the behavior of the belligerents has come to be considered reveals long discussions in the field of morals (...) and theory of morality, and, especially, regarding the different manner of establishing the elements to whom obedience is rather owed (the divinity, the sovereign, the law) and the relations between these. Hence, the present paper aims at analyzing the connections between moral responsibility and legal responsibility for wrongful behaviur during war in a diachronic approach, along with the major shifts in paradigm (codification and individual liability). Understanding morality as practice, convention, custom, we are arguing that the nowadays requirement of liability for war crimes appeared due to an assumed intention and practice of the decision-making entities (the sovereign, the state) and, ultimately, to a decision-making process of the most influential states. (shrink)

The phenomenon of missed interactions between online users is a specific issue occurring when users of different language games interact on social media platforms. We use the lens of institutional theory to analyze this phenomenon and argue that current online institutions will necessarily fail to regulate user interactions in a way that creates common meanings because online institutions are not set up to deal with the multiplicity of language games and forms of life co-existing in the online social space. We (...) argue for the need to enable and foster grassroots online institutions that can stabilize the norms of interaction by redesigning algorithms and user interfaces. Such online grassroots institutions would facilitate user orientation at three distinct levels: informational, normative, and semantic-pragmatic. We propose user orientation as a principle that would facilitate the formation of institutions aiming to regulate information exchanges between users inhabiting various forms of life. This principle of user orientation should guide design decisions, while designer teams would need to become aware of the institutional power unleashed when they set up interfaces and algorithms for user-generated content. (shrink)

This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...) found online. Misinformation sharing belongs more in the realm of rumour spreading and gossiping rather than in the information-giving language games. However, the norms for sharing cannot be fixed in advance, as these emerge at the interaction between the platforms’ explicit rules, local norms established by user practices, and a meta-norm of sociality. This unpredictability does not leave us with a normative void as an important user responsibility still remains, namely that of making the context of the sharing gesture explicit. If users will clarify how their gestures of sharing are meant to be interpreted by others, they will implicitly assume responsibility for possible misunderstandings based on omissions, and the harms of shared misinformation can be diminished. (shrink)

I put forward precise and appealing notions of reference, self-reference, and well-foundedness for sentences of the language of first-order Peano arithmetic extended with a truth predicate. These notions are intended to play a central role in the study of the reference patterns that underlie expressions leading to semantic paradox and, thus, in the construction of philosophically well-motivated semantic theories of truth.

BackgroundThis article aims to contribute to a better conceptualization of pain and suffering by providing non-essential and non-naturalistic definitions of both phenomena. Contributions of classical evidence-based medicine, the humanistic turn in medicine, as well as the phenomenology and narrative theories of suffering and pain, together with certain conceptions of the person beyond them are critically discussed with such purpose.MethodsA philosophical methodology is used, based on the review of existent literature on the topic and the argumentation in favor of what are (...) found as better definitions of suffering and pain.ResultsPain can be described in neurological terms but cognitive awareness, interpretation, behavioral dispositions, as well as cultural and educational factors have a decisive influence on pain perception. Suffering is proposed to be defined as an unpleasant or even anguishing experience, severely affecting a person at a psychophysical and existential level. Pain and suffering are considered unpleasant. However, the provided definitions neither include the idea that pain and suffering can attack and even destroy the self nor the idea that they can constructively expand the self; both perspectives can b e equally useful for managing pain and suffering, but they are not defining features of the same. Including the existential dimension in the definition of suffering highlights the relevance of suffering in life and its effect on one’s own attachment to the world. An understanding of pain and suffering life experiences is proposed, meaning that they are considered aspects of a person’s life, and the self is the ever-changing sum of these experiences.ConclusionsThe provided definitions will be useful to the identification of pain and suffering, to the discussion of how to relieve them, and to a better understanding of how they are expressed and experienced. They lay the groundwork for further research in all these areas, with the twofold aim of a) avoiding epistemological mistakes and moral injustices, and b) highlighting the limitations of medicine in the treatment of suffering and pain. (shrink)

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical (...) thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble. This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms. (shrink)

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we (...) will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text. (shrink)

Truth predicates are widely believed to be capable of serving a certain logical or quasi-logical function. There is little consensus, however, on the exact nature of this function. We offer a series of formal results in support of the thesis that disquotational truth is a device to simulate higher-order resources in a first-order setting. More specifically, we show that any theory formulated in a higher-order language can be naturally and conservatively interpreted in a first-order theory with a disquotational truth or (...) truth-of predicate. In the first part of the paper we focus on the relation between truth and full impredicative sentential quantification. The second part is devoted to the relation between truth-of and full impredicative predicate quantification. (shrink)

One of the main logical functions of the truth predicate is to enable us to express so-called ‘infinite conjunctions’. Several authors claim that the truth predicate can serve this function only if it is fully disquotational, which leads to triviality in classical logic. As a consequence, many have concluded that classical logic should be rejected. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we consider two accounts available in the literature of what it means to express infinite conjunctions with a (...) truth predicate and argue that they fail to support the necessity of transparency for that purpose. Second, we show that, with the aid of some regimentation, many expressive functions of the truth predicate can actually be performed using truth principles that are consistent in classical logic. Finally, we suggest a reconceptualisation of deflationism, according to which the principles that govern the use of the truth predicate in natural language are largely irrelevant for the question of what formal theory of truth we should adopt. Many philosophers think that the paradoxes pose a special problem for deflationists; we will argue, on the contrary, that deflationists are in a much better position to deal with the paradoxes than their opponents. (shrink)

Stephen Yablo [23,24] introduces a new informal paradox, constituted by an infinite list of semi-formalized sentences. It has been shown that, formalized in a first-order language, Yablo’s piece of reasoning is invalid, for it is impossible to derive falsum from the sequence, due mainly to the Compactness Theorem. This result casts doubts on the paradoxical character of the list of sentences. After identifying two usual senses in which an expression or set of expressions is said to be paradoxical, since second-order (...) languages are not compact, I study the paradoxicality of Yablo’s list within these languages. While non-paradoxical in the first sense, the second-order version of the list is a paradox in our second sense. I conclude that this suffices for regarding Yablo’s original list as paradoxical and his informal argument as valid. (shrink)

This article proposes a method for the semi-automatic extraction of resemblance metaphor terms from a manually annotated corpus of marine biology texts in English and Spanish. The corpus was first searched for target domain terms as well as for lexical markers indicative of metaphors. The combination of these search strategies for metaphor extraction resulted in a set of English-Spanish term pairs. After analysing and comparing these metaphor candidates, a quantitative analysis provided comparative statistical data regarding marine biology metaphor. Finally, the (...) metaphorical nature of marine biology terms was verified in three ways. The first verification strategy entailed an adapted version of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (CitationPragglejaz Group, 2007). The second involved the analysis of contextual data extracted from the corpus, and the third involved the analysis of visual images from an online marine biology database and from the Google search engine. (shrink)