The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has strongly affected oncology patients. Many screening and treatment programs have been postponed or canceled, and such patients also experience fear of increased risk of exposure to the virus. In many cases, locus of control, coping flexibility, and perception of a supportive environment, specifically family resilience, can allow for positive emotional outcomes for individuals managing complex health conditions like cancer. This study aims to determine if family resilience, coping flexibility, and locus of control can mitigate (...) the negative affect caused by the pandemic and enhance positive affect in breast cancer patients. One hundred and fifty-four female patients with breast cancer completed the Walsh’s Family Resilience Questionnaire, the Perceived Ability to Cope With Trauma Scale, the Positive-Negative Affect Schedule, and the Mini Locus of Control Scale. Family resilience and internality of locus of control contribute significantly to positive affective responses. Family resilience is responsible for mitigating the negative affect perceived during the pandemic and is enhanced by external locus of control. Evidence suggests that clinical psychologists should develop and propose programs to support oncology patients’ family resilience, coping flexibility, and internal locus of control, allowing for decreased stress and improved adaptability for effectively managing cancer treatment during the pandemic. (shrink)

Background: The role of personality in cancer incidence and development has been studied for a long time. As colorectal cancer is one of the most prevalent cancer types and linked with lifestyle habits, it is important to better understand its psychological correlates, in order to design a more specific prevention and intervention plan. The aim of this systematic review is to analyze all the studies investigating the role of personality in CRC incidence.Methods: All studies on CRC and personality up to (...) November 2020 were scrutinized according to the Cochrane Collaboration and the PRISMA statements. Selected studies were additionally evaluated for the Risk of Bias according to the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale.Results: Eight studies met the inclusion criteria and were eventually included in this review. Two main constructs have been identified as potential contributors of CRC incidence: emotional regulation and relational style.Conclusion: Strong conclusions regarding the influence of personality traits on the incidence of CRC are not possible, because of the small number and the heterogeneity of the selected studies. Further research is needed to understand the complexity of personality and its role in the incidence of CRC and the interaction with other valuable risk factors. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Tradurre. Pratiche, teorie, strumenti, n° 10, Primavera 2016. F. Scotto, Il senso del suono. Traduzione poetica e ritmo, Roma, Donzelli, 2013, 224 p. Ce mot « rythme » ne m'est pas clair. Je ne l'emploie jamais. Paul Valéry Nel suo vastissimo trattato Critique du rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage, Henri Meschonnic si sofferma sulla scorretta etimologia che fonda il mito del ritmo, ossia quella che ricollega il ῥυθμός al movimento del mare : seguendo (...) - Recensions. (shrink)

Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the (...) acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses. (shrink)

This book presents 12 essays that focus on the analysis of the problems prompted by cyber operations. It clarifies and discusses the ethical and regulatory problems raised by the deployment of cyber capabilities by a state’s army to inflict disruption or damage to an adversary’s targets in or through cyberspace. Written by world-leading philosophers, ethicists, policy-makers, and law and military experts, the essays cover such topics as the conceptual novelty of COs and the ethical problems that this engenders; the applicability (...) of existing conceptual and regulatory frameworks to COs deployed in case of conflicts; the definition of deterrence strategies involving COs; and the analysis of models to foster cooperation in managing cyber crises. Each essay is an invited contribution or a revised version of a paper originally presented at the workshop on Ethics and Policies for Cyber Warfare, organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The volume endorses a multi-disciplinary approach, as such it offers a comprehensive overview of the ethical, legal, and policy problems posed by COs and of the different approaches and methods that can be used to solve them. It will appeal to a wide readership, including ethicists, philosophers, military experts, strategy planners, and law- and policy-makers. (shrink)

Using a term coined by the contemporary Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan, we could define Zhou Dunyi's thought in terms of ‘moral metaphysics’. Zhou Dunyi, a thinker who lived in Northern Song period, developed a philosophy that shows an ontological link between the cosmic order of the universe and the human moral reality. His contribution consists of two short works, Penetrating the Book of Changes and Discussion of the Supreme Polarity Diagram. These works played a fundamental role in creating the metaphysical (...) structure of the neo-Confucian thought: Zhu Xi emphasized Zhou Dunyi's contribution to the neo-Confucian philosophy and, more precisely, he pointed out how Zhou Dunyi's ideas helped to define the conceptual framework of neo-Confucianism. Moreover, Zhu Xi legitimized Zhou Dunyi's role as the pioneer of the ‘Learning of the Way’, or the renewed neo-Confucian tradition. This paper aims to provide an overview of Zhou Dunyi's crucial role in the field of neo-Confucianism. At the same time, we stress the need for further analysis in order to fully understand the value of Zhou Dunyi's philosophy in the Song period intellectual context. (shrink)

This special issue gathers together a selection of papers presented by international experts during a workshop entitled ‘Ethics of Cyber-Conflicts’, which was devoted to fostering interdisciplinary debate on the ethical and legal problems and the regulatory gap concerning cyber conflicts. The workshop was held in 2013 at the Centro Alti Studi Difesa in Rome under the auspices of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence . This NATO-accredited international military organisation that has always placed a high value on an (...) interdisciplinary approach to cyber defence, uniting as it does perspectives from technical, policy, legal, and strategic domains. The Centre’s mission is to enhance capability, cooperation, and information-sharing between NATO, its member states, and partner countries in the area of cyber defence by virtue of research, education, and consultation. The workshop was one of the projects supported by the Centre to achieve this mission.Readers may .. (shrink)

It has been shown that Recurrent Artificial Neural Networks automatically acquire some grammatical knowledge in the course of performing linguistic prediction tasks. The extent to which such networks can actually learn grammar is still an object of investigation. However, being mostly data-driven, they provide a natural testbed for usage-based theories of language acquisition. This mini-review gives an overview of the state of the field, focusing on the influence of the theoretical framework in the interpretation of results.

Biases in cognition are ubiquitous. Social psychologists suggested biases and stereotypes serve a multifarious set of cognitive goals, while at the same time stressing their potential harmfulness. Recently, biases and stereotypes became the purview of heated debates in the machine learning community too. Researchers and developers are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that some biases, like gender and race biases, are entrenched in the algorithms some AI applications rely upon. Here, taking into account several existing approaches that address the (...) problem of implicit biases and stereotypes, we propose that a strategy to cope with this phenomenon is to unmask those found in AI systems by understanding their cognitive dimension, rather than simply trying to correct algorithms. To this extent, we present a discussion bridging together findings from cognitive science and insights from machine learning that can be integrated in a state-of-the-art semantic network. Remarkably, this resource can be of assistance to scholars (e.g., cognitive and computer scientists) while at the same time contributing to refine AI regulations affecting social life. We show how only through a thorough understanding of the cognitive processes leading to biases, and through an interdisciplinary effort, we can make the best of AI technology. (shrink)

We inquire into the notions of ‘boundary’ and ‘cluster’ in the fields of medical genetics, pharmacogenetics, and population genetics. First we show that the two notions are not well discussed in literature. Then we propose a promising explication of them, in which we argue that clustering is always ‘property laden’, that is, fundamentally dependent on decisions about the properties to be taken into account. In particular we suggest three different kinds of properties that have a role in these decisions. That (...) is, we conclude that boundaries and clusters among humans depend on our way of considering nature. Concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnic group’ are discussed too, since they are the most used clusters among humans. (shrink)

This paper describes the semantic mapping methodology we applied to define an integration model for describing the stages of an outdoor and indoor route within the historic center of Naples, dating back to between the 17th and 18th Centuries. We detailed the side concerning the selection and connection of cultural contents, as well as that concerning the transformation of data into an interoperable format. From both perspectives, the working methodologies are illustrated, and issues and opportunities are highlighted. The semantic model (...) can be applied to any project that needs to integrate heterogeneous data for the fruition of cultural heritage in a well-defined sequence of stages. (shrink)

I present the traditional debate about the so called explanation of Russell’s paradox and propose a new way to solve the contradiction that arises in Frege’s system. I briefly examine two alternative explanatory proposals—the Predicativist explanation and the Cantorian one—presupposed by almost all the proposed solutions of Russell’s Paradox. From the discussion about these proposals a controversial conclusion emerges. Then, I examine some particular zig zag solutions and I propose a third explanation, presupposed by them, in which I emphasise the (...) role of an implicit premise in the derivation of the paradox. In conclusion, I propose a different zig zag solution obtained by the adoption of a negative free logic. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to explore whether face recognition technology – as it is intensely used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies – is racism free or, on the contrary, is affected by racial biases and/or racist prejudices, thus reinforcing overall racial discrimination. Design/methodology/approach The study investigates the causal pathways through which face recognition technology may reinforce the racial disproportion in enforcement; it also inquires whether it further discriminates black people by making them experience more racial (...) discrimination and self-identify more decisively as black – two conditions that are shown to be harmful in various respects. Findings This study shows that face recognition technology, as it is produced, implemented and used in Western societies, reinforces existing racial disparities in stop, investigation, arrest and incarceration rates because of racist prejudices and even contributes to strengthen the unhealthy effects of racism on historically disadvantaged racial groups, like black people. Practical implications The findings hope to make law enforcement agencies and software companies aware that they must take adequate action against the racially discriminative effects of the use of face recognition technology. Social implications This study highlights that no implementation of an allegedly racism-free biometric technology is safe from the risk of racially discriminating, simply because each implementation leans against our society, which is affected by racism in many persisting ways. Originality/value While the ethical survey of biometric technologies is traditionally framed in the discourse of universal rights, this study explores an issue that has not been deeply scrutinized so far, that is, how face recognition technology differently affects distinct racial groups and how it contributes to racial discrimination. (shrink)

The second part of Philosophical Investigations and other contemporary writings contain abundant material dedicated to the examination of visual perception, along the lines of similarities and differences manifested in the use of concepts such as “seeing as”, “seeing aspects”, “noticing the aspect”, “aspect blindness”, among other, related ones. However, the application of these concepts to phenomena such as face perception and word perception has not received proper attention in the literature. Our interest lies in identifying the features pertaining facial perception (...) and recognition of its content in order to understand how and to what extent they contribute to shed light on perceptual (and experiential) relationships we have with language, in particular with its written form. In other words, we will try to show in what ways the “phenomenology of facial perception” or “physiognomy” helps to understand the “experience of meaning” and the “phenomenology of reading”. My interpretative hypothesis is that, in Wittgenstein’s view, the features shared by face and word perception are more profound than a mere analogy, and that, in the case of words, these features can explain specific semantic (perhaps, semantic-pragmatic) phenomena that should be included in an appropriate reconstruction of the varieties of use in natural languages. (shrink)

Investigating the reality and significance of racial categories, Remapping Race in a Global Context examines the role of race in human genomics, biomedicine, and struggles for social justice around the world. In this book, biologists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers inspect critical questions around the biological reality of race and how it has been understood in different national and regional contexts. The essays also examine debates on the usefulness of race in medical and epidemiological studies. With focus on the fields of (...) human genomics and biomedicine, this book presents critical findings on whether and how race might be ethically and epistemologically justified in our age of personalized medicine, mass surveillance, and biased algorithms. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in a broad range of scientific and humanistic disciplines, including biology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, cultural or community studies, critical race theory, and any field concerned with the deep racial dividing lines running across societies globally. (shrink)

Introduction : (re) making meaning -- Shaping private demons -- A play of selves : art as play -- Narrating the self -- Mapping : the need for borders -- The fluidity of time and space in art, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience -- Resisting representation -- Conclusion : order and chaos or framing ambiguity.

Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, since a measure of the perceived similarity between faces may be used to investigate fundamental tasks like face categorization and recognition. Despite its fundamental role, measuring perceived similarity between faces is not trivial from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. In this paper we present theoretical arguments that undermine the method currently most used to measure perceived similarity between faces in visual perception, and we propose an (...) alternative method. We finally compare the two methods and find some empirical evidence that the proposed method can provide a more reliable evaluation of the perceived similarity between faces. (shrink)

The wide presence of the right to work in national and international legal texts contrasts with a lack of agreement about the concrete content of this right. According to the hegemonic interpretation, it consists of two elements: extension of wage labour and significant improvement of working conditions. However, if we study the history of right to work claims, especially from the French Revolution to 1848, we can notice that the meaning of this right was rather wider in the past. Rescuing (...) the historical significance of the right to work may help to face the problem of the future of work. In particular, and unlike what might seem at first sight, the claim that everyone should have his or her right to work guaranteed can be a way of articulating and concretizing issues such as workplace democracy, the organization of domestic work or the transition to a sustainable society. (shrink)

En este artículo examinaremos un caso de aplicación de la hipótesis de la relatividad lingüística : la influencia del género gramatical de las lenguas sobre la cognición o el pensamiento de los hablantes. Dado que las lenguas difieren tanto en sus repertorios léxicos como sobre todo en sus gramáticas de género para referir a las personas, a otras entidades animadas e incluso a entidades inanimadas, nuestro propósito será, en primer lugar, revisar la evidencia experimental reciente que avalaría la HRL en (...) este dominio, al comprobar una variedad de impactos cognitivos y psicológicos, variables según las lenguas de los hablantes. En particular, identificaremos cuáles son los “efectos relativistas” en el caso de los rasgos morfosintácticos de las lenguas con carga de género, y en relación con la universalización del género masculino. Sobre la base de la evaluación realizada e incorporando los aportes de los estudios de “género y lenguaje” de los enfoques feministas, concluiremos señalando de qué diversas maneras es viable e importante promover usos inclusivos del lenguaje e incluso cambios más profundos hacia un lenguaje inclusivo, con especial referencia al español. (shrink)

Psychological understanding is a required capacity for moral competence in the sense that understanding the intentions, beliefs, and interests of others is a critical input for evaluating the responsibilities involved in their behaviors and understanding, in turn, how to interact with them to achieve our purposes. For its part, interaction with others is at the heart of both capacities, since both are essential and closely related components of human social life. My aim in this paper, in relation to both assumptions, (...) will be to highlight a structural similarity between ordinary psychological cognition and moral cognition, showing as certain differentiated types of explanations on one domain and the other allows to identify a theoretical framework consistent that, in turn, it can account for the relationships between the two. For this, I will refer first, synthetically, to the _Social Intuitionist Model_ (MIS) of J. Haidt (2001), as it exemplifies a non-classical and dual approach to moral cognition in which moral intuitions play a more basic role than reasons. In the field of psychological cognition, I will refer with more detail to _the interactive or second-person approach_, enriched by the dual approach to cognition, in particular by the proposals on implicit or “minimal” varieties of mental attribution. In this context, I will identify the so-called _expressive behaviors: _their nature and role in human behavior and interactions, and their significance as the evidential basis for psychological understanding. They constitute the primary objects of psychological intuitions. I hope to show that expressive signals are “readable” through the intuitive abilities that detect them and understand their psychological significance in efficient ways. Having exposed the theoretical affinities between the MIS and the interactive-dual approach, I will emphasize that, just as for the first, moral intuitions come first, and reasons later, also for the interactive-dual approach of psychological understanding, psychological intuitions come first, and reasons later. (shrink)

Christiaan Huygens’s late writings, ranging from 1686 to 1695, bear witness to his philosophical and theological reflections. In his Cosmotheoros, which was intended for publication, and other late writings that can be regarded as its preparatory drafts, Huygens deals with issues central to seventeenth-century philosophical debates: God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology, and the plurality of worlds. This paper explains how Huygens’s reflections on animals and their souls, rational or not, play a key role in his (...) epistemological reflections on natural theology. The issue of animal generation, as well as of animal souls, is crucial to identifying elements of continuity between the scientific topics of Huygens’s works, and may be considered as the point of intersection between his understanding of mechanism and of the teleology of nature. This neglected perspective on Huygens’s philosophical-natural animism reveals key elements of his model of rationality and of his attitude towards religion, demonstrating his involvement in the debate over animism, in which he seems to have been strongly influenced by English Protestant empiricism. (shrink)

En su discurso del 10 de mayo de 1793 sobre la Constitución, Robespierre combina una concepción fiduciaria de los representantes públicos con una defensa de las virtudes de la democracia, el único sistema político en el que los gobernantes, al ser parte del pueblo, tienen los mismos intereses que este. Es esta defensa de la soberanía popular, así como de la primacía del poder legislativo, lo que constituye la esencia de su “economía política popular”, una expresión que toma de Rousseau. (...) Para Robespierre, solamente esta clase de economía es compatible con una República cuyo primer objetivo sea la garantía de los derechos naturales del hombre. In his 10th May 1793 speech on the Constitution, Robespierre combines a fiduciary conception of public representatives with a defence of the virtues of democracy, the only political system in which the rulers, being part of the people, have the same interests as the latter. It is this defence of popular sovereignty, as well as of the primacy of the legislative power, what constitutes the essence of his “popular political economy”, an expression he takes from Rousseau. For Robespierre, only this kind of economy is compatible with a Republic whose first objective is to guarantee the natural rights of man. (shrink)

PurposeThis study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology and tattoo similarity detection technology, which are expected to be increasingly used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper investigates the new ethical concerns raised by tattoo-based biometrics on a comparative basis with face-recognition biometrics.FindingsTRT raises much more ethically sensitive issues than face recognition, because tattoos are meaningful biometric traits, and tattoo identification is tantamount to the identification of many more personal features (...) that normally would have remained invisible. TSDT’s assumption that classifying people in virtue of their visible features is useful to foretell their attitudes and behaviours is dangerously similar to racist thought.Practical implicationsThe findings hope to promote an active debate on the ethical and social aspects of tattoo-based biometrics before it is intensely implemented by law enforcement agencies.Social implicationsTattooed individuals – inasmuch as they are more controlled and monitored – are negatively discriminated in comparison to un-tattooed individuals. As tattooing is not uniformly distributed among population, many demographic groups like African–Americans will be overrepresented in tattoos databases used by TRT and TSDT, thus being affected by disproportionately higher risk to be found as a match for a given suspect.Originality/valueTRT and TSDT represent one of the new frontiers of biometrics. The ethical and social issues raised by TRT and TSDT are currently unexplored. (shrink)

This article investigates some main characteristics of TED talks, a new popularizing genre. In particular, it examines the process that recontextualizes scientific speeches into TED talks presented by their own authors, using several discursive conventions to negotiate their role as experts and to establish a closer relationship with their audience. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 2012 TED talks, the article will draw upon Hyland’s concept of ‘proximity’, and the five elements that he takes into account when illustrating (...) proximity in popularizing texts: organization, argument structure, credibility, stance and reader engagement. It will be observed that the linguistic techniques used to enhance comprehensibility, the use of evaluative and emotive adjectives, and the direct involvement of the audience through the use of inclusive pronouns help the speaker breach the expert/audience barrier, establishing an ‘alignment’. Rather than focusing on proximity of membership, these talks emphasize proximity of commitment, by concentrating not on the speakers’ identity and reputation, but rather on how they are personally involved in the topic of the speech. These techniques reveal TED’s idea that science should be ideas to be discussed rather than information to be passively received. (shrink)

This article aims to make a philosophical contribution to the understanding of the communicative dimensions and functions of faces and facial expressions. First, I will refer to the expressivist and socio-communicative theories of FEs, and to a proposal to unify them under a pragmatic approach based on the theory of speech acts. Subsequently, I will examine the characterization of faces and FEs as social and behavioral affordances, and I will identify their characteristics and communicative functions, especially in “conversational displays”, to (...) justify why they are functionally special. I will then insert facial signals into the framework of a pragmatic perspective on human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, which is broader than speech act theory: a Pragmatics-First Approach to Human Communication. I will argue that it provides an adequate understanding of the pragmatic-interactive foundations of human communication, where Facereading is a central component. Finally, I will refer to the relationship between Facereading and the Second-person Perspective of social cognition. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

The present article is part of a preliminary study concerning the discursive manifestations of US President Trump’s sexist beliefs. While many studies have focused on Trump’s usage of hostile sexism, this work examines the linguistic strategies utilised by Trump to convey benevolent sexism, a form of discrimination based on the idea that women are weak and need to be protected, that they should respect traditional male-centric gender roles, and that they should be idolised by men. Drawing upon Fiske and Glick’s (...) Ambivalent Sexism Theory, the study will analyse a corpus of all the positive tweets addressing women tweeted by Trump since the beginning of his 2016 campaign. The study sheds a light on how President Trump’s usage of hostile and benevolent sexism are actually two sides of the same coin: they both confirm the idea of women as an inferior sex. (shrink)